Andreas Slominski at Proyectos Monclova & Barbel Graesslin

(Proyectos Monclova, Barbel Graesslin)

Looking at dead things, torn from their living context, trapped under ethyle acetate in the kill jar's sterile light and pinned to walls to make a butterfly collection. A collection we understand culturally to hold meaning for the belief in the docents and researchers behind it. But they mean only what we know about them, and the objects sparkle. Like dead butterflies, Monoliths, and signifiers, blank beautiful entrapments.


See too: Andreas Slominski at Thaddaeus Ropac, “Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co.,

Maria Eichhorn at Chisenhale

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Art is collective cloud-based fantasy envisioned by the countless projecting its realm in which we all role-play our abstractions. When you begin to get into the material conditions of art things, of course, get hairy. The cloud space we envision is different from the dark recesses in the network of those hitting the pavement. Discussions of the material conditions are symbolic.
It is of course a privilege to be able to take time time off from work, (it is assumed staff will remain getting paid for this vacation although this is never specifically addressed (Lorey presents it as hypothetical) and the paid intern (trainee) actually completes his traineeship before the vacation but there might be a new trainee, but so all sorts of question) and - as is mentioned in the Eichorn's interview with staff, and further expounded by Lorey's essay on the infiltration of debt - art jobs permeate the very being of the worker and so the point is who even knows what a vacation is anymore, but at the very least no one was posting to facebook, instagram, or twitter, and emails are being deleted, but backup emails are provided.
But the whole question of work, privilege to be able to take time off, etc. remains in the symbolic and abstract realms. Nightmare artist Dan Colen once remarked that idol Dash Snow's heroic punk-tude was built upon the privilege of a trust fund, while Colen's aw-shucks background forced the polishing of objects we all hate because otherwise he would starve. Colen is telling this story, but it's symbolic, parable-like abstraction, and one is a legend and the other is despised. Even W.A.G.E. - mentioned in Chisenhale's publication - while talking about the grim mechanics of pay still mostly exists as a fantasy where things are fair, or fairer. Fraser's biennial essay self-examines as being part of the reviled 1% and cannot reconcile and thus cries. Everyone caroms off the material conditions. Artists aren't required to release their tax returns. No one knows that 60% of this blog was written in a car in a Big Box store's parking lot leeching wifi we didn't have. or who's curatorial lifestyle is funded by oil futures and not institutions, or if the difference is one of middle men.
The point is Chisenhale can do this because their funding comes from public and private funds and is not exactly tied to having the doors open for the showroom floor. Eichorn used the artists magic wand of artistry to divert those funds to this reprieve. 27% of which are public, taxpayer's.
"‘The public’ now floods the scene, but most of what they say will not be recorded. Out of the flood, however, bobs a vociferous new role, ‘the critics’, who will attempt to inflect the light of publicity and mediate between ‘the public’ and the artwork. ‘The critics’ have two masks readily at hand for this job, ‘the agent’ and ‘the provocateur’. Through one or other, or both at the same time, the hushed voice of ‘the public’ will be spoken over." - Stewart Martin in the catalog
Eichorn ultimately makes it opaque, a sign out front forbids entrance and we have all the tabula rasa visions of what those people are doing with all that free time and whose money where and maybe not being accountable is the real gift to them.

Miriam Cahn at Meyer Riegger

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Cahn is important, perhaps like Andrew Wekua, in the age of the digital euphemising the body, that someone retensions connection to our corporeality. The body is battleground of artists deciding how to represent it back to us. An artist can drop it from a height over and over again and care nothing for it if they so wish. Cahn seems to care, even while suspending its pink people over the sandpaper causticness of its abrasive color, one of a very few painters to make painting's bright beauty a violent thing. and against people like rubbed erasers, pink and sensitive worn forms. Painting can do a real violence to balloons filled with red liquid. Rubbed of noses, devoid of hair, flesh the color of factory chicken skin. The manifold meanings of the adjective tender, "showing gentleness" as well as "sensitive to pain."  "(of meat) easy to cut."



