Alex Katz at Sant'Andrea de Scaphis

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It is so nice to be effortless. To be a breeze. To be warm winds. God could you imagine trying hard. No one wants to watch someone pedal a bicycle. They want motorcycles leaping chasms. Speed. And not wearing a helmet, or seatbelt, for danger allows you to fuck up the face. Look cool with a broken nose. Do not stop. Guns like brushes blazing. Saying, This / broken nose / makes me look cooler / than the guy / in a helmet of perfection / right? God can you imagine slowing down, to correct a mistake, pedestrian.

Terminal velocity, production itself becomes the product: Brätsch, KAYA, Genzken, Craven, Guyton, Smith, the zombies, the current, etc.

Bernd and Hiller Becher, or Borges, the attempts an archive expand to questions of what use? What use is a photo of every wasserturm. Every image of the world. There is too much water in ivory towers. Eventually their flood replaces the land, light houses occluding everything else, the territory replaced with its map scaled to consequence, beamed directly to your hand, interest. There is darkness elsewhere, dragons. We're not even sure there's art anymore, only documentation covering the land, creating the land. Where do you stand in it? Where we're going we don't need roads, or the 90s. There's a Before CAD and an After Daily. We used to like art until it became its image. But it's a necessary project, a good one possibly. 

I walked into Micheal E. Smith's show at Clifton Benevento, ten years ago exactly, where Mr. Clifton himself greeted me and gave me a tour. It ended with him grabbing the car console and spinning out the whole world around us. Him still smiling. 

Past: Michael E. Smith

"A google search says no one has used to word 'tumor' in any online writing about Smith. Which seems odd; his objects seem awfully affected by a lot of lumps, red dots, growths... Teratomas: the classic hair and teeth of your twin in your tummy. You can google pictures of these, they actually look a lot like Smith's more "bodily" objects. ... find a potato in our eye, the 'categorically promiscuous.' Things sliding into new subjects like bare knees across asphalt..."

"It's a cliche at this point to say that Smith makes the mundane object estranged. And in a sea of so many surrealists currently operating, less than helpful. Estrangement is today's go-to strategy. Smith's is individuated, each object set off so that we can no longer 'know' the sculpture, eroding a complete vision, and opening a distrust. A psychological sliver. We cannot know the object, its relation to other objects is broken, either categorically (there is no category to place the object within, surrealist) or psychologically (the unknown threat). The rocking chair I project from the two elegant bones still in contact with the substrate of the real is not the same as the one in your head. This unknown destabilizing of our ability to conceptualize the objects in equitable terms to exchange with another -both objects and other people - (eroding the material semio-substrate with which our exchange is based) breaching a distrust, is its sinister quality."

"Threat of bodily violence is implicit to art that treats materials as categorically promiscuous (surreal - a body to become goo as any other), e.g. if you can put puffer fish under the table's summer sky, inflate them like footballs with whale ears, aren't you as wiling to place skulls at your knees. The disregard for the categorical order is like gore, crushing bodies."

"You can never be certain you've seen all the butterflies, their artwork is everywhere."


Click for full: Michael E. Smith at Atlantis, Michael E. Smith at 500 Capp Street Foundation, Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center, Michael E. Smith at Michael Benevento, Michael E. Smith at Zero, Michael E. Smith at Lulu, Michael E. Smith at Susanne Hilberry,

Nora Turato at Sprüth Magers

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What Nauman did for neon, Turato does for motivational posters, bus adverts. The contemporary illuminate manuscript to nonsensical ... sadness? - that empty pang after finding yourself having read the billboard before even knowing you were reading the billboard. Your brain wants to "make sense" of its surroundings, and you read it for clues, end up reading the billboard that has commandeered your evolutionary wiring to sell you a half naked woman in socks. It's not your fault you read it, not your fault it barely makes sense. You were not intended for spaces like these. Nothing is rational in art or advertising, for both there is only that same distending space that creates a void, a meaning that must be filled, consumerist or otherwise. 

Perhaps this is part of our Modern Gothic.


See too: Matt Keegan, Kay Rosen at Grazer Kunstverein, Hanne Lippard & Nora Turato at Metro Pictures, Gene Beery at Shoot the Lobster, Karl Holmqvist at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, John Giorno at Almine Rech, Nora Turato at LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS, Nora Turato at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein

Masato Kobayashi at ShugoArts

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Paintings that barely stand on their own. That's .. a position. "What I can say about freedom is, perhaps, how I go about making my frames." - the artist. The PR: " ...no fixed forms, but are free and flexible. His style of painting while stretching the canvas is unprecedented." Artforum: "It’s hard to like Masato Kobayashi’s exhibition." You can't say "bad," you say, "an apparent act of apostasy against 'taste.'" This is About Freedom. Reminded of a meme: 

A chad says to a monkey in a zoo, "You are not free."
The monkey responds, "No, it is you who are not free."
"But you are in a cage" replies chad.
The monkey then begins to publicly masturbate.

This is about freedom.

Past: Lin May Saeed

"Making art that expresses care for animals by carving it in material that - if left uncared for - would quickly degrade and release poisons harmful to animals is sort like selling live grenades in a puppy shelter. Why not take a grenade home, why not take back some of this asbestos to protect the earth if not your home, these animals need you. ... the suicide games pretty much everyone believes we're playing now in the anthropocene's foot-to-the-pedal towards brick walls type of time period."

"Its forthrightness would seem naive if it wasn't so endearing, handing it right to you to care for its fragility."


Full: Lin May Saeed at Jacky Strenz, Lin May Saeed at Studio Voltaire, Lin May Saeed at Lulu

Past: Ulala Imai

"... Paintings that feel sort of worn in, faded, like your life. The things ready to date themselves, the air exposed fruit, the bordering passé culture - it's all so ready to expire. Which makes them skulls."

"..already going out of style, like a 70s spread left to the light, going blue with that ultimate death, cliche." 

Full: Ulala Imai at Nonaka-Hill, Ulala Imai at KARMA, Group Show at High Art,