The Displeasure Principle
The Armory Show, the change of seasons, and the timeless clash of eros and death
My Armory Week was weirdly—and I mean that in the eerie sense—shadowed over by Gillian Welch. Her new record with her partner, David Rawlings, came out August 23 and more or less instantly cast over me a dire and intricate spell. If you don’t know her music, it’s about death and love and self-annihilation. The first song on the new release, Woodland, is, so far as I can tell, about contemplating suicide. The second is about recognizing that a long-term relationship has disintegrated. And so on. For all that, the album maintains a jauntiness. Relatively anyway.
Woodland is not the kind of music apropos to the festive ringing-in of a new season in the big city. That would be music like the Dare, for example, who made a cameo in a column I wrote this time last year. He released his first full-length album on Thursday, September 6, smack in the middle of the art melee, which poses a question with its title so many of us in the culture industry love to ask: What’s Wrong with New York? The Dare makes fucking and sucking music but in a fun American Apparel revivalist way; last year I described it as electroclash for straight people. He’s curiously a pet of a coterie of literary types and intellectual friends of mine, I don’t know why exactly, though he is a charming guy—and like myself, he’s a Pisces, so I’m rooting for him. He’s about to became very famous, and we all want to be on the right side of history.
I RSVPed for the What’s Wrong with New York? daytime listening sessions. They seemed like a good respite from a week of scrambling. Plus they were serving hot dogs, and my week featured a distinct lack of good, gallery-underwritten meals. Unfortunately the sessions conflicted with that old exigency, work, and of course my need to visit the Armory. The fair could have used a little of the Dare’s embrace of the pleasure principle. It was fine—check out Spurs in Beijing, who showed a range of excellent work and were brave enough to include three videos in their presentation. But overall felt a bit relegated to the minor leagues in this, its second year owned by Frieze. Under its own brand, Frieze had a massive fair in Seoul the exact same time as the Armory—lets you know how they’re feeling about the property, and American collectors.
The Welch/Dare dichotomy, eros and thanatos, kept tipping back and forth on the scales, settling graveward. An artist friend posted about how she would prefer her funeral arrangements (always a sign of good mental health) and in our DMs explained her terror of not existing as the result of a visit the Paris catacombs as a child. I found myself on the dance floor at the Gauntlett Cheng afterparty—it was also Fashion Week, and it is as imbricated as ever with art’s kickoff—talking first to a sculptor about the pros and cons of immortality and then to a painter about their preferences for their interment ceremony, which was that people be “really fucking sad.” Yes, I am both the kind of person who brings up death at a party and, worse, the kind of person who insists on talking on the dance floor.
Perhaps it was more than simply Gillian Welch’s power as an artist; perhaps my mortal feelings were simply dialectical at a cyclical moment of beginnings. Perhaps it was reflecting on all the labor that went into putting on the Armory Show for four days and how futile it seems ultimately in a time of listless markets, and also beside the point. Perhaps it was the metaphor so many people use for this time of year, the back-to-school season, and how remote that time seems. Perhaps it was the seasonal convergence with the aforementioned Fashion Week, and its foregrounding of a genre explicit about transience. Or perhaps it was how fashion has strangled art in recent times, and not in a sexy way.
Ok, maybe a little sexy.
Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve found that as you age your sense of time changes; you hit a point, rather discretely, where you can no longer obtain a purchase on events, not in the sense of comprehending them, which one has typically done casually and even unawares, but rather marking them, slowing them down long enough to touch and crawl inside, to inhabit them as if they might not end. That’s what my week was like. Another one gone, and what’s on the books?
In the lengthy wait outside the red-velvet cheap-chandelier midtown club Lips, which typically appears to host drag shows, the Gauntlett Cheng party (which I only entered after some skullduggery), a painter friend proposed to me the theory that in the USA, thanks to neoliberal democratic politics, etc., the annum as unit had ceded ground to the quad, with the stress of recent elections and their discursive omnipresence making events a little more things to look past than forward to or be in. I thought this was persuasive as an appendix to the general internet-capitalist time slip.
A final circularity that the week kept churning up: that aforementioned column I wrote for Artforum about last year’s Armory Week would turn out to be the last piece I wrote for the magazine. Another gloomy subject—David Velasco’s ouster over a political statement whose premises have been borne out more horribly than I had ever imagined. I’ve been underwhelmed by the new AF in the peeks I’ve granted myself in lobbies and libraries (research!). To be fair, I haven’t read deeply, but the contributor list is depressing both for its near-total unfamiliarity and its scabism. Some people will run through any open door. The loss of the magazine as a significant venue for criticism weighed on me, the sub-bass that pulsed in my chest in the rare moment when all the trebly chatter dropped out.
Art
The week was studded by shows with old friends, which meant more rearward glances. Josh Kline did so explicitly, eccentrically, offering retrospective different from the one that took place last year at the Whitney. Kline has at Lisson applied a number of his signature sculptural motifs to himself—his disembodied head overprinted with the cardboard-brown and labels of Amazon packaging; racks of monochrome sculptures of his hand holding a juice bottle, a donut; his full form wrapped up in plastic and curled up in a fetal position. For an artist strenuously focused on politics, on other people rather than himself, it’s bold, completely effective, and a droll self-packaging for a debut at an NYC blue-chip gallery.
Another good friend, Whitney Claflin, opened an exhibition of paintings and the occasional objet at Derosia. Characteristically various and playful, serious but funny in a warped way, it swerves between styles—there’s a pseudo Richter; there are superb works in thin black paint on a white background, sheerly iconic and as elegant as calligraphy. There’s a large portrait of Chester, a happy-go-lucky character from the sock-puppet fake cable-access program The Sifl and Olly Show, which aired on MTV only from 1998 to 1999, which is sure to baffle most everyone who sees it. There’s a child’s drum kit; bring the kids.
I should underscore that in both of these cases I’m in the tank. Blatant favoritism is something I hate when other writers do; apologies. But they were the show that most struck me this week.
Dragging myself to a picnic on Sunday, I had a good conversation with an artist visiting from London who had been at Claflin’s opening. She described the show as something that, coming to an outsider to a downtown New York painting show, she expected would be so self-aware that it would be unbearably “critical,” except that in Claflin’s case the work was made with—and here she paused for a moment looking for the right word. Joy.
Wine
Punctuating the week, my friends Elvia and Andreas got married at the Housing Works Bookstore in SoHo, in its wonky, homey, handsome arcaded space on Crosby. I get reliably depressed at weddings—shocker, I know—from the way the ceremonies mark and measure time, from the check-ins with old friends I haven’t seen in a while, from my own detachment from a spectrum on which to measure maturation or growth, sometimes from a sense of bogusness or doom. Not this time, of course! Congratulations and much love.
The hosts, who for some reason did not request that my wedding gift be to serve as their sommelier, served some very nice booze. The quality of the wine the newlyweds offered was high, particularly Novaia Valpolicella Classico. Valpolicella isn’t the most famous Italian wine, hails from the slightly unusual setting of the Veneto. The Novaia was perfectly supple, a little cherryish, uncomplicated, unconcerned, heart lightening, and still motivated enough to smooth out the wrinkles with food.
Finally, as a public service: if you are ever confronted with the sign below, DO NOT succumb to curiosity. Wonder why you’ve never heard of a dirty tequila martini? For good reason. It tastes like José Cuervo run through a sour sock and shaken with water from the Gowanus Canal, no ice.
Music
RIP Rich Homie Quan, who I discovered when I bought one of his mixtapes on a hand-labeled CD at the local gas station while spending time in South Carolina after my mom died.