Marianna Simnett at Kunsthalle Zürich

The documentation here comes from at least three different Museums: the, as stated, Kunsthalle Zürich, but also Frankfurt's MMK ZOLLAMT, and the above image from NYC's New Museum. Glitches as evidence of dislocation, of images just completely adrift at this point, does it even matter at this point, who cares at this point. Put anything anywhere, the video-stills are photoshopped in anyway. Drag and drop. An exhibition appears. It's the metadata that counts. How far can we dissociate. Someone should standardize the museum, to be more like the suburbs its already become, you could find anything anywhere, a McDonald's like a Guggenheim, in every metropolis, a LOVE sculpture in every park, tastes standardized across continents, fly to Zurich and still feel at home with real New York artists or cheeseburgers, anywhere. Is this dissociation?


See too: Nairy Baghramian at Walker Art Center?

Jutta Koether at Galerie Buchholz

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Well these are as ugly as they come. There is almost weight to the ugliness, like it sags off the picture, obese with garishness. Koether seems continuously giving painting an excess content, the hyperlink references, the hung on glass, adding layers until it's gluttonous, unwieldy, here: bloated.


See too: Jutta Koether at Bortolami, Jutta Koether at Museum Brandhorst

Jutta Koether at Museum Abteiberg

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I had always wanted to take a Morandi painting out of its frame, hang it on a glass wall, and write an essay about erotics and pornography.

Win McCarthy at Atlantis

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As updates on Kelley's arenas, tchotchkes on blankets, these add a box. It's a more literal symbol of repression that Kelley's, an artist with a lifelong interest in cultural repression, had left as perfume. These are like Brad Pitt crying "What's in the box?" The PR narration's spells it out ominously: "we tend to have to wait to find out what’s lying beneath" like a Kevin Spacey line. What's latent in a culture? And it's again literal, turns out the clown was a pedophile. A joke we've heard before.

Calvin Marcus at David Kordansky

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Against a bedrock fear, of death, of castration, the nervous person searches for vitality and extension to ward off impotence and death with a "big one" like a muscle car, a militarized gun, a mid-life crisis and a trophy bass, and here a harhar painting to cover fear. You have sublimated your anxiety of death to a painting mocking that fear, but it's still a Mustang against death, a painting equivalent of a truck with nuts, underneath the irony, the wet-eyed naiveté, the fear, the fear.

Past: Calvin Marcus at Clearing

...paints like a kid, draws like a kid, had huge crayons made for his big kid self. It would be an interesting history correlated, the desublimation of painting, its id-ification, from the surrealist's subconscious, to Pollock's becoming "nature," to finally the triumph of neanderthalism of say Joe Bradley, the history of men's important doodle. The mythology of the infantilized artist. We must care for him, them, genius whose diapers we exchange.


See full: Calvin Marcus at Clearing

Gabriel Hartley at Foxy Production

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Hartley always developing some new process, techniques-yet-named, aerosoling impasto, rubbing wood blushes, printing crumpled flat, etc. Processes for abstraction like all those modern photographers solarizing, photogramming, or just pouring light concrete. Processes to fulfill our need for the novel. And nice. But maybe the best analogy would be Tillmans' "Blushes" where the very thing at stake, their tension, is in seeming to be both lovely and arbitrary. Our fear.


see too: Wolfgang Tillmans at Maureen Paley