Oliver Osborne at Tanya Leighton

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The Symbol. Archaic and X-rayed. Dressed and redressed. What could it mean, this puzzification. A clue is presented, then tortured, wrung for information, why won't painting tell us, why, speak dammit. 

Antonio Ballester Moreno at Tanya Leighton

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Tasteful, set to maximum. You could put these things anywhere and you would prepare to be served a longstem cocktail. Like art from a really lovely hotel, hotel art, but maybe a perfect hotel.

Sharon Hayes at Kristina Kite Gallery

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"It's days like this when you realize you are just looking at promotional vehicles, you haven't left the house in days, the world being advertised to you. There's no content here, just a dark room for your projection of how interesting this could be. The advertisement."

Artworld films live or die on their promotional images. A succesful film still, you can almost speak about the films without having seen them. This is how they succeed.

i.e.:

"If Matthew Barney somehow didn't know of Ulrike Ottinger's oeuvre then a medal is in order. Others have made the connection in terms of gender, surrealism, mythos, which is accurate if vague horoscope retro-prediction. But the more distinct fingerprint lay in Ottinger's use of the promotional still image as a mode itself, able to connote and transact meaning equivalent to the film, a received token with through which to speak, a common communal currency. Barney had to have known of this when he turned the promotional image into a metastasized hypertrophic version involving stylists, lighting and image consciousness to an extreme, into basically Levi's ad campaign of artistic hubris. Cremaster succeeded, regardless any filmic merit, on its ability to manifest excitement and intrigue as a promotional vehicle, a cultural mythos that mirrored the mythos within. At the time you could almost talk about Cremaster without having seen any of it, the image was so omnipresent. Seeing was of less import than having being able to have an opinion and know of it. Having gained traction ever since, this form of promotional vehicle cannot be understated in importance post CAD/insta etc. when pipes and what they can funnel is tantamount."

"Towards a language of the promotional still, which, brandishing the act it can only suggest but never actually capture, becomes a sort of gestural pool, an we infer. In this way the promotional image, suggests narrative, a story we can't see, making them function the way altar paintings once had: creating icons for stories, propaganda for their churches.

"The promotional image has a leg up on art since it doesn't finalize itself, it withholds its decisive utterance. It gestures a story, but we are not allowed to speak of it, since we can't "know it." Serving cake and keeping it too, spread, replicate without depleting itself."

"Important for performance to begin to swallowing its own promotional material. The relevant info being self-contained is part of good documentation. Everything there, apparent. Punctured back in, the reason we're here, promotion."

Towards a language of the promotional image: Ulrike Ottinger at Kirchgasse, Lawrence Abu Hamdan at Secession, New Red Order at Artists Space, Paul Maheke at Vleeshal

Marianne Wex at Tanya Leighton

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We should know who Wex is for returning conceptual art's borrowing of information systems - for its own poetic haywiring - back to a visualization of terrene issues, i.e. no longer rooting around in linguistic abstraction but instead its empirical evidence returned to the scientific foundations of material conditions. Like, while Kosuth was concerned for all the mysteries of "Chair," Wex and Mary Kelly were like yes, but we also get pregnant. The "cerebral" of men's white concerns was treated as the higher plane and, for all its agnostic posturing, the "conceptual" allied itself with a reverence akin the religious divinity it ostensibly exiled. Men, oblivious to their own bodies that had never been in question by culture, had the privilege to etherealize themselves above everyone's heads to some assumed universal while women's were increasingly entrenched in politic ground war.  The men atop, the women below. The production of gender that Wex visualized has today become further entrenched as it has become microtized, with the amount of content produced today we are able to produce micro-genres of gendered images that are the laughingstocks of today: "Women alone laughing at salad" its most viral.  With this mass dispersal, normativity dissolves into vaguer forms of power structures, but at the same time, and more hopeful ulterior forms of identity seem to flourish, but this is the bifurcation to today's stems.

Aleksandra Domanović at Tanya Leighton

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At one end they're working on meat grown from stem cells floating in bioreactors filled with fetal bovine serum "fed" proteins and sugars, stimulated and toned for texture by electric current, and at the other end the cattle, with the rise of cheap genetic manipulation technologies like CRISPR, are themselves undergoing a smoothing of their rough points, genetically clipped for capitalistic ergonomics, streamlined; both technologic ends are moving towards bags of convulsing meat, orbs in sterile conditions possibly with mouths or just painted with nutrients like an inverse gyro-meat spinner continually growing and slathered with nutrients, a "cow" is just a scaffold for its muscle, a self-feeding machine that could even be genetically clipped of its ability to feel, to do anything but self-feed, what is a cow but a human technology of meat-production so happily installed with a self-growth AI.

These the terms Domanovic is working with, and sculptures that appear to contain their own streamlining, made for be packed for their transit, appendageless. The images art is working with today are as fantastical as ever, and the democratization of the image, when a young man can turn the artworld on its head simply by disseminating its images, as opposed to its gate keepers in ivory publications before, into the diaspora of them in feeds and phones, young art is seeming to once again turn to strong images.


See too:  Biennale vs Triennial

Sam Anderson at Tanya Leighton

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Precious, Anderson's not packaged with the usual given art gloss but fragile and at stake, with the possibility of loss that is inherent to the precious, a loss that so many wish to defeat with packaging to eternalize; and many forms of. E.g. FGTorres giving the metaphorical finger to loss with sheer determination to print it free of its preciousness; Agematsu's cellophane; the whole subgenre of contemporary reliquary art; Anderson's loss instead something the objects flatly accept, their defeat, preciousness without preservative, making it sentimental. Romance is usually intended to be forced upon the viewer by artist's gilding and gloss, but these - like the wire traps before - force instead a stewardship, a carefulness, so terribly awkward, the way bad feng shui consistently reminds you of your body.


see too:  Sam Anderson at Off Vendome, James Lee Byars at VeneKlasen/Michael Werner

“Play” at Tanya Leighton

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By bringing the others under Cesarco's distancing, they too have their discrepancy become a loss. The mismatched image/text of a Baldessari become numb, a Louise Lawler photograph no longer feels critical but sentimental, and Steinbach's rhetorical question floats with lost meaning, everything like dark ships passing in the night.

Jamian Juliano-Villani at Tanya Leighton

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Like Ernst's graphic novels cut up from the cheap illustrations of culture, surrealism and pop go in hand, the abject impoverishment of images today begets a mash-culture on amphetamines, channeling, thieving, and mixing everything and more regardless of flavor. Ingredients in the style John Wesley placed into Albert Oehlen's 3D render blender on Rosenquist's dice setting all in the backyard BBQ of Hannah Hoch. The point today is to accelerate the katamari like sludge while maintaining, like Ernst, a semblance of representational order, to make the regurgitation uncanny, seem, somehow, true. Of course the concoctions going to make you feel nauseous its still got a face.

See too: “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center

Bill Lynch at Tanya Leighton

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The various endpoints, finish, for Lynch's painting, even divergent states among objects within a single painting, makes an elusive game of what Lynch saw. A question of why at this point did Lynch stop, what was seen. As always the subject rendered in the decisions of representation.
Certain tendencies emerge, the landscape trees a frisson of circular blossoms effervescing, plates hover above surfaces missing and front lips dissolving as the though the rear were more solidly there, and brushstrokes with a tendency not to touch, distinct and fragmentary, the paintings continuously coalescing rather than any rigid stasis, like particles exploded on their mean free path to collision and the cups ready to slip from their plates.

“No Joke” at Tanya Leighton

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Humor as Trojan delivery vehicle, its content entering us sub-defenses allowing incongruity recognized to bubble forth in laughter, put forth as palliative to the surrealist contemporary, and cartoons which act as Icons for the human dispossessed of their reality's physicality, this show could be thought of as more than just a list of Kantarovsky's references.

See too:  Sanya Kantarovsky at Marc Foxx, "Puddle, pothole, portal" at Sculpture Center, Allison Katz at BFA Boatos, Sean Landers at Friedrich Petzel, Pentti Monkkonen at High Art+Jonathan Viner

Claus Rasmussen at Tanya Leighton 



 Despite all the cold clarity and directness the show retains that contemporary trope of ironic mystery - the same feeling tuned to by so many of the neo-materialist mystics - that attempted uncanny “where did this come from” irrationality - a sort of marxist surrealism of so much Städelschule. Rasmussen extends this Mysteriosity, adopting a Christopher Williams type refinement: the PR and audio piece positing a lifeless explanation for the photos. Yet still coldness remains in the disjunct of logic, as in science: that the how could somehow answer for the why. While the more straightforwardly Marxist Williams always posits, at least the feeling of, answers in the veiled nebulism (and generally expounded to great rhetorical fireworks in the texts); Rasmussen here simply dashes hope like a novel cut in half. Rasmussen’s feelings no less palpable, yet it feels synthetic, forced, possibly justifiable, the feeling of attempting to discern any lifelike motives in the pin-striped businessman’s dreams.