Don Suggs at L.A. Louver

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The doodles of artists are often their most interesting, so why not find a way to make that automatism the concrete jewels themselves. Far more interpretable than diamonds.

Venice 2019, Neïl Beloufa

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Are these not bondage devices for tourists?

"What the third-century Stylite sought in self-privation and proud stillness, [the jogger] is seeking through the muscular exhaustion of his body. He is the brother in mortification of those who conscientiously exhaust themselves in the body-building studios on complicated machines with chrome pulleys and on terrifying medical contraptions. There is a direct line that runs from the medieval instruments of torture, via the industrial movements of production-line work, to the techniques of schooling the body by using mechanical apparatuses. Like dieting, body-building, and so many other things, jogging is a new form of voluntary servitude." - Baudrillard

Art is the new form of penance. A form of entertainment as self-flagellation, "of repentance for having done wrong."
The doctor's table and the movie theater converge.

Venice 2019, George Condo Arsenale

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This is the first thing you see. Proposition A. Surely opening - at least one half of - your travel destination exhibition with this prominent, large, painting is something. Surely something more should have been made of this? Ironic mirror to Warhol, to Elvis, to Condo, cartooning the world. Surely something.

Venice 2019, Arthur Jafa Central Pavilion

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"The White Album" is probably best explained in reaction to reaction of "Love is the Message, The Message is Death".

"This was sad bc of where it was. I was uncomfortable bc of the ppl sat around me, the number of white ppl laughing at black people that went viral like Sweet Brown, like that beginning intro of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is rly fucked up, it’s not funny, the whole intro is a joke at the expense of the black body and the tropes of speech that white society has marked as laughable. They were laughing at these bits that weren’t for them to laugh at, without reflection on their position as an audience, the fact they were laughing felt grotesque like, it wasn’t there for it to be funny, it was there as part of the stuff, the stuff popping up with all the other,, it made me tense. it felt violent n i haven’t rly got words to explain it very well [i feel like Aria Dean explains the feeling and more better in Poor Meme, Rich Meme; but also this essay on Black Trauma & the viral video from Buzzfeed] it was like… ok so this happened; i was sat behind two like hype beast skate bros wearing busted vans and dead Supreme caps n like… there was a moment in the film when Earl Sweatshirt pops up n they like elbowed each other got all gassed that they recognised him;;; but there was no like irony for them that 2 minutes before there was a clip of Amandla Stenberg saying “what if white america loved black people as much as it loves consuming black culture”. It felt all at once, simultaneously too much;; like both irresponsible and immediately radical to dump this raw and vulnerable film, this footage, this black twitter as archive, all this in the film there in that setting with no cushion. At the top of a London building on the Strand that had been transformed into like a Lisson Gallery greatest hits album underneath us. No explanation, no address really. It felt violent that certain ppl could potentially walk away having had that laugh, n nothing else. No really emotional connect, not feeling like a freshly picked scab// like i did. Not to say, ‘i had the right reaction, lol at these white plebs’;;; but like… if u don’t get it, maybe it isn’t for u? isn’t it radical and irresponsible also to speak in specificities, to be both marginalised and not try and speak to a majority, how beautiful, to revel in that complexity! It made me sad bc the people around me didn’t get it. i know they didn’t get it, fuck me, white ppl never do. it made me sad bc this film made me feel so fucking much, but tbh i shouldn’t feel sad. I had a beautiful, specific reaction even though this film wasn’t actually really for me either." - The White Pube

'I’m not making any more Love Is the Messages,” [Jafa] said in a phone interview from his home base, Los Angeles.
“I started to feel like I was giving people this sort of microwave epiphany about blackness and I started [feeling] very suspect about it. After so many ‘I cried. I crieds’, well, is that the measure of having processed it in a constructive way? I’m not sure it is."

The White Album’s tonal and visual proximities begin with The Pure and the Damned, the music video from Oneohtrix Point Never featuring Iggy Pop’s eerie poesy, from the 2017 film Good Time. “To me, I look at that video, I was like: this shit is definitely about whiteness,” Jafa said of the clip, which he stumbled upon on YouTube. “A lot of really white shit that white people don’t think is about whiteness, they just think it’s about the world.” - The Guardian

Venice 2019, Danh Vo, & at kurimanzutto

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"Vo has acquired objects from the estate of Robert McNamara [...] This first contact with the McNamara family led their son Craig McNamara to befriend Vo and later gift him with a walnut orchard*, its timber destined to make rifle stocks. Instead, the timber has been used by the artist to make replicas of designer furniture or to be used raw and unfinished"

