Wangechi Mutu at Gladstone Gallery, New York

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Last time's nguva sculptures had at least owned the slickness of bronze. Palpable. These seem more bronze than myth.  These are monuments to, maybe rather than of. If we're having big badass sci-fi-myth sculpture.. then the sculpture part of that phrase seems the least interesting. The Alien-like pool in the other room seems to do it better. Towards a narrative art that is neither monument nor film setting.

Reina Sugihara at Lavender Opener Chair

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These look old. Probably because no one paints this way anymore. (Maybe Cathy Wilkes' rare painting?) Probably because at some point it became important to not look like 2nd generation abex, because that looked dated, because looking new stood in for being new, and thus painting adopted technology like acrylics and cartoons and metal plating and whatever other process it could cling to its surface. But, with a wide enough historical lens, all painting condenses into the same gooey dumb thing. And these just stand out as strange as weird good things.

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)

Past: Jon Pylypchuk at Petzel

 ... a more formal torture of our facial tendencies, is now a wanton mass, a poopy stuff. Pylypchuk had stretched pareidolia to absurdity; you can disfigure a face into extreme proportions and still see human. ... Proportions were used with a comic's timing. The endless use of little arms, doofy mouths, and hyperbolized eyes like a child aroused to Saturday morning TV. Affective little terrors. Infantile features triggering nurture responses in adults. ...

Full: Jon Pylypchuk at Petzel

Past: Kayode Ojo at Praz-Delavallade

...perfume advertisement sedimented as sculpture. Awaiting moistened Drake to pour and offer, not just a drink but a life. ... The smallest narrative allows the biggest projection. We like chintz, and better any excuse to play it as ironic, look down upon it. How much artworld glitz comes with heavy justification, armor against actually liking it. Excused glamor are why artists were invented. ...

Past: Kayode Ojo at Praz-Delavallade

Past: Emanuel Rossetti at Karma International

... an entertaining moment of alterity, bizarro-real, in which in moral hopes we must realign ourselves to its products, our experience of it, recognition delayed, and the static charge of our disorientation in finding an identification to hold onto, objects which connote but don't mean...

Past: Emanuel Rossetti at Karma International

Analia Saban at Tanya Bonakdar

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Not even a metaphor, a literalization? Weaving subject matter into canvas. When de Rooij did wove value, it seemed about its dumbness, and when Arcangel printed it, it definitely was. When Baldessari accumulated his own credentials on a painting, that too seemed just incredibly dumb. Laughable. Funny. That's not to say that is what these are, or have "been done before." No the point is that these are different. These seem serious. Process-based abstraction, the fallout of conceptual art, the technology for myth, woven into object.

see too: Analia Saban at Sprüth Magers