Past: Eliza Douglas

"The setting as the halo, the performance as the backer to the souvenir. Literally. Swirl the cultural object. The symbolic processes of art become literal, literalification."

 "These aren't paintings of the t-shirts, these are the t-shirts."

Read all: Eliza Douglas

Gelatin at Galerie Meyer Kainer

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Gelatin's would seem a populist stupidity balanced with the high abjection of a butthole. But it's all butthole in populism, and Gelatin's greatest skill is getting a blue haired public to smile on camera with said butthole, to join in happily to dig the worthless hole. It doesn't take much. Everyone is happy to laugh because irony excuses everything. Like a nun taking photos with the Naked Cowboy - this is common. Dunking on the Mona Lisa is playing basketball against a team paid to lose. The dunks better be Globetrotter - otherwise what is the point of the effigy. Comedy falls flat when it commends an audience's ability to distance themselves.

Hanna Hur at Kristina Kite Gallery

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Spirituality was always psychedelia wearing a different coat. The vibes were differently ordered. Sacred Geometry, Minimalism. And this is the Venn center of all of them. Geometric psychedelia. Sacred hallucinatory. Amsler grids for God. Sense a higher plane, order, any order, just order, through the meat of your eyes.

see too: Hanna Hur at Feuilleton

Hypothesis: if art was given to a simple taxonomic system it would reveal that there are relatively few strategies that are continuously reshuffled underneath a facade of ever updating cultural signifiers on its surface. The stems that underpin flowers aren't all that different. That while perhaps the canvas isn't a given, and the visages refresh, there is little independence to art's conceptual underpinnings. That this taxonomy of simple mechanics is never done is not because taxonomizing art would be dogmatic or repressive - but because we need the myth, that we all must actively prevent the destruction of art by the most basic levels of assessing, categorizing, and worst naming. 

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Oier Iruretagoiena at WIELS

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The press release will explain the diagram, or it won't, but it doesn't matter - the diagram makes interest on a fabric of communication. Legibility, unimportant. The diagram appliques interest. Lends interpretability. The highest prize of art. Because it insinuates meaning, gold at colorful banner's end. 

Berenice Olmedo at Fitzpatrick Gallery

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"Every era gets the art it deserves." So then, artists were the indicator species, or canary to coal mine. Like a fever to an ailing body, art was a symptom "deserved." And so we looked to artists like idiot-savant diagnosticians. We gave them our signs, our medical equipment, pictures of our sickness so they would perform the rituals to make meaning in the churches. We didn't believe they could heal us, but we believed in a hidden knowledge in the nonsense.