This exhibition includes 47 artists City Galerie Wien, Vienna Layr, Vienna

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It sucks that drawing has to have a reason. That art requires an explanation. Both a reason to be, and a reason to be explained. The myth of art as meaningful. We've transmuted Manet's asparagus into a cultural behemoth we were then forced to symbolically fund. With more language, consecration, text, framing, walls, institution. Eventually too big to fail. How would we pay for all this gilt? So the artworld invented ghosts, a higher plane, myth. Genius. Dividends of interest paid, $30 to get into MoMA. We weren't producing goods like painting anymore, we were producing meaning, text, numbers, the symbolic financialization of art, invertedly, a use-value for it. Art was meaningful, could be explained, could provide value. It was vital, necessary. My god what had we done. Making art necessary.

So maybe the only way out is through. Explain the art. Kill it. Something dead will finally be unnecessary again. 

Marlie Mul at Kunsthaus Glarus

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Mul's sort of "proliferation of meaning" surrealism had previously been formed into recognizable shapes: puddles, sperm, turds. Its cartoon symbolics didn't mitigate the seepage of content. The sperm wore wigs, the turds had alibi as clubs. Its cartoon built an innocence that seepage was willing to rescind. The funny puddle-in-the-gallery also floated a condom. Now the form is art, geometric abstraction, weaving, with suggestive material, Eva Hesse but less contingent, more mechanized. 

"Ambiguousness as a means for the simultaneity of surrealism. A tree sort of looks like a horse so we can put them together; a cloud can look like anything, much like a turd, some will see interest."

[What I] project from the two elegant bones still in contact with the substrate of the real is not the same as the one in your head. This unknown destabilizing of our ability to conceptualize the objects in equitable terms to exchange with another ... is its sinister quality.

Group show at FELIX GAUDLITZ

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Is Björn Dahlem pretentious or cringe? Both? Cringe because it's so begging for approval; amassing enough of its whatever to eventually self-monumentalize, undeniably there. Pretentious because it backpads its mass with talk of astronomy or whatever "science." Maybe that's the cringe. Either way. This looks like shitty Björn Dahlem. Which would be a compliment, it's got neither the sniveling people-pleasing, nor seemingly any reason to exist at all. Which again, is a compliment, I'm not sure why its coming across as an insult. Maybe that's your fault. Why do we like when an artwork makes no attempt at pleasure, all those monochromes steadfast refusal? Do we have some type of aesthetic kink? 

See too: "[The internet says] there is a spectrum between "based" and "cringe." And also that binaries are insipid. That there is a third option, the only true "baseness" is through "cringe." A zoomer divide analogous to GenX's authentic/corporate divide (grunge fully Hegelianated into hyperpop, Pop 2.) But so, point: interest comes from synthesis."

"These kinks sound a lot like a voluntary anhedonia, defined as an inability to feel pleasure, a distinct symptom of depression. But while search volume for “depression (syndrome)” as well as “depression treatment” are actually falling, searches for “Anhedonia” are rising perhaps as people search useful diagnostic terms. While these aforementioned and trending kinks enact this distance-from-pleasure themselves. The theory here, is that people wish to “own” their pain"

Robert Colescott at Galerie Buchholz

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Galleries sure seem to have a magic power in finding and exhibiting "rediscovered" artists' safest work. Maybe it's the simply the work left in the estate for private sale; maybe its may be leaning toward further evidence of a politically charged artist being accepted "so long as your language is abstracted into wallpaper." This work from his Cairo days is interesting, but cynical parts run high these days. And Colescott was a master of cynicism. The eighties paintings have sarcasm in their surface, it's in the brushwork, their cold cartoon. They dripped with cynicism. So admittedly it is interesting to see this earlier more probing "earnest" painting. Colescott is important, not only as forebear to today's "modernism colorized" but also in an escape from it, in participating but not necessarily letting the master's tools be the only ones you allow yourself. 

