Wade Guyton at Galerie Chantal Crousel

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Whatever happened to Guyton\Walker? That cute duo bring relinking Genzken to a Raushenberg root, and then turned it to comedy, printed it on everything. This was right before the algorithm, before KAYA, right before Walmart was caught selling a mug emblazoned with adults wearing diapers. Both Walmart and G\W were a parody of the same thing, mass appeal and the need to fill any and all space by placing everything onto everything else, both of the same quality. It seems prescient now, as the bargain bin of content rises to surface of every display possible. That these are starting to look like Gerhard Richter's priciest paintings seems to follow from the rest. You can put anything on a mug. Again, production is the product. 

Group Show at Altman Siegel (Wade Guyton)

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Because history is more interesting than painting. Because culture more surreal than surrealism. Because the unconscious of society already printed for you. Now it's a plaque-as-painting for a museum to own. To allow them to put the didactic next to. In a museum you need a painting to mark it. That's just how museums, dumbly, work. 

See too: Wade Guyton at Academie Conti & Le Consortium, Wade Guyton at Friedrich Petzel

Wade Guyton at Friedrich Petzel

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Guyton began as the perfect Warholian*: a slacker drawing Xs, and killing content in service to the machine of its reproduction, the production proved it and this alongside the fantasy of eruptions tugged from our subconsciouses plugged into the machine and pulled from. Eventually this got boring. The machine wasn't so much able to manifest our subconscious as provide brief illusion that this was possible, that we could print our dreams, creativity, whatever as a perfect reproducible commodity. Instead, they were just commodities potentializing dreams as any other. And so the next perfect Warholian step was to print the newspaper, which itself was like the manifestations of the Giant subconscious of earth people, the newspaper printed was in fact the eruptions of all those subconscious desire's added up, a real freaky thing indeed.

* even perhaps moreso that the direct illusions by the race rioting Walker, Kelly

Furthermore: Wade Guyton at Academie Conti & Le Consortium 

"Print the painting, how cold and deliciously malevolent it all seemed at the time until our own body temperature fell so low to match it that eventually even Scheljdahl felt warm towards a retrospective of them."

Wade Guyton at Academie Conti & Le Consortium

(Academie Conti, Le Consortium)

Print the painting, how cold and deliciously malevolent it all seemed at the time until our own body temperature fell so low to match it that eventually even Scheljdahl felt warm towards a retrospective of them. Everyone stressed endlessly the physicality of them, that poor ol' Guyton had to actually tug them out of the printer, that it was tough work, a little sweat, a little body heat, not absolute zero, but this extraction only served to underscore the fantasy of the creative act soon able to be stretched out from digital ethers like raw id tugged from digital subconscious, and erect in a gallery. That we could lose our hands in the printing press because soon our wet desire would just print itself as diamonds on a wall, we could stop tugging them off in studios, and the Onanist accident of its spills and smears prevented reproduction, the accident made them unreproducible, sterile.
But now 2016 in the era of Atkinsian avatar-conciousness, and Rachel Rosist digital semio-corruption we understand that the digital was just a new pool to self-reflect in, and we're still looking into it wanking. Look a Guyton self-portrait appears up in it.


See too: Zak Prekop at Shane Campbell, Cheyney Thompson at Raucci/Santamaria, Daniel Lefcourt at Blum & Poe

“The Contract” at Essex Street

(“The Contract” at Essex Street)
Artists: Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda, Maria Eichhorn, Wade Guyton, Hans Haacke, Park McArthur, R. H. Quaytman, Cameron Rowland, Carissa Rodriguez

Haacke’s overt literalism was due to its merely exposing what was read between lines, its belief in the act of transparency. Oddly everyone in this exhibition - which takes its title in reference to Haacke - makes work that is overtly opaque, obfuscating and mysteriorizing itself in the opacity of its use of cultural symbols. If Haacke’s work was about transparency in the value extracted from art objects, the rest of the work in the show is about contemporary art’s extraction of value/content from culture, complicit in its own theft of value, “borrowing” symbols that were never lent. While appropriation foregrounds its act of theft, this exhibition’s implicit form is a possibly insidious version that guises itself as a form of critical doubling. Quaytman’s “borrowing” of Andrea Fraser’s most vertiginous performance, reprinting it under her own brand image - even if old orchard friends - placing even what has become her logo over the top of the image, what is this but a strange form of theft among friends? Is this exhibition an homage to "Haacke’s" seminal contract, which attempting through transparency to ink slight power to artist’s, or a simple vampiring of cultural capital of it, placing artists, literally, around it as if osmotically credibility it would absorb.
"Haacke’s" poster, contract, and idea was free; I can’t imagine anything else in this show is.