Saturday, January 31, 2015

Keith Mayerson at Freddy

Keith Mayerson at Freddy
(link)

Mayerson isn’t going abstract. The paintings date over the last number years, mostly 2012, first exhibited together here, and as PR attests some were included in Whitney Biennial’s figure salon.
Mayerson’s proliferating archive of painted images - assiduously maintained on a personal website over a decade of work - swelling over the years, slow roaming among variations, genres, and means, and began pre-Instagram - Mayerson already ascertained the cheapness of the image, in which individuals were trumped by the accumulation and abutment of contents. Each image maintains a content modular in relation to its cohorts, here a full meltdown. An archive of cultural attenuation that, like the Biennial’s recent install, “a non-linear narrative we are asked to complete ourselves.” To become our own detectives of what the gooey form of what his “American Dream”, Mayerson’s, the son of a psychoanalyst, could mean, dripping like clocks, “to channel my subconscious into my paintings and make it ‘real,’” like seeing faces in the wood, like seeing the faces Mayerson sees, like what representational painting represents.

See too : Jana Euler at Kunsthalle Zurich , Jim Shaw at Metro Pictures


Friday, January 30, 2015

Isabelle Cornaro at Francesca Pia

Isabelle Cornaro at Francesca Pia
(link)

The Spoerri/Nevelson mashups are fine, but the simplicity of Cornaro’s videos make them feel tuned subliminal, a primeval filmic language that in the true stupidness functions sub-haptic, like submersibles, unable to be rationalized, a sort of commercial eroticness. A brilliant real dumbness, whereas everyone else was only feigning it.

See too : Isabelle Cornaro at Museum Leuven , Ida Ekblad at Herald St.

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Kaspar Müller at Société

Kaspar Müller at Société
(link)

And see here Muller inhabits the generic image of lake, Lake Zurich, and although the images are “his,” their interchangeability with any lakeside photograph known from a collective memory, produces an opaque identity; It is hard to see “Kaspar” or his subjective "hand" through the photographs "which contains things under its surface that can’t be seen. It’s like a mirror in which you search for deeper things, but just reflect yourself. One will want to read something into it, force it even, because it’s not acceptable for it to stop there. Only very hard-boiled reception would leave it there, then it would feed from disappointment and tragedy because more was expected. But one might assume there must be a dark potential. Or a twin potential. That there must be another side. If not, the rejection of any depth would almost amount to aggression." A photograph as severance, a wall between you and Kaspar like a guillotine.

See too : Kaspar Müller at Federico Vavassori , Seven Reeds at Overduin

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at 356 Mission

Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at 356 Mission
(link)

In the smoke of Matias Faldbakken's rocketship ascendancy the artworld was left blind scrambling to adhere a politic for it, to make a critical foundation for the artworld's hot new power iconography, unable to accept that how it looked, rather than any little content it contained, was its appeal.*

But so Maeda and Chung deliver today’s dealings with the legacy of conceptual art’s poetics, i.e. a look that connotes a critical intelligibility (meaning) at the same moment appearing elusive, a withholdingess prevails. It produces the look of an enigma, and with it the attendant lure, reading between the lines of evidence evinced. An imbuing of its images/objects with potentialized meaningfulness, making a dissonance that ramps up the aura of even rubber lain on a floor, of cheap bookshelves and its remnant objects, of a decade of art dealing reduced to its minutes, a text that like Warhol’s diary finds initial interest in the search for rumor and gossip but eventually finds humanity in the piecing together of human lives lived.


*(Who in that moment didn’t want have to their big fuck-all paintings and sell it too. The ironic self-awareness of Faldbakken’s sculpture, like Fontaine, made its recycling of an already co-opted language acceptable, the viewer being smarter than the sculpture a sales value added.)

See too : Nina Beier at David Roberts Art Foundation , Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque

Monday, January 26, 2015

Sturtevant at Thaddaeus Ropac

Sturtevant at Thaddaeus Ropac
(link)
Dynamo for so much of the 1960s art world, Oldenburg was also, at times appallingly, no cartoon. (Séance Hannah Wilke.) Did an artist with such psycho-aesthetic investment in the invagination of commercial space ever stop to consider what might happen if, courtesy of a wildly inverting repetition, the phantasmatic derangements of capitalism or branding embroiled in his concession shoppe and its merging of philosophical and commercial notions re-rendezvoused to, vagina dentata-like, bite him in the ass? 
- Bruce Hainley, Under the Sign of [sic]
Sturtevant has extracted a few breathless acts of writing brilliance from those attempting siphoning of the mind's gymnastics ascertaining what, exactly, one sees seeing a Sturtevant. The murky dilute comedy of painting above as example. What one would wish for now is an almost exacting unpackaging of a Sturtevant object, a sort of T.J. Clark vivisection of the animal, dead on the table but understood, a Monsieur Sturtevant's Hat, would be something.

