Elizabeth Peyton at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art

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The joy of an Elizabeth Peyton painting is its mess, the disservice done to her pictured the glee in leaving it wrong, sick.  They weren't so much "toggling between vapidity and sophistication" as realizing vapidity was sophistication: vampire, tuberculoid. People wanted "regal," men with red lips and blue blood. A sickness that was their allure. The beautiful young men are already a putty, a generic interchangeability of any of the men on The Bachelorette, and Peyton's just added apple cheeks, crimson lips, death, paint as a smear of affection on hollow containers.


See too: Sam McKinniss at JTT, "Watermelon Theory"

Rute Merk at Gallery Vacancy

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Cue Radiohead, "Fake Plastic Trees," angst over our coming cling wrap lives. Emo polygon living. We spray representations of this anxiety in physical goo on material canvas. New style on old themes, as the world struggles to self-represent. Here's the process: the world, culture, attempts to manufacture a synthetic version of itself - CGI, video games, American cheese - and the artifacts, struggle, of this process is its own aesthetic, a sediment of its age. Eventually artists package this aesthetic, create 8 bit indie video games, airbrush paintings, Velveeta cheese product.


See too: Louisa Gagliardi at Open Forum

Guan Xiao at Antenna Space

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The stuf of the world congeals a character to mock us. Art of the last 5(?) years has shown itself capable of treating the inhuman as human, pressing the inanimatcy to skull and hypothesizing vitality, and so these imagined ghosts stand up like Frankenstein's monster and mock us. A yoga cushion now seeking your advice on its object orientated analysis doctor. We did this to ourselves. 40,000 years from lion-man to capitalist-waste-man.

See too: Guan Xiao at Bonner Kunstverein, David Lieske at MUMOK, Rachel Harrison at Whitney Museum

Ivy Haldeman at Capsule Shanghai

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To summate, the casing is the suits, which is the comic line, which is the erotic sheen, which is the women.


see too: Ivy Haldeman at Downs & Ross

Nancy Lupo at Antenna Space

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Encased in Soylent - that complete nutritional replacement, everything the body needs, body powder, and of course us all knowing its green version is people - we couldn't help but see their pale applied flesh as bodies themselves and representations of the increasing plastics inside our own and correspondent sudden and mass fear of endocrine distribution as estrogenic seepage turning a world's men into castrati and a world's water into one giant liquid castration complex; plastics became the Freudian fear, of lost phallus now aerosolized into everything and manufacturing changed overnight in order to allow our cheap crap to come with a new sticker: BPA free. We had to protect masculinity. We had to protect the body described as "fastened to a dying animal," in a poem from time when body/mind distinctions were thought clear and imagined a possibility of being able to slough your flesh and emerge fresh to be pounded shaped into gold and set upon branches to sing like Yeats if our passages weren't so congested with stuff.

See too: “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO), Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu, Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Nancy Lupo at 1857, Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts, Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak, 

Lu Yang at M Woods

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Uterusman, whose 11 minute introduction video is on view, whose main superpowers appear various forms of spouting blood out of his vagina located between his feet - he also can throw ovums, ride a pelvic chariot (with deep throat laser cannon), skateboard on a menstrual pad, summon a baby and then use the baby as a mace-like weapon with umbilical cord whip, among other things - is a woman's organ bestowed with male superheroics, as if given the domineering heroic characteristic the womb would ostensibly receive had it only been given to man instead of woman, Uterusman. Like Superman until realizing the redundancy: man was already super in 1940s culture, so the trope removed super and comics just starting appending man - Batman, Aquaman, Iceman, Beastman, He-man - to anything, variable-man, and thus the x-man, x-men were born. So then, Uterusman, if only boys had been born with them. Discussions of feminism aside - so steeped so heavily in camp as to be quite soggy on such rigid concepts - whether this is a critique of culture or fantasy for it doesn't matter anymore, trying to out-absurd culture is impossible but look how far it's gotten us, Genzken too.



see too:  KAYA at Deborah Schamoni,  Isa Genzken at Hauser Wirth & Schimmel + Daniel Buchholz

Danh Vo at White Cube

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Vo, the interminable and loved symbolist, coming out of Gober into literalness. Whereas Gober invented his own icons self-filled - plumbing metaphors - Vo compositionalizes pre-existing signs to move them around in space. Sculpture becomes words, texts of an affectual sign space, so the curators can write their own on the wall. Bones ascended alongside Jesus into the higher plane extinction.

See too: Gina Litherland at Corbett vs. Dempsey

Sherrie Levine at Simon Lee

(Sherrie Levine at Simon Lee)

Not to mention the infiltration of certain forms of cultural capital into emerging markets.

The opacity of Levine’s practice, what at first seemed political eventually dispersing to the desire clouding their surface, the first photo cancelling Levine’s second, leaving it as fetish, its surface, an erotic act of medium. Krauss writing it’s “act of theft, which takes place, so to speak, in front of the surface of Weston’s print” made it impossible to see hers, and others theorized the feeling of third sets of eyes, implying a form of moral stakes in which the viewer really was birthed in a consciousness that signaled the end of edenic ignorance. Levine eventually ditching the overt specificity of appropriation proper, and began rendering unplaceable genericisms and monochromes under the burnish of banal surface, a less cruel and more seductive version of Mosset monochromes, whose destruction of content made their opaqueness a violence, and more like commodity forms, whose reproduction was their content and total-allure of surface their meaning.