Apartment Gallery

In the world of fine arts, there are the people on the inside, and there are the people trying to get there. This is about the latter.

Every year in Chicago there is an Art Expo. A convention center usually used for car shows and consumer expos suddenly becomes a neatly organized grid of miniature galleries, each repping some of the best selling artists in our city and tri-state area, both the mayor and the governor usually make an appearance. If you find yourself on a spring morning near Navy Pier, the collection of tourists and suburbanites hauled in by the Metra is spotted with another type: they wear carefully curated outfits, and play the social dance like a circus performer on a tightrope. They move in groups, sorted by age.

 The youths, twentysomething dreamers, college kids using student discounts, and wayward princes of American Wealth, are dressed the snappiest, either wearing their best and loudest outfits, or carefully curated humble affairs covered in just the right amount of paint. Those in the latter outfits often hope desperately that someone will ask them if they are an artist.

The elders wear smart suits, or on their day off a sweater from Nordstrom or Northface, with a button up or a polo underneath. The older the more casual. Peacocks among these wear sequin dresses, bow ties, ascots. They nudge each other and whisper about paintings. At galleries they sip the wine and discuss the greats each painting or sculpture stands on the shoulders of. They imagine the fantasy lives of the artists would look something like the expats in The Sun Also Rises. They know this isn’t the reality, but they believe in it anyway, so that when they meet those artists, and they talk to them, and they grill them on art history or their influences and themes, they can imagine them sipping cappuccinos or a hardy Pinot Noir at an outdoor table somewhere in the south of France, caught in between the vibrant manic creative tornado of life and the tragic tornado of reality and pain which fuels the former. But this story is about the latter.

I had handled art for a couple of years now, I felt confident and skilled, and when fresh young faces struggled to cart around gregarious paintings, or strap down large wooden sculptures in the back of the truck, I could guide them through the process with an earnest world weary note, set their anxious hearts straight with the dreaded realization that their work doesn’t actually matter that much. My pal Roland got me on Expo this year, first by underselling it. “It sounds like they’re expanding the street art section so really it’s going to mostly be laying out the red carpet and making sure the temp walls look professional enough for the stuffier galleries.” I knew he was making it sound a lot easier than it was, but I accepted the job anyway because I liked those jobs in the evening, when everyone was tired and sore and joking around, and we would go to some bar off the blue line and get blasted together, then I could bike home from The Owl at 4 am, barely upright, along Milwaukee, and the rest of the week would be a roller coaster. Also, he promised me free tickets to the Expo.

Home was a converted factory loft off of Grand, a sought after part of town at the time. I lived with three other artists. Rocky, a electronic musician from Turkey who was always giving his soundcloud link to everyone. He had a lot of friends, always bringing new crowds and new drugs into the apartment. He had an effortless charm and an accent. Chip came from a rich family, when we first met him we thought he was just some social climber, but his short films —all of which skillfully followed the rules of Dogme 95, mostly out of the limitations brought on by our lack of “pull” in the creative industry—we knew he was the real deal, an asset. Melodi also came from a moneyed background: as a seasoned party animal and avid consumer of acid, Melodi could find creative pathways through the world of Event Coordination that less social animals like myself would never have thought of. We had met years ago, in college, when Melodi brought us all under the same roof.

That roof was to an abandoned nunnery on the north side. We filled it with our art. My paintings, a projection installation that Chip had programmed to respond to Rocky’s experimental noise piece, a cover charge and a table of cheap beers and brownies for sale. The event page blew up on Facebook. The evening brought nearly everyone from our art school out from the trenches of their studios, and by the end of the night we fancied ourselves the next great artistic movement. The new Hairy Who. We dubbed ourselves The TrialHood Collective, and were inseparable from that day forward.

Now, Rocky and I spent more time trying to scrape together enough for rent on freelance gigs than discussing the finer nature of conceptual interdisciplinary practice, but we still partied like artists. We fancied ourselves as the thoughtful ones in the corner, listening to everyone else’s conversations and cooking up wild game-changing pieces, but we knew this gave us more credit than we deserved. I hadn’t picked up a paintbrush in months. But we still had The Apartment.

The Apartment was our meta-name for the gallery we ran out of our living room. It was our equivalent to naming a bar The Office. When we first rented the space, we were still in school. We learned some practical skills and built four freestanding white gallery walls. Over the course of the next year, we would cycle through our tight-knit friend group’s loose collection of styles and aspirations. Movie nights with rare found footage VHS and Laserdisc showings. Wine nights with rows and rows of Franzia, accompanied by live music and performance art. We once hosted a group show of New Media kids we had met at the sushi place near campus. Even Roland put up a series of blankets he had knitted by hand, each featuring big breasted anime women that had a distinct Deviantart vibe to them. It was usually just group shows of our personal projects and the promise of cheap booze, but it covered rent most months.

Melodi and Chip were keeping the programming up still. There was a steady flow of art from the fellow Alumnus, as well as current students that had found their way into our faded, late twenties shadow of a collective. So many had disappeared, moved away, gotten too good for us or—worst of all—gone into teaching, it seemed silly to keep dreaming. But Rocky and I were so deep into it that our options had narrowed. It was either keep dreaming or be nothing, so we made sure to get off work early enough to make it to the opening of the month, talk about what we’ve been making lately, and keep up appearances. It was our duty as members of our own elite club, which we couldn’t ever quite escape.

The secret unspoken manifesto of The Apartment had changed over the years. The loftier mottos when we first signed the lease were usually somewhere along the lines of “Always stay true to yourself” but they had transformed into something more cynical. “Attract buyers and agents.”

The Art Expo was a special time for The Apartment. The gallery scene in general was in a fuss, but for people like us it was a chance at something more. After the big event at the pier, the community dispersed into smaller galleries and apartment galleries like ours. It was our chance to be discovered. Someday a Jerry Salts type would wander into our place and realize we were something he’d never seen before. He’d write about us in a magazine and from then on we’d be the voice of a generation. It was paramount that we timed our event scheduling to coincide with the fluctuations of the market.

I sat at the park bench we had dragged into the crevasse of the apartment between the kitchen and the faux gallery walls. The narrow space there served as a dining room and gathering hall whenever our asynchronous orbits aligned. This morning I was determined to sleep in late, since I knew tomorrow would be a long day setting up for the expo. I laid there in the daylight, cast into my room, on my old mattress on the floor. A stack of books in the corner. In the other corner, where I refused to look, were two piles of canvases. One pile was completed pieces, all of which I hated, the other was blank canvases, which I despised even more. Unable to shake the day I rose from the dead.

My usual breakfast was a bowl of the sugariest cereal I could find. Melodi gave me shit for it whenever she saw me eating it. She would always remark, 

MELODI: You should try to eat healthier. Oatmeal and chocolate protein powder, every morning. It isn’t just better for you, it’s a significantly smaller carbon footprint. Long protein chains mean more energy throughout the day.

And I would have no choice but to nod in agreement. Thankfully, she didn’t usually get out of bed before ten, so on days I worked, I could enjoy my bowl of the human equivalent to dog food. This was not today.

Today, we all sat at the bench with coffees and cigarettes, joints, fresh fruit and sugary breakfast cereal, discussing nothing and everything.

CHIP: I think I have someone for the show.

MELODI: Do they match our brand? I’m feeling really good about this year.

CHIP: I’d say so. Blake Brightly, he’s got “The Spirit”

We called it “The Spirit” but what really really meant was “enough manic energy to power through whatever rigorous demands are made to fill the gallery space in time.” Usually these events are planned months ahead of time, but our attitude and lifestyle had once again gotten the best of us.

CHIP: I’m doing a studio visit with him in a couple of hours if anyone wants to come along.

I shrugged. Why not. We took the blue line to Western, a dead part of town. The stop was snuggled between Damen, which opened up on the six corners of the bustling Wicker Park, and the quickly rising star that was Logan Square. This part of town was once called Bucktown, because it had, in the 20th century, a large population of young black bachelors, bucks ready to take on the forest. They were edged out eventually, and now it was the runoff of gay moms that couldn’t afford Wicker or Logan but still wanted the nightlife on Milwaukee Ave. Them and the pack of homeless folk camped out in the empty lot on the corner.

Blake sublet a garden apartment two blocks from the stop. His roommate answered the door. Some scrawny grease ball. The apartment was a mess: random junk strewn on the floor, hand prints and scribbles on the walls. He told us Blake was out back, then proceeded to trip over his own feet on his way into his own room, losing his footing then finding it again all in one swift motion. It was like watching a slapstick routine.

Blake was on the back porch, surrounded by lightbulbs. One was screwed into a dirty floor lamp, old and dusty handprints running up the wooden hand turned pole, near the top the prints culminated into chaotic and undisciplined brush strokes, which transferred seamlessly onto the light bulbs.

BLAKE BRIGHTLY: Just in time!

First he approached chip, executed a complex secret handshake, which may or may not have been improvised and ended in a big bear hug. He got paint all over, but Chip said nothing of the velvet shirt hanging onto his body, ruined. 

BLAKE BRIGHTLY: I’m almost done with this series, you’re gonna love it.

ME: Neat, how long have you been working on it?

BLAKE: A few days.

CHIP: Wow, longer than usual.

Blake Brightly chuckled at the painfully accurate statement.

BLAKE: Yeah I’m really into how this one plays with material. Let me show you what I have.

Blake washed his hands off with water from the spigot. Most of the fresh material came off but there were stains on his skin, nail polish expanding beyond his nails to cover his cuticles and the pads of his fingers. Forgotten sharpie doodles. Stick n pokes on his knuckles.

Inside he leads us to the room he’s subletting. A modernist bed with an expensive foam mattress, a poster of David Bowie, in the corner a box of nail polish, marks all over the walls made of paint and polish and grubby fingerprints. Scribbles and notes to Blake Brightly, signed Blake Brightly. He digs out of the detritus covering the floor a grocery sack, then opens it and pulls out a lightbulb, layered in various colors of acrylic and oil based paint. In the bag are at least a dozen more.

BLAKE: So I’ve started taking interest in intersectional mediums. This series started as a readymade, turned into a three dimensional canvas for some abstract painting work, and has now evolved into more of a light based sensory experience. Installation art, if you will. The piece itself isn’t actually the lightbulb, it’s the light the bulb creates, how it expands to fill a space, and how it is changed and manipulated by the hand of the artist. Observe.

Blake takes the shade off his subletter’s lamp. No way someone like Blake would own a lamp with that level of class and design. Blake seemed to be the kind of guy that gets most of his furniture exclusively off of street corners. He makes his art out of trash.

Blake screws in one of his light bulbs. It had a strong sense of color palette, the patterning of the brushstrokes had some sense of placement and curatorial thought, but ultimately it was, like its creator, born to chaos. It reminded me of Cy Twombly’s less significant works. Or, god forbid, Jackson Pollock.

ME: What sort of philosophy of art to you ascribe to? Are you a pluralist?

BLAKE: Well, I believe the work’s interpretation is always up to the viewer. I’m just trying to make good shit that I like, you know? Its meaning or conceptual purpose comes to fruition later. I just listen to the muses in the wall, try not to do wrong by them, ya feel? That leads to the most honest work, I think, and sometimes it reveals a lot about my psyche to the audience, and even myself, which I think can really elevate the work.

If this man knew anything about his own internal machinations, what made him do what he did, I’d be amazed.

Blake Brightly turns on the bulb. Shadows cast by the paint on the bulb fill the room with hot light. Colors of a grand variety, all centered on a warm and energetic tone, change the landscape of the space from static and clinical to something more organic and curious. I feel as I did as a child, laying under a tree and watching the light pass through the leaves, overlapping and cutting along indiscernible patterns, flickering with the wind calmly but in such a way as to say “There is no life in the still air, only you, carrying it forth like a torch, to bring energy to the silence.”

The paint on the bulbs looks dirty and brown when the light passes through it, but the blurs on the walls tell another story. Blake takes a bead off of a broken necklace in the subletter’s jewelry box. He places it on the tip of the bulb.

BLAKE: I’ve also been using them to melt these beads, which are another interesting layer of readymade abstractions.

CHIP: Have you been using heat resistant paints? Or is discoloration a time based aspect to your piece?

There Chip went again, putting ideas into the artist’s head. Chip’s biggest character flaw has always been that he accepts complete intentionality. The artist can do no wrong, so he often puts ideas in their heads, giving them the opportunity to sound wise beyond their years, masking any flaws in their work from critical discussion.

BLAKE: I just use whatever paints I can find, you don’t think that’s an issue do you?

Blake just showed weakness. A crack in an otherwise skillful performance of the self. We nod and consider the naïveté of his statement. Can it still be played in our favor? Just then, a smell hit my nose, a low crackling noise, and smoke rising from the bulb. The paint on the northern pole of the bulb quickly cracks and peels away. The room goes dark. The sound of glass shattering instantaneously in heat. Chip hits the light switch and the ceiling fan begins its rotation. Cold blue energy-saving light fills the room instead. Where the bulb was, smoke continues to rise like an impure candle, shattered glass is scattered across the room, lodged in the paper thin walls. I check my body for injury, as does chip. Blake runs out the room and comes back with a dripping wet towel, which he throws over the smoldering wreckage of the star piece from his series.

