BA Degree Thesis 2006: Everybody is Entitled to My Opinion

“THE BEST WAY TO GET AN IDEA ABOUT CONTEMPORARY ART IS TO WATCH THE PEOPLE INVOLVED. Looking at the art will only get you so far, and, although studying the books might help, you have to remember that they’re only written by people who’re just as much insiders as anyone else. Reading that stuff is more like a kind of self-initiation than actual learning. What I mean is that all you’ll learn from them is the jargon, an attitude. Then once you’re in you won’t see the wood for the trees, and you won’t want to either because you’ll have invested so much effort into getting the patois down that you won’t be able to resist putting it into practice. Which is fine; I’m not judging anyone. I’m just saying that, for myself, I want to be more like an anthropologist. I want to wait in the bushes and watch all the little customs and rituals and incantations, and get my own take on it all: openings, private views, public discussions, award ceremonies, the lot. Then I might get involved or I might not, but - if I do - atleast I’ll know what I’m getting into, you know? Eyes open.”

So ... that’s what I’ve been saying, over and over for the last two years, to anyone who asks what I’ve been up to since finishing art college, and it’s starting to sound like a lot of shit lately, even to me.

The shorter answer is that, following graduation, I took a job at the National Museum of Modern Art, and I’ve been there ever since, working as an assistant in the bookstore (pretty boring) and an attendant in the galleries (mental torture). It is true that I’ve learned very little from interminable hours sat with the museum’s permanent display, but then I haven’t been particularly enlightened by watching the visitors shuffling around either, nor by the occassional critic or curator coming and going, so the anthropological theory really is yet to be proved either way. As if I care. It’s no grand theory, remember. Just an excuse.

Not that I need excuses anymore. Wardhaugh gallery called me this morning and basically they’re saying that they want to start representing me and my work starting in September which is exciting because Wardhaugh handle Michel Ammes and another one of their artists has just been nominated for the Hugo Boss Prize.
I always figured I could make it if I wanted to, but it’s a relief to be proved right.

I never needed the money anyway - from the job in the museum, I mean – and in this respect I guess I’m pretty fortunate. I receive a fixed quarterly allowance (way above what the museum pays me) that’ll keep coming until my parents croak, at which point I will receive the remaining inheritance (a dumbly massive sum) in one bulk transaction. Until that sad day, the allowance is granted on condition that I am “pursuing a career”. That’s right, I must be seen to be a self-sufficient professional adult in order to maintain my existence as a financial dependent. What can I say? My parents are addicted to lies.

And while I’m on the subject, I saw my dad today.
He had a cab drop him outside the museum at one-pm, jet-lagged and over-dressed in an office suit. We walked through two floors of galleries without stopping. He talked about what my arrangement with Wardhaugh would be and how amazed he was that there weren’t more contracts involved and that art really is the last handshake business and occasionally he pointed out good-looking women among the other visitors. There were four.
We spent the remaining 45 minutes of my lunch hour browsing the museum’s bookstore. In the centre of the room there was a huge new glossy hardback about contemporary art displayed open on a transparent perspex plynth. Leafing through it, I found an image of an art work that I thought might amuse dad and called him over. He smiled at the picture but when I started describing other works by the same artist he glazed. Later, while I was in the bathroom, he bought the book for me. I offered to call him a cab back to the airport, but he said there was no need because he’d kept the one he arrived in waiting outside.

I own the following books :
The 20th Century Art Book
Art of the 20th Century
Art at the Turn of the Millennium
Art Today
Art Now
Art Now Vol 2
and Art Tomorrow
I really like to look at them and read about the artists’ concerns and the themes of their work and all that shit. Best of all, I like the idea that these are comprehensive overviews, almost definitive, like if you’re familiar with everything in these books then you’ve got yourself a pretty impressive knowledge of what’s what without ever having left the house. As a teenager, I memorised every single image in The 20th Century Art Book so that I could open it on any page and tell you the artist’s name and title of the work just by looking at the picture. I felt this was the only way of getting full value from the book. There are 500 pages.
Some of my tutors in highschool made fun of the “naked ambition” of my trying to “learn the art world by rote,” and a girlfriend I had back then used to go crazy at how “postmodern” my approach to “art appreciation” was. I don’t know exactly what they meant but it had something to do with superficiality and indiscriminate pluralism and flattening out. Nobody understood my pathology: until I got to the city.
I still enjoy sitting back with big books like that, while the bath runs or before bed. Looking at the photographs and reading and feeling like it’s all soaking in, and sometimes I find things that are really interesting, but even if I don’t it doesn’t matter.
In fact I can honestly say, I get more pleasure from sitting at home with picture books than I have ever had at any gallery ever. Period.

