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

stonehengification

stonehengification - 

The "big dumb object." A more cartoon sculpture. Paleo-totemism. With a smile. The cruder it is, the more archaic it looks, the more permanent we perceive it. Interminably stupid rocks last an unfortunate forever. So paintings like pictograms, petroglyphs. Give a rock some eyes.

As the world feels precarious, moves closer towards its end, we find solace looking towards the primitive we might find as our future, the deities we will worship in the trees we once had.

We find some comfort in dirt smeared not because of its primeval "truth" but because it seems like it can't obsolesce, it can't be superseded, blown away as dust, which we mistake for being eternal.

Olaf Breuning at Metro Pictures, Solange Pessoa at Mendes Wood DM, Aaron Angell at Koppe Astner

Past: Heimo Zobernig

"[The work's] banality incites questioning [as disinteresting objects must expel interest elsewhere], and exposes its stage to skepticism [institutional critique]. The inanity of such an operation might seem at the limits of humane interest, but Zobernig's magisterial ability to continually wrest insipid rabbits from hats irrupts a comedy at the depths of that hat.

"The dizzying aspect of its practice: the ability to lack any particularness whatsoever, terrifying blankness as genericness as phantasmagoria, projecting ghosts of modernism on the backs of our brains."


Read full: Heimo Zobernig at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Heimo Zobernig at Simon Lee, Heimo Zobernig at Indipendenza, Heimo Zobernig at Petzel, Krupp, MUDAM

 Past: Huma Bhabha at Clearing

"sculpture's totemization ... the mystique of the runic object, stonehengification"

Full: Huma Bhabha at Clearing

Altoon Sultan Paintings at Chris Sharp Gallery

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I was told you have to see these in person, that they're on calfskin, that you're missing half of it, the dusty tempera, the supple egg. A shield against digital suck, prizing your IRL. The sensuous preserved from its extraction/production by image. Protected. It could feel a bit christian, chaste, the erotic guarding, what's not revealed. Which the compositions support, they are roadblocks, closed and hinting, like... O'Keeffe, but the pants stay on. Looking through the fence of your jeans, finding denim, seeking calfskin.

Lynda Benglis at Xavier Hufkens

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Everyone owes a big [x] to Benglis. The "unspecific objects." What made her outré from post-minimalism then is everyone's laurels today. The "theatrical," an excess of reference, too many things at once. I don't even mind the gold bronzini in the other room - sometimes you get to give yourself a trophy. 

See too: Pamela Rosenkranz, "Bodily Innuendo", Nairy Baghramian, Ron Nagle at Modern Art

Past: Tony Cokes at Greene Naftali

  ...but now text is aerosolized, language appears from all corners buzzing up from your hand to see newscasts across the continuum. An economy of speech value is recalculated on the ability to harvest attention. ...  Cokes' read like poems of how text feels today, a glitchy attention deficit ... difficult to read but they command attention.

Full: Tony Cokes at Greene Naftali

Past: Megan Marrin

"... there's something about "mechanistic" and "shower" that will always dredge some historical subconscious. These are the afterimages of such. If Foucault were alive we'd already know the spa is a prison. But he's dead and these linger with some notion of. ..."

Megan Marrin at Queer Thoughts

 Past: Shana Moulton

"endless mockery of her subject's desire to appear, to express in any sort of meaningful way, bullying our desire for comfort in recognition itself .... somberly kicking us when we're down with a medical donut strapped to our ass"

"humor in searching for spiritual value in commodic life ... juxtaposed with the day's small tragedy turning over a can of beans to read its ingredients"

"You've got to actively believe for the things to have effect: the point was the power was inside you all along... The placebo effect so strong in the US that drug manufactures have difficulty time creating new painkillers that are stronger than sugar pills. The effect is not seen in Europe, or pretty much any where that does not allow pharma advertising. That this mass inculcation might be the strongest effect of all, like we're all living in a theater in mass suspension because thats what gets the crystals like art to work."


Click full: Shana Moulton at Kunsthaus Glarus, Shana Moulton at Gregor Staiger

Oscar Murillo at Taka Ishii Gallery

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This is the fallout of On Kawara conceptual art. What he posed as a question - whether a sign can contain its moment - has metastasized into marketing strategy.* The PR tells you the locale of these paintings making - their "downloaded content." Against modernist universality, the big dumb abstraction of today localizes itself, we resurrect the author to make sure their symbolic laurel is branded into the painting by the press release, this is the On Kawara stamp. You don't contribute anything to geopolitics, the point is to chant it. 

*"While this was the central conundrum to conceptual art since its inception, the rupture and distance between sign and object (always at risk that its sign didn't actually contain its object) it has since been taken as granted, as a granting agency for value added. While On Kawara's July 21st 1969 poses the question of whether it actually contains the weight of a moon landing, the paint sprayed is given to absorb the history. If an artist goes into the woods and there is no cellphone service around to hear him, does it imbue itself into the copper objects as significant? Jason Rhoades built a career of mocking this value-added system, performing it under absurdly comical conditions, to create his referentially seminal signature: PeaRoeFoam, a mess of so much reference and history and jest that it self imploded. Or Seinfeldized by Arcangel. .. So a word for this value-added process based absorption/valorization of reference."

