“Life Itself” at Moderna Museet

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Kelley's Uncanny exhibition should be restaged every ten years, that was a good one. The word Life provides enough secondary subtext and poetic license, along with the "itself" existential attachment, to provide umbrella enough for any curatorial hand. A lot fits under it, it was the title of Roger Ebert's memoir, obviously alluding to all of film and thus art's examination of the topic. Hard to think of artist that doesn't fit. The idea of staging an exhibition around it is absurd, probably the point, that ha ha of existential loss. Like Holler states as much in common in the PR, any overarching definition of life is going to be incomplete, arbitrary.

William Leavitt at Greene Naftali

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If it hadn't been film sets it would have seemed corny, but since these were the remnants of the way the world's image was constructed we were forced to believe them. The set broadcast becomes a truth. Truckloads of sand replaces the snow for B+W olympic broadcast in order to avoid whiteout, making neither version real. The world and its double overlay, and the shift in experience of seeing the world superposition real and facade, the world as malleable substance. Look at the designs for it.


See too: Group Show at Greene Naftali, Guillaume Bijl at Nagel Draxler, David Lieske at MUMOK, Alicja Kwade at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen

Ajay Kurian at White Flag Projects

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Art's Post-war war on the symbolic, depictive or narrative - of say Greenberg, championing a purity and "universalist" language - isn't difficult to read as supression of narratives divergent from those commonly accepted as universal. Consolidating its experience as the universal. Think Everybody Loves Raymond. But so while Greenberg's and its modernist moment passed the specter still hangs, an artifact in the often refusal to read symbolism and signs for what they are. Think Mira Schor's incredulity at David Salle's critics refusal to see - and endless excusing of - the gratuitous nude women. "It doesn't matter what you paint its how you paint" is a fantasy stemming from another, the "universalist" experience from an artist whose body is non-subject, their body has never been in question in culture. Instead think Keinholz Mendieta Wilson Wong Ligon

Max Brand at Off Vendome

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"They manage to look refreshing but not unexpected" says R. Smith spit-firing painters to see what would stick attending the flavors in the stew. Seeing the soup for its referents and judging hazy memories of once distinct tastes roiling in the surface. The consommé so clarified as to not single out any one flavor, any one referent, everything so blended, you could just keep naming ingredients. Which is where we're at today. Soup easy to mass produce, a base prepared in advance can be used to a support a wide and readily available ingredients on its surface.


see too: Sanya Kantarovsky at Marc Foxx, Joanne Greenbaum at Crone, Vittorio Brodmann at Halle Für Kunst Lüneburg, Heather Guertin at Brennan & Griffin,

Mathieu Malouf at Jenny’s

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Hard not read in terms of Malouf's Real Fine friend Jana Euler. For Instance. Malouf's infringing inhabitation of stylistic churn mentioned in an RFA PR 5 years ago: "Contemporary Art’s Circulation as an operable form of life and its android engagement of "Hipster" art forms, which could characterize a vast array of artists from Simon Denny to Amanda Ross-Ho, are starting off points for Malouf." The Grinch was a lesson in learning to live with the generosity of others.

Cheyney Thompson at Raucci/Santamaria

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Guyton printed and Thompson laughed. Losing your hands to the printing press was nothing compared to losing self to an algorithm, a standardized operations to create "content."  Coming from the genre of subjective's loss to evermore reflexive systems mirroring the structures they sat inside. Bochner to Asher. But Thompson's mirror churned through information processes arbitrarily translating randomized position into codified color produced as beautifully arbitrary as "pollen floating on water." From 3 standard stoppages to E. Kelly to McCollum arbitrariness in abstraction has a long history, and Markov Cheyney precipitating its endgames using of models that turn code into money.

Peter Fischli and David Weiss at Guggenheim

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Almost no photos here but it matters little, we know what there is to see: an elegy fitting fragments. For FW time was always at issue, the small moment projecting its largess, say the moment of Einstein's conception, or large waste carving its single momento mori whittled in time's erosion. The Gug needing not expend documentary energy but instead promotion's concision, fragments. The humor of FW's misuse of time, in time, becomes instead its loss. Suddenly not very funny at all.