Gene Beery Practice at Derosia

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An "elemental usefulness" to signage.  We evolved to interpret signs, and there should be mutual respect in harnessing our primeval wiring. This is what the advert does. To speak to someone is an intimate thing. To have their ear. To be inside their head, my words. We should treat it delicately, erotically that it is. We were made to interpret this. To interface. The painter controls volume that poet does not. Treat it with respect, a mutual suspicion. Beery and I invent a third thing together through the handshake of the poem. Not a cruelty of font size.

Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel at Antenna Space

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Can't help but think of the memento mori of Fischli and Weiss hand-carving trash. It was about "abusing time," the waste of labor, the clock. Here labor is venerated, monuments slow carved to it. Seating whittled with a snails pace. Again, the trend for stitching. Knitting that is engraved, like, do you get it? The look of craft, of labor, of farming. Concepts so alienated to us that they return as aura, as art. Nostalgia for a time that never existed. Now labor is a fun haycation. A thing for people who don't do it to experience as a novel other. 

"...it was a concealment: the aluminum clamshell of your laptop being seen as economic product of capital innovation itself, rather than the hand-sweat of laborers distanced beneath gloves. A price tag for a face. Almost nothing is this world is actually automated - everything you touch is hand-made by workers. This separation of our social relations we've so completely assimilated that labor itself returns as a literal fetishism, stitches mark this labor, look compelling, can be brought out onto white walls, as aura, as artwork. Every cheap objects is an equal tapestry. The stitches in time are smoother, hidden. Hold up your child's plastic toy and feel another at its end..."

See too: Stitching Labor, Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Portikus, Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Micheline Szwajcer, Peter Fischli and David Weiss at Sprüth Magers

Nora Turato at Sprüth Magers

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Scream! Yell! Weeee! Bang, bang, bang the pots of language! Feel the emptiness. Feel hollow in indiscriminate wailing. A child in a grocery store deprived, is, yes, this is the sound of our world, adverts, attention, corporation. You have described our terror, armed the artist with these weapons of mass language... now what? This is the point where I turn, I'm not interested in being made numb anymore, in this classic form of desensitization. It was fun for a little while. Now it just gets bigger? The arms race was already won, we have demilitarization programs in place. The artist need not a bigger billboard to prove large emptiness. 

See too: Desensitization, Modern Gothic, Nora Turato

Past: Nora Turato

What Nauman did for neon, Turato does for motivational posters, bus adverts. The contemporary illuminate manuscript to nonsensical ... sadness? - that empty pang after finding yourself having read the billboard before even knowing you were reading the billboard. Your brain wants to "make sense" of its surroundings, and you read it for clues, end up reading the billboard that has commandeered your evolutionary wiring to sell you a half naked woman in socks. It's not your fault you read it, not your fault it barely makes sense. You were not intended for spaces like these. Nothing is rational in art or advertising, for both there is only that same distending space that creates a void, a meaning that must be filled, consumerist or otherwise. 

...language, propelled with advertorial oomph, instead deadpans with its empty cymbal crash; understand the words but, devoid of context feel a little haunted, disembodied, ghosts of something far."

....Language adrift from meaning. There's always more meaning. Like crap to chewed gum. Our pink lump that attracts the dirt, any interpretable speck of concrete information. Something will stick to it. And hold it for contemplation... Both advertising and poetry leverage our interpretable bits to their advantage, opening us like a can - I'm not sure if we are meant to enjoy these or feel once again dispirited by their abuse of our good nature - our tender top, berated."

".. The garbage of the 'infosphere.' ...politicians having clipped the sound bite down to two word phrases, the fun of creating your own haunting version, headlines like haikus, is fun. Cut the ends off a sentence and be left with a poem."

read full: Hanne Lippard, Nora Turato at Metro Pictures, Nora Turato at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Nora Turato at LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS

Christine Tien Wang & Ken Lum at Galerie Nagel Draxler

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At root both artist's text/image relation is a vibe ambivalent, cynical(?) The reproduced memes, the ironic signage. The story in the PR is telling. A European artist at dinner casts designation: "oriental." Surely one can understand an apathy with words, surely empathize a distrust to identification, "organization."  In relation to words a vibe that might be described of white knuckling, teeth gritted, smiling, polite laughter. The detachment in relation to words might be one of self survival. Of cool rage. We ask for violence to be turned to comedy to make it palatable. For trauma turned to NPR bites, the "asian" section of grocery store. For both its served cold and you get to turn it over on your palate and question whether learning to like it makes you a better liberal. It is fun for the chef. I like it. 

see too: Christine Wang at Nagel Draxler Kabinett, Ken Lum at Wattis

John Riepenhoff at Broadway

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Yesteryear's zombie movie pulled a punch: all this boring abstraction was actually a process! of [x]! Cue the conceptual gong. Riepenhoff extended the thought, "what if all that process orientation went toward making paintings that looked marketable, looked like the candied past. That looked like so many things your rapid fire reference uzi couldn't debrain the hordes. They have fast zombies now. This was akin to interest. It was always how zombies win, a press release to explain it.

Art has become a giant machine mining sources of abstraction.

Claude Rutault at Federico Vavassori

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"two canvasses mounted on stretchers, of identical size and shape, painted the same colour as the wall on which they hang,"

Rutault, as if painting were some side project of interior design. An object springing from walls, architecture's mushroom. Whether or not this is true, the thought is better. You don't have to think about Painting, instead you get to think of air. You get to think of a painting that serves something else. It is pleasant to watch painting be useless like this.