Postcards from Mitteleuropa
Curated By: Fragmented Subjectivity, Vienna
Berlin Art Week
Chris Sharp, Los Angeles slop-gallerist extraordinare, once scolded me on Instagram for comparing Raoul de Keyser to Peter Shear, evidently because he thinks it's wrong to see connections between artists if they're not from the same generation, which is a novel opinion if I've ever heard one. When I asked why that would be a problem, he only cared to smugly (and incoherently) retort that I should "get out of New York and the US more often," which I guess was an attempt at disparaging me for being poor. Still, I did just get out to Europe for three weeks, but I can't say it broadened the outlook I've developed in my provincial backwater. Contemporary art is a global(ist) phenomenon and the local differences are ones of emphases and degrees; the qualities that distinguish the Vienna and Berlin art scenes from New York mostly read as minor contingencies and/or anachronisms, not comprehensively systemic variations that lead to genuinely divergent perspectives on art. They're not entirely trivial differences, however, at least if you're as inured to the NYC gallery playbook as I am. Since I was traveling with other people these gallery visits were hastier than I'm used to, and it's not my usual practice to review shows two weeks after I saw them, so from an evaluative perspective they may be even more cursory than usual. As such I'm more interested in dwelling on the conditions of European art that aren't found in American art, because on their own a lot of these exhibitions weren't particularly compelling.
The clearest difference is the lingering European belief in the coherence of the symbolic order, which is no surprise. Europeans have their culture and their history in a way that Americans do not, which is the source, alternately or simultaneously, of our envy at their pleasant ways of life that have been preserved by tradition, our condescension at their staid complacency enabled by tradition, and our disbelief at their various forms of self-righteousness (the rude and haughty French, the rule-obsessed German, the forthright Dutch, etc.) instilled by tradition. These are truisms that don't need to be rehashed, of course, but they're unavoidable, and their manifestations in art are less obvious. I'll expand on this in the reviews below, but the prevailing mode I find surprising is the faith in signification. Artists are still babbling on about breaking down barriers, this year's Curated By theme is "Fragmented Subjectivity", institutions believe even more fervently in identity political pieties, there's a weird prevalence of text elements in artworks, etc. Part of this is simply a received arts education that hasn't updated its rhetoric in decades and still takes deconstruction and the vitality of language for granted, but, more glibly, much of Europe feels trapped in the long cultural 2015, Berlin in particular. The disillusionment of the first Trump presidency, which feels now like a quaint memory, was a shock to the US cultural system that at least swept out the club futurism of PAN records and moved on. I mean, I liked Lee Gamble in 2012, but the openings at Berlin Art Week are still full of people in expensive goth-sci-fi outfits and, as an American, it's distressing to be dragged back into that aging fever dream. What felt fresh a dozen years ago is now mouldering, and visiting this time capsule doesn't feel like a utopian enclave but nightmare of repressed consciousness that refuses to acknowledge its feeble irrelevance. Now, New York isn't much better, but I'll take market cynicism over delusional optimism any day.
VIENNA
9/5/2025
Florence Carr, Tatjana Danneberg, Nora Kapfer, Antonio López, Mira Mann, Mickael Marman, Chaeheun Park, Phung-Tien Phan, Olivia van Kuiken - Durée - Galeria Dawid Radziszewski curated by Reilly Davidson - **
Having said that, there's an almost embarrassing proportion of art in these shows that I'm already plenty familiar with. After playing Lower East Side curator hopscotch with a half-dozen galleries in less than a half-dozen years, Reilly Davidson jumped ship from Clearing a few months before it sunk and landed with this Polish gallery that I'm not familiar with. I can't remember the last time I saw a show she curated, but her time in Europe seems to have Europeanized her sensibility, which is to say it leans more on an affectation of refinement than an affectation of downtown scene knowingness, but in both cases the affectation predominates over the substance. She certainly threw in everything plus the kitchen sink: semi-figurative, semi-abstract, semi-postconceptual, semi-installation, semi-cute, semi-political, semi-austere, plus some Xerox for good measure. Something for everyone, I guess, unless you wanted something special. Still, aside from the stuffed animal looking at the painting, none of it is that embarrassing, but it's more an intermingling of brand identities than a sensibility. Suffice it to say that the press release on Bergson (philosophy press releases may be thoroughly obsolete in New York, but just you wait) rehashes deconstruction after the fact, without realizing it.
Olaf Holzapfel - Drawing shapes and lines of the world we made - Christine König Galerie curated by Kathleen Reinhardt - *.5
And with this we're off to the races: unbearably ugly straw bullshit sculptures replete with a press release that leans on Blanchot. The text also claims that the artist's concerns are firstly with the material, not its embedded history, even though there's a vitrine with pictures of old Austrian farm structures used for storing straw and old books on the history of straw. The gallery smells like straw, as the streets of Vienna sometimes do, which is less evocative than a literal mirroring of the outside world, and, inevitably, the artworks look like the stuff of MFA nightmares. I'm belatedly noticing that the Blanchot quote comes from the introductory essay for all of Curated By, which means the gallery was just trying to do a good job on its homework. The essay, by Sophia Roxane Rohwetter, is surprisingly competent by art world standards as a brief primer on the postmodern condition, but the problem is that it takes Jameson's Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, a book that's almost as old as me, as its basis. In other words, "Fragmented Subjectivity" isn't a very good topic for a contemporary art festival because fragmented subjectivity has been the basic state of affairs for Millennials and Gen Z since they were born. To make it the show's "subject" is beating a dead horse; it's not even a prompt, it's merely an irritation to pretend that it can be addressed directly or productively at all. The essay acknowledges this aimlessness, sheepishly, in its second sentence: "Whatever postmodernism was–whether a rejection or the radicalization of modernity, the beginning or the end of history–now lies behind us, or still awaits us." How insightful! Certainly none of the exhibitions I saw seemed to have found anything particularly useful to do with the theme, but I'll hazard a guess that it's a condition of Viennese respectability that someone has to write an essay with citations to get funding. I don't mean to trivialize Rohwetter's writing, as I can't imagine any corner of the New York art world putting out anything so serviceable. Rather, I have the impression that Europe's more well-padded support structures for art create an infrastructure of resignation that can't push beyond its familiar comforts into an understanding of our fragmentation that actually addresses it. Europe has good faith institutional complacency, America has bad faith market complicity, they're just two forms of deterring substantiveness, which is to say that in both cases good things only happen in spite of their surrounding structures. I'd decline to throw my support behind one or the other, but at least it seems nicer to live in Europe.
Henri Chopin, Keta Gavasheli, Nour Mobarak, Angharad Williams - Song of Flight - Lombardi-Kargl curated by Kathrin Bentele - **.5
Sound poetry: a classic Euro genre neglected stateside by all but the most insufferable experimental music nerds, such as myself circa 2013. I still have a bit of a soft spot for the stuff, not that I listen to it anymore, because records like Revue OU and artists like Gerhard Rühm were the fulcrum where my interest in esoteric music started to transition into art. Chopin in the star here, which isn't my personal bias: Williams only offers a few photos of a singer's mouth, which is shamelessly hacky and lazy, Nour's video is pleasant but innocuous (she also has a sound installation next door with a trippy pattern on the wall and a blacklight, it was more fun but I only caught that part when I came back with some friends after a wine-heavy dinner so my memory is foggy), and Gavasheli's sculptures made from cassette tapes and other musical material land variously between a smirk and an eye-roll. Chopin, by contrast, is a freak genius documented on video losing his shit with nothing more than a microphone and a tape recorder, and his concrete poems manage to hold up as visual art as well. The other artists politely reference the midcentury legacy he was a major player in, but for whatever number of systemic and historically-contingent reasons (I doubt gender is one) they've scrubbed out all the crudity that's the defining appeal of the sound poetry tradition. It's worth noting, for the through-line of these shows, that the press release emphasizes the artists' use of language, although there isn't much language actually present in the works.
Anna K.E., Sally von Rosen, Linnéa Sjöberg - And tell us how to save us from ourselves - Galerie Martin Janda curated by Tessa Praun - *
The parallel bars installed on the walls of the gallery are engraved with text, which I didn't read in sequence, but the section I looked at said, out of order, "the circulation and juxtaposition within a collegial suspiciousness of paradigmatic compose", which put me off from the rest. None of the other works were any consolation. It's here that I started noticing the prevalence of text, as if Europeans expect art to explain itself in its own words; an earnest belief in wall texts and press releases taken to its logical conclusion where the statement of meaning in an artwork trumps the artwork itself, so that the artwork becomes a mere pretext for the statement.
James Lee Byars, Matheiu Malouf, Franz West, Heimo Zobernig, gelitin - El Dorado - MEYER*KAINER curated by Herwig Kempinger - ***.5
The Byars pieces are tiny and precious and do the text-as-meaning thing (maybe he was a pioneer of that, I don't really know his work but I get the impression Europeans like him more than Americans), but everyone else is a certified piss-taker. I enjoy this kind of stuff, but it also occurs to me that taking the piss and other evocations of the id are Vienna's art historical bread and butter. So, if I were a hypothetical Viennese version of myself, I'd be as sick of bad boy scatalogical art as I am of, say, mid-tier AbEx, although I'm not a hypothetical Viennese version of myself so I'm not going to downgrade my experience. This reflection also made me intuit that this space is roughly equivalent to a semi-respectable Chelsea gallery that can pull in minor works by canonical artists when they need to, whereas a lot of these other galleries are small downtown spaces I'd know to avoid if I were in New York.
S.M. van der Linden - The DEPRESSIVA Revolutions - E X I L E curated by Oliver Koerner von Gustorf - ***
I covered Sabina's Gandt show last year, which was a fuller survey and more sensibly arranged. The three smaller screens here are single videos from that body of work, which worked better at Gandt as a playlist, both in terms of being able to pay attention and the generous abundance of content that made the show so likable. The two bigger projector works are from a later series and utilize creepy night vision effects: one is a nightmare of being buried underground, the captives kept alive by a young girl sticking a breathing tube in and out of holes in the ground into their mouths, the other is the artist, I think, talking to a young guy in a thin fur-lined jacket, but I couldn't discern what they were talking about. That's the main issue, I like her work but the cramped presentation and audio bleed makes it impossible to really digest it.
