Lisa Williamson Amplifier Tanya Bonakdar, Los Angeles

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They're always like a half of a sculpture. Like the other part should be somewhere nearby. Like a piece pulled out of IKEA both, some assembly required. Something missing.

Analia Saban at Tanya Bonakdar

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Not even a metaphor, a literalization? Weaving subject matter into canvas. When de Rooij did wove value, it seemed about its dumbness, and when Arcangel printed it, it definitely was. When Baldessari accumulated his own credentials on a painting, that too seemed just incredibly dumb. Laughable. Funny. That's not to say that is what these are, or have "been done before." No the point is that these are different. These seem serious. Process-based abstraction, the fallout of conceptual art, the technology for myth, woven into object.

see too: Analia Saban at Sprüth Magers

Haim Steinbach at Tanya Bonakdar

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"the artifacts of a future civilization.”-Germano Celant

It perhaps should come as no surprise that Haim Steinbach’s practice has seemed increasingly relevant during the past decade, a period in which the rituals around commercial objects have become all the more pervasive and resolved in their choreographies of desire. Indeed, the heightened attention to design in mass culture—its near-total application in commerce, from the making of products to the construction of display space, at the service of rendering life itself more a matter of lifestyle—would seem an immediately resonant context for an artist long interested in the ways in which our subjectivity is inflected by the things with which we choose to surround ourselves. One might even productively compare corporate focus groups, which seek to articulate and refine the emotional and intellectual associations consumers have with their belongings... But whereas the focus group is steeped in a kind of mercenary anthropology, Steinbach’s endeavors hold up a mirror not only to the symbolic operations attending the creation of exchange value but also to the real psychological dynamics that underpin such identification.  - Tim Griffin

If desire is what Steinbach’s work produces, it arrives with blunt, unexpected force. That might be because our drive to acquire and organize things is, in part, a conduit through which we understand ourselves. Less a comment on capitalism than an investigation of the production of the self, Steinbach’s work acknowledges the fragility of subjecthood—that our funny, fragile egos are bound up in the unexpectedly rich terrain of the knickknacks and bric-a-brac we collect and covet.- Johanna Burton

Whether his manipulations of anticipation and desire produce a unique psychological space or are merely clever remains in question. -Joshua Decter

See too: Danny McDonald at Bortolozzi, Danny McDonald at House of Gaga

Susan Philipsz at Tanya Bonakdar

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An opera of objects. An internet of things. The lullabies, found. Sounds emanate from an elsewhere, from culture, from barrels - this is important, suggesting a different intelligence, a possibly objective intelligence - the objects play us, the tool with a heart. It won't be true; the suggestion is somehow enough.

Kelly Akashi at Tanya Bonakdar

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Our touch cast in glass, is there a better image for today? Visual metaphors for feeling. Porn is metaphor for sensation, the internet is our aquarium and the world is a kunstkammer, we look but don't touch, preserve it in zoos, on swatches, designated scenic lookouts. The world is covered in glass, we now find sensuousness in glass, rubbing erotically on the aquarium. Eventually we prefer glass.

We've been talking about this for so long: Materialphilia


See too:  Kelly Akashi, Cayetano Ferrer at PP,

Group Show at Tanya Bonakdar

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Odd a press release for an exhibition titled "Living in a Lightbulb" would fail to mention Mcluhan's thoughts on lightbulbs, that the "electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message." And now the exhibition on CAD displaying these lights, our lightbulb.

Haim Steinbach at Tanya Bonakdar

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in the world as a whole that these objects exist next to each other is the tension. What keeps them apart otherwise? And displayed totemically, museologically, almost ask for the academic papers and thoughts that should separate them. The great breadth of stuff. A mixing we find almost anxious. And we forget how much Darren Bader owes to Steinbach, nervousness in plain things.

Rivane Neuenschwander at Tanya Bonakdar

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The trope of conceptual art is the semantic rupture between signifier and signified, a loss in meaning becoming is pathos.  Each Neuenshwander work comes with a set of conceptual instructions documenting this translation. e.g:

Fear of fear (dengue fever), a series of photographs taken with a pinhole camera depicting a person dressed in the guise of a dengue mosquito traveling through the streets of the artist’s hometown, Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Recalling carnival costumes worn in Brazilian villages, the image of the mosquito may inspire dread as Brazil currently combats a sharp rise in dengue fever cases due to people hoarding water (the insects’ breeding ground) in the wake of a severe draught in the south eastern part of the country. Traveling through Belo Horizonte’s tourist sites, parks and peripheral neighborhoods...

 A "misunderstanding" of tone, forcing a culture's vibrance to speak about its malady, affords a rupture, an irony of Foster-Wallacian sadness of a culture, colliding opposite symbols apposite, losing their signifieds (vibrancy championing death, and death mocked childishly); a loss at the heart of most Neuenshwander work, and trope of much permutation-conceptualism, signs run through culture in pre-packaged ways to make it "speak" of that culture.
Interestingly this work isn't even shown in CAD's documentation of the show, it seems it needn't be either, the signs merely becoming metonyms for this extended narrative, each object a blank abstraction until limned by the text.

And see too: On Kawara at the Guggenheim