The Brooklyn Rail

A contemporary art gallery is not built to last. While artworks and museums, texts and libraries, may aspire to eternity, galleries are a fickle business. Their fortunes come and go, perilously tied to their principal’s good taste, good health or good luck. I once read that galleries are like glaciers, inexorably pushing their myth material down the mountain into private collections and public institutions, before melting into air, leaving a subtle moraine of clues which live on in archives and memories, provenances and wall labels. All glaciers—from the continental glacier that deposited the terminal moraine also know as Long Island, to the pocket-sized Lilliput glacier of California—are eventually experienced through their absence, an invisible force that once carved out valleys and deposited strange materials far from their origin.

Like a glacier, a gallery belongs to a time and a place. Before its inevitable thaw and slide into absence, a gallery trades, above all, in presence. Its existence is synonymous with being seen, visited, patronized, photographed, written and talked about. This is the clear command of “contemporary art”: the shock of the new, shock of the now. Relevance. Urgency. Timeliness. Presence. Suggested in the nomenclature of defunct street addresses, pseudonyms, catchphrases, or evocatively European names, American Fine Arts, Art of This Century etc. etc. “Contemporary art,” along with the American Century and the Holocene, may well be in its terminal phase, its purchase on the here and now likely past the point of no return.

Yet sources of presence have proliferated. Just as the richest ores for extracting precious metals like gold, platinum, and palladium are no longer found in any mine, but in mountains of electronic waste, so some of the richest sources of present and future are found in our collective past. The end of the end of history is experienced as a landslide that frees us from the teleological and technological desperation of modernism, the modish fetishism of the now. No more claims to a single past, a single present or a single future. These liberated conditions actually require the work of hundreds of galleries cultivating myriad sources of presence (contra the cantankerous critics of the “too many galleries” school), far greater in number than the clique needed to administer the “necessary developments” of modern or contemporary art in the past. Galleries, merchants of scarcity and attention, are best placed to negotiate this exchange between presence and absence, what comes after “contemporary art,” is in fact already taking its place.

Two exhibitions currently on view in New York speak to this sublimation of absence into presence. At Gordon Robichaux, an exhibition in two parts by Jenni Crain (1991–2021). In the first suite is a large wooden floor-based sculpture, constructed posthumously from detailed diagrams and conversations with her gallerists days before Jenni’s sudden passing, and exhibited in the room specifically intended by her. A second work, destined for the same room, yet too loosely described de son vivant for faithful reconstruction, is mentioned in the exhibition text but remains immaterial. The large ribbon of Japanese paper tied to a wall peg is installed in the space of imagination, a shared space outside time where the viewer and the artist can be equally present (and absent). The second suite comprises the work of twenty artists championed and researched by Jenni in her lifetime—she was equally curator, writer, and gallerist—deposited by the now-invisible force of a relentlessly curious and generous spirit anticipating its own after life: testament to a life lived like a glacier.

At the old Hotel Keller on Manhattan’s West Side, seven paintings made by Lee Brozgol (1941-2021) between 1977 and 1981 are on view in an exhibition presented by the itinerant New Canons. Discovered in his studio by Brozgol’s family after his death, these paintings look like they were made yesterday; brightly colored, cartoonish depictions of the violence and erotics of a long-disappeared New York. The exhibition is directly opposite the site of the old Christopher Street Pier, a legendary cruising spot haunted and photographed by Lee Brozgol, and explicitly depicted in his painting FUCK ANY HOT ASS TODAY (1980). The charge of these works is only heightened by today’s neighboring brunching grounds and running clubs, the contrast amplifying the absence of an older New York and the artists who haunted the same piers, among them Wojnarowicz, Hujar, Baltrop, and Haring, swept away by a tidal wave of AIDS and gentrification. The historically specific exhibition site brings the absences and absentees living in these paintings sharply into the present, and in turn thickens the shallow and leaky present by grounding it in its multiple pasts (full disclosure: LEE BROZOGOL 1977–1981 is presented by New Canons, in collaboration with my gallery Foreign & Domestic).

A gallerist is always looking for space. New space, old space, off space, storage space, studio space, project space … Maybe all this talk of space is also a way of talking about time. A good gallery is a time machine, fueled by a combustible mixture of presence and absence, a fleeting, sorting algorithm for art, and the people surrounding it, to find their place just in time for the final disappearing act. At the same time, we all know that there are too many galleries, too many exhibitions, too many artists. Too little time and too many places for any one human to see it all in the span of a single life. Maybe this is the crisis of contemporary art? The audience that can take it all in, make sense of it, is yet to be born (or made). I imagine a future being, AI, alien or otherwise, a century or two hence, finally able to find the time to consume the many millions of images documenting the art and exhibitions of our present, the billions of words and social media posts, the way we now consume full-color monographs on “the Renaissance,” and think to itself: What a time it must have been to be alive!