THE SWISS COMPANY The unveiling for Ser Serpas and Alfatih happened one day after January 24, which a friend told me is said to be the saddest day of the year. I shared this with artist Maxwell Graham, who immediately brightened it up. “That’s great!” he beamed. I had the same result. After weeks of January melancholia, I finally got over the fever last Wednesday. Some people thought: Despite the heavy rain, the Swiss Institute is full – a proof that we live in bodies, after all, and that these bodies live in a private body with a mixed and often unintelligible. Hari Nef, whom I saw at a Denis Johnson play in December, said he was rehearsing with Parker Posey for a Chekhov tragedy, and Artforum Director David Velasco looks very wet but happy. Dinner at Old Tbilisi Garden is celebratory, elegant, and dramatic—not fitting for a Artforum diarist.
The next night, a motley crew of artists gathered at TJ Byrnes. The first place after the party for the gallery Svetlana is now taken by Matt Moravec and Eleonore Hugendubel (who manages the technical department Mato Perić’s namesake Collection) as a space for serious conversations about art and criticism. First up: Dean Kissick and Manhattan Art Review’s one-man masthead Sean Tatol — who, as it turns out, didn’t do himself any favors: “If he. [art] good, good, if it’s bad, then it’s bad,” he tautologized. Kissick launched into an avalanche about how television and culture are now in a “bad place.” You don’t read Adorno,” Tatol said.
There are two ringtones I like from Tatol: “. . . The smoke of self-criticism acts as a defense – an awareness. (Seth Price, who came along, is always a genius at this.) Second, Tatol says he started the blog because he came to town without any context. He has no friends and he wants to find them by writing. (That’s a cup of Honest Tea—if we’re nurtured by our environment, should any of us write or make art?) In a funny way, it got me interested in the art world again. I liked the way he felt in the room, as if people were thirsty for something. It’s lively. Price agreed, adding that Tatol wanted love.
Somehow, Richard Maxwell and the New York City Players sold out. field of Mars on Friday night Dean and Sean’s conversation continued.
“What’s the song about?” asked a musician to a musician.
“It hurts, man,” said Jim Fletcher, who plays a man named Jim. “That’s the way life is . . . What is more important than dreams? The music I want to remember—that’s what I want.”
During the break, Carol Greene said the play puts her in a “weird place” emotionally. Olivia Shao admits she had a midlife crisis (nothing wrong with that – personally, I think it’s a sign of progress sometimes). Jason Farago said he was working on the Perić Collection conversation with Kissick in March and was a little nervous. I told him I thought he would be a good person and believe.
In the second half, two brothers and sisters begin to bond with each other; then sister binds sister; brother fucks brother; a brother begins to adopt a sister; brother and sister to befriend and breed; baby fucks baby; brother kills sister; sisters and brothers and babies eat brothers, etc., etc.
“I’m hungry!” shout at the people.
“Kill something!” cried the women.
“I’m hungry!”
“Then kill something!”
After the game I met a friend at Chelsea’s El Quijote, where I impressed the bartender by ordering his favorite cocktail (a Naked and Famous), and he joined us after the Dinner for Charles Atlas. As we got into a friend’s car to go into town, Glenn Fogel joked about “some cat with attitude.”
“who is?” I said. “Who cares?” (I love beef with emotion.)
“My dog,” Fogel replied. “Coconuts.”
On Saturday, when I arrived at the Japan Club across the street from the UN for the CFGNY runway show, I ran into Dean Kissick.
“Hiji,” he purred like a Cheshire cat, “This is the first time I’ve seen a cute picture of you.”
“What is?” I asked in shock. “Where?”
He took out his phone and showed me the series of paintings in Jenny’s gallery for Amalia Ulman’s new exhibition. Nick Irvin, Ulman’s boyfriend, told me the show was “cool,” but I didn’t know what was going to happen. The show is based on an anthropophagic social logic of feuds, romances, and other entanglements in a mix of loosely “downtown” artists, writers, dealers, restauranteurs (I live in Brooklyn but I’m happy to live right under Keith McNally), ex-friends, ex-roommates, ex-business partners, ex-lovers—Levi-Strauss is right when he says that we are all human.
Meanwhile, another star group was assembled at the CFGNY exhibition, where artists such as Korakrit Arunanondchai, Trisha Baga, Stuart Uoo, Diane Severin Nguyen, and Fiffany Luu compared the composition and with added music. Okyung Lee). After sushi and drinks, I went on the town with my friend Dani Leder to the after party at Jenny’s on The River, where everything was melting – another exception was Jenny’s Mathew Sova, surprised at how good he is. (Two weeks earlier, he tried to throw me off the second floor of the Russian Samovar—Annie Ochmanek and Caleb Considine served as witnesses.)
Cameos were made by Isabel Beatty (daughter of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening) and Jordan Wolfson, who happened to be a great boyfriend and best friend to me that night. Marlene Zwirner also comforted this troubled diarist when I felt hopeless at some point in the fall night. I think I saw a shadow of Jay Sanders for a brief moment; if I had talked to him, I might have had the balls to apologize for sitting on a Jana Euler sheep portrait. For the record, I’m sorry, Jay and Jana. I thought it was a vision!
On Sunday, I went to Reena Spaulings, arguing about what was really hit during the week. Various images are shown Wednesday through Saturday, where Morag Keil, Nicole-Antonia Spagnola, and Bedros Yeretzian will open a group exhibition featuring a selection of Keil’s piss painting. I brought a health tea from Westville and drank it slowly before allowing myself one beer—it was time to button up and prepare for what I thought was going to be a big freeze of February. I asked Ben Morgan-Cleveland how Keil’s documentary on Real Fine Arts is going (“slow but steady,” for all those waiting); it is long overdue, in my opinion, although algorithmically, and spiritually, the time is ripe to catch the post-2008 Weltanschauung for its mistakes. be happy.
I had one last potato and an order of mashed potatoes (not mashed) at Bacaro with the artist George Egerton-Warburton and Lily Randall, a psychoanalyst-in-training and self-identified ” Lacanian pervert.” A Lacanian perv saw me as a “hysteric book, a kind of death.” The hysteric is punished (graced?) by his desire to know, the desire to know the price he speaks. “He’s a lot of fun but he’s always trying to fix himself, if he has to stay where he is.” Well, on Monday, this type of alarm screamed the entire bus ride to the office of his small house on the Upper West Side. Why, you ask? The fragility of life and love, the pain and beauty of it – a woman got on the train with her baby, then she sat down in front of the stroller, holding on between his knees. I can see the child leaning his head on his mother’s lap. This brought more tears.
I re-recorded my analysis in prayer, prejudices and misfortunes, and then I sat down to read for the hysterical Jamieson Webster course on psychoanalytic bodies that began this week. When Reena opened up, George asked what I thought “psychoanalytic bodies” meant.
“It’s a big pot,” I replied.
And so last week in New York, a well-known player “felt like a cartoon.” Demented, perverted, neurotic, hysteric, psychotic, romantic—yes, of course, it’s really stuck, then exploded, all of the above.
— Hiji Nam
