Andy Warhol at The Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich CT

 

About a year ago I went to The Brant Foundation for the first time to view the Karen Kilimnik show (briefly written about on this blog a year ago).  Then, I was in rich people (like actual one-percenters) shock at the grandeur and obscenity of what money can do.  Also, the show was underwhelming so that probably colored the whole vibe of the day.  Well, I received a golden ticket this year and it was for a show on Andy Warhol.  This I had to see because Warhol is a measure to me in so many ways and oddly I was looking forward to a day in rarified country land. 

For those who don’t know much about the Brant Foundation set up, it is a converted farmhouse of sorts on a massive estate.  A racetrack and polo field is visible yet any semblance of an actual residence is not.  Peter Brant is a super rich guy who has been an art collector and connoisseur for decades.  He owns just about everything that is seen at the foundation.  During the invite only opening, lunch is served, drinks are served and gentile conviviality of art world elitism is mingled with celebrity and Greenwich’s finest.  Last year I was a bit grossed out by it all, but this year I relaxed and wore my tackiest ensemble of neon green and leopard print to stick in and stick out like a sore thumb. 

Enough of the background of the environs, lets get to the art.  The show was all about Andy and it was really very well curated and installed.  The exhibition begins on the foyer space on the first floor and here there is an assortment of drawings, chotchkies, and small paintings.  These were fantastic to see, especially the drawings.  It is well known that Warhol was an illustrative drawer of fashion and other such things prior to being the factory running art star and seeing this considered collection of some of these works was refreshing and insightful.  I especially liked the small drawing of a repeated women’s face in three quarter turn with lips in various shades of reds and pinks.  This repetition felt like a precursor to his focus on this that is seen throughout his later works.  Also, there was this fantastically tall drawing of a nude male that was so confident yet slight in gesture.  It gave a sense of personality and sensitivity to the enigmatic figure that Warhol projects at times. 

In the next room there was a more obvious relationship to the early drawings and the better-known works by Warhol.  Drawings of Campbell’s soup cans, Coca-Cola, a roll of dollar bills, were on view.  What was especially nice to see was the still life combos of soup cans on and with coke bottles.  Through this, one can almost see Warhol’s brain working and considering what these daily consumer objects can reveal in their objectness.  Then you enter the first large room and it’s all very familiar.  The boxes, some pansies, silksceens of this and that which have all become so familiar that in a way they have lost some signification, at least to me.  There was one very nice silkscreen though, which I have never seen, and it was of Merce Cunningham and a chair and as the one image gets repeated in its grid, it melds and hides the dancer and the chair into a singular gesture of a curve. 

Next there was a staircase and along this very coyly and smartly was placed a generous collection of Warhol’s Polaroids. They feature all the main characters of a certain time, Dennis Hopper, Yves Saint Laurent, Basquiat, Dolly Parton, etcetera.  What was interesting, and perhaps a tell of something, was to see amongst this gang of cultural relevancy Peter Brant himself on many occasions.  Was this to reaffirm his legitimacy in that time, as a leading man both then and now?  I would have chaulked it up as ‘no’ but the repeated reinsertion makes me think possibly otherwise.  Regardless though, it’s a fun way to see the array of freaks and inspirators that was of Warhol’s scene.

The next room on the bottom floor has the largest ceilings and here there are well-hung groupings of Mao silkscreens and Marilyns but also there are a few surprises amongst the hits.  One was the nearly messy large horizontal work that was placed near his Rorschach works that felt bizarre in its painterliness.  Then next to this was the most interesting thing to see which was a medium sized work that looked like a bona fide abstract expressionist painting.  It was a red background with a slash of black from top left to bottom right corner, like a L.  Never would I have thought that it was a Warhol placed out of this context.  This reminded me of the smaller, similar version of this that was also upstairs that was possibly an early study for this.

