the dribble-shit from your mouth

“Finger painting with the dribble-shit from your mouth is as good an allegory as any for attempting personal expression.”

source: T. J. Carlin “reviewing” Debo Eilers @ On Stellar Rays, artforum.com

filed under: Dribble Shit

a globe-shaped costume symbolizes resistance against the flatness

“These and other spatiotemporal preconceptions are superimposed and interwoven in an alluring filmic meditation on standardization and irreversibility titled The Refusal of Time (Prologue) – Anti Mercator, 2011. Here, scattered flecks of charcoal magically revert to the coffeepot shape they formed before being dispersed, while a dancer wearing a globe-shaped costume symbolizes resistance against the flatness of the Mercator. Finally, another drawing from Towards the Black Wall Procession references the third moment, the theory of black holes which are thought to destroy spatiotemporality altogether: It shows a procession of people inexorably marching toward their death.”

source: Rahma Khazam “reviewing” “The Refusal of Time – Prologue” @ Le Laboratoire, artforum.com

filed under: The Bullshit Meter Broke Again

eruptions of both hot and cold colors

“Such reliance on exuberant hues and minimal, if ambiguous, planar relationships might suggest naiveté; but here the charged colors invite us to find more subtle formal links among the elements of the composition. Thorne deploys stark, if not unsettling, eruptions of both hot and cold colors in a single space. The juxtaposition excites, because we cannot be certain if the cool colors are pushing the warm colors forward or vice versa—a surprising reversal of tonal convention.”

source: Gerard McCarthy “reviewing” Joan Thorne @ Sideshow, artinamericamagazine.com

filed under: Fine Baloney

as milk morphs into blood, the nurturing breast undone

“Allusions to variously hued skin, voluptuous folds and juicy orifices merge with the words and punctuation marks—loaded, humorous and poetic by turn. War Frieze IX (1992), a multipart, 10-foot-long section from a 200-foot-long work concerning the Gulf War, demonstrates Schor’s early fusion of words and paint, as well as the importance to her of feminism, which has informed her practice into the present. Issuing from a breast on one end and a phallus attached to an ear on the other, a red liquid stream outlined in squiggly pubic hairs spells out the word ‘undue’ in cursive. The pink, impastoed, fleshlike ground bears the word like a tattoo. In the Gulf War context, ‘undue’ could describe excessive force; but, given Schor’s predilection for double entendres, it also implies ‘undo,’ as milk morphs into blood, the nurturing breast undone (presumably) by the weaponlike phallus.”

source: Constance Mallinson “reviewing” Mira Schor @ CB1, artinamericamagazine.com

filed under: A Bullshit Spill

the cup’s suggestive patterns

“The installation Decorative took its cue from a splotchy red and white enamelware cup that was hung high on the left-hand corner of a wall. From it tumbled glossy red and white strands of flowers, and silhouettes of words from peeled-off red vinyl lettering. Completing the ensemble were four framed abstract paintings on paper informed by the cup’s suggestive patterns, in which the viewer can’t help but seek hidden imagery.”

source: Ruth Lopez “reviewing” Maximo Lopez @ Hyde Park Art Center, artinamericamagazine.com

filed under: Fine Baloney

Art Baloney Jackpot: Eugenio Viola “reviewing” Yinka Shonibare @ Alcala 31

“Yinka Shonibare’s syncretic work investigates ethnic and cultural identity, the effects of postcolonialism, and the processes of hybridization at work in contemporary society. That the artist depicts himself as a “dandy”—at first glance an innocuous, merely narcissistic endeavor—in fact subverts prejudicial expectations that certain aesthetic ends are entirely European pursuits. [...] Here, clothing becomes a mere facade, a polymorphous, constantly transmuting aspect of identity. Shonibare’s use of apparel adds expressivity to an oeuvre that is a mirror of our time: chaotic, brazen, hedonistic, and at times vacuous—the perceptive, pitiless analysis of an eclectic artist who is a faithful chronicler of his own era.”

