Guillaume Bijl at Meredith Rosen Gallery

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Wearing a mask of your own face. When does the movie set become actual?  An office attempts to represent an office. This nonfunctional office, dead, is the uncanny, painted corpse. A"transformation" of space in capitalism.The fun here is how easily it works, the distinguishing signs among commodities. The difference between a tarp, a trash bag and tent. Mere signs. Don't bring Baudrillard into this. This is not theory, but funhouse, fun. 

For many, a film's believability is important ... to maintain its dream-thrall and for its duration become real. We understand fiction as able to - even momentarily - become actual. And in [x's] work seeing false things we know have the power to become real is its humorous anxiety. The various distances from "realness" are its multiple punchlines. At what point are the arrangements are decor and at what point it is the authentic living room.... At what point does our decor function as a reflection of society and at what point do our living rooms produce their own image for Hollywood and your neighbors to reproduce, and at what point does suspension of disbelief just become permanent.

See too: Guillaume Bijl at Nagel Draxler, William Leavitt at MAMCO

“Idiorrythmia” at CACBM

Remember the flag art everywhere like 10(?) years ago, Grey Flags, flags screened with bricks, reflective flags, Reena Spaulings' whole product line of them, their flags half stuffed in trash bags, everyone trying to neuter wide legged stances, neutralize country, symbology, remove meaning. It was what we were into then, our anti-aboutness stage. Trying to make the image itself dissolve, disappear, into the format, the object, so it's almost an internal joke now, but the ability to wrest one more rabbit out of the hat is the talent, a clear flag, we hadn't thought of that.

Guillaume Bijl at Nagel Draxler

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Bijl the euro-weirdo existing on the fringe of artworld purview. Probably in need of a retrospective. Bijl is the missing-link between Broodthaers' display-tact-as-object-creedence-lent and today's culturo-marxist-surrealists. Like, see David Lieske. Sign detached ever-so-slightly from its signified, like wearing a mask of its own face. Tableau in which the performers perform themselves. And question of, "How could I ever possibly be not be myself?"  Is the Scrooge McDuck staring into you still the Scrooge McDuck when he is set into the alternate blank white universe where he acts only as a referent sign to himself, or was he always only a referent to himself. Like, see David Lieske. 

See too: David Lieske at MUMOK, Merlin Carpenter at MD 72,