The final room was to me the best room of the installation.  On one wall there is giant camouflage piece, on the opposing is this incredible, never seen to myself before, huge painting/drawing of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper.  Adjacent to this was smaller silkscreens of the actual image and also a set of ultra violet Jesus portraits.  To cap it off, on opposite wall, across from the da Vinci’s silkscreens and UV Jesus, was a large red and black portrait of Warhol with his spiky hair and disembodied head.  All very pointed, and possibly a bit over the top, but visually it was fabulous to see.  Warhol as Oz or a pseudo god to this thing that is the art world and perhaps even art history. 

Seeing the show made me re-appreciate Warhol and not just in his legacy of pop and art star but him as an artist.  You can see and feel through his earlier works, his drawings and his fascinations, that he had a truly specific aesthetic interest and the trajection from works with his hand to the distillation of just reproduced image seems natural and honest.  The sense of any gimmick or easiness can be brushed aside as a point to be made or sought.  The fact that this selection of works can be viewed with such care and consideration due to one man’s acquisition is possibly not a generous gesture but one in which I am thankful can occur.  There seems to be a true love of the works that were shown and that carried through on viewing it. 

Lying on the linen blankets with plush matching pillows, I looked up at the massive sky, the clouds and the vastness of horizon that wealth affords and then I looked over at the people all decked out and knowing that the bank accounts of those in attendance equaled more then most small nation states and I thought what would Andy think?  What would he and his consort of friends, hangers-ons, and muses do at a place like this?  They would roil in it; they would make a fantastic scene and be the center of the party.  I drink some champagne and feel okay about all of it, all of art and of the inevitability of wealth and culture being bound. 

In Conversation with Zachary German on Art

 

(Italic paragraphs ZG)

Do you want me to ask you a question?

Sure

When’s the first time you think you saw art?  Like when was the first time that something registered as quote unquote art or something like art?

There was a thing in my bedroom that had drawings of circus people.  I liked that.  How about you?

(laughter) I don’t, I don’t really quite remember because I used to like draw so I think that my drawings, somehow people told me was art and so then maybe that’s how I thought art was but I guess in terms of seeing it, I think maybe like, I never went to museums when I was little, but I remember this Frida Kahlo reproduction one time when I was little and this one where she has animals next to her, she has a monkey or something near her, I was really into animals, so yeah I think weirdly I was like that’s not like seeing.  Knowing that was a fantasy in some way maybe that triggered something about art. (laughter)  Frida Kahlo (laughter).

Yeah kids draw things and that’s, they say that that’s art but then there’s another thing where it’s not about drawing. It’s about just doing something else in whatever form that kids don’t know as much, or something.

That’s definitely true but at the same time don’t you think there is like a possibility of not knowing what one is doing but it is still valid as quote unquote art in terms of a viewer?   Like maybe the intention of the maker wasn’t like a kid or whatever, or quote unquote outsider artist or just some sort of ephemeral design or a commercial design, you know or something that can be reinterpreted, perceived as…

I guess I would largely view that the same as something in nature.  Like you can appreciate it.  But art coming from like artifice and making something I don’t know that if you don’t know what you are doing at all, that I, I don’t know.  Seems different.

So impulse is not enough?  It has to have context or reflexivity? You know what I’m saying?

Yeah I’m just saying. (long pause) Yeah intention I guess, is the difference between like something in nature.  Yeah.  Anyway, next topic.           

           

Do people (pause) like your parents experience art?

That’s an interesting question. I don’t really think so.  I think that maybe my one parent does or maybe understands it as a bigger concept maybe but I don’t know if my other parent, if they do.  I think it’s just like, I think that there is definitely a weird comprehension or a desire or a curiosity and additionally a comprehension that’s kind of not necessary per se, but it is kind of necessary actually, to be kind of open to and receptive to and to even let one seek or discover that they are looking at or experiencing art, you know?  I think that if you don’t have that, if you have no openness or curiosity for it, even if it’s something you don’t know about or have never seen before, or you have no reference to.  Just the openness is necessary for experiencing art at all, in a way. Does that make sense?

Sure.  Openness.  Yeah.

Do you think your parents do?

I don’t… its hard for me to grasp what anyone gets out of anything.

(laughter)

I was just talking more, not specifically of about either of our parents, (laughter) but about the broad thing of people that aren’t people that view art as like a thing in their life.

For sure, I definitely, I understand that as the question.