See too : Sturtevant at MoMA

Group Show at Greene Naftali

Group Show at Greene Naftali
(link)

How quickly this work has accumulated the look of the academic.  Possibly because it all went in hand with the theory that consumed it as their banner in its initial flourish it has as quickly dehydrated in the burning of its moments usefulness. Harrison’s dissonant abstraction, packaging the painter's studio schizo positioning of inside/out, its initial edge worn to the look of safety scissors in its childlike spoils. Or as recent as 2008 writers speaking of Krebber’s ability to “make us nervous” or in 2013 still describing his second 2003 Greene Naftali exhibition, “these works were if anything even more unfriendly to critics and collectors expecting a show of Important European Painting.”  Yet who today is really nervous about these text paintings. Surely for all the descriptive language of “evasion, deflection, deferral and refusal; diffidence, apprehension, ambivalence and doubt” and the sloganesque “preferring not to” Krebber’s greatest “evasion” was his willingness for absorption into those so willing have him, the conceptual disposability of a practice premised on the initial shock of the “evasion” in plain sites, readied for gallery’s recoup, to be making the most historically assailable paintings around. A horse on a wall as if mocking it all from behind the wall of the institution. The murderer dreaming not of the murder but of tacks placed on the map of the detective.

Sunday, January 25, 2015

Group Show at le-1

Erkka Nissinen
(link)

Graw surmised returns of sculpture’s figure as inalienable from its subject as commodity, particularly Harrison/Genzken's:
THESE SURROGATES thus reveal the embattled subjectivity at the heart of what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have famously called the "new spirit of capitalism," which demands the exploitation not only of labor but of personality, emotions, social relations, and other noneconomic aspects of our individual lives. Since this new regime works on and within subjectivity itself, even absorbing it into capital's own flows, Harrison's and Genzken's recent sculptures could be seen as delivering what is currently most in demand: subjectivity as a product. It is hard to decide, in fact, whether these works merely satisfy the current desire for staged subjectivity, or whether they exaggerate it in order to point to its problems.
4 years later human invasiveness find artists still struggling to refoot it in view, depicting it not in the commodified space of the real but in virtual space of video/painting where desire is the limit to treat it like a grotesque punching bag, finding glee in its horror.

See too : Andro Wekua at Sprüth Magers

Saturday, January 24, 2015

Prospect New Orleans

(link)

So there was a lot to see.

Friday, January 23, 2015

Peter Wächtler at Reena Spaulings

Peter Wächtler at Reena Spaulings
(link)

Somewhere between Amelie von Wulffen vegetable soirées and Sophie von Hellerman washy lumpen, a coolness carved from retrograde contemporary, a sort of faux-naive crafted askew of out-of-fashion methods. (cooly naive to fashion) Like Martin Creed’s slaughtered portraiture, the "exaggerated literary forms," the having gotten it wrong, lends an Edenic earnestness as if unspoilt by social awareness, and reattempting it through the mistakes of a Forest Gump or incompetent detective still winning the hearts if not criminal with immaculate sincerity, which of course isn’t true, but the interest lay in ascertaining the discrepancy, the disorientation of its irony.

Thursday, January 22, 2015

Jorge Pardo at 1301PE

Jorge Pardo at 1301PE
(link)

The original vertigo of aura grafted onto furniture has since, with art fair’s erosion of the distinction between art and decor, lost all meaning. This exhibition looks more art fair than interior design, like toadstools on a wall. What may be beleagueredly interesting about Pardo’s practice now - artists for decades attempt “meaning”’s destruction in an intellectual whack-a-mole - to consider here something inconsequential. The real exchange was ability for museums to now enhance their lobbies with a didactic.

See too : “Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co. , Ned Vena at Société , Stephan G. Rhodes at Vilma Gold

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Chris Ofili at New Museum

Photo by Maris Hutchinson/EPW
All artworks © Chris Ofili. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London
(link)

Ofili always was a decorator, and the neo-nouveau finds itself welcome as decor to a museum in need of something to look at, and all images David Zwirner's courtesy.  The museum stirs publicity from a press able to create mass visibility convertible into admissions sedimenting as prestige and hopefully donors, from work rented out (“lent”) by the commercial powerhouse hoping to leap economic strata with the museum’s imbued validation read by collectors as investment’s mark of approval, a stamp of permanence that is the museologic myth the museum implicitly condones.
Look at that sculpture.
Like CAD, the museum is a visibility box containing a machine working to control the attention of an audience cultivated as willing to accept its voice, which attention then able to be exchanged for other forms of capital. The expanded field of cultural production.  The writer exchanges his proof of extended attention by the culturally accredited, the writer hopes not to fuck it up, parasiting off the attention turned, to draw attention to oneself. This text wishes to extract your attention in in hopes of future exchange. The museum becomes a gatekeeper of history, of history’s image, of visibility sedimented, a lineage which reinscribes its power as objective, and exhibits a beautiful show.

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Mark Leckey at Wiels

Mark Leckey at Wiels
(link)

A youth couched in music videos, it was a pleasure, and Leckey understood the potential of its seduction.  If Fiorucci experimented with the pop address as upload into the viewer, the hypnosis of spectation, then “Shades of Destructors” 5 years later was an experiment of what could be done once inside, and everything since about what it means to place an object inside another’s head and the possibility of that inside an object’s.  The states of reality, virtual, image, filmic, object find their superposition between phase shifts, and Leckey moves us between all with a deftness. If Sturtevant’s interest in film/video was its capability for dissociative fugues and blackouts, Leckey’s interest is the possibility of a plasmaticness and production within it, a velvet couch where Leckey is the dentist administering gases of mildly psychoactive potential.

Monday, January 19, 2015

Lutz Bacher at Statens Museum for Kunst

_30B1221

(link)

Every Bacher work is its tombstone, the thing which represents its end, the last person remembering their name.
The framing is contextually ambiguous and stripped of their time and negated by the remoteness of their handling a viewers attempts to position themselves in relation to the subjects feels instead their meaning transpire and fade. The small facts make them mean less, caroming off the possibility of understanding. A hallucination of connection, of information adrift from meaning.

See too: Lutz Bacher at Daniel Buchloz

Sunday, January 18, 2015

Sam Anderson at Off Vendome

Sam Anderson at Off Vendome
(link)

Like pigeon spikes the objects ward off landing platforms, nowhere to quite sit well, and a good way to lose an eye, like traps, a high surface area to volume content, sort of abjectionably awful but functional, things you really don’t want near your eyes but love for the fret they cause, strange frentic things.

Saturday, January 17, 2015

Claire Fontaine at Galerie Neu

Claire Fontaine
(link)

Again a blast from the 2000s past, the ever posturing Fontaine today looking winded, having lost of their fighting spirit, instead merely combating the weight of the world with global travel's candy, and presenting an exhibition exchanging their pre-packaged imposter anarchics and poseur declaratives for an ennui, a gentle boredom, looking out of planes and recursive self-questions, nostalgic for a time when this was still fun, or critically acceptable. The melancholia of the palinode is having watched someone look at themselves in a mirror and possibly self-reflect in their vampirism, a good vampire never does.

Friday, January 16, 2015

Martin Puryear at Matthew Marks

Martin Puryear at Matthew Marks
(link)

A small shift in Puryear's formalism leaves it looking wildly less conservative as a superannuated contemporary moves reactionarily backwards to meet it, an unradical contemporary in which any Stadelschulite handed these objects, packaged à la mode instead of as craft, would look “fresh;" fresh as septuagenarian's handiwork.

See too: Transatlantic Transparency at Mathew ; Martine Bedin, Mai-Thu Perret at Fondation Speerstra




Thursday, January 15, 2015

"Clifton Palace," “Pho Viet Huong” "Vzszhhzz," "Astro 5," and "Tes Yeux" at 186f Kepler

restuarant_outside
links: “Tes Yeux” “Pho Viet Huong” “Vzszhhzz” “Astro 5″ “Clifton Palace”

