Deshaun Price at Neue Alte Brücke

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Glass holds the juice, painting, the signifier of art. Held aloft in white air. Floats in glass, canvas, gallery, as the invisible structure for what we really want, the markers of art liquidity. "...Drawing ripples in surface to activate [painting], tap the vast depths of painting's cultural wealth"

The juice theory: Anna Zacharoff at Neue Alte Brücke

Eliza Douglas at Neue Alte Brücke

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The setting as the halo, the performance as the backer to the souvenir. Literally. Swirl the cultural object. "appends the abstraction we want, that we associate with painting while giving the value of the photographic, the 'abstraction' performs the work of 'art'. ...the mechanistic process of reproduction doesn't ruin it." The symbolic processes of art become literal, literalification.

Is all art just twirling culture into composition? to make it mean as art? Finding the twist you like?

See too: Eliza Douglas, Calida Rawles at Various Small Fires, 

 

Anna Zacharoff at Neue Alte Brücke

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"...Drawing ripples in surface to activate the beneath, tap the vast depths of painting's cultural wealth"

Previously:
1

Like cutting a rose from a watermelon, everyone wants the sweet fruit but we facet a composition. This is a metaphor for painting.

2
The watermelon in the metaphor is that essence "painting" - that unconscious object, myth, we all have some benign feelings towards, painting. And [Marlene] Dumas provides illustration: got famous for theatricalizing its juice struggling against the container, composition, corral.

3
Because it seems what we are actually pushing around on the canvas is the cultural object of painting. The canvas, support, oils, were long ago replaced by this mythos, the actual material, its signifiers, significance.

4
Paint becomes simply the candied shell to painting's cultural myth. Doesn't matter how thin because it's merely the container/shape of our love for "painting." As thin as marginally abstracted t-shirts. Drawing ripples in surface to activate the beneath, tap the vast depths of painting's cultural wealth, this the watermelon.

5
A lot of painting functions by tensioning the relationship between painting and its cultural myth - think the Neanderthalism of Joe Bradley, Krebber, or conceptually negated Sturtevant, the printer of Guyton, the signature of Josh Smith, the bruising history of von Wulffen, necrotics of Richter, the fordist production lines of Koons, Craven, Murakami, Kaws. Etc. Neurotic affairs with "painting." But occasionally painting succeeds by making us forget the relation to its myth, succeeds as a painting without history, paints something else and Painting we get to forget about.

Previously: (1)Julie Beaufils at Balice Hertling, (2)Marlene Dumas at Zeno X, (3)Svenja Deininger at Collezione Maramotti, (4)Eliza Douglas at Air de Paris,  (5)Nazim Ünal Yilmaz at Exile

See too: Anna Zacharoff at Kantine

Magnus Andersen at Neue Alte Brücke

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An exhibition titled "Stockholm Syndrome" which is "a condition in which hostages develop a psychological alliance with their captors during captivity." Which CAWD called Andersen's last Neue Alte Brücke show: "which we, [Andersen's] visual hostages, on a long enough timeline, learn to love..." Stockholm Syndrome is thought to happen because "the victim’s need to survive is stronger than his impulse to hate the person who has created the dilemma." In order to survive one must begin to identify and find compassion for the captor: people held captive for decades will defend their captors in court. An analogy could be made for a decades long acclimatization to certain types of aesthetic abuse, where an artworld begins to actually like the Jeff Koons, or Josh Smith.  On a long enough timeline they begin to appear quaint, lovable, despite their demonics. To deny it would simply place you outside it. And so, "Andersen knows that to survive is to triumph. And so with defeat you must accept its march into visibility." You will be seeing more of these, and as always with hideous painting, "half the fun is learning to love it."


see too: Ida Ekblad at Herald St., Josh Smith at David Zwirner, Magnus Andersen at Neue Alte Brücke

Bob van der Wal at Neue Alte Brücke

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Someday something will feast off the roughage of our crotches. And all the walls covered in notes behind it like a set for a conspiracy film, the mad attempts at extracting some actionable knowledge from it. As it's said, Conspiracists, like fetishists, like theists, find comfort in the underlying belief that someone is in control, at least someone is pulling the strings that manipulates the world that would otherwise feel so painfully arbitrary. We attempt to make sense, our Hominid brains are excellent at seeing patterns. We extract meaning from nothing. We become paranoid of a silent informed minority. Attempt to read the subtext in everything. Like art.

Philipp Timischl at Neue Alte Brücke

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Timishcl's sculpturification of photography is on one hand full of cheeky little moments of puncture - the objectification, fetish, and bejeweling of hyper-beefed men who unwittingly take part - as well as the need to sediment the more transitory elements of photo and video in an object original. Louisa Gagliardi's pierced and vajazzled painting comes to mind. But then thinking of 2004 when Bjarne Melgaard and his lover shot up anabolic steroids and fucked each other and the resultant photographs were shown as I'm sure we've all heard Kelsey tell it. About the level of risk involved and who bears it in what situations. And how Kelley Walker was recently and finally taken to task for not really being able to answer questions about his appropriation of particular cultures, like pushing on the sliver he wanted to finally drew his blood. How it was no longer this cold cerebral thing, and art's problematization actually was problem, our carefree objectification.