Dear Reader,
Art reviewed below.
Wade Guyton – “The Undoing” – Matthew Marks
Butch techno-haptic photo-“paintings” as funky intuitive journalism with a politely stoic misting of “technology is crazy, man,” work floating lazy-river-style down an ab-ex tributary, a weird and unnecessary flex from a middle-aged man with a computer and internet access. I don’t care for this show but I may understand the impulse that produced it. I can imagine producing this work as engaging for the artist and his studio assistants but, as a viewer, I suspect I’m getting the dregs of that experience.
Matthew Marks, a polite blue-chip gallery for intellectuals with good taste, is a big beautiful space with high ceilings and an abundance of natural light. The works on display at Matthew Marks must sell for many moneys to pay his West Hollywood rent. I have seen some really wonderful shows in this space and the Matthew Marks Organization supports many special, strange, and specific voices – actual good thoughtful multiple-boundary-pushing artists like Trisha Donnelly, Nayland Blake, Nan Goldin, Fischli & Weiss and many more. The gallery says “we’re accessibly intellectually fun” (and profitable) with the contemporary expanded-field work of Laura Owens or Vincent Fecteau and then says “we can be fun historically too” and has taken to showing (collectable) deep cut Imagists like Suellen Rocca and represents local kings of (collectable) fun(k) Ken Price and Ron Nagle. I liked the Peter Cain cars show, I don’t like the Reena Spaulings work but I like the idea, and sometimes I think I’m the last person alive that thinks the Charles Ray machined metal stuff is unbelievably lame. Also Ellsworth Kelly, who I love. Also Jasper Johns, who I basically like. Anyway, so what? Who pays for this shit? The idea that Matthew Marks has an identity distinguishable from any other mega gallery like Deitch or [in$ert whoever] is, I’m sorry to say, a false distinction.
I only mention any of this to acknowledge the distinction Matthew Marks would like you to make, that they are a “serious” gallery with regularly-interesting ideas about art. This isn’t wrong but following this logic, I’m supposed to also take this Wade Guyton show seriously, which is hard for me to do. I’m supposed to take this guy at face value and acknowledge that it might be about both the art object and the world that produced it. I’m supposed to ask myself stupid questions like “what’s a painting” or “what’s a photograph” while simultaneously asking more interesting questions like “what is a world” or “how do I tell stories about the reality and complexity of my life and will it feel true and overlap with the experiences of others?” It’s not that I think Wade isn’t serious - I’m sure he is, he looks serious as hell in photos - I just can’t take the work itself that seriously. I have no doubt that, in private, Wade is seriously asking himself these serious questions, but the work isn’t carrying that load for him.
The show is 26 “paintings,” all “Epson Ultrachrome HDX Inkjet” on linen, all untitled, all the same size, about 7 x 6 feet. I don’t know what that Epson device is but it has to be an expensive photo printer and I’m not going to Google it. The show is called “THE UNDOING” which likely refers to both The Pandemic, racial and economic unrest of the last year, and also to Guyton’s material process, i.e. the wet smears through printer ink that constitute his artistry. Like most works by Wade Guyton, these “paintings” are digital abstractions which are sometimes left to their own internal glitches and sometimes modulated by that signature moist and deforming touch. Some of these canvases are pure-shapes abstraction while some incorporate snapshots from the studio, chairs, racks, prints on the floor, manipulated back into another image, yawn, sorry, etc. Anyway, classic Wade, right?
The works that define the show are blown-up screenshots from the New York Times and Post websites, featuring grabby headlines about the pandemic and capital insurrection, George Floyd, and then with less context: a picture of a digital thermometer, a still from a Cuomo press conference, hands doing something with a printer or maybe science, who knows, but listen, the point is that this is real life in case you thought it was just art, buddy. The newspaper screenshots seem designed to invoke the au courant simultaneity-experience of seeing real corpses in body bags while being sold phone accessories in the same window, which is definitely crazy but pretty normal for any 12 year old. Focusing on this simultaneity seems very “OK boomer” to me. It’s not that this simultaneity isn’t pervasive or interesting, it’s both, but Guyton says almost nothing about it other than that it happens. These screenshots are loosely layered and sloppily adjusted in the same way as the rest of Guyton’s work as though to say, yes we both looked at this but I printed it out and touched it. Ok dude, should I do that too? Was it useful for you?
Walking around this show I wondered how many canvases he makes that don’t end up in the show. How many are iterated before he isolates the right gesture. I imagine him trying some with smears and some without. Rephotographing something until it’s meta enough/just right. This part of it seems fun and I have heard from multiple sources that he’s a good artist to work for. Looking at it, however, most of the gestures feel slight and withholding, asking me the same questions I’m asked by so many masculinist abstract paintings: “Do you respect my lack of decision making?” or “What even is a decision, man?” which teeters dangerously close to “How dumb is this, actually?”
This work has a Walead Beshty/Limp Bizkit “break shit” energy that I can’t get into. A friend I went to the gallery with said the works could just be looked at online and actually I disagree. They look different up close. You can see the little smears and bleeds, an actual hand-handled quality that’s not available online and what the art is, I’m supposed to admit, ultimately about. Are these works “post-internet” in that way? “Bro, I touched a website.” I believe that this work is Personal but I’m not touched by these touches, consider me unmoved.
Albert Oehlen – “Ömega Man” – Gaga & Reena Spaulings
This gallery was full of flies buzzing around. Four big almost-identical shapes cut out of canvas, full bleed soft-brushy abstraction-muck in dark colors, the canvas shapes adhered directly to big yellow squares painted onto the wall. The shapes are ostensibly cartoony mutations of the Greek character omega? I didn’t read the press release, but I know the title is a Charlton Heston movie where he wears a track suit and lives paranoically clutching a rifle in an abandoned department store. I think it was remade with Will Smith. This work is fine, it looks good, reminds me of good poster design, it’s very photographable but not totally rewarding up close. Don’t get me wrong, I basically like AO and I certainly like a well-considered cartoony-shapes-type abstraction ala E.Kelly/early fabric Tuttle and this definitely has some of that. As always, Oehlen is kidding around, “trying to be bad” and undermine expectations in a very (purposefully) annoying “disruptor” kind of way, which is made less artful and more actually annoying when he is an aloof handsome German guy who sells these flaps for an actual one million “euros.” This show seems closer to what I think I like about Oehlen than the concurrent work at Gagosian, which is a muted and more sparse iteration of his classic black-and-white broken dot matrix printer looking paintings which I like for the way they simultaneously undermine and satisfy my expectations. The newer ones at Gagosian feel farther away, a little more defiantly phoned in, which Oehlen hardly needs to emphasize.
It’s hard for me to care that much about this show. That said, after seeing this show together, my friend told me that Albert’s brother is also a painter and I didn’t know! As it turns out, I really like Markus Oehlen’s paintings a lot, maybe even more than Albert’s. Here’s to adult education! This is apparently the last show in this Reena Gaga space, which for a number of years has cultivated a sloppy “Cool To Be Casual” vibe and has a nice window out onto MacArthur Park. Their best show was Danny McDonald and I usually had a bad time at their openings but I’ve enjoyed their free food and I respect galleries who smoke cigarettes inside and will let anyone use their bathroom, which is the correct way to be in this world of bathrooms for “customers only.” All the little black flies really stood out on the yellow wall background. Fingers kiss emoji.
Elizabeth Englander, Lauren Quin, Bri Williams – “Quickening” – Smart Objects
This show is a spicy combination of Goth and Not Goth with Williams at the “goth” pole, Quin at the “not goth” pole and Englander occupying the space between the two. The “curation” of this show feels pretty random and the works don’t really add up but it feels honest and I particularly like the work of Elizabeth Englander, pokey wire figures in various states of crucifixion, constructed by stretching a detailed patchwork of sewn bathing suit pieces over armatures that remind me of Pinhead from Hellraiser. Lauren Quin’s colorful layered paintings are always in process, they seem very much about her making them. She’s got a small and recognizable toolbox that gets added to and subtracted from, augmented in experimentation. I never love the final object but I respect the process and the rigor, Quin always feels like a dedicated scientist to me. Williams’ work is less accessible to me, seems full of “accidents,” found material and spilled and congealed and loosely burnished media. Something rustic, something domestic, moody muted tones. The upside of this show’s lack of curation is that it ends up being an actual showcase for the actual artists rather than the personal expression of the organizer/curator/gallerist. The downside of this is that it kind of looks like an art fair booth.
Sparkly Berman – “Miracle Zone” – Le Maximum
There’s a lot of work in this show and it seems to be divided into three categories: 1. Big brushy paintings of abstracted and fading lips and flowers and orifices and rippling vulvic asshole pastry landscape. 2. Big-pottery scaled ceramic works in a popular sloppy chunky detailed free-style, on pedestals, colorful, gritty, horny and mutant like the paintings. 3. Cartoony ceramic scrolls mounted to the walls, glazed with faces and lips and text on top of a speckling that looks like confetti melamine. Apparently there is a musical spiritual performance that happens behind a big painting on a hinge but I wasn’t able to see it.
My favorite moment in the show is on one of the scrolls, the word “Ready,” written in a matte blue glaze, peels forward off the scroll and into space. I imagine this piece is extremely delicate. This experimental glaze-peel doesn’t look intentional, this work seems open to improvisation and happy accidents. Not all of the content is as successful as the dimensional “Ready” and showing this much work, when the work can read as so freestyle, tends to undermine the pleasure of the individual decisions/accidents, for me. In the paintings, the brushwork is repetitive, haptic-impassioned, a big fat lip or flower rendered over and over in lines of paint that, even though I’m told it’s oil, has never looked more like acrylic, dry and plasticky.
There is a painting in the show called “Experimental Kingdom (Sexual Idiot Savant),” which I think is a great and hilarious title. The painting is a big pair of red lips drifting brushily into the mist of a pink background. There are some yellow and blue echoes and a nude on her knees tipping her head back, depicted in open black line that is simultaneously on top of and under the rest of the shapes. This is not a great painting but it seems fun to make for the artist. This work is so touched and so much about touching - but everyone touches and likes to get touched differently. This dynamic is a classically alienating thing about intimacy and there is definitely something alien about this show, but in more of a flying saucer Venice Beach peace sign alien way than in a psychosexual way. All of the lips in this show remind me of how much I love the Rolling Stones mouth logo and how much I hate the Rolling Stones. “The Body Never Lies,” which is not a true statement, is a pedestal sculpture with a notably well rendered butt and leg. One of the other pedestal works is like an ashtray made of melting devils, I like it. My favorite of the paintings is a very wacky small one called “Sparkly22Miracles Zizek,” featuring some deforming ochre-skinned forehead goblin with emerald eyes like assholes and purpling pigtail wolverine hair. The lower half of the thing’s face devolves in cartoony bird-layers with some nice linework. I do not like the title of this painting because of a personal beef with Zizek which is that he is a corny edgelord. But maybe the title is critical and Sparkly agrees with me? I shouldn’t like a title just because someone agrees with me and I’m not even sure what this painting has to do with the philosopher.
Berman knows how to trace an elegant organic curve but maybe takes it for granted and certainly doesn’t flex it as often or as rigorously as I’d like, a wild-and-free-femininity like the wild-and-free-masculinity I have used as short-hand to describe wanky blues guitar solos and howling free jazz and Jackson Pollock. One of the best examples of Berman’s actually flexed dexterity is the nice painting “Unfolding Rose Consciousness,” where a transparent nude appears to sit or squat with her arms wrapped around a swollen rose like a vaginal cinnamon bun.
This gallery is relatively new and seems to have moved into a space that was not a gallery. They should tear down the walls between the three awkwardly sized rooms and just have an open space. The press release doesn’t make any sense to me, doesn’t feel honest, and, if it’s performative - i.e. not-honest as fiction - I don’t follow the concept enough to get into it.
“Miracles are events that defy the laws of nature and science, or lawlike events of whose causes we are ignorant. These works depart from the latter understanding, approaching art as a material pathway to unknown structures and invisible frequencies. Like the demiurge of ancient Greece who shapes worlds from clay, Berman and her counterparts give physical approximation to spiritual realms. Visitors to the Miracle Zone are invited to participate in these and other processes of creative becoming and psychic dissolution.”
Wow, no kidding? I watched a recorded livestream of the performances and they are echoey new age soft noise music with some confused guests or the artist alone, slapping on amplified ceramics and whispering what feel like jokey koans. This show seems largely about excess, a kind of old fashioned idea about sensuality as gluttonous. Not that it can’t be, but desire is usually about what you don’t have and this show is overstuffed, both with work and framing devices, which is too bad because there are a lot of likable art-moments in it.