Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho at 47 Canal

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Haegue Yang’s early blinds - prior to the later shopping-spree installationism - interspersed heaters, smells and videos of airport lounges within its venetian mazes to create metonymnic sites for the then-still analog fracturing of space (it was 2007 when jet-setting was still the only way to fly) was relevant to globalizing artworld. Yang's spaces disfigured unconscious visual ordering of space and inserted their own artificial senses for it. The video monitors depiction of circulation’s non-sites became ironic respite from the disorder, but in the banality becoming no escape at all. Of course that all now looks nostalgic, superseded by the all-powered exchange of monitor-theater.
And so here the lights turn low and the curtain drawn around all-interior personal theaters, locked in to Bacta tanks of network refresh in a Sturtevant spin, fleeing videos in which attention cannot be directed-to but merely mis-directed by whirli-wig visions, matching the press release's dizziness of everywhere-nowhere artist romance, refreshing art’s nauseating self-sentimentalization.

Frances Scholz at Tif Sigfrids

(Frances Scholz at Tif Sigfrids)

 You can cheer yourself with donuts and coffee between each, but the rising regret of a days visiting galleries in Los Angeles is, like summer heat, slowly oppressive, omnipresent. You’ve never felt stupider in your decision, driving ten minutes between each to look for parking at each, turning off the car, getting out, feeding a meter with the prediction of how interesting the exhibition will actually be, and walking into the space where everyone looks incredulous at your having shown up. Every desk jockey’s eye implicitly asking the question of “don’t you know its beautiful outside.” It is beautiful outside, and you have to reassure yourself your interest in art is real and just and there is a brief standoff between you and the gallerist as to whether you will stay or just be a normal person and leave but you win and the jockey's body, creaky from attunement to semio-labor and not the physical one of having to get up to turn a knob, gets up and turns on the sound to the projector and returns to their desk behind a wall to resume conversation. You can tell how important they think you are by how lewd the gossip remains. Because everyone in L.A. knows everyone else, and since they don’t know you, its assumed you don’t know anyone. So the conversation is lewd.  And since you don’t know anyone there is no way you could be interested in this, your attendance can only be rationalized as an accident and heads in disbelief erupt from behind the wall every 2 minutes later, in wait to to turn the sound off once again, expecations for the mistaken viewer to leave. Heads not even waiting the length of even one trailer. 4 times in 10 minutes the heads peek like whack-a-mole, but where I, the viewer, am the mole, and the disembodied moles attempt shooing their voyeur away. Disbelieving in an ability to maintain interest, to watch all 10 minutes 16 seconds of video.
And as if to prove them right it shows up online, they have the world on computers now.

The trailers are interesting. A perfect distending form of art, the film trailers purpose to give jist of what the thing is “about,” giving each bit of film, each fragment, a projectable potential into its larger arc continually guessed at over the length of its viewing. In this way the form itself is the lure in which one already understand the rules and assumptions of its form and anything placed into it will assume a certain type of viewing. It gives the nonsensical mess a structure which make it appear to make some sense as potential. You can throw whatever into it, adding more and more, and it will self organize by the cultural assumptions which precede it. Paul Giamatti helps too.

Danny McDonald at House of Gaga

(Danny McDonald at House of Gaga)

The toy/action-figure has become a major feature in art.
From Steinbach’s belief in the formal beauty of the product, to Harrison’s abuse of their semantic connotation - demolitioning of meaning - and the cargo-cult pickings arranged as marxist totems, toys now bespeak a Pop-freudian analysis, dredging up the subconscious of culture - a C-3PO with robot tits, an Alien brain tumor, Schwarzenegger slurping a pink dick, the monster made to hold a mirror to itself; that, like a Jim Shaw pop-surrealism in Cady Noland means, becoming assemblage Rorscharchs of what this culture could possibly mean, and fun to boot, the hot new item on everyone's list surely.


See also: Pentti Monkkonen at High Art, Flat Neighbors at Rachel Uffner, Jim Shaw at Metro Pictures, Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick, “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center

Albert Oehlen at Skarstedt

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“No. There have been all kinds of filth in art. Beuys, Vienna Actionism, Miserabilism, every kind of filthy painting, broken bodies, bits of flesh, violent spray orgies, and painters who listen to Tom Waits while they work. We didn't have anything to do with any of that." 