Just after museum closing time a colleague of mine came by to ask if I’d seen the exhibition galleries. They’re nine rooms located in the centre of the building with no skylights or windows. While we walked I told him about Wardhaugh calling me and how they’re basically saying that they want to start representing me and my work beginning in September which is exciting because Wardhaugh handle Michel Ammes and another one of their artists has just been nominated for the Boss prize. As soon as we were there I understood what it was he wanted to show me.
The ceilings and walls of the exhibition rooms are uniformly white and the floors are bleached timber; except on this occassion they were covered with some sort of white canvas, right up to the walls, to protect the floor while the exhibition was being changed. All of the previous show had been removed and the new stuff would be arriving the next day, which meant that the rooms would be left empty for the night. The museum’s lighting is a cool bright simulation of daylight and in here it seemed to be reflecting in every direction, off the walls and the canvas on the floor, obliterating every shadow. This depthless field of white was unbroken except for the doorways carved directly out of the walls and even they only opened onto more rooms, each as blank as the last. It was making me dizzy.
“Isn’t it weird?” he grinned, pacing around wide-eyed, his own hand held up infront of his face, “You can see everything so clearly, every detail.”
There was something oddly antique about his fascination.
“Makes you think how dingy everything usually is,” he went on, “like you never usually see anything as it really is.”
It’s true; the dazzle was genuinely disorientating. Details like the edge of the canvas on the floor appeared very sharply defined. But it only seemed to be a clearer more truthful image of things. It was stark, but that didn’t make it any more or less illusory than anything else. What I mean is, it was just another way of looking at stuff really. That was all.
“Oh ... my God,” he had rolled one shirt sleeve up to the armpit, “My arm has a tan but my shoulder is totally white,” and suddenly he was staring me right in the face, pop-eyed, “... hillbilly.”

In case you’re thinking I only look at picture books, I don’t. I’ve been to college so I know what I’m supposed to know about. Like I said, I enjoy reading, but I really get fucked off with reading difficult theory-type books and then straight away forgetting what’s in them, or remembering something but not knowing where it was in the book, or which book it’s in.
So I’ve got a strategy to prevent that from happening and it goes like this:
You’re reading some brain-drain book and you come to a line and think, “Woah there – I’ve read something in another book that is relevant to this.” Then you get a sharp pencil and draw a neat straight line under that sentence (this feels great). Next go find the relevant bit in the other book and underline that too. In the margins by the side of the underlined stuff, you write the surname of the author and title of the other book and the page number of the reference, so that they both have a reference to each other. Is this clear? Describing it is more difficult than doing it.
Anyway, that’s what I do, and over the years I’ve built up this virtual matrix of cross-references between all the books I own. In fact, I don’t read books that I don’t own because if I can’t draw the text into my reference network then I don’t feel that I’ve really digested it. Deep down, I know this has become habitual and I’m not sure if it serves a purpose any more, if it ever did. It’s got so extended, if I ever wrote out all of the underlined sections it would be like The Arcades Project or something.
For example: The first time I underlined a passage about ‘freedom’ was in an interview with Jackson Pollock. I cross referenced it with another book, and then another, and then another. Every time I read something about freedom (and most writers seem to have something to say on the matter) I cross-reference it back to this one line in the Pollock interview. The margin of that interview is now crammed with references to other books.
So in case you’re interested, and to prove I’m not making this up, here they are; all the references currently linked to Pollock’s comment about freedom (You don’t have to read all these unless you want to: it’s enough just for you to know that I have):

William Wright: Would it be possible for you to explain the advantage of using a stick with paint – liquid paint rather than a brush on canvas?
Jackson Pollock: Well, I’m able to be more free and to have greater freedom and move about the canvas with greater ease. (1950)

Disenchanted with the canonization of Abstract Expressionism by critic Clement Greenberg and seeking greater freedom of expression in the spirit of the times, artists from New York, and, soon afrter, from California, declared their repudiation of the canvas. (Michael Rush, 1999)

... but you are the answer, or; your question is already an answer, etc. – the whole strangulatory sophistication of intercepting speech, of the forced confession in the guise of freedom of expression, of trapping the subject in his own interrogation, of the precession of the reply to the question. (Jean Baudrillard, 1978)

(c) symmetry that is free, repetition with change, based on African music and African movement. (Jeff Donaldson, 1969)

As I worked along, making the sculptures as they appeared in my mind’s eye, I slowly came to realise that what I was actually trying to do was to take paintings off the wall, to set color free in three dimensions for its own sake. This was analogous to my feeling for the freedom of my own body and my own being, as if in some mysterious way I felt myself to be color. (Anne Truitt, 1979)

The bicyclist is completely free to move anywhere in this three dimensional database – not just along the streets but also across and between and through the buildings of letters. (Jeffrey Shaw, 1990)

