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.

Toru Otani at XYZ collective

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As art becomes its meaning, graphic design's "information" becomes tension and lure. Signs symbols and apophenia. 

Humans are information processing machines with leg systems to move us toward the carrot of new information. Dopamine, long mythologized as the "pleasure center," instead creates seeking behavior, which, at the roulette wheel of digital feeds, scrolling news, and authoritative lists, causes all the odd psychological problems of lab rats given access to their own dopamine levers in humans. "After only a few days of training, the monkeys showed a clear preference for choosing the informative colored target." ...with paintings that prize information-as-legibility, that the usefulness of the information matters none: the complete arbitrariness of it here still invokes its authority.

See too: Antek Walczak at Jenny’s, Gertrude Abercrombie at Karma

Masato Kobayashi at ShugoArts

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Paintings that barely stand on their own. That's .. a position. "What I can say about freedom is, perhaps, how I go about making my frames." - the artist. The PR: " ...no fixed forms, but are free and flexible. His style of painting while stretching the canvas is unprecedented." Artforum: "It’s hard to like Masato Kobayashi’s exhibition." You can't say "bad," you say, "an apparent act of apostasy against 'taste.'" This is About Freedom. Reminded of a meme: 

A chad says to a monkey in a zoo, "You are not free."
The monkey responds, "No, it is you who are not free."
"But you are in a cage" replies chad.
The monkey then begins to publicly masturbate.

This is about freedom.

Genpei Akasegawa at SCAI PIRAMIDE

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Like freebasing Wolfgang Tillmans - the raw particles of a life, its detritus of attention, this is the good stuff, artless, hidden in drawers, in nana's closet. Pay attention to someone else's attention. We of the upturned noses, hoovering up another's stash, vacuums all the way down, or human centipedes of another's output. 

Satoru Kurata at Tomio Koyama Gallery

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Most of today's wild wacky arm figuration is limbs as an excuse for some Pollock. An abstraction excused as the narrative it isn't. (Like we still haven't gotten past Schutz. Or Beckman.) But here the narrative structure is stupid simple, effective. The trick gives subjects autonomy, the minorest amount of agency. We see them seeing. Instead of just the painter. Which we still always are. But we get to forget that for a brief edenic moment. Momentarily vicarious.

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

Evelyn Taocheng Wang at KAYOKOYUKI

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"fragile candy, soft and hard shell, capturing its affect in an art lozenge. Swallowable. .... affect is captured, the feeling, packaged."

It's a personal bias - associating sumi with chintzy prettiness, a touristic souvenir art. "takeaway objects of little import but hold significance. ...tchotchkes are transactional objects made for the transference of the buyer's desire. The souvenir acts as a placeholder for tourist's urge.. likely some vestigial expression of our sexual selection's wiring, which is why so many of them are cute. "

Reina Sugihara at Misako & Rosen

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A deployed ability to resemble. Allude. Hint. Vaguely suggest. This makes an inkblot.  I see a nightmarish tide pool with deep crabs and horror. You see Arthur Dove and your mother. A dark pool for a viewer's reflection. A John Marin watercolor, a corpse of something expensive. 

"But Dohi's resemble, recall unplaceable things, which is our politics now. Resemblance was dirty back then, we wanted purity in forms, because clouded abstraction led to impure thoughts. Why do we desire allusive formalism now? Fecteau, Baghramian, Balema, Nagle, et al. Is still a latent surrealism? The shifting space of ambiguous 'clouds' saying that one looks like a rabbit but never knowing it."

Suggestions: Vincent Fecteau at greengrassi, Vincent Fecteau at Misako & Rosen, Lui Shtini at Kate Werble, Ron Nagle at Modern Art, Nairy Baghramian at Walker Art Center?, Nairy Baghramian at Museo Tamayo, Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman Larry Poons at Michael Jon & Alan, Lucy Bull at High Art, Olga Balema at High Art, Olga Balema at High Art (2)

Chim↑Pom at Mori Art Museum

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Our wreckage as Disney land. Amusement. The giant trash bag of earth. We delight in the impropriety, snorting badness by the line of "raising issues." You treat the world like a cartoon, write captions in the sky, to render the world "in comic book style." The world is a cartoon at least make yourself an artist entrepreneur. Start a business, tear it down, corporate dreams, etc. etc. etc. The world no longer a clay but an erector set with artist designed neon. Very very very fun.  

Portals Misako & Rosen, Tokyo

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Goya painted some black paintings but even the well fed generals contain hell. A pallor in dough. Looking into the fire in a Night on Bald Mountain are nudes that burn. The Maja's autopsy. A fire vacant like Goya's eyes.

Masahiko Kuwahara at Tomio Koyama Gallery

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Cuteness is a gargoyle, the policing gremlins of Gothic architecture dispersed into media, into Pikachu, politically kneading your desire into acceptable dough. Cuteness creates artificial identification, forces sysmpathy, care, for an object its church. You become sympathetic to their cause, the militarized demons of the holy police state, Pikachu. 

see too: Sam McKinniss at JTT, Misaki Kawai at The Hole, Sean Landers at Rodolphe Janssen

Motoyuki Daifu at Misako & Rosen

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An odd fact that we let dogs piss all over the world. It's, like, totally cool. "It will rain someday," thinks the dog owner, letting god take the reins on this mess. Dogs emit the color of hazard, signaling their species' - on the whole - dehydration. 

