Than Hussein Clark at Crèvecoeur

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What would it mean if your face went baroque? Grew extra decoration, an excess of facial ornament, a sinuous nose, maybe a second or third nose, a face rippling and exuberant, an excess of face, your eyes like twisted columns, 64 floral teeth, a rococo face, a visage replete with flourishes. verb, to baroque something, a surfeit of something. That's sorta Clark's modernism.

see too: Marc Camille Chaimowicz at INDIPENDENZA

Than Hussein Clark at GAK

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At its most extreme the proposition may be that art is not as valuable as the context surrounding it.  That the spaghetti dinners attribute diamonds their value. And so the context, under new light, grow baroque, wilt new leafs, gilt themselves in preparation for their spotlighting, put little balls on their feet so as weight their connection to it, the theater.

Villa Design Group at MIT List Visual Arts Center

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Calling yourself a design group you avoid the sticky responsibility of art. It's a trick of course, not so much halting our critical appendage as rerouting concerns, an excuse for a temporary injunction of arts more mannered rules that while appearing to resemble critical turns are more stylistic concerns. The design group is of course an ironic statement in that it intends to function as both and that if art were really all that expressionistically free wouldn't matter anyway. The Memphis group was as culturally attuned as any artist who had then avoided such stylistic concerns as the fashion that today so many embrace, doubling down on the visual psychosis of a culture. These still with ease function as art objects, superficial ones in the best sense.


The “The Violet Crab” at DRAF,

Than Hussein Clark at Futura

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By staging the objects as theatrical their vacancy becomes strength, hollowness holding a surface for eyes to move and containing whatever importance the narrative can attribute it, like a beautifully feathered bird you are required to know nothing about, or a Tahitian landscape unencumbered by syphilitic artists, or a tie-dyed Heimo Zobernig.  Like Sci-fi as excuse to CGI a lot of shiny things, theater to reimagine some neo-Memphis-group for Petra von Kant.

See too: “The Violet Crab” at DRAF, Than Hussein Clark at Futura

“The Violet Crab” at DRAF

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This exhibition is a proposition. That art should be more like cabaret, a category optimistically defined as a risque entertainment that absorbs and harbors the fringes of culture, an ideal art that would dissolve lip-service to post-modernity still aggressively holding on to the autonomous work. It's like championing spaghetti to replace diamonds.  We would have to give up the authorial subject for the carnival. A radical happening transferring art to artifacts of a scene, and the entrepreneur as author. Maybe.
Satirizing the rules of production in the present isn't that difficult, even the mildest flatulence breaks gallery decorum. Turning the house topsy-turvy, the curatorial address of throwing it all in and letting god sort 'em out with song and dance.

“Transatlantic Transparency” at Mathew

(“Transatlantic Transparency” at Mathew New York, Berlin)

In the intentionally bathetic ending of Lerner’s novel (quoted in the press release) the Poet, throughout stricken with self-reflexive paralysis, described by one reviewer as an “examination of just how self-conscious, miserable, and absurd one man can be” arises from the dream of his Madrid fellowship discovering his problems somehow gone the moment he leaves them.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. The exhibition's formalism is criticism only in the sense of contemporary art's allergy to the word, but of course Wilde’s “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances...” and so. Appearances are politics, and in an age where the image replaces thought, the formalism often exists as an interesting necessary tool. So why does this exhibition feel so defeated before born? Like the press release, it itself uses its stylistic assemblage to bog itself in its own mire, only to get sad about it, defeated by its own appearances.

HE HAD ENOUGH RESPECT FOR PAINTING to quit. Enough respect for quitting to paint. Enough respect for the figure to abstract. For abstraction to hint at the breast. For the breast to ask the model to leave. But I live here, says the model. And I respect that, says the painter. But I have enough respect for respect to insist. For insistence to turn the other cheek. For the other cheek to turn the other cheek. Hence I appear to be shaking my head No.
-Ben Lerner from Angle of Yaw.