Michaela Eichwald at Reena Spaulings Fine Art

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Giving new meaning to art that matched the couch. Painting like a potato, couch like an Erwin Wurm. They meet in handshake of our body - they both hold meat and brain, contemplation and weight. Becoming here an ouroboros, contemplating our own tail, head feast ass.

Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg

Alastair Mackinven at Reena Spaulings

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The Spaulings shift happened around 2014. Josh Smith was painting palm trees. Klara Liden took dance lessons (instead of bashing bicycles with a pipe in an empty apartment.) Koether showed painting on canvas. Even Carpenter painted paintings. Claire Fontaine's revolution stopped being given several exhibitions a year. Seth Price decamped for Petzel. It was like everyone had kids. And then two years later, a second home, and suddenly tasteful paintings on the walls, many exhibitions of them. Had we all just become adults? This was everywhere. Even Mackinven's 2013 paintings seemed more with old Spaulings. But everyone's teenage hopes of criticality and middle fingers given over to colorful walls, given over to the mere apparatus of visibility (2014 was one year after Sanchez's question on digital transmission, is this the aftermath?) to just keeping the symbolic lights on for fluorescent symbolist moments. So that there are two kinds of nostalgia operating now. 

see too: Alastair Mackinven at Reena Spaulings 

Heji Shin at Reena Spaulings

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There is too much metaphor, too much content to Shin's subjects: birth, cocks, Kanye, the X-rays of objects we don't need. And casts their lure in photographic concrete, explicit, as incredibly stupid-if-beautiful facades. Against all the assumptions of art's effusive aboutness, or meaning, (or whatever critical magic we unconsciously appreciate) Shin's turn the subject off, loaded with a content that's there but not it: entering into its game of unpacking "cocks" is the bright red gap, the herring to a photo depicting it. It's a dare, like shark-cocks, a socially constructed mirage. But you are not a detective, this is not a Clue board. This is the sort of Wolfsonian dissonance, an affective-if-meaningless thing, a vacuum we can't allow. An X-ray is no help to thought, a picture maps no meaning. Cocks are pretty. Kanye is a uniquely Baroque wall, not a window. The writer who attempts shall be eaten by dragons.

See too: Heji Shin at MEGA Foundation, Jordan Wolfson at Sadie Coles HQ, Jana Euler at Galerie Neu

K8 Hardy at Reena Spaulings

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The seemingly obvious in art shouldn't itself be a criticism since, well, Greenbergian abstraction was itself pretty obvious confrontation with some psychoanalytically blank wall stained with all those painterly headbutts of a phallic order. "less surface, perhaps, than receptacle" the press release nails. Just like all those stiff socks for male expression.

Sure it's yet another inkblot test for endless interpretation, but at least it's got a frame to shape it. Like tea leaves, like expression's seminal drips, this at least owns the navel it gazes with.

Merlin Carpenter at Reena Spaulings

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Irony was fun about a decade ago, seemed to have its peak in about 2010 before the political discourse shifted abruptly and boots on the ground politics seemed pressing. But now, recoil, irony is back with people wearing clown makeup and being disingenuous online. Irony is a scapegoat for so much. A means for someone to deflect and quagmire conversation by being deeply unclear. Carpenter feels like a game of "well I know that he knows that I know that he knows..." en abyme. 

Carpenter knows this is dumb, and knows that we know he knows this is dumb. But us all gripping chins wondering on which floor precisely the middle finger is resting. Our cerebral assessments of navel's swirl that 5 years ago couldn't have been less interesting now return in way that feels apt to the political moment. Because we're exhausted. And perhaps what Carpenter is actually trading in is the feeling of exhaustion. Can you imagine being forced to explain these to someone? Explain politics now to someone?

Because people often don't think this is dumb:

"Interactive art, of which this is, like Web 2.0's [...] the system shifts from content generation to interactivity itself, turning itself into interface for the user themselves to self produce, the turnkey-op entrepreneurial dream, in which as long as the structure is up and running "content-revenue" will self-generate, [...] because like Scanlan on Sehgal, even mediocrity is acceptable to a public so long as it has a hand in it."Read full Urs Fischer at JTT

Read all posts tagged Merlin Carpenter

Juliana Huxtable at Reena Spaulings

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Difficult to write a history of the internet without mentioning its catalyzing a complete restructuring of identity that had been then slow simmering. The early dictum "No one on the internet knows you're a dog" had its counterpart: "No one on the internet doesn't know you're not a dog" and thus the furry. This was a miracle. Be who you were. An immaculate conception the IRL has yet to absorb and thus the Brillo pad friction when it irrupted in. We binged cartoons as Disney children to manifest them later in Goofy costumes, the Saturday morning cartoon education we devoured alongside hyper-processed cereals mapping our internal worlds in the same malleable cartoon goo. The world a cartoon, at least make yourself an artist.


