Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at Koelnischer Kunstverein

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It's important to note the artists' strategies in mise-en-scene. These photos tell you nothing, give you no information but they connote an affect, one of literal and metaphorical velvet ropes. What, after all, is this photograph of? Of the air, in the impressionist sense. That emptiness they love. Cold like sharks. It'd be something if the artists didn't have at least some hand in the documentation. Or maybe there is just that much air. Like John Knight, the strategies of withholding generate power. In forests we imagine predators, in confusion invent gods, or artists.


See too: John Knight at Greene Naftali, Yngve Holen at Kunsthalle Basel

Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda at Francesca Pia

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It's becoming a problem that our daily consumption of media is predicated on exhibitions depicted in blankness, which as CAD becomes a more powerful form of reproduction and knowledge that, as Sanchez might be right in proclaiming, visibility replaces and trumps thought legitimization, we need be aware that this "visibility" isn't actually all that transparent, since most of this exhibition cannot be seen, this documentation barely exhibits, that the infinite visibility of inter-webbed artscenes has an acute case of glaucoma for those on the sidelines witnessing its transactions while precluding it from critique. And why should we be given that right anway? Is CAD mere Curriculum Vitae promotion. Issues of interest for Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda, artists for whom the excising of all but a few remnants generated a enormous look of power.

See too: Willem de Rooij at Le Consortium, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at 356 Mission, John Skoog at MUMOK, And so Quarterly has finally come to pass.

Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at 356 Mission

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In the smoke of Matias Faldbakken's rocketship ascendancy the artworld was left blind scrambling to adhere a politic for it, to make a critical foundation for the artworld's hot new power iconography, unable to accept that how it looked, rather than any little content it contained, was its appeal.*

But so Maeda and Chung deliver today’s dealings with the legacy of conceptual art’s poetics, i.e. a look that connotes a critical intelligibility (meaning) at the same moment appearing elusive, a withholdingess prevails. It produces the look of an enigma, and with it the attendant lure, reading between the lines of evidence evinced. An imbuing of its images/objects with potentialized meaningfulness, making a dissonance that ramps up the aura of even rubber lain on a floor, of cheap bookshelves and its remnant objects, of a decade of art dealing reduced to its minutes, a text that like Warhol’s diary finds initial interest in the search for rumor and gossip but eventually finds humanity in the piecing together of human lives lived.


*(Who in that moment didn’t want have to their big fuck-all paintings and sell it too. The ironic self-awareness of Faldbakken’s sculpture, like Fontaine, made its recycling of an already co-opted language acceptable, the viewer being smarter than the sculpture a sales value added.)

See too : Nina Beier at David Roberts Art Foundation , Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque