Michaela Eichwald at Reena Spaulings Fine Art

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"But Eichwald finds the edge, the moment before a Frankenthaler turns into a dog's sick. 

The neanderthal nappie merchants - Joe Bradley, Josh Smith, et al - attempted proving beyond doubt: paint just always looks good. But Eichwald makes one really sit in its question. "

The scatalalogical mess used to be a lot funner. It reified what the idiot savants of abstraction were spraying. Their nappies. Jackson Pollock from a different less sublimated orifice. "The brown rope that tethers us to earth." But grown tired of being forced to look into the toilet and see the sublime. Once, in the Schipol airport restroom hearing a man inside a stall groaning, "Bitte! Bitte!" Ha ha, too bad we weren't in germany, I would have liked to read the kritical text sprayed. 

See too: All Michaela Eichwald, Calvin Marcus at Clearing

Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff at Reena Spaulings Fine Art

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A conceptual beartrap, the inkblot asks that you spill forth the contents of your head with its innuendo as lure. What is the contents of your head.

Inkblot, inkblot, inkblot

All: Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff

Marc Kokopeli at Reena Spaulings Fine Art

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"Like the drug smuggler casting his contraband in the shape of Jesus to escape the prying eyes, [artists] recast trash as flimsy endearing objects that we are made to love. ... repackaging, a reincarnation, second life in the only way objects know how: camouflaging themselves as fresh commodities. "

"Composing it into art objects becomes a blessing for sending the objects into the "heavenly" afterlife, a means of delivering them to the majority white institutions to get them to care for them in perpetuity."

Diaper cakes. Why recast your gift as a cake? Because the content isn't nice enough to be product/gift. This is an apt metaphor for art. The form (cake) is pretty far from function (shit napkins). So you jazz it up. This is the compositionalization of art. The diaper giver and the artist (or drug smuggler) - they must stealth their package into a societally acceptable object. You abstract the content.  Of course this is actually the new form, a socially compressed oddity, but we don't treat it as that. We think, press release on, "ooh 'a German bucket wheel excavator, used for industrial coal mining.'"

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

Reynaldo Rivera at Reena Spaulings Fine Art

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Documentation awaiting its documentary. Its context, life, backfilled into it. You feel it when the reviewer recommends the catalog. The loss. The ruins of a once beautiful citizenry. We now vampire. Not only its pain, but its life too, brought to cold hands of art's Wunderkammer. "Dominant culture lays the concrete of its social conditions, proclaims 'look a dandelion has grown,' hangs its photo in our halls as testament to humanity. But it can seem like a testament to the concrete." I'm not sure who is at fault here, no one really, I guess life should be bottled, the only way to continue ours. 

See too: Alvin Baltrop at Hannah Hoffman, Peter Hujar at Maureen Paley