Virginia Overton at Francesca Pia

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Cut up and rearrange the objects of capital, they will hint at their previous legibility but they will not mean, it is something we will be forced to assign. Playing in the sandbox we've been left.

Brian Belott, Rhoda Kellogg at San Francisco City Hall

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Before a certain age pretty much every drawing a child makes is unambiguously good. Pre- selfconscious drawing is more an act than an accomplishment. Children's drawing is more akin to carving, space has no natural means, like middle period Gustons' wads in every child's dreams. No joke that "my kid could do that," so many modern artists attempting to reaccomplish their childhoods. The thefting of art from childhood for "mature" intents we could mock, but since every artist today is mining theirs for the cartoons that litter their surrealist landscapes who are we to judge.

Passed: John Baldessari

"Baldessari's career spent on a mockery of art's formal givens, puppeteering its dumbified literal versions and removing the protective aura of seriousness so a skepticism could seep into it cracks, paving the way for today's boorish Pop conceptualism.

"Here, dissonant image/text relations leaves a viewer floundering to connect the basic formality of art: that the text relate. That we still find this Baldessarian gimmick relevant 800 exhibitions later, sometimes even comically worth it, shows how strong this base impulse is ingrained."

"The text's irrelation performs the poetic fissure lamely, mechanically, i.e. Baldessari's engineered breakage of logical closure, conclusion. The space we rush to fill with guesses, the INTERPRETATION of art, that interminable precursor to MEANING. The poetic is the process for staging these interpretive fissures, founts for guessing, which Baldessari's plain creation of feels like a corpse made to dance. That dullness feels a point."


Click here for full John Baldessari at Marian Goodman, John Baldessari at Sprüth Magers

Meredith James at Jack Hanley

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A notable rise in couch art, in furniture displays, as we continue our archaeology unearthing artifacts of the body. In anthropological remains seeking human representation. So the couch becomes the projection screen for us, the surveillance into us, like looking back asking the question: "Before our we uploaded to the cloud what were we?" back through the screen to see reality - or its cave - through the remains. What the exhibition titles "shadows on the wall."


see too: Lisa Herfeldt at Between Bridges, Anna Uddenberg at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Jessi Reaves at Bridget Donahue, Sarah Lucas at CFA Berlin

Past: Hun Kyu Kim at The Approach

"Or is it a means to alienate the world so as to see our own actions as helpless stupid critters. We've been anthropomorphizing animals since pretty much forever with 30,000BCE zoomorphic figurines. Which gave rise to Saturday Morning Cartoons and then now Furries in adulthood. A study showed people were able to identify human traits in simple shapes, the triangle was bossy, violent, imprisoning the circle. Angular shapes in general are shown to be associated with "bad" while the curvilinear is associated with "good," which is probably why we love all those rotund creatures drawn with curvaceous softness like every Disney squirrel a Venus of Willendorf. Of course kids are going to grow to sexualize them, franchise films of them, they've been genetically bred for appeal. Crushed by capitalism. Dogs bred for pureness with destroyed hips."


Past: Hun Kyu Kim at The Approach

Leigh Ledare at Office Baroque

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Leigh's is titillating surely, anxious, naughty, filled with all the nervous transgression of an arthouse "social experiment". Haha what if we took an anxious group psychology project but added a documentary panopticon. Of course the projects are interesting as they are well polished mirrors, psychology is turned into a formal exercise of cinema. And this thing is made for essay explicating all the formal structures that mirror its conflict. Watch "psychology" made into object of art, humans into a petri-dish, cross-sections of a people for microscope slides. "Arguably more anthropological than therapeutic..." The problematization method,* a sort of making-confounded. Greying the waters with the tangling of culture: people made demographics made signifiers, and forced to abut and spark. People are made to be art's object which gets conflated with analysand. Good cinema is not necessarily healthy outcome.


*Think Renzo Marten's Enjoy Poverty, Jordan Wolfson's Animation Masks, Korine's Spring Breakers.  
(Watch the film through Ledare's website here.)

Rasmus Høj Mygind at Jir Sandel

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Personally I think Epstein did kill himself.* But in an exhibition about contingency this is hardly the point. It's about enacting a viral birth in reality, the Epstein meme is its own title, its own reality in meme-like propagation, simply reading/thinking it propagates it, which like the far-right's conspiracies spread less by truth than by simply continuing to collect consciousness of. This becomes akin to art/entertainment where consensus/agreement is less powerful than commonality, fame reduced to shared-knowledge-of, Kardashian-like, as art and things become self-reflexive self-illustration. Pollock illustrates abstraction, Judd minimalism, enter the history books. Which these are self illustrations, self-propagate. The point isn't abstraction it's amoebic survival in consciousness. Against self-annihilation, towards extending consciousness, what we call viral may simply be confused life.

* Even if we're feeling conspiratorial, the shadow org would only have to tell him he must. Perhaps a semantic argument. But it is a scarier thought, rather than being strangled by gloved assassins, that someone doesn't need assassins at all. Instead people follow orders to kill themselves because alternatives to suicide are worse. Someone who can conjure worse-than-death.