One Summer Show That Was Good
One show this summer that was not just good but actually worth thinking about for a minute was The Patriot at O’Flaherty’s. The show’s now over so if you haven’t seen it, too late. Sorry!
Like a lot of things about O’Flaherty’s—like the gallery itself—The Patriot was a conceptual gambit, a show explicitly about the lousiness of summer shows. The crass, quotable press release began, “The most disappointing show for an artist to be in is a summer show.” It ended, “The Patriot is a truly democratic show where everyone is treated equally like shit.”
The exhibition itself was a doors-thrown-wide open call that crammed literally as many people as possible into maybe 700 square feet; the count of artists was 1,028. The works were close enough to give each other monkeypox. The maximalist use of space was not for sales purposes—the show wasn’t exactly staged to be a bonanza—but to hammer home the fact that the niceties of thematic curating are irrelevant in such contexts, mere sales-floor camouflage. And you were supposed to look at all in the dark, guiding your eye with a flashlight.
As usual, O’Flaherty’s proprietors Billy and Jamien made some nonsensical curatorial feints. One involved a pillow that allegedly cradled the head of Abe Lincoln as he died, viewed from a drop floor like at a carnival. The back room, entered through an oversized doggy door, involved an arena’s worth of stage lights and a mechanical monkey in a litter box. The gallery had apparently succeeded in borrowing an Arman sculpture to put in there but realized too late they couldn’t get it through the front door. Thus the back area’s main function, aside from being a deliberate letdown, was to blind you before you returned into the main gallery’s pinpoints of light in the gloom.
This bit of stagecraft was far more canny than it sounds. Using the flashlight forced you to track your gaze, to become very aware of what your eye was drawn to and why it lingered. It could be a suitcase with a roll of toilet paper grafted to its side; it could be a technically impressive gouache. There was a portrait of Lincoln, a portrait of Pacino; totems and dildos; an imitation Torbjørn Rødland and an ersatz Elizabeth Peyton; a discreet Cecily Brown and a copy of Infinite Jest glued over the door to the toilet. The roster mashed up people from the neighborhood, Bushwick graffiti kids, Gagosian and Zwirner artists, and characters you haven’t thought of in a while like Tim Noble/Sue Webster. One of the best items was a sheep made entirely of tinfoil mounted on a dolly, which, if that’s a reference to Dolly the sheep, the first cloned animal, Zwirner needs to pick them up ASAP. It’s a work Jason Rhoades would have lobbied for.
Given that all writers today must occupy the position of participant-observer, even I contributed to The Patriot, a humidifier full of cheap white wine called The Emperor’s New Juice. I imagined a gallery perfumed continuously with pinot gris like the grim morning after an opening that went on too long. Ultimately, all it did was remind people of the early ’10s and attract fruit flies.
The Patriot makes the point, common to O’Flaherty’s endeavors in general, that you can balance taking art seriously and realizing it’s all an artifice, possibly even a cosmic joke. The joke part got The Patriot lots of attention—not one NYT story but two and omnipresent coverage of the opening. You saw the pictures; it drew an arguable number of people but let’s say a thousand (the cops who shut it down told the O’Flaherty’s braintrust 4K). A lot of these people were civilians, people outside the art world, who love to see contemporary art as ridiculous. But, crucially, they also think it should be fun. That’s why The Patriot avoided the whole Cattelan-banana syndrome: Cattelan is too laconic and tidy not to seem like self-parody sometimes.
Our cultural moment, O’Flaherty’s realizes, requires actual LOLs. There’s a danger of wandering into Deitch territory but so far the gallery’s avoided it. And the show’s brusque inclusiveness was embracing but not hand-holdy. There’s maybe a class angle to all this, or perhaps it’s just an issue of American sensibilities versus lineal European ones. Either is too intricate for me to unravel in mid-August.
The Patriot closed August 10. Next wk: maybe Rafael Montañez Ortiz, maybe “beach reads.”
Something That Sucks
[It really seems to get people’s metaphoric dicks hard if, when you have even the most tenuous claim to being a critic—boat shoes, a Twitter following—you say you really hate something. So then: when Spigot is primarily positive, I’ll make sure to dole out a quantum of loathing. Make sure to post these on the socials.]
Richard Phillips! Look at this Richard Phillips painting in The Patriot:
GTFO Richard.
Gifts!
One subscriber premium has been decided: all paying subscribers will receive handmade friendship bracelets to commemorate our lifelong bond that began this magical summer. It might take me a while but they’re coming.
Wine
Thymiopoulos Young Vines Xinomavro. At one of the many extremely exclusive gatherings of media elites and influencers I attended recently, everyone lost their fucking minds over this wine, which I bought because the guy at the store told me to when I gave him the prompt “seafood, vaguely Vietnamese (but not really).” Greek reds are often harsh, especially Xinomavro, but this one is subtle and like a Frappato but less fruity. Chill it for 30 or 45 minutes then pop it open and make yourself the center of attention for five fleeting minutes.
A Song
In the spirit of The Patriot. If you can’t hack the whole Miley Resort World experience I nevertheless implore you to check out what happens beginning around 2:32.