Reena Spaulings is an imaginary art gallery, or rather, it is a real art gallery that so wants to usurp the nature of what a gallery does that it refuses to exist in ways we expect. Exhibitions in random spaces scattered across New York City with artists oftentimes taking on aliases or intricate mythologies are what they present. Mysterious is-it-art-or-some-kind-of-joke installations and performances have mystified art patrons the last few years.
Run by Emily Sundblad, John Kelsey, and Carissa Rodriguez, the gallery, or more precisely, the “collective,” questions what exactly art is in a hyped-on-steroids art world. It is the anti-art gallery, or maybe, as Reena Spaulings is often characterized, the “art gallery as artist,” or art itself—a blurring of the line between gallery and artist, artist and art, performance and reality. An early show at the downtown space the gallery has inhabited since 2004 was titled, absurdly, “Robert Smithson”—named after the famous sculptor of grand outdoor natural spaces. The exhibition was reportedly an anonymous show consisting mainly of a live mock country music band.
No matter how abstruse a lot of this may seem, a good deal of the art Reena Spaulings produces is fun. The recent month-long “Dead Already” exhibition at a raw offsite space in Chinatown, presented by Kim Gordon, bassist of Sonic Youth, and painter/performance artist Jutta Koether, was billed as an exhibition with “live acts and friends.” It included art installations, video screenings, dance performances, workshops, bands, films, a classical music recital, as well as lectures and discussions—a kind of art happening and underground symposium. The three days of events scattered throughout April evoked a throwback to a time when New York was about cross-pollination and creativity. Movement was a theme throughout, from the workshop by dancer Cynthia James that Gordon and Sundblad themselves participated in to begin “Dead Already,” to the intense performance by K8 Hardy that closed it.
The press release states that Gordon and Koether “see the gallery as a fragmented body marked by past and present struggles… a sort of camp, a momentary Deadwood-ian outpost… [It] performs a kind of autopsy on painting and on the gallery, pulling the viewer into a physical and mental dialogue with a performance of its own economy.”
James performed classic Isadora Duncan dances, discussing the history and the psychology behind much of Duncan’s choreography. Artist Dan Graham showed videos of his conceptually dense performance works from the seventies and discussed their context. Gordon and Koether collaborated on sculptural works and a performance video at the rear of the gallery in which half naked performers, perhaps a band, violently bounced around an underground studio.
The second gathering, two-weeks later, began nonchalantly with Gordon and Koether producing feedback-laden noise on misplayed instruments and amplifiers. There followed dance chaos by performance artist Ei Arakawa choreographed with Eleanor Erdman and a host of collaborating dancers. They improvised and crashed about the floor as if battling demons or searching through nonsense. Plastic tarp was stapled to the walls and blanketed over portions of the audience. Chopped up bootleg recordings of NYC punk bands made by Graham in the late 70s accompanied most of this. “You suck!” shouted someone on the soundtrack. “You suck me” a female singer laced back before crashing into a tune. The exchange could very well have occurred in the gallery.
Art critic Johanna Burton followed with a very interesting lecture on Descartes’ The Passions of the Souls, as it related to a feminist approach to art criticism. Burton projected diagrams from Descartes’ work of the facial configurations for the emotions “wonder” and “astonishment.” Her point, I think, was that Descartes’ interpreting the make-up of these “facial patterns” was an example of a subjective gaze, similar to the point-of-view that projects onto art an opinionated, objectifying glare. Burton intimated that a feminist approach to art criticism would be based on a more unbiased reading of the art object, a purer and appropriate love, rather than an objectification of the object. This would transcend the viewing of art simply along sexual or male-female perspectives. Or this was my understanding. Burton stressed that this half-hour presentation was a tiny sampling of a longer essay.
An experimental film by Alivia Zivich screened next with trippy exploding bursts of shapes, fractals, and morphing colors, a kind of cinematic Warholian “exploding plastic inevitable.” This second night concluded with a hilarious 2005 video newscast spoof by artists Wynne Greenwood & K8 Hardy in which a deadpan street reporter on location in Chelsea searched for an unnamed female artist’s “thrown away paintings.” The reason for the unseen artist’s trashing of the paintings was discussed, as well as faux interpretations of those paintings’ value or, as it were, non-value.
The Paris-based art collective Claire Fontaine, who has collaborated with and been represented by Reena Spaulings, crafted an idea some years back about something they characterized as a “human strike”—dropping out of facets of existence with the purpose of rallying against that in contemporary existence one finds untenable. It is a theoretical, high-minded idea. The team at Reena Spaulings claimed in a recent interview with Seth Zucker in the journal Self Service that this idea of a “human strike” managed to trickle outside the realm of theoretical art and play a role in a series of strikes students at a university in Rennes, France undertook to protest conditions there. They shut down the school, an instance of art, ideas created by artists, crossing over into contexts affecting the real world.
Curator John Kelsey was quoted as saying that artists like Claire Fontaine “try to produce unstable works that move between art and non-art… [ ] the best thing you can do for an audience is not to treat them as an audience.” A camera inside the gallery during “Dead Already” pointed outside the window down onto the Chinatown intersection and projected onto walls inside the gallery what unfolded outside on the streets.
A novel titled Reena Spaulings was published a couple of years ago that was “really not connected with the gallery” but written by an artist collective (a lot of collectives here) calling themselves “Bernadette Corporation.” (The book’s “editorial team” included Jutta Koether and actor Jim Fletcher.) Set in a mythical New York, the story follows a twenty-something woman named “Reena Spaulings” who is discovered and becomes a famous fashion model, while the New York City of the novel is being transformed by a terrible tragedy. The depths and layers of meta-art associated with Reena Spaulings seem boundless.
For the final “Dead Already” performance poet Karl Holmqvist half-sung a collection of haunting poetry, managing to quiet the restless crowd with a nonsensical, song-like recitation of mundane relationship clichés sprinkled with dozens of references to syrupy pop songs. Composer Stefan Tcherepnin played a wonderful piano piece on upright piano, accompanied by residual amplified feedback generated by the piano itself. It was the exhibition’s most elegiac moment.
It was followed by performance artist K8’s fiery finale, the artist channeling a Dervish explosion of energy, crashing about the space, shouting, erupting into mesmerizing deep throat-singing howls. Dressed in war paint and a Vivien Westwood-like punk costume, she pleaded and screamed at the audience, proclaiming we were “dead” (she might have added “already”), and shifted around the space in what was part tantrum, Movement Theater, and spiritual exorcism. The effect was unsettling, and oddly beautiful.
“Reena Spaulings Fine Art,” as the gallery very formally bills itself, is part of a wave of Lower East Side galleries questioning the role a gallery can play in contemporary environments. Maccarone (recently moved to Chelsea), Orchard Gallery, The Journal Gallery, and Rivington Arms, to name a few, seem more like cliques connected more by a set of esthetic and philosophical concerns than by the presentation and selling of art.
Quoting the founders again, Reena Spaulings attempts “to produce its own rhythm” in relation to the dominant perspective of contemporary galleries. They represent a desire for creativity outside the market concerns continually imbedded in us. Or maybe not, perhaps it’s all just silly, fun shenanigans.
