Luchita Hurtado at Hauser & Wirth

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The blue chip gallery unearthed a resurgent dead artists' pleasant and inoffensive abstraction? The trope is a cliche beyond. And the metaphor here is overpowering. You can say "I am" so long as it is in the vernacular of the institutions in power, so long as your language is abstracted into wallpaper, into gentle background, affirmative noise for the collector. Hurtado might be a great painter and this is made moot by gallery. It has nothing to do with the painter and everything to do with institutions who helm our ship's navigation relentlessly toward this inkblot goal. Mladen Stilinovic: "an artist you cannot speak english is no artist." But he had it wrong. The point is not to speak. The point is to make yourself abstract enough it doesn't matter.

Philip Guston at Hauser & Wirth

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That belabored plodding brushwork that conjures and sediments its act, painting - the stress and sweat of it. You can practically see the anxiety in the glass of it. Which is why everyone been so thievery with Guston - at a moment when self-consciousness in painting was hot (the Krebber vs Barre 2008 World Championship moment) - people were looking for ways to display that anxious hesitation and still have their painting too. Guston had self-consciousness, and painting, in spades. Thus a corpse was looted. And we looked at goopy tenuous abstraction for 5 years until someone invented a figure again and everyone lost consciousness again and now here we are. Guston again.

Anyway someone should really curate an exhibition of Guston's early pre-abstract figurative work, the real de Chirico meets Ensor moody mirror shit. That's the rare stuff, give us that stuff. 

Luchita Hurtado at Hauser & Wirth

The 98 year old painter who seemingly first heard about from Park View/Paul Soto unearthing its gold and then the Hammer's showcasing that gold looking so contemporary like every painter with an airbrush today (that cartoon brand of surrealism merging virtual and spiritual we all wish to upload to) and suddenly the rush to it unstoppable:

"Hurtado has recently experienced a rise to fame that has been thrilling to witness — albeit maddening in its lateness. Later this month, Hauser & Wirth will dedicate three floors of its gallery [...] the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London will mount a solo exhibition [...] Hurtado’s first international [...] Museo Tamayo [...] then travel to a series of art institutions in the United States.

"Albiet maddening in its lateness." Maddening in its pretense to an artworld omniscience. As if a lot of artists haven't been left off. As if mere oversight. As if a lot of people aren't suddenly seeing a lot of dollar signs. The prospectors drooling. Ulrich Obrist already having issued grandiose statement to be quoted endlessly. and did you know she was friends with a lot of famous artists? thankfully the tastemakers, the overlords, have finally selected her for accreditation, get to join the ball. The Disney story we all believe in, the rescue we're all waiting for, recognize the good in us. Placed near expensive hardwood benches.

Berlinde de Bruyckere at Hauser & Wirth

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In the American version of horror film The Ring, a famous scene of a horse loose on a ferry jumping overboard to its (oncoming) death. The scene, which like most recent horror is a series of horror images strung together by a thin plot, is striking for the horse's strong leap into the water jarringly interrupted by misjudging the jump (underscoring the horse's fraught psyche) hitting the side of the boat to tumble end over end into dark water. The scene is reminiscent of Dick Hallorann's anti-climatic demise in The Shining, or the opening shooting at dogs in The Thing, rejecting our expectations of Hollywood cliches (the savior, the majestic horse, killing the innocent dogs) by abruptly severing them as an implicit statement that the rules are off and a new unruled territory (of terror(!)) has been entered. De Bruyckere's horror scenes trade in similar tensions, the powerful horse so magnificent and frail, everyone growing up with stories of horses being shot in fields unmercifully merciful after breaking legs, and after watching in The Ring the innocent horse plowed to bits by the ferry's prop into red water, it acts as a marker underlining that even the innocent can be made to pay, a symbolism not lost on de Bruyckere.

See too: Michaël Borremans at Dallas Museum of Art Berlinde De Bruyckere at S.M.A.K.

Pipilotti Rist at Hauser & Wirth

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A friend once noticed Wolfgang Puck removing his shoes at a dinner table before eating, theorizing it as a physical signal separating work and pleasure. Socks denoting pleasure. This exhibition's shoeless desire is “to release some of the social inhibitions” before laying on bean bags, fetal on the floor. Gone the white walls with monitors at 57 inches, current video brandishes attention to setting, using theater’s primitive virtual-reality in which suspension of disbelief becomes an actual suspension of self lost in the mirror of the screen’s silver. The dim theater of shade necessary for Narciussus to see his reflection, hiding his self-consciousness.
Wheras some of the best video being made today openly acknowledges the viewer, from antagonizing (Wolfson) to alienating (Atkins) or even willfully attacking their affective link with its signs (Rose), etc et. al., Rist desires to swallow the viewer whole, to unbirth them, and deliver them into the her amniotic unreality. Rist’s work today feels anachronistic in this sense, an idea of the future that comes from the past - renderings of architectural potential - already a retro vision that in the hindsight actually makes Rist appear different than 10 years ago, even critical. Have you seen this completely CGI advertisement for marble countertops? There isn't a real thing in it. http://vimeo.com/15630517 It’s all the more imporant because its an advertisement.

See too: Petra Cortright at Societe , Ed Atkins at Serpentine Gallery , Rachel Rose at High Art