Leonor Antunes at Taka Ishii Gallery

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We don't need word pastiche or appropriation anymore because we invented the word "research" which allows influence to become a value-added in PR fodder. Recycled material is now green-washed as "investigation" and we purchase a brown product because of it. Begin to prefer the brown recycled product as nostalgia, as the fan-service and reference-bait of reboots which provide franchise fans with back-patting. The products' comfortization toward viewers becomes congratulatory prize: "I understood that reference." Our nostalgia becomes legitimated. The candy of easter eggs thus becomes a packaged and sold as the whole meal. In art this recycling gets reframed as connoisseurship, knowledge, a one-sided forcible "collaboration" with the past. With "overlooked" histories. The recycling machine is the same. In the cargo-cult era, the detritus of the world is a shopping mall, hang these references like jewelry around your neck. And these are good sculptures. 

See too: The benediction of sign systems. The highest order these relics can obtain is that they get put on Beyonce, as a Christmas tree of our sign systems, collective wreckage, past. The highest order of totems, shown back to us like a lighthouse reorganizing meaning.

Sanya Kantarovsky at Taka Ishii Gallery

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There is occasional painterly comedy - the necronomic fingers of Schiele's corpse hands grasping the blemishless lithe expanse of a Frankenthaler's body. Or, the melting visage of some cortical homunculus, melting into a warm goo, not what the critics call drawing but a pleasure centering painting... The cartoon is often muddled by the wanton perfume of the paint. The long sinuous line stretching Kantarovsky's whole career has been made much of, typographic elegance, his cartoonists wit - though wish we could just have the drawings to prove it, since this seems a reviewer's fundamental misunderstanding of what is so enviable about cartoons, their lack of painterlyness - but Kantarovsky has always convoluted painting and drawing, the sleight of hand: having one, a fondling grope of the other. 

Leonor Antunes at Taka Ishii Gallery

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Antunes is the link in the fossil record from Eva Hesse to Hague Yang. Hanging stuff like flypaper in the air to accumulate reference, innuendo, feeling. The materials change but the vibe remains the same.

Christmas trees to capitalism: Haegue Yang

Oscar Murillo at Taka Ishii Gallery

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This is the fallout of On Kawara conceptual art. What he posed as a question - whether a sign can contain its moment - has metastasized into marketing strategy.* The PR tells you the locale of these paintings making - their "downloaded content." Against modernist universality, the big dumb abstraction of today localizes itself, we resurrect the author to make sure their symbolic laurel is branded into the painting by the press release, this is the On Kawara stamp. You don't contribute anything to geopolitics, the point is to chant it. 

*"While this was the central conundrum to conceptual art since its inception, the rupture and distance between sign and object (always at risk that its sign didn't actually contain its object) it has since been taken as granted, as a granting agency for value added. While On Kawara's July 21st 1969 poses the question of whether it actually contains the weight of a moon landing, the paint sprayed is given to absorb the history. If an artist goes into the woods and there is no cellphone service around to hear him, does it imbue itself into the copper objects as significant? Jason Rhoades built a career of mocking this value-added system, performing it under absurdly comical conditions, to create his referentially seminal signature: PeaRoeFoam, a mess of so much reference and history and jest that it self imploded. Or Seinfeldized by Arcangel. .. So a word for this value-added process based absorption/valorization of reference."

Group Show at Taka Ishii Gallery

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The early 21st century of art will be remembered for a stylization of opacity (blankness) that, regardless of whether or not it actually did, connoted intention to mean. Silvered photographs with surrealist orbs hovering. That there exists a connotation or affect of meaning that remains separate from it, acting to totemize objects as clues styled to conjure the affect of signification. Much more apparent in group shows as the objects become disenchanted from their significant network. That what we find profound might be a mannerism.

"The fact that there were two of them signifies the end of any original reference. [...] Only the doubling of the sign truly puts an end to what it designates." -Baudrillard

See too:  Group Show at Salle Principale, Merlin Carpenter at MD 72