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Peggy Chiang

“Wasted, 2024”

Laurel Gitlen, New York, NY, USA

“...pues polvo eres, y al polvo serás tornado” -Génesis 3:19

"Wasted" consists of a handmade-ready-made back section of a garbage truck butt-up against the front wall of the space, a smooth-faced rubble of cement with cigarette butts and ashes on top, and fall leaves spread out on the floor mostly accumulated at the perimeter of the room. The gallerist present in the space (could have been Laurel Gitlen herself or someone else, I didn’t ask) offered to light an incense. They then placed a cigarette onto the cement slab upright with all the butts, lit it, and the smell of incense filled my lungs. I don’t think I've ever seen a garbage truck at this close proximity to my face, probably because, in real life, garbage trucks are repulsive and so why would a garbageman allow civilians to get that close in the first place? This replica, or approximation, allows for deep, sustained contemplation of the affective qualities of standing in front of the mouth of a garbage truck as one would before a shrine or monument of sorts. This experience is punctuated by the cigarette’s utility of cleansing or preparing the atmosphere of the space, and thus formalizing the ritual of said contemplation. Every time I visit New York I’m inundated with the re-realization of how abject the city is, and the fact that the ugliness looks aesthetically compelling but my olfactory and gustatory senses bear the brunt of the sheer volatility of the city's abjection. Chiang’s garbage truck has no smell and no taste. Well, actually, instead of rotting material and tobacco smoke, the show tastes like calming down and being in awe. 

I viewed this show accompanied by a friend who said that it reminded her of being in a Buddihst temple. I resonate with this idea and see the garbage truck as a syncretic surrogate idol. The truck is God, or at the very least, it is divine. 

I stood directly in front of the mouth of the beast for most of my viewing experience because of the low volume of the sound and my voracity to see the details of this fake garbage truck. I wondered about throwing myself in its mouth, kind of like a child’s desire to return to the womb. In some way, this is the fragmented logic of a garbage truck; once exhausted, trash gets returned back to the celestial womb called the dump, which always happens to be sites situated in approximation to marginalized people worldwide.  

As I viewed "Wasted" there were other people in the space speaking to one another loud enough and for long enough so that, although I could locate the sound emanating from the garbage truck, I couldn’t really make out all the defining details of the audio compositions themselves, and for this circumstance, I will not go into too much detail of the sound provided by lexi welch, Coco Klockner, Allen Moore, Jazzy Romero, and larí garcía. However, the sound made me get closer and prompted these feelings of desiring a material integration between me and the artwork.     

The following account might be too subjective and personal for some folks' taste for art writing but I suspect that in here there's a one-liner, straightforward joke (that only artists who make art with found objects will understand) about the art being literally trash. This work is trash, and this is an undeniable statement on a purely content level and not a negative critique of Chiang’s effort. It is like a sculptural equivalent to self-deprecating humor. The humor and the serenity in tandem is the basic virtue of "Wasted".  

My absolute favorite aspect of this show is the ingenious decision to pack empty cigarette bodies with several sticks of incense so as it burns it unfolds open like a flower, wow. 

Chiang remains to be one of the greatest artists of our generation. Chef’s kiss.

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Arthur Carter

“Mathematical Beauty, 2023-2024” 

The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, USA

Siri! Play "Shopping Delirium" by Disconscious.

This is an incredibly unhip collection of artwork that is trapped within dated questions surrounding how to present modernist artistic styles anew. This work challenges art audiences who prefer figurative and landscape painting to other forms of art that could be described as “experimental” or “abstract.” The kind of risks this art proposes are palpable to those who predominantly prefer Hudson River School paintings. Within Carter's art world, the answer to basicness is a little less basicness. The work glistens like chrome and jewelry in a Kay commercial. A promotional video aptly displays the sculptures on turntables, akin to rings and necklaces on JTV ads. This is the sculptural equivalent of Muzak, best utilized to decorate a mercantile environment. The last time I went to the mall (during which I cried for a long time), all I saw were sconces, closed storefronts, metal sculptures akin to Carter's artwork, and nerdy apparel shops targeting millennials nostalgic for the days when Rugrats and Rocket Power were on television.

I think my liking for Vaporwave and the infinitesimal traces of post-9/11 nihilism within me have somehow bastardized my taste because these sculptures are actually very appealing to me, although not for the reasons that I think Carter wanted me to like them for. Or perhaps I am attracted to this work in a way I have never felt about most sculpture. I think a very large part of it has to do with the fact that it's so much work consolidated into one room that you get a real sense of Carter’s working logic, and each work accentuates the decisions of the others, each does something the others do not do quite in the same manner. 

I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much of this kind of work all at once. Usually, it’s just one sculpture situated on top of a grey rugged lobby somewhere in downtown Hartford, CT, or something like that. Usually, no one actually looks at them anyways.

Even how the work is cheapened by the glass display table of pencil drawings and the 3-minute promo video works in the show's aesthetic favor and creates a fuller picture of just how much this exhibition is what the internet calls an “industry plant”. I should not like this work as much as I do, but maybe I’m experiencing a horseshoe theory psychological phenomenon induced by the show’s inherent dedication to formalism and shininess, and honestly, everything is really well constructed. 

This is a more accurate example of Modern Gothic than any artist that Contemporary Art Writing Daily has ascribed to the genre.

“Mosquitoes, they flyin'

I lamp, I'm shinin'” - Zelooperz, "Mosquitos"

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Winona Sloane Odette

“Subsong, 2023” 

April April, Brooklyn, NY, USA

With all the time I took thinking about writing this reflection on Odette's exhibition at April April the thing that kept coming to mind was how pertinent it is to properly revere its beauty. This show stands out as the most visually stunning display I've encountered all year.

Beauty often disarms me; I typically find myself drawn to exhibitions with a darker or embedded institutional critique. Beauty, by its nature, is simple and needs little justification. However, this artwork transcends mere design, embodying a palpable tension within its beauty that elevates it to the realm of true Art. In this review, I aim to unpack this inherent tension.

Daisy Sanchez's eloquent press release provides an excellent description of the formal qualities of the work. To avoid redundancy, I'll delve straight into my thoughts. The 'speakers,' constructed from trimmings boxes and silver-plated dog bowls, symbolize sound, although they remain silent. This composition resembles a child's toy, suggesting a range of possibilities while remaining within the realm of plausibility. I envision either the gentle lapping sound of dogs drinking water or a hushed, ambient melody. During my visit, accompanied by the sound of raindrops on the windows, these 'speakers,' positioned at eye level, offered an intimate connection to the viewer. The sound had already been transmitted, and the installation reduced the distance for the vibrations to reach our ears—directly to our heads. 

On the back gallery wall, the underside of another dog bowl is exposed, alongside a large phonograph horn extending through a custom-built wall into the adjacent unfinished backroom. One can venture, if one pleases, into the backroom through a narrow walkway, witnessing the horn resting on more trimmings boxes—an obvious yet delicate solution that will likely go unnoticed. The varying heights of these 'speaker heads' on the preexisting walls might hint at different resonances that would have emerged if they emitted sound. This variation echoes a choir, harmonizing with different elements. 

The ground houses two sculptures that serve as the centerpiece of the exhibition. An arrangement close to the floor, crafted from Tyvek, industrial felt, discarded rubber ball remnants, assorted bells, socks, and poly batting, conceals the line between found elements and those created anew. This captures the essence of Odette's artistry—meticulously selecting and manipulating materials to suspend one's presumptions of process and what is found versus what is contrived. It exemplifies a finely honed 'eye' and a seamless fusion of materiality and poetry. A good 'eye' is pivotal in crafting beautiful compositions. Each ball fragment transcends mere arrangement; they evoke music—hypnotic, twinkling, and snapping. If the speaker boxes whisper, these fragments emit small metallic bleeps. Although it feels peculiar to describe the artwork in terms of personal imagery, this piece effortlessly led my thoughts in that direction. It invoked songs such as Burial x Four Tet - 'Moth,' Solange - 'Beltway,' Urn - 'Childish Gambino,' and Flying Lotus - 'Getting There (feat. Niki Randa).' These songs share an ethereal, soulful quality, aligning with Odette's impulse to transform a dog bowl into speaker heads.  Usually subjective interpretations of art can be cringeworthy but this work just takes me there. A mat beneath the felt suggests a play zone, acting as a cushion between one's knees and the wooden flooring. 

The exhibition's standout piece, a sculpture close to the ground, comprises Trimmings/notions boxes, a stainless steel slow-feed dog bowl, tree sap, wax, corn starch, pigment, and high-heel components. As mentioned in the press release, tree sap and wax are molded into egg-like shapes, filling the stainless steel bowl. This sculpture's material and imagery defy interpretation rooted in reality, beckoning us to explore the cavernous recesses of our imagination. It's a truly surreal work, captivating in person as much as in photo documentation. Some eggs, as suggested in the press release, transform into Euclidean forms, while others cleverly mimic real eggs. These eggs also reflect a chain or necklace sequence of smaller eggs on the upper inner rim of the stainless steel bowl. The bowl itself resembles an undulating mirror, complicating the artwork's image and serving as its landscape, armature, setting, and world. Gazing into this mirror, one sees a small, distorted reflection of oneself, inverted and flipped upside down. I can only imagine the time and creativity invested in conceiving a sculpture like this. Few artists consistently imbue found objects with such intimate alienness. Several artworks come to mind—both found and not—such as Terry Adkins’ 'Aviarium,' Marie Angeletti’s polished balls, Philip Guston’s late career paintings, and Louise Bourgeois’ biomorphic marble sculptures.

Living in the same era as Odette fills me with excitement and gratitude, knowing I have the privilege of potentially witnessing more of her art spring forth from her mind and into the world.

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Pap Souleye Fall

“It Ain't That Deep, 2023”

Gratin NYC, NY, USA

It ain't that deep, an interesting title for an exhibition within a bodega-sized storefront that took me about 30 full minutes of pure observation to absorb. Even still, there are decisions, gestures, balances, and connections that I believe I inevitably missed.

I don't think you'll ever fully grasp this work. This realization becomes apparent when you stand in front of the art. It's not disappointing; rather, it inspires wonder and encourages you to linger in the presence of the work itself. The composition is so intricate that it fails to coherently imprint on the mind. I cannot define this composition except by using terms like site-specific, maximal, obsessive, or deep. Actually, the details are profound in this exhibition. Found objects are amassed to a point where their utility is reduced to their volumetric and physical capabilities, rather than their cultural uses or distinct object significations. The objects become webbing or filling that distorts the skin enveloping them. They are both communal and individualized. The materials distort the image. Distinct objects meld into greater wholes, often amounting to something indescribable.

Gestalt psychology describes the mental process that naturally allows figures to emerge as wholes, holding dominance over their parts. This work seems to explore the oscillation between the coherent and failing gestalt. This becomes even more apparent when you consider the Black Panther motif, as well as Justin Allen’s wall writing using a constructed language.

I haven't even begun to provide a coherent visual description of this work because, quite frankly, it's a bit intimidating…

The installation commences with a large image covered in packing tape of T'Challa and Killmonger from the blockbuster film, Black Panther, embracing through the proximity of their faces. The image hangs off an elaborate, geometric found object serving as the artwork’s armature. It appears as if they are kissing. The image is distorted to a large degree by the glare of the tape and the dissected small rectangular pieces and seemingly pieced back together again, akin to a very large puzzle. A bright green body suit with motion capture markers hangs limply off the back of the armature, while the rest of the back is covered in either blue, red, or green painted material. Directly behind this armature, a twin bed-like form has objects injected or embedded throughout it, consistently spinning on an axis above the ground. Parts of the materials on the architecture of the bed are highly reflective, some humorous, some unsettling. Again, trying to describe this thing literally defeats the purpose that seeing it achieves. Instead of a full description, I will point out that this bed has two Pikachu figures that don't serve as the sculpture's focal point but occupy their space and add more value changes when the light bounces off the sculpture's surface. Besides the bed, there are two wallworks that function as distinct sculptures, potentially saleable in appearance. sconces in effect maybe. By salable, I mean they are relatively smaller in scale, lit directly, not surpassing a person's line of sight, and colorful as well. They seem to be talismans. Quite beautiful pieces. One of the wall works also contains more images of T'Challa seemingly smelling Killmonger’s hair while in an embrace. At this iteration of the Black Panther motif, I realize that the images are A.I. generated. Adjacent to these wallworks, we find a rectangular monolithic artwork with many different openings and windows to look inside of it. I remember feeling like this monolith was a shrine that resisted observation. Near the back wall, one of the last components of the show is a viewing... fence? There is a symmetrical visually open picture plane made of found objects that allows one to see the rest of the show while partially obscuring whoever stands behind it. Everything seems to be covered in a brown paper bag material that has either been colored or dyed blue. The most uncanny aspects of this installation occur on the ground and the ceiling, I kept feeling like my body was actively forming the art with my weight.

I’m just going to list off some parts that stood out: a pinched packing peanut with a pearl embedded in its body, small prints of T'Challa and Killmonger sprouting out from a snake-like form that's slightly through the ground, compartments of gold, a welcome mat painted blue, a literal passport embedded in a sculpture, jeans painted blue as part of the blue ground, latex gloves painted blue and stapled to the ceiling, to-go containers piled to the ceiling. There are too many moments to make a comprehensive list.

I will attempt to directly address the Black Panther problematic now. Marvel's "Black Panther" begins by villainizing Killmonger for believing that pillaged goods should be returned to their original owners or their inheritors: a classic case of imperialist propaganda posited as representation for marginalized folks, African people, and racialized people simultaneously. There are many other problems with the misalignment to proper representation of racialized African people, but this introductory scene is by far the most pressing for setting up all the following failures within the film. "Black Panther" the movie might be entertaining, but it is not good in the Neo-Platonist-woke understanding of “good”; rather, it presents a never-ending impasse. It begins with a contradiction and just slips that contradiction under the rug, only for the critically adept to tear it apart, while the rest of moviegoers get to feel like Marvel is validating black lives now.

All forms of representation, especially of “Black” people, a group continuously overly misrepresented, will forever lack the competency to articulate the stories and history of the very people they attempt to represent. Representation is impossible, and therefore, portraiture remains the only sliver of hope we, as cultural producers and arbiters of truth, have left to even begin the calling to “represent” something.

Shrek describes himself like an onion; I think this is a good analogy for this installation. Is shrek Black? Does that matter? Can any cartoon be black?

If this installation were to be described as a representation of something, I would argue it represents unintelligibility in the form of architecture, subjecthood, framing device, and process. When you look at this work, instead of arriving at meaning, you arrive at more looking, and therefore, the lesson learned is not one of having a clearer understanding of the subject matter of either "Black Panther" or this installation itself, but of feeling satisfied with abstraction as such. There is only abstraction and no answers.

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Andrei Koschmieder 

“When is Time, 2023”

Jenny’s, New York City, NY, USA

Or as reviewsfornone.art titles it, The Baby is My Boss and My Delirium Inducer

This exhibition serves as my introduction to Koschmieder’s work. From my own understanding of this exhibition, Koschmieder used the material conditions of their current life to make meaning of the existential nature of being responsible for a creature that may possibly forever need them. 

The gallery is more or less the size of a bedroom with glossy gray floor and white walls. On the walls directly in line of sight of the entrance there are wall sculptures made of metal and tree branches painted white. The wall artworks are harboring… devoid of any hard signification, acting as a pause from the more narrative driven, colorful sculptures found in the middle of the room. I can't help but imagine that the lack of possible conveyable meaning in these artworks come from the effects that the middle works are attempting to address, that is, the ineffable heaviness of being a new parent and the way in which parenthood is an all consuming durational event. The wallworks are a way out. A place to pause from the day-to-day overthinking and emphasis on executive function. Color, and even titling, is too fussy to be implemented.  

The circular plinth in the middle of the room is where the meat and potatoes of the show’s form and content are consolidated. Made up of pasta dough, food dye, polymer clay, modeling clay, wax, tempera, latex paint, and acrylic coating the sculpture consists of handheld tableaus that narrate an elusive funny story of parenthood from the emotional point of view of a parent in distress, or possibly, just plain old exhaustion. From afar the collective objects resemble the technical and imaginative potential of a child, but upon further exploration, the deskilled sculpting techniques are contrasted by their content. Varying between sitting groggily in bed while contemplating to get up, changing a baby's diapers while possessing an abstracted body with what seems like too many limbs, melding with other adults' bodies in a weather-like and nonsexual manner, giving birth to a child while on the toilet. The content delineates these artworks precisely from the point of view of an adult. The finessed muddiness and sloppiness of the colors in many of the objects only add to their manic-depressive quality. Actually, sloppy isn't quite the right word, it's more like, extra, expressive, extended, thin, kaleidoscopic even. From certain angles, the sculptures do not convey any representable scenario and remain in the abstract, but on the right angles, the contours align to make the scene appear as though you had been miss-observing the form all along. The combination of different clay materials that vary even within each tableau adds variations in material outcomes including surface sheen, strength, texture, and perceived weight. These differences also add tension to the initial misrecognition of these clay sculptures as being made by children. Perhaps an overarching takeaway from "When is Time"  is that the infant renders the parent malleable through their incessant neediness and the chaos that they add to the world, forcing the parent to be lucid in relation to the infant who is the primary conditional force in their life while their other endeavors (i.e the untitled wall works) are barely hanging on to life and even less so scrutable.

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Scapegoat Garden

Directed by Deborah A. Goffe

“Liturgy|Order|Bridge, July 13th, 2023”

Christ Church Cathedral, Hartford, CT, USA

The stage was shared by Deborah Goffe, Abena Koomson-Davis, Lauren Horn, Arien Wilkerson, Jasmin Agosto, Chantal Edwards-Matthews, Juanita Harris, Kerry Kincy, Latoya Walker, and Ian Watson. Taken directly from the language readily offered in the performances’ program Liturgy|Order|Bridge is “a participatory dance-based ritual that uses Black church traditions and secular performance modalities to make porous the border between ‘audience’ and ‘performance.’”

