“Digital Gothic” at Centre d’Art Contemporain La Synagogue Delme

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Why has the gothic returned? It has metastasized, a gothic grown on gothic. A more byperbolic version. Sometimes it's easier to embrace pain, ruin, than it is to desire change, which would leave possibility for disappointment. Instead welcoming the car crash to feel some control over its. We peek through doors at madness, horror, peel back scalps to see skull's white, as a comfort to state, surely the end-times will not be as bad as this.
The gothic's dissolution from historical marker to stylistic genre, like steampunk or retrofuturism, holds onto an anachronism, an implicit nostalgia for the past's future, rather than our own. What the Victorians had imagined as horror, pools of blood and pendulum cuts, is far more genteel than what is our current madness. This is the pleasure-saftey of genre, it has rules.


See too: Morag Keil at Project Native Informant, Morag Keil at Jenny’s, Morag Keil at Real Fine Arts, Nicolas Ceccaldi at Le Consortium

Bea Schlingelhoff at Museum des Landes Glarus Freulerpalast

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A good thorough dry PR. Removing the glass from the Museum. When art finally comes back around to things like conceptual practices, or institutional critique, one wonders what role CAWD will have in a more patient thorough artworld. If we get back there ever.

Naomi Rincón Gallardo at Parallel Oaxaca

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A PhD in art. Thoughts on doctoral necessitude arts once alit the artworld. Now here we are. Pursuing it. Can calls for anti-colonialist practices come from inside the house?

“Automatic Door” at Park View / Paul Soto

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The asinine quantity of pictures of bodies today, instagram influencers, lotion advertising, pornography. The vast amount of flesh smeared on everything, our stores full of them, our faces spread at 10 meter heights. Everywhere; a hall of mirrors. As if Bernd and Hilla Becher had foretold of a, this, complete surveillance, catalog, cars with more eyes than spiders to take everything and render it. And our bodies become so extracted, mined, and repackaged, that we start to feel like we don't have bodies at all. Just things, mocked as meat space, something stupid or without sense, or heat, or passion, or sensitivity, but whitened teeth smiles mined. And but then here a photo of a body still surprising, that can endear us to it, these weird incongruous things not yet fully extracted.


See too:  AA Bronson and Keith Boadwee at Deborah Schamoni, Geumhyung Jeong at KLEMM’S, Roger Hiorns at Faena Arts Center, Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg,

Ann Craven at Center for Maine Contemporary Art

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A disposability, amassment, like pages in diary, sketches in a notebook, kleenexes to breeze, dust to the wind. Cheapness enhances their temporality; it tarnishes quickly to any glare that won't care for it. They come pre-wounded as chintz.

Andrea Büttner at Galerie Tschudi

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We've become so addicted to the candied surrealism that dominates. Not sure other forms are even entirely legible anymore. Your gut biome begins to mirror the flora of what you feed it. Eventually you crave what you've been fed.

“Body Check” at Lenbachhaus

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As a visual pairing, a sort of symmetry, sense. And also a physical feat collecting "about one hundred selected works on loan from international collections that are rarely on public display." But we get about 16 images here. And as a conceptual pairing, a goose chase, "dramatizing the female and male bodies" pretty much end the similarities. A coincidence if not a mistake.