exhibitionary largess

No contention these exhibitions don't hold up well in documentation, often barely in person, a sprawling fest whose largess is also a request, like serving a 47 course meal everyone wondering how many is required for politeness to be transacted, the paper soaked swells and breaks apart, oversaturated, the books behind glass, presenting the covers you can not judge the book by but cannot open either, lectures sedimented as image, a catalog for anarchist reading, an effort of "slow programming" is pressed into a egg of publicity, which we are given to swallow whole here, a list of events that have already past. 

Joëlle Tuerlinckx at LLS Paleis

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"We know the sky’s blueness even before we know it as “blue”, let alone as “sky.” as Robert Irwin paraphrased, may actually not be true. Art's belief in the unfiltered experience, its underwriter, in that raw sight's could overcome cultural bias to see the thing itself but one of the scarier aspects of where cognitive science seems to be toeing is that raw experience is rife with blindspots to the point of collapse held to together by our cognitive structures we believed as fault, that sky is actually possibly culturally blue. Whatever. There's no truth here, just the carnival of experience, fun house made from the funhouse glass of cultural knowing, the warbled mirror of art's stuttering experience. "Having in this way blurred the borders between space and work, the unprepared visitor may at first not notice the work. Because in the world of Joëlle Tuerlinckx, anything can be exhibited."

Michael E. Smith at 500 Capp Street Foundation, Darren Bader at Sadie Coles

Anna-Sophie Berger at JTT

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Berger's exhibitions look like group shows, filled to the brim with objects inconsistent. If outward appearance needs consistency to "make sense," if fashion is meant as an expression of its subject, the wearer, we could draw a line from Berger's fashion discourses earlier to now: a breakdown in objects ability to communicate its subject, artist or wearer - the artistic object itself sediments its subject as an appearance - in Berger's denial of "sameness over time" - or pretty much any artistic "signature" - that thing that undergirds identity, instead the river carves new course with each exhibition amassed to the brim with disconnection and forcing a sort of refusal of the usual sense, resist the easy corralling that similarity would invoke, a person of many fabrics.


See too: Amy Sillman at Sikkema Jenkins, Darren Bader at Sadie Coles, Adriana Lara at Algus Greenspon

Siera Hyte at Cordova

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Like awaking to find the remains of the party with hangover fully in head, touched,  Hyte's littered objects evidentiary to what was, point to the artist as magistrate god hand, party organizer, but it's less requiem than happiness at the post-apocalypse the doors open to nature spilling into ours, the crust of time and hand, the paper that conforms to your pressure.


See too: Susan Cianciolo at Modern Art

Tom Humphreys at High Art

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A man bent over looking deep into his own anus to find in there a mirror.
Remember as schoolyard kids holding your breath until you passed out as a form of primitive pharmacological entertainment? That's sort of the experience of Humphreys' paintings and sculptures here, deprivation as pleasure. The directness of image construction - why belabor? While others in the circle have moved into production endeavors or installation, Humphreys' has almost doubled down on the crude plaintives. I appreciate this.

Max Brand at Galerie Bernhard

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If you rolled a piece of silly putty across the newspaper of Painting's history, you'd have Brand. The paintings are worn, patinated with the accumulated hands of artists, like the graffiti at painting's urinal. Grave rubbings of history, frottage of so many corpses, the accumulated seed some primordial stew whose clean up rag is molding, beautifully, colors. Eventually congealing some fetal cartoon life. Brand's moving away from the neanderthal hamfists of say Joe Bradley puts him closer to Sergei Jensen's vintagification - the washing of fabrics for softness, stains like well-used blankets, the kleenex of history, the teenage folder, everything adolescent, sticky.


See too: Sergej Jensen at dépendance, Ida Ekblad at Herald St, Ida Ekblad at Herald St (1)

“Stories of Almost Everyone” at Hammer Museum

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The hammer opening a box. You likely have seen the video of Ferrell and his windblown partner comedically "not getting art." Sanctioned by the Hammer, Ferrell and everyone involved operating pro bono, Ferrell’s wife on the Board, an advertisement that was embraced and spread, and perhaps something to do with its appearance on CAD now.

In it the Ferrell mocks the art which he of course sees - at least a little - as mocking him. The comedy alleviates the tension of and fear of conceptual art - fear whose expression runs the spectrum from “just not getting it” or incanting “the emperor's new clothes” against it. The film does little in the way of traditional education even when glaringly obvious: Ferrell's explication of the pillow slept on by acrobats is exactly the point, to create a story like a dream inside your own pilloried head. This goes unremarked. Instead the advert supplants traditional education for an implicit training: how to feel okay in museums by arming potential visitors with a weapon against artworks: irreverence, jadedness, mockery, that interminable arms race of cool we all learned in grade school by proving who could care least. The Hammer’s spectacle almost begging people to feel okay mocking art. That we now feel the need to educate people in artistic insouciance is a symptom of how badly the artworld had arranged itself toward the opposite: decades guiding the public toward veneration and supplication toward it. Now needing to explain to people you can make fun of art, condoning it. That art and more specifically contemporary art museums have become synonymous with entertainment, younger people finding themselves gravitating to MoMA rather than the Met, the Hammer has made a decision to consciously align itself with this new audiential target, the young who are interested in art but have little or no education in it, and goes out of its way to cater to this audience by claiming a stance against the education priorly requisite. This makes sense. Even the Met is opening contemporary wings. The outreach seems sensible. Ah to be mocked by a famous comedian! what success, to be patronized by a movie star playing the everyman. “Stories of Almost Everyone”