Um, it’s different though, it seems like a thing, I don’t know… like why do people eat like shit in this country.  Why do people not realize how simple it is to cook.  It is somehow something that they never where taught or experienced or don’t care to learn about.  You know what I’m saying?  How does one continue to eat like shit when they don’t need to?  It seems like a weird system of choices and desire. To live an alternative, or that there is possibility outside of just what is prescriptive, then just what’s around them.

Do you think people are born with a desire to understand art and to see art and to experience art or do you think that it is something that is learned?

I think, we are born with a desire to be a part of, to feel closeness, and...( for sure)  To be apart of something and I think that society can either make that seem like art be an important part of that closeness or just make it not matter at all in how the society accepts things. And so I think in art, in a mainstream thing, the latter is happening but. (pause) Yeah.

Do you think that something like pop music is art because it does in some ways do this, like activates closeness?

I think the intention of the viewer can make pop music be art or not, in a way.   Which is contradictory to what I said earlier about the intention of the creator.  I think that pop music on the shelf is art but I think that people don’t experience it that way.

Yeah, is it all about the participant, like not the maker then?

I think, I guess both are important…So I mean outsider art looked at by someone who doesn’t care about art is like double bad (laughter) while like Jay Z looked at by someone who cares about art is, and then there’s in betweens, yeah.

Yeah yeah yeah.  Is there like pure art, like is there like PURE art.

I think that would probably… I don’t you know what you mean by that but the experience that the artist has with their own work probably.

So that is the only form of pure art, is the maker with.,.

I would never use the term pure art. But if I had to imagine what that could mean  I guess that is what I would come up with but I don’t like to use words like pure or something like that…

I know, I know I know, its like we are limited by language so just like the concept of something that is consistently certain.  A certain way or resonates a certain way, or is itself in a certain way.

How bout you? You seem to want to say what pure art is.

Nah, no I don’t, I’m just curious about your opinion cause it seems like yeah, like you know its not ambiguous but, the way that you described what you were first saying and then what you just said.

I view the purpose for me to make art or to look at it…experience it, is to feel like connection.  Is that what you view as the purpose for it?

Yeah, I think that life, the whole everything, existence and all that stuff, is all just about connection and forms of love and connection and art is definitely a thing that I participate in because it lets me have connections with people directly.  Physically and verbally and you know interactively but also just the way people think and express themselves and it helps me and inspires me and makes me feel a closeness to them if it resonates and it does something, like it hits something in me that is like a similar idea or thought or feeling or something like that.  I think art is definitely a primary thing that I use to connect to people and I think it’s also kind of like ideas.  Art lets you and reveals ways that one, another person, another human being, thinks and it allows you to… it’s an invitation into conversing with them in a way. And then that conversation, how does that effect you and how does that change you and can you even form actual relationships based on that?  And I think that’s really very essential or powerful or I don’t know, it’s really… that’s like the point of it all.

Do you think that movement towards connection is the driving force of art makers in general or do you think there are different purposes?

I think that there is this weird thing that’s happening where there are people, I think that…whatever art… I like can’t judge cause I’m an idiot, but like um, I think there are definitely people who make art because it’s this way, it’s a tool for them to communicate plus connect, communicate thus connect. I do think there are other people that just like to make stuff or possibly be a participant in the culture of the quote unquote art world and they are good at quote unquote making stuff and thinking of things that are clever or passable or I don’t know, can be termed as art.  I guess that it is a desire for connection because it’s a desire for them to be a part of a world or validated within a world in which there are people that they think they want to have some sort of peer group with or respect or recognition or anything like that, but I don’t know, there’s something about the impulse or the intention of that, that I don’t know why but really bothers me. 

I guess its not different in terms of language, in terms of what you are saying about connectedness but it feels very different to me when I interact with people that are kind of navigating it in different ways. And I’m just arrogantly judging them (laughter) in my own scales (sure) and it’s not probably real but when I interact, when I see a certain person doing a certain type of thing and I’m like holy shit that is like a-mazing that is like so, oh my god, it’s real, it’s like it.  And then other people that I’m like oh my god how the hell does this person have a career and like how does anybody buy this, not buy it even with money like that but also like buy it even in terms of an idea, or like a form.  How does this person keep getting opportunities and validation to keep doing whatever it is they are doing which I feel like is kind of shitty? You know?

