My Semiotic Darling
Craig Jun Li at RainRain, Gillian Welch, and a grotesquely fascinating rum. Plus a Spigot reprise and my loathing of upstate New York
Craig Jun Li’s show at RainRain—a gallery “upstairs from the 7/11,” as the artist jokingly likes to put it; you know the one, off Walker Street—bristles with ideas. The variousness of the works on first glance is a little puzzling. Large stretched-mesh works printed with bold photos of flowers hang on the walls. Interspersed among them hang small, richly colored silicon pads bearing fine-grained debossed images in mod frames, along with similarly sized framed grids of polaroids. On the floor, enigmatic black wooden structures stand shin high, with uncertain mechanical bits and textiles placed atop and about, while above, there’s a gleaming work that you might miss if the gallerist doesn’t tell you to take a peek at the ceiling.
That sounds like a lot, but the installation gives the works plenty of room, leaving the ideas to wander and collide. Collision and conjunction are key motifs. The stretched-mesh works, for instance, are actually printed with two different sets of images. The botanical scenes, which the artist received in WhatsApp chats, show a family garden back home in northern China, while the other images show Li’s own downtown studio. This cool use of personal subject matter also features a twist, or rather, a bulge: the surface of each work distends regularly thanks to the presence of a pendulum-like apparatus that sweeps up and down at specific points under the surface.
Meanwhile, the enigmatic black structures, made with contributions from Clare Hu, suggest miniature tables and lecterns. The commensurately sized objects set atop them include model-railroad set elements, time-lock mechanisms, cast silicone and brass, old children’s books and tip-in prints, and textile elements printed with patterns or photographs. On one, a spiral metal band takes the form of a golden ratio/Nautilus construction. The assemblages conjure bumptious academics talking at and occasionally even to one another—though admittedly in this case I might be weighting my own experience too heavily.
There are few clear answers with Li’s show but lots of questions, a lot of invitations to make connections. If you have any doubt that the thematic of conversation across context is intentional, give a glance to the press release, penned by Coco Klockner, which pops off with a quote from Wittgenstein about language’s uncertainty. The dense references in Li’s works don’t short-circuit each other, nor do they reach for the easy tactic of overload. The show is profuse but not messy. It’s almost coy, like those regular comical bulges, playful like a poke in the ribs.
Li has slyly titled the show of—a preposition, a linkage, something that has less semantic value than grammar, a node without essence and able to be infinitely redeployed: a conduit, a function. I saw a similar allusion in the work overhead, a dotted-line of shiny cylindrical segments that look like piping mounted in the rafters. It unexpectedly evokes Robert Gobert’s grates and flowing waters, and maybe there’s a little Broken Kilometer in there too. My most fanciful thought was that they séance with Céci n’est pas un pipe, the pun reinforcing the faceted quality of words, the reference to Magritte piping up about semiotics.
In fact, the work, a collaboration between Li and Emily Leach, is none of the above, or not exactly. The segments are actually anamorphic cylinders that render an image sequence of a parrot flapping its wings. Anamorphosis was invented during the Ming Dynasty, then traveled to Europe in the 1600s; the piece thus approaches, like the flower works, the transmutation that occurs in communication across figurative and literal distance.
Li means for us to focus on the systemic and the relational rather than the fixed. The images are layered; the constructions on the floor addressing one another form a clunky network. The nautilus shape that appears embodies the unity of two seeming incommensurates, the mathematical and the organic. The ultimate emphasis in of is the tension between the image and the arrangement they reside in and the dramedy of making rapprochement between them.
Li’s show closes October 26, so make sure to catch it this week. As a finale, the gallery will be hosting a reading that day at 4 pm.
Liquor
Clairin Sajous sugarcane rum. Clairin Sajous is made in the Haitian countryside and features on the label a seemingly idyllic scene that turns out to be an idealized, somewhat eyebrow-raising depiction of myriad antlike laborers toiling in cane fields. The liquor, too, is a little deceptive: clairin is not really a rum but rather a Haitian spirit with a local identity all its own, using sugarcane juice instead of molasses and made in small batches like mezcal. It’s innocuous and crystal clear in the glass, like water straight from the Berkee.
I first tried Sajous at a friend’s house; the bottle had mellowed over a couple years, smelling a lot like blackstrap and a little rotten. The taste, however, was milder, vegetal yet a little plasticky. The only thing it remotely resembled in my sadly vast drinking experience was poured one New Year’s Eve from a gallon jug a friend had brought back from Mexico—mezcal de pechuga, which, yes, involves a chicken in the distilling process, and a raw one at that. Clairin Sajous seemed as if it had been filtered not via fowl but rather through a sunbaked supermarket container of prewashed arugula. And yet the drinking was a little sweet, a little fruity, a little horseradish mustard.