Past: Oscar Murillo at Carlos/Ishikawa

"like Water Lilies, spilled in crude oil. Painting history, a denim we distress. 'The hardship that is reclaimed like wood for collectors.' ... While the ultra-wealthy trade the scatalogic nappies of adult-child-brutes whose own naive styles self-declare their idiocy as avant and thus valuable as coins amongst collectors..."

"A distress we can apply like paint... "

"There's never been anything particularly subtle about Murillo's work... hulking metaphors writ in barn door sizes. A grandiosity that shadows whatever the work is "about," allowing a fleetingness, an evasiveness. ... The arrows are huge, blinking, blinding, cover for what-you-want-it-to-be-about aboutness."

Past: Oscar Murillo at Carlos/Ishikawa, Oscar Murillo at David Zwirner

Pentti Monkkonen at High Art

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Life averts entropy, says the press release after a sorta synopsis of oil and marketing. Basically life is complexification, sews ornate carbon chains that we now crumble, burn to release their energy. I.e. we simplify life to power our cars, putting out chaos, exhaust, (traveling to a localized heat death before a later big one. (Plus your own personal.)) Returning to the dust we once were, without order, everything again sand. (See too: Lutz Bacher.) Your own personal dust machine. This would have the minorest semantic connection to the paintings on view, if it weren't that Monkkonen didn't seem continually hellbent on slicing container from content, brand from form. So the infra-thin PR addendum is just another onion skin peeled. It's the marketing, the butterfly preserve to pretend the rest isn't belching smoke. Painting as advert for its claim to avert chaos. Pretending, like me, to, against a law of the universe, produce order worth burning.

Everything Pentti Monkkonen

Past: Pentti Monkkonen

"Monkkonen's box-trucks literalize the metaphor: painting as commodity vessels in transit. What were rectangular become parallel grams sent for accelerating markets. The vessels are moving fast, the trucks skull cab and silver toothed grill portend their too-fast-too-young market crash. The flow of brand. Graffiti, produce, logos, brushstrokes, artistic identities all competing for recognition.  Like many interested in the cheap plastic promise of fantastical playthings, it is found perfectly in the toy-form’s commodic pleasure whose projectable fantasy's complete dissolve of use-value mirrors art’s ostensible own."

"The package as product, medium masseuse, the vessel which projects its internal object, which here isn't anything, instead the subject of art, the artist."

"That like childhood figures of action, producing their jism all over town to heroic ends, painting an identity placed over a muscular blank, the vessel, creating a subject."

Past:  Pentti Monkkonen at High Art(2), Pentti Monkkonen at Truth and Consequences, Pentti Monkkonen at High Art(1), "Paris De Noche” at Night Gallery, Pentti Monkkonen at Jonathan Viner

Merlin James at Kerlin Gallery

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For all our interest in "pushing the boundaries of painting" or whatever, James shows how weird painting can actually be. So far outside current tastes that not even sure we like them, ugly as hell, but beauty is dead. These totally void the question of the painter alignment chart -  what did Hainley say about Dianna Molzan, they "vogue their structure"? These are like painting trying to turn itself into a car. Even the dumbly painted ones, paintings trying to pretend they're a cat. 

See too: Richard Aldrich at Gladstone Gallery, Torey Thornton at Essex Street

Carlos Reyes at Soft Opening

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It's about time the techno-conceptual and the surreal had their current vogues assimilated. Martin Creed's lights turning on and off with a more technically advanced press spanking.

 Past: Carlos Reyes at Waldo

"aboringdystopia or the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey. A time machine built in Self-Storage by incompetent tech bros in Dallas. That vaguely sci-fi style of Artviewer.org. There's something that draws us to tech-fantasy in the ruins, the outskirts and desolation and the way capitalism inhabits it. ... Worth it for the photos alone.."

 full: Carlos Reyes at Waldo

 Past: Christopher Williams 

"But [Williams'] en abyme of institutional/self reflection requires an outside party to discern the navel's tea leaves. Otherwise it's just tying up the institution in your ornate slick personal knots to look at your button. Otherwise it's just kink. "

"Williams' institutional mirroring... also simply multiplies and reiterates its institutional halos."

"MoMA finally succumbing to its role mass incarcerating tourists  ... hard to see the decades’ work or installation subtlety amongst the brambles of families asking themselves aloud, literally “When do we get to see Matisse?” the Frenchman whose tickets are timed before you can even get in line and so the Williams show acts as a sort of slumbering-area for the masses ...The punchline to this whole joke, is that there is no punchline at all, the wall texts have been eliminated..."

"Commuting in the same deception, that no amount of looking will explain the object/image, they are representations, deferring elsewhere, and never conceding what lay beneath."

All: Christopher Williams 

Goutam Ghosh at STANDARD (OSLO)

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Anyone spending anytime reading Tufte understands that information is more interesting than painting. (Tufte should be handed out in drawing/painting 101.) This because we are hardwired to seek and the roulette wheel of information skimming (more than actually discovering information) is what triggers dopamine reward centers. So when a painting lures a visual array that we might could process, there's an intrinsic nervous response to its search. Surely our rat brains will make some meaning of this. We're desperate to. Twombly or Griffa, yeah. Information age symbolism? But a bit yellower, warmer, threatening its loss. 

See too: Antek Walczak at Jenny’s, Jordan Wolfson at Sadie Coles HQ, Yellowing

Past: Nancy Lupo

"Like eye goo, stuf's service is its waste, a continual sloughing, so we can remain fresh, clean. Stuf accumulates, piles, is shed. Stuff is quasi things, is transient, transactional. A disposable fork is, like, quintessential stuf.."

"Stuf becomes subject. Curdles a skin, a flake to slough. Contaminates, spreads. "Disposable." "Flushable." Problems in city pipes, amassing with congealed human grease to create clogs from hell. "Behold The Fatberg: London's 130-Ton, 'Rock-Solid' Sewer Blockage" A world unable to contain our disposability. Reamasses elsewhere.."

Read full: Nancy Lupo at Sydney, Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite, Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Nancy Lupo at 1857, Nancy Lupo at Antenna Space

 Past: Kara Walker

"... silhouettes lacking color were assigned it through expectations of their inhabited shape: Colorless and projected with a hue-as-designation through our own cultural assumptions, achromic yet colored, the metaphors manifold and rife. Now Walker paints in the colors like an assignation, assigning of her own hand what had been ours to.  What is noticeable is the umber never touches its outline, it's held within or smeared on top. The pale fleshes melt, meld with their surroundings, perhaps simply because paleness is considered to be standard, the backdrop, blend into it."

Full: Kara Walker at Sikkema Jenkins, Kara Walker at The Domino Sugar Factory

Donna Huanca Obsidian Mirror Peres Projects

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10 years ago we were all in an anxious tizzy about painting - my god the hand wringing. Only to now have all that skepticism dissipate and we believe in its showroom, with spirit, animism, whatever addendum/dance in front of it? What happened? This is steroidal. A possibility that nothing changed. Maybe all we ever wanted, invented, was new excuses for modernism. New excuses for a new old painting. 

Past: Andrea Bowers

"Surely the protest sign is a populace's stealing back the language of advertising for its own self [...].  the protest sign attempts to recoup a voice that has been disenfranchised by a powerful who can drone it out with the turn of a monied knob. [...] When the protest sign already has all the coronating volume of white walls and press packets and being sold in a blue chip gallery as a commodity it may no longer be protest sign."

"..."Art, despite all its PR and back patting as a common good, is a privatized endeavor.  Museums are behind paywalls, is a pony show of the elite. Art is not medicine, it is only sold as such. The monuments of art will never be as public as an actual class consciousness, as the public itself, which the phrase already was."

read full: Andrea Bowers at Capitain Petzel, Andrea Bowers at Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst

Sophie Barber at Alison Jacques

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A mutation, demanded by an increasingly virtual world, plants a flag in physicality, inflated and crusty. New harder forms of materiality required as we personally all desensitize to images. Still painting. (Minus the difficult corpulence of Gina Beavers.) An attempt to give warm tatters to cold images - distressing its denim. (So Wolfgang Tillmans makes sense.) A new nostalgia. A new reclaimed wood, new reclamation of images. Plastic technologies for. It's sort of the moral program of painting to do so. 

See too: Wolfgang Tillmans at Galerie Buchholz, Wolfgang Tillmans, Gina Beavers, Materialphilia

Yasutaka Kojima at Yuka Tsuruno Gallery

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attempt to give these nonspaces some crown of silver attention, preservation. Not the nihilistic irony of Smithson's New Jersey "monuments" nor the dislocation of internet trend's "liminal spaces." The above attempt nobility, resurrection even. The streets are even cleaned, lacking the usual detritus in sleeping corners (a single remaining cigarette butt is in right angle alignment) nary a wet newspaper or tattered bag and wondering if Kojima sweeps before, or if they're photoshop sparkled. The desire is the same. Many artists trying to deal with these spatial leftovers and Kojima seems interested in remembering it fondly. At the other end, in hell, there's the trend for "Modern Gothic" exacerbating the pain. Merely a difference of temperament. The point is there's an anxiety for everyone.

See too: Modern Gothic

Ilê Sartuzi at Auroras

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The reduction of a form to its comical base. At the other end, in hell, they're remaking Scenes from of a Marriage, shiny new, actors so gleaming they may as well be chrome. But the form is one we implicitly understand, a high budget is superfluous. Here given exactly what it needs, no Oursler excitement, just plain dressing, banal life. Not even sure it matters that we can't watch it, we might already know what it says. Scenes from a theater, not a whole pornographic thing. 

Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya at Murmurs

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Book title; Elongated Necks: Italian Mannerism through Anime Mech: mutant figuration throughout history. There's some type of desire for a new physicality. More potent forms of body. Harder forms of body. Evangelion EVAs, a mech that bleeds. Transformers, no coherence to their machine, only endless CGI particles. Gore is just a body undergoing process based abstraction. Teratomas. The body goes rococo. Your face goes baroque. Not to even mention the cyborg. An unidentified animal washes up on shore, decomposing, mythical. The mutation on the mutation, an ever growing corpus. Necks selected for desire, lengthening. John Currin comedy. H.R. Giger's sudden high art popularity. Akira: Tetsuo's corpus extrapolates itself. Ballard's Crash, surprisingly sensuous. Biological tech atrocity. Calvin Klein models, their own El Grecoing body. Etiolated males. The Thing.  New forms of body always giving torture of yours.

