Nicolas Party at The Modern Institute

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As Party hues desaturate the underpinning becomes clearer: banality. It was always there it was just masked by Party lighting. The Disco turned off, the overhead lights reveal your unpleasant face. In the other room of the paintings of the world burning? That's your friend reminding you you've got work tomorrow, now today. The world is on Fire! Thanks Nicolas! Gosh sure wish we hadn't taken all those Party drugs yesterday. I might be able to feel something about this impossibly lackluster apocalypse of today. But this is how the world ends, incredibly mediocre paintings. 

Nicolas Party at The Modern Institute

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The world is insane so act like it. The decor turned to 11, become lurid, horrible. Isn't that our world currently? The berating of sense. Have you come to enjoy your pummeling? And is Party's really what others have called "sincerity and joy"? "Polychromy" states the press release, as if maybe we thought of Greek statues colored as they were, this would be our world now. But our eyes experience exhaustion, our cones cannot handle, biological imprints on our art a certain taste as barrier against a visual depletion, but maybe we would learn to love this chromatic pain.

Andrew J. Greene at The Modern Institute

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You could think of Greene as a decorator in our semiotic apocalypse picking through the ruins of what we would have probably rather forgot. The obsolescent and malformed. It's some malignant Frankenweenie archaeology. The 1984 version. No one would mistake these for pleasant. Not even quite kitsch, but some anti-nostalgial form. The question of what to do with our rubble is a pertinent one. These things, despite their delegation to the back burners of culture, of closets and bins, still linger and Greene scrounges back to re-festive our lives with. We don't necessarily want it.


see too: David Lieske at MUMOK

Sue Tompkins at The Modern Institute

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The painting's ineptness could almost be salved with reminders of Tompkin's enjoyably askew performances, the hollow echoes of paintings like. Today everyone verbs the noun. "Performs Painting" "Investigates Painting." And Painting saved by performance has become a trope. At least these have Polaroids as appendages to make them kind of do a jig.


See too:  Sue Tompkins at Lisa Cooley

Anne Collier at The Modern Institute

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As Sturtevant foretold, "appropriation" post internet is different indeed, no longer political or even contentious, "theft" is airquoted, artists incredulous at being called out on it. It was perhaps the youtube era of Supercuts, a "genre of video meme, where some obsessive-compulsive superfan collects every phrase/action/cliche from an episode (or entire series) of their favorite show/film/game into a single massive video montage" garnering millions of views, tumblr collections reported on in NYTimes, pinterest boards, the age of aggregators and the lines outside the door for Marclay's Clock, arrangement became meaning, content, "appropriation" went full populist. In the absolute deluge of images as the fount of internet opened it made sense for the archivist impulse to popularize as people tried to make sense of the mess, of the overstimulation of everything all once, that could be divided arranged, made into little groupings of sense. Sturtevant on the other hand started making nightmares.

Manfred Pernice at The Modern Institute

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Of course cans, as named, invoke emptiness (a filled cans would be called by what they contain, a soda, sardines, refried beans) but, clean, the possibility for containment, the ability to can, canning, the process for preserving, pickling,  a funny metaphor for the preservation of an artist's hand severed from them, held in brine, they look green through the glass museums place to frame them, objects which maintain the objects, pickled. Artists willingly put their objects in such canisters, even the most ephemeral are given some package tradeable, they are the bridge between two hands shaking. If it wasn't, at least in some way transmissible, tranistable, it would be broken.


See too: Manfred Pernice at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Manfred Pernice at Galerie Neu

Richard Wright at The Modern Institute



Wright continues his laborious ephemerations castaway from the wall, casting glass to cast light ephemerals back on the walls, light as a brush. Beautify your site-specificity, home, lobby, whatever, it’s made-to-order non-representational design service fitting niche market of anywhere you wanna be. “Wright has adapted the technique initially employed in his recent commission for Tate Britain’s eastern windows, in the Milbank foyer." Museum wing, to gallery, to your home, totally beautiful.