Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff at Reena Spaulings Fine Art

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A conceptual beartrap, the inkblot asks that you spill forth the contents of your head with its innuendo as lure. What is the contents of your head.

Inkblot, inkblot, inkblot

All: Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff

Emma Reyes at Crèvecoeur

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The point is, give your inkblot a shape. Let the shape sweat out something to be seen. Not to interminably serialize a single spilled question mark. There is something to be seen here. In the sweating flesh of a tomato jacuzzi. We don't know what it is but it is to be seen.

See too: inkblot

Louise Lawler at Metro Pictures

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It's lights out. The big sleep, render art in some purgatory, between the ghosts of artistic mythology, and their cynical corpse: "they are but objects." Render an inkblot: whether you see spirit or corpse depends on your personal faith in an afterlife. There are two types of art person, and the afterlife is a dividing idea of whether art's sacrificial Christ-like MEANING have intrinsic value/spiritual uplift to a culture, or whether it's just a story told for comfort against a great yawning cold. I.e. What you see in the shadows. An inkblot.

Night at the Museum would show that, at least culturally, we believe in some form of afterlife. Ben Stiller gesticulates. 

Jürgen Klauke at Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman

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The luggage scanner was more free of political baggage in the 80s. Sorting the internals of an object- it's a metaphor for interpretation, understanding, for meaning. But as Heji Shin has shown, the internal can be as useless as the face of God, Kanye. It's all visage, mirage, inkblot. Giving the inkblot a shape at least relieves the viewer full culpability to meaning. The artist shares in the guilt of creation. This is small kindness.

See too: Heji Shin at Reena Spaulings, Heji Shin at MEGA Foundation

The inkblot has a shape - there is interpretation to be had - we recognize patterns in cultural noise. We are tasked with naming the forms. Naming the forms is its own type of sculpture, a chisel in viewer's hand, what do you see in the marbling. The artist awaiting his sculpture of your making. Tell him what it means. 

Group show at Astrup Fearnley Museet

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You could say it's an "everything but the kitchen sink" exhibition except there's actually multiple kitchen sinks. Which the PR is exemplar of the mythic language crowning art in which art can hold a seemingly endless paradoxical traits, until art can seemingly do anything, represent anything, timely timeless, individual, universal, and back again. A magical property of being in the eye of the beholder, an inkblot. And so one would like for a straightforward list of what exactly art cannot do, that is the art exhibition we need. 

Julien Bismuth at Parisa Kind

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The PR would have you believe that Bismuth is painting faces into the inkblot patterns, adding a layer of personal subjectivity that we could construe as "meaning" rather than arbitrary symmetries. The symmetry we've all but been proven to find attractive and alluring and thus their inscutability matters none, we are attracted to something that can never provide the release of information instead only decoration. And while there may be information encoded in the whorls a fingerprint can only be identified, it cannot tell you anything about its finger, this is a only a lure, to design a blankness we desire. A serviceable PR.

Sam Falls at moCa Cleveland

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"You know what the market has shown every collector wants walled? Abstraction, and so art has become a giant machine mining sources of abstraction. ... Abstraction is the inkblot that acts like silver, that acts like mirrors, to place whatever you want to see in it. And we keep digging mirrors. 

"The point is, the production is product. The machine you create to create. This replaces meaning. The machine does. No one knows why Pollock dripped anymore, that knowledge is lost. What is important is that he created a machine that dripped. 

"The industrialization of aura through reference-shredded-process." "You put the referent forest in the shredder to make a puzzle appear. Which looks like a painting. Gives the PR something to talk about."

"And so they are like sunsets, both the near endless regurgitations of saccharine accident, cliche. Incidental returns of arbitrary conditions, completely unique and endlessly the same. A triple-point of beauty, arbitrariness, non-meaning. And perhaps meaning, our affection for the blushes, only appears as ward against inversion: If even one stupid sunset doesn't matter, nothing matters. Our fear."

"...any sufficiently complex sidewalk is indistinguishable from art."

"PeaRoeFoam"

A candle that smells like rain. A wine that remembers its year, can taste the vintage, the sticks, the horse shit. Not non-objective, just non-objectionable, the highest object of art today. 

Takako Yamaguchi at Ramiken Crucible

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Setting aside the Domenico Gnoli question for the present, there is something continuously robust in the breast of your facade. Blank and interpretable. Art fount. We turn identity into inkblot. 

Till Megerle at Christian Andersen

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Megerle's earlier drawings with all their provisionality, like comic book schematics for inkblot architecture, retain some of that previous ambiguity here: the amorphous bulbs of lumpen potato people, forms of soft confusion, the graphic line replaced here with corpulence, a dumbness that flatters them, doubt as to what is taking place in them, uncertainty opens as possibility: art's usual interest in opacity replaced with a direct mystery.


See too: Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque,

Trisha Donnelly at Galerie Buchholz

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Donnelly's game is plain, obvious. The detractors points clear: it's mysterioized, basic obfuscation as easy enigma. And the art, just skylines turned, reflected, solarized, whatever. CAWD could label them another example of inkblot art. (They are.) But despite, there still remains. And it is this affective quality despite, that becomes their carapace. Attempting to tell the detractors the photograph looks like deep sea evil, rapture, and that despite the rudimentary workings there's something occasionally affective. Despite. Think Nairy Baghramian uncanny lumpen, her photos of clouds. Or Michael E Smith's cancerous suggestions. It is this ability of Donnelly to separate and divide and make evil our inability to share feelings, to see christ (or not) in the photograph. The innocent question of "what you see" in the cloud becomes apprehensive. Yes the game is dumb, plain, obvious, the quality is despite. 

Past: Marie Angeletti

"exacerbating all the annoyances of images today, Angeletti's are always claustrophobically opaque, too close, dim. Not quite sure Angeletti has ever shown in a completely lit space..."

"which, in an era of almost total fuck-all of images our cognition is molested by daily, could make an art practice mirroring such seem a brutal finger but at some point we have to be trained for this, we could attempt to make sense of, it all, if we wanted to start lifting."

"The Rorschach inkblot is the ultimate symbol of art. It is exactly what we now demand: an interpretable stain, an endlessly inscrutable fount for "meaning" generation."


see too: Marie Angeletti at Atlantis, Marie Angeletti at Beach Office, Marie Angeletti at Édouard Montassut

Cudelice Brazelton IV at Murmurs, Los Angeles

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Maybe its nostalgia for late aught's unmonumentality, for Donnelly mystery, for E. Smith estrangement, for that single image of Hammons' little radio on top a brick or whatever, or maybe this is finally just art that's hard to parse again. Not even knowing what you're looking at type enjoyment. In the last ten years art has become appallingly clear. Instead this more like "The rocking chair I project from the two elegant bones still in contact with the real is not the same as the one in your head." Searing your brand into the wall, an amorphous inkblot, but an amorphous that's more, already gone. For Donnelly, E. Smith, for that little radio it is less about the object more about altering the air. Book title: Arts of Suspicion. 

see too: Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center

Heather Guertin at JDJ

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The static noise, floating through low reception airwaves, the bad television of painting history. It arrives jumbled, confused, i.e. the "What we think we see is a creation of our mind’s eye." In other words, an inkblot.

see too: Heather Guertin at Brennan & Griffin 

Joseph Olisaemeka at Derek Eller Gallery

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An interesting tactic: painting the farm "despite having little to no knowledge of farming ecosystems."  Painting what you don't know, you can only paint the preconceived cultural idea, your own expectations. This sounds like a criticism but it's the opposite: this is plein air myth. There's a depth. Like von Wulffen, history roils up from behind. Like, history bruises the present moment. The big looming past. A past in the shadows. Haunts. Not present in the main narrative. The foreground is today bright and hard to see past. Built into the effect of how we paint today. An interest in the depth of the inkblot.

See too: Amelie von Wulffen,  forgetful surrealism

Matthew Angelo Harrison at MIT List Visual Arts Center

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Compositionalization, as an artistic strategy, might have born out a Broodthaers' insight that "the arrangements of display [were] credence to meaning, institutional or otherwise." Highlighting museum display absurdity, a department of eagles. Oddly meaning still worked, stupidly. The meaning was in the display's pedagogical function, implicitly stating "meaning, here, now." Somewhere along the trickle of this history things got confused and now press releases are written now where objects once again "speak of" histories or "examine" the great big. But its a function of display, of compositionalization, of rearranging signs in picasso-like forms, until an inkblot appears in the sandbox of culture, art, where we move playthings around to feel control over them, wizards of a fantastical land, us. 

Adam Pendleton at MUMOK

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Pendleton's work is supposed to look like photocopied art history, a zine of bricolage referent, and in this repetition we are told is some new space that "renews the instability of discourse and identity" or "refashions history into something that opens out into the new." But this new space that art continuously opens always seem to be more trophy abstraction.

