Margaret Harrison at Silberkuppe



The justifiable reaction to Ken Johnson’s review of Michelle Grabner currently lighting up social networks is an interesting contrast to Margaret Harrison’s didactic outrage on paper over actual glaring societal problems. The Johnson fiasco unfolds in real-time, a parody of New York male critic explaining a woman’s as fit only for parody, as if to prove transgressive the assertion of the domestic, giving talking points to the pundits sprung into the web of interaction; whereas the already-explained nature of Harrison’s texts beget little interest, at least on my feeds, both pointing to the glaring rift that feminism has for a while now been seeking to fill.

The less overt drawings are the more interesting in their subtle freudian fingering of advertorial tropes, of women pinned up to lemons, or in sandwiches portrayed as literal meat, mere garnish to tasty consumption.

Simon Starling at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago



Starling’s “Metamorphology” is histories' mirroring reenactment in symbolic fashions. (i.e.: take a car whose production was off-shored, Starling then buys the imported car in its original country and returns/exports the car back to its new origin where he replaces its facade to have the car mimic the flag of its new country before hanging it on a gallery wall like a painting...  Or raising a ship from the sea-floor to feed it to itself so it sinks again. Or, balancing marble chunks whose sizes are respective their price differential.) A structural/contextual tautology repeatable in an interminable number of ways, the baseline tropes of today’s neo-conceptual art deadpan.
The artworks feel logical in their ouroboric repetition but contain a tautological inability to be reasoned with. Tautologies make sense, but state nothing, equating a silence as poetry. They become koan-like emblems of the histories it condenses like cliff notes, glazing history subservient to it’s poetic reenactment.
Of course man/woman’s need for new images and storytelling, but this is total curator bait begging for a catalog essay by those who can’t wait to pour hearts out over globalization, outsourcing, imperialism, and poetry etc. etc. by globally ambiguous curators loving the relief of talking about history as opposed to art. Probably the same essay everyone is reading in all the photo documentation, over and over.

related: Jason Dodge at Franco Noero

Marc Camille Chaimowicz at Galerie Neu



It would be unfair to bring up Portlandia’s mocking “Put a bird on it” since the spectacle here envelopes a real space, with real birds, not merely a clever documentation winking a la Gambaroff’s cats. The real trick was inviting others to take part in the party shining through the romanticism of it all with the black light of cynicism, Liden’s subtle mockery of public-housing insistence, and Pernice’s can’t-be-bothered urban blight objects, casting the whole thing as a dystopian present which, like the invasive tropical-green parrots of Brussels whose color is dissonant to their blight, the urban apocalypse is at least beautiful.

Christopher Williams at MoMA



MoMA finally succumbing to its role mass incarcerating tourists - its expanding culture-industrial complex finally warranting destruction of neighborly competition to further house its prisoner-patrons - yet, MoMA, still desiring relevancy to the system, art, whose name it bears and not merely to the throngs from which it happily accepts 25$, delivers the academic-respectable retrospective of Kapital p Photography godhead, Christopher Williams.
Walking through the space it’s a nice gesture but hard to see the decades’ work or installation subtlety amongst the brambles of families asking themselves aloud, literally “When do we get to see Matisse?” the Frenchman whose tickets are timed before you can even get in line and so the Williams show acts as a sort of slumbering-area for the masses awaiting the carnivale nearby. The punchline to this whole joke, is that there is no punchline at all, the wall texts have been eliminated, and so people stumble through blind, somnambulist mass searching for their trip but nothing does and awake to find themselves in line for Matisse. Whether because they are completely acclimated to the lie of photography or too tired to care who knows, but MoMA needs to stop doing these shows here for anyone who wants to actually see.

Annette Kelm at Gio Marconi



We’re good enough artists today, that we know how it works. Knowing that intentions and value are gained in the circumscribing of a practice, the ability to theorize it, Kelm’s slow expansion (as well as undermining) of her “subject,” produces a knowing game: a continual delaying of the limnable parameters of her practice, producing photographs as hangnails eliding easy assimilation into a theory of the work, impeding understandable relations between the photographs, leaving scrutiny of the photographs themselves which give nothing but a blankness of intention, a formal dumbness.

Like Michele Abeles, or Roe Ethridge, it’s toying with, tickling, photographic ontology, Kelm’s backdrops often “touching” the picture plane, become it, blurring photography with adverts and print, full-frontal compositions suspending a viewer from entering photographic space, forced to look at the surface, the Greenbergian flatness of the photo.
This precocious meta-knowing of the game of art produces a Brechtian alienation or a Godardian-like game that, in the context of its time (Godard's), felt deeply inhuman, ironic, proto-hipster in its frivolous mockery of aesthetic ideals, as Pauline Kael mentions in her review of Godard’s “Band of Outsiders,” but as in time everything fell further towards its level grew to become, somehow presciently, deeply human. My computer’s dictionary even spell-checks Godardian at this point.

Silke Otto-Knapp at Galerie der Stadt Schwaz



Like the recent use of Hilma af Klint as fashion, her totems of spirituality becoming themselves symbol-patterns printed on dresses and totes worn as cultural baggage, Otto-Knapp shortcuts this droste-abyme of cultural appropriation immediately placing its icons onto its own tasteful dresses before being recirculated dancing in front of/into paintings, reinserted back into its aura. An aware circulation of aura in the contemporary brand system, re-uping Munchian mannerism for 21st century management. At what point are spirituality and the quasi-mystical retainable through the deadening pragmatics of contemporary art, in which symbols are vaporized in a Kelley Walker-esque reproduction line, and at what point is it able to retain its “irrational” function standing in opposition to the immediate rational vampire of functionary markets.

Jean-Luc Moulène at Miguel Abreu



The inflated masks while brilliant, aren’t all that interesting to look at. Their dull plasticity on the goo-gloss of grey enamel floors looking cheap in comparison to the copper pieces’ more-than-just-the-color-of money hanging behind them, beauty’s patina masking the cultural currency, the thick chunks forged of the symbolic-mine. And in the other what-used-to-be-gallery-entire is now the back showroom for a single artwork in what has become the brokerage of conceptual power-art, wasting space like it’s L.A.
Moulène seems best when his objects are bordering banal, like DIA’s huge clown-tent missile; unexpectedly mixing power, glitz, and ugliness in equally estranging components, a tumor of confoundment more than the skull-balloon on view here, though Moulène's commitment to the head-subject is interesting.
It would be hard to not acknowledge the kinship to the younger Michael E. Smith, both using what appear to be skull chips in pairs, both recycling refuse into mysterio-objects denying explanation’s assuaging.

See too: Michael E. Smith at Susanne Hilberry