Jessica Jackson Hutchins at Soccer Club Club

(link)

The ubiquity of "goopy ceramics" itself became the problem. Spent of our gooey dopamine reward, we come to believe our boredom as judgment, which replaces criticism, authorizes moving to the next shiny thing.

Aria Dean at The Renaissance Society

(link)

   Note: the PR contains the password to view the film. 

Slaughterhouse are marked by efficiency in death, a tenet of modernism. So if everything comes to resemble a slaughterhouse... that's true too. Modernism is a slaughterhouse, the utopian impulse was turned against us as efficiency to extrapolate realty capital, turn cities into glass, into "luxury" rent harvest machines. The slaughterhouse curves a Richard Serra - so the bovine experiences a merry temple grand in relaxation of its muscle before getting its captive bolt steel. We all know what happens in slaughterhouses. People say if people only knew what happened they wouldn't eat meat. But people know. People know of world's injustice. They know the the unfairness. The darkness in cobalt mines. That's not the problem. We humans are too adept at compartmentalization. We train everyday on trains full of animals to remove ourselves from the problem of identification with others. Beating hearts in the floorboards of every human on your commute.  But I think we're alone now, where there is nothing scarier than the monster in the closet of your mind, guilt.

Gordon Hall at DOCUMENT

(link)

The part, piece, glint is inherently evocative. It projects its missing part liked a dotted shadow, which we fill in. Everything here ready for something else. You stop the artwork from completing meaning so that it forever self renew, remain ungraspable, await its performance again.

Michael Rakowitz at Rhona Hoffman Gallery

(link)

Totemizing the debris of culture. Art as church for contemplation. We come to see the cultural oracle.

[Art] always look like you blew up a shopping mall, like its reassembly after catastrophe, like hangers categorizing airline wreckage. Trying to make sense in debris. Us, a cargo cult. Us, a primitive culture, drawing aurochs on our white cave walls. With the debris of culture. Our Mystic auto-anthropology. "

"art treats culture as a system of artifacts to be interrogated by its own white light certification process, a factory for meaning production." 

At least here the politics are clear. A giant trashbag in the other room inflates and deflates, turning a political act into performance. Press "on" to repeat history for audience. The PR asks a telling question about an artist who sculpted monuments to both Confederate and Union generals: "What does it mean that the same pair of hands made these two works?" But the obvious answer is telling. In cultural war artists are mercenaries. 

Arnold Joseph Kemp at M. LeBlanc & The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society

(M. LeBanc, Neubauer)

A peculiar fact that humans have empathy, emotional connection, identification with their others. With a sack with some holes in it. These are "masks" but only in the most reduced sense. The face as it childhood parts. The emoji as signifier. You face is barely distinct a bowling ball, in a semiotic sense. What's wrong with us. 

See: Jon Pylypchuk at Petzel, Sarah Lucas at CFA Berlin

Hannah Levy at Arts Club of Chicago

(link)

Surreal lush: plethorize association, fertilize until green abundance overflows, and we can't contain our reference. "It's risky, committing language to such ambiguousness, you sound like a perv while the tight-lipped get doubt's benefit. The words [will] assign more meaning to us than the sculptures which reflect them." The planet manifests unconscious what the spacemen would prefer closeted, our dead relations reappear. "We don't need other worlds. We need a mirror." - seems Lem's critique for conjured aliens. And between the poles of sentient-planet-surface-island-fantasy and mirror not sure where these lay. Somewhere like Matthew Barney chromed Louise Bourgeois. 

