The Off Brand

Pillow Talk

    There are precious few ways to improve an Eames 670 rosewood lounge chair, especially when your cherished example is a down-filled, early production model. But there are even fewer chances for a heterosexual man slightly insecure in his masculinity to publicly buy a vintage pillow to decorate his house. I managed to do both this morning with the purchase of a 1981 trompe l'oeil paint tube pillow manufactured in Japan by a firm called Petit Loup, Co., Ltd. I hadn't put the pillow and the chair together when I was examining the thing at the flea market. Mercifully my mind doesn't work that way. I was occupied with how the pillow related to pop art and the soft sculpture of Claes Oldenburg. But the reds and the silver and the everyday objectness of it really light up the black leather of the chair and charge the ensemble with, uhhmm, a sense of the uncanny. On the chair, for some reason, the pillow looks like a Robert Gober sculpture. And cradling the pillow the iconic mid-century throne is rendered newly strange.

    Maybe I'm grasping—but It was that kind of a day at the flea market—a real grab bag. After the pillow, I found this 1969 poster from an obscure porn film called Sisters in Leather. No where to put it, wanted to leave it, had to have it. It's the kind of thing Richard Prince would buy and figure out later how to knock off.

    The cherry on top of my day, however, was this Oscar Wilde Action figure. Not worth a lot, except to someone for whom the inversion of depth and surface was a milestone in their intellectual development, and who just happened to name his one and only child Ernest. This one will hang from the christmas tree next to my other male hero: Captain Kirk.

A Gloomy Hawaiian Sun....

Marguerite Blasingame, undated, oil on canvas, 22 x 30 inches

 Because I gravitate to obnoxious, political, bad boy art, I would normally not pursue Marguerite Blasingame's gloomy, child-like, pacific surrealism. But that's why I love the flea market. It's like a chat roulette for objects. It gleefully imposes on my intellectual and aesthetic patterns it's own. So now I am the owner of this funereal Hawaiian flatland. Is it dusk or is it dawn? The artist died very young. Could it be her prophetic fear of the impending darkness? Or could it be the nuclear dawn trying to crack the grey yolk of an Yves Tanguy wasteland? All we really know, is that is one eerie fire ball.

Marguerite Blasingame, 1906-1947, was a WPA sculptor, painter and author, who was born in Hawaaii, studied at Stanford, and died while traveling in Mexico.

Radical Cheek

In my gallery practice I am hyper-conscious of the so-called death of the avant garde and its repressed desublimation. That pretentiously describes a situation in which we no longer rage against the machine but sell each other artifacts made by people who once raged against the machine as a way of staying slightly miffed at the machine or accoutred for a battle with the machine that we never intend to fight. I am both a victim and a perpetuator of this practice, as is most everyone in the art world, and my pennance is to program shows in which the art is genetically designed, at least, to draw attention to this problem, as solving it seems a bit above my pay grade.

Rene Burri, 1975, gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 inches

With that beautiful loser dialogue as the default backdrop for my daily activities, you can only imagine how excited I was to come upon this photograph at the Alemany Flea Market yeaterday. That's Eldridge Cleaver, former Black Panther Minister of Information, and the author of Soul on Ice, posing in a pair of codpiece pants from his 1975 fall collection. The photo by Rene Burri of Magnum fame was taken through the window of a shop in the Les Halles district on the right bank of Paris, with Saint Eustache church in the reflection.

For me, Black Panthers are the ne plus ultra of revolutionary commitment in post war America, and they had extremely good fashion sense. Therefore they don't fit neatly into the jeremiad paradigm of a lost revolutionary authenticity that keeps getting swallowed up by capitalism and spit back as bourgeois fashion. They were both revolution and fashion at the same time. At least for a while. When he designed these clothes Cleaver had been on the run for six years after being charged with ambushing two Oakland Police officers in an incident that ultimately led to the death of fellow panther Bobby Hutton. He would soon recant his revolutionary activity, come back to America and become in sequence a born again christian, a moonie, a mormon and eventually a republican. That's not just repressed sublimation, that's only-in-America-crazy. Which Cleaver, as cagey and intelligent as he was, was.

