Group show at What Pipeline

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"heightening the contrast of edges" "appearing larger" - blurring their boundaries, that dirty smudging edge, crust filth excess. Nice. But you don't want to get it on you. 

Will Benedict at Gio Marconi

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The strong scent of banality, the groan you feel escaping, The alienation these so cherish to conjure, Their hyper-ennui, a dissociation. Desensitization occurring "emotional response is repeatedly evoked in situations in which the action tendency that is associated with the emotion proves irrelevant or unnecessary." Arbitrariness is a terror. You can't even remember what it felt like to be healthy.


Will Benedict at Overduin & Co., Will Benedict at Bortolami

Will Benedict at Overduin & Co.

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Thinking of Benedict like a gothicly depressed Baldessari is helpful. A formal artist using the basic propositions of art against itself, in the wrong, that if, like Baldessari, the text must relate, when in semio haywire it does not, its semantic slippage disconnects us. While Baldessari's rupture produced laughter in art's children, Benedict's continual unplugging of content creates morose vacuum: when Benedict, as early on, is funny, it is easy to take, but when it, as he continually more and more aims to depict culture as, is decidedly empty it creates a resignation to its abuse, a feeling of learned helplessness in rats, of numbness, feeling like viral conditions speaking through stuffed nasal sinuses, stuffed up, comparison leading violence.

John Baldessari at Marian Goodman, Will Benedict at Bortolami

Will Benedict at Bortolami

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The best thing you can say about Benedict's is that they are scary, misleading objects, projecting a symptomatic spread of virus like conditions of these things all over the block. These look the way having a cold feels. Unremediable institutionalization. If Krebber performed everyone fears of social market with a guileless smile, Bendict is that fear, unsmiling.  The apostate entrepreneur. Not preferring not too, but mass producing it.

See too: Group Show at Greene Naftali , Tom Humphreys at What Pipeline , Karl Holmqvist and Ei Arakawa at Overduin & Co. , Will Benedict at Bergen Kunsthall , Fredrik Vaerslev at Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle ,

Will Benedict at Bergen Kunsthall

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The new method of artistic identity production, vacant-token-products for the gallery leaving the unsaleable cultural-capital building for the museums. Benedict has always been, like Kanye, a wonderful producer woefully lacking in “content.” Instead the arrangements are based on the formal material massaged in the medium of the network, buoys in the flow. Though Yeezus was great.

And Benedict's turn towards video production gives the most interesting results, yet the temptation to connect Benedict’s passé part-outs to the subliminal-abjection of the anti-adverts - both creating a fragmented disgust - would miss how sick-sweet repulsiveness of Fried Chicken and KFC commercials is premised on their physiological allure set against a much deeper horror. Benedict’s are closer to the phenomenon of trypophobia, a socially spread internet “fear,” presenting a study of whether it actually premised off a biological response or a form of social inclusion

See too: Will Benedict at Balice Hertling 

Will Benedict at Balice Hertling

Benedict revolves the art world like a key to a scene. He's probably not in charge, or even all that connected to it, but he's become an unspoken masthead, or mascot. Everyone wants some part of it, and for the last number of years he's been everywhere, in countless exhibitions seen.
Here mud encrusted corporate zombies replacing Benedict’s friends would seem a step in the direction of content, all with the musical furniture, but its a more a move, like many of Benedict’s, of bland displacement, of using blank markers in the codified gallery system, the contextual architecture of art; and like before's paper shrimps, the addendum of little washy paintings ironize the whole thing, once again displacing meaning, blankly nice. To say that these are actually starting to look better would be besides the point. It's more interesting to look at them as examples in the codified strata in the art world, gestures and attempts.