Thomas Sauter at Bernheim Gallery

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The PR's commitment to nailing these to the board of expressionism is something. These are paintings. With color and form and feeling.  "an inner feeling gives way to exploration, guided by what happens when a red meets a yellow..." About "the touch of the brush on the canvas..." and genius. "Such feelings can only be transmitted from an object through a deeply focused and committed approach to work. We may find ourselves asking, can’t I too produce this? No. Not like this." It's heroic. And looking into the distance between heroism and magenta/viridian/yellow is a pathos almost too much. 

Simone Fattal at Karma International

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Part of being amorphous, blobby, is that it gives nothing to hang on to. Vagueness becomes shield, defenses, an outer wall to climb like glass, nothing to hang onto, where are the suction cups, what words can you append. Attempts describing rocks, they seem impervious to all general description. We individuate them by saying they look like other things, otherwise they're just rocks. This is somehow meaningful. 

Ser Serpas at Karma International

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Think of milk congealing a skin. Objects, things, threaten a flesh, the hoarder begins to see objects as a living thing, requiring compassion. Canvas like animal skins. "We disavow our excretory bodies  because they are signs of disorder, remindersof the body’s ambiguous limits (its leaking from multiple orifices), and of its ultimate death: 'Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit—cadere, cadaver...'"


See too: Ser Serpas at LUMA Westbau, Yuji Agematsu at Lulu

K8 Hardy at Karma International

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30 seconds of video, and images through glass, of a lifetime of outfits, enjoy your daily contemporary art.

“HOOKS & CLAWS” at Gregor Staiger - Bruno Gironcoli

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Ask and any Austrian artist will roll their eyes at how famed Gironcoli is and everyone outside of Austria wonders who the fuck you are talking about. Seems to be the general vibe. Gironcoli has been dead ten years but you could confuse them for a Jordan Wolfson, Marguerite Humeau, Helen Marten or whatever. Just enough for the surrealist soup'dujour.* They are modernist sculptures that abscess with the wrong thing: what is supposed to be the clean lines and  modern ergonomics of say Henry Moore or di Suvero tinges a little too dumb, fecal, stupid, wet. Like Mike Kelley paintings made into sculpture, the abject mess of high/low. The way Children's toys always seem one vibration button away from sex toy. Every one of them somehow far more uncomfortable than a Paul McCarthy buttplug on your plaza.


*As how H.R. Giger was in the past considered campy at best for his blend of Machino-sexual organisms, Gironcoli's blending of hulking pop-sculpture with tinges of Actionist entrails was similarly a bit too on the nose. Similarly having mild resurgence. 

Ebecho Muslimova at Maria Bernheim

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Cartoon characters are only cartoon when they are cut from their world and pasted into the real. In their natural inked setting cartoons are simply flesh, however elasticized. Floors, feces, body are of the same stuf and there was some inherent truth.
When the cartoon now does its Who Framed Roger Rabbit thing, the duck finally becomes a cartoon duck, the visual promiscuity is lost, his flesh is now not of the the surrounding world and forces him to become more singularly himself.  Fatebe becomes a character, no longer a natural feature of her reality but a style cut and pasted into. And her world becomes simply a grab bag of digital effects to encounter. It was always bound to happen, drawing must eventually be valorized as painting. Madani gets away with it because her painting is drawing. And Who Framed Roger Rabbit was most interesting when the softness of cartoons were hit with hard reality, forced to take its shape, "flatten the duck with a frying pan and he becomes a frying pan" and the worlds again begin to seamlessly blur in the green glow of the Matrix, our imagination's virtual plane, and the cartoon naturalizes again.


see too: Tala Madani

Marianna Simnett at Kunsthalle Zürich

The documentation here comes from at least three different Museums: the, as stated, Kunsthalle Zürich, but also Frankfurt's MMK ZOLLAMT, and the above image from NYC's New Museum. Glitches as evidence of dislocation, of images just completely adrift at this point, does it even matter at this point, who cares at this point. Put anything anywhere, the video-stills are photoshopped in anyway. Drag and drop. An exhibition appears. It's the metadata that counts. How far can we dissociate. Someone should standardize the museum, to be more like the suburbs its already become, you could find anything anywhere, a McDonald's like a Guggenheim, in every metropolis, a LOVE sculpture in every park, tastes standardized across continents, fly to Zurich and still feel at home with real New York artists or cheeseburgers, anywhere. Is this dissociation?


See too: Nairy Baghramian at Walker Art Center?

Virginia Overton at Francesca Pia

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Cut up and rearrange the objects of capital, they will hint at their previous legibility but they will not mean, it is something we will be forced to assign. Playing in the sandbox we've been left.

