D-List Art Report: Maybe This Time
Galerie Buchholz, Paul Soto, Meredith Rosen
I just made the mistake of looking at my unsubscribers. Bad for the spirit. And it does make me wonder—why is shopping the only activity that seems to find a scalable audience on substack? To be clear, The Arcades is a shopping substack (admittedly at a high price point) and I do like some shopping substacks (Rotting on the Vine, Natasha’s shoppy editions of Selling Out). But both Zoe and Natasha are interesting as shoppers because they’re interesting as people—the wares are ancillary to a more compelling vision of them as persons, and it’s not coincidental that they both have slightly shaded titles. What seems to really “work” on substack however is “15 Lip Glosses That Saved My Effing Life, You Guys” and “This Hidden Gem in Marseille Won’t Stay Hidden for Long!” [affiliate link, affiliate link, affiliate link]. Like crabs evolving again and again in biological history so too does spam keep finding itself in our inboxes, and for much the same reason: it’s what the environment demands.
It makes me wonder if the issue is in fact substack itself and its slow en-shitification. The epistolary communities of taste (Bellevue triage nurse, weary but unfazed: “David, are the ‘communities’ in the room with us now?”) turn out to need revenue, hence the affiliate links. Substack itself needs revenue and shopping becomes a platform-wide imperative.
There’s a very good show on at Galerie Buchholz: Correction of perspective in my bedroom by Alix Cléo Roubaud (1952-1983). It’s a show of black and white photographs; many are multiply exposed, superimposing or sedimenting images, one on top of another. The effect is less that of clutter than dissolution: the images float and recede in negative space (a standout, à Jean, is an image of the titular Jean nude, lying “lovingly naked, sleeping and vulnerable,” Roubaud notes, “but also a corpse”—the printed image only a dollop on the sheet). The multiple exposures record something like a repetition compulsion (is it aiming to finally achieve mastery? Or compelled by some other mysterious drive?) and in good psychoanalytic fashion, we sense immediately the importance of both Roubaud’s lover and her parents. Some of the prints were, in fact, made from her parents’ negatives, deploying photography as a kind of inter-generational mnemonic. Her knowing play of remembering and repeating (and never quite working through) brought to mind Sally Bowles:
Maybe this time I'll be lucky
Maybe this time he'll stay
Maybe this time, for the first time
Love won't hurry away
He will hold me fast
I'll be home at last
Not a loser anymore
Like the last time and the time before
Roubaud undoubtedly had her demons. Thankfully the show is not about the details of her biography—we do not need another Francesca Woodman. The focus is on the remarkable photographs in their formal excellence and psychological depth. Roubaud destroyed her negatives once she had achieved what she wanted in her prints—she left behind a single material corpus that is aging in time and all the more singular and beautiful for it. See the show.
Paul Soto has a lovely group show up too. His standouts were also black and white silver gelatin prints, here by Mark Armijo McKnight (b.1984, LA). They depict nude figures in the southern California landscape, many with skull masks on. The effect is blunt force punchier than Roubaud—it’s hard to beat a skull for graphic impact. But the obvious references aside (Día de los Muertos, memento mori), the photos temper the self-serious content with both play and a love (and command) of the medium. This kind of photography was literally made for this kind of light, and it’s a pleasure to see.
Finally: Catharine Czudej at Meredith Rosen. The show is centered around a series of paintings in a limited palette of blacks, whites, and tea-colored canvas. Many have a checkered pattern, with squares slashed and reapplied to the painting’s surface. A motif of QR codes (they don’t work) runs through the series, and the images are built up with stencils and drips: cyberpunk quilts, but still rather law-abiding. The installation of construction lighting as garlands wrapping around the sprinkler system are a nice touch—she even mixed the 3000k warm bulbs with 4000k gallery white. There is a large, video complement to the paintings. I need to watch more—there’s a world being imagined here but I don’t know its contours. The dissociative feeling of being pulled by images (what POV twitch feeds feel like to me) is certainly familiar, however.
The gallery has a rack of commemorative t shirts that you can either buy for $50 or exchange a t shirt for. Thats good twisted fun. The line between merch and work is already fraying and it highlights the show’s location in the garment district in a nice way. Whoever ends up with my T should probably wash it.
Personal note: I did a fun styling project for Fred Tang that’s up on Elle Decor here. I got to use the Edo screen from the last Arcades show to cover the tv:
Email me if you’re doing something I should see.
david@the-arcades.com
C U Next Tuesday, luvs!
Where are the flowers in your Elle home piece from?!