Adam Pendleton at MUMOK

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Pendleton's work is supposed to look like photocopied art history, a zine of bricolage referent, and in this repetition we are told is some new space that "renews the instability of discourse and identity" or "refashions history into something that opens out into the new." But this new space that art continuously opens always seem to be more trophy abstraction.

 

You know what the market has shown every collector wants walled? Abstraction, and so art has become a giant machine mining sources of abstraction. And the endless ironizing of abstract legacies with its remaking in different modes (fire extinguisher, silvering, abjection, food photography) ostensibly acts as critique. Pollock was just spurting cum, symbolically accredited decoration, abjection whatever; the critique fails to, despite 40 years of it, functionally do anything. It's like battling a ghost with a longsword. Abstraction is the inkblot that acts like silver, that acts like mirrors, to place whatever you want to see in it. And we keep digging mirrors.

 

see too: Lisa Holzer at Kunstverein München

Past: Michael Krebber

Krebber's "preferring not to" the herald of his artistic progeny, fantasizing that maybe they wouldn't have to either. And so artistry's lack became a claim of radical "protest," artist's claiming "strike" on the walls of the institutions that would have them, taking sumptuous bites of the hand that had become feed. Promising the academic artist a taste of social cool.

In 2013 Krebberesque was actually academically defined in the 8th edition of Quinton and Rohling's Aesthetic Jargon falling between between Kowtow kraut and Kremlin Stoogism.

The famous “digging into the mirror” photo's context reveal much less conceptually prescient images of Krebber for instance with a boot dangling from his ass.

See full: Michael Krebber at Morena di Luna, Michael Krebber at Kunsthalle Bern, Michael Krebber at Greene Naftali, R.H. Quayt­man and Michael Kreb­ber at Museum Ludwig, Group Show at Greene Naftali

Yaerim Ryu at Peres Projects

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Advertising so robbed the corpus of idealization from the hands of artists that now artistic representation is doomed to forever paint us as lumbering buffoons. As canon fodder, to painting's demands. "A state of painting that has sunk so far into endless permutable bent-figuration - that someone actually tending to the body feels like free healthcare." A desire for the tender of wounds. 

See too: Karen Fan, Caroline Zhang at Gern en Regalia, Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, “Automatic Door” at Park View / Paul Soto

Past: Reynaldo Rivera

The ruins of a once beautiful citizenry. We now vampire. Not only its pain, but its life too, brought to cold hands of art's Wunderkammer. "Dominant culture lays the concrete of its social conditions, proclaims 'look a dandelion has grown,' hangs its photo in our halls as testament to humanity. But it can seem like a testament to the concrete." 

All: Reynaldo Rivera

Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff at Reena Spaulings Fine Art

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A conceptual beartrap, the inkblot asks that you spill forth the contents of your head with its innuendo as lure. What is the contents of your head.

Inkblot, inkblot, inkblot

All: Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff

Rirkrit Tiravanija at MoMA P.S.1

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A dinner enshrined, behind closed doors, enshrined in an image. Posted on this day of our own relational aesthetics, Christmas Eve. So when you pass your uncomfortable uncle the taters imagine the utopian world foods you could be enjoying. Think of art as your moral compass, the curry you could be sharing. 

We need someone to unpack what happened here. And this is it; this is the case study. From utopian salespitch to museum display.  The salespitch is enshrined as meaning. This is the machine of art. It's not quite history, not quite record. It's a series of things that point elsewhere, are elsewhere. But we're here. Asked to be elsewhere. A long explanatory text explaining the process of this. How art in its current regime promotes this, basically corrals all art into this, endless meaning elsewhere.

Past: Amy Yao at Various Small Fires

" ... Surrealist juxtaposition in an age bio-medical cybernetics, aerosolized industrial waste and food packaging with endocrine disruptors distributed between ever more complex global conglomerates makes war and diamonds seem quaint as juxtaposition is dispersed into further and further micro-artificialities, plastics outweighing plankton in certain parts of the ocean. The sculpture here is called Doppelgängers..."


Click here Amy Yao at Various Small Fires