Remember "process orientated abstraction", those set of instructions - a conceptual rubric - that was enacted to be left as traces surfaces the painting? Spraying of fire extinguishers, extracting dyes from flowers, silvering paintings, et al. Vo's is the conceptual art version of that. Vo allows legend to become perfume, an adornment mystifying its objects. Like an unironic Jason Rhoades, exhibitions become spaces for the process of mythification. Whereas for Rhoades it was a  comic process of figurative trash becoming some hokey possibility for art, for Vo the pre-christened becomes involved in the permutations of further embedding it in objects. I think somewhere here there is a conflation of terms or ideas. The aura of art, of objects, is somehow smeltable, is made able to be repoured into new objects through a form of storytelling. Vo is a factory for this witchcraft, for the production of belief in these ghosts. This is not to denigrate storytelling, or myth, but that somehow (through conceptual art) we've equated the aura of art with the mythologizing of objects with a narrative, a press release. Replaced something's raison d'être with any reason for being whatsoever. What exactly do the walnut tables actually contain?

*According the Guardian, Vo was gifted 10 hectares of lumber, not an actual orchard. (24.7 acres of Sierra Orchard's 450. Though some of this acreage is dedicated to olive oil and other things. However, according to Time Out London, this was all the wood from a recent clearing.)

Venice 2019, Belgium Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys Mondo Cane

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Against Venetian statuary, against marble gods with triforks, JdGHT's is wantonly provincial, the unsophisticate, the stupid it is. Turns out, despite centuries of looking up at them, we don't actually resemble Greek Gods. Instead these sullen mannequins far more accurate to the people encircling it. Tourists or art-polloi are made electric by this awful mirror. We are the botched paintings of Christ. It is a cruel realization that more than the marble, we unfortunately echo these, you Chuck-E-Cheese animatronic. Turns out people are ugly. A Golden Lion to mockery as corrective.
Welcome to Belgium.


Read all posts about Jos De Gruyter and Harald Thys
Read: Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys at Kunsthal Aarhus, Jos De Gruyter and Harald Thys at Gavin Brown, Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys at Wattis, Jos De Gruyter and Harald Thys at MoMA PS1

Venice 2019 Notes: Christoph Buchel

Something like a conversation, Venice:

"Something like 75 migrants died."
"No, I think it was 300, maybe more."
A third person through sipped coffee conjectured a third much higher number, which everyone, my eavesdropping included, agreed was absurd.

The United Nation's number is a Google away for you and had been for us as well, group shaded in Free WiFi. But nobody wants to google a deathtoll. And we, having heard it before, carried with us some approximation we felt accurate-ish. Accurate enough. We carry vague feelings of distinction between 75, 300 deaths, 800 deaths labeled migrant. It is the indistinction that matters, matters more than the actual number. Scales of death blurring as equivalent-ish. Say, one-third of a September 11th.

Interesting that an artist generally dealing with installation and artifice is now trafficking this.

Venice 2019

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When Venice has finally sunk and the winter beaches have washed away and we jetset can no longer virtualize space by exhausting the earth and finally have to stay put and upload to cloud for our higher desires, when there is no earth and there is only net, then we'll be forced to come up with a way to better sort our image. The primitive mass of image against this is all going away in our best attempts at preservation.

Venice: Sheila Hicks at Arsenale

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Not quite sure if this counts as the rocks and props display systems of which we had mentioned, but there is that biomorphic gesture, the lumpen here like minimalist plushies, like muppets melted into pellets, physical round things mirroring our jelly prone bodies in sweaters, set against the display which generally euphemizes the body to appeal the eyes rather than spatial and proprioception of big soft rocks, Hicksian materiality in piles.


See too: Venice so far, Continuing Venice

Continuing Venice

(Venice: Kishio Suga at Arsenale)

Continuing from here. We've got more rocks propped. Though Suga has been propping potato objects for some time now, the rocks and sticks and lumpen things always seeming made to stand under pressure, like they're having a real rough go maintaining their uprightness. Their sort of dumb monumentality always human scaled. It makes them endearing. The lumpen always resembling us, or our eggs.


see too: Venice so far.

Venice: Anne Imhof at German Pavilion

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It's hard to watch bodies adopt ad campaigns. If Imhof's performances seem made for the documentation that echo them it's because they have our beautiful youth retension this conformity to the fashion that will transmit them. Move behind the glass of magazine pages. Identity is performance, seeing its most theatrical version, fashion, as art performance looking like a fashion shoot, is a nightmare. All of youth's beauty is wasted, by everyone, but now you can watch it be caged live in the clothing of another.


