Nancy Lupo at Michael Benevento Gallery

(link)

At a certain point profusion became the too-much that would kill us. All of it implicitly understood, the ever multiplying stuf as asphyxiant. A curse on humanity, to find our abundance become poison. To our atmosphere, biosphere, markets, all being choked by bubbles of plenty. The sorcerer's apprentice, we can't stop the inflation, the machine of capital, production, its terrible prosperity, a merry wealth to be our death. 

see too: The Burger King wears the crown given to him freely, but the crown in mass disperses responsibility amongst the birthday party and someone must pay for all that cardboard scenery. We all do. The wastebasket is technology for making true that stuf is opposite of art's monument. 

Eric Wesley at Pio Pico

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The unexpected next step is the Wesley game - artworks, identity, like endless non-sequitur, digression, absurdity. Instead a "philosophical bait" - go play Freud with these clams and missiles - this is the game of art, our MMORPG, the artist creates a puzzle and you solve it for him. Yes, this. 

See too: Because [art] deputizes us detectives, which gives hope. "A mystery! A mystery! Where can I lay meaning?" Art's interpretability is its highest duty. The crime scene and art are both given this role. The movie detective, the painting, both allow mystery's possibility of answers, thus light the candle that there is an answer.  Provide the possibility to believe in interpretation, giving a truth-potential without having to actualize answers. Interpretation, made as interminable as possible, already provides the same comfort as answers because it enacts the genre, creates art, which assumes meaning.

Scott Benzel at Phase Gallery

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A show named after the ancient ways of mirror gazing. As a means to communicate with spirits. What do you see reflected in a black mirror? A perfect analogy for art. Our apophenia on overdrive. What do you see in the void? How does your brain make sense in noise? From meaninglessness? We make art, see a face in toast, a spirit in rock. All of art is laboratory of it. Prisoner's cinema.

See too: "On Kawara's One Million Years versus here's dice roll over a Million Random Digits. ... art becomes the casino of picking digits, making meaning, manufacturing rarity."

Adam Alessi at Hoffman Donahue

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There's a threshold where horror and style cross into something.. else. Tim Burton perhaps, where an arabesque cutesery becomes its own grotesque. A clam corpse flaired like a theater-kid. A fedora perhaps. Resident Evil's victorian mommy. Hard to pinpoint what is so off putting about Tim Burton, but so blockbuster to some. If painters are going to treat the body as some compositional putty to dislocate hips for painterly whims.. at least admitting the horror to the manipulation seems earnest - if manneristly unnecessary. 

Group Show at OKEY DOKEY KONRAD FISCHER

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We're only missing Robbins' Talent and Heji Shin's portraits of Kanye. To exemplar the exploitation of your social scene, and the big uselessness of image. To add to the Becherian desire to own everything. Sekula's invisible labor, people set to work. Capitalistically, everything must be harvested. Pornographize your social circle. Visibility above all. 

See too: "Robbin's Talent was funny because it wasn't a joke. It dryly announced its commercial moment, no art to it at all. Artists as their headshot. Artist as professional. This was before "Top 10 Under 30"s. It was saying the quiet part loud. Here the caricature is alms paid to deny the horse of it all. Barely caricature at all."

"Notable to the migratory flocking, Henkel and Pitegoff decamped to Berlin and opened a bar. In business it would be called a "blue ocean strategy ... The theater that came next placed their social capital literally on view, staged, showcasing the finer patrons on a pedestal and brightly lit to be gawked upon... Whatever institutional critique it held was mostly in the fact that it could do it better, insinuate itself better, prove the sporting of it, point dull yellow lights at the gameroom of it."

Deondre Davis at CASTLE

(link)

As far as animism in art goes, gluing eyelashes to your fetish is funny. Literally attaching human traits onto an object. A functional anthropomorphization. To yassify your copper pipes. Bat their lashes to plead for the mercy of your sympathy. Don't laugh. Marx would warn us against not recognizing the social relationship of objects, not seeing another human at the end. Objects become subjects, subjects objects.   The drawings did sorta cast a spell on me though. 

