Art is a ludicrous object, a Rube Goldberg device for some strange cultural malignancy. But art's basic forms mask the inanity. Painting is a format that seems to tautologically explain itself, it's a painting, it's meant for walls. In this way artwork falsely naturalizes. Bedin's objects evolve structures that prevent naturalization, like peacock tails they are partly too stupid for this world, but somehow biologically necessary. Design which refuses to be necessary, importantly.
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."
James makes paintings that are difficult without resort to "bad painting." A distinction interesting since, for all "bad painting"'s ostensible antagonism to rational orders and anti-appeal, has become immensely commodified - the idiot savant nappies now become blue chip trading cards. Somehow the adults love trading diapers. Bad painting not so bad. The point: James's rejection is more obtuse, slow to reach the demands of consumable painting. Like Hans Hoffman, an intellect doomed to make terrible paintings. Or Joseph Albers always being terrible at color. James forever caroms off anything digestible. Elderstatesman to the Richard Aldriches working tangentially to canon's rutted path, instead an outer mud searched through, never really wiped clean.
See too: Richard Aldrich
Past: Merlin James
... James shows how weird painting can actually be. So far outside current tastes that not even sure we like them, ugly as hell ... These are like painting trying to turn itself into a car. Even the dumbly painted ones, paintings trying to pretend they're a cat...
Read Full: Merlin James at Kerlin Gallery
At a time when so many artists are working to backfill their materials with "content" the press release elucidates as ingredient lists, it's become an unironic Pearoefoam so prevalent. So it's a point to note Preciousness is arbitrary. Diamonds, the internet will tell you, are artificially rare, demand conjured by corporations excellent marketing. Which, is all preciousness artificial? Conjured through the technique of aura production? Everything is Pearoefoam? Are artists the industrialization of aura? Anyway its a point made clear here, jewels made from the mine of arbitrary standards, as good as any other here, better even, these jewels were invented.
The simple Brechtian device, knot tied around finger, reminder distance. In comparison, how overwrought today's hi-budget televisual orgies. An interesting observation from the PR even, "Layering text over moving image is as familiar now in memes, tweets and social media posts," - that these are memes, constantly updating, live, cycling between nonsense and prescient. An analog HUD. "Items that are overdetermined to point of banality, yet the obviousness of the operation does not lessen it." Now you get to watch TV with some ostensible criticality, two TVs at once, what could be better.
See too: Julia Scher, Gretchen Bender at Wilkinson
Past: Gretchen Bender
"... the almost imperceptibly slight shift required to bend our cultural images as though Empire's propaganda... Bender did, famously, design the credits for America's Most Wanted, the most explicitly authoritarian expression of US entertainment, in which the ostensible good skip judge and jury for the exciting mercenary chase of the manhunt from the comfort of your home, call 1-800-CRIMETV, themselves the long arm of the law.."
Read full: Gretchen Bender at Wilkinson
Like freebasing Wolfgang Tillmans - the raw particles of a life, its detritus of attention, this is the good stuff, artless, hidden in drawers, in nana's closet. Pay attention to someone else's attention. We of the upturned noses, hoovering up another's stash, vacuums all the way down, or human centipedes of another's output.
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."
There is no narrative anymore. There is only soup, a Matisse boiled alive, a figured consumed, a PR acting as an ingredient label: "arts and crafts" "Yoruban" "Mexican Mural" flavoring. A more refined soup compared to the squalor punk of, say, Max Brand's squat house gruel. Soups are everywhere today. "Soup is easy to mass produce: a base prepared in advance can be used to a support a wide and readily available ingredients on its surface." The point being soups are brought to taste, you might even like yours.
See too: Max Brand
A sort of encapsulation of current art. Cargo cult totems that we perform our art rituals upon. It might as well be magic what today's press releases claim. Incant. And wryly Werner's contraptions are the Rube Goldberg machines of art function, like Rachel Harrison and Jason Rhodes finally shaking hands - the factory, meaning disassembles and reassembles, semantically fractured, as content/aura. Art's ostensible value. The sign is material, the art is the machine for compositionizing them, meaning's byzantine Mouse Trap.
