Alex Kwartler
Monday, December 19, 2005
Alex Kwartler at the JCP Annex
Several weeks ago now I met Alex Kwartler, along with a few other people, at Nancy's Whiskey Pub. We had a good time. Groups of people came and went and the conversation didn't stall, which is sort of a miracle when I'm around and drinking, since I sort of try to turn the conversation around to myself whenever I'm drunk and become petulant when I fail.
In this case I didn't have to get petulant. People asked me questions and I yelled out the answers, true or false. I gesticulated and and spoke ex tempore. People laughed. Time passed. Eventually our group was reduced to just myself, my girl Karla, Alex and our friend Heather Hubbs, from the New Art Dealers Association. We wandered away from Nancy's and had drinks at some faceless bar that set paper tablecloths out on the tables. Alex drank scotch and drew my portrait on the tablecloth. Karla sprinkled the portrait with pepper to try to approximate my whitening hair. This delighted me. Whenever I get to know an artist I try to get him or her to do my portrait, drunk.
As such, we later walked by a place on Canal playing loud music and walked in (Alex told me he had passed this place a "thousand times before" and that "there was always a party happening there." He had never gone in until then). There was a mixed crowd inside, very young, listening to hip-hop from the year 1997. Nostalgia hit, and we danced for a while but my back started sending shooting pains down my leg. The children at the party glared at us as if we were wearing badges.
Wobbling, Alex told me to come to his art opening, which was happening in one week, and he added that I should try to dress up. "Do you have any loafers?" he asked. "Try to scrounge up some loafers." Eventually he disappeared, unable to pay me any further attention. It was 6 in the morning and Karla was mad at me for keeping her out so late--she had to work the next day. She was right to be mad. I was tottering and my leg was like a nylon stocking full of bricks. We went home.
Throughout the week I tried to take it easy. The doctor told me I had sciatica and set me up to get an MRI test. So it goes. "Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make self-absorbed." A week later, when I got to Alex's art opening, at John Connelly's gallery at the JCP Annex, I was practically on my hands and knees. Still, I followed instructions: I had a suit on and I was wearing loafers.
There's been a lot of press about the JCP Annex--all the hot little galleries are going to move there and sort of become a JC Penney for hot young artists. Connelly's was the first gallery to open, and Alex his inaugrial artist. The space was exciting, unfinished as it was, and there were a lot of good-looking people there. Everyone was sweating because the place was packed. I dragged my sciatic leg among them and paid my respects to Alex, who seemed to be fencing with a lot of horned and elderly patron types and who therefore seemed genuinely happy to see me, if only for a second.
Lately there's a demand for big adolescent scenes in everything from music (Fannypack, Go! Team) to clothes (Neighborhoodies) to literature (J. Lethem, J. S. Foer) but it seems to have found expression most fruitfully, I guess, in the so-called visual arts: that is, the stuff that hangs on white walls and is usually sold by the piece to the well-to-do. In this setting, this teenagerist sort of art incorporates unicorns and black light posters, Yodas and death metal, with none of the expected dissonance of a Warhol or a Lichtenstein. It simply is, offered as a choice among others. It's just that the others seem "pure" in a way that seems out of touch. So the most forward-looking art these days is no longer "performed" or overtly political or intentionally "made" in the modernist sense but looks instead like it belongs on the cover of a Trapper Keeper. It's garbage--but like Mike Kelly's stuffed animals, it's also sucked on, slept with, loved until filthy. It appeals strictly to the emotions, a sort of Romanticism without the sublime aspect. It's also overtly transparent work, a portal into another world, and its subject is ordinary obsession--not that of an artist for God or Socialism, or that of a politician for war and retribution--but rather for love or for plentiful food or for winning a game one's become good at playing. Every teenage thing we want to have outgrown, but may abandon ourselves to in the face of trauma or bliss or whatever. All for the sake of a neat effect, this weepy object on a clean white wall.
Alex Kwartler gets this. His work wouldn't look out of place in a Paper Rad show. But he can't abandon the sublime, and it makes his work sort of unbearable and paradoxical and very interesting. He makes skyscapes--heavy with art historical meaning--that border around the "branded" look of an Apple IPod campaign.
His past work features fireworks displays, portrayed as abstracted dots in an abstracted sky; an LCD display of fading dots, frozen against a "real" moody sky right out of George Inness (the moodiest American skyscape painter there ever was). Is a firework an object after it’s exploded? Can it be loved, branded, slept with, etc.? We covet fireworks in order to send them into the sky and watch them pop. This is why they are so disappointing in pictures, because pictures capture that moment in which we've destroyed the object we loved. It freezes in sight what is meant to disappear. It’s something Alex latches on to in these paintings.
