Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino at‬ Kunstraum Leuphana

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Conceptual art's legalese sets a premise:"keys to a building," displayed but unused; or:"ceiling color chosen by mom," a premise without theory - thought is cut before completion. You are left to imply the rest. It's poetic. Signification without significance. You make it up yourself. Art infers meaning without providing meaning. This is how art becomes meaningful. This is how conceptual art become's Prisoner's Cinema. 

See too: Ghosts: "Writing about blank art you are confronted with the theater of your skull.  Devoid of stimuli the brain seeks recognition, applies logic to nothing to make sure the world retains solvency, coherence as defense against the face of meaningless abyss. Eyes phosphene in darkness, in vacuity your mind alights. This is how god exists. This is how Peter Halley's paintings exist. It's called Prisoner's Cinema.  Blankness rewards the already full mind. Blankness hands the viewer back to themselves, allowing all the self-satisfied self-congratulations the viewer can self-muster. It's called projection. Art abhors vacuum. You cannot kill content if you tried. Because art is baggage, preloaded with a cultural et al. 

"[Because] not knowing is unacceptable, and rejection of the object would prove viewer's impotence, thus created an environment where artists are able to produce further and further extremes of blankness filled by those refusals to not-know, whose sensory deprivation creates phantasms, see the abyss looking back because we are doing the projecting.

"The wider the distance between signs/images the greater the space to be filled, the grander the concept, the impossible gap, generally seceded to the viewer. This is our conceptual moment. Objects have meaning, we cannot pass that off, and the distance between them, grand like the canyon, vacant and large. ...the only thing left to do is to produce greater and greater gulfs of meaning.

"The tension: whether this beacon actually broadcasts idea. Or simply clears space for fill, me, this, now.

"In dark forests we imagine predators, in trees see intelligence. In confusion we excel at inventing gods, or meaning."

See too: "Conceptual art mutated into three genres, 1, zombie abstraction; 2, art legalese, say Cameron Rowland or Daren Bader/Martin Creed; and 3, myth attractors. "

AR: Lucie Stahl at Halle Für Kunst Lüneburg

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Originally Posted: August 5th, 2016

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Lucie Stahl at Halle Für Kunst Lüneburg

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We haven't had a CAD Stahl solo since 2014. Which whose then, despite their slight derivitives, in the specificity of their slick digi-crust-materialism and resolution-as-sex, we loved the scanner trash prints: what everyone else was at such pains to display with existential and overwrought, like, expression, Stahl had turned into cheap easy and fast slacker products that got closer to the existential dread of that material-reproduction by embodying all its cheap easy fast sexy disposability. Somehow better than the cold tricks of Guyton/Walker because Stahl's was falsely warm. But that latent sadness present in this ex was sort always so.

Vittorio Brodmann at Halle Für Kunst Lüneburg

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By turning the painting into an accumulation of "Brodmann moments", in a sort cave-painting/graffito mode, Brodmann compositionalizes his semio-capital, transmuting it into information, into a field of redirects failing to place it anywhere, turning it into painting as sort of recursive field, allowing to renege on the artist task of "be Brodmann" while being Brodmann.


see too: Julien Ceccaldi at Jenny’s Fredrik Vaerslev at Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle, Vittorio Brodmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick

Mathis Altmann at Halle für Kunst Lüneburg

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The Model becomes predominate as the world's point of scale becomes unmoored, and reality floating between the virtual and material conditions abstracted by floating points of enumeration etc. etc. Housing replaces houses replaces house distinct from home, which is bombed out. The model encapsulates this world governed by virtual features, planning, projected statistical everything, abstraction of everyday. Looking down at our hands the sphere of the earth is said to be at our fingertips. This abstraction feels lived in. The architectural model exists as a plan scalable and virtual. The mix of real scales and virtual scales - a pipe standing in for piping - a vertiginous collapse, our proprioception lost in relation vibrates. Altmann's loss of orientation to physical objects has followed him for some time now.