Past: Fred Lonidier at Michael Benevento

"making a real ideological pickle indeed, the work which can't be read with any real ease here and who could have stood long enough there, and which proves the book it needs and so can't be read easily anytime soon and so we interpret it at the level of surface, form becoming the content, the affectual, the look of information, having all sorts of relation to today, like watching debates with the sound off and which we sometimes did, it looks pretty good."

Frances Stark at Museum of Fine Arts Boston

(link)

Stark's, like Lecky's, a shared concern with the bedroom posters of adolescent coolness, the affective strategy of marketing that often form subjectivity under. And each poster/film a new and effective marketing strategy of coolness, the exhausting inventiveness of the painfully cool, picasso of teenage cool. Cool of any merit expressed with vulnerability: the manufactured cool of Vanilla Ice has nothing on the supreme empathetic but-also-if-not-manufactured-at-least-laying-the-blueprint-for-its-future-pruduction-line cool of, say, K Cobain. But, the point being Stark's cool is a self-manufactured, small business production. They're her own bedroom posters, rather than those of a post-Leckyian sort willing to post those they grew under as some cultural "criticism." Pay attention because even though its exhausting its an outline of escape from that, subjectivity can conform to the vessel without losing its shape, or so Stark would wager.

Past: "[Stark's] a gesture towards admitting the cultural disposability of an art practice of images today that stands over the face of the Deep, Instagram, that Artists can’t get over, blasted in an unstoppable deluge of culture daily. With so many “dealing with it,” detourning it into art  (as if that was meaningful) launching conventional artist weapons in atomized age, Stark’s insistence in the form's cheapness itself, its mixtape assemblage of a disposable music video, affirms her as one of the few who actually get it." Click: Frances Stark at Daniel Buchholz and Daniel Buchloz


See too: Mark Leckey at Haus Der Kunst + Kunsthalle Basel, Frances Stark at Daniel Buchholz and Daniel Buchloz

Sonia Kacem at Gregor Staiger

(link)

Elegant sticks, folded; like origami they, through simple steps followed, make a goose. The transparent invoked skin not hiding the skeleton of fabrication here. Instead simplicity and plainness, a sort of protestant ethic, finding interest in the job as its result. You see the construction, are forced to appreciate all the effort that went into it, none of which is hidden, witness the effort expended.

See too: Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage

Ella Kruglyanskaya at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis

(link)

Now, and having been trending, the world's craving directness, the assertive image qualifying nothing and instead saturates itself in plainness, a matter-of-factness. Straight-talk has, in-fact, steamrolled several countries. The painter caroms off the directness of the sign-painter, of the slogan maker, of the one with such clear thoughts they can can be said in 140 characters or less. It's all there already perfectly plain everything to see, a still life.


See too: Etel Adnan at Sfeir-Semler

Oren Pinhassi at Tempo Rubato

(link)

The chair becomes goo to remove it from the strict realm of functional objects to something more bodily, tongue-like, and palms like green boogers spraying. Oreo calls the white substance gluing together its cookies simply "stuf" and its an apt coining for a material vague and formless. It's just stuf, the building block of everything if we didn't know anything about the subatomic but rather formulating the corporeal junk that we might theorize underpins everything, stuf. The stuf we as children saw comprising the characters in cartoons and allowing them to take a hammer to the face. The malleable taffy we believed made up the world and allowed us the fantasy of it remade at our wills as slapstick.


See too: “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center, Chris Burden Metropolis II at LACMA

Hayley Tompkins at Lulu

(link)

Schmutz and stuff, and schmutz on stuff, Tompkins' practice endeared to the goo, the stuff, like all those edges of Jasper Johns, or encaustics, the stroke into hyperbole, like its own totem.  Like painters who manifesto'd their unneeding to hide brushstrokes, a literalness conflated with honesty, we find schmutz to be authentic, anti to the glitz and glam of the advertorial and mass, instead its the personal we trust, the good neighbor, the mom-n-pop, the trustworthy crust of the rustic intentional.

Anna-Sophie Berger at MUMOK

(link)

Coming from a Bochnerian indexical or Kosuthian ontological fashion design to now what is firmly looking like art: diaspora of objects, parabolic playthings, affected benches, weight-pinned jester, Frankenstein's hat, warbled whites, set peas, objects admitting nothing but a clue like game of whispers across things. It's a fun game if you got someone to play along with, otherwise you're just sending words across space, luckily Berger seems well-attended so the objects get the attention. Ten art experts invited seventeen artists to apply, an international jury consisting of mumok director Karola Kraus, Georg Kapsch, CEO of the Kapsch Group, Eva Birkenstock, director of the Kunstverein Dusseldorf, Yilmaz Dziewior, director of the Museum Ludwig, and Stephanie Weber, curator for contemporary art at the Lenbachhaus Munich, selected the artist Anna-Sophie Berger as the first prizewinner of this new art prize.