But here the artist splashed water - it's not pee - which, I don't know, I guess complicates it something. The Pollockian waypoint: dribbled abstraction and marking Guggenheim property, your territory, drunkenly, yelling "I am nature" to the policeman explaining, "you can't pee here, Pollock, dog."

Julio Le Parc at Maison Hermes Le Forum

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This same artwork appeared on CAD exactly 10 years ago. The above is today, the below yesterday. There is probably nothing to be made from this info, from the difference, but you could. 

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."

Yasutaka Kojima at Yuka Tsuruno Gallery

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attempt to give these nonspaces some crown of silver attention, preservation. Not the nihilistic irony of Smithson's New Jersey "monuments" nor the dislocation of internet trend's "liminal spaces." The above attempt nobility, resurrection even. The streets are even cleaned, lacking the usual detritus in sleeping corners (a single remaining cigarette butt is in right angle alignment) nary a wet newspaper or tattered bag and wondering if Kojima sweeps before, or if they're photoshop sparkled. The desire is the same. Many artists trying to deal with these spatial leftovers and Kojima seems interested in remembering it fondly. At the other end, in hell, there's the trend for "Modern Gothic" exacerbating the pain. Merely a difference of temperament. The point is there's an anxiety for everyone.

See too: Modern Gothic

Reina Sugihara at Lavender Opener Chair

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These look old. Probably because no one paints this way anymore. (Maybe Cathy Wilkes' rare painting?) Probably because at some point it became important to not look like 2nd generation abex, because that looked dated, because looking new stood in for being new, and thus painting adopted technology like acrylics and cartoons and metal plating and whatever other process it could cling to its surface. But, with a wide enough historical lens, all painting condenses into the same gooey dumb thing. And these just stand out as strange as weird good things.

Masaya Chiba at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery

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The zany installation needs to make comeback. That science fair exhibit gone wrong of the 90s/00s. Jason Rhoades, Cloaca, Hello Meth Lab in the Sun, Christoph Büchel, etc. Everything looked like a laboratory, an industrial factory, used conveyor belts. Rhoade's PeaRoeFoam predicted the late 2010s process orientated abstraction as a giant comedy - art's industrialized factory of charisma, a caricature of the production of aura. It was also enjoyable. Something about the science fair animates and comedies the ideologic process of art's chambers. The conveyer of viewer, the turtle munching mulch, the paintings aloft, the didactics and visible/invisible arrows. Look here, learn this. "You can sit in this chair." Thanks. That the imprisoned turtle is the stand-in for us isn't even that far fetched, just like Foucault said, society is a...

Trevor Shimizu at Misako & Rosen

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(Someone confirmed, this might count as a water lily. As impressionism. Which is too bad, the prediction is only fun when its suspended... let's say this is post-impressionist water lilies.)

I enjoy late Monet, before his cataracts surgery, the rusting of his pastiche into yellow lumps, all but blind. Their gross mismanagement of color failing to materialize his prettiness. You watch a master, hampered, fail. Late Monet, like Soutine painted a colonoscopy. Shimizu's, ditching the coprophagia, have almost the opposite but equally compelling problem, a prettiness for which there is no reason - you watch failure produce horrible beauty. 

Yu Nishimura at Crèvecoeur and KAYOKOYUKI and Komagome SOKO

(Crèvecoeur, KAYOKOYUKI and Komagome SOKO)

either avoiding or lack a language for the most obvious elements of painting. Or pretend the obvious isn't. Speak to some ulterior, interior, some grand "meaning" just out of sight. Matisse painted incredibly stupid paintings of goldfish, even more of women, but we don't say that; we say, "Goldfish were introduced to Europe from East Asia in the 17th century." A complete non sequitur to painting. We pretend painting is too serious, handled with care. But it is the childlike wonky that is their enjoyment, the complete derangement of "cat" that may be their only fun. Look how poorly I can paint it and still might make you feel it.  But, "poor" is a subjective term masquerading as an objective one, an assessment tool of some biased hoodwink. We don't say that anymore. Which is why this cat looks like a pickle.

See too: Trevor Shimizu

Hikari Ono at XYZ Collective

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"a jejune experiment for proving entropy. Picture in your mind’s eye the sand box divided in half with black sand on one side and white sand on the other. We take a child and have him run hundreds of times clockwise in the box until the sand gets mixed and begins to turn grey; after that we have him run anti-clockwise, but the result will not be a restoration of the original division but a greater degree of greyness and an increase of entropy.
"Of course, if we filmed such an experiment we could prove the reversibility of eternity by showing the film backwards, but then sooner or later the film itself would crumble or get lost and enter the state of irreversibility. Somehow this suggests that the cinema offers an illusive or temporary escape from physical dissolution. The false immortality of the film gives the viewer an illusion of control over eternity—but “the superstars” are fading." -Robert Smithson, "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey"

Smithson's angst, placing art within the grand scales of cosmic time. This was his hurt. Casting art as mere symbolic regaining control if not return sandboxes to "order." (Smithson obviously believed in confronting geologic time with erections against it, casting spells in landscape.) Besides the fact that Smithson sounds a little bit like a cop here, the grand scales of his cynicism surpasses thinking about comfort, likely because he himself had it, and was rewarded for his soft chair from which to think about things bigger than, because thinking "big" was important then. The disinterested and "grand" aesthetic.


See too: Lutz Bacher at 356 Mission, Lutz Bacher at Galerie Buchholz and Sarah Rapson at Essex Street