Edvard Munch, Trevor Shimizu at VI, VII, Oslo

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Have you seen the chart? This exhibition proves it, the retrograde, paintings like puncture holes, folding the time continuum to wormhole a pencil through it, write an extra zero on the check. 

Eliza Douglas at VI, VII

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Culture/commodities valorize their objects with simple bludgeons: the celebrity holds the product, the commercial assigns attitude. Our knowledge of its arithmetic does not cancel it. The code still functions. Brand is the level we fight on. The Whitney Biennial weathered months of protest until the attacks came at their identity, a rebranding "The Teargas Biennial," and suddenly softened their militancy. (CAWD wrote an essay about this here.) Museum brand in turn forms its signet in the installation view, architecture watermarks the photographs, walls as the celebrity hands cradling the art. Why else would Christopher Williams be shipping walls across continents? More celebrity hands. These celebrity hands have been chopped off, stolen, dead hands made to hold. Like as teen you photoshopped yourself kissing Johnny Depp. It would be interesting if a lawsuit developed. Like when the Guggenheim sued Paul McCarthy and Mike Bouchet (again the attack was at brand level.) But Douglas's theft is probably flattering, who doesn't want people stanning for them, building at home reliquaries to them, Johnny Depp, The Whitney, they live off our reverence to them.  

Robert Kulisek at VI, VII

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In the sky, written overhead by plane, "Leave the youth alone. Stop extracting their joy to be sold like a vampire pleasure for vaults. Youth is not some fount to be bottled. Youth is not wasted on the young, attempts to preserve it the cold hands of those knowing is. A canned and brined youth. Advertorial youth. Youth to sell perfume. Youth to be enjoyed as youth is not youth. Put your plastic bottling devices down. There is no fount here, only cold hands."

James Hoff at VI, VII

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We need a word for something.
Let's make a fictional example, an artist, let's say this fictional artist is named Lucien Smith.
Lucien Smith makes paintings with a fire-extinguisher. This is called "process based abstraction." But if Lucien Smith had made paintings with fire extinguishers pulled from the wreckage of an art warehouse burned to the ground with so much of Saatchi's art within it, these fire extinguishers unused and thus a testament to dashed hopes of prevention and ready for Smith's painting well then, he'd really have something wouldn't he. This value added of anecdotal content, of reference converted to sign and emblazoned on painting, this.
While this was the central conundrum to conceptual art since its inception, the rupture and distance between sign and object (always at risk that its sign didn't actually contain its object) it has since been taken as granted, as a granting agency for value added. While On Kawara's July 21st 1969 poses the question of whether it actually contains the weight of a moon landing, the paint sprayed is given to absorb the history. If an artist goes into the woods and there is no cellphone service around to hear him, does it imbue itself into the copper objects as significant?  Jason Rhoades built a career of mocking this value-added system, performing it under absurdly comical conditions, to create his referentially seminal signature: PeaRoeFoam, a mess of so much reference and history and jest that it self imploded. Or Seinfeldized by Arcangel.
So a word for this value-added process based absorption/valorization of reference.


See too: On Kawara at the Guggenheim , Simon Starling at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago