Something About Us at Fons Welters, Amsterdam

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A show of fragile candy, soft and hard shell, capturing its affect in an art lozenge. Swallowable. Affect has always been important to art, machismo sizing of the expressionists, the bureaucratic cool of conceptualism. Affect connoted the reverence you should have for the church objects. Which ostensibly released meaning. But now affect is itself the captured thing, the feeling, packaged. 

Ryo Kinoshita at Fons Welters

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So why does labor reappear? Why does "stitching" make a comeback? Impressionism's strokes showcasing its painterly labor. It had been that eventually genius embedded itself into the canvas, itself signifying "art," and blankness was fine. Does canvas no longer back painting's monetary value a priori? Do we need proof of work? Like the ornately etched lines of paper currency, making the labor of reproduction more expensive than the bill itself - proof of scarcity, value. Time equates to money. But now we have copy machines, CNC routers, childlabor and interns. Perhaps proof of work is just nostalgia for when there was infinite time, for when there was time. 

See too: Diedrick Brackens at Various Small Fires

“The Classics” at Fons Welters

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The lumpy that resembles us. The play dough, artists like the lumpy form since it embodies all the potential of their creative act, the embryonic, the material from. Rodin's lumpy men resisted the representation for leaving the remains of its sculpting. Erwin Wurm inflating his cars to make the sculpture apparent, otherwise they'd just be cars. The lumpy is an excess which proves the artist was there, showcases their hand. Things droop, we bloat.

Stefan Tcherepnin at Stedelijk Museum

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Like Rat and Bear before them their best feature is banality, their inertness, don't really do much of anything, the muppets grown and birdbrained, as boring as any of us, taking on the roles of young adults, drinking, watching TV, sinking Karaoke, acting as neanderthals, getting all the same shows as Tcherepnin.

Avery Singer at Stedelijk Museum

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Remember that scene in the Matrix when, readying for climax, they enter the blank void of the virtual and conjure a Babelinian library of weapons? Whatever the power of its virtual blank slate - despite its seeming infinince - it couldn't conjure a rifle outside of what any American police force would already own, revealing severe limitations of its virtuality to the pre-existing commodities already found in its prison-like realm. Whether this digital limitation was an artifact of its virtual script, or the inability of the actor/agents to themselves think outside their commodic prison* it showcases an inherent issue with the power of the virtual as still limited to human ability to think outside itself.

The virtual "White Room" is obviously a metaphor for a blank canvas.
This impotence in manifestability still inherent to primitive modes as it irrupts again in new technologies.

Like Guyton, the digital expression comes with the promise of fuller possibility that anything thought can be rendered, that the blank white space can be filled with anything you can dream, printed direct from our subconcious but reveals our dreams to be mostly the same but with some effects added.

*and thus tragically reveal themselves to be stuck in their own learned form of The Matrix's prison, i.e. never truly free having already internalized the dominant order.


See too: Wade Guyton at Academie Conti & Le Consortium, Tala Madani at David Kordansky

Bernadette Corporation at Stedelijk Museum

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You'll have zero idea what's going on here if you don't already know the projects, though you can make a guess. BC's absorption of fashion-means (not necessarily the clothes as McGuffin that they are) can't really be under-stressed. Launching a hundred like-minded careers since, BC weren't the first of the fashion-orient but their understanding its "based on mythmaking and seduction" opened the eyes of today's Genzkenites to the aura preceding their deluge of material whateverness. Brand was the powerforce of the artist, and confusion, misalignment and just stuff could dissolve objects to the narrative-sans-critque, seen performed in the phenoms of today everyone from Arakawa and Bratsch to half the surround-audience gen and trickling into some of the post-krebberites' conceptual horsing. Much of BC's project was pointed despite its intended then dispersion that now in exhibition looks like the miasma of the younger's extraction of it.


See too: Stewart Uoo at 47 Canal, KAYA at Deborah Schamoni

Roger Hiorns at Annet Gelink

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The Jewel-crusted success of Hiorns sulfate sculptures almost eclipsed the less fabulous concoctions-as-representations for the surfaced body. Here the latex skins on polycarbonate panels - looking like congealing soup, e.g. Kristeva's abjection: breakdown between subject and object - the goo and strata of flesh and bone, and the machinic body ejaculating foam at the mouth, Hiorns wild material divergence always expressed in dualities, steel and perfume, machine and foam, boy and fire, boy and gratuitously hulking aircraft engine, the bodily soft always set against its cold hard master, rigid and pliance, occasionally providing a mild erosion of that order, a strange and insistent fetish that we all seem to enjoy.


See too: Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings, Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Cathy Wilkes at Kunstmuseum Linz, Valerie Snobeck at Essex Street, Andro Wekua at Sprüth Magers

Rezi Van Lankveld at Annet Gelink

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Psychedelia's tropes attempt to convey the psychotropic by finding visual metaphors for it, that while kaleidoscopic and tremulous in their own right merely find analogy for what are the very distinct slippages in perception that drugs produce - drawing the carpet melting isn't the same as experiencing the carpet thawed to run under feet sinking quite rapidly into it - the experience vs the concept, the difference between, say, photography and Cezanne, two poles between which van Lankveld has fluctuated for some time before finally clubbing one far end hardly with the clouds, with this particular painting.

Glenn Sorensen at Annet Gelink

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Got to give Jennifer Higgie Credit for calling Sorensen "post-industrial Monets." If the impressionists commented on the particularity of French light, Sorensen maybe on the peculiar liquidness of lighted night, and what had been Sorensen's illustrative starkness now sights meltdown of a visual disturbance sort, of unnatural abruptness that shorts rods and cones into afterimages, emergency light, disorientated to something representational that feels abstract.

Renzo Martens and The Institute for Human Activities at Fons Welters

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The fathomless villainy and flippancy with which Marten's conjured evil out of hats of kindness in Enjoy Poverty - in the end making us almost delight in the ability to manifest evil with ease and invert altruism to encompass its antithesis in a way even Ayn Rand never could - made him a nefarious star so dark that he himself, the handsomest bad boy on the block, competing with Wolfson for a mire of intentionality, couldn't handle it. And so in another reversal - not quite as spectacular as those that made Enjoy Poverty - Martens attempts a "gentrification" of the plantation wound he once salted. Like Tim Rollins and KOS the power of art as therapy expressive as well the as the monetary redirection it produces is used as a moral sword brandished, and good for everyone. But after Marten's toppling the altruism of everyone else he sets himself up here for the same, and you could use Marten's own premises, you could, say, recall the segment explaining horror sells better than happiness, and present the grimaces here, and raise your eyebrows high, you could and but who really wants to be that bad of a guy.