Past: Laura Owens

"What hides behind the nicety is an insidiousness of attentional assault."

Past: Laura Owens at Capitain Petzel

Koichi Enomoto at Nonaka-Hill

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This on the other hand is the Pollockification of figuration. The splatter gun school of content. The drips become sign systems, limbs, etc. Painting is the flypaper of culture. Collects its surreal. All forced into the depth of an Ipad, or again, Beckman. Painting as your punk jacket assembled and stitched with the cultural buttons you find neat. 

Satoru Kurata at Tomio Koyama Gallery

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Most of today's wild wacky arm figuration is limbs as an excuse for some Pollock. An abstraction excused as the narrative it isn't. (Like we still haven't gotten past Schutz. Or Beckman.) But here the narrative structure is stupid simple, effective. The trick gives subjects autonomy, the minorest amount of agency. We see them seeing. Instead of just the painter. Which we still always are. But we get to forget that for a brief edenic moment. Momentarily vicarious.

Reto Pulfer at Hollybush Gardens

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This type of artwork may be the final boss of 2010s contemporary art. A book you can't read. Pinned to the floor. An object of infinite affect. Compare to this object from 7 years ago. The tied up text.

"The packaging - the design, the arrangement - is the object, the affective manipulation of its viewer: the object above all connotes. Connotes intention and therefore meaning. The documentation encircles and presents it." But also prevents it.

"It creates a hole for the projection of its potential, fun or meaning. ...  The art object must be an inexhaustible hole, an affectation of the toy never opened. Like the toy manufacturer who ultimately wins by having privatized access to object, the artwork privatizes its "meaning." [Both are locked in packaging. ] It "means" nothing outside of the inflection of its affect [advertsing]. Circulates its sign within the sign structures of art, it looks like art, like it means something."

The toy designer and the artist no longer design a toy, design an artwork, they design a transaction. 

Past: Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff

"Notable to the migratory flocking, Henkel and Pitegoff decamped to Berlin and opened a bar. In business it would be called a "blue ocean strategy," i.e. with Berlin's art party become more Donner than dance, the artistically snowbound cannibalizing, a bone thrown to waters bloodying was respectable way to neutralize hungry dogs, demonstrate oneself a source of sustenance, feeding the hungry with cocktails, was no small ingenuity. The theater that came next placed the bar's social capital in the spotlight, literally on view, staged, showcasing the finer patrons on a pedestal and lit to be gawked upon. Before exhibiting the bar itself. Whatever institutional critique it held was mostly in the fact that it could do it better ... continually furthering of the Berlin trope of artist diasporas of song and dance routines to attend the paintings and objects..."

"'I’m leaving because this is bad. Because it’s really bad, isn’t it?'"

Read full: Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff at Cabinet, Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff at The Downer

New Space Show at Layr & The Old Greyhound Bus Station at Bortolami

(Layr, Bortolami)

New Space day at CAD. An old bus station, a fresh digs. The exhibition space is the thing we're meant acknowledge but also not supposed to really acknowledge. (It would be too base to talk about the space in a true art review.) But yet it's there, the cosmic radiation to art.  I'm not even sure we have a language for its criticism, we only talk about it as a whole, as the common cube, to everyone. The implicit gold wreath. That now occasionally self-acknowledges? The exhibition's space is the watermark for the gallery's brand. the identity - so of course there is desire to puff its chest. 

Cindy Ji Hye Kim at Kunsthall Stavanger

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Saccharine counterbalanced with fragility in excess. Laser cut bones, graphite sandcastles. This will all be erased! Graphite drawing: granules in time, sand in the hourglass! It makes the chintz bearable knowing it will disappear. Why does our nervous systems resemble brambles? Our venous system roses? Our love all tinder in the long run's fire. As we desiccate. To the charcoal we will become. Art linked to our own bonfire.  It makes the sweetness temporary, endurable. Saying the same thing 3 times.