“Philip,” he said, “this isn’t the subject. Do you know what the real subject is?” And we both said at the same time, “Freedom.” Then we hugged each other again. Of course that’s what it’s about. Freedom. (Philip Guston, 1978)

Western art, once the celebrator of emperors and popes, turned to serve the newly powerful bourgeoisie, becoming an instrument of the glorification of bourgeois ideals. Now that these ideals have become a fiction with the disappearance of their economic base, a new era is upon us, in which the whole matrix of cultural conventions loses its significance and a new freedom can be won from the most primary source of life. (Constant Niewenhuys, 1948)

A common vice among artists – or rather bad taste artists – is a certain kind of mental cowardice because of which they refuse to take up any position whatsoever, invoking a misunderstood notion of the freedom of art, or other equally crass commonplaces. (Piero Manzoni, 1957)

Art is communication – it’s the ability to manipulate people. The difference with show business or politics is only that the artist is freer. (Jeff Koons)

What we’d had to offer – originally, I mean – was a new, freer content and a look at real people, and even though our films weren’t technically polished, right up through ’76 the underground was one of the only places people could hear about forbidden subjects and see realistic scenes of modern life. (Andy Warhol, 1980)

Francis Bacon: ... I think with great effort I’m making myself freer. I mean, you either have to do it through drugs or drink.
David Sylvester: Or extreme tiredness?
FB: Extreme tiredness? Possibly. Or will.
DS: The will to lose one’s will?
FB: Absolutely. The will to make oneself completely free. Will is the wrong word, because in the end you could call it despair. (1962)

Benjamin Buchloch: What kind of picture?
Gerhard Richter: One that represents our situation more accurately, more truthfully; that has something anticipatory; something also that can be understood as a proposal, yet more than that; not didactic, not logical, but very free, and effortless in its appearance, despite all the complexity. (1986)

... some of the important issues of art. For example, the relationship of the way that groups or individuals use art to the way that it is conceived and made; the social role of the museum; the notions of freedom and responsibility in art; etc., as well as those that I expected. (Michael Compton to Robert Morris, 1971)

Indeed one often hears Existentialist echoes in their words, but their “anxiety,” their “commitment,” their “dreadful freedom” concern their work primarily. They defiantly reject the conventional values of the society which surrounds them, but they are not politically engagés even though their paintings have been praised and condemned as symbolic demonstrations of freedom in a world in which freedom connotes a political attitude. (Alfred H Barr, 1952)

... electronics is very connected, of course, in terms of speed, to your brain. It’s very very fast. So there’s a kind of immediate freedom that you have. (Laurie Anderson, 1984)

My greatest dream is the projection of light into the vast night sky, the probing of the universe as it meets the light, untouched, without obstacles – the world of space is the only one to offer man practically unlimited freedom. (Otto Piene, 1961)

Yet this emphasis on the experience and sensibilities of the individual, and therefore upon “expression” as emblematic of personal freedom and this as an end in itself, provided an opening for the assimilation of video – as “video art” – into existing art-world structures. (Martha Rosler, 1986)

Danielle Rice, a curator of education in the museum [Philadelphia Museum of Art], has argued that the Rocky bronze proved popular because the movie character portrayed reinforced the mythic vision of liberty as free enterprise and therefore ideally suited the American dream of success. (John A Walker, 2003)

The economic freedom which is the prerequisite of any other freedom cannot be the freedom from economic care which the socialists promise us and which can be obtained only be relieving the individual at the same time of the necessity and of the power of choice; it must be the freedom of our economic activity which, with the right choice, inevitably also carries the risk and the responsibility of the right. (F A Hayek, 1944)

... money is one of the greatest instruments of freedom ever invented by man. (F A Hayek, 1944)

We were the first to assert that the more complicated the forms of civilisation, the more restricted the freedom of the individual must become. (B Mussolini)

The relative failur of May ’68 in France can be seen in the low level of institutionalisation where freedoms are concerned. (Nicolas Bourriaud, 1998)

It is a small step from love to freedom. To predefine freedom is a paradox in itself. Therefore, we must retrace the development of freedom historically in order to understand it. (Nam June Paik, 1984)

Even in bright and free ancient Greece, there was the term free man, referring to a social class, but there was no philosophical concept of freedom. The passionate idea of freedom is said to have been born under the most unfree, dark domination, of medieval Christianity. ... In any case, freedom is not a concept inherent in man (it is found neither in the Koran nor in the Analects of Confucius) but is an artificial creation like chocolate or chewing gum. (Nam June Paik, 1984)

We have progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past. (F A Hayek, 1944)

To allay these suspicions and to harness to its cart the strongest of all political motives, the craving for freedom, socialism began increasingly to make use of the promise of a “new freedom”. (F A Hayek, 1944)

Marx and Marxism have betrayed this basic idea of socialism by their fanatic but utopian adherence to the abstract idea of freedom. (F A Hayek, 1944)

