Alice Tippit at Night Club

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Between the anthropomorphic and the pareidolia is the seeing ghosts in images that contain a sort of liquid content, innuendo, which form to fit the container of the viewer that views them. A cat butt appears but perhaps only in me.


See too:Autumn Ramsey at Night Club Larry Poons at Michael Jon & Alan

Judith Bernstein at Kunsthall Stavanger

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The conceptual cymbal crash, punning cocks with screw, was defeatist humor mocking not just the male tool but deflating the hard language of conceptual art: telling the joke over and over again on larger and larger sheets of paper, the high rhetoric of big egos reduced to a bad joke - Cue: Beyonce "♪♫ Cause he's got a big 'ego.' ♪♫" Bernstein: "it wasn’t funny." 



See too: Judith Bernstein at Mary Boone

Zarouhie Abdalian at Clifton Benevento

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Parts and pieces, fragments, inherently interesting in that they narrativize themselves, project their story as artifacts of it. We automatically read the objects as parts of a whole that they withhold telling. A story that doesn't tell itself, but the parts limn this possible whole and the tension in our inability to piece it perfectly creates a mistrust, mystery. Abdalian's "storytelling" makes art's metaphorical viewer as detective a sort of literal mode in a setting for them. The mis-en-scene carries the narrative. Artforum thought it was about gentrification.


See too: Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center

Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street

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Mass market crap given torture burden, little batteries tasked oversized objects, drones that will exhaust soon. AAA batteries have a little under half the ampere-hours of their AA counterparts and Rantanen has made them to overwork themselves, speed demise, intentionally crafting kawaii critters to abuse their labor-force in the circuits of his machinery. The gestures seem less absurd than frustrated, Rantanen's exacerbation of late-stage-capital's more aggressively abject objects. Self-inflicted. The director of fetish crush films Jeff Valencia speaks often of desiring to be the subject under the feet of the crusher, identifying with the object/animal being crushed.


See too: Calvin Marcus, Chadwick Rantanen at Clearing, “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center, Dylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento

Pilvi Takala at Centre for Contemporary Arts

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Takala's The Committee, is a story of children given fantastical power faced with the continually dwindling possibilities of real: a child's unfathomable wealth, 7000£, quickly grinding down and halting the committee. The fantastic cannot be realized. One child equates the once impossible amount to a mere 7 iPhones. It's not enough for everyone. Unblinkered several children move quickly through history proposing different corporate schemes to generate profits with websites and business models (already envisioning themselves receiving discounts on fees) to sustain their wants, and the whole thing moving from open possibility to well-trod territory with a patterned timing. Watching the death of the possible in people so young raises questions of whether this is simply precocious social replication of the status quo, or whether capitalism is just natural to us and there really is limited amount of practical means and invention in world. The children, in the end, get a single -albeit large - bouncy castle.
The limits of invention are apt to both art's open escapes (eyerollingly) and Pivli for whom most of the films generously on view here each take their genre from established entertainment, candid camera shows, Kids Say the Darndest Things, prank videos, etc. Meaning while actual modes within possibility might be limited, that its all about how you work within the framework. The children, in the end, get a single - albeit large - bouncy castle.

Sylvie Fleury at Karma International

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“Rather, Fleury represents her desire precisely as it is a far more interesting strategy  of ultimate passivity, not unlike Lacan’s slave/master relationship whereby the slave’s freedom depends precisely upon a position of submission and resignation to the order of power. It must be understood  that there is not the slightest critique, analysis or satire involved in Fleury’s presentation of her shopping bags or display of show and their boxes; this is her shopping presented as it is, and the radicality of this act is precisely in its divorce from any intention or argument, political, social, or cultural. This strategy may be as disturbing as Donald Judd’s vision of a new art based on absolute anti-emotion. In fact Judd’s visibility seems, in some weird, insane and impossible manner, akin to Fleury’s, both of them attracted to artificial shiny and fetishistic materials, both utterly opposed to Romantic formulas of nature and naturalism, to the ideal of “authenticity.” “Things that exist, exist, and everything is on their side.” Judd’s formula perfectly desires Fleury’s own project in which “thingness” is allowed to resonate by itself without further intervention.

“Fleury suggests art can be liberated from its reliance on constant innovation and complex physical formulation and relax instead into a sort of ne plus ultra of laissez faire “whateverism” which ups the ante on American “Slacker” culture’s aesthetics of resignation.”

-Adrian Dannatt

See too:  Simon Denny at MoMA PS1, John Armleder at Fernand Léger Foundation, Group Show at David Kordansky

Kathryn Andrews at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

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I'm not so sure that the lip-service paid to warding off Koons as an aesthetic terrorist was anything more than fearful attempt at repression for the thing we all secretly loved, the shiny commodified surface. Keeping coming back to us.  Now in present form. The "inanimate demons" of Koons's "gangbanging" of us is made further vaporus and spectral here.