source: Eugenio Viola “reviewing” Yinka Shonibare @ Alcala 31, artforum.com

filed under: Art Baloney Jackpot

this deliberate and simple linearity

“Combined with the work’s forthright subject matter, this deliberate and simple linearity creates a subtle sense of nostalgia and moreover suggestively questions the increasingly complicated relationship between technology, images, and the culture they reflect.”

source: Britany Salsbury “reviewing” Devin Leonardi @ Broadway 1602, artforum.com

filed under: In Bed

between the sexual and the diseased

“Swaddled in handmade colored felt and bandaged with linen strips in an array of vibrant hues, the majority of the works are characterized by spindly armatures, both venous and sticklike, and bulbous protuberances that vacillate between the sexual and the diseased.”

source: artforum.com “reviewing” Fabienne Lasserre @ Jeff Bailey Gallery

filed under: Fine Baloney

like oily kisses on the wood

Increasingly unprimed, often dazzlingly striated, Hodgkin’s plywood veneers shape the rippling logic of a work like Snake, 2006–2008, where a serpentine stroke of cadmium red light wobbles across a grainy field, surrounded by the artist’s signature dabs—jaunty red markings that read like oily kisses on the wood—and several concentric painted borders, all bounded by a hefty wooden frame, mounted backwards so that its pocked reverse faces out.

source: Leora Maltz-Leca “reviewing” Howard Hodgkin @ San Diego Museum of Art, artforum.com

filed under: Increasingly unhinged nonsense

that didactic, historicist trope now in crisis

“Without ‘-ism,’ ” the exhibition text asks, “what will life be like?” In this minor mistranslation of “will” instead of “would” lies a spark that animates the artist’s view further still: Beyond the mask of ‘isms’––that didactic, historicist trope now in crisis––perhaps life will be like this.

source: Iona Whitaker “reviewing” Sun Xun @ Shanghart Gallery, artforum.com

filed under: When the brain rots

Art Baloney Jackpot: Eugenio Viola reviewing Delia Gonzalez

“Through their cadenced, deliberately repetitive, and often hypnotic sequence of movements, two ballerinas seem to be transformed, with the help of suffused lighting, into almost abstract entities that sublimate Nin’s erotic recountings into something more formal and abstruse. Presented via the metaphoric language of the body altered into Baudrillard’s ‘carnage of signs,’ the work conveys the complexity of desire and the dynamics of amorous interactions. The artist opts for an intimate approach proceeding from a deliberately absorbed, interior, private point of view. The rhythmically paced images also suggest the evanescence of memory and the oneiric atmosphere of an introspective journey that traverses the twists and turns of human emotion.”

source: Eugenio Viola “reviewing” Delia Gonzalez @ Galleria Fonti, artforum.com

filed under: Art Baloney Jackpot

edifices as substructures for new socioeconomic dispensations

“While contemporary color photographs of the hotel cycle on one wall, a black-and-white photograph from the resort’s heyday repeats impotently on the other: The slide carousel advances, clicks, only to sputter forth an identical image of stilled time. It was ‘a foundational time,’ Garcia Torres comments, reciting the well-worn metaphor of edifices as substructures for new socioeconomic dispensations—except that here the foundation, like the building’s broken framework, has turned in on itself, free-falling into the earth.”

source: Leora Maltz-Leca “reviewing” Cyprien Gaillard and Mario Garcia Torres @ Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, artforum.com (repeat offender!)

filed under: Le Bullshit

in the repeated motifs of peering wolves

“By aligning the meticulousness of craft with elements of psychopathology, the show also provides an intriguing self-referential twist that can be seen, for instance, in the repeated motifs of peering wolves that is perhaps a nod to Freud’s Wolf Man—but also in the works’ engagement with the fallibility of perception.”