“Freedom” and “liberty” are now words so worn with use and abuse that one must hesitate to employ them to express the ideals for which they stood ... (F A Hayek, 1944)

The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘this field is free from weeds’. It could not be used in its old sense of ‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually free’, since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. (George Orwell, 1949)

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. (George Orwell, 1949)

5.1362 The freedom of the will consists in the impossibility of knowing actions that still lie in the future.
(Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1921)

How, without turning my back on expectations, could I have had the extreme freedom of thought that places concepts on a level with the world’s freedom of movement? (Georges Bataille, 1967)

I am alone in this white street lined with gardens. Alone and free. But this freedom is rather like death. (J P Sartre, 1938)

Man has difficulty enduring the freedom of others because it is not in accordance with his nature and because he cannot endure it for himself. (Dostoyevsky, quoted by Jean Baudrillard)

That a false hypothesis is sometimes preferable to an exact one is proven in the doctrine of human freedom. Man is, without a doubt, unfree. But it takes profound philosophical study for a man not to be led astray by such an insight. (G C Lichtenberg)

Freedom, he explains, “is a very troublesome concept for the scientist to discuss, partly because he is not convinced that, in the last analysis, there is such a thing”. (C H Waddington)

Freedom? A dream!
Everyone aspires to it, or at least gives the impression of aspiring fervently to it.
If it is an illusion, it has become a vital illusion.
In morality, mores and mentalities, this movement, which seems to well up from the depths of history, is towards irrevocable emancipation.
And if some aspects may seem excessive or contradictory, we still experience the dizzying thrill of this emancipation.
Better: the whole of our system turns this liberation into a duty, a moral obligation – to the point where it is difficult to distinguish this liberation compulsion from a ‘natural’ aspiration towards, a ‘natural’ demand for, freedom. (Jean Baudrillard, 2005)

Originally I guess I did it for college. I thought all these references would be helpful for writing my essays and stuff. They weren’t. But I love them now, in and of themselves, and not as a means to an end. Which is the only way to truly love anything, of course.

I switched my cellphone on as soon as I got out of work. There were two text messages, both from Mom_Mobile:
“Kitchen units look great! Love momx”
sent at 15:37:09; and
“Final decision on tiles. Corn husk or sea shell? Do you remeber them? X mom x”
sent at 16:55:53.
From the top of the block, the pedestrians swarming through the high street looked alot like lice. Or something smaller. A culture of microorganisms surging around a Petri dish, for example. In fact, I was thinking, they don’t look like something microscopic; they are like something microscopic, and the tiny cellular worlds inside their bodies are like the star systems in space, or whatever. Obviously you could go on like this, bigger and bigger, smaller and smaller, everything alike, for ... like, you know ... forever. This is fractal geometry; it’s not just swirly psychadelia for nerds. This is what scale is: An infinity of things within things within pointless more things.
It’s kind of profound, if you think about it, but thinking like that doesn’t get you anywhere in the real world so I try not to.

During the spring I rented a studio with a guy called Peanut who makes assemblages of sampled images from manga and porno and crossword puzzles all glued on to designer sneaker boxes. He buys a lot of sneakers. Then, in June, I got a free ticket to Venice for the Biennale pre-opening press week and went with a bunch of writers I know. We went to alot of invitation-only parties. There were so many they had to be timed to begin at two-hourly intervals throughout each of the four days. None of us paid for any food or drink the entire time we were there.
I don’t remember much else, except one particularly sweaty press conference with the European curators dressed up like actresses from Dallas or Dynasty. They were saying how they wanted to get rid of ‘linear narratives’, ‘closed thinking’ and ‘hierarchical Western metaphysics’, in favour of ‘multiplicity’, ‘intensity’, ‘neighbourliness’, ‘pleasure’, ‘freedom’, ‘transformation’ and ‘newness’. Nobody disagreed. In a Gucci store the sales girl noticed some free catalogues under my arm and asked if the Biennale was “very beautiful?”. I lied.
When I got home I wrote a pretentious apathetic article about the vacuousness of my experience and had it published in a fashion magazine accompanied by a load of really great photographs of installations that I don’t remember seeing taken by a photographer that I’ve never met. And then summer was over.

