Alison Yip at Noah Klink

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Art in becomes reading the tea leaves of abstraction. (Stated previously.) The viewer made seer. The point of art, seemingly, is to create stronger affect in said tea leaves. To make the more desirable lures. So Yip's reversal here, having her fortune read before making the painting here, is a literalization of art's more mythic, latent, process of viewer-seerization. Sort of like explaining the joke as the joke. 

Monika Stricker at P420

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It's become a trope the generic lumpy thing stands as question, a guessable what, an interminable fount ... of interpretation. Stricker's previous scrota attached a specificity to this decipherable gum. They were tea leaves but they were testicle tea leaves, thorny full frontal fun. A too-specific amorphousness to your nightmare. Maybe the problem is "Bigfoot is blurry.. It's not the photographer's fault. Bigfoot is blurry, and that's extra scary to me. There's a large, out-of-focus monster roaming the countryside." Because not being able to discern is our Halloween. 

Gabriel Orozco at Galerie Chantal Crousel

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Orozco used to make sculpture. Now Orozco sells tourist art, but as the tourist. Souvenirs not of your travels but his, buying his peripatetic romance. We purchase romance. - this is what artists sell, on Japanese paper. That they are almost literally inkblots is perfect. Because this romance is all you can project into it, interpret it. A diary of plants, us once again reading tea leaves left of porcelain walls, shit. 

The whole premise of "process-based abstraction"'s creating souvenirs of experience is premised on some vestigial trait of conceptual that may never have existed. Like, does On Kawara's "January 22nd 1988" on canvas actually mean anything outside a finger pointing toward it. Does an artist in the forest placing native plants on a canvas actually contain its sound? What information is stored? 

While this was the central conundrum to conceptual art since its inception, the rupture and distance between sign and object (always at risk that its sign didn't actually contain its object) it has since been taken as granted, as a granting agency for value added. .... Jason Rhoades built a career of mocking this value-added system, performing it under absurdly comical conditions, to create his referentially seminal signature: PeaRoeFoam, a mess of so much reference and history and jest that it self imploded. 

souvenirs of experience: Sam Falls at 303 Gallery, their valorization: James Hoff at VI, VII

Tea leaves from the bowels: Yuji Agematsu at Lulu

and of course, inkblots.

Pentti Monkkonen at Truth and Consequences

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"Blanks" is a production term for a material partially formed that has yet to receive whatever finalizing process will finish it, painting, milling, etc. The blank receives all type of process and treatments. The work formed work yet unfinished. They then recieve the processes of production, for Monkkonen the individual sign systems at play, the quasi-readymades applied the blank of painting. Monkkonen who has obviously been playing with painting as product for some time. The bug splatter, like the expressionist's before it, becomes the interpretable tea-leaves of the painting, the same as the cell-phone roach and patterning: signifiers that perform the interpretable content of "Monkkonen." Again treating painting like a blank, a material for production, vessels.


See too: Pentti Monkkonen at High Art, Pentti Monkkonen at Jonathan Viner

Julie Curtiss at Various Small Fires

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Domenico Gnoli in Christina Ramberg styles, we see the banal given a character and edge, a rippling read like tea leaves.

Yuji Agematsu at Lulu

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Expelled from cultural bowels onto streets and corners, and hook it to the intellect, placing the ass into the head, its virtual cubes, its broadcast mechanism, its hermetic boxes, proffering it, holding it in hands up, saying look at this shit. The new ecologies of waste. In old Germania the toilets were backwards and you would poop onto a shelf so you could face your fear. Look at what you had done. The ropes of your making on stark white planes. It had some medical diagnostic purpose, to know what you had expelled, reading tea leaves in shallow pools, to determine how our cultural digestion was going.


See too: Ser Serpas at LUMA Westbau, Dylan Spaysky at Good Weather, Dylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento, Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz, Henrik Olesen at Schinkel Pavilion,  Henrik Olesen at Cabinet, Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings, Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu, Martin Soto Climent at Michael Benevento & Yuji Agematsu at The Power Station, Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts, Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak, “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO)

Past: Yuji Agematsu

"What is contained in a day, what does a date contain, etc. If you pressed anyone on these questions they would admit the hairiness of the situation. But that isn't how we act, when we write press releases the questions themselves are preventatives against answers. This because "raising questions" is, we are told, the power of art. Which makes actually answering its questions a loser's affair - the questions must be kept on life support; Art, for its shareholders, must be eternal. (And thus why thousands of artists continue redeploying On Kawara's essential question. It becomes a mannered tool for evoking, but not answering, a question.) This is one of the worst aberrations of art. There is no critique if that critique never cancels. "Our fingerprints are ours, but we cannot be created from them."

