Trisha Donnelly at Galerie Buchholz

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Donnelly's game is plain, obvious. The detractors points clear: it's mysterioized, basic obfuscation as easy enigma. And the art, just skylines turned, reflected, solarized, whatever. CAWD could label them another example of inkblot art. (They are.) But despite, there still remains. And it is this affective quality despite, that becomes their carapace. Attempting to tell the detractors the photograph looks like deep sea evil, rapture, and that despite the rudimentary workings there's something occasionally affective. Despite. Think Nairy Baghramian uncanny lumpen, her photos of clouds. Or Michael E Smith's cancerous suggestions. It is this ability of Donnelly to separate and divide and make evil our inability to share feelings, to see christ (or not) in the photograph. The innocent question of "what you see" in the cloud becomes apprehensive. Yes the game is dumb, plain, obvious, the quality is despite. 

Trisha Donnelly at Eva Presenhuber

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Not quite the Ian Rosen whole-in-one, you can find more images on Presenhuber's website But Donnelly has made a career of limiting the availability of the document that feeds the current apparatus of art, instead edited into an esoterica through regulation, the Donnelly mythos floats on the inability to know, though even actually seeing them never helped answer anything, the nebulous otherworld aesthetic that like H.R. Giger channeled an techno/medical aesthetic for a decade before finding in the Alien its embodiment that Donnelly refuses, a ghost.


See too: Trisha Donnelly at Museum Ludwig, Ian Rosen at The Finley

Trisha Donnelly at Museum Ludwig

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An artist doing her best to abolish the possibility of a reference we can call common, bury it behind opaque markers. i.e. difficult to recount without resorting to the degrading telephone game of myth, scattered primary source quotes cut/pasted ad infinitum; the PR limbo bending backwards to avoid description, replaced with chimes; and objects which, even at peak banality aren't really describable without metaphor, some sorta whatsa type a deal. What you see isn't mine. Probably why there's such radical opinion difference, Donnelly's cult and the mudslingers. The inability to derive equitable terms, a reference to talk about, looking like slack-jawed yokels.


See too: Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center

Trisha Donnelly at Air de Paris

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Donnelly’s cultivation of myth, generator of legends, in her information’s stipulated lacking of documentation, PR, mutates quickly in time into boring myth, into anecdotes retold to oblivion: of a white horse and “Napoleonic garb,” mythic meme of which no photos exists, now documented as a blank white page on Kaplan’s website, or the ancient Buick with California plates unceremoniously parked in a Minnesota museum’s underground parking garage as gift to it, ultimately unaccepted as a work into its collection, a mistake if there ever was one, and shipped back to her, a Buick. Viewed from above the expanse of projects seems a willfully obscure self-promotional package (omens) of the artist as mythos but does nothing to dull the strange specificity of the individual objects themselves, which in documentation seem constructed to reveal less than nothing, the chimes muted.
But the silence which Donnelly surrounds her objects broken by two stellar MoMA talks, one on the 11th prismatic - a broken poem to make every Berlin press release cry - the other expounding her interest in objects curated, quickly showing her infatuation with objects more than posturing cool, but an ability to draw the otherworldly manner of objects into the world, even assigning Robert Rosenblum’s voice a color.

See too : Florian Hecker & John McCracken at Künstlerhaus KM-

Edit: It was Robert Rosenblum, not Harold Rosenburg...