See too: Tony Conrad's Glass

Venice vs Triennial

Venice, Triennial

Cold adult sobriety vs hothouse youth. The difference is generational. 10 years ago avenues to visibility were tightly controlled by finance beholden gatekeepers pedigreed and willing to bestow public accreditation to neophytes in line, behaving to a system; Today youth of the post-net are really post image-democratization, a time in which all images come preloaded with mass audientential capabilities, and accredited publications (with expensive paper real-estate) are matched by cheap raw visibility's fungible version, exchangeable with any world (fashion, commerce, literature) equally, the gold standard of different disciplines. Views now actually equatable with dollars, concretizing vague importance of public attendance numbers with dollar signs. This isn't that the New Museum is going full populist, but rather that it must manage now a cultural idea of art that they present back to it. The Bienniale, a pretty much artworld only affair, must conform to an artworld's image of itself, reserved and tasteful, and look how staid most of it in comparison is. And the preponderance of the Triennal exhibition's viral capable art that flowed through the net alongside it is as symptomatic of cultural changes in art as it is the new liquid spirit. Old guards' approval no longer perquisite to fame, Artists can produce visibility organically, through, it turns out, interesting images and so if the Teletubbies look through you, disinterested in your presence, chalk it up to art that isn't predicated on Fried's theater attending to the viewer's presence, but the populist behind it, and so this new art, frighteningly enough, is actually kind of entertaining.


See too Chris Ofili at New Museum, Seven Reeds at Overduin and Co.

Venice: Thea Djordjadze at The Arsenale

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Little leg syndrome, the flat and thin things from that time, the late 00's, Gedi Sibony, Ian Khaer, Dike Blair, Sosnowska, Pumhösl, Djordjadze, et al., everyone having these fragile objects carefully held on stilts and legs, over rugs, levitating things off the floor and potted plants in Broodthaer's resurging mis-en-scene faux Décors. Everyone invested in tableaus, of feng-shui industrial animism. Fried's theaters run though home decor staging's emptiness. Morphing into today's "speculative materials." Reinvesting in the material sited. Djordjadze's thin legged fragility looked, after the conquest of Ikea, libidinal. Reestablishing fragility in industrial forms we all wanted so bad. Petite arrangements of decor.

Venice: Céleste Boursier-Mougenot at The French Pavilion

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How romantic is this. This is like Arte Povera gentrified by clean white Apple design, the Apple Ad of art. Cue music.

See too : Marc Camille Chaimowicz at Galerie Neu

Venice: Victor Man at The Central Pavilion

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Jana Euler, Mathew Cerletty, etc. the overt affect of Man’s brooding tinctures in the hieroglyphs of a new puzzle form of painting, the explicit clarity of subjects, revealed flatly, become illustrations of a mysterioized subject withheld. The more overt the “subject,” the harder we fall into its promise of illustrating something, meaning. Man taking the hewn in stone rigidity of Piero Della Francseco’s stilted figures to place them in night glazed sinister. The black patinas concretizing the dark affects of pre-renaissance painting mysticism, ideals of math and Christianity ordered by divine principle. Man’s, and other’s, equally full frontal subject explicit wishing too for some divine mystery.

See too : Matthew Cerletty at Office Baroque , Jana Euler at Kunsthalle Zurich

Venice: Marlene Dumas at The Central Pavilion

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Dumas always risked becoming a materials fetishist, and here the variations on a theme seem exceedingly formal production,painting profs dream. Burdened by the image, treat it as token.  Is there real difference between these and Ann Craven besides a technical interest. Today, no longer painting, but a speed of working triumphs. This why painting dots so in fashion, we desire to become printers of our authorship. Production gaining important through its mass. Warhol's serial skulls mechanically mocked death, these ones are nice, pleasant even, fine.
These are pretty good.

see too : Ann Craven at Confort Moderne

Venice: Gedi Sibony at The Arsenale

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The small pleasure of Sibony's found paintings is their modernist uncanny within vernacular abstraction. That those uncaring, underpaid to blot out corporate logos for truck's resale, might - through dumb luck or undiscovered brilliance - have painted something fine. Their unartful reason a pleasantly fresh breeze of non-art. Dumb hamfisted inelegance, brilliant.  That brushstrokes without art intention always look best, and these just made to cover, to stop beer from selling itself, so painting could.

These "paintings" are easy to mock - the enterprise if you don't believe falls quickly into pastiche - and the can still being kicked down the line from the last bland Greene-Naftali ex - definitely Sibony and his objet trouvé animism with the least finesse, most bumbling, but saleable.


see too : Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak , Zak Kitnick at Rowhouse Project , "Seven Reeds" at Overduin and Co.