Pierre Klossowski at Bernhard

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Chronicler of Christian psychosexuality, Klossowski perhaps understood what what was happening in the back room, even divined the Catholic sexual abuse scandal. Maybe he, 1964 renewer of the days of Sodom, libertine, participated in it. These paintings weren't that long ago. Maybe he, like many artists, simply saw the rituals and its concerns for body and blood and heavy robes, as inherently erotic, just pushed what was latently there. Like his novels, half the fun is the not quite understanding what is happening, always something more to be unearthed, buried. A lot of watery innuendo; it's between Klossowki's pastel lines. We like Klossoswki for this faint transgression. But these aren't erotic, the PR is right to point out the discomfort in everyone's grave stilted faces, sex unpleasurable.

Fabian Marti at Peter Kilchmann

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Your exhibition against the wheel of time is asking for exhaustion, defeat, which this is. Kawara stated himself alive though, pointedly, not necessarily well. As if consciousness was enough. Distance of 10,000 years recedes everything to pinpoints anyway, reduced to binary, alive dead on off. The system denotes what is on/off. Capitalism it is selling/not selling. Art, show/noshow. So just whatever, put yourself out there, as if enough.

Josef Strau at Francesca Pia

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These are much uglier, which is an improvement I suppose. And Straus's text begins with an almost apology for the exhibition, which reminds how endeared we all were to artists failing ten years ago. The "I prefer not to." or Manfred Pernice's ongoing struggle to get erect. or The performed hesitance in every painting made. Remember that time? But then Strau's text turns it around.  Attempts to incant and imbue some earnestness into the enterprise. Calls it Sutering, or the process of invoking something earnest, Vivian Suter, meaning, into the paintings. Remember the wacky wild inflatable arm men who danced in front of their paintings to imbue some some [criticality] into bland abstractions?  This is like that, hunched over its making and saying a prayer.

A hail mary pass to capture, touch down, on some meaning.


See too: Josef Strau at House of Gaga (2), Josef Strau at House of Gaga

Tobias Kaspar at Peter Kilchmann

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Folding fashion into art should seem to cause a nebulous hole to erupt, a singularity, the whole thing en abyme and vertiginous, distinctions collapse and the thing torn open for questioning. But it just looks like art.


see too: Tobias Kaspar at Silberkuppe

“No Thing” at Eva Presenhuber

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because though Pendleton's sign shows through, the permutations act to make it safer for consumption, an aesthetic that acts like a packaging, rather than spilling it out on the floor, crawling towards you. Instead petri-dished for white-gloved examination, the pretense that no one has to get dirty.

“No Thing” at Eva Presenhuber

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If laughter was the earthquake alleviating the tension of the joke, then Pope.L's don't really relief its valve. A refusal that turns humor into a weapon where misunderstanding the joke might have risks. "Swiss Are People Lonly." "White Peo abstr ation." Pointed fingers. What are the stakes of misunderstanding? The generalized artworld fear of misinterpretation someone's artwork becomes conflated with the generalized fear of Blackness, of one's foot in one's mouth, of white spaces suddenly filled with an innuendo that doesn't confine itself to safe quotational space of art, the usual polite holding patterns of white walls, and art mumbo treating its signifiers as some archaeologic thing, subject to whatever formalist schooled things that can be thrown at it - the whole Richard Prince affect - but Pope.L's are living breathing wet things, crawling towards a floor near you.

See too: Pope.L at What Pipeline, William Pope.L at Steve Turner, William Pope.L at Catherine Bastide

Pedro Wirz at Longtang

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We all fear for lumps inside us, unchecked growth, a malignancy, "matter out of place," "the contaminated diversities that proliferate in the dump." Fear of toxins, poisons, heavy metal build-up, of heavy concentrations of micro-plastics in the great Pacific beverage, in parts per million, in tumors, cysts, in bisphenol A, BPA's estrogenic symptoms to counteract the now "natural" amounts of viagra in rivers, our vessels leaded with a new Rome, our castrati and fears dispersed, pl, everywhere and nowhere. These things are bioaccumulative, they add up in sediments in your blood, fat, balls, turning the frogs "gay."

A lot of art brandish, monument, these fears into nervous objects:

See too: Pamela Rosenkranz at Karma International, Nancy Lupo at Antenna Space, Michael E. Smith at Atlantis

Shana Moulton at Gregor Staiger

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Equating our investment in the celestial power of "self-care" with primitive digital effects would seem to be mocking both: a particularly pleasurable bath delivers the only the filter of Google's Deep Dream, a yoga practice against belly distension births a green screened moon to the heavens. The effects are child-like, naive like the character, and require suspension of disbelief. This seems the point, any skepticism towards crystal effects, video or holistic, might render them moot. You've got to actively believe for the things to have effect, a placebo effect like a Disney ending: the point was the power was inside you all along if you just believed the pill would. The placebo effect so strong in the US that drug manufactures have difficulty time creating new painkillers that are stronger than sugar pills. The effect is not seen in Europe, or pretty much any where that does not allow pharma advertising. That this mass inculcation might be the strongest effect of all, like we're all living in a theater in mass suspension because thats what gets the crystals like art to work.



See too: Shana Moulton at Kunsthaus Glarus

Markus Oehlen at Karma International

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1985, Kuspit; Artforum:

"Werner Büttner, Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, Markus Oehlen

METRO PICTURES

I admire these artists quirkiness, irreverence, and contempt. I first saw their work several years ago in Germany, and I’m glad to see they’ve become still more perverse or saucy, to use a word they like. One can label their work neo-Dadaist, which suggests that their attitude is more important than the objects they make. Certainly they seem to aspire to become sacred monsters, although that’s nothing you can work at, even when you have command of seemingly limitless reserves of (Dadaist) disgust; the world makes your monstrousness happen.
However large the range of their activities—they write as well as make music—it is as painters that these artists exist in New York. No doubt their painting is just another kind of performance, but it leaves behind a deliciously smelly residue. It is this odor of garbage that attracts us. We sense that the artists are trying to set painting right after it has betrayed us by pretending that it can become attractive flesh hanging in museums and apartments. Garbage must be garbage, in the name of the honest truth; this claim of authenticity is a traditional one, like many others around today, but it’s harder to resist than the others, for history and art history’s pile of garbage continues to grow. Compost heaps are never out of fashion. These young Germans, like true youth everywhere, are obsessed with the decay of both art and meaning, which they have decided to enjoy with as many crocodile tears as possible. They have seen through everything; they know the shiftiness of everything; they know shit is the only substance eternally present. They quote Dali with approval: “I don’t like it when something goes in the nose and comes out the anus, but I love that which slips in the anus and exits through the eye.” They have restored paranoia to its original anality, making images and meanings, and of course paint, into so much shit they playfully offer the world that has mothered them.
[...]
I prefer not to take them seriously, though, but to enjoy their spiteful antibourgeois satire as part of the eternal return of shit.

"

The shit, for Markus Oehlen, a toolboxing of cultural forms slapped in maximalist congealings of it, forced to eat it all, more Charline von Heyl but directed by James Cameron. 

Ser Serpas at LUMA Westbau

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Hoarding as a sort of extended compassion for the derelict neglected of culture, a sympathy moving to material itself that a world simply would like to rid itself of. Composing it into art objects becomes a blessing for sending the objects into the "heavenly" afterlife, a means of delivering them to the majority white institutions to get them to care for them in perpetuity. Hooking the hose from the expelling parts of our cultural body to the part that feeds, getting it to eat its underwear.


see too: Dylan Spaysky at Good Weather, Dylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento

Pamela Rosenkranz at Karma International

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As ostensible critique of pharmaceutical, technological and advertorial strategies, Rosenkranz deploys them to great affect in art, using their strategies in consolidating attention and maintaining lure over the viewer. The attractive pink, the technologic jargon. This exhibition showcases among other things "Anemine" "a new generation of medical products" that are synthesized chlorocruorins, oxygen-binding hemeproteins found in many annelids, manufactured green worm-blood essentially.* A portion of the afternoon googling substances, phylums, blood hemotypes, the only results for Anemine are Rosenkranz and a German electronic artist. Maybe Anemie really is that medically cutting edge, but noted about earlier of Rosenkranz by Abreu itself: the substances are often fictional, and Anemine appears an artistic bruhaha of long long line of products and "doctors" with liminal connections to good medicine, from InfoWars guy to Tom Brady's longtime personal trainer hawking products with vague but powerful claims. So long the as the promotion outspeeds due diligence the product will remain valid. And they are fun to say: NeuroSafe, Anthroplex, Brain Safe, Myco-ZX, TB12, Super Male Vitality, medical leeches, all seeming to counteract the very real issues of Atrazine and xenoestrogen, though Obama did not turn the "frickin' frogs gay." Look at the Bosch-like extraction of Horseshoe Crab blood chopped in half and bleeding out in dungeon apparatuses into jars for highly valuable medical technology, for blue blood, so it's not hard to imagine research extracting green worm blood for sport, and for an artist to get the good idea to make paintings with. "gives consumers a sensation of security: the less they understand the terms used to describe the product, the more reliable it seems, because it's at the cutting edge of technology." Horror film foreboding, green blooded insectoids, the large company willing to make money of its extraction, everything there for a real good narrative.

*Synthetic blood is currently being developed and has actually been created before, though though never approved for use anywhere outside of South Africa. A side effect was noted to be flatulence. 




See too: Nancy Lupo at Antenna Space, Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute

Trisha Donnelly at Eva Presenhuber

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Not quite the Ian Rosen whole-in-one, you can find more images on Presenhuber's website But Donnelly has made a career of limiting the availability of the document that feeds the current apparatus of art, instead edited into an esoterica through regulation, the Donnelly mythos floats on the inability to know, though even actually seeing them never helped answer anything, the nebulous otherworld aesthetic that like H.R. Giger channeled an techno/medical aesthetic for a decade before finding in the Alien its embodiment that Donnelly refuses, a ghost.


See too: Trisha Donnelly at Museum Ludwig, Ian Rosen at The Finley