Aria Dean at Greene Naftali

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The disquiet is a lack, everything here is removal. The crash crash minimalism is instead a computer rendering - the handsy violence of Chamberlin reproduced in silicon gum, printed. Blank assets of a Looney Tunes world. What if we removed all this, life? A gray goo situation, the jouissant world replaced with... the basest simplest desire of self reproduction. The gray goo scenario is a metaphor for art, for everything, what if our propagation is what it's all about? Highest achievement, another art exhibition. The artist gets out the goo. 

Dean making work without any of the generalized signifiers of Black art, while avowing her "ongoing pursuit of art that models the structure of Blackness." Dean's is a work that is scrubbed. This scrubbing would be a fertile ground for critical hooha, but mostly it is an affective one, in the sense that it's almost affectless, chilly. Slaughterhouse modernism, art galleries, the anti-ligature rooms of our age. "A room full of paintings that won't let you kill yourself."

See too: Aria Dean at The Renaissance Society, Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz

Sophie von Hellermann at Greene Naftali

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Throughout the cotton-candy scuzz our attempts to make out images ambiguous leaves what?  We look through the paint at some cloudy apparitions like a Renoir got wet, left in the rain. For all their candy von Hellerman's aren't all that appetizing; Suzanne Hudson called their characters etiolated, plants grown leggy in darkness, a feeling of being deprived of crucial nutrients, teeth-shakingly saccharine, you can almost feel how sticky.


link: Joanne Greenbaum at Crone,

“Painting: Now & Forever, Part III” at Greene Naftali & Matthew Marks

(Greene Naftali, Matthew Marks)*

"Painting Now and Forever I-III"
"Painting Forever!"
"The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting"

"Painting Now" is unfortunately a book though.

and "Now that's what I call painting" seems also to have been a show in a Chicago gallery Scott projects.

*Interestingly the first "Now that's What I Call Music" was released in the US shortly after Part I, in 1998.

As Frankel said of Part II in Artforum it's sort of like "blowing your trumpet in the middle of a marching band." Painting, then as now and possibly forever, isn't in need of cheerleaders, painting sort of auto-blows itself. "But there's some good paintings in here!" as the reviews state. A survey, taking stock of the land so as to produce a map. Great. There's more figuration, color, surrealism, goo. Go look at 2008 here or here. Remember that? Guyton, Price, Smith, Walker, the concentration on the production as excuse to the product? The market was about to fall out the floor in 2 months but it was built back up on the mindless dead who took the 2008ists at their word: painting meant a concept for its execution, pressing print, spraying paint, screen-printing bricks to prove the wall you were looking. The fallout left a vacuum to be filled with those picking up the remains, and we were berated by it until someone finally assembled a figure. So now, 2018, we have the peak of figuration. Guess what is probably going to happen next. Can you short the market for figuration?

Tony Cokes at Greene Naftali

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"Printing, having found in the book a refuge in which to lead an autonomous existence, is pitilessly dragged out onto the street… If centuries ago it began gradually to lie down, passing from the upright inscription to the manuscript resting on sloping desks before finally taking to bed in the printed book, it now begins just as slowly to rise again from the ground. The newspaper is read more in the vertical than in the horizontal plane, while film and advertisement force the printed word entirely into the dictatorial perpendicular."
Walter Benjamin, “One-way Street”

The dictatorial perpendicular enforced the decrees of the powered and wealthy, but now text is aerosolized, language appears from all corners buzzing up from your hand to see newscasts across the continuum. An economy of speech value is recalculated on the ability to harvest attention. And how many novels, even great ones, have come out in the last couple year that read like sporadic bulletins.  We make sense of the world in lozenge form. Compartmentalized by the feed, everything must self-contain. Cokes' amassments of others' don't make sense but sure read like poems of how text feels today, a glitchy attention deficit, while the videos chop longer texts into segmented, and affectually applied by music, chunks. They are difficult to read but they command attention.

