Oier Iruretagoiena at WIELS

(link)

The press release will explain the diagram, or it won't, but it doesn't matter - the diagram makes interest on a fabric of communication. Legibility, unimportant. The diagram appliques interest. Lends interpretability. The highest prize of art. Because it insinuates meaning, gold at colorful banner's end. 

Kasper Bosmans at WIELS

(link)

The Visitor's Guide takes the symbols at face value, making the painting hieroglyphs to which the guide is Rosetta Stone. Which implies an inner to be translated, implies a hidden meaning, which implies myth that art is pedagogical and museum as intrepid archeologist caretaking meaning for the lay. Put the bilingual dictionaries down. The idea of translation at all. 

George Rippon at Wiels

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"Now you are one of a group, invested in the belief that it has elected the company it keeps, and that by this act can set itself aside both from those whose acts of power require of them a strict adherence to a state of ignorance, and the desperate rabble always seeking whatever it can get, sapped of intention – one of those whose lives miraculously prove to reproduce the ideal of that fantasy of being apart from the crowd and its automation – popping around the globe to the tune of champagne flutes and flight announcements, while at the same time adhering to and enjoying all the conventional accouterments and assurances of self-esteem and respectability – of mobility – aspired to by that very same normalizing mass one shuns, but whose effort of desire as a multitude creates the conditions under which that ideal can project itself as the fabricated lifestyle you assume, and which consumes you." -Roger van Voorhees

Which was a press release for Rippon's last, and while absorption of critique - or simply acting as the enemy -  is one way to attempt to neuter it, it occasionally just rings.

“Unexchangable” at Wiels

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Long discussed as ironic kitsch - literally: "These are some of the worst paintings you will ever see" Searle - Shaw's thrift store finds have been slowly encroached by contemporary painting circling it. See "“Pharmacy for Idiots” at Rob Tufnell. Paintings' last five years seems close, if more proficient, to these vernacular imagists. The surrealism of today's painting mirrors the fact that any of the medium, in quantities vast enough, begins plotting points of the cultural unconscious. If you amass enough hand made images you begin so see dreams emerge. Painting, a virtual box that you fill with what you desire, but the desire is, if not caged, steered around themes that can be inferred by the collection circling around them. You can't see the pier but you can see the fish circling around them: the nude, Jesus, the phallus, pink things, us. Shaw's collection is like Wade Guyton's ostensible promise of printing our dreams, the conveyer of painting collecting like flypaper a civilization's subconscious. These are better much better most.


See too: Wade Guyton at Friedrich Petzel, “Pharmacy for Idiots” at Rob Tufnell, Tala Madani at David Kordansky

Rita McBride at Wiels

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Like the previous empty negatives of industrial cut outs, hollow forms that speak to both specificity and vacuity, that old modernist tension of simplicity and its ability to strike, that has come to be mocked by so many so well able to perform it a zesty stupidity, Zobernig, Lili Dujourie, Armleder, Levine, etc. etc. Modernism was obviously absolutely vampired by the production it pathed until it became cheap clad chip-board flat-packed and distributed to the point of annihilation, everywhere, insidious, today represented by its most terminally numb forms. Wresting just one more inert but definitive object from it is the ongoing joke.


See too: Heimo Zobernig at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Heimo Zobernig at Simon Lee, Heimo Zobernig at Indipendenza, Heimo Zobernig at Petzel, Krupp, MUDAM

AR: Stan Douglas at Wiels

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Originally Posted: January 9th, 2016

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Stan Douglas at Wiels

(link)

"examining the 'failed utopia' of modernism and obsolete technologies"
"a critical analysis of our social reality"
"Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, E.T.A. Hoffmann and the Brothers Grimm, 
blues and free jazz, television and Hollywood, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud
haunt the uncanny montages
of the Canadian artist"
"In what art historian Hal Foster describes as 
the 'outmoded genre'
in "failed utopias and obsolete technologies"
"a new medium out of the remnants of old forms"
"the parameters, functions and limits of cinematic adaptation"
"creating the effect of a recurring nightmare"
"everything deferred and delayed"
"troubling the material and spatial boundaries of the cinema and museum"
"thematically disturb these distinctions
as his art occupies
a transitional zone
that interrogates 
perception, narrative
comprehension and 
modes of visual and aural storytelling."
"and"
"invites interrogation
from film studies insofar as it not only utilizes the medium but also actively modifies 
and references 
the canonical texts, orientations and histories of cinema"
"Douglas situates Overture in the historical moment that the beginnings of film share with the end of the novel, when Proust's faith in the tantalizing structures of his great predecessors, Balzac and Wagner, was being undermined by the perceptive discontinuities that film helped to bring about."

- Wikipedia.

Mark Leckey at Wiels

(link)

A youth couched in music videos, it was a pleasure, and Leckey understood the potential of its seduction.  If Fiorucci experimented with the pop address as upload into the viewer, the hypnosis of spectation, then “Shades of Destructors” 5 years later was an experiment of what could be done once inside, and everything since about what it means to place an object inside another’s head and the possibility of that inside an object’s.  The states of reality, virtual, image, filmic, object find their superposition between phase shifts, and Leckey moves us between all with a deftness. If Sturtevant’s interest in film/video was its capability for dissociative fugues and blackouts, Leckey’s interest is the possibility of a plasmaticness and production within it, a velvet couch where Leckey is the dentist administering gases of mildly psychoactive potential.

See too : Pipilotti Rist at Hauser & Wirth

Robert Heinecken at Wiels



The artist schizo-neurosis love/hate of the printed image. Imagine being an artist confronted daily w/ onslaught of freely disseminated images, and knowing it’s accelerating. A world near comprised of images. And so of course artists “deal with it.” Princes lubricated masturbation of them, the reinsemination of the Marlboro Man's potential, DISimages inhabitation of the acceleration, the interminable unknown artists cut/collaging porn reifying the fetish of print itself, the McCarthy all-hands-on-deck scorched earth blitzkrieg against. Artists are losing the battle, neurotically and nervously, a where-can-we-even-stand type philosophical conundrum. But so, here, it’s nice to see some reserved expenditures of image explication. Tending towards a mockery but saved by the slowness of its accumulating angles of approach. Sure some is stock critique, but handled well and still looking slightly fresh even in its Heubler-esque dryness, none of the cut-crystal ideologic perfection of Levine/Lawler’s jewels way more sexy than all these half-naked women. Same generation, a little browner.

Rossella Biscotti at Wiels



What are we even looking at? A totally unhelpful press release attached to a totally unhelpful aggregator leaves this exhibition as a name inexplicably attached to some blank pictures. Thanks internet.