Transmissions and Eclipses
Christopher Baliwas at Theta, art appreciation at Billymarks Tavern, and the orange wine you should ban from your house parties. Plus an update on Spigot radio.
Christopher Baliwas roots his art in a seemingly simple, conceptually rich methodology. He photographs something, quite possibly the cover of an album he likes—say Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get by the ’70s soul group the Dramatics. Then he prints the image, carefully strips it from its surface using packaging tape, and reassembles the results to recreate a ghostly vision in brown. There are variations on the process; in some cases yet more camerawork is involved and Baliwas produces ghostly inkjet prints. But the fundamental technique is displayed most clearly when the “pull print,” as he calls it, is the object on display, the overlapping lines of tape stretched horizontally or vertically across a frame.
One of my favorite things in art is when a compressed gesture reveals itself to be multidimensional. Baliwas’s technique is a great example; it ramifies in myriad directions. It’s about cultural heritage (Baliwas is of Filipino descent), the transmission of ideas both diachronically and synchronically, hybridization, and more. The quality of the resulting images themselves, faint to ethereal, speaks to something more philosophical or even spiritual. Two allusive, even oblique photographic works metaphorically bookend the show’s pull prints. In one work, a careful observer will recognize the weathered assemblage as depicting a gravesite during a funeral. The other photo, carefully composed, resolves into an image of a pregnant belly and a small child in overalls at a petting zoo—the artist’s wife and daughter. The cycle of life entwines with the tortuous transmission of knowledge via the reversals and reorientations that compose Baliwas’s work.
The implications of Baliwas’s facture also apply reflexively to art: he is, after all, using album covers and images of musicians as source material. He makes an illuminating comparison with another virtuoso of packing materials, Thomas Hirschhorn. Given how different their works seem—the intimate vs. the world historical, the subtle vs. the bludgeoning, the quietly aesthetic v. the anti-aesthetic—the connection might appear tenuous. But both Hirschhorn and Baliwas share a core interest in the distribution of ideas. Baliwas’s method is a literal tearing away of an image from one surface and its reassembly as a ghost (in the sense of trace) or spirit (in the sense of essence). By making music his point of departure—he’s also a DJ—he metaphorizes the idea that art transmits something important but hard to articulate, at times hard to register.
In contrast, Hirschhorn deals with a kind of hyper-registration of imagery that defiles both its viewer and the image itself—while maintaining the paradoxical faith in the indefatigability of the idea visible in his “monuments” to Gramsci, Deleuze, Spinoza, and, more playfully, Robert Walser. He stages the death of liberalism while simultaneously propounding the need for some core of humanism, broadly defined. Baliwas takes up this same yearning and registers in a similarly dialectical way but without bombast, through intimate connection to one’s loved ones as well as with art.
To accompany the show, Baliwas penned an artist statement, which closes with a poetic, elliptical line apropos to his work: “I start with a goodbye.” Equally fitting is that it’s a citation, of the writer Nathaniel Mackey on race, in particular Blackness, and art making. “Only such admitted fugivitity,” he writes with a polyvalence equal to that of Baliwas’s work, “stands a ghost of a chance of apportioning prodigal truth.”
Celestial Bodies
Great week to be a hater, pace Ann Manov, so I’ll just come out and say it. The solar eclipse? Kinda bullshit.
For the occasion, I ensconced myself in a quiet green pocket of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. The moon moving across the sun—sure, that was neat. The light dimmed a little, but given the Portland-like weather this winter, it wasn’t much different from any other day, and it was nowhere close to nighttime. No Purkinje Effect either. The animals, who I thought would tuck themselves into bed, seemed as indifferent as I was. They get it: it gets dark every night!
Maybe I misunderstood what 90% occlusion is supposed to do. Maybe my soul is just a blacked little nub like a scorched popcorn kernel. But the earthquake on Friday stole all the thunder. Tired: the moon passing in front of the sun. Wired: getting loose on the Ramapo Fault.
Spigot x Montez
The Spigot Radio Hour launches in a couple weeks on Montez Press Radio, on April 24 at 6 pm. The inaugural episode will include on-air wine tasting, expert analysis of the new Taylor Swift record, and conversation with a soon-to-be confirmed guest. And if any of you happen to know Tina Rivers Ryan, tell her to accept my invitation to come on the show—I’m really a very nice guy!
Wine
Gulp Hablo. This wine is bad. Please stop bringing it to parties.
Yes, I know it’s a cheap liter bottle—and a screwtop—which makes it perfect for big social scenarios. And I’m not shading orange wine. It’s just that Gulp Hablo tastes horrible. You’re being scammed under the banner of ersatz sophistication because it’s the “natural” option fronted at your local liquor store. Gulp Hablo orange is a drinking option that any reasonable person would drop by age twenty-five. If it were a grocery store, it would be Trader Joe’s.
I’ll grant that Gulp Hablo’s aroma isn’t terrible; it’s the best part in fact, floral and a little weedy. But it’s a faint pleasure as it fades into something acrid. Swish it around in the glass. You’ll find that it’s lightly honey colored rather than orange, a little viscous. It’s not sweet, however; its thickness becomes allegorical—this wine is dumb as a doornail. It’s an archetype of what people dislike about skin-contact wine. Sour. Scorched. You say almonds, I say cyanide. “Funky” as a synonym for bad, not richly fetid or strange. Gulp is a perfect name for this wine because it’s best if you sluice it into your throat without letting it sit on your tongue for a second longer than absolutely necessary.
If you’re on a budget and going to a party, buy a Bota box—they make a quality cheap product and it’s people love a post-ironic carton of booze. But if it’s really going to take orange wine to get you laid, the GOAT of cheap bottles, maybe of all skin-contact wine, is of course Paleokerisio, a tad yeasty but smooth and without the tannins that overpower many an orange wine. It’s almost champagne-like. Another solid, commonly available option is Dila-O, which is what Gulp should be, saltier and more balanced. Bonus points for being from where the whole wine thing started, the Republic of Georgia. Or you can indulge the goofy label of Orange Party, which is actually pretty good. But don’t buy Skins. It sucks only a little less than Gulp Hablo.
Books
If you happen to go to Billymarks Tavern after some Chelsea event—and why wouldn’t you? it’s the only bearable spot for half a mile—and you happen to be carrying an art catalogue, may I suggest you offer it to the bartender?
You can proudly point out your essay about Jamian Juliano-Villani’s current exhibition at Gagosian, on view through April 20, and explain how deftly you position Juliano-Villani’s work in historical context and contextualize it vis-à-vis both the internet and good old American television—while also tackling the vexing problem of Italian American representation in the visual arts. I know, it’s sad the things people will do for attention.