Trisha Donnelly at Museum Ludwig

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An artist doing her best to abolish the possibility of a reference we can call common, bury it behind opaque markers. i.e. difficult to recount without resorting to the degrading telephone game of myth, scattered primary source quotes cut/pasted ad infinitum; the PR limbo bending backwards to avoid description, replaced with chimes; and objects which, even at peak banality aren't really describable without metaphor, some sorta whatsa type a deal. What you see isn't mine. Probably why there's such radical opinion difference, Donnelly's cult and the mudslingers. The inability to derive equitable terms, a reference to talk about, looking like slack-jawed yokels.


See too: Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center

Huang Yong Ping at Museum Ludwig

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The material representations of history so often just stuff: cast concrete memories, or just bags of concrete, Keifer's lead, every undergrad's duffles of weighty sand - masses of time connoted by its mulch, by abject material resembling eyelid crust - trying to represent the raw stuff of time before its conversion to history. That artistic representations of time/history so often take on this trope seems almost a sociological phenomenon, why do we equate trash with history, with dumping grounds of material.

R.H. Quayt­man and Michael Kreb­ber at Museum Ludwig

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The two most retentive painters around. An anality of one expressive, smeared on walls, and the other's compressed tight to form diamonds of expression. Krebber is the embodiment of a public's contemporary art fears, the disordered body, Quaytman's crystalline structure a slick transparent version. Either way its desiccated enough at this point to be allowed into clean halls of adult history.

see too: “The Contract” at Essex Street, Michael Krebber at Nagel Draxler, Michael Krebber at Daniel Buchholz