Ree Morton at Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Terminal clusters are flower bunches at the end of a plant. But it also sounds like your diagnosis. It doesn't quite congeal. And lit up like a homemade carnival, wonky, exposing your investment/care as greater than talent, and this feels raw. The sleek store purchased Mother's Day cards instead provide assurance that your sentiment is socially acceptable, capital proves it. The inscription approved by committee, and the floral front by an artist who cools his care with talent. Has a mother ever really preferred Hallmark?

There's a tonal dissonance to Morton. It doesn't quite add up, the visual trumpets in lights and banners fail against a phrase falling flat. This failure to arrive at the promise is its pathos. Something we can all get behind.


see too: Careworn: Susan Cianciolo at Modern Art;Andrew Norman Wilson at Futura, James Lee Byars at VeneKlasen/Werner

John Miller at Institute of Contemporary Art Miami

John Miller at Institute of Contemporary Art Miami

MILLER: Yeah, he’s very much into that. I think it’s just a generational difference, too. I know this from my students—they check out shows online all the time, they keep up with Contemporary Art Daily. So we might think, “Oh, this show was over there and this audience hasn’t seen it,” but younger artists, if they’re engaged, they’ve probably seen what’s available online. I always forget that because I’ve never gotten in the habit of looking at shows online. It’s just not something I do. But artists in their 20s and 30s are very much doing that.

WILLIAMS: I have to admit, I look at Contemporary Art Daily every morning. When I’m having coffee, I look at the New York Times and Contemporary Art Daily...

Moyra Davey at Institute of Contemporary Art

(Moyra Davey at Institute of Contemporary Art)

Sontag pointed out photography as inherently elegiac, and Davey further expresses its moribund nature-morte with a gloss of preemptive nostalgia. Like instagram filters made to affect 70’s grain on crystalline microlenses - implanting an artificial comfort into the cold of its technologic clarity - Davey went from photographing the dust and stains that mark human touch and embody nostalgia, to pre-placing that touch on the photographs, mailing them to package the touch that preceded them. Unlike Beshty’s copper marring conceptual emblems, the touch placed onto photographs re-re-re-inscribes photography’s loss of the human in favor of the sediment of it. Like Long Life Cool Whites, brimming with the ghosts photography’s past theorists, the book was pre-yellowed with the past brought to the present to fill it like Proustian remembrance of theorists past.  It’s all incredibly affective, like Sontag’s furthering Genet’s “the only criterion of an act is its elegance” with Wilde's: “the vital element is not sincerity, but style.”