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The video starts off simply enough: teen or pre-teen skaters of modest ability fly through a sunny, suburban context. They document middling kick flips over low curbs with a handheld camcorder and an extra-wide-angle lens. The teens off-camera voices dont reveal any particularly distinct geographic locale besides North American. Not thirty seconds into the ride, the skaters are interrupted by a panicked women. She rushes them, pleading for help in a strong Eastern European accent. As she accosts one of the skaters, he jumps off his board and she quickly kneels to grab it. The woman then turns and takes off, yelling for the kids to follow. The scene takes us to a nearby parking lot, where the womens two young children, between one and two years of age, are trapped inside a minivan. She and her husband beg the skaters to break the windows of the car so that the toddlers may be freed. The boys try.

The video, a work by the young artist Bradley Kronz (b. 1986, American; lives in New York), was presented at Team Gallerys new exhibition site in Los Angeles earlier this year. There, the humdrum but briefly tense narrative of the piece was projected and looped. Its main, uncut video segment was found online by the artist. Rather than manipulate the footage, Kronz de-cided to present it unedited, only adding a brief abstract animation at the very end of the piece. From a series of digitally rendered inter-titles before this bookending abstraction, we learn that the source material dates back to 2010. So why does the work look so 90s? Maybe its the grain and colors of the interlaced stream, which sug-gests a MiniDV or similar camcorder in use. Maybe its the fisheye lens. Or, perhaps its the genre of the thing itself: kids who skate recording their exploits, imitat-ing a style of skate video formalized in the 80s and widely popularized in the early 90s a time when such tapes could only be found in neighborhood skate shops and mail-order catalogs. The skate video genre is one

whose stability was put into flux since the emergence of YouTube and other video-sharing services, as well as the general democratization of video recording tech-nology via even the most modest of smart phones. In this regard, Kronzs own video seems a bit historically adrift. Its out of register with the time of the source material: this found footage is neither historical nor exactly contemporary. Rather, one could describe it as a rapidly aging piece of media, lacking the advanced software-enhanced clarity of an iPhone video clip. It lays out its narrative against a cloyingly saturated video-blue sky and a contrived wide-angle view.

The way this particular work traffics its formal payload of found footage brings to mind the ways in which Martha Rosler has written about the discarded commodity. Not old enough to evoke nostalgia, only shame, the cast-off commodity, according to Rosler, is an artifact of culture that belongs to the just-past, seem-ingly awkward and out of place in the context of the present. This is a period in the commoditys life before it can be considered vintage or once again desirable, a metonym for an entirely different era or symbolic regime. This is the culture of our parents, the clothes we were wearing five (rather than ten) years ago, our discarded ambitions and ideals: all things that are un-comfortable to think about from the perspective of the present. The kids in Kronzs piece originally set out to make a skate video and failed. There is little skat-ing in what theyve produced. Their failure, however, is perhaps not so incongruent with the artists own. Rather than making aggressive cuts or perplexing jux-tapositions as a generational predecessor may have done (think of Rosler or Elaine Sturtevant), Kronz simply footnotes the found footage with a touch of abstrac-tion. Lets take this as an entry point to thinking about some of the other works Kronz has produced over the past two years.

Caring, CaringBoko Blagojevic on the art of Bradley Kronz

Next page:Untitled (2015)Courtesy of the Artist and Team Gallery, New York

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In his summer 2014 exhibition The Ambitions of Large and Small Things at the gallery Off Vendome in Dsseldorf, Kronz presented an untitled set of two related (but individual) paintings, both depicting red hands in subtle gestures against a bright, out-of-view spotlight. The hands cast shadow puppets in the light: silhouettes of a dog and a hare. These paintings, hung only inches apart, actually originate from a single, found canvas Kronz rescued from a trash bin at one of his several short-term studio sublets. To make it his own, Kronz split the painting in half, literally cutting it, and in the process serialized an otherwise monolithic work not unlike the way so many painters today serialize their working methods to create unique but highly reproducible bodies of work. For Kronz, the body already reaches its reproductive limits at two. Thus, an unloved painting begins a second life as a du-ality: freed from its stretcher bars and inserted into the paper stock frames for which Kronz has become known.

What happens when a painting begins a second life in Kronzs frames? The artist has cautiously deployed

this strategy in other works, over the course of several exhibitions, in turn beginning to work as a painter. The first thing that happens is a general slackening. A paint-ing in some sense is defined by its tautness, whether it is stretched across bars or simply a panel or board. Kronzs shadow-puppet painting in this regard is now suddenly lankier, hanging more loosely, malleable. Like a muscular, disciplined body suddenly made limber with a stretching regimen, the painting seems larger in subtle ways. Bits of canvas previously confined to the back of the stretcher bars are now visible near the edges of the artists frame. Secondly, a sort of inherent naturalism returns to the paintings substrate, which rolls and moves, ever so slightly, as it comes to inhabit its new dwelling.

Kronzs paper frames are tricky constructions. En-countered in digital images on the Internet, theyre easy to miss. They dont attract the eye nearly as much as his hand-rendered drawings or the photographs and paint-ings Kronz appropriates to make his own. The frames are often quite thin in relation to the work they encase. They also rarely contrast or make a visual fuss with their tenant works. Sometimes they arent picture frames at all, but rather the ground upon which he arranges and manipulates one or more found photographs. Unlike their professional counterparts, these frames dont pro-fess an overwhelming concern with presentation. In this sense they operate with a modicum of stealth, but they dont exactly seek to disappear. On the contrary, like a shy but eccentric party guest, they become hard to ignore after they are noticed. They often show up in exhibitions disheveled and scratched-up, occasionally cracking at the edges. They might be made of cardstock of various types or very high-end watercolor paper. Oth-ers are constructed from repurposed, ready-made card-board framing stock, often left unfolded or otherwise deconstructed. Some are just sloppy, one might even say.

