“It’s all about things”, ok so I’m gonna go see stuff. Maybe I’ll sing a song or tell a joke and receive some crappy drawing…ahhh mementos to an afternoon of art…how do we fill the Days of Our Lives?
The day I went to see this exhibit I was being paid a visit from an econ wiz friend of mine from Harvard and considering the exchange value context of the show he decided to tag along. To me it seemed like an interesting idea to be with someone who is not so easily convinced of the validity of certain, if not most, artistic practices. By the end of the whole thing he wasn’t so sure if what we saw was art, or if that even really mattered, but we both agreed that art aside the artist, Luis Maldonado was definitely an interesting and probably intelligent man who had found a way to insert himself into a world concerned with the value and progress of artistic practices. I guess on an individual level that’s all that really matters…getting your “in”.
I had procrastinated and waited for the closing weekend of the show to attend which ended up being quite fortunate because the artist was giving a talk or maybe leading a discussion or something along the lines of just trying to keep the room from reaching a laughably awkward silence of which everyone seemed painfully aware…needless to say there was plenty of free wine to help celebrate the closing night so long as you weren’t too bashful to ask for seconds or thirds but there were far far too few of us. Propriety be damned.
So we entered. Second floor a small room, greeted quietly at the door by a pleasant young woman who offered us some of the afore mentioned wine and ushered us in to the afore mentioned discussion where we encountered the afore mentioned awkward silence with the people who really should have been asking for seconds and thirds. At first I wasn’t quite sure which one was the artist but I quickly settled for the chubby man in the snug pink shirt who seemed to talk with authority rather than curiosity. Having entered mid conversation I turned my focus to the walls, the place where the art is supposed to be. I saw lots of small canvases painted with polka dots and others with zigzag patterns at which point I heard Luis mention something about an interest in Frank Stella. Art historical reference, ok. Some of the zigzag paintings formed an M, which I thought was kind of funny considering the surname, Maldonado… then there were blank spaces, places where bartered paintings once hung. A mild interest over the value of exchanged services or commodities entered my mind. Artist’s mission accomplished? These paintings were not so nice, not so interesting, not so anything really. However it made me smile to think of this man at some point in the past laboring over them, it seemed like a funny image…why even bother? When your show is all about things, you need to have a lot of things. To each his own.
There is something about being surrounded by what someone calls art, or being part of what has been predetermined to be an artistic moment of shared experience that makes people feel the need to be intellectually (and maybe emotionally) transcendent. It isn’t quite enough to just sit around and shoot the shit while being surrounded by “things”. I think it’s because his pictures, his things, weren’t really pretty enough to just be looked at…which meant they had to be talked about in a way that personified their object-hood rather than reveled in their aura or effect. Because they had no real market value he had to create a market for them, insert them into a market or impose a market on them, these relatively valueless objects…kind of interesting. On any level other than conceptual and participatory his works are dismissible, perhaps even as participatory or relational works they are dismissible. I suppose it’s the kind of exhibit which makes me question “MFA theses aside…are you just a bad painter and that’s why your art has to exist as this quandary of values and economics?”
The few in attendance slowly shuffled out as my friend and I self served ourselves some decent wine and moseyed about the room: a wall with mix media drawings hanging from fishing line and a wall title “A US not and American Revolution”, a nook with what I believe the artist called seasonal painting, paintings good enough to sell, paintings too good to barter…
Straight up my favorite thing about this artistic experience was hanging around after everyone else had left and it was just me, my friend and this funny little Chilean guy we met sitting around with Luis Maldonado drinking wine and listening to how he had come to be an artist in the real world. There was definitely some valuable information in there about how to find galleries where to show and/or do your work. The space wasn’t so much a lounge but we were definitely chillen’ and it seemed at the time like a really gratifying experience. Compared to the bartering this seemed much more relationally significant. We all got to share about forty-five minutes of our life that we can never get back and in the grand scheme of things and the cosmic web of humanity that seems pretty worthwhile. We all felt somewhat better about ourselves as we skipped down the steps of 119
On one side of the street you got the crystal people and on the other you got the plastic cup people, the profit and the not for profit, the nice big expensive paintings and the… in terms of value and markets and exchange this polarity was the most poignant characteristic.
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