source: Franklin Melendez reviewing Mrzyk & Moriceau @ Ratio 3, artforum.com

filed under: A Bullshit Spill

also an upward creeping from below

“From spiraling shots of urban blight in Kiev to the Caribbean jungle nibbling at an erstwhile grand hotel, the dystopic landscapes of Cyprien Gaillard and Mario Garcia Torres free-fall into decay. Both artists catch modernist utopian architecture in not only a tumble from above (a “falling into ruin”) but also an upward creeping from below––the future gnawing at its past.”

source: Leora Maltz-Leca reviewing Cyprien Gaillard and Mario Garcia Torres @ Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, artforum.com

filed under: Critics Gone Wild

a luxuriously lumpy piece of furniture

“Black Couch presents a nude reclining on a luxuriously lumpy piece of furniture. The body has the head and hairy legs of a frat boy, but it also has the breasts of a woman, and a conspicuous lack of a penis for a crotch-draped hand to cover. An extra arm that seems to dangle to the floor––and the setting is apparently an artist’s studio with sketches blue-taped to the wall––suggests that a single pose is insufficient to capture the gist of self. The same could be said of the stances and gestures that imply masculinity.”

source: Glen Helfand reviewing Geoffrey Chadsey @ Electric Works Gallery, artforum.com

filed under: Fine Baloney

shards by turns interwoven and pulling apart

“If the composition still bears a certain indebtedness to post-Cubist pictorial space—its shards by turns interwoven and pulling apart, fractured into a flattened, even surface—the paint here reveals an autonomous energy, one that calls attention to whirls and eddies and the surface itself.”

source: Ara H. Merjian reviewing Lee Krasner @ Robert Miller Gallery, artforum.com

filed under: The Randomness of Words

the more exclusive E and F sit huddled nearby

“A, B, C, and D form their own quorum, while the more exclusive E and F sit huddled nearby. The seemingly arbitrary parsing of the alphabet underscores what is arbitrary about its signs to begin with.”

source: Ara H. Merjian reviewing Mark Bradford @ The Studio Museum in Harlem, artforum.com

filed under: B as in bullshit

young conifer tree trunks pulled down by cast cement weights

“Using combined materials such as young conifer tree trunks pulled down by cast cement weights, Rathbone creates an amalgam of the expected and the unexpected, of the subtle and deliberate associated with the impulsive and coincidental. With a mélange of natural and artificial materials including wood and cinderblocks, chalk snap lines and spray paint, Rathbone puts her audience in a state of alertness, as her wall drawings and installations feed on the imaginary of the subconscious and on all gradual perceptive states in between.”

source: press release Amy Rathbone @ Priska C. Juschka Fine Art

filed under: Fine Baloney

the tension between satire and drama

“Words are all over his work, in Flemish but more frequently in French: merci , racaille, kamikaze… or expressions: the crackled Flemish, the philosophy of tears, mental doctor; numbers (reversed dates or just enumerated) and names or initials evoking his own pantheon (Antonin Artaud, Edvard Munch, Vincent Van Gogh, Niko Pirosmani…). Sort of invocation spoken out (very) loud, highlighting the tension between satire and drama, they amplify an emotional weight which we cannot escape.”

source: press release Bart Baele @ Galerie Polaris

filed under: Fine Baloney

disembodying consequences

“In I arrive when I am foreign (Centennial Tin), 2006, Erika Vogt creates a space of fantastic self-involvement. The piece is a large-scale print of a video still, in which Vogt faces away from the viewer, holding a camera behind her back with its lens pointed down, and snapping a picture. Beneath her, a life-size photograph of the artist responds with a vexing near-symmetry: In that image within an image, she lies on her back, holding a camera at her waist that is taking a flash photograph of her upright double. The spatial inconsistency of the ostensible mirror image suggests there are disembodying consequences to the ubiquitous representation of self and others.”

