Pedro Wirz at Marc Selwyn

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Souvenirs of our demise!


See too: Pedro Wirz at Longtang, Cooper Jacoby at Freedman Fitzpatrick

August Review Index 2020

Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo) at Balice Hertling
Torey Thornton at Moran Bondaroff
Maren Hassinger at Tiwani Contemporary
Guan Xiao at Antenna Space
Brandon Ndife, Diane Severin Nguyen at Bureau
Solange Pessoa at Mendes Wood DM
Juliana Huxtable at Reena Spaulings
Sandra Mujinga at Kunstverein Hannover
Tishan Hsu at Hammer Museum
Bri Williams at Queer Thoughts
An-My Lê at Marian Goodman
Hadi Fallahpisheh at CENTRAL FINE
Ser Serpas at Karma International
Simone Leigh at David Kordansky

Tetsumi Kudo at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

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Before CAD the largest vault of images were catalogs, expensive, locked in coastal university libraries. Acquiring them you would get maybe one good image of an installation and a lecture, essay. This is how we learned about art. The "contemporary" you had walk to see. Sending it around meant describing it to friends. What was going on in Zurich was a faint smattering of bad images on a website like steam engines. Then, around the cusp of the 2010s, suddenly enough everything changed. The most ephebic artist's exhibitions were each documented in 40+ crisp images in pornographic lighting that could be sent instantly, everywhere. And in the center, in the palm of your hand, the campfire CAD. I have no hard statistics about actual numbers in the increase in documentation but the difference is total. There are more images of many 30 year old artists exhibitions circulating than Bruce Nauman's entire career. There is a Before CAD and an After Daily in this history of art. The deluge of contemporary images, simply by mere quantity, threatens an occlusion. Bruce Nauman or Eva Hesse is safe, but the early-career 90s artist might be completely lost. Early/Pruitt, or Art Club 2000, for ones we actually remember.

The Artworld has always been attempting "rediscovery."How many times is Kudo himself going to be "rediscovered." But the term seems more loaded now, like pulling things out of an oblivion. It had been that books rested on shelves for long terms next to each other, discovery was there, all lined up right next each other. But the attention economy changes the shelves' equalizing nature into a quicksand in which viewing must be continually renewed, pulled up into the top of the feed, refreshed at the top of the page, requiring a publicity, an action, a press. The ideology of the institutional acquisition gets replaced with the ideology of attention. "Rediscovery" might not be a limited action on historical subjects but the act that we are now engaging with constantly, eternally, daily, asking to be seen.

This was all originally to say thanks to the Louisiana Museum for putting the full catalog online, and to CAD for hosting it. Though PDFs are brutally cumbersome, they feel more sane than the disenfranchised images that circulate online. Hopefully someday the artworld invents something better.

AR: Simone Leigh at David Kordansky

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Originally Posted: June 22nd, 2020

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Ser Serpas at Karma International

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Think of milk congealing a skin. Objects, things, threaten a flesh, the hoarder begins to see objects as a living thing, requiring compassion. Canvas like animal skins. "We disavow our excretory bodies  because they are signs of disorder, remindersof the body’s ambiguous limits (its leaking from multiple orifices), and of its ultimate death: 'Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit—cadere, cadaver...'"


See too: Ser Serpas at LUMA Westbau, Yuji Agematsu at Lulu

AR: Hadi Fallahpisheh at CENTRAL FINE

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Originally Posted: February 11th, 2020

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Jochen Lempert at Contemporary Art Centre

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When the new Planet Earth (II) came out there was a critique that the tiny slivers of the planet in exquisite 4k and presented on 70 ft screens made those tiny glimpses appear larger than they were. Most of "planet earth" didn't look like that, that most of the world burns. They were right, the "documentary" had increasingly become escapist television. The "reality TV" that is a fantasy of a world that isn't on the edge, that still safely harbors flora, breath, life, isn't choking. Securing some fantastical turf for the "natural" we ostracize to parks and behind 4k glass.
So maybe Lempert's moribund nostalgia is actually a sci-fi, of our present from the future, as it wrinkles and curls and blows out. Tragedy.


See too: Jochen Lempert at Between Bridges