Deshaun Price at Neue Alte Brücke

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Glass holds the juice, painting, the signifier of art. Held aloft in white air. Floats in glass, canvas, gallery, as the invisible structure for what we really want, the markers of art liquidity. "...Drawing ripples in surface to activate [painting], tap the vast depths of painting's cultural wealth"

The juice theory: Anna Zacharoff at Neue Alte Brücke

Eliza Douglas at Neue Alte Brücke

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The setting as the halo, the performance as the backer to the souvenir. Literally. Swirl the cultural object. "appends the abstraction we want, that we associate with painting while giving the value of the photographic, the 'abstraction' performs the work of 'art'. ...the mechanistic process of reproduction doesn't ruin it." The symbolic processes of art become literal, literalification.

Is all art just twirling culture into composition? to make it mean as art? Finding the twist you like?

See too: Eliza Douglas, Calida Rawles at Various Small Fires, 

 

Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz

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Like rock tumbler jeweling its stones, Jochims smoothes his. A simple process, wiping away the rough, a polish, revealing pools. Dumb rocks become gems. Why we like polished rocks, that is a good question.

See too: Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz (1), Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz (2), Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz (3) 

Darkened Rooms, their couches

(Top, Center, Bottom)

It's nice on these hot days, to have all these promotional images of dark rooms, to keep our brains cool. The couch becomes the main signifier. We're going to start a collection of these, send in your own finds. Which will you choose? What does your couch say about you?

Lynne Cohen at Jacky Strenz

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The dryness of black and white documentary photography becomes a deadpan. Something you can't quite call comedy. But might. That same small twist of sense. Sometimes the world doesn't acquiesce to staid photographic capture; sometimes the world seems to sort of fight back. Seems too absurd for its clinical silver. Cohen seems to seek out these moments.

Anna Zacharoff at Neue Alte Brücke

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"...Drawing ripples in surface to activate the beneath, tap the vast depths of painting's cultural wealth"

Previously:
1

Like cutting a rose from a watermelon, everyone wants the sweet fruit but we facet a composition. This is a metaphor for painting.

2
The watermelon in the metaphor is that essence "painting" - that unconscious object, myth, we all have some benign feelings towards, painting. And [Marlene] Dumas provides illustration: got famous for theatricalizing its juice struggling against the container, composition, corral.

3
Because it seems what we are actually pushing around on the canvas is the cultural object of painting. The canvas, support, oils, were long ago replaced by this mythos, the actual material, its signifiers, significance.

4
Paint becomes simply the candied shell to painting's cultural myth. Doesn't matter how thin because it's merely the container/shape of our love for "painting." As thin as marginally abstracted t-shirts. Drawing ripples in surface to activate the beneath, tap the vast depths of painting's cultural wealth, this the watermelon.

5
A lot of painting functions by tensioning the relationship between painting and its cultural myth - think the Neanderthalism of Joe Bradley, Krebber, or conceptually negated Sturtevant, the printer of Guyton, the signature of Josh Smith, the bruising history of von Wulffen, necrotics of Richter, the fordist production lines of Koons, Craven, Murakami, Kaws. Etc. Neurotic affairs with "painting." But occasionally painting succeeds by making us forget the relation to its myth, succeeds as a painting without history, paints something else and Painting we get to forget about.

Previously: (1)Julie Beaufils at Balice Hertling, (2)Marlene Dumas at Zeno X, (3)Svenja Deininger at Collezione Maramotti, (4)Eliza Douglas at Air de Paris,  (5)Nazim Ünal Yilmaz at Exile

See too: Anna Zacharoff at Kantine

Lea Von Wintzingerode at Jacky Strenz

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Despite the depths of figuratives that we're in, rare to just be painting someone. Like an actual person. The painters using people's bones to hang or inflate abstraction. (We're abstract enough aren't we.) But here reminiscent of Quintessa Matranga's toilets. Just painted. Maybe paradoxically by inventing characters you have to actually paint that person. You don't suddenly have an excuse to throw paint at them, rearrange their features for your whims.


See too: Quintessa Matranga at Freddy

Magnus Andersen at Neue Alte Brücke

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An exhibition titled "Stockholm Syndrome" which is "a condition in which hostages develop a psychological alliance with their captors during captivity." Which CAWD called Andersen's last Neue Alte Brücke show: "which we, [Andersen's] visual hostages, on a long enough timeline, learn to love..." Stockholm Syndrome is thought to happen because "the victim’s need to survive is stronger than his impulse to hate the person who has created the dilemma." In order to survive one must begin to identify and find compassion for the captor: people held captive for decades will defend their captors in court. An analogy could be made for a decades long acclimatization to certain types of aesthetic abuse, where an artworld begins to actually like the Jeff Koons, or Josh Smith.  On a long enough timeline they begin to appear quaint, lovable, despite their demonics. To deny it would simply place you outside it. And so, "Andersen knows that to survive is to triumph. And so with defeat you must accept its march into visibility." You will be seeing more of these, and as always with hideous painting, "half the fun is learning to love it."


see too: Josh Smith at David Zwirner, Magnus Andersen at Neue Alte Brücke

Alia Farid at Portikus

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Monuments to our plastic shackles, lifelines, supplying water and indenturing us to its machine. Where we were once attached to rivers, springs, we are not attached to some global complex. Like the "Plastics make it possible" ad campaigns, a journey through time, cast in plastic. Deeply ironic, no? Isn't the world itself a monument to plastic, and covered in it. Not entirely sure why we now monumentalize our pain, but art seems to enjoy masochism, it is "critical."

Cady Noland at MMK

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The means through which we connect. Noland's inventing then what has become widespread today, an archaeology of modern society in art poetics, using objects to denote the human. These things were made for us, they are evidence of us. Turns out the poetry of the modern world isn't pretty, but instead a lot of connections through galvanized steel.

Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz

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Against Jochims' more splintered or fractured here is an exhibition of sculpture looking more digested. There is analogy to be made in the sculptor as an intestinal tract: Freed from the structure and striations of skeletal muscle that once predicated historical (figurative) sculpture, the smooth muscle sculptor digests like an intestinal tube that is artist's erosion in time. Time is tube in this metaphor.  Time over the open touch of just rubbing, frottage until the rocks are tumbled to our gratification. Smooth muscle occurs mostly in the gut, uterus, walls of blood vessels, bladder, sphincter, etc.- the body's transit tubes - and these sculptures look like the things those organs produce: turds, early fetuses, blood cells, kidney stones. Things warmed in the gut of the artist.


Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz (1), Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz (2)

Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz

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Jewels or portals, the tension-confusion. A faceted sapphire is both; painting a jewel for your wall. Precious stones do have a patient resistance to our looking, and we try to cut them to out will, but the more you polish gems for eyes the further they seem from us.

Bob van der Wal at Neue Alte Brücke

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Someday something will feast off the roughage of our crotches. And all the walls covered in notes behind it like a set for a conspiracy film, the mad attempts at extracting some actionable knowledge from it. As it's said, Conspiracists, like fetishists, like theists, find comfort in the underlying belief that someone is in control, at least someone is pulling the strings that manipulates the world that would otherwise feel so painfully arbitrary. We attempt to make sense, our Hominid brains are excellent at seeing patterns. We extract meaning from nothing. We become paranoid of a silent informed minority. Attempt to read the subtext in everything. Like art.

Thea Djordjadze at Portikus

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We’ve invented some kind of Stockholm syndrome to the architecture we are hostage to. An art in supplication to the building's wings that embrace it. We see a vitality, a benevolence in the architecture, like a generous god's embrace. We build to it totems, in it reliquaries. The several photos of the light in the space. Art that literally reflects its light as halos. Any architecture that will host it, a gift to it.

“Re: Re: Black Macho. Unleash the Queen” at Philipp Pflug Contemporary

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This was a little before shoe burning had recently hit front pages. Johnson's less viral*. I'm not sure what is with brands and our ability to stick ourselves to them, 4 days ago there was no opinion on Nike other than as any other global capitalist conglomerate. Now, thanks to the power of hyperconfused white people, we are forced into conjuring an opinion because Nike has roped a lightning rod into their orbit. Dogwhistle polemics as divide and conquer strategy. The NYTimes is reporting on it. My distaste for Nike's exploitation of a valid (and invalidly polemical) political movement. An interest in Kapernick becomes an opinion on Nike thanks to the power of branding. Staggering that somehow the conversation over race, sports, and protest, is now, if momentarily, controlled by a Fortune 500 whose name is at the top of the search results. When have brands had such control? Now I want to burn the shoes too.

*One of the more engaging moments of the performance is far before this climax: Johnson appears to stop his contortionals and rests. He squats down, rubbing hands and holding skeptically out above the audience. A respite that doesn't feel all that. An anxious pause that we could make all sorts out of, but the moment feels real and if not Johnson could be an actor. Then he winds his body through the gallery down the stairs and outside and set fire to the Timberlands and sips Hennessy from the bottle, now absolutely dejected but finally actually relaxed while boots bonfire. He wears pink converse (parent company Nike) and a white union suit, patented as "emancipation union under flannel." 

Philipp Timischl at Neue Alte Brücke

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Timishcl's sculpturification of photography is on one hand full of cheeky little moments of puncture - the objectification, fetish, and bejeweling of hyper-beefed men who unwittingly take part - as well as the need to sediment the more transitory elements of photo and video in an object original. Louisa Gagliardi's pierced and vajazzled painting comes to mind. But then thinking of 2004 when Bjarne Melgaard and his lover shot up anabolic steroids and fucked each other and the resultant photographs were shown as I'm sure we've all heard Kelsey tell it. About the level of risk involved and who bears it in what situations. And how Kelley Walker was recently and finally taken to task for not really being able to answer questions about his appropriation of particular cultures, like pushing on the sliver he wanted to finally drew his blood. How it was no longer this cold cerebral thing, and art's problematization actually was problem, our carefree objectification.

Moyra Davey at Portikus

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It's alluring to attach the psychology of money to feces.

"For example, the miser’s hoarding of money can be thought of as symbolic of the child’s refusal to eliminate feces. The defiance with which the child withholds its precious feces in the face of parental demands is generalized over a period of time to the withholding of all precious possessions from a world perceived as hostile and demanding. Since it is readily apparent even to developing child that most people view money as a prized possession, the transition from feces to money is an easy step." "Feces themselves are perhaps the most valuable commodity in the child’s young life.

“Norman. O Brown observ[ed], ‘In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known - that the essence of money is its absolute worthlessness.'"- Money Madness Goldberg & Lewis

And us tossing pennies into watery wells, everyday make a wish upon a throne with coins in stow, placing O. Browns into white repositories, a text released to the underworld.  Davey symbolically rooting around in latent feces, fingerprint stamps all over, evidence of molding it to your hand.



See too: Quintessa Matranga at Freddy, Moyra Davey at Institute of Contemporary Art

Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Portikus

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Totems hewn of old-timey techniques, preloading new content with the time travel of the ancients. It works, the objects and their symbols feel pulled from primeval wells, they affect - despite their modern gastrointestinal - the look of something deep rooted. When Hirst applies gilt to goat horns or barnacles to statues it appears as chintz patinas; DD&GC's abraded by the time's digestion by building techniques pulled through with it.  In 2017, we desire wood, representations of the natural, a connection to a time when we touched things with our hands and our stores name themselves after objects of such lost: Iron Oak Spade Copper Rooster mad lib titling. Wishing our objects to connect us with a mythic past when we weren't cognitively fritzed socially gamified cyborgs, even if it isn't true the affect is there to make us feel better.


See too: Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Micheline Szwajcer

Günther Förg at Barbel Graesslin

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It was hard to argue with the slightly stupified version of Forg's modernism. Awkward buildings colors and installations, scribbled pleasures later. Rendered dumb, it didn't speak to anyone, rather happy with, instead, simple existence, becoming a stone in the modernist pathway, a weighing down ideals of transcendence, like attempting to see a Rothko with a pile weighing heavy in your bowels, the work refuses to lift one beyond the limits of your earthly human presence, the usual higher pleasures lifting spirits instead hamstrung to leave you right where you already are.


See too: Heimo Zobernig at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Heimo Zobernig at Simon Lee, Heimo Zobernig at Indipendenza, Heimo Zobernig at Petzel, Krupp, MUDAM

Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz

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The sign/icon that isn't there, and the emptiness stemming from. Shapes generally denotes an object that should be telling us something, instead a vacancy.



Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz