Daniel Turner at Kunsthalle Basel

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Sculpture never had its Zombie formalism. But this is it. The industrialization of aura through reference-shredded-process. This stuff comes from hospitals! And, like, chemical factories! Spooky. Think of hospitals, stuff happens there! Chemicals! I bet they linger! Wow, have you heard of On Kawara! It points! Things in the world! Oh my! Traces! Like the Shroud of Turin in relation to the face of Jesus, they are fake. But asking questions! Artworld JAQing off. A more steroidic budget. Turning human blood into wine for rich consumption. 

This value added of anecdotal content, of reference converted to sign...
While this was the central conundrum to conceptual art since its inception, the rupture and distance between sign and object (always at risk that its sign didn't actually contain its object) it has since been taken as granted, as a granting agency for value added. While On Kawara's July 21st 1969 poses the question of whether it actually contains the weight of a moon landing, [now art] is given to absorb the history. 

Jason Rhoades built a career of mocking this value-added system, performing it under absurdly comical conditions, to create his referentially seminal signature: PeaRoeFoam, a mess of so much reference and history and jest that it self imploded. A satirical factory of art aura.

The animism that pervades contemporary sculpture is a compositional strategy of curators and artists drawing out a latent feature of minimalism described already in 1967 by Michael Fried as a "theatricality," and used as a showroom potentiality, a sort of pornographic objecthood in a showroomization of art, imbuing importance with display strategies arranging attention, prioritize the presence of the object in relation to a viewer, no longer the blank mirror objects of minimalism creating a stage to hold the viewer/actor, but objects which the actor, you, holds in relation to themselves, Hamlet touching the cranial vault to his own, all under the shadow-less white light of product photography or god.

See: “Being Thing” at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage & Treignac Projet, James Hoff at VI, VII

Past: Walter Swennen

 Swennen's painterly literalness: there is no magic, just the object and the sisyphean onus, push paint. It makes an image. The interest in this hamhandness is in never pulling the same gambit twice, still producing some object interest while lacking any painterly ambition whatsoever.

an occasional brilliance in darkness, that dies, and leaves one wondering what light there ever was in the first place, and when its dark its almost chilling levels of it, sort of begging you to hate them.

full: Walter Swennen at Xavier Hufkens(1), Walter Swennen at Xavier Hufkens (2)

Heimo Zobernig at Petzel

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There is no bedrock to terrible things. Imagine something bad, now imagine it a little worse. Make it children. Redder. Make it expressionist. Continue until you have ugliness you cannot commit to paper. There are further depths than this abyssal trench. A drill is required to get deeper technicolor horror. The baseness of Heimo Zobernig's painting. Things you can't explain to father. 

Past: Silke Otto-Knapp

"The ethereal silver surface appending some Last Year at Marienbad memory".." they're projection screens for home films of your cultural baggage."

"Our recognition-of is the greatest asset of a painting, proving its commonality, prerequisite to fame."

"Yesterday's brand strategies reemerge in painting's today. Mona Lisa handbags, af Klimt on a tank, Carl Andre halloween costumes. You can't water down a public's desire for a painting, prevalence only increases the throngs lined to see it, at distance, behind glass. "


Read Full: Kyung-Me at Bureau & Silke Otto-Knapp at The Renaissance Society, Silke Otto-Knapp at greengrassi, Silke Otto-Knapp at Taylor Macklin

Dashiell Manley at Marianne Boesky Gallery

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Laura Owens was able to rescue from cynicism the quotational irony of Jonathan Lasker's cartoons and whack out a baroque nosegay. The academic into clusterfucks. Even Fun. Here the quotational returns to that Xeroxed question; you put art history straight to the office paper shedder. "You put the referent in the shredder to make a puzzle appear. Which looks like a painting. Gives the PR something to talk about. "

See too:Anna Ostoya, Dashiell Manley at Jessica Silverman

Past: Dashiell Manley

" A lot painting today is excuses for getting bright striking colors onto canvas. ... PRs become the spellcasting against anything that could be mistaken for irrational, and we spit-firing reasons, definitions, reference, backloading the work to look like weight. ... Perhaps brilliance, like Grotjahn, in just not even excusing oneself. A confusion of whether or not these are dumb."

Dashiell Manley at Jessica Silverman

Past: Sascha Braunig

...rendering's look itself has come to represent and stand in for our imaginative space ... The wet image absorbed the qualities of virtual space, the sheen of the digitally plastic, denoting its manipulability...

Past: Sascha Braunig at Kunsthall Stavanger, Sascha Braunig at Rodolphe Janssen, Sascha Braunig at Foxy Production, Sascha Braunig at P.S.1 & Foxy Production