Best MN Exhibition

Patricia Esquivias - Reads Like the Paper - Midway Contemporary Art

Floating in understated, lingering quietly before disappearing back to Europe, Esquivas anachronistically landed, and in hindsight of NY Moment’s artistic schizophrenia over the digital vacuum, the exhibition had already, in its precocious know-too-muchness had jumped past the NYmoment’s digio-existential crises and instead pre-predicted nostalgia existing with its present, doubling its moment to feel the it, as if two moments could exist concurrently, knowing, nostalgia is not the photo in your hand but your hand holding the photo, your face in front of the screen’s screen.

Bjarnne Melgaard’s Protest Banners

http://karmakarma.org/private/18154099069/tumblr_lzvddqsVie1qiyeuk

3 Worst

Ai Weiwei

Emptying out politics in service to spectacle, Ai showed how a branding of “Political” could shortcut/circuit a substitution of attention exchangeable for action. Using the “poetics” of art to fill in for understanding, Ai made politics an aggressively manufactured psuedo-conflict in exchange for hyper-visibility: Ai WeiWei need say nothing, only perfom “politically.” The fact that he “did nothing wrong” and was still jailed, taken by the media as a sign of China’s brutism, was never considered as a criticism that the man “did nothing.” Nor did anyone. Discussion is reduced to “AI Weiwei is in jail: The situation must be bad.” The Manipulation of being just annoying enough to get a reaction, but dare not enough to get beheaded; garnering the artworld’s incapable attention, given to hyperbolic rhetoric as our savior. AgitPropaganda. Meanwhile real politics lacks visibility, flounders. Assuaging the artworld by thinking their support for Ai somehow condones their a-politic and lack so long as they support him. Brand.

Can’t wait to see what he does when he takes over Alcatraz in 2014.

Jerry Saltz’s loyal following constantly up in arms.

Long since voluntarily removed himself as a viable source of even what people call “accessible criticism,” the unbelievability of Saltz’s eternal return to people still find themselves reacting to something sensationalist Jerry Saltz says or does achieved apogee this year: skepticism finally transferring to the people who still find Saltz’s endless misunderstanding of the problem a problem.  

The Dissapointment of the Claes Oldenburg Show.

For reasons vaporous, vague press perfume and breaths of mouths, the show rode a wave of favorable feeling to its landlocked US setting setting expectations high.

The excitement of “seeing it in person,” gave way to the realization that the most interesting of came straight from the Walker's collection, and which if you'd been paying attention the show felt oddly, perhaps unnecessarily, like a rerun. Save for THE STORE, whose highly revered (never-see-em-again) objects seemed, in their store-less display, glitteringly sad.  More dead butterfly catalog than exhibition the show did little to reevaluate the standing of artist who has remained firmly in high standing. If anything the artist’s repeated insistence on sad-dad fifties innuendo, and ogled breasts made Oldenburg’s endless commodic punnery seem even if prescient, horribly outdated. The sly latent sexuality of most of the best objects was finally rammed dryly to bed by drawings with no question of what the spoon digging gratingly into the fertile crescent really stood for. It’s a dick.

Like an uncle nostalgic for when his slightly misogynistic dick jokes were still culturally acceptable, or even funny, the show felt uncomfortably unradical, and definitely not of this moment.  

Runner Up:  The fact that Absolut Vodka caught onto the fact that art implies cultural/symbolic cred-bling before rappers did.  Shame on rappers.

Rise of the new SuperCools

From the first moment of Mathew’s first Press Release it was apparent the gallery was birthed fully formed as the coolest space. Its terseness a list of social credibility, the PR contained an implicit knowing of its social capital in stocks enough to be exchanged for immediate visibility. It would have attention. Its mere listing of artist-names would have been enough. The fluff about nextdoorness and dj/artist/curator trichotomy in hindsight seem redundant if not cloying. At the time, probably, it seemed pertinent.  Its first show was immediately picked up by ContArtDaily.1

1 for those surely wondering about the seemingly over-importance placed on CAD. In Forrest Nash’s talk at Midway, a statement was made that in order to remove subjective choice from its vetting process the CAD “group” would want possible galleries to have established themselves as being part of the “conversation.” There would be no outside. CAD would choose what mattered by seeing first who could make things matter. CAD remains a great allegorical evidence of how things gain real visibility, when visibility is easily some form of capital.

Exporting Berlin socio-capital to cities throughout the globe was easy, remaining connected to the artworld made flat.

FreedmanFitzpatrick in CA. In Frankfurt, Neue Alte Brücke, operating cooly for a long time before Dr. Will Benedict became their first CAD show, Chez Valentin in Pari.... etc etc.... Galleries began franchising Stadeschule vetted Berlin cool all over the map, greedy for their moment.  (  “Neue Alte Brücke and Real Fine Arts” at Valentin (for which no listing who made what because that would be besides the point.)) Pro Choice Vienna, etc etc. et al.

