David Korty at Derek Eller Gallery

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Laying somewhere in a lineage between Carrol Dunham, David Reed, Math Bass, painting becomes cipher, a code for it, turned into its puzzle pieces. PR: figures "haunting me from logos and bygone cartoons, advertisements meant to sell desires more than childhood entertainments." The wacky fun of painting converted to information, iconographies of, which connote but don't mean. We feel like we could make sense of these, connecting the dots between its puzzled parts. But we won't, they are their scrambled non-sequitur. What is important to note is that painting converted to symbols for it.

“The Crack-Up” at Room East

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Wurtz's very unspecific objects exist in a generalized zone of middling indeterminancy that bordered, but never hit, humor. Concertos of flat notes. But whereas Wurtz transcended the genre of mediocrity with an overly fastidious attention to his dumpy objects belying the sort of deranged care attended to them - the fastenings and threads so fussy as to feel slightly troubled - the Wurtz sensibility is not a champion of slacker lethargy, Wurtz becoming the flagship for a brand of wonky-abstractionist tendencies en vogue in the background noise of group show art that it never seemed intended to, far too buttoned up.