Kiki Kogelnik at MOSTYN

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Art doesn't quite buoy a mood, doesn't quite levity the situation. I suppose that's why we don't put cheery art at funerals - we wear black, play pipes. It would be absurd to do otherwise, to try "brightening the mood." Art isn't escapism, there's no suspension of disbelief, it just sits there in front of you. You see your face as some cartoon. You are left to sort it out. We pick up the pieces.

Shimon Minamikawa at Lulu Annex

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"fraught tradition of painting and repetition. One thinks of everything from Morandi’s heartbreakingly beautiful depictions of vases and bottles to On Kawara’s dry, no frills paintings of dates. The German painter Peter Dreher’s commitment to painting the same exact drinking glass for decades comes to mind."

would like to think of CAWD in this way, repetition, attempting to bracket something, everyday looking at the same glass. 

See too: Glass

Tom Wesselmann at Nouveau Musée National de Monaco

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While this exhibition is relatively Playboy tasteful, Wesselmann has gone Hustler before. Though Wesselmann - as far as I can tell - has never actually depicted coitus. Great American Nude #87 is as explicit as he gets, and is perhaps most off-putting in the thought that that there are 87 more of these. I don't think its defense enough to say Wesselmann merely had "a love for women" as people seem to say. It may have been a love totemizing and pedestalizing the idea of "woman" but not necessarily women, since individuals are scrubbed of their faces like pink erasers. Thankfully they do get to keep their sexual organs. But, even with genitals intact, these women don't ever get laid, there is never a penetrative act*, the women never even pleasuring themselves. The pleasure they do get is the classic centerfold delight of just being an object of desire; women seemingly made orgasmic, titillated, by the eye itself. Maybe this is all obvious. Maybe the women are just happy that they got to keep their pink bits, if not their eyes. If they were allowed eyes, we can guess the look they'd be giving us, because its culturally encoded in us. But the women, despite any desire they exude, remain pure to intrusion, any penetration, even the corruption of their own devices or hands. A little agency on the part of the women might allow the virginal fantasy popped, and the commodity can't come unshrinkwrapped. The women are instead held at that mythic distance that feels a lot like (is) objectification that is desire/want perhaps come to be misunderstood as love. And Wesselmann's few penis paintings look like underwater photos of dull-headed sharks on the hunt. We haven't moved past this essentialism. Sexual dimorphism in humans is actually pretty low comparatively yet we invent this distance, must continually highlight it, perform it, seemingly incant it. Surely they are about heterosexual desire, its glossy magazine version. And are, almost by definition, sexist. Maybe this is all obvious. Maybe we can find some complexity in that. Worldcat shows I'm a couple thousand miles, or Amazon shows I'm 65$, away from the essays on the matter. Which I would like to read an astute defense. Because one of the paintings is a shelf with Mayonnaise and a ripe red tomato, which is a cruel Sarah Lucas sculpture if there ever was one.


See too: Betty Tompkins at Rodolphe Janssen, Lisa Yuskavage at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Nicola Tyson at Friedrich Petzel,Nicola Tyson at Nathalie Obadia
*Found a single image of a negative-shape penis about to enter a lipsticked mouth, and another with something that could have been a popsicle or phallus, though no C. raisonné on hand to verify entirely.

Michael E. Smith at Atlantis

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A google search says no one has used to word tumor in any online writing about Smith. Which seems odd, his objects seem awfully affected by a lot of weird malignant lumps, red dots, growths on institution and inflated with resin crusts. Teratomas are a specific type of tumor composed of tissues not normally present at the site, the classic hair and teeth twin in your tummy. You can google pictures of these, they actually look a lot like Smith's more "bodily" objects. Of growths without cause, find a potato in our eye, a DNA corruption, the "categorically promiscuous" things sliding into new subjects like bare knees across asphalt, so that black tar is becoming-blood, and knees ground becoming-asphalt. You can move between categories, your body could become alligator skin, claws inside you.


Michael E. Smith at 500 Capp Street Foundation, Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center, Michael E. Smith at Michael Benevento, Michael E. Smith at Zero, Michael E. Smith at Lulu, Michael E. Smith at Susanne Hilberry

Martin Soto Climent at Atlantis

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The gesture given frame, cradle for its image, able to be sent, transacted. The clear delineation of artistic parameters allow fungibility. Soto Climent's sensitives haven't always been so packaged. The packaging lends a sentimentality, a hope for stasis, permanence, removed from the chaotic world into an order, like butterflies pinned to boards, like a new gallery seemingly without website finding itself well represented on white backdrops.


See too: Martín Soto Climent at Proyectos Monclova

“Symbolisms” at Cooper Cole

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Walls evaporate in backgrounds tuned to pornographic white, shadowless, paintings and sculptures float in the fog, as though tossed in the air, into the html space they drift, gallery neutrality moving ever closer to the anywhere/everywhere of globalized affairs. Galleries were the slow form of the internet: a networked system for image trade. CAD is the new silk road, the trade route of social fabrics. 

The "willfully retrograde" of gallery logistics, still shipping images across seas to see them sprout in back in the internet's ether, and of this exhibition's stated rose-colored eyes for a past long passed it, oddly, framed in the context of reactionary politics' goosechasing for a golden age, exemplified well in most of the work here. But the surrealist assimilation of Santiago de Paoli seem the most futuristic despite their decrepitude.

Rodrigo Hernández at Kurimanzutto

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Icons distribute meaning; and, they, like art infer an order that is meaning, a rationality to be understood complying to the code that governs, and so when we meet an icon that we cannot infer definition for, it appears ominous, alien.


see too: Julien Ceccaldi at Jenny’s, Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi