“Sputterances” at Metro Pictures

(link)

No myth that curators are beholden to a "conversation," one that manifests by reinscribing and working around the general pool of artists we see commonly. Curators show certain art/artists to prove (and thus renew) their access to the structure that legitimates them. Reciprocal legitimization by no single curatorial/artist node but instead the conversational majority, arranging consensus by those delegates already given authority, e.g. curators, institutions. Access starts to look like legitimacy. This insight why CAD took off. Read Sanchez's "Contemporary Art, Daily."  This why we see artists/exhibitions in triplicate, the same ones proffered around the globe. You proffer 3 givens, and one unknown.  And so maybe artists make more enjoyable curators because they're freed from the profession's need to prove the contemporaneousness of the vision, you get something a bit more idiosyncratic, interesting.

Simon Denny at MoMA PS1

(link)

There's a great panel discussion published with Denny in which his staunch refusal to talk about artmaking in any terms but the corporate terms of "product" "content" and "brand" leaves the other art-types at a sort of incredulous distance, wondering whether to refute the position (corporate terms obviously implying evil) or understand it at the safe distance of metaphor. This "struggle" to come to terms with such description is mirrored in much of the writing about Denny's work, in which writers search desperately to find where the critique - that of course must be there- lay.

Throwing two cents into the pile of change one hopes to be in the world: there isn't "critique" in the ambivalence of Denny's semi-archaeological work, and if there is, it is a tangential critique of the art-world itself, that the Artworld is much less interesting than the oddness of "experience" larger-Culture provides, even its objects. That an exhibition of Mega founder's collection of - what one glossy art magazine felt it without qualifier could be stated as "bad art" - misses the reflexivity of such situation in which a representation of an artifact of culture, an exhibition of "bad art" would be a more interesting experience than more art itself. Whether Pierre Menard or the Quixote himself, "critique" for Denny would only be part of experience of the product, its brand. And, in the same panel, stating a complicitness with capitalism that he doesn't want to kill, Denny is challenged asked what he does "want to kill," again implying the assumption of "critique" that the artworld so desperately needs for its own ends to be there. Denny responds, "That's not my goal. My goal is to make interesting content."


See too: Simon Denny at Portikus, Timur Si-Qin at Carl Kostyál, Ben Schumacher at Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon

Venice vs Triennial

Venice, Triennial

Cold adult sobriety vs hothouse youth. The difference is generational. 10 years ago avenues to visibility were tightly controlled by finance beholden gatekeepers pedigreed and willing to bestow public accreditation to neophytes in line, behaving to a system; Today youth of the post-net are really post image-democratization, a time in which all images come preloaded with mass audientential capabilities, and accredited publications (with expensive paper real-estate) are matched by cheap raw visibility's fungible version, exchangeable with any world (fashion, commerce, literature) equally, the gold standard of different disciplines. Views now actually equatable with dollars, concretizing vague importance of public attendance numbers with dollar signs. This isn't that the New Museum is going full populist, but rather that it must manage now a cultural idea of art that they present back to it. The Bienniale, a pretty much artworld only affair, must conform to an artworld's image of itself, reserved and tasteful, and look how staid most of it in comparison is. And the preponderance of the Triennal exhibition's viral capable art that flowed through the net alongside it is as symptomatic of cultural changes in art as it is the new liquid spirit. Old guards' approval no longer perquisite to fame, Artists can produce visibility organically, through, it turns out, interesting images and so if the Teletubbies look through you, disinterested in your presence, chalk it up to art that isn't predicated on Fried's theater attending to the viewer's presence, but the populist behind it, and so this new art, frighteningly enough, is actually kind of entertaining.


See too Chris Ofili at New Museum, Seven Reeds at Overduin and Co.

“Work Hard” at Swiss Institute

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"A group of civic-minded Swiss, established businessmen in the city, came together to assist their newly arrived countrymen with advice, jobs and money. In 1846, ninety-six supporting members formally organized as Swiss Benevolent Society of New York to carry on what they had started."