See too: Juliana Huxtable, Carolyn Lazard at Shoot the Lobster, Eva Fàbregas at Kunstverein München, Lisa Yuskavage at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

Leidy Churchman at Reena Spaulings

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"the 'manure of experience.'"
"an 'extraordinary junkyard' of symbols,"
"a disconcerting heterogeneity at first glance,"
"individually rich but collectively inscrutable."

Klara Liden at Reena Spaulings

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Dance in the expanded sense. The ability for a body to move, across a theater stage or clipping fences to access a city's forbidden sites. Liden's early video dance beating a bike to death, or hysteric strip on train car. The literal moonwalk and ballet practice. Videos. Dance. The posters are just tchotchkes advertising this theater performance, bodily movement that Liden's practice always been invested in.
So then here, the pratfall, physical comedy, SLAPSTICK. The world turned to rubber. "In social psychology, the pratfall effect is the tendency for attractiveness to increase or decrease after an individual makes a mistake. An individual perceived to be highly-competent would be considered, on average, more likable after committing a blunder, while the opposite would occur if a person perceived as average made a mistake."There's something about our world today where slapstick isn't as funny.

Ken Okiishi at Reena Spaulings

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By throwing their stuff, themselves, into the ocean they were able to keep a freedom, their lives, a paradox that Okiishi has obvious misgivings over placing current lives back in the desert buried. Stripped of your heritage how free did you remain, the question. Now Okiishi, a new transport of history towards oceans which left the LA Times wondering what was in the puppet head box rather than the seemingly more pertinent question of this displacements of an Ames Iowa basement's catalyst. No one packs up a van without reason, a much less exciting white Ferrari of Okiishi's time vehicle, precisely one car load, kept, allowed into the future. The amount one can carry. What can be preserved as our possessions-as-selves eroding in time streamlined against current's abrasion. Which amass more in new homes. What will be the last object of yours finally cast into waste by your children? Objects carry briefly into tomorrow, but the artist is allowed attempts to loft their objects onto the generational ships of museums, while entire histories of others are and have been lost. Like Dahn Vo's attempt to carry Martin Wong's possessions, or even Cianciolo's corrugate time vessels, we allow a certain amount of artistic provenance into the future, and all the hope for it.


See: Susan Cianciolo at Modern Art

Amelie von Wulffen at Reena Spaulings

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It's almost like the history of painting is a trauma that comes bruising into von Wulfenn's paintings. How images transact through time, in notional reassemblages, incorrect.  Our memory of Matisse is like seeing the past in bad dreams, crushed into the present. We have memory of how painting was, how history functioned, how impressionism was painted, but it's wrong, like your head full of hangover, a painting full of malfunction, its shipment through time arrives damaged. The hematoma is fine.



See too: Amelie von Wulffen at Barbara Weiss, Amelie von Wulffen at Freedman Fitzpatrick

AR: Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings

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Originally Posted: February 21st, 2016

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Klara Liden at Reena Spaulings

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At best Liden's "examinations of the anxiety of urban space" demonstrates the fraughtness on which society often rests: flippantly publishing the keys to city, (e.g. bolt cutters and flashlight); implicit threat of artist's desublimating their professions higher order bashing a bicycle to death (see too: real violence); or the small smile of this exhibition's theft of things that delineate private property (i.e. stealing the things that make private property possible). Bristling the small hairs separating us from chaos. The giddy nerves of being in break down's presence. Feel the rush of anarchism from the safety of the institution that by allowing its entrance proves it isn't so. It is fun. At worst wonder whether the rich whose wealth rely on this power that Liden ostensibly undermines don't feel some sort of safety in the irony of owning these institutional white walls, proving their invulnerability.



See too: Claire Fontaine at Galerie Neu, Claire Fontaine at Galerie Neu, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at 356 Mission, Reena Spaulings at Chantal Crousel

Ken Okiishi at Reena Spaulings

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Untitled 2016, We're serenaded to a drive's Concerto in D (major), in prosaic's extreme, until the camera zooms onto a skeletal billboard stripped of the flesh that should sell, its meat, before the camera pans over to yet another billboard through bones showing the heavens behind it that should be eclipsed by content. The metaphor seems apt. It's nice to not have content. Blankness. For there sometimes to be nothing at all.