See too: Antligature Rooms p.43, Cargo Cult
At one point we force fed things like Krebber, all the hot white stars of the western hegemony, spammed in feeds, again and again. For we were the Colognies. For years. This was the digital process of artworld reproduction, spread across seas, maps spread like all the dark slide rooms of schools, of catalogs, of the cannon reproducing itself in wet eyed young forced to look up to it. Which we're taking account for now, decolognizing your bookshelf, contemporary art library et al. An artworld ostensibly returning care to those previously left at the fringes. One wonders how many of these will return? How many will be cared for? Each day we receive a new banner heralding the new forgotten. As a matter of inclusivity. Rightly so. How many will be taken down from the banner and be given hospitality. How many will return? Will we see Bispo again? Can the ark of culture bring more than two in this deluge, all existing artists on Earth. Questions everyone kept asking.
European Kunsthalles have budgets with press releases bearing the weight of the world. In NYC gallery will have no press release and be a show of dirty dishes. A Kunsthalle serves a slightly different purpose, but the trope extends throughout.
Mirrors which allow color to spill, bleed. Into the political dimension - a place artworld can see but can't access. Just hope our artwork somehow runs into it.
Past: Dominik Sittig
"forcing the child to smoke the whole carton, painting. A 'too much' to taste, painting. Sittig's had been so entrenched in their miasma (paintings that approached, but never quite landed on, hyperbolized mud) that no love for paint would save it, they were paintings dying in their own tar pits, unrescuable."
"keepers of the sewer."
Dominik Sittig at Nagel Draxler Kabinett, John Miller, Dominik Sittig at Nagel Draxler
Today we should all be paying a lot less attention to Gerhard Richter and a lot more attention to Bernard Frize. Because everyone today is nervous what to do with a corpse, Frize already provided the answer.
Both of these artists used to be harder, and that's a selling point.
A drawing does what so much art must artificially prevent - its exhaustion. A drawing is only an idea, a scratch pad for the realized candy. The drawing is instructions for a creation inside your head. What kunsthalle budgets and SFX can concretize will never match the monster hiding in the closet of your mind. This is why inkblot abstraction has taken over the artworld - it secedes responsibility to the viewer for its meaning - making it an interminable interpretable fount. But we already had one in good ole stupid drawing. This is what we must protect from the landlords.
Past: Robert Kulisek at VI, VII
In the sky, written overhead by plane: "Leave the youth alone. Stop extracting their joy to be sold like a vampire pleasure for vaults. Youth is not some fount to be bottled. Youth is not wasted on the young, attempts to preserve it the cold hands of those knowing is. A canned and brined youth. Advertorial youth. Youth to sell perfume. Youth to be enjoyed as youth is not youth. Put your plastic bottling devices down. There is no fount here, only cold hands."
More interested in the Exhibition Guide. Huberman has always made the relating of art itself an artform - a deeply earnest and plain one. And today we should be thinking about the plain guide. And this one teeters over audiential petting, but it's a risk feeling fresh, telling how far we've sunk into verbose ass.
Dear museums, let me write a guide, a pamphlet, picks, to your collection.
Past: Caroline Bachmann
The waypoint between today's digital surrealism and the pre-renaissance's religious devotion ... the way spirituality has been rendered over the centuries has a direct influence on our computer interfaces. Organization of symbols to access higher planes.
See too: Caroline Bachmann at Kunsthaus Glarus, Interface Astrology
This is just the Bechers with a jazz soundtrack.
Like Marclay's Clock, interest is subsumed to a logic, an accounting fulfilling the parameters. Quality is mere quantity, organized. Collector porn or just something to do with those stacks of old magazines. It would seem to have some relation to conceptual art, with the aesthetics of administration. But what Bernd and Hilla Becher made into an ontological question, Mungo Thompson turns into a funhouse, conceptual art with the numbing affects of cinema. There are no questions here, only bad answers. Questions depleted to games. Thompson trades the aesthetic experience for the trick of "getting it." Getting it becomes the relief. Because people hate "not getting it" and Mungo is there to apply balm that the world makes sense, that there is rationality in the system.
