Alexandre Singh at Metro Pictures

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An "imagined dystopic future." Says every press release today. Dystopia ripples through the artworld with the Gothic, occasionally hand in hand. Though Singh has been invested in Dystopia for some time - you may recall 2008's "Hello Meth lab in the Sun" - which now does feel very 2008 doesn't it. (Breaking Bad and antagonism to relational times.) This was then at the waning moments of the US's 8 years of George W. Bush. We were only hearing about Hope then. "Dystopia" spikes in Google Search Trends in 2005 (a video game released under the name) and, well, January 2016, correlating with another shifting US Presidential epoch. Why were we searching for Dystopias if we hand one on our hands? Why do horror themes correlate to each age's neurosis; Nuclear fears: Godzilla; Climate Change: environmental cataclysm films. Latest research on dreams says we perform in sleep to practice duress, invent the situation to imagine our performance. Our anxieties are given the fantasy of horror, dystopia, to watch and say, surely it won't be that bad, make them feel like fantasy.


See too: Andrei Koschmieder at Jenny’s

Paul Gondry, KAYA at Deborah Schamoni Paul Gondry

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By Gwynne Hogan | October 21, 2016 1:24pm
EAST WILLIAMSBURG — The artist son of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" director Michel Gondry was questioned by NYPD hate-crime investigators after he hung a dummy from a tree on the same block where the film was shot — in what some neighbors considered a disturbing reference to lynching.

The dummy slung up by Paul Gondry, 25, Wednesday outside his Orient Avenue home was an effort to  "create some weirdness" in the days before Halloween, he said.

"I don't want it to be seen as a hate thing, it's not," said Gondry, 25, who was featured in three of his father's films, according to his IMDB page.

The artist's creation was the second effigy found hanging from a neighborhood tree in several weeks, though Gondry is not claiming credit for the first.

Following a DNAinfo report about the second dummy, police notified hate-crime investigators, who were looking into it, according to Deputy Inspector William Gardner of Williamsburg's 90th Precinct.

Paul Gondry, son of director Michel Gondry, didn't intend the hanging puppet to be a racist, he said. Gondry said he hoped his dummy — which had its head covered in cloth and its arms tied behind its back — would add to the suspenseful build-up to Halloween.

Because the dummy had a cloth around its head, police thought it might have been targeting Muslims in the neighborhood, Gondry said they told him during questioning. But the son of the Oscar winner had chosen the cloth for another reason.

"It was supposed to be more like a medieval peasant. The world we live in is reminiscent of medieval times," he said, pointing to the city's record homeless population. He hoped to "bring that back into an urban context," he said.

Gondry, who said he was "really into puppets," had some second thoughts about hanging the dummy, though he wasn't totally sorry he'd done it.

"I think I would do hanging clowns if I were to do it [again]," he said, adding, "It's always cool to create a bit of polemic."

Gondry added that there were "no Halloween decorations in the neighborhood. It's weird."

"I wouldn't go to Bed-Stuy and do it," said Gondry, who's lived on the block for seven years. "It's my own house."

Hate-crime investigators will determine whether or not to press charges against Gondry, police said.

The first dummy was found strung up around the corner, on Kingsland Avenue in front of the Cooper Park Houses, at the end of September, unnerving residents who called it a "spiteful symbol of lynching."

Tess Jaray at Exile

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 The history of western modernism is one of secularization, no longer higher powers commanding but instead argued for in manifestos, the age of critics who proclaimed the usefulness of aesthetics (or anti-aesthetics) in a society increasingly industrialized and pressurized to extract value from everything, including art, and putting Greenberg on tirade, espousing the paradoxical function of an art ostensibly for only art's sake. The critic pokes the painting, saying "C'mon. Do something." The need for painting to "function" so sublimates into art that it becomes naturalized, becomes necessary. (Even art that is destructive, anti-, or wanton is recouped and given function by its "criticality," by saying things like its "opposition to dominant order." Immediately closed back into.) But so, precursor to Tomma Abts, painting as configurations, organized. We like organized paintings, because organization implies meaning, a function, a higher order. We like function, a use. A well constructed painting like a chair begins to feel functional, a painting like a Swiss army knife, capable of many situations.

Past: Than Hussein Clark

"Staged theatrically, their vacancy becomes strength, hollowness holding a surface for eyes to move and containing whatever importance the narrative can attribute it, like a beautifully feathered bird you are required to know nothing about, or a Tahitian landscape unencumbered by syphilitic artists, a tie-dyed Heimo Zobernig.  Like Sci-fi as excuse to CGI a lot of shiny things, theater to reimagine some neo-Memphis-group for Petra von Kant."

"so the context, under new light, grow baroque, wilt new leafs, gilt themselves in preparation for their spotlighting, put little balls on their feet, weight their connection to it, the theater."

"Turning the house topsy-turvy, the curatorial address of throwing it all in and letting god sort 'em out with song and dance."

Past: Than Hussein Clark at Crèvecoeur, Than Hussein Clark at Futura, “The Violet Crab” at DRAF, Than Hussein Clark at GAK

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster at Century Pictures

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Reading a book in a commercial art gallery was a torture device invented for the late Medieval Era. A sort of mental flog, a public humiliation. The point being, you're not supposed to read the books. It is a show library. Like, you can call Strand bookstore and order a library by the foot, you can specify "classics," "law library," or spine color. You can reverse engineer this. What do the collected titles reveal about the impetus catalyzing it. You peruse a person's library to triangulate a subject, denote their reader, here an artist, an ostensible brandishing of an intellectual pedigree. A lot of people fake it; it's a form itself.

Group Show at Meyer Kainer

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In which object becomes notes of music to showcase the gallery that coronates them.

Oscar Murillo at Carlos/Ishikawa

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There's never been anything particularly subtle about Murillo's work. It's hulking metaphors writ in barn door sizes. A grandiosity that shadows whatever the work is "about," allowing a fleetingness, an evasiveness. Let's ask 12 people what Murillo's work is "about." What does a painting that says "Leche" mean? Or "coconut water"? "Maiz." "Yoga." The words function like fish hooks: something perhaps about class, but necessarily what about class. A few more in in this exhibition: Dirty bundles of bread and concrete. Black Vultures eating the black carcass of a black dog hidden under black tarp. Peformance, another tarp covering a body on the street shown in headlights is painted on by the artist. The arrows are huge, blinking, blinding, cover for what you want it to be about aboutness.