This paradox is captured again in Alex's new work, the stuff I've seen in person, in which he bends rainbows in those moody skyscapes and turns them into lowercase letters, b's and w's both finished and unfinished. They strive for transparancy but turn back on themselves. I don't think this is an intentional effect. I think that Alex is really arguing with himself in these paintings. They're honest this way, and unresolved. His objects can be loved--unconditionally, sure, if you want. But it means loving a modernist object, too, and modernist objects have never wanted to be loved except, as chilly Charles Foster Kane says, "on their own terms. The only terms anybody knows." Alex gets this too, painfully. This argument he has with himself is fascinating to watch. It could go in any direction. Seeing Alex Kwartler's work is like watching a sport--shirts against skins, and tackling allowed. I hope neither side wins. The Postgame is never as interesting.
I said goodbye to Alex and left early that night, dragging my leg behind me, sober and newly admiring of my new friend's talents.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 3:17 PM, ,
My Spine
Friday, December 09, 2005
My Spine
Among hospital implements, the MRI machine has a totemic quality second only to the scalpel itself. Most people hate them. "I couldn't breathe in there," said one person I spoke to before going to my own appointment. "They had to keep taking me out and then starting the process all over again. It's like being buried alive."
It may be some quirk of my own personality, but I actually sort of liked it. It could be that it's cured me of my self-diagnosed claustrophobia, the claustrophobia I thought I had whenever I got on an airplane. As it turns out, I just hate flying, because I was fine wrapped up in the magnetic belly of the MRI machine, with the whirring things pulsing against my body and the soft, fuzzy technician's voice giving me play-by-play through a microphone earbud.
There is an urban legend about an MRI machine that once sent a metallic wheelbed hurtling across the room toward the technician at the controls. So powerful is the magnetic charge. And I think it was Nicola Tesla who believed that magnetism could cure a host of mental pathologies, including melancholy. There are "cutting-edge" doctors today who believe that magnetic charges could be a safe replacement for electroshock therapy. I'm not willing to quote sources on this, but I will admit that, among Nicola Tesla's many beliefs, he thought he was being sent transmissions from advanced intelligences on Venus, and that scientologists, too, have their own "cutting-edge" doctors.
Where am I going with this? Only that I'm not depressed. I'm actually quite up. This, in spite of the results of the MRI, which states in relation to my spine:
"L4-L5 moderate central protrusion resulting in moderate canal narrowing...L5-S1 large central extruded disc resulting in mild central canal narrowing; and broadly abutting and displacing posteriorly the s1 root sleeves near the thecal sac."
Or in other words, I've got two slipped discs in my lower back, jabbing into the sciatic nerve which runs down my leg into my foot. Here's a picture:
It's painful, and I'm sort of just getting around. The feeling is of electricity running from my spine down to my heel. If I straighten out too much or turn the wrong way I get the juice. Sometimes at four in the morning the mad Nazi in the small of my back will suddenly crank the dial into the red and I'll sit up sucking in air for a half an hour with my fists whirling around like Lotto balls. But mostly the pain is managed. I sit and I lie down a lot. I'm slathered in Ben-Gay most of the time, so I smell great, like a combination of Man and Christmas Tree. I'm also on medication, which is working well enough that it's a struggle to write anything unBaudelarian. They let me work sitting down at the register, smelling like a bottle of Christmas cheer, which helps sales.
There are three solutions to this condition. The first two are merely stopgaps to see if my sciatic nerve can get used to its new neighbor: those are physical therapy and injections of steroids. The neurosurgeon I went to see sort of sucked in through his teeth when he saw my MRIs and registered his pessimism about the last two approaches. He suggested a third: microdiscectomy, a surgery in which the offending portion of disc is removed (and in which a scalpel hovers perilously close to a few critical nerve bundles). This surgery has a 90 per cent rate of success, I've read. Nonetheless I've squeamishly opted for the physical therapy. My new sort of hippieish physical therapist has a kind, impassive face, one that wouldn't change whether you were lying in peaceful sleep or having an epileptic seizure. She's very reassuring, like the Madonna; again ensuring the Christmasy theme of our narrative.
Pain. Some people say, "I'm tired of these blogs. Keep it in, man." Not me. I say, if I'm in pain I'm going to scream and jabber out in the fields until one of you big strong silent cowboy-types are man enough to put me down.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:30 PM, ,