"Expelled from cultural bowels onto streets and corners, and hook it to the intellect, placing the ass into the head, its virtual cubes, its broadcast mechanism, its hermetic boxes, proffering it, holding it in hands up, saying look at this shit. The new ecologies of waste. In old Germania the toilets were backwards and you would poop onto a shelf so you could face your fear. Look at what you had done. The ropes of your making on stark white planes. It had some medical diagnostic purpose, to know what you had expelled, reading tea leaves in shallow pools, to determine how our cultural digestion was going."

"Our growing attraction to trash..."
"Like Tetsumi Kudo's radioactive ecology, or Thek's plexi-flesh, Agematsu's warm materials of human cast-offs reanimated... Agematsu's delicate compositions as ecosystems, precious, resituating the natural to include microplastics dissolved into heavy saturation islands in the great pacific beverage...bears witness to the beauty of Butterfly collections of petri dish human waste, packaged"

Read full:
Yuji Agematsu at Lulu

Yuji Agematsu, On Kawara at LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS
Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu,
Martin Soto Climent at Michael Benevento & Yuji Agematsu at The Power Station,
Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts,
Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak,
“May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO)

Lena Henke at Kunsthalle Zürich

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Because the turd is a form morphing in a viewer. The dimensional Rorschach, the sculpture everyone makes to turn down and see themselves reflected in the water at, a picture of you for your interpretation. Even looking digested, worn at by smooth muscle of artistic intestine.  How regular are you, how often have you practiced this interpretation, looking at the german shelf of porcelain. What does it mean that it's green, that it's black, there are guides, the internet will tell you its based on the location of the bleeding in the tract. Wiping course woven sheets to clean our concrete of our personal tea leaves at the bottom of the cup, a poop joke.


See too: Alma Allen at Shane Campbell

Naoki Sutter-Shudo at Bodega

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The PR's meter relates them to sun - "Sunshine made physical" - and not that dark shameful interior - the abyssal logs we pass like intestinal ropes, attaching us our immanence. The difference between what something is and what something represents. They are but sticks. Sunshine made physical. But oiled with elbow grease. Which makes them sensitive. Opens pores for interpretation. The break in between what something is and what something suggests: a function, poetic fissure. Tea leaves, turds, or sticks, when placed against porcelain, it's open. Suggestive and, more importantly, moistened.

See too: Yuji Agematsu at Lulu, Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi, Naoki Sutter-Shudo at Bodega

Christopher Williams at Capitain Petzel

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Williams once admitted in an interview to looking at Contemporary Art Daily every morning, and one wonders how he feels about it now having had the scene slip so far from his particular register of work. Does he even recognize his anomaly in the deluge of representation? Even what might be considered his progeny - say Cameron Rowland - have rid themselves of the Knightly Cold Cuts opacity, with work that clearly delineates itself. Because we don't want opacity anymore, we want clearly established intent. This probably makes Williams important to moment, a medicinal flavor. But the en abyme of institutional/self reflection requires an outside party to discern the navel's tea leaves. Otherwise it's just tying up the institution in your ornate slick personal knots to look at your button. Otherwise it's just kink. 

Past: J. Parker Valentine

"expectations of legibility, depictive of some tip-of-the-tongue subject within a library of means detailing the amorphous thing it circles but fails to produce. There is the lure of subject-object, the thing that will at any moment manifest itself in the definitive lines of drawing"

"a viewer left to sort spaghetti formed lines like tea leaves that were inside you all along. Pareidolia."


J. Parker Valentine at Misako & Rosen, J. Parker Valentine at Juan and Patricia Vergez Collection, J. Parker Valentine at Park View

Aspirated Trash

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The stuf expelled from cultural bowels onto streets and corners. Hook it to the intellect, , its virtual cubes, its broadcast mechanism, its hermetic boxes, placing the ass into the head, proffering it, holding it in hands up, saying, "look at this shit." In old Germania the toilets were backwards and you would poop onto a shelf, it served some diagnostic purpose, to look at what you had done, face your fear. To know what you had expelled, reading tea leaves in shallow pools, to determine how our cultural digestion was going.