When I saw the Sajous on sale mere days later, I made an impulse buy. Yanking the cork on a fresh bottle, I learned that the spirit definitely gains from a couple years of oxygenation. Taking a whiff when it’s freshly uncorked was fumy, sphincter dilating like those boutique poppers from Texas with scent names like Double Scorpion. It didn’t smell like molasses at all, and unfortunately it tasted a lot like it smelled—summertime trash bags stuffed with sticky cola cans, moldering greens, a slowly leaking, botulism-afflicted can of peaches, and a fiberglass mannequin arm cauterized on a plug-in hot plate. Every time I took a sip I was afraid it might dislocate my jaw. By day two, it had mellowed just enough that I could leave it on my tongue long enough to taste a big pinch of autumnal spice amid the atrocity, now ever so slightly more demure.
Henceforth Spigot offers a new benefit to premium subcribers: a tumblerful of Clairin Sajous. Come over anytime.
Return Engagements
Spigot readers in New York might want to catch a show by an artist who appeared in these virtual pages last summer, Juliana Halpert, who has an exhibition at Sebastian Gladstone on view through Halloween that comprises eight photos she surreptitiously took in the Artforum office of the infamous Knight Landesman. It was May 2017 and Halpert was leaving her job at the magazine, coincidentally just a few months before the scandal broke (you know the one). Here, as in the rest of her work, Halpert has a deliberately oblique touch, which works well in such a charged context. The excellent accompanying text, penned by the artist, emphasizes the relation between language and image, the impossibility of definitive meaning or even clear communication.
The photos capture Landesman’s inimitable handwriting, his habitual red pen, the blizzard of notes around his office. The blown-out quality of the pics are an artifact of the blinding light he bathed his environs in, which is a little ironic given the shady behavior that brought about his downfall. I loved Halpert’s show, found it strangely funny rather than depressing. I’ll be very curious to hear how it goes over with people lacking a personal connection to the place. Dr. Rivers Ryan, I’ve got a great pitch for you . . .
Writing
The moment we’ve all been waiting for has arrived: my essay on hotness has emerged from behind the paywall and is now available online from Spike. It turns out the first digital graf differs from the spare, elegant, more quietly aggressive intended version, available only in print, but don’t worry: I fixed it for you above.
Music
It takes so much energy to go through life restraining one’s irrational desires. I do a pretty good job, relatively, but this week I decided to submit to my need to see Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings live in concert. The local gigs are in Connecticut (definitely not) and Kingston, NY, a small city up the Hudson. I have a visceral negative response—loathing is just a little too strong—for upstate, for no good reason except possibly being dragged there over the years by friends as if a weekend in a squat, desiccated postindustrial region with a few creeks and beech trees could serve as a tonic for the ails of the cruel metropolis. Seeing Welch/Rawlings amid the slackened, joy-deserted populace seemed wrong to me; the limited emotional range of the crowd would feel wrong.
Thus I decided to fly this weekend to my improbable ancestral homeland, the Carolinas, to see the duo perform in an SRO wood-frame music hall on the Haw River, just south of Mebane and just north of Eli Whitney, west of Trees and east of Rock Creek. It’s not about authenticity; one of the things I love about Welch is the fact that she was born in NYC and raised in LA by parents who worked as musicians in Hollywood. She went to Crossroads for high school (you probably know someone who went there, or maybe went there yourself!), then UC Santa Cruz and thereafter Berklee College of Music. Yet somehow she makes songs that seem like they were written a hundred and fifty years ago, full of grief and sparkling like dark gems on the throats of the damned. I just couldn’t see her and Rawlings in a place that has always felt to me benumbed.
The new album, Woodland, comprises the first set of songs written by the pair that’s been billed under both of their names. Rawlings takes a more prominent place in the vocals than usual, and the sound has shifted a little from the heavily bluegrass/old country sound toward some ’70s acts like Neil Young and Fleetwood Mac. The song “#Hashtag,” sung by Rawlings, has a title that might seem cringe, but once you listen you find that it’s far from it. It’s a tale about wandering alone into a strange bar extremely depressed and running into an equally depressive friend, who also happens to be hilarious. I kept imagining the interlocutor as David Berman, but apparently the song was written for Guy Clark, a member of the ’70s–’80s folk-rock cohort that included characters like Townes van Zandt who mentored Welch and Rawlings when they were first starting out. The chorus is haunting, backed with strings cast a little Nick Drake spell, but I’m equally bewitched by the barely perceptible slowdown in tempo during the refrain’s lead-in. It’s as if the song must rupture just a bit before it gathers itself to reach its emotional peak.
I’ll let you all know how the trip goes.