Trisha Baga at Marta Cervera

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A genuine gesture to provide the 2D version just to really prove you're not seeing the 3D version, evidence of your distance. But providing the crappy version at least tries. Maybe you've got your own 3D glasses at home. 

Than Hussein Clark at GAK

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At its most extreme the proposition may be that art is not as valuable as the context surrounding it.  That the spaghetti dinners attribute diamonds their value. And so the context, under new light, grow baroque, wilt new leafs, gilt themselves in preparation for their spotlighting, put little balls on their feet so as weight their connection to it, the theater.

“From the Collection – Verlust der Mitte” at S.M.A.K.

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This is what August should look like. Sprawling massive inanity that trades one mess, polite objects arranged like dead butterflies so hammeringly common for instead the mess of Buchel's opened vacuum bag nightmares. You don't have to spray the bags contents everywhere, it's an obvious allergen hazard, but galleries could sure find a better way to arrange the dust they've pulled from beneath storage floorboards each summer the remnants of every spring cleaning, from the collection.


See too: “Sputterances” at Metro Pictures, August Slog, Third Annual August Review

AR: Lin May Saeed at Jacky Strenz

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Originally Posted: April 4th, 2016

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.

AR: DAS INSTITUT at Serpentine Gallery

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Originally Posted: May 17th, 2016

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.

AR: Stan Douglas at Wiels

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Originally Posted: January 9th, 2016

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.

AR: Ceal Floyer at Aargauer Kunsthaus

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The aesthetics of small cleverness - the set-up, tension and click of conclusion- and its bathetic pull, "this interplay of expectation and disappointment." Floyer's work has always felt like mocking tragedies, less fun than sinisterly aware of their exchange of the broken sad comedy of puns as like existentially it, this small disappointment threatening to replace understanding with "getting it," our world as a series of painfully dumb effects.

Michael Beutler at Spike Island

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Making monumental art with unimpressive tools whose roots in the child-like art-n-crafts freedom of imagination are run amok fueled by grandeur: a work ethic showy while retaining its unpretentious strategies of the vernacular. Like Tuazon its interest is in the wonder of construction itself, but whereas Tuazon's protestant ethic posits a lot of somber logs Beutler seems interested in the impressive monumentality of structure itself, seeing your imagination huge and erect.


See too: Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage, Chris Burden Metropolis II at LACMA

Tomma Abts at greengrassi

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Even just 2 years ago Abts still seemed an island of jilted tight trompe-leoil abstraction perhaps only harking back to the much forgotten "abstract illusionists" or all the way to constructivists. But the rise of tight-knit illusionist abstraction, in say Braunig or Orion Martin as much as Owens among others, makes Abts seem less hermitically sealed as the reference - if not influence - spreads in the reaction against mass-processed abstraction and toward slow-abstraction and icon illusionism.


See too: Tomma Abts at David Zwirner, Sascha Braunig at Rodolphe Janssen

Sam Lewitt at Kunsthalle Basel

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"Keeping the lights on" is synonymous with capitalist vitality, the blood flow current signifying property over time, which Lewitt turns to heat, redirecting its energy to liminally exchange light for warmth for the corpse.

It's impossible to be certain whether the new techno-conceptual isn't anything more than a refurbished arte-povera, in which its spirituality and metaphysics is replaced with a ghost in the scary looking machines of a predestined future come to haunt us menacingly, like cultures assigning gods and poetry to corral phenomena we are at a loss to control.


See too:  Elaine Cameron-Weir at VENUS Los Angeles, Ben Schumacher at Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon, Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street

John Knight at Cabinet

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The subtle assertion of power rising the tiny dictators, covering the world with chain link fence to keep theirs. Knight with the usual verve excises as a grand authorial means, exerting as much power as is his.  The austerity as though seething through clenched teeth, we seem to implicitly understand this type of anger.


See too: John Knight at Greene Naftali

Andreas Slominski at Proyectos Monclova & Barbel Graesslin

(Proyectos Monclova, Barbel Graesslin)

Looking at dead things, torn from their living context, trapped under ethyle acetate in the kill jar's sterile light and pinned to walls to make a butterfly collection. A collection we understand culturally to hold meaning for the belief in the docents and researchers behind it. But they mean only what we know about them, and the objects sparkle. Like dead butterflies, Monoliths, and signifiers, blank beautiful entrapments.


See too: Andreas Slominski at Thaddaeus Ropac, “Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co.,

Maria Eichhorn at Chisenhale

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Art is collective cloud-based fantasy envisioned by the countless projecting its realm in which we all role-play our abstractions. When you begin to get into the material conditions of art things, of course, get hairy. The cloud space we envision is different from the dark recesses in the network of those hitting the pavement. Discussions of the material conditions are symbolic.
It is of course a privilege to be able to take time time off from work, (it is assumed staff will remain getting paid for this vacation although this is never specifically addressed (Lorey presents it as hypothetical) and the paid intern (trainee) actually completes his traineeship before the vacation but there might be a new trainee, but so all sorts of question) and - as is mentioned in the Eichorn's interview with staff, and further expounded by Lorey's essay on the infiltration of debt - art jobs permeate the very being of the worker and so the point is who even knows what a vacation is anymore, but at the very least no one was posting to facebook, instagram, or twitter, and emails are being deleted, but backup emails are provided.
But the whole question of work, privilege to be able to take time off, etc. remains in the symbolic and abstract realms. Nightmare artist Dan Colen once remarked that idol Dash Snow's heroic punk-tude was built upon the privilege of a trust fund, while Colen's aw-shucks background forced the polishing of objects we all hate because otherwise he would starve. Colen is telling this story, but it's symbolic, parable-like abstraction, and one is a legend and the other is despised. Even W.A.G.E. - mentioned in Chisenhale's publication - while talking about the grim mechanics of pay still mostly exists as a fantasy where things are fair, or fairer. Fraser's biennial essay self-examines as being part of the reviled 1% and cannot reconcile and thus cries. Everyone caroms off the material conditions. Artists aren't required to release their tax returns. No one knows that 60% of this blog was written in a car in a Big Box store's parking lot leeching wifi we didn't have. or who's curatorial lifestyle is funded by oil futures and not institutions, or if the difference is one of middle men.
The point is Chisenhale can do this because their funding comes from public and private funds and is not exactly tied to having the doors open for the showroom floor. Eichorn used the artists magic wand of artistry to divert those funds to this reprieve. 27% of which are public, taxpayer's.
"‘The public’ now floods the scene, but most of what they say will not be recorded. Out of the flood, however, bobs a vociferous new role, ‘the critics’, who will attempt to inflect the light of publicity and mediate between ‘the public’ and the artwork. ‘The critics’ have two masks readily at hand for this job, ‘the agent’ and ‘the provocateur’. Through one or other, or both at the same time, the hushed voice of ‘the public’ will be spoken over." - Stewart Martin in the catalog
Eichorn ultimately makes it opaque, a sign out front forbids entrance and we have all the tabula rasa visions of what those people are doing with all that free time and whose money where and maybe not being accountable is the real gift to them.

Miriam Cahn at Meyer Riegger

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Cahn is important, perhaps like Andrew Wekua, in the age of the digital euphemising the body, that someone retensions connection to our corporeality. The body is battleground of artists deciding how to represent it back to us. An artist can drop it from a height over and over again and care nothing for it if they so wish. Cahn seems to care, even while suspending its pink people over the sandpaper causticness of its abrasive color, one of a very few painters to make painting's bright beauty a violent thing. and against people like rubbed erasers, pink and sensitive worn forms. Painting can do a real violence to balloons filled with red liquid. Rubbed of noses, devoid of hair, flesh the color of factory chicken skin. The manifold meanings of the adjective tender, "showing gentleness" as well as "sensitive to pain."  "(of meat) easy to cut."



See too: Miriam Cahn at Jocelyn Wolff, Group Show at Meyer Riegger, Lisa Yuskavage at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Nicola Tyson at Friedrich Petzel, Tala Madani at David Kordansky,  Andro Wekua at Sprüth Magers, Michaël Borremans at Dallas Museum of Art, Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg

Roni Horn at Museum de Pont

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"She has linked her use of doubled forms or images and the ambiguity of many of her pieces to androgyny. Consequently, her work has been seen as an indirect form of identity art."¹

"If androgyny ultimately expands the possibilities of identity beyond its stable, gendered binary, Horn's paired works propose the untenability of the fixed binaries on which minimalism historically staked its own critique."²

"For Horn, the terrain of likeness - that which is similar, the same yet different, akin, or simply close - encompasses a panorama of experience. Her work dwells of differences of degree that, she suggests, constitute as profound a representational problem as the starker discrepancies that conventionally give us our social and sexual selves. "³

The androgynous minimalism of Horn's pointed critique of Judd's specific object: instead of the remarkable unit⁴ Horns work arrests flows in their state of transition, glass as a "supercooled liquid"⁵, androgyny the flow between genders stabilized, like taking a photo of river to supercool its movement, frozen transition, a gender like glass.