Then there's Okiishi's PR'd concern for his "bubbles" and "tubes" forming the "linked-together aggregations of masses of actors" sharing the angst of both Gaugin's "D'où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où Allons Nous" and, perhaps more apropos to the bubble and tubed, the Smashing Pumpkins' hamster, trapped in a maze despite all his Je nes sais...  The better you can pronounce the issue seems only to aggravate the problem, of painters writers and musicians finding new rhymes for "cage."

Georgie Nettell at Reena Spaulings

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Okay so let's be honest here: what we've got is Nettel taking cultural-cool's fetishization of politics and basically metastasizing it into garishly obvious and horribly blank versions. Like Shepard Fairey posters for today's political desensitization that feels like a personal catatonia, the semio-dissonance frustrates. Like the iconic hope poster quickly depleting its utopic optimism, now appearing ironic gravestone. Embodying the corruption of desire for political agency and replacing it with the politically negligent. The strategy of corrupting its signs, of language, ruins our ability to form political response. If you fuck up language, the rational, enough it destroys the opposition's ability to speak, to rebut. Enough of this causes the "learned helplessness in rats." Again, our political desensitization. Common assumption that art should be a positive force is mistake, sometimes it just proves how evil things can be, like leaving dirty dishes in place of discourse, we feel nothing but alienation.


See too:  Will Benedict at Overduin & Co., Gili Tal at Jenny’s, Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co.

Reena Spaulings at Chantal Crousel

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Reigning champions of the dumb art gesture so profoundly, inertly, token as to rupture any semblance of hope for meaning; it found comedy in the malignant stupefaction of the "art gesture." Proudly took the hot wind from the sails of conceptual structures moving art and blowing hard.  The work actively attacked the insider: anyone who understood Spaulings game did not receive art's usual self-congratulations but the unloading of 40 foot soldiers of uncommon stupidity inside your head. A virus affecting only those in-the-know while the blissfully unaware remained free of its belittling folly. Writing this, I've actually needed a thesaurus for "dumb." That the work draws heavily on Kippenberger's "paintings as excuses for their titles" or Club Paint's even more beautifully perfectly asinine paintings matters less than none: the derivativeness actually aids in amplifying its flat hammed power, the more you get it the more it evacuates.


See too: AA Bronson and Keith Boadwee at Deborah Schamoni, Martin Creed at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co.

Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings

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I don't know if anyone remembers Garbriel Kuri risen to prominence by interjecting globalist pluralism into modernist austerity, tin cans into rectangles, but Olesen asserts the filthy body into the sexless/bodyless vernacular of conceptualism, all those conceptual gestures of cutting gallery walls, photocopied images, and philosophical referentials, are with Olesen given to an unclean version. Meat and Christian martyrs are two things one shouldn't mention when playing with the neat rationality of conceptual art. It's "dirty." And the screws should be neatly gridded, they shouldn't resemble deformity. Like Alan Turing, paragon of rationality and computer logic - that clean efficient purity - until he wasn't in the eyes of society so bent on binary, was stripped of everything and given breasts as if that would somehow be better to have a breasted man without libido, is its own minimalism, a bent version of society's high ideals, this conceptual art so clean.