See too: Miriam Cahn at Jocelyn Wolff, Group Show at Meyer Riegger, Lisa Yuskavage at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Nicola Tyson at Friedrich Petzel, Tala Madani at David Kordansky,  Andro Wekua at Sprüth Magers, Michaël Borremans at Dallas Museum of Art, Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg

Elaine Cameron-Weir at VENUS Los Angeles

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"snake with sexual interest in own tail,"describing an onanistic ouroboros, oneself as sex object, bent in half autoerotically, folded in a mirror we devour ourselves, reflected in the blue light of narcissus's new glass pond, in our hands cupped holding ourself scrolling up and down vigorously on our electrically charged glass skinned self, in cupped bivalves on half shell the mouthfeel of genitals, with salt, lemon and myrrh. In a techno-seance eliciting the same sexiness muscles cars once did, a sexual response. In Pier Paolo Calzolari, who also used clams and neon, in an impoverished art not quite meeting the new alchemical conjuring of the spirituality we connect to the iPhone. "In using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tests, my team looked at subjects’ brain activity as they viewed consumer images involving brands like Apple and Harley-Davidson and religious images like rosary beads and a photo of the pope. We found that the brain activity was uncannily similar when viewing both types of imagery."


See too: Tony Conrad's Glass, “RR ZZ” at Gluck50, “Flat Neighbors” at Rachel Uffner, Ajay Kurian at Rowhouse Project

Roni Horn at Museum de Pont

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"She has linked her use of doubled forms or images and the ambiguity of many of her pieces to androgyny. Consequently, her work has been seen as an indirect form of identity art."¹

"If androgyny ultimately expands the possibilities of identity beyond its stable, gendered binary, Horn's paired works propose the untenability of the fixed binaries on which minimalism historically staked its own critique."²

"For Horn, the terrain of likeness - that which is similar, the same yet different, akin, or simply close - encompasses a panorama of experience. Her work dwells of differences of degree that, she suggests, constitute as profound a representational problem as the starker discrepancies that conventionally give us our social and sexual selves. "³

The androgynous minimalism of Horn's pointed critique of Judd's specific object: instead of the remarkable unit⁴ Horns work arrests flows in their state of transition, glass as a "supercooled liquid"⁵, androgyny the flow between genders stabilized, like taking a photo of river to supercool its movement, frozen transition, a gender like glass.

1. Mignon Nixon Roni Horn Artforum 2009
2. Roberta Smith, NYTimes, 2009
3. Zachary Rottman, UCLA M.A. Dissertation, 2014
4. unit is also slang for penis.
5. Roni Horn, in conversation with Jarrett Earnest Brooklyn Rail 2013


See too: Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Tony Conrad's Glass

Cynthia Daignault at Stems

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Most of today's returns to figuration finds everything chopped and screwed, comical and maniacal, in garish colors that have only become naturalized by screens, and painted with a hard edge and airbrush representing the discarded body of a post-internet subject. Of which Daignault is not. The central friction of Daignault's work is the body moving from its localized version to its decentralized self. In this upcoming metaphor the post-internet painters represent globalization and Daignault represents the locavore movement, relocalizing the product, marking its origin, and traded in the gift economy before adrift in loose markets of art, so that even once loose they will still be representations of that trade, of that local movement, so we get to look back and remember those days.



See too: Joshua Abelow at Freddy

Gerry Bibby, Henrik Olesen at Sismógrafo

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The semiotic distress of Bibby is possibly a place to hide the body lint of Olesen. Puns, in material and language, open up space for innuendo, for the filthy human Olesen has, for a while now, been hiding in crevasses. A crosswalk becomes a Halley abstraction becomes our semiotic Jail, both the crosswalk and painting-referent limit what had once been free space. Insect is misheard as incest and we all call you out for it because that is a freudian slip and you are mentally sick.


see too: Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings