Darja Bajagić, Aleksander Hardashnakov at Croy Nielsen

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The bruising capillaries, hematomas of color, of a Klossowski like softness, physical, drawing made objects, and across the cut-collage assemblage of cultural detritus as scrappy flags.  Both are pleasant uses of material, sans Bajagić's normally aggressive imagery reliant the work immediately resembles a Richard Hawkins effeminate attachmenting, with a bit more "edge," across from blushing brute frames, which have a sort of weak force that's nice.

Olga Balema at Croy Nielsen

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Materially this work is weird, interesting, the taught over-inflated carcass of rotting whale PVC fetishists, dead fish washed ashore and sexually lurid, the hyperreal of the package holding the bodily abject, but the installation of it exemplifies today’s occult handling of spatial composition, the feng shui arrangements that bespeak an other, or a spiritual warmth, weirding, and there exists an interesting conversation between Gedi Sibony (arguable harbinger of current compositional resurgence, possibly even of the curtain meme) and Kai Althoff in which the former kinda sorta admits the latter. These compositional strategies become a signal, attempting through odd/unusual placement to valorize objects, in the same way higher powers once commanded painters into corners, sculpture today arranges on a logic established/predicated on an otherness. To quote Carpenter yesterday, “non- allegorically allegorical “displays” I seek to confound these products into a hieroglyph.”
But the work is desirable, expect to see more of it. Buy now as it were.


See too: Olga Balema, Anne de Vries at Michael Thibault , Michael E Smith at Susanne Hilberry, Merlin Carpenter at MD72, David Douard at Johan Berggren,  Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace, “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center

Jutta Koether at Bortolami

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Certain art memes burn so quickly that in their aftermath a wasteland, the theoretical ground so well cleared that its almost like starting over, we have to look elsewhere from "Painting Beside Itself"s turf, or risk losing an artist to its rubric. I've got nothin.
But how striking it is now Koether's obvious forebear to the likes of Jana Euler and other’s loaded representation. Representation was always sort of beside itself, at least pointing elsewhere, but whereas for today’s puzzle painting exists as a kind of confounding delay of symbol's comprehension, Koether's over-saturation never seems a puzzle, but a hyperlink version, rerouting what we bring to it.

Jana Euler at Kunsthalle Zürich + Bonner Kunstverein,  Jesse Benson at Michael Benevento, Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque

Merlin Carpenter at MD 72

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In the mist of Berlin's fashion for press released in Ashbery poetics, Carpenter plops a desiccant earnestness, to clear the fog and expose the mildew of this all growing old. Carpenter has always been master of framing houses of cards, where any breath of thought topples, the whole thing must be moved with care, but here instead contextualizes with a single vantage's solemnity so dry it may lack compassion for us (what Carpenter ex doesn't), but posits an agreeable proposition: we've read Marx wrong, a disservice to the auratic objects of capital arranged so commonly speculated upon as "anonymous." And so, "By combining the single works into non-allegorically allegorical “displays” I seek to confound these products into a hieroglyph" a description of most artworks today, asserting that we need a new language for it, and assembling arrangements of luxurious object as a mockery of it, art's attempting to totemize the objects of capital as an occult other, a mistake if there ever was one, and Carpenter has an essay forthcoming for that, and we'll all look forward to that.

Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co., Zak Kitnick at Rowhouse Projects, Mark Leckey at Haus Der Kunst + Kunsthalle Basel, Vincent Meessen, Thela Tendu at Kunsthalle Basel

Mark Leckey at Haus Der Kunst + Kunsthalle Basel

Haus Der Kunst, Kunsthalle Basel

Sanchez called Leckey a hack ( in the sense of what "artist John Kelsey discussed"), taking issue with Leckey's lecture's magisterial administration of an audience swooning: hypnotic affection that would one day be called a Ted Talk or manipulating an audience. Thing was Leckey had always been trading in affects. It was like his thing. Taking cue from that other realm that predicated itself upon it, commerce, entertainment, advertising that was constructing the world and the commodities, objects, films, and talismans that produce it, and, Leckey, attempting to build the work from it. Fiorrici Made Me Hardcore - Leckey's seminal origin - is only and entirely affect, a semblance of surface run like warm oil over your grey orbital, and in the 15 years since a practice built of discerning this surface force, kin Sturtevant and Trisha Donnelly among others, giving birth to today's youthful irrevant abuse of it seen in the New Museum's Surround Audience and even badly by all those anonymous materialists speculated upon. What, at the moment, separates Leckey from his progeny's use of affect is attention to it, amassing at the very least an index of it, and interest examined, and not necessarily just exploiting it.


See too : Venice v Triennial , Mark Leckey at Wiels, Trisha Donnelly at Air de Paris, Zak Kitnick at Rowhouse, Sturtevant at Moma, &Thaddeus Ropac 

Haegue Yang at dépendance

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Yang’s shopping spree installationism, artist who package commodities as their signature, replaced by packaged objects, not dispersed through space, but singular, souvenirs a bit more decor apropos.

See too : Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho at 47 Canal , Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps

Venice vs Triennial

Venice, Triennial

Cold adult sobriety vs hothouse youth. The difference is generational. 10 years ago avenues to visibility were tightly controlled by finance beholden gatekeepers pedigreed and willing to bestow public accreditation to neophytes in line, behaving to a system; Today youth of the post-net are really post image-democratization, a time in which all images come preloaded with mass audientential capabilities, and accredited publications (with expensive paper real-estate) are matched by cheap raw visibility's fungible version, exchangeable with any world (fashion, commerce, literature) equally, the gold standard of different disciplines. Views now actually equatable with dollars, concretizing vague importance of public attendance numbers with dollar signs. This isn't that the New Museum is going full populist, but rather that it must manage now a cultural idea of art that they present back to it. The Bienniale, a pretty much artworld only affair, must conform to an artworld's image of itself, reserved and tasteful, and look how staid most of it in comparison is. And the preponderance of the Triennal exhibition's viral capable art that flowed through the net alongside it is as symptomatic of cultural changes in art as it is the new liquid spirit. Old guards' approval no longer perquisite to fame, Artists can produce visibility organically, through, it turns out, interesting images and so if the Teletubbies look through you, disinterested in your presence, chalk it up to art that isn't predicated on Fried's theater attending to the viewer's presence, but the populist behind it, and so this new art, frighteningly enough, is actually kind of entertaining.


See too Chris Ofili at New Museum, Seven Reeds at Overduin and Co.