source: John Motley reviewing “Image Transfer: Pictures in a Remix Culture” @ Henry Art Gallery

filed under: Fine Baloney

a pile of postcoital puke

“While one drama, concerning repressed homoerotic desire, takes place in an entirely mundane urban apartment, another, featuring a histrionic aristocrat attempting to seduce a young actress, transpires within a grand estate that traffics in an unusual zone between Transylvanian house of horror and hippie love nest. Throughout the film, actions that occur in one space seem to inexplicably influence those in the other, and the work culminates in the simultaneous deaths of the aristocrat, overdosing on pills while at his candlelit piano, and the actress, now in the apartment, suffering head trauma after slipping on a pile of postcoital puke.”

source: James Nisbet describing “Pagan Rhapsody, a 1970 short by the American independent-cinema pioneer George Kuchar”, artforum.com

filed under: a pile of postcoital puke

at once absorbing and elusive, warmly autobiographical and coolly distant

“Recurrent images of arrowlike angles (a blue neon sign in Gwangju [all works 2010]; a Walker Evans–ish print of a pitched-roof building turned on its side in Druid Hill) gently direct the viewer’s gaze and attention from one work to the next, compounding poetic juxtapositions that are at once absorbing and elusive, warmly autobiographical and coolly distant.”

source: Glen Helfand reviewing Sara VanDerBeek @ Altman Siegel, artforum.com

filed under: Critics Gone Wild

Hairy and brutish, the bear seems quite male

“In the video, Keading herself is seated on a bed, uncomfortably close to an enormous black bear, her stoic expression betraying subtle anxiety. Sometimes she accepts the bear’s nudges; at other times she shies away with fearful anticipation. The eight-hundred-pound bear takes up most of the room, and Keading’s blonde locks conjure childhood fairy tales. Ursine icons accent the room—a child’s stuffed animal, bear-patterned sheets—and, by contrast, fortify the actuality of the natural bear. Hairy and brutish, the bear seems quite male in his dominant and clumsy yet powerful presence, and he appears to hold the girl captive, physically and emotionally, with his mere potential for violence.”

source: Micol Hebron reviewing Hilja Keading @ Angles Gallery, artforum.com

filed under: Hard to bare (get it?)

Hitting the Art Baloney Jackpot: Sam Pulitzer reviewing Dan Torop @ Derek Eller Gallery

“A motley flock of sheep populating a hillside, a heron floating squarely above a forest stream, a dog walking into a forested sunset, a hiker passing through a valley of green hills, and a tortilla roasting by a campfire are just a few of the images offered in Torop’s fourth solo exhibition for this gallery. Yet within all the work appears an intimate awareness of photography’s discretionary frame and its relationship to the subjects it commits to image, with Torop acutely negotiating this relation to construct photographs that privilege viewing as an emotionally nuanced form of self-awareness. This is why the most powerful image in the show is Seizure, 2009. This piece cleverly and affectively illustrates photography’s cathectic cache without proscribing access to its sentimental munitions––those punctums lying unknowably in wait. Seizure self-reflexively captures a dog’s seizure; its bulging eyes gaze across its body as if pained to register the moment’s jolting reality through the act of seeing. Even though depicted crippled to the ground, this poor creature appears, thanks to an acknowledged use of photography’s uncanny effects, as if in the free-fall of the show’s title, aware of a present that has been, and beholden to the uncertainty of becoming’s soon-to-be.”

source: Sam Pulitzer reviewing Dan Torop @ Derek Eller Gallery, artforum.com (where else?)

filed under: Art Baloney Jackpot

Part cosmology and part camp

“Seven arrangements of items on a long wooden table each allude to a different article of clothing removed, including a hat cradling an egg and a pair of high heels wrapped in pantyhose. The piece culminates in a wall-projected black-and-white video showing a dancer’s suggestive shadows. With a palette of nude, pinks, and blacks, and with a fair amount of leather, Soto Climent pulls panties taut over an oversize goblet and entwines a white boot in a black heel. Part cosmology and part camp, these erotically charged objects stand in for an absent female body, or for the artist himself.”

source: Lori Cole reviewing Martin Soto Climent @ Clifton Benevento, artforum.com

filed under: Lord Help Us!