"The theater that came next placed their social capital literally on view, staged, showcasing the finer patrons on a pedestal and brightly lit to be gawked upon. It would be called a Blue Ocean Strategy... Whatever institutional critique it held was mostly in the fact that it could do it better, insinuate itself better, prove the sporting of it, point dull yellow lights at the gameroom of it."This is how you get corrupted. Eventually you get intertwined, which is the same as ensnared, because you know these people. Your opinion is no longer neutral, you bite your tongue, you become a compromised asset. There's nothing New Yorkers love more than self-congratulations. They and movie industry making self-congratulations an unironic artform. This is Empire and its state of mind. Do I fear other's toes? - that's what no one was asking. It's fun to be part of something. The toast and the roast are the same to the professional. It's barely caricature at this point. Robbin's Talent was funny because it wasn't a joke. It dryly announced its commercial moment, no art to it at all. Artists as their headshot. Artist as professional. This was before "Top 10 Under 30"s. It was saying the quiet part loud. Here the caricature is alms paid to deny the horse of it all. Barely caricature at all.
Past: Diane Severin Nguyen
"... Filth is only gross when we fear its spread, contamination. And we have become lovers of filth. [The list below proves it] ... It could be that rise of CAD and crystalline documentation - the even-white fluorescence provided the clinic - could hold filth at a distance, anti-sceptic photography for petri-dish transmission. Everything looks good in the white light of pornography, even that filth. Like we finally had the clean rooms to handle it, not just white boxes, but had invented technological gloves to package all of it..."
An enhanced interrogation on our own childhood's wet eyed tube intake. Art History's torture of Disney rodents: Oldenburg, Foulkes, Pensato, McCarthy, Beeple, et al. Attaching artistic electrodes to the commodified rabbits and amplifying pain. Our moment today: "the body reappears and it appears as a cartoon, which we're mad about." Why? Abstraction: "Our bodies extrapolated from the growing prevalence of data and numbers domineering discussions of humans. The "broad picture" we use for governance. People as populations. Everything feels like a cartoon in this virtuality because you can do great violence to it. A million jobs lost, a million jobs gained. Tom whacks at Jerry with a mallet like an axe. Jerry distends."
The "just fuck my shit up" school of reasoning paint to canvas. Building armatures to spray. Rube Goldberg device, for displaying juice. Paint will always look good. This is a permanent feature of art - that these gold coins we trade are always already minted, you are just looking for reasons to fill the parameters. A backronym for the trade.
Past: Kinke Kooi
"...like green leaf lettuce and frill and Kooi's superfluity - increases in a descriptive power only release further metaphor, an excess of reference, description becomes the watering can, flowering a loaded lettuce content, a power for suggestion, leaving you, pervert, with pesticides spread against tumescence."
George W. Bush's leaked Guccifer paintings were laughably earnest in the ex-pres's personal struggle with representation - they were self-conscious, bad, and, literally, nakedly vulnerable. The ineptitude allowed obvious metaphors that any regular publicist would shine out. A war criminal's self-portraits with all the symbolism of teenage art class. And this was the president's teenage years. Literally looking in the mirror, at toes, again, naked. Later, when Bush realized he could append thick abstraction to cover for lack of talent the paintings became middling, average, collegiate. An impasto to cover the cracks, a style to camouflage. But the bad was when it was good. Appropriate here.
Past: Kayode Ojo at Praz-Delavallade
"...perfume advertisement sedimented as sculpture. Awaiting moistened Drake to pour and offer, not just a drink but a life. ... We like chintz, and better any excuse to play it as ironic, look down upon it. How much artworld glitz comes with heavy justification, armor against actually liking it. Excused glamor are why artists were invented. ..."
Past: Koak at Altman Siegel
"... The painter demands composition, extraction, humans repurposed for painting's ends, how modern. Arabesque motifs get harsher until the ballet seem inhuman doll-like, Picasso rips apart models and we find this intoxicating. Our runway models and their own body's El Grecoing..."
Read full: Past: Koak at Altman Siegel
This torturing our social symbols. Why? What does a technical interrogation garner? What are we looking for?
Past: Magnus Frederik Clausen, David Ostrowski at Spazio Orr
"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."