If professional frames buttress an aura of value, desire or status in an art object, Kronzs frames exhibit something much more fugitive: they exhibit a kind of nave care on the part of the artist. Consider his 2013 exhibition JUD at New Yorks Essex Street gallery. There, a series of drawings, photographs and sculptural compositions were presented by the artist, many of them in custom cardstock frames. In one wall-bound work, Moms 280C (2013), two photographs from the artists family archive are playfully pinned to an uncon-structed paper frame kit the artist uses as the ground for the composition. The images he chose to present in this work are the kind of photos that would be awkward in a family album. These are unpeopled images: there are no grinning family members, views of an exotic vacation locale, no toddlers posing with grandparents. There is no family gathering or important ceremony being depicted in these pictures. Rather, there are simply two nearly identical photographs of a car in the process of being painted. It calls to mind the kind of vanity portrait a young man might take of his first automobile, souped-up or freshly painted function-ing not unlike a second girlfriend, an extension of the

This page:TBT triangle (2015)Courtesy of the Artist and Team Gallery, New York

Next page, above:Untitled (detail, 2014)Courtesy of the Artist and Off Vendome, Dsseldorf/New York

Next page, below:Untitled (2014)Installation view at Off Vendome, DsseldorfCourtesy of the Artist and Off Vendome, Dsseldorf/New York

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approach, seeking to preserve or isolate works of art from the natural world and the forces of time. Rather, his framing is more in the spirit of the kind of sentiment that proxies the affective energies we have for our loved ones onto family photos and their possessions, long after they have departed. Its an uncertain and flighty kind of sentiment with which we stay connected to that which is now out of reach. Its flimsy. Rather than af-firming a triumph over time with technology, like the industry of personal media and photography seems to promise us, Kronzs work suggests a response to times passing that is mournful, sweeter.

Solo exhibitions: Team Gallery, Los Angeles; High Art, Paris; Off Vendome, Dsseldorf; Essex Street, New York.Group exhibitions: Mathew, New York; Boatos Fine Arts, So Paulo; Night Club, Chicago; Tomorrow, New York;

Bed Stuy Love Affair, New York; Shoot the Lobster, New York; Tanya Leighton, Berlin; Tomorrow, Toronto;

Foxy Production, New York.

Boko Blagojevi is an art writer and co-founder of Svetlana, New York.

This page:xxuuuzs. 1n (2015)Installation view at Team Bungalow, Los AngelesCourtesy of the Artist and Team Gallery, New York

Next page, above:Moms 280C (2013)Courtesy of the Artist and Essex Street, New York

Next page, below:Untitled (detail, 2014)Courtesy of the Artist and High Art, Paris

male ego, a kind of symbolic phallus. But its hardly a vainglorious moment for the vehicle in Kronzs work. Missing a bumper and half-painted, the Mercedes in the image a low-end Mercedes in an American garage, already a powerful aspirational symbol is presented as a kind of vulnerable, naked commodity. Its a com-modity stripped of its prestige and further cheapened by a visual doubling. Unlike other works in the show, the edges of the photographs are not covered by fram-ing material. Instead, the pictures are presented bare.

In another work from the same exhibition, Jeep (2013), we see a swiftly dashed-off marker drawing approximating a photograph. The image, somewhat abstracted by the tight cropping of its subject matter, is an image of vacancy: the traces of a dislodged Jeep car logo, the American brand of capable masculinity, occupies the center of the image like a ghost. A drawing inspired by another sort of reject-image from a fam-ily album, Kronz entombs it in an off-white cardstock frame. The result is sort of funny. Rather than protect-ing the already stained paper from the exposure of UV light or physical trauma, Kronzs frame offers us instead the artists twee affirmation that this image is cared for. In place of a caption, a narrative or a relationship, we have only this vacant, ineffective promise. Dads jeep? A healthy brand logo is already something that, when it works, evokes sentiment as much as it encourages us to pour our own sentiment into it. As such, every

logo and every commodity envies the family heirloom. Commodities that serve us longer and with more inti-mate contact and purpose like a car, for instance, in which one experiences many emotions over many years of ownership often create deeper and more intimate bonds with their possessors. Kronz often presents us with work that is materially insignificant; that is, made from inexpensive or discarded material. But through operations of framing, presentation and doubling, he creates what appears to be a kind of auratic context of care and importance between himself and these objects. The work is strongest, however, at the moment of the outsiders confrontation with it. Imagine coming face-to-face with Kronzs presentation of family photos or drawings in slapdash, homemade cardboard frames works that explicitly mime counterparts in the world of commodities and personal media with the deliberately flatfooted affect of a theater prop. These objects will suddenly seem to mock us: how do we submit to the affective regime Kronz fabricates with such subtle pro-cess and downtrodden material? How to fall under the spell of something so foreign, so explicitly ineffective?

Writing about the Essex Street exhibition two years ago, I compared the works in it to coffins, which maybe they are. Coffins, after all, are vessels with which we affirm the sanctity of the human body after its animat-ing forces have long withdrawn. Consider the logic of the artists custom frames. His is not a museological