See too: Ron Nagle at Modern Art, Nairy Baghramian at Museo Tamayo

Nancy Rubins at Rhona Hoffman Gallery

(link)

Nancy Lupo noted in a PR that MOCA's Nancy Rubins sculpture, located in the plaza, had become a bird hotel. The cleaning fees likely astronomical. Lupo's proposed plaza sculpture, a bench to feed the pigeons, was rejected by the museum, sadly. But all I can think of is Rubins being bird houses. Machines to amass pigeon shit. Beautiful nests for sky rats. It's hard to return from the thought. There's a long history of artists deterritorializing the previous generation, like David Hammons' pissing on Serra. Tom Burr's cruising spot Serra. Or the kids you find using Serra as hideouts to smoke pot. Punctures the artistic bloat. Return the public sculpture to the ecosystem of the urban, wasp and orchid. A sort of embrace as ruin. Alter myth.

Derrick Adams at Rhona Hoffman

(link)

Hard to be critical of a warm breeze. Hard to find injustice in pleasant days. A curmudgeon with the weather so good. The color amped to electrified sign. Color as a sign. Force fed pleasance. Not to rain on someone's parade. A "tropic interlude." Art becomes a fantasy, a vacation. A kindness we live vicariously through. We do a lot of living through these days.

Anne Wilson at Rhona Hoffman

(link)

Tensioning the labor we value and the labor we don't. The communal labor of the hand, the weaver, the worker/laborer, versus the drip, the stain, which is seminal, authorial, and thus rich, valuable. (Which of course stains your grandma's tablecloth and teenage bedsheets.) We don't want hands, we want the mark of the hand. Hands are a mass product, but the drip is neoliberally genius. This is why there may be a healthy skepticism at the framing of communal labors in a realm of art, because generally art isn't great at spreading its rewards.

See too: “Kasten” at Stadtgalerie Bern

Kyung-Me at Bureau & Silke Otto-Knapp at The Renaissance Society

(KM, SOK)

One has its own internal world; one uses your internal world. You look into Kyung-Me's, awaiting you is a little snow globe of a world inside it. But the other reflects you, displays vessels for your pour over. Its why Otto-Knapp's feel like memories, they're projection screens for home films of your - like Koether - cultural baggage.


See too: Silke Otto-Knapp at greengrassi, Silke Otto-Knapp at Taylor Macklin, Jutta Koether at Bortolami, Jutta Koether at Museum Brandhorst

Sarah Ortmeyer at Chicago Manual of Style

(link)

Writing about blank art you are confronted with the theater of your skull, your dome's skeletal movie screen. Eyes phosphene in darkness, in vacuity your mind alights. It's called "prisoner's cinema," a useful term for art. Blankness rewards the already full mind, handing the viewer back to themselves, allowing all the self-satisfied self-congratulations they can self-muster. The philistine sees checkers; the learned, chess; the PR wonders about the things that aren't there, and the aesthete, Sherrie Levine, Rosalind Krauss's Grid, the whole history of Modernism to fill whatever text space allowed: art abhors vacuum. The tension here: whether this beacon actually broadcasts idea or simply clears space for fill, me, this, now.


See too: Sarah Ortmeyer at Bodega, Sarah Ortmeyer at Potts, “Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co., Kaspar Müller at Museum im Bellpark, Yngve Holen at Fine Arts, Sydney, Yngve Holen at Kunsthalle Basel, Yngve Holen at Modern Art, David Lieske at MUMOK, Yngve Holen at Modern Art

Amy Sillman at The Arts Club of Chicago

(link)

Maybe Sillman's paintings are uglycute in the way fetuses are ugly, there's not enough drawing to hold the shape nor body to give it viscera, which is why they have that newborn quality of looking like pink pencil erasers more than human, painting and fetus both. A confusion of painting and drawing (within painting specifically, the processes distinct from their materials we could say) that give them that uncanny modern nubility. Abject, sure. About to realize some full state if never completing it, the continual caroming off reaching full maturity.

Robert Heinecken at Rhona Hoffman

(link)

Mass images are startling, powerful, ubiquitous. Artists had commanded images. Ringing a lot of echoes to those churches earlier, and their, artist's, power controlled and wielded by the already empowered to show godliness, authority, divinity, before becoming a mass program of consumption that artists would now attempt some sort of dismantling, their overlords, to prove its understanding against. Envy or upset, art as stones against its Goliath, though artists claim not to be theists.

Tomma Abts at The Art Institute of Chicago

(link)

The monastic adherence to a form could become its own gratification, refusal, a withholding that feels like control over its pleasure. Or the canvases' ascetic ground a soil ripe for tilling. Instead the cut corners of mild invention placidly chose neither, shaped with a sorta-not-sorta-evolution for the form. It's a wildly unexciting development, threatening the whole enterprise with its contaminant arbitrariness, the whole hermetic tight-ass pleasure suddenly loosed with an open cavity. You can't cut the paper in origami, and if you did, you would expect results better than this. And perhaps then that is the point, of a relaxed attitude or orifice, a bit more air in the room, the painting, unlike a well made chair, doesn't need to stand up, because it will do so under scrutiny to call that air its fourth leg, painting is in fact arbitrary, we can hope for nothing else, even if we had hoped for something else.

Chloe Seibert at Mickey

(link)

Like Dubuffet run through Joyce Pensato, the scabrous is given countenance in style, a meaty thing to be toyed with, drawn on. Artists have such a strange relation to the face, to our lumpen forms. A middle fingers raised rebellion to it. No matter what gratuitous things they do it, whatever fingers clawed through it, we recognize it. Perhaps reason to hate it, through the violence it remains, you can get a smile.


See too: Chelsea Culprit at Yautepec, The violence against faces. Geumhyung Jeong at KLEMM’S

Stan VanDerBeek at DOCUMENT

(link)

A photo of a projector. Two photos actually, of 19. While a video is provided, the photos are an assertion of your missing something, even of the object we usually ignore. An object photographed as totem to the distance between you and what you clicked to see.

Richard Rezac at The Renaissance Society

(link)

but different from minimalism in their contaminating themselves in faint veils of cultural signifiers. These look purposed. Look like other things vaguely. As their power.  "the elusive mechanisms of interpretation," They appear designed but without a purpose we can ascertain. We are so accustomed to objects bent to our service that appearing without purpose we call alien. The power of the uncanny is to teach us what we expect from certain forms by removing the parts that would cause recognition replaced with mystery, instead all the doohickies and flimflams and us wondering why we expected it to begin with. The flux capacitor must only look like the expectations a public has for such an object.


See too: Alicja Kwade at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi

Paul Mpagi Sepuya at Document

(link)

Perhaps the difference from Tillmans is proven then by its flaunting the camera as possessor, the machine which embeds the photographic capture as loss, everything moving away from the machine indexing time we see now but was. These people, these bodies, moved away from this moment and its crux the camera, projecting the point. It's horribly romantic but it's true, time intransigently on, surely stupid to point out, but painful to see every-time we see it, this, our, present meeting some past and knowing now us too then. It's why so many photographers are want to document the youth, embodiment of the photograph's eternal nubility as we all die, see you then.

David Hartt at Graham Foundation

(link)

The potted plant in art. Was Broodthaers the first underlining the theatricality of its installation, the artificiality of its use as staging, the stage, decor of a gallery.  The potted plant can only ironize with temporality clashing against that of the gallery, a greenery that extends beyond it. I've been collecting art images with them for a while a now, its a trope, one of the few home decor choices regularly entering the space of art.

Roger Brown at Kavi Gupta

(link)

Brown, along with all the Chicago crew, precursor(s) to today's painter-infatuations, the rendering and the digital and the surreal modernity that binds them.  Good to see their resurgence with. Imagists who seemed to predict the smoothness and cartoonification whose resemblance to our world we obviously identify with. From the bones of comics, airbrushed magazines, and wry smile of advertorial psychosis, predicting the look we would come to associate with internet's advent and smooth-muscle CGI, a repetitive cartoon cage, a future forecasted rather than appropriating its look now is impressive, absorbing all the nervous energy of today's iconographies, the stark clarity we cant't make sense of.