Daiga Grantina at Emalin & Paul Lee at Adams and Ollman

(Emalin, AdamsOllman)

Are we getting theme days now? Yesterday's painterly auto-satisfaction and today is fishnetted TuttleWurtz? Which ostensibly allows experimental comparison: constants can be ignored, the variables leading to data - we determine difference. For the sorting of garbage. Like, while Hesse's materiality was more organizations systems to flaunt it, Benglis's excessed itself to monuments, less organized than amassed (what Donovan would later make spectacle). Chamberlain versus Nancy Rubins. Tuttle's accumulation was painterly, made formal, pretty for the pageants. And Wurtz... Wurtz more just the treating the refuse with a dignity - combing the child's hair for picture day. And Miho Dohi's fungi amongst. And here we have two somewhere in the field, picking up the remains, assembling a late assemblage. There's a joke in here about recycling, or upcycling, or maybe just "reduce, reuse, recycle" it'll always be a different product.

See too: Paul Lee, B. Wurtz

Danielle Roney at Upfor

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"Whispers are 3D printed sculptures formed by algorithmically interpreting vocal recordings of readings by and about migrants, intended to embody the physical intimacy of a whisper."
We took your pain and made it into an object! Took the story and made it abstract, silent, and finally beautiful. Abstraction is better when it's imbued with someone's soul, preferably yours.


See too: Dane Mitchell at Mossman

Katherine Bradford at Adams and Ollman

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There might be less menace than Miriam Cahn, the color less abrasive, but the lighting still portends. For both, color can appear as cruelty, threat. Heatmaps for vitals, sensitivity.  And paint is substance these things wear. It's why painters love pools, water, excuse to cover their subjects in. What we came to be deluged with: nostalgia for painting.


see too: Miriam Cahn at Meyer Riegger, Miriam Cahn at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Miriam Cahn at Jocelyn Wolff, Miriam Cahn at Meyer Riegger

Kelly Akashi, Cayetano Ferrer at PP

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More exhibitionist materiality. Open the wardrobe to expose the wood. We so desperate for some woodgrain to counteract the glass we see everything through. We crave touch, sensibility, sense, something to counteract this numbness from everything electric, world rendered. This materialist becomes conflated with the authentic, the rustic. Stripped. But, no matter how much you want it, do not touch the art. Leaving everyone with a case of erotic sexual denial.


See too: Olga Balema at High Art (2) Olga Balema at High Art (1) Olga Balema at Bridget Donahue, Daniel Lefcourt at Blum & Poe, ektor garcia at Cooper Cole, N. Dash at Casey Kaplan

Jesse Stecklow at Chicken Coop Contemporary & Adrian Piper at Hamburger Bahnhof

Jesse Stecklow at Chicken Coop Contemporary
Adrian Piper at Hamburger Bahnhof

Hypertrophied conceptual art still flexing instructionals retains, at heart, an interest in poetics, the fissure in semantic conclusion, the discrepancy in language's overt clarity and concern for bureaucratic legalese and recipization standing in for that object, even the most bureaucratic language fails and is semantically open, poetic. Information is pleasurable, activating our brain's dopamine reward system, addictive, we consume it without need for it, lack of place to use it just silver information reflecting its space, "consciousness and experience can not be described in materialist terms" in Stecklow's terms. Piper's contractual better world exchanges real world ethics with paper versions, "each individual voluntarily commits to align his or her future deeds with ethical principles such as honesty and reliability. ... They form a community of people who are likely to be trustworthy in the future." Which like nuclear disarmament leaves one community at a disadvantage, obligatory trustworthiness advantageous to others lacking it, the trustworthy lose the tools maintaining MAD strategies pleasant standoff, lies at the ready, trying to replace the grey world with black and white text never quite as functional.

Andy Coolquitt at Disjecta

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Coolquitt's assertion of the tube (and tube forms) a sort of Rhoadesian maneuver, imbuing forms with aura through repeated insistence, exhibitionary marketing campaigns. For Rhoades the pearoefoam mocked the artist product (signatures) of artists hands. The Pollock drip-cum-glue reified as object/product.  Whereas Rhoades attempted dismantling the mythologizing of the artist genius to make its brand establishment happen in front of you, Coolquitt, in several exhibitions past, has already retaken ad nausea the process as a cute cleverness that absorbs anything into its ever encompassing fold. Everything makes sense as "The signature product" of the artist, a pareidolia of artistic significance, taking photos of boxes of tubes. In this exhibition water is deployed from tubes, logs people step on are tube, the artist himself a large tube. Eventually everything, however insipid, begins to look like, and therefore brilliantly become justified and even somehow significant as, an inane tube; call it tube theory.