Daiga Grantina at Emalin & Paul Lee at Adams and Ollman

(Emalin, AdamsOllman)

Are we getting theme days now? Yesterday's painterly auto-satisfaction and today is fishnetted TuttleWurtz? Which ostensibly allows experimental comparison: constants can be ignored, the variables leading to data - we determine difference. For the sorting of garbage. Like, while Hesse's materiality was more organizations systems to flaunt it, Benglis's excessed itself to monuments, less organized than amassed (what Donovan would later make spectacle). Chamberlain versus Nancy Rubins. Tuttle's accumulation was painterly, made formal, pretty for the pageants. And Wurtz... Wurtz more just the treating the refuse with a dignity - combing the child's hair for picture day. And Miho Dohi's fungi amongst. And here we have two somewhere in the field, picking up the remains, assembling a late assemblage. There's a joke in here about recycling, or upcycling, or maybe just "reduce, reuse, recycle" it'll always be a different product.

See too: Paul Lee, B. Wurtz

Noel W. Anderson at JDJ

(link)

Because we need to turn images into tombstones. And the press release is the meaning giving prayer. And abstraction as a verb, an artistic technology for memorial. Processed pain. 

past: Noel W. Anderson at JDJ

Sanya Kantarovsky, Camille Blatrix at Modern Art

(link)

Artists engaging in traditional crafts, marquetry and woodblock. But tradition was wiped out by the invention of capitalist plastic. Labor was reduced to work, and craft became manufacturing processes, became laser cut wood, CNC milled blocks, a thousand interns on call. Suddenly your dreams could be injection molded. Ostensibly. And these are two artists who's importance is the plasticity of style - the sort of whatever possibility of plastic goos, bent for artistic purposing. New images in old habits. So it's odd then to have a press release calling the whole thing into question, a excerpt from a 1906 book of traditional wood crafts lamenting novelty:

"If there is one quality which more than another marks the demand of the present day it is the requirement of novelty. ...the question is not, 'Is this fresh thing good? Is it well-fitted for its intended uses?' but 'Is it novel?' ... dispens[ing] with tradition, and ... set forth with childlike naïveté. Careful study of these experiments discloses the fact that .... the undigested use of natural motifs results not in nourishment but in nightmare"

This would all depend on whether we believe this art to be "undigested designs indifferently executed which have little but a fancied novelty to recommend them.” Not a "...a saner view of what constitutes originality by setting before them something of the experience of past times, when craft tradition was still living and the designer had a closer contact with the material in which his design was carried out than is usual at present." Surely this is not today. But there's something I'm not willing to throw away with the show. Somehow its uselessness seems the point, an abuse of interest. 

see too: Sanya Kantarovsky at Marc Foxx, Camille Blatrix at Wattis

Liz Larner at Regen Projects

(link)

"Painted trash" sounds like an insult, but it's what we have here. A decorate filth. Framing the more expensive. Does this imbue them a criticality they would lack otherwise? Connecting them to issues at hand? Or a self-inflicted wound, pointing out that the jewels too are just mud with a glaze. Eventually the plastic disintegrates, washes away, and inside the lumps remain. 

Monique Mouton at Bridget Donahue

(link)

The fragments, clouds, poems on papyrus to be reassembled. "[Fragments] are wounded, ominous, their meaning is fractured, in ways that can't be put back together. We place these objects to our foreheads and ask for their secrets, contemplate their use, rotate them in our minds. [Their use is] to be pressed to ears, interminably silent, and hear the ocean in your head." Attempts to cage a cloud, the pleasured exhalation of your last cigarette, leave one wondering at the limits of repair. You can identify a world by its fingerprints, but you can't recreate it from. Think Lutz Bacher xeroxing the cosmos to noise that they were always planning on returning to already. The palimpsest that can't be regained. Bathrooms wiped of their graffiti would be a waste two millennia later but two millennia of graffiti isn't much better. Poor Smithson. Sand through fingers, the columns of society finding themselves into finer and finer granules.  For society was a fine dust, and a dust is what it will return. I say, stubbing out a cigarette.

See too: Nazgol Ansarinia at Raffaella Cortese

Martin Wong, Aaron Gilbert at P.P.O.W

(link)

Wong's are hard, heavy, enclosing, emphasis on bars, bricks, bricks, more bricks. This was the era of neo-expressionism and this was city's expression, Wong painting what the city exuded, its own abstract expressionism. Bricks clung to the canvas like broken plate brutalism. There's just so many bricks. Very little light. Which against this dull light, Gilbert's figures grow etiolated, leggy, soft. They bend in strange ways. Squishy vulnerability. For all the bad situations they still manage to find a lot of pleasant lighting, lovely pastel color. Wong's get none, the pleasure of color is walled in the red bricks, imprisoned by police blues.  

Ann Craven at KARMA & Léopold Rabus at Wilde

(Karma, Wilde)

Bird day down here at the dailies. We got scrappy paintings of birds and polished paintings of birds. Birds on blue backgrounds and sticks in the ether. Foliage and naturalism and big ole pizza pie eyes. Painters that couldn't be more different or same. Both rupturing a full connection with their aviary in the warble glass of their eye - painting - a scrappy Craven brushwork or Rabus slight doubled eye surrealism. A crack in the glass that is style, the rupture that prevents full connection to our nature's plumage, a gap to throw our guesses at meaning, the gap is value not the meaning. So they're not just birds, art birds.

