Diango Hernández at Nicolas Krupp

(link)

This exhibition is like the first time you psychedelic drugs but if you could retain faculties enough to draw, notate what was so cool in the waves. Then of course you awake to sobriety, all that is left to wonder what precisely was so interesting at the time, why your camera roll contains 377 photos of your hand. What were you seeing dear psychonaut? A mystery, how art works. 

Michaela Eichwald at Kunsthalle Basel

(link)

What is a couch but an innuendo for a body? Suggesting its shape and therefore resembling its function, a loaf. 

Ann Craven at KARMA & Léopold Rabus at Wilde

(Karma, Wilde)

Bird day down here at the dailies. We got scrappy paintings of birds and polished paintings of birds. Birds on blue backgrounds and sticks in the ether. Foliage and naturalism and big ole pizza pie eyes. Painters that couldn't be more different or same. Both rupturing a full connection with their aviary in the warble glass of their eye - painting - a scrappy Craven brushwork or Rabus slight doubled eye surrealism. A crack in the glass that is style, the rupture that prevents full connection to our nature's plumage, a gap to throw our guesses at meaning, the gap is value not the meaning. So they're not just birds, art birds.

Raphael Hefti at Kunsthalle Basel

(link)

There are risks. In the process of his still young career, the artist has subjected himself to extreme heights and endured punishing heat, he once accidentally blew up his car (and as a result was under investigation for years by an anti-terrorism unit), and his hair temporarily fell out due to the substances he was using to produce his early photograms. For a solo show in 2013, he piled more than 25 tons of sand in his then-gallerist’s tiny London space and set in motion a chain reaction that sent an unstoppable flow of 1,600° Celsius molten steel down sand channels in an act that was partly sculptural and partly performative. No one was hurt and the gallery floors held up, but that these processes remained benign could not have been predicted with certainty. To make his art, and importantly also, to show his art, Hefti probes the limits of the possible, for himself as much as for the institutions who exhibit his projects. (This one being no exception: The weight of some of his works challenges the structural limitations of the historic Kunsthalle Basel building, the electricity coursing through other pieces court a high voltage risk.) 

This would make a great character in a book. Post-minimalism, but bigger. Turned to 11. Those Serras that killed people, awesome. Dealers out of business. The sum of all lines snorted. Oh yeah that's the stuff. 

Pedro Reyes at Museum Tinguely

(link)

Castrated and made to sing. Art never feels worse than in trying to poeticize a politics - its process of symbolization more important than its musically flat final existence. Conceptual art might actually be the process of creating myth. The objects are manufactured merely to gather the public around.


See too: Dane Mitchell at Mossman, Dana Hoey at Petzel

KP Brehmer at Weiss Falk

(link)

Information displays appear authoritative, declarative, they are telling us something. Whether or not it does, it contains the look of content, and beyond that content brandishing the authority of science, facts, and data, all the power of a white lab coat, whether or not it does.


See too: Peter Fend at Museo Nivola

Hannah Weinberger at Nicolas Krupp

(link)

Since Weinberger's generally seem to be about establishing some sort of social/relational intimacy of living breathing art slugs, it is a odd turn now to have an exhibition of video of stone people, an intimacy that, like all of us communicating through televisual monitors, leaves no real intimacy at all. Just statue and flesh, becoming similar material under glass, the mere shapes of human we're all pantomiming on Zoom, indistinguishable from any sufficiently complex animatronic.

Art Basel Miami Beach 2019

(link)

I mean holy bright and bubbly rainbows, humongous goopy aluminum, and just overall a phantasmagoria of oreo-like stuf, too much stuf, everything looking like a stop sign, like a battering ram. Maybe a yearlong moratorium on red, or rainbows, or are we armoring our emotions against a world ending 2020.


See too: CAD'S NADA BASEL MIAMI

Ben Schumacher at Weiss Falk

(link)

Trading one techno for another, all the gloss of server racks, acrylic and glass exchanged for a roughdraft music fest. The success of fail of this artistic gamble, trading laser cut aluminum for cardboard, is placed on whether people cared for your ideas or that your art had looked like a new idea. It is a proposal.


See too: Ben Schumacher at Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon, Ben Schumacher at Bortolami

Dora Budor at Kunsthalle Basel

(link)

A Pierre Hughye for the post-apocalypse, Budor's maybe a bit more invested in theatrics, the movies, and less in magic, instead in its dumbness, which is what we love those big sci-fi budgets for, the vast quantity of ash.

Wong Ping at Kunsthalle Basel

(link)

Comedy in anxiety over the bile we all believe lurking beneath surface norms, in your neighbors closet a man watching you have sex with his wife. Finding yourself watching your wife have sex with a man, from a closet. Penis attacked by ants. A penis snaps. Abortions raised to kiss their daddy. The candy shell animation serving coprophilic chocolate just below. Ping's protagonists narrate their chocolate predicaments with a general numbness. Mama died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know. The Stranger is when you sit on your hand until it goes numb before masturbating. So it feels like a stranger. An indifference, world's slight remove. All the penises look like different alien creatures. Because they do. This is all believable because the world is already a cartoon.

Tania Pérez Córdova at Kunsthalle Basel

(link)

Cosmetics, gunpowder, and volcanic ash walk into a gallery and smear themselves onto the wall. Conceptual art is a lot of jokes without punchlines. Instead a lapse, opening expanse like vacancy. This room is the interpretable space, the gap, where we could manifest the punchline. "The mathematician confronted with fire, proves that solution exists, and goes back to bed." The cymbals and relief of punchlines is replaced by the viewer as critic who interprets. This gap between the returns are literal here, physicalized in the holes of pots attempted to be recast into original forms. That's funny. But not like haha funny. The holes mimicking the ones placed in your head, you fill them.

Sanya Kantarovsky at Kunsthalle Basel

(link)

10 images. Of which 7 installation views, 2 photos of paintings on walls straight, and one promotional still from a movie yet to play. Kunsthalle Basel has always been pretty miserly with their images, but this is a new low. The old low is 11 images acting as documentation but mainly just letting you know it happened through the window you have your faced pressed up to look in on. They come in a packet on the website marked "Press images." Like we've glued our lips to promotional pamphlets.


see too: Sanya Kantarovsky at Marc Foxx, Joanne Greenbaum at Crone, Vittorio Brodmann at Halle Für Kunst Lüneburg, Heather Guertin at Brennan & Griffin,

CAD'S NADA BASEL MIAMI

(NADA, Basel)

CAD posted over a thousand images today. While today was a special one, for the second year in a row no longer selecting the choice bits but publishing the full-nude of NADA and Basel, it presents CAD's crossroad in deciding between art documentation's curatorial highlighter or mass storage locker. Should CAD collect them all or just the right stuff. Miami has its limits, the full thing can be consumed, perhaps even be sorted through to find yourself, or us, but should our feed enlarge, put us at the limits of our stomachs produce the indigestion of our fracturing guts at just so much: taste superseded by amount, the tastemaker chef no longer matters in a trough, and we'd have to remove our lips glued to their hose and start our own sampling systems at the deluge. What is more profitable, feeding with the mass or attempting selection for high-end. Eventually the curator can't also represent the panopticon.


Correction: CAD didn't actually post the entirety of every booth, it appears some booths were selectively documented, for instance What Pipeline's booth (which doesn't have a link oddly) only had Quintessa Matranga work documented.


See too: CAD

“Ungestalt” at Kunsthalle Basel

(link)

Tube goo viscera. Bourgoise to Emin. The rotund, biomorphic. The anthropomorphic, anthropoid, and the dripping and the glistening. The meaty and the squishy, fungal. Glass etched with goo, sprayed. Wax deformed Rodins. Primordial, high definition flesh. The dirt. Psoriasic pulchritude. Your standard innuendo; vaginal negatives. The soft and photo sensitive. The band-aid awaiting its knee. Someone farts. The misshapen; hideously deformed. The institutionally nurse-like and the gore spread across asphalt. The putrescent, the rotting inside taught PVC. The colonoscopic. Our bodies inferred, touched, spread with creams oils and ointments. The sick. It was a lie to believe in machined aluminum autonomy, bodies and minds everywhere guttered. Every sculpture today inferring the body.