Sure.

Yeah, like it seems like that is very transferable, like you can transfer that to any industry of art making though, you know? In some ways.

Anything else you want to talk about there?

Um. I guess we should ask one final question because that felt like a hanging question.

Sure.

So…(long pause) This is a dumb thing but… If art could be a color or object or a word that is not the word art, like if there was a sculptural or representative stand in for the way that you are feeling about art at this moment what would that be?

A nice, a nice looking women.

(laughter)

All right cool.

Eckhaus Latta and Heather Guertin’s MODEL TURNED COMEDIAN

 

Eckhaus Latta

Want to know what you should be wearing right now?  You should be wearing anything, everything from the design duo Eckhaus Latta.  Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta are fresh young things that graduated from RISD and are making interesting clothing/ interesting shapes and textures that can be worn as clothing, out of their Brooklyn studio.  I was introduced to their work when I helped a friend out with a project and there were people bedecked in these uniforms of cotton waffle layering.  I kept asking who made them and where I could get them and were there any extra lying about that I could take with me, sadly there wasn’t.  Later that day I emailed the studio directly as the pieces from their line via their website seemed hard to locate and was responded to with enthusiasm and I now eagerly anticipate my studio visit with them.

What makes Eckhaus Latta not your run of the mill new design trend?  It’s a mix of experimentation with function that is elegant yet not trying too hard.  You can view their Autumn/Winter 2013, Spring/Summer 2013 and Autumn/Winter 2012 on their site.  Each collection is varied although a clear aesthetic vision can be traced throughout.  This is a feat and reassurance to see, evolution versus mere one-upmanship.  I especially love their A/W 2013 line.  It’s like a wearable future being proposed.  There is a mix of minimalism, futurism, Asia, Bauhaus all combined in subtle and form creating ways.  This is perhaps the thing that makes Eckhaus Latta so interesting to me.  Their clothes are not merely about projection of a lifestyle (although it certainly does), it’s more about how the body is the walking summation of parts and that fabric, cuts, folds and color can accentuate and liberate one’s body, movement and presence within space. 

Fashion and art is a funny thing.  One that I have remarked on in mostly tones of dismissal.  Maybe I spoke too fast though, or maybe Eckhaus Latta’s clothing has visually excited me more then most art I have been seeing of late.  All I know is that the pile of art money that I have squirreled away is definitely justified in the purchase of a few of their pieces and when I wear then around town I will feel like a moving sculpture that has potential to change the mood within and around me just by standing there. 

Heather Guertin, MODEL TURNED COMEDIAN, 2013 (Publication Studio/ Social Malpractice Studio)

This is a sliver of a book that can be read faster then a load of laundry but damn was it fun to read.  This shy novella of under 70 pages is a quick telling of an unnamed women, told in first person, and how she was a model who pretended to buy clothes in LA to increase store sales, how she became a comedian, the end of her ten year marriage, her love affairs with The Swiss and Kas and how she almost karate kicked David Letterman in the face on air. 

Guertin is an artist and comedian based in New York.  I don’t know too much about her paintings but the bio section on the back of the book says that she uses comedy and her other forms of art making in incorporative and referenced ways.  After reading this, it makes me want to see as many formations of her practice as possible.  The book is very much a women’s tale.  It has this crisp reflexivity and the sentence structure and tone make reading it a breeze and also had me laughing out loud, literally at the laundromat at some parts.  The honesty of the character’s thoughts, insecurities and indifference is refreshing and hit a nerve with my own brain/thought patterns.  Things that would seem important or somehow altering are brushed off in a few sentences, such as:

That same day I made a pact with myself that I would be a standup comedian.

I realized that I could do anything. Running on adrenaline I bought two tickets to New York City.

I only needed one ticket, so I had to do some negotiating with the airline to get my full refund for the second ticket. I succeeded but ended up paying a fee of $175.