Upon first entering the room I was taken aback by the sheer scale and quality of the construction of the church itself, its stained glass windows and vaulted ceilings make the church reminiscent of cathedrals found in old-world Italy or France. In order to reach the seating area you have to cross a boundary in which the performers trace a walking pattern around the seats. This demarcates the first instance of interaction between the audience and performers that becomes even more accentuated once the show develops. I often find myself indifferent to “audience participation”, not a hater nor an advocate for it, I find it simply as a means to generate meaning though often it feels like the audience itself has strong feelings for or against it, especially considering the nature of the art event. Scapegoat Garden’s take on audience participation was rooted in the tradition of being in close community one’s people and this element of closeness was something that was apparent in a lot of the compositions offered throughout the performance and quite possibly the driving ethics of the dance company itself.

There's a moment in the performance in which Goffe asks the audience if they ever wished they could give someone else their weight to bear after which the core group of performers rest on one another in a mass moving group bearing itself around the audience. Moments before the group movement Koomson-Davis sang a song that she instructed the audience to sing back to her. The song was about being a person that is new again. I immediately started crying after the first iteration of the song. I had chosen to see the performance even though I was in low spirits and I felt like although I could clearly see the joy in her voice and in the rest of the crew’s body language, and the way the performers looked at each other, I did not carry with me joy into the space and being asked to express being anew made me I feel fragmented. And so I stood in my state with acceptance. By this point of the performance, I realized it would be a challenging one for me because of the reflexivity taken up on the issue of how one is feeling and comparing that to a general state of satisfaction.

I cried about two other times, once when Agosto recited words about being there for yourself even through moments of self-effacement. And another time was when the audience was given time to reflect on their experience of the event thus far and given a phrase to consider. The phrase I was given was “Wait on it”. 

Outside of writing reviews I also make visual art. Being a visual artist is a big part of my personal identity and although my entire life I have had the privilege of attaining close friends either through grassroots community building or affiliations born through institutional environments, my creative life has been one in which I descend into my own dungeon and come out the other side from long bouts of creative isolation. Isolation can be incredibly useful and positive but its insistence can also be a sign of something lacking. I felt sorrow at the reality that I don't have mentors that I readily collaborate with let alone see anymore in the flesh. Hartford is my hometown and it was very refreshing to see a show in which people from Hartford perform at a high caliber in front of an audience also from the same town. Many faces in the crowd were familiar and this made it apparent that the audience in question wasn’t a generalized group of people but peers and friends of the crew whom the performers actually took an interest in their journey of transforming for the better. All my work has proliferated my own career and abilities but has often not been done with those that I love without working through some kind of built-up inaccessibility steaming from clashing egos or toxic masculine hesitancy of intimacy. What I'm pointing out here is that this performance made me realize how socially distant the visual arts world can be and that this is not a natural given but a symptom of a structured culture that prioritizes self-achievement, atomization, and competition over the virtues of being in community and sharing or dismantling of authorship as well as the responsibility of healing practices that group work inherently addresses. I have had desires to travel and leave my mark on all different parts of the world, but if I do this alone do I get to reap the benefits that my work may or may not be producing for others? 

The most moving moment was when the cast called out the old nursery rhyme “If you're happy and you know it clap your hands.” I could feel that Goffe was genuinely happy and that she also was seriously inquisitive about the status of the audience members’ emotional state, I mean everyone individually and as a unit. I knew that I was not happy for reasons outside of the performance. This moment opened up the existential nature of the simple saying, calling into question not only the original inquiry but also what is the root of the reason behind the happiness or lack thereof. Although potentially a joke, I didn't feel like the call to action was prompted with any ounce of irony or sarcasm and this added to its affective weight. How could one be so happy given the ever-present suffering in this world? My usual appeal to assuming insincerity was nowhere to be found. I was just unhappy and I knew it. 

After the performance, I talked with a friend who noted that the event as a whole reminded him of the insurmountable faith in a better world that essentially every African slave as well as their descendants had to embody in order to remain internally free and powerful enough to manifest a more just future. I agree with my friend. I think seeing this performance could be of specific use to men who feel alone, especially men who may not have nurturing mentor figures who share space with them on an emotional or physical level. The show was feminine and worked through formulations surrounding the task of nurturing others.

There was a recurring movement motif that encompassed, in its own abstract terms, the weight of the task of taking care. A right-handed scoop behind oneself, pushing the air forward towards one's torso followed by a deep simultaneous rotation of the hips and the neck. The movement looked sensual and laborious simultaneously.  

Liturgy|Order|Bridge is like a pedagogical model for being gentle and loving with others and oneself, and I was not expecting this quality of the show to reveal itself as overwhelming as I had experienced it. I am grateful for being overwhelmed. As I write this I am crying and for that, I am also grateful. 

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Malcolm-x Betts, Arien Wilkerson, Nile Harris, Andy Kobilka

“Niggas at Sundown, June 16th, 2023”

New York Live Arts, New York City, NY, USA

“Doctors say I’m the illest 

‘cause I’m suffering from realness

Got my niggas in Paris 

and they going gorillas”

Kanye West - Niggas in Paris

I wrote this review while experiencing COVID-19 for the first time and I probably would’ve written this differently if it wasn’t for my maniac desire to be productive while suffering from a life-threatening virus. I really resent hustle culture and I think, in part, this work is about coming to terms with that feeling.  

Niggas at Sundown is an ongoing series of performances choreographed by New York-based visual and dance artist Malcolm-x Betts. While previous and ongoing performances in the series feature other artistic collaborators, including essential collaborator Nile Harris, the specific performance I witnessed on June 16th, 2023 at New York Live Arts included Betts, Arien Wilkerson, and Andy Kobilka. 

Before even seeing the performance I made a direct mental association between the title of “Niggas at Sundown” with the track titled “Niggas in Paris” by Kanye West and Jay-Z from their 2011 collaborative album, “Watch the Throne.” The track and the performance share some thematic and conceptual affinities that make them both uniquely hyper-hood. Another direct reference to sundown towns. The following description of Sundown Towns is taken directly from blackpast.org: 

“Sundown Towns are all-white communities, neighborhoods, or counties that exclude Blacks and other minorities through the use of discriminatory laws, harassment, and threats or use of violence. The name derives from the posted and verbal warnings issued to Blacks that although they might be allowed to work or travel in a community during the daytime, they must leave by sundown. Although the term most often refers to the forced exclusion of Blacks, the history of sundown towns also includes prohibitions against Jews, Native Americans, Chinese, Japanese, and other minority groups.

Although it is difficult to make an accurate count, historians estimate there were up to 10,000 sundown towns in the United States between 1890 and 1960, mostly in the Midwest and West. They began to proliferate during the Great Migration, starting in about 1910 when large numbers of African Americans left the South to escape racism and poverty. As Blacks began to migrate to other regions of the country, many predominantly white communities actively discouraged them from settling there.”

Before I get into the rest of the review I want to talk about insincerity and the arts.   

People in the fine arts world simply do not make much dangerous art anymore and because everything is more expensive and there’s so many examples of rags to riches, or riches to riches, and most forms of cultural expression have been receded to manners of online marketing, everyone is playing “the game”. The days of Chris Burden hiring someone to shoot him with a gun are a relic of the past. Outside of the context of non-institutionally backed creative spheres like New York / Chicago Drill music, vagabonds that drift from place to place using whatever means or graffiti writers that chose to stay off the internet and in the street for the sake of just doing so, I would assert that the American fine arts world is in an exuberantly contrived era of art making in which the artists are expected to produce content with the direct intention of appeasing or otherwise becoming a subject produced by the institutions that they desire to work with. No one is punk. The art-world is becoming more and more professionalized as we move forward in time. The reality of this contrived world and the staging and fetishization of the experience of being an artist makes for a world in which artists feel compelled to have to check whatever boxes possible for socially acceptable reasons to be making art. Now, more often than not, artists are opting to describe their practice as primarily a “healing” one instead of a “transgressive” or “critical” one. This isn’t a critique towards art that seeks to “heal” as it should also be noted that, ultimately, all art helps people heal because art viewing and production are processes dedicated to the field of intellectual play. “Healing” is also a necessary stage of cultural work after the moving effects of the killing of George Floyd alongside the leveraging of lives in order to make a profit through the medical system during COVID-19. Despite this fact, there are always certain culturally and politically invested limitations put on artists’ ability to be radical enough to push the limits of intellectual play. This further illuminates the dichotomy between making artwork as a pure means of exploring meaning versus making artwork to feed the super-ego and be someone of status within an elitist social field. Artists want to be immortalized, they want to be successful, and they want things. And the more they want the more legitimate the question is regarding if they actually want to even make art in the first place. The easiest way to get recognized by art institutions is to do exceptionally well what the institutions want from you. Much of the energy of artists in 2023 who identify as belonging to ethnic or racial categories that are non-European are using their artistic abilities to make work that is transparently (or rather publicly) made to uplift and heal the communities they feel that they represent or serve. The necessity for having a true stake and interest in healing matters comes second to the availability of such a practice to land an artist in the professional position that they desire. Furthermore, the ideologies conveyed through the artworks and the ideologies publicly held by artists are expected to align and this creates public trust for the artist that may or may not be merited. Because life has degrees to a series of cultural signifiers, the process of appearing to be virtuous is a formula. This process of acting “real” or “honest” is almost completely automated. Say the right things and where the right face while doing it and you’re on your way to get some value. What we often fail to contemplate is what effect the professionalization of artists creates for potentially insincere, uncritical art practices, with artists making creative decisions that are market-driven instead of purely motivated by their inquiries about the phenomenological and material world. There are some artists that tend or claim to create outside of their own personal ideological values, namely Jordan Wolfson and Santiago Sierra, but if you pivot the lens away from art and into comedy, the range slams wide open but also being able to parse out sincerity becomes more difficult. Artists like Jordan Wolfson or Santiago Sierra would probably not make art if it didn’t make them money or grant them social status, I say this with my gut alone. So feeding the ego is a major factor as to why artists make art. Artists want to feel important. I’m thinking about the trope here among comedians that describes how every comedian is profoundly depressed and necessarily so in order to be funny and even want to step into the limelight in the first place.

Why did bring this up, to begin with? To me witnessing Niggas at Sundown, it was obvious that both performers have lots of desires for their careers and these desires are if taking what they communicated during the performance at face value, contradictory to the very real grievances that they feel are important to air out. The end result is incredibly cringeworthy, memorizing, and brave all at the same time.        

What makes this performance “Art” is not that it’s about racial justice, or that it includes movements from classic European dance traditions nor that its made by prolific Black art practitioners but rather that it does all these things while infusing meta-comedy inside an institution that (along with almost all others) has grown fearful of meta-comedy because of its all too current association with alt-right and reactionary groups of different variations that indoctrinate young people into conservatism through “jokes” that might have never really been jokes in the first place. Trolling has two requirements: 1) A topic or point to make fun of and 2) Mystification around whether the troll is in fact joking or telling the truth in order to appease the platform users/guests who agree with the joke as a legitimate critique as well as strike down any request for accountability with a simple plea of understanding the joke as just a joke and nothing more. Essentially a lack of sincerity is paramount for trolling. Art does not need to be purely sincere. Trolling can be a legitimate element for art-making. In todays political climate it seems that queer and black-identifying artists are highly pressured and incentivized to be sincere in a positive manner even at the expense of exploring notions around how sincerity or the lack thereof has been historically leveraged against them through colonial cognitive dissonance, heteronormativity and generational trauma stemming from the history of racism, homophobia, acts of hatred and hate speech, shame and slavery in America.

“Niggas at Sundown” takes these aforementioned parameters and turns them upside down, calling into question the validity of many institutions and gatekeepers who are inside them while also exposing their own drive to be seen, admired, honored, and taken care of by a community. The performers have an anxious attachment to their careers as a byproduct of holding resentment for the institutions that pay them (very little) to perform. Wilkerson and Betts used the two-hander theatrical form to play diametrically opposed characters. Wilkerson enacted a kind of classic stereotypical hood, black caricature that is hostile, unrelenting, and radiant with energy (think something like the new 5th member of the hip-hop group, Onyx, but gay) while Malcolm wavered between egging Wilkerson on, setting the parameters for the ongoing critiques and attempting to tame (and cover the tracks of) their co-performers general anti-sociability and unpredictability. Midway through the performance, Betts apologizes to Janet Wong and Bill T. Jones, the director and the founder of New York Live Arts, while exposing insecurity (economic insecurity, insecurity regarding the sincerity of said apologies, insecurity regarding their own perspective on what is happening as it is happening, insecurity about sounding desperate and being upstaged). It seems like Betts is both sincere and just as easily able to turn that sincerity into sarcasm. I kind of splitting; an ability to oscillate between valuing and devaluing.   

The performance starts with Betts asking “I want to be taken seriously but who is in control of the improv, who is in control of the improv?” He says this as Wilkerson begins their tirade of calling out people in the audience, calling them names and calling them out of their name. Wilkerson displayed a disciplined, consistent willingness to speak openly about administrative and interpersonal turbulent interactions between them and the institution. “All I’m thinking about is how you all suck!” All while doing this the two characters are performing dance movements. Wilkerson mocks Bill T. Jones, by doing a pirouette, and then when they digress to less traditional dance movements they pick it right back up saying “Bill! Bill! No, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Bill take me to Chick-fil-A.” “They’re not inviting me back here no more right?” Wilkerson says to their collaborator.

It was like watching a person try to calm their drunk friend down as they start problems with a stranger, or seeing someone caught in a downpour. Furthermore, the thoughts were lucid and self-referential. The state of crisis and disintegration of the reality of the opportunity to perform for such an “esteemed audience” seemed to be the concept, and the parameters that created the crisis, as articulated through the performance, was the convergence of feeling legitimate anger and placing it at the professional audience, and specifically called out individuals who were among it, to bear the brunt of a partially-sublimated emotional outpour via theatrical and dance performance. What was also apparent was that this entire performance was an invitation to psychoanalyze the performers themselves because the entirety of the performance also felt like possibly a legitimate crisis rather than a rehearsed one. Betts apologized more than once and then was communicating something that felt like an attempt to advise Wilkerson to “Leave Janet alone.” I sincerely believe that many of the things said by Betts and Wilkerson were new to the performance and new to each other and thus they both had to trust that it is what it is and that what is done will not be forgotten but will be done anyways. We learned about what some of the performances would entail at the same time as the performers did.    

It is important to keep in mind the profoundly problematic connotations that the term “Nigga” contains. To openly attend a performance with such a name should merit some questions about the nature of the performance and your own role in expecting to see something that would represent that word. Whoever attended the event could have anticipated a work that was aesthetically analogous to the word. Niggas are not inherently found in the world but rather are produced through the very systems that condition them and others to identify a set of inconsistent behaviors as nigga-like. I kept thinking about historically afflicted jesters critiquing the high court. In Medieval times the jester’s schtick was to “represent” the lesser people and act like one of them. Jesters were also often people with neurological, or physical problems, so in part, they were afforded the right to critique because they were pitied and discredited due to their poor health. Wilkerson has H.I.V. Betts and Wilkerson are both gay and therefore, as Wilkerson said of Betts as he was beautifully soloing among a chain of lights on the ground, “That’s a faggot, shut that down!” This was moments after Wilkerson told Betts “Take your time baby, fuck them, take your time, you don’t have to talk to them they don’t deserve this!” In 1972 a masked “H. Anonymous, M.D.” spoke out against the inclusion of homosexuality in the DSM as a psychopathology at the APA’s 1972 Annual Meeting. The man later to be revealed as John Fryer, M.D. had been forced to leave his psychiatry residency at the University of Pennsylvania when it was discovered that he was gay. The performers are angry because they are traumatized and they are anxious because they know fighting will lead to social alienation. It is a catch-22. The spoken lines in the performance contained considerable longing for better treatment. All the trouble was utilized with the knowledge that it would inspire a strong negative response from the high-brow, art audience. This capacity for open hostility reminds me of Rap music in the 1990s when being hard and embracing toxic environments were paramount in the aesthetic experience as well as in the environments that were spoken about within the music at the time. I suspect that Niggas at Sundown may have started from some kind of joke about New York City being the land where toxic masculine hip-hop made its debut for the world to take up and appropriate.   

To represent something is to offer it to the dominant other, immediately centering and acknowledging hierarchical structures, an admittance that you are under the throws of someone else’s power. To be a puppet on stage. To be an artist is to navigate a world that either values or devalues you based on almost everything outside the merit of one’s output. The iteration of Niggas at Sundown that I viewed was a mixed bag that disallowed any clear delineation between what was real, and what was communicated in order to entertain (or horrify) the audience, much like a jester afforded the right to critique the royal family and then proceeding to have a breakdown. There are many shows that make use of institutional critique but I think it’s more apt to describe this performance as a critique of the contrivance of stardom and lose-lose situations as well as an unfurling of anti-social tendencies that reveal new levels of destabilization between art and life.

[reviewsfornone]

Omari Douglin

Wave Gods 2, 2023 

Ramiken Crucible, New York, NY, USA

I was unable to attend the show in person as the gallery hours coincided with my work schedule. Therefore, this review is based solely on the provided show documentation. It is important to note that there may be certain gestures or elements that I might have missed or were not provided in the materials available online. Generally, I strive to avoid making evaluations without firsthand observation. However, despite this limitation, the exhibition compelled me to step outside my usual boundaries and review a show I have only experienced virtually. All this aside, this is the best exhibition currently on view in New York City.

The exhibition titled 'Wave Gods 2' makes a reference to the incarcerated Harlem rapper, Boss Don Biggaveli, Max B. The show seems to consist of a room filled with piñatas, most of which represent humanoid characters with deep brown skin color. The sculptures are dressed differently but generally styled in streetwear attire. They create a cute animated series that could appeal to children or adults, or perhaps they exist as a world of characters beyond any specific target audience. Some of the sculptures rest or interact with solid-colored pedestals attached to the walls. The incorporation of these pedestals has a couple of effects: they imply movement, create hiding spaces, provide eye-level interaction, or serve as support for the piñatas. They effectively establish a landscape for the piñatas to exist in.

The figures are impressively crafted, adhering to the conventions of figurative piñata making while offering enough variety in individual designs to provide a generous range of types. Some of the characters are based on real people or existing cultural figures, while others are more whimsically niche, such as Kodak Black, Dragon Ball, Aang, Fillmore, Yeat or Executioner, Knicks Fan, Rapper, Smilaholic, Super Hero, COVID Guy, Music Lover. The collection of piñatas forms a mass in a holding room, all exhibiting indifference to the fact that their materiality suggests a potential future violence enacted upon them. However, this violence may never occur due to their status as fine art objects rather than mere party tricks.

Initially, when I saw this show, it elicited a degree of sadness similar to my response to more somber artworks, such as those by Miroslaw Balka or Mike Kelley's MoMA PS1 retrospective. Yet, this sadness struggled against the vibrant colors, scale, and playfulness of the work, creating an intriguing friction. The campiness of the exhibition is fun and lively. Is the violence fun too? The politics and psychology behind this installation are complicated, particularly considering that the general public may interpret the work as creating equivocations between violence and brown skinned people.

Through my experience working as a gallery attendant, I have come to realize that docents in museums often relay the most generic and easily understood themes to the visiting public when discussing art. This exhibition, however, embraces the challenge of being excessively charged and, as a result, becomes susceptible to simplistic interpretations or an overconfident understanding of its meaning. Douglin's secret weapon lies in the fact that these piñatas will be liked by everyone, despite, and partly because of, their contradictions. It genuinely caters to anyone, whether it's your grandpa, the store clerk, or fourth graders. The intuitive level of fun and humor in this artwork is undeniable. 

You can’t touch the art so you can’t swing at it neither.   

The press release doesn't even suggest the actions commonly associated with piñatas. Instead, it chooses to elaborate on cultural convergence and the sculpture's sacredness. This deliberate measure seems to be taken to imbue the work with the potential to transcend the automatic response triggered by seeing piñatas with dark brown skin. Is violence itself the Trojan horse here? Or perhaps the opposite? Are the piñatas themselves, as conceptual objects, Trojan horses that utilize their surfaces and collective presence to smuggle in the process of forgetting their materiality? They are so adorable together that their identity as piñatas becomes secondary to their initial playful appearance as a world of funny, tiny people. 

Reluctantly, I am inclined to draw a comparison to South Park, another world of tiny people whose bodies are crudely simplified and sometimes portray distorted versions of real people. Within the parameters of the show, all the characters in South Park experience violence enacted upon or haunting them in various forms. This exhibition also reminds me of Marc Kokopeli's 2022 "die Pampertaarten" exhibition at Reena Spaulings, as both projects take an original culturally sourced form and create a show that revolves around generating iterative versions of that initial form. 

My personal favorites from the exhibition are either Token or High Delivery Guy. I appreciate the implication that the piñatas themselves smoke weed, and that they could serve as inspiration for the act of smoking and that this is concept is formally conveyed through the design of the eyes, no more or less.      

[reviewsfornone]

Martin Wong 

“Attorney Street (Handball Court with Autobiographical Poem by Piñero), 1982–84” 

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA

Aside from the two incredible Dali paintings in the modernist galleries, this is by far the best work of art that I witnessed at the MET on my very first visit to the museum.

The uppermost border of the painting features a poem by Miguel Piñero. His poem screams the 1980s in its use of idioms, New York City vernacular, and a specific toxicity that is indicative of the personalities in New York during that point in time. Wong using hyperrealistic painting techniques renders the border as wooden with painted metal hardware and painted wooden plates with text on top. The painting slightly evokes a 1980s-New-York-neoclassical sensibility in its use of flat planes set inside designated plates for information, even the painted scene is a series of plates; the background being a red brick facade with a handball court on top that lays flat flanked by metal fencing at either side that leads to the wall at hand. The handball court features an array of tags, throw-ups, and pieces all noisily overlaid on each other like a quintessential graffiti wall that is not claimed by any individual but rather an accumulation of loose and free activity over time. There are some discernible words: a black fill-in with a white outlined “CASE” can be seen taking up the lefthand side of the handball wall painted on top of a red fill-in and green outlined piece that once spanned the entire width of the wall, the remaining letters seemingly read “...EXAXO,” although it's hard to say for sure if this is actually what it says. Some people call this the “ugly” kind of graffiti that does not increase property value and contributes to the “broken window theory”. 

The painting also features finger spelling. The MET’s website itself does a good job of writing about the use of that effect: “Wong used the manual alphabet to finger-spell the title and his name on the top part of the frame. Each line of the phrase in the cartouche on the lower frame is transliterated, using the manual alphabet, in the foreground.” 

The use of the hands widens the scope of the painting’s investment in the visuality and veneration of marginal language and culture. The painting offers something of an authentic multiculturality that supersedes its too-often cringe status by today’s standards by ducking any interest in promoting multiculturality for its own sake, or worse, for the sake of selling a product, rather it uses multiculturally to enhance the abstraction and dynamic quality of the composition and uses the exact forms that he was neck deep inside of as a living being, essentially Wong uses multiculturality not as something reached out to but found from within. It is easy to realize that Wong is grounded in and identifies with all these disparate cultures.   

The colors are appropriately muted and a bit muddy evoking a shitty day in the city. It seems as though all the components of the work take inspiration from the aesthetics of the phenomenon which was the handball wall that was used as the reference to create the painting. This is a landscape painting that takes the geometry of New York architecture to hone in on the organic line qualities on the sheer surface of the handball court and the invisible, eclectic, organic qualities of languages in the metropolitan area. There are no people seen in the painting, only their traces as spray paint on concrete and the slippery signification of language via disembodied, chunky human hands. The hands predict effects like emojis and reaction emotions that now appear on top of video recordings and media online through messaging apps and social media.    Wong is a witness of innercity life that turns that experience into phenomenal portraits of that life. In doing so he takes the complication of the limits of identity and sees that limit as his own possession as converted into love. Wong’s work continuously reminds me to love myself and those who could be considered “my people”. Wong also makes reminds me to expand the notion of who “my people” seemingly could be. Wong was a painter to trust with your identity and its limits. Many artists in this century only hope to be trusted in this same manner.

[reviewsfornone]

Aristilde Kirby 

Daisy & Catherine², 2022 

auric press 

"When you give people an opportunity to think in a void, people will see what they want to see, or see what makes most sense to them in its place." - Aris 

Daisy & Catherine² is a book of poetry by Aristilde Kirby. For the duration of this review, I will refer to the author as Aris, utilizing her first name because the book says that you can on the first page. The book includes track lists, found writing, and a highly aestheticized formalized approach to offering poems, with unique demarcations and reading structures made creatively from Aris’ own imagination. The book seems to consistently conjure objects and sounds that exist outside of the text, it could be seen as being in awe of a plethora of art and cultural artifacts. Daisy & Catherine² is rendered vivid in the way it plops from saturated image to fucking dripping image. I feel like each unit is an exquisite bite-sized gift. Google image search "molecular gastronomy" and you get something like my experience of dabbling across the units of this publication. This is a book of photos and videos and songs encoded into text, one after another in procession. Or rather sat all together on the table all in display simultaneously.  

There's a ton to unpack with this deceptively thin book and while I’m enthusiastic about the urgency of reading the work I don’t hold a cohesive grasp of what my account with this book may be. I found myself consistently at my limit of reading comprehension while trying to take on the task of digesting the text in this book. I resisted googling things while reading, but when I gave up and did so it really made me fall into it even more. This is as concentrated as it gets for me. The entire reading felt extreme.

The totality of the book is printed horizontally making the spine rest as a horizontal line break between the pages of text, the choice reminded me of the scale of computer screens. 

In the first couple of pages, a character named “Tadi” is introduced. Tadi orients the reader to the forms and structure of the book, sort of like “Clippy” the old, anthropomorphized paperclip Microsoft Office assistant. Except this is a bunny emoticon. The cartoon gives the reader options; it says you can read the text in one of two ways. Utilizing the x and y axis to create movement through the text. This tangibly opens the possibility of other undisclosed ways of reading Daisy & Catherine2 that could emerge from the reader’s imagination. Hallucinatory. 

Tadi mentions a text previously written by Aris published on Montez Press titled “The Envoyelle: Notes on a Conditional Form”. The text is generously made in an effort to help readers be better able to decipher Aris’ work and also see how the works came to be.  I tried engaging with the text before reading this WILD text and I think the experiences before and after were starkly different with the latter being exponentially more rewarding. I imagined a plausible reality in which either the page that includes the article is corrupted or the site does not work anymore, or Montez Press ceases to exist anymore and the URL is for sale or the reader is stuck on a island (on vacation?) where there is no access to the internet and they inadvertently miss out on a process they would have done otherwise. Essentially, I imagined an “error 404 not found” message where the key to this book is lost. I do think this book needs the key and so it’s essential to listen to Tadi! 

This book made me acutely aware again of the fact that books are a form of printmaking and that printed literature is the convergence of visual art and language. It makes use of the standards within English literature but it also takes great strides in building its own idiosyncratic legibility. Many books of poetry do not seem to take seriously enough the reality that books are visual art, instead often adhering to very strict formulaic rules that elude their art-objectness in order to emphasize the meaning behind what is communicated while understating the effect that its visuality actually has on its meaning. This book takes total advantage of the opportunities of a codex format by establishing itself as a visually specified experience that is gratifying and rife with meaning and abstraction. 

The section called Parousia Nocturna feels a myriad of things concrete poetry, musical scores, narrative fictional story, and graphic art prints. This section offers a nice unfurling of away from the structure presented in the first half, kind of like the way the alien in Nope opens itself up to reveal its silky fabric-like body. It's an aroused form. Super Saiyan. The way it deliberatively evades efficiency made me think of it as some kind of unhinged medieval text.

Anyone interested in diving deep into Daisy & Catherine² will be rewarded in equal measure.  

P.S. I found the term “number pearl to be such a precious use of language that I’m probably going to make an artwork with it in mind.

[reviewsfornone]

Gabi Losoncy

Second Person, 2017

Amphetamine Sulphate, USAI have been admitted into psychiatric wards twice in my life thus far. I have a personal stake in uncovering the relationship between living a beautiful, healthy life and the compulsion to make artwork that coveys suffering in order to validate and expose the truth of other people’s and my own lived experience. I have read this publication about 5 times now.      

“Second Person” is a 44-page “self-help” book by Gabi Losoncy. I put the self-help in quotation marks because although it is proposed as that by Losoncy on the first page of the publication, she quickly rescinds the statement saying that what she would like to write would be sick as it doesn’t “speak to” what makes her happy, comfortable and capable in this world. To summarize my reading, in this book Losoncy is saying that people are often suffering within social dynamics and institutions that do not serve them, part of this suffering is based on the fact that they are not substantially aware of the fact that they do not behave in their own interests and often are being inauthentic in how they reflect their desires through their actions. This could be called the phenomenon known as “people-pleasing” and sticking to the status quo. People-pleasing or “assimilation” generates unpleasant feelings of “resentment” in the subject and in order to address this problem what they should be doing is closing the gap between what they desire and what they do so that they never yearn for something but rather live as they want. The second paragraph on page 33 beautifully paints a possible explanation for the unraveling of one’s psyche as one is on the path towards self-healing: “Where before I have felt the same feelings, contempt at imprecision in a boundless and temporary love of the voice of desire inside me, with no real outlet, but as I fed this side, the other side gained an increasing ability to understand precisely why I was upset or rejected something.” If mental illness as a concept were to be removed as an inherent quality in a being then what would remain is the being’s continual forgoing or embrace of their personhood by making room in their life for what would otherwise be attributed as the cause or cure of “illness”. Losoncy is saying forget the illness part and work on getting what you want, even, and especially if, that goes against what others want you to get, as long as you are not hurting others in the process. Perhaps making a case for hedonism and self-acceptance as a way to end suffering. She posits that everything you want does exist in the world but that one has to actually know what one wants, which often “stays before language” or rather before one’s ability to describe exactly what one’s desire is. She also argues that the time spent doing what you don’t want to do could be spent having fun and being creative. Page 32 reads the following: “The more of you there are, the better off we are.” I think this could be useful to readers looking for help with how to proceed if they are stuck and unhappy although because of its tendency to also divulge into abstraction, it isn’t high up on my list of books to recommend to people who are highly sensitive to “irritants”. It is an acquired taste.   

Losoncy’s vocabulary and patterns of structuring thoughts seem to come from a genuinely singular place, I do not know people who talk as idiosyncratically as she writes. A standout paragraph on page 27 reads: “I have a theoretical concept that has been with me since I was a teenager. I call it ‘fuck everyone in the house.’ I got it from pornography. The concept is meant to illustrate multiple deep empathy. If a person is to be understood, they are to be understood completely.” The idea never gets used again but opens another entryway to see Losoncy as an artist (character) with a unique perspective on how to identify useful information from sources generally considered irredeemable by those concerned with respectability politics. Losoncy has released numerous physical musical projects and much of it is either field recordings or herself reciting seemingly unhinged, purely formal monologues and discursive experiments on awareness practice. I think this book is a written form of her monologues. At times her writing is plain and simple and at other times, it seems as though she is offering prose-poetry, or perhaps she’s attempting to use more words than necessary, or perhaps she likes using slippery or abstract words to an affectively dynamic end, or perhaps her language is just starkly personal and individuated, or perhaps she has some cognitive impairment, or perhaps she could work at becoming a more efficient writer. She might be aware of the spaces between all of these potential realities in which her writing could be interpreted. I have not exhausted all the parameters that could be at play here. I guess mostly what I feel is that instead of this being a self-help book written for everyone, it is actually a hard-to-read self-help book that is more satisfying when considered as a work of art that welcomes a sundry of speculative projections about how the book came to be, what is the intention of the book and who is Losoncy as a narrator and sole character and artist with aesthetic proclivities. Integrated evading being proper in the name of (I believe) following exactly what she wants to. Losoncy might be or is using pure self-expression in order to make a case for pure expression. “Irritants” is what she calls it, I think. The thing is I can’t say I understand this book all that well but I have some coherent feeling of empathizing with the trailing off and always being on that this book rides on. I like being challenged and being at the edge of something that could be a huge accomplishment and a fumble. The entire thing feels like anti-art. Not understanding what is happening is part of the lure of the text and it is paced in such a way that the thoughts oscillate well between understanding and bewilderment. 

Although considerably shorter in length and scope I see this book as speaking on similar concepts related to “desiring-machines” expounded upon in the book “Anti-Oedipus” by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. If “Second Person” resonates with you then you ought to just go ahead and read “Anti-Oedipus” and watch a lot of YouTube videos on the subject.

[reviewsfornone]

Vijay Masharani

Permanent Water, 2023

Hatred 2, Brooklyn, NY, USA

Or as reviewsfornone.art titles it, At 2 Minutes and 39 Seconds My Field Made an Image Through Me and my Myths, or #DrawingIsLife.

People walking around with cameras pick stuff off the street, virtually. Masharani is exposing the truth that life has a way of consistently edging on art potential and the human body is sometimes a machine that makes propositions about what to frame or keep to show later from within its experience of life. Literally being somewhere at any particular time will coalesce into something somewhere close to oneself becoming formally dynamic. Somewhere being the spatial potential of walking and living with a camera or the spatial potential of drawing with a material leaving a delineated trace on another material which is essentially a brain generating. “Drowsy, Kinless,” a seven-and-a-half minute single-channel video, the primary artwork in “Permanent Water”, first observable when entering the space, is projected onto a panel that is hung between the corner of the back and right wall. The editing style is best compared to contemporary musical releases that emphasize experimentation, field recording, noise, assemblage, and an aerated sense of a narrative structure. It doesn’t cohere into a story about a character that overcomes something, nor does it remain within any harmonic progression but rather its blots in and out. It's a music video in which affective characteristics change as certain ambiguous images are conjured. I have a gut feeling that the looping composite drawings and video parts are (perhaps unconsciously so) formal attempts at articulating a kind of externalized stereotypy. He frames his own family with reverence, concealment, and wonder, their likeness is fragmented and as such, the video renders them mysterious, prophetic even, like they hold the answers. I get a sense that Masharani treats the implementation of his kin in a similar manner that Pentecostals deliberate with the question of whether or not to indulge in representing their beloved lord and savior, opting for as much likeness as necessary but nothing more so as to respect the divinity of their bodies. 

The sample list is also in line with the culture of experimental music, reminiscent of lyric and credits booklets often found in old CD cases. They're an interesting way to introduce an element of literal drawing and printmaking without framing them and hanging them 57” on center. The disclosure of the samples partially clarifies some of the abstraction in the video but also, most importantly, it adds another layer of image-making through remembering or imagining the primary sources and their formal qualities. The tape ending sound turns into remembering “Tuscan Leather”. A burning sky barely expresses its anomaly amid an equally saturated film, before I read the list it looked normally orange. The drawing acts as a key to the drawing. The artist mostly samples himself. Adumbrative.

“Give me that fucking content, Universe”, a video on a monitor with headphones with a running time of just under 2 minutes plays beside the entrance facing the projection. This video is much more accessible than the first. Abiding by a relatively stricter formula, the video consists of short clips of a fisheye Go-Pro that Masharani wears outside. The camera meanders around its field of vision literally looking for and honing in on content, occasionally holding its frame on a dynamic or mundane image or interaction. On the right side of the screen, a screencap of the audio recording application is used for the video's sound plays clips that sync with the video. We hear Marshiran playfully and aggressively pleading for the universe to give him “that fucking content”. It is as if he is speaking to a younger sibling or a friend or an enemy, I can't really tell. Perhaps the joke is a way to cope, perhaps he is more serious than he lets on. Masharani could be described as embarking on a dérive if it wasn't for the insistence that he get something out of the activity. It's like a person trying to meditate and the whole time they are looking for the moment where it clicks and their problems are alleviated, forcing a vibe instead of allowing it to ebb and flow. Seems like perhaps the artwork in particular explores the act of failing to be in the moment by being hyper aware of one’s desire to be in the moment. This video feels like an ode to life in New York City and because it is NYC the plea for content is granted over and over again. The last seconds of the audio play two spliced samples that articulate “If you want me to stay, stay” before cutting to black. Is that a concerning, affectively reduced ultimatum? Like the stakes in a video game and the characteristics of an NPC, Masharani‘s distinct appropriation of specifically chosen slivers of messages from unrelated media renders one’s understanding of his authentic position as blunted and obtuse. Instead of elaboration and emotionality, you get efficiency, and repeated mantras, like a collage of tickle me Elmo’s limited bank of sentences.

It feels like Masharani’s working method requires him to throw stuff at the wall and accept what naturally arises and intuitively feels right for the time being, effectively the exact opposite of attempting to create a masterpiece with a bulletproof sense of meaning, message, and intent of direction. Good for him, masterpieces are overrated, and being at a loss while improvising is something many can empathize with but often do not encounter within the world of art in 2023. Instead, we get lots of art world folks LARPing as type A individuals who think they know who they are, who they are speaking to, and why and how the world is in need of their agreeable efforts at creating value through art. 

Sometimes life is like swimming in a storm while feeling like you are living by yourself on an island for an extended amount of time.

[reviewsfornone]

Tobi Kassim

commentary on weather, 2022

Quickbooks, New York, USA

True to the publisher's name this is a quick read, an eight-page collection of prose and poetry printed on two folded sheets of yellow paper bound by a single staple at the crease. The pages contain dispersed graphic debris that connotes lint or granular specks of black that overlay the text. The gesture to add barely visible crumbs is subtle but the inclusion of it along with the paper color choice leads me to believe that it was made to intentionally allude to the sun and dirt. My copy is not in mint condition, it's crumpled, and handled without care. I feel as though the choice to produce such a thin and large book lends it to be more vulnerable to becoming tarnished, possibly even a formal imperative evolution of the publication as something that was foreseen and desired. 

The text is written in two overarching registers. First, there’s the narration in which Kassim reflects on the motivation of the proceeding “dialogues” and traces or assesses the scenario that set the dialogue in motion. As the text progresses, the prose communicates how the stakes shift and the formal structure of the dialogues also changes. I see the prose as the commentary about the second register: the poetry itself. 

There are a handful of aspects of the text that I would like to reflect on. First, there seems to be a lack of interpellative value within the work. With very little explicit evidence of modernity save for the few lines regarding screens, TVs, and food advertisements. No mention of gender, racialization, or nationality there is a primary focus on the relationship between the body being spoken about and the weather. This text seems to lure the reader to step into the position of the writer himself and water, shadows, and light along with it. Quite often while reading I felt seen by Kassim in recognizing that I too am as complex and beautiful as the weather and elements themselves, that through the text offered, there was little to me as an ideological subject that presupposes my inability to feel one with the weather and the writer.

A butchered summary of the narrative arch of the commentary goes as follows: Kassim sees poetry to perhaps be the “convergence of arbitrary weather and brain chemicals,” he makes an attempt at describing his inner self by resonating with the weather through a method he describes as “atmirrorsphere.” The dialogue starts then something feels off, the dialogue continues and then he reaches an awareness that the two voices are “arising from the same interiority.” The dialogue again continues but is shown to become more gnomic and vivid while also less personified, existing more as objects/phenomena rather than something personally experienced although not completely, the “you” and “me” still appear but seem to be less important than the fact the things occur and do not stagnate. The final two narrations expose a struggle Kassim embarks in trying to parse through what seems like a lack as well as the obvious presence of harmony explicating that “the page was a confession to shared origins.”  In the final iteration of the poem structure, the lines actually converge so as to bleed into one another's preconditioned margins. 

“commentary on weather” is a beautiful exploration of the idea that all creatures and nonsalient matter are on the same plane of existence as time, space, and light and that as weather undoubtedly exists outside of creatures so too it exists inside them and that the two things, outside and inside, are inexplicably bound as weather, poetry being the attempt to explain what can not be explained. This oneness principle reminds me of (my little knowledge of) the Hindu concept of Brahman as well as (my even smaller knowledge of) henology. Essentially the world is merged, you have always been the weather this whole time. This publication has high and low skimmability value, lending itself to be read and reread so as to better hallucinate (imagine) what you have felt before. Reading the sequence in its order seems to be one way of taking in the form but each line of poetry is also a world in and of itself that presents something that could be meditated on for quite a long time in the fashion of koans. The poetry component of this publication is wonderful to read, full of lush descriptions that feel like a theatrical play in which instead of characters you have two blank spaces that are ready to be personified (like blank paintings or video monitors without video content), able to completely alter based on what new images are offered. 

Writing this review made me hyper-aware of the difference in the specificity of word choice and affective potential between this document and Kassim’s writing. In reality, I can never write a review that would give “commentary on weather” justice because the caliber of Kassim’s writing is so strikingly superior compared to my review. I am merely trying to give my opinion and Kassim is making art.

[reviewsfornone]

Kanye West - Viva La Vida (AI Cover), 2023

This is Coldplay’s Viva La Vida but with Chris Martin’s vocals replaced or attenuated/modulated to appear to possess the qualities that people understand to be Kanye West’s voice. I am not sure what it takes to do such a feat, if it is considerably hard or easy, and to whom, what software was needed nor if other songs that are on YouTube with the same A.I. cover concept were made in the same or similar way. It seems that in the past week, the A.I. cover phenomenon has blown up and every vocalist with considerable fame has been used to A.I. cover others' songs and their own songs have been A.I. covered using other famous vocalists’ voices. Reminds me of a fantasy football karaoke party for our beloved pop stars. I am here for it. I think this really does sound like West if West had diligently practiced emulating all of Martin’s vocal inflections and minute pronunciations. A perfect performance. He also sounds authentically British. Lost in the online wilderness that is West’s interviews and public speeches I faintly remember him admitting that he didn’t like his singing voice and had wished he could “actually” sing, here he is actually singing, able to do it and it is beautiful. West could consider spending some time directing all his energy into vocal lessons, I don’t think he is that far off from the virtuosity exemplified through this abomination of a mashup. I guess this is the scary part of artificial intelligence, human labor and time spent become reducible to fast results through the use of and to the end of a predictable product. The difference between being able to hear a song in your bedroom and hearing West perform the same song live is taking the chance that he might not do what you want him to do. He might spend the concert venting about the glass ceilings he’s facing or the people in his life doing him wrong, trying to convince you that his problem is your problem too. With A.I. (at least for these ends, these predictable ends) you can get Mr. West to do what he might not want to do, which I think is what he’s been inadvertently working against his whole professional life.

This song makes me think of all the possible Wests, the multiverse of Mr. West because this cover feels oddly fitting for West’s aesthetic sensibilities, perhaps a song that could’ve fit into My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy or 808s and Heartbreak, but totally off by the twisting of his national identity inherent in his voice. This distortion makes West anyone in particular, perhaps there’s someone out there that already sounds like West + Martin, just like how Desiigner sounds exactly like Future or like how Dusty Locane sounds just like Pop Smoke. Now, come to think of it Desiigner: Future or Dusty Locane: Pop Smoke A.I. covers might be more interesting in the quest to see if a difference is even at all perceivable to the naked ear, or in other words, has the Brahman predicted the emergence of artificial intelligence by offering natural instances in which separate beings inhabit indistinguishable qualities organically?

[reviewsfornone]

Albert Oehlen and Paul McCarthy

THE ÖMEN, 2023

Gagosian, New York, NY, USA

I didn’t bother looking at the works list nor the press release and Imma say it right off the bat this is big dick art. 

THE ÖMEN is structured as three distinct rooms. One room has a plethora of abstract paintings by Oehlen with a single life-sized figurative sculpture by McCarthy on a table on casters reminiscent of the tables found in American art colleges. Aside from a narrow passageway in the back that's blocked off by a floating wall, the paintings did not do much for me individually. The paintings that are in the back though have a nice progression that almost illustrates the becoming and transfiguration of yellow mall-sized logo abstractions. The scale of the paintings and the compositions in these yellow ones feel deliberate and confident, alluding to a sequence much like larger-than-life comic book panels. The sculpture itself, although well made, lacks novelty, it feels like a B-side that finally gets to see the light of day (I should qualify that it is a B-side for McCarthy which would make for a masterpiece for most other artists of any period or style.) I just didn’t see how this figure related to the rest of the work that is on display. 

The second room has a simple installation of a painting on the wall hung across two adjacent monitors showing video pieces made by both individual artists. The painting is similar to the ones in the first room. At this point I’m beginning to interpret that although unavoidable, and ubiquitous, the paintings assume the presence of grass in their scale, uniformity and granularity of difference and sameness; perhaps acting as a quieter lower tone to set an ambiance or vibe for the sculptures to work with and against. The videos seem like blatant references to The Painter, a 1995 video work that depicts McCarthy himself satirizing the very existentially arduous and often contrived and absurd process that every modernist-influenced, abstract painter goes through to make a painting full of vitality and expression. The Painter ends with a patron brown-nosing the artist, very funny and poignantly accurate. Oehlen’s video conveys his own take on a neurotic artist painting a painting. I am unfamiliar with the man in the video. This man seems to be really enjoying the presence of the camera and is playing up his gestures and rhetoric. I cannot tell if it is real or satire. My inability to see the position he is conveying could very well be due to a loss in translation as the audio is of a language other than Spanish or English and there could be cultural cues that I was not able to pick up. McCarthy’s video shows himself and a female dry humping, consistently moaning, becoming messier as they dry hump and make a drawing. They are dressed in McCarthy’s familiar chaotic cosplay. The video reminds me of tweakers having sex or CrackheadBarney performances. There's a part in the video where McCarthy inserts his flaccid penis into the small end of a cardboard cone and places the wide end on the woman's crotch as they begin humping and fake moaning and all I could think about was McCarthy cutting a circle around his penis and how crazy that is. Either way, both videos evoke The Painter quite strongly for me, setting the tone for the last room.

The final room once again features walls lined with Oehlen’s paintings that I didn't look at too closely. At this point the paintings feel like a theatrical backdrop for the giant work in the room, I’m sure other visitors would lend more time to the paintings individually but I could not, for the life of me, stop looking at the rest of the work in the room. Across from the paintings, there is the positive form of a casting McCarthy made when he was much younger, a larger-than-life figurative form in the style of, and in direct reference to, the sculptor Henry Moore. I see this as some kind of indirect allusion to primitive and traditional African sculptures that are often seen in Western museums made by nameless craftsmen/artists/mediums or some other identity that I, and the institutions who house them, have little context and understanding of. It kind of felt like a “mother nature” sculpture and I was into that.  

In front of the Moore ripoff there lies the magnum opus of the show, a large-scale installation titled The King. The artwork consists of a painter's brown-colored painting studio decked out with trash bags, a giant easel, painter's tools, buckets, paint sprayers, and sexually suggestive black, limp fume ducts. In the studio, there is a casting of what I assume is a nude and hairy McCarthy himself with jagged geometric body joints wearing a blond wig that is flowing from a small dingy fan that is perpetually on. The figure sits on an office chair seemingly imagining something. Behind the figure, there is a work-in-progress painting of a muscular, attractive, semi-nude black male. Besides the studio, there are giant paintings wrapped in plastic that feature white women and a red monochrome classic portrait of a cowboy kind of splayed on top of each other, leaning on the wall to convey that they are previously finished paintings that are in storage. In front of the studio lies three church pews. 

While viewing the exhibition I overheard a Gagosian employee tell a pack of waspy visitors that if they bought the artwork they could switch out the painting on view for one of the wrapped paintings. This remark made the installation seem even more racist than I had originally thought. Not only is McCarthy positing an idea of a white painter/king getting off on the process of objectifying the black male body in an elaborate form of a sissy-hypno sexual act but the specificity of that composition, and thus that narrative, can be altogether hidden by an art collector who has been given the go-ahead to use the built-in modularity of the artwork in which all the other possible narratives are not outright racialized, effectively allowing the racism to exists as a hidden footnote, or possibly never see the light of day again. If McCarthy chose to lead with raceplay why advocate removing that raceplay? Would it cease to be the same artwork anymore? Does this stuff even matter to art dealers? (I guess once the customer has bought the work they can do whatever they want with it, no?) I wondered if the employee was simply just embarrassed by the content of the work and was trying to offer a way out, by replacing racism and homoeroticism with misogyny or plain old homoeroticism.   

In writing this review I am not attempting to call out or cancel Gogosian nor the artists involved, I am simply pointing out that, at least to me, and I’m sure to plenty of other racialized visitors of the gallery, and to the artist himself, McCarthy is using the concept of racism and racist methods to make artwork. Is this the new frontier for Post-woke edgy white art? I don’t think it is, I think McCarthy is being somber here, and edgy by default but I don’t think he's being very edgy either. I could come up with a whole lotta worse directions this could have gone.

In truth, this is the cleanest McCarthy install I have ever witnessed. The King feels a lot more politically straightforward than most of the work he has produced which often utilizes fantastical references to exist in the realm of the collective imagination. Maybe he's pointing out that it's not uncommon for freaky white people to engage in a little raceplay occasionally. Maybe he’s trying to make a woke point and felt like he had to put his own reputation on the line to make it work. This is what I mean by clean, it feels like he is making a criticism outside the paradigm of cartoons and folklore, he's making a followable statement about real-world dynamics using real-world raw material. I prefer the phantastical stuff like the new video, I like the jagged ankles and wrists though. This is like if Richard Prince tried to make a Paul McCarthy. I wonder if McCarthy will continue making art in this way and how it'll be received by those who are racialized art world people.

[reviewsfornone]

Crackhead Barney

Cooning into the Metaverse One Day at a Time Hopefully !!!, 2022

Icebox Project Space, Philadelphia, PA, USA

A thorough Artist. During the first twenty seconds of this performance, Crackhead Barney instructed me to pull a red tampon out of her vagina after revealing that she was on her period. She then put it in her mouth and threw it on the stage. Later she instructed a white actor to feed me melted ice cream off the hands previously licked by the entire row. I was the last seat in my row. I was not a part of the cast nor did I know what the performance would entail. Crackhead Barney put on an amusing performance that may be the rowdiest I have ever seen someone in their right mind. I will not go into detail as to what was offered specifically by the performance's individual phases. It seemed like the structure of having a theme to a sketch was also satirized, everything seemed to be made fun of, I couldn’t even get the sense that Crackhead Barney actually cared about the show being “good” because that could also be made fun of. Most of her comedy was aimed at white supremacy, America, white people/whiteness, the state, corrupt people, respectability politics, and reactionary crowds alike but some of the skits surprisingly had no ideological grounding and were instead indulgences in wet and messy fetishism coupled with crude body humor. The show didn’t feel sexual really, it felt intimate like a baby handing you a wet Cheeto, staring at you to ensure you enjoy it. 

There was a point in the end when she asked the crowd what they learned from the performance or something to that effect (such a funny set-up) and an old man said something like “I learned that black people can be racist too.” And she along with the whole cast and a few crowd members who got familiar quickly all started running and screaming. I understand both perspectives. The man felt attacked and perhaps alienated by the performance because he was often the butt end of brutal and brutish jokes, some of which are in fact ignorant, and do not exhibit empathy for white people, she’s laughing because here is this white man claiming that she is aggressing him when a) he paid to be there b) her work, and therefore her approach, speaks for itself, it lives outside of the compulsion to be beholden to the rules of the real world, she is an artist creating a fiction c) did he expect that Crackhead Barney would not make jokes about white people (in addition to other races)? d) is he unfamiliar with Crackhead Barney’s work and accidentally watched exactly the opposite of what he wanted to see!? It seems like getting offended by a Crackhead Barney performance is more importantly a reminder of the privilege you hold, and the worry you fear about the Woke-left wielding too happily the hammer of judgment. The thing is, Crackhead Barney is not Woke-left, she is an artist whose artistic style operates on the level of repulsion, pure embodied anarchy, human touch, autonomy, existential dread, social ostracization, and criticism. At the very least, she has a lot of endurance to keep up such a filthy act. 

The stuff she does on the street, contained within whatever form, seems freer though I gotta say, maybe perhaps because on the street one is beholden to the intangibility of performance length, and the juxtaposition between real life and art event is harsher. I think most of the audience knew what they were getting into with Cooning into the Metaverse One Day at a Time Hopefully !!! and that gave the work a response that lends to less sadistic gratification, it just doesn’t hit the same as the videos because in public enthusiasm isn’t always the thing she is met with, leading to funny power struggles and a range of perceptions of what is actually happening. I think someone should just pay her to do exactly what she is doing on the street without any stipulations about uploading the material to any platform or performing to any sized crowd, no parameters, no analytics, just the phenomenon that is Crackhead Barney.

[reviewsfornone]

Raza Kazmi

Dread Circumference, 2020

Interstate Projects, New York, NY, USA

The show has a handful of works that were engaging in their own right but for this retroactive review, I will choose to speak exclusively about a work that I still think about often, even today three years later. Kazmi made an isolated fly’s wing hover in midair indefinitely using sound waves. I am not sure what coding and specificity of hardware was needed to create the action, or whether the materials and form offered are the ideal parameters. For instance, the black concave plates emitting sound could've, maybe, been a different color or treated with some meaning producing skin or what have you, or why the artwork is on a pedestal or why is a piece of glass fixed to the top of the pedestal? These things truly don’t matter, and their not mattering is part of the way the poetry of the work operates. The work was made with the most efficient and perhaps some necessarily not aestheticized decisions to offer us a disembodied flight component of a once living thing, offering it the best thing behind flight– levitation, dead flight, still-life. This work still evokes trash very directly. We probably crush fly wings every day on our walk from our cars or buses or trains to work. We sweep dead flies all the time unless you have the privilege of not being responsible for the brooming of your own living quarters, in which case flies would mean even less to you. Even the sound emitting is trash; the few videos online that feature recorded documentation of the artwork have their audio turn into noise and the noise gets noisier the closer the photographic device gets to the artwork. Kazmi has a granular preoccupation here with value and vitality and gratifies the itch that connoisseurs of minimalist found-object art, existentialists, and freaky children alike all feel in the back of their necks. It scratches the itch by turning ordinary valuelessness into meta-valuelessness. Creating a humble form of surrealism. A memento-mori desublimated. Look ma, it’s not dead anymore.