The mid oughts was the apogee of discourse’s infatuation with the mysterious as critical. 2007 and Huberman, writing against “information” decries art readily understood, that “To understand, then, signals the moment of having caught up with an artwork,”-  i.e. the moment it dies - arguing a conceptual “Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees,” and advocating an ideology ostensibly “against” the rigid order of category, and advocating a post-interpretation. It was something hot then too for artist’s websites to be labyrinths of unintelligibility.
2015, 186f Kepler releases press stating the liquidation of information’s category’s as more closely resembling the aqueous system of art, and it’s true, the Field of Cultural Production now looks less like the rigid markets of symbolic goods and more like a social systems of pedigree in which, as predicted by Deleuze, the postscript on society’s controls turns institutional  interiors into dispersed system of self-policing and production, in which there no longer is an outside to market, your existence becomes the system of circulation for circles and scenes, seeking the endlessly theorized “network” of social capital. And here having CAD as your sandbox to immediately sediment your activity with visibility, you can do as little or much as desired, with enough accredited names attached you’ve got CAD to market your dispersion for you, becoming “of interest” simply by having been seen. 186f Kepler does in fact mirror and perform the social mechanism in which liquidation isn’t so much “escape” as marketing.
Relyea relates the dissonance:
“To take one particular example, Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne, curators of the 2006 Whitney Biennial, tried to credit such coy artist collectives as John Kelsey’s Bernadette Corporation and Reena Spaulings as having escaped the art system into a zone of freedom, “creating a space outside the market ... so that the artist isn’t directly accessible.” Their comments appeared the very week that the Wall Street Journal ran an article on the Spaulings gallery’s part in the pseudonymous fad, quoting Kelsey’s comment that “in part because of this “mystique around the collective,’ at a recent show works sold quickly.”
Like attachment to any social network, the important thing isn't what you're doing, the job is to make sure you’re seen doing it.

See too : National Gallery at Grand Century

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Harun Farocki at Hamburger Bahnhof

Harun Farocki at Hamburger Bahnhof
(link)

Coming from Filmmaking, Farocki never reproduced the tropes of the art world that became receptive to him. Those artists in lineage since without exterior however often unable to transcend art’s established idioms and visual speech. If so much video essay today resembles Farocki’s, it is because Farocki’s art was itself a form or a framework, a vessel invented through which content could be made to speak of itself, taken up by any willing artist since. In the early 1969 video, Farocki’s lifelong documentary problem/premise is summarized directly; asking the question of how one would be able to depict politics without its producing an immediate reaction that itself can be reacted to (rejected, accepted, etc.), and instead prolonging depiction’s moment, postponing indefinitely a reaction and thus politics. This neutrality has since become the bread of a contemporary art often unwilling in risking any pronouncement, rendering itself in ambivalence. Farocki in his voice-over doesn’t address this endpoint as paralysis problem, but the difference is often that Farocki was risking politics and everything since was only risking art.

See too: Koki Tanaka at Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

David Douard at Johan Berggren

David Douard at Johan Beggren
(link)

Douard’s big year has sown spaces to be filled, a chain reaction burning interest fueling the expansionism of visibility, a speed of production in which interest generates on the premise that even if not all of it is at least some of it will be, the trade shows of nomadic artists that Duoards asserts the bodily in the trash accumulated, acknowledging the filth of things ready made, the body in the product, in the package, in the excrement of practice, Duoard both reacting to and participating in the cold industry of the system; filthy, disgusting, sporadically humane.

See too. Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick , Michael E. Smith at Susanne Hilberry , Simon Denny at Portikus , Cathy Wilkes at Tramway , Ben Schumacher at Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon

Sunday, January 11, 2015

“Darknet” at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen

"Darknet" at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen
(link)
Premising itself of the ominousness mystery of the deep web the artworks will never expose it, needing that mystery for its own import. It will instead further lure it into metaphor and fable, revealing nothing about the darknet and everything about art’s ability to vampire interest. The worst way to make art is to find something interesting in the world and deciding it needs to be art.

See too: Simon Starling at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Saturday, January 10, 2015

Joanne Greenbaum at Crone

Joanne Greenbaum at Crone
(link)

The proto-modern gentility balanced with an undercutting maximalism, like a dog having found the birthday cake to lay it out once again on the patterned rug.
Awkwardness is the contemporary expression of painting “critically;” by denying the logic of painting’s normal order (taste) it infers a strategy not commanded by higher powers but an immanence, the human subject, "dysmorphic", without returning to an expressivity, inferring an idea or conceptualism. It’s the result of the schizo positioning of painting today, in which everyone wants a subjectivity expressed but no one wants human expression. The hysteric is the ability for the human to appear through the grate of order; social, relational, capital, or artistic.

