Past: LaToya Ruby Frazier

"Against this someone like LaToya Ruby Frazier's grayscales confuse time and conflate eras, make chronology slippery, and deny a continuum of progress, inherently anti-nostalgic."

"...appear as from some distant past because surely we can't believe it's the present; photos from last year seem in some nebulous era ... of historic tumult."

"a question of why today can look like 30 years ago, and  30 years ago look like today. Antidote to nostalgia photography. "We have facial recognition tech in the palms of our hands and water we can't send through pipes.""

LaToya Ruby Frazier at Gavin Brown, Nostalgia photography, 

Past: Wong Ping at Kunsthalle Basel

"Comedy in anxiety over the bile we all believe lurking beneath surface norms... The candy shell animation serving coprophilic chocolate just below. Ping's protagonists narrate their chocolate predicaments with a general numbness. Mama died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know. ... This is all believable because the world is already a cartoon."

Full: Wong Ping at Kunsthalle Basel

Leonor Antunes at Taka Ishii Gallery

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Antunes is the link in the fossil record from Eva Hesse to Hague Yang. Hanging stuff like flypaper in the air to accumulate reference, innuendo, feeling. The materials change but the vibe remains the same.

Christmas trees to capitalism: Haegue Yang

Todd Gray at David Lewis

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Land acknowledgements become the prayer before meal. An expression of gratitude, humility. Our original sin. God is replaced with another adjudicating sin. Forgives the mechanized reaping from an overseeing eye, guilt. (The material substrate underpinning increasingly abstracted.) There exists no similar expression for houses built by slaves, the wealth extracted from under the feet of dominated peoples. Though Armand White did call out 12 Years a Slave for allowing white people to self-congratulate for feeling aghast at slavery. Art becomes a similar guilt release valve, an acknowledgment as prayer, talisman, a badge to prove we thought about it, and found ourselves humbled in East Hampton.

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