Thursday, March 14, 2024

Life in Hell

Explaining the artworld to your therapist.

"...an oscilloscope of various pitches of language: the high speech of disinterest against the low grovel of complaint. A comedy between the press release and what is said at the bar after. Therapy. Of art. And its interpretation. Of critique Vs complaint. Of trying to explain the artworld to your therapist, or mum..."

Tuesday, February 13, 2024

Zoe Leonard at Galleria Raffaella Cortese


(link)

Like the Calendar's mechanization of time, photography too asserts its frame as an artificial blocking. Of the world it renders like little cubes of meat, morsels. Of life that it embalms. Real geopolitical borders if you know what I mean. So the attempts to blur these lines with the filmic language of frames, with TIME, an attempt to give artifical motion, motion, life, is an admittance or benevolence, to the world butchered into cuts. Suppose you were about to be executed, which size axe would you choose for your piecemealing?

 Past: Zoe Leonard at Whitney Museum

Stuff, decay, waste, time; data visualization has become hot button for business, the ability to represent comes the ability to wield it, and not necessarily inhuman, around for ages with the question: how to mark time. ... In attempts to see subjective scales of time, we see wear on shoes, stores closing, passports stamped, fruit rotting in vain. Leonard's practice seems in establishing marks to gauge the rise and fall of water, the rising and falling breath of the city. Stores close, cities revitalize, we pack and move, the body wears, the books become obsolete, our fruits into the floor, the water changes but the falls are still the same, is the point seemed to be made.

Full: Zoe Leonard at Whitney Museum

Monday, February 12, 2024

Peggy Ahwesh at Photography Exhibit


(link)

A myth that art should "speak for itself." So art always attempts hiding the text that it has become reliant on. Surreptitiously holds up the newspaper that acts as "proof of life," that there is thinking, that its corpus is still product, producing, useful. But admitting to the hostage situation is structurally more interesting than pretending it's simply class photo day, that artworks aren't at gunpoint of meaning. 



Sunday, February 11, 2024


"Monkkonen's box-trucks literalize the metaphor: painting as commodity vessels in transit. What were rectangular become parallel grams sent for accelerating markets. The vessels are moving fast, the trucks skull cab and silver toothed grill portend their too-fast-too-young market crash. The flow of brand. Graffiti, produce, logos, brushstrokes, artistic identities all competing for recognition.  Like many interested in the cheap plastic promise of fantastical playthings, it is found perfectly in the toy-form’s commodic pleasure whose projectable fantasy's complete dissolve of use-value mirrors art’s ostensible own."

"The package as product, medium masseuse, the vessel which projects its internal object, which here isn't anything, instead the subject of art, the artist."

"That like childhood figures of action, producing their jism all over town to heroic ends, painting an identity placed over a muscular blank, the vessel, creating a subject."

"...Painting as advert for its claim to avert chaos. Pretending, like me, to, against a law of the universe, produce order worth burning."

Saturday, February 10, 2024

Friday, February 9, 2024

Past: Jef Geys

If Geys' work is confusing, ever shifting, it is because it voids itself of the general markers that usually demarcate its sense/use/meaning.  Geys' don't necessarily ordain a use, something "used to finish our homework" but instead images which flight in and out of an ability to read them for information. A language we are not necessarily tasked with translating but ascertaining whether meaning at all. 

"...the bluntest blankest things forcing interest everywhere besides the art, is for Geys more a process of stuffing your navel elegantly full of mirrors to gaze en abyme into it, packing them tightly, pristinely, to see a hall of navels winking like eyes, the rules of Gey's objects - well indexed in the PR - redirecting you through this hallowed hall of art..."



Click for full: Geys at Essex StreetJef Geys at Air de Paris