-Oehlen on Kippenberger and himself.

Kippenberger may have had the charisma and showmanship, but, as is revealed in interviews and paintings, Oehlen was the funny one. While Kippenberger's paintings were a joke, self-mocking farce on the viewer’s desire for mastery, Oehlen’s paintings were a comedy relying on the formal exigencies of the craft - timing, inflection, nuance - acerbic without punchlines; they lack a clear position from which to “get the joke.” Oehlen’s paintings do not clearly delineate their intended “content."
This, what the NYTime’s called a “lack of pretense,” set him apart from the multitudes today indebted to his practice who, desiring to be swallowed so quickly, find a lured aspect for which the paintings to be consumed, following on 2009’s Luhring Augustine finger paintings that proved you could make bad paintings and be cool too, of course then the moment Gagosian decided to represent him, and Oehlen’s second American wind from the huffing of so many young churning out marketable variations of him.

O’BRIEN: But can you be an abstract painter and a bad painter? 

OEHLEN: Absolutely. [all laugh] 

WOOL: The worst. I like a story you told once that I tell students sometimes. You said you were trying very hard to make seriously bad paintings, while the New Museum version of bad painting was really about something else—it was about outside ideas that were bad—but you were trying to make really bad paintings, and you realized that the worst ones you could make were exactly like the Neue Wilde painters in Berlin. And then you decided it really wasn’t worth it, and Dieter Roth said something similar. He was interested in making bad paintings, and he said he always failed, because with paintings it always looks good in some way. Just because of the material . . . But he could do it with music, he could do it when he was playing the piano by himself, but it was excruciating to listen to, and he would immediately have to stop. It kind of closes the loop. 

OEHLEN: I mean, you have to do it seriously. You have to take responsibility. You cannot just do it as a side project and make an arrogant attitude, a gesture. I think Dieter Roth could not have done it because he was not a painter. You have to become a painter and hold your head out the window. You have to give it an importance, and I did that, so that’s why I could do it. [laughs]

Interview Magazine

Miriam Cahn at Jocelyn Wolff

(Miriam Cahn at Jocelyn Wolff)

The material presence of Cahn’s dusty surfaces that the work is predicated on is here instead given a physical presence to occupy real space, the spectral planes become exhibitionist bodies, hewn logs simply scattered. This of course is the most romantic - nearing nostalgic - pleasure afforded by art today, to remember the days of bodies. Yet overt sentimentality is balanced in their formal dumbness, the directness of the intention, the pleasure of physical bodies without the formal wankery of Puryear. Just dumb lumps molded to softness, sanded skin looking like dough, the gross stupidity of our bodies, something entirely erotic about the fan shape etched in flesh.

See too: Cathy Wilkes at Tramway

Will Benedict at Bergen Kunsthall

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The new method of artistic identity production, vacant-token-products for the gallery leaving the unsaleable cultural-capital building for the museums. Benedict has always been, like Kanye, a wonderful producer woefully lacking in “content.” Instead the arrangements are based on the formal material massaged in the medium of the network, buoys in the flow. Though Yeezus was great.

And Benedict's turn towards video production gives the most interesting results, yet the temptation to connect Benedict’s passé part-outs to the subliminal-abjection of the anti-adverts - both creating a fragmented disgust - would miss how sick-sweet repulsiveness of Fried Chicken and KFC commercials is premised on their physiological allure set against a much deeper horror. Benedict’s are closer to the phenomenon of trypophobia, a socially spread internet “fear,” presenting a study of whether it actually premised off a biological response or a form of social inclusion

See too: Will Benedict at Balice Hertling 

Sean Landers at Friedrich Petzel



Landers’ aborted-before-conceived humor is continually resuscitated by the artist’s writings - here etched in the paintings themselves at the bottom of the ocean - imbuing a pathos into the not quite fully gestated juvenalia, asking to be excused for mistakes made in teenage exuberance of dealing with art in the eternal sense, becoming all so stupid and pathetic as to become endearing, like all John Candy’s exasperatingly aloof characters who in the film/gallery's third act find him asking directly and pathetically for forgiveness to found-families for the idotic-yet-winning obliviousness, as a whale wearing flannel about to go down, here an Uncle Buck kept on life-support to achieve immortality as a joke.