Past: Will Benedict


"Thinking of Benedict like a gothicly depressed Baldessari is helpful."


Will Benedict at Gio Marconi, Will Benedict at Overduin & Co., Will Benedict at Bortolami

Amy Sillman at The Arts Club of Chicago

(link)

Maybe Sillman's paintings are uglycute in the way fetuses are ugly, there's not enough drawing to hold the shape nor body to give it viscera, which is why they have that newborn quality of looking like pink pencil erasers more than human, painting and fetus both. A confusion of painting and drawing (within painting specifically, the processes distinct from their materials we could say) that give them that uncanny modern nubility. Abject, sure. About to realize some full state if never completing it, the continual caroming off reaching full maturity.

Past: Amy Sillman

"A tragic affair collectors seek "signature" pieces, [...] requiring the artist already having a signature and thus emptied of its origination, adolescence, nubility and becoming etc, that Sillmans work, generally, seems about... "

"Sillman's painting too curdle representation, bodies."


Amy Sillman at Sikkema Jenkins, Amy Sillman at Kunsthaus Bregenz

Jörg Heiser:      Do you think there is anything ‘polemical’ left in referentiality today?

Willem de Rooij:     Rather the opposite. It has become a completely mainstream convention. I’m amazed by the flood of art pieces I’ve seen lately that consist of a photograph of a book that the artist finds interesting. Or a book in a showcase. Or sculptures that consist of a bookshelf on the wall with a number of books on it. Or a photo of a bookshelf. Or a photo of a book in a showcase. These books might be interesting, but the photos and sculptures are usually not. I find it so unfair to art that the form of the work gets ignored in that way.

https://frieze.com/article/we-speak

Past: David Lieske

"Lieske was of the first of the cargo cults reassembling the totems of meaning in the desert of it, picking detritus. The issue was resolved not by necessarily by making objects mean again - which they couldn't - it's hard to make an empty bottle mean in arid land - but by situating objects so that they connoted meaning despite whatever inscrutable blankness. Like hieroglyphs. What was important was exuding the affect of meaning, regardless of whether there was any and that it didn't matter anyway was what we were all beginning to pick up on and what the commercial world had known for decades (that you can create "meaning" at will with attitude, aura) which while Lieske pondering whether this was a problem was suddenly flooded and drown by more ephebic artists already having decided for him it wasn't and now this is the water we live in, a flooded terrain of objects imbued, over-saturated "meaning."

"If so much art looks like Broodthaers today, it is because Broodthaers was of the first invested in the arrangements of display as a credence to meaning, institutional or otherwise."

"An ambivalence at the heart of much of art today displayed as presentations of objects left to the viewer with a "deal with it" coolness, figurative sunglasses donned."


Click to read full: David Lieske at MUMOK, David Lieske at Lovaas Projects

Josef Strau at Francesca Pia

(link)

These are much uglier, which is an improvement I suppose. And Straus's text begins with an almost apology for the exhibition, which is reminds of how endeared we all were to artists failing ten years ago. The "I prefer not to." or Manfred Pernice's ongoing struggle to get erect. or The performed hesitance in every painting made. Remember that time? But then Strau's text turns it around.  Attempts to incant and imbue some earnestness into the enterprise. Calls it Sutering, or the process of invoking something earnest, Vivian Suter, meaning, into the paintings. Remember the wacky wild inflatable arm men who danced in front of their paintings to imbue some some [criticality] into bland abstractions?  This is like that, hunched over its making and saying a prayer.

A hail mary pass to capture, touch down, on some meaning.


See too: Josef Strau at House of Gaga (2), Josef Strau at House of Gaga

Past: Josef Strau

"The way butterflies seem garish and unnecessary to a world and inspire our wrath so children crush them and artists crush them against canvas, looking for ways to bejewel our production, steel it against the unpleasant taste of mouths eating coin. They're fine in that way of pleasantness, pinnacle of subservience that is the crux of high dollar abstraction, submission to their surroundings by letting it walk all over them."

"Strau’s concurrent rise with the hegemony of the art's image (say, CAD) makes a sense. Strau attaching text to image, delaying reception by giving words to its arrival at the moment it made it consumable without giving it away. This was huge."


Full: Josef Strau at House of Gaga (2)
Full: Josef Strau at House of Gaga