Lucie Stahl at Queer Thoughts

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Stahl's PR placing in it, in the lineage of a romanticism, darkly what we have come to. No longer the romantic era representing ourselves as fathomless depths, standing in front of nature's crashing; we are now better feared as plumbing: oils, flows, pumps, fluids directed, misunderstood as monsters. The human body is indistinguishable from any sufficiently complex sewer. And while the gothic has had a resurgence in style, [see: Digitalat Centre d’Art Contemporain La Synagogue Delme] there is an undercurrent of a few who find gothic horror in mere reflection of the world. [see: Morag Keil, Georgie Nettell, Gili Tal, Will Benedict, Merlin Carpenter] This is our modern not southern gothic. A world already dripping black nightmare, that we pump from the earth, have constructed our world out of; Stahl:"the fluid fruit of their labor allows us to express the feeling we got used to calling freedom."  to which Henning Bohl states earlier: "Lucie Stahl has become the oil." That this all's apparent freedom may have only just come to feel like. A product pipe-capable. Art as fluids, pipes, same as any other product. We all are forced to become fluid, make a product for channels, be pumped. Morose in banality, yes.

See too: “Digital Gothic” at Centre d’Art Contemporain La Synagogue Delme, Quintessa Matranga at Freddy, Gili Tal at Cabinet, Morag Keil at Project Native Informant, Georgie Nettell at Lars Friedrich, Georgie Nettell at Reena Spaulings, Gili Tal at Jenny’s, Will Benedict at Overduin & Co., Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co.

Lucie Stahl at Cabinet

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They hyper materiality of Stahl's earlier HiDef gurgitation is traded here - the resin soaked works which worked like soap's tighter attempts at control, sent physicality slipping from grasp, everywhere expelling digital gloss - a slipperiness that this exhibition finds in the cognition of pumping. The concern for wetness and Metaphor's sponge: pumping, like liquidity, milking rooms, the intravenous network of pipes, exchange, capital flow, financial meters, water tables, inelastic demand and liquid assets, dry powdered milk and barreled crude, black and white, gallons and barrels, flood plains and dry market: In 2012 a drought in New Zealand causes the worldwide prices of powdered milk and crude oil to diverge for the first time in a decade, this according to a website tracking such flows, the Progressive Dairyman. The point being the interconnection of flows that deliver also tether us, pipes become bars.

See too: Tony Conrad's Glass

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.

Will Benedict at Bergen Kunsthall

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The new method of artistic identity production, vacant-token-products for the gallery leaving the unsaleable cultural-capital building for the museums. Benedict has always been, like Kanye, a wonderful producer woefully lacking in “content.” Instead the arrangements are based on the formal material massaged in the medium of the network, buoys in the flow. Though Yeezus was great.

And Benedict's turn towards video production gives the most interesting results, yet the temptation to connect Benedict’s passé part-outs to the subliminal-abjection of the anti-adverts - both creating a fragmented disgust - would miss how sick-sweet repulsiveness of Fried Chicken and KFC commercials is premised on their physiological allure set against a much deeper horror. Benedict’s are closer to the phenomenon of trypophobia, a socially spread internet “fear,” presenting a study of whether it actually premised off a biological response or a form of social inclusion

See too: Will Benedict at Balice Hertling