Herr Krebber had played it for laughts in 2011. In his vampirism of the blogs which mocked him, taunting them with goosey paintings (neutering their spite), He at the same time also exhibited paintings (stolen from a princess) at these blogs’ author’s gallery, at Real Fine Arts in Brooklyn - artists showing there members of Jerry Magoo such as Sam Pulitzer who was, of course, RealFineArt’s next show - Dr. Krebber put Real Fine Arts literally on the Map: Becoming its first exhibition hosted on Contemporary Art Daily, who, RFA, in a completion of the ouroboric vampirism mirrored CAD’s site as their documentation for King Krabber’s show.  Krebber proving the same way the princess’s paintings were only valuable due to her princessness... etc. etc. etc.   It was Michael Smith’s ITEA groupshow slogan ““Elevation through Association” come to life without irony and with all the dead seriousness of one who is really willing to suck blood.  What was so transparently cloying to Smith it could only be mocked, was to Krebber so explicitly obviously working it could only be exploited.

Will Benedict and later his better half seemed the key, getting passed around like the party’s drugged body asking for it and loving every minute of it, pants off party on, and CAD the lascivious choiceless detective whose well attended spotlight shone partiers like deer very happily in the headlights as they all incestously diddled each other under the penumbra of ghastly light.

Seeing Benedict in 2011@Renwick/Leslie Fritz show, the then critique of, “How contemporarily perfect and boring,” had missed the point. It was instead hot potatoes for all this great gravy.  

FreedmanFitzpatrick opened with two group shows. First “Hi from California,” speaking to the outside, that while California was their home (and what a cool one at that) they were speaking to everyone else watching.  That their second group show stole a little more directly from the Berlin scene mixed with a little more LA, maybe a sign of having played it a little too cool.  At this point Lucie Stahl easier to get for the guest appearance than Will Benedict, Benedict having long since entered middle age.

Milwaukee/Chicagoans had been playing on for years. The slow rise of the Suburban legend, with its Luc Tuymans mythos. But here on Berlin amphetamines and phantasmagoria of instant vis and credibility. Word of mouth was steampunk, the critic, once the harbinger of visibility, totally cut out by CAD. A democratization by way of glistening effeciency, in which colossal networks trumped the coal-fired writer or the laughably still getting-on-a-plane-for-studio-visits gallerist.  The privilege of those having traveled New York was mocked by their returning home to see doubled on the screen the shows they had just paid a 300 dollar ticket to see.

Get yrself a scene and get yrself another one.

Ceccaldi siblings, Genoveva Filipovic, Anne Imhof, Veit Laurent Kurz, Julien Nguyen, Mark von Schlegell, Eric Sidner, Taocheng Wang, Max Brand, Karl Holmqvist, Matheiu Malouf, Yngve Holen, Lena Henke, Heji Shin, Heike-Karin Foell,  Etc. etc. etc. etc.. et al. et al.....

End of The autonomus mysterio object, The New Directness

Mark Lecky's proposal for an exhibition, The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things.

our Top 5 posts of 2013

THE WHIPPINGS CONTINUE UNTIL MORALS IMPROVE

“So there is, obviously, a problem.”

THE TC TRILOGY PART II  

“You  hear it all the time, ever present, broadcast on NPR every so often, people talking about how great the art scene in the TC is.”

REVIEW JUSTIN SCHLEPP - DAVID PETERSEN GALLERY

“The drawing’s tension exists in abutting the vacuum of architectural rendering's lifeless code against imaginations breath; skeptical over imagination's "excessive valuation:" that sensitivity without rigor breeds the horror of poorly painted flowers.”

REVIEW JOE SMITH - DAVID PETERSEN GALLERY

“This work is not after viscera, but viscera as a signifier, held at the distance of interpretation, behind glass, as if for want of study.”

The whipping continues until moral improves.

Considering the reviewing of Art Exhibitions in Minneapolis through the lens of the Minnesota Biennial Reviews.


 

Quote:

-Abbe 2010 ("Low Value Biennial")

Quote:

- Abbe 2013 (“Minnesota Biennial features 38 state artists at Soap Factory in Minneapolis”)

Quote:

-Schouweiler 2013 (“Biennial Fail: Making it Make Sense”)

Quote:

-Jay Gabler 2012 (“Does Minnesota Need a Biennial?”)

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"A preview tour suggested that the show, however appealing, is short on theory and vague about values, a loaded term that seems irrelevant in this context. If biography and interests can be inferred from art, the 16 seem to be curious about assorted media, fascinated by fragments, tentative, self-absorbed and obsessed with arty in-jokes. Their aesthetic is loose, open-ended and anything goes. Ranging in age from early 20s to mid 50s, the show's artists paint, sculpt, take photos, build stuff and do video. As a sample of Minnesota art at the moment, this is dismayingly vacuous and inbred stuff. The "value" conveyed, if any, is a vague, amorphous anomie."

-Abbe 2010

"Still, this particular partnership makes for an interesting clash of pretension and openness – something particularly in evidence at the Soap Factory on opening night of ‘, , ,’. On the one hand, a huge number of people showed up, as is usual at the Soap’s events; there was live music and other performances -- it felt like a party. On the other hand, there were no gallery notes on the wall to indicate the titles of the pieces and few entry points for visitors to engage with some of the more highly conceptual pieces if they didn’t know something about the artists beforehand."

"The fact is, this curatorial duo was given an opportunity to curate a biennial in the largest gallery in the Twin Cities, and even paid a modest stipend to do so. Simply to shrug and decide you’re not going to do it may be in keeping with the punk rock mindset of Art of This, but it also feels like a big “fuck you” to the audience."

