Past: Reena Spaulings at Chantal Crousel

"Reigning champions of the dumb art gesture so profoundly, inertly, token as to rupture any semblance of hope for meaning; it found comedy in the malignant stupefaction of the "art gesture." ...  The work actively attacked the insider: anyone who understood Spaulings game did not receive art's usual self-congratulations but the unloading of 40 foot soldiers of uncommon stupidity inside your head. A virus affecting only those in-the-know while the blissfully unaware remained free of its belittling folly.
"Writing this, I've actually needed a thesaurus for "dumb."
"...the more you get it the more it evacuates."


Read full: Reena Spaulings at Chantal Crousel

Past: Marc Camille Chaimowicz

"Art like pieces of display catalog, Ikea presentations of what your home could be, as images of potential, like all those pantone grids we all find so pleasant in organizing the full mess of choice into something pleasant, choosable."

"We find this wanton sensitivity almost unnerving in art, we fear the institutionalization of its form, the hospitalization of 'sensitivity.'"


Read full:
Marc Camille Chaimowicz at Kestner Gesellschaft
Marc Camille Chaimowicz at INDIPENDENZA

Ebecho Muslimova at Maria Bernheim

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Cartoon characters are only cartoon when they are cut from their world and pasted into the real. In their natural inked setting cartoons are simply flesh, however elasticized. Floors, feces, body are of the same stuf and there was some inherent truth.
When the cartoon now does its Who Framed Roger Rabbit thing, the duck finally becomes a cartoon duck, the visual promiscuity is lost, his flesh is now not of the the surrounding world and forces him to become more singularly himself.  Fatebe becomes a character, no longer a natural feature of her reality but a style cut and pasted into. And her world becomes simply a grab bag of digital effects to encounter. It was always bound to happen, drawing must eventually be valorized as painting. Madani gets away with it because her painting is drawing. And Who Framed Roger Rabbit was most interesting when the softness of cartoons were hit with hard reality, forced to take its shape, "flatten the duck with a frying pan and he becomes a frying pan" and the worlds again begin to seamlessly blur in the green glow of the Matrix, our imagination's virtual plane, and the cartoon naturalizes again.


see too: Tala Madani

Friederike Feldmann at Barbara Weiss

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It would be so nice if we could just have some drawing without requisite need of deploying it like a big factory of gesture, magnified swatches of what had been human. The just plain ol' drawing has everything already. This is the fault of the world. We need more drawing.

Cyprien Gaillard at Sprüth Magers

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This is the language of advertising: upstairs you view the commercial and in the showroom the products. The film, which is beautiful and affective like all good ads, ostensibly provides a confusion/detournment to the process of commodity affectation, but not sure language can talk itself out of the language. Cynicism about the process is still the process.

Koak at Altman Siegel

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People bent like pipes for their decorative purposing. The painter demands composition, extraction, humans repurposed for painting's ends, how modern. Arabesque motifs get harsher until the ballet seem inhuman doll-like, Picasso rips apart models and we find this intoxicating. Our runway models and their own body's El Grecoing. Etiolated for the consumption. There is discrepancy between what things represent and what they are: beautiful.


see too: Julien Nguyen at Modern Art, Lisa Yuskavage at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Louisa Gagliardi at Open Forum

Charlotte Posenenske at Konrad Fischer

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PR states "she erased all gestural traces avoiding and dimishing [sic] any kind of subjectivity." which while not entirely true the attempt does feel apropos to our current scratching at the glass, less to feel something than touch its borders as well as mark it. Scratched glass tends to reveal itself. This is the edge, the limit. Posenenske found it. And then Posenenske, tellingly, left the artworld. Yet we keep dragging her back, out. Why does art love and mythologize the people that leave it? As Herbert recounts one of her last acts was handing out broadsheets at Documenta stating "You culture vultures, so here you are all gathered together to chat and lie and talk crap so as to gain the upper hand." Us all loving our artists while not listening to them, an exhibition like a condescending smile.