Hamishi Farah at Fri Art

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Pusha T and Drake's longstanding beef ended with Drake having to release a statement admitting, yes, he was hiding a child and, yes, that was him in blackface. It exploded. People said Pusha took it too far. Drake vocally conceding the beef would have been less of an L than his hand forced in apology.  Beef was supposed to remain in the land of publicity grabbing headlines, in hyperreality, in the game. I.e. Children, etc., shouldn't be involved. Farah's own "going nuclear" would also involve children that should maybe be left out of the game's foibles. Do you see where this is going? For those seeking beef's reportage: After Schutz excused her razzle dazzled murdered black child through her relation as a mother, Farrah, no stranger to surgical summer, painted Schutz's child. It exploded. Farrah's painting of the child was censored in Monopol, labeled an "act of revenge" (language seemingly no German paper used to describe Schutz's painting of someone else's child.) The jujitsu here is black belt. Returning all the stakes of painting - that artists are quick to claim in the same breath they claim to be outside of -  into the real. The virtual sacrosanct of poised conceptuality - "in the game" of hyperreality - Farrah is all too canny in, happy to, throw into the artistically hot water it supposedly was already boiling. Basically, if you want stakes in art, here are your stakes. This is isn't conceptual, these are people's lives, not necessarily all in the game. Not a game. Farah, reasonably, has beef. And there is more of it. His instagram, @merlincarpenter, documents another beef with none other than. Carpenter's once conceptually excused racist joke, that he seemingly would prefer to disappear, Farah continuously drags back into the mud of the real. 

Choosing a side in a beef is always part of the fun. And your choice here is going come with political questions on the limits of art's unquestioned terrain, stakes, Debord, and how much hyper faux reality we can take from rappers. But I fucking hate Drake.

 Past: Lewis Hammond at Casa Masaccio

"Dark in amber, scenes held in brown glass. A "wine dark sea," a Homerian world devoid of azure. ... scenes reflected in another substance, using a mirror to inspect the bathroom, ... An aberration in the glass or in you."

 Past: Lewis Hammond at Casa Masaccio

Past: Michael E. Smith

"A google search says no one has used to word tumor in any online writing about Smith. Which seems odd; his objects seem awfully affected by a lot of lumps, red dots, growths on institution and inflated with resin crusts. Teratomas: the classic hair and teeth of your twin in your tummy. You can google pictures of these, they actually look a lot like Smith's more "bodily" objects. Of growths without cause, find a potato in our eye, the "categorically promiscuous." Things sliding into new subjects like bare knees across asphalt..."

"Threat of bodily violence (a body to become goo as any other) is implicit to art that treats materials as categorically promiscuous (surreal), e.g. if you can put puffer fish under the table's summer sky, inflate them like footballs with whale ears, aren't you as wiling to place skulls at your knees. The disregard for the categorical order is like gore, crushing bodies."

"It's a cliche at this point to say that Smith makes the mundane object estranged. And in a sea of so many surrealists currently operating, less than helpful. Estrangement is today's go-to strategy. Smith's is individuated, each object set off so that we can no longer "know" the sculpture, eroding a complete vision, and opening a distrust. A psychological sliver. We cannot know the object, its relation to other objects is broken, either categorically (there is no category to place the object within, surrealist) or psychologically (the unknown threat). The rocking chair I project from the two elegant bones still in contact with the substrate of the real is not the same as the one in your head. This unknown destabilizing of our ability to conceptualize the objects in equitable terms to exchange with another -both objects and other people - (eroding the material semio-substrate with which our exchange is based) breaching a distrust, is its sinister quality."

"You can never be certain you've seen all the butterflies, their artwork is everywhere."


Click for full: Michael E. Smith at Atlantis, Michael E. Smith at 500 Capp Street Foundation, Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center, Michael E. Smith at Michael Benevento, Michael E. Smith at Zero, Michael E. Smith at Lulu, Michael E. Smith at Susanne Hilberry,

Mathis Collins at Crèvecoeur

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Perviously there was a speaker for an eye, which makes a metaphoric sense for the haptic reversal of carving. Seeing a feel. The vibration of carving, a touch without. The labor dabbles the surface. While Guston's heavy belabored stroke plodded its anxiety, the sweat here seems less anxious than proof of work, not frivolous, not quite etched in stone, but heading there.

Ceal Floyer Massimo at Minini, Brescia

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Historical anti-retinal trends led to concerns with meaning, to an audience's battles with "getting it." Many things were written, both for and against. But eventually getting it was the prize, was the humor, conceptual art distilled to its simplest form, comedy. The set-up, delivery and a vast emptiness. But these begin toying with something different. Almost nothing to get, attempts at non-meaning, attempts on its life. Anti-thought art. A head "kept clear" with the sound of one hand clapping, masturbation pleasure.

 Past: Peter Fend

"Art has been co-opted for worse things than environmental boostering. Fend's utopic aspects seem nice if not necessarily utilitarian, but since when has art been confronted with actualities. Art is a space without expectations of internal success, of even internal logic. ... giving the boring problems of our coming environmental cataclysm at least ostensibly interesting solutions. ... ideas are less the feasible-solutions-for-actualization than they are acts of branding and dissemination, where being excited-for is itself the solution. Whether or not you feel excited is yours."

"... How can one invest in getting Musk to stop?..."

Read full: Peter Fend at Museo Nivola, Peter Fend at Embajada, Peter Fend at Essex Street

 Past: Ceal Floyer at Aargauer Kunsthaus

"...cleverness - the set-up, tension and click of conclusion- and its bathetic pull, "this interplay of expectation and disappointment." ... less fun than sinisterly aware of their exchange of the broken sad comedy of puns as like existentially it, this small disappointment threatening to replace understanding with "getting it," our world as a series of painfully dumb effects."

 Full: Ceal Floyer at Aargauer Kunsthaus