 

You know what the market has shown every collector wants walled? Abstraction, and so art has become a giant machine mining sources of abstraction. And the endless ironizing of abstract legacies with its remaking in different modes (fire extinguisher, silvering, abjection, food photography) ostensibly acts as critique. Pollock was just spurting cum, symbolically accredited decoration, abjection whatever; the critique fails to, despite 40 years of it, functionally do anything. It's like battling a ghost with a longsword. Abstraction is the inkblot that acts like silver, that acts like mirrors, to place whatever you want to see in it. And we keep digging mirrors.

 

see too: Lisa Holzer at Kunstverein München

“Work Hard” at Swiss Institute

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"A group of civic-minded Swiss, established businessmen in the city, came together to assist their newly arrived countrymen with advice, jobs and money. In 1846, ninety-six supporting members formally organized as Swiss Benevolent Society of New York to carry on what they had started."

The Swiss Benevolent Society, still around today, eventually gave original housing to the Swiss Institute, made a home for them in their building for the elderly and indigent, the poor and needy, and therefor artists too, the SI's goal seeming artistically mirrored, giving their countrymen a leg up, a strictly Swiss affair, before being nerfed to today's PR: "provid[ing] a significant forum for contemporary cultural dialogue between Europe and the United States" paid for by mostly Swiss government and businesses - as well as contributions from a few American galleries who of course have artistic overlap, as is the case with Carron and 3 of the galleries providing him solo shows in the last years (though Carron already had a solo at SI in 2006), nothing new to the artworld's corporation/institution symbiosis - to supply and sustain a bastion of "European culture" in the heart of it, corporate art culture. "Dialogue" having become a sort of meaningless PR inkblot whose shape amorphous reflects and is culled by whatever the reader's personal investment, a Rorschach if there ever was one. The mildly conspiratorial air surrounding the Institute and always in vogue curators lay in the difficulty ascertaining where exactly the cart lies in relation to these hottly trotting artists often already appearing to be riding trains to market, questions of who delivering who.

Transcription of an 1862 benevolent meeting's minutes seem fitting:

Four applicants were sent to the Interior.

Three applicants were sent to Europe.

Seventeen and a half tons of coal have been given to 35 applicants.

Three thousand seven hundred and twenty pounds of bread have been distributed.

Nine applicants have received board and lodging.

No word on how many artists distributed.

see too : Chris Ofili at New Museum , Stefan Tcherepnin at Freedman Fitzpatrick

Reina Sugihara at Misako & Rosen

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A deployed ability to resemble. Allude. Hint. Vaguely suggest. This makes an inkblot.  I see a nightmarish tide pool with deep crabs and horror. You see Arthur Dove and your mother. A dark pool for a viewer's reflection. A John Marin watercolor, a corpse of something expensive. 

"But Dohi's resemble, recall unplaceable things, which is our politics now. Resemblance was dirty back then, we wanted purity in forms, because clouded abstraction led to impure thoughts. Why do we desire allusive formalism now? Fecteau, Baghramian, Balema, Nagle, et al. Is still a latent surrealism? The shifting space of ambiguous 'clouds' saying that one looks like a rabbit but never knowing it."

Suggestions: Vincent Fecteau at greengrassi, Vincent Fecteau at Misako & Rosen, Lui Shtini at Kate Werble, Ron Nagle at Modern Art, Nairy Baghramian at Walker Art Center?, Nairy Baghramian at Museo Tamayo, Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman Larry Poons at Michael Jon & Alan, Lucy Bull at High Art, Olga Balema at High Art, Olga Balema at High Art (2)

Luchita Hurtado at Hauser & Wirth

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The blue chip gallery unearthed a resurgent dead artists' pleasant and inoffensive abstraction? The trope is a cliche beyond. And the metaphor here is overpowering. You can say "I am" so long as it is in the vernacular of the institutions in power, so long as your language is abstracted into wallpaper, into gentle background, affirmative noise for the collector. Hurtado might be a great painter and this is made moot by gallery. It has nothing to do with the painter and everything to do with institutions who helm our ship's navigation relentlessly toward this inkblot goal. Mladen Stilinovic: "an artist you cannot speak english is no artist." But he had it wrong. The point is not to speak. The point is to make yourself abstract enough it doesn't matter.