Jochen Lempert, Nobuko Tsuchiya, Moe Yoshida - Urchin Compass - Gregor Podnar curated by Simone Menegoi - **
When a press release mentions the anthropocene, I reach for my pistol. Obviously, I'm tempted to leave things there, but while I'm at it it's worth attempting to consider what all these biology photograms and resin-pole assemblages think they're doing. The bigger constructions by Tsuchiya and Yoshida are basically pleasant and precious for their tinkered-over quality that's at odds with the raw, trashy materials, but as has been and will be the case, the works feel rule-bound by meaning(s) and significance(s) that are imposed on the work even when the press release claims that the "dialogue in the context of the exhibition is intuitive and visual rather than conceptual." The baggage of the visual content carries with it conceptual traces of object-oriented ontology and other short-lived 21st century philosophical trends, and it's this signification embedded in the aesthetic references that prevent the pure intuition and visuality that the text makes claim to. This is another condition of the tendencies that paralyzes art in Europe: where America is mostly in on its own commercial grift and therefore at least has some room for self-consciousness and irony, Europeans insist far more on an earnest belief in the seriousness of art's social value. This ruins art, of course, because the non-conceptual facticity that art aspires to can only be wrested from the clutches of institutional heft, if not necessarily in direct opposition then at least by maintaining some degree of disassociation from it. It goes without saying that art relates to society, but earnestly engaging with the logic of "this photograph of sand questions the limits of the human" is a reification and negation of what art does as art by presuming that all art is always a vital question, and moreover that artists are capable of consciously dictating the nature of that inquiry. In reality art is far more unwieldy and ambiguous, and although some successful art does abide by this logic (even talented artists need to play to the script to get their grant money), I would argue that these elevator pitch interpretations that institutions demand of art are always at best secondary or coincidental to their real value.
Jieun Lim, Willem Oorebeek - Beyond Certainty - Galerie Hubert Winter curated by Vanessa Joan Müller - ***
Another philosophy press release, and the most unfortunate one yet: it's hard to think of a less apt adjective to use for any philosopher than referring to Wittgenstein as "verbose". I can only hope it makes more sense in German. Oorebeek is good, even Wittgensteinian in his rigorous and insistent negation of graphic design, and I would say his is the best work I've seen thus far; Lim is a terribly overwrought sentimental pastiche of conceptuality. I can't really justify this, but I have the sense that contemporary artists from Asia working in installation art often appropriate and aestheticize the signifiers of conceptuality with none of the requisite anti-aesthetic criticality or intellectual rigor. The austerity seems to be the appeal, but that's incompatible with the naive emotionality that's retained by artists who are insufficiently grounded in the history of 20th century art, which, to be fair, is the case with most artists. There's just a certain draw towards these specific empty signifiers that I associate with artists from Korea and China, for whatever reason. Oorebeek is doing all the heavy lifting here, he compensates because Lim's works are so lightweight that it's easier to ignore them than it is to pay attention.
Jennifer Aldred, Eyrie Alzate, Ericka Beckman, Ada Friedman, Jack Salazar, Julia Yerger - September - Shore curated by Otto Bonnen - ***.5
Vienna does Ridgewood; there's worse things you can do. The advantage of whimsical/crafty doodle-core is that it dictates very little from a formal standpoint, so the consistency of vibe is counterbalanced by a wide variety of approaches that stop it from feeling like a facile trend. Eyrie's two horizontal taped-up collages, mostly made up of many cut-out iterations of Nico's son's boots from the Desertshore cover repeated in a stuttering non-pattern, is the strangest and therefore the best. It's literally whimsical, as in dictated by her attraction, on a whim, to the boots on the album cover, which she then incorporated into a construction of a sensitively offhand method for focusing and dilating that aesthetic intuition into its own object without simply becoming a derivative fetish. The rest yearn for a similar effect by the means of horror vacui not-quite-abstract drawing procedures, and, while none feel particularly derivative, they don't manage to go beyond chasing after a feeling of freedom, which would turn the lingering arbitrariness into a feeling of specificity. Ericka Beckman is a slight outlier as the only intergenerational artist, and her robot cartoons are more figurative than the others while fitting in well (I didn't realize she was older until I saw the dates on the work). They're imaginative, if too twee for my blood, but the whole show fares surprisingly well considering this whole style is too twee for my blood.