The Swiss Benevolent Society, still around today, eventually gave original housing to the Swiss Institute, made a home for them in their building for the elderly and indigent, the poor and needy, and therefor artists too, the SI's goal seeming artistically mirrored, giving their countrymen a leg up, a strictly Swiss affair, before being nerfed to today's PR: "provid[ing] a significant forum for contemporary cultural dialogue between Europe and the United States" paid for by mostly Swiss government and businesses - as well as contributions from a few American galleries who of course have artistic overlap, as is the case with Carron and 3 of the galleries providing him solo shows in the last years (though Carron already had a solo at SI in 2006), nothing new to the artworld's corporation/institution symbiosis - to supply and sustain a bastion of "European culture" in the heart of it, corporate art culture. "Dialogue" having become a sort of meaningless PR inkblot whose shape amorphous reflects and is culled by whatever the reader's personal investment, a Rorschach if there ever was one. The mildly conspiratorial air surrounding the Institute and always in vogue curators lay in the difficulty ascertaining where exactly the cart lies in relation to these hottly trotting artists often already appearing to be riding trains to market, questions of who delivering who.

Transcription of an 1862 benevolent meeting's minutes seem fitting:

Four applicants were sent to the Interior.

Three applicants were sent to Europe.

Seventeen and a half tons of coal have been given to 35 applicants.

Three thousand seven hundred and twenty pounds of bread have been distributed.

Nine applicants have received board and lodging.

No word on how many artists distributed.

see too : Chris Ofili at New Museum , Stefan Tcherepnin at Freedman Fitzpatrick

Ben Schumacher at Bortolami

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An exhibition as a proposal for an architecture, an exhibition preparatory, preliminary in its sketch, everything here is a “performance,” an inference for projection, the techno-materialism of Schumacher’s practice spun to threads, to the lines of schematics, doodles on photographs reneging the objects that once adorned his exhibitions in favor of the documentary plans, a conceptualism you assemble yourself like IKEA, components stretched thin to dissolution in the dilation of time as speeds approach ludicrous. Look at this documentation, without a thing to be seen anywhere. Schumacher no longer the contractor but the architect, setting up a chains of command as entrepreneur, the only way to increase speed is to oversee those who have been sourced, soon to be Schumacher the CEO.
Techo acceleration useful in limits fraying, swelling with hot-air, to loft itself out of exhibitionary containers and coursed to see itself in skyscrapers, fueled on the fumes of gaseous networks of friend-ibitions, accumulative and outsourced models of growth. If it can get off the ground.

Ben Schumacher at Musee d'art Contemporain de Lyon , David Douard at Johan Berggren , Simon Denny at Portikus

“Lands’ End” at Bodega

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Bodega operating cooly for 5 years now and this the first CAD approved, one conspiratorially wonders if it’s with newfound Pryde.

The uncanny and abjection, and the various forms of it, from the saccharine of overripeness to detritus sticky resin stuck and mannequin wire children in floatsafe fashions, to the cold necrotic design of corporate cooperative, to place the mess against the continuing prophylacticizing of the world behind rubber corners, and all the seediness within it. A trending antagonism against clean whiteness, the final form of punk will be something with disgust no one wants at all.

David Duard at Johan Berggren , Flat Neighbors at Rachel Uffner , Cathy Wilkes at Tramway

Matthew Chambers at Zach Feuer, Praz-Delavallade

(link Zach Feuer Praz-Delavallade)

Whatever was the quaint fun of  Chamber’s shoddiness in past onslaughts has been strip-mined to the bedrock of materiality’s ability for monolith pleasantry.

Group Show at Greene Naftali

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How quickly this work has accumulated the look of the academic.  Possibly because it all went in hand with the theory that consumed it as their banner in its initial flourish it has as quickly dehydrated in the burning of its moments usefulness. Harrison’s dissonant abstraction, packaging the painter's studio schizo positioning of inside/out, its initial edge worn to the look of safety scissors in its childlike spoils. Or as recent as 2008 writers speaking of Krebber’s ability to “make us nervous” or in 2013 still describing his second 2003 Greene Naftali exhibition, “these works were if anything even more unfriendly to critics and collectors expecting a show of Important European Painting.”  Yet who today is really nervous about these text paintings. Surely for all the descriptive language of “evasion, deflection, deferral and refusal; diffidence, apprehension, ambivalence and doubt” and the sloganesque “preferring not to” Krebber’s greatest “evasion” was his willingness for absorption into those so willing have him, the conceptual disposability of a practice premised on the initial shock of the “evasion” in plain sites, readied for gallery’s recoup, to be making the most historically assailable paintings around. A horse on a wall as if mocking it all from behind the wall of the institution. The murderer dreaming not of the murder but of tacks placed on the map of the detective.

“Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center

(“Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center)

Animation and Cartooning's comedy was premised on slapstick’s violence upon the real, stretching the real into a comic absurdity, teasing a threat to break it, which rationalizing this discrepancy forced laughter in children. Irrupting cartoons (or rotating ASCII) into the real - the real that we daily refer to as dissolving, mocked as “meatspace”- feels apt, funny, impish pranks of mischievous adolescent arts. What may be interesting about this show is that we have defined the moment, the kids grown on cartoons have arrived and their childhoods have coincidentally, absurdly, become the accurate depictions of the way the world has begun to feel, and will soon become generic, but at least we'll get to stop repeating ourselves.


See too: Danny McDonald at House of Gaga , Pentti Monkkonen at High Art , Nicholas Buffon at Freddy ,  Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick

Sam Lewitt at Miguel Abreu

(Sam Lewitt at Miguel Abreu)

Technocratic sculpture, symbols of technology and information as banners draped over the bones of the Unmonumental styles, an art that appears new, shiny, and once again copper, made to be placed on the covers of philosophical texts as illustrations of the spooky newness of our condition, emblems. Bochner measuring with the giddy glee of new technologies.  These aren’t conceptual objects but representational ones. They depict the information they contain.The world and the processes that comprise these objects are interesting, in the future as the works become historical documents of these technologies possibly the art will become too.

See too: Ben Schumacher at Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon , Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps

Sturtevant at MoMA

(Sturtevant at MoMA)

It would make sense that Sturtevant’s culminating exhibition would be a bad one. Yet to call the show a disservice amongst an entire career of stop and starts and too-soon brilliance - what Hainley refers to as the artist’s tendency for prolepsis - makes this addendum of an exhibition all the more sadly apt; that to think the work capable of a finality of representation was of course misguided. An artist who in her 70’s began again with a whole new line of work capable of competing with 20’s Berliners in fresh faced zeal, the artist would have been better served outside this dullest of institutions. Yet curator Eleey, always the installation showman, and alongside the artist seems to have smuggled a few time-bombs of white-hot brilliance  into of the dim yellow tendencies of MoMA corporate-hood. An ecstatic video work placed within sight of Starry Night, an act of total historical vertigo, too soon.

Greer Lankton at Participant Inc.

(Greer Lankton at Participant Inc.) link

Today, in the era of the online avatar Lankton’s surrogate dolls may have had a resurgence of relevance, staging and reflecting its world in the warped mirror of Lankton’s desire, the way digital technologies’ virtual platforms potentialize the endless construction of the avatar-self and its world. Lankton’s worlds were proto-virtual; projections of her desire/vision into imagined worlds that today makes more sense in terms of so many artists' digital desire-realms. It could have been great. But today the cast of characters surrounding the work today and writing the PR seems more concerned with projecting it back into history, back into its now lifeless scene, alongside the more famous names it can accredit to it, preserving it in the embalm of the all the pedigree it can inject.

See too: Tony Greene at Schindler House , Nicholas Buffon at Freddy , Danny McDonald at House of Gaga

Albert Oehlen at Skarstedt

(link)

“No. There have been all kinds of filth in art. Beuys, Vienna Actionism, Miserabilism, every kind of filthy painting, broken bodies, bits of flesh, violent spray orgies, and painters who listen to Tom Waits while they work. We didn't have anything to do with any of that." 

-Oehlen on Kippenberger and himself.

Kippenberger may have had the charisma and showmanship, but, as is revealed in interviews and paintings, Oehlen was the funny one. While Kippenberger's paintings were a joke, self-mocking farce on the viewer’s desire for mastery, Oehlen’s paintings were a comedy relying on the formal exigencies of the craft - timing, inflection, nuance - acerbic without punchlines; they lack a clear position from which to “get the joke.” Oehlen’s paintings do not clearly delineate their intended “content."
This, what the NYTime’s called a “lack of pretense,” set him apart from the multitudes today indebted to his practice who, desiring to be swallowed so quickly, find a lured aspect for which the paintings to be consumed, following on 2009’s Luhring Augustine finger paintings that proved you could make bad paintings and be cool too, of course then the moment Gagosian decided to represent him, and Oehlen’s second American wind from the huffing of so many young churning out marketable variations of him.

O’BRIEN: But can you be an abstract painter and a bad painter? 

