Christopher Williams at The Perimeter

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You say shampoo 100 times until it feels foreign in your mouth - lost for the signal, gone numb, meaning. This is an analogy to this 47th showing of Williams' Hand Painted Signs, Photographs, Printed Matter, now with Long Play Vinyl, Audiophile Bar - the list itself is a redundant mouthful. A semantic satiation, an amnesia, like holding your breath as a pharmakological experiment. Lost all connection to what this is or was. Just back to a list of images circulating. Is there difference. The audiophile bar is lost. I am lost. At a loss. Why again? CAD?

see too: ... Because we don't want opacity anymore, we want clearly established intent. This probably makes Williams a medicinal flavor. But the en abyme of institutional/self reflection requires an outside party to discern the navel's tea leaves. Otherwise it's just tying up the institution in your ornate slick personal knots to look at your button. just kink. 

Isn't this all starting to sound like a brand package of institutional critique from the Pictures Generation? Blankness becomes its own commodity, its own bowtie...

...it’s a nice gesture but hard to see the decades’ work or installation subtlety amongst the brambles of families asking themselves aloud, literally “When do we get to see Matisse?”

Jasmine Gregory at Soft Opening

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The current thing online is a dunkathon on Dan Colen's painting "Holy Shit", specifically its auction downfall. A 96% precent loss. Spurned by Artnet's headline (the article is only headline) ending in a dry sardonic "Why? - a question which seems to treat us as so stupid that one might believe that there is something else afoot. But maybe there isn't. Maybe we are this stupid. Maybe we need the system explained to us over and over again. But comically the question is never answered. The why is only headline bait. Because the system is predicated on being able to cast the same line into the sea where everyone buys it hook line and sinker again and again and again. Holy shit it will return again and again and again.

Than Hussein Clark at Corvi-Mora

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Sculpture had already become a theater, a stage concerned so much with mis-en-scene, vibes. How much art looked like wanna be sci-fi sets or interior design. So it's welcome to finally press the button we've all been waiting for, "play."


"like a beautifully feathered bird you are required to know nothing about, a Tahitian landscape unencumbered by syphilitic artists, or a tie-dyed Heimo Zobernig. Like Sci-fi as excuse to CGI a lot of shiny things, theater to reimagine some neo-Memphis-group for Petra von Kant. ... their vacancy becomes strength"

Kayode Ojo at Maureen Paley

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2006? Carol Bove, Martin Boyce, Patrick Hill, Michaela Meise, et al. VVork-core. "All the chatter about a 'new formalism' going on." It was our "Fuck the Bauhaus" moment. They're all in Artforum several times. Everyone was repackaging, recompositionalizing, a minimalist modernism. Presenting tableaus of a wonkified high culture past, like bent Ikea showrooms of minimalism. Now it is a micro-era, quickly forgotten. But the procedures remain fun, merchant stands for selling something back to ourselves.

See too: Every 10 years assemblage reinvigorates itself as the dumpsters picked through are modernized to the current castoffs and appear new, the waste that evolves along culture until finally an artist is able to rummage up enough LEDs, acrylic panels and Arte Povera catalogs to accumulate the update to our Rauschenberg cardboard clogging the pipes of our forward progress.

Djordje Ozbolt at Herald St

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Painting is a basic technology for images. But you can imagine anything and you can paint it. Leave it right there for the viewer. Every new technology promises the printing of our dreams. AI will render you anything! We get a lot of what already existed, boobied fantasy women. A bird smoking. But they already do that in the real world, I saw it on instagram. Somehow the painting of three birds standing on each other comes off as far stranger. 

See too: Bird Day, Ann Craven at KARMA & Léopold Rabus at Wilde

Sibylle Ruppert at Project Native Informant

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We've run out of Giger works to flip so we dig a little further into the basement. A better basement perhaps. Less interested in the surface displays of a HD leathery seduction - than the intermittent potions of past styles, the Ernst, the Moreau, her Giger friend, into some flavor more disgusting than its parts. Hans Bellmer with better graphics, a better refresh rate. Giger had the the good luck to have his monster trophy become icon. These are more acid to dissolve the past into a possible formula. The formula is what most are searching for today. But these have more fun than running the endless permutations, seem devious in the idea. And a ray tracing way ahead of its time. 

