010. A Fishing Lesson, Part I
Plus two STRONG recs for a Soho gallery bang-bang
I started this Substack because people have always asked me for gallery recs and it seemed like a good way to share my suggestions. Before Substack (B.S.) I used to send people a million screenshots of gallery Instagram accounts, Google Maps locations, and SeeSaw listings, cobbled together into some sort of itinerary that only someone with my exact mental illness could decipher.
But the old saying goes: Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, he’ll eat for life.
So, I’m going to do some writing about developing taste in art and what you do with that taste once you have it. Part 2 will be more about practical tools and resources for figuring out which shows to see.
Important: Eye Mileage
My friend just got back from a work trip that put her in some “heavy” rooms (in terms of being surrounded by art collectors) and they all talked about “eye mileage” as the key to developing your art collecting muscles. I had never heard that term before and my immediate reaction was to scoff (to be fair, I have, like, two knee-jerk reactions to things and one of them is to scoff), but now that I’ve thought about it, what better term is there?
Eye mileage meaning: put some strain on those eyes. See as much as you possibly can. Don’t worry about only seeing what is tasteful or good or recommended by critics. The best thing to do if you love art (or WANT to love art) is to see a lot of it.
My taste in art has actually grown more expansive over time. Rather than whittling my likes down to a narrow few, honing some specific visual preference, I have discovered that the more I see, the broader my personal canon becomes. That’s kind of an artist’s job, really. To convince you. It doesn’t matter the medium, the subject matter, the technique. What you’ve previously liked and what you’ve loathed. If they’re good enough, you’ll leave the gallery feeling that you’ve witnessed something transformative.
EXAMPLE: CLOWN TORTURE
As a child, I was always very afraid of clowns. It stemmed from seeing a shelf full of IT VHS tapes at Blockbuster. Fifty identical fanged clowns leering at me. I would have nightmares about them and wake up sobbing. A few years ago, MoMA held a giant Bruce Nauman retrospective. He has a piece called Clown Torture that plays on multiple monitors, showing a hapless clown screeching “NO!” through a series of denigrating experiences—caught on the toilet, pranked with a bucket of water. There were so many elements of this piece I would expect to hate. But I was mesmerized by it. It humanized an character I had always feared. It was funny, sad, and scary. And there was something so technically fascinating in the lo-fi, surveillance cam visuals. Nauman completely sucked me into his singular vision and transformed me with this bizarre-o work. Plus, I’m no longer afraid of clowns.
END EXAMPLE.
In the same way that an artist earns your appreciation, you have to earn the experience of appreciating. That is the eye mileage. An open mind is essential. I have FINALLY learned to stop making sweeping statements like “I don’t like XYZ medium/movement/artist” because I was finding my mind changed over and over and over again.
You might reach some point in your art-seeing when you know your favorite galleries and you get excited to see certain artists’ work, but even then, you should always take a chance on the thing you’ve never heard of.
The great NYC art world figure Walter Robinson died a few days ago. I had long followed him on Instagram but didn’t know too much about him and his legacy. According to Kaitlin Phillips and Jerry Saltz, he was exactly the type of “art person” I hope to be: first and foremost, a relentless fan. I loved reading the caption and comments on this post of his from a few months ago:
I saw just a few shows yesterday while running around in the city, but they were dense and beautiful and very worthy of your time. Reccos below :)
Shota Nakamura at C L E A R I N G (260 Bowery) - So so beautiful. Don’t even look at the pictures I took. These paintings are perfect in person, you feel the pigment vibrating off of the drab linen. An excess of goldenrod yellow, every imaginable shade of green, deep maroon. A decidedly “autumn” color palette save for one bright white winter landscape. If I was a collector…!
tinyvices Archive 20th Anniversary Exhibition curated by Tim Barber at The Hole (312 Bowery) - I saw that a bunch of people I know/know of were randomly at this opening (not people who would typically be at an opening at The Hole), which felt weird until this morning, when I read Chris Black’s newsletter for GQ (lol) and understood that this is a thing.
I’m a few years too young to have witnessed round 1 of tinyvices. I’m glad I went in blind, or else I might have been embarrassed and biased by the indie sleaze of it all. I had no context for the shitty presentation and label-maker name plaques stuck directly onto the walls. It is supposed to look like the internet in the early 2000s. Honestly, it’s pretty charming.
The photographers included are a who’s who of the last two decades, with heavy hitters including Ryan McGinley, who gets a whole swath of precious wall real estate. My two takeaways:
Not everyone is a photographer. The advent of digital point-and-shoot cameras, and now of course the small but mighty camera in all of our pockets, caused a mass proliferation of photography as a “skill”. But these photographs are mostly VERY GOOD. Unlike Carriage Trade’s annual Social Photography exhibition of intentionally pedestrian snapshots (coincidentally opening 2/15), tinyvices highlights people with serious talent. This is not amateur hour.
Curation is an art form in and of itself. Clearly Barber, who was the photo editor in the halcyon days of Vice, has IT. Without understanding how everything in this room was related, I quickly felt a unifying sense of weirdness, almost “gotcha” style photography that could have felt hokey but mostly felt exciting to witness. In his interview with Chris Black, Barber said: “If there's a word for my aesthetic, it would be ‘mysterious.’” I see it.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Rudy Burckhardt at Tibor de Nagy (11 Rivington Street) - This is just really lovely. Paintings of the view from the artist’s Chelsea studio, folksy self portraits painted onto chunks of tree bark, and zoomed-in nature scenes of woodsy Maine.
