“About Face” at Kayne Griffin

More and more we find comfort in and identify with, the human become its icon, an avatar stripped of the lush erotic qualities of visual contact so desiccated by advertorial language instrumentalizing image as sex, and instead find solace in a chaste distant representation, the person as a system of appearances, desiring remove from our bodies, cartoonifaction as armor.

And like: “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center

AR: “Friday, July 31, 2015” at Essex Street

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Originally Posted: July 24, 2015

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Christoph Keller at Esther Schipper

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Correction: This post originally mistakenly conflated two different artists named Christoph Keller.

AR: Veit Laurent Kurz and Stefan Tcherepnin at What Pipeline

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Originally Posted: July 27, 2015

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

“Violent Incident” at De Vleeshal

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Nauman's Violent Incident takes rendered reality of sitcom slapsticks and with slight reintroduces the bodily, insinuating the violence as "real," in a way television wanted us to forget and flighting between the two worlds (slapstick and true violence) in a repetitive, exhaustive, serialization that Mike Kelley - always insightful critic on cultural symbolic violence, and speaking of Nauman's bodily sculptures - described as producing the uncanny, which could just as well be described as alienation, the same alienation that has become synonymous with the sort of first-world symbolic violence that most of us feel day-to-day as the background radiation to life, and is the aleph to a lot of renderstentialist art, a violence against our connectivity to whatever we deem real these days: That when a fake corporation engraves "i love rihanna!" on a the false concept of luxury faucet, connections to any concept of "speaking" or affect is broken, and feel numb, a violent incident indeed.

see too : Rachel Rose at High Art

AR: Aldo Mondino at Eden Eden

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Originally Posted: July 31, 2015

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Mungo Thomson at Contemporary Art Gallery Vancouver

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Taking the tropes of conceptual and post-minimalist art, Thompson's boorish version replaces romantics with a cleverness, inserting pop-culture into the permutations of conceptual art. It's all almost funny. e.g.: taking the October-author-weight of concern with the index and making an indexical film about the antiquated quaintness of the Rolodex, a gallery's. or: John Cage's 4:44 rendered beautifully as symphonic chirping of crickets. or: Pistoletto mirrors ripping the 2006 Time's person of the year cover being "You" and featuring a shoddy mirror, itself derided as a gimmick and now reflecting the viewer for their portrait in a museum. or: Asherian reflexivity as the mail pile grows as a long vacation. The list goes on and critics groan and the uninitiated feel some sort of awe at getting it, art, we get it, the easily explainable trick Mungo's greatest trick of all.


So see too: Peter Coffin at Herald St. , Darren Bader at Kölnischer Kunstverein , John Baldessari at Marian Goodman , On Kawara at the Guggenheim