Oscar Tuazon at Bergen Kunsthall

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Wasn't aware Tuazon had gone Andrea Zittel, pods and geodesics. But apparently he was born under the dome. A school for water. It is difficult watching art's procedures escape its cultural sandbox and enter into the wider world - witness "creativity" against reality. Perhaps the goals are different, in art visibility tis the highest order, where in reality it's the bare minimum against a decades long trudgery toward enaction. Art relies on Buckminster solutions: "At best giving the boring problems of our coming environmental cataclysm at least ostensibly interesting solutions... ideas are less feasible-solutions than they are acts of branding and dissemination, where excitement is itself the solution. Whether or not you feel excited is yours."

Fredrik Værslev at Bergen Kunsthall

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Continuously amazing, Josh Smith's ability to produce a tasteful painting today. And Værslev too an incommensurate tastifying of painting identities smoothed and well worn into comfort: the softness of acid-washed history, whose untreated denim is stiff, abrasive, and has edges that Værslev happily washes away, with the already pre-distressed historical material. Gerberian friend support is made as a kind of joke, of painting "off-the-shelf," readymade and there's a story Værslev tells in interviews, of the shelf origin in which in his final moments at the Städelschule, and tormented years since his last paintings -"for three years and a half I did not paint, not a single drop of paint" - and encouraged heavily by professor de Rooij, he makes a painting to his (Værslev's) mother's specifications: useful and pink with a shelf for her flowers to prevent stereo ruination and does so, paints the pink shelf with the flowers, and this success deemed by professor student and ostensibly mother seems an apt in describing its continuation today meeting demand for a market, giving the people what they want, a comfort.


See too: Fredrik Vaerslev at Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle

Giorgio Griffa at Bergen Kunsthall

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What is perhaps important about Griffa is that despite the ledger like accounting of marks, like most Povera, it provided a contingency to Minimimalism index and auto-reflexivity, projecting a trajectory outside literalist theater without a return to expressionism, keeping their hands that Minimalism sought to cut off. A materialism waiting around looking pretty for its 2012/13 "rediscovery" coinciding with the gentle turn in abstraction and Columbia sponge painting that looked so much like it, coming back again just way more soft, but at least someone "remembered" it.

Will Benedict at Bergen Kunsthall

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The new method of artistic identity production, vacant-token-products for the gallery leaving the unsaleable cultural-capital building for the museums. Benedict has always been, like Kanye, a wonderful producer woefully lacking in “content.” Instead the arrangements are based on the formal material massaged in the medium of the network, buoys in the flow. Though Yeezus was great.

And Benedict's turn towards video production gives the most interesting results, yet the temptation to connect Benedict’s passé part-outs to the subliminal-abjection of the anti-adverts - both creating a fragmented disgust - would miss how sick-sweet repulsiveness of Fried Chicken and KFC commercials is premised on their physiological allure set against a much deeper horror. Benedict’s are closer to the phenomenon of trypophobia, a socially spread internet “fear,” presenting a study of whether it actually premised off a biological response or a form of social inclusion

See too: Will Benedict at Balice Hertling