See too : Zak Prekop at Shane Campbell

Friday, January 9, 2015

Pipilotti Rist at Hauser & Wirth

Worry Will Vanish Horizon, 2014Installation view, 'Pipilotti Rist. Worry Will Vanish', Hauser & Wirth London, 2014 © Pipilotti Rist. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine, New York Photo: Alex Delfanne
(link)

A friend once noticed Wolfgang Puck removing his shoes at a dinner table before eating, theorizing it as a physical signal separating work and pleasure. Socks denoting pleasure. This exhibition's shoeless desire is “to release some of the social inhibitions” before laying on bean bags, fetal on the floor. Gone the white walls with monitors at 57 inches, current video brandishes attention to setting, using theater’s primitive virtual-reality in which suspension of disbelief becomes an actual suspension of self lost in the mirror of the screen’s silver. The dim theater of shade necessary for Narciussus to see his reflection, hiding his self-consciousness.
Wheras some of the best video being made today openly acknowledges the viewer, from antagonizing (Wolfson) to alienating (Atkins) or even willfully attacking their affective link with its signs (Rose), etc et. al., Rist desires to swallow the viewer whole, to unbirth them, and deliver them into the her amniotic unreality. Rist’s work today feels anachronistic in this sense, an idea of the future that comes from the past - renderings of architectural potential - already a retro vision that in the hindsight actually makes Rist appear different than 10 years ago, even critical. Have you seen this completely CGI advertisement for marble countertops? There isn't a real thing in it. http://vimeo.com/15630517 It’s all the more imporant because its an advertisement.

See too: Petra Cortright at Societe , Ed Atkins at Serpentine Gallery , Rachel Rose at High Art

Thursday, January 8, 2015

Anicka Yi at Cleveland Museum of Art, Transformer Station

Anicka Yi at Cleveland Museum of Art, Transformer Station
(Anicka Yi at Cleveland Museum of Art, Transformer Station)

Surrealism at best estranged the world in a way that its signs were able to express something latent within it, at worst it was an attempt to make art more interesting than the world by disregarding its rules and positing the makers own. “The surrealist claims his dream world as more interesting than your dull nasty everyday one...”as Reinhardt theorized it. It was a debate between Adorno and Benjamin, whether the juxtaposition of contradictions could actually reveal something about them, or further obfuscate a world already slipping under fog.  Marx’s ironic use of the fantastic, vampires and werewolves, mocked the superstitions of capital’s veil. Ranciere, “On the other hand,” thought, “the work which builds understanding and dissolves appearances kills, by so doing, the strangeness of the resistant appearance that attests to the non-necessary or intolerable character of a world.”
And today we have weights shining behind tempura-fried flowers and a press release stating that it’s “analyiz[ing] the acceptance of what it means to be human,” the acceptance seeming finally having stopped, given up, to smell roses, push up daisies, an exhibition called Death.

See too: "Flat Neighbors" at Rachel Uffner , Group Show at Bortolami

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Koki Tanaka at Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle

CAP-Koki Tanaka 2014-031
(Koki Tanaka at Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle)

The terror of allegory is that humans placed under its banner immediately become symbols and their actions extrapolated as universal archetypes (slipping towards stereotypes) and denying the individual for false assumptions about the universal. This exhibitions subtitling itself as “a soundtrack for collective engagement” readies it as an inference, turning a documentary into a parable at the expense of the young adult’s being. The political intimation takes away from the chance of its operation, occluding the risk, and predetermining its allegory and extracting value from it a priori, almost as if the humans in its logic were secondary to it: It mattered little whether they succeeded or failed because the project itself was always bound to extract meaning from it.Demolishing what is the best part of documentaries in that genres liquidate their tropes and the relationship to narrative elements becomes estranged, at all moments one must reposition ourselves in relation to the characters, there is no deity to assuage a sensibility, coherence , or, worst, a moral. Like Restrepo, an antidote to all the Errol Morris style docs, the characters negate the spectrum of types to create a film whose bathos becomes its emotional impact. Far more moving than any of the eternal return fatalism of some recent Best Pictures.
The best part of this isn’t a idea about collectivity, but the base enjoyment of watching people, for which this video is phenomenal. People are generally more interesting than people’s ideas about them.

Tuesday, January 6, 2015

Stephen G. Rhodes at Vilma Gold

Stephen G. Rhodes at Vilma Gold
(Stephen G. Rhodes at Vilma Gold)

Paul McCarthy desublimation in Mike Kelley vernacular with Cameron Jamie theatricality of a John Bock or Mika Rottenberg abjection with Jonathan Meese irony, overlain with an overarching Jason Rhodes value production through storytelling (here in the droll PR) to make mess seem rational, making a fairly accurate depiction of culture, though none of it covers this exhibition's stoned Adult Swim aspect, again the absurd placed into the real. We differentiate art from the cultural forms it appropriates by the expectation of the artist’s self-reflexivity + self-consciousness and therein implicitly promising a “content” that culture doesn't. Yet whole swaths of art actively attends its jettisoning of this - or its absurdification - and the comedy it appropriates become more and more self-conscious, and the difference becomes that one is entertainment and the other is boring.

