Jannis Marwitz at Lucas Hirsch

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It's easy to talk about symbols, reference, history, they practically unfurl their themselves - but it is hard to talk about images. A painting stippled with rattails or tentacles don't lend well to consulting the familiar cultural texts - and there's no PR to relieve its burden. Ostensibly that's the critics role. Which, delight in the refusal. Just let the worms perforate the surface, your head. An interest in not having the Tarot Cards read. The worms, the painting, does the consumption, digestion. 

Jannis Marwitz at Lucas Hirsch

Jannis Marwitz at Lucas Hirsch

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I suppose the thing that keeps Bosch from being the first surrealist is his ostensible belief in some kind of truth to his images, biblical authority. But which the surrealists too -  under a new bible, manifesto - also led a new moralizing order. Maybe you can't paint humanoids and skulls without some small redistribution of sense. Which is why Tarot cards are such powerful meaning creation devices - humans are apophenic machines - seeing sense where there may be none, they create it for themselves. Art comes to resemble it.


See too: Caitlin Keogh at Bortolami

Charlotte Posenenske at Konrad Fischer

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PR states "she erased all gestural traces avoiding and dimishing [sic] any kind of subjectivity." which while not entirely true the attempt does feel apropos to our current scratching at the glass, less to feel something than touch its borders as well as mark it. Scratched glass tends to reveal itself. This is the edge, the limit. Posenenske found it. And then Posenenske, tellingly, left the artworld. Yet we keep dragging her back, out. Why does art love and mythologize the people that leave it? As Herbert recounts one of her last acts was handing out broadsheets at Documenta stating "You culture vultures, so here you are all gathered together to chat and lie and talk crap so as to gain the upper hand." Us all loving our artists while not listening to them, an exhibition like a condescending smile.

Kinke Kooi at Lucas Hirsch

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What one could consider eccentric art and its rarity. Despite an entire contingent of culture ostensibly pursuing it, something outside bounds of normalizing walls. Instead just hordes of art. These touch eccentricity, but appear not lost to it. It having to do with the current state of cultural affairs.

Julian Charrière and Julius von Bismarck at Sies + Höke

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"'We are not going to comment further on the videos other than to say it appears the goal of these individuals was to mislead the public; and in the process they wasted valuable resources,' the DNR statement said. 'That’s unfortunate and doesn’t warrant further comment.'"

Okay new rule: "generating a conversation" is no justification for an artwork. And all the other various PR speak of "raising awareness" "critical discussions" or whatever various cliches excusing art that gadflies into consciousness. A wooden splinter  raises awareness of your thumb, stupidly. These PR cliches that we begin to think in, think of art as, the same blanket excuse attempted in recent controversies like Schutz's painting or the gallows displayed in the art museum's park "beginning a conversation"; this odd belief in art's inherent morality like a get-out-of-jail-free card like all those youtubers yelling "it's just a prank" and art's claim to "It's an artwork." A more interesting question than of real and fake is at what point something is an artwork and at what point its just people behaving disingenuously in the public sphere.

Ei Arakawa at Kunstverein Dusseldorf

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artwork's origin dates as astrologic charts, your level of trust in the celestially telling matters less than the overall strategy: turning an artwork to an interpretable state and blinking, tea leaf divination in sporty Vegas-odds inkblots. We're primed to see meaning in information, in art, particularly when so bright and shiny, and thus here's lots to be said about these works, interpretation to be done, they'll pour forth all you are willing to extract from them. Perfect analysands. Like the wacky inflatable arm man drawing eyes to dealerships, Arakawa understands the qualifiers for "art," performing them with wacky panache, theatricalizing the artwork as a caricature of attention, art played to show its now quite standardized set of rules.


See too: Ei Arakawa at Taka Ishii & Peter Halley at Modern Art, Ian Rosen at The Finley, And so Quarterly has finally come to pass.

Diango Hernández at VAN HORN

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"The number 5 on my list of least used words in contemporary art is ‘love’. Believe it or not these days love is not really in vogue, hip or cool. I have looked repeatedly in museums, galleries and all sorts of exhibitions and rarely I saw or heard it used. How could that have happened? Who took it away from art? Have we all forgotten the primary reason why we make and exhibit art?"

If you believe art to be some abstracted form of sexual plumage it would make sense that all art is a form of "love," shimmering objects like peacock's tail. It is perhaps why Chuck Close could - oopsie - assault by mistaking an interest in his object as an interest in him, the conflation of art with its sexual extension. We don't speak of art as love - Gonzalez-Torres had to all but force the issue - because we fear this sublimated form of desire bubbling back up its primordial grease. Art is an extension of us, our selves, our home, sometimes as an innuendo at the end of a rod.

Jeff Wall at Studio for Propositional Cinema

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The symbo-cred cash-out of artists post-mid career usually excuses a lot of easy bad production under a brand to activate it and printed big. Annoying at best, sad at worst. No idea when these were taken, but the choice to exhibit them now could signal the tragic end for Wall's conceptual interest, but instead, rather than place its lens towards big generic what-have-yous of impressive mediocrity, it turns its Wallian skepticism of photographic staging towards small snapshots, that most unstaged and true photography, the thing we base our personal live's recording on, ominous.


See too: Thomas Demand at Avlskarl,  Florian Maier-Aichen at 303 Gallery

Gaylen Gerber at Studio for Propositional Cinema

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"In the second exhibition Gerber presents two Supports, each oil paint on cinematic props of Nazi scalps from Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds."

"Frieze Magazine: Questionnaire: Sturtevant.
What film has most influenced you?
Any film of Quentin Tarantino because he is a concrete example of the vast barren interior of man."

Sam Anderson at Off Vendome

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Like pigeon spikes the objects ward off landing platforms, nowhere to quite sit well, and a good way to lose an eye, like traps, a high surface area to volume content, sort of abjectionably awful but functional, things you really don’t want near your eyes but love for the fret they cause, strange frentic things.

Michael Krebber at Nagel Draxler

For all Krebber’s hoodwinks, in the grand and continuing view of his practice over decades, the oeuvre looks tame, conservative. Compare a walk through Chelsea today sees violent lashing out in the struggle for visibility. What allowed Krebber to be, here in “youth” 90’s - 00’s, unflappable. Perhaps presence of famous friends. This of course his subversion, the aiming at self’s feet for well placed shots, and a long trail of much loved blood.
But revelatory here the prairie-home innocence of this time periods exhibtionism, less the silly artfair painting jest redoubled today as bad paintings joke sold to collectors, than the nostalgic young Krebber and friends having a time in the country. The famous “digging into the mirror” photo's context reveal much less conceptually prescient images of Krebber for instance with a boot dangling from his ass. Similar to Capa’s filmrolls revealing his famous shot soldier really hadn’t been captured midst ballistic trauma, but rather tripping over his own feet.

Affiliated: Krebber at Daniel Buchloz