After that was settled, I arrived in N.Y.C.

New York was cold and dirty so I flew back.

This made me wish I hadn’t refunded my second ticket but rather just kept it and changed it to a flight back to L.A.

Then it would have only cost me $50 to change flights plus the difference in the ticket price, which I can’t imagine would be much.

Anyway, L.A. was the place for me. 

So yeah, that is a sample of Guertin’s writing style, which is like reading an episode of Seinfeld but has more sensitivity and an overall search for love and connection vibe.  What was very exciting to read in Guertin’s story though was how art and the desire to make some form of art, in this case comedy, is an intense and real drive.  The character being a woman is wow to see because there are so few instances of this and it is done in a transferable way but does not disavow the fact that she is a woman experiencing things.  The need to express and actualize oneself is not the domain of men only and it was a relief to see it being articulated with such ease and humor in this book. 

The line that got me good was this:

How can I be so manipulative, not only to other people but also to myself?  Am I tricking myself into fulfilling my own goals? Is success against my nature? Would I rather transgress against my own personal development?

I need to understand that it is not artificial to allow yourself to be successful.  It is just learning to have self-control and self-control in an important part of developing a strong identity. 

Ok so like yeah, girl just read my mind! But really this book is a nugget of inspiration and I use that word in the most cliché way but really damn it, I mean it.  Read it; make an hour of your day fun and funny.  Everyone is the same but different and that’s okay.

Understanding Others

 

We exist and we exist with others.  Communication is the impulse that drives most human endeavors.  We need to connect to others, be around others, to exchange ideas and emotions with others in order to have a thriving life.  People do this is various ways and with different scales of need and desire but everyone who exists is networked to others.  There is no singularity in existence.  This feels odd at times though since we are always contained within ourselves.  We are born, we live and we die and the world/reality is contained within this package of ourselves.  We can never be outside of ourselves, not truly, but yet to exist, to live, interaction and connection is essential.  Forms of communicating are tools and ways in which we seek and fulfill this need.  These forms are various and are manifested in many different ways.  Scales of intimacy are also factors.  Close relationships and anonymous sharing are both equally impactful depending on the affects and the needs of the person.  Art, visual art, is a means for communication as is other forms of art like writing, music, film, dance, etcetra.  Art allows us to communicate ideas and emotions through form and content and one can be removed from it, not be personally attached to the presenter, yet still have great connection to it. 

This is a reason why art is essential to my life.  It allows me to connect and to understand the world in which I exist in and to think about what that existence means.  The distance allowed in this interaction is good and something that is loose and freeing.  I am very comfortable with this exchange and the structures of it.

Something of late that has been a part of my life in an imitate as well as an overall way is the way in which language is a means of communication.  Language is the primary tool almost everyone has to connect and to communicate to others.  At times though, this simplest and most basic of forms is fraught with failure, disconnect and ineptitude.  It is odd to think that something so familiar and so everyday can be such a challenge.  I have been thinking about how one connects and communicates to the world that is outside of themselves, to others near and distant.  The forms of art, although more abstract and undefined, is sometimes safer and easier to reside in (at least for myself) then a simple one to one conversation.  Communication is complex and specific while also grounded in rules and expectations.  Does disjuncture, inability and disconnect mean failure?  I don’t think so, I think that communication through language is like any other thing we humans do and the more we do it, the more it becomes familiar and the more equipped we are to traverses its complexities. 

When I look at art, even with close friends, I rarely speak about it afterwards.  I think about it a lot and at times write those thoughts down but rarely do I speak of it in the ways I think about it.  Is that good, is that bad, does that reveal something?  I don’t know.  I don’t think so, but language and conversation is key to life.  Trying to see how it matters and if it matters is bizarre, revealing and an unanswerable task I have been mulling over the last few days.  One day, I hope that the way I feel when I look at art, the ease in which I feel like I am connecting to it is possible for the way that I can sit across from someone else and just talk, talk, talk.

Below is something mildly obvious that I found online on the ideas of this.  It didn’t change or give tools on how to resolve issues of language and communication but the basic-ness of it is a reminder that things are a certain way sometimes and also that it takes two to tango. 

Excerpted from Philosophy and Spirituality, 2003, Serge Carfantan.  Translated by Catarina Lamm

D.   Knowing How to Listen, Knowing How to Speak

…

It is true that being able to speak to someone should make one better able to understand him.  Yet what exactly do we mean by “speaking”?  It is not enough to “speak” in order to engage in dialogue.  There is dialogue when speech is alive and that many conditions are fulfilled:

1) The presence of two people

2) Mutual understanding

3) A common ground

4) Something meaningful to share. 

Dialogue is only a way to understand another person when it is authentic, which may be more complex than one thinks.

Talking to somebody is not just trying to make oneself understood.  Dialogue can walk astray and off the path leading to an understanding of others. 

1) One may slip into mere information; in this case only the person talking understands what is being said.  Exchange never takes place, yet this is required for dialogue.  To have a dialogue it is not enough to find a willing listener with the patience to put up with your talking, but to whom you yourself will not be listening. 

2) There can also be a misunderstanding when two people don’t attribute the same meaning to the same words, so that each one of them speaks at different levels.  The common ground is then missing. 

3) Dialogue can degenerate into mere chatting.  Chatting appears to be a dialogue, but the people talking are not present in what they say: the content of their speech is as insignificant as it is repetitive.  Speech does not aim at the other person’s understanding it; it is only there to substitute for a real presence and above all to avoid silence.  A dialogue is only useful to understand others if it makes possible an intimate exchange with them. 

4) A dialogue can degenerate to polemics when one wants the exchange of a dialogue, while refusing to make any effort to understand the other person’s position.  Each person then sticks to his position and instead of exchanging ideas one struggles to uphold this or that conviction.  Polemics replaces the confrontation of points of view by the opposition of individuals.  We see this when spokesmen fire off all their weaponry to criticise a viewpoint, then retreat into muteness, and pay no attention to the objection of their adversary. 

5) Dialogue also self-destroys in lying. As soon as lying makes its way into the dialogue, speech loses its true purpose.  There can be no comprehension without truthfulness and without a genuine intention to have a dialogue.  Have can we understand one another if we are not sincere?

Supposing that these obstacles are overcome in mutual sincerity, the dialogue allows one effectively to open up to the other person and hear what the other has to say. Understanding means to grasp intentions and motives; this is best done when we listen to the other person and do not make conjectures from outside.  To listen to what the other person has to say is also to help him find his way in language, to find the words in which to put what he needs to say in order to make himself understood.  To understand someone is to listen to a conscious presence, to someone expressing this presence with his own words and this sharing can take place in dialogue. 

Nevertheless, if intentions develop inside words, they also appear between them.  If discourse is meaningful, so too is silence: the gaps between words also have their eloquence.  To understand the other it is not enough understanding what he says; it is also understanding what he does not say but what his presence expresses all the same.  The other person gives himself just as much in what he says as in what he doesn’t say; he is this undivided totality.  In other words, understanding supposes at once what is said and what is left unsaid.  Our gestures often say as much as our words.  According to psychologists, only 7% of communication is through words, 38% is via the tone of the voice and 55% pertains to body language.  There is often a discrepancy between conscious discourse and unconscious discourse, the one expressed in a face, an attitude, and then the internal consistency of communication is broken.  For instance someone’s speech may be artificially playful, yet his body expresses embarrassment at first, then self-defence, then lying and concealing of inadmissible truths.

To understand others one must also therefore have the capacity to allow him to be himself, without judging him, and listen to what he says in his presence.  And this is difficult because we are just as unable to give time and attention to other people as we are unable to listen to them.  To understand another we must be totally available to him here and now.  We must neither condemn him nor identify him to ourselves. Understanding is not judging, yet it is so easy to form prejudices about other people, much easier than trying to understand!

