Nina Manobra at Jir Sandel

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A lullaby maneuver "...boredom, and layers, layers, layers. Layers of Boredom, Layers of Time..." Framing a show in boredom almost feels like relief, honest - and thankfully not intellectualized.  Boredom is stupid, dumb, not smart, and here someone crawls around on the carpet filming their gnatty flight over its monochrome. The monotone, those fleeting glimpses of total malaise where no one is writing a press release to attempt understanding.

David Ostrowski at Jir Sandel

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Preferring not to, inhabiting the other, the parasite, etc, etc. In 1994 Heimo Zobernig was asked to make a design for the dust skrim covering the Generali Foundation's facade during renovations. He painted the Foundation's logo as large as would fit in the wrong colors and pretty poorly. Refusing the responsibility of the creative act, giving in to corporate signs - I find the critique is in not doing what art was supposed to, soften the facade with "design" but instead merely repainting its logo forcing an ugly re-exposure - no facade at all. Anyway that was decades ago and here we are again.


Past: David Ostrowski at Sundogs

Tetsumi Kudo at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

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Before CAD the largest vault of images were catalogs, expensive, locked in coastal university libraries. Acquiring them you would get maybe one good image of an installation and a lecture, essay. This is how we learned about art. The "contemporary" you had walk to see. Sending it around meant describing it to friends. What was going on in Zurich was a faint smattering of bad images on a website like steam engines. Then, around the cusp of the 2010s, suddenly enough everything changed. The most ephebic artist's exhibitions were each documented in 40+ crisp images in pornographic lighting that could be sent instantly, everywhere. And in the center, in the palm of your hand, the campfire CAD. I have no hard statistics about actual numbers in the increase in documentation but the difference is total. There are more images of many 30 year old artists exhibitions circulating than Bruce Nauman's entire career. There is a Before CAD and an After Daily in this history of art. The deluge of contemporary images, simply by mere quantity, threatens an occlusion. Bruce Nauman or Eva Hesse is safe, but the early-career 90s artist might be completely lost. Early/Pruitt, or Art Club 2000, for ones we actually remember.

The Artworld has always been attempting "rediscovery."How many times is Kudo himself going to be "rediscovered." But the term seems more loaded now, like pulling things out of an oblivion. It had been that books rested on shelves for long terms next to each other, discovery was there, all lined up right next each other. But the attention economy changes the shelves' equalizing nature into a quicksand in which viewing must be continually renewed, pulled up into the top of the feed, refreshed at the top of the page, requiring a publicity, an action, a press. The ideology of the institutional acquisition gets replaced with the ideology of attention. "Rediscovery" might not be a limited action on historical subjects but the act that we are now engaging with constantly, eternally, daily, asking to be seen.

This was all originally to say thanks to the Louisiana Museum for putting the full catalog online, and to CAD for hosting it. Though PDFs are brutally cumbersome, they feel more sane than the disenfranchised images that circulate online. Hopefully someday the artworld invents something better.

Maria Wæhrens at Jir Sandel

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Painting comes with a story, history attaches painters to moments and ideas, paint as reaction rather than paint, often rather rarely talking about painting at all. The relief of talking about history rather than art. Maybe someday this will change. Maybe someday we will have painting.

Lina Viste Grønli at Christian Andersen

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Attempting to short circuit the conduit/loop by placing tongue already in objects. The words inside my head are no longer mine. Someone sitting on your shoulder, expecting you. Common to Lina Viste Grønl.

Rasmus Høj Mygind at Jir Sandel

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Personally I think Epstein did kill himself.* But in an exhibition about contingency this is hardly the point. It's about enacting a viral birth in reality, the Epstein meme is its own title, its own reality in meme-like propagation, simply reading/thinking it propagates it, which like the far-right's conspiracies spread less by truth than by simply continuing to collect consciousness of. This becomes akin to art/entertainment where consensus/agreement is less powerful than commonality, fame reduced to shared-knowledge-of, Kardashian-like, as art and things become self-reflexive self-illustration. Pollock illustrates abstraction, Judd minimalism, enter the history books. Which these are self illustrations, self-propagate. The point isn't abstraction it's amoebic survival in consciousness. Against self-annihilation, towards extending consciousness, what we call viral may simply be confused life.

* Even if we're feeling conspiratorial, the shadow org would only have to tell him he must. Perhaps a semantic argument. But it is a scarier thought, rather than being strangled by gloved assassins, that someone doesn't need assassins at all. Instead people follow orders to kill themselves because alternatives to suicide are worse. Someone who can conjure worse-than-death.

Tom Humphreys at Christian Andersen

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While Hupmphrey's gang has gone onto bigger better things, Humphreys doubled down on the stupid. Paintings like found in the bins of art school. The revulsion we feel at "bad painting" becomes proof of at least some internal power of painting. The Kippenberger game of self-infliction without the personality panache to recoup it, instead, again, paintings that don't relieve their stupid, but rub their face in it, even yours. This could be a Vittorio Brodmann or Nolan Simon situation, in which the slacker ruse eventually decurtains its prowess, reveal eyerolling deft brushwork, but Humphreys seems like someone who might commit to mud.

Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys at Kunsthal Aarhus

“They seem big in the empty room. And they remind you of grandiose busts of important people. But when you approach the individual head, it’s as if it’s shrinking, and instead mimics the violent gesture of a decapitated, mummified trophy."

That's a pretty good description. It's JdG&HT's deflationary effect. An initially expected form withdraws, and the more you look the stupider and stupider they get. They appear to hit rock bottom stupidity, but then they fall a little more. They're funny, but they don't feel good to laugh at, no matter how stupid they are, they still reflect us. The doofus in film is guaranteed redemption by the contrivances of plot and will win out in the end. These characters get none. Our laughter will not be redeemed.


Read all posts about Jos De Gruyter and Harald Thys

Till Megerle at Christian Andersen

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Megerle's earlier drawings with all their provisionality, like comic book schematics for inkblot architecture, retain some of that previous ambiguity here: the amorphous bulbs of lumpen potato people, forms of soft confusion, the graphic line replaced here with corpulence, a dumbness that flatters them, doubt as to what is taking place in them, uncertainty opens as possibility: art's usual interest in opacity replaced with a direct mystery.


See too: Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque,

“Sirens” at Christian Andersen

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Wolfson made clear that Irony could be weaponized. And here a CSI spoof becomes Sirens' lure, showcasing the world as a way-more-than-directionless cast of characters flailing at even the start of existential questions, obliviousness becoming a goofball existentialism, Caddyshack meets Nausea, and the wait for Godot replaced by a boneheaded stonerism, the absurdity cranked to 11 on a world that reflects not bleakness, but the barren stupidity of Hollywood cliche. When a character - in a spark of clarity - decides to de-mire themselves from the bog of their helplessness, "change the world," the plan ultimately involves selling mermaid meat to the rich. Hopes dashed, and meaning becomes a jumbled mess that ultimately catalyses the apathy it depicts, and the plot is obviously lost to a the gaseous settling of I'm-not-even-able-to-mean into the cracks of everything, interspersed with a few solid jokes. It's just a prank, Bro, and non-sequitur the major currency of comedy today.
As David Robbins becomes evermore relevant, the problem of artists moving closer to mainstream forms is that one enters into direct competition with people who are professionals at it. And this risk of wild amateurism in comparison makes risk averse artist shy. Artists obviously do something different. The metaphysical pondering of the mermaid is probably the highlight of the short, and the jokiest question becomes the most pertinent for art, "How can you move into the future riding a dinosaur?"

Lutz Bacher at Statens Museum for Kunst

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Every Bacher work is its tombstone, the thing which represents its end, the last person remembering their name.
The framing is contextually ambiguous and stripped of their time and negated by the remoteness of their handling a viewers attempts to position themselves in relation to the subjects feels instead their meaning transpire and fade. The small facts make them mean less, caroming off the possibility of understanding. A hallucination of connection, of information adrift from meaning.

See too: Lutz Bacher at Daniel Buchloz

Elmgreen & Dragset at Statens Museum for Kunst

(Elmgreen & Dragset at Statens Museum for Kunst)

Thomas Demand at Avlskarl



Look Demand has subtly altered his practice. Look they’re big abstractions. Look they’re not that interesting. But look they’re probably selling like hotcakes with 1/100th the labor, 1/1000th the effort. Look nice, Sugimoto-esque, perfectly unassuming abstractions, ready to be made decor.
The Richter effect - the big abstractions sell for double. Enter the blue-chips cashing in their cult-cred toward respite from their laborious labor, the lazy borey stuff sells the same under brand names. There's like a waitinglist ready to get in line for this, this cash in.