Markus Schinwald at Museum Leuven

(link)

“What are the differences between looking at static objects and looking at moving bodies or fish in an aquarium?”
The invasive and impressive Lionfish placed not as ornament, a crime, instead its held at the staid reserve of object, a sober erection.

See too : Markus Schinwald at Wattis

Matthew Chambers at Zach Feuer, Praz-Delavallade

(link Zach Feuer Praz-Delavallade)

Whatever was the quaint fun of  Chamber’s shoddiness in past onslaughts has been strip-mined to the bedrock of materiality’s ability for monolith pleasantry.

Sanya Kantarovsky at Marc Foxx

(link)

“‘Stylization’ is what is present in a work of art precisely when an artist does make the by no means inevitable distinction between matter and manner, theme and form. When that happens, when style and subject are so distinguished, that is, played off against each other, one can legitimately speak of subjects being treated (or mistreated) in a certain style.”(Sontag)

It would seem this sentence already feels antiquated, painting today prerequistely stylized with the past worn as its own sleeve. There isn’t a painting today not “stylized” with its own past instance, that doesn’t dress itself in it.  Kantarovsky doesn’t treat style as symbolic fashion to be worn, but merely the water one swims in today, the status quo for an art submerged in the redirection of flows of “content.”  That some could be mistaken for a Kai Althoff matters less than none, the difference is ideological, one cold one warm. Interesting now to see this show finding a child illustration-like pathos within it. The thin veil of the press release decoded with a simple substitution cipher, the enigma revealed:

“Surrounded by a chewy gelatinous sugar coating[...]Laden with [painting] history, [Kantarovsky] is burdened as well with the impossible task of conveying sweetness in a largely bitter and disenchanted world, a world overwhelmed with familiar pictures of unfamiliar people. Each [painting] packs a memory of itself, staining the tongue with streaks of saturated color, issuing a syrupy nostalgia for [?] itself—abated only by the hope that some still remain in the pack.”

David Altmejd at Musée D’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

(link)

Discounts for fairs, museums, etc. given to students are seen as a genial act but also a means of increasing the social reproduction of institutions, investing a future viewership with whatever message the institution implicitly contains, the discount given to students and not mere youth.
But so visibility is a form of capital that CAD wields, and thus exhibitions featured are lent a implicitly critical affirmation placed among the countless other exhibitions which becomes the great flattening ground of art history, a new means of historical acceptability. For instance this is Altmejd’s first exhibition featured whereas his orgiastic forebear Matthew Barney and contemporary Urs Fischer have both had none. One would perhaps relish the lapse in publicity for the powerhouses, and this implicit form of criticism (both choosing one over the other as well as the decibels of its contemporary voice leaving swaths unheard) is left obfuscated to anyone but those “in the know” about the artist’s individual critical acceptability. Interestingly much of CAD’s taste tendency’s of the scrappy mysterio-surreal materialist can be seen in the Altmjed’s work, even if no one likes him some people are about to start bumping into him.

See too : Group Show at Neue Alte Brucke , S.O.A.P.Y. III at What Pipeline , Chris Ofili at the New Museum , Dai Hanzhi 5000 artists at Witte de With

Willem de Rooij at Arnolfini

(link)

Every bouquet is the package of “nature’s” beauty amped to steroidic artificiality by its mechanization under Capital’s fuel. Beauty produced by destroying natural significance given over to its industrialization. Flowers no longer natural rarities of amazing sensuality but disposable and instantaneous orgies. Of which De Rooij’s 95 variety bouquet is its endgame, numbers governing the bottom line (95 of any variety) over attunement to any individual heterogeneity of genus, species, taste, knowledge or sensitivity. It is to flowers what the frenzied visible of pornography is to sex; the natural giving way to industrial significance. Like 2.5 years of “Riots, Protest, Mourning and Commemoration” photographs, in their accumulation they speak not to individual situations but, through their ordering, instead render how a culture itself chooses to visualize and represent and thus define its concepts, and de Rooij within that, artificially cold, useful only for what can be conceptually extracted (produced) from it, by say a writer.

Group Show at Neue Alte Brücke

(link)
Artists: Magnus Andersen, George Rippon, Anna Zacharoff, Julien Nguyen
Exhibition Title: Late European Decadence

Neue Alte Brücke set the trend that come full circle to be greet with their own franchise deemed International Style, and so if this doesn't look “fresh” it at least looks current, hegemonically so; possibly the most important thing today is that art look fine, just fine, without an excess of presence and an irony to cut its own heel, a bridge to the new old decadence.


See too : Transatlantic Transparency at Mathew

Michael E. Smith at Lulu

(link)

Coming by way of Povera rather than its more normalized pop onslaught, contemporary surrealism a vital materialist adaptation to old modes.  Touching into the same desirous unconscious that packaged products diligently mine a libidinal desire from. It makes today’s surrealism feel "true" in that our access to its machinations is hidden.  Arranging its objects as if knowing something you don’t, organized by a logic you cannot see taste touch or smell, like a monoxide. Surrealism must obfuscate in order to mirror the commodic penchant for touching something sublingual inside us. Like orchids selected over millennia for their ability to drive the Apoideas to lust, products live and die and evolve for their ability to incite within us a desire, a fear, a feeling, a sale. A t-shirt inside a sunflower.

See too : Michael E. Smith at Susanne Hilberry , Flat Neighbors at Rachel Uffner , Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak , Anicka Yi at Cleveland Museum