Past: Andrea Bowers

"Surely the protest sign is a populace's stealing back the language of advertising for its own self [...]  the protest sign attempts to recoup a voice that has been disenfranchised by a powerful who can drone it out with the turn of a monied knob. [...] When the protest sign already has all the coronating volume of white walls and press packets and being sold in a blue chip gallery as a commodity it may no longer be protest sign."

"..."Art, despite all its PR and back patting as a common good, is a privatized endeavor.  Museums are behind paywalls, is a pony show of the elite. Art is not medicine, it is only sold as such. The monuments of art will never be as public as an actual class consciousness, as the public itself, which the phrase already was."

read full: Andrea Bowers at Capitain Petzel, Andrea Bowers at Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst

Past: Neïl Beloufa

Are these not bondage devices for tourists? .. Art is the new form of penance. A form of entertainment as self-flagellation, "of repentance for having done wrong." The doctor's table and the movie theater converge. 

"enjoyability in the mastery of lubricating forms of cultural massage, mediums of libidinal and candied fun."

Venice 2019, Neïl Beloufa, Neïl Beloufa at Balice Hertling

Fergus Feehily, Günther Förg at June

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At first an odd duo. But time deironizes, dissolves the difference between stupid and reason to a painting leaden before you. Though Förg may be lineage in the neanderthal abstraction to Joe Bradley or Josh Smith avant-nappies, in the end Feehily's seemingly less industrial more underdog engine may be no differently dead. 

See too: Fergus Feehily at Misako & Rosen, Günther Förg at Barbel Graesslin

Past: Günther Förg at Barbel Graesslin

 "the slightly stupified version of Forg's modernism..  it didn't speak to anyone, becoming a stone in the modernist pathway, a weighing down ideals of transcendence... the work refuses to lift one beyond the limits of your earthly human presence, the usual higher pleasures instead hamstrung to leave you right where you already are."

full: Günther Förg at Barbel Graesslin

Past: Veit Laurent Kurz at Kunstverein Nürnberg

".. anachronistic period aesthetics misremembered, like retrofuturism, or steampunk. Call this look post-apocalypse primeval. Cosplay nostalgia for time that was not. 

"Steampunk clung to the Cartesian, mechanistic, [a nostalgia] comforting against the opacity of neoliberal globalism, market algorithms, and subprime CDOs that no one understood until collapse. Then it made sense that [Star Wars] and Apple commercials began setting their products in lush green forests, envisioning the technology so advanced it appeared natural, magic, indistinguishable; today: Artisanal baguettes and iPhones."


Read: Veit Laurent Kurz at Kunstverein Nürnberg

Ser Serpas at LC QUEISSER

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a particular type of flesh, between medical and Barbie, a plasticity of morgues or dough. The way students paint, ineptitude that comes out as violent smoothness. Or like dolls, we're all genderless beneath the outfit. Which is its own violence. New in the way that fresh infants resemble old corpses. 

becoming flesh: Martín Soto Climent at Proyectos Monclova

tender flesh Nicola Tyson, Miriam Cahn

 Past: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster at Century Pictures

"Reading a book in a commercial art gallery was a torture device invented for the late Medieval Era. A sort of mental flog, a public humiliation. The point being, you're not supposed to read the books. It is a show library. ... You peruse a person's library to triangulate a subject, denote their reader, here an artist, an ostensible brandishing of an intellectual pedigree."

Full: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster at Century Pictures