Cudelice Brazelton IV at Murmurs, Los Angeles

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Maybe its nostalgia for late aught's unmonumentality, for Donnelly mystery, for E. Smith estrangement, for that single image of Hammons' little radio on top a brick or whatever, or maybe this is finally just art that's hard to parse again. Not even knowing what you're looking at type enjoyment. In the last ten years art has become appallingly clear. Instead this more like "The rocking chair I project from the two elegant bones still in contact with the real is not the same as the one in your head." Searing your brand into the wall, an amorphous inkblot, but an amorphous that's more, already gone. For Donnelly, E. Smith, for that little radio it is less about the object more about altering the air. Book title: Arts of Suspicion. 

see too: Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center

Haena Yoo at Murmurs

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Rhoades' pearoefoam was brilliant in its mockery of art mythification. The "factory of art" became actual factory, cartoonifing the symbolic conveyor belt, the transubstantiating of stupid object. The fact that it worked, that the objects became highly sought after art, was twice the fun. The above similarly mocks the potion-izing of certain essences, identities, importances. The things we put in the potion to make Aura. Press Releases or dolphin tongue, everyone has their own secret sauce. Which, like Rhoades, would be a joke if it didn't work so well. I mean you have artists today selling actual magic potions - wondering a question of what's the difference. Secret sauce is to taste.

See too: Masaya Chiba at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, James Lee Byars at VeneKlasen/Werner

Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya at Murmurs

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Book title; Elongated Necks: Italian Mannerism through Anime Mech: mutant figuration throughout history. There's some type of desire for a new physicality. More potent forms of body. Harder forms of body. Evangelion EVAs, a mech that bleeds. Transformers, no coherence to their machine, only endless CGI particles. Gore is just a body undergoing process based abstraction. Teratomas. The body goes rococo. Your face goes baroque. Not to even mention the cyborg. An unidentified animal washes up on shore, decomposing, mythical. The mutation on the mutation, an ever growing corpus. Necks selected for desire, lengthening. John Currin comedy. H.R. Giger's sudden high art popularity. Akira: Tetsuo's corpus extrapolates itself. Ballard's Crash, surprisingly sensuous. Biological tech atrocity. Calvin Klein models, their own El Grecoing body. Etiolated males. The Thing.  New forms of body always giving torture of yours.