Frances Stark at Gavin Brown

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You have to admit, artists are grass to the hammering of cultural winds, growing sternly against it while sternly whipped with it.  So more text in space, the billboard space of advertising, of ad copy, of slogans, mottos, quips, of the ability to deliver a phrase into you. Clipped from its context, it floats, wafts with a sort of empty vigor. The blunt brunt of the advertorial, slapping you with words you can read, recognize, but fail their handshake of emotional resonance, whacked with a Whiffle bats, the lack of becomes its main force. The bathos of artistic text, failing, becomes the means of overcoming that hollow form of advertorial address by embodying it, deploying it for all its tragic cruel means.


clipped words: Matt Keegan, Kay Rosen at Grazer Kunstverein, Hanne Lippard, Nora Turato at Metro Pictures, Gene Beery at Shoot the Lobster, Karl Holmqvist at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, Sue Tompkins at Lisa Cooley, Jenny Holzer at Blenheim Palace, Barbara Kruger at Sprüth Magers Peter Fend at Essex Street, CAWD on Fetish, Frances Stark at Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Frances Stark at Daniel Buchholz and Daniel Buchloz

Joëlle Tuerlinckx at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage

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"that explore the power of form to appear and disappear" apt to a current vogue - of which Tuerlinckx is a forebear - for the anxiety of stuff. The quantity of objecthood and Artwork and its risk, once again in the history of art, for disappearance. Art vanishing from the retinal dissolving into concept wasn't enough. Now there's risk, fear, of the unauthenticated object. Mass produced or intentional, do and does not matter. A gleeful anxiety of teetering art over the brink of art just being stuff as any other, art into piles indiscriminate and question what separates authentic from artifice and watch the distinction melt, its just stuff that's not stuff or so.


Art into piles: Jason Dodge at Casey Kaplan, “School of Chairs” at 500 Capp Street Foundation, Joëlle Tuerlinckx at LLS Paleis, Darren Bader at Sadie Coles, Michael E. Smith at 500 Capp Street Foundation, Martin Creed at Hauser & Wirth Somerset

The groups shows this summer are more colorful, attractive, bouquets of disparate species of artists selected for the fact that they bloom, arranged by what looks good together. Ten years ago painters were all about irresponsibility, printing paintings, hands off, cold, calculated. Now look at us.

AR: Lu Yang at M Woods

Artist: Lu Yang

Venue: M Woods, Beijing

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Originally Posted: February 1st, 2018

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Hanne Lippard, Nora Turato at Metro Pictures

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Lots of artists like to put phrases on signs, do it in a similar way. A particularly satisfying gesture: language, propelled with advertorial oomph, instead deadpans with its empty cymbal crash; be understanding the words but, devoid of context feel a little haunted, disembodied, ghosts of something far. Like Lippard's audio work, we glean through archaeology of their words the character. But Turato's texts and her own performances gleefully amplify a schizophenic fracture through estrangement and affectual register shifts. Disallowing complete connection, we instead begin to feel its loss through ears numbed by corruption. The garbage of the "infosphere." In an era when everyone spends their time off creating protest signs against politicians having clipped the sound bite down to two word phrases, the fun of creating your own haunting version, headlines like haikus, is fun. Cut the ends off a sentence and be left with a poem.


words on walls: Matt Keegan, Kay Rosen at Grazer Kunstverein, Gene Beery at Shoot the Lobster, Karl Holmqvist at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, Sue Tompkins at Lisa Cooley, Jenny Holzer at Blenheim Palace, Barbara Kruger at Sprüth Magers Peter Fend at Essex Street, CAWD on Fetish

AR: Lucie Stahl at Freedman Fitzpatrick

Artist: Lucie Stahl

Venue: Cabinet, London

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Originally Posted: March 3rd, 2018

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

August Review 2018

Today we initiate our fourth annual August Review. Every year we reflect on the exhibitions that were especially memorable to us since the previous August. We will re-publish one show each day, marked by “AR:” in the title, while continuing to cover new exhibitions daily.

At the end of the month we will provide an “August Review Index.” The previous seasons’ selections are available here:
2015, 2016, and 2017.