Matthew Angelo Harrison at MIT List Visual Arts Center

(link)

Compositionalization, as an artistic strategy, might have born out a Broodthaers' insight that "the arrangements of display [were] credence to meaning, institutional or otherwise." Highlighting museum display absurdity, a department of eagles. Oddly meaning still worked, stupidly. The meaning was in the display's pedagogical function, implicitly stating "meaning, here, now." Somewhere along the trickle of this history things got confused and now press releases are written now where objects once again "speak of" histories or "examine" the great big. But its a function of display, of compositionalization, of rearranging signs in picasso-like forms, until an inkblot appears in the sandbox of culture, art, where we move playthings around to feel control over them, wizards of a fantastical land, us. 

Flaka Haliti at Kunstverein Friedrichshafen & Sreshta Rit Premnath at MIT List Visual Arts Center & Yuki Ikenobō at Tokyo Gallery

(Haliti, Premnath, Ikenobō)

Metal, water, winter. A cold spring. The world blown apart and reassembled. A world compositionalized. Three distinctly different backgrounds give forth through a selection process something that resembles a general feeling acceptable. Because we're looking at the world through the same selective peephole. Or is it our pattern seeking monkey brain. But its gone from soft to cold right?

Leslie Thornton at MIT List Visual Arts Center

(link)

Aren't these images such a soft paternal voice, a soft authority. The chairs gathered before. Balanced delicate image. Someone was paid to take it, to touch it up, to paste in the images which would otherwise be blown out. Not really a real image, they are a mockup of your experience. How you could, how you should. This is the water of our "contemporary art experience." All silver. Reflect.

Allison Katz at MIT List Visual Arts Center

(link)

the two subjects to painting, the thing represented in paint and the artist-as-subject rendering both. Painterly "style" is the sediment of an individual's subjectivity accumulating in the granules of their decisions eventually garnering a pile: identity. Look through the glass of another's eyes to see their world through them. We - despite all - trust art to tell us something about subject, and Katz's "self-portraits" make this mirror between painter and self-subject anxious by threatening this trust: painting that feel like fibs, competing styles that delay any coherence in its subject, the painter, our trust for the text to tell us something about the author. Others have called them palindromic or Janus-like, expressing this anxiety over the mirror. An irritant in our lenses, the paintings.


Leidy Churchman at Koelnischer Kunstverein,

“Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1974-1994” at MIT List Visual Arts Center

(link)

An apt time for a reassessment of art's dealing's w/r/t televisual media as its new versions are given artistic gloss of "critically examine" or "recontextualisation" or whatever of their affective strategies and not simply deploying its effects in a sacred setting. Many would likely admit they were surely.  An exhibition cross-sectioning an artistic period by the genre of medium seems to place an inordinate amount of weight on that medium, but its true, television televisions cultural cudgel made and impact, and we developed feeling towards its taking us hostage. It was like Mickey Mouse appearing in so many paintings of the era, the bubbling up of our oppressors in the hands they helped mold themselves.

Cerith Wyn Evans at Museo Tamayo

Villa Design Group at MIT List Visual Arts Center

(link)

Calling yourself a design group you avoid the sticky responsibility of art. It's a trick of course, not so much halting our critical appendage as rerouting concerns, an excuse for a temporary injunction of arts more mannered rules that while appearing to resemble critical turns are more stylistic concerns. The design group is of course an ironic statement in that it intends to function as both and that if art were really all that expressionistically free wouldn't matter anyway. The Memphis group was as culturally attuned as any artist who had then avoided such stylistic concerns as the fashion that today so many embrace, doubling down on the visual psychosis of a culture. These still with ease function as art objects, superficial ones in the best sense.


The “The Violet Crab” at DRAF,