One often hears that dialogue enable[s] people to understand one another.  It is of course desirable to praise dialogue, especially in a world of incomprehension, such as our own, yet this also means that it has to be genuinely there, otherwise the apology of dialogue is no more than empty words.  What is at stake is to know how to listen, and this comes before knowing how to talk.  The art of speaking supposes a respect of others’ expectations, the art of finding where they stand in order to give them whatever answer can be given and share whatever can be shared.  It is an art founded above all on the art of listening.  Yet, listening to others reveals differences that are do not always make it easy sharing in dialogue.  One must of course drop conventional etiquettes; behind the etiquettes there is each human being’s unique personality, which defeats all comparison.  The prerequisite of all authentic understanding is therefore to throw away the image one has of the other person.  A dialogue is  -beyond conventional discourse and empty speech – to partake in somebody’s intimacy, an intimacy which is neither our own, nor anonymous.

Daniel Reich’s Death

  

I was just in New Jersey for the weekend and it was good to get away from the bizz buzz of New York City.  It was relaxing, near water and yards sales, flea markets, local restaurants and bars were visited.  It makes one realize/remember that most of America is like this.  It isn’t the dense wonderful jumble that is the city but more a series of towns spread out with nucleuses of stores, restaurants and odd gems here and there. Most of America is these towns with people, families, and characters and they all have lives that usually don’t have much to do with the art world.  It was nice to be around all this for a few days as this past week has been full of things and it was helpful to get a distanced look at those events and experiences. 

The announcement that has still been wedged in my mind from this past week is the death of Daniel Reich.  It was released on Artforum online and then it was re-linked and re-announced on various art blogs, news outlets and sites.  I personally did not know Daniel but he was always a curious personality to me. I remember many times making it a point to see one of his shows and most often to his group shows which were almost always interesting and purposed.  He started his gallery in 2000 in his apartment and then opened a ground floor space in Chelsea.  His mentors, Pat Hearn and Colin de Land, were the best in the business and a breed that seems to be nearly extinct now a days.  With the effects of the recession he closed his gallery in 2011 and I remember getting the email announcing this and it saying that they would be “relocating.”  Everyone knew what it meant but it was at least hope that there would be a round two. 

The news and blog outlets say that Reich died on December 25^th at the age of 39 and that he killed himself at his parents’ home in a suburb of New York.  The news is only now trickling to the art world, the delay perplexes me but that may reveal other things.  It was so sad to hear about this; even though Reich was not someone I had personal connection to this news felt like it represented something deeper.  One cannot open handedly blame “the art world” for his death, there is probably a caravan of internal and external baggage that he carried as we all do, but there is something so defeating about it all.  Owning a gallery seemed like a tool of living versus an occupation for Reich.  Losing one’s medium and agency of living in a certain way must be catastrophic and especially if it is a form of existence.  A singer with no voice.  A ballerina with broken feet.  A teacher with only test scores.  The recession seems like a faded memory but it did hurt many in the arts and those that didn’t have reserve capital, backers (who could maintain being backers) or cut throat tactical survival skills were sucked under.  The art world needed this; it still probably needs more of a purge but losing programs like Daniel Reich’s seems unfair and well just sad.  Life isn’t fair, art isn’t fair, this we know, but the state of things, the loss of things, the loss of people, the loss of art is very real and has real affects. 

Getting away from the city made me think about life in a way that I sometimes forget to do in the midst of appointments, things to see, people to see, living life to one’s fullest and all that jazz.  I thought about it in a small picture way.  About the little things, the daily things, the sky, trees, talking and walking.  I do this in the city too while living my regular life but most times I’m busy thinking about big things like what’s next, what’s it all mean, where to now, art, aesthetics, philosophies of living and so on.  Thinking about and letting myself experience things in this smaller scale helped in thinking about the news of Reich’s death and what that all means.  Mostly, it means that there was a person who once lived and who did things in a way that others responded to and respected and enjoyed.  He was a person and he lived his life.  Even though I did not know him, it feels like the loss is personal somehow.  Strange but true.  I will leave now with the memoriam written by Reich’s friend Paul P. that was published on Artforum’s site.  It is revealing and tender and makes one sense that a strange and special type of person is no longer apart of the art world, can no longer be with any of us. 

