Josh Kline at Various Small Fires

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The PR states this "explores the catastrophic implications of America’s political dysfunction." No, it doesn't. For the students in the room this is called "puffery" "a promotional statement or claim which no 'reasonable person' would take literally." A generous read is that it is simply an anti-display, inverse to the usual ebullient displays of US nationalism, the equivalent of how in high school I wore a t-shirt with an inverted flag and thought that was cool. This is Piss Christ but with a flag in a TV and stained. A perhaps formally interesting technique (like, how did all those clowns fit in that car) this should have been one of those quiet shows you use to make a buck in a new city but now boom it is on CAD and mildly soiled underpants for everyone to see.


see too: Josh Kline at Modern Art

Candida Höfer at Kukje Gallery

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Taking photos of jewelry would have been clearer. The act of appropriation here attempt subversion of the institution by spotlighting it. As if a highlighter critiques its excised words. The Bechers, as post Sander taxonomists, prophesied a world that was complete document, threatening the world with their cold camera whereas their now even-more-famous students wielded this mechanical coldness  to excise from the world the blank jewels that undergirds so much contemporary art. Blankness becomes the lure for the viewer to feel rewarded for the ability to backfill the emptiness with everything they can throw at it: there's a thousand things we can say about these because they are illustrations without text, use them for anything. We invent ghosts inside machines, or architectures without people. The "technical perfection" that Höfer is always by writers rewarded for is the very thing that negates any fingerprints for more perfect mirrors, creating a perfect duplicate of the architecture it wishes to encase in glass. We fill in the rest.