Art for Art's Sake
Gallery girl (me)
Art. It’s all around us. But sometimes you have to go to a gallery to see it.
I’ve written about this before, but my sister is constantly is trying to get me to do activities. Though we’re both earth signs, she’s a Sagittarius rising and legally, as an LA resident, I have to assign our behavior to astrology. When I join for these activities, I do so kicking and screaming. Mid-activity I realize that deviating from my careful routine has made me grow as human being and expand my horizons and remember what it is like to be truly alive. Ugh. Sisters are so irritating.
Last weekend, she dragged me along to a gallery with her fiancé. The gallery was new to me because I never go to galleries. It’s named Jeffrey Deicht Gallery. It is owned by man named Jeffrey Deicht. To be fully transparent, Jeffrey Deicht Gallery is actually two separate galleries, down the street from each other in West Hollywood. One was apparently not enough for the man. We started at the smaller of the two.
On display was an exhibit by Mr. Wash, an LA artist who painted a lot of his work while serving 20 years in prison on a drug charge. Much of it includes self-portraiture. His distinguishing feature, I would say, is a long beard segmented with hair ties, making him look like an ancient philosopher.
He was scheduled to give a talk that afternoon, so when I turned from a painting of him to see him standing in the middle of the gallery, I felt that thrill of art coming to life before my very eyes. My favorite picture was this one:
Painted while he was in prison, the guards interpreted it as an escape plan and placed him in solitary confinement. Contrary to popular opinion, imprisoning a body does not imprison a mind, so that was pretty dumb. The painting evoked a Renaissance painting of a scene from the life of Christ—the soul’s struggle amid the grandeur of God’s creation. Another convenient example of state punishment sort of backfiring on its proposed goals!
The baby was being psycho so we didn’t stay for the talk, as much as I wanted to. We walked down to the second gallery and its exhibit of Los Angeles Latinx artists. The mediums varied from paintings to sculptures to video to “life size stuff that you can touch and is also art, isn’t that fun?”
In this case, that life size stuff included a trailer parked in the back room labeled “Trucker’s Chapel.” Inside were meticulously placed signs of life (a sputtering coffee maker, a wall calendar, fake plants) minus the life that had placed them there for my voyeuristic pleasure. A TV in the corner played a music video in front of a bank of folding chairs arranged before a lectern. I entered to find a few patrons already seated, including an elementary school aged kid. At one point he got up from his seat to peak behind the lectern. When his parents started to scold him he protested, “I wanted to see what was there!”
He wasn’t wrong. That’s what it’s all about: seeing what’s there.
But, after all, it seems it turned out there was no there there for the child. Behind the lectern.
Wish I’d been with you.