CHIP: Blake, I think you’re bleeding.

Chip points to a growing spot of red just beneath Blake’s ribs.

BLAKE: Well would you look at that.

Blake reacts calmly, taking his shirt off to reveal a good sized chunk of light bulb sticking out of him.

BLAKE: Barely hurts at all!

Blake pulls the shard out of his gut. Blood gushes out. Blake reacts calmly. Tying his shirt around his torso like a tourniquet.

CHIP: Holy shit! let us take you to the hospital.

BLAKE: No, I don’t want to get any blood on your car. I can walk, it’s seriously fine.

CHIP: Oh, no we took the train here.

BLAKE: Yeah, then don’t even trip. We can continue the meeting later. Man I hope this scars, that would be so rad. Chicks dig scars.

CHIP: Let’s postpone the show for now. No offense, I don’t want to put any of our patrons in danger.

Blake nods solemnly, shakes our hands, and heads out the door.

CHIP: Well, fuck. What are we going to do?

ME: We’ll figure something out.

On our way out, we encountered the roommate. Smoking a spliff on the back porch, He surprised me. I recognized him then as Seamus Duplano. He had been in one of my last classes in art school. A first year while I was on my way out the proverbial door.

ME: Hey, you were in Knickerbocker's Social Practice In The Field class, a couple years back?

SEAMUS: Oh, yeah, I remember you!

He offers me a puff of the spliff. I’m surprised because, at least in that class, Seamus was a total dweeb. Not the kind of people I would expect to be open to illegal substances, much less know where to get them. Back then he was overweight, usually not dressed well, he barely looked like an artist. Perhaps I misjudged him, perhaps he simply didn’t know how to market himself. I take a puff and pass it back to him.

ME: So what are you up to these days, Seamus?

SEAMUS: Just been writing grant proposals, y’know. Graduating soon so getting on the grind early.

ME: Respect.

SEAMUS: Yourself?

Chip already looks bored with the small talk.

CHIP: I’ve got a train to catch. See you back at the space?

I give him an affirmative nod and a fist bump.

CHIP: Nice meeting you, Seamus.

Seamus also gives him a nod of affirmation. He reciprocated Chip’s sense of dismissal, which I respected.

ME: Y’know, living the dream. Tell me about your proposals my dude.

SEAMUS: You run The Apartment, right?

ME: Yeah. But this isn’t—

SEAMUS: I know, I know, we’re just two dudes, chatting. I’m chill.

ME: Cool.

SEAMUS: You probably wouldn’t be too into this one, it’s this intersectional interactive performance slash installation. Globalism and Nostalgia, I’m calling it Senbazuru Cootie Catcher. It feels like homework. ‘What The Market Wants’ kind of thing. My real practice is more on the edge, you feel me?

ME: Well, tell me about one you’re passionate about then.

SEAMUS: I have this idea to host a town hall in a gallery space. Break down what community means, pull back the thin veil of society, address what really brings us together. The community would be the artwork, more than the performance itself.

ME: Epic. Best of luck with it, Seamus.

I start making my way to the gate when he stops me, shoves his phone my way.

SEAMUS: Give me your number, let's grab a beer or something.

ME: Definitely.

I take his phone, shoot a text to myself, smile and nod, then escape the situation.

The rest of the day I feel a sense of pride, I gave a strange kid a chance. I feel like a good person. As a group, we discuss the events with Blake, laugh and commiserate in our absurd struggle. We agree not to show his work this time. Back to step one. We get high and sit on the floor and make dumb jokes, watching the yellow and red of the headlights below us move across our ceiling.

The next day I show up to The Pier around sunrise. I’m put on patching duty. As more important grunts than me go around, hanging art, I fill in the holes made by their drills and their clumsiness. Some artists stand by and bark orders about their precious works. Most overseers are Gallery People in Nice Clothes. I’d learned long ago not to dress in my own peacock gear while installing, unless I wanted to destroy it, so I look nothing like them. Deep down, though, I know I’m more than them, and I resent them for not seeing it. To them, I’m a hunk of muscle. I’m a failed artist holding onto the dream through hard labor and proximity. I keep my head down and patch away.