Reina Sugihara at Arcadia Missa

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Ode to the oyster. To the folds and frill. To innuendo, guessing. To the suggestive aphrodisiacs. The thing we all see but can't say. The unmentionable. Us all slurping at what's underneath table. That what you see is not what you see. A toast to the suggestibility of the viewer, who holds this oyster in head. Whose head is an oyster, making sense of oysters. Painting isn't a wall, it's a suggestion, interpretability. Inkblots and oysters, they spill the shape of meaning inside your head.

Inkblot

Nika Kutateladze at Modern Art

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What is it with painters and the wastelands? Is it that the plains mirror the virtual plane of imagination, the blank void of painting, ready for projection?

The Wasteland: Gertrude Abercrombie at Karma, Adrian Morris at Galerie Neu, Tala Madani at David Kordansky, Tala Madani at 303 Gallery, Alexandra Noel at Freedman Fitzpatrick, Atlantis, Maryam Hoseini at High Art

Michael Andrew Page at Project Native Informant

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If you stack enough tents, do you get a glass stained cathedral? Preferably it is arbitrary methods to render an agnostic psychedelia. Rather than using a kaleidoscope to retroactively put a halo on its "content." It's a question of which direction we're looking, back towards the dwelling that loosely underpins these or towards the painting we should be dwelling. Cloister or Claustrum. Rendering its symbols into neuter meaninglessness seems more interesting than making something of folding tents. The confusion of church and tents, its a metaphor for painting, sure, but let's separate church and technology of lead solder.

Justin Fitzpatrick at Seventeen

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The victorian era surgery of Gross Clinic, HR Giger, The Thing. Stitching mutant art together with premodern surgery? That is most contemporary surrealism, Frankenstein juxtaposition of zombie culture. But the artist today seeks new medical procedures for our content's facelifts. This is genetic mutation, assimilation, a steam punk CRISPR, a Deco horror.

Jennifer Packer at Corvi-Mora

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These seem transparent about intentions, to get color at scale. Bouquets of it. The linework, the drawing, an excuse to hang wanton libidinal paint. Watermelon theory. Conceptually we prize art for what it means, for its "politics," but then occasionally we remember that the beach exists. That candy tastes sweet, and chefs, chemists, need reinvent it. 

Anna Uddenberg at The Perimeter

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The Greeks revolutionized ancient sculpture with contrapposto serving cunty, but now we've appropriated whole new asanas. Update figuration with fashion, this makes new. And new fabrics, new frills. You no longer paint the model, you tell the model how to dress. A thrill to play with dolls - they'll wear whatever, bend however. Matisse proved bending women till they're blue everyone found fun. Compositionalizing women for culture. It works! This is cynical but it is maybe naturalism.

Art loves women in culturally approved bondage gear: Cindy Sherman at Metro Pictures, Amalia Ulman at The Gallery at El Centro

Max Hooper Schneider at Maureen Paley

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There is little difference between the vitrine and the television, a box for growing an amoeba-like sentience - be the longterm point MHS has been making. And its parallel to painting. The petri dishes of a culture medium. Culturing culture. These grow lights. It's fun to open up a TV and see a brain, cut open a painting and see anything but art, splice into fantasyland, the casino shrunken, it's a small world afterall. 

Read all: Max Hooper Schneider

Anna Glantz at The Approach

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Glantz's surrealism has become more subtle, repressed into the paint itself, making you the fool explaining the surface of a face, painting. 

Georgie Nettell at Project Native Informant

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>>>Modern Gothic

This is an example of the Modern Gothic.