1. Mignon Nixon Roni Horn Artforum 2009
2. Roberta Smith, NYTimes, 2009
3. Zachary Rottman, UCLA M.A. Dissertation, 2014
4. unit is also slang for penis.
5. Roni Horn, in conversation with Jarrett Earnest Brooklyn Rail 2013


See too: Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Tony Conrad's Glass

Gerry Bibby, Henrik Olesen at Sismógrafo

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The semiotic distress of Bibby is possibly a place to hide the body lint of Olesen. Puns, in material and language, open up space for innuendo, for the filthy human Olesen has, for a while now, been hiding in crevasses. A crosswalk becomes a Halley abstraction becomes our semiotic Jail, both the crosswalk and painting-referent limit what had once been free space. Insect is misheard as incest and we all call you out for it because that is a freudian slip and you are mentally sick.


see too: Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings

Martín Soto Climent at DREI

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Coerced intimacy in sentimental sizes, there's an affection. Not that Soto Climent has always made small soft objects, there have been large pointed ones as well. But its not the way you touch the thing but they way your body scales next to them. Like Lulu, founded by Soto Climent, the tiny is given to a warmth, a scale of proximity, of being close.


see too: Martín Soto Climent at Proyectos Monclova

Ruth Root at Marta Cervera

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Like a Yield sign from hell. Dramatically asserting its declarative without reason. Incoherent as a Rachel Harrison sculpture. Organized but staunch against coherence, disorientating. Even when painting in solid elegant tones, Root's paintings never resolved anything fully tasteful. Their garishness precedes them.


See Too: Charline von Heyl at Gisela Capitain

DAS INSTITÜT at Serpentine Gallery

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2009, 7 years ago, 2 years after the founding of DAS INSTITÜT, already, then:

"However, the joke is actually on the curator, as many artists have learned to feed this desire with work made quickly, but with enough conceptual acrobatics to make them acceptable as part of a canon of their own oeuvre—or that of a supposed canon on the critique of modernity. And here, the artist has found a way not only to maximize the circulation of his/her work, but also to reduce the budget in terms of both time and materials—the original shady business of “skimming”, although one that is justifiable considering the low rate of artist fee’s. Within this particular loop, a potential critique of excess is ensnared as another symptom of that very excess. And it is with this dual farce of today’s production and related branding activities, namely the desire for the curator to collect and justify an artistic industry of prefab and ready-at-hand esoterics, that one should enjoy DAS INSTITUT’s irreverent something for everybody with a little for everyone approach.

“DI Why?” treats referents like refreshments at a party, from appropriation, to the politics of representation, to subculture fetishism, to pop, and even Relational Aesthetics—there was an opening event with an “exotic” food import: Currywurst and Berliner Weisse mit Schuss. What is truly unique about this show is that all of these devices are derived from completely blank and empty signifiers..."  -Adam Kleinman TZK

What started as a mock "import/export" business in 2007 became so quickly real, its sham background mattering little in art so long as it looked like it, and the network "featuring non-competing points of attraction at various scales and orientations" and franchise friendibitions and its hard to deny a room full of so much something.

See too: KAYA at Deborah Schamoni, Isa Genzken at David Zwirner,  Ann Craven at Confort Moderne

Judith Bernstein at Kunsthall Stavanger

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The conceptual cymbal crash, punning cocks with screw, was defeatist humor mocking not just the male tool but deflating the hard language of conceptual art: telling the joke over and over again on larger and larger sheets of paper, the high rhetoric of big egos reduced to a bad joke - Cue: Beyonce "♪♫ Cause he's got a big 'ego.' ♪♫" Bernstein: "it wasn’t funny." 



See too: Judith Bernstein at Mary Boone