Amalia Ulman at Jenny's

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"The theater that came next placed their social capital literally on view, staged, showcasing the finer patrons on a pedestal and brightly lit to be gawked upon. It would be called a Blue Ocean Strategy... Whatever institutional critique it held was mostly in the fact that it could do it better, insinuate itself better, prove the sporting of it, point dull yellow lights at the gameroom of it."

This is how you get corrupted. Eventually you get intertwined, which is the same as ensnared, because you know these people. Your opinion is no longer neutral, you bite your tongue, you become a compromised asset. There's nothing New Yorkers love more than self-congratulations. They and movie industry making self-congratulations an unironic artform. This is Empire and its state of mind. Do I fear other's toes? - that's what no one was asking. It's fun to be part of something. The toast and the roast are the same to the professional. It's barely caricature at this point. Robbin's Talent was funny because it wasn't a joke. It dryly announced its commercial moment, no art to it at all. Artists as their headshot. Artist as professional. This was before "Top 10 Under 30"s. It was saying the quiet part loud. Here the caricature is alms paid to deny the horse of it all. Barely caricature at all. 

"A culture, say a magazine or a museum, that can purchase an absolution to the images it wants through an art that gesticulates critique."

See too: Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff at Cabinet, Amalia Ulman at The Gallery at El Centro

Karen Fan, Caroline Zhang at Gern en Regalia

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A state of painting that has sunk so far into endless permutable decor-figuration - that someone actually tending to the body feels like free healthcare. Nursing wounds.

Past: Andrea Zittel

"... " Zittel is local science-fiction - ideas as propositions, viewing them you get to feel the utopian impulse - imagine a world where we haven't already welcomed the new insect overlord, fantasy rebellion against Empire. - a fantasy of a world cognizant."

Read Full: Andrea Zittel

Pae White at greengrassi

"... Grandma's quilts compressed into jewels, like Babylonian cylinder seals you can roll out their patterns to any length, threatening a mass production of precious moments.

Pae White at greengrassi

 Past: Diane Severin Nguyen

"... Filth is only gross when we fear its spread, contamination. And we have become lovers of filth. [The list below proves it] ... It could be that rise of CAD and crystalline documentation - the even-white fluorescence provided the clinic - could hold filth at a distance, anti-sceptic photography for petri-dish transmission. Everything looks good in the white light of pornography, even that filth. Like we finally had the clean rooms to handle it, not just white boxes, but had invented technological gloves to package all of it..."

Read full: Brandon Ndife, Diane Severin Nguyen at Bureau

Gowoon Lee at Meredith Rosen Gallery

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An enhanced interrogation on our own childhood's wet eyed tube intake. Art History's torture of Disney rodents: Oldenburg, Foulkes, Pensato, McCarthy, Beeple, et al.  Attaching artistic electrodes to the commodified rabbits and amplifying pain. Our moment today: "the body reappears and it appears as a cartoon, which we're mad about." Why? Abstraction: "Our bodies extrapolated from the growing prevalence of data and numbers domineering discussions of humans. The "broad picture" we use for governance. People as populations. Everything feels like a cartoon in this virtuality because you can do great violence to it. A million jobs lost, a million jobs gained. Tom whacks at Jerry with a mallet like an axe. Jerry distends."

"...comedy premised on slapstick’s violence upon the real, stretching the real into a comic absurdity, teasing a threat to break it, which rationalizing this discrepancy forced laughter in children...What may be interesting about this show is that we have defined the moment, the kids grown on cartoons have arrived and their childhoods have coincidentally, absurdly, become the accurate depictions of the way the world has begun to feel, and will soon become generic, but at least we'll get to stop repeating ourselves."

Past: Isa Genzken

"To make one of those statements that art writers have tendency to make based upon an inflated assessment of their own opinion's import... Bruce Nauman has passed the torch of most influential living artist to Isa Genzken. It happened in field about 4 years prior as part of a much unpublicized ceremony 28 miles due south of Santa Fe. Without fanfare, neither artist even leaving their respective vehicle, handed through lowered windows, Nauman reported to have said "Best of it." The two made eye contact and somewhere off a small goose was made to fly along with several terse press releases from the agency that assess such matters. It was said that Genzken's speed finally attained escape velocity from the crushing gravitation of Nauman's iron mire."

"Genzken founded strategies rather than objects, an artistic down-shifting, a speed that could overtake. "the most influential living artist not because everything looks like it, but because it predicated a conglomerate speed absorbing any last vestiges of particular attention to individuated objects" i.e. When we see Genzken we react to the deployment or manipulation/alteration to its strategy, the means of attending the object rather than object itself. Weirdly deny the consumptive act of looking by permanently existing in a state of limbo.."

Past: All posts tagged Genzken, Isa Genzken at David Zwirner, Isa Genzken at Institute of Contemporary Art, Isa Genzken at Hauser Wirth & Schimmel + Daniel Buchholz, Isa Genzken at Galerie Buchholz