Nora Turato at Sprüth Magers

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What Nauman did for neon, Turato does for motivational posters, bus adverts. The contemporary illuminate manuscript to nonsensical ... sadness? - that empty pang after finding yourself having read the billboard before even knowing you were reading the billboard. Your brain wants to "make sense" of its surroundings, and you read it for clues, end up reading the billboard that has commandeered your evolutionary wiring to sell you a half naked woman in socks. It's not your fault you read it, not your fault it barely makes sense. You were not intended for spaces like these. Nothing is rational in art or advertising, for both there is only that same distending space that creates a void, a meaning that must be filled, consumerist or otherwise. 

Perhaps this is part of our Modern Gothic.


See too: Matt Keegan, Kay Rosen at Grazer Kunstverein, Hanne Lippard & Nora Turato at Metro Pictures, Gene Beery at Shoot the Lobster, Karl Holmqvist at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, John Giorno at Almine Rech, Nora Turato at LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS, Nora Turato at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein

Gretchen Bender at Sprüth Magers

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The simple Brechtian device, knot tied around finger, reminder distance. In comparison, how overwrought today's hi-budget televisual orgies. An interesting observation from the PR even, "Layering text over moving image is as familiar now in memes, tweets and social media posts," - that these are memes, constantly updating, live, cycling between nonsense and prescient. An analog HUD. "Items that are overdetermined to point of banality, yet the obviousness of the operation does not lessen it." Now you get to watch TV with some ostensible criticality, two TVs at once, what could be better. 

See too: Julia Scher, Gretchen Bender at Wilkinson

Analia Saban at Sprüth Magers

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Making things look like other things with other more culturally cached things all put in the frame of the biggest cache of all, that frame, art. Ostensibly this is meaningful, reweaving signs and myths into themselves, but it feels like doing imaginary math, a premise to simply get us to argue about the answer, which makes the formula appear interesting.

Cyprien Gaillard at Sprüth Magers

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This is the language of advertising: upstairs you view the commercial and in the showroom the products. The film, which is beautiful and affective like all good ads, ostensibly provides a confusion/detournment to the process of commodity affectation, but not sure language can talk itself out of the language. Cynicism about the process is still the process.

Hanne Darboven at Sprüth Magers

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Proposal: A series of videos of artists and curators explaining Hanne Darboven to their dad.

Lucy Dodd at Sprüth Magers

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reminiscent Amanda Ross-Ho's big-ass tie-dye T-shirts - the cosmic/comical scale of psychedelia amped. Into sizes everyone has to mention in reviews. And Anicka Yi's antidepressant and palm essence elixirs.  Elixir and kaleidoscopia spread across canvas to make a painting as potion for the "spiritual" that has returned so strongly and forces belief once again.

Barbara Kruger at Sprüth Magers

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Words are cruel, advertising is crueler, deploying statements as an injection like bludgeon. Words like bat on the aluminum of your skull, recognition, legibility. Advertising takes advantage of your ability to see, to read, of human's innate need to recognize the information of your surroundings, so put words bigly around and watch people look and read without thinking, the delivered words already standing inside your head, whacking away at sense. Kruger's popularity in the Supreme irony of advertising is the desire to castigate its belittling skull-whack by owning it, approving it yourself, asking for it, taking the poison of alcohol on the daily to numb the feeling.

John Baldessari at Sprüth Magers

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The text's irrelation performs the poetic fissure lamely, mechanically, i.e. Baldessari's engineered breakage of logical closure, conclusion. The space we rush to fill with guesses, the INTERPRETATION of art, that interminable precursor to MEANING. The poetic is the process for staging these interpretive fissures, founts for guessing, which Baldessari's plain creation of feels like a corpse made to dance. That dullness feels a point.


Also these look a lot like Vern Blosum at Kunsthalle Bern and see too: John Baldessari at Marian Goodman

Andrea Zittel at Sprüth Magers

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I purchased a vegetable with Star Wars adverts on it. A large anthropomophic talking bumble sells cereal to adults. Fantasy is a strong force in the universe. "Smashes box-office records." Zittel is local science-fiction - ideas as propositions, viewing them you get to feel the utopian impulse, image a fantasy of a world cognizant considered and real with magic - "how to live?" - imagine a world where we haven't already welcomed the new insect overlord, rebellion against Empire.

Andreas Schulze at Sprüth Magers

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Schulze's corrective to painting's gentle trends turns its dull insipidness into a direct address against recent decor-abstractionists so widespread critics began wondering if they were painted by a virus of mindless humanoids in search of brains. Schulze's dumbness turns against its soft assuage with a visual, uh, enmity of childish mockery of the mindless willing to line up neatly along walls to see their splatters upon it, the distress of the constipation of painting today, which a purge of this expulsive anal-expressive type offers its own relief of jammed traffic.


See too: Nicolas Party at Gregor Staiger