The strategy: employ, display, the depressing methods of our late-stage-nightmare. A celebration you nor anyone will enjoy - it's in the title. The high five of office pizza parties, the coal black drudgery of corporatized fun. What does it mean to give out what you know no one wants. The Modern Gothic can't be mistaken as art, won't provide that relief. The Modern Gothic only redoubles the banality. The John Knight quote: "It’s the primary lexicon for substantiating neoliberalism. It’s the off-the-shelf language of hegemony." We all know we hate this, why does it exist, why can't we stop it, this balloon party to capitalism.

This "repackaged and repurposed disobedience" with "a raw print speed of more than 12,000 square feet per hour." MASS MARKET HOPE. MASS MARKET CRITIQUE. Like the iconic Fairey poster quickly depleting its utopic optimism, now appearing ironic gravestone. A ballon party to the corruption of desire for political agency. Replacing it with the politically negligent. The strategy of corrupting critique, corrupting our political language, ruins our ability to form political response. If you fuck up language, the rational, enough it destroys the ability to speak, to think. Enough of this causes the "learned helplessness in rats."

Jacqueline Humphries at Modern Art

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The long and short of it is, Humphries always remained ahead of the zombies by making the embalming process more cartoonish, more itself, and gave us what we always really wanted: new paint, a shinier paint, a wanton paint. (The zombie formalist only had handwringing conceptual excuses for old paint, their endless search for "brains" to make 2nd generation Abex somehow refreshed with "process" but generating old looks.) Humphries looked garishly more - without excuse - bested abex by being even more airheaded than it - no search for brains, just new paint big. Humphries processes always felt mere wreaths to the dingdong, which they were, exceptionally beside the point. (That was the point, you didn't need them.) But lo this is the first exhibition where the first thing you see, a quotation, not delicious paint, a conceptual process foreground itself, which is like reading IKEA instructions for the sex promised.

Maaike Schoorel at Studio M

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Teasing cotton candy seems the sort of blue-balling kink we'd be into and you're right. There's pleasure in restraint. We don't need the cake, we only need to know there might be cake. Don't fuck me, just give the air its possibility. The crumbs of someone else's pleasure, that's how painting works. 

Richard Tuttle at Modern Art

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You got to hand it to Tuttle, he never cashed in, never cast it in bronze. Instead still the pernickety things hard to swallow, like fishing lures they need only approximate the shiny fish of formalism. Provisional objects still hook us. Look how crappy that sculpture is. Is this cute? Coy? Useless? Still resolutely ugly in a formally confetti way, continually falling apart is what they were meant to. 

Gretchen Bender at Sprüth Magers

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The simple Brechtian device, knot tied around finger, reminder distance. In comparison, how overwrought today's hi-budget televisual orgies. An interesting observation from the PR even, "Layering text over moving image is as familiar now in memes, tweets and social media posts," - that these are memes, constantly updating, live, cycling between nonsense and prescient. An analog HUD. "Items that are overdetermined to point of banality, yet the obviousness of the operation does not lessen it." Now you get to watch TV with some ostensible criticality, two TVs at once, what could be better. 

See too: Julia Scher, Gretchen Bender at Wilkinson

Reto Pulfer at Hollybush Gardens

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This type of artwork may be the final boss of 2010s contemporary art. A book you can't read. Pinned to the floor. An object of infinite affect. Compare to this object from 7 years ago. The tied up text.

"The packaging - the design, the arrangement - is the object, the affective manipulation of its viewer: the object above all connotes. Connotes intention and therefore meaning. The documentation encircles and presents it." But also prevents it.

"It creates a hole for the projection of its potential, fun or meaning. ...  The art object must be an inexhaustible hole, an affectation of the toy never opened. Like the toy manufacturer who ultimately wins by having privatized access to object, the artwork privatizes its "meaning." [Both are locked in packaging. ] It "means" nothing outside of the inflection of its affect [advertsing]. Circulates its sign within the sign structures of art, it looks like art, like it means something."

The toy designer and the artist no longer design a toy, design an artwork, they design a transaction.