Antek Walczak at Jenny’s

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PR: "The prevalence of icons, symbols, and glyphs across the screen interfaces interacted with on a daily basis, and their basic shorthand command work equivalent to the first steps of written language. To communicate, at a glance, tallies of river cargo hauled on the Euphrates (c. 3100 BC), memorable recordings of mastodon hunts and campfires, what gets attention on the App Store."

Humans are information processing machines with leg systems to move us toward the carrot of new information. Dopamine, long mythologized as the "pleasure center," instead creates seeking behavior, which, at the roulette wheel of digital feeds, scrolling news, and authoritative lists, causes all the odd psychological problems of lab rats given access to their own dopamine levers in humans. "After only a few days of training, the monkeys showed a clear preference for choosing the informative colored target." Walczak has proven for some time now, with paintings that prize information-as-legibility, that the usefulness of the information matters none: the complete arbitrariness of it here still invokes its authority.

Misaki Kawai at The Hole

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"Konrad Lorenz argued in 1949 that [cuteness] triggered nurturing responses in adults and that this was an evolutionary adaptation which helped ensure that adults cared for their children, ultimately securing the survival of the species. Some later scientific studies have provided further evidence for Lorenz's theory."

Victor Burgin at Bridget Donahue

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As early internet's de-motivational posters were antidote to the faux-enrichment of the office's patronizingly motivational own, the very first digital memes spread viral in forums and message boards in the new quasi-underground of workers' stolen snippets of off-time web-surfing, a small revolt-solidarity-communicado for the proletoid forced to do so beleagueredly under those signs and not hard to see the viral spread of such comedy and its big business as desire to own one's dark expressions rather than cover it. The point being: with the democratization of image making software and the ability to easily disseminate it the worker - as early as 1998 - immediately creates funny images revolting against its dominant structure asking for false optimism. Memetics are an intensely powerful form of social construction.
Victor Burgin's images arrive from the same period that another Victor gave us the original famous motivational poster, the "Hang in there, Baby" cat. And while Baldwin's markedly expressed positivity and hope (despite dark threat of failure's toll). "Memetics is also notable for sidestepping the traditional concern with the truth of ideas and beliefs. Instead, it is interested in their success." Burgin's instead, with their elusive and meandering political sentiments that couldn't be more obviously intended to deny easy authority or expediency, seem to exist as a radical stop-gapping of message production and instead desiring suspension of the image/text consumption/construction of meaning (a more culturally/politically apropos Baldessari), the blurbs of authority and manufacturing ideology in which everything is related with succinct tautology of demagoguic ease that we find so alluring today.  In the same way de-motivationals were an ironic detachment rupturing the facade of their motivational counterparts, Burgin's exist oppositional to the consumptive force as anti-memes. Which of course has all sorts of relevance to today, Burgin's underground expressions of anti-ideology held hostage in a gallery.


See too:  John Baldessari at Marian Goodman, Henry Flynt at Audio Visual Arts, CAWD on Fetish,

Past: FLAME

"Reinhardt’s dictum of his as the last paintings taken as a challenge rather than rhetoric, certain artists since race to end painting in an escalating torture-porn of it, sending their innocent child paintings to be forcibly taken in all the imaginative ways of the market, ready to prove - by forcible insertion - its shiny new neo-liberal critique to teach it know better, horror as ethics."

Past: Flame at 576 Morgan Ave Apt 3L Gallery

Anna Ostoya at Silberkuppe

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Ostoya takes images of historical, political, personal significance and runs them through the office paper-shredder, into abstraction. The overlay of "art" atop the images, both absorbing and destroying the initial significance, a conceptual gesture, making its futurist and Sheeleresque overlay a quasi-destructive act that reviews of Ostoya's paintings spend most space ignoring to tell you about the images buried because its usually easier to elucidate history than art, at root an act-as-question of what reason if any aesthetic overlay performs in creating significance or just aesthetify them, which in the ex's title reference to the New Objectivity who had no issue in caricaturing the object, this old objectivity still given to enjoy birthing a grotesque.

Past: Maria Lassnig

"It’s the ones that run near amok that are best... [the] subject-object problem permutes as prescient proto-version of Sillman’s bodies-that-matter imbued formalism, and many others..."

Past: Maria Lassnig at MoMA PS1

Leidy Churchman at Rodeo

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Painting representation fails. The plainness of Churchman's depiction is a respect to the source material, a non-compete clause showing deference to the object it can't fully contain or conjure. A fish swims, it shouldn't be the wild fanciful object of some painter's heinous desire. Showing it some respect by leaving it well enough alone, plainness acknowledging the representation that can't do justice to it. Painting treatments like massage to soften the body presented. Like any of Paul Thek's paintings of the Earth hovering over black unarchival void, the distance is homage. PR:"we are so afraid of the brilliance coming at us, and the sharp experience of our life, that we can’t even focus our eyes."

See too: Trevor Shimizu at 47 Canal