Simon Fujiwara at Fondazione Prada

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It is easy to say what's good/affective about these. It is ideology uncanny, the way the arcade is the cultural mythos machine, made topsy turvy. Fujiawara's production of meaning is a big cartoon factory. Artists blow up a mall, rearrange cultural debris. Edutainment gone haywire: Dr. Frankenstein reanimates a trade show. The ideology of display into comedy for it. Etc. Learning, but like, stupidity is the funhouse of meaning. Which the exhibition was always the factory of, and we ostensibly liked this, meaning, and ostensibly this was good meaning, rather than ideology. But this became two meats hard to slice. The ability to construct meaning itself became the ideologic function of the gallery that its look lended. And here it was in a kaleidoscope. 

"This is how my world looks – diverse, confusing, exciting, incomprehensible, fearful – and I can only make work that is close to my experience. ... And then, from that, how we construct meaning for ourselves now, amid those ruins. Throughout everything we haven’t lost a desire for meaning or belonging but maybe in a ‘post-meaning’ world we can still have a meaningful existence. I’m trying to understand if this is possible or if the search for it is meaningless."

There's no truth here, just the carnival of experience, fun house made from the funhouse glass of cultural knowing, the warbled mirror of art's stuttering experience. 

see too: Simon Fujiwara at Dvir(1), Simon Fujiwara at Dvir(2)

Past: Simon Fujiwara

"Fujiwara's accumulations of content are not the endless permutations of cultural arrangements that make culture "speak," ala Danny McDonald et al. Instead they seem a return to narrative invested in its display systems that constructs that cultural story, history, myth, not just our garbage. Whether or not it actually assembles meaning, it at least looks a little more like it, by rebuilding the structures that construct it."

Fujiwara: "I was teaching in Amsterdam and wanted to take the students to see the house as we were discussing monuments and how ideology translates into material language."
"The Anne Frank House [...] is one of the few places where every mundane detail of a home—door handles, wallpaper, floorboards—transcend their material status and become symbols of tragedy and hope."
"Inside the house, I was told by the guide that almost nothing of the original house remains except for the structure. That the house was only purchased after the making of the first Hollywood film about Anne Frank"

Full: Simon Fujiwara at Dvir(1), Simon Fujiwara at Dvir(2)

Martine Syms at Bridget Donahue

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Thomas Hirschhorn also started as a graphic designer, also invested in tape construction, but Hirschhorn sold his fandom of philosophy as philosophy (a Gramsci t-shirt in the form of artwork) which was bogus if endearing. Syms' constructions are less the constructions of phallic monument broadcasting the big self than a collecting flotsam of identity, the graphic ring of scum clinging each our cup's rim. The debris of culture, a collective identity. This is our stuf. The undigested matter clogging our pipes and our consciousness. This is afterall the post-Harrison/Genzken aftermath. It's all a bit Unmonumental, which like Maggie Lee, an interest in the becoming stage, self-consciousness and construction. We become the diggers, forced investigators, of our own world. 

See too: Martine Syms at Human Resources, Maggie Lee, Thomas Hirschhorn 

 Past: Martine Syms 

"Proposals for a radical graphic design often denotes expensive fonts and overlaid text, merely beefing up the intensity of its devices whereas a real radical design would be one which self-exposes the mechanisms of its influence. There is a lot of very unradical graphic design in museum exhibitions whose stark posters and mild conceptual parameters stand in for radicality by being visually and thematically aggressive. This isn't now to put forth Syms as radical graphic design but that a graphic design actually filleting itself probably wouldn't look like graphic design at all and within Syms' claims to be a designer in the visual production of identity is at least closer."

Past: Martine Syms at Human Resources

 Past: Nina Canell

"not entirely convinced art's absorption of the technologic look isn't simply a means to bring something it doesn't understand into a realm it does in order to feel some small control over it. Let's face it, the world has moved beyond pretty much everyone, we only get our small corner of it, and it would make psychologic sense to develop pathologies in order to feel control of something you have little over."

Full: Nina Canell at Wien Lukatsch

Past: N. Dash

"swatches of touch, the anthropological preserves of our dissolving physical world. These are like catalogs for its remains, our once sensual pleasure distributed over digital networks."  "The Kunstkammer conveyed symbolically the patron's control of the world through its indoor, microscopic reproduction" "but no one is that hubristic today, these are about the loss of that, mourning it, our desire to once again touch things again, like all those salvaged wood paneled Brooklyn bars, churches for mourning"

 at base they are still the butterflies, material, pinned behind glass, catalogs of physical sensations you see but cannot touch. Materiality porn. "...art is the world's development project in all the ways to [build] a materiality so strong it visually empaths itself, feel something through glass.""Our touch, now more than ever, comes from sight, comes from packages of it in the high definition of images and advertising, we feel through sight"

Read full: N. Dash at Casey Kaplan(1), N. Dash at Casey Kaplan(2)

Stanislava Kovalcikova at 15 Orient

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The "creepy changing painting" - behind your back the camera reveals portraits melting to skulls - another horror trope situating art as haunting metaphor. The trope literalizes the living-dead presence of subject, held suspended in oil, an undead thing. Portraits were always slightly creepy, and this was the hamfisted cinematic realization of that. Portraits "go creepy." Painting was always spooky magic. Conjuring souls before mechanical reproduction. And painters at pains to make some sort of twist on the corpse, acknowledge dead things. Richter drained the blood. Tuymans warmed the corpse. Some just blast holes in it. But all portraits acknowledge their corpse maybe, some more so than others. I think there was a Ghostbusters about this.

