Nicolas Ceccaldi at Meyer Kainer

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Joker was happy to stick the multiple prongs of its fork into multiple political hot sockets and see sparks. For reasons seemingly not much more than to see those sparks; political hot buttons becoming their own form of Hollywood special effects. The film's patheticness against its grand ambitions seems to mirror the main characters own, a sort of filmic meta-pathos. Identifying not with the joker, but the losers who paint pictures of the joker.

"becomes impossible to imagine an identity outside of cultural signs."


Read all posts tagged Nicolas Ceccaldi

Jordan Wolfson at Sadie Coles HQ

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The success of a Wolfson artwork seems how effective the lures are in ensnaring us. The spectacle is always just the technologic bait for the game in which seemingly innocuous - but visually seductive - elements become easily quagmired in overlapped semantic dissonance. Even the James Lee Byars childhood works read like a technology for affective means, a product. This formalizing the world of course causes tension: "political trends and topics, but seemingly only for decorative purposes." Wolfson himself: “It creates a kind of poker face of absurdity to the artwork that negates meaning. They can’t load meaning into it, because it. Just. Doesn’t. Work.”  But we refuse to believe this, we can't believe something that could affect us could be meaningless. That Wolfson has become of the most famous of his generation is a case study in what the artworld demands from its artists. Attention without anything to attend to, a blank slate with bait. Wolfson seems have become a search for new technologic means to repeat the same fantasies.


See too: Jordan Wolfson at David Zwirner, James Lee Byars at VeneKlasen/Werner, Blankness

Past: Jordan Wolfson at David Zwirner

"Wolfson is a semio super-villain, weaponizing Naumanian irony to undermine affective means.  [using signs, objects] which establish identification-with (the artist's interest in the gaze and facial recognition tech as well as nostalgia and cultural mythos) only to systematically abuse and deplete that link through endless tonal dissonance and juxtaposition, e.g. playing saccharine love-songs while a boy who looks into our eyes is repeatedly dragged and dropped onto concrete from a steel marionette of the artist's hand, basically irradiating the gold underpinning our emotive currency, held hostage and tortured."

read full: Jordan Wolfson at David Zwirner

Giulia Essyad at Cherish

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Between libidinal corporeality on one end and cybernetic dislocation of consciousness on the other. Between concrete cake and blue screen fantasy. Between touch and imagination. The gulf between and its discrepancy we're all trying to currently deal with.


See too: Juliana Huxtable at Reena Spaulings, Materialphilia

Jon Pylypchuk at Petzel

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What had been a more formal torture of our facial tendencies, is now a wanton mass, a poopy stuff. Pylypchuk had stretched pareidolia to absurdity; you can disfigure a face into extreme proportions and still see human. They were cleaner children then. Proportions were used with a comic's timing. The endless use little arms, doofy mouths, and hyperbolized eyes like a child aroused to Saturday morning TV. Affective little terrors. Infantile features triggering nurture responses in adults. And now I guess we deal with the nappies too, very pop-grunge.

cute: Sean Landers at Rodolphe Janssen

Frances Stark at greengrassi

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Country and date of US coups looming over pop songs from that year. The level of frission between the two varies.* Grand Funk Railroad's 1973 hit is pretty apt: "We're an American band / We're comin' to your town / We'll help you party it down." Others are less on the nose. The discrepancy provides the interpretability, that poetic fissure. The internal disjuncture on a semantic completion, allowing that sort of blank state that you dear viewer get to ink your own adventure into, wall text or otherwise.  This would be a much less interesting if Stark hadn't for a long time now been investing in bedroom posters as self-construction, adolescent in the good sense. The point isn't being political but in construction oneself as political.


see too: John Baldessari at Sprüth Magers

Past: Frances Stark

"They're her own bedroom posters. Pay attention, it's an outline of escape, that subjectivity can conform to the vessel without losing its shape, or so Stark would wager."

"Stark’s teenage formality, her posters and videos, though clean, contain a level of humanist existential goo. ... drawing from DIY-punk ethos letting it all hang out, a gesture towards admitting the cultural disposability of art practice based in images today that stands over the face of the Deep, Instagram. Artists can’t get over it, blasted in an unstoppable deluge of culture daily. With so many “dealing with it,” detourning it into art, [...] Stark’s insistence in the forms cheapness itself, its mixtape assemblage of a disposable music video, affirms her as one of the few who actually get it."

Click: Frances Stark at Gavin Brown, Frances Stark at Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Frances Stark at Daniel Buchholz and Daniel Buchloz