Sandra Mujinga at The Approach & Angharad Williams, Mathis Gasser at Swiss Institute

(Approach, Swiss)

Remember S.O.A.P.Y? Remember Cameron Jamie? Sturtevant's carnival. The haunted house's continual slow rising but never quite crescendo. (It has to remain lo-budget somehow, for fear of turning to full amusement park.) Object's Friedian presence amped to hyperbole, almost comedy, but these don't seem intent on funny: the camp relief valve, that laughability post spookability, doesn't seem here. Good art is said to haunt you, and so maybe it's brute force attempting that. 

Past: Mathis Gasser, Sandra Mujinga

Jan Kiefer at Swiss Institute

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You're on lockdown, staying in. The Swiss Institute is closed. The food only being delivered. You log on to www.contemporaryartdaily.com to find some interest, to find a snowman mocking you, enjoying his pumpkin headed freedom. The joke is on him; soon he will be dead, melted like the glaciers he skis. This is what you come here for, the beautiful vistas, windows, cruelty.

“On Half a Tank of Gas” at various locations in New Glarus, Wisconsin

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I wonder how many people came, I wonder how many stayed. I wonder what the people thought. I wonder if they felt it was an enriching cultural experience, I wonder if they had fun. I wonder if they talked about it afterwards. Did they laugh and later drink wine. Were they disquieted. Was the art, distinctly coalesced for this "Little Switzerland" town, only able to communicate nuance with a cultural context, finding Mike Kelly & Paul McCarthy's adaption of Joanna Spyri's most renowned Swiss novel, Heidi, and finding interest in the adaption's latent violence with characters as puppets for violent marionetting as revealing something instrinsic to it. Is the US's absurd level of interest in personal heritage, roots, DNA home testing kits hitting 2.6 billion$ market in 2014, assigning themselves sister cities, and "where your family is from" a cocktail question, is this interest undone by the fact that most contemporary artists today have little cultural heritage, besides the "international style" of Art, that contemporary artist implies the jettisoning of tradition besides the giant global one we conform to.



See too: “Work Hard” at Swiss Institute

Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute

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Set up like a jaw. Gnathic. Run your tongue over your teeth. Most adults have 32. It is warm, nutrient-rich, continuously bathed with saliva; a pH of between 6.75 and 7.25. Ivory towers protruding from wet mass of human gum that had been intended to be scrubbed polished and sanitized. We believed in the pure autonomous body. Distinct from the the onslaught of bacterial-other we believed continually threatening its entrance into us. But the mouth is warm. It is, according to the USDA, center in temperature at which not to place food. The "Danger Zone." Harbors a diverse, abundant and complex microbial community. And different species thrive on the front of our teeth than on the reverse. Plaque is resultant the corruption of the mouth’s homeostasis. When your teeth feel furry. More than 600 bacterial species comprise the plaque microflora that exists on surfaces within the oral cavity and, like belly button's lint, bacterially so diverse it is more unique than fingerprints. Teeth are more like timbers green in the ocean. In November 2014 headlines declare, "A ten second kiss transfers 80 million bacteria." A journalist discovers his belly-button contains bacteria not found outside the soil of Japan. The man has never been to Japan. And Japanese sake is poured by researchers down lab rat's noses to introduce lactobacillus into their artificially bacterially amok sinuses. The social practice of kissing derives from parental feeding through mouth-to-mouth regurgitation between mother and child, which like the vaginal birth's bacterial transference, populate the infant’s sterile gastrointestinal tract, aiding in a diverse gut flora and against colonization by large numbers of E. coli and streptococci found in most feces. Fixed appliances like orthodontic hardware cemented to teeth increases the habitat for bacteria, and after eating an Oreo smiling revealed teeth covered in chewed black goo. There are “good bacteria” and “bad bacteria.” Complete your own at-home fecal transplant with a Youtube instructional. Make sure you lay down a trash bag or tarp. The rats insufflating sake did clear their sinusitis. That we are not ourselves. No object is itself. But collections of sedimented energies, desires, biomes, utilities and images. Rubbermaid Brutes were shaped by a human with desires that are latent in the curve of its lip. The last centuries' want for objects maintaining autonomy and austerity caused problems in the long run attempting their clean self. The definition of clean is going to be entirely different in 20 years. Traditional native methods of burying rotting fish in the dirt to ferment has much lower chance of causing food sickness than doing the same in sterile plastic buckets. Food Grade plastic which is not impermeable and food-safe such the LLDPE of Rubbermaid Brute TM creates anaerobic conditions favorable to botulism. Looks like a teether. The exhibition title: quasi-homonymic and homologous parent and parrot, social reproduction and each becoming the other. Lupo's sculptures are like these things.

See too: Nancy Lupo at 1857

“Work Hard” at Swiss Institute

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"A group of civic-minded Swiss, established businessmen in the city, came together to assist their newly arrived countrymen with advice, jobs and money. In 1846, ninety-six supporting members formally organized as Swiss Benevolent Society of New York to carry on what they had started."

The Swiss Benevolent Society, still around today, eventually gave original housing to the Swiss Institute, made a home for them in their building for the elderly and indigent, the poor and needy, and therefor artists too, the SI's goal seeming artistically mirrored, giving their countrymen a leg up, a strictly Swiss affair, before being nerfed to today's PR: "provid[ing] a significant forum for contemporary cultural dialogue between Europe and the United States" paid for by mostly Swiss government and businesses - as well as contributions from a few American galleries who of course have artistic overlap, as is the case with Carron and 3 of the galleries providing him solo shows in the last years (though Carron already had a solo at SI in 2006), nothing new to the artworld's corporation/institution symbiosis - to supply and sustain a bastion of "European culture" in the heart of it, corporate art culture. "Dialogue" having become a sort of meaningless PR inkblot whose shape amorphous reflects and is culled by whatever the reader's personal investment, a Rorschach if there ever was one. The mildly conspiratorial air surrounding the Institute and always in vogue curators lay in the difficulty ascertaining where exactly the cart lies in relation to these hottly trotting artists often already appearing to be riding trains to market, questions of who delivering who.

Transcription of an 1862 benevolent meeting's minutes seem fitting:

Four applicants were sent to the Interior.

Three applicants were sent to Europe.

Seventeen and a half tons of coal have been given to 35 applicants.

Three thousand seven hundred and twenty pounds of bread have been distributed.

Nine applicants have received board and lodging.

No word on how many artists distributed.

see too : Chris Ofili at New Museum , Stefan Tcherepnin at Freedman Fitzpatrick

David Weiss at Swiss Institute

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You can see the mindset already rooted, the early works of one half a duo, the sardonic irony of life, Fischli and Weiss artwork always tempting fate with their abuse of ideals, their jesting the seriousness life requires, and becoming admittedly bourgeois artists awaiting the comeuppance they teased.
You can see it slightly here, the eroding flippancy at life, taking it unseriously easy -serial paintings of not-quite nondescript scenes - coming in the package of art, drawing prints paintings depicting, drawings and paintings of, 9 notebooks of preparatory sketches, practice, game-planning, for the later celebrated works, which through the committee's business-like approach to mass frivolity finally made it the most artless serious business.

See too : Peter Fischli and David Weiss at Sprüth Magers

“Fin de Siècle” at Swiss Institute



Sometimes it's nice to just look at some chairs. The theatrical staging neuters the aura of their historical import, instead placed in a stage as characters among themselves. A Studio 54 crime scene whose acerbic mocking of cultural fashions erodes solemnity, able to see them as objects again, mostly as the awkward objects they are. Sometimes it's nice to just look at some chairs.