one holistic message from a multitude of stimuli

“Beyond conjuring pure aesthetic emotions, the result engages viewers in an interactive search for meaning, as they attempt to derive one holistic message from a multitude of stimuli.”

source: Julia Moreno de Rouvray reviewing Jean Michel Alberola @ Galerie Daniel Templon, artforum.com

filed under: that’s one way to see this

passing cyclists, hairstyles, and earrings

“These abstract hybrids are attuned to the details of passing cyclists, hairstyles, and earrings and seem less shaped by the chapters of painting sampled in previous work.”

source: Michelle Cotton reviewing Nicholas Byrne @ Vilma Gold, artforum.com

filed under: Critics Gone Wild

The ramifying ovoid lines

source: Frances Richard reviewing Chris Ofili at David Zwirner, Artforum January 2010

filed under: Fine Baloney

Lyric and purposeless

“The use of polished aluminum and bronze in several of the sculptures allows for the play of reflectivity and opacity while bringing to mind the streamlined functionalism of high-end kitchen and bathroom fixtures. The silk, cherrywood, and Hydrocal suggest tactility and malleability, and yet the fact that silk and cherrywood are materials favored by the luxury-home-goods industry for their suggestion of richness, depth, and warmth adds a piquant fillip of irony to these works. Lyric and purposeless, the pieces are sculptural folly for the serious-minded viewer.”

source: Claudine Ise reviewing Richard Rezac @ Rhone Hoffman Gallery, artforum.com

filed under: Critics Gone Wild

of pleasure or of pain

“The artist eschews explanation of the meaning or purpose of these additions by giving only first names, such as Adam and Carola, as titles, leaving the viewer to interpret whether their jarring appearances might be the result of pleasure or of pain.”

source: Britany Salsbury reviewing Markus Schinwald @ Yvon Lambert New York, artforum.com

filed under: The Pain! The Pain!

Our brain, our brain, our brain (or: bending, rending and longing)

“The only way to get at something is to circle it like an appointment on a calendar or an opponent in a wrestling ring or a very small bird, above an endless ocean, ;searching for a place to light. People say color is light. If so, then matter is an understudy. Our eyes, a fanclub. Our brain, our brain, our brain —an IMAX where phenomena gets its script. People say: ‘Color doesn’t matter.’ as in ‘Color doesn’t matter, I’m not a bigot.’ Is this idea cousin to the notion: ‘Color isn’t matter’? And if so, how so? Perhaps in terms of possible worlds: People who say color doesn’t matter have an implicit belief that color is in the theater of the beholder. Lift the curtain, sift the ocean, what do you perceive? A plethora, a process that surrounds us, is inside us, behind, before and beyond us. Color isn’t matter, it’s the transmission of bending, rending and longing; the prismatic messiness of the original lens.”

source: press release William Pope. L @ Samsøn

filed under: You can’t make this shit up

sans peur, ni sentiments, ni souffrances

“Des lieux sans peur, ni sentiments, ni souffrances, ses oeuvres sont caractérisées par des transformations, des mutations, des atmosphères énigmatiques. Une poésie de l’horreur et de la beauté.”

source: press release Damien Deroubaix and Maël Nohazic @ The French Institute

filed under: Le Bullshit

ochre, violet, black and red tones

“The sombre color palette combines ochre, violet, black and red tones, which are sometimes carefully blended and other times left to appear rough.”

source: press release Katharina Otto @ 401contemporary

Filed under: Reviewed for blind people

the randomness of the world today

“In a way to reconcile or address the randomness of the world today is the biggest task, to let it all in, but still hold course. Colour help me! It’s a pure seeing I’m interested in the mind being stretched by trying to pull this world of pictures together, like a bit of a screw-up. Eat this! Previous shows also often included absurd moments and odd subject matter that had nothing to do with the core narrative of the ‘real’ utopias portrayed in my pictures. But this show reverses the balance – a few pictures from ‘my world’ are met with a majority of ‘outside’ world.”

source: Wolfgang Tillmans quoted in press release of his show @ Andrea Rosen

filed under: The Randomness of Words

rote, serial application of paint by roller

“The tension between the rote, serial application of paint by roller and each canvas’s subtle variation adumbrates an interesting postscript to some of the fundamental questions related to modernist painting with regard to autonomy and originality.”