Past: Magnus Frederik Clausen, David Ostrowski at Spazio Orr
Past: Hanne Darboven
"the staggering vastness of information, The feed we are forced to endure, the stream choked down like faucet glued lips ... the .jpeg format is a finite set of pixels, already contains within it the entirety of images, every photo that could possibly be taken, in the noise there are nudes of you in it, of your father, nudes of Napoleon, simply shuffle the pixel deck enough, one will be accurate, the trick is finding something meaningful in the babble, in the stream knowing what meaning would even look like."
"Proposal: A series of videos of curators explaining Hanne Darboven to their dad."
Read: Hanne Darboven at Sprüth Magers, Hanne Darboven at Deichtorhallen
Past: Theodora Allen at Blum & Poe
"Call it, Byzantine icon influenced iPad Tarot painting. Maybe just, iPad Surrealism. Interface Astrology. "the priest, like the painter, is perhaps the manager of both realms"
Past: Brook Hsu
"... like looking at a museum through Heineken bottles ... And this chromatic loss only instead heightens desire, want for the full spectral ecstasy, denied in your beer-glassed body. Maybe this is what Homer meant by a wine dark sea, ... But, this continually applied loss could be metaphorically over attended, it is too meaningful, and wants for. Its erotic denial is itself a thing..."
Full: Brook Hsu at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Brook Hsu at Manual Arts
Painting takes on the appearance of a widget, a machine for itself. Functionality is an appearance, an affect of form. Like Matt Paweski, there's an enjoyment of the functional object's subservience, a footrest for your feet, for your eyes it displays.
See too: Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps, Sam Pulitzer at House of Gaga, Sanya Kantarovsky, Camille Blatrix at Modern Art, Rachel Harrison at Whitney Museum
Past: Sung Tieu
"Astrology like tarot cards finds alliance with art since the artwork has mutated to be less an object of beauty than a fount for interpretation. Art having gone from object to oracle. The point of art begins to be setting the spheres to rotate so they may occasionally align, a machine for semio-recombination we could call meaning. Artists become not merely the recombinators of signs, but the producers of machines to do this, to be turned to on, set to run. Endless interpretability becomes their function."
The "certifying white light." Of food porn, pornography, and god. Also the gallery. Product photography. To reduce blemishes. Feign omniscience. Pretend to be science, all knowing, objective. If we could remove darkness, spend extra on the intricacy, we would find some kind of truth-identifying substance. We only require extra wattages, a more technical brilliance, higher levels of magnification, detail, analysis. Then it will be revealed. The exhaustion engine.
Past: Patricia L. Boyd at Christian Andersen & Front Desk Apparatus
"But what does this system produce? Nothing except an image of itself. The artist refers to the work as an “exhaustion engine.” It simultaneously represents and realizes the use and expenditure of her artistic resources: a commission fee and a studio at the NASA-grade production facilities" -Annie Godfrey Larmon Artforum
Past: Hana Miletić
"...that labor itself returns as a literal fetishism, stitches mark this labor, look compelling, can be brought out onto white walls, as aura, as artwork. Labor itself becomes auratic, the look of it. Simulacra. Because every cheap objects is an equal tapestry. The stitches in time are smoother, hidden. Hold up your child's plastic toy and feel another at its end.
"Because knitting is so laboriously outmoded it can only be care, i.e. not capitalism, more love hours than can ever be repaid, etc. Knitting is the province of excess time, and attention, which translates to -anticapitalist- care)"
The receding sign, withdrawal, threatening loss, like paintings in the rain. 🥺 sad. "art often feels like a process, technology, for imprinting nostalgia. Casting banality in bronze, silver, with a halo of rose. " The Sontagian elegy of photographs as an Instagram filter. "preserves your recognition like pickled pigs and call it romantic." Pre-attaching its loss, you can almost print it. Nostalgia turning into an industry for creating it.
IN 2014 Alex Becerra was titling exhibitions "problematic whores" and getting reviews in Frieze and LA Times. Lauding him for "the self-granted freedom ... that no white artist would dare put his name to.""clearly feel[ing] no pressure to self-censor, which is a rare thing today, not just amongst artists." Now almost 10 years later the paintings are tame and the "reviews" come from culture magazines. It's a classic shift of the painter entering midcareer yes, but also a measure of how the art world has childproofed itself. No more edge, is it growing up or growing old?
