This exhibition includes 47 artists City Galerie Wien, Vienna Layr, Vienna

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It sucks that drawing has to have a reason. That art requires an explanation. Both a reason to be, and a reason to be explained. The myth of art as meaningful. We've transmuted Manet's asparagus into a cultural behemoth we were then forced to symbolically fund. With more language, consecration, text, framing, walls, institution. Eventually too big to fail. How would we pay for all this gilt? So the artworld invented ghosts, a higher plane, myth. Genius. Dividends of interest paid, $30 to get into MoMA. We weren't producing goods like painting anymore, we were producing meaning, text, numbers, the symbolic financialization of art, invertedly, a use-value for it. Art was meaningful, could be explained, could provide value. It was vital, necessary. My god what had we done. Making art necessary.

So maybe the only way out is through. Explain the art. Kill it. Something dead will finally be unnecessary again. 

Marlie Mul at Kunsthaus Glarus

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Mul's sort of "proliferation of meaning" surrealism had previously been formed into recognizable shapes: puddles, sperm, turds. Its cartoon symbolics didn't mitigate the seepage of content. The sperm wore wigs, the turds had alibi as clubs. Its cartoon built an innocence that seepage was willing to rescind. The funny puddle-in-the-gallery also floated a condom. Now the form is art, geometric abstraction, weaving, with suggestive material, Eva Hesse but less contingent, more mechanized. 

"Ambiguousness as a means for the simultaneity of surrealism. A tree sort of looks like a horse so we can put them together; a cloud can look like anything, much like a turd, some will see interest."

[What 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 ... is its sinister quality.

Group show at FELIX GAUDLITZ

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Is Björn Dahlem pretentious or cringe? Both? Cringe because it's so begging for approval; amassing enough of its whatever to eventually self-monumentalize, undeniably there. Pretentious because it backpads its mass with talk of astronomy or whatever "science." Maybe that's the cringe. Either way. This looks like shitty Björn Dahlem. Which would be a compliment, it's got neither the sniveling people-pleasing, nor seemingly any reason to exist at all. Which again, is a compliment, I'm not sure why its coming across as an insult. Maybe that's your fault. Why do we like when an artwork makes no attempt at pleasure, all those monochromes steadfast refusal? Do we have some type of aesthetic kink? 

See too: "[The internet says] there is a spectrum between "based" and "cringe." And also that binaries are insipid. That there is a third option, the only true "baseness" is through "cringe." A zoomer divide analogous to GenX's authentic/corporate divide (grunge fully Hegelianated into hyperpop, Pop 2.) But so, point: interest comes from synthesis."

"These kinks sound a lot like a voluntary anhedonia, defined as an inability to feel pleasure, a distinct symptom of depression. But while search volume for “depression (syndrome)” as well as “depression treatment” are actually falling, searches for “Anhedonia” are rising perhaps as people search useful diagnostic terms. While these aforementioned and trending kinks enact this distance-from-pleasure themselves. The theory here, is that people wish to “own” their pain"

Robert Colescott at Galerie Buchholz

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Galleries sure seem to have a magic power in finding and exhibiting "rediscovered" artists' safest work. Maybe it's the simply the work left in the estate for private sale; maybe its may be leaning toward further evidence of a politically charged artist being accepted "so long as your language is abstracted into wallpaper." This work from his Cairo days is interesting, but cynical parts run high these days. And Colescott was a master of cynicism. The eighties paintings have sarcasm in their surface, it's in the brushwork, their cold cartoon. They dripped with cynicism. So admittedly it is interesting to see this earlier more probing "earnest" painting. Colescott is important, not only as forebear to today's "modernism colorized" but also in an escape from it, in participating but not necessarily letting the master's tools be the only ones you allow yourself. 

 

see too: "It has nothing to do with the painter and everything to do with institutions who helm our ship's navigation relentlessly toward this inkblot goal. Mladen Stilinovic: 'an artist you cannot speak english is no artist.' But he had it wrong. The point is not to speak. The point is to make yourself abstract enough it doesn't matter."

