William Leavitt at MAMCO

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For many, it's important, a film's believability, the story's ability to maintain its dream-thrall and for its duration become real, its objects become realized. We understand fiction as able to - even momentarily - become actual. And in Leavitt's work seeing false things we know have the power to become real is its humorous anxiety. The various distances from "realness" are its multiple punchlines, as far from realness as the the science lab on view and we can still understand our ability to believe in them as signifiers of science lab.  At the other end, like Guillaume Bijl, the stages are hyperrealist with question of at what point are the arrangements decor and at what point it is the thing it represents, i.e. authentic living room or staged, is the obvious question, the answer is that all living rooms are. At what point does our decor function as a reflection of society and at what point do our living rooms produce their own image for Hollywood and your neighbors to reproduce, and at what point does suspension of disbelief just become permanent.


see too: William Leavitt at Greene Naftali

Nairy Baghramian at Walker Art Center?

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So CAD's photos are almost certainly from S.M.A.K.'s dark wood floors - where the exhibition was originally presented - and not the Walker Art Center named here, a fun bit of transpositional virtuality, a rose by any other name would smell something different in it, a theme of Baghramian's work. You look in the clouds in the background and see a fist crushing a fire, whereas we see two tapeworms' coitus, a mold for an object we cannot see but envision, the negative space we are left to fill with our own hot air, you the blimp to travel to different institutions in new names, what would it matter if the floors change.


see too: Nairy Baghramian at Museo Tamayo, Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman

Matias Faldbakken at Astrup Fearnley Museet

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Do you recall, in the smoke of Matias Faldbakken's rocketship ascendancy the artworld was left blind scrambling to adhere a politic for it, to make a critical foundation for the artworld's hot new power iconography, unable to accept that how it looked, rather than any little content it contained, was its appeal. Who in that moment didn’t want have to their big fuck-all paintings and sell it too.  Objects representing the 101 ways to say "no." The ironic self-awareness of Faldbakken’s sculpture, like Fontaine, made its recycling of an already co-opted language acceptable, the viewer being smarter than the sculpture was a sales value added.  The comedy today: after such years of "negative expression" one is now looking any such ways to escape the bed one lain. "His artistic practice previously revolved around the concept of negation as it is expressed in avant-garde art and underground culture." 

Moyra Davey at Portikus

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It's alluring to attach the psychology of money to feces.

"For example, the miser’s hoarding of money can be thought of as symbolic of the child’s refusal to eliminate feces. The defiance with which the child withholds its precious feces in the face of parental demands is generalized over a period of time to the withholding of all precious possessions from a world perceived as hostile and demanding. Since it is readily apparent even to developing child that most people view money as a prized possession, the transition from feces to money is an easy step." "Feces themselves are perhaps the most valuable commodity in the child’s young life.

“Norman. O Brown observ[ed], ‘In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known - that the essence of money is its absolute worthlessness.'"- Money Madness Goldberg & Lewis

And us tossing pennies into watery wells, everyday make a wish upon a throne with coins in stow, placing O. Browns into white repositories, a text released to the underworld.  Davey symbolically rooting around in latent feces, fingerprint stamps all over, evidence of molding it to your hand.



See too: Quintessa Matranga at Freddy, Moyra Davey at Institute of Contemporary Art

Henrik Olesen at Cabinet

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Take for instance the coroplast sheets these are on, corrugated plastic, sheets of industrial quantity and cheapness that is less thing than stuff, a temporal substrate, a material capitalistically expendable, what we call "disposable" despite stuffing landfills for eons, denting and scuffing with ease to become "waste" while remaining stuff, flakes like your dead skin collecting under beds with dirt as dust, the cells that Olesen keeps adhering like wet toilet paper to everything, and the hangnails sticking out from walls, an imitation game of filth, waste failing to crystallize packagability, use, the matter of bodies that meaninglessly accumulate, failing representation.  "Polypropylene has been reported to degrade while in human body as implantable mesh devices. The surface's degraded material forms a tree bark-like layer." a skin cell, sloughed.


See too: Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu, Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings

Karl Holmqvist at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis

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On Holmqvist at GBE: "It's punk plagiarism, sucking out the affective lyricism of the pop ecosystem to flatten out all those very-much-felt feelings into a poetry of surfaces - and tedium."
  - Andrew Durbin TzK

We like words, we trust words, our whole society practically predicted on words, everywhere, ubiquitous, magnificent and fragile. So the Holmqvistic hammering of words into tin for his cymbal tapping repetition could feel either charmingly disruptive or cruel.  Holmqvist has expressed less affinity for jazz than for noise, words become the sensation of objects felt with a numb hand, the cacophony of nerves deprived. A rose is a rose is a rose, there is a long history of this use of semantic satiation: the repeated arousal of a specific neural pattern causing "a reduction in the intensity of the activity with each repetition" - effectively numbs like our hands our ability to perceive them with any force but some wide flat plainness, deprived of structure to give its words lifeblood like sucking nitrous from balloons until the world dissolves into a stupefied vertigo, and we feel the noise, the static of our brains deprived.

Michael E. Smith at 500 Capp Street Foundation

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A public's anxiety over the status of the artwork represented in the likes of online quizzes to differentiate children's from famous, a prank gone viral placing glasses on the floor of SFMoMA, or Pierre Brassau. We feel comfort with the artwork identified and labeled, packaged by the camera or work list, catalogue raisonnéd. We appreciate butterflies pinned spread behind glass.  Removed from the packaging artworks and butterflies disperse, cling everywhere, etherealize into suspicion for them. You can never be certain you've seen all the butterflies, their artwork is everywhere. The entire space becomes a distrust of what means and what is merely meaninglessly there. Never really be sure. In Marfa seeing - in the hordes of Judd's objects arranged on tables - a small box repeated amongst many different rooms and asked what this one object of Judd's was: It was a recorder for humidity and sunlight for archival purposes put there by staff, not Judd's at all. Was it meaninglessly there, or should we choose it to mean. For Ireland everything would seemingly be encompassed with open arms, comfort to know. For Smith, building this distrust likely the point. Anxiety artworks.


See too: Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center, Michael E. Smith at Michael Benevento, Michael E. Smith at Zero, Michael E. Smith at Lulu, Michael E. Smith at Susanne Hilberry