And so if the landfill is hell and the museum is hermetically sealed heaven, an eternal life (with benevolent steward), art is a practice of purgatorial attempts to suspend its object from the trash, place them onto the helmed cultural ships that navigate time, rather than fall to the abject slaw of whatever-mud at the bottom of the bin.

Like the drug lord, smuggling these objects into blessed afterlife requires you shape an object into what will pass inspection, get through of the security gates of better opportunity, disguise your wares to get there. But whereas the drug lord cares not the for Virgin Marys he casts his product into, Art must believe in desire for its object. Composition is the artist's magic benediction for sending the objects into the "heavenly" afterlife, a means of delivering them to the majority white institutions to get them to care for them in perpetuity. A sort of extended compassion for the derelict neglected of culture, a sympathy moving to material itself, that a world simply would like to rid itself of.  Hooking the hose from the expelling parts of our cultural body to the part that feeds, getting it to eat its underwear.

For Jane Bennett the pathologic hoarder expresses a heightened sensitivity to the world of objects
(and not some vestigial evolutionary trait gone haywire post-scarcity.)  For Bennett's hoarder the world is a little like Toy Story 3. The cheap and mass produced must be saved from the incinerator, the injection molded plastic eyes must identified with, kept indefinitely, inert experienced with connection. (And perhaps the mass production doll replacing the handmade one coincides with a turn from paganist expression to materialist hoarding expression.) Anyway, Art, who feels something towards garbage, attempts smuggling their components out of the trash. The "warm" items of refuse attempt their own repackaging, a reincarnation, second life in the only way objects know how: camouflaging themselves as fresh commodities. Art recasts the trash as flimsy endearing objects that we are made to love, for fear the prying eyes of men who seek to ruin them.

In the real world, this is now a waste management issue called "aspirational recycling" in which "people set aside items for recycling because they believe or hope they are recyclable, even when they aren't." It's a real problem with systemic effects. No longer just trash flooding our excretory paths but hopes clogging our recycling. We don't want plastic in our blood. And these headaches as evidence of anxiety at the hands of trash.

Our aspirations finally lets them levitate, holding them off the ground where they would become trash. Which they, temporarily, suspend from.
Art performs this same relief in seeing the objects cared for, not amassed in landfill graves but given the second life in our carousels.


See too: Yellowing Conceptual Art, Yuji Agematsu, Dozie Kanu, Jessi Reaves, Darren Bader, Gedi Sibony, Laurie Parsons at Museum Abteiberg, Dylan Spaysky, Ser Serpas, B. Wurtz at Richard Telles & ICA LA, Marianne Berenhaut at Island, stuf stuf everywhere,

 Past: Christopher Williams 

"But [Williams'] en abyme of institutional/self reflection requires discerning the navel's tea leaves. Otherwise it's just tying up the institution in your ornate slick personal knots to look at your button. Otherwise it's just kink. "

"Williams' institutional mirroring... also simply multiplies and reiterates its institutional halos."

All: Christopher Williams 

K8 Hardy at Reena Spaulings

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The seemingly obvious in art shouldn't itself be a criticism since, well, Greenbergian abstraction was itself pretty obvious confrontation with some psychoanalytically blank wall stained with all those painterly headbutts of a phallic order. "less surface, perhaps, than receptacle" the press release nails. Just like all those stiff socks for male expression.

Sure it's yet another inkblot test for endless interpretation, but at least it's got a frame to shape it. Like tea leaves, like expression's seminal drips, this at least owns the navel it gazes with.

Allan McCollum at Galerie Thomas Schulte

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This is perfect, exactly what we've been talking about, the interpretative box of art, a painting as tarot card, tea leaves, humans as meaning production machines. Make an object that performs it, dancing, meaning. 

J. Parker Valentine at Misako & Rosen

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Lines, they delineate. So, failing to produce the object, the quasi is given to viewer, an inkblot, a form they construct.  "difficult to articulate" the PR says, becomes painting of a mirage, handing the goo to a viewer left to sort spaghetti formed lines like tea leaves in you all along. Pareidolia.