Sean Raspet at Jessica Silverman

(Sean Raspet at Jessica Silverman)

Peter Eleey's exhibition The Quick and the Dead was an expose on the Conceptual art’s hinging of itself on the poetics of its functionlessness, even the driest conceptualizations of dead art scrolls were in lineage with a Caspar David Friedrich existentialism, positioning art within a cerebral vastness and nothingness, conceptual art latently filled with men standing before crashing waves of their romantic ideals. The go-to form of conceptual art now is a mannerist product version of it, sited within minimalist tendencies of theater, ascribing precepts to objects which evoke an endless myriad of poetic feels. The recipe for this process is well understood, the problem lies in making its concoction more concentrate, more acidic, a better product, and once Raspet finally rid himself of the hairgel cubes to present the near nothingness of his thesis show in which the concentration reached peak, and here the ouroboros of its olfactory conceit in which everything and nothing happens in inevitable returns, the vast nothingness spreads before us and the conceptual cymbals crash.

See too : Jason Dodge at Franco Nero

Philippe Parreno at Esther Schipper

(Link: Philippe Parreno at Esther Schipper, Schinkel Pavillon, Pilar Corrias)

Parreno always felt askew in the ideological containment of Relational Aesthetics. Yet Kelsey’s final cut at Relational programs as coup-de-grace description: “capitalist realist adaptation of art to the experience economy” fits particularly unfortunately well to Parreno. Parreno’s premised on a pagan-importance of experience run through the fun-house of post-modernity, a contemporary update of some of the quasi-spiritualism of minimalism’s Light and Space and Irwins phenomenological trips, forgetting the name of the thing one saw as a salve to ordering impulse of capital, rendered now (further realist ala Kelsey) with symbols and mis-en-scene, alienating the experience of today’s banalities towards the to-what-ends? of the real contention of RA. If no one has made such bold claims in the beginning we wouldn't have had the maelstorm that colors the sight of these things today and they would look like mere art, instead of politically contentious objects that fall under a name that we can't forget and thus cannot see.

Margaret Lee at Team

(Margaret Lee at Team)

From Buren’s stripes previously turned polka dots and Zobernig’s banality turned to silver, Lee’s interest in “transforming the act of presentation into a subject unto itself” makes for a semi-reflexive nondescript jewelry form of institutional crit: so banal one must wonder about them. References so watered down to make tastes so bland it becomes impossible to discern where the appropriation even lay. Like the p-zombie, it becomes impossible to discern those mindless forms of art and the forms that mine the them. Zobernig was able to able to make funny the surprise of wresting yet one more form of banality out of saturated markets of it, a new runner in a race of weak-tea genericism as critically appropriate.

See too : Heimo Zobernig - Petzel,  Krupp, MUDAM

Sturtevant at MoMA

(Sturtevant at MoMA)

It would make sense that Sturtevant’s culminating exhibition would be a bad one. Yet to call the show a disservice amongst an entire career of stop and starts and too-soon brilliance - what Hainley refers to as the artist’s tendency for prolepsis - makes this addendum of an exhibition all the more sadly apt; that to think the work capable of a finality of representation was of course misguided. An artist who in her 70’s began again with a whole new line of work capable of competing with 20’s Berliners in fresh faced zeal, the artist would have been better served outside this dullest of institutions. Yet curator Eleey, always the installation showman, and alongside the artist seems to have smuggled a few time-bombs of white-hot brilliance  into of the dim yellow tendencies of MoMA corporate-hood. An ecstatic video work placed within sight of Starry Night, an act of total historical vertigo, too soon.

Moyra Davey at Institute of Contemporary Art

(Moyra Davey at Institute of Contemporary Art)

Sontag pointed out photography as inherently elegiac, and Davey further expresses its moribund nature-morte with a gloss of preemptive nostalgia. Like instagram filters made to affect 70’s grain on crystalline microlenses - implanting an artificial comfort into the cold of its technologic clarity - Davey went from photographing the dust and stains that mark human touch and embody nostalgia, to pre-placing that touch on the photographs, mailing them to package the touch that preceded them. Unlike Beshty’s copper marring conceptual emblems, the touch placed onto photographs re-re-re-inscribes photography’s loss of the human in favor of the sediment of it. Like Long Life Cool Whites, brimming with the ghosts photography’s past theorists, the book was pre-yellowed with the past brought to the present to fill it like Proustian remembrance of theorists past.  It’s all incredibly affective, like Sontag’s furthering Genet’s “the only criterion of an act is its elegance” with Wilde's: “the vital element is not sincerity, but style.”

Greer Lankton at Participant Inc.

(Greer Lankton at Participant Inc.) link

Today, in the era of the online avatar Lankton’s surrogate dolls may have had a resurgence of relevance, staging and reflecting its world in the warped mirror of Lankton’s desire, the way digital technologies’ virtual platforms potentialize the endless construction of the avatar-self and its world. Lankton’s worlds were proto-virtual; projections of her desire/vision into imagined worlds that today makes more sense in terms of so many artists' digital desire-realms. It could have been great. But today the cast of characters surrounding the work today and writing the PR seems more concerned with projecting it back into history, back into its now lifeless scene, alongside the more famous names it can accredit to it, preserving it in the embalm of the all the pedigree it can inject.

See too: Tony Greene at Schindler House , Nicholas Buffon at Freddy , Danny McDonald at House of Gaga

“Paris De Noche” at Night Gallery

Andrei Koschmieder, Pentti Monkkonen, Amy Yao

(“Paris De Noche” at Night Gallery)

In a sense you don’t want to fault these three for making such perfect lozenges of product/commodities, because 1; they all really look great, and 2; to do so, would require faulting every painting ever made for its perfect commodic form: painting's content valuable for the support on which it rests, the sexy container. Similar to Seth Price for whom the packaging was the product and Dispersion as content, the three here take to crafting the package itself, in re-making the support as a form: ladders as frames, trucks as canvas, and corrugated metal as painting; each a product inseparable from its package whose functional content remain to be seen.

See too Pentti Monkkonen at High Art , Andrei Koschmieder at Real Fine Arts