When I saw my girlfriend Alice’s number calling my cellphone I let it ring three times before answering because she likes to know I have a “full life”.
“What are you doing? Where are you?” her voice is a scratching nail. I ducked out of the street-noise into an absurdly cramped newsagent’s. Newspaper headlines everywhere: INTERNATIONAL VD TIME BOMB; SENATOR SUICIDE PROMPTS FBI INVESTIGATION; NIG-NOG BUBBLEHEADS STRIKE AGAIN. I bought a YORKIE bar for some reason other than nourishment. Politeness maybe? I owed them nothing. The telephone reception was abysmal in this broom closet, and the guy serving me wouldn’t even look at my face. Too busy talking in Greek to something under the counter.
Alice tortured my ear down the phone: “Hon, I’ve got to be quick. I can’t make the private view this evening, sorry
happened and I into town tonight
remember Lydia from Pilates?”
Me: “Yes.”
Her: “Well -big sigh- not her fault ‘a’ and ‘e’
kind of diet pills or -tensive care, I mean
sent straight to Hell-
... Matt? Can you hear me?”
Me: “Yeah, yeah (not really). God (don’t believe in him), that’s awful (so what?).” And then I stepped out under an oncoming cab – almost – unwrapping and feeding myself YORKIE with one hand; cellphone in the other; feeling a bit ... you know. She didn’t stop,
“I worst thing is that it basically she was
really confusing directions for know, like, a correct dosage, and this is
totally reputable private doctor, and for that fee you’d expect
-ush ”, until the signal went.
I put my cellphone back in my pants and started checking out my reflection in an adult bookstore window. There was a display centered around one poster-sized image of a woman in her twenties wearing a school uniform, her hand in her panties. She was glaring out at me with the determined expression of a carpenter hacksawing through a really hard slab of wood. I scrutinised her flawlessly toned digitally enhanced legs (this took 0.5 of a second - I’m twenty yards further down the street already), and got anxious over the saturated fat content of the YORKIE bar, of which only the wrapper remained. I ended up back in another almost identical newsagent’s, this one playing Smells Like Teen Spirit on a portable stereo, and bought a bottle of water to cleanse my system and a pack of Wrigley’s Extra Sugarfree Gum because it’s wise to show people that you care about their experience of your breath, even if you really don’t.

Alice called back. Throughout this final round of our conversation I observed my emotions like they were scrolling across a screen. We exchanged “good news”: She’d been given some kind of promotion and a salary increase of almost one-hundred and twenty percent and, to my surprise, my artificially enthusiastic response came out sounding utterly convincing although, predictably, she didn’t appreciate it. To follow, I told her about Jonathan from Wardhaugh gallery inviting me in for a meeting and another look at my porfolio and that basically he’s saying the gallery want to start working with me beginning in September which is great because Wardhaugh handle Michel Ammes and another one of their artists has just been nominated for the Boss prize etcetera. Her shameless excitement at this, and the fact that it had evidently made me instantly more attractive to her on every level, was repulsive. Or rather, I observed that I was deeply repulsed: Why, I’ll never know. Maybe she was faking too. That thought alone gave me hope.

Just before ending the call, she awkwardly dropped in, “Hm, we’ll have to think of some way to celebrate our successes,” presumably intending to provoke sexual excitement, but instead un-nerving me by teasing a crack that opened onto the dark alien landscape of our sex-life; a realm presently constituted entirely of oral, anal, mild-sado-masochistic “training” and / or the dreaded strap-on. Anything less, including my taste for regular missionary position vaginal penetration, had been phased out, deemed too “conservative”, “habitual,” and most damning of all, ... “Victorian” . I’m often tempted to suggest that when you’re as liberated as we are, there’s nowhere left to go but back.

After ringing off I experienced a brief impulse to return Alice’s call and tell her everything: How last autumn I’d spent almost an hour stood on a chair with the cord of my dressing gown dangling around my neck until I finally accepted that I wasn’t going to do it, that it wasn’t going to happen, and that consequently I had an entire adult life ahead of me (accident and disease notwithstanding) which meant nothing, was to no end, irredeemable from start to finish, and yet was fated to happen. Being an artist? Possessing talent? Exercising critique? Creating beauty? = Nothing. What’s more I have retained this view in my daily life, and as a result of this disinterested outlook I have not fallen apart but rather become more succesful in my work and personal life (a mysterious and attractive coolness having replaced my un-reliability and “emotional dependency issues”). Finally I longed to confess to her how I am unable to attribute value to any part of our relationship other than a single memory of the two of us running through a meadow to a riverbank where we lay under the shade of a weeping willow, listening to the dragonflies, my hands behind my head, her face resting on my chest ... but it would only annoy her, or come out wrong, and anyway it would be so difficult to phrase since none of these things ever actually took place.
Instead, I replied to Mom’s text message.
“Sea shell.”
Then, feeling this was kind of short, added “It’s a cleaner colour. X ps wardhaugh gallery might be taking me on in september!! Will tell u more later x” and sent.

