“The Photographic I – Other Pictures” at S.M.A.K.

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We scroll images of images. Our capacities for dealing, for dealing with, making sense, of them erodes as the sheer quantity of information we are met with on the eponymous daily. They flow against whatever wishes for a control to the spigot, they'll be more tomorrow. We begin to triage our incoming information; our form of relation moves from a relation of understanding to one of recognition, able to name something, our conversations formed around the little opinions we've manifested as stopgap standing in for control, CAWD.

Lucy Skaer at KW

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They're just such nice things. Commodity's reproducibility, the quantity, the mass suggests its virtuality, the perfect other they all infer as individuals plucked from it, the ether of abstraction, the idea of the product. Obviously this is a lie, the commodity isn't its conception but rather the defecation of it, the bodily machined sweat object. Commodities infer virtuality. But are far more handmade than we generally think, factory sweat is wiped from every clean aluminum body. Things melt and are cast aside.  The particular begins to vanish from above, so we bejewel some, award them medals, give them titles, separate them from populations, learned like children from gameboards, how we deal with the world today.


See too: Katharina Fritsch at Walker Art Center, Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick

Willem de Rooij at KW

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Attempts to discern is handed a blue screen to infer what in "Whiteout—a selection of de Rooij’s production from the last twenty years" is happening.  This feeling we have at such attempts, of confusion, of being at a loss, is strange to us since art generally works to be so visibly, pornographically there. But it's the power of the known artist to withold, give us the promotional still as FOMO shield: that we are unable to judge but know happened and we missed out.





See too: Willem de Rooij at Le Consortium and Willem de Rooij at Arnolfini

Petrit Halilaj at Kamel Mennour

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"composed of a group of 12 school desks [...] from the Primary School “Shotë Galica” in Runik , a small town in the north of Kosovo, where Halilaj lived and studied. The artist discovered [...] while filming the demolishing of the building of the school in favour of a new and more modern one. The green surface of the desks and the wooden benches were covered with thousands of drawings, inscriptions, carvings and scribbles left by several generations of school kids. [...] reproducing and enlarging these drawings in his sculptures..."

The desire to preserve often comes with attempts to rectify, solidify, clean, put it in frames, protect it from the world with cushions and embalm it, so its nice to see the graffiti of children maintain a bit of its chicken scratch projected like leaded ghosts on walls. There's no desire to clean it up, Halijaj is like a povera artist on roids even amidst a sea of it in contemporary art, the sentimentality balanced with material mysticism bearing the weight of history in all its unkempt detritus, so the sky transmits Eminem.

Ahmet Öğüt and Goshka Macuga at Witte de With

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Disimages humor wasn't so much in its mockery of stock photography - they swore they weren't - but in making fun of artists: Dis, with an early understanding the growing need for artists to function as their own producers of stock-like images in an increasing pressure for artist's to make a striking singular image, mocked the artistic anxiety for image production that could handle anonymized displacement in the network, speak for itself images sturdy enough for dissemination in image aggregators like CAD, VVork and all those other tumblrs exploding. Both stock images and the artistic contain similar relationship of specificity and anonymousness, like promotional stills they allow a viewer to infer a few specific traits ("multicultural office", "Gallery sculpture") at the same time broad, blank enough to accommodate a viewer's own interpretations. Both stock images and many art images are as plain as they are inscrutable. An image like a handshake of the artist.


see too: Sherrie Levine at David Zwirner

Jenny Holzer at Blenheim Palace

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The struggle to find new ways to flaunt text, to sediment it as a thing, transactable. at least instagrammable. Holzer's mimicking the advertorial strategy, of programmatic infiltration into, its ability to evolve new forms of advertising, ways to address you. "The main focus of her work is the delivery of words and ideas in public spaces." And Holzer has for years developed a rainbow of means to do so blinking. The recent resurgence along with Kruger as a voice and means for political activism - which, activism understandably, needs little in the way of grey area - seem odd.  Holzer truisms had seemed almost koan like in their ability to use a sentence as a slogan to defeat sense. A protest sign must almost violently means what it means. It never really felt as though we were supposed to believe in what the truisms were saying, their rapid fire semantic blugeon and mass strategies seemed to exist as a question of how we were left to interpret something so explicit already telling us something. Now it seems in our political moment we are asked to maybe ask and believe in their bludgeon. Or maybe we've just been conditioned to not trust any text in public.


See too: Matt Keegan, Kay Rosen at Grazer Kunstverein

Nolan Simon at What Pipeline

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Whoa when was the last time you saw detail shots in painting documentation? Pointing at the paint itself seems to come with Simon's slow move towards seriousifcation, way long ago Simon used to make funny paintings, mentioning 4chan even, the subject matter occasionally Tansey-esque. Comedy which seems to been have shored up to the much more artworldly common form, that quiet awkwardness, that flat footed, punchline free form of humor of like Nauman, say, and you could make an argument Simon's now aren't even actually comical at all, that the traditional scumble technique on view would maybe even point to them being anti-funny since technique generally isn't associated with humor (as if comedians weren't putting hours into craft) comedy is supposed to appear effortless and these appear - and with detail are asked to be noticed as - labored. Jokes aren't really prone to art. A joke is spent and exhausted. So an artwork with its requisite implicit promise of eternalness can't really make a joke without implying that it too will one day be depleted. Prince's real joke is that the paintings keep telling the same joke for years and years stupidly.  Maybe it's with more time that the joke can still survive being even more slight, maybe the joke is painting flowers at all, maybe it's painting them with conviction, a real slapstick subject for contemporary art.

Matte painting: Caleb Considine at Massimo de Carlo