Raqs Media Collective at Kunstverein Braunschweig

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Art that always sorta looks like a brand launch. An IPO party. You're not quite sure that the media company does, but the brand is built, swirled, holds feelings. The aimless affect spins. Maybe all art is a brand launch for what promise might harbor. Profits don't matter, what matters today is the excitement it can be made something great tomorrow. Buzz.

Past: Bri Williams at Interface

"if I covered you in lye, your body would turn to soap, a simple process of an alkaline solution mixing with fatty tissues. Your body itself is barely not-soap, and soap opens your body to becoming not body, cleanses you by blurring self with soap, which goes down the drain..."

Read full: Bri Williams at Interface, Bri Williams at Queer Thoughts

Jordan Casteel at MASSIMODECARLO

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Totally fine paintings, everything plain, explicitly about what they're about, a direct representation. They're a product for which most museums, fashion mags, genius lists, are in dire need. And the press releases actually temper the gold that they have. A pearl too large for anything good. Jealous neighbors whisper, trackers follow for market value, the little coyote dies in the tumult. The script written by a white man. The gem comes with peanut gallery critique, that this is its "moment," that eventually fashion passes, and everyone holding bag of passé pearls. (As if the last twelve "intellectual" movements haven't been.) But by this time they will be in the halls, spaces previously occupied by shadows, tidal floods reroute the river, and we learn to respect collected water. 

Reynaldo Rivera at Reena Spaulings Fine Art

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Documentation awaiting its documentary. Its context, life, backfilled into it. You feel it when the reviewer recommends the catalog. The loss. The ruins of a once beautiful citizenry. We now vampire. Not only its pain, but its life too, brought to cold hands of art's Wunderkammer. "Dominant culture lays the concrete of its social conditions, proclaims 'look a dandelion has grown,' hangs its photo in our halls as testament to humanity. But it can seem like a testament to the concrete." I'm not sure who is at fault here, no one really, I guess life should be bottled, the only way to continue ours. 

See too: Alvin Baltrop at Hannah Hoffman, Peter Hujar at Maureen Paley

 Past: Sophie Reinhold at Sundogs

"Unsure how fun it is to watch someone melt into a bubble bath."

Full: Sophie Reinhold at Sundogs

Naoki Sutter-Shudo at Crèvecoeur

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The trinket functions like a flower, a desirous other, holding some promise. We don't know what it is for, but it feels for something. The flower was beautiful before we knew its sexual radish. A promise on its lips. "the fantasy of [function], that thing that serves us. Of course something erotic about that. A table accepts your feet on it, the meat grinder barfs sausage by the mile, generates. A complaint-less subservience, erotic." An object that gestures its need, its promise for, with wet eyes blinking.

See too: Matt Paweski at Park View/Paul Soto, Naoki Sutter-Shudo at Bodega (1), Naoki Sutter-Shudo at Bodega (2)

Past: Naoki Sutter-Shudo

"The souvenir acts as a placeholder for tourists urge...  desire, likely some vestigial expression of our sexual selection's wiring, which is why so many of them are cute."

"The break in between what something is and what something suggests: a function, poetic fissure."

Full: Naoki Sutter-Shudo at Bodega (1), Naoki Sutter-Shudo at Bodega (2)