Louise Lawler at Metro Pictures

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It's lights out. The big sleep, render art in some purgatory, between the ghosts of artistic mythology, and their cynical corpse: "they are but objects." Render an inkblot: whether you see spirit or corpse depends on your personal faith in an afterlife. There are two types of art person, and the afterlife is a dividing idea of whether art's sacrificial Christ-like MEANING have intrinsic value/spiritual uplift to a culture, or whether it's just a story told for comfort against a great yawning cold. I.e. What you see in the shadows. An inkblot.

Night at the Museum would show that, at least culturally, we believe in some form of afterlife. Ben Stiller gesticulates. 

Liao Wen at Capsule Shanghai

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[H.R.] Giger for whom the mechanical and biological found a waypoint in the skeleton, the complex curvature of the arthropod's organic exo-shell, the crabs and muscle cars who share the PVC fetishist's interest in shiny hard bulges; it wasn't hard a move to the erotic.
And these find waypoint of flesh and bone and in wood. A confusion of Ripley and her Alien queen, a newborn mess of biological scaffolding, saying "please kill me" and under flamethrower, flesh that burns like kindling. 

See too: "Unspecific Objects"

Ghislaine Leung at Museum Abteiberg

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The detective novel. evidence. monoliths. clue. diversion. Suspicion. Creep. examination under light. walls dusted for prints. reading for signs. to solve. to produce MEANING. a portrait, forensic psychology. But, you say, CAWD has railed against the viewer deputized as detective, making exhibitions as hunt for the story trailed clues. (i.e. That's a Kippenberger in a frame by Leung, the Beuys drawings have a history, the onions' backstory. The walls reveal writing.) And you, dear viewer, on the hunt. The goal of this art is to produce a meaning-like affect in objects. The greatest goal is a suspicion without end - a mechanized fount of art. On the other hand, It feels like we can get rid of all this, say these objects do not meaningfully add up, preferably, and still there is something here. A distinction important. What Hainley called "the affect and the sensorial in a tradition of conceptual or minimalist work." or question of "when is the smell coming from the item and when it is manufactured without the thing." Important:  a meaning not generally associated, a meaning dissociated. "an emotional response repeatedly evoked in situations in which the action tendency that is associated with the emotion proves irrelevant or unnecessary" causes desensitization. "WELCOME"

What Fatima Hellberg called Leung's "ambivalent logic spaces" - their care for us is dissociated- which is our general experience but which we are socialized to endure.  The replacement of [sensitivity, emotion, humanity, our utterance] with not necessarily colder forms, but more efficient. A provided more efficient sentiment. (A more efficient conceptual art? Museum space architecture as invisible socialization.) Made apparent by the continuous multiplying of forms, "Welcome", into a chorus of commodified sentiment. Signing "The Boss." Capital providing our utterances with balloons that kill turtles. ("The hospitalization of sentiment.") The socialization of space or more accurately that spaces are socialization. Now estranged. Ir-relational aesthetics?

See too: Philippe Parreno at Esther Schipper, Carolyn Lazard at Essex Street, Ghislaine Leung at Cabinet, Ghislaine Leung at Chisenhale & Essex Street, Ghislaine Leung at Künstleraus Stuttgart

Past: Ghislaine Leung

"...increasing modern "miracle" conveniences and the then latest "smart objects" is hard not to read as a fear of these conveniences, submissiveness, actually infiltrating us, until we became, if not kitchen appliances ourselves, at least frighteningly subservient molded to kitchen surrounding us. The fear of our kitchen as a mold. Such that options for expression become limited by the cultural detritus available in stores.  You join in union, with a multitude, a choir, signing "THE BOSS." Whether or not highlighting these cultural walls with a gloss is helpful, it does make for good scary. "

"...the gradual creep of its suspicion, the John Knight cold cut ominousness in staging. Why must the light be blackout? Why the floor silenced? Why does the carriage require staves? The creep builds suspicion: a house haunted under glistening sterile light. A crime scene scrubbed, we, detectives."


Read full: Ghislaine Leung at Cabinet, Ghislaine Leung at Chisenhale & Essex Street, Ghislaine Leung at Künstleraus Stuttgart

Past: Lucie Stahl

"the specificity of their slick digi-crust-materialism and resolution-as-sex, we loved, the scanner trash prints: what everyone else was at such pains to display with existential and overwrought, like, expression, Stahl had turned into cheap easy and fast slacker products that got closer to the existential dread of that material-reproduction by embodying all its cheap easy fast sexy disposability."

"No longer the romantic era representing ourselves as fathomless depths ... we are now better feared as plumbing: oils, flows, pumps, fluids directed, misunderstood as monsters. The human body is indistinguishable from any sufficiently complex sewer. ... A world already dripping black nightmare, that we pump from the earth, have constructed our world out of... A product pipe-capable. Art as fluids, pipes, same as any other product. We all are forced to become fluid, make a product for channels, be pumped. "


full: Lucie Stahl at Queer Thoughts, Lucie Stahl at Cabinet, Lucie Stahl at Halle Für Kunst Lüneburg

Guillaume Bijl at Meredith Rosen Gallery

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Wearing a mask of your own face. When does the movie set become actual?  An office attempts to represent an office. This nonfunctional office, dead, is the uncanny, painted corpse. A"transformation" of space in capitalism.The fun here is how easily it works, the distinguishing signs among commodities. The difference between a tarp, a trash bag and tent. Mere signs. Don't bring Baudrillard into this. This is not theory, but funhouse, fun. 

For many, a film's believability is important ... to maintain its dream-thrall and for its duration become real. We understand fiction as able to - even momentarily - become actual. And in [x's] work seeing false things we know have the power to become real is its humorous anxiety. The various distances from "realness" are its multiple punchlines. At what point are the arrangements are decor and at what point it is the authentic living room.... At what point does our decor function as a reflection of society and at what point do our living rooms produce their own image for Hollywood and your neighbors to reproduce, and at what point does suspension of disbelief just become permanent.

See too: Guillaume Bijl at Nagel Draxler, William Leavitt at MAMCO

 Past: Guillaume Bijl

"Sign detached ever-so-slightly from its signified, like wearing a mask of its own face. Tableau in which the performers perform themselves. And question of, 'How could I ever possibly be not be myself?'"

Full: Guillaume Bijl at Nagel Draxler