OEHLEN: Absolutely. [all laugh] 

WOOL: The worst. I like a story you told once that I tell students sometimes. You said you were trying very hard to make seriously bad paintings, while the New Museum version of bad painting was really about something else—it was about outside ideas that were bad—but you were trying to make really bad paintings, and you realized that the worst ones you could make were exactly like the Neue Wilde painters in Berlin. And then you decided it really wasn’t worth it, and Dieter Roth said something similar. He was interested in making bad paintings, and he said he always failed, because with paintings it always looks good in some way. Just because of the material . . . But he could do it with music, he could do it when he was playing the piano by himself, but it was excruciating to listen to, and he would immediately have to stop. It kind of closes the loop. 

OEHLEN: I mean, you have to do it seriously. You have to take responsibility. You cannot just do it as a side project and make an arrogant attitude, a gesture. I think Dieter Roth could not have done it because he was not a painter. You have to become a painter and hold your head out the window. You have to give it an importance, and I did that, so that’s why I could do it. [laughs]

Interview Magazine

“National Gallery” at Grand Century



The exhibition was a month ago but its good timing this late-entry-prior Miami arrivals to get the free advertising, labelled on the map of relevancy, legitimation and visibility. Before there be just serpents in the uncharted. But a few famed friends shed light as german markers of this new territory, addendum to Empire’s realm.
The show hung on the ceiling.
Looks fun - Genzken at 66 still has it, and Kennedy’s work was always made to do this - but in it’s desire for “a heightened physical awareness that serves to explore the idea of vision as corporeal” and “a temporary resistance to mass circulation” the irony of its installation upset lies in the fact that it was always going to end up in the trading routes of it not Empire, then any of the other outsider networks, pretty much made for it by the gallery National’s standard two day party affair, documentation for the hungover circulation, and that that is all that is left, temporary resistance as a good foreplay, because every good sea man does eventually want to get swallowed.

Oscar Tuazon and Eli Hansen at Maccarone



The brutalist bravado of Tuazon meeting the campy stoner pastiche of Hansen’s psuedo-psychedelia makes for an imprecision of tone like Prince’s appropriation of the rural’s common tire planters, hard to disentangle celebration from sarcasm, like the joke of this exhibition’s endless column of toilet water. What was brilliantly found common ground in previous co-exhibtions, containing the specificity of both’s affective attachments, as in duct taped glassware, becomes in this exhibition dulled in its conflicting auras, mixed-metaphors of irony meeting its antithesis, of the deft masculine erections mocked by its sidelined dropout equivalent, found a meeting point in the threshold of blue-collar car craft aesthetics.

Paul Cowan at Clifton Benevento



Continuing the thread: But so how does one deal with monochromes who over-perform the narrative theatricality inherent to its minimalist theater, dissolving the beholden position to supplant it with its own, the comedy of mimes painting, (mimes painted these) deflating the modernist is-what-it-is with a whoopee cushion like laugh. Unlike the “autonomous” gentle monochromes whose “contentless” portability transfers their contextually-fungible aura, perfectly tradable vessels for commodity markets; Cowan’s content fractures with its removal from its over theater, bringing its artifactual baggage along. Cowan’s monochromes do not behave in their silent assertion of their living quarters, but ruin the air with musty aura of its mime punchline, silent but deadly.

See: Seven Reeds at Overduin and Co.

Rob Pruitt at Gavin Brown



No one is ever going to stop Rob Pruitt. You can’t evict the returned prodigal son, that would be too.... ironic, like being stuck in an Alanis Morisette song, stuck in the 90’s with a teenage artist that just turned 50, 50, and still kicking holes in the drywall and smoking ciggies in rebellion (to what?) and getting the couch sandy, and we put up with the loud music in hopes he’ll eventually grow wings and grow up and make something of interest. But he’s got the loudest soundsystem on the bloc, screaming, and a lot of cool people like to ride in the irony of his obviousness mistaken for interest. The Pepsi style of corporate “throwbacks” - doodling on notebook cover “paintings” - couldn’t even be called nostalgic it’s such an empty gesture, runaway on the cheap high-school amphetamines of vampiring of his studio assistants, the young people that make these, mining their 90’s childhoods for Pruitt’s empty laugh, and what’s mistaken for dumb is actually sinister, that no matter how old Pruitt or his schtick gets, he’s like “That’s what I love about High-school kids, I get older, they stay the same age.”