Mark McKnight at Park View/Paul Soto

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The confusion of the machines reading this as "violent content" is almost objective evidence of McKnight's latent own - the algorithm seeing violence, "humanitarian crisis," or corpses in the body of a tree. I mean it is a sensitive photo. Instagram's policies are notoriously opaque, but assuming this was an automated process, the robots choosing violence don't understand corpses or flesh or violence. (Picking a boat out of a lineup of 9 images fools most robots.) Rather they amass a generalized cloud of what violent content looks like. It's in this etherous affect of violence, of horror - removed from a strict concept of corpse - that both you and the algorithm respond to a tree. No so different after all, husks of the dead, apophenic machines. There's more content to that Bernini-like grasping of flesh than the new church would allow. 

“Automatic Door” at Park View / Paul Soto

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The asinine quantity of pictures of bodies today, instagram influencers, lotion advertising, pornography. The vast amount of flesh smeared on everything, our stores full of them, our faces spread at 10 meter heights. Everywhere; a hall of mirrors. As if Bernd and Hilla Becher had foretold of a, this, complete surveillance, catalog, cars with more eyes than spiders to take everything and render it. And our bodies become so extracted, mined, and repackaged, that we start to feel like we don't have bodies at all. Just things, mocked as meat space, something stupid or without sense, or heat, or passion, or sensitivity, but whitened teeth smiles mined. And but then here a photo of a body still surprising, that can endear us to it, these weird incongruous things not yet fully extracted.


See too:  AA Bronson and Keith Boadwee at Deborah Schamoni, Geumhyung Jeong at KLEMM’S, Roger Hiorns at Faena Arts Center, Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg,