Leonor Antunes at Taka Ishii Gallery

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We don't need word pastiche or appropriation anymore because we invented the word "research" which allows influence to become a value-added in PR fodder. Recycled material is now green-washed as "investigation" and we purchase a brown product because of it. Begin to prefer the brown recycled product as nostalgia, as the fan-service and reference-bait of reboots which provide franchise fans with back-patting. The products' comfortization toward viewers becomes congratulatory prize: "I understood that reference." Our nostalgia becomes legitimated. The candy of easter eggs thus becomes a packaged and sold as the whole meal. In art this recycling gets reframed as connoisseurship, knowledge, a one-sided forcible "collaboration" with the past. With "overlooked" histories. The recycling machine is the same. In the cargo-cult era, the detritus of the world is a shopping mall, hang these references like jewelry around your neck. And these are good sculptures. 

See too: The benediction of sign systems. The highest order these relics can obtain is that they get put on Beyonce, as a Christmas tree of our sign systems, collective wreckage, past. The highest order of totems, shown back to us like a lighthouse reorganizing meaning.

SoiL Thornton at Galerie Neu

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Letting the world into the gallery. Sand or baseballs or pompoms. There is no meaning here. There is only the world, which is a shopping mall, which allows purchase of identity. This is good. This is the whatever of perfection: just a world. You can construct your own. The biblical "for dust you are and to dust you will return" is, as far as we know of entropy, scientifically accurate. A sand grain falls for each day in your hourglass. You can go into the world and order pompoms instead. This is the perfection of whatever: your dust. 

Jameson Green at Derek Eller Gallery

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"Pastiche" used to be the incantation to make reuse palatable. (Alongside appropriation and buggery.) Condo, for instance, made his unoriginality acceptable under the guise of ostensible mockery (implying critique, implying meaning). This was a cake-and-eat-it-too situation if there ever was one. Because eventually everyone stops saying the word pastiche and just says Condo- and this is the moment that the art self-justifies, magically, and Condo becomes sui-generis almost tautologically, as if it didn't need Picasso. It no longer looks like a stupid Picasso, it looks like a Condo. It looks like "expensive painting." And so in this way the world has rid itself of the magic incantation pastiche because its the aerosol we now breathe. 

Patricia Treib at Bureau

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It was the briefest of micro genre, "gentle abstraction," it existed in the cusp of the 2010s between "indexical contingent beside-itself painting," and the "process-based zombie pollockstraction." Artists were sponging soft colors. Treib was their masthead. Then the world changed and we needed figures to stand in for progress. But this was thought to be the future then. Rearming painting as a non-objective babyroom warmth. 

Allison Katz at dépendance

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Painterly "style" is the sediment of an individual's subjectivity accumulating in the granules of their decisions eventually garnering a pile: identity. Look through the glass of another's eyes to see their world through them. We - despite all - trust art to tell us something about its subject. But growing a diaspora of signifiers accumulates a puzzle, a representation adverse to coalescing identity.  Delays coherence in its subject, and creates an anxiety in our trust for the text to tell us something. The actual meaning is in this means to distribute meaning. Fails to deliver on its promise of arriving a destination. To make it feel like there may be some. Content is the red herring. Questions are Frankensteinian death-in-life of art. The game of Clue that never ends.

Megan Plunkett at Dracula's Revenge

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Because its deputizes us detectives, which gives hope.

"A mystery! A mystery! Where can I lay meaning?"

 

"[Art] is a cultural structure such that its prize is "what it is about." ...  there is something to be unlocked, understood. There is something to be won. This is the belief. ... Painting begins to be prized not for painting but for this mystery. And a mystery, should it not spoil itself, cannot tell you its answer. A mystery instead must load its objects with intent, clues, an ambrosia of noir, an affect of meaning."

Art's interpretability is its highest duty. The crime scene and art are both given this role. The movie detective, the painting, both allow mystery's possibility of answers, thus light the candle that there is an answer.  Provide the possibility to believe in interpretation, giving a truth-potential without having to actualize answers. Interpretation, made as interminable as possible, already provides the same comfort as answers because it enacts the genre, creates art, which assumes meaning. So you must create the fissure, enable the mystery. You enact the murder, censor a part of the sign. Snip the semantic loop. This fissure is the poetic, is its interpretability. It deputizes us detectives, which gives hope, "lights the candle that there is an answer." Leaves the TV on at dusk, a nightlight in darkness. The real mystery is who made it dark.

 

See all: Megan Plunkett

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt at Buzzer Reeves

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Writers spend pagespace wondering why Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt hasn't gotten his due. A golden bio, a lovely art, and galleries allot the tentative groupshow, museums retrospectives at secondary locations. Everyone sees success but no one can quite realize it. Is it because we need it to be outsider? Does jankiness only appear polished when found in the rough, feels discovered, rare? Perhaps the inability for Lanigan-Schmidt to find mainstream success is that diamonds in the rough are only valuable for the potential gains. But what if the diamond gains are to remain unrealized, do we still want the stone? Does making outsider art inside kill it?