BLOG #10: SCABS
Saturday, May 3, 2025, 1:41AM: Man sitting directly beside me on the Ozone Park-bound A train pulls up Feeld, swipes a few people, finds my profile, double takes, turns up the brightness so I can see the contents of his screen, types a Ping message slowly: “what’s ur stop, sexy.” I thought about getting off at Hoyt-Schermerhorn but my outfit was too bodycon to take the walk alone that late at night so instead I got off at my stop with a large group of people and pretended like I was mute. Got away unscathed. I do appreciate the forwardness though.
You guys, I love art so much.
I can't believe I knew nothing about it until moving here and making friends. While I do cover art openings and exhibitions and think I have pretty good taste, I don’t know shit about dick, really. I mean, it's like movies: haven’t seen that many in the grand scheme of things, however the ones I have seen, I know incredibly well. Don’t know a lot of your deep cut artists, not familiar with 90% of gallery directors, can’t spell Green Naftali, and no, I don’t know what Sophia or Rachel or Joan or Melissa from that gallery did that night, or why it’s iconic (derogatory or otherwise). 95% of my art knowledge comes from having made friends in art who told me what they were thinking and why it matters, and then compulsively googling down the list of name drops and galleries I recorded in my Notes app during a conversation. It’s a novel concept, I know—I listened and I learned because I was interested in something enough to build a knowledge framework around it, on my own. I will continue doing this for the rest of my life.
It’s the end of Frieze week in New York which, for the unaware, is a giant festival that operates like art-world fashion week, if you like those kinds of semi-false equivalencies. And I haven’t participated in any of Frieze because I no longer have a job that requires I pay attention to anything I don’t want to pay attention to. I say this as I type this blog post on my phone while gallery sitting at Management so owner-founder-director Anton Svyatsky can man a booth for roster-artist and general baller Tahir Karmali at the festival (see: Anton serving MUG in Frieze Magazine). In addition to Anastasia Komar’s current exhibition on view at Management until June 1 (with experimental-fiction-as-show-notes by yours truly), there have been, like, so many other great art experiences that have nothing do do with Frieze.
First is Some Debatable Readymades on view at Turquoise, a micro-gallery situated in curator Bennett Smith's home. The show is both an ode to Marcel Duchamp as well as a kind of foray into his kind of art; conceptual, the everyday object as a conduit for artistic meaning as well as, well, an object with abject purpose. Smith shows this by turning readymade into a verb, readymade-ing everyday objects sourced from the same time period as certain deep cut Duchamp works, like a stick and ball game from 1914 and license plate. Wonderful query. At the opening for the show last Saturday, my friend Madeline described the show perfectly: “making things because you want to see them, knowing that there is no commercial viability.” “Curiosity through creating the artwork,” I replied. We both agreed.
This past Thursday, artist and friend Emmanuel Louisnord Desir opened his third solo exhibition with 47 Canal (hilariously, their new address is 59 Wooster) called Let My People Go. And damn. Lou is known to get real sexy with a block of wood and a lathe, but these metal jawns consisted of both fabricated lattice patterns or sparkles or skulls and ATV parts, wheels and all. When I spoke to Lou a couple months ago for a feature published in Justsmile magazine, I practically begged for a preview of this show. I’m thankful that all he really gave me was “Maya, I’ve been thinking about automation a lot,” and then described the idea of labor as a kind of fully-automated process that affects how you move in the world, like someone with the last name Shoemaker whose earlier ancestors were cobblers. Following his footsteps, I’m not giving you all more than what he gave me. You just have to go see this show, up until June 21.
SIDENOTE—the afters were really funny and delicious for this too. Mission Chinese, delicious bites and an MSG Margarita for the house cocktail whose blue hue very closely resembled Hypnotiq. I met new people and we ended up talking about weird software snuff porn, artistically, of course.
