Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork at Empty Gallery

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Art is the airline hanger where we assess the fallen debris of culture - let the objects, set to dance by artists, "speak." We initiates perform the ancient practice of meaning. Divine from cultural tea leaves a wall text, a press release, a content. The use-value of art, meaning, the world is not arbitrary, there are things in the dark trees, we cannot see them but assume them, look until your eyes produce them.

See too: Airline Wreckage

Chou Yu-Chenga at Kiang Malingue

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Embryonic seed inside the maternal gourd/womb, painted in Pantone color-of-the-year stained glass. Made for a baby's room. Or a designer Maternity Ward. Someone has to design the paintings for hospitals where surrogates roam. High end. Something a little more designer than glassed prints of yellow foliage and seaside homes. Something more hospitable. No need to be afraid of being nice.

See too: We find this wanton sensitivity almost unnerving in art, we fear the institutionalization of its form, the hospitalization of "sentiment." ; Pantone color of the year painting.

Richard Hawkins at Empty Gallery

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Philosophy buggered its forebears, and Hawkins's art history is a defiled corpse. A past that rots lovely, flesh as sustenance for fish or eyes. The way Hawkins looks at an eternally young Matt Dillon is the way serial killers shampoo their dead victim's hair. Alive to the bearer in its mausoleum, art. Preservation and worm mulch, and maybe no difference between the two for your bride. I wish Hawkins would release books of the collages, the forensic files of his/our art corpse love. Hawkins, let us write the essay.

Tishan Hsu at Empty Gallery

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Videodrome's image of the man sinking into a television screen, along with its tagline "Long live the new flesh," were two perfect nuggets all but eclipsing the film itself - which I can barely remember. But recall the movie magic: image, pure ethereal surface, desire, that could was given reality, body, skin. The practical SFX perfected the transubstantiation. It tapped some unconscious cultural anxiety to give body to what was only presented to us abstractly, remotely, a televisual war that didn't actually take place. It's an old horror story- our dreams, manifested, bring actual nightmares. This is what we deep down know, why it's such successful plot trope, our desires are craven, you manifest the flesh on the screen and in reality you receive a really annoying supermodel. 

Danh Vo at White Cube

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Vo, the interminable and loved symbolist, coming out of Gober into literalness. Whereas Gober invented his own icons self-filled - plumbing metaphors - Vo compositionalizes pre-existing signs to move them around in space. Sculpture becomes words, texts of an affectual sign space, so the curators can write their own on the wall. Bones ascended alongside Jesus into the higher plane extinction.

See too: Gina Litherland at Corbett vs. Dempsey

Sherrie Levine at Simon Lee

(Sherrie Levine at Simon Lee)

Not to mention the infiltration of certain forms of cultural capital into emerging markets.

The opacity of Levine’s practice, what at first seemed political eventually dispersing to the desire clouding their surface, the first photo cancelling Levine’s second, leaving it as fetish, its surface, an erotic act of medium. Krauss writing it’s “act of theft, which takes place, so to speak, in front of the surface of Weston’s print” made it impossible to see hers, and others theorized the feeling of third sets of eyes, implying a form of moral stakes in which the viewer really was birthed in a consciousness that signaled the end of edenic ignorance. Levine eventually ditching the overt specificity of appropriation proper, and began rendering unplaceable genericisms and monochromes under the burnish of banal surface, a less cruel and more seductive version of Mosset monochromes, whose destruction of content made their opaqueness a violence, and more like commodity forms, whose reproduction was their content and total-allure of surface their meaning.