Philip Guston at Hauser & Wirth

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That belabored plodding brushwork that conjures and sediments its act, painting - the stress and sweat of it. You can practically see the anxiety in the glass of it. Which is why everyone been so thievery with Guston - at a moment when self-consciousness in painting was hot (the Krebber vs Barre 2008 World Championship moment) - people were looking for ways to display that anxious hesitation and still have their painting too. Guston had self-consciousness, and painting, in spades. Thus a corpse was looted. And we looked at goopy tenuous abstraction for 5 years until someone invented a figure again and everyone lost consciousness again and now here we are. Guston again.

Anyway someone should really curate an exhibition of Guston's early pre-abstract figurative work, the real de Chirico meets Ensor moody mirror shit. That's the rare stuff, give us that stuff. 

Laurent Dupont, Lisa Jo at Braunsfelder Laurent Dupont

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You paint the thing over the thing, a face over your face, a representation getting closer and closer to its object until, well, they touch, link, and representation adsorbs, becomes, its object. A history of attempts to kill the artwork - here make a painting so redundant as to negate it - always fail - but we find them titillating, art as thing that cannot be killed. In its place a ghost of it.

Kaspar Müller at Société

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Because it stirs the pot, ripples the surface of mythos, of art, content. You cannot kill content if you tried because art is baggage, preloaded with a cultural et al. So make it look good on a wall, even toilet paper.


Read all posts tagged Kaspar Müller, Ripples in the Surface

Hanne Darboven at Sprüth Magers

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

Marcelo Cipis at Spike

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The blurring of art and design produces an uncanny effect, seeing art airbrushed to a mannequin smoothness, an efficient body. Why isn’t all art this clear in desire, in its use. In design the auratic function is the product; the advert is the gears turning to produce the glow around it. Art is more of a dirty cloud that purports not to be, a ghost claiming it isn't.

Shirana Shahbazi at Kunsthalle Bern



Do something to it, then do something more. Like many “young” photographers today Shahbazi works at estrangement of the mass commons of archetypal/cliche cultural images. Shahabazis format and frames shift both between and within exhibitions, here the “roadtrip,” which having something done, and then something a little more, shift in their continual detachment from the real, until rendered neuter, until we feel them not at all, becoming something so overly familiar as to become foreign, crumbling its content to be mocked by the clownish aggro of intensely hued walls’ overbearing presence, a means vacillating between a self-flagellation for the photos sentimental printed nostalgia and an ironic overlay of cheer, laughter for the slaughter of content. That as the PR mentions these could be anyone’s instagram photos, the new banal spectacular, the dissolution of experience within the grand illusion of the individual for the cloud, a generic humanism.

See too: Annette Kelm at Gio Marconi