Gili Tal at Cabinet

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the question of what outside your window could be less interesting than this. You draw the shade on the world just to be mocked by this, a curtain that [shows your banality back to you.] won't let you escape banality. If the photos are by no means good, would it not be fault of the world they depict? It is your city that is ugly, and you should be forced to buy one of these as reminder that your castle not separate from. This mindset allowed for the suburbs, its devolution into ugliness, people moved in personalized containers, personal vehicles in trajectories to their big boxes sheltered, their home, their work, moved in submarines of personalized climate, protected in white walled towers. Curtains are a weak force against the world that these posit perhaps someday someone will invent something to break glass, and the world will flood in.


Modern Gothic is a mode or genre prevalent in Contemporary Art from the early 21st century to this day. Characteristics of Modern Gothic include the presence of banal, irrational, and transgressive thoughts, desires, and impulses; grotesque settings; dark humor, and an overall angst-ridden sense of alienation. While related to the Southern Gothic tradition, Modern Gothic is uniquely rooted in contemporary Capitalism's tensions and aberrations. During the 21st century, the everywhere-nowhere setting of today's post-industrial cities became “the principal region of Modern Gothic” in art. The Modern Gothic brings to light the extent to which the idyllic vision of the progressive, collectivized City rests on massive repressions of the region’s historical realities: capitalism, class, and patriarchy. Modern Gothic texts also mark a Marxist return of the alienated: the region’s historical realities take concrete forms in the city's banality of power structures that highlight all that has been unsaid in the official version of Modern history. Because of its dark and everyday subject matter, literary scholars and critics initially sought to discredit the gothic on a national level.


Modern Gothic: Morag Keil at Project Native Informant, Georgie Nettell at Lars Friedrich, Georgie Nettell at Reena Spaulings, Gili Tal at Jenny’s, Will Benedict at Overduin & Co., Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co.

Georgie Nettell at Project Native Informant

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>>>Modern Gothic

This is an example of the Modern Gothic.

The strategy: employ, display, the depressing methods of our late-stage-nightmare. A celebration you nor anyone will enjoy - it's in the title. The high five of office pizza parties, the coal black drudgery of corporatized fun. What does it mean to give out what you know no one wants. The Modern Gothic can't be mistaken as art, won't provide that relief. The Modern Gothic only redoubles the banality. The John Knight quote: "It’s the primary lexicon for substantiating neoliberalism. It’s the off-the-shelf language of hegemony." We all know we hate this, why does it exist, why can't we stop it, this balloon party to capitalism.

This "repackaged and repurposed disobedience" with "a raw print speed of more than 12,000 square feet per hour." MASS MARKET HOPE. MASS MARKET CRITIQUE. Like the iconic Fairey poster quickly depleting its utopic optimism, now appearing ironic gravestone. A ballon party to the corruption of desire for political agency. Replacing it with the politically negligent. The strategy of corrupting critique, corrupting our political language, ruins our ability to form political response. If you fuck up language, the rational, enough it destroys the ability to speak, to think. Enough of this causes the "learned helplessness in rats."

Harry Gould Harvey IV at Bureau

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Not sure what multiplier of neo-neo-gothic we're on. As early as 2001 artists already mocked the gothic vacancy with felted craft projects of black metal's "Norwegian Romanticism" or New Gothic, Southern Gothic, before the "Digital Gothic" Modern Gothic- etc. - etc. People want the Gothic. Want the look. We reclaim it like wood. The above sculptures claimed from a Gilded Age Gothic Revival mansion. Wealthy 19th century Americans who "admired the estates of the European nobility" and saw themselves as nouveau-nobility, wanted it, recreated it. Reflected and distorted enough times, the gothic becomes a signifier without origin. Which like neoclassicism whose attempt to affect stateliness becomes McMansion Hell, the gothic becomes the safety scissors of edge. The affect of brooding power. "language that was once living and ephemeral turns from undulating patterns and waves of frequency into physical declarations that simultaneously attempt to solve social ills while imposing structural violence on those who may be marginalized."

Attached to real history to add some new bells, whistles, lockets, an affect on an affect. A look. A whole history of burning architecture to be dark and look cool. 

...an anachronism, an implicit nostalgia for the past's future, rather than our own. What the Victorians had imagined as horror, pools of blood and pendulum cuts, is far more genteel than what is our current madness. This is the pleasure-saftey of genre, it has rules.

For more conceptual wood: Venice 2019, Danh Vo, & at kurimanzutto

Yasutaka Kojima at Yuka Tsuruno Gallery

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attempt to give these nonspaces some crown of silver attention, preservation. Not the nihilistic irony of Smithson's New Jersey "monuments" nor the dislocation of internet trend's "liminal spaces." The above attempt nobility, resurrection even. The streets are even cleaned, lacking the usual detritus in sleeping corners (a single remaining cigarette butt is in right angle alignment) nary a wet newspaper or tattered bag and wondering if Kojima sweeps before, or if they're photoshop sparkled. The desire is the same. Many artists trying to deal with these spatial leftovers and Kojima seems interested in remembering it fondly. At the other end, in hell, there's the trend for "Modern Gothic" exacerbating the pain. Merely a difference of temperament. The point is there's an anxiety for everyone.

