Ryo Kinoshita at Fons Welters

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So why does labor reappear? Why does "stitching" make a comeback? Impressionism's strokes showcasing its painterly labor. It had been that eventually genius embedded itself into the canvas, itself signifying "art," and blankness was fine. Does canvas no longer back painting's monetary value a priori? Do we need proof of work? Like the ornately etched lines of paper currency, making the labor of reproduction more expensive than the bill itself - proof of scarcity, value. Time equates to money. But now we have copy machines, CNC routers, childlabor and interns. Perhaps proof of work is just nostalgia for when there was infinite time, for when there was time. 

See too: Diedrick Brackens at Various Small Fires

Luís Lázaro Matos at Project Space 1646

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It would seem that no amount of thinking about alien life could release us from any sort of anthropocentric prison. Thinking about aliens, we design childhood bedrooms by accident.

Paul Maheke at Vleeshal

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Towards a language of the promotional still, which, brandishing the act it can only suggest but never actually capture, becomes a sort of gestural pool, an we infer. In this way the promotional image, suggests narrative, a story we can't see, making them function the way altar paintings once had: creating icons for stories, propaganda for their churches.
The promotional image has a leg up on art since it doesn't finalize itself, it withholds its decisive utterance. It gestures a story, but we are not allowed to speak of it, since we can't "know it." Serving cake and keeping it too, spread, replicate without depleting itself.

“The Classics” at Fons Welters

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The lumpy that resembles us. The play dough, artists like the lumpy form since it embodies all the potential of their creative act, the embryonic, the material from. Rodin's lumpy men resisted the representation for leaving the remains of its sculpting. Erwin Wurm inflating his cars to make the sculpture apparent, otherwise they'd just be cars. The lumpy is an excess which proves the artist was there, showcases their hand. Things droop, we bloat.

Stefan Tcherepnin at Stedelijk Museum

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Like Rat and Bear before them their best feature is banality, their inertness, don't really do much of anything, the muppets grown and birdbrained, as boring as any of us, taking on the roles of young adults, drinking, watching TV, sinking Karaoke, acting as neanderthals, getting all the same shows as Tcherepnin.

Ahmet Öğüt and Goshka Macuga at Witte de With

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Disimages humor wasn't so much in its mockery of stock photography - they swore they weren't - but in making fun of artists: Dis, with an early understanding the growing need for artists to function as their own producers of stock-like images in an increasing pressure for artist's to make a striking singular image, mocked the artistic anxiety for image production that could handle anonymized displacement in the network, speak for itself images sturdy enough for dissemination in image aggregators like CAD, VVork and all those other tumblrs exploding. Both stock images and the artistic contain similar relationship of specificity and anonymousness, like promotional stills they allow a viewer to infer a few specific traits ("multicultural office", "Gallery sculpture") at the same time broad, blank enough to accommodate a viewer's own interpretations. Both stock images and many art images are as plain as they are inscrutable. An image like a handshake of the artist.


see too: Sherrie Levine at David Zwirner

Avery Singer at Stedelijk Museum

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Remember that scene in the Matrix when, readying for climax, they enter the blank void of the virtual and conjure a Babelinian library of weapons? Whatever the power of its virtual blank slate - despite its seeming infinince - it couldn't conjure a rifle outside of what any American police force would already own, revealing severe limitations of its virtuality to the pre-existing commodities already found in its prison-like realm. Whether this digital limitation was an artifact of its virtual script, or the inability of the actor/agents to themselves think outside their commodic prison* it showcases an inherent issue with the power of the virtual as still limited to human ability to think outside itself.

The virtual "White Room" is obviously a metaphor for a blank canvas.
This impotence in manifestability still inherent to primitive modes as it irrupts again in new technologies.

Like Guyton, the digital expression comes with the promise of fuller possibility that anything thought can be rendered, that the blank white space can be filled with anything you can dream, printed direct from our subconcious but reveals our dreams to be mostly the same but with some effects added.

*and thus tragically reveal themselves to be stuck in their own learned form of The Matrix's prison, i.e. never truly free having already internalized the dominant order.


See too: Wade Guyton at Academie Conti & Le Consortium, Tala Madani at David Kordansky

Bernadette Corporation at Stedelijk Museum

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You'll have zero idea what's going on here if you don't already know the projects, though you can make a guess. BC's absorption of fashion-means (not necessarily the clothes as McGuffin that they are) can't really be under-stressed. Launching a hundred like-minded careers since, BC weren't the first of the fashion-orient but their understanding its "based on mythmaking and seduction" opened the eyes of today's Genzkenites to the aura preceding their deluge of material whateverness. Brand was the powerforce of the artist, and confusion, misalignment and just stuff could dissolve objects to the narrative-sans-critque, seen performed in the phenoms of today everyone from Arakawa and Bratsch to half the surround-audience gen and trickling into some of the post-krebberites' conceptual horsing. Much of BC's project was pointed despite its intended then dispersion that now in exhibition looks like the miasma of the younger's extraction of it.


