Camilla Wills at Gaudel de Stampa

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Perhaps since Genzken's blowout Venice Pavilion, exhibitions have come to look, become acceptable to look, like fashion proposals for department store windows, exhibitions as trendbooks predicting the future of displays eventually culturally dispersed to haybail-nightclub aesthetic in the windows of H+M, Urban Outfitters, et al.  I don't speak french but the accompanying text probably mentions Broodthaers at least several dozen times, a refrain to critically pass as embodying the system its meant to critique by posing it the international style of art to self-eviscerate, but instead just looks really super great and I want to buy something.

David Lieske at MUMOK, Zak Kitnick at CLEARING

"Rio" at Office Baroque

The press release really did a good job of saying it all.
Something to be said, in terms of an international conceptual art period, about the name Office Baroque. Functions well.

And so Quarterly has finally come to pass.

As the water tinges red, accumulating imitators who with ease replicate its system, seeking a piece of its pie, provide competition threatening CAD's monopoly of art world visibility, it evolves new systems, a new hustle to keep it at the forefront of this fragile new visibility-ecosystem of attention.

And so what form does the new extension take but an anabolic enhanced CV, the literalization of artist pedigree. CAD's system still clinging to the mass feed, a linear flow of artist accumulative practice, ignoring the "web" for a singular fount, flow, mainlining the image. CAD has professed disinterest in criticism as part of its institution, and the hegemonic power of the visible remains its brilliant main structure. An accumulative method which monopolizes the territory art stands on: documentation. Control the field of making visible. The only way to beat CAD now is to be faster than it. Other "features" promoted by competing websites has nothing on the completest vision of CAD as the arbitrator of the artworld's visibility.

Perusing the first of the 3, the speed of finding patterns in an artist practice becomes infinitely faster, and here we see the importance of Arakawa's body doing something, anything, an action to conjure the documentation.


See too: "The Sea" at Mu.Zee, Gina Folly and Mandla Reuter at SALTS,  “Dai Hanzhi: 5000 Artists” at Witte de With

Neïl Beloufa at Balice Hertling

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It's the distance between the thing and Beloufa's ruinous plastic version, showing light through its facade of Sci-Fi film, Reality video, and trade show beauty. Belfoufa's distilled tropes and cliches we have come to culturally love in the fun cardboard playtime version of; enjoyability in the mastery of lubricating forms of cultural massage, mediums of libidinal and candied fun.  We watch the sci-fi without the baggage of plot or anything really, just the wet surface of cold sci-fi, the gloss of display systems and fetish for the warm succulent life.

And see too: Timur Si-Qin at Carl Kostyál , Zak Kitnick at Clearing

“Popular Images” at Karma

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"Popular images" is a perfect name. While appropriation dealt with images specific, today's hand-me-down version diffuses appropriation as a genericism, the culturally dispersed vagueness, accumulated echos in the gunked corners of visibility that we usually wash off our eyes, the hyper-distilled image of all the generic shit we see.
This inhabitation of the generic is meant as a critical doubling, to embody the other in clean assimilation of a replicant criticality, inverted where the ostensibly artistic human desires the borg-like reproductive body of capital info-machines. This doubling is expected as opposition to its takeover, but it may betray a latent desire to welcome the new overlords, to see the body destructed, and offer aid to the enemy. Like us and our reproductive master.

2 more versions of this show to come.

Peter Coffin at Herald St

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Along with Mungo Thompson, Coffin surfing the mid-late 00's vogue for pop inflected conceptual art, cultural forms stressed into 70's reflexive systems. The artists wanted to be cultural pranksters, using the devices of conceptual art's powerful navel strip-mining on the world at large who might finally be made to care about art's tools. But they didn't and so found refuge in the lobbies of museums to friendlify their interiors with symbols the common-man would recognize, but with the value added of a wall-text able to explain why they didn't, and justifying educational budgets, the oldest, blandest, trick in the book.

Loretta Fahrenholz at Midway Contemporary Art

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Ditch Plains was as a success as one can have, preceded by its perfect promo-stills replicating across the art-network in a self-generating promo campaign. The stills reproduced so well, and functioned so perfectly to manifest desire for a summer blockbuster (still in theaters 2 years later) difficult to separate its expectation from arrival, but Plains fulfilled perfect the blockbuster function of libidinal fun for our eschatological drives, a post-apocalypse film-trailer, functioning itself as an ad, a future, fragmented images distending to project a unfolding and manifest a desire now for more.
 It's two years later now and it seems like still no one has had anything interesting to say about the film despite the massive press because like any blockbuster it has more to do with our cultural desires than any thing the film is "about," - which brilliantly Fahrenholz's film isn't - just black bodied apocalypse hip-hop and us who desire it.


See too: Frances Scholz at Tif Sigfrids