- Regen 2013 (“Minnesota’s Third Biennial: The Art Stands Alone”)

"With the exception of a pamphlet discreetly placed by the gallery door that maps the show and relates artists and titles, the work stands alone, mute. You can buy a handsomely printed exhibition catalogue for $16; there’s a limited-edition LP for sale as well, featuring the musicians’ contributions. But don’t bother looking in these auxiliary pieces for substantive context or background information."

"There’s little practical difference between radical accessibility and stubborn silence. Openness is not the same thing as invitation. The expressed aim is that , , , be an “exhibiting” that reveals its content and purpose over the two-month run, in repeated gallery visits, engagement with ephemeral performance and music events, and the various panels. But from all available evidence, the curators are simply uninterested in engaging the casual gallery-goer. The show’s a grab bag with little evident intention connecting its constituent parts into anything like a coherent whole."

"Marks and Petersen used to run a high-minded, non-profit, artists-first exhibition space in Minneapolis, called Art of This, which presented work by beguiling but inscrutable artists. Petersen currently runs a commercial gallery of his own with much the same vibe."

-Schouweiler -2013

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"’We wanted to provide some organization but not have it conceived as a “Best of Minnesota” show, so we cast our net wide,’ said Douglas, 38, chief curator at the Rochester Art Center. Stulen, a former associate curator at the Rochester organization, is now project director for Mnartists.org at Walker Art Center. Both are Minnesota natives who wanted to sample ‘a slice of this place and this time,’ as Stulen put it.”

-Abbe 2010

"The artists were corralled for the biennial by John Marks and David Petersen, veteran Minneapolis gallery operators in their mid-30s. As in most biennials, the curators were given free rein to choose artists according to their own criteria. In this case, they were picked as a “representation of the artists we are interested in at the moment,” Marks said in a recent interview."

-Abbe 2013

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“With no narrative thread or overarching motifs to track, the show offers a pleasant amble through the Soap's warehouse, whose raw beauty sometimes dwarfs and sometimes augments the art.''

- Abbe 2010

“These act like liner notes to the show, primarily of interest to those already well-versed in the featured artists’ bios and bodies of work.”

Schouweiler 2013

“I was talking with an artist friend about Abbe’s scathing assessment. She made an apt point, saying: “The curators didn’t have to load the exhibition with intention or narrative, or even any explanation at all. But if [the biennial is really just] a snapshot of current practice, and all Petersen/Marks are doing is showing us that snapshot, then it’s fair game to say it looks like what it is: ‘a bunch of stuff in some room.’”

Schouweiler. 2013

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“Aside from a few promising pieces, the exhibit part of the biennial — which includes periodic performances not reviewed here — is largely a shabby collection of apparently unfinished, unfocused and occasionally sullen detritus.

A few noteworthy pieces rise to attention.”

-abbe 2013

Despite my problems with exhibition as a whole, there are individual pieces that work on their own, despite the flawed structure of the show’s design.

-Regen 2013

Two video works, close to the entrance, rise above the fray.

-Schouweiler 2013

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Abbe:  "Broc Blegen’s nearby sculptural installation of Scrooge McDuck characters based on a 1952 comic about greed and public art seemed to be hilariously topical satire. But I was wrong. I didn’t realize, until told by the curators, that Blegen was merely copying an earlier work by another artist, Allen Ruppersberg. [...] But it was a huge letdown to learn that Blegen’s piece is a third-generation homage to someone else’s creativity."

Schouweiler:   "Broc Blegen’s painstaking re-creation of Allen Ruppersberg’s 2010 conceptual work “Big Trouble” dominates the back gallery. [...] This work, in particular, cries out for some good curatorial context. All but the surface of Blegen’s work is lost on a viewer unfamiliar with the artist’s obsession for collection through re-creation. Without that crucial information, without being privy to the why behind this young artist’s museum-quality knock-offs, even an otherwise attentive viewer will miss out on the nuances..."

Regen: "If you aren’t already familiar with something of the story behind Blegen’s body of work, there’s no way that you’ll be able to understand what he is trying to do. While there is a handout that provides maps of the galleries with basic caption information, I don’t see why there couldn’t be labels or other peripheral materials provided as needed -- just a tiny bit of background, made readily available, to help visitors enter the work."

///////////////

So there is, obviously, a problem.

Whereas, generally, critics (distinct from theorists such as Buchloh, etc.) operate under the guise of insightful tour guide, docents, halfway between public and those private artists, using their art reviewer’s knowledge to help a public who may only stumble once upon a time into the soap factory; here in MN, no such thing happens. The Critic instead stands in as the public, choosing to operate as the “audience's” aggression towards what, the critic believes, they cannot understand, and thus must take a stand against: what the MNcritic believes as public ineptitude, not only condoning it, but nurturing it, letting it atrophy by acting a crutch for “them,” the audience.  The facade created, of acting on behalf of a public without voice, is as an excuse to renege on the critics responsibility to act as neither public nor artist.  If a general public (who is given very little esteem) cannot get it, the MNcritic decides to do no further work.  This is the "common sense" pandering political appeal of GWBush and Sarah Palin that, while comforting, is gluttonous.  It implicitly condescends to the public, infantilising them by acting as Authorial protection from the ostensible asininity, trickery, and scary scary hubris of the MN art world.  Critics in minnesota, reiterate the fear of "not knowing" that is, apparently, amoral; stating to an audience, "it'll be okay, Authority is here to give the bad people just the scolding they deserve."

