Lynn Hershman Leeson at Vilma Gold

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CAD never explains why things are important but Hershmann should be paid attention to not for this exhibition but for her resurgence now showing in Dreamlands: her forecasting much of the renderstentialist video and robot art of today's youth. Skip these images and go watch a low quality online sample of her work Seduction of a Cyborg and then everything else and see all the foreshadowing of Moulton's mock techno-spiritual, Wolfson's sex robots, Atkins' authorial monologue and sound cuts, Rose's affective slippages, Steryl's anti-comedy, Cortright's digital Sherman-esque subject construction, James Richards affective collaging, etc. etc.  It's all there.

See too: Shana Moulton at Kunsthaus Glarus, Jordan Wolfson at David Zwirner, Rachel Rose at High Art, Ed Atkins at Serpentine Gallery, Petra Cortright at Société

Brian Griffiths at Vilma Gold

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What had been Griffiths' tents, drapery and sealed wardrobes - alongside the occasionally recurring oversized head - before now's architectural models and fascination with Bill Murray's surface - yeah that's all Bill Murray there* - is still the obviously recurring theme of the exterior as phantasmagoria: blank surfaces for projection and the psychic cruel comedy of visage as facade. The use of architecture as representing psychic space has become a major motif in art, but whereas it had been usually literary or filmic to as physical metaphors for memory or dreams or whatever, art's use has recently become much more concerned with its meaty resemblance to a head, reminiscent of Deleuze pointing out that Francis Bacon didn't so much paint portraits but instead heads, the meat structure normally eclipsed by our concern with face. But so, concerning Bill Murray, has there ever been a celebrity whom people have been willing to wear on a t-shirt a giant image of their head? They're incredibly popular, yet a Brad Pitt head t-shirt seems unconscionable. We love the facade of Murray, his likeness, his surface, we treat him like a walking public architecture, a horrifying way to die.

*well not that guy, no. 



See too: Mathis Altmann at Halle für Kunst Lüneburg

Julia Wachtel at Vilma Gold

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Wachtel's sign systems of the cultural meltdown, express the rupture, floating between Baldesarrian inanity and Wolfsonian semantic violence. Finding the tense middle ground where the inanity is the violence, of someone hitting you in the face with something so dumb.


See too: John Baldessari at Marian Goodman

Puppies Puppies at Vilma Gold

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The sweet blood of all those Disney characters is actually corn, barrels of it, the dream of american heartland rendered sickly sweet, sweeter than sugar and cheaper to produce, our cellular frames now an industrial byproduct delivering and adapting consumers taste for saccharinity without restraint. A debate about whether or not these corny subjects are inherently harmful, their omnipresence in American diets surely presents later in life. The internet's rule 34 once predicted that if it existed there was porn of it, but has come to mean images of childhood cartoons engaging in sexual acts. Sweetness imprints in kids it seems. Rule 34 continues to grow as a google search (though interestingly less so in the UK where this ultra sweetness is not found.)  The corny fantasy without balance is an addictive substance, a better commodity, we never experience nourishment or taste so much as direct dopamine reverb, foods and disney treated to ever more focused scientific research achieving not only a more pleasing product but one never delivering satiation. Artists can at least deliver some form of relief to the fantasy by erotically showing off their ends' bitter taste, a fantasy cornhole.

See too: Venice vs. Triennial

Stephen G. Rhodes at Vilma Gold

(Stephen G. Rhodes at Vilma Gold)

Paul McCarthy desublimation in Mike Kelley vernacular with Cameron Jamie theatricality of a John Bock or Mika Rottenberg abjection with Jonathan Meese irony, overlain with an overarching Jason Rhodes value production through storytelling (here in the droll PR) to make mess seem rational, making a fairly accurate depiction of culture, though none of it covers this exhibition's stoned Adult Swim aspect, again the absurd placed into the real. We differentiate art from the cultural forms it appropriates by the expectation of the artist’s self-reflexivity + self-consciousness and therein implicitly promising a “content” that culture doesn't. Yet whole swaths of art actively attends its jettisoning of this - or its absurdification - and the comedy it appropriates become more and more self-conscious, and the difference becomes that one is entertainment and the other is boring.

José Rojas at Vilma Gold





See too: "Flat Neighbors" at Rachel Uffner

Single Moms at Vilma Gold



According to the statement issued, the origin story was: Single Moms feeling, if not “disabled,” at least having “problems getting by” and so with a few phone calls got the band together making “plans to produce and possibly trade certain self manufactured commodities.” Set against stories of princes who choose to live as paupers, it takes on a altruistic hint of mission from god to raise enough money to save their orphan souls from eviction.
Interesting because it premises everything that came before as not commodities, that these new works under the group’s name were “beautiful home goods,” whereas whatever came before, under their individual selves, were neither. These plucky entrepreneurs, saw opportunity by entering, only now, into free markets as freeing them, meaning their not-commodity-objects could continue being so because these were for sale instead. That they weren’t selling out. Or, that they were selling out so as not to have to sell out.
An interesting trick to free yourself from the demands of cultural production for those of market production, reminiscent of S.O.A.P.Y.’s magick trick. Though an interestingly impossible distinction between luxury goods and art.  See too, Ooga Booga and Paradise Garage's Sweatshop among countless others.
Interesting because they look less like “beautiful home goods” and more like piles of contemporary art tropes. Interestingly even less so than the worded lamps, singing paintings, among other objects for which these artists are known. Interestingly being shown in a gallery setting. Interesting because like so much art today attaching little doodads to retail display systems it is hard to distinguish between desire for commodity and the desire for art.

See too : “S.O.A.P.Y. III” at What Pipeline