Louis Fratino at Galerie Neu

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No one in a Fratino painting ever smiles. The highest emote is a cattle calm. Even the explicitly coital figures could also be sleeping. It's like the Wes Anderson school of emotion. Everyone is trapped behind style, artifice, and middle class ennui. Combine it with the painterly trend for lounging. Figures like cats in sunbeams, the same anatomy, tired. Canvases read like the word "languid" in all caps.  All the more if its in the nostalgic melange of modernism. Real comfortable genre. So it is surprising to find it works better in sculpture. That languid calm men in sculpture, after centuries of being women's role, is mildly refreshing. A simple genre switch, a key change, maybe it's easier to hear the Kouros. Maybe it is as simple as that it's rare to see a sculpture of man calmly holding a baby. Because everyone eats ass these days. Simply a somewhat new image, even vaguely.

See too: "The asinine quantity of pictures of bodies today, instagram influencers, lotion advertising, pornography. The vast amount of flesh smeared on everything, our stores full of them, our faces spread at 10 meter heights. Everywhere; a hall of mirrors. As if Bernd and Hilla Becher had foretold of a, this, complete surveillance, ... And our bodies become so extracted, mined, and repackaged, that we start to feel like we don't have bodies at all. Just things, mocked as meat space, something stupid or without sense, or heat, or passion, or sensitivity, but whitened teeth smiles mined. And but then here a photo of a body still surprising, that can endear us to it, these weird incongruous things not yet fully extracted."

Ebecho Muslimova at Kunsthall Stavanger

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I always liked when Bart got an X-Ray. Or that time when Homer went 3-D, that he was nervous about it. Homer adrift in the abyss of the matrix. Horror over his body. What were these things, ontologically? Did they have meat, air, blood, breath? The show went meta in an existential way.  But I never enjoyed Fatebe's similar transmogrification to painting. Her being a different substance than the world felt like a brand logo placed into the expensivizer device, painting. Homer: "This place looks expensive." That her environment was messy with 3D SFX was maybe a in-joke on this more jeweled painted world. But it never felt as magic as Fatebe in drawing getting a whole piano inside her. That was the thrill of her natural world, it was consistent. Which is all to say, this above painting is the first that I've enjoyed. Fatebe cut open to reveal she is of the same world, she bleeds, she has steaks, stakes. 

"... When the [Fatebe] cartoon now does its Who Framed Roger Rabbit thing, the duck finally becomes a cartoon duck, the visual promiscuity is lost, his flesh is now not of the the surrounding world...  Fatebe becomes no longer a natural feature of her reality but a style cut and pasted into. And her world becomes simply a grab bag of digital effects to encounter."

Mike Bouchet at Galerie Parisa Kind

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Your past sculpture mulched into consumer friendly bricks, into painting. Reminiscent of Mike Kelley's Memory Wares. Or the US current obsession with protein bars. Everything is consumable in bar form. Even sawdust. A literalizing of painting becoming cultural flypaper: you take the world and grind it up and apply it as painting, you get surrealism. Works pretty well actually. We need larger grinders.

See too: "any medium, in quantities vast enough, begins plotting points of the cultural unconscious. If you amass enough hand made images you begin so see dreams emerge. Painting, a virtual box that you fill with what you desire, but the desire is, if not caged, steered around themes that can be inferred by the collection circling around them. You can't see the pier but you can see the fish circling around them: the nude, Jesus, the phallus, pink things, us. Shaw's collection is like Wade Guyton's ostensible promise of printing our dreams, the conveyer of painting collecting like flypaper a civilization's subconscious."

Deondre Davis at CASTLE

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As far as animism in art goes, gluing eyelashes to your fetish is funny. Literally attaching human traits onto an object. A functional anthropomorphization. To yassify your copper pipes. Bat their lashes to plead for the mercy of your sympathy. Don't laugh. Marx would warn us against not recognizing the social relationship of objects, not seeing another human at the end. Objects become subjects, subjects objects.   The drawings did sorta cast a spell on me though. 

See too: "...And so if the landfill is hell and the museum is hermetically sealed heaven, art is a practice of purgatorial suspension, hoping to place them onto the helmed cultural ships that navigate time, rather than fall to the abject slaw of whatever-mud at the bottom of the bin."

