Nora Schultz at dépendance

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Jury-rigging's nautical roots in the provisional ropes and lashing raising a temporary mast and sails - before basically come to mean any unsightly but workable solution to a problem - has a particular relevance to Schultz, whose early misuse of materials to create impromptu painting machines involved lots of rigging raising awkward solutions to the made up problems of needing to produce a painting to achieve that sort of elegance captured by outsider architecture, redneck repairs, and the whole meme of "if it look stupid but it works, it ain't stupid" captured by the internet, thematizing the absurdity of the problem's demands as a whole to begin with and then with further inelegant metal solutions to sculpture as horrendous jagged objects, the term is often malpropoed with "jerry-built" but not to be confused with the definition of "built unsubstantially of bad materials; built to sell but not last."


See too: Nora Schultz at Reena Spaulings

Valentin Carron at David Kordansky

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Carron's vague objects become conceptually blurry, rounding the corners of specificity to become pegs of exchangeablity where the tension of an art object is in occupying category rather than individuated objects, where Carron's object exist at the cusp of slipping over into, risking complete genericism.


See too: Darren Bader at Radio Athènes, Heimo Zobernig at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Ulla von Brandenberg at Pilar Corrias

Michael Stevenson at Carl Freedman

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Meticulous rebuilding of antiquated technologies; their fossil-like remains as evidence of human built conjunctions of the mechanistically immanent against the ideologically transcendent, of our desire for our primitive technologies' oily gears to spit out some ethereal sublime more than the sum of its part, are the artifacts of human desire. The Moniac attempted representation of world markets, the flight simulators search to spread god's will, everything locked in its mechanistic body hoping for transcendence, locked in a loop of represented flight. This Icarusian failure of technologic failure to invoke transendence is something many of the youth are working on today, with current technologies failure to deliver on a promise with freedom supplanted with something that feels more and more like imprisonment, see the renderstentialists, there isn't much escape, and so Stevenson's dig through the past is likesome to that saying about history.

Jeff Wall at Studio for Propositional Cinema

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The symbo-cred cash-out of artists post-mid career usually excuses a lot of easy bad production under a brand to activate it and printed big. Annoying at best, sad at worst. No idea when these were taken, but the choice to exhibit them now could signal the tragic end for Wall's conceptual interest, but instead, rather than place its lens towards big generic what-have-yous of impressive mediocrity, it turns its Wallian skepticism of photographic staging towards small snapshots, that most unstaged and true photography, the thing we base our personal live's recording on, ominous.


See too: Thomas Demand at Avlskarl,  Florian Maier-Aichen at 303 Gallery

Katja Novitskova at Kunstverein Hamburg

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Lurid visual culture, new material and new images used to impress and assert the power and validity of its images, to achieve the slick look of information that we have come to understand as irreparably meaningful.


See too: Katja Novitskova at Kunsthalle Lissabon

Aleksandra Domanović at Tanya Leighton

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At one end they're working on meat grown from stem cells floating in bioreactors filled with fetal bovine serum "fed" proteins and sugars, stimulated and toned for texture by electric current, and at the other end the cattle, with the rise of cheap genetic manipulation technologies like CRISPR, are themselves undergoing a smoothing of their rough points, genetically clipped for capitalistic ergonomics, streamlined; both technologic ends are moving towards bags of convulsing meat, orbs in sterile conditions possibly with mouths or just painted with nutrients like an inverse gyro-meat spinner continually growing and slathered with nutrients, a "cow" is just a scaffold for its muscle, a self-feeding machine that could even be genetically clipped of its ability to feel, to do anything but self-feed, what is a cow but a human technology of meat-production so happily installed with a self-growth AI.

These the terms Domanovic is working with, and sculptures that appear to contain their own streamlining, made for be packed for their transit, appendageless. The images art is working with today are as fantastical as ever, and the democratization of the image, when a young man can turn the artworld on its head simply by disseminating its images, as opposed to its gate keepers in ivory publications before, into the diaspora of them in feeds and phones, young art is seeming to once again turn to strong images.


See too:  Biennale vs Triennial

Michael Van den Abeele at Trampoline

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Unable to read the word "dandyism" in a press release without experiencing some mild form of post-trauma stress flashing back to 2008 and being force-fed Krebber and all the fall-out from that, of artists with loose brushes and inflated press releases excusing over-cooked noodles in place of paintings, making this like a really badly timed joke, a reappearance of a ghost of a past anguish wafting back undead and dancing with a shimmy to rub it back in our faces, we should replace the word Dandy with obnoxiously leisure class.