Juliette Blightman, Dorothy Iannone at Arcadia Missa

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...tarot, images drawn and illuminated shine to bounce around in your head to alight some new substance inside, like any painting. The further you believe in the drawing the more deeply it affects. A charm for wealth eventually brings it through stubborn physical existence to remind you that's what you value, seek. Any object's aboutness, its meaning, it tautologically enacts like a string tied around your finger: the string doesn't necessarily intrinsically symbolize "pick up eggs;" its meaning is conjured by the reminded who tied it. Thus objects are imbued with meaning. Tarot cards tell you they are meaningful.

Which is why Tarot cards are such powerful meaning creation devices - humans are apophenic machines - seeing sense where there may be none, they create it for themselves. Art comes to resemble it.

Agnes Scherer at Sans titre (2016)

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We should be exceedingly skeptical of comparing artistry and servanthood. Art isn't service. Fraser's existential question “What do I, as an artist, provide?” comes to mind. Or Bourdieu:

"cultural producers tend to feel solidarity with the occupants of the economically and culturally dominated positions within the field of class relations. Such alliances, based on homologies of position combined with profound differences in condition, are not exempt from misunderstandings and even bad faith."

That said, the PR does fine corralling why such affinities might exist. And Flaubert's novel and parrot are made for metaphor. The parrot dead and our heavenly afterlife: an art career. Anyway, write what you know. The professionalization of art is pain, our lives are increasingly disembodied and neuroticized. Paintings of laptops make sense, they are our story.

Helen Mirra at Nordenhake

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"As measurements of time and being, the 13 woven pieces capture in yarn the somatic activities of standing, extending arms, articulating hands, breathing, and sensing."

The Marxist commodity fetish was, confusingly named, our mistaken relation to capital's objects as an economic rather than human social relations, it was a concealment: the aluminum clamshell of your laptop being seen as economic product of capital innovation itself, rather than the hand-sweat of laborers distanced beneath gloves. A price tag for a face. Almost nothing is this world is actually automated - everything you touch is hand-made by workers. This separation of our social relations we've so completely assimilated that labor itself returns as a literal fetishism, stitches mark this labor, look compelling, can be brought out onto white walls, as aura, as artwork. Every cheap objects is an equal tapestry. The stitches in time are smoother, hidden. Hold up your child's plastic toy and feel another at its end.

See too: Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz, 

Laurent Dupont, Lisa Jo at Braunsfelder Laurent Dupont

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You paint the thing over the thing, a face over your face, a representation getting closer and closer to its object until, well, they touch, link, and representation adsorbs, becomes, its object. A history of attempts to kill the artwork - here make a painting so redundant as to negate it - always fail - but we find them titillating, art as thing that cannot be killed. In its place a ghost of it.

Berta Fischer at Barbara Weiss

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Stuf. Crushed and molded into gangbangs. Not even necessarily organized or compositionalized, more just amassed. The "errancy" here would be against manners of taste, more an orgy, an excess. Stuf itself accrues a byproduct: a quality we could attempt to separate the difference from surplus and glut; exuberance and waste.

Kathleen Ryan at Ghebaly Gallery, Valerie Keane at High Art

Past: Phung-Tien Phan

"... placing a thing on another thing. Foregrounding the ghost who've arranged the space, the artist's hand, both magnifying their leave while highlighting the staging. of the encounter. Like Broodthaers' potted palms casting the scene in its artifice, it makes the ghosts come out, those who constructed its object for you, tombs where flowers have been left."


Read full: Phung-Tien Phan at Bonner Kunstverein

Sydney Schrader at Gandt

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"Experimental" would ostensibly insinuate "new" and "untested" forms, but more often applied by readers unwilling to do the work required or by artists themselves successfully applying for European grants. At worst experimental is synonym for obtuse, or, when applied to oneself, intentional obfuscation. "Off-spaces" generally assume "experimental" perhaps simply because a lack of white walls encumbers the usual halo identifying what is and "isn't" the art. Which generally also applies to the documentation, 00s web-design like memories of rotten.com. The point is to enjoy the experience, be lost, possibly click on some gore, not make sense of something. It's annoying, sure. But occasional "titillation" was part of Gandt's success was finding for the perfect venue for a tickle fetish "novel." Or a dissociative text. Think Lynch's Inland Empire, enough nonsense that eventually you open to it.