Gina Beavers at Michael Benevento

(link)

Culture ate Warhol, and the body is spectacularly insane, but culture wants the body flat, glossy and sharp, like the Warhol which became fame, and Beavers reanimating the body's real corpus in such a culture that does not want it feels like real horror.


see too: Gina Beavers at Clifton Benevento,

Annette Kelm at Meyer Kainer

(link)

The PR, in one paragraph, describes well how the things function; Kelm's practice has narrowed slightly here, removing its expansive and dissonant genres eluding easy art-practice circumscription, the landscapes and genres etc.; this exhibition honed to icons, which are sharp, what would be called "striking" images of the advertorial, direct, but when they fail to deliver anything on that promise of a striking image, fail to reveal anything at all, what the PR calls "demonstratively unspectacular productions" feels not only dissonant, but depressing, like you're complicit in something you never meant to be. This is what makes them equate with commodities.


see too:  Annette Kelm at Gio Marconi, Adriana Lara at Algus Greenspon

Carol Bove, Carlo Scarpa at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens

(link)

So as to encounter the whole no individual thing could be too interesting, Modernist Architecture's elegance was blankness sliding eyes away from any particular to encounter an entirety, but Scarpa's bent version was filled with particularities, rather than decoration, as a means to emphasize itself. The awkwardness inscribed the elegance, like all those supermodels with strabismus. And this Particularness is the commons between the two, a hyptrophied aspect of modernism looking baroque within its narrow view, everything overly attended to.  Bove's looking not so much plain but obsessive, fetishistic attention toward the display, like the objects are beautiful but wouldn't the objects be more beautiful if they were wearing some organic leather strapping or tied down.

See too: Matthew Brannon at Casey Kaplan, Venice: Thea Djordjadze at The Arsenale

Richard Phillips at Mathew

(link)

Yeah that Richard Phillips, channeling Wool and Oehlen in the fabric with a playboy bunny.

There's an old artworld legend, that as far as known here is true: of a famed and admired painter, European and critical darling, 6 or 7 figure painter, this is 2003, painter with a waiting list and shows sold before even openings, this painter deciding to exhibit at a small provincial gallery of the American midwest in what couldn't even be called the garage of the green front lawn of a suburban home but a sort of concrete storage shed not much larger than the honest to goodness 6 or 7 figure painting being shown in 6 square meters of gallery space, to be sold out of that shed. It was one of those star-struck mutually beneficial kind of deals. Artists using the full breadth of their powers and burning it as gift, street cred for economy kind of deals.

This exhibition is like the black oily bizarro version of that legend.

Group Show at The Duck

(link)

M/L doing exceedingly well for themselves as a roving symbiotic socialiaty, an institution "going its own way" with middle fingers raised in intentionally hyper-postured PR and social muscle glistening with heavy artist lists' ostentatious lifting. The press release states as much, all this, and more: "a social experiment."  (q.v. Bourdieu; the artist maintains aloofness to the economic field while accruing its social capital etc. etc.) This the playing field for some time now, but now CAD is the grand legitimizer to concretize social relations in viewership, others will actually award you a number based on social rank within a field and continue to do so no matter how hard our eyes roll, none of this is new, what makes M/L interesting is the sort of blatant and innocent way in which it does this.

Andrea Zittel at Sprüth Magers

(link)

I purchased a vegetable with Star Wars adverts on it. A large anthropomophic talking bumble sells cereal to adults. Fantasy is a strong force in the universe. "Smashes box-office records." Zittel is local science-fiction - ideas as propositions, viewing them you get to feel the utopian impulse, image a fantasy of a world cognizant considered and real with magic - "how to live?" - imagine a world where we haven't already welcomed the new insect overlord, rebellion against Empire.

John Bock at Regen Projects

(link)

There's a goodwilled cartoonishness that overlays Bock's violence. It's like the fun face culture puts over its assertions, the growing patina of fun that you find on cereal, a talking bumble bee selling food to adults.