source: Ara H. Merjian reviewing Skyler Brickley @ Marvelli Gallery, artforum.com

filed under: Critics Gone Wild

an obscure matinee idol is perched upside down on a rock

“A photograph of a face is unevenly bisected by floor and wall, a potted houseplant sprouting surrealistically from its cheekbone; an enlarged head shot of a man with the handsomely faded looks of an obscure matinee idol is perched upside down on a rock; an image of flirty, heel-shod legs emerges from the wall, partitionlike; a photograph of a woman posing prettily as she gazes at her own reflection is divided by strips of mirror, accompanied nearby by a lamp atop an end table.”

source: Naomi Fry reviewing Marlo Pascual @ Casey Kaplan, artforum.com

filed under: Seriously: WTF?

the transience of adolescence

“This ambiguously collective portrayal illuminates the transience of adolescence and alludes to the universality of both the aggression and the malaise that inevitably define these years.”

source: Britany Salsbury reviewing Maximilian Toth @ Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, artforum.com

filed under: the malaise!

mprovised music, garden design, psychoanalysis, stand-up comedy

“Borrowing expertise and problem-solving approaches from disciplines as seemingly diverse as architecture, improvised music, garden design, psychoanalysis, stand-up comedy, Quantum Physics and philosophy, the exhibition space becomes a dynamic site of potentially constructive frictions and a bridge between, or rather a conflation of, both inside and outside, public and private.”

source: press release Damien Roach @ David Roberts Art Foundation Limited Fitzrovia

filed under: You can’t make this shit up

an escort between the determinate and the ephemeral

“Jackson’s paintings deliver light as both a lure and an escort between the determinate and the ephemeral.”

source: press release Julian Jackson @ Kathryn Markel

filed under: Fine Baloney

His hair is always in place

Strictly speaking not art baloney, but certainly a critic gone wild (or uberfluff): “And Mr. Deitch is not just any art dealer. For one thing, despite running a free-form, often funky art gallery — sometimes as a nonprofit, as others have noted — he has always looked like a museum director. His hair is always in place; he wears almost without fail a dark (bespoke?) suit and French cuffs.”

source: Roberta Smith commenting on Deitch as new LA MoCA director, here

his own philosophical and literary iconography

“From here, the artist explores the dynamics of voyeurism and the unsettling dimension of artistic imagery, revisiting classical myths, baroque iconography and memento mori, filtered through the fundamental issues of post-modern thought. By uniting his own philosophical and literary iconography, the artist has defined a modern form of realism.”

source: press release Bernardi Roig @ Claire Oliver

filed under: Fine Baloney

sculpture-in-the-round as expressive poetry

“By imaginatively handling of his material within a formalist sculptural framework, and awareness that major traditional forms of African sculpture contained the basic tenets of universal sculpture tradition, Olu Amoda has created a compelling and significant sculptural ensemble that extend the range of sculpture-in-the-round as expressive poetry, and challenge the viewers’ for their interpretation of the play by expanding a cultural experience that foster the notion of artwork as multivalent narratives crafted from multiplicity of approaches that express big ideas about humanity.”

source: press release Olu Amoda @ Skoto Gallery

filed under: Fine Baloney

a mannered sexual savagery

“Also noteworthy is the offhand sadism throughout — a mannered sexual savagery of a most specific bourgeois, modern European type.”

source: David Lewis reviewing Keren Cytter @ Le Plateau, artforum.com

filed under: The Bullshit Meter Broke Again

a one-way direction toward seriousness

“If indeed the artist’s millennial generation oscillates between irony and sincerity, Finsel’s appropriated melodrama strives in a one-way direction toward seriousness in its characterization of the means and stakes of identity formation today.”

source: Natilee Harren reviewing Dan Finsel @ Parker Jones, artforum.com

filed under: Critics Gone Wild

full of possibility, or pointless folly?

“In his second solo exhibition in Hosfelt’s San Francisco gallery, Ballantyne explores the in-betweenness of place in works ranging from large-scale murals to small-scale india ink drawings. Are the structures he represents being built, or are they deteriorating? Are the places full of possibility, or pointless folly?”

source: press release Chris Ballantyne @ Hosfelt Gallery

filed under: If you buy this you’re an idiot

the peril of inexhaustible freedoms, contradictions, and material saturation

“At Buchholz, a procession of totemic structures draped with chintzy materials brings to mind a precarious antiheroism and effaces the simplicity and clarity of form valued by Minimalist and classical taste. Yet beyond any furtive dialectics is the impression that a cautionary romanticism is embedded in her aloof humor and seeming ambivalence; while being strangely beautiful and visually enchanting, Genzken’s sensitive and elaborate constructions hint at the peril of inexhaustible freedoms, contradictions, and material saturation.”

source: Genevieve Allison reviewing Isa Genzken @ Galerie Daniel Buchholz, artforum.com

filed under: Seriously: WTF?

a knuckle-size knob of the Yaku cedar

“Floating in the luminous gold fluid, a reliquary crystal orb holds a knuckle-size knob of the Yaku cedar, alternately a message in a bottle from a lost civilization and the assurance of quality behind a commercial luxury.”

source: Julia Langbein reviewing Jean-Luc Vilmouth @ Galerie Aline Vidal, artforum.com

filed under: Critics Gone Wild

the vacant, echoing walk through museum real estate

“By Tuerlinckx’s design, visitors access her small cluster of spaces only by walking through a long succession of vast, empty galleries on the museum’s second floor. By the time one arrives to find an astounding mise-en-scène of materials – scientific manuals, stones, mirrors, collages of her sources of inspiration, and evidence of research on crystalline structures as well as investigations into the city of Madrid – the vacant, echoing walk through museum real estate has literally attenuated the connection between this laboratory and the rest of the building.”

source: Cathleen Chaffee reviewing Joëlle Tuerlinckx @ Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia

Alternative interpretation (Occam’s Razor in action): the artist did not bother filling the rest of the museum

the yogurt lids, nailed to partition walls

“Gestures tend to lose some of their energy when they’re repeated. The shoebox is in the MoMA survey, it’s the first thing you see in the galleries. The dirty ball is there too. So are the yogurt lids, nailed to partition walls. But they feel archival.”

source: Holland Cotter reviewing Gabriel Orozco @ MoMA

PS: The first post in our new category “So THAT is your problem?”, where critics’ only problem is that they have seen something before.

think of the word lunatic

“For a while, in any case, the extraplanetary eccentricities of the moon (think of the word lunatic) form the axis of our visual and existential attentions.”

source: Ara H. Merjian reviewing Taro Shinoda @ Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, artforum.com

the sculpture-as-barricade interrupts it

“The C-prints mark the breakdown of a technological order; the sculpture points to the breakdown of a social one, as well as to the modulation, by means of a system of proportions, between different uses of space (the walls create and define a usable area; the sculpture-as-barricade interrupts it).”

source: David Lewis reviewing Jason Loebs @ AVA, artforum.com

Hitting the art baloney jackpot: Maia Damianovic interviewing Dinos and Jake Chapman

“Damianovic: Your reduplication of store dummies seems coldly reserved in its seriality and hyperrealistically clear; yet, your representation is full of slippages and semantic gaps that sidestep interpretative resolution in a way that hinders the otherwise straightforward visual authority of the image. It is permeated with a psychotic moment that subverts clarity. This aspect of your work seems to address the issue of conveyance at the heart of contemporary critical discourse.”
read the full interview and weep – or laugh (whichever one you prefer)

a smaller, paler orifice emerges

“Though the paintings can get heavy-handed (shades of Prof. von Trier), their angst is cut with a sly perversity and an adroit handling of paint that are welcome. And not completely dark: Above the bloody gash in Triptik, a smaller, paler orifice emerges; suggesting a moon or a child in utero, the cloth is as pale and untainted as the dream of a purer form.”

source: Quinn Latimer reviewing Piotr Janas @ Galerie Nicolas Krupp

the ostensible reason for massing these bricks outside people’s homes

“Both works tie labor, materials, and process to the specificities of place, leaving as universal only the cosmic state of deferral that seems to accompany the prospect of home renovations – the ostensible reason for massing these bricks outside people’s homes.”

source: Leora Maltz-Leca reviewing Damián Ortega @ ICA Boston

live to die or die to live

“With her bold brushstrokes and raw sculptures, Lambert engages her audience with a seemingly primordial dilemma – that only by decidedly accepting mortality and death, can we enter into a new phase of growth and creation, consequently raising one of the most principal questions of humanity – whether we, as humans, rather live to die or die to live every day of our existence.”

source: press release Emily Noelle Lambert @ Priska C. Juschka Fine Art

literally and figuratively the fabric of our lives

“The silk screen, a type of cloth, acts as a grid to organize the hot, pigmented wax before it embraces the muslin. Cloth to cloth, weave against weave, they exchange color in a unique process like an exchange of ideas between two people or two civilizations. The pigment is delivered to different depths of the muslin depending on the temperature of the encaustic, creating soft and hard edges and appears close or far away. The works are then uniquely folded and pinned to the wall, as if evidence of mankind’s long historical relationship with fabric. One is reminded of cloth folded and wrapped in ancient tombs, a shroud, swaddling a newborn, folding the sheets, making the bed; literally and figuratively the fabric of our lives.”

source: press release Richard Tuttle @ Carolina Nitsch Contemporary Art

a chair that has been broken open

“The violent rupture seen within the figure is acknowledged in a chair that has been broken open to reveal a clay-like interior – evidence that the recognized, if enlarged, component parts share a material center with the figure and elevated stage.”

source: press release Mark Manders @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

the omnipresent force of darkness

“But the omnipresent force of darkness – whether it hovers threateningly, annihilates the background, or appears in shadowy splotches to sculpt her blunt arrangements of mundane household objects, furniture pieces, and cars – endows her work with its dramatic edge.”

source: Travis Jeppesen reviewing Ricarda Roggan @ German Bundestag, artforum.com

elevating the cultivation of their own skin cells

“Then there is a ‘theater-body,’ as described by the epistemologist Roberto Marchesini, that welcomes otherness, which flares up in a network of hybridized relationships, both on the symbolic level of performance, as in inthewrongplaceness, 2005–2009, by Kira O’Reilly, and on a phenomenological level, in works like Artists’ Skin Cultures, 1996–1997, by Art Orienté Objet, who elevate the cultivation of their own skin cells to the rank of artistic medium.”

source: Eugenio Viola reviewing “sk-interfaces” @ Casino Luxembourg, artforum.com

perhaps even shrouds or cerements

“Edges, whether sewn seams of clothing or the borders between triptychs, insinuate themselves as metaphors for the limits of thinking. They are ‘critical’ Kantian paintings in this sense, although ones concerned less with cognitive bounds than with the multidimensional cartographies of consciousness that lie between, that is, with painting spinning thoughts and their unraveling. The Derridean thread metaphor seems apt for an artist who so self-consciously plays with the tissue of the canvas and the warp and weft of timeworn linens, trawling spare threads across paint like errant lines of drawing. Sacks’s textiles also suggest the gauze of bandages, the wounds of body and time, perhaps even shrouds or cerements.”

source: Leora Maltz-Leca reviewing Peter Sacks @ Paul Rodgers / 9W, artforum.com

the complex meaning and motivations of our inferiority

“The intuitive processes of using emblematic imagery and the implications of dreams, as well as an exploration of the intermediary attributes of shamanistic beliefs filtered through everyday experiences, yield grounds for the artist to steer, unravel and exorcise the complex meaning and motivations of our inferiority.”

source: press release Min Kim @ ATM

Hitting the art baloney jackpot: Leora Maltz-Leca

“Paper gains mass and volume in Kirsten Hassenfeld’s exhibition of recent sculpture: It shimmers and swirls in the low-lit gallery at David Winton Bell, drawing the viewer into a luminescent world of alabaster baubles and dangling airy chains. [...] Hassenfeld toys with scale in this elaborate installation—lunar not only in its weightlessness and its spectral glow but also in its call to Dionysus and the gods of all paper party favors—inflating gems to the size of boulders and making cameos for a giant. Yet despite the nimbuslike aura summoned by both the work and its title (meaning, idiomatically, ‘to have one’s head in the clouds’), both beauty and lust circulate freely through this fantasy space of platinum light and paper diamonds. Hassenfeld’s enlarged bibelots speak to a grotesque desire for objects: as if a penumbra of insatiability––the dark side of the moon––lies just beyond the visible in these delicate, ethereal forms, whose ghostly silhouettes gesture to the elusiveness of possession.”

source: Leora Maltz-Leca reviewing Kirsten Hassenfeld @ Cade Tompkins Editions and Projects

multicolored broomsticks

“The combination of multicolored broomsticks fashioned into a fragment of a rug and reflected into a right-angled mirror re-creates a Smithsonesque non-site, though the site represented is that of the domestic sphere.”

source: Chelsea Weathers reviewing Greely Myatt @ Memphis Brooks Museum of Art

Amazing – A gallery press release we can believe in!

“Paintings of hats: alone, on heads, in still life, indoors and out – funny and serious.”

That’s it. Really. That’s the full press release. No, we’re not making it up: press release Judith Zeichner Parker @ Noho Gallery

struggling with both the ordinary and the immense issues of the day (aka the thinking contemporary artist’s burden)

“Co-mingled tropes suggest the conflict of the thinking contemporary artist struggling with both the ordinary and the immense issues of the day.”

source: press release Nicole Eisenman @ Leo Koenig Inc.

PS: We know it’s tough to be a thinking contemporary artist – but someone has to do it!

evading consistent rhythms and aligned harmonies (aka bridging a rift in the art-bullshit continuum)

“Evading consistent rhythms and aligned harmonies, the sound track also uses overdubbed voices that reference topics as disparate as ancient creation myths and twin-brother baseball players.”

source: Emily Weiner reviewing Matthew Ritchie @ Andrea Rosen Gallery, artforum.com

PS: If the art works in question, in the words of the reviewer, “elegantly bridge a rift in the art-science continuum”, then the review itself surely and elegantly bridges a rift in the art-bullshit continuum.

the epistemological and the psychological

“In this cacophonous family romance, Zanisnik’s sire and stand-in negotiates equally the epistemological and the psychological with bemused forbearance and grace.”

source: Joseph R. Wolin reviewing Bryan Zanisnik @ Sunday, artforum.com

We are not alone!

“Writing about fine art is an art in itself. Too often though, writers get away with murder by hiding behind art’s amorphous, subjective and intangible qualities to justify vague, contradictory and nonsensical writing. Call us old-fashioned but we believe writing should be legible and clear with a point.” write BlackLab (here)
If we may be blunt for just a second: Fuck, yeah!

nearly two tons of birdseed

“The recurrence of symbolism in Orozco’s work is fairly explicit in Turista, a photographic sequence depicting a bicycle wheel spinning through a vehicle graveyard, but also makes an appearance in Loop, an installation consisting of a living canary in a room occupied by nearly two tons of birdseed, underlining the disproportion between availability and necessity.”

source: Francesco Stocchi reviewing Ariel Orozco @ Federica Schiavo Gallery, artforum.com

a volley of determinate ‘play’

“He dramatizes the schism between art’s requisite sophistication and the quirky naivety of primary creative tools, and herein the paintings stage a volley of determinate ‘play’ against dense and developed adult practice.”

source: press release Greg Parma Smith @ Khastoo Gallery

slapdash, serene and lurid commingle

“Delicate and blunt, intricate and slapdash, serene and lurid commingle; painstaking ornamental elaboration turns into the impatient, sweeping gesture that would wipe the slate clean; abstract forms and spontaneous effects bump up against precisely rendered images, not without surprise but certainly without antagonism.”

source: Barry Schwabsky as quoted in press release Donna Moylan @ Michael Steinberg Fine Art

in his search for symbols and metaphors

“He employs the textured and improvisational qualities in his work, imbued with a poetic amalgam of abstraction and reality in his search for symbols and metaphors that explore ideas of spirituality, space and motion, expanding the boundaries of art and consciousness.”

source: press release Wosene Worke Kosrof @ Skoto Gallery

not to mention frozen inner thighs

“Her pratfall is defused by the viewer’s prolonged anticipation and becomes a memorial to inevitable defeat––not to mention frozen inner thighs.”

source: Glen Helfand reviewing Bessma Khalaf @ Steven Wolf Fine Arts, artforum.com

Criticism: Why postmodernism is bullshit

“‘postmodernism’ is bullshit for the following reason: Assume that the central tenet of postmodernism is that there is no such thing as truth or that the word ‘true’ is no more than a clever cover for whatever beliefs or attitudes are generally accepted in some culture (and that is accepted due to concealed coercion). The problem is this: If there is really no fact of the matter as to what is true and someone may become conscious of this, then there can be no honest speech and no lying; this is because, as [Harry] Frankfurt holds [in "On Bullshit"], assertion and lying is characterised by aiming to say what is true and aiming to say what is not true, respectively. Being fully aware that there is no truth either way, no-one can honestly assert anything (or lie) at all; without truth, assertion looses its goal. All that can remain of speech, if there is no truth, is bullshit or pretending to assert (although just pretending to assert would require at least the idea of truth and truthful assertion to remain, itself a tension in the postmodernist’s position on truth).” – Ben Kotzee

all in a seemingly never-ending recombination

“His work simultaneously suggests the not-quite- finished, the in-transition, the nearly-emerging, the slowly-evolving, the near-end, and the move-toward-erasure – all in a seemingly never-ending recombination.”

source: press release Franklin Evans @ Sue Scott Gallery