See too: Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Klara Lidén, Alicia Frankovich at Kurator, Park McArthur at Chisenhale, Olga Balema at Croy Nielsen

Yngve Holen at Kunsthalle Basel

(link)

The terrible emptiness of objects, an indifference that hurts, and in Holen and other's objects we begin to see boogeymen that we assume must be there filling the cold object with anything but an emptiness. We exceed at inventing gods where there are none. What is behind it is only us. It is obvious at this point that objects we design are reflections of us, this is how the field of anthropology operates. We are designers or our world, of our water coolers cut in half in attempts to find its ghost where there is only us standing around it attempting the small talk of art writing. Artists' recent turn towards this mystic auto-anthropology would perhaps be better suited to more rigorous dissertations of objects affectual torture of us that Holen and other's more symbolic moments seem primed to leech out of all-too-ready curators, but it is true that our objects haunt us.


See too: “Being Thing” at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage & Treignac Projet, Yngve Holen at Modern Art, Mark Leckey at Haus Der Kunst + Kunsthalle Basel, Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps, Klara Lidén, Alicia Frankovich at Kurator, Park McArthur at Chisenhale, Sam Lewitt at Kunsthalle Basel

Sam Lewitt at Kunsthalle Basel

(link)

"Keeping the lights on" is synonymous with capitalist vitality, the blood flow current signifying property over time, which Lewitt turns to heat, redirecting its energy to liminally exchange light for warmth for the corpse.

It's impossible to be certain whether the new techno-conceptual isn't anything more than a refurbished arte-povera, in which its spirituality and metaphysics is replaced with a ghost in the scary looking machines of a predestined future come to haunt us menacingly, like cultures assigning gods and poetry to corral phenomena we are at a loss to control.


See too:  Elaine Cameron-Weir at VENUS Los Angeles, Ben Schumacher at Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon, Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street

Marina Pinsky at Kunsthalle Basel

(link)

CMD+T. Click and drag to scale. Return. M. Click and Drag. G to fill.
Somewhere between Elad Lassry and Nina Bier waistdeep in the newfound rubbery substance of photography.  That photos do weird things in the world today. They wrap the curves of public transit, dissolve from gray paper in puddles, facade high-rises, are uploaded to clouds, stabilized by conservators, projected in darkrooms, amassed in feeds. They lack need for any substrate whatsoever yet the process of being photographed is called being objectified. You become an object and things become their representation. Photography is a purgatory between the filth of the world and the infinite white virtual. But so the wooden versions of the Cryogenic tanks too are privy to this process of objectification as we start to understand the whole world as photography.


see too: Nina Beier at David Roberts Art Foundation, Alicja Kwade at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Elad Lassry at David Kordansky, Jana Euler at Galerie Neu & Portikus, Amanda Ross-Ho at The Approach

Anicka Yi at Kunsthalle Basel

(link)

Yi’s various means of display are frames. The frames, generally a referent in themselves, come preloaded with the expectation of what should be contained. Dryer portholes, aquariums with grow-color lights, positive-pressure bubbles, cooking pots, the Prada hallway, each is a self-contained system of expectations for the sculpture. That these expectations are met with bodily concoctions that actively undermine the expectation is their surrealism.  Like the surrealist classic, lobster telephones, supplanting bio-waste mystery for what should be held as the “clean” idea. Spooky bodily excrement in the pure objects of culture.

See too:  Anicka Yi at Cleveland Museum of Art

Mark Leckey at Haus Der Kunst + Kunsthalle Basel

Haus Der Kunst, Kunsthalle Basel

Sanchez called Leckey a hack ( in the sense of what "artist John Kelsey discussed"), taking issue with Leckey's lecture's magisterial administration of an audience swooning: hypnotic affection that would one day be called a Ted Talk or manipulating an audience. Thing was Leckey had always been trading in affects. It was like his thing. Taking cue from that other realm that predicated itself upon it, commerce, entertainment, advertising that was constructing the world and the commodities, objects, films, and talismans that produce it, and, Leckey, attempting to build the work from it. Fiorrici Made Me Hardcore - Leckey's seminal origin - is only and entirely affect, a semblance of surface run like warm oil over your grey orbital, and in the 15 years since a practice built of discerning this surface force, kin Sturtevant and Trisha Donnelly among others, giving birth to today's youthful irrevant abuse of it seen in the New Museum's Surround Audience and even badly by all those anonymous materialists speculated upon. What, at the moment, separates Leckey from his progeny's use of affect is attention to it, amassing at the very least an index of it, and interest examined, and not necessarily just exploiting it.


See too : Venice v Triennial , Mark Leckey at Wiels, Trisha Donnelly at Air de Paris, Zak Kitnick at Rowhouse, Sturtevant at Moma, &Thaddeus Ropac