See too: Modern Gothic

Contemporary Art Writing Quarterly: Modern Gothic

It is our pleasure to announce the release our first Contemporary Art Writing Quarterly archive documenting the trend of Modern Gothic.

The archive includes 8 artists: 14 exhibitions 2014 to 2020. Please enjoy the archive and look forward to the next Quarterly release coming this spring.

Lucie Stahl at Queer Thoughts

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Stahl's PR placing in it, in the lineage of a romanticism, darkly what we have come to. No longer the romantic era representing ourselves as fathomless depths, standing in front of nature's crashing; we are now better feared as plumbing: oils, flows, pumps, fluids directed, misunderstood as monsters. The human body is indistinguishable from any sufficiently complex sewer. And while the gothic has had a resurgence in style, [see: Digitalat Centre d’Art Contemporain La Synagogue Delme] there is an undercurrent of a few who find gothic horror in mere reflection of the world. [see: Morag Keil, Georgie Nettell, Gili Tal, Will Benedict, Merlin Carpenter] This is our modern not southern gothic. A world already dripping black nightmare, that we pump from the earth, have constructed our world out of; Stahl:"the fluid fruit of their labor allows us to express the feeling we got used to calling freedom."  to which Henning Bohl states earlier: "Lucie Stahl has become the oil." That this all's apparent freedom may have only just come to feel like. A product pipe-capable. Art as fluids, pipes, same as any other product. We all are forced to become fluid, make a product for channels, be pumped. Morose in banality, yes.

See too: “Digital Gothic” at Centre d’Art Contemporain La Synagogue Delme, Quintessa Matranga at Freddy, Gili Tal at Cabinet, Morag Keil at Project Native Informant, Georgie Nettell at Lars Friedrich, Georgie Nettell at Reena Spaulings, Gili Tal at Jenny’s, Will Benedict at Overduin & Co., Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co.

Contemporary Art Writing Quarterly

In case you’d like to spend a while absorbed in anything other than listless documentation of art, you might like to visit Contemporary Art Writing Quarterly, where we publish deeper, uh, "expanses" on art. Pick your essay below:

Yellowing Conceptual Art

Material Porn 

Choose your own Intestinal Adventure

Violence Against Faces

The Model

Modern Gothic

CAWD on Fetish (Featured on CAD!)

Denny's Fast Food Criticism

Interview in SPIKE
Find more in our Office Notebook

Rose Marcus at Night Gallery

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The world is ugly if you don't compose it. Like being forced to actually look at the decor in a Starbucks, like looking out a Starbucks window into this mess. Forced to look through all the glass of the world. Which more and more is covered in corporate design. Like, imagine adding racing stripes to a tropical aquarium. Unlike bad painting, bad photographs are unbearable. The mass of undigested photography sitting on phones, in hard-drives. If it takes a talented photographer to makes the world look beautiful, wouldn't that say a lot about the world?


Modern Gothic. See too: Gili Tal at Cabinet

Nora Turato at Sprüth Magers

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What Nauman did for neon, Turato does for motivational posters, bus adverts. The contemporary illuminate manuscript to nonsensical ... sadness? - that empty pang after finding yourself having read the billboard before even knowing you were reading the billboard. Your brain wants to "make sense" of its surroundings, and you read it for clues, end up reading the billboard that has commandeered your evolutionary wiring to sell you a half naked woman in socks. It's not your fault you read it, not your fault it barely makes sense. You were not intended for spaces like these. Nothing is rational in art or advertising, for both there is only that same distending space that creates a void, a meaning that must be filled, consumerist or otherwise. 

Perhaps this is part of our Modern Gothic.


See too: Matt Keegan, Kay Rosen at Grazer Kunstverein, Hanne Lippard & Nora Turato at Metro Pictures, Gene Beery at Shoot the Lobster, Karl Holmqvist at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, John Giorno at Almine Rech, Nora Turato at LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS, Nora Turato at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein

Nora Turato at Sprüth Magers

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Scream! Yell! Weeee! Bang, bang, bang the pots of language! Feel the emptiness. Feel hollow in indiscriminate wailing. A child in a grocery store deprived, is, yes, this is the sound of our world, adverts, attention, corporation. You have described our terror, armed the artist with these weapons of mass language... now what? This is the point where I turn, I'm not interested in being made numb anymore, in this classic form of desensitization. It was fun for a little while. Now it just gets bigger? The arms race was already won, we have demilitarization programs in place. The artist need not a bigger billboard to prove large emptiness. 

See too: Desensitization, Modern Gothic, Nora Turato