“The Pain of Others” at Ghebaly Gallery

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CAWD on our art's cuckolding, on our fetishes, on our intentions to own our pain through others: Desensitization

Morag Keil at Jenny’s

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Possibly the culmination of Jenny's program towards rendering the cloying dread of banality's final boss. It's not so much empty as toneless. Thus the hollow soundtrack. While at one end there's the renderstenialists whose tonal overabundance manicizes, say RoseHenrotProuvostAtkinsWolfson, at the other, this affectlessness of "clean" objects scrubbed to that everyday clean feeling of pleasurelessness. Think just how much tone you're subjected to in so much current art strapped into a chair, how well this show conjures without it. Banality isn't a word strong enough. Those particular door handles, the defining feature of cheap mass apartments. Nettel once left the dirty dishes out and has Keil washed them, put them away behind that brown door,  in each others apartments for their collaboration, "The Fascism of Everyday Life" forcing day to day drudgery's recognition, the things we care to forget, every one of us socialists but as roommates we don't share hot-sauce.

""Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an 'event boundary' in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away," said the lead researcher. "Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized.""

Our brains are haywired continuously, forced to deal with frizzing nonsense, cheap dishes and smart tvs, that old joke: "My work is inspired by [...] paintings so boring the human mind is incapable of remembering them, creating the impression that you are seeing them for the first time, everytime." Daily amnesia of us trying to remember our lives.



See too: Morag Keil at Real Fine Arts, Carissa Rodriguez at Wattis, Karl Holmqvist at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis

Tobias Spichtig at Malta Contemporary

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Its an effective image, one from Spichtig's endless activities in framing (e.g. the walls weren't painted but the paintings were with it, documented by the artist, mattresses, desks blockades, etc.). But the fridge. Fridges unrunning and closed will have their internals fester with mildew, stink. The closed body rots, the fridge breeds internally. (Was someone from the gallery opening them at night to let air in, or were they allowed to fester.  Or were they running, breathing dry air against mold; the several electrical outlets documented show otherwise. Or were they modified. Maybe some anti-fungal. Or at the end simply gathered like corpses at room-temperature, rotting, and tossed into their grave, atop Malta's apparent landfill problem.) You can probably properly prepare a fridge for long term storage, embalm them just like the paintings removed from the rot that makes them interesting to be hung on your wall nicely, away from our gathering images of metal bodies rotting, stinky fridges more interesting than painting.


see too: Roger Hiorns at ELI Beamlines Center

Njideka Akunyili Crosby at Baltimore Museum of Art

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Perhaps too easy a statement that for Akunyili Crosby, like Kerry James Marshall, the patchwork assembling of visual cultures not necessarily the western canon and manifesting all the diaspora of it - Nigerian pop and pattern for AC; comics, movie posters, barbershops for KJM - feels less like the paintings trends of post-modern dicey-ness, less a Rosler war brought home than saturated by, felt lived in, warm. When the graphic face of a Nigerian minister comes roaring through collapsing space like a advert it seems less compositional than accurate to how time functions, we don't to keep attaching lead and weight to canvases to function for the weight of history.


see too: Kerry James Marshall at MOCA Los Angeles





by not necessarily being indebted to western canon

Than Hussein Clark at GAK

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At its most extreme the proposition may be that art is not as valuable as the context surrounding it.  That the spaghetti dinners attribute diamonds their value. And so the context, under new light, grow baroque, wilt new leafs, gilt themselves in preparation for their spotlighting, put little balls on their feet so as weight their connection to it, the theater.

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Betty Tompkins at Rodolphe Janssen

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For all the explicitness and its usual attendant cruelty Tompkins' candid blunt feels tinged remorseful for a subject that is denied the full blood of its humanity, a humanity replaced only with the lasciviousness of pornography - our genitals now denoting smut rather than humanity. Tompkins' Fuck paintings basically beginning alongside the advent of modern pornography's spread, a subject their painting seem to gather back from the photographic a pulse, restoring a faint heartbeat to the grid of measurement, reproduction; Tompkins' drawings are evidence of drawing's relevance in conjuring back something the photograph excises, holding its subject with the ginger hand of the pieta.