I am sitting in the most placeless of all places: the airport. Yes, the Portland Airport has that special carpet that everyone puts on Instagram and there is a Stumptown and Lardo ; both hometown creations. Nonetheless, even the most valiant efforts at establishing specificity at any airport produces a wan, tinny copy of the original. It could be that one goes to the airport in a liminal state: to wait for an airplane to whisk you off to another place. I feel this no matter what airport I am in. It’s like texture, touch and memory succumb to the sexless plastic surfaces and washed out media that pervade the space. Anyway, waiting in an airport means I’m going somewhere and that somewhere is Los Angeles for the Frieze Art Fair at the Santa Monica Airport. LA Art Week is an excellent time to maximize looking at art, seeing friends and taking in the California sun during Portland’s oppressive late winter gray.
On the plane I glance up from my book to look at other people’s screens and what they’re watching. I have noticed that any movie, no matter how visually stunning or any blockbuster however keenly received in the theaters becomes a thin paper doll on the airplane. Particularly formulaic, genre films and television that would be passably enjoyable on a large screen are revealed to be meager, their cheapness grotesquely highlighted. I know I sound like a scold and a bummer. I probably am. But there you have it. I can make it through a long flight with my own screen but looking at other’s screens is like seeing behind the movie lot town facade. The illusion falls apart. That is my sense of the entire airport and airplane experience: I am suddenly aware of the pure shittiness of the world we’ve built.
Frieze is one of the premiere art fairs in the world. There is one in London, New York, Miami and of course Los Angeles. Art fairs have become one of the most important spaces for selling art. Art fairs have varying levels of prestige, hipness and relevance. Frieze is the tent pole around which LA Art Week is built. Aside from Frieze, whose Wednesday VIP event is attended buy A-List celebrities, hedge fund managers and one-percenter collectors, there is Felix; a mid-sized fair and Spring/Break; the popular and hip startup. Special installations, artist panels, museum exhibition openings and gallery shows occur simultaneously. A booth at a premiere art fair can cost thousands of dollars in booth fees, not to mention shipping, staffing and advertising. A lot is at stake monetarily for the participating galleries. One gallerist I spoke with used to have a physical space in L.A. but realizing that the art fairs ate up the bulk of his yearly income, switched to an online model and works with an exclusive client list. Needless to say, there is a lot to sneer at about the art fair.
Frieze Los Angeles takes place at the Santa Monica Airport. The airport area has the square footage to house the large tent for the ninety-five galleries that participate. There is another reason I think of the airport affect on artworks that I’ll get to in a moment. Entry into Frieze is expensive. I had hoped to go with a friend but he got sick so I was solo. It allowed me some anonymity. I have no business there. I mean, I literally have no business there in that I am neither showing nor buying, just another looky-lou. It is thrilling though to be part of an event that seems necessary to attend. This is about being in place. Being seen for sure but seeing in-person and being open to serendipity. That it takes place in a giant tent and the galleries have booths, accentuates the sense of a very high end craft fair. That everything is obviously for sale is part of the honesty of the thing and its most depressing element. It’s why I can’t condemn it outright. It’s a contradictory experience.
At an art fair it is impossible to hide behind any sanctimony about the intrinsic value of artwork. Economic inequality and auspicious wealth are on display. Marketplaces are not inherently bad or corrupted. Sometimes it is a relief to have an exchange value on a thing. We all desire objects. Even if the desire is unfulfilled or is satisfied vicariously there is something potent in that. Some artworks conduct themselves with dignity. Jordan Casteel had a few knockout paintings that were a joy to see in person. Vanessa German’s installation of heads and objects covered with various beads, rose quartz and other pink materials found a pressure point between department store display, museological arrangement and talismanic power. Some pieces however, like those movies screened on board a flight fall apart. They stand naked before you with nothing but pastiche, cheap irony and/or slap dash current pieties. What happens to an artwork drained of its dignity? If taken home by one of the many potential buyers do they rehydrate and glow under their own sun? Or once revealed is the game up and they never generate enough heat to matter? Ultimately, I don’t think this is particularly good for the health of art.
But as I write that, I have to consider that in this absurd place with everyone engaged in the performance of being seen and observing others’ performances, we’re all spending hours looking at pictures and objects. We’re spending our precious time and money in the company of ludicrously priced uselessness; each thing containing a seed of transcendence within its belly. Seeds fail or seeds persevere there’s no telling which other than the manner of attending to it. By the end of a few hours I am drained, feeling low and ambivalent. Maybe even a little soul sick. Why do you even want to be part of this art world I ask myself. I look at myself in relation to all those around me and realize I matter even less to this world. But. But. But. Later I meet up at a friend’s new studio, meet another friend at a great gallery show and we go to one more before heading to a bar. Faith is restored. In each instance we talk about what we saw: mock, revere, disagree and rethink.
Now it is time to return to Vincent Van Gogh where I started this essay. Van Gogh is seen as the ur-pure artist. He suffered romantically in beautiful isolation. He has a tragic biography with a number of questionable scenes that fit neatly into a psychological reading of each painting. It’s the story the mainstream media likes to tell of artists: he was driven by his vision no matter the cost to his reputation and pocketbook and history gives him the last laugh. This is a marketing story. According to the massive biography Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Smith Naifeh and Gregory White, Van Gogh’s first introduction to art was through his job working for his uncle at an art gallery. It wasn’t quite the art gallery as we know it now. More like the somewhat fancy seller of reproductions you might find in a respectable small town. He was obsessed with sentimental images and derivative prints. Before he tried his hand as an artist he tried, and failed miserably to be an art dealer. Once he began painting his measure of success was monetary. He desperately wanted to sell his work and was constantly coming up with various schemes that might fit the current market. In that way, he is like all artists. We want market success because it allows us time to make more work, it assuages our egos and it gets your disapproving family off your back. Vincent was apparently a very unlikable fellow and a big part of success is social.
Still, I wouldn’t trade his paintings for a thing. One reason he didn’t jive with the marketplace was that he was hopelessly sincere. He really did believe that these pictures could transform the soul. And for me in that museum it did. It is the living germ of this life I’ve chosen that I can protect under layers of professionalism and cynicism. We live in a capitalist system of value. If you’ve ever seen a worm bin with three levels you know the top layer is fresh clippings and waste. It still retains its native odors. The middle bin is where the works are really doing their bodily thing. Eating, pooping and breaking down. It smells and looks funky. The lowest layer is the stuff that smells like soil and goes into the garden to feed its vitality. In capitalism, the art fair may be the middle layer of the worm bin. It is the workings of the market in all its visible scatological glory.
By the time the same work leaves the homes of the mega rich into the institutions the mega rich fund, it is cleaned. You can choose to look at this a couple of ways. One is that the cleansing happening is money laundering. That means every museum, gallery and artwork is inherently corrupt. You can choose to consider the oligarchs as enlightened by funding enlightened activity that a culture needs to survive and the bare knuckled metrics of the market would never bear out. You could walk away from it all and make art on a commune with your friends. All of the above are true and valid. Yale depends on donors from a class that benefits and propagates inequality. They’re not about to upset their privileges anytime soon. If not for this very questionable system I would not have had that experience before The Night Cafe. Something has got to give. It is not sustainable for artists, artworks, people or the planet. And yet we cannot reduce all culture to false equivalencies or dead end utilitarianism. It is in the inefficiencies and uselessness that the real vital stuff exists. Sloganeering delivers nothing in the end but division and anxiety.
The temple bell that rings in us, rings in the body. It rings against the forged ribs of a composite self that is made of many things: place, memory, story and time. We can only attend to that with our bodies. The body is a being in relationship to the physical world. To accept that physical world we must accept all its inefficiencies, contradictions and beautiful absurdities.
And a reminder:
THE GROUND BENEATH US AT BUILDING FIVE
STORYTELLING AND DRAWING WORKSHOPS
COST :
$400 per workshop
$1000 for a bundle of any three workshops
$1600 for all five payable by April 1, 2024
Register at www.buildingfive.org
Five immersive, intensive weekend workshops.
Old stories come from specific places, from lands with distinct voices. Stories travel like burrs on traveler’s pant legs. Story is the most reliable container for memory. These workshops connect one’s innate creative spark with deep-time storytelling and straightforward drawing exercises. Oral storytelling and image making exercises are braided together into each session. We go deep into old stories and myths to examine how they speak to our lives in the present day. Each weekend begins with a telling of a story. We build drawing exercises around the images in each story. Through discussion, exercises and critique, each participant creates their own image world from the stories.
This course is for anyone interested in unlocking their visual storyteller: teachers, writers, artists and the narratively curious. This is not about technical prowess, but storytelling and expression. The drawing exercises do not require previous training. Participants come away having created their own story based in image and text; gaining tools for telling stories with pictures and thinking in mythic time.
Saturday and Sunday 10AM-4PM
Weekends are full days of storytelling, drawing exercises and workshops.
APRIL 12-14, 2024:
The Odyssey
The Odyssey is one of the most iconic of Western stories. We look at what the story has to say about leaving home, coming home, and being a migrant in the world. What does that longing in our stories say about our own longing? Who is a migrant, a refugee, or a native? Our stories root us to the ground and allow us to travel over great distances.
JUNE 28-30, 2024:
River Stories
Stories from the Mabinogion, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Chinook stories about rivers, water spirits and the energy of moving water. We consider the energy of rivers at the Building Five site. History of the ironworks, the buried rivers of Portland and the Willamette and the Columbia.
SEPT. 7-8, 2024:
Tree Stories
Folktales from Pagan Europe, Indigenous stories from the Pacific Northwest about trees, forests and plants. We consider the presence of Forest Park that rises behind Building Five. Divinations from ravens, conversations with trees, and rivers that fall in love. These stories are remnants of old understandings between the non-human world and the human society. Can we restore our relationship with a living world in crisis if we hear the voices of other personages? Is it possible these old stories have been waiting for us to sit quiet and really listen?
NOV. 15-16, 2024:
Underworld Stories
It’s that time of year. Stories that guide us through the Underworld, visits to the land of the dead, ghost stories and divinations from beyond. Grief, uncertainty specific stories. The veil of the worlds is thin how do we enter into conversations with the spirit world? We go through the Underworld with Orpheus and Eurydice.
DEC. 13-14, 2024:
Homecoming Stories
What does it mean to come home? Journeys need to have a return. Stories of belonging, returning and finding place. How do we define home? Can we find stories in the ground beneath our feet that welcomes newcomers and honors the ancestors? Looking at Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home.