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 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.