We've become so slowly steeped into contemporary surrealism it doesn't even register anymore. The cartoons we swim in, the schematics and icons that we now accept as denoting us, it's just us, for granted.

Thea Djordjadze at Portikus

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We’ve invented some kind of Stockholm syndrome to the architecture we are hostage to. An art in supplication to the building's wings that embrace it. We see a vitality, a benevolence in the architecture, like a generous god's embrace. We build to it totems, in it reliquaries. The several photos of the light in the space. Art that literally reflects its light as halos. Any architecture that will host it, a gift to it.

Ricky Swallow at David Kordansky

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Cast the world in bronze, make it an image, a trophy. People like permanence. And these are an act of making-permanent, of embalming. Stupid, but permanent. We like permanence. The aesthetic of permanence. The Tuttles will melt but these will stay until our endtimes. A Tuttle made by Charles Ray. Mark Mander's Nocturnal Garden Scene, a slackness of rope converted to "a three-dimensional photograph." Against the Wurtzian resurgence these feel megalomanic.  A cartooning of the world rendered plastic. Casting your desire for forever.

Henrik Olesen at Schinkel Pavilion

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Dirt collects where there are no eyes, this is surely a saying somewhere. Culture has its own rheum. It accumulates in street corners, behind hedges, in dark clubs. Opened to the light society finds these areas repulsive, "Social phobias that reinforce the pathologies of abnormality." And so control must expose everything to light. Social reproduction is premised on this exposure, the normative society you are judged against, must assimilate to. For instance Chickens peck any limping young to death by using words like fag or sodomy laws. This way the cast-off internalizes the panopticon as an ever carried guilt. So the newspapers in alleys will know they are out of place. We prefer clean streets, our families nuclear. The overt reference to Thek here fits as an artist frustrated with minimalist cleanliness, the art of power desiring the removal of fingerprints, subjectivity and labor for grand notions of autonomy that only function when you can function in the light. Which now of course Olesen standing occupying the garde position of Art's Schinkel panopticon.



See too: Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz, Henrik Olesen at Cabinet, Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings, Gerry Bibby, Henrik Olesen at Sismógrafo

Past: Etel Adnan at Sfeir-Semler

"...removing the decisions that brought it to be, clarity is edited and terseness a political strategy that is inarguable. It strips the handles of which one could control the thought. Making a sleek delivery belying its concealment..."


Click for full: Etel Adnan at Sfeir-Semler

Richard Bosman at Freddy

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A lot seems to have been made of Bosman's discrepancy of paint and image. People referring to the images as "annoying" and "bad metaphors" and "empty signifiers" and "numbingly stalemated" and maybe closest when Roberta Smith called them "parody-homage". The theme throughout seems that Bosman's "masterfully casual" brushwork would be better suited to more noble subjects. Wanting paint, not subject matter. An uncomfortable understanding that Paint is more noble than this surely. But then already back in 1982 Kate Linker called them "melodramatic tactics," said "Richard Bosman’s scenarios, for example, are depicted with irony, in thick and frenzied strokes which suggest the impossibility of evoking the “authentic” sentiments they once conveyed." Which sounds a lot like today. The affectual torture of signs and pathways, aren't sure how to relate. Like a bad writer pointing out they're closed doors and saying Brechtian.


See too: Andrew Norman Wilson at Futura

Mai-Thu Perret at MAMCO

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Painting is the ultimate art commodity but these still feel like the commodes of home catalogs and design-porn magazines. Souvenirs of a high-end experience. Perhaps Perret predicting the craft object trends. The pottery on everyones shelves. The neon signs somehow trending in summer cottages. Perret originally created a narrative of a fictional utopia which "produced" the artworks. Which is all the funnier since the trends that look like hers all premise themselves on the selling of hopeful futures, the crafts we will all already be acclimated to post-apocalypse, raku firing our dreams. Perret eventually got rid of the utopia fiction, and then they became just art, much less utopic.