See too: Stewart Uoo at 47 Canal, KAYA at Deborah Schamoni

Roni Horn at Museum de Pont

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"She has linked her use of doubled forms or images and the ambiguity of many of her pieces to androgyny. Consequently, her work has been seen as an indirect form of identity art."¹

"If androgyny ultimately expands the possibilities of identity beyond its stable, gendered binary, Horn's paired works propose the untenability of the fixed binaries on which minimalism historically staked its own critique."²

"For Horn, the terrain of likeness - that which is similar, the same yet different, akin, or simply close - encompasses a panorama of experience. Her work dwells of differences of degree that, she suggests, constitute as profound a representational problem as the starker discrepancies that conventionally give us our social and sexual selves. "³

The androgynous minimalism of Horn's pointed critique of Judd's specific object: instead of the remarkable unit⁴ Horns work arrests flows in their state of transition, glass as a "supercooled liquid"⁵, androgyny the flow between genders stabilized, like taking a photo of river to supercool its movement, frozen transition, a gender like glass.

1. Mignon Nixon Roni Horn Artforum 2009
2. Roberta Smith, NYTimes, 2009
3. Zachary Rottman, UCLA M.A. Dissertation, 2014
4. unit is also slang for penis.
5. Roni Horn, in conversation with Jarrett Earnest Brooklyn Rail 2013


See too: Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Tony Conrad's Glass

Roger Hiorns at Annet Gelink

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The Jewel-crusted success of Hiorns sulfate sculptures almost eclipsed the less fabulous concoctions-as-representations for the surfaced body. Here the latex skins on polycarbonate panels - looking like congealing soup, e.g. Kristeva's abjection: breakdown between subject and object - the goo and strata of flesh and bone, and the machinic body ejaculating foam at the mouth, Hiorns wild material divergence always expressed in dualities, steel and perfume, machine and foam, boy and fire, boy and gratuitously hulking aircraft engine, the bodily soft always set against its cold hard master, rigid and pliance, occasionally providing a mild erosion of that order, a strange and insistent fetish that we all seem to enjoy.


See too: Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings, Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Cathy Wilkes at Kunstmuseum Linz, Valerie Snobeck at Essex Street, Andro Wekua at Sprüth Magers

Rezi Van Lankveld at Annet Gelink

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Psychedelia's tropes attempt to convey the psychotropic by finding visual metaphors for it, that while kaleidoscopic and tremulous in their own right merely find analogy for what are the very distinct slippages in perception that drugs produce - drawing the carpet melting isn't the same as experiencing the carpet thawed to run under feet sinking quite rapidly into it - the experience vs the concept, the difference between, say, photography and Cezanne, two poles between which van Lankveld has fluctuated for some time before finally clubbing one far end hardly with the clouds, with this particular painting.

Glenn Sorensen at Annet Gelink

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Got to give Jennifer Higgie Credit for calling Sorensen "post-industrial Monets." If the impressionists commented on the particularity of French light, Sorensen maybe on the peculiar liquidness of lighted night, and what had been Sorensen's illustrative starkness now sights meltdown of a visual disturbance sort, of unnatural abruptness that shorts rods and cones into afterimages, emergency light, disorientated to something representational that feels abstract.

Renzo Martens and The Institute for Human Activities at Fons Welters

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The fathomless villainy and flippancy with which Marten's conjured evil out of hats of kindness in Enjoy Poverty - in the end making us almost delight in the ability to manifest evil with ease and invert altruism to encompass its antithesis in a way even Ayn Rand never could - made him a nefarious star so dark that he himself, the handsomest bad boy on the block, competing with Wolfson for a mire of intentionality, couldn't handle it. And so in another reversal - not quite as spectacular as those that made Enjoy Poverty - Martens attempts a "gentrification" of the plantation wound he once salted. Like Tim Rollins and KOS the power of art as therapy expressive as well the as the monetary redirection it produces is used as a moral sword brandished, and good for everyone. But after Marten's toppling the altruism of everyone else he sets himself up here for the same, and you could use Marten's own premises, you could, say, recall the segment explaining horror sells better than happiness, and present the grimaces here, and raise your eyebrows high, you could and but who really wants to be that bad of a guy.