For a century now art has been take x but big. Expressionist childhoods projected at meters square carried 50 years of art. Etc. So no foul here. (And we've said before, big jewelry, brilliant.) If you're going to put the sign on the wall, put the sign on the wall. The sign scales. And scale is a tenuous thing today, it may be the defining characteristic of it. The ability to scale. The loss of scale in image that consumes us. Richard Serra could build something so big as a sign.
See too: Ana Pellicer at House of Gaga, Amanda Ross-Ho
This on the other hand is the Pollockification of figuration. The splatter gun school of content. The drips become sign systems, limbs, etc. Painting is the flypaper of culture. Collects its surreal. All forced into the depth of an Ipad, or again, Beckman. Painting as your punk jacket assembled and stitched with the cultural buttons you find neat.
This type of artwork may be the final boss of 2010s contemporary art. A book you can't read. Pinned to the floor. An object of infinite affect. Compare to this object from 7 years ago. The tied up text.
"The packaging - the design, the arrangement - is the object, the affective manipulation of its viewer: the object above all connotes. Connotes intention and therefore meaning. The documentation encircles and presents it." But also prevents it.
"It creates a hole for the projection of its potential, fun or meaning. ... The art object must be an inexhaustible hole, an affectation of the toy never opened. Like the toy manufacturer who ultimately wins by having privatized access to object, the artwork privatizes its "meaning." [Both are locked in packaging. ] It "means" nothing outside of the inflection of its affect [advertsing]. Circulates its sign within the sign structures of art, it looks like art, like it means something."
The toy designer and the artist no longer design a toy, design an artwork, they design a transaction.
Saccharine counterbalanced with fragility in excess. Laser cut bones, graphite sandcastles. This will all be erased! Graphite drawing: granules in time, sand in the hourglass! It makes the chintz bearable knowing it will disappear. Why does our nervous systems resemble brambles? Our venous system roses? Our love all tinder in the long run's fire. As we desiccate. To the charcoal we will become. Art linked to our own bonfire. It makes the sweetness temporary, endurable. Saying the same thing 3 times.
Drip paintings as hyper realist memento mori? A salad days preserved for years, preserved by "photography's inherent embalm and morbidity." Argument: "But youth should be wasted, sloughed into bogs of our own autumns. Instead [salad's] preservation, feeling always like photography flexing its own ability to do so, holding its pearl while we are like strapped to dying animals, timers and all. Like Imhof's Faust, subjects are forced into becoming advertisements for themselves [for painting], for the thing they cannot hold onto but [art] gets to reap." So you get your big abstraction, at a slight remove, and the humility flies upon it. They're vanitas, all art temporary, your Pollock rots, attracts vermin. This will all spoil! But only in representation. "Dutch vanitas were also a means for the wealthy to signal their humility through ostentatious displays of said humility." The joke is you get your cake and display a humble cake too.
Past: Henry Taylor at Eva Presenhuber
It's a odd property of most paint that you can't brighten black skin by adding white; brown's vibrance is muted by white. While the tonal value is "lighter" the chromatic intensity is lessened... An artifact in history's poor representation of blackness ... in the paint itself.
Full: Henry Taylor at Eva Presenhuber
The blind painter, it's like a Borges story, we see the creation the creator cannot. The preloaded failure in communication, the age old question whether the tree in my mind is the tree in yours. Why was it important for culture to keep dinosaurs lizard like - we were afraid of boys constricted by feather boas? Puffs with teeth underneath? If these dinosaurs are flamboyant then Jurassic Park's are alt-right. We're not even sure we're looking at the same thing. Different trees.
Connecting the dots between rooms we would assume those too are fake modernist "decoys" - not precisely art -which, in the longstanding modernist battle to end art, making a fake version seems as apt as anything. But fake art presents the real-fake-doors conundrum - that the fake requires an authentic. Which there wasn't. It's all in service to the trophy - the token as meaning. What is a trophy? And not even sure why we wanted to kill art - but this seems less an attack on art more like attempt at self-deletion, the trophy hunter capturing himself?
