Fiona Connor at Modern Art

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Mark, touch, history, transience, communication, all things the sign board sediments. As a newspaper's pages accumulate history, a condo's message board holds its neighborhood. There is lives, jobs, wants, wishes, desires attached to a board, fossils of a building accumulating the tacks of people's frontiers, the edges of their presence in the world, leaving notes to the chance of being happened upon, message in a bottle of dryland. Information display systems we find increasingly endearing.

“Lemurenheim” at Meyer Kainer

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Every 10 years assemblage reinvigorates itself as the dumpsters picked through are modernized to the current castoffs and appear new, the waste that evolves along culture until finally an artist is able to rummage up enough LEDs, acrylic panels and Arte Povera catalogs to accumulate the update to our Rauschenberg cardboard clogging the pipes of our forward progress. At least sticks are still in vogue as symbols of the foraging, our original human toil, production.



See too: Ei Arakawa at Taka Ishii & Peter Halley at Modern Art, Kerstin Brätsch at Gio Marconi, DAS INSTITÜT at Serpentine Gallery, KAYA at Deborah Schamoni,

Kasper Bosmans at Gladstone Gallery

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PR provides: "evoking political artifacts and labor practices reified into material gestures [...] presented as an ensemble of painting, sculpture, textile, and wallpaper, [...] rendering them as inert aestheticobjects."  Inert aesheticobjects.  i.e. The numbhanded approach, assessing objects with bloodless feelers that estrange them, cast across the gulf of meaning, the fissuring of symbol from its signified, this distance of the rift the interpretable space we call poetic. The symbols ability to store and dissipate information, hyperlink icons and broken links, and paintings with all the navigable space of ipads, littered with icons. The look of information, the pleasure of useless maps.

"Painting in the virtual space that our world increasingly appears. Space becomes an information deployment system, and layout becomes highly organized studied and manipulated. Style becomes a corruption of the subject. Reflecting the increasing prevalence the interface over the image."

See too: Karl Holmqvist at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, Carissa Rodriguez at Wattis, Math Bass at Michael Jon & Alan

“Mechanisms” at Wattis

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CAD is turning 10 this year and we'd like to nominate this photo, in its absolute blankness, as the icon of all we've been through, a symbol for the "neutral" that has come to feel a trauma, the mass grays aggressively empty, the foam of installation insulation: averaging a couple hundred CAD images produces a warm grey (#b0aaa7 C:33 M:29 Y:30 K:0) the color of eye stuff, a warm enduring color and a paint sold only in select stores, refined images from the refinery of art. And in the distant background amongst all the framing and vitreous substances we look through to an artist's warped mirroring of all of it, us.

Nikolas Gambaroff at The Kitchen

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An exhibition filled with robots that run enchantingly around the space because of a play the artist might have read but at least heard about which is unstageable and art loves stuff like that and but the play really has almost nothing to do with the exhibition - except for its connection to our current political moment thereby connecting these lovable bots as somehow now attached to our political moment - a talking point to excuse the use of 3k$ robots running around the space and documenting themselves and the exhibition and a few artworld famous people (how many can you name?) and basically the whole thing is an excuse for the expensive paintings as set dressing, except the robot play is really the set dressing for the paintings which are characters in a global theater of currency as painting being traded the world over, is how I understand it.

“After Curfew” at Freedman Fitzpatrick

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An adequate press release points out: the kids grew up on Disney, adolesced under its demonstration, force fed a diet of muppets and princesses as if this was normal consumption, and society wondering why people have furry issues today. When are we going to start dealing with it the people ask. After curfew we should be adults, but our children tag along recessed in our closeted heads. Whether or not the PR or the exhibition has anything particularly revelatory to say about the condition - the PR basically stops at diagnosis - is maybe beside the point, no one is sure, really, about the children we have stored and all the attempts to leave them along all their teeth pulled awaiting the Fairy ending, Freedman Fitzpatrick following the Disney chain to their own Disneyland Paris.

Lu Yang at M Woods

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Uterusman, whose 11 minute introduction video is on view, whose main superpowers appear various forms of spouting blood out of his vagina located between his feet - he also can throw ovums, ride a pelvic chariot (with deep throat laser cannon), skateboard on a menstrual pad, summon a baby and then use the baby as a mace-like weapon with umbilical cord whip, among other things - is a woman's organ bestowed with male superheroics, as if given the domineering heroic characteristic the womb would ostensibly receive had it only been given to man instead of woman, Uterusman. Like Superman until realizing the redundancy: man was already super in 1940s culture, so the trope removed super and comics just starting appending man - Batman, Aquaman, Iceman, Beastman, He-man - to anything, variable-man, and thus the x-man, x-men were born. So then, Uterusman, if only boys had been born with them. Discussions of feminism aside - so steeped so heavily in camp as to be quite soggy on such rigid concepts - whether this is a critique of culture or fantasy for it doesn't matter anymore, trying to out-absurd culture is impossible but look how far it's gotten us, Genzken too.



see too:  KAYA at Deborah Schamoni,  Isa Genzken at Hauser Wirth & Schimmel + Daniel Buchholz