Mispronouncing an artist’s name makes you look ignorant. Without a firm grasp of the name you will never feel confident discussing the work. Not knowing leads to anxiety because it puts a distance between you and the art. Fortunately it doesn’t have to be this way.
If I‘m stuck on the pronunciation of an artist’s name I find out what gallery they are represented by, telephone the gallery, and ask for a demonstration of exactly how the name should be pronounced. Watch out because even the person answering the phone at the gallery is often unsure and may be tempted to improvise an incorrect pronunciation. Therefore it’s worth asking to speak to the gallery owner themselves if possible.
It is also useful to learn standard written phonetics so that you can note down the pronunciation and refer to it later.
Here are some names that you might be getting wrong :
Francis Alÿs (Like “a lease”)
Thomas Demand (Equal stress, not like the word “demand”)
Marlene Dumas mar-lane do-mar
Lukas Duwenhögger lucas doovenhogger
Tracey Emin (like “eminant” and not like“semen”. Not ee-min)
Ceal Floyer seel floyer (like “lawyer”)
Tom Friedman freed-mun (not like “fried”)
Callum Innes IN-us (like “innocent”)
Christian Jankowski christian yang-KOFF-skee
Ian Kiaer ian KEE-uh (like “overseer”)
Karen Kilimnik karen kill-LIM-nick
Udomsak Krisanamis ooh-DUM-sack kriss-Anna-miss
Tracey Moffat tracey moffut
Yoshitomo Nara yoshy-toe-moe NA-ruh
Rivane Neuenschwander ri-VAN-ee NOY-un-shwunder
Chris Ofili uh-feely
Tony Oursler ows-luh (rhyme “house-ler”)
Giuseppe Penone jiseppy (soft ‘j’) pen-OWN-ay
Daniel Pflumm flum (not like “flume” or “glum”, somewhere between. Rhyme “bedroom”)
Wilhelm Sasnal will-helm SASS-nul
Gregor Schneider greg-er SHNIDE-er
Thomas Schütte SHUT-er (like “put”)
Yinka Shonibare yinker shonny-BAH-ree
Annelies Štrba anna-leez stree-ber
Andrea Zittel an-DRAY-er zi-TELL

Just as I got to the corner of the street where this private view was happening, I became aware that I had gotten kind of sweaty during the walk. I ducked into a bar on the corner where I had to queue to buy a can of Red Bull that I didn’t want so that I could get the code for their customer-only bathroom. It was empty and very quiet compared to the bar-room, with six cubicles in a row facing six wash basins, all strobing under the glow of florescent tube lights mounted on the ceiling. I blotted my T-zone and under my eyes with toilet paper to remove the oily shine that had accumulated, finishing with a gentle circular motion, guiding the tissue across my cheekbones with my finger-tips. As I did this, like something from a nightmare, I watched in the reflection of the mirrors lined up above the wash basins as a tall thin man stepped out of one of the cubicles with a bunch of toilet paper in his fist and proceeded to do exactly the same thing, all the while fixing me with an unflinching dead-eyed stare. It was so wrong. Shuddering and generally freaked-out, I turned slowly, so that he was behind me and, on a wave of adrenalin, hurried off, without looking back, trying to shake the memory of his long-fingered hands mechanically pushing the paper around his face. I couldn’t stop thinking: the truly horrible thing was, he didn’t look sweaty at all.

But half way down the street I was already concentrating on other things: swallowing and blinking; the crowd already milling aimlessly outside the gallery; whether success brings contentment. I scanned the guest book for signatures of people I know and then, although I wasn’t thirsty and really didn’t want to get drunk, I took a bottle of beer from the refreshments table (complimentary, as always) and enjoyed the relief of having something to hold, something to do with my hands, like everyone else.