Daniel Reich (1973-2012)

My first encounter with Daniel Reich was also my first encounter with New York. In January 2003, I came to the city with a small folder of drawings in hand; a friend made a phone call, and suddenly I was in Daniel’s apartment/gallery amid Christian Holstad's beautiful Life is a Gift installation. We knelt on the floor to lay out the works. I remember him wiry and fresh, pulling out a few hundred-dollar bills from his jeans pocket and buying all of the works I’d come with. Those crumpled bills meant more to me than any subsequent payment I’ve ever received, and on the Greyhound back to Toronto I knew my fortune had changed.

Then there was silence, and I didn’t hear from him for a month. I later learned that this was when Colin de Land had died. Daniel started at Pat Hearn's gallery; he sought her out specifically because she showed Mark Morrisroe . It was from these two dealers, Pat and Colin, that Daniel found the value system that came to define his métier: a belief in Art above all things, and in its confluence with personality. This wisdom included giving to those special people who gravitated toward him as many big opportunities as possible. I didn’t live in New York and could only witness his small gang periodically, but I remember Nick Mauss and Ken Okiishi stuffing envelopes and hanging paintings not as artists or staff, but as believers in something extraordinary at work.

To me, Daniel always appeared a slightly mystical creature. Yet he possessed, perhaps to a stronger degree, a great number of human frailties: giddy indulgence, obstinate faith, consuming worry. He swanned and he sweated. There are lines we all skirt which Daniel—a symptom of his genius—continually trespassed. Nothing was average or passable in his world, nor was he a perfectionist; things were lost, destroyed—things languished. And yet it was the labor, the ebullience of his rich, deadly smart, radically free-associating mind that made something remarkable out of each and every show. Daniel was a born dealer, not just because he, like most good artists, was otherwise unemployable, but because his eccentricity was alchemy in the gallery. He took risks with his money and with the money of others, and I think he always sincerely believed it would all work out. Spending was like making a wish or saying a prayer; new shoes, or capriciously rebooking airfare was a type of strange magic to augur success.

I remember another conjuring, a performance almost, as we installed my show in fall 2008. Amid the unsettling quiet brought on by the worsening recession, Daniel devised a strategy for painting the gallery—one that was all but invisible to everyone but himself. An assistant went over the gallery walls, already painted in their typical white, with two other hues of white, a “yellow” and a “green.” Daniel conducted the painting with precision, so that narrow swaths were applied here and there, like highlights and shadows, taking up several days of our time in an imperceptible aesthetic labor which I could only understand as wizardry meant to invoke the old rush of collectors who weren’t coming through. On opening night the gallery had its aura, and it worked.

But despite all of his surreptitious magic, it ultimately wasn’t enough. There was a breach in the hull and the part of Daniel that understood the usefulness of life began to ebb when he had to close his gallery, forced out by his own amazing folly and by a world that demanded something more practical. Daniel enjoyed scrappily going up against the hegemony of Chelsea. An inscrutable David, what he proposed was soft, slight, and upset by masculinity. Daniel knew the legacy and aesthetics of the strengths and frailties of homosexuality. We would talk about Tennessee Williams, Denham Fouts, and King Ludwig. He knew the course of lives lived and lost.

Anyone who has had a telephone conversation with Daniel will remember that the sign-off was the hardest part for him. There were various long pauses and rapidly repeated “okays” before the final, hesitant, goodbye. I feel very much like this now, so I want to add two more little remembrances. I’m brought back to one of our earliest emails where he said, “Yes, of course I’m interested in handling the work long-term. In a way it is perfect for me.” Daniel tried to engender his artists with his own delicate gestures of rebellion, and a spirited, cerebral pleasure in beauty. It’s an imbued force, something that will continue to manifest in our best work, which will in turn always be perfect for him. Finally, the last time I saw Daniel was in August. He invited me to the Russian Tea Room and implored me to order the cheapest drink on the menu so he could treat me. I had a peppermint tea and he had several Ivan the Terribles. His conversation frothed with wicked intelligence, jokes, and glumness. I left him with an electric buzz in my gut; I felt happy and proud. I knew that Daniel was one of the last of a kind of rare bird, and I couldn’t believe my luck at having him for a friend. I know that I will miss him for the whole of my life.

Paul P.