Merlin Carpenter at Reena Spaulings

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"Self-Consciousness" in painting mainly excused noodly paintings in rhetoric as sales adage's humble aggrandizing: a painter so conscious they cannot paint! Oh how romantic. Carpenter amped this to the level of broadcast, enacting the paralysis on the viewer. Attempts to unpack exhibitions as even description overflow, stacking sub-clauses and tangentials and questions of where to even begin with a vantage that can be continually shifted in attempts to circumscribe what is exactly at stake. So, a list: what is going on is that formally the paintings might actually not suck, this is big, because if they do, contain the possibility of formally not sucking, this means that the "conceptually orientated" Carpenter may be invested formally as a painter (and which he may never have not been to begin with) and if he is a formally invested painter, which he might be, means we would have to go back, reassess, though he may just be turning "on" for this exhibition a formal investment and never will be again which would make this a "conceptual gesture," Carpenter may not have even made these paintings, and would that matter, but what would that mean if someone can suddenly "switch on" a formal investment, and can formal investment be a joke if it is taken so far as to actually formally invest oneself so far as to make paintings which contain the possibility of not formally sucking, or is irony always overpowered by its sign, and is that even possible that Carpenter is not formally invested but is making paintings that don't entirely suck - and I brought a second party in to confirm the possibility of these not entirely formally sucking, which second party did affirm the possibility - and are these categories more useless than thought, but then what does that mean for so many formally invested painters who may or not be emotionally wounded by Carpenter's, or hired lackey's, ability to just pull 40 out of a hat, assuming they were so easy as to pull out of a hat, and what would that mean for "painting today," for then Carpenter to happily ironize 40 paintings with a ledger accounting the 40x40k= 1.6 million dollars of paintings underlining painting as cultural object of conspicuous consumption, and the whole art trope of symbolic cred to $ cash-in that many of the conceptual sort must resort, and Carpenter's obvious awareness of this, and again subclauses of whether awareness of an artistic scapegoating preclude that wiener from being eaten, and I would have thought Carpeneter's paintings were selling for more than that at this point, and what does it mean that Carpenter is making paintings that have the possibility of standing at a level with so much championed painting today on formal level even as a self-aware ironic "conceptual" conceptual cash-in if this exhibition in fact is and if they do sell and if Carpenter is aware of all this, though the mirrored floor's reflection's points all point towards..., at all and if the painting do in fact not suck of course which we can not be sure, so switch those on and off at leisure, and one hasn't mentioned a Marxist or Bourdiean take on this en abyme.


See too:  Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co., Adriana Lara at Algus Greenspon, Merlin Carpenter at MD 72

Nora Schultz at Reena Spaulings

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Through the 5 pages of her CAD archived exhibitions, the thread throughout is Schultz's awful materiality, predicated like the art student's mistake on the misuse of specific purposed objects sold by big box stores like Home Depot as though they were generic materials for the generic purposes of art and delivering objects with that uncomfortable look of misuse that seen here is made so abject.

Peter Wächtler at Reena Spaulings

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Somewhere between Amelie von Wulffen vegetable soirées and Sophie von Hellerman washy lumpen, a coolness carved from retrograde contemporary, a sort of faux-naive crafted askew of out-of-fashion methods. (cooly naive to fashion) Like Martin Creed’s slaughtered portraiture, the "exaggerated literary forms," the having gotten it wrong, lends an Edenic earnestness as if unspoilt by social awareness, and reattempting it through the mistakes of a Forest Gump or incompetent detective still winning the hearts if not criminal with immaculate sincerity, which of course isn’t true, but the interest lay in ascertaining the discrepancy, the disorientation of its irony.

Group Show at Bortolami and Galerie Neu at Gladstone Gallery
Ian Cheng, Melanie Gilligan, Carissa Rodriguez, Anicka Yi
John Knight, Manfred Pernice, Tom Burr, Klara Liden, Kitty Kraus, Gedi Sibony, Reena Spaulings, Sergej Jensen





Bortlomi
You go see these shows only to be confronted again with its screen representation. Why do you even get out of bed, its representation, historical sediment, becomes the real version in catalogs. Arendt's we're all images to others. All this stuff is on monitors anyway save for Anicka Yi’s art-fetish-displays, or maybe Melanie Gilligan’s lenticulars, primeval .gifs for the real world, the most basic version of affirmed presence, good job you got a bed sort. And eventually with Ian Cheng’s Oculus Rift experiments, not shown here, it’ll all be here. Remember when an artist made Katamari Damacy- that was a sculpture. Carissa Rodriguez’s prints at least suggest a complicit defeat in attempting critique of the new digital supremacy, everyone else seems left-behind in the uncommitment to digital acceleration’s disposibility.

Neu
Which makes Reena Spauling’s poor portraits all the digitally-smarter for their commitment to disposable ideation. Spauling’s whole project premised on every whatever-is-beyond-insipid self-reflexive “art idea” executed with jest, and smart, social cred made to be liquidated and poured through the network of pipes, brilliant. And then you’ve got John Knight actually still dragging real objects across the world, displacing them with antiquated labor-power, and just really the most needless idea of reflexive context art that he’s known for, reminiscent of the sisyphean Heizer’s levitating the mass of his rocks to get his jollies off, and so in the context of all that it makes sense why so much of the other art is limp in these shows, barely able to erect itself in bed in the morning, and because its not hard to get really hard to get up in bed when you’ve got some form of super-cool steroids like all these people seem to have.