Remember 10 years ago? Wade Guyton. Josh Smith. Kelley Walker. Isa Genzken. KREBBER. The unmonumental moment finally getting some dust on the the neo-minimalism that pervaded. We hadn't yet been flooded with the brained abstraction. Our abstraction then was called "indexical." It was cold. We liked negation. Matias Faldbakken. Gareth James. R.H. Quaytman. Andre Butzer was a bad boy, instead of the water we swim. Our gallery websites with badly color corrected images the size of thumbs, impossible to navigate. Scarce exhibition documentation and flash splash pages. There was no Instagram, students checked catalogs out school libraries. ARTBLOGARTBLOG feeling organic against Walmart Image Superstore. Surrealism was contained to Juxtaposition magazine and teenagers. The imagists hadn't been completely dismembered for new careers. Colorful painting was naive. Matthew Barney was passé instead of prescient. Remember where we were. There wasn't a figure for miles. We weren't yet bashing head against inert objects and declaring vitality. Hadn't yet revised history to seem inclusive all along. Greene Naftali still seemed cool. Gedi Sibony for that matter. Josef Strau. Sergej Jensen. Claire Fontaine. Reena Spaulings the artist. Real Fine Arts. Pro Choice Vienna. 10 years. CAD had a comments section.
Rest in Peace.

Past: Simon Starling

"Starling’s “Metamorphology” is histories' mirroring reenactment in symbolic fashions.
"The artworks feel logical in their ouroboric repetition but contain a tautological inability to be reasoned with. Tautologies make sense, but state nothing, equating a silence as poetry. They become koan-like emblems of the histories it condenses like cliff notes, glazing history subservient to it’s poetic reenactment..."


Read full: Simon Starling at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

Rachel Harrison at Whitney Museum

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The hipster too was a semio-naut; whose careful balance of fashion’s signs were an additive and appropriative construction of appearance and identity, a careful facade of references, and so the concurrent rise of Rachel Harrison [with the hipster] makes symptomatic sense for its ability to thematize semio-collapse and short-circuits in a way that was jokey, pranksterish and light relief against undeconstructable-tuber confusion of “the real” having really ascended into code that both Harrison and Hipsters were obviously responding.

Condensing the mall into the diamonds of its peak 2006-08 moment we have to admit it was a pretty neat trick, the things just felt like collapse within singular objects.

The fallout of [this] semiotic manicism/collapse/supernova, of the 00’s assemblage (Harrison, Genzken, Pernice et al) and the exploding of Unmonumental’s detritus, left the next generation picking cultural rubble. Artists became post-apocalyptic cargo-cult, artists, still wanting to believe, began to reassemble totems of cultural meaning. Staedelschulites rehashing a form of ready-made-marxist-surrealism, societie's tchotchkies made to “speak” the tongues of the Invisible Hand, worship of gods who must be crazy. Post-Lieske - the real rabble of Neue Alte Brucke, Pro-Choice, etc. - Ceccaldi, Yngve Holen and everyone else - rearranging/collaging/juxtaposing the signs of capital as some sort of anti-altar to them - the whole "arrangements" phenomenon, tableaus of cultural artifacts, seen again and again and again on the rugs of art fairs everywhere - finally hitting bedrock in the strip-mine of Darren Bader just arranging capital’s objects on the floor.

Alexis Smith at Parrasch Heijnen

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What if you could compress it all into the picture frame? Hold everything? See everything next to everything else? Is that the dream of art? Of imagination? Our heads full of it, world, with the garbage accumulated getting updated from time to time as culture lurches and sloughs itself. And us attaching it to self, like gum to shoes, sticky things, catching it all.

Lisa Herfeldt at Between Bridges

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The reason we've gotten into upholstery, into couches, chairs and gotten into sleeping bags, is that they infer us, they contain the ghost of the human they were made for. Every chair is a bodily innuendo. Every couch is suggestive. An "excess content" in implication. Making things look like other things, creates the vapor that there is something further there. The pervert knows what the decorous don't.

Sean Landers at Rodolphe Janssen

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We identify with cuteness, with the interminable wet-eyed critters of Disney, Pokemon, whatever latest commodified and neotenic rodent. Cuteness' pressure causing Pugs' eyes to bulge and esophagus to choke. (The stunted bone structure of Pikachu leaves him in constant pain.) And Landers' plaid animals, sad clowns, and now a pinocchio "plankboy" are the means of a lesser sort of identification. Landers' characters are not focus-group perfected. And their revulsion is "an effect of anticlimax created by an unintentional lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous." Like Greek mythos for a plankboy or Moby Dick in flannel. The definition of bathos. Which Landers prances sad clown around. Landers paintings "arousing pity, especially through vulnerability or sadness," pathetic.


See too: Sean Landers at Friedrich Petzel

Birgit Megerle at Emanuel Layr

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Banality in the soft technicolor of handtowels. Or looking more like the hand-coloring of black and white photographs. Adding rose to the cheeks of children, ceruleans to the skies. The PR would chide you for not liking dogs, that populist obedient critter which, like sunsets, seem to be beyond reproach in culture. "like sunsets, both the near endless regurgitations of saccharine accident, cliche." But above take these forms and squeeze cotton candy out from it, spank the sunset for its bruise.


See too: Wolfgang Tillmans at Maureen Paley, Amelie von Wulffen at Reena Spaulings, Amelie von Wulffen at Barbara Weiss, “J A N U A R Y” at dépendance