Israel Aten at What Pipeline

(link)

Our childhood figures of action, action figures, painters, seminal spray webs from wrist, paint from sabres - blur together literally, figuratively. Arms dripping musculature of paint. Linework delineate form and forearm, masturbating, spraying Herculean abdomens, Doryphorian sixpacks, statues now with battle damage! a Kouros spiderman, carved lionman, power figures nailed wood, gods of the old style, men in the new style, a sistine God who benched heavy touched man. History's palimpsest of juggernauts Zeus to Antman, a framework to hang paint, "masculinity."

Puppies Puppies at What Pipeline

(link)

expression through other's forms, the works cited accounting its ideation board if not entirely readymades. In fashion we express through brand, we stand behind labels to represent our better selves. Express through cultural containers, languages of mass culture, and the subject dies metamorphosing into its branding, adorned in its collection. Behind a hostage of the forcibly public-domained. You get to disappear behind others'. A system of drag (drag as corporeal parasitization, cosplay) but too the dirty and cruel world of bodies forced to adopt the identity and means of the larger cultural empire that oversees it, i.e. Adorno’s conform or perish: and that there is a sadness at the base of PP’s comedy that involves the body adopting not its own subjectivity but the the larger culture's as its means of representation with the implicit and ostensible threat to not be seen at all. Purell evaporates leaving your hands covered in a vast wastelands of bacterial corpse.




see too: Puppies Puppies at BFA Boatos

Nolan Simon at What Pipeline

(link)

Whoa when was the last time you saw detail shots in painting documentation? Pointing at the paint itself seems to come with Simon's slow move towards seriousifcation, way long ago Simon used to make funny paintings, mentioning 4chan even, the subject matter occasionally Tansey-esque. Comedy which seems to been have shored up to the much more artworldly common form, that quiet awkwardness, that flat footed, punchline free form of humor of like Nauman, say, and you could make an argument Simon's now aren't even actually comical at all, that the traditional scumble technique on view would maybe even point to them being anti-funny since technique generally isn't associated with humor (as if comedians weren't putting hours into craft) comedy is supposed to appear effortless and these appear - and with detail are asked to be noticed as - labored. Jokes aren't really prone to art. A joke is spent and exhausted. So an artwork with its requisite implicit promise of eternalness can't really make a joke without implying that it too will one day be depleted. Prince's real joke is that the paintings keep telling the same joke for years and years stupidly.  Maybe it's with more time that the joke can still survive being even more slight, maybe the joke is painting flowers at all, maybe it's painting them with conviction, a real slapstick subject for contemporary art.

Matte painting: Caleb Considine at Massimo de Carlo

Pope.L at What Pipeline

(link)

If art is some alchemical process for value creation from nothing, then turning poisoned wells into monetary venture is proof; snake-oil sold as a souvenir to the ruse, the artistic swindle is absolved by irony, the buyer "in the know"enjoys the hoax of uselessness: "Flint Water ain’t for drinking, it’s for thinking!" Flint's water is unique afterall, an object of contemplation if there ever was one, lead transmuted to gold.



See too: William Pope.L at Steve Turner, William Pope.L at Catherine Bastide

Alivia Zivich at MOCAD

(link)

The well connected gallerist, the illuminated object, look at it. The billboard carries the expectation its delivery, information, something, and instead the Rorshach blot returning nothing but yourself. What do you see? Do you see two men, clubs raised, about to do berate a small fondling, locking eyes frozen, petrified by the gaze of another, or Gellar? It doesn't matter, the important part is returning the issue of subject matter to you. The celebrity like the blot is a construct of the viewer, a bland bag allowed to pour desires into. Like Warhol's own blots, Carpenter's Cobain, the important part is you lay on the couch provided and tell me about it.


see too: Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co

AR: Henning Bohl at What Pipeline

Click here to read

Originally Posted: December 11th, 2015

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Henning Bohl at What Pipeline

(link)

Use the magnifying glass to find him, "Knot guy," wishing for control, he wishes the world to be rational and organized, his wish, deep down, is that the world be sensible and ordered. Not being so, he rails against this. The knots being so, he asserts authority over them, his realm he seeks to control some small portion of, a symptom of most overly authoritative blogs on aesthetics. The inconsolable arbitrariness of the world is a scary cosmic horror, thus knot guy assuredly does not like the vast abyss of non-meaning that Bohl has been politely skipping across falling into for some time now. Bohl is the indeterminate horror that knot guy fears, of the possibility of arbitrariness, inconsequence. (This is why conservatism, tradition, fear-mongering and religion all go hand-in-hand.) Fearing a world where meanings and distinctions slip, erode and are horribly abused in dark concrete cells called studios.


See too: Adriana Lara at Algus Greenspon

Veit Laurent Kurz and Stefan Tcherepnin at What Pipeline

(link)

Tcherepnin one of the first to finally complete the lap, Neue Alte Brucke, Real Fine Arts, Freedman Fitzpatrick, and finishing with What Pipline, visiting all the locations of the Franchise on a blockbuster tour of all the satellites that can promote it, and CAD there to eagerly document each stop on the way to the finish.

and so see too: Stefan Tcherepnin at Real Fine Arts, Stefan Tcherepnin at Freedman Fitzpatrick

Rob Pruitt at MOCAD

(link)

Pruitt's insecure teenage aestheticism. The high school unknown of the instructor's measure of quality, the criteria vague, the grades a mystery, and the student in fear unknowing "good," knows only that enough will be enough decides instead to produce "enough," the fearful attempt to avoid the qualitative mess of "good" by supplanting the factual criteria of enough: measured, quantified, and no one can say the student didn't put in enough, its right there in it, even alongside his mates more masterful aesthetics, the student not knowing the criteria was "good" was inside him all along, its that kind of movie, and everyone feels empathy for the kid whose insecurity shines so bright, its got a kind of pathos, and teacher smiles paternally, stating Yes, Pruitt, That's enough.


see too : Rob Pruitt at Gavin Brown

Tom Humphreys at What Pipeline

(link)

"Contentless” in that it acts as directives for the flows that can brought to it. Looking at a Humphries, like looking at Levine, occurs “in front of the surface of the print;” appropriated markers dispersing visual contact suspended by the information which precedes it, all the informational baggage flaunted by it’s visual void that the mind so adapted to monochromatic thought readily fills in. Its impossible to even see these without thinking about the system that distributes them, the Benedictian monks and organization of chapels all over the world. 

 See too : Group Show at Greene Naftali , Sherrie Levine at Simon Lee , Seven Reeds at Overduin and Co.

“S.O.A.P.Y. III” at What Pipeline



From Frankfurt to London to now Detroit, it's a M. Carpenter marketing campaign that so many of the cool crowd attempt (with 1/10th the irony) since their elders networked success, a still physically viral necessitude in spite globally flat internet.
S.O.A.P.Y.’s magick and allegorical dungeon-capitalism acts as a fictitious umbrella, an excusable space not bound by art’s habitus. Things can get wacky when you’ve pre-excused them. So here we get a sort of 8-bit RPG of fetishized magic art-items. Healing amulets, and green orc-sax players, Parasols of Lambo-shadow, and wands and crystals galore - arranged in a grid like so many early nintendo adventurer’s inventories. Punning on the Städelschule materialist-surrealism. Art-Magick. Painting’s square like the battle screen. You’ve encountered the leather pants nihilist.
The excuse works, we get some campy-mysticism not normally allowed, but its a style laden on top the assemblage of tropes not meant to be taken too seriously, a sort of fresh air.

Dara Friedman at MOCAD

Simple, enjoyable, almost commercial like, recalling Apple’s early ipod campaign sans gloss, the work would almost seem sketches for Doug Aitken, or homage to the dance down the streets of Carax’s Mauvis Sang, were it not for the recent and complicated Play. There’s only 5 minutes here, but the narrative flips, charismatic actors, and unexplained circumstances make it compelling, there’s immediate narrative: a chase, whose “participants” are nude, unexplained, then we move back to answer some plot, but the discussion resolves little, and then back to the chase, capture and climax. The sort of structural play could become endless formal exercise, and the sexual layer could seem a ham-fisted easy way to “content,” and never resolving could seem conceptually masturbatory, but at least its enjoyable.

Michael E. Smith at Susanne Hilberry

(link)

Always one step ahead of the pack, Smith has moved away from the sparse hide-the-object installationism towards a b-wurtz-like awkward modernism, where objects, though still mysterio, experience no disinclination to proclaim themselves as objects in a gallery, like no-problem, but, often looking more awkward for it, placed with an obtuseness, and never resolve themselves into it in any tidy manner.
From his Yale grad exhibition to now, Smith’s work has moved further into the realm of odd material fetishism, without adornment, in space.
From magazines and fluorescent liquids to weed-whipper-heads covered in oatmeal, to skull-chips, to now lightning rods, and clarinets swallowed snake-like inside pvc tubes, and prehistoric whale ear bone fossils attached to footballs. Moves from dark ambience to clear-view contraptionism of a product-like strangeness.