Kathe Burkhart at FIERMAN

(link)

What's it take to get your new gallery's first show on CAD?  Running the art advisory for the interminably wonky Salon 94, or a previous gallery for 5 years that never once got on CAD, or Kathe Burkhart. Of course Kathe Burkhart will be the answer. Who knows. Neighbors are jelly. Burkhart is great, and been terribly assigned to group show fodder for a number of years. Nice to see someone step up to bat. CAD's obvious thing for the resurgence of older semi-omitted oft-gay New Yorkers is understandably interesting for what it all predates now. And Burkhart's interest in the campy celebrity seems in line with today's mass-culture minded youth. Neat.

See too: David Rappeneau at Queer Thoughts

Milano Chow at Mary Mary

(link)

Ornateness and decadence is given the silent treatment, made square, hard-edge and if-not-quite cruel at least ordered to austerity, its skin off. They become Clue boards, picturing images as signs to feel in need of decoding, the compositional feng-shui that makes objects mysterious, play along if you like.


See too: Matthew Brannon at Casey Kaplan,  Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque, Lucy McKenzie at Daniel Buchholz

Amelie von Wulffen at Barbara Weiss

(link)

One of the few painters not caught up in their own stylistic bog, instead with ease shift between means that never feel coerced by their author. It will be fun to one day see von Wulffen's retrospective because there will be surprises and not strategies.

A.L. Steiner at Koenig & Clinton

(link)

A man made blaze-orange and reflective through the stranger emergent rules of capital's risk assessment, donning its anonymous uniform highlighting his labor we are meant to ignore in a world he manicures to pretend the world isn't ending, like we're keeping something intact, like there will be something intact, scrubbing the earth. Channeling all the tragedy of the paradoxical rules that stem from of our world's "rational actors." I.e. To save cents per worker on insurance we paint them orange. Emergence is known for producing some of the most spectacular feats in nature - snowflakes, bird flocks, Giant's Causeway - and in Capital it causes our workers to turn orange. The absurdity is as staggeringly beautiful as it is tragic for the once human who is made subservient to it. I mean maybe this man wanted it. This anonymous and yellow drone trimming our earth to meet the desires of those who control it, channeled here in a photograph of Steiner's personal-as-political best.

Cerith Wyn Evans at Galerie Neu

(link)

The beautification of conceptual art, by assigning it more visceral roles it had once, in theory, rejected, is a hypostatization of conceptual art's poetic function. i.e.: Conceptual Art was always maximally poetic, failing to deliver the bureaucracy its language promised - breaking the glass of language to expose perfume of its confusion, irreductive - and glossing beauty atop to prove it: annoying at best. Wyn Evans engagement with this problem seems, at least partially, the point, the aestheticization of experience and awareness of the gloss. This is the sinister pulsing quality of Wyn Evans, the fact that there is no need for this artificial light.


See too: On Kawara at the Guggenheim

Eric Wesley at Midway Contemporary Art

(link)

Wesley's ability to mock what contains him, a laughable institutional crit whose assault is the brilliant dumbening of art dialect. The Burrito is hot right now. You've got Murillo's 300k one, Flame's mockery of, Bader's continual replenishing it as category, and Wesley's endless one. The difference here is Wesley's insistence of the burrito not its signifier which art has long found a way to be protected from, but to actually work with the burrito, which morphs to Taco Bell here, to force that most base of architecture to reflect on the walls of Midway. The joke isn't Taco Bell placed in art, but actually maybe caring about it.

Erika Vogt at Overduin & Co.

(link)

Big objects mock us. They hystericize space by treating it as plastic, irrationally. And their lumpy forms remind us of our bodies, which makes their injustice to the general order of space a personal issue, taking up space that was, ostensibly, meant for us with a big cartoonish grin. They are weapons. As theater props and staged here they are meant to have a relation to your body.

See too: “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center, Amanda Ross-Ho at The Pit