The stanzaic theme throughout all the reviews is that curators aren't doing enough to make their shows accessible, either due to insider gimmickry, or simple laziness: that the hand has not been extended enough; and that the shows often look like a mere hodge podge of objects in a room because the art is lackluster and insider (never due to the soap factory's stifling backdrop which is unanimously, unconsciously, loved), and the only objects that work are either high-polished (video screens, factory made objects), massive (miles of a substance), or simply quarantine themselves within a space built within the space; none of which of course has anything to do with separating themselves from oppressive soapfactory decorum subsumption.  The problem is the unhelpful curators not explaining it all.

This is not to let Douglas, Stulen, Marks, and Petersen off the hook for whatever; they all could have done everything a lot better.   (Patricia McMeans co-curated the first, 2008, biennial, so it hasn't always been freshly-minted men.  However the 2008 show, as far as I can tell, received no reviews.)  Because All the biennials have totally sucked ass.  They deserve criticism. but the Tsk-Tsking of reviewers who themselves refuse any personal responsibility for the criticism is ridiculous.

To claim that somehow everything is insider year after year, is not only a ridiculous trope, it is willfully ignorant to an extreme. MN is not a big place.  Artists are congenial.   To not know at least 50% of the people on this list by name, before even walking in, is actively not participating in MN's very very small art community.  If you have stumbled into MAEP's 5 times a year exhibitions you should know 12, possibly 13, of this biennial’s names. THAT IS OVER 50% OF THE ARTISTS LISTED ON THE CATALOG’S COVER. Simply by attending one major institutions 5 or so co-exhibitons a year. These people are by no means obscure artists to anyone in the MN art world.

The biggest euphemism about the whole thing, is that no one from the public is actually reading these reviews.  The echo chamber of Art Criticism in MN really consists reviewers talking directly to the curators by means of a ventriloquist dummy.  The reviewers are talking about a insider-ness while claiming to be outside of it, speaking as from or for the public, but who really are just as insider. There is no public, there is only the writer. No one is reading the Biennial reviews except DPetersen and maybe JMarks. These reviews are aimed at them. Talking about this elusive "public" to whom the work is closed is actually simply a scapegoat for a reviewer who refuses to own up to their responsibility as a critic.

The assumption that anyone should be able to pick up a critics notebook, and start writing, is the same as saying that if you can’t explain foreign affairs to Joe the plumber then you are unnecessarily complicating things.  Being fresh off the street is not a credential.  Andy Roony had been playing this shtick since like forever, and the art world smiled.

Yet it wears its ignorance on its sleeve.  "I discovered Art of This in the spring of 2010, a few months before it closed." (Regen)    "Marks and Petersen used to run a high-minded, non-profit, artists-first exhibition [...] which presented work by beguiling but inscrutable artists. Petersen currently runs a commercial gallery of his own with much the same vibe. Both curators are influential fish in our small art pond, respected as benefactors and sharp-eyed talent scouts for up-and-coming Very Serious Artists."   -(Schouweiler)

I would like to ask why very serious artists is capitalized?  It would almost appear to be mocking the idea of an artist taking themselves seriously, a willful anti-pretension that is the height of anti-intellectualism that for Adorno was at the root of fascism.

Justin Schlepp, David Petersen

"[The Counter-paralypse] spends his time in withholding the decisive utterance of his doctrine, concerning it he gives us only examples, seductions, 'appetizers'; the message of his book is the announcement of a forthcoming message: wait a little longer, I will tell you the essential very soon."

"[the Counter-Paralypse] other than that it obviously translates the neurotic fear of failure (like that of a man afraid to jump - which [transferred] to the reader, uttered as the mortal fear of pleasure) points out the vacuum of language: caught in the toils of the meta-book, his book is without subject: its signified is dilatory, incessantly withdrawn further away: only the signifier remains, stretching out of sight, in the book's future."




The drawing’s tension exists in abutting the vacuum of architectural rendering's lifeless code against imaginations breath; skeptical over imagination's "excessive valuation:" that sensitivity without rigor breeds the horror of poorly painted flowers.


Architecture’s schematics are anti-subjective, existing as math's equations: drawings intended to translate ideas and space into code: an image that also acts as instructions. It also jettisons the general contractor’s subjectivity so that (in its ideal world) any one contractor and all contractors are the same, drains them of their subjecthood, as only drones able to set the architect’s thought into stone. The architectural drawing transforms bodies into computers of schematics, into orders, into ordered world. Architecture in this way makes concrete a singular subject onto the real world, denies you freedom through the existence of walls. When Schlepp presses imagination into the grate of clarified transmissable architecture, the object represented bleeds, fracturing itself in the limits of codified architectural space.





For Schlepp, Axonometric perspective (a common architectural rendering method for rendering dimensional objects on a surface) is bent. Instead, a flux of multiple perspectives represented on 2 dimensions. Literalized in the fore in the NE section of the gallery: Drawings of an wrought-iron serif carousel seen from 180 degrees, a black object whose subject suspends itself over the course of its ribs; the section is presided over by a drawing/xerox: an exhumed bookpage’s highlighted passage. The drawing describes a cornice of Rodin’s Gates of Hell in which the gates’s molding, modeled as the wings of an angel, morphs “in a sweep of drapery” into both the body of the doors and also the “serpentine pattern” of the fallen woman (caryatid.) On the same page a Rodin sketch depicting a crossection of molding whose silhouette, according to the books caption mimics “a nude woman,” (next to which Schlepp has placed another collaged-on cross section of what might be molding or what might be something else, but the caption is in italian, saying something about adders, and while Rodin’s sketch looks barely feminine, this collaged on cross section is something else entirely, perhaps screaming clown, perhaps something else) each item pointing at the other in standoff.

The highlights interpret the text, fray its edge and draw a latent thought that multiple subjects can exist within the space of one, embedded within a “sweep” of view, able to morph. The drawing shares its insight with a past artist. The drawing presents a hypothesis for a possiblily to render multiple subjects in the same information: nude, wings, moulding, and serpentine gilded caryatids, can all be contained within the same architecture/object, an instance of architecture as either subjectively holographic or surrealist. It claims an architecture outside the 1 + 1 basis of “form and material = building/object.” Breaks the schematical code in which, even if unrealized, a project drawing’s already contain their perfect conceivable existence. Fault lines form whose fuzzy breath allow “hinges” to be filled with mortar as potential, confusion, gap, breath. A surrealist "architecture" whose form isn't so much at stake but its unconscious construction by a viewer. An architecture whose baroqueness blooms with its capacity to be conceptually modular.

Its barely thereness reinforcing the subjectivity of its and your breath, to not concretize its abstract, “replete with hinges" elusivity. The show at all points risks utter dissolution into its own fog, counterbalanced by moments in drawing of utter specificity.

Its meekness, might be understatement, simple elegance, and somehow reminiscent more of an ampersand than violin. Suspends its object over the course of it ribs, unable to be broken into its constituents, postponed.

The Press Release's Airtight Garage anecdote, the comic of which Schlepp's insistence to know nothing about builds a dead end to segregate itself from biography's mythos, cutting off lines of referential interpretation from which much critiscism/stakes are drawn. (A garage without subject becomes...)

Counter-Paralypse: a big Barthes word for his simple, elegantly articulated concept, framing the show. It describes the refusal of an essentialist aboutness: instead of climax: suspended end, possibly blue balled, an endless deferral of itself into what it would hope as valency's (attractiveness’s) erotic suspension.

"Aboutness" instead withdraws into its own insulated world devoid of static fountains of traditional "signifiers," or reference. Trades them for syntaxes and modularity, drawings whose charts consist only of diagrammatic punctuation (arrows, variable x, braces, asterisks, brackets, parentheses, and arrows) moving more of themselves, that only themselves move things, without thing, only more deferring, endless agency without agent. Thrown into a sea, sink or swim.

In another drawing, disembodied hands, reminiscent of Mickey Mouse's character's hands in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" segment of Fantasia, which cause major hubristic damage.

The drawing's gloves point and move in swirls (& footnoted zig zags) and complete their cycle over a face whose holes for eyes create both a mask before you and yours. The hands conduct with asterisks. The drawing’s caption states "(A) Facial Managerial (Symmetrical/a)," implying a maestro's or possibly marionette's magisterial control over two faces at once.

Next to it: a drawing whose caption reads "(B) Axometrical Managerial (asymmetrical),” and depicts either an exploded view of a house, a house with invisible walls, or a series of rooms attached by rods to a central spinning axis. Below it is a quote attributed to mathematician Paul Erdős: "God I will call the supreme fascist. (You will never win) but the purpose of mathematics is to keep his score as low as possible."

Rebuttal to Painter Painter. Provincial arts writers as angst ridden teenagers in protected parental homes. And a pause for a brief hiatus.

I have many swift arrows in my quiver that speak to the wise, but for the crowd they need interpreters. The skilled poet is one who knows much through natural gift, but those who have learned their art chatter turbulently, vainly.

-Joe Scanlan quoting Pindar 

The Walker is the 900lb gorilla, every critic wants to stab it. So of course it gets terrible reviews - it’s easy. But It doesn’t even matter.

- Some well connected drunk after an opening

I have no idea what is so supremely satisfying to the writer about adding quotes to the beginning of an essay, but let me tell you it is really, really satisfying.

- writer

As Exhibition after exhibition the Walker coughs up irrelevance.

Some are actually bad, some are misunderstood, some are stoned by the philistines, but the thread throughout is that the Walker goes on it’s merry mile-long way.
Feeling oppressed by the continuous import of the dominant voice, receiving it’s eternal wisdom by way of one-way speaker, one is eventually feels the need to speak back, to be heard. “They don't understand,” stakes the writer.
Yet critiscm of the Walker is critque of Empire’s most distant bastion, continuously reinforced by supplies from the gleaming corporate towers of High-Culture proper, our critiques lofted from the corn are limp and meaningless, instead reflected off the high polished tin of the Walkers gleaming cube. We are all weak and powerless to change what's on the menu, the supply line remains rutted.
The arts writers want retribution they cannot have, the audience would surely mock them behind their backs at each and every fool attempt.
Belittled by their powerless critique in the shadow of a juggernaut, writers use it instead as means of reflecting themselves. Meant less as an critical judgment of art, it instead becomes a mere mirror for their own interminable auto-analysis. It exists as a refication of ego, a mastubatory game of narcissistic spectacle, the brain and its erudition. Lifting cerebral weights in front of mirror, we groan. Arts Writers love ourselves and our “ideas” more than art - joined together in an integrated circuit - we watch our magnificence unfold before us. The Walker glimmers with the faces of a thousand writers who use it as their mirror. The collective image of the writer is a person with hand under the table, the one handed typist: Thought and sensuousness joined in circle by mind, screen and hand. Oh what pleasure!
And Masquerade as professionalism.
What is implicit in the Writer’s statement is that like a teenager in his highschool bedroom under the watch of parents, the writer is actually saying: “They don't understand me.”
but,
to attempt a critical takedown of any of the recent plethora of gaspingly boring curatorially non-existant exhibitions with which the Walker has graced us, exhibitions that simply exist as shows of artworks - generic, affectless, anywhere-any-artist shows - would be not only entirely futile but worse: an exposing of the subjective arbitrariness of the reviewer at the exposition of these sprawling generically smooth exhibitions. “The Living Years,” (which is terrible) is an impossibility of critical masturbatory review because there is nothing left to say: It is a giant pointless exhibition with an arbitrary premise, a showcase for nothing more than the Walker’s past exhibition hits now in it’s collection. To reason with something that is so arbitrary, would be to expose one’s own arbitrariness. One cannot get off on this dead play-acting. It would expose the absurdity of the reviewer and reveal his hand under the table grasping a thin member, expose me.

In order to pretend some critical relevance the arts writer must wait for some critical angle, some point to be made, some curators to blame. This is the hyperbolic magnificence of rhetoric, the prismatic loveliness of one’s own intellectual regurgitation spilling onto marble floors.

The reviewer sits in wait to score the critical hit. Reviewers do not waste arrows at the sad juggernaut of the Golem, plodding, maldeveloped, doing its very worst best, (i.e. The Living Years), no arrow could ever hurt it, it is art itself to contend with, we would be forced to stand up before it like parents whose children, our own, we despise for having such sticky chocolate shit on their lips.

thus you sit in wait, for the exposition of some critical hand, for the curators to expose but some minute curatorial thought, and the armor’s missing scale, subjectivity; lay in wait in the low grasses, to release the frighteningly honed arrow from your quiver, to hit that which one has been waiting for, not that which will slay the monster, but that which is going to sting - with rhetorical marvelousness, the climax of having been right. 

So writers lay in wait for some wily dragon to expose, and we fire our arrows mercilessly to make our point heard. Die! Die! Die!, we scream to the ducks whose magnificence we express our admiration for by riddling their bodies with spray, preferably more than their small intestines can handle, to add their stuffed corpses to our walls, a notch to our belts. and self-congratulate. Good for us. Everyone.

Painter Painter, Walker Art Center

“focused survey of emergent developments in abstract painting”

What is continually euphemized throughout the Painter Painter exhibition, throughout its programming, its takeaways, its press; what is continually sublimated into aboutness or conceptual rubric of a ”new” aqueous culturally borderless (!) painting, positing some grand theoretical schema about current painting, i.e. what is totally refrained from saying, is that the show, Painter Painter is another hot young painter show.

The Artworld loves its young hot painters more than candied yams, it collectively fiends for more painters. It’s the only time they can feel good about their libidinal urges. Paul McCarthy gagging down 8 ketchup soaked hot dogs is the collective image of the artworld and its painters. Goya’s “Saturn,” Ed Gein wearing the flesh of women, and a man with his penis exposed underneath the table are all relevant images when it comes to the artworld desire for painters.
We knows this. We can read between the deluge of lines in surrounding ephemera. The dirge. We don’t even have to say it, we can see it for what it is.
What is scary about this irony, this take-me-as-other-than-I-mean, is that it is horribly misleading to a general public. That the public reading the PR surrounding this exhibition are going take it seriously. They are being patronized. They might think this show is about painting. Can you imagine taking this press stuff literally. Go, read it again. It’s not even obfuscated enough to veil its inconsequence.
“Indeed, Painting today increasingly crosses paths with sculpture, poetry, film, design, fashion, music and performance as well as disparate histories of art, craft, and visual culture.”
… [image of me looking dejected]

*

The exhibition, Painter Painter, is dead butterflies, pinned and labeled. “Ooh that one is from the amazon!” - an excuse to pin and label these things. This is my butterfly collection. sterile and dead. Like magnificent rocks behind glass they teach us nothing about geology, it exists in the museum for the curators to talk about it, a glorified advertisement for the speaking. “Now tell me Mr. Connors, in an exhibition in the genus of painting, you’re specimens seem to exhibit none of usual traits, they seem another phylum entirely! An egg laying mammal? Heresy! Elucidate! Expound! Please! Please Dr. Connors! Desperately we seek your counsel! Dr. Connors!” Bring the monkeys to watch them speak. - a spoon inserted into my throat until I am retching bile and stomach contents onto the floor. the sound of sogged cornflakes poured from a height onto marble.
We are given scraps. Pieces. A painting per person. I suppose, In the desert one should welcome the carcasses that from time to time fall from the sky.
There as an example, a reference, a name, but sure pretty.
If there is a lack of critical and curatorial authority, it's because there was never meant to be one to begin with.
This is the game of artworld hot potato. Keep it airborne, while its hot, but don’t burn yourself be left with a cold unwanted potato, a cold unwanted artist. Get it on its meteoric rise up the ladder. No one in five years will remember that it wasn’t a show, that it was a list of names. It won’t even need have happened. The PR steamroller happens. The internet reblogs it, the Newspaper “reports” it, the people they talk. No one ever stops to question it, the press release is taken as fact, wrung for content to be reported. The press, oddly, never questions the press release. If the Walker says its a painting show, it must be a painting show. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, smells like a duck, it is, often, a duck; except for when it is instead two clever duck afficiandos who have awoken well before dawn, dressed in thick warm camouflage, coated themselves in duck piss, and driven to the middle of a feild and laid in low lying trenches covered with a camo netting and blown practiced winds through plastic whistles, waited in darkness for dawn with ice-cold Beretta break action double barreled 12-gauges, safeties off, held pointing through tiny holes, not at their sturtevanian idea of ducks, cleverly arranged, but at the small warm satchels of duck feathered meat which have appeared, these doing their own quacking, and Bartholemew is feverishly whispering "do it!, Do it!" and Eric is mouthing him to "shut the FucK up!" in frozen breath and shouldering the weight and squeezing one eye closed as the real meat packed ducks examine their frozen brothers whom they have joined in communion and are only just beginning to get the first hints that something might be in fact righteously fucked up about this field, about those calls that lured them. These may in fact not be ducks at all.

The contemporary greased artist.

I remember the fourth time I saw Prekop’s baby blankets, the fourth time some curator had decided to put his paintings in my path, was a solo show in Vienna that when I look up now I realize he doesn’t even list on resume. It makes one wonder just how many shows this guy is having?

At what point are curators able to make decisions about painters included in a hot young painters show and at what point already pre-selected. And maybe Zak Prekop really is this interesting? Higher Powers he has been given.. When narrowing it down, how large is the actual pool from which these painters are selected? When Dominik Sittig seems the only true oddity, the only person I’m interested in understanding why the curators chose, a man once included in a show called “Put Hate Back into Painting.” Now that sounds interesting. It’s too bad there is one painting when his shows seem to be overloaded to the point of meanness. It’s too bad I had to google his work. I am left googling this work. Something about the provinces.

*And so little mention of these works cannibalization of painting itself, its as if they are doing everything but.  Let's not mention the growth on his neck. The painters themselves aren’t talking about it, so we pretend too.  It’s the new easy-peasy free-stylizing baroque.  No need for history when you have the present.  Dredge the silt, draw the mineral, pound it into crystalline form, faceted hexahedrons, making them sparkle.  These objects are the jewels of compressed history detritus. “But I did it without brushstrokes!” "cooooooooooool." This is the point at which beauty becomes oppressive in its banality.   Looking at another ‘s diamond collection is among the least interesting experiences one can have.   The world is interesting, your paintings are not.  

(when Bruce Hainley makes the theoretical metaphorical and strained leap to connect fashion to Diana Molzan’s work it is interesting.  But what is not interesting, in the slightest, is to simply say Molzan’s work references fashion.  It’s less than interesting, it is incorrect.  Hainley makes it true, but it is not true outside of that.)

THE TC TRILOGY PART II.

It's long.

Joe Smith, David Petersen

With gesture to Curtis.

This work is not after viscera, but viscera as a signifier, held at the distance of interpretation, behind glass, as if for want of study.

Cinema, an object that denotes its construction allowing the construction of the narrative of its making.

As an instance:

Smith hefted the beams, which are heavy and unwieldy and have not an uncertain violence and “inserted” them into the bucket.*

This is narrative, the work presents this, it is hard not to imagine this, we imagine this. The buckets with strange othery blue, drawn up through capillaries, exuded and dried and crust.  Salts crust and form, on the lips of the bucket, on the shaft of the pillar. The pillar erect, exerts itself both on-top-of and into the hole that is the bucket filled with inky blue, the blue of urinal cakes, heavy detergent, the nightmare black of subconscious chemical toilets, bleaching an erect shaft.  The beam presses and dwarfs the bucket, and despite its referential stability, if tips, is going to be a salty fucking mess. One might say the wood domineers the bucket. This the same beam that Tuazon committed an “architectural attack” with in a large way.  Here reduced to human scale, this beam limp, hanging, but erect. A log penetrating a bucket.  

Another way: Joe picked up his cigar and submerged it, extinguished it in the chemical bucket. This has connotations. Joe did this. This has connotations.

Buckets of blue chemical, pillared, stab struck, and wet.  A bored hole wetted white.  Blankets, of the softest baby styles, others coarse, messed. made a mess of.

