Petra Cortright at Société

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Cortright of the internet. Of the self in the matrix, trying to express through the grate of industrial filters. It was all too ahead of its time. It is simply now the world we live. "The Naumanian axiom of, as an artist whatever I do in the studio is art [is] updated as: whatever an internet artist does on the internet must be art. The difference is that, today, everyone has this studio, and privileging the play of those who call themselves artists as somehow more self-aware or capable is a crumbling distinction."

So a return to painting, to flowers, to the categorically undeniable marker of art. In the action movie, the matrix conjures guns, lots of them. In art, we conjure our own tropes. In genre, the delivering of expectation doesn't kill satisfaction. No, in fact getting what is expected is what people pay money to see. Guns and flowers. You just want more of it. Because then shooting can begin. You line the henchman with squibs, oh god it will be good, so much plate glass, but here they never go off. We just get flowers, memento without mori. Painting's goon, praying to be released from his hell, his existence, trope.

See too: "Post-internet art" as become the Kinko's avant garde - Petra Cortright at Team Gallery, Inc, Petra Cortright at Société

Dora Budor at Nottingham Contemporary

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The less things are sci-fi, the more they get drab. Sci-fi, even at its most dystopian, portends a certain hope: there is a future we can think. But as things turn, they become more minimal, more mud, you become more present, grounded, which is dull. Surely this is point of experience. To be here, interminably. 

This cardboard thing reflects piss onto your shoes, your thought onto your shoes, your blood pounding in your ears, your tinnitus at 11. The world becomes so beige that your functional biology becomes of interest. Boredom is when you most feel alive. Again, again, again, the artist shows, the world turns, heart beats. The press release redirects thought like piss towards the 19th century, pissing on your shoes for you. I feel alive being peed on. This is life, but let's do science fiction as dystopian: imagine you can pee on the gallery. See, hope. Territory marked with thought, piss.

"...which is what we love those big sci-fi budgets for, the vast quantity of ash." Dora Budor at Kunsthalle Basel

Life in Hell

Explaining the artworld to your therapist.

Watch the full thing here

"...an oscilloscope of various pitches of language: the high speech of disinterest against the low grovel of complaint. A comedy between the press release and what is said at the bar after. Therapy. Of art. And its interpretation. Of critique Vs complaint. Of trying to explain the artworld to your therapist, or mum..."

Zoe Leonard at Galleria Raffaella Cortese

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Like the Calendar's mechanization of time, photography too asserts its frame as an artificial blocking. Of the world it renders like little cubes of meat, morsels. Of life that it embalms. Real geopolitical borders if you know what I mean. So the attempts to blur these lines with the filmic language of frames, with TIME, an attempt to give artifical motion, motion, life, is an admittance or benevolence, to the world butchered into cuts. Suppose you were about to be executed, which size axe would you choose for your piecemealing?

 Past: Zoe Leonard at Whitney Museum

Stuff, decay, waste, time; data visualization has become hot button for business, the ability to represent comes the ability to wield it, and not necessarily inhuman, around for ages with the question: how to mark time. ... In attempts to see subjective scales of time, we see wear on shoes, stores closing, passports stamped, fruit rotting in vain. Leonard's practice seems in establishing marks to gauge the rise and fall of water, the rising and falling breath of the city. Stores close, cities revitalize, we pack and move, the body wears, the books become obsolete, our fruits into the floor, the water changes but the falls are still the same, is the point seemed to be made.

Full: Zoe Leonard at Whitney Museum

Peggy Ahwesh at Photography Exhibit

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A myth that art should "speak for itself." So art always attempts hiding the text that it has become reliant on. Surreptitiously holds up the newspaper that acts as "proof of life," that there is thinking, that its corpus is still product, producing, useful. But admitting to the hostage situation is structurally more interesting than pretending it's simply class photo day, that artworks aren't at gunpoint of meaning. 

Past: Pentti Monkkonen

"Monkkonen's box-trucks literalize the metaphor: painting as commodity vessels in transit. What were rectangular become parallel grams sent for accelerating markets. The vessels are moving fast, the trucks skull cab and silver toothed grill portend their too-fast-too-young market crash. The flow of brand. Graffiti, produce, logos, brushstrokes, artistic identities all competing for recognition.  Like many interested in the cheap plastic promise of fantastical playthings, it is found perfectly in the toy-form’s commodic pleasure whose projectable fantasy's complete dissolve of use-value mirrors art’s ostensible own."

"The package as product, medium masseuse, the vessel which projects its internal object, which here isn't anything, instead the subject of art, the artist."

"That like childhood figures of action, producing their jism all over town to heroic ends, painting an identity placed over a muscular blank, the vessel, creating a subject."

"...Painting as advert for its claim to avert chaos. Pretending, like me, to, against a law of the universe, produce order worth burning."

Past: Pentti Monkkonen at High Art(3) Pentti Monkkonen at High Art(2), Pentti Monkkonen at Truth and Consequences, Pentti Monkkonen at High Art(1), "Paris De Noche” at Night Gallery, Pentti Monkkonen at Jonathan Viner