Thomas Eggerer, Jochen Klein at CICCIO

(link)

Always surprised when the US rolls troops or tanks into war zones since its greatest weapon is capitalist aspiration. Military's territory attrition is primitive compared to bourgeois comfort's assimilation. After all it was the sight of an American supermarket that ended communism. Why go to war with a neighboring tribe when given a battle to "keep up with the Jonses." Today new levels of tyranny creep over US politics and no one takes up arms because people have phone. Tools of capital welcomed inside your home. 

Poppy Jones at Overduin & Co.

(link)

At this point we can start talking about the nostalgia industry complex. For mass culture it's returning childhoods to silver screen. For art it's inventing sepia filters on technology for the silver haired. 

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

"... filters made to affect 70’s grain on our 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 to pre-placing that touch on the photographs.. .a gloss of preemptive nostalgia. "

"The rise of endless photography filters eventually irrupt an ultra-sepia, casting it in mud, the nostalgia of stone."

"Nostalgia is how we laminate our heads to appear like there's more precious substances inside."

"Art is intended as preservation. Art is already rosed glass fetal pigs, embalmed for interminable annual dissection. You need not smear the rose pig in dirt to feign archaeology. Though.. that would be kinda fun science project. Actually okay lets bury some fetal pigs, see what science brings us. "

"Richter drained the blood from the body and Stingel the mortician meticulously copying the deceased face's crimson lips atop its sullen corpse: the mortician painter repaints the embalmed dead as motionless life for an audience that wishes for brief illusory glimpse of that thing's memory, totally cold."

These are mummies. Dry dusty desiccated. Gaunt and hollow. 

Vittorio Brodmann at Gregor Staiger

(link)

For a brief moment Brodmann almost went tasteful-  but, looking at these one would assume we are back to having fun. They are irreverent, cartoon, colorful. And yet ...  they're about as fun as farts, or watching someone paint one. Which pretty sure this is. A fart. Last time a butthole was implanted into someone's forehead. Today, disgusting green gas. 

See too: "Everyone loves the smell of their own brand, and the miasmia of this 'immersive installation' wafts in with a laugh of its aesthetic impropriety.  Like a fart joke. ...  Even the more tasteful tinged yellow by Armelder's power bomb of a painting. It's a gas. Paintings which look the way 'oopsie' sounds. Whether or not anyone else loves is it in relation to how deeply trapped they are with it. Fart aesthetics in the high speech."

"evolution doesn't always lead to advancement, occasionally a butthole develops on a forehead, leaves a whole family tree in ruin ..."

Elizabeth Englander at From the Desk of Lucy Bull & Theta

(link)

Modernism, freed from the weight of so much bronze ego, returned to a provisional idea. Even again stealing from the east. A maquette for. Admit its vaguely refreshing, with our current moment's endless barfed modernist returns, to see a [s]crappy version. Removing the weight, coronation, though keeping its look, ghost, spirit. Always trying to reincarnate, the eternal.

See too: At one end you have the trash reassembling to totem and at the other end the figure shredded into composition. They meet at the same point, our expectations of art, an object as cultural phantasm...

"Art is symptom of death's fear, and men erecting their 'monuments,' tumescence, to outlast them, the fear. Thus most art is cast iron, unwilling impermanence or loss. But so much humanity isn't iron, instead it is kept in acidic cardboard, gnawed at by the affection rifling through it.."

Ross Bleckner at Capitain Petzel

(link)

Always appreciated Bleckner for this pathos: they failed to be pretty. Always obstinate in their vague ugly. Which as intended pretties made them sad. But there is something about this show that fails at that failing. They look like failed paintings, like they were never intended to be a sucked pretty. 

Andy Meerow at Derosia

(link)

Probably the best thing you can say about Meerow's work is that it doesn't really fit anywhere. Which in that sense it's abject. A sort of non-thing. The image equivalent of goo that collects in the sink mesh. The only throughfare is the non-identity of it all. There's no signature Meerow work. It all denies each other, stylistically or production-wise or anywise. Why they feel accumulatory. The endless sense of having seen it before, but not in this way, the sieve collects hair, wilted spinach, feta, bits of wrapper, a boy's face, almost already digested. This is not the wanton soup of Brodmann or Brand (or the Picasso by Guston trend). This is real postmodern soup and disgusting. Look that one's leaking. 

See too: Max Brand, Vittorio Brodmann

Over My Head: Encounters with Conceptual Art in a Flyover City

(link)

Art has become utter suburbia - you can find the same food, the same artists all over world over. The museums all over the world generally show the same stuff, same narrative. Not only that every town has a Starbucks and every museum a Picasso but even young artists make their global rounds to every kunsthalle and gallery looking to place the new artist under its name - to show the forefront of contemporary art. This is as "to be part of the conversation." Which delocalizes the museum to the broader scope of cultural franchises. This is corporate culture. We are shown it.

This exhibition in turn tries to relocalize in the system of art by remembering exactly what it was shown. A strategy to try and really remember what has been broadcast to you. What you have been asked to look up to? Especially true for the "provincial" locale always asked to clean the tray of New York's mass platter. Or its local stars, locally so bright. What was that thing that happened to us? A question rarely asked.