Group show at Astrup Fearnley Museet

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You could say it's an "everything but the kitchen sink" exhibition except there's actually multiple kitchen sinks. Which the PR is exemplar of the mythic language crowning art in which art can hold a seemingly endless paradoxical traits, until art can seemingly do anything, represent anything, timely timeless, individual, universal, and back again. A magical property of being in the eye of the beholder, an inkblot. And so one would like for a straightforward list of what exactly art cannot do, that is the art exhibition we need. 

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

Matias Faldbakken at Astrup Fearnley Museet

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Do you recall, in the smoke of Matias Faldbakken's rocketship ascendancy the artworld was left blind scrambling to adhere a politic for it, to make a critical foundation for the artworld's hot new power iconography, unable to accept that how it looked, rather than any little content it contained, was its appeal. Who in that moment didn’t want have to their big fuck-all paintings and sell it too.  Objects representing the 101 ways to say "no." The ironic self-awareness of Faldbakken’s sculpture, like Fontaine, made its recycling of an already co-opted language acceptable, the viewer being smarter than the sculpture was a sales value added.  The comedy today: after such years of "negative expression" one is now looking any such ways to escape the bed one lain. "His artistic practice previously revolved around the concept of negation as it is expressed in avant-garde art and underground culture."