Mark McKnight at Park View/Paul Soto

(link)

The confusion of the machines reading this as "violent content" is almost objective evidence of McKnight's latent own - the algorithm seeing violence, "humanitarian crisis," or corpses in the body of a tree. I mean it is a sensitive photo. Instagram's policies are notoriously opaque, but assuming this was an automated process, the robots choosing violence don't understand corpses or flesh or violence. (Picking a boat out of a lineup of 9 images fools most robots.) Rather they amass a generalized cloud of what violent content looks like. It's in this etherous affect of violence, of horror - removed from a strict concept of corpse - that both you and the algorithm respond to a tree. No so different after all, husks of the dead, apophenic machines. There's more content to that Bernini-like grasping of flesh than the new church would allow. 

Brook Hsu at Manual Arts

(link)

"In dark forests we imagine predators, in trees see gods. We excel in confusion at inventing gods, or meaning." Critics appear in screens to talk against it. Their babble is the nightlight against unknowing, provide meaning to the void, the loss, the space of art. To feel some comfort against darkness. Explain it.

Ben Sakoguchi at Bel Ami

(link)

A sort of psychosis on canvas. The cultural litter accumulated/arranged as signage for the horror -  billboards welcoming the not-so-golden state of culture. This is not the surrealism of painting, but the irruption of a cultural repression. (This is a big difference, as types of surrealism go.) Like comedy is a system that reorganizes culture- rerouting it to a laughter - like Pope.L there's no relief of a joke complete, instead reorganizing culture for pain, an organized crime rearranging legs to prove them capable of breaking.

See too: Pope.L

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

Clayton Schiff at Real Pain

(link)

Transcendence and medical technology illustrate themselves similarly. Cartoons become the hollow container you fill yourself into. The body illustrated becomes a cartoon you can inflict. Both art and sales require this permeable vessel. It supplies the identification for its product.

Adam Henry at Candice Madey

(link)

Like op-art turned to info-graphics, there seems to be something we are being diagrammatically informed of - which - conflicting with the phenomenological fuzz creates an artistic ambiguity we associate with smiles. 

Sharon Hayes at Kristina Kite Gallery

(link)

"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

Derrick Adams at Rhona Hoffman

(link)

Hard to be critical of a warm breeze. Hard to find injustice in pleasant days. A curmudgeon with the weather so good. The color amped to electrified sign. Color as a sign. Force fed pleasance. Not to rain on someone's parade. A "tropic interlude." Art becomes a fantasy, a vacation. A kindness we live vicariously through. We do a lot of living through these days.

Alex Heilbron at Meliksetian | Briggs

(link)

An explosion in a Hello Kitty flannel factory. A John Wesley from hell. Organized, but not necessarily reasonable. 

Pope.L at The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society & Mitchell-Innes & Nash

(Neubauer, Mitchell-Innes & Nash)

Language abstracted to near illegibility would be frowned upon as a cake-and-eat-it-too cop out, the affect of meaning without having say anything at all. But Pope.L makes the illegibility unnerving, like a joke whose punchline we aren't sure we get, the language's refusal to be clear instead affect uncomfort. Aggravating an unspoken racial relation of a violet people.

Caitlin Keogh at Overduin & Co.

(link)

Clue board games. Painting converted to iOS, and graphical icons to redistribute sense. Building interfaces for interpretation that is abyssal, sinking. Art seems doomed to be particularly suggestive tarot cards. 

Ken Taylor at Simchowitz

(link)

What the artworld attempts to disavow always comes back to haunt it. (Andrea Fraser wrote about this well.) Disavowal "rejects a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept" - i.e. the artworld unable to accept some uncomfortable truth that doesn't agree with the self-image it needs to project. So for instance, Simchowitz is the artworld villain of the 2010s -  I can't even remember what the villainry was - maybe saying the quiet part loud - his name basically synonymous with "evil dealer."  But as new villains emerge evolving greater forms of evil, Simco seems tame, his methods all but accepted, and the artworld acclimates to the uncomfortable fact about itself. That people use it to make money. The lesson here being the ultimate adjudicators of [vitality] in art are not justice. It is the merely the ability to self-replicate - to procreate, survive, spam yourself into consciousness with press, sales, money. Power in the artworld is simply the ability to leverage ones assets into more.. well assets,  which eventually becomes visibility. Until it's non-ignorable. Until they all absorb the evil, still pretend something else. 

Same w/ the Cucchi/Clemente thing here - despite all the last 20-30 years warding against neo-expressionism, guess who is back. 

Alastair Mackinven at Reena Spaulings

(link)

The Spaulings shift happened around 2014. Josh Smith was painting palm trees. Klara Liden took dance lessons (instead of bashing bicycles with a pipe in an empty apartment.) Koether showed painting on canvas. Even Carpenter painted paintings. Claire Fontaine's revolution stopped being given several exhibitions a year. Seth Price decamped for Petzel. It was like everyone had kids. And then two years later, a second home, and suddenly tasteful paintings on the walls, many exhibitions of them. Had we all just become adults? This was everywhere. Even Mackinven's 2013 paintings seemed more with old Spaulings. But everyone's teenage hopes of criticality and middle fingers given over to colorful walls, given over to the mere apparatus of visibility (2014 was one year after Sanchez's question on digital transmission, is this the aftermath?) to just keeping the symbolic lights on for fluorescent symbolist moments. So that there are two kinds of nostalgia operating now. 

see too: Alastair Mackinven at Reena Spaulings