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

(link)

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

Lili Dujourie at Mu.ZEE & S.M.A.K.

(Mu.Zee, S.M.A.K.)

Dujourie, like a less sarcastic Zobernig. If minimalism's primary structures were so reduced to their axiom as to become iconic, Dujourie's polishes outs an object unspecific, un-iconic, hard to hang language on something so rounded, making for strange viewing experience of objects so general they become difficult to articulate, defintion fleets quickly away, conceptually formless but having the look of art objects.


See too : Group Show at Salle Principale, “The Crack-Up” at Room East

Berlinde De Bruyckere at S.M.A.K.

(link)

Francis Bacon in Apple design pallor, the material image of death. Torturing history to wrest meaning from referents, Anselm Kiefer found lead the go-to material for the weighty depiction of historic emotion, before killing it with its programmatic deployment ad nauseum, finally solved the alchemist’s puzzle, exchanging leaden trauma for gold. De Bruyckere finds too a material of contemporary nostalgia, like Greek temple's purity of whiteness, the unnaturally cold wax a paragon of cleanliness through its color bled out, lost.

Thomas Ruff at S.M.A.K



Of all the Dusseldorfers, Ruff’s brilliant origins, as the most boring among, saved him the inevitable decline of initial impressiveness since it was all already, had always been, mired in conceptual dust, making him the smartest guy in the room, hard to get tired of something that was tired to begin with. Their slightly bent derivativeness, of all the projects strata, Warhol by way of driver’s license, Richter blurs, Science approbation through appropriation, virtual photograms, etc... it’s all a clever connect the conceptual-historico dots whose failing to come full circle (reveal something concrete) your standard dissonance equaling enigmatic art poetry. The blandness of all the miracles on display here meant to weigh like the blankness of Celmins’s stars, the discrepancy between seeing and knowing and raw computing power vs photograms and your spirit versus your image, and technology vs banality, and school dogma vs blankness, the cold embalm soothes the atrophied soul well, I sorta like Ruff’s dark hard paralysis candy, Richterian emptiness.