The difference between the works which denote acts, reveal a maker and thus a distance - we see the remnants of a struggle, but not ours, this is the blue buckets, the paintings, this is joe’s issues, this is cinema, we’re watching Joe - between this and the works that do not reveal their hand, hide their maker. These instead infer a stage, utilize theater. These latter, “theater” works, allow a viewer only themselves in relation to the objects, infer a stage. Rather than display their maker’s interaction, remnant and possible psychosis, a stage implies you as the actor, gives you the agency. This is the psychological and theatrical space of minimalism, amplified by a “situation.”  There’s nothing particularly inapt about beams running across a gallery, but why does it feel so violent, such an act of ownership, of seared branding, stretching out to say this is the space I need.

The question operates in Smith’s work whether the “projection” and interpretation is coming from the analysand (object) or the analyst, and whether this distinction matters (I don’t think it does in art), and but really whether this analysis reveals something about the work (the artist) or about the viewer confronting objects.

This is the sinister feeling operating in the work, like the psychoanalysis problem, a tension of not knowing whether a “transgression” is a sign of deeper issues, or, simply, not. Or whether it is actually a transgression at all? You Bring Only What You Can Carry, scrambling to make sense of why two beams stretched across a room causes a drop in temperature in the space between genitals and anus. Is this Joe, or is this me?  this tension of psychoanalytic dubiousness. Are the kids alright? Is my sexual deviance normal? How would we know when there is no outside empirical marker from which to judge?  This the tenuous horror of living in your own head.

The question leads to nothing but a recursive self-analysis of “he said, I said, who said?” murky vagueness of anti-empiricism that probably allowed for Freud to steamroll psychology in the first place.   

little pictures of self-help books held asunder, reduced to an image that holds them forever, held in fine contemporary frames, preciously, sentimentally, lovingly, how a photographer would depict a child’s teddy in worn torn countries: with nice lighting.

The work’s fetish confuses contemporary art fetish, and “real world” subconscious repression.  When this connection is overt, say in the relation between contemporary painting, mawkish paint, anal expression, and childhood blankets it borders on ciphers, connecting references to establish a sentence spoke.** However, it becomes weird and unspeakable when there is a discrepancy between from where references form and their relation to the space, as in the two rafters hanging. This is amplified by the theatrical relation of ourselves to the "situation." As opposed to seeing it at the distance of Smith’s narrative remnant. This is pre-language. With the rafters it becomes convoluted describing what makes them connote such violence.  This has nothing to do with reducing it to formalism, or stripping connotations.  The rafters have many. I could begin to describe this, but you would give me a look.

Smith presents artificially conflated scenarios, critical sites for the recursive questioning of pyschodynamics’s developmental signifiers and defining of pathology.

In A Theory of Values, Smith’s backroom installation, a work I will dub “the science fair” set. Compared to the glossed, super-contemporary, axiomatic structures from which to hang loaded acts, baggage, the “science fair’s” understated lo-fi display was uncanny and without reveal, without the yuck-factor of plastic wrapped baby hair.  Instead, the science display said nothing.  It didn’t even reveal anything about paper towels. It just shone, really well, in the sun, while paper absorbed wetness. It existed as an ambiguity of whether this was in fact weird, latent, absolutely repressed or, maybe, totally fine. The lower lowered towel implies, however euphemized to the point of loss, a gesture which gives nothing and is given to mean everything.***

This is exemplified in the photos of nondescript pastoral scenes, also scenes of brutal crimes, where there is both nothing and everything wrong.

Smith removes a signifier from its context, and displays it in the hermetic, vacuous, and suffocating gloss of contemporary art. Showing how at once the fetishistic act of display (literally fetishistic in the original sense of placing “unnatural” importance on something in the wrong context, i.e. the foot removed from locomotion, and inserted into sexual desire) can become violent, removing it from the real world of proper signification and not the fictive art-verse.  Which is, this removal of proper context and common sense explanation, exactly what psychoanalysis did and art does. That it is simply Art that makes it wrong. That maybe the kids are just fine.  A kid’s science project inserted into Art creates the sick feeling of what exactly this thing is doing here, besides cooling genitals.  A magazine page limply tucked between glass.

This whole writing entirely and blatantly ignores a discussion of formal concerns that are undoubtedly very important.

*As per an argument held, I assert: it doesn’t matter whether or not Smith actually did it, or who did it, Smith wanted it there, Smith is the one who bears responsibility for its existence.  (Obviously if Smith was having child laborers do his bidding this would affect the meta-narrative, but that doesn’t ring here.)

**which, with the current vogue of the highest form of sublimation in painting: post-neo-geo-nonobjective-painting -w/discursive-referent (gentle abstraction) to see somebody who in fact desublimates to the point of infantilizing and idifying painting is really really satisfying, pleasant even, even if it can be read as a pun on painting: “we’re all just covering our blankets in euphemized feces.” Smith gets a pass on this one.

*** This is a fine line for Smith to toe, and all the more difficult when even grad students have trouble with it, walking around repeating "I don't know, I don't know" and then even going so far as to translate their "I don't knows, I don't knows" into international art english and publish it on MN websites.  I generally think if you don't know, then work is probably pretty good, its the work that's readable that we should be worried about.