Nathan was wearing some kind of gendre-bending distressed-denim 1970’s Berlin look finished off with thrift store sneakers and an unwashed mullet. He studies at the same college I went to, and talking to him usually triggers pleasant memories of my own time there: the beurocracy loathed by students and professors alike; tortured tutorials with Japanese kids who don’t speak English and are only accepted on the course because they pay, like, four times as much as the rest of us in fees; me wearing hoody sweaters all the time because they made me feel like a toddler; every lame semi-productive minute: I miss it all. He was smiling directly into my face.
“Hello!” and, Christ, for some reason I found myself behaving in an insanely artificial manner, barely able to restrain myself from doing ‘funny’ voices and accents. Why? Because there is no mode of social conduct that corresponds with my state of mind. But that doesn’t explain why I would resort to this exceptionally phoney shit. By contrast he was effortlessly ‘natural’, all be it pretty dull.
Unfortunately he wanted to talk about his thesis; some kind of arbitrary convoluted theory referencing the usual suicidals: Debord, Benjamin, Deleuze, et al. A clumsy tissue of sanctioned quotations. No worse than the “humorous” (read indulgent) ‘performative’ text that I’d handed in for my final year, but does he wake up at night thinking about this stuff? I doubt it. Yes he seems interested, his eyes are bright, he’s talking fast, but I strongly suspect that deep down he’s mostly interested by his own interest in it. You see the same thing at the Museum: the gawpers, the jokers, the chin-strokers; all fascinated by their own reaction in the face of ‘culture’.
Whatever, I was nodding away with a big dumb grin across my face, “Right, spectacle, yeah, rhizome, totally, micropolitics, hmm ...” and basically not coming up with any kind of sensible response. He was talking like art is this benevolent force that can make the world nicer, or people fairer, as if there’s something inherently wrong about them just being mean and selfish and short-sighted like they always have been. In fact, he was pretty much talking like a God-damn Marxist, to be truthful, and what can you say to that? Especially nowadays. Dream on, dreamers of dreams (and before you blow your wad over that quotation, it’s only Willy Wonka, so don’t give me the Nobel Prize for literature yet. ).
Then he got on to this ‘relational aesthetics’ shit. Jesus! Nobody goes to a gallery to eat soup and play table tennis. Interactive art is embarassing because it misses the point: Like a porno with lame sex but a really great message.
Anyway, he was also drunk, if not high, and I was really starting to wish he’d close his mouth. Nathan was violating an axiom that he is evidently yet to grasp: No matter what you’re saying about art, however much it comes from thinking and loving and obsessing about it, if you say it in a loud booming voice in a gallery with other people around to hear it, you will sound ... like ... a dick.
When he asked me what I was doing, it all came very easy: “Well, I got a call from the Wardhaugh gallery this morning and basically they’re saying they want to take me on starting in September which is exciting because – did you know? – Wardhaugh handle Michel Ammes and another one of their artists has just been nominated for the Boss prize, so, yeah...” and he looked jealous and intrigued, but not deep down. Oh, and I think there was music coming from a video installation, a song by INXS overlaid on a speech by Hitler, some appropriated racket, you know it.

Text message:
Please come 4 birthday drinkies (mine and marcus’s) this fri (3rd) 8pm onwards. All welcome!
Directions followed. It was from this woman I’d got to know working on an exhibition just after graduating. She’d been a mature student at a good college but was never really “with it” even during the course. More recently, word got round of a wedding and, not long after, the birth of twins. Apparently she’s now running a commercial art venture, with her husband doing the business side. Birthday cards. Interior design. Illustration. I don’t remember.
So I won’t go because we’ve grown apart.

An old tutor of mine was stood too close by to ignore, so we started talking. I delivered the Wardhaugh speech, and he listened attentively without showing any real excitement – too jaded for that. Out of politeness, I asked how college was and what the new students are like. That’s when things went a bit weird.
“I’m not there anymore,” he told me, “I’m working as a writer now, freelance, and also advising a few private collectors.”
“You ... advise them?”
Then, too conveniently to be realistic, a middle-aged face-lift-y kind of couple walked over to us and my tutor responded all casual / enthusiastic and introduced me as an ex-student of his (in a we’re-all-grown-ups-now way) and passed on what I’d just told him about Wardhaugh and I realised that these people were the collectors that he “advised” so we talked about the show and in a matter of minutes he had used every single word that people use when art is being bought and sold: “interesting”, “important”, “beautiful”, “genius”, “exciting”, “masterpiece”, and so on, as if he’d never sat and deconstructed these terms, like, a billion times with us in class. What a hypocrit. What a sell-out. But then, fuck it. Who cares? That’s life. I got another beer.
Somehow the conversation turned to which artists I was “into”. I got the feeling these collectors were testing to see if there was anything they didn’t know about that they ought to know about, in case they needed to recalibrate their internal log of what’s hot and not. Alternatively, they were checking to see how informed I am. It’s all relative, after all. Either way, I didn’t want to say anything that would make me look dumb, so naturally every name that came into my head was either so established and commercially succesful that it seemed too ubiquitous to be worth mentioning, or otherwise way too obscure. There were so many potential pitfalls: too left-wing, too gay, too cynical, too politically correct, too easy, too obvious...
I finished up saying that a recent show by Matthias Wohnseifer had been “pretty amazing”, and they asked me if I meant Johannes Wohnseifer and I lied, “Yes, - ha ha - of course”, realising that I had accidentally said Wohnseifer when I meant to say Matthias Weischer who is a young German painter. Now I had to pretend I meant Johannes Wohnseifer, a German installation artist who I know nothing about. I kept telling myself this doesn’t matter, this doesn’t matter.
“Where was this Wohnseifer show?”, the woman asked.
“At ...” if I mentioned a specific gallery it was highly likely that atleast one of these three people would know I was bluffing, “... Austria,” oh God, “... last christmas.”

A note to all writers on art; If you want me to understand you, avoid using the following words:
contiguous, praxis, millenarian, vector, dichotomy, mise en scène (no foreign language phrases please!), quotidian, teleology, prophylaxis, eschatological, extirpate, hypostasis, paroxysm, valency, conjugate, apogee, fulcrum, quixotic, apotheosis, idiom, interlocution, excrescence, insuperable, aver, anamnesis, panegyric, peradventure, substantive, partitive, immure, cathexis, vitiate, enervate, homologous, ossify, avatar, catachresis, insentient, ancillary, diachronic, indefectible, etcetera etcetera. (this is a small selection)
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a retard or anti-intellectual, but I don’t ever use any of those words in conversation. I’m not sure how they’re spelled. I’ve never written them down or typed them out or even heard them spoken anywhere that I remember. They are jumbles of letters to me, right? So you can imagine how delighted I feel when I start reading your essay and find you’ve covered every page with them.
Yes, I can use a dictionary, but not when I’m on the subway or whatever, so mostly I just read straight through and hope that I’ll be able to fill in the gaps. If not, too bad. There’s a lot of other shit to think about apart from your theory about art, you know?
And it’s not just the unknown words. It’s also really familiar words used in weird new ways. You take a word (“form,” or, “play,” or whatever) and use it repeatedly in a totally different way from how any normal person understands it, until I’m wondering if I ever knew what it meant in the first place. What the fuck is that about?
But then, of course, I have my suspicions about why you’d want to make people feel too dumb to just ‘get’ your theories in one read; why you might want to really drive home the fact that only some people can read this stuff, and even fewer can actually write it, and (killing two birds with one stone) cover up how you’ve had to stretch out one little idea into a big old essay because, well, you couldn’t just publish a few incisive lines, right? Oh no.
Okay, I’m not being totally fair. And you can’t answer back. It’s a rant.
But you know exactly what I’m saying.

Karen took me by the arm and lead me out of the packed gallery into a back room which had been converted into an office. Bookshelves covered two walls, filled with coffee-table format artist monographs. All the book jackets had the surname of an artist printed down the spine in big letters, and it felt just super to recognise every single one. There were large expensively framed performance photographs and sketches and other tarted-up by-products propped against the wall in stacks on the floor. Apart from the occasional young girl or guy from the serving staff dashing through with crates of lager and sacks of empties, we were alone. Karen looked young and sexy and affluent in a white blouse and black pencil skirt, and if my life was a generation ‘X’ movie then we’d’ve fucked or done some drugs back there, but it’s not, so we just chatted about who was in the show and if it was as good as the last one and about articles in Modern Painters and Frieze magazine written by people we went to college with.

There is always a table or window sill covered with copies of the exhibition press release and promotional postcards and copies of the catalogue (if there is one, and this time there was). I stared blindly at the press-release wondering what the words would be like if I actually read them, and then gave in and started flicking through the pictures in the catalogue. A breast pushed against my elbow from behind, and this girl’s voice came over my shoulder:
“Great photos,” she muttered, “God, the work looks better in these than it does in real life,” and gestured behind her in the direction of the exhibition. It was Roz. We’d met before but this was the first time she’d addressed me personally so naturally I wondered if she’d heard about Wardhaugh. We proceded to cover a large range of subjects extremely superficially: the aura of folk art; curation as an area of academic study; whether a distinction can meaningfully be drawn between post-conceptualism and neo-conceptualism. After that, she started bitching about how too many galleries are in scummy parts of town, to which I falteringly replied, “Well, gentrification is ... slow.”
Then, all at once, I couldn’t take it any more. I don’t know why, but she was making me want to cry, and suddenly I was yanking my cellphone out of my pants pocket like it was vibrating, signalling “sorry” with my face and “one minute” with my index finger and backing out onto the street. Fearing that she might see me through the glass (not likely, it had a weird way of reflecting in on itself), I actually answered the ‘call’ loudly, laughing like an idiot, and pathetically stumbling away into a sidestreet to catch my breath. The side walk down there was parked up with silver BMWs and Bentleys and Mercedes with chilled out black or hispanic guys in the drivers’ seats reading paperbacks. They looked so relaxed. I waited a few minutes before going back inside.

The rest of the evening was vague and fairly typical. Increasingly I was plagued by an irrational concern about projecting negative stereotypes onto everyone I meet. Do I ever really see the complexity or uniqueness of anyone else’s actions? I asked myself. And if not, is this holding me back?
At some point the gallery got incredibly hot, like, too many people, and it became a big effort just to push through them all without actually moving backwards. I was wanting to get my jacket off, but then not, because all I had on underneath was a t-shirt baring the slogan: EVERYBODY IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION, and I couldn’t have felt further from that. If anything, I’m totally sick of constantly being expected to have one. An opinion, I mean. About anything. They only ever reflect right back on me holding the God-damn thing, like a mirror focussed squarely on my stupid fucked-up subjective ass.
That’s the last thing I remember thinking, and you know what? Two days later I will realise that the gallery was so packed out that I never even saw any of the work on show, just because of all the people blocking my view. Dumb but true, man. Dumb but true.