Megan Plunkett at Emalin

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Dear grad students: a history of the concept of "paintings' eyes that follow you" - the "Mona Lisa effect" - literalized in the trope of "portrait painting peephole" - villain's eyes peering out at meddling kids. Essays on Sherrie Levine explain the feeling of being observed. Michael Fried's viewer/actor stage. The anxiety of observing, the anxiety of art, the anxiety of being unable to produce "meaning." Feeling others eyes at "not getting it," a social panopticon appears, "surely this is a joke." The Emperor's new clothes, one feeling exposed. 

Thus the artwork mutates to clue boards, becomes mystery awaiting its detective.

"There is a parallel between conceptual art and murder scenes. ... turning a messy world into object, language, into document. Turn a world's blood and guts into evidence ... Both the detective and the conceptual artist turn the world into a story, relying on aesthetic or truth, it's attempting one that you can get an audience to swallow, convince."

"[Art] is a cultural structure such that [its] prize is "what it is about." ...  there is something to be unlocked, understood. There is something to be won. This is the belief. Even the hardest attempts to slap the viewer with just fucking looking at the thing are always already subverted into questions of what this visceral slap means. Painting begins to be prized not for painting but for this mystery. And a mystery, should it not spoil itself, cannot tell you its answer. A mystery instead must load its objects with intent, clues, an ambrosia of noir, an affect of meaning."

"But you are not a detective, this is not a Clue board."

See too: Michael E. Smith at 500 Capp Street Foundation, “Stories of Almost Everyone” at Hammer Museum,

Seyoung Yoon at Galerie der Stadt Schwaz

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Painting has become a cultural interface anyway, so these make sense, compounding the issue as windows and signs, painting as adverts for painting itself, infographic without info, board without bulletin. But slick affect of tech niceties. What poetry and advert copy have in common, unburdened with having to say anything reputable. "an idea (that sells), that has no corporate use under the corporate surface." Painting after eating one's own tail, disappearing into chimera of surface, the new windows 11 display of painting.

Sean Raspet at Various Small Fires

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The cultural image of genetic mutation, a shared fear: three eyed fish, double headed calves, glowing cats, turtle ninjas, C.H.U.D.s. Or its potential, Golden Rice, AquAdvantage® Salmon, a cataclysm resistant earth.  Accurate or not, the point is a shared etherous cultural fear/potential, a readymade collective unconscious understanding, and these are artworks reaching in to press the button on this anxiety. They gesticulate a potential, a possibility that is aestheticized, juiced on techno-minimalism, to create a Rorschach test reflecting all the cultural baggage they can muster. They need not, nor shouldn't, produce any function of their possibility, because in good conceptual art fashion they neuter any aesthetic to be replaced with its potential. They are inkblots.

There are already artworks with GMOs, people paint with proteins modified for fluorescence, but they don't do thing we demand of contemporary art, clip the image and provide a space for projection.  (See too: Trevor Paglen) The potential monster in the closet is scarier than the monster that appears; an unfortunate fact for our cinematic universe is that most IRL apocalypse/advancement turns out looking pretty banal, but the fear/potential is pretty spectacular.

 Past: Sean Raspet

"the latent cultural desire we have for the fantasy of watching the world burn so long as they are sublimated (make us able to believe we would never actually desire to see them enacted) through the filters of acceptable and neutering forms, pop-film or philosophy, and here art."

"Conceptual art’s hinging of itself on the poetics of its functionlessness, even the driest conceptualizations of dead art scrolls were in lineage with a Caspar David Friedrich existentialism ... conceptual art latently filled with men standing before crashing waves of their romantic ideals, positioning art within a cerebral vastness and nothingness. The go-to form of conceptual art now is a mannerist product version of it, sited within minimalist tendencies of theater, ascribing precepts to objects which evoke an endless myriad of poetic feels."

Full: Sean Raspet at Société, Sean Raspet at Jessica Silverman, Marte Eknæs, Sean Raspet at Room East

Sophie Thun and The Estate of Zenta Dzividzinska at Kim? Contemporary Art Centre

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The artist performing the resurrection on the dead artists career. Developing it, an emerging artist from the negative. It becomes a performance. The conjuring itself becomes the promotion, generates visibility, is the career.

Past: Sophie Thun at Sophie Tappeiner

"Forensic or creepy photo lab guy, you implicated in eyes looking back, our hands all over these eyes ... Uncertain, our relation. .... the ever slight variations in a human face are alone more than enough for an artwork, face's ability to crumple, wither, and smooth itself in expression. Hand manipulate them to be so."


read full: Sophie Thun at Sophie Tappeiner

Past: Pope.L

"but the joke dissipates and the punchline, lost, disperses the energy of its expectation to an audience as nervous flatness. This type of joke flips the roles, the performer now audience to their reaction, making the best of such jokes just complex enough to contain within the possibility of real punchline hidden and thus doubt, a heightened consciousness of where exactly it lay, the blankness of its meaning a projectable void that you can stand on many sides of..."

"Language abstracted to near illegibility would be frowned upon as a cake-and-eat-it-too cop out, the affect of meaning without having say anything at all. But Pope.L makes the illegibility unnerving... Aggravating an unspoken racial relation of a violet people."

Click for full: Pope.L at What Pipeline, William Pope.L at Steve Turner, William Pope.L at Catherine Bastide, Pope.L at The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society & Mitchell-Innes & Nash

Past: Tala Madani

"When Madani's brush smears shit it bears the shiver of actual ... because it feels someone imagine doing it. Reading a story of a murder feels less horrible than finding, even a fictional, a scrawled notebook saying how they would murder. ..."

"The paint - which painting professors will be quick to remind you is just fancy dirt suspended in fats - equates to shit, or cake, or flesh. Light is sprayed like urine. Children bear the face of men, bear the brunt of Madani."

"Conjuring in the virtual theater of imagination's Matrix-like plane ... the drawing of imagination from an abyss, that, like Bacon's claustro-realms, become spaces for enacting and enacted belittlements and torture, and what this means for Madani in psychoanalytic terms is hard to tell ..."

Click here to read full: Tala Madani at secession, Tala Madani at David Kordansky, Tala Madani at 303 Gallery

Pasiphae at House of Gaga

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Pellicer was Metcalf's 4th wife, his third wife was Pellicer's sister (with whom he had children), and this is but one fun fact in lives wildly full of them. Wars, missing fingers, metal smithing communes, Paris, Brando. Surprise no movies have been made. The world is as full of stories as it is of art. This shouldn't feel like competition, but it does. Preserving the art, even good, seems like wrong archaeology. Keeping what we have the showrooms for. 

see too: Ana Pellicer at House of Gaga

Heather Guertin at JDJ

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The static noise, floating through low reception airwaves, the bad television of painting history. It arrives jumbled, confused, i.e. the "What we think we see is a creation of our mind’s eye." In other words, an inkblot.

see too: Heather Guertin at Brennan & Griffin 

Past: Jennie Jieun Lee 

"Like an art museum..  a world we see but don't touch. Separated by this glass, both art and porn must find ways to make physical sensation a visual code passable through glass. ...cabinets of curiosities collecting various exotic tokens displayed for enlightened society's pleasure"

Past: Materialphilia 

 Past: David Weiss

"...always tempting fate with their abuse of ideals, their jesting the seriousness life requires, and becoming admittedly bourgeois artists awaiting the comeuppance they teased. ... the eroding flippancy at life, taking it unseriously easy... which through the committee's business-like approach to mass frivolity finally made it the most artless serious business."

Past: David Weiss

Nicole Eisenman at Astrup Fearnley Museet

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Recent figuration - or perhaps figuration in the general last-200-years sense - oft used its skeletons as mere armatures hanging style, flesh was merely the tapestry of artistic identity, brand. Aesthetic invention was an artistic rug to throw over scene, this was called painting. The person's face was less representation than stamped by artistic trademark.  Brushwork as logotype. This is so obvious that is becomes part of the myth of art - we identify paintings based on well they showcase the "essence" of the painter. For a minute this is what we all loved Amy Sillman for - the awkward adolescence of artistic development, a becoming before it actually became. 

A difference between cartoons/comics and paintings is that comics ask you to understand them but paintings ask you to identify them. This is all to say that Eisenman seems - even when invested in style - to care about the image more than artistic overlay. This makes them more enjoyable than most, there are "surprises and not strategies." The above painting is basically a medical illustration of such.

See too: Leidy Churchman at Koelnischer Kunstverein, Amy Sillman at Sikkema Jenkins, Amelie von Wulffen at Barbara Weiss

 Past: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster at Century Pictures

"Reading a book in a commercial art gallery was a torture device invented for the late Medieval Era. A sort of mental flog, a public humiliation. The point being, you're not supposed to read the books. It is a show library. ... You peruse a person's library to triangulate a subject, denote their reader, here an artist, an ostensible brandishing of an intellectual pedigree."

Full: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster at Century Pictures

Past: Bri Williams at Interface

"What a time for an exhibition about soap. Soap we consider clean but we wouldn't want to touch a bar found on the floor of a public shower. 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

Past: Kerstin Brätsch, KAYA

"Genzken the most influential living artist not because everything looks like it, but because it predicated a conglomerate speed absorbing any last vestiges of particular attention to individuated objects. And whereas others used this to produce "series," Genzken extrapolated, used this as a means of acceleration in which speed and production was the communication, amassing product and centering production as the point. That the production of itself became the product."

Adam Kleinman in TZK: "as many artists have learned to feed this desire with work made quickly, but with enough conceptual acrobatics to make them acceptable as part of a canon of their own oeuvre—or that of a supposed canon on the critique of modernity. And here, the artist has found a way not only to maximize the circulation of his/her work, but also to reduce the budget in terms of both time and materials—the original shady business of “skimming”, although one that is justifiable considering the low rate of artist fee’s. Within this particular loop, a potential critique of excess is ensnared as another symptom of that very excess. And it is with this dual farce of today’s production and related branding activities, namely the desire for the curator to collect and justify an artistic industry of prefab and ready-at-hand esoterics, that one should enjoy DAS INSTITUT’s irreverent something for everybody with a little for everyone approach."

"WHO says by 2020 depression will be the second most prevalent medical condition in the world. Rats pleasure themselves to death. ...use of beauty as a deployable assaultive thing, prolific- likely what critics refers to as the artist's "advertising strategies" - exhausting..."


Click here Kerstin Brätsch at Gio Marconi
Click here DAS INSTITÜT at Serpentine Gallery
Click here KAYA at Deborah Schamoni
Click here Kerstin Brätsch at Gavin Brown

Past: Nora Turato

"... The garbage of the 'infosphere.' ...politicians having clipped the sound bite down to two word phrases, the fun of creating your own haunting version, headlines like haikus, is fun. Cut the ends off a sentence and be left with a poem."

"language, propelled with advertorial oomph, instead deadpans with its empty cymbal crash; understand the words but, devoid of context feel a little haunted, disembodied, ghosts of something far."

"Language adrift from meaning. There's always more meaning. Like crap to chewed gum, something will stick to it,  Our active pink lump that attracts and minds the dirt, clings to any interpretable speck of concrete information. And hold it for contemplation. Both advertising and poetry leverage our interpretable bits to their advantage, opening us like a can - I'm not sure if we are meant to enjoy these or feel once again dispirited by their abuse of our good nature - our tender top, berated."

read full: Hanne Lippard, Nora Turato at Metro Pictures, Nora Turato at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Nora Turato at LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS

 Past: Talia Chetrit at Sies + Hoke 

"The particular fabric of business suits and the explicitness of world's origin selfies' rawness makes for an interesting fetishistic photography."

Past: Yngve Holen

"We treat objects as if they are magic, we acting like a cargo cult, arranging the droppings of the industrial gods like paganists worshipping more technically advanced nations. We place their refuse in our altars. Objects are designed to affect us, strangely adept at it, advertising like a massive psychologic program and objects are the sediment of its energies. But despite every attempt to make technical objects sympathetic to us, they are unfortunately cold and this is difficult for us."

"That terrible emptiness of objects, an indifference that hurts, and in Holen and other's objects we begin to see boogeymen that we assume must be there to fill the cold object with anything but an desolation. We exceed at inventing gods where there are none. What is behind it is only us. It is obvious at this point that objects we design are reflections of us, this is how the field of anthropology operates. We are designers or our world, of our water coolers cut in half in attempts to find its ghost. There is only us standing around it attempting the small talk of art writing."

"These insectile eyes we recognize is an anthropomorphism softening the blow of cold dead indifference."


Read full: Yngve Holen at Fine Arts, Sydney, Yngve Holen at Kunsthalle Basel, Yngve Holen at Modern Art, David Lieske at MUMOK, Yngve Holen at Modern Art

Past: Lin May Saeed

"Lin May Saeed likes animals, and communicates that by making art depicting animals. Its forthrightness would seem naive if it wasn't so endearing, handing it right to you to care for its fragility."

"Making art that expresses care for animals by carving it in material that - if left uncared for - would quickly degrade and release poisons to harm those animals depicted is sort like selling live grenades in a puppy shelter. Why not take a grenade home, why not take back some of this asbestos to protect the earth if not your home, these animals need you. Sort of expressing the suicide games pretty much everyone believes we're playing now in the anthropocene's foot-to-the-pedal towards brick walls type of time period."


Full: Lin May Saeed at Jacky Strenz, Lin May Saeed at Studio Voltaire, Lin May Saeed at Lulu

Eliza Douglas at Overduin & Co. and Tina Braegger at Friends Indeed

(Overduin, Friends)

Perform our little tortures of cultures. Twisting its nipples to make it say uncle, make it "speak." This stands for criticality. A corpse forced to dance with all the electricity of abstraction. Take culture, give it a little stir. This is our auto-ritual. This is how we make it "mean." Stand in for meaning. These aren't paintings of the t-shirts, these are the t-shirts. 

See too:Eliza Douglas at Overduin & Co., Eliza Douglas at Air de Paris, “No Joke” at Milieu

Past: Eliza Douglas

"...clever ideas for coating painting in a candy shell, creating frames that exist as excuses for painting. Like before's hands which cast spells for some "painterly moment." ... means to fill an exhibition."


Read full: Eliza Douglas at Overduin & Co., Eliza Douglas at Air de Paris

Cassandra Press, Kandis Williams at LAXART, Los Angeles

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Cassandra Press is good and interesting thing and this is an exhibition to put the laurels around that. Basically proof that more interesting "aesthetic politics" exist, it isn't whatever generation of conceptual navel gazing we're on. (Possibly this is because what has become "aesthetic politics" has been so gelatinized by art discourse PR that the "political" itself has become a non-sequitur.) So much so that just recollecting discourse for a reader is more interesting. Just like an imaged wall of culture is more interesting than a wall of art. The point is that, like Jafa, we can be direct without sacrificing art's poetic opening.

Past: Pieter Schoolwerth at Miguel Abreu

"... the stylistically performative running the permutations of their look. ... aptly describe the loss of your viewer-self within, metaphor for the free floating body that everyone everywhere is at pains to describe but not touch. So we’ll say it here, it hurts to touch nothing. So when looking at the coldness and feeling the stylistic chrome they contain know it’s a real possibility."

