Pati Hill at Essex Street

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"the drudgery of adult administrative duties and the messy thrills of high-school collages and punk zines." Erotic photographic frottage against bureaucratic method. Like Bacher's xeroxes, they imply the noise, entropy and dust to which they, their objects, will return.  The photograph is the object's loss. Inherently nostalgic. "Inherently elegiac" The ghosts that photography threatens.

The PR wants to reiterate that these predate Pictures appropriation by some years. And, connectedly, Hill's ex-husband's gallery had been showing Sturtevant since '65. And like Sturtevant's consistent reiteration that she was not appropriationist and thanked the pictures gang for their providing a "negative definition." What she was not. Regardless of who was first. The point being a negative definition and that while the Pictures gen treated the world as image (available for all forms of permutable misdeeds), Hill's 1:1 copying seemed far more interested in the objects and their traces, not inherently its theft. Far more Gonzalez-Torres than Sherrie Levine.

B. Ingrid Olson at i8 Gallery

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The pr attempts a sort of Sisyphean task of being the text, trying to circumscribe the work. It is the case that often now, the pr will be the best writing (for better or worse) a show receives. So we require the impossible for it.

AR: “Magic Ben Big Boy” at Matthew Marks

"A portal opens, a cork plugs, things are sealed, places buried. What happens inside these "Shirley Temple Rooms" is what's at stake... our eyes the size of eggs"

Artist: Lutz Bacher, Nayland Blake, Vincent Fecteau

Venue: Matthew Marks, New York

Click here to read

Originally Posted: April 2nd, 2019

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Jacqueline de Jong at Château Shatto

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Stupid direct perhaps what we need right now. Feeling like relief from the overdetermined grab bag of coloric cartoons currently feeding on. We could use some dry paintings. Maybe you have to come out of Situationism to make something this calmly strange. Still and horrible.

August Review 2019

Today we initiate our fifth annual August Review. Every year we reflect on the exhibitions that were especially memorable to us since the previous August. We will re-publish one show each day, marked by “AR:” in the title, while continuing to cover new exhibitions daily.

At the end of the month we will provide an “August Review Index.” The previous four seasons’ selections are available here:
2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018.

Nicolas Party at The Modern Institute

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The world is insane so act like it. The decor turned to 11, become lurid, horrible. Isn't that our world currently? The berating of sense. Have you come to enjoy your pummeling? And is Party's really what others have called "sincerity and joy"? "Polychromy" states the press release, as if maybe we thought of Greek statues colored as they were, this would be our world now. But our eyes experience exhaustion, our cones cannot handle, biological imprints on our art a certain taste as barrier against a visual depletion, but maybe we would learn to love this chromatic pain.

Ann Cathrin November Høibo at DREI

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Materially in excess, it condenses through glass, perspires its objecthood through the glazing. Painting we can feel through the window, that has replaced feeling. CAD is a window in an abyss of many windows. Everyone trying to feel something through. Our personal panopticon.