9/6/2025
Edward Dean & Matthew Linde, Flora N. Galowitz, Bradley Kronz, Hans-Christian Lotz, Simon Lässig & Vera Lutz, Teak Ramos, Nora Schultz, Pol Summer - The Artists Alone Decide - Felix Gaudlitz curated by Can - ****
I assumed I would casually like this since Can works with a lot of people I know and I'm familiar with a good portion of these artists, but I was impressed; it's the only legitimately compelling show I saw at Curated By. Nora Schultz has three photographs of wooden wedges on the floor, Brad Kronz has three spheres hanging from the ceiling behind a framed piece of plexi, there's one of Teak's silk on shaped board pieces, a family tree shape made out of aluminum by Hans-Christian Lotz, four low-effort sub-minimal/monochrome paintings and a ball with paintbrushes sticking out of it by Pol Summer, Simon Lässig & Vera Lutz submit a scrappy audio installation on old computer speakers (I can't remember what the sound was or if I heard it at all), a stoney raver video of people hanging out from 1998 by Flora N. Galowitz, and two photos of a mannequin by Edward Dean & Matthew Linde. This sounds eclectic, but it's actually quite cohesive. Pol Summer may set the tone simply by having the most work, but sub-minimalism is as good a quasi-term for these works as any. All the works are negational, airy, and "of" nothing, even Flora's video and Ed and Matthew's mannequin, as both emphasize an aimless sense of space instead of a figurative presence. By the same token all of it is far too scrappy, modest, and blasé to imply any actual reference to minimalism's autoerotic neoplatonism, or anything else really, except in the broadest categorical terms of painting, photography, installation, sound. The show is interesting, even exciting, precisely because it lacks any aspiration to accomplish something new, which these days implies an affectation of old innovations, or worse, an affectation of new innovations, inevitably related to technology (see the review after next). Those affectations are contrived because they're grounded in an inherited avant-garde notion of progress that has hit a wall. The "next big thing" is no longer new, big, or arguably even anything anymore. Thus this work manages to feel new simply by not falling for the pitfalls of newness, landing on a contemporary relevance by declining to aspire to it. "Art only needs to be new to avoid being old" is something I've been saying for years, and this show is a perfect example of what I mean. The press release even tacitly points to this strategy of avoidance: they mention the tension in the artist-audience dynamic between "pretentious" (postured aloofness) and "cringe" (shameless ingratiation), implying that they hope to do neither while acknowledging that it's impossible to avoid the problem entirely. If I wanted to quibble I'd say that pretension is itself just a different form of ingratiation, but that just proves the point and I think they'd agree with me. One might say the show does neither/nor by being both/and, but I wouldn't because that would imply a method or formula, which is definitely not what was used here to make a successful show.
Ethan Assouline, Bogdan Ablozhnyy, Mariia Andreeva, Fabienne Audéoud, Altroy, Perfect Blue, Keren Cytter, Merlin Carpenter, Nicolas Ceccaldi, Olivia Coeln, Courtesy, Juliet Carpenter, Albert Dietrich, Ruth Angel Edwards, Marius Engh, Chloe Elgie, Michaela Eichwald, Elin, Balearic Eric, Zoë Field, Genoveva Filipovic, Marie Yaël Fidesser, Hélène Fauquet, Stina Fors, Evan Jose & Simon Glaser, Nik Geene, Julia Haller, Katharina Hölzl, Hannah Hansel (Flower Crime), Christian Ingemann, Kristoffer Karlsen, Gretchen Lawrence, Paul Levack, Mel E. Logan, Birgit Megerle, Bjarne Melgaard, Mathieu Malouf, Jonathan Meese, Chloée Maugile, Tomás Nervi, Laurids Oder, Marysia Paruzel, Evelyn Plaschg, Philipp Quehenberger, Isak Ree, Public Reptile, Sydney Schrader, Calle Segelberg, Eirik Sæther, Heji Shin, Nora Schultz, Anne Schmidt, SALARY, Superskin, Universal Studio, Josef Strau, Nino Stelzl, Dominik Szereday, Stefan Tcherepnin, Octavian Trauttmansdorff, Bernadette Van-Huy, Leonard van Vuuren, Roger van Voorhees, Wounder, Morag Keil & Bedros Yeretzian, Oren Yehoshua (DJ Yeriho), Julia Znoj, Nina Zeljkovic - Telepathy Curating presents: Teases and Synthesis; Empty Threats, Vienna Love and Anxiety Reality Paradoxes - City Galerie Wien & Layr curated by Josef Strau & Kristoffer Cezinando Karlsen - ***.75
Herein lies the hipster apocalypse, but it's not so bad. The indifferent pileup of 70 of the curators' closest friends is remarkably successful, because brainlessly curating out your social connections can be a legitimate organizing logic if your friends are all in the right quadrant of the international art chiller network. There's no point in separating the wheat from the chaff because the assembly of the whole makes a mockery of one's attempts to judge it: some works would grate on me otherwise (Stefan Tcherepnin, Ruth Angel Edwards, Bedros Yeretzian & Morag Keil, Evelyn Plaschg), there's very few that I'm sure I legitimately like (Albert Dietrich's wardrobe in a box), and the vast majority is in a huge middle ground of work that I can't even distinguish my feelings on because I can't divorce it from the assault of the whole. That ambivalent chaos is pretty enjoyable; I wonder if this is what Reena Spaulings shows felt like 15 years ago. Still, I'm designating a unique ".75" rating because that enjoyment is a little aimless and unconvincing, like the show is playing a trick on me more than it's exhibiting art well.
Simon Denny, Katja Novitskova, Marianna Simnett, Christopher Kulendran Thomas - Seeds - Galerie Nächt St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder curated by Thomas Thiel - *
Simon Denny printed out a picture of an Anduril drone, a powerful statement meditating on the nature of radical possibilities in our time being with regards to art as well as also to technology. Someone should tape a "kick me" sign to Thomas Thiel's back.
BERLIN
9/10/2025
Christelle Oyiri - Dead God Flow - LAS Art Foundation - *.5
I wasn't really paying attention to the show when I came here, I was too amused by how ridiculous it felt to be in a stereotypical Berlin club "fog machines and colored lights in a concrete room" setting as an art show. There was a text printed on some slabs leaning against the wall that ended with "Noise is our passport. Excess is our ecology. The borders will fall. The rhythm will remain" and you just know she thought she ate when she left out the last period. The main video slaps an institutionalized version of DIS aesthetics with no apparent recognition of their belatedness on top of mythologizing footage of Memphis, TN, which prominently features the Bass Pro Shops pyramid. I really don't know what's going on, is this the nostalgia cycle tightened up to be rehashing stuff from the early '10s when Berlin was cool, or has this been going on here the whole time and I stopped paying attention? I think the former, and musically it's a lot less adventurous and charged than, say, Elysia Crampton. Regardless, this is all a clear symptom of Berlin's long 2015.
Mark Leckey - Enter Thru Medieval Wounds - Julia Stoschek Foundation - ***
I like Mark Leckey just fine, indifferently, which by the standard of my usual feelings towards tech-forward spectacle artists is an effusive compliment. I've seen a lot of this stuff before because I happened to be in New York in 2016 for his PS1 show, and there's a few pieces from his Gladstone show from January. It's hard to say how I would have felt if I didn't have those experiences, but both detract from this. The Stoschek Foundation building itself is pretty cool as the former Czechoslovakian Cultural Institute from the GDR days, but as a gallery space the interminable curtain-lined hallways connecting tiny screening rooms have a disorienting effect. Videos should be shown separately, sure, but cutting the show up into so many pieces makes it feel underwhelming until you realize there's two more floors and it immediately becomes fatiguing with no manageable middle ground. That could be an unavoidable fact of the space, but what's more damning is that Leckey's usual focus on cohesive exhibition design is nowhere in evidence. The new works from the Gladstone show, which was one of the most successful multimedia gallery experiences I've ever had, have been tossed in with no attempt to reconstruct any of the dynamics that made it memorable. Rather than a fully-realized retrospective, which the PS1 show was, this feels more like a half-assed compilation of stuff being dragged out of storage. Someone told me a lot of Berlin retrospectives have the same feeling.
9/11/2025
Berlin Biennale - passing the fugitive on - KW Institute for Contemporary Art - .5
Hoo boy. Where to start? Well, Nge Nom's piece is called The Ditch, and it's a ditch in the back courtyard. The accompanying wall text begins, "Comprising mud, water, plants, and a wooden fence, this installation is a poignant symbol not only of survival and traumatic loss but also of the intelligence and courage of Myanmar's younger generation resisting military control." The rest of the paragraph discusses the artist's activities as an activist, not the ditch or why it's a symbol, although I can't imagine I would have been convinced if they'd tried. (The online text includes a story about hiding from the military in a ditch, but not the wall text. I don't particularly think that makes the ditch itself more powerful, but it's characteristic of the show that they self-censored and rendered the piece incoherent.) This approach is mirrored in everything else in the show, but a ditch at least has the virtue of being aesthetically neutral; the other works are a shameful embarrassment as art. A coat and leash hung on a pale green canvas, the leash connected to a cabbage in a little cart on the floor, lots of fluffy meaningless text like "THE PAST IS NEVER DEAD. IT'S NOT EVEN PAST," Karl Marx's face on a globe, a caricature of Trump's face in the center of a windmill with fighter jets on the ends, a giant bra, a computer game called "Panties for Peace" that's supposed to crush Burmese dictators. Those are just some of the ones I took pictures of because I thought they were funny, and I didn't look at most of the wall texts but I'm sure they all stated the import of the work in similar terms of rapturous activism. Similarly, I saw a panel on "art criticism and belonging" before going to the exhibition, and the curator, Zasha Colah, read a prepared statement that only dwelt on how vitally important it is to exhibit work by these artists from embattled and oppressed regions of the world. How or why this action becomes vital (and clearly the curator's concerns are sociopolitical, not artistic) was left unsaid, because such rhetoric is considered sacrosanct in Berlin. This created a strange state of affairs since the panel was occasioned by the negative response to the exhibition, but no one seemed capable of raising the question that perhaps the logic undergirding the exhibition, and the careers of these artists, is based on an assumption about the nature of art that is simply incorrect. Rather than suggest that the art on display is mostly crude and unbearably corny, the sentiment of critical backlash was that the exhibition did not address Palestine explicitly enough! This is the symbolic order of European art at its furthest, most ridiculous extreme, an authoritarian demand that art must be used to uphold political values that are already wholly normative in the art world and the general public, if not the German government. I don't take any pointed issue with those values, I only question art's efficacy in this role. Pablo Larios bent over backwards in his review to place responsibility entirely on the Berlin bureaucracy and the city's generally repressive political atmosphere, giving "two thumbs up" to Colah's assertion of "the cultural ability of art to set its own laws in the face of lawful violence" while shrugging off, with remarkable backhandedness, all "conservative" diagnoses of biennales as overly moralistic or concerned with identity because moralism and identity are "a reflection of our societies." In other words, in the span of three paragraphs, he affirms that art has a legislative power (presumably metaphorical, but I'm unfamiliar with how art goes about making any laws), but also that that same force cannot tolerate any critiques leveled against it because any suggestion that the conventional approach to biennales should be reconsidered is to deny art's reflection of society. This seems as though it would contradict his complaints about Berlin being a hostile environment: isn't a tepid biennale a reflection of Berlin society? I'm being snide, but I don't see why anyone defending this should have any sympathy. The panel's Q&A got pretty heated, with the curator defending herself from the audience with the same excuses of a repressive and paranoid institutional climate, as if it would have flourished in a vacuum and then made a real difference on the world stage, like, I don't know, the spontaneous establishment of Western-style democracies throughout Asia, or attendees being inspired to drop everything to become NATO peacekeepers. I can't imagine a situation where this crap could help the world, so all the moral piety is not only wrongheaded but a self-deceiving barrier to anyone involved from doing anything useful with their lives. (Nge Nom may be an engaged political organizer, but her ditch has no bearing on that.) I feel like I'm retreading my review of the 2022 Whitney Biennial, only the motivating sanctimony from the inside as well as from the outside reception has been multiplied exponentially to crank up psychological repression of seeing the pointlessness of the entire exercise. The cracks are showing, now blatantly, but in characteristically German fashion no one is capable of acknowledging the return of what has been repressed. For my part, this whole phenomenon is sad, pointless, and generally not even worth addressing; Adorno's Commitment from 1962 already settles the issue for me, and his critique is that much stronger for having been levied against the likes of Sartre and Brecht, as well as during the Cold War when the Soviet Union at least represented a cause that one could claim to be throwing their support behind. I don't see any point in the contemporary "awareness raising" here in a purely pragmatic sense; it's manifestly worthless in the political terms it sets up for itself. The only thing that makes the exhibition worth commenting on at all is that it happens to be the worst collection of artworks I've seen in my entire life.
9/12/2025
Marc Kokopeli - Now We Are On Easy Street - Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi - ***.5
Marc has been the unequivocal top of the art food chain in New York for the six years that I've lived in New York: Gandt started a couple of months after I moved here and it's still easily the most consistently exciting platform for artists in the city, and up to this point his own exhibitions have managed an impressive act of juggling formal surprise and aesthetic appeal that reacts to the conditions of the art world with more acuity than any other contemporary artist that I can think of. It's pointed that I say he's reacting to the conditions of the art world because the terms of engagement that characterize his work are firmly on the side of a cool aloofness whose value comes from its dedication to illegibility, and thus to legibility with a sphere of art insiders. The art is determined by that context of knowingness more than anything else, which is fine. This is "pretentious" by the metric of the Can press release, although I wouldn't put it so negatively because the aloofness is more of a serious strategy than an affectation; I have my reservations about the Tell Them I Said No approach to art, but the ends often justify the means with Gandt-affiliated artists. The most tangible value in being cool, as far as I can tell, is that it's liberating to have enough clout that you don't have to worry about being cool, which is why the great faux pas of bad hipster art is being able to discern the artist's desire to be cooler than they are. This self-possessed independence that allows for a consciously unselfconscious approach to art is what has kept Marc's work aloft, but as soon as I saw the promo image of a South Park character I started to worry that he'd stumbled a bit. South Park is an on-the-nose uncool-cool pop culture reference where he's usually ahead-of-the-nose (see his use of Radiohead in his 2022 show at Edouard Montassut), and where his Reena Spaulings exhibition at the beginning of this year did a disarmingly flagrant reflexive NYC gesture by dropping New York by Ric Burns in its entirety in the gallery, here the references to New Year's in Times Square and social life in Dimes Square start to feel glib. His weird box TVs with transparent screens are still cool but, again, his previous show's flat use of them as screens with bricks lurking inside highlighted their weirdness as objects while using them to animate cartoon dolls is more trivial. The centerpiece is a girl doll in a hip outfit giving a 45 minute lecture, I was told, on Hieronymous Bosch and the drudgery of shitty jobs, next to a doll dressed up like a stereotypical painter in a beret that paints silently. I couldn't really hear the audio even though the gallery was quiet, so, if that was the content, I mostly missed it. The show isn't bad by any stretch, but the elliptical, reticent strangeness that usually makes his work stand out is absent.
Hans Josephsohn & Günther Förg - Galerie Max Hetzler - **.5
So flat that the works are like unformed masses, graves, etc., but their impassivity doesn't cross the line from dull withholdingness to a substantial negation. Förg's smaller works on wood are better. The upstairs space with more active sculptural works make the artistic dialogue more explicit, but the bluntness is middling. I walked past a group of people in rapt discussion of a piece and I can't possibly imagine how they found something to talk about.
Philipp Fürhofer - Idyll and Apocalypse - Galerie Judin - *.5
Mostly a pathetic attempt at blending landscape painting, mirrors, and text to commercial ends, but it's done with such stupidity that the seascapes overlaid with cutouts of the word "Fuck" and marathon runners end up being a little bit funny.
Lee Bae - Syzygy - Esther Schipper - *
Only Europeans are so arrogant in their self-regard that they'd try to seriously validate this. They want you to put on shoe covers to walk around this shit, can you imagine!
Tauba Auerbach - Clepsydra - Esther Schipper - *.5
Which is worse, the guileless, stupid desire Europeans have for futuristic polish, or the opportunistic American artists who capitalize on it? I remember 2012 quite clearly, when words like "clepsydra" or "syzygy" were super-aesthetic track names for sides A and B of your modular synth album, but I have a lot more sympathy for a 20-something smoking weed and selling tapes for $7 than I do for any element of this gallery's existence.
Richard Sides - Looking at Rooms in a New Light - Schiefe Zähne - ***.5
The press release is worryingly New Age, with references to camera obscuras, robot futurism, orgone accumulators, and Canadian islands. It would be hard to guess that from most of the work though. Well, aside from the orgone accumulator. There's vacuum cleaners in plexi boxes, like Koons, an advertising collage that's sort of like a Richard Prince, a microtonal sound piece made with cardboard that works for once as a sound installation in an art show, and some admirably withholding reflective paint monochromes. The orgone accumulator had some effect on me, not that I was going to have a full meditation session in the gallery, and the audio paired well with it. There's more baggage with the hippie shit and the art references, but like the Can show it mostly succeeds in actively not doing anything, in a good way.
Robert Colescott - Imagine! Going to Egypt - Galerie Buchholz - ****
The press release gives these works an unusually informative frame of reference because Colescott has an unusual biography, eventful but more by chance than any apparent eccentricity on his part. A white-passing black man, he chose to present himself as white for almost forty years until he spent a year as an artist in residence in Egypt in 1964, which radically transformed his attitudes towards race, culture, art, and life in general. He returned to Egypt for a two-year position in 1966 until he was forced to flee the Six-Day War in 1967, after which he and his family moved to Italy and then France, where they were present in Paris for May '68. He then lived through the politically charged atmosphere of 1970s Oakland, painting and teaching in the Bay Area until 1985 when he relocated to Tuscon, residing there until his death in 2009. The paintings here predate his best-known racial satire works that he started making in the '70s, and are mostly from around the time of his pivotal first Egypt experience aside from one 1949 work from when he was a student of Fernand Léger. They're good paintings, certainly, but it's hard to shake the knowledge that the expressively caricatured facial expressions emerging from the abstracted murk of his backgrounds are the formative glimpses of what he would later hone into a far more expansive language. Maybe that's ungenerous; the strange apparitions of Imagine! Going to Egypt and the hieroglyphic symmetry of Masked Lady, for instance, are strikingly different from the rest of his oeuvre, and their oneiric charge suggests something of the outside forces at work in Egypt that changed him for life. In Michael Lobel's exhibition text he quotes something Colescott wrote on these paintings: "...[I]f the work has any meaning beyond my own involvement, it is about [the] human condition. Spiritual condition is the one I mean, the kind of split second rapid fire experiences that make up any day as we collide with unrecognizable selves at every uncharted turn. Piece all of these together in any order, and you still have an odd-shaped fragment." Well said!
Christelle Oyiri - Heaven's worth, Hell on earth - Galerie Buchholz - *
Five stylized Memphis rap tape titles as a series of wall works, a miniature Bass Pro Shop pyramid with a skull in the top, a nice vintage tape/cd player, some music playing off a speaker in the background. Converting a contemporary DJ's aestheticization of '90s rap into an installation aesthetic is, for all intents and purposes, below the threshold of being art. I didn't like her videos at the other space either but at least they weren't nothing.
Cecily Brown, Ella Kruglyanskaya, Sarah Lucas, Maja Ruznic, Tobias Spichtig - I Sing the Body Electric - Contemporary Fine Arts - **
Less a group show than Kruglyanskaya and Spichtig (5 works each) buoyed by one or two works by the other artists. Ironically, both of them are already buoyed by their classical/impressionist/expressionist referentiality. I can see the market strategies more than the art because the market strategies are the art, because the artists are just trying to game the market. Unfortunately for them, I think this transparent cynicism is exactly the source of the art market's current tummyache and they're going to be the first to go as belts tighten.
Márcia Falcão - Corpo de Cor - Contemporary Fine Arts - *.5
I thought she might be okay going off of the brushwork on the one photo of her work on SeeSaw, but she's clearly a hack who only knows how to do one not very interesting thing when you see her works together. This feels like a money gallery with fake taste, like Perrotin or Skarstedt when it shows a young artist. Falcão is aspiring to the level of Cristina BanBan?
Peter Bömmels - Gängle geh'n noch - Galerie Michael Haas - **
The night before I saw this show I did a talk with Çağla İlk, and she mentioned that the German political climate was too conservative and repressive for any German Surrealist movement to emerge back when it was popular elsewhere in Europe. Bömmels makes me suspect that, on top of that, the German psyche is itself too conservative and repressed to make Surrealist art in the first place.
A.R. Penck - Selbstportraits - Galerie Michael Werner - **.5
I missed an almost identical show of these at Werner NY because it didn't seem very good or interesting, and I'll hold to that. Penck in general is alright with me, but the flat dumbness of these repetitive exercises don't make any effort to engage and I'm not about to meet them halfway.
Mama Baer & Kommissar Hjuler - Asservatenkammer - Benny Boy's Fuck Palace - ***.5
Fun. Noise musician porn diorama collages in the damp basement of a bar. The fun is less about the content of the works themselves, which is solid but mostly generic, than the insistent, sincere, and almost quaint naturalness of a middle-aged German couple doing this with as much self-consciousness as they would tending to their garden. That's one of the nice things about the noise world, you get some real homegrown dyed-in-the-wool freaks. Kommissar Hjuler goes by that name because he was a police officer for many years, and when I spoke briefly with the artists he mentioned that they refer to each other as "Mama Baer" and "Papa Baer" so insistently that their own children didn't know their real names for years.
9/13/2025
Issy Wood - Magic Bullet - Schinkel Pavillon - **
They're Issy Wood paintings, you know what they look like. If you don't: it's the preciousness of Instagram aesthetics transfered to canvas. Her technique is visible, even overtly drawing attention to itself, but it's so consistent that it's a branded product instead of a technical means of approaching her subjects. I'd been to the Alte Nationalgalerie right before this, which isn't very good aside from the Impressionism room. Comparing her with Pissarro isn't particularly fair, but there's a categorical divide between two where her "painterliness" derives from a similar economy of brushwork in her approach to light and shading, but it's a flat, facile trick instead of an investigation of real-life phenomena by means of paint. Hence the Instagram comparison. What's worse is the upstairs room, where she's set up a guitar, bass, piano, drums, and amps and painted on them, plus her own music playing on the speakers. I can't pretend to know her intentions, but it felt to me like a bit of self-hating neurosis about her success driving her to "innovate" her practice, but combining her music and painting so flatly is the sort of bad idea you should get out of your system by the end of undergrad. I was telling a friend about the show the next day and she said, "Ugh, I can't stand those photorealistic painters! I knew some in school and they didn't do anything but sit there poking away at their paintings. They always find some little porcelain thing to paint... And they're always crying!" That seems like an accurate characterization, from the sense I get. Not that all artists have to be stoic and strong, but the feeling that she's trapped in her work and lamely non-attempting to change that up is a weak petulance that's hard to sympathize with when it's coming from one of the most commercially successful artists of her generation.
Hanna Hur - Visitor - Sweetwater - *
I have no idea why my glance at the promo photo made me think this might be interesting. The formal rigidity is completely decorative and inert; a classic case of an artist attempting to sublimate their neurosis with drudgery. That's also Wood's shtick as a weepy melancholic object fetishist, but by comparison Issy is practically a manic pixie dream girl.
Lena Tutunjian - Inside the Time machine - Rubbish Bin - ****
This "gallery", run by friends formerly of Melbourne's Guzzler, is hard to approach evaluatively; not because of social ties (I think they'd want me to be frank and/or don't care what I think) but because the curatorial project itself is a sort of conceptual artwork. The space is a room with a dirt floor in a basement complex on a construction site, and the air is dank and clearly less than pristine, although I was told it was a lot worse before an exhibition in June that consisted only of trenches dug into the floor and inadvertently tilled out some of the microbial buildup. My old apartment in Chinatown left me with a lingering mold sensitivity, so I felt pretty shitty after being down there for 10 minutes, and what I mean when I say the project is a conceptual artwork is that that's the point. Rubbish Bin cultivates its own abjection intentionally and self-consciously, inviting, or rather forcing, you to participate in a way that recalls some of the more extreme and successful exercises of early conceptualism. Maybe it's because I was just rereading "The Turn of the Screw", but Buren's ill-fated 1971 Guggenheim International intervention feels like a point of reference, if only with regards to the shared intransigence and genuine site-specificity. Lena's show is a follow-up to a 2020 Guzzler exhibition she describes as "The soul of man, a cumshot video for Guzzler composed of unsolicited d pics sent to me by men online." The work in this show, Soul of man II was first proposed in 2021 but only realized for this show: it consists of ten A4 prints with a background of photos of a financial district in London overlaid with said dick pics in a loose stylistic imitation of Stephen Willats. Anticlimactic, maybe, but anticlimax is, again, very much the point and a consistent quality of all their shows. An expansive masterpiece would completely betray the spirit of the project, so the work has to be marginal, even "failed", to succeed by its own terms. If the "best" shows have been by the guys who run the space it's only because they're more in touch with what their goals are, the conditions are uniquely demanding for anyone else. If my nigh-meaningless metric considers this a "good" show it's because Rubbish Bin and Guzzler's negative seriousness of purpose is coherent and entirely singular in art today. That's clearest in comparison to its derivatives, like Benny Boy's Fuck Palace or much of the now-dead Melbourne project space network, that revere the extremity of their negation but aren't rigorous or fucked-up enough to come close to accomplishing something similar. If the dead-endedness of deconstructive rhetoric is a running theme in the above exhibitions and of the "European art world psyche" at large, then Rubbish Bin is a rare instance of an opposite movement, no matter how provisionally. It works as a construction, but one that starts from a station low enough that it preempts any overwrought positivity from the first, which is to say it refuses illusion and pretense and starts from where it is, which is the only appropriate ground for doing something that breaks away from the crap we already have.