Monday, January 5, 2015

“The Contract” at Essex Street

"The Contract" at Essex Street
(“The Contract” at Essex Street)
Artists: Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda, Maria Eichhorn, Wade Guyton, Hans Haacke, Park McArthur, R. H. Quaytman, Cameron Rowland, Carissa Rodriguez

Haacke’s overt literalism was due to its merely exposing what was read between lines, its belief in the act of transparency. Oddly everyone in this exhibition - which takes its title in reference to Haacke - makes work that is overtly opaque, obfuscating and mysteriorizing itself in the opacity of its use of cultural symbols. If Haacke’s work was about transparency in the value extracted from art objects, the rest of the work in the show is about contemporary art’s extraction of value/content from culture, complicit in its own theft of value, “borrowing” symbols that were never lent. While appropriation foregrounds its act of theft, this exhibition’s implicit form is a possibly insidious version that guises itself as a form of critical doubling. Quaytman’s “borrowing” of Andrea Fraser’s most vertiginous performance, reprinting it under her own brand image - even if old orchard friends - placing even what has become her logo over the top of the image, what is this but a strange form of theft among friends? Is this exhibition an homage to "Haacke’s" seminal contract, which attempting through transparency to ink slight power to artist’s, or a simple vampiring of cultural capital of it, placing artists, literally, around it as if osmotically credibility it would absorb.
"Haacke’s" poster, contract, and idea was free; I can’t imagine anything else in this show is.

Saturday, January 3, 2015

“Dai Hanzhi: 5000 Artists” at Witte de With

Exhibition view 
Photo: Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk 

Installation photo, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, 2014
(“Dai Hanzhi: 5000 Artists” at Witte de With)

The death of Contemporary Art Daily will be another site with better formatting. The speed of consumption was what birthed CAD - the instant glut of it - yet it now lags with the machinations of its web1.0 formatting still using clickable arrows in aggressive pageview extraction tech. Group shows become a chore, clicking buttons like a neanderthal. If someone rehosted the exhibition images to be located on a single page it would kill CAD overnight. Like a Myspace waiting for a Facebook. Incredible that museums still give CAD  domain over their documentation. Their current position as the contemporary art world’s documentation curator is waiting to be usurped by those who plot it. Which, who currently is plotting this coup of the power it wields is ominous, for those who desire this power obviously have use to manipulate it.

Also this exhibition's celebration of the white guy among a group of chinese artists feels a little like a samurai film starring Tom Cruise.

Note: CAD is currently in the process of updating the format of the site.

Friday, January 2, 2015

“Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center

"Puddle, pothole, portal" at Sculpture Center
(“Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center)

Animation and Cartooning's comedy was premised on slapstick’s violence upon the real, stretching the real into a comic absurdity, teasing a threat to break it, which rationalizing this discrepancy forced laughter in children. Irrupting cartoons (or rotating ASCII) into the real - the real that we daily refer to as dissolving, mocked as “meatspace”- feels apt, funny, impish pranks of mischievous adolescent arts. What may be interesting about this show is that we have defined the moment, the kids grown on cartoons have arrived and their childhoods have coincidentally, absurdly, become the accurate depictions of the way the world has begun to feel, and will soon become generic, but at least we'll get to stop repeating ourselves.


See too: Danny McDonald at House of Gaga , Pentti Monkkonen at High Art , Nicholas Buffon at Freddy ,  Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick

Thursday, January 1, 2015

Jonas Wood at David Kordansky

Jonas Wood at David Kordansky
(Jonas Wood at David Kordansky)

With the dilute abstraction of today’s forever now atemporal soup, the reptilian pleasure of seeing objects painted feels like relief. To see something rather than sift histories. Like 8bit nostalgia, or Guston’s plodding brushwork, the faux-niavete of Wood’s style magnifies choices made in representation, the shortcuts and decisions. The chunking holds the object depicted behind the filter of its maker, Wood’s subjectivity of calculating how to represent, the decisions sedimented as strokes itself a subject. The way a boxer's tattoos get rendered, or the way the likely commissioned portraits become suddenly less wonky. It’s an act of framing, holding “painting” at slight remove, like the pots as paintings, framing the container.  It’s stupid fun.