Camilla Wills at Gaudel de Stampa

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There is a lot of things, but not a lot of light shed on it. Wills' stubborn opaqueness like low-light conditions, our systems for recognition short-circuit in attempting resolution in scarce information, causes hallucinations. At home science experiment: With just 200 lumens and 10 minutes in the mirror will see your face notably disfigure, like low information voters whose perceptions deform our candidates, a lack of information causing boogeypeople's appearance.  Instead we must "Control the narrative," "get ahead of it," not allow viewers in darkness to install their own figments of imagination, prefill everything with a narrative control that Wills seems obsitinately intent on eliminating, the lack of press releases, or dressed in lorem ipsum, causing a contextual vacuum, a dearth of writing on her, perhaps because writers all so afraid what they are writing is simply themselves in the mirrors on the mantel, invent ghosts in ignorance.



See too: Trisha Donnelly at Museum Ludwig, Anna-Sophie Berger at JTT, Yngve Holen at Fine Arts, Sydney

New Museum Triennial: “Songs for Sabotage”

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A triennial scorned, its overt political posture embedded in monuments as gestures for wall and catalogue texts throwing around almost unanimously reviled underdefined politics as big ideas:

"New Museum Triennial Looks Great, but Plays It Safe" -nyt
“Songs for Sabotage,” the New Museum’s 2018 Triennial, tethers fresh artists to stale palaver." -newyorker

"Fielding the hazards of art as activism." - 4columns
"How the New Museum’s Triennial Sabotages Its Own Revolutionary Mission" -artnet

"Ignoring its faux-dissident title" -frieze
"And the curators’ understanding of a systemic problem like this doesn’t diminish it" -art-agenda

Which McGarry goes on: "The most conspicuous effect of introducing them to the market via the museum is the institution’s own accrual of various capital—intellectual, geopolitical, and, with regard to claiming names untouched by rival fundraisers, territorial. The fastidiously heterogeneous selection of artists constitutes a risk-adverse portfolio that secures growth for a museum whose projection of its identity, in an especially crowded local context, has been remarkably ambitious." 

and ends with an honesty: "Part of me wonders if I should continue reviewing international group exhibitions when I am so predisposed to be bored and disappointed by them. I consider it my duty to speak out against the convention when given the platform. I don’t know if it’s fair to cast artists as victims and curators as complicit, if often well-intentioned, facilitators who are ultimately either too weak or too disempowered to change how biennials and triennials are done. With a handful of discoveries, this show does its job, but “Songs for Sabotage” doesn’t sabotage the mold of the triennial itself, so in most respects it feels like lip service."

But perhaps most telling, in Artforum Chloe Wyma's preview had already presumed the critiques at before the show even opened in a single quip, "But will the master’s tools, as Audre Lorde famously cautioned, ever dismantle the master’s house?"

So what does it mean then that we can pre-critique our exhibitions, we already know the aperture for knife's insertion? Whose game is already played out, reviewer and curator.

Ken Lum at Wattis

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Whereas for Baldessari the image and text ruptured to dissonant stupidity, for Lum the relation between text and its image, or stylization as font, vacillates in complicating tone, affect, and comprehension, fritzing usual relations to vertical text so usually standardized, corporate, and sanded of any possible misunderstanding. Vertical text is intended to be clean, sleek and lozenge like, a clearly defined transaction between speaker and reader, and Lum's version bubbles with all manner of nerves in us. You see the human erupt through the advertorial transaction which is supposed to remain free of subjectivity - there is never a plaintive plea in advertising, and in witnessing this breakdown of decorum we feel pity.


See too: Mark Grotjhan at Karma, John Baldessari at Marian Goodman, John Baldessari at Sprüth Magers

Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at House of Gaga

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Artists continually forcing a reading between the lines they force distinctly apart so that the blank white space feels ominous and full, like a detective novel, figure it out, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda adept at objects in aura of evidence or clues. Bits of knowledge that are brought up in the PR, starting with the failure of the cult to deliver its prophecies, its promised cataclysm falling to a gaping white nothing burger, a lot like the art's lines. Providing no auto-bloodshed or endorsement, instead a musing on the aquarium shark (and its connection to Hirst) as a symbol of contemporary art's "predicted avant-garde revolutions [that] never came to pass" and the "set of special texts, rituals, and institutions whose purpose is to manage the disparity between the prophecy and the reality of its non- appearance."  This is all uninteresting, another meditation of art's failed deliverance we've been rehashing for 20 years but now cults and sharks and texts. Except for the text accompanyment which is itself its little own hard-boiled plot that itself empties and fills like a corpse on the beach and you could attempt to use the detective's cultish tools to attempt post-mortem on the story's failure to deliver catacylsm or just think of it as "set of special texts, rituals, and institutions whose purpose is to manage the disparity between the prophecy and the reality of its non-appearance."



See too: Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda at Francesca Pia, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at 356 Mission

Dadamaino at Mendes Wood DM

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Looking back now you have to imagine life was, if not hell, at least a brutal minefield for women of the era who, free of a patriarchal home, were paroled to experience the full trauma of a world of men, those sexually "liberated" of the artworld excusing discomfort as "no major offense," the assaulters still allowed their sexual plumage to hang out openly in museums, forced to dodge big pendulous egos swung to wide berths, the male surety allowing the Greenberg-likes to steamroll the scene almost on machismo alone, to allow Judd to state as an entire thought about Anne Truitt in Art International: "She doesn't have a clear idea of what she is doing though," - that's it that's Judd's entire sentence - the defense of which is simply Judd was this much of a prick to everyone, and maybe Italy was kinder, less of the implicit patriarchal rules for gender so pervasive you still hear a generation occasionally defend as "natural," and within this then to somehow find some small elbowed room to make something soft.  Only to have echoing in your head Judd's castigation of Frankenthaler: "Frankenthaler's softness is fine but it would be more profound if it was also hard."


See too: Hannah Black at MUMOK

Past: Sarah Lucas

" The dirty mind sees the content of a culture that is present but subsurface. Some early "venuses" were barely human let alone women, yet we see the maternal. The lengths to which stretch it, how deep it runs. Man two spheres a tube, woman a bucket and curves."


Click for full: Sarah Lucas at CFA Berlin

Eloise Hawser at Somerset House

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Plumbing the depths, the correlation between waterways and our most technically advanced medical imaging, the ability to peer under surfaces and into our sewage systems you and me. The human body is indistinguishable from any sufficiently complex sewer. The metaphorical transpositional points are numerous, we're all just bodies of water with structural needs to remove waste through complex veinous systems, and the methods of mapping those bodies mirror each other somewhat as tubed networks. "This will be the first time phantoms, a crucial part of modern medical practice, will be shown in a creative setting" seems like an oddly specific Guinness World Record, but a preliminary search through Leckey's Universal Addressability of Dumb Things and Kelley's Uncanny shows it maybe technically correct if beside the point in a long history or alternative figuration. The long symbiotic history of medical and artistic representations, artists interest in them. Why did Simone Ambrogio come back, what are these medical professionals really up to? The difference in interest may be instead of the representations is how the representations are made here, flaunting the medical science it remains at least somewhat disconcerted with, the new means of figuration, your body like a toilet.


See too: Quintessa Matranga at Freddy, Yngve Holen at Fine Arts, Sydney