I’m patching a gash in the wall next to a sculpture. It is composed of knots, tied succinctly along thick twine and starched so as to spread outward like tendrils. Square knots. Monkey’s Paws. It is wrapped in protective plastic to protect from my spackle. It is more important than me.

A slender man with grey hair slicked back approaches me. He is wearing a well cut suit coat, a wool button up, and a fanny pack. His badge is tucked into the inside pocket of his jacket, so I can’t read his name. He looks at the art through the plastic.

STRANGER: Please tell me you didn’t make this.

A British accent. He must have flown here just for the show. Could I be speaking with a gatekeeper of the international market?

ME: This isn’t really my style, honestly.

STRANGER: Thank goodness. It’s so bland.

ME: I feel like this year’s collections are very… decorative.

STRANGER: I wish they took more conceptual risks. Retreading ground is how you end up like the Roman Empire.

ME: The mixed media element introduced by the plastic drop cloth is riskier than this piece, if you ask me.

STRANGER: Good taste for a day laborer, you seem to know your way around a conceptual debate.

ME: Well most of us do this on the side, I have my own creative practice and my collective runs an Apartment Gallery. I’m only a “laborer” 35 hours a week.

STRANGER: Interesting. I’ve been trying to find the Outsider market in the Midwest. Do you have a card?

I feel shame, but hide it. I pat my overalls and feign surprise when nothing comes up.

ME: Seems I forgot them at home, dammit. Here let me send you my V-card.

STRANGER: No problem.

The stranger procures a business card and hands it to me. It is thick, it feels good in my hand, expensive. It reads:

JEREMY B.

Collector

Conversationalist

Good at massages.

His number and email is embossed on the bottom right corner of the back of the card. Humble.

JEREMY B.: Let me know next time you’re having a show.

ME: Definitely. Nice fanny pack, by the way.

JEREMY B.: A man of culture, I see!

He moseys away. I grab my heavy coat and step out for a cigarette. It’s the kind of winter air you don’t mind on this particular day. It doesn’t nip so much as wrap around you, and shake you awake. I inhale the hot and savory smoke, I feel an energy swelling in my gut. Surely I’ll remember this moment the rest of my life. I’ll recount it in my interview on Art 21 and young artists in dorm rooms will watch from their bare mattresses with jealousy and ill-informed hope. The smoke elevates my swelling heart. Our show will have to be good. More than good. Great.

I rush home in the afternoon. The sun is low and our gallery is perfectly lit. Golden and glowing, I tell the roommates the good news.

MELODI: You met a gatekeeper? What was he like? How did he dress? Tell me everything.

ME: We were both too busy for an extensive heart to heart, but he had good taste.

We look around, we see the feeling in each of our solitary hearts in each of our eyes. The time has come. We have to play our cards right.

ROCKY: None of my current projects are very ready to show

MELODI: I think, if we don’t make the most of this moment, we’ll regret it.

CHIP”Well, if we’re going to do a group show next week, I’m not wasting any more time, I have a lot to make.

We agree to seize the moment. Retreated into each of our respected cubbies, we drink coffee and smoke cigarettes. Only uppers tonight. Chip’s coke guy comes over and I buy some adderall. I crush up the blue pills and snort them, instead of wasting time waiting for my stomach to digest. I fold my mattress up against the wall and lay out my paintings. I try to look at them as a whole. What do they say that hasn’t been said? What can they say about me.

I grab three of my blank canvases and lay them out in between my completed pieces. All of them are abstract line work with no connecting visual themes, styles, or colors, but maybe I can find something in the darkness. I rip up some terrible figure drawings, I don’t know why I still had them to begin with—I barely passed figure drawings 110. The teacher didn’t appreciate my abstract playfulness. She said I lacked skill. I wheat paste them on all my paintings and add connecting lines between all the canvases, make a new, larger body. As the sun rises, I decide to go over all of them with primer. It looked terrible, pedestrian. The kind of art you’d see crust punks selling tied to chain link fences. What a waste of time.

I emerge from my room at dawn, defeated. I tiptoe through setting up the coffee pot, when I hear creaks behind me.

One by one, we all remove ourselves from our private spaces, the same look of defeat and resignation in each of our eyes. We can’t do this all on our own.

Between sleep deprivation and distraction, trying to come up with something new, I almost fire a nail gun through my thumb at work. Thankfully nobody saw, especially not Jeremy B.