See too: "...And so if the landfill is hell and the museum is hermetically sealed heaven, art is a practice of purgatorial suspension, hoping to place them onto the helmed cultural ships that navigate time, rather than fall to the abject slaw of whatever-mud at the bottom of the bin."

Luchita Hurtado at Hauser & Wirth

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The blue chip gallery unearthed a resurgent dead artists' pleasant and inoffensive abstraction? The trope is a cliche beyond. And the metaphor here is overpowering. You can say "I am" so long as it is in the vernacular of the institutions in power, so long as your language is abstracted into wallpaper, into gentle background, affirmative noise for the collector. Hurtado might be a great painter and this is made moot by gallery. It has nothing to do with the painter and everything to do with institutions who helm our ship's navigation relentlessly toward this inkblot goal. Mladen Stilinovic: "an artist you cannot speak english is no artist." But he had it wrong. The point is not to speak. The point is to make yourself abstract enough it doesn't matter.

Minami Kobayashi at Bel Ami

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Bonnard, Vuillard, Rodin, Gaugin, complaining that we keep repeating this is like complaining that bouquets still contain lilies. Adrenalized paint, like flowers, never goes out of style. Who would complain about another bouquet, about playing the hit a second time? A Dining Room in the Country returns in a second hand store. Now vintage. Stretch that song to thirty minutes at the Fillmore. Replay it a hundred years. Revamp the band with younger painters. Think how much those dead heads stole from the east. It okays the return eternal to playing it again but livelier. 

Fred Lonidier at Michael Benevento Gallery

(link)

The hornball photographer was baked into its spread. And Lonidier brings the receipts. Every new pictorial technology comes implicit with promise for men to manifest their dreams, spray their desire into a real, but photography was a gun of mass proportions. Advertising had made capturing women seem photography's very purpose. The sad comedy of this show, the hard sale to men, a tool for their desire, it was never more explicit. Look at the contact prints, Luncheon on the Grass became a documentary, became the norm, became a DIY kit packaged and sold for the everyman. 

(There's enough ideas here for four shows, maybe four careers at this point. Artists today are so afraid of explicit meaning, we've given in to so much "anonymous material" but Lonidier is proof that explicitness doesn't close meaning. The walls pinned with straightforward questions are surely redundant to the anonymous material of art's white walls glowing the same question, but the hamfisted redundancy is far more interesting, alienating, fun even, than the "mystery" of any noodly object on the floor. There's stakes and they're real. )

Wayne Koestenbaum at Gattopardo

(link)

It's really a great press release. Acknowledging the art is for Instagram. Still contain life. A late-career career. Fun is generally pestilence to art. (A confusion/fear of being the quasi-art of Meow Wolf, Museum of Ice Cream, all those museum courtyard carnivals.) Halpern makes the case for the shape a giggle makes. So nice to not be jaded. Or, more, believe it possible. "Henri Matisse painted pretty pictures during one of history’s ugliest eras." Early on I was haunted by a Kostenbaum paragraph about Warhol's nose sanding. A flippant aside of his, personal, visual struggles. Years later haunted by a piano jingle casually performed about cubed meats. Koestenbaum can haunt. Its in the ability to perhaps cast aside, continue on, in the face of it. 

Nora Turato at Sprüth Magers

(link)

Scream! Yell! Weeee! Bang, bang, bang the pots of language! Feel the emptiness. Feel hollow in indiscriminate wailing. A child in a grocery store deprived, is, yes, this is the sound of our world, adverts, attention, corporation. You have described our terror, armed the artist with these weapons of mass language... now what? This is the point where I turn, I'm not interested in being made numb anymore, in this classic form of desensitization. It was fun for a little while. Now it just gets bigger? The arms race was already won, we have demilitarization programs in place. The artist need not a bigger billboard to prove large emptiness. 

See too: Desensitization, Modern Gothic, Nora Turato

Valie Export at MAK Center for Art and Architecture

(link)

So much art demands the flesh obey, the body must be compositonalized. Picasso rearranges women into angles and we declare modernity. Higher powers command women El Greco, and several generations etiolate into pale heroin chic. You serve a higher purpose: conforming to beauty. There's a healthy dose of skepticism in the air, that the demands of art may serve no other purpose than watching people conform. 

I'm not convinced art doesn't just love women in culturally approved bondage gear: Amalia Ulman at The Gallery at El Centro, Anna Uddenberg at The Perimeter,Cindy Sherman at Metro Pictures, Maryam Hoseini at High Art, Koak at Altman Siegel, Lisa Yuskavage at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Louisa Gagliardi at Open Forum

Naoki Sutter-Shudo at House of Gaga

(link)

From the detritus of our semio-catastrophe we re-erect old forms: the wreckage is placed back into the shape of airplane, or of the critic and its painting. (Of a world still generating meaning.) The ability to re-erect it stands in for it, a literal strawman, the wreckage magically invokes its whole. If it can be recreated surely it can be understood. A social ritual to create a collective conscience that this once existed. There used to be people and not just cave paintings from the mall. 

Hanna Hur at Kristina Kite Gallery

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Spirituality was always psychedelia wearing a different coat. The vibes were differently ordered. Sacred Geometry, Minimalism. And this is the Venn center of all of them. Geometric psychedelia. Sacred hallucinatory. Amsler grids for God. Sense a higher plane, order, any order, just order, through the meat of your eyes.

see too: Hanna Hur at Feuilleton

Caitlin Keogh at Overduin & Co.

(link)

What can a tornado mean? How does it speak, catapulting whole neighborhoods into the air. A house blown up, again. How many times can you explode the house, the archive, mailbox, fenceposts, Greg, displayed, waving though the air, help. They continue beyond the frame! What can a Tornado mean by this? This is the fallout of Rachel Harrison semiotic explosion. The settling dust of nonsense. This is meaning aloft, in midair, the detritus of whatever art recently smart bombed. The airline wreckage cataloging its hangar. The little stick and poke tattoos glistening on your body. This face of Post Malone. A pox, outward flush of signs. He's got a case of the semiotics. He's got a pox of the interpretability. The illustration is clear.. but the meaning, whoa, wait till you get a load of the meaning. It's everywhere. The point is to make it look like a Clue board, to make the game is meaning. The loser is the first person to say "pipe."

Chadwick Rantanen at Michael Benevento Gallery & Aria Dean at Progetto

(Benevento, Progetto)

Silent instruments, silence musicians. Artists castrate sound. What is the resonance of mute instrument? What is the sound of one hand clapping? Between the form and the lost notes is the gap, the fissure allowing the viewer fill meaning in that distance. Blue ball you until you mean it. 

cameron clayborn at Morán Morán

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Not looking different but looking affected different. Chewed, digested, rubbed. Not really sculpted. A figure that's more accumulated by abuse of handwork <-- That's a metaphor.  Like Eraserhead too "mocks and assesses the event of the family portrait." Everyone's wounded, welcome, here's your artistic panacea. 

See too: Alma Allen at Shane Campbell

Dominique Knowles at Hannah Hoffman Gallery

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The use of "memory" in art generally finances loathsome schmaltz, turning the weight of concrete into gold bars of MEANING. Dusty, half-remembered paintings would feel like a slight but its true, they receding, they returning to the dust they will become. A world or a child, trying to recall a horse. Trying to remember how painting was. It is stupid blurry, worthless, it is weightlessly gone. Less memory than foreboding. More futuristic than most sci-fi tech.  

Mónika Kárándi at Anat Ebgi

(link)

The Welwitschis mirabilis plant looks like something the surrealists would want to have sex with, so it makes logical fodder for painting today. A humanoid brushstroke laying out in the sun, that's how you get a Tanguy.

Morag Keil, Bedros Yeretzian at Commercial Street, Los Angeles

(link)

Word clouds exploded as the vacuous form of auto-generated poetry that - as art - found meaning through artifactifying culture. Pulling objects from the wreckage to totemize - ascribe aura as font-size to. And generate an ostensible meta-layer of meaning. Doesn't this sound like art? Like art, it was stupid. Turning text into an inkblot to search for signs of what ended up being only your mother's indifference. Yourself in a warbled mirror. 

See too: Click Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co., Lutz Bacher at 3320 18th St