John Baldessari at Sprüth Magers

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The text's irrelation performs the poetic fissure lamely, mechanically, i.e. Baldessari's engineered breakage of logical closure, conclusion. The space we rush to fill with guesses, the INTERPRETATION of art, that interminable precursor to MEANING. The poetic is the process for staging these interpretive fissures, founts for guessing, which Baldessari's plain creation of feels like a corpse made to dance. That dullness feels a point.


Also these look a lot like Vern Blosum at Kunsthalle Bern and see too: John Baldessari at Marian Goodman

Passed: John Baldessari

"Baldessari's career spent on a mockery of art's formal givens, puppeteering its dumbified literal versions and removing the protective aura of seriousness so a skepticism could seep into it cracks, paving the way for today's boorish Pop conceptualism.

"Here, dissonant image/text relations leaves a viewer floundering to connect the basic formality of art: that the text relate. That we still find this Baldessarian gimmick relevant 800 exhibitions later, sometimes even comically worth it, shows how strong this base impulse is ingrained."

"The text's irrelation performs the poetic fissure lamely, mechanically, i.e. Baldessari's engineered breakage of logical closure, conclusion. The space we rush to fill with guesses, the INTERPRETATION of art, that interminable precursor to MEANING. The poetic is the process for staging these interpretive fissures, founts for guessing, which Baldessari's plain creation of feels like a corpse made to dance. That dullness feels a point."


Click here for full John Baldessari at Marian Goodman, John Baldessari at Sprüth Magers

Frances Stark at greengrassi

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Country and date of US coups looming over pop songs from that year. The level of frission between the two varies.* Grand Funk Railroad's 1973 hit is pretty apt: "We're an American band / We're comin' to your town / We'll help you party it down." Others are less on the nose. The discrepancy provides the interpretability, that poetic fissure. The internal disjuncture on a semantic completion, allowing that sort of blank state that you dear viewer get to ink your own adventure into, wall text or otherwise.  This would be a much less interesting if Stark hadn't for a long time now been investing in bedroom posters as self-construction, adolescent in the good sense. The point isn't being political but in construction oneself as political.


see too: John Baldessari at Sprüth Magers

Naoki Sutter-Shudo at Bodega

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The PR's meter relates them to sun - "Sunshine made physical" - and not that dark shameful interior - the abyssal logs we pass like intestinal ropes, attaching us our immanence. The difference between what something is and what something represents. They are but sticks. Sunshine made physical. But oiled with elbow grease. Which makes them sensitive. Opens pores for interpretation. The break in between what something is and what something suggests: a function, poetic fissure. Tea leaves, turds, or sticks, when placed against porcelain, it's open. Suggestive and, more importantly, moistened.

See too: Yuji Agematsu at Lulu, Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi, Naoki Sutter-Shudo at Bodega

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

On Kawara at the Guggenheim

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The poetic in art is the sign's inability to complete its connection, conclude.  The painting's dates point to a specificity that immediately is lost in largess and unknown, a fissure, in the inability to circumscribe a date's entirety, or one man's marking of it. This distending distance between the signifier (the date) and its lost signified (the entirety of a day) is its affective pathos. The weight of this. Kawara's index hypothesizes its accumulation of time and date, one million years, eyeing a library of Babelinian proportions, to feel small in front of this vast empty expanse, sublimely romantic. The desire of viewers to find dates to which they can link "significance" eases the longing for the sign to conclude, to fill with meaning.  Like July 20, 1969, the moon landing's meaninglessness given to mean everything, the largest painting to date.


Trevor Paglen at Metro Pictures, John Baldessari at Marian Goodman, Alejandro Cesarco at Midway Contemporary Art, Mitchell Syrop at Croy Nielsen & Glenn Ligon at Regen Projects, Jason Dodge at Franco Noero , Sean Raspet at Jessica Silverman , Simon Starling at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

Juha Pekka Matias Laakkonen at Corvi-Mora

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Reverence is intoned by vast space, emptiness. Used as moral in cathedrals and power by banks we are made to feel small and thus invest ourselves in its offering. People in large open settings show preference first for seating along the edges, backs against walls, or within small alcoves, whereas seating in the center feels vulnerable. In this way Architecture forces an experience of self-awareness, a shiver of our own mortality. The poetic is often reducible to connections within a system of signifiers that ultimately fail to coalesce - or produce a fissure within - a logical statement, a lapse sort of a lot like the architectural expanse. But then the material conditions of an artist placing his head where the log was, into the gap.

Jesse Stecklow at Chicken Coop Contemporary & Adrian Piper at Hamburger Bahnhof

Jesse Stecklow at Chicken Coop Contemporary
Adrian Piper at Hamburger Bahnhof

Hypertrophied conceptual art still flexing instructionals retains, at heart, an interest in poetics, the fissure in semantic conclusion, the discrepancy in language's overt clarity and concern for bureaucratic legalese and recipization standing in for that object, even the most bureaucratic language fails and is semantically open, poetic. Information is pleasurable, activating our brain's dopamine reward system, addictive, we consume it without need for it, lack of place to use it just silver information reflecting its space, "consciousness and experience can not be described in materialist terms" in Stecklow's terms. Piper's contractual better world exchanges real world ethics with paper versions, "each individual voluntarily commits to align his or her future deeds with ethical principles such as honesty and reliability. ... They form a community of people who are likely to be trustworthy in the future." Which like nuclear disarmament leaves one community at a disadvantage, obligatory trustworthiness advantageous to others lacking it, the trustworthy lose the tools maintaining MAD strategies pleasant standoff, lies at the ready, trying to replace the grey world with black and white text never quite as functional.