Group Show at Group Show at Group Show at

Group exhibitions as a series of incomplete images. A false diaspora. The exhibition's arrangement promises to, if not resolve, at least route, provide semblance, movement, trajectory. But they begin more and more to feel like remnants, like rubble or partial artifacts. They're like flotsam of our wreckage, objects d'contemplation of our ruins, hung in altars. Our windows in have gotten so small. And we're asked to project worlds onto them.


see too: Group Show at Group Show at Group Show

“Lampen” at Francesca Pia

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Lampen, "a group exhibition exploring recent artistic production relating to light, design and its stabilizing elements." A definition signaling that there are still elements intrinsic to lamps that haven't been deconstructed in a way of, say, painting where one would, in order to successfully broaden the definition to inclusivity of practices under the banner of 'painting,' be forced to say things like "explore the cultural concept of painting" exclusive of any defining elements like paint, since painting need not. But all these seems at least illuminated, electrified, and as per their definition, stabilized, somewhat. No one placing a pound of vulcanized rubber on the floor and calling it "lamp." So being somewhat useful is important. That we trust in the usefulness of lamps as opposed to 'painting's total uselessness is maybe a reason why we see so much neon today, its modern day campfire is somehow comforting.


See too “Marlborough Lights” at Marlborough Broome Street, Sam Lewitt at Kunsthalle Basel, Cerith Wyn Evans at Museo Tamayo

exhibitionary largess

No contention these exhibitions don't hold up well in documentation, often barely in person, a sprawling fest whose largess is also a request, like serving a 47 course meal everyone wondering how many is required for politeness to be transacted, the paper soaked swells and breaks apart, oversaturated, the books behind glass, presenting the covers you can not judge the book by but cannot open either, lectures sedimented as image, a catalog for anarchist reading, an effort of "slow programming" is pressed into a egg of publicity, which we are given to swallow whole here, a list of events that have already past. 

“Stories of Almost Everyone” at Hammer Museum

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The hammer opening a box. You likely have seen the video of Ferrell and his windblown partner comedically "not getting art." Sanctioned by the Hammer, Ferrell and everyone involved operating pro bono, Ferrell’s wife on the Board, an advertisement that was embraced and spread, and perhaps something to do with its appearance on CAD now.

In it the Ferrell mocks the art which he of course sees - at least a little - as mocking him. The comedy alleviates the tension of and fear of conceptual art - fear whose expression runs the spectrum from “just not getting it” or incanting “the emperor's new clothes” against it. The film does little in the way of traditional education even when glaringly obvious: Ferrell's explication of the pillow slept on by acrobats is exactly the point, to create a story like a dream inside your own pilloried head. This goes unremarked. Instead the advert supplants traditional education for an implicit training: how to feel okay in museums by arming potential visitors with a weapon against artworks: irreverence, jadedness, mockery, that interminable arms race of cool we all learned in grade school by proving who could care least. The Hammer’s spectacle almost begging people to feel okay mocking art. That we now feel the need to educate people in artistic insouciance is a symptom of how badly the artworld had arranged itself toward the opposite: decades guiding the public toward veneration and supplication toward it. Now needing to explain to people you can make fun of art, condoning it. That art and more specifically contemporary art museums have become synonymous with entertainment, younger people finding themselves gravitating to MoMA rather than the Met, the Hammer has made a decision to consciously align itself with this new audiential target, the young who are interested in art but have little or no education in it, and goes out of its way to cater to this audience by claiming a stance against the education priorly requisite. This makes sense. Even the Met is opening contemporary wings. The outreach seems sensible. Ah to be mocked by a famous comedian! what success, to be patronized by a movie star playing the everyman. “Stories of Almost Everyone”

“Portikus XXX” at various locations

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A plucky young venture-idealist somewhere online collecting the mass sum of the artworld's published photographs of people giving readings, an art genre unto its own: a great instagram feed awaits.