Josh Faught at The Wattis Institute

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After the post-apocalypse of the sign, in the wasteland, we began picking up the rubble. We needed meaning, which was old, vintage, possible authentic. We started storing it in reliquaries, placing it in altars. Aura by the altarfull. The relics were asked to speak. We pressed fragments to foreheads and contemplated skulls. Which was a very old pastime. 

Diamond Stingily at Wattis

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A shelving not quite inspiring confidence. A bookshelf is a form of social signaling, marking class, worth, status. This one is made of compressed dust to which it shall return.

Google "no participation trophies in life." You'll get hundred of results, get NYTimes debates. Rapid opinions, Millennial castigation. This despite childhood development studies saying you should reward effort, not achievement. "You did so well" is less positive reinforcement than "You worked so hard." Rewarding achievement threatens the hand of failure. Effort can be contributed without risk.

Sports are a form of systematized and controlled adversity. For a certain class of children this will be their only form of adversity.

Trophies, shelved, imply the past that looked through tint rose, nostalgia on achievement.

No one seemed to really mention the stark shadow these cast. 

Things said in recollecting the past, against the trophy of achievement they do not contain, become lamentations for a past that isn't garnered any such social trophies like a real wood bookshelf.

Ken Lum at Wattis

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Whereas for Baldessari the image and text ruptured to dissonant stupidity, for Lum the relation between text and its image, or stylization as font, vacillates in complicating tone, affect, and comprehension, fritzing usual relations to vertical text so usually standardized, corporate, and sanded of any possible misunderstanding. Vertical text is intended to be clean, sleek and lozenge like, a clearly defined transaction between speaker and reader, and Lum's version bubbles with all manner of nerves in us. You see the human erupt through the advertorial transaction which is supposed to remain free of subjectivity - there is never a plaintive plea in advertising, and in witnessing this breakdown of decorum we feel pity.


See too: Mark Grotjhan at Karma, John Baldessari at Marian Goodman, John Baldessari at Sprüth Magers

“Mechanisms” at Wattis

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CAD is turning 10 this year and we'd like to nominate this photo, in its absolute blankness, as the icon of all we've been through, a symbol for the "neutral" that has come to feel a trauma, the mass grays aggressively empty, the foam of installation insulation: averaging a couple hundred CAD images produces a warm grey (#b0aaa7 C:33 M:29 Y:30 K:0) the color of eye stuff, a warm enduring color and a paint sold only in select stores, refined images from the refinery of art. And in the distant background amongst all the framing and vitreous substances we look through to an artist's warped mirroring of all of it, us.

Candy Jernigan at Wattis

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Artistic power to make something "appear," be visible, is often abused with a beatification or worse aestheticization of a subject the artist predicts will interest nobody without their, the artist's, supple grace, i.e. the stylization, photorealist iconizaton, or whatever painterly reifications for aura redundantly affixed. Of course drawing is recording and thus proof of its seeing, document to its witness, made visible, and more accurate lines authenticating, but the drawing need not be "special." Jerrigan's accumulation proves a more a serviceable method in which the painter yields to the object, representation of it and not talent. Like all those tacos and kebabs painted on stucco to advertise the real thing inside, there is a functionalism in vernacular foodstuffs that often feels like a relief. If you want to show something you just put it there.

Yuki Kimura at Wattis

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The Double is a strange fascination of many, and PR's referencing the duplicitous 4th dimension, time, and spatial slippage everpresent, and our holographic space/time proves gravity an illusion? positing perhaps that the double is less as a conceptual predicament than a material one: pieces of clean metal in a vacuum will auto-weld together, atomically unable to differentiate their objecthood and so confused become one. Mathematical quandries of whether or not "2" exists, or "1" for that matter, is saying 2 silicon atoms true, or are all silicon atoms unique clouds that aren't mathematical abstractions stripping unique properties, particularly when today and tomorrow don't particularly exist. Tricky questions, sure.

Camille Blatrix at Wattis

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The hospital aesthetic. How objects present themselves when encountering you in your vulnerable situations. Which in a Gallery is a pleasant change, to have an object soften itself to you, rather than brutalize you with austerity. A softening [that is] less the adoption of commericial interest in infantalising you [luxury car interiors that look as intestinal as they do sexual] and of which much similar art interprets but instead a vulnerable thing. The cuteness of Hospital beds, which are ostensibly sympathetic to us.  Like that other Camille, Chaimowicz, the look of object who wish to project their sympathetic nature to us humans. This is what iPhones will look like in the future. They are already starting to. Like baleens overturned and vibrating.


See too: Marc Camille Chaimowicz at INDIPENDENZA, Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi

Carissa Rodriguez at Wattis

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The wider the distance between signs/images the greater the space to be filled, the grander the concept, the impossible gap, generally seceded to the viewer. This is our conceptual moment. Objects have meaning, we cannot pass that off, and the distance between them, grand like the canyon, vacant and large. Rodriguez, against any "signature object", the only thing left to do is to produce greater and greater gulfs of meaning.


see too: Adriana Lara at Algus Greenspon, Henning Bohl at What Pipeline

Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys at Wattis

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Taking up where Fischli + Weiss left off, Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys continue the unchecked carefree edging comedic nihlism; already systematized into the production line it was always already fit into. "The sensation of boredom and nausea that the programs cause in me are experiential proof that I am not completely programmed," as the PR quotes.  The so slight tangent they provide to the moor of modern life - afternoons spent drawing trollies - meant as an acerbic aloofness, an "abuse of time," could be soothing to nervous bones, but also has already accepted the defeat expected, a Naumanian irony extended to the long view, a symptom soothing, anesthetic, numbing fun.

See too: David Weiss at Swiss Institute , Fischli and Weiss at Sprüth Mages

Markus Schinwald at Wattis



Since the press release ignores mentioning it, Schinwald has assembled chair legs to look like strippers dancing around poles. Though similar work was shown at the Freud Museum, so perhaps the guy with the cigar isn’t always a dick. Either way it’s Tom Otterness level of comedy in an Oldenburg style of sculptural punnery, lipstick rockets and cherry licking. It’s camp, but camp so buried in a cultural miasma of conservative taste it’s not really all that fun, not really fun at all.