The Brooklyn Rail

When Eve Babitz said “everyone knows that it would have been much better to have been popular in high school when your blood was clean, and pure lust and kisses lasted forever. Chocolate Cokes in high school are better than caviar on a yacht when you’re forty-five,” she wasn’t lying. Simple yet unsparing, Babitz’s articulation reflects America’s most potent dream: a lust not only for living, not only for freedom, but for a ravishing innocence, repressed except on languorous, drunken days.

Put plainly: nostalgia has become the most dangerous commodity. As inelegant as champagne uncorked without finesse, regret-soaked recollections douse the mind and liver, nursing a hangover of defeat whenever we try to mature. Each time we begin to repair our broken clocks, when we finally refute the senselessness we swallowed—all our treasured cruelties—and we step, timidly, into the present, we find ourselves once again running in circles of decaying teenage dreams, standing pitifully on the battlegrounds where our first world wars occurred.

High school. The site that unleashes the most undarling of memories, brutal even at its best. Don’t mistake the word as merely a noun, for high school is a psychic and emotional state, one which so few of us have graduated from. So one feels a certain uplift walking through The Campus, a hybrid concept and gallery space, as it offers an education—at last!—evading outmoded curricula and blazing a path to re-enchant our abused imaginations.

Founded last year by Andrew Kreps, James Cohan, Bortolami, Anton Kern, Kaufmann Repetto, and Kurimanzutto—The Campus is a site for cross-disciplinary experimentation and communal study. Occupying over 22 acres, the project aims to elevate the stunted standards typical of white-cube presentation. Walking down the manicured lawns, with glinting sculptures by Nancy Rubins, I spied a young man sitting cross-legged beneath a cedar tree, gazing up at the clouds. Though the façade of the refurbished public school looked institutional and forlorn, with red-brick walls and tall windows, I felt giddy crossing the quad. Instead of the boys too cool to smile or the incandescent girls from my personal antiquity, there was a mixture of summer-suited gallerists, simply dressed artists, locals, models, and a tribe of ageless women, their wrists encircled in silver and coral bracelets.

Inside, the double doors were held open by streams of famished-faced attendees. The lighting—even with afternoon sun—was as painful as I remembered: a fluorescence assaulting my vanity and making me grateful for my brim-bent hat. But in a blink all familiarity dissolved. This was not a John Hughes film, nor was it a place I could recall from my own days on the edge of seventeen. Under Timo Kappeller—whose adaptable, directorial lens is matched by his sensitivity and unpretentiousness—the curation achieves something special: it allows the art to lead.

Past the most charming coffee station is Char Jeré’s installation. A metal bed frame, overrun with straw and jumbled debris, becomes the detritus of institutional life, snatched back by pastoral promises. Scattered across the floor are pastel cafeteria trays—pink, green, beige—each empty save for one stamped “Enough Is a Feast.” Beside these plates are broken bits of technology and painful-looking chairs, overlooked by produce bags crammed with plastic dolls. Against a wallpaper of prancing animals and sepia-skinned women draped in sleep, the room’s aura is one of limbo.

Another striking tableau is Mark Dion’s library. Inside a barricaded room, subjects are dutifully sorted into standardized genres: Art History, Music Dept, Earth Day, Pride. There’s a menacing air, set by a fruitless attempt to impose categories on memory. Encircled by caution tape, the wooden shelves are crowded with bound journals, thick textbooks, and banned books. A plastic skeleton, draped in plastic, stands like a pilloried poet. Its full-toothed smile is enough to chill your heart. Even more unsettling is the laminated active shooter poster. I found myself slinking out, breathless.

No room compares to Ming Fay’s locker room. Only his sculptures could uplift such a desacralized space and tilt it toward the sublime. Thick stalks in the color composition of The Very Hungry Caterpillar imbue the room with a kind of eroticism that feels charged by the sensuous allure of alchemy itself. Here, a place so often cheapened by connotations becomes lush, reverent. The sonic chamber formed by the abandoned shower sends waves of sound reverberating off bright discs resembling autumn leaves. Bland gray lockers, some left ajar to cradle Fay’s signature fruits, become little altars.

My favorite room was a library converted into a celebration of ceramics. Flanked against deep-set shelves, Skuja Braden’s works enlivened the stuffy showings of grand china. No flowers, thank god. No staged lighting displays. Instead, sunlight in its full glory rained over the collection and made me wish my study hall had been in this radiant place. But I doubt I would have paid any attention anyway, because just like her series of narrative vases—cold-eyed girls, dangling upside down and snaking serenely in thick shibari ropes—I, too, was amenable to the fantasies of invincible athletes.

When I stepped outside, I did not seem to be alone in the urge to commune. A semi-private party gathered under umbrellas or stood in huddled circles. Everyone was smiling—not the posed smiles either. I suspected the rush of art induced hope. One woman, an actress, who said her favorite room was the rainbow-spewed silks by Katharina Grosse, blamed her wet eyes on the breeze. But cradling her glass like a secret, staring off after I asked how she felt, made me wonder if I could trust her words. “I feel inspired…ya know? Like I’m ready to get back out there.” Overcurious, like I was and will forever be, I asked her to elaborate, but she just laughed. In her unguarded laughter I heard what I remain desperate to believe: it is indeed possible not to flinch or be subsumed by one’s past, but to walk through each and every door, and become younger than you ever were.