Cleaver also had a disturbingly good sense of humor, as you can see from this ad for his line. He's toying with the critique of militantism in America as cynically fashionionable, called out most famously by Tom Wolfe in Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's. But let's not let the politics of politics keep us from glimpsing Cleaver's sexual politics in these clothes. By foregrounding the penis, a dicey move for a famously self-described rapist, and one that illustrates Cleaver's ability to be revolutionary and shameless at the same time, Cleaver said he was trying to make clothes more honest and combat the trend of using fashion to erase sexual difference. This would have definitely gone over well in France at the time. If a man got an erection he should be able to show it, said Cleaver. If there is a better definition of revolution in fashion than that, I've not heard it.

And Mine Were Separated

Rarely do the flea market gods dangle success with such promise, only to yank it away, as they did to me one recent weekend at Alemany. By not counting my chickens, I've generally innoculated myself against the emotional highs and lows that haunt the intrepid investigator who seeks his fortune among the soiled piles and broken dreams of this recycled, second-hand world. This time, unfortunately, I broke my own rule.

The egg in question is a white glazed ceramic pitcher or tea pot designed around 1937 by Paul Schreckengost for the Gem Clay Forming Company in Cleveland. Paul Schreckengost is the brother of Viktor Schreckengost, one of the most celebrated American industrial designers of the mid-20th century. Viktor made ceramics, the first banana-seat bicycle, and lots of other amazing things. Paul is largely remembered for this art deco masterpiece, which he supposedly made as a Christmas present for the employees of Gem Clay.

I grew up hating design. My parents were big folk art and antiques collectors, and one of the ways they tried to keep their marriage from imploding—which it eventually did anyway—was to distract themselves on Sunday afternoons by rearranging their collection like deck chairs on the Titanic. I was commandeered to do the lifting and my discomfort during this process contributed, I'm sure, to my disdain for the world of objects as a sullied version of the higher and more beautiful world of ideas that I began to explore as a teenager.

Art Deco's hyper-masculinity, emphasis on geometry, and reverence for technology, which I discovered in my late 20s, was the Trojan Horse that brought me back down to the earthly world of things and design. I've since moved on to more conceptual and political kinds of objects, but I'll always have a soft spot for the Tom Swift designs from the 1930s and 40s, eerily the time of my parent's youth.

When I saw the outline of the bulbous, streamlined pitcher on the folding table against the rising dawn that day I made for it quick-like. Usually objects that advertise their art deco genes this broadly are revival objects from the '70s and '80s. But as the sun rose I could sense the age in the faint black veins that had begun to appear beneath the pitcher's white skin. As in some old movie illustration of time travel, the calendar pages began to flutter in reverse until I was back in that land of kitchen aprons, picket fences, brimmed hats and color-saturated magazines.

At $30 it was a no-brainer. When I got back to my car, I could just make out the company's name impressed underneath. This is where it got ugly. iphone brought me to a website that identified Schreckengost's authorship: Bing! iphone brought me to the websites of important museum design collections: Bing! Bing!  iphone brought me to a website that proclaimed a $15,000 auction return: Bing! Bing! Bing!

I know you're thinking that when I got home I found a hairline crack. Wrong. I scoured the pitcher for damage from its journey through time like a novice tele-transporter on Start Trek, ensuring that his body was still intact. Everything was okay. Unfortunately it turns out that Schreckengost designed a tiny chromium-plated top that matches the metallic speed lines on the pitcher's edge to sit DISCONNECTED atop the spout. A strange and utterly impractical decision by the god-like designer, given the top's tiny size and how perfect the pitcher looks single and alone. And if he had to make a top, should he not at least have designed a hinge?  For how could this mouth and its cover, even though connected as intimately as two inanimate objects could be, ever stay together over time without some more profound bond? And mine were forever separated. God it hurt when that sunk in.

Oh well.  Cancel the flight to Paris.

The Paul Schreckengost pitcher with all its parts together.

 

 

 

An Umbrella Shaped Umbrella

There are so few accessories that a man can get away with without seeming affected, and an umbrella is one of the really theatrical ones. I find umbrellas to be strange, spidery, web-like things. Especially the old-fashioned kinds with pointy noses and u-shaped handles. They are artifacts from the past, and yet we still use them; spiky phallic vectors when closed, vaginal demi-spheres of protection when they blossom. No wonder the surrealists found them useful in conveying the uncanny.

   Rene Magritte, Hegel's Holiday, 1958, 61 x 50 cm, private collection.

I always feel better defended when I go out with an umbrella. And I don't just mean against the rain. I mean against the vast nameless threat that resides outside my doorstep. You know the one. It's written in the sky, etched onto the curb, and lurking around every corner. Once in a while it fades away but then it always returns more menacing than ever.

Women seem to know how to carry umbrellas when they're open better than men. They seem better at exploiting their potential for shelter and expression. Men seem to like to keep their umbrellas shut, sometimes even during the rain. We find it soothing to grab onto something firm and sword-like. You can lean on an umbrella, almost as though it were a fancy cane. It's like a weapon but in the way that a toy gun or an english accent is like a weapon. An umbrella's magic has something to do with its formality, the way it makes you feel proper, genteel, correct – states of being that are hard to conjure these days, but that retain certain powers even in a world of hoodies and emoticons.

Julie Andrew in Mary Poppins, Walt Disney, 1964

 For a man, carrying an umbrella is a tiny taste of what it must feel like to be in drag. Just beyond the umbrella is the morning coat, and then the cigarette holder, and then before you know it, you're on stage in a Noel Coward play or you're the Penguin to someone's Batman. (If I have to be the Penguin please let it be Burgess Meredith, not Danny DeVito.) Even though umbrellas have been with us for thousands of years, and are unlikely to be surpassed by a new technology, they seem on the edge of extinction. One good push from the hoodie and they'll become a collectible. I notice they got no umbrellas on Star Trek.

 With this, the usual churning of ludicrous, abstract thoughts just beneath my consciousness, and the unquenchable thirst for yet another consumer transaction, I stopped in front of a brass umbrella-shaped umbrella stand at 5:30 a.m. one recent Sunday at Alemany Flea Market. Like most brass objects that I see at the flea market, I assumed from a distance that this one said "Made in India" underneath. As usual I'd forgotten my flash light, so I couldn't confirm. But the longer I stared at the umbrella's sleek rippled body, beaded trim, tripod base, well-cast handle and tiny jester pompons, the suspicion of kitsch gave way to the suspicion of haute design. When the seller informed me the price was $30, I picked it up to see if it possessed an inner life. Yes, I have that power.

The object in question, cast brass umbrella stand, French, circa 1970, as attributed by the author.

There are very few objects made in the style of architecture parlante or narrative architecture, where the form of the thing literally represents the thing. The ones there are have an eerie presence and this one is no exception. I grew up driving past one that we used to call the Big Duck. A fowl-shaped folly on the Sunrise Highway in Riverhead, New York, built by a farmer out of concrete to sell eggs, it marked the passage each summer from our regular life in New York City to the escapist delights of the beach on Long Island. The only other contact I've had with architecture parlante is the outsider drawings of A.G. Rizzoli, whose delineations of baroque skyscrapers are really portraits of the kids in his neighborhood. Thus conditioned, I wondered driving home if I hadn't found a piece of American folk art. But that didn't add up. This umbrella is a thing of chic refinement, most likely distributed by some cool boutique. No, I thought, this self-reflexive brass container has to be French '60s, or French '70s, more Catherine Deneuve in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg than Gene Kelly in Singing in the Rain, more sculpture than functional object. And isn't that the way we think of the French? I really can't see myself sullying it with dripping versions of the real thing.

 

Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, 1964, directed by Jacques Demi

Mystery Bronze


Junior used to enjoy the flea market. But he's eight now, and if I request his presence he sticks his hand out and demands $20. Usually I just let him sleep in. Not because his price is too steep—what's 20 bucks for a day of surly, pre-teen silence punctuated by beginner's sarcasm and out-of-the-blue references to Sponge Bob Square Pants—but monitoring a small child amongst an unpredictable rabble is distracting. Flea market people are mostly a joy to be around but they can occasionally bite, and I realized with 10 percent of my brain focused on junior, I was missing things.

Our presence then on the bridge to Alameda Point at 5:30 a.m. recently was due solely to his mother's insistence that he buy his own Christmas presents and the knowledge that he could acquire a box of vintage tree ornaments for a buck a piece and assign one to each of his doting grandparents as though it were this year's branded corporate gift.

The poor lad had no idea what he was getting in to. Since his last trip to the flea market I'd been on a scoring spree. Success had begotten a new "commitment to thoroughness." For Junior, this meant the old "three hour tour" would become a six hour death march of circuitous meandering, recurrent mumbling, strange darting hand gestures and countless pleas to an iphone for some light to be shed on the factual, aesthetic and economic black hole that is the flea market.