a richly differentiated and mediated sensorium

“Through juxtapositions of sound transmission and reception, light sources and reflections, automated and haptic scenes, Bolande’s diptychs present a richly differentiated and mediated sensorium. Rather than collapsing into the unified body of the spectator or deferring to that of the artist, these works demonstrate a distributed corporeality carried out through a multimedia network of production and consumption.”

source: James Nisbet reviewing Jennifer Bolande @ Thomas Solomon Gallery, artforum.com

filed under: A Bullshit Spill

an apple dangling from the ceiling of a sealed-off annex

“Similarly, Piano (a player piano of sorts made with Ping-Pong balls rattling across piano strings set in motion by oscillating fans) and Waiting for Harold Edgerton (an apple dangling from the ceiling of a sealed-off annex, visible only through a small window) raise questions about the relationships between “art” and its immediate environment in Signer’s work.”

source: Mara Hoberman reviewing Roman Signer @ Swiss Insititute, artforum.com

filed under: Questions and more questions

the fetishistic sexual charge associated with the curl of hair

“Q03, 2010, is cast from a nineteenth-century side table in sterling silver and is carved with abstract depictions recalling beard hair (a reference to the subculture of hirsute gay men known as bears), which morph into decorative foliage and filigree. In the process, the fetishistic sexual charge associated with the curl of hair becomes simultaneously lost and found—in the same way the value of the antiques the artist reworks in precious metals (from aluminum to bronze to sterling silver) vacillates.”

source: Alpesh Kantilal Patel reviewing Brice Brown and “Sèvres and Savage” @ Schroeder Romero & Shredder, artforum.com

filed under: For the shredder indeed

interrupted always by a ‘hysteric whimsy’

“Works proceed unpredictably to their completed state, leaving figures fixed in visual moments throughout the psychological and material experience of committing them to canvas; these are interrupted always by a ‘hysteric whimsy’ that productively fails to seize Wulff’s mannered subjects in a uniformity that might be recognizable to the self-identifying techniques routinely unquestioned by contemporary culture.”

source: Sam Pulitzer reviewing Katharina Wulff @ Greene Naftali Gallery, artforum.com

filed under: Not winning any prizes

sexual desire, whether overt or sublimated

“Even as historical, religious, and mythological painting gave way to secular themes in Western art, sexual desire, whether overt or sublimated, remained a primary psychological drive. Herbert’s paintings, as big as Rubens’s or Delacroix’s, present conceits of eternal youth and boundless pleasure, fleeting ideals that, like the glory of battle, few hold onto.”

source: Christopher Howard reviewing Jim Herbert @ English Kills, artforum.com

filed under: Even badly depicted sex sells

the moral ambiguity of treating aesthetically a material

“Starting in 1963 with his ‘Lynch Fragments’ series, Edwards welded together dense arrangements of hammers, machetes, scissors, and nails––assertions of steel’s capacity to hit, hack, cut, and pierce. Gnarled by heat but nevertheless sharp, the fragments register the moral ambiguity of treating aesthetically a material imbued with violence.”

source: Colby Chamberlain reviewing Melvin Edwards @ Alexander Gray Associates, artforum.com

filed under: Fine Baloney

the regurgitation of gentrified visions of its origins

“Lavender blue and sky blue, as anthropologist Michael Taussig has argued in What Color Is the Sacred? (2009), are names that bring to mind a color’s natural source, thereby functioning “as substitutes for what had disappeared” with the development of chemical-based pigments: a relationship with color that, in Taussig’s view, allowed it to be polymorphous, even magic. The marketing of a color, then, involves the regurgitation of gentrified visions of its origins and the idealized relationships we have with them, much as supermarket tubes of factory-made margarine are adorned with pastoral scenes.”

