Paul McCarthy at Schinkel Pavillon

(link)

McCarthy the great desublimator, and of late the great literalizer. Literalization is a form of desublimation. And we watch him objectify someone, literally turn someone into an object, Elyse Poppers or himself. Unusual for McCarthy it is clean, clinical and calculated. It feels awful. This process, usually huge on billboards and bus stations showing half-naked young things, should entail all the fun of commodities, should replace the desire with an object that can be purchased, replace that desire. Instead here is cruel, useless and wasted. The world has little use for naked old man on table. Watch the procession of Poppers' body become not hers, the literal object consumable.

Thea Djordjadze at South London Gallery

(link)

In a world where so much is streamlined, everything worn smooth by productive pressure and ergonomically bent for us, an object that feels like a reject from that process feels something like comfort.


See too: Venice: Thea Djordjadze at The Arsenale, Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage, Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi

Ed Atkins at dépendance

(link)

Fitting to see him now in the white wasteland of art's daily now as a disenfranchised series of promotional images adrift, incommunicable. Recall when Dave had the long ethereal hair of a newborn, bald Dave. Now Dave is dying, an infant with melanoma. Will Dave die? The existential questions of Dave pertain strangely to us all not since we're becoming less different from a render, but because our digital selves are already more widely real, and then who is Dave, the elderly child, newborn Dave.

See too: Ed Atkins at Serpentine Gallery, Mark Leckey at Haus Der Kunst + Kunsthalle Basel, Rachel Rose at High Art,

Stephen Prina at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen

(link)

The medium is the message another way of saying that saying nothing a whole lot of ways is the same as saying a whole lot of something. This has a lot to do with art, in which the goal is to make a elusive content engorge with meaning, make the non-content of biographic Galesburg seem big. And it does. We attribute meaning to this suburban genericism. Structuring experience as a series of means of deployments, Prina is, like the suburbs, a much more insidious real estate developer than first seems.

K.r.m. Mooney at Pied-á-terre

(link)

Mooney born a jeweler makes sense, apart from its decorative function, the "setting" of jewelry is key, the holding of an object, the micro-fetish of attachmenting objects presented and the problem of material convergence, of which Money is all about. All this relating to our cyborg bodies. Of weirdo materials reminding us of things stranger than ourselves. The most typical aspect of the various object orientated is that we conceive of our body in relation to it, feel our meat as sinew and rod connected. Like the decorative decorates its thing, not the finger but the person atop flesh.

See too: “Being Thing” at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage & Treignac Projet

Max Hooper Schneider at High Art

(link)

The decrepit Casino cut and parted out and distributed as a future predicted will speak to a fantasy of our gothic present amplified. The heavily floraed aquarium holds the lush world behind the glass screen of those surfing having fallen in. The web is like a very deep aquarium and there will be neon signs underwater, in glass. Whole fantasies behind glass, Disney World behind glass where 20,000 leagues under glass a squid would attack your submarine. From sentient watermelon to primordial hot baths, the Chuck-E-Cheese Animtronics begin horribly signing a new dystopian that is lush.

A continuation of: Ajay Kurian at Rowhouse Project

Sheila Hicks at Sikkema Jenkins

(link)


While the larger assert themselves through a sort of program exhausted, and big, the small seem yet full with their potential, mysterious and replete; and not yet farmed for harvest, time + material. No doubt Hicks graduating in of an era not particularly known for much besides measuring competitions in some ways shaped the product.