Zak Kitnick at Ribordy Contemporary

(link)

in line of Sears' full history and its intersection with Kitnick's own, for the then pouring into the Jello molds here which will contain it like good art objects as retainers for stories, no longer looking at the art but the little vacuous middle distance of. Objects don't exist anymore is the point, we have post-Marxed them to oblivion with fetishization into names as placeholders: at the end "Craftsmen" was merely an object containing all the distant echoes of its storied history of quality to coast on as its final form as junk wringing out this nostalgia as cash pyres (the story of many brands narrative arch from triumph to trash, Schwinn, Smith & Hawken, et al.) - which seems, Kitnick ever the melancholic, the point, "the highest score for both 'Brand Expectations' and 'Trust'" is more capitalistically leverageable than any use-value or beauty that these artworks portray themselves not as having but ostensibly able for you to take home and create yourself, again trading the ghosts - here the history as press release - we survive on, to do it yourself pal. Defeatist or just powerfully unhappy is what is at stake.


see too: Kyle Thurman and Zak Kitnick at Parapet Real Humans, Zak Kitnick at Clearing

Zak Kitnick at Clearing

(link)

Like Warhol's Shadows, the darkened frames projected zoopraxiscope-like as silhouettes stacked build a dizzying depleting motion that like Bausch's Kontakthof's accounting of the vast inflections of the word "Darling" or Foster Wallace's Pale King opening sentence's taxnomic vegetation, Sturtevant's Finite/Infinite, the trend for lists in art writing, the cycling and dispensing of information bludgeon's our affective connection to it, a "diminished emotional response to a stimulation after repeated exposure to it," a desensitization, a very modern ennui building tragic subjects recalling Ranciere's quip on Bela Tarr: "one does not win against rain or repetition."


See too: Zak Kitnick at Clearing, Zak Kitnick at Rowhouse Project

Zak Kitnick at Clearing

(link)

The hieroglyphs of contemporary art products, are in effect an attempt at estrangement from the commodities that comprise them. Like Prince or Levine the doubling effects a remove, and now the genericism of product photography replaces it in anonymous otherness, printed steely to metal, meant to evoke the distance from the world felt. Cold, numb anhedonia to the pleasure afforded, nature's bounty and the newest product manufactured for connoisseurship's symbolic violence, sad, and the fact that Kitnick continues to pump these very heavy weights out again and again and again attaching an intention-dumb press release indifference to it not even, like, trying anymore is part of the emotive plea, Kitnick seems like real tired from bearing so much ennui.

Merlin Carpenter at MD72, Zak Kitnick at Rowhouse, Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace, Merlin Carpenter at Overduin and Co.

Zak Kitnick at Rowhouse Project

(link)

Kitnick in the wasteland of a collapsing distinction between commodities and art. Hamilton Beach trading in the same nebulous affects of today's semio-surrealism. The reptilian effects of consumer language, our love for art becomes indistinguishable from our love of products. The product, kin art, become its packaging: images as totems for desire. The objects conjure a semio-construct, and we do battle with a hypnotic ghost manifested. The affect is the object. Basically the point is Hamilton Beach, et al. have entered the field playing high level game of avant-garde animism that art is trying to catch up to, conjuring spectres of occult need. I'm not convinced speculative realism has anything helpful to offer art (philosophy another question) that couldn't be deduced from some post-baudrillard semio-construction that seems to have gotten away from us, playing upon us. Not from the objects themselves but a symptom of a market ecology. I don't even know what this packaged object is, but I desire it, a unique piece of trash.

See too Michael E. Smith at Lulu , Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace , "Paris de Noche" at Night Gallery , Pentti Monkkonen at High Art , Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak