Jutta Koether at Museum Brandhorst

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because what you're looking at isn't what you're looking at: what you're looking at is cultural baggage, garbage piling your sentience, floating to the surface like diapers, clots, the noise of signal and symbols. You can't see purely, you are clogged with reference. "Koether’s own “battle” with art history."



see too: Jutta Koether at Bortolami

Justine Kurland at Mitchell-Innes & Nash

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or personal opinion that the youth should be left alone. Photography's inherent embalm and morbidity. Youth should be wasted, sloughed into bogs of our own autumns. Instead adolescence's preservation, feeling always like photography flexing its own ability to do so, holding its pearl while we are like strapped to dying animals, timers and all. Like Imhof's Faust, subjects are forced into becoming advertisements for themselves, for the thing they cannot hold onto but Imhof, advertising and Kurland get to reap; Kurland's light merely warmer.


See too: Venice: Anne Imhof at German Pavilion, Wolfgang Tillmans at Galerie Buchholz

Zak Kitnick at Ribordy Contemporary

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in line of Sears' full history and its intersection with Kitnick's own, for the then pouring into the Jello molds here which will contain it like good art objects as retainers for stories, no longer looking at the art but the little vacuous middle distance of. Objects don't exist anymore is the point, we have post-Marxed them to oblivion with fetishization into names as placeholders: at the end "Craftsmen" was merely an object containing all the distant echoes of its storied history of quality to coast on as its final form as junk wringing out this nostalgia as cash pyres (the story of many brands narrative arch from triumph to trash, Schwinn, Smith & Hawken, et al.) - which seems, Kitnick ever the melancholic, the point, "the highest score for both 'Brand Expectations' and 'Trust'" is more capitalistically leverageable than any use-value or beauty that these artworks portray themselves not as having but ostensibly able for you to take home and create yourself, again trading the ghosts - here the history as press release - we survive on, to do it yourself pal. Defeatist or just powerfully unhappy is what is at stake.


see too: Kyle Thurman and Zak Kitnick at Parapet Real Humans, Zak Kitnick at Clearing

Anne Libby at Night Gallery

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over the course of a career Frank Gehry made some fish and they are pretty much horrible. Kitschy blundgeoned ham handeries of what would be the shimmering skins of architectural circusry. They are completely obvious in a way that is painful, reducing nature to a mimickry of its lithe body for future extraction.  Libby's shimmering scales seem to gravitate towards this middle state of architectural decorum, a scales that could be placed over the whole, a fragment waiting to be multiplied, capitalized on.

Pippa Garner at Redling Fine Art

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creating fake products revealing the ostensible absurdity of capitalistic variation?  If we hadn't invented the lithium ion battery a gas powered vibrator an acceptable concession for many. We're already burning it and worse elsewhere to energize your battery there and with a lot of loss between so environmental concerns aren't as much at issue as the desire to keep exhaust out of our intimate moments. Parody is funny, but a form masking the pain of the content, often. But Pippa was invited on Merv Griffith's and Carson's - did you know? - and so its an ostensibly popular form, our self-mockery.

Julie Curtiss at Various Small Fires

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Domenico Gnoli in Christina Ramberg styles, we see the banal given a character and edge, a rippling read like tea leaves.

Lyle Ashton Harris at Participant Inc.

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The D that spreads across as both the Daddy of letter's address but also as a variable, D, placeholder, name, the thing we desire and the container to hold all we can pour into it spreading across us our histories tainting thoughts desires action dreams like a contagion or a fear.