Raúl de Nieves at Freedman Fitzpatrick

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Too much decoration is a terrible thing. We call it "gaudy" or "garish" or "lurid" or "vulgar" no longer arranged but vomited in quantity, too much, like the clowns on view who baroque their face to comical levels found frightening, a rupture of the socially decorous. Because these are ethnocentric terms, wielding the symbolic violence of "taste," and such it is rare museums didactic their greek statuary with "this greek marble would have actually been caked in makeup like a whore" preserving both the marble and myth of white antiquity. The myth of white antiquity that believes in the raw lineage that gives us aluminum Macbooks and UberBlack as opposed to the lesser Ubers which come in colors disorganized. Sontag wrote the word camp and it suddenly allowed the intelligentsia to participate in the kitsch with the shield of irony, but if you weren't, if you couldn't, what then if these were just garish.


See too: Joanne Greenbaum at Crone, Olaf Breuning at Metro Pictures

João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva at Andrew Kreps

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As if the several images of projectors illuminating gallery walls wasn't enough, we brandish the literal celluloid here to state "this is a physical object," a spell to ward off the anonymizing ether of digital networks that would, god forbid, force competition with every other image. Instead we wreath it, frames architecture filmstock perforations. Objects seem to almost fear their dispersion, fear their image against Instagram mass. Kreps website doesn't actually have the photos without their frames, that's a CAD exclusive perhaps ready for its close up. And the celluloid is labelled like a movie, time and all. Walls for protection. It's important to keep you distinct and the gallery in its resplendent pasture, separate from the polloi.

Janice Kerbel at greengrassi

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Typographic enunciation. Abstraction that get its content too - legible. All manner of questions in the difference between reading and looking. One is data processing, a systemized manner we have been trained specifically for. That though the "lake" in your head is not mine, we have quasi-equitable terms of exchange. And so you can disappear into a text, be "transported." Looking keeps you here, staring, what you are meant to do with that is up to you.  The difference between a serif or sanserifed "GRAB" is interpretable.  This "Grab" is fancy, that "Grab" is plain. The different garb we dress in. Despite comics' or Wool's long interest in such matters, these are dressed tastefully in tuxedos to match our white walls.

“The Myriad Forms of Visual Art” at The National Museum of Art, Osaka

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The strangeness of documentation that doesn't conform to the crystalline white of lighting. Everything looks primeval, like what we imagine museums at night, occult spaces of objects left to do what objects do when no ones looking. The museum seems closed, set in a forest. A warmth we usually enact through instagram filters or rose tinted glass. Like its the 90s. Covered in nostalgia. Now everything looks like porn, bleached and depilated.

Stuart Middleton at Carlos/Ishikawa

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Which like metaphor for the wrangling of the image, of forcing it out, Middleton's investment in manhandling the image, often laborious, stop motion, animations, of banal, finger-tapping, plain scenarios, extinguishing cigarettes in piss, show effort, weird flex but okay, hauled off to market, labor, means, a beautiful cow. What is a cow but a technology for meat production, surely kin to art.


Cow too: Wilfredo Prieto at NoguerasBlanchard, Aleksandra Domanović at Tanya Leighton

Aki Kondo at ShugoArts

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All we want is something painted. The ostensible white language of plainness is actually easy means to see the difference, what we're looking for anyway, the subject of painter rendered in the glass they see the object through, the errors of their mis-seeing. No one thinks bananas look like this, but a question of what was finished enough for acceptability here. See the flaws in the glass of another's eyes.

Sara Greenberger Rafferty at Rachel Uffner

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The need to rephysicalize the image, cut it from an ether that can edition itself, and instead localize it in a "unique object." It's a strange feature that you can endlessly multiply images of your world but you can't multiply gold. Glass printing valorizing the reference's assets, realizing profits. The world is dissolving anyway why not let it sink into its image.