For our troubles this day we scored the aforementioned box of ornaments, quickly lost it, angrily bought a second box of ornaments for twice the price, recovered the first one in a booth where we had obsessively tried on vintage women's sunglasses, engaged in a long socratic discourse on the near total absence of legos at the flea market and bought an old fashioned plastic model kit for a 1950s muscle car. I, the collector, however, remained empty-handed.

 Against a sunny afternoon backdrop of youthful shoppers in flip flops and tee shirts we had begun to look like street people with our heavy morning clothes and depleted demeanor. When my son announced in a mutinous tone that he was rerouting the ship of fools toward the exit I outwardly surrendered. But inside I kept alive a lottery ticket fantasy of finding something, anything really with my final few seconds. My desperate plea was miraculously answered in the form of a small fetishy bronze relief mounted on wood that looked to be from the '60s or early '70s. A  pudgy "W" plumped out of a bronze sheet, it had two U-shaped nails hammered over each low point where the lines changes direction. At first I could make as little sense of it as you probably can from my description. The black patina and oblique reference to the body suggested something like Melvin Edwards meets Bruce Naumann. Then I began to discern the lower half of a human body as seen from the rear, with the looping nails like some kind of sex harness. A Tom of Finland repousee. It went over junior's head but he could sense the thing's weirdness and it's unlikely career as a financial investment and asked with more than his usual lack of curiosity why I wanted to buy it.

"For the mystery," I answered. And to stop the hunger, I thought.

 

I Found a Picasso at the Flea Market

I've always wanted to say that.

I have found lots of amazing things at the flea market over the years: Warhol prints, Edward Weston photos, innumerable pieces of Charles Eames furniture. But there is nothing quite like speaking the words, I found a Picasso at the flea market for $30. It has an incantatory quality that make one's eyes enlarge with dreams of treasure. Mine is not even a great Picasso. Just a 1927 etching from Chef's D'oeuvre Inconnu, edition 99. But a Picasso nonetheless. I like the image of the shirtless older artist painting the young bohemian model but I have almost no emotional connection to it and will feel no pain when it transfers to a new owner.

Here is how the deal went down. I arrive at the Alemany flea market early one sunday about a month ago. One of my frenemies brushes past at the edge of the parking lot trying to hide a classical-looking drawing under his arms. I say something like, I see I'm a little late, and the usually witty dealer can do nothing but chortle. Imagine getting to work at 5:50 am on sunday morning and realizing you're late.

Even though frenemy is normally thorough, I try to trace the arc of his exit back to the site where he scored. It turns out to be one of the least interesting of the regular sellers who happens to have stumbled on an interesting load. To my great surprise there are several tidy piles that still appear untouched. Frenemy must have really scored if he abandoned all this opportunity just to cart off a treasure.

My mind clouded with envy I go to work on the old portfolios and start to make a pile of my own: early Vasarelly litho from his time with the Denis Rene gallery in Paris before he sold out and went commercial, a portrait by Minor White of a male youth at SFAI in the 1940s, Daumier prints, a book of Felicien Rops engravings, and to top it all off, the Picasso. The seller tries to appraise his material a la prima as I mutely stand by, but is overwhelmed by his desire to make quick sales. The bill tallies up at around $430. I feel a twinge of guilt but not enough to suppress my grin when I tip my hat to frenemy later on that morning.

Busted

    I bought this anonymous painting of black youth playing dice from the '70s at the Alemany Flea Market the other day. It's a bit naive but undeniably entertaining, probably done after a snap shot taken by the artist, and discovered by an estate liquidator in the East Bay.

    My intuition tells me it was painted by a black artist. I'm sure any attempt to rationalize that will make me sound racist. So I'll just say it looks more like other paintings I know by black people than those I know by white people, and that there is a high level of sympathy and intimacy between painter and subject. However, what makes this painting so interesting, is the parallel created between the viewer and the intruder surprising the kids at their game. We presume it's the artist, but the looks on their faces—fear, distrust, scorn—suggest an outsider, a white person, maybe even a cop. It's an amazing enactment of the viewer as intruder and to a white person already guilty for profiteering off the art of black people, an allegory for the way white people barge in on the private realm of black art, exoticizing it, policing it's aesthetics and pyramiding its values. 