source: Lloyd Wise reviewing Brian Nuda Rosch @ DCKT Contemporary, Artforum

filed under: Le Bullshit

conceived upon a mathematical formula

“Choosing to film on Día de la Raza, Sierra makes an allegorical connection between the conquest of the Americas by the Spanish, and the penetration that occurs in his film. The subject matter of anal sex invites an examination of cultural psychologies of domination and submission as they relate to labor, race, gender, and class. Though conceived upon a mathematical formula, the film’s acts arrive at a succession of fluctuating outcomes, which yield an analysis of contemporary social structures in Spain.”

source: press release Santiago Sierra @ Team Gallery

filed under: You can’t make this shit up

a critical context for the delicate, handmade objects

“Their integration of fragmented material abjection would be nearly retrogressive within the context of art history were it not for a presentation of five films that provide a critical context for the delicate, handmade objects, which themselves espouse an attitude of pure insouciance.”

source: Kathleen Madden reviewing Rudolf Polanszky @ Ancient and Modern, artforum.com

filed under: Le Bullshit

the music will gradually stop playing when the potatoes rot

“The nearby installation Extinction Kit (Songs to Die for) offers a slower death: A pink coffin-shaped tent sits next to a mound of potatoes. These food staples are wired, bomblike, to function as a homespun battery that powers a Walkman playing Hungarian folk songs. This haven for tradition proves to be a trap, however, as the music will gradually stop playing when the potatoes rot.”

source: Emily Weiner reviewing Andra Ursuta @ Ramiken Crucible, artforum.com

filed under: When the brain rots

a lampoon of Martin Luther King’s exalted mountaintop

source: David Duncan reviewing William Pope.L @ Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Art in America September 2010

filed under: Critics Gone Wild

the subtle, naturalized violence of the everyday, the domestic, and the institutional

“If the austerity of the installation detracts from the visceral impact of some of the pieces, such as those fashioned from human hair, it emphasizes a dichotomy long present in the artist’s oeuvre: The refined simplicity and sensitivity of Hatoum’s work is held against a quiet, disturbing, and often hidden violence—not only in its overt forms, like conflict and war, but also in the subtle, naturalized violence of the everyday, the domestic, and the institutional.”

source: Genevieve Allison reviewing Mona Hatoum @ Akademie Der Kunste, artforum.com

filed under: In Bed

to ponder the implications of the term Pan-Americanism

“Works like Wilfredo Prieto’s Cuba libre (Free Cuba), which consists of two puddles of rum and Coca-Cola on the floor of the exhibition space, suggest that freedom for Cuba depends on the help of the United States. It therefore prompts the viewer to ponder the implications of the term Pan-Americanism in relation to the Monroe Doctrine, and the consequences of classifying specific artistic practices according to region.”

source: Montserrat Albores Gleason reviewing “PanAmericana” @ Kurimanzutto, artforum.com

filed under: Critics Gone Wild

a type of embarrassment that also feels profoundly normal

“Christopher Miner’s video The Best Decision Ever Made, 2004, plays on an old TV tucked away in a cupboard like a dirty secret or a set of plates. The artist’s plaintive confession of professional and financial failures layered over a slow montage of the comfortably worn interior of a house about to be sold elicits a type of embarrassment that also feels profoundly normal.”

source: Megan Heuer reviewing “Housed” @ Alice Austen House (get it?), artforum.com

filed under: Embarrassed indeed

by liberally rubbing the leader with hallucinogenic jimson weed

“Her lists of eccentric materials in long parentheticals bridge a conceptual gap, revealing a diaristic and tongue-in-cheek approach to her work. For instance, West ‘transforms’ Lavender Mist not only allegorically, by liberally rubbing the leader with hallucinogenic jimson weed, but also through subversive mark-making strategies. She achieves the effect of Pollock’s signature drips and splatters through spray paint and nail polish: a double middle-finger salute to Greenbergian formalism in the materials of urban vandalism, on the one hand, and decorative feminine primping, on the other.”

source: Wendy Vogel reviewing Jennifer West @ Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, artforum.com

filed under: The Bullshit Meter Broke Again

a mixture of Brechtian pronouncement, pop-song lingo, and menace

“The works both court and subvert these self-serious, art-historical motifs (and the macho politik that went with them); that all could fall away with the pull of a string does not lessen the power of each ‘painting’ but rather underlines it with a potent, witty weirdness. A recent series of collages are equally persuasive and formally expert—moody figures alternate with bits of foil, newsprint, and paint—and the evocative titles teem with male and female pronouns, a mixture of Brechtian pronouncement, pop-song lingo, and menace.”

source: Quinn Latimer reviewing Rosemarie Trockel @ Kunsthalle Zurich, artforum.com

filed under: You can’t make this shit up

the films also traffic in a permeability

“What Nashashibi and Skaer’s collages have to do with the myth of Pygmalion, a sculptor so bewitched by his work that he willed it to life, is hard to say. The artists prefer associative thinking, a gambit that ultimately allows audiences’ memories and imaginations to produce the works’ meaning. But the films also traffic in a permeability that changes the act of simply ‘relating’ into a query about the pictorial and about the propensity of images to absorb, transmit, and, most of all, to make their presence felt, even in their absence.”

source: Lauren O’Neill-Butler reviewing Nashashibi/Skaer @ Murray Guy, artforum.com

filed under: Critics Gone Wild

a series of three corked vessels

“When the checklist reveals that a series of three corked vessels contain, respectively, vodka, bourbon, and lube, it’s clear this is work ripe with versatility.”

source: Glen Helfand reviewing Erik Scollon @ Ping Pong Gallery, artforum.com

filed under: Fine Baloney

folded into memory through the act of painting

“Cooke’s agile, calligraphic drawing catalyzes the exhibition into a vision of place that is both measured and literary, suggesting Proustian spaces of encounter, folded into memory through the act of painting.”

source: Stephanie Snyder reviewing Judy Cooke @ Elizabeth Leach Gallery, artforum.com

filed under: Critics Gone Wild

naively rendered images of tinned prunes

“The same, happily, can be claimed for his flat works, in which naively rendered images of tinned prunes and pocketknives rub up against those crisscrossing systems, willfully peripheral road maps to a lovingly reimagined center.”

source: Michael Wilson reviewing Tucker Nichols @ Ziehersmith, artforum.com

filed under: Fine Baloney

an air of transcendence both menacing and promising

“It’s a gorgeous, ice-cold painting in purple, red and blue, with an air of transcendence both menacing and promising.”

source: Sabine Russ reviewing Shannon Finley @ Christian Ehrentraut, Art in America, June/July 2010, p. 172

filed under: Fine Baloney

to cast doubt on the earnestness of her allegory

“The oppressive obviousness of these questions, in contrast to the intelligence with which Kerlin handles her medium, is enough to cast doubt on the earnestness of her allegory—suggesting instead that the endgame for the current generation might no longer be a predicament, nor even a point of departure, but rather a diversion (with some pretty low stakes).”

source: Joanna Fiduccia reviewing Alisha Kerlin @ Real Fine Arts, artforum.com

filed under: ye olde endgame!

gestural, blanketlike folds of concrete almost lovingly sprayed

“Attacca began to seem more attached than attacking, its gestural, blanketlike folds of concrete almost lovingly sprayed on the wall, framed casually by concrete drips. So too with the stucco ridge, which falters and slips from the perfect horizon the eye expects, acknowledging its own imperfection.”

source: Quinn Latimer reviewing Kilian Rüthemann @ Museum for Contemporary Art, Basel, Art in America, June/July 2010

filed under: Critics Gone Wild

Beauty and the Beef

Beauty and the Beef

source: press release Judith Schaechter @ Claire Oliver

filed under: Moronic Titles and pseudo-cool spellings

primordial ooze, cell division run amok, fragments of the cosmos

“Hughes’ forms are strangely suggestive, but of what exactly: primordial ooze, cell division run amok, fragments of the cosmos, a frozen oil spill, decay or growth, plant, animal, or human?”

source: press release Ian Hughes @ 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel

filed under: A Bullshit Spill