Eva Fàbregas at Kunstverein München

Today's post is an assemble your own intenstinal adventure.
Current common themes.
Images of Intestines: 

Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Portikus, Michaela Eichwald at Silberkuppe, Michaela Eichwald at Maureen Paley,  Nicolas Deshayes at Modern Art, Jessi Reaves at Bridget Donahue, Juliana Huxtable at Shoot the Lobster, Quintessa Matranga at Freddy

Bodily Innuendo 1 
(haha funny sculpture mock human):

'Painters do violence to faces, but sculptors love mockery the body, its forms, bulbous. Tragedies we have been given, our corpulent throes. And comedic our attempts at preserving that, our treatments to spas, acupunctures, health tonics, facial plumbing, giving facelifts to the homeless.'

Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Geumhyung Jeong at KLEMM’S, Sarah Lucas at CFA Berlin, Roger Hiorns at Faena Arts Center, Venice: Anne Imhof at German Pavilion, Gina Beavers at Michael Benevento,

Bodily Innuendo 2 
(uncanny lumpen)

'...biomorphic stones complicating the minimalist mantra that "what you see is what you see" because what you see is sometimes sexually confusing, leather seats looking like the lap of a taught, tan and naked man. The cigar that just might, or rocks that just might not, it is a “bodily” different from its post-minimalist reassertion: entendre produces uncertainty in polite company...'

Nairy Baghramian at Museo Tamayo, Alexandra Bircken at Le Crédac & BQ, Bergen Assembly, Jessi Reaves at Bridget Donahue, Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman, Sarah Lucas at CFA Berlin, “Ungestalt” at Kunsthalle Basel, Ron Nagle at Modern Art
Ed Atkins at dépendance, Miriam Cahn at Jocelyn Wolff, 

Bodily Innuendo 3 
(objects which denote us)

'...Darwin, living in the 1800s, could see a flower and draw a moth undiscovered until after his death. The objects here, designed for ourselves, in a similar way infer something about the bodies which they govern...'

Park McArthur at Chisenhale, Klara Lidén, Alicia Frankovich at Kurator, Anna Uddenberg at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Katja Novitskova at Kunsthalle Lissabon, Alexandra Bircken at Le Crédac & BQ, Cady Noland, Eloise Hawser at Somerset House

Visual Material Fetishism (pornography and the need for materials to express itself through glass):

ours is a world we see but don't touch, like in an art museum. And like porn, we want to touch, want to experience sensuality, and so separated by this glass both art and porn must find ways to make physical sensation a visual code passable through glass. Pornography does this by covering the body in oil, wrapping it in latex, inflating its breasts to absurdity. Art does this with goo and viscera and softness and lumps. Hypernormal stimuli.

Olga Balema at High Art (1), Olga Balema at High Art (2), ektor garcia at Cooper Cole, N. Dash at Casey Kaplan, Tony Conrad's Glass, Anna Uddenberg at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler,

Medical Device Horror (blushing)

'...if the trope of horror-films was to die after sex, it was because the carnality established the body as fragile, human, meat; sex filled the character with blood for the destruction to come...'
'The biomorphic ambiguity invokes the body better than any specific image, the ambiguous evokes feelings which we relate to corporeality rather a concrete image we would relate to as information. It's why what is unseen has such stronger potential in torture scenes, ears cropped or arms chainsawed...'

Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman, Michaël Borremans at Dallas Museum of Art, Ambera Wellmann at Lulu, Miriam Cahn at Meyer Riegger, Andro Wekua at Sprüth Magers

"The rotund, biomorphic. The anthropomorphic, anthropoid, and the dripping and the glistening. The meaty and the squishy, fungal. Glass etched with goo, sprayed. Wax deformed Rodins. Primordial, high definition flesh. The dirt. Psoriasic pulchritude. Your standard innuendo; vaginal negatives. The soft and photo sensitive. The band-aid awaiting its knee. Someone farts. The misshapen; hideously deformed. The institutionally nurse-like and the gore spread across asphalt. The putrescent, the rotting inside taught PVC. The colonoscopic. Our bodies inferred, touched, spread with creams oils and ointments. The sick. It was a lie to believe in machined aluminum autonomy, bodies and minds everywhere guttered. Every sculpture today inferring the body."

Wong Ping at Kunsthalle Basel

(link)

Comedy in anxiety over the bile we all believe lurking beneath surface norms, in your neighbors closet a man watching you have sex with his wife. Finding yourself watching your wife have sex with a man, from a closet. Penis attacked by ants. A penis snaps. Abortions raised to kiss their daddy. The candy shell animation serving coprophilic chocolate just below. Ping's protagonists narrate their chocolate predicaments with a general numbness. Mama died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know. The Stranger is when you sit on your hand until it goes numb before masturbating. So it feels like a stranger. An indifference, world's slight remove. All the penises look like different alien creatures. Because they do. This is all believable because the world is already a cartoon.

George Rippon at Wiels

(link)

"Now you are one of a group, invested in the belief that it has elected the company it keeps, and that by this act can set itself aside both from those whose acts of power require of them a strict adherence to a state of ignorance, and the desperate rabble always seeking whatever it can get, sapped of intention – one of those whose lives miraculously prove to reproduce the ideal of that fantasy of being apart from the crowd and its automation – popping around the globe to the tune of champagne flutes and flight announcements, while at the same time adhering to and enjoying all the conventional accouterments and assurances of self-esteem and respectability – of mobility – aspired to by that very same normalizing mass one shuns, but whose effort of desire as a multitude creates the conditions under which that ideal can project itself as the fabricated lifestyle you assume, and which consumes you." -Roger van Voorhees

Which was a press release for Rippon's last, and while absorption of critique - or simply acting as the enemy -  is one way to attempt to neuter it, it occasionally just rings.

Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz

(link)

Against Jochims' more splintered or fractured here is an exhibition of sculpture looking more digested. There is analogy to be made in the sculptor as an intestinal tract: Freed from the structure and striations of skeletal muscle that once predicated historical (figurative) sculpture, the smooth muscle sculptor digests like an intestinal tube that is artist's erosion in time. Time is tube in this metaphor.  Time over the open touch of just rubbing, frottage until the rocks are tumbled to our gratification. Smooth muscle occurs mostly in the gut, uterus, walls of blood vessels, bladder, sphincter, etc.- the body's transit tubes - and these sculptures look like the things those organs produce: turds, early fetuses, blood cells, kidney stones. Things warmed in the gut of the artist.


Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz (1), Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz (2)

Diedrick Brackens at Various Small Fires

(link)

A stitch correlates to time, it is a labor visible in increments. While brushstrokes may have been the impressionist equivalent, modernism seemed, somewhat, goal orientated toward removing the more intensive marks of labor (first for a performative "expressive," the work was not labor but expression) before culminating in Minimalism and Conceptual art, two legacies infatuated with things ostensibly springing from ether. (The instructions being the art, not the 40 museum interns drawing it.) I'm not sure what this meant for them, their desiring to be capitalists, desiring to wipe the sweat from their aluminum, but it's still a desire today, no wants want to imagine previous fingerprints on their new iPhone. So the workers hands are latexed. Work, labor, sweat is the parcel of something we denigrate to the great purity of "good design," that cerebral craft we revere, which should be clean, elegant, and without a trace of sweat.


see too: “Tierra. Sangre. Oro.” at Ballroom Marfa, Ajay Kurian at White Flag Projects, Brendan Fowler at Mathew

Michael Queenland at Maureen Paley

(link)

Pre compress our trash into the decorative fossils it will become? Litter absorbed into the earth that on geologic scales become liquids, so our landfills are like slow smoothies. Someday someone assess our ruins as beautiful fossils.


Trash: “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO), Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu, Dylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento, Nancy Lupo at Antenna Space, Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts

ektor garcia at Cooper Cole

(link)

"...made, crafted, formed, manipulated, and arranged by the artist's hands. Hand shaped and glazed terra cotta, stoneware, and porcelain. Intertwined ceramic rope and chain. Hand made copper wire lace, crocheted ropes, twined threads. Hand sewn leather hides. Imprints, mark making, fingerprints, gestures: the trace of the artist's hands are everywhere. [...] the tactile memory of garcia's hands. They call out to us to be touched in return, tempting us, even daring us — to touch. But we can't touch them back. The gallery is at once a space of sensory overload, and sensory deprivation. So how can we make up for the inability to touch?"

a very modern problem, our world, mediated by screens, the totality of which becomes enshrined in gallery or touch screen glass, and art is the world's development project in all the ways to surmount it, a materiality so strong it visually empaths itself, that we could actually feel something through glass. A "supernormal stimulus," exaggerated materiality that begins to look like fetish for.


See too: Tony Conrad's Glass. Olga Balema at High Art (1), Olga Balema at High Art (2), N. Dash at Casey Kaplan