Birgit Megerle at Kunsthaus Glarus

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Banality in painting makes tense a medium we think of as so inherently singular. Placing its original object in the neither-nor world of common. These are like staring at milk, an object of effort to make so plain, pasteurized, from a fount so specific and pink. Even the more particular subjects achieve some iridescent vague. Paintings you could find anywhere but fit nowhere, Megerle is diligent in boiling the paintings to something congealed, gelatinous, soft-firm, melting. Living with one of these would be like hiring someone to mock your individuality everyday.

Continuing Venice

(Venice: Kishio Suga at Arsenale)

Continuing from here. We've got more rocks propped. Though Suga has been propping potato objects for some time now, the rocks and sticks and lumpen things always seeming made to stand under pressure, like they're having a real rough go maintaining their uprightness. Their sort of dumb monumentality always human scaled. It makes them endearing. The lumpen always resembling us, or our eggs.


see too: Venice so far.

Venice: Anne Imhof at German Pavilion

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It's hard to watch bodies adopt ad campaigns. If Imhof's performances seem made for the documentation that echo them it's because they have our beautiful youth retension this conformity to the fashion that will transmit them. Move behind the glass of magazine pages. Identity is performance, seeing its most theatrical version, fashion, as art performance looking like a fashion shoot, is a nightmare. All of youth's beauty is wasted, by everyone, but now you can watch it be caged live in the clothing of another.


See too: Tony Conrad's Glass

Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz

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Minimalism's infatuation for the industrial process, of say Judd et al, was, in part, premised on these industrial processes deletion of the body and its "expression" (if not a promise of subjectivity lifted entirely) in looking "pure," like objectivity, removing the human. Of course this was the lie of any commodity: that the clean aluminum sheets comprising boxes or laptops weren't simply wiped of their indentured sweat. Minimalism hid the body in the closet. Edward's balls coagulated these castoff bodies minimalism so desperately wanted to forget.


See too: Ajay Kurian at White Flag Projects

Past: Franz Erhard Walther at CAPC

"the look of functional objects: well designed packages, exemplifying - stand in for - its protestant ethic, morality. Packages as stripped minimalist looks meant, through fetishistic “functional” design of today’s REI or Muji, to impress functionality as a nebulous holisticness. Functionality is today’s fetish in a world already post-apocalyptically Capitalist dog-eat-dog. So when you stand with your head in a bag with a stranger or docent, the bitterness of its awkwardness is understood as medicinal, good for you."


Click here Franz Erhard Walther at CAPC

Candy Jernigan at Wattis

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Artistic power to make something "appear," be visible, is often abused with a beatification or worse aestheticization of a subject the artist predicts will interest nobody without their, the artist's, supple grace, i.e. the stylization, photorealist iconizaton, or whatever painterly reifications for aura redundantly affixed. Of course drawing is recording and thus proof of its seeing, document to its witness, made visible, and more accurate lines authenticating, but the drawing need not be "special." Jerrigan's accumulation proves a more a serviceable method in which the painter yields to the object, representation of it and not talent. Like all those tacos and kebabs painted on stucco to advertise the real thing inside, there is a functionalism in vernacular foodstuffs that often feels like a relief. If you want to show something you just put it there.

Albert Herter at Koenig & Clinton

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The cartoon - as the primitive manifestation of the virtual, the ability to treat reality as malleability - feels more and more aptly depictive of the world currently lived, a world governed by abstraction and rulers on whims swapping crutches for legs, swamps for politics, licorice for sustenance. In the future your head will be replaced by a pumpkin and this will be the will of hand we can't see but can all infer, sense will be destroyed and replaced with something much more billowing, slapstick maybe.


See too: Gijs Milius at Gaudel de Stampa, “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center, Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick