It’s Berlin Gallery Weekend, when openings blossom throughout the city like stinking linden trees and the town parades itself to visitors like the naïve girl from the provinces who vamps through the market square in her tacky “best.” This weekend, many weary, Sekt-filled opening goers will do just that and end up at Janus a.k.a : ) : , the recurring party that, for nearly a year now, has carved out a solid place within Berlin’s art-related, non-Berghain nighttime diversions. “This really was what Berlin was like ‘back in the day’,” says a compatriot to me at a recent fog-machine filled Janus event, “when we’d just put speakers on the floor and someone would DJ and we’d do whatever.” Janus has consistently hosted acts like House of Ladosha, DJ Sliink, Total Freedom, Venus X, and Aids-3d, and the clientele – a mix of artists and well-informed teens – has been refreshingly mixed and upbeat. (Wolfgang Tillmans, for one, was sighted lurking around when Mykky Blanco performed). It’s never polite to describe a party to those who weren’t present, and in any case Janus is a future-thinking deity: this Friday they’ll host their “Year Of The Snake” party, featuring DJ Hvad, Why Be, and M.E.S.H., an event that will inevitably turn into the unofficial after-after party for umpteen Berlin Gallery Weekend events.  Fittingly, below a post on their event page on Facebook – a 4chan image of a toddler whose mermaid-like body is the end of an anaconda – Janus wrote: Gallery Weekend Special: If you can prove you’re a Gallerist, you get in FREE*. The joke being that most of the gallerists will have already gone home by then, leaving only the most die hard of art world folks. (Pablo Larios)

Enlightenment, it’s been said, reverts to myth. Esoterica, seduction, exoticization: these words come to mind when looking at Juliette Bonneviot‘s sculptures and paintings. Alternating between tech-friendliness and deliberate amateurism, they playfully fixate on encounters with the cultural ‘outside’. Take the story of Koko, a gorilla who was once so affected by a blooming meadow that she picked up a brush and began to render it in acrylic on canvas. For her exhibition “Pink Pink Stink Nice Drink”, shown at Berlin’s CIRCUS gallery in 2011, Bonneviot hung appropriated paintings of historical artists’ works on modernist Struc-Tube displays – including a painting by Koko the gorilla herself (who gave the exhibition its title). Trained at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Berlin-based Bonneviot creates works that – with a kind of Flaubertian delicacy  – willfully inflate our capacity for exocitization or cultural voyeurism. Take Rush Hour Gate (2012), where the subtitles for a Jackie Chan film were translated into Chinese ideograms and drawn onto a flowing, scroll-like cloth, or her piece at the Wilkinson booth at the Frieze Art Fair in 2012: here, Bonneviot reproduced images of Anne-Louis Girodet’s 1798 portrait of Senegalese abolitionist and former slave Jean-Baptiste Belley (a.k.a. Mars) on a PVC banner, above a re-printed Enlightenment book plate, and weighed down fatalistically by an industrial brick. Currently showing at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, and Import Projects, Berlin, Bonneviot has an additional upcoming group show at Crawford Art Gallery, Cork. (Pablo Larios)

Foodstuffs and works of art have in common that, with neglect or patience, they tend to accrue unexpected surfaces: glazes and sheens, skins and crusts. Likewise, protracted viewership brings out imaginary exteriors that are difficult to pierce. Nicolas Deshayes’ sculptures combine austere, industrially-built flat planes with nods to bodily and organic processes like skins and films. In Drifters (2012), shown at his solo show “Browns in Full Colour” at Jonathan Viner in London, ripple-like surfaces reminiscent of petri dish formations or crop circles were created using the industrial technique of vacuum-forming, then installed on the ceiling using chains. Deshayes who was born in France in 1983 and currently lives in London, recently completed a residency at the Wysing Arts Centre. Combining post-minimal traditions with the sleek deliberateness of home décor and contemporary design, his works reveal a level of attunement to today’s hyperspecific semiotics of color and material choices. Industrial processes reappear in Sels (Salts) (2012), shown with George Henry Longly at “Vanille” at Galerie chez Valentin in Paris: sculptural shrink-wrapped objects containing multiple frames over a washed-out psychedelic background. The work’s surface looks like it should be moving, the way hanging windows might collide with one another were they to hang by strings on the outside of a colorful room, unsettlingly. (Pablo Larios)

Nicolas Deshayes’ work is included in “The Glass Show” at Jonathan Viner Gallery, London until 16 February.

Hanging up in my room right now is a promotional T-Shirt designed by Alex Damianos to promote Sex Magazine, a new free online publication: a white Hanes t-shirt with a crummy image of the busty beach babe from Richard D. James’ “Windowlicker” (1999) single (designed by Chris Cunningham), on which James superimposed his chavvy mug over the model’s face. Except that Sex’s shirt deappropriated the image by reinstating the model’s original face, which looks creepier and more sullen as a result. The gesture captures the pitch and invective drive of Sex, whose first issue was released in fall 2012 as a response to the “stalemate” between Internet and print in contemporary publishing. The current Sex features an interview with Art Club 2000’s Danny McDonald and Berlin fashion label Bless’s Manuel Raeder, a snarky talk with singer Dan Bodan, and fashion/food/photography/film dispatches. Whereas many publishing outfits are embracing digital formats—with a speed that recalls the URL bubbles of the dot-com boom—Penn misses the trashy, speedy, and lo-fi quality of independent publishing culture. Sex, with its straightforward bold Courier font and sparse HTML, fuses these traits with a personal cultish interest in celebs and a consumerist slant. Readers can access James’ now-missing smirk in concentrated form on Sex’s website: the menacing smiley face from an ecstasy pill ☺ that serves as the site’s favicon. (Pablo Larios)

The second issue of Sex Magazine is getting launched tomorrow December 15th, and features among others Thuy Pham (Bernadette Corporation), Jordan Wolfson, Thomas Bullock (Rub ‘n Tug), Jacqueline de Jong (The Situationist Time), Harsh Patel and Laurie Spiegel.

An art-handler friend in New York has some stories about installing in buyers’ ritzy apartments: a doorman’s insistence that he ride the service elevator up; having a maid point out where the de Kooning’s supposed to go.

One doesn’t really ‘flip’ through eBooks so much as enter their hybrid worlds, which can mix print conventions with the scattered way of reading we’ve picked up from the web. iBooks’ goofy page-turn effect works well with Rachel Harrison’s The Help, A Companion Guide, a hilarious and off-kilter edition released for iPad and iPhone by Badlands Unlimited, Paul Chan’s art book publishing outfit. The book was inspired by Harrison’s show, The Help (2012), at Greene Naftali in New York, but there are no finished gallery shots, nor any standard catalogue text. Instead we’re bombarded with snippets of Harrison’s reference materials and numerous shots from the installation of her exhibition.

The theme, of course, is the “help”: the research sources and people that surround the polished final exhibition: the denim-clad art-handlers wrapping up Harrison’s speckled foam sculptures beside buckets of cleaning fluid and stray packing tape. There, photos of colored-pencil drawings depicting Amy Winehouse singing to caricatures inspired by early Picasso paintings; Google image searches; newspaper clippings (from Malaysia, I think) about basketball teams and 90s rappers; scans of ceramics from old art catalogs. You’re offered a taste of the artist’s colorfully neurotic research process, sensing the stench of cigarette smoke in a Chelsea alleyway during an overworked gallery registrar’s lunch break. (Pablo Larios)

Aleksandra Domanović tells me that during the installation of her piece for the 4th Marrakech Biennale this year, it somehow went missing. Apparently, authorities came in the night and relocated the outdoor sculpture because it obstructed the pathway where the Princess takes her morning stroll. History is a series of ironies and here the joke was on the monarch. The piece was a monolithic pink fist in abstraction called Monument to Revolution (2012). The relocation was doubly fitting, because Domanović’s videos and sculptures deal with those dysfunctional siblings, art and politics. For 19:30 (2010), a project exhibited at New York’s New Museum, Domanović collected music intro hooks (called idents) from news stations in the former Yugoslavia to assess how the rhythm of news-watching in times of political turmoil becomes psychologically, and musically, encoded in individuals. At times, seeing her pieces is like finding a Nike shoe peeking out behind the shroud of Turin. “Low” culture meets its institutional other, where it creeps up unexpectedly into political and aesthetic regimes. After the wars in Yugoslavia cities found themselves hunting for political emblems untainted by the complications of war. Public sculptures of Bill Clinton and Bruce Lee began to spread throughout the area. Turbo Sculpture (2009-2012), a video essay shown at Domanović’s solo show at the Kunsthalle Basel this year, is an archive of this phenomenon and a fascinating take on the movement of icons in our bizarre, networked age. (Pablo Larios)