Group Show at Bortolami and Galerie Neu at Gladstone Gallery
Ian Cheng, Melanie Gilligan, Carissa Rodriguez, Anicka Yi
John Knight, Manfred Pernice, Tom Burr, Klara Liden, Kitty Kraus, Gedi Sibony, Reena Spaulings, Sergej Jensen





Bortlomi
You go see these shows only to be confronted again with its screen representation. Why do you even get out of bed, its representation, historical sediment, becomes the real version in catalogs. Arendt's we're all images to others. All this stuff is on monitors anyway save for Anicka Yi’s art-fetish-displays, or maybe Melanie Gilligan’s lenticulars, primeval .gifs for the real world, the most basic version of affirmed presence, good job you got a bed sort. And eventually with Ian Cheng’s Oculus Rift experiments, not shown here, it’ll all be here. Remember when an artist made Katamari Damacy- that was a sculpture. Carissa Rodriguez’s prints at least suggest a complicit defeat in attempting critique of the new digital supremacy, everyone else seems left-behind in the uncommitment to digital acceleration’s disposibility.

Neu
Which makes Reena Spauling’s poor portraits all the digitally-smarter for their commitment to disposable ideation. Spauling’s whole project premised on every whatever-is-beyond-insipid self-reflexive “art idea” executed with jest, and smart, social cred made to be liquidated and poured through the network of pipes, brilliant. And then you’ve got John Knight actually still dragging real objects across the world, displacing them with antiquated labor-power, and just really the most needless idea of reflexive context art that he’s known for, reminiscent of the sisyphean Heizer’s levitating the mass of his rocks to get his jollies off, and so in the context of all that it makes sense why so much of the other art is limp in these shows, barely able to erect itself in bed in the morning, and because its not hard to get really hard to get up in bed when you’ve got some form of super-cool steroids like all these people seem to have.

Morag Keil at Real Fine Arts



The real fine crowd seems all really want to impress on us their disgust with networks/working and the conglomerate of social sludge. Its neurotic. Beg the rabbit for forgiveness as you slaughter it; or so the press release would have it. Its like you apologize for showing at Real Fine Arts. Apologize for a room full of artworks, self ironize. Like the schrimps that magically ward off marketability, or meaning to marketability. oops. I mean if Kassay taught us anything its collectors like shiny-metal covered canvases. Silver your werewolf desires.
I mean I like the photographs, the banal disjunction, the alienation of experience in late capital. The schizo-world of scream masks and idols of imaged women, etc. I could write the press. The whole recycling thing of Kelley Walker in the united colors, and the video reminiscent of the context comedy of Zobernig’s filming of the comings and goings of Texte Zur Kunst. I can’t really read the message in the pee, but I think its asking the same question as the wall.

Judith Bernstein at Studio Voltaire



Was Lozano repressed, subject to the time, or nuanced? And then Oldenburg with his dated reactionary innuendo. ‘Cause here a similar but more ragged temperament, a fuck-all mandala of not quite ‘tudes. I mean I like the cuntface, the hammy “dick-screws;” everything direct addressing someone though everyone’s unsure who. Yale is a repressive regime, or maybe just everyone who considers Guston their god inspite of the miraculous universe, of cunts. I mean Josh Smith continues with his tricky dick, and screw him.

Peter Fischli and David Weiss at Sprüth Magers



The memento mori, the natura morta, all life still, vanitas, tinged in the passing, laced with latent death: an asymptote on approach to nihilism - sometimes masked by bright-lights-fun. Not here. “The abuse of time,” as F+W have called it, relates to Craven’s fordist version of it. One imbues, the other empties. We should be disgusted, but the artists, or assistants, who whittle away, literally, here, “facsimiles of the objects they depict, yet they are empty and insubstantial” are all going to die like all the rest anyway and so the question of whittling, of waste, is abuse only abutted against Borderless doctors, and vaccinists and The Cosmos. So many artists wanting to mark so much time, to reify its weight in romance, but nor should we forget the vertigo standing there, the world rendered plastic. This pile mid-use left in closet only makes clearer the accumulation soon to have its door closed, end of an era. NOSTALGIA KILLS / POST HISTORY 4 EVR


See too : Ann Craven at Confort Moderne

Ann Craven at Confort Moderne



The Naumanian premise “I am a painter, therefore I paint.” and any second-guess-skepticism ceded to the viewer, while painter’s axiom leaves artists whittling unfazed, Irony tempered by luxury fordist production. Surely if one cares to paint the moon this many times, one cares. The clock critiqued with a On Kawara style of deliberation, accumulation, a stickler’s dedication Laura Owens renounced.
The non-object of its subject, Bambis and the like; like so much contemporary work, displacing meaning, surely it is not here, and we look everywhere and find it nowhere, but in Man’s search for meaning in whichever camps, Frankl’s or John Waters, black satin and- are those cat food tins glued to the painting?

Robert Heinecken at Wiels



The artist schizo-neurosis love/hate of the printed image. Imagine being an artist confronted daily w/ onslaught of freely disseminated images, and knowing it’s accelerating. A world near comprised of images. And so of course artists “deal with it.” Princes lubricated masturbation of them, the reinsemination of the Marlboro Man's potential, DISimages inhabitation of the acceleration, the interminable unknown artists cut/collaging porn reifying the fetish of print itself, the McCarthy all-hands-on-deck scorched earth blitzkrieg against. Artists are losing the battle, neurotically and nervously, a where-can-we-even-stand type philosophical conundrum. But so, here, it’s nice to see some reserved expenditures of image explication. Tending towards a mockery but saved by the slowness of its accumulating angles of approach. Sure some is stock critique, but handled well and still looking slightly fresh even in its Heubler-esque dryness, none of the cut-crystal ideologic perfection of Levine/Lawler’s jewels way more sexy than all these half-naked women. Same generation, a little browner.

Vern Blosum at Kunsthalle Bern



Did you know the Boltonia Asteroides is rhizomatous.

The Baldessari anti-jokes may be more kin Lutz Bacher’s desolate informationals, or Zobernig’s gallows, or even Josh Smith not-non-paintings (stop signs to boot) but Vern Blosum’s fake artistry might be just the most relevant today, possibly blanker than Codax’s market strategies (who seemed to forget that Warhol was blankest of all.) To attempt a further hollowing of pop art, now that’s what I call abysmal. These are just fake paintings. And pretty dismal fake paintings, though only slightly worse than Baldessari’s endlessly celebrated hoodwinks. Who cares who did it first; these are fakes for the ages, if only because they exist, dryly, in front of us in a museum. I mean "planned anticipation", who could ask for a better fake painting than that.