Sylvie Fleury at A MAIOR

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Sylvie Fleury in a store sort of closes the loop, no? Returned to its home. Wasn't displacement its content? Now its just the language of shopping.. in a shopping mall. It short circuits by not short circuiting. It just .. is.

Eloise Hess at Chapter NY

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How to objectify photography. Encase the elusive "moment" into something more ... preservative. Not the fetal pigs' brine but a wax. The rise of endless photography filters eventually irrupt an ultra-sepia, casting it in mud, the nostalgia of stone. The contradiction of etching our fleeting into earth.

See too: 

"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, can't be blown away as dust, which we mistake for being eternal."

"..a gloss of preemptive nostalgia. Like instagram filters made to affect 70’s grain on crystalline microlenses - implanting an artificial comfort into the cold of its technologic clarity - Davey went from photographing the dust and stains that mark human touch and embody nostalgia, to pre-placing that touch on the photographs.."

 "art often feels like a process, technology, for imprinting nostalgia. Casting banality in bronze, silver, with a halo of rose. " The Sontagian elegy as an Instagram filter.

Seamus Heidenreich at LAILA

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Trend for a pastoral return. Our agrarian retro. A new Blue collar chic. Distinct from "Stonehengification" - which loaned its cred from the eternality of rocks. This is labor as aura. We're so detached from work that it returns as a tahitian exoticism. "At least sticks are still in vogue as symbols of the foraging, our original human toil, production."

Here labor is venerated... The look of craft, of labor, of farming. Concepts so alienated to us that they return as aura, as art. Nostalgia for a time that never existed. Now labor is a fun haycation. A thing for people who don't, to experience as a novel other. 

...it was a concealment: the aluminum clamshell of your laptop being seen as economic product of capitalist innovation itself, rather than the sweat of laborers distanced beneath gloves. A price tag for a face. Almost nothing in this world is actually automated - everything you touch is hand-made by workers. This separation of our social relations we've so completely assimilated that labor itself returns as a literal fetishism, ... look compelling, can be brought out onto white walls, as aura, as artwork. Every cheap object is an equal tapestry. The stitches in time are smoother, hidden. Hold up your child's plastic toy and feel another at its end...

As the world feels closer and closer to destabilization, autocratic leaders, isolationism, far-right tolerance, moves closer towards its end we find solace looking towards the primitive technologies we might find as our future, and the deities we will worship in the trees we once had.

 Is this prep for our medieval future or nostalgia for a fantasy past. 

*a nod to the PR for the lucid essay. One would channel Bourdieu. "The Field of Cultural Production, or: Economic World Reversed": "The cultural producers, who occupy the economically dominated and symbolically dominant position within the field of cultural production, tend to feel solidarity with the occupants of the economically and culturally dominated positions within the field of class relations. Such alliances, based on homologies of position combined with profound differences in condition, are not exempt from misunderstandings and even bad faith."

See too: Stitching Labor, Stonehengification, Hana Miletić at Basement Roma, Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Portikus, Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Micheline Szwajcer, Magnus Andersen

Tina Girouard at Museo Tamayo

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Icons hyperlink, signs point elsewhere. Lead to a history of New York's creative mythos. Symbolic capital as collateral backing its symbols. It is part of a consecrated history. So can't be a loss. Must have value. To say nothing of the paintings.

Sherrie Levine at Aspen Art Museum

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There's something suburbanite sexy about theft, libidinal about owning. Converting another's artwork to a commodity. To yours. Like a coworker showing pictures of someone else's children as their own. An act of lost desire. And Levine presented a philosophic question of paternity that Prince later converted to a legal one. The contrast makes Levine's in hindsight feel less political and so much more about intimacy in this deranged adoption. You let the coworker "have" the children because it's in the realm of fantasy's safety, meaning art. The coworker's devotion is real.

Shaun Motsi at KIN

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Chocolate was what the artworld wanted then. Color on your walls. "Chocolate bars" rife for inference, wordplay, poetical inkblots for the viewer to see what they wanted. Suggestive and blank. A Rorschach lure, and trap. Now here they becomes a silver mirror. Now here we've got holes cut out for white "spectacles," peeping for a history of scientific racism, for our gawking and calling it erudition. Which is another apt metaphor for recent turns in art. Never seeing the white for the walls. Turn around, look inward, calls coming from inside the house, etc.

