Hanna Hur, Dorothea Rockburne at Ulrik & Nick Oberthaler at Layr

(Ulrik, Layr)

Geometry day down at CAD. Art demands religion be turned secular, into math, "art" which allows belief in higher powers without the pesky god. Angels to origami, optics. Oberthaler too deletes the gods of abstraction, transmutes their capital to symbols, coinage, packaged as Campbell's soup cans. Art is good at performing these transubstantiations, making blood into wine, into something we can taste, connoisseur, if not necessarily need believe. 

New Space Show at Layr & The Old Greyhound Bus Station at Bortolami

(Layr, Bortolami)

New Space day at CAD. An old bus station, a fresh digs. The exhibition space is the thing we're meant acknowledge but also not supposed to really acknowledge. (It would be too base to talk about the space in a true art review.) But yet it's there, the cosmic radiation to art.  I'm not even sure we have a language for its criticism, we only talk about it as a whole, as the common cube, to everyone. The implicit gold wreath. That now occasionally self-acknowledges? The exhibition's space is the watermark for the gallery's brand. the identity - so of course there is desire to puff its chest. 

Lili Reynaud-Dewar at Layr

(link)

"I invited men into my hotel room and asked them very personal questions about their lives" - making for the most overloaded artwork ever.  Sophie Calle by way of Ryder Ripps. Or Leigh Ledare. A conceptual gesture precluding/eclipsing its subject. An art as a set of procedures. It's a way of making sure you end up with something "interesting" - the program defines it. The psychoanalytic baggage becomes super saturated, too many rung bells to define a tune. Lest you forget, there is a hidden-not-hidden object here under all this red flag. Which is less the paradox of art's "contractual obligation to display freedom" than it is artistic-commodification of one's own body as an object for psychological projection, for MEANING. Everything is reflected back into the object of one's displayed-not-displayed body. Hannah Wilke but now dancing its inkblot in front of you. To interview a human is not enough you must find a way to paint yourself red into it. Self-immolate into it. Wilke was forced to get cancer to prove it.

Philipp Timischl at LAYR Coburgbastei, Vienna

(link)

Blinky light art, the rearranged parts of the cultural casino, cut from and placed into its altars, deranged artifacts. The PR says as much: "ratifies a pop modernism celebrating the a priori unnatural marriage between the culture of entertainment and that, sacerdotal, of modernism. Our Clement Greenberg in TMZ sauce, restages the epic formalist quest for flatness, infused with pop calibrated for iPhones."

The culturally accredited mall.

See too: Philipp Timischl at Neue Alte Brücke