Read: Pieter Schoolwerth at Miguel Abreu

grounded at Berthold Pott

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"Group shows always look like you blew up a shopping mall, like its reassembly after catastrophe, like hangers categorizing airline wreckage. Trying to make sense in debris. Us, a cargo cult. Us, a primitive culture, drawing aurochs on our white cave walls. With the debris of culture. Our Mystic auto-anthropology. "

"art treats culture as a system of artifacts to be interrogated by its own white light certification process, a factory for meaning production." 

Which this show takes literally. Less a criticism than the exhibition understanding, reifying, the cultural ether. This is what these shows do. Catalog the wreckage. 

 Past: Anne Imhof

"... It's hard to watch bodies adopt ad campaigns. If Imhof's performances seem made for the documentation that echo them it's because they have our beautiful youth retension this conformity to the fashion that will transmit them. ... fashion, as art performance looking like a fashion shoot, is a nightmare. All of youth's beauty is wasted, by everyone, but now you can watch it be caged live in the clothing of another."

"...Buchloh’s vivisection of Anne Imhof in Artforum only lead to her being in Bankowsky’s Top Ten, which mentioned Buchloh’s gutting as value added...."

Full: Anne Imhof at German Pavilion, Denny's

No couch!

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No couch! Amazing! 10/10. What a performance. In all the wildest dreams...

see too: Summer's couches, Venice: Anne Imhof at German Pavilion

Darkened Rooms, their couches

(Top, Center, Bottom)

It's nice on these hot days, to have all these promotional images of dark rooms, to keep our brains cool. The couch becomes the main signifier. We're going to start a collection of these, send in your own finds. Which will you choose? What does your couch say about you?

 Past: Michaela Meise at STANDARD (OSLO)

"Meise's 15 years of reproduction of modernist tropes in awkward phrasings is, like Raoul de Keyser, its visual aberration:  Meise's (or de Keyser's) irregulairty forces a recognition of their having been a regularity, a system of rules to which these avoid conforming. ... allowing inference to see why these wouldn't have been acceptable then ... Like, placing the thing outside the circle allows the circle to be seen at all."

Michaela Meise at STANDARD (OSLO)

Manuela Gernedel Alice Select, Berlin

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Transplanting content into a different frame, here a dishwasher.  The white space of art becomes the cube of watery dispatch. Anything in it will get wet, clean. A fantasy.

Past: Phillip Lai

"What Romance! The remnants, records and romance of the hand, the touch. The expressionist stroke absorbed into sculptural gesture, a sensitivity so heightened they feel stunted by their own fetish of sense.  The fetishistic attention to details which remind us of all the sexual deviant's interest in attachments, space, and knots, the fetishist knowns the beauty of his knot is bearer of his love, the pleasure in pained restraint."

Phillip Lai at Modern Art

NADA House 2021 at NADA House, Govenors Island

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I swear these walls are not white but that new shade of CAD background grey (#ebebeb). The walls were whiter in 2019. I'm not saying we've painted, they didn't, we're just adjusting our visuality - there's new settings on our frame. This new one is more cake like, frosted even, a more indulgent cream. 

see too: A new grey

Rosy Keyser at Parrasch Heijnen

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The secret to Keyser's paintings is that, beneath the scum and the janitorial chunder sponge, the fecal and snot rags like a mother's sleeve in winter, or the sock under boys' bed, they are just really generally pleasant paintings. Opening the tissue to reveal flecked orange magic. 

Magnus Frederik Clausen, David Ostrowski at Spazio Orr, Brescia

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The less you try the closer you are to getting something uninhibited, almost natural. You get raw wood, a brushstroke that looks free. Like it's not in a cage. Of course no one really thinks it is. But you maybe get to imagine it. 

see too: David Ostrowski at Sundogs, David Ostrowski at Jir Sandel

Yona Lee at Fine Arts, Sydney

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The objects of capital, our world, are strange enough. So they become the hieroglyphs of the gallery world, moved into cubes for contemplation. Artists perform the rituals. We glean a ritualized understanding. 

See too: Yona Lee at Fine Arts, Sydney

 Past: Yona Lee

"You can attach anything to anything today. A subway pole becomes a mop, runs plumbing, becomes lamp, attaches a table for when we're all stuck underground. The signs get slippery, confused (the thin difference between a barrier pole or a handrail.) This capitalist surrealism that seems inherent to our age - symbolic orders melt to some other demand. Efficiency - the invisible hand pressing everything into everything else, together, the same."

Yona Lee at Fine Arts, Sydney

Past: Judith Hopf 

"Each brick lain a decision by the artist to continue."

Read full: Judith Hopf at Museion, Judith Hopf at kaufmann repetto

Bradley Kronz at Lars Friedrich, Berlin

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Kronz has shown everywhere, making the rounds, leaving an exhibition at every cool young space, once. Sorta like the work, unable tell where we're at, what scale we exist on. Is this a model for something, is this a representation, or is it an object? Everything happens only once. (Except for the time it happens 3 times.) Then it's off somewhere else. Never firm ground to stand on. A fun press release. Weird enough to be interesting, scrappy enough to leave you skeptical. A friend you can't form a relationship to.

see too: Manfred Pernice at Galerie Neu

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.