Hanna Hur, Dorothea Rockburne at Ulrik & Nick Oberthaler at Layr

(Ulrik, Layr)

Geometry day down at CAD. Art demands religion be turned secular, into math, "art" which allows belief in higher powers without the pesky god. Angels to origami, optics. Oberthaler too deletes the gods of abstraction, transmutes their capital to symbols, coinage, packaged as Campbell's soup cans. Art is good at performing these transubstantiations, making blood into wine, into something we can taste, connoisseur, if not necessarily need believe. 

This exhibition includes 47 artists City Galerie Wien, Vienna Layr, Vienna

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It sucks that drawing has to have a reason. That art requires an explanation. Both a reason to be, and a reason to be explained. The myth of art as meaningful. We've transmuted Manet's asparagus into a cultural behemoth we were then forced to symbolically fund. With more language, consecration, text, framing, walls, institution. Eventually too big to fail. How would we pay for all this gilt? So the artworld invented ghosts, a higher plane, myth. Genius. Dividends of interest paid, $30 to get into MoMA. We weren't producing goods like painting anymore, we were producing meaning, text, numbers, the symbolic financialization of art, invertedly, a use-value for it. Art was meaningful, could be explained, could provide value. It was vital, necessary. My god what had we done. Making art necessary.

So maybe the only way out is through. Explain the art. Kill it. Something dead will finally be unnecessary again. 

Kobby Adi at FELIX GAUDLITZ

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Conceptual art mutated into three genres, 1, zombie abstraction; 2, art legalese, say Cameron Rowland or Daren Bader/Martin Creed; and 3, myth attractors. The myth attractors best illustrated by Trisha Donnelly for whom stories circulate as much as image. But a definition might be provided by this description of Adi: "an idea extending beyond any material work, disseminated by hitching rides on the memories of those who have seen it, on the words of those who talk about it, or within the images and accounts that document, or merely suggest, its existence. Still, the label is not the artwork. Wherever there’s water, All splashing and pouring can appear—that’s the point." While Donnelly has gone on to arguably more formal work, the setup remains, this air of suggestibility, the ominous object whose explanatory reference points are cut at some specific level, until reference begin pointing everywhere, until the air becomes perfumed with it. The gap is the mystery, is its interpretability. These are instruments made of gut string inside heat resistant tubing, which, like the internal temperature of animals, you can hear the music already. It exists in the suspicion for it. Reminiscent of Michael E. Smith's clarinets inside PVC tubes - documentation of which seems vaporized along with Susan Hillbery's gallery and website. It's just myth now. But they sounded great.

See too: We feel comfort with the artwork identified and labeled, packaged by the camera or work list, catalogue raisonnéd. We appreciate butterflies pinned spread behind glass. Explained. Removed from the packaging artworks and butterflies disperse, cling everywhere, etherealize into suspicion for them.

Group Show at Croy Nielsen

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Against yesterday's joy, today's lethargy. Drear. Anhedonia. The color drains. The puddles accumulate. A swamp. A stage, it all becomes a theater of sad. It feels apt.

Adam Pendleton at MUMOK

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Pendleton's work is supposed to look like photocopied art history, a zine of bricolage referent, and in this repetition we are told is some new space that "renews the instability of discourse and identity" or "refashions history into something that opens out into the new." But this new space that art continuously opens always seem to be more trophy abstraction.

 

You know what the market has shown every collector wants walled? Abstraction, and so art has become a giant machine mining sources of abstraction. And the endless ironizing of abstract legacies with its remaking in different modes (fire extinguisher, silvering, abjection, food photography) ostensibly acts as critique. Pollock was just spurting cum, symbolically accredited decoration, abjection whatever; the critique fails to, despite 40 years of it, functionally do anything. It's like battling a ghost with a longsword. Abstraction is the inkblot that acts like silver, that acts like mirrors, to place whatever you want to see in it. And we keep digging mirrors.

 

see too: Lisa Holzer at Kunstverein München

Mandla Reuter at Croy Nielsen

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When you start to look at exhibitions as a crimescene and art as its evidence - you can't unsee it. The art is the mystery. Which makes clues of everything. Clues lend aura. Aura is mistakable as art. The documentation plays up the murder mystery. The artwork placed in forensic baggies. This is a continuous vibe of art today - with its disparate elements array on floors.

Gelatin at Galerie Meyer Kainer

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Gelatin's would seem a populist stupidity balanced with the high abjection of a butthole. But it's all butthole in populism, and Gelatin's greatest skill is getting a blue haired public to smile on camera with said butthole, to join in happily to dig the worthless hole. It doesn't take much. Everyone is happy to laugh because irony excuses everything. Like a nun taking photos with the Naked Cowboy - this is common. Dunking on the Mona Lisa is playing basketball against a team paid to lose. The dunks better be Globetrotter - otherwise what is the point of the effigy. Comedy falls flat when it commends an audience's ability to distance themselves.

Kyle Thurman at Sophie Tappeiner

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The suit is a vessel we project into, a blank everyman we can identify ourselves in. A male power fantasy, the mech suit or the business suit. The suit is painting. It's not even a metaphor. It is simply how art operates, as a receptacle, a fantasy projection screen, a sandbox dictatorship for the tiny artist dreams.

Jürgen Klauke at Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman

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The luggage scanner was more free of political baggage in the 80s. Sorting the internals of an object- it's a metaphor for interpretation, understanding, for meaning. But as Heji Shin has shown, the internal can be as useless as the face of God, Kanye. It's all visage, mirage, inkblot. Giving the inkblot a shape at least relieves the viewer full culpability to meaning. The artist shares in the guilt of creation. This is small kindness.

See too: Heji Shin at Reena Spaulings, Heji Shin at MEGA Foundation

Marcia Hafif at Galerie Hubert Winter

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This is tragedy, no? Art cataloguing a world. Swatches of what was. The airline wreckage assessment. The white light searching rubble for meaning. Permanent Green Light, 1972.

Edith Deyerling at FELIX GAUDLITZ

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This press release is good. I am Jack's indentured meaning. A moral failure, a character flaw, to the viewer who can not release it. If I tell you, have I deprived you of yours? Your hero journey across deserts of well.. dessert. What could all this frosting mean?

Alain Guiraudie at Crèvecoeur & Timothy Kelly at Can

(Can, Crèvecoeur)

A joke about photography being the Hoover of the world, indiscriminately sucking.

Patricia L. Boyd at Secession, Vienna

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The "certifying white light." Of food porn, pornography, and god. Also the gallery. Product photography. To reduce blemishes. Feign omniscience. Pretend to be science, all knowing, objective. If we could remove darkness, spend extra on the intricacy, we would find some kind of truth-identifying substance. We only require extra wattages, a more technical brilliance, higher levels of magnification, detail, analysis. Then it will be revealed. The exhaustion engine. 

New Space Show at Layr & The Old Greyhound Bus Station at Bortolami

(Layr, Bortolami)

New Space day at CAD. An old bus station, a fresh digs. The exhibition space is the thing we're meant acknowledge but also not supposed to really acknowledge. (It would be too base to talk about the space in a true art review.) But yet it's there, the cosmic radiation to art.  I'm not even sure we have a language for its criticism, we only talk about it as a whole, as the common cube, to everyone. The implicit gold wreath. That now occasionally self-acknowledges? The exhibition's space is the watermark for the gallery's brand. the identity - so of course there is desire to puff its chest. 

Lili Reynaud-Dewar at Layr

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"I invited men into my hotel room and asked them very personal questions about their lives" - making for the most overloaded artwork ever.  Sophie Calle by way of Ryder Ripps. Or Leigh Ledare. A conceptual gesture precluding/eclipsing its subject. An art as a set of procedures. It's a way of making sure you end up with something "interesting" - the program defines it. The psychoanalytic baggage becomes super saturated, too many rung bells to define a tune. Lest you forget, there is a hidden-not-hidden object here under all this red flag. Which is less the paradox of art's "contractual obligation to display freedom" than it is artistic-commodification of one's own body as an object for psychological projection, for MEANING. Everything is reflected back into the object of one's displayed-not-displayed body. Hannah Wilke but now dancing its inkblot in front of you. To interview a human is not enough you must find a way to paint yourself red into it. Self-immolate into it. Wilke was forced to get cancer to prove it.

Siggi Hofer at Secession

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Painting converting to sign systems, bastardizing the pure expectations; painting begins behaving more like a stop sign. Painters love the functional sign, the sign painter, but capital P Painting can't be given to such pedestrian work. Josh Smith actually painting stop signs proved the bad boy point: painting isn't intended to function. Smith's point negated itself as an eyeroll, expected bastardizing. But when painting fuzzes sign/painting territory the point becomes Math Bass clearer discomfort.

Math Bass at Mary Boone
"It makes for paintings that can be painful, sensitivity traded for force."

Angelika Loderer at Sophie Tappeiner

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"The mycelium disintegrates the fibers of the prints, and images." This artwork that self-destructs. Sorta.  The non-secret in a long history of artwork auto-destruction is that doesn't. Like the Banksy half-shredded, it merely performed spectacle. Valorizes itself, processes its material to create brand. Like a mushroom, or an artist, or the point.  What we need is not this psuedo-suicide. What we need an artwork that destroys other artworks. A giant chomping crushing machine. What we need is writing.

Nairy Baghramian at Secession

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"In the last few years the status of a work of art has risen beyond that of mere autonomous existence, to the point where works are sometimes treated like quasi-subjects capable of their own autonomous thinking. ...

One sometimes gets the impression that a work of art can speak, live, and even outlive the artist and hence also artistic discourse. I believe that this work-turned-subject is a kind of monster. Curators, art historians, and critics sometimes nurse this monster ...

The tendency of the art work to be turned into a subject is further promoted by the growing silence of the artist–subject, who thereby threatens to turn him or herself into a self-mystifying object. ..." Nairy Baghramian - "Le Mépris" TzK

 

Rachel Harrison at Galerie Meyer Kainer

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An information processing app asked to process our world. The premise reasonable. The results are deeply midcareer. Literal. Instead of a Terminator HUD, we get a generalized mess, abstraction. Harrison has a struggle, recompressing the diamonds after the explosion of her star, the mall, our world. But every group show looks like you blew up a mall today. Harrison's influence is prevalent. CAWD has written more about her mostly through other artists. Her work explains a lot of other artists. Our exploded semio-wasteland. We're all just garbage pickers now in Harrison's ruin, even Harrison. A trash become good god. 

Philipp Timischl at LAYR Coburgbastei, Vienna

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Blinky light art, the rearranged parts of the cultural casino, cut from and placed into its altars, deranged artifacts. The PR says as much: "ratifies a pop modernism celebrating the a priori unnatural marriage between the culture of entertainment and that, sacerdotal, of modernism. Our Clement Greenberg in TMZ sauce, restages the epic formalist quest for flatness, infused with pop calibrated for iPhones."

The culturally accredited mall.

See too: Philipp Timischl at Neue Alte Brücke