The Off Brand

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.

Eulogy for a Riot

Julian Meyers, the art historian, had a wicked little dialectic going in Riot Show, a discussion he hosted last week at SFMOMA, about his archive of music performances disrupted by rebellious crowds. Myers envenomed the room by juxtaposing archival scenes of audiences rioting against the passivity of a live audience watching scenes of audiences rioting. People could be seen nervously scouting each other, sensing their own submissiveness, as Myers played audio of an attack on John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) during a 1980s performance of Public Image, Ltd.  Myers even toyed with the energy, goading the crowd at times to disrupt him by salting his language with curse words, talking too long and cheerfully withholding the audio and video samples. There were a few half-hearted responses, but it's hard to get an audience to riot today, particularly a highly educated one with class privileges, even when you hold a mirror up to their complaisance.

The total unlikelihood of a riot is in fact what makes a talk like Riot Show at SFMOMA even possible, and what makes Myers' collection something you can call an archive. By the time a thing gets collected it's usually fairly inert, and that's pretty much the only way it's getting into a museum. It's rare that an object in the museum reanimates in some dangerous way, like an egyptian mummy in an old B Movie. The way museums collect contemporary art might tell us more about how toothless the art is and less about how adventuresome is the museum. To fight the mausoleum perception museums are also serving booze and staying open late and hiring people like Myers who do edgy curatorial work. Two floors up from Myers Stephanie Syjuco was invited to create a no-frills, black market pop-up shop as a kind of in-house critique of museum elitism,a and it was packed with manic consumers. The tipsy human decor, however, felt more like some kind of social taxidermy than genuine community energy when compared with the myths of human action surrounding some of the museum's great objects, and it makes one wonder if maybe we just have to give in to the notion that, like old people, we live in a post-action, post-drama era of nostalgia.

This only made Myers' talk more poignant and entertaining and the footage even more fun to watch. In addition to the aforementioned riot, there was audio of a crowd going bonkers after a sax solo from a player in the Duke Ellington Band, and video of 20,000 pissed off fans ripping up a stadium in St. Louis after a petulant Axel Rose fled the stage due to the presence of an unauthorized camera in the audience.

Myers is onto a body of material that not only works as a curatorial framing device for examining the passivity of our post avant garde situation, but links two things that rarely get put together: the high art notion first put forward by Duchamp, that the audience finishes the work, in this case literally; and the political and class frustration that bubble up around music riots. It's going to make either an interesting book or a museum show one day, and I only wonder if Myers will present it as a desk mask for the avant garde, or a romantic reassertion of protest energy, which seems to be slipping away, at least in this country. 

Hammered, Again

    There were two good story lines in the Fall sales and both involved Phillips, the perennial also-ran of the big three major auction houses, and the one that usually supplies the bumpiest ride. First, the smudgy, inky early Warhol that sold for some $70 odd million at the contemporary evening sale organized by Phillipe Segalot. According to news reports, Segalot procured the painting from the Mugrabi family, one of the largest—if not the largest—holders of art by Warhol. He put it up for auction, then declared that it was bought way over the high estimate by one of his very own customers. Why then, you ask, did Segalot even bother with Phillips and their commission in the first place? Why not simply take the safe route and sell the work privately? A work of art is better transferred discreetly because the painting's virginity vis a vis public exhibition makes it more attractive for a future sale. When you know both the user and the seller you can exploit that added value. My only answer is that the market needed a public  demonstration of value in these hard times. So this important early Warhol was trotted out by the major stakeholders to prove itself in the free market, or its cheesy doppelganger, the auction market, since there is no free market in the art world. And it did it's job. Why then, you further ask, would Segalot undermine the newly created public faith by revealing the suspiciously narrow circuit the painting traveled while ostensibly in public? That's the kind of news I would want to suppress. And these are the kind of questions the art market wants to steer us away from. Rather that we focus on the winners, the Mugrabies, whose painting sold way above its estimated value, and all us little people who own a piece of the Warhol pie, and a piece of the contemporary art market pie, who can now use the new Warhol price as a confidence inspiring benchmark to keep this Ponzi scheme of ours chugging along.

    A more uplifting lot, Baptism by Abdi Farrah, hammered down the next morning in the contemporary day sale for $11,000. Abdi won first prize on Work of Art, Bravo's art reality show competition, and with it a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum, and the chance to consign a work of art to the Phillips sale. First, I ask you, when did the chance to auction a work become a prize for a young artist? Auction's used to be for art by dead people and art that nobody loved anymore. Things of course have changed. For young artists the auction house is no longer a home for lost children or a tacky casino, it's an international exhibition space with the potential to seriously goose their careers. In China artists work the auctions the way they would any other aspect of the market place. Abdhi figured out how to game the auction world too, although not with shills and chandelier bids. When Baptism appeared on television, it came across as a melodramatic self portrait in tightie whites. In the auction environment it blossomed as a metaphor for his entry into the marketplace, and for the christening of a new mass media path to artistic success through television and the auction house. By getting a room full of white people to bid on this large drawing of a mostly naked black man, briefly turning turning an art sale into a slave auction, Abdhi proved that his work is less static and more interesting than we thought, and that he is politically savvy about his racial identity and the largely rich white audience that will consume his work.

I have to apologize to art writer Jerry Saltz, one of the judges on the show, who helped put Abdhi's work in that sales room. In 2005 he wrote a piece for Artnet.com headlined Hammered, in which he referred to contemporary art auctions as "bizarre combinations of slave market, trading floor, theater and brothel." He's totally right, and I thought him a hypocrite for participating in a show in which the prizes included a trip to the auction house. But Abdhi's aesthetic success at Phillips has gotten him off the hook. It'd be great if Saltz looked at Baptism and thought, this'll prove my point about art sales and slave auctions. It's more likely he looked at Abdhi and thought, he's a real artist and art-making is a basic human endeavor that can survive even the most difficult conditions of which capitalist speculation is one. It appears now that some art actually needs those conditions to thrive. This bodes well for artists who want to escape the nerdy confines of places like the Brooklyn Museum for the rough and tumble world outside.

Annual Debate

This will tell you what it's like to be on the east side of San Francisco in August.

Embedded

 I bought an unusually homely painting, even for me, at the Alemany Flea Market recently. It’s a drab WWII scene of amphibias transports, ferrying troops to the beach on D-Day, as artillery shells explode around them.

The men’s magazine genre is generally not my thing unless it features Nazi midgets and bare-breasted amazons. But I got sold on the possibility that, given the age of the board and the artist’s point of view—which we would now describe as embedded—the picture could have been done by someone who was actually there.

Even so it was half way to the graveyard, which my wife still charmingly calls the garage, when junior got curious. He’s seven and heavily into machines that kill so he began asking questions. I started to tell him the story. Now I’m pretty cynical abut America, and might describe our world war II adventure as an excuse to spread the new testament of consumerism to the old world, but I soon found myself choking up over phrases like, most of these men were about to die, and they were fighting a war against people who were murdering innocent people, and they gave their lives so that we could ….

I stopped. Were I alone I would have said, “shop at Wal-Mart.” Around a boy for whom guys in green suits and muddy boots can still be heroes, a pathway to some closed off pool of emotion was cleared and I could only gulp. This was the clearest, most physical demonstration I’d ever had of how the significance of an image can fluctuate based on context. For me the picture’s subject became its porousness, its instability, and finally mine as well.

It has only been a few decades since art theory has accepted the tilt in power from object to context, but dealers have always known this and relied on it to make their living. What is a press release if not an attempt to cloud the viewer’s sight of the object with a plume of hyperbole. The white cube, the tabletop monographs with essays by celebrated writers, the auction records, these are all things that disperse the object’s significance across a field of marketing and situations. When you add to this the art fair dynamic of tribal get-togethers in which collecting functions as a pretext for social exchange among economic elites, it looks like the infrastructure no longer exists to support the object—if it ever did—but quite the reverse.

Should we worry that the marketing, the tourism, the architecture, the socializing is enshrouding the object, the so-called raison d’etre for all these things? Or should we just give in to the truth of our age, that context and interpretation are as valuable as creation?

The Truman Show

        The flea market is a hyperactive space filled with underachieving entrepreneurs whose moral world is painted in subtle shades of gray. It’s a graveyard of unloved and cast-off things that are often broken, fake or stolen. A hard place to make a buck but an easy place to piss one away. I know this, having been burned many times. But the dream of a big score dies hard. I still have to give myself a pep talk on self-discipline before I enter its gates if I don’t want to get in trouble.This I neglected to do last Sunday and predictably I lunged at the first thing I saw, a naïve painting of a town in Gibraltar, dated 1958. Pinks, greens, yellows, cheap, flashy brush strokes, one step above commercial drek. I normally bounce right off this kind of thing but I got tangled up on the signature— Capote.

        I could hardly be expected to resist the exacta of a painting by a famous author, worshipping as I do the twin despots, writing and art. Still I would never buy something so ugly just on a hunch. But iPhone seemed to confirm my hunch with two more images by the same artist and my mind hopelessly clotted with an image of Capote lisping on the Tonight Show, “The only difference between the rich and everyone else is that the rich eat smaller vegetables.” What the hell. It’s only 50 bucks.

        Moments later back at my car I came to my senses, flames of buyer’s remorse burning my skin. I could see it was hideous. It seemed so much more promising a mere minute earlier. What was my logic again: Capote traveled with a fast crowd. It made sense that he was in Gibraltar; it’s right next to Tangier. He could have been on his way to Paul Bowles. I thought of Noel Coward’s campy depictions of the Bahamas as precedent. Great writer and a socialite too. In hindsight, the justifications of a desperate man in a bar of ugly woman trying to make a connection.

        Among the list of warning signs that I blew right by: Capote’s Christian name appears nowhere, as if the author of In Cold Blood would neglect to distinguish himself from the other Capotes; the painting is not only signed, dated and titled on reverse but there is a reference to a room and a floor .WTF??!! Seller has added a typed label reiterating the information on the back of the board and seller is no stranger to good merchandise and certainly no fool.  On top of that, the painting is a piece of crap and Capote would never sign a piece of crap given his close friendships with artists like Andy Warhol.

        When I double check my Google search I see the moron who posted the two paintings that look like mine is merely asking for information relating to Truman Capote the painter, not offering any. Which means there is no information regarding Truman Capote the painter. I look to myself like one of those crackpots divining for change on the beach with a metal detector, except I’m following  iPhone.

I hide the hideous thing under a blanket and lie to everyone who asks me if I’ve bought anything. No croissant for you today, buddy.  Breakfast at Alemany is humble pie.