grounded at Berthold Pott

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"Group shows always look like you blew up a shopping mall, like its reassembly after catastrophe, like hangers categorizing airline wreckage. Trying to make sense in debris. Us, a cargo cult. Us, a primitive culture, drawing aurochs on our white cave walls. With the debris of culture. Our Mystic auto-anthropology. "

"art treats culture as a system of artifacts to be interrogated by its own white light certification process, a factory for meaning production." 

Which this show takes literally. Less a criticism than the exhibition understanding, reifying, the cultural ether. This is what these shows do. Catalog the wreckage. 

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork at Empty Gallery

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Art is the airline hanger where we assess the fallen debris of culture - let the objects, set to dance by artists, "speak." We initiates perform the ancient practice of meaning. Divine from cultural tea leaves a wall text, a press release, a content. The use-value of art, meaning, the world is not arbitrary, there are things in the dark trees, we cannot see them but assume them, look until your eyes produce them.

See too: Airline Wreckage

Michael Rakowitz at Rhona Hoffman Gallery

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Totemizing the debris of culture. Art as church for contemplation. We come to see the cultural oracle.

[Art] always look like you blew up a shopping mall, like its reassembly after catastrophe, like hangers categorizing airline wreckage. Trying to make sense in debris. Us, a cargo cult. Us, a primitive culture, drawing aurochs on our white cave walls. With the debris of culture. Our Mystic auto-anthropology. "

"art treats culture as a system of artifacts to be interrogated by its own white light certification process, a factory for meaning production." 

At least here the politics are clear. A giant trashbag in the other room inflates and deflates, turning a political act into performance. Press "on" to repeat history for audience. The PR asks a telling question about an artist who sculpted monuments to both Confederate and Union generals: "What does it mean that the same pair of hands made these two works?" But the obvious answer is telling. In cultural war artists are mercenaries. 

“A Love Letter to a Nightmare” at Petzel

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Group shows always look like you blew up a shopping mall, like its reassembly after catastrophe, like hangers categorizing airline wreckage. Trying to make sense in debris. Us, a cargo cult. Us, a primitive culture, drawing aurochs on our white cave walls. With the debris of culture. Our Mystic auto-anthropology. Sexy legs made in wheat aren't surreal but reality when a world sells children cereal with fat assed bee, then sells adults figurines of that bee. This is reality, a sexy hotdog is practically a readymade. Merely exploded.

Caitlin Keogh at Overduin & Co.

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What can a tornado mean? How does it speak, catapulting whole neighborhoods into the air. A house blown up, again. How many times can you explode the house, the archive, mailbox, fenceposts, Greg, displayed, waving though the air, help. They continue beyond the frame! What can a Tornado mean by this? This is the fallout of Rachel Harrison semiotic explosion. The settling dust of nonsense. This is meaning aloft, in midair, the detritus of whatever art recently smart bombed. The airline wreckage cataloging its hangar. The little stick and poke tattoos glistening on your body. This face of Post Malone. A pox, outward flush of signs. He's got a case of the semiotics. He's got a pox of the interpretability. The illustration is clear.. but the meaning, whoa, wait till you get a load of the meaning. It's everywhere. The point is to make it look like a Clue board, to make the game is meaning. The loser is the first person to say "pipe."

David Douard at Serralves

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The trash pile of culture looks different every 20 years. Certain shapes just didn't exist 30 yers ago. Metal logos metastasized and "Every 10 years the art's assemblage reinvents itself as the dumpsters picked through are modernized to the current castoffs and appear new, the waste that evolves along culture until finally an artist is able to rummage up enough LEDs, acrylic panels and Arte Povera catalogs to accumulate the update to our Rauschenberg cardboard clogging the pipes of our forward progress. At least sticks are still in vogue as symbols of the foraging, our original human toil, production."

This "looks like you blew up a shopping mall, like its reassembly after catastrophe, like hangers categorizing airline wreckage. Trying to make sense in debris. Us, a cargo cult. Us, a primitive culture, [these are the] aurochs on our white cave walls. With the debris of culture. Our Mystic auto-anthropology."

"art treats culture as a system of artifacts to be interrogated by its own white light certification process, a factory for meaning production." 

Art becomes cultural waste, the gallery swallows, and you the viewer digest its tract. and "We eat its excitement."

Eventually the malls will look again like this, maybe they already do. 

Marcia Hafif at Galerie Hubert Winter

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This is tragedy, no? Art cataloguing a world. Swatches of what was. The airline wreckage assessment. The white light searching rubble for meaning. Permanent Green Light, 1972.

TARWUK at HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark

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There was the Affect Theory Reader and then there was what the kids called "vibes." It wasn't what you advertised it was the fact that skateboarding dog growled it. Previously the hipster had mocked this with a discombobulated semiology of PBR truckers and really expensive denim. Rachel Harrison. The object was meaningless vessel to the light. Hahaha, we all collectively admitted, groaned, or smiled. But now we're here, in the sunken place serious with our mood lighting and artifacts from several genre of past wreckage. Alien, Roman, or cousin Greg. This is the acceptance stage of grief. The lighting has already done the airline crash assessment for us. There is nothing outside of mis-en-scene. 

See too: Josh Kline at Modern Art, Adrián Villar Rojas at MOCA Geffen