Dana Lok at Clima, Milan

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Coy maybe, or a little cute, but a least they follow their own path into a strange terrain of their own whatever. That's how a subject appears? It's all we ask, even terribly. 

Past: Trisha Donnelly

...abolish the possibility of a reference we can call common, bury it behind opaque markers. ... objects which, even at peak banality aren't really describable ... What you see isn't mine. ...The inability to derive equitable terms, a reference to talk about, looking like slack-jawed yokels."

It is this ability of Donnelly to separate and divide and make evil our inability to share feelings, to see christ (or not) in the photograph. The innocent question of "what you see"  becomes apprehensive.


Click: Trisha Donnelly at Galerie Buchholz, Trisha Donnelly at Museum Ludwig, Trisha Donnelly at Eva Presenhuber

 Past: Sung Tieu

"The point of art begins to be setting the spheres to rotate so they may occasionally align, a machine for semio-recombination we could call meaning. Artists become not merely the recombinators of signs, but the producers of machines to do this, to be turned to on, set to run. Endless interpretability becomes their function."

Astrology like tarot cards finds alliance with art since the artwork has mutated to be less an object of beauty than a fount for interpretation. Art having gone from object to oracle. 

Sung Tieu at Emalin

Ugo Rondinone at The Green Gallery

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Ugo Rondinone makes stupid work whose stupidity doesn't matter. That may be because he's Swiss and  the Swiss have a knack for stupidity, one that auto-destructs, abuses time, or is John Armleder. Swiss stupidity accepts a mechanistic uselessness. (Is it antidote to fine watches, knives?) It would seem joyless if it didn't build such elaborate contraptions for its own touched smile. The antecedents here of Ellsworth Kelly meets Yves Klein is a red herring to the main point of Rondinone turning stupidity back to its roots: flowers, bright colored whatevers made to attracts insects. It works. 

Past: Gili Tal

"The more pathetic and depressing aspects of commerce's reign are mirrored in Tal's reconstructions of it, like those half empty coolers: a lightness mimicking advertising getting closer to grim comedy alongside a press release from hell once again reminding us all of our relegation to capitalistic damnation..."

"a rain that is mass produced..."

read full: Gili Tal at Jenny’s, Gili Tal at Cabinet, Gili Tal at Kunstverein Braunschweig

Wade Guyton at Galerie Chantal Crousel

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Whatever happened to Guyton\Walker? That cute duo bring relinking Genzken to a Raushenberg root, and then turned it to comedy, printed it on everything. This was right before the algorithm, before KAYA, right before Walmart was caught selling a mug emblazoned with adults wearing diapers. Both Walmart and G\W were a parody of the same thing, mass appeal and the need to fill any and all space by placing everything onto everything else, both of the same quality. It seems prescient now, as the bargain bin of content rises to surface of every display possible. That these are starting to look like Gerhard Richter's priciest paintings seems to follow from the rest. You can put anything on a mug. Again, production is the product. 

Past: Wade Guyton

...Like Wade Guyton who rode a wave of funereal optimism that we would one day merely press print on our dreams.

... killing content in service to the machine of its reproduction... the fantasy of eruptions tugged from our subconsciouses plugged into the machine ... Eventually this got boring. The machine wasn't so much able to manifest our subconscious as provide brief illusion that this was possible, that we could print our dreams, creativity, whatever as a perfect reproducible commodity. Instead, they were just commodities ... And so the next perfect Warholian step was to print the newspaper, which itself was like the manifestations of the Giant subconscious of earth people...

...Because history is more interesting than painting. Because culture more surreal than surrealism. Because the unconscious of society already printed for you. Now it's a plaque-as-painting for a museum to own. To allow them to put the didactic next to. In a museum you need a painting to mark it.