Ok so, none of this is in order for when it actually happened, but I want to end with talking about choreographer-dancer-mover-my-friend Isa Spector's one night only performance with Rhizome, Mr. Art Needs a Break because it is genuinely in the top five performance art pieces I’ve seen in all my nearly-nine years living here. The performance was a site-specific foray into building history of 161 Water Street, former headquarters to AIG bank and current home of It Building WSA. After opening on a business man (his name is later revealed as Craig) trying to jump out of one of the giant suicide proof windows on the 5th floor, a second character named Mr. Art is revealed on a stage made of a giant speaker, and he is faced with a dilemma: he’s so tired, of making money, of being used as a pillar to uphold the It Building reputation of hybrid creative-workspace-office-incubator-money laundering front (hey, it’s a rumor!), WSA. There are so many numbers all the time, they’re overwhelming for Mr. Art, they’re scaring him, they’re overflowing from Craig's scooping hands, they’re halting his orgasms at their peak (this is my favorite aspect of the work, where Mr. Art would strip and cum at the largesse of his numbers with live sound mixing by musician-producer-engineer-artist-friend-of-mine Ben Shirken). Mr. Art finally rests, covered in styrofoam packing peanuts by two fluffy white angels, or are they clouds? Specters? Omens? By the end, the bass rattled through the giant subwoofer-stage and guests were even invited post-show to lay down and feel it for themselves. “It’s the numbers vibrating through the space,” I joked with my friends.
My favorite part of this work isn’t just the surrealist aspects choreographed into the narrative as these great little movement-centered breaks, like the dancing flame-girls who return as the angels, but the fact that Isa refused to be a fucking scab. I hung out with them a few days before the show and told them how excited I was to see the work, even though it was in WSA. We talked about the building, everything we knew about it and SAA (another friend called it Sexual Assault Association...abuse is never funny except in this case) and Happier Grocery and Palm Heights, and how the conglomerate is able to survive cancellation by involving the demographic who poses the greatest threat to their operation, with artist residencies, swimming pools, free office space in WSA, at least, until rent skyrockets or until someone younger with a cooler haircut renders them irrelevant. The cognitive dissonance I hear from some of these people proves that for a lot of artists and “creatives” in this city, all they need to serve the man is an invitation to a luxury spa in Bushwick (oxymoron!!) from him. The other day, I heard one of these people use the term “destroying the master's house with the master’s tools.” You cannot destroy the master’s house with the master’s tools if your very artistic production serves as a cloaking device for whatever sus operations are going on behind a conglomerate; you’re merely partaking in the delights of your masters. You are a human shield for when the building collapses on them.
This is what Isa’s work feels like it’s all about: they provide a mirror for audiences, a lot of them WSA or WSA-adjacent, too examine the ways they are Mr. Art, exhausted from producing number after number to the point where nothing feels good anymore. Or, an alternative interpretation, maybe they’re reminded that they too are just one of those infinite numbers Craig keeps spilling all over the floor, another figure for these building goons to say they champion diversity and creative exploration while doing god knows what else in the back. I say Isa isn’t a scab, because they don’t need WSA/SAA/Happier/Palm Heights to separate them from the masses of actual starving artists. They are one of the few people to be invited to stage something in WSA, and produce work that says, “I don’t care if I’m invited back.” Isa is a star. I honestly hope they are invited back just so people can see what impactful work really looks like.
Anyways. I’m in love with so much art that’s out there right now. More people with more point of view, it feels. Soooo Obama ’08 but...hope, guys. It exists beyond its material condition. I’m just happy that artists are saying no, and doing so publicly; you don’t have a gallery, put one in the spare room of your apartment, like Turquoise. You want to think about means of production, turn bodies into cars into sculptures, like Lou. You want people to see how their role in the arts can be leveraged by mysterious suits wielding mysterious numbers, stage a performance piece critiquing the institution on the institution’s very grounds, like Isa. Say no, and do something even more daring; mean it.
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