See too: "The Rorschach inkblot is the ultimate symbol of art."

"In gaming, "the meta" is the strategy created by players using knowledge of the inner workings of the game mechanics."

"in the style of ancient plated mirrors, an object of vanity for the rich, giving them back exactly what was loved most, their surroundings, their homes, their empire and visage. To prove the point the more well silvered even reached higher prices."

Robert Grosvenor at Fridericianum

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A mass-production car must be designed for the broadest appeal, but the magic of art is in engineering a desire to an end where it meets no consumer need. This is the only magic of art. (Though its failure at this is routine.) This is the magic of Grosvenor, for whom objects seem bent to some ultraspecifc whim. You can work backwards from the object toward its desire, its impetus. This is how you see a subject. You make out reason in Grosvenor's over and under engineered oddities, aerodynamic goofiness, his minor surprises. They come out of left field. For all their design, they magically end up artless. It's nearly outsider art. Full of polish for the id. Full of concepts that are never capitalized.  They feel in-process, provisional. It makes them feel like drawings, actual ideas. 

See too: Richard Rezac at The Renaissance Society, Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi, Naoki Sutter-Shudo at Bodega

Than Hussein Clark at Corvi-Mora

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Sculpture had already become a theater, a stage concerned so much with mis-en-scene, vibes. How much art looked like wanna be sci-fi sets or interior design. So it's welcome to finally press the button we've all been waiting for, "play."


"like a beautifully feathered bird you are required to know nothing about, a Tahitian landscape unencumbered by syphilitic artists, or a tie-dyed Heimo Zobernig. Like Sci-fi as excuse to CGI a lot of shiny things, theater to reimagine some neo-Memphis-group for Petra von Kant. ... their vacancy becomes strength"

Bagus Pandega at Kunsthalle Basel

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Youtube is full of mushrooms making music. Electrode strapped fungi pulsing midi machines. One mushroom plays the keyboard. If only the forest floor could speak. Remember when you could buy CDs of whale sounds? The new age reverberates. Here deforested wood planks are let to scream their political messaging. We don't know what they actually say, and that's important to art, which has been absolved the responsibility. The highest order of art is gesticulation. A charade. A game played by two teams, where one member acts out a word, phrase, or title in pantomime (without speaking) for their own team to guess.

Beatrice Bonino at Radio Athènes

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It's nice to seal things. To preserve to pretend that there is permanence, however performative. Ward off the bed bugs at night with prayer. The small comfortizing litany of petition. Grandma putting plastic over the sofa to pretend that is there something worth saving. Sentiment, and praying it's not erased. How much plastic would we need to preserve the world forever. To not leave a mark. Make sure the lipstick touching penis is acid free, archival.

"We coat chairs in plastic to think they're worth preserving. " Susan Cianciolo at Modern Art, Steve Bishop at Kunstverein Braunschweig

Luchita Hurtado at Hauser & Wirth

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The blue chip gallery unearthed a resurgent dead artists' pleasant and inoffensive abstraction? The trope is a cliche beyond. And the metaphor here is overpowering. You can say "I am" so long as it is in the vernacular of the institutions in power, so long as your language is abstracted into wallpaper, into gentle background, affirmative noise for the collector. Hurtado might be a great painter and this is made moot by gallery. It has nothing to do with the painter and everything to do with institutions who helm our ship's navigation relentlessly toward this inkblot goal. Mladen Stilinovic: "an artist you cannot speak english is no artist." But he had it wrong. The point is not to speak. The point is to make yourself abstract enough it doesn't matter.

Trevor Shimizu at art hall

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It kinda sucks that Shimizu got better at painting. "Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point." More accurately, "Heartbreaking: The Worst Artist You Know Just Made a Decent Painting." More more accurately, The bad-boy artist had gentrified his painting enough to make something pleasant, marketable. Tale as old as time. The wink-wink attitude of the early work which will eventually dissolve in time, leaving us with this gentle landscape abstraction. Pleasantry, from an artist with a "fart" series. This might be one of the farts. They might all be. The artist as orifice emitting Pantone colors of the year. Worst, it is better than most.