 

see too: "It has nothing to do with the painter and everything to do with institutions who helm our ship's navigation relentlessly toward this inkblot goal. Mladen Stilinovic: 'an artist you cannot speak english is no artist.' But he had it wrong. The point is not to speak. The point is to make yourself abstract enough it doesn't matter."

Louis Fratino at Galerie Neu

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No one in a Fratino painting ever smiles. The highest emote is a cattle calm. Even the explicitly coital figures could also be sleeping. It's like the Wes Anderson school of emotion. Everyone is trapped behind style, artifice, and middle class ennui. Combine it with the painterly trend for lounging. Figures like cats in sunbeams, the same anatomy, tired. Canvases read like the word "languid" in all caps.  All the more if its in the nostalgic melange of modernism. Real comfortable genre. So it is surprising to find it works better in sculpture. That languid calm men in sculpture, after centuries of being women's role, is mildly refreshing. A simple genre switch, a key change, maybe it's easier to hear the Kouros. Maybe it is as simple as that it's rare to see a sculpture of man calmly holding a baby. Because everyone eats ass these days. Simply a somewhat new image, even vaguely.

See too: "The asinine quantity of pictures of bodies today, instagram influencers, lotion advertising, pornography. The vast amount of flesh smeared on everything, our stores full of them, our faces spread at 10 meter heights. Everywhere; a hall of mirrors. As if Bernd and Hilla Becher had foretold of a, this, complete surveillance, ... And our bodies become so extracted, mined, and repackaged, that we start to feel like we don't have bodies at all. Just things, mocked as meat space, something stupid or without sense, or heat, or passion, or sensitivity, but whitened teeth smiles mined. And but then here a photo of a body still surprising, that can endear us to it, these weird incongruous things not yet fully extracted."

Ebecho Muslimova at Kunsthall Stavanger

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I always liked when Bart got an X-Ray. Or that time when Homer went 3-D, that he was nervous about it. Homer adrift in the abyss of the matrix. Horror over his body. What were these things, ontologically? Did they have meat, air, blood, breath? The show went meta in an existential way.  But I never enjoyed Fatebe's similar transmogrification to painting. Her being a different substance than the world felt like a brand logo placed into the expensivizer device, painting. Homer: "This place looks expensive." That her environment was messy with 3D SFX was maybe a in-joke on this more jeweled painted world. But it never felt as magic as Fatebe in drawing getting a whole piano inside her. That was the thrill of her natural world, it was consistent. Which is all to say, this above painting is the first that I've enjoyed. Fatebe cut open to reveal she is of the same world, she bleeds, she has steaks, stakes. 

"... When the [Fatebe] cartoon now does its Who Framed Roger Rabbit thing, the duck finally becomes a cartoon duck, the visual promiscuity is lost, his flesh is now not of the the surrounding world...  Fatebe becomes no longer a natural feature of her reality but a style cut and pasted into. And her world becomes simply a grab bag of digital effects to encounter."

Mike Bouchet at Galerie Parisa Kind

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Your past sculpture mulched into consumer friendly bricks, into painting. Reminiscent of Mike Kelley's Memory Wares. Or the US current obsession with protein bars. Everything is consumable in bar form. Even sawdust. A literalizing of painting becoming cultural flypaper: you take the world and grind it up and apply it as painting, you get surrealism. Works pretty well actually. We need larger grinders.

See too: "any medium, in quantities vast enough, begins plotting points of the cultural unconscious. If you amass enough hand made images you begin so see dreams emerge. Painting, a virtual box that you fill with what you desire, but the desire is, if not caged, steered around themes that can be inferred by the collection circling around them. You can't see the pier but you can see the fish circling around them: the nude, Jesus, the phallus, pink things, us. Shaw's collection is like Wade Guyton's ostensible promise of printing our dreams, the conveyer of painting collecting like flypaper a civilization's subconscious."