Lutz Bacher at Galerie Buchholz

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Every Bacher work is its tombstone, a final gesture, a remnant for someone to remember. In this exhibition monuments to a fiction: sci-fi explorers of galaxies that Bacher, in other works, would xerox into dust. These are the fictional navigators of that dust — cosmic in scope, absurd in premise."The absurdity and nihilism of cosmic scales entering the personal ones" is taken up by sci-fi as a sublime, the bold explorer who will never see even a portion of it all, but into the night boldy goes. This is Bacher's oft-premise of the doomed gesture of trying to contain, label, some part of humanity as it makes it way towards expected apocalypse, the cusp of obliteration. All the information in Bacher's work already contain the threat of their loss. Like a  museum to a fiction - it is already gone. A Science categorizing dust to which we shall return. But their universe, being, exists in its telling, and so these monuments, in keeping the story alive, keep their being alive. Of course it's a fiction so it's already dead. Just like you. It's both optimistic and absurd, haunting and comedic, stupid and sincere, making it lifelike, and fictional, perfectly Bacher.

 

see too: ten years of writing about Lutz Bacher.

Elliott Jamal Robbins at Kai Matsumiya

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Not quite drawing, nor painting, nor animation. Not quite Kentridge or Madani or Churchman's Painting Treatments. More Guston's heads. But messier. More nebulous. A tough position when we demand art be "about something;" want the museum jewel of didacticism - or the troll of question's eyerollingly forever. But these happily float in goo and blood and guts. It's more Pope.L writing jokes without punchlines, the unease in letting an audience hang. Be with themselves over this mess. Sketches without objects, just sketches, which are real ideas. "A drawing does what so much art must artificially prevent - its exhaustion. A drawing is only an idea, a scratch pad for the realized candy. The drawing is instructions for a creation inside your head. What SFX and kunsthalle budgets can concretize will never match the monster hiding in the closet of your mind."

See too: "If laughter was the earthquake alleviating the tension of the joke, then Pope.L's don't really relief its valve. A refusal that turns humor into a weapon where misunderstanding the joke might have risks. "White Peo abstr ation." Pointed fingers. What are the stakes of misunderstanding? The generalized artworld fear of misinterpretation becomes conflated with the generalized fear of Blackness, of one's foot in one's mouth, of white spaces suddenly filled with an innuendo that doesn't confine itself to safe quotational space of art..."

Stephen Pace at Altman Siegel

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Hard to hate on something so breezy, so made for summer. Breezier than Katz. And compared to today's faux neanderthal naiveté of say Nava, Bradley, Smith or Craven - these retained vintage palettes and foot in tradtionalism makes them just nicer to be around. None of their teenage middle fingers that have come to associate "rule breaking ugly" with genius, or more so, interest. Less authority, just pleasant paint.

Robert Lostutter at Derek Eller Gallery

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The blockbuster Chicago Imagist retrospective we need is overdue, might be ten years too late at this point. The movements today which took so much from it, the "Millenial Real," are pretty much over.  Replaced with a more Corporate Memphis figuration. It's been all so assimilated, these look like yesterday but they were 50 years ago. It's a failure of an artworld to collectively remember. CAWD, ten years ago: "the kids grown on cartoons have arrived and their childhoods have coincidentally, absurdly, become the accurate depictions of the way the world has begun to feel, and will soon become generic, but at least we'll get to stop repeating ourselves." Still repeating ourselves.

Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino at‬ Kunstraum Leuphana

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Conceptual art's legalese sets a premise:"keys to a building," displayed but unused; or:"ceiling color chosen by mom," a premise without theory - thought is cut before completion. You are left to imply the rest. It's poetic. Signification without significance. You make it up yourself. Art infers meaning without providing meaning. This is how art becomes meaningful. This is how conceptual art become's Prisoner's Cinema. 

See too: Ghosts: "Writing about blank art you are confronted with the theater of your skull.  Devoid of stimuli the brain seeks recognition, applies logic to nothing to make sure the world retains solvency, coherence as defense against the face of meaningless abyss. Eyes phosphene in darkness, in vacuity your mind alights. This is how god exists. This is how Peter Halley's paintings exist. It's called Prisoner's Cinema.  Blankness rewards the already full mind. Blankness hands the viewer back to themselves, allowing all the self-satisfied self-congratulations the viewer can self-muster. It's called projection. Art abhors vacuum. You cannot kill content if you tried. Because art is baggage, preloaded with a cultural et al. 

"[Because] not knowing is unacceptable, and rejection of the object would prove viewer's impotence, thus created an environment where artists are able to produce further and further extremes of blankness filled by those refusals to not-know, whose sensory deprivation creates phantasms, see the abyss looking back because we are doing the projecting.

"The wider the distance between signs/images the greater the space to be filled, the grander the concept, the impossible gap, generally seceded to the viewer. This is our conceptual moment. Objects have meaning, we cannot pass that off, and the distance between them, grand like the canyon, vacant and large. ...the only thing left to do is to produce greater and greater gulfs of meaning.

"The tension: whether this beacon actually broadcasts idea. Or simply clears space for fill, me, this, now.

"In dark forests we imagine predators, in trees see intelligence. In confusion we excel at inventing gods, or meaning."

See too: "Conceptual art mutated into three genres, 1, zombie abstraction; 2, art legalese, say Cameron Rowland or Daren Bader/Martin Creed; and 3, myth attractors. "

Richard Prince at Sant'Andrea de Scaphis

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Is this a Kaufman reality bending skit? Or is Richard Prince really so self-grandiose to bloviate this hard under questioning? Or, after the lightbulb moment of greg.org publishing his first deposition, did Prince see the metaphorical soapbox awaiting his spotlight to bloviate. It would be appropriate. And Kaufmanesque. Weirdly the more "authentic" Prince gets, the more Fischer Price the whole deposition feels. Prince's and the artworld's high-speech feels chintzy against the procedural of legal questioning. No one reacts at all to Prince's deludes, except to worry about Prince's own time here. One of the zaniest things about the testimony is how inflated Prince's opinion is of his work. And how he keeps trying to reframe questions into grand timescales of art history and rapid firing dead European painters. It all feels Kaufmanesque. But repeating the joke is what Prince is good at. 


See too: "Art, in all its critical hooha, attempts to both access the real as politics while at the same time asserting its critical distance as a sovereign land of pure ideation or whatever. The friction (and paradox) of these two positions is never more apparent than when the artworld sends one it’s s creative sovereign citizens into the courtroom where inevitably our kingdom's Prince loses his legal battle and the artworld collectively wrings its hands and decries a legal system not quite understanding the rub. We, artworld, are bodies collectively absolved of debt. Or so it were."

"A joke can only be told so many time. "A joke is spent and exhausted. So an artwork - with its requisite implicit promise of eternalness - can't really make a joke without implying that it too will one day be depleted. [Richard] Prince's real joke is that the paintings keep telling the same joke for years and years stupidly." 

Mona Filleul at Air de Paris

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During painting's 2020 surrealist phase there was a subgenre of turbo David Salle. Painting as "cultural flypaper" collecting reference stuck to its support, a miasma of cartoons/image/internet/whatever. The idea isn't bad. Painting, after all, is a tray to collect image/culture. The painter gives it a little swirl and voila, art. But bathrooms walls collect better. Graffiti sediments the unconscious at night. The irruption on the walls of a bedroom is seminal. Just stuff, often more interesting than art.

See too: Subgenres of surrealism, "the kids grown on cartoons have arrived and their childhoods have coincidentally, absurdly, become the accurate depictions of the way the world has begun to feel"