When The Box of Old Sex Photos Led To A Moment of Autochthony

For years, my wife mocked me for not seeing lost objects that were directly in my field of vision. Then her friend told her that, as hunters, men evolved to see moving targets not stationary ones. The mockery only diminished to a thinly-veiled exasperation, but I finally had an explanation for why I miss small, hidden or hard to see things at the flea market. For years I blamed it on laziness and a mild case of mysophobia, which kept me from getting too close to the dirty boxes with the hidden jewels. Now I realize I'm looking for things in motion. The ladies of the flea market, I guess. Fortunately, last week the petite jewels waiting for me at the bottom of an old box of photos were hinted at by an oversized color print of some classic 1960s cheese cake that was draped haphazardly on the concrete loading bay. Not the kid of thing I'm likely to miss. 

 

 

 

As usual I was late to arrive at Alemany that morning. It wasn't raining but the place had a desolate look. Many dealers stayed home to avoid the weather, which sucks there even in summer because of its location along an icy wind channel. I strolled around, winter coat and gloves, five fresh twenties from the cash machine folded in my pocket, a limp leafy zine just waiting to be peeled apart. I see a familiar face surrounded by the aforementioned pin-up material. I know him to be a buyer of storage lockers, the thing everyone's obsessed with now that storage locker auctions have their own reality show. WTF??!! It's a godawful business but you do hit now and then and when you do the material is fresh.

 

 

The technicolor pulchritude draws me in; I leave my gloves on and start to dig. Aging file folders, 8 x 10 prints of the interior of something called the Cinema Lab, many photos stamped Blaire Dixon. He turns out to have published a book of photographs called Polk Gulch, which document Polk Street between California and Geary in the 70s when it was a queer sex playground. Little envelopes. Small format travel pictures. Wait a minute. Bingo. Polaroid: woman taking her top off: signed Eric Kroll, the renowned fetish photographer. My blood starts to boil. There is something about scoring vintage fetish photos at the flea market that is so San Francisco. I briefly experience the rare feeling that I'm living in the right place. This shit ain't turning up in Wichita. I try to speed up the process as curious people sensing my energy mill around. Nothing to see here, I telepath. Most people are respectful, but every now and then some desperate person will try to bowl me over and take my stuff.

 

After 4 or 5 minutes I accumulate five to 10 more prints, and a couple of obscure New York art journals from the '70s. If I take any longer the seller's going to charge me rent. I show him my pile: "Gimme  $35." I give him two of those twenties. Like a true flea market seller, this one hates to give change. How much will you give me for me the whole pile? he asks. I groan in negativity as we survey the ruined landscape of photos, ephemera and crusty cardboard. He's clearly desperate to leave before the rain starts. "How bout $40 for everything." Really desperate. Later, I count 20 early Eric Kroll photos, including some wicked '70s pulchritude and an image from my old stomping ground, the old Studio 54. One elaborate set-up finds a couple on their bed with a buddha, a telephone and a spaceman television reflecting the buddha's face,which looks like a leather hooded mask. The woman's holding the phone and the man a 1975 copy of video art by Ira Schneider and Russel Conner. That TV, the copy of Video Art and all those wires in the bed—very prescient.

 

Goodbye To All That

 
   People in charge of art spaces are more and more reluctant to embody the elitism that historically has been at the core of their mission. Unlike their predecessors who reveled in materializing the sign of class and cultural dominance through a church-like grandeur, today's curators try to democratize the space with programming that focuses more on the experience than the object. It's as though they are saying, it's not about us, it's about you! The result of these experiments is often a stilted facsimile of social interaction in which you're not sure if you're being directed in a performance or participating in a mixer or both. That sounds good, like a heightened version of the way we perform out lives now on Facebook, but it feels nerdy when its happening.
    In the 1980s my friend Claire Carlevaro came up with a homemade solution for the gallery with a stick-up-its-ass problem: she founded Art Exchange, a resale space for contemporary art. Claire doesn't have what you would call a gallery practice at Art Exchange. It's all a function of her humanity and emotional availability. Put off by the phony superiority projected by the galleries that she was shopping in, she dumped the pretense of formal installations for a haphazard salon style wall hanging, which made Art Exchange infinitely more approachable. Then she basically just went about being herself: a low-key sales approach, total lack of jargon, tireless patience, buoyant disposition and willingness to educate even the most ignorant customers. This transformed the normally fraught retail space into a secure place where you could imagine buying art but also forming a friendship. Because the art only had to be good and contemporary (later Claire would expand to include 20th century modernism) there was something for everyone with an emphasis on dealers of course. We profited shamelessly as both buyers and sellers from Claire's skill and generosity.
    Art Exchange is closing at the end of this month, and there is one thing I know for sure: there won't be a curatorial project to replace it.