A roundup of new and noteworthy things I’ve seen and read over the past few weeks.
This column, more than anything else, is just a diary and a catalog that doesn’t fit anywhere else. However, if I had to step back and say something about the overarching theme, I would say the following: I was trying to get some context as to why the cultural present feels so complex and hard to navigate.
And if I really had to scrutinize my own tastes, perhaps I would say that these two halves are related. The hyper-political mood of the recent past. However, that may be overthinking.
In any case, here are some that caught my eye in the gallery and writing.
what i saw
O’Flaherty’s Gelitin was accompanied by the gentle notes of a guitar. Photo by Ben Davis.
Gelitin by O’Flaherty’s
I was at the debut night of Jamian Giuliano Villani’s new venue in O’Flaherty. The venue opened with a series of performances by the great Viennese art collective Gelitin.
Actually, I didn’t know when I was performing for the two-hour show, but I was lucky enough to get a seat before it was full. It was hot, disgusting, and a lot of fun as no one could go to the cooler so people were standing in the aisles and beer was going through the crowd.
on what occasion actually was (Outside the scene): The Gelitin boys strip naked, cover themselves with petroleum jelly, and slowly apply a plaster cast to their bodies. , it became clear that they were doing an approximation of a living sculpture Laocoon.
I complain that if you do a two hour art performance, you really need some kind of beat or moment and it has to end, but this was not the case. But that night was equally about the joy of sitting with a crowd of people listening to guitar music, chatting with neighbors and guessing where you were going.
verdict: Outside of The Met’s actual Greek and Roman galleries, it’s the messy, fun, funny, most nutsack you’ll see at this month’s art venue.
Ito Miyoto Untitled (1970). Photo by Ben Davis.
Miyo Ito from Matthew Marks
In all honesty, I love all three of Mark’s shows that are currently running. The funny Leidy Churchman monotypes, especially the giraffe and the airplane window, are a lot of fun. trompe l’oeil Paintings and invented Picasso posters have a lucid appeal.
As for Ito (1918-1983), I can’t think of another painter like her. She has long been a key figure in Chicago Imagism’s expanded universe, and more recently has made her mark more and more in her retrospectives. Here, 1970s sherbet-like abstract paintings are at once quiet and self-contained, but at the same time restless to propose new images: landscapes, microscopic worlds, interiors, creatures. It’s also a machine.
verdict: A gentle and reassuring picture that makes you feel fresh just by being there.
“The Politics of Charm” by Mark Van Yetter. Photo by Ben Davis.
Bridget Donahue Mark Van Yetter
This show presents a series of related, minor style paintings. This style, which has been in vogue for a while, is filled with wacky images that are sometimes brusquely laughable (for example, an image of her two women holding a rifle and a man quietly urinating). opposite side). rowing boat). Van Yetter adds this other element. Each piece in this 20-part series of his work is divided into his six panels, in which quirky images are repeated and reflected in one another in mysterious ways. The enigmatic antics of his images lie in this mysterious order, the two elements being drawn like chocolate bacon.
verdict: A highly likeable and successful exercise in Slacker Surrealism.
what i read
Current Y2K Wave: Paris Hilton attends the Klarna and Paris Hilton House of Y2K Launch Party on February 23, 2023 in Los Angeles, CA. (Photo by Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images for Klarna)
“Chains or Whips: The Cruel Decade and its Aftermath” Christian Wistrip Madsen white review
A serious intervention in the current vortex of 2000s nostalgia. Fundamentally, Madsen argues, one cannot truly understand the bland, tactile aesthetics of the past few years without understanding the spectacle of coldness and media that provided the formative experience the aesthetics are responding to. doing. “With the impersonality of the 2000s, the complete denial of identity, all it was worth having by 2012 were ‘in-game skins’, feminist positioning, and cars.”
Anton Yeager’s “Everything is Hyperpolitical” point
A slightly different attempt to explain the present as a manifestation of the recent past: Through Wolfgang Tillmans’ rave photography and Annie Ernaud’s novels, Jaeger finds the key to the present in postpolitics and the ‘end of history’. The era of the 1990s, and the vaporization of ideas for major system changes.
Rather than turn the pages of that era, Yeager thinks the tumultuous online micropolitics of the recent past inherited the collapse of political engagement into a lifestyle. Unite around a coherent target.
“Hyperpolitics,” writes Yeager.
“How Do Standards Change?” by Sarah Shulman, art forum
Criticism of Yeager’s claims exaggerates the conflict between “lifestyle” and “real” systemic politics at a time when attacks on queer and trans people are concentrated at the government level. I can imagine it being something. So finally it’s worth complementing “Everything Is Hyperpolitical” with this. art forum.
Ostensibly it’s about star contemporary painter Nicole Eisenman, an artist who never wants the press. art forumBut this is from Sarah Shulman, author of an amazing recent book SHOW THE RECORD: POLITICAL HISTORY OF ACT UP, NEW YORK, 1987-1993The arrival and mainstream success of Eisenman’s openly queer and witty work, made possible by the entire history of queer political organizing in the ’90s, is so sustained and methodical..
other things
“Capitalist Realism” meme.
Joshua Citarella’s “Capitalist Realist Memes (yes, all of them)”
One of the things I’m most interested in these days is artist Citarella’s attempt to incorporate ideas into online communities. The most famous case is his year-and-a-half quest to sow the seeds of a meme about the radical tome of theorist Mark Fisher. capitalist realism This is an initiative that serves as a highly informative case study of what it takes for online cultural discourse to change minds in the Hall of Mirrors.
also spawned that particular initiative tons All of the weird fisher-themed images have just been cataloged in a post on Citarella’s substack. Check it out. However, if you want to get a sense of what’s going on, I recommend reading up on the project’s history (or listening to this podcast).
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