Gedi Sibony at Greene Naftali

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It had been exciting then, its barely-thereness, so slight, that "unfinished too soon" look we all at that point had craved, the provisional existence we felt stood in for life, a triviality allowing Sibony to package the feeling of noticing. Notice their niceties that felt almost moral in trash. You couldn't even have imagined a hued sculpture, that would have been baroque. There was something so charming about its lack of artistry, almost not art that it now just sorta looks like.



See too: Gedi Sibony at The Arsenale, Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage

William Leavitt at Greene Naftali

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If it hadn't been film sets it would have seemed corny, but since these were the remnants of the way the world's image was constructed we were forced to believe them. The set broadcast becomes a truth. Truckloads of sand replaces the snow for B+W olympic broadcast in order to avoid whiteout, making neither version real. The world and its double overlay, and the shift in experience of seeing the world superposition real and facade, the world as malleable substance. Look at the designs for it.


See too: Group Show at Greene Naftali, Guillaume Bijl at Nagel Draxler, David Lieske at MUMOK, Alicja Kwade at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen

John Knight at Greene Naftali

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Knight's seminal Cold Cuts is one of the better entrances into why the practice has been so influential, that Knight's most exasperating aspects are its most powerful forms, the ultimately austere cold display system establishing authority and meaning through severe withholding, editing as meaning, leaving the signifier hanging without its signified meaning rush to fill it.


see too: Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda at Francesca Pia, Merlin Carpenter at MD 72, Christopher Williams at MoMA

Michael Krebber at Greene Naftali

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Krebber seems to be preferring to these days. A brand established rescinding pleasant discussions of the elusive "krebberesque."  In 2013 Krebberesque was actually academically defined in the 8th edition of Quinton and Rohling's Aesthetic Jargon falling between between Kowtow kraut and Kremlin Stoogism. Excitement and Myth has given way to branded production. Having once "suddenly instructed his students never to paint again" now producing paintings at a brisk clip.


see too: Group Show at Greene Naftali

Michael Smith at Greene Naftali

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There's something just so sad about Michael Smith's work it's gross. It contains all the pathos of sodden cardboard, limp and dull in puddles And our repulsion from it only strengthens the abject pathos to it. We feel for Mike, for Baby Ikki, but we really don't want to be anywhere near him. The single middle-aged male unassimilated to normative culture leaves us feeling all sorts of weird, buying a ticket to Kidzania.

Group Show at Greene Naftali

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How quickly this work has accumulated the look of the academic.  Possibly because it all went in hand with the theory that consumed it as their banner in its initial flourish it has as quickly dehydrated in the burning of its moments usefulness. Harrison’s dissonant abstraction, packaging the painter's studio schizo positioning of inside/out, its initial edge worn to the look of safety scissors in its childlike spoils. Or as recent as 2008 writers speaking of Krebber’s ability to “make us nervous” or in 2013 still describing his second 2003 Greene Naftali exhibition, “these works were if anything even more unfriendly to critics and collectors expecting a show of Important European Painting.”  Yet who today is really nervous about these text paintings. Surely for all the descriptive language of “evasion, deflection, deferral and refusal; diffidence, apprehension, ambivalence and doubt” and the sloganesque “preferring not to” Krebber’s greatest “evasion” was his willingness for absorption into those so willing have him, the conceptual disposability of a practice premised on the initial shock of the “evasion” in plain sites, readied for gallery’s recoup, to be making the most historically assailable paintings around. A horse on a wall as if mocking it all from behind the wall of the institution. The murderer dreaming not of the murder but of tacks placed on the map of the detective.

Dan Graham at Greene Naftali



The banal-sinister that Graham early perfected still looking fresh despite its omni-influence over several generations as market diverse as Liam Gillick to Sam Pulitzer. A proto "relational" project whose difference was Graham’s work belied the corporate-style insidiousness of its MET rooftop friendliness, that Graham has always been, if not indifferent, at least analytically impersonal towards his subject matter, texts elucidating all the problems of its fun, punk, of the videos so comfortably viewed here, instead of letting its proponents speak for it, giving texts like “Punk as Propaganda” or “Rock my Religion” becoming a trope in its own right, in which opaque installations promote the texts that come with it.
The strangest of the whole thing is how similar Greene Naftali newly all in glass has begun to look like the corporate-pastiche of the art it houses.