At home that evening, we pitch possible solutions. In the background, Rocky streamed a live musical performance on Twitch. Some girl from New Zealand with a Ukelele performing covers of her favorite TV show themes, and taking requests. She seemed to already know most songs, and if she didn’t then she would learn them on the spot, in a matter of minutes she’d be strumming the theme to Cheers as if it had been inside her heart the whole time. Good art makes you feel, but these days, good art only makes me jealous.

CHIP: We can’t put ourselves out there as anything less than what we are trying to be. How can we expect him to know where in the art world we belong if we don’t show him?

ROCKY: If we half ass a show together, how can he even care that we know what we want to be when we grow up? I mean this pipe dream is starting to feel really silly.

MELODI: It’s not a pipe dream and it’s not silly.

ME: So do you have any better ideas?

MELODI: Well, yes. If you boil it down, we’re just trying to get our foot in the door. So why are we so worried which foot goes in which door? We get in the game and we navigate it to where we belong.

ROCKY: What are you suggesting?

MELODI: We curate a good show with a good artist, we only piggy back a little. Curate the shit out of it. Once we’re in the gallery side of things we can become fully self-funded.

ROCKY: Are there even any people left to show here? I feel like we’ve run the gamut.

ME: Actually. I might know a guy.

Seamus comes over Sunday, just before lunch. Most of our friends already know the code at the door, and just walk in, but Seamus had never been here before. So we did the whole song and dance routine. 

“Text me when you get here.”

“Yo! I’m here.”

“Cool. Be down in a sec.”

The front gate is a heavy iron fence, its rattle is loud and alarming every time we open and close it, and I hate it. I open the gate and Seamus is standing there. He’s in an ill fitting sports coat and a black t-shirt and jeans, both stained with white paint. Under one arm is an iPad with some papers jammed into the case, crumpled and sticking out and generally concerning. In his other hand is a black grocery sack. I can see the outline of a six pack hanging in the bag.

SEAMUS: I wasn’t sure what kind of thing this would be, so I may have over prepared.

ME: Don’t trip, kid, everyone’s hyped to meet you.

He breathes deeply.

SEAMUS: Okay.

He seemed entranced when we got upstairs. The way he looked around the apartment, like he had entered hallowed ground. Who does he think we are? 

When we do our introductions, he shakes everyone’s hand. Seamus gives them all his name, one by one. Even though we all knew he was coming. Even though each of us was in earshot for each introduction.

SEAMUS: I bought a six pack. It’s Old Rasputin. I don’t know, it felt apropos. You guys want one?

ROCKY: I’m good, it’s a little early for me.

CHIP: I don’t drink on sundays.u

MELODI: I’m not a ‘guy’ but thanks.

Apropos, Old Rasputin. Who is this kid trying to impress? Us?

ME: So why don’t you tell us about some of your performance work.

Seamus shrugs. He pulls out one of the Rasputins and cracks it open. He sits back and tries hard to look casual. He swigs the Rasputin.

SEAMUS: I’m trying to address a casual cultural atemporality with my pieces. It feels like, as a society, we’re in between movements. My goal as an artist is to diffuse those past movements, look into the future, and carve out spaces for the next. I try to do this by breaking down anachronistic traditions and reshaping them. I try to stay experimental, and make work that I don’t know how it will turn out, so that I, and the audience, can react to the process and the outcome the same way scientists react to new data. I like the idea of ‘peer reviews’ in art.

I feel a flash of anger. Does this fucking kid think he’s starting the next movement. This dweeb? With all his art-speak, he’s just fluffing himself up with absolutely no substance. What does he have to say? It’s not his turn, it’s ours. 

I calm myself. Remain objective for the meeting.

MELODI: Nice speech.

SEAMUS: Thanks, I practiced. A bunch.

I don’t think Seamus picked up on her sarcasm.

MELODI: I could tell.

CHIP: So what was your last performance?

SEAMUS: It’s called ‘Free Tequila’

CHIP: Neat, where’d you do it?

SEAMUS: Just in class.

CHIP: Do you have any documentation?

SEAMUS: I don’t.

CHIP: Okay, so tell us about it.

SEAMUS: Well, I’m really into Tom Marioni’s A Beer With Friends Is The Highest Form Of Art. So I got legally ordained online, and blessed 8 shots of tequila in class. Making holy water is actually a complicated process. There’s like 3 long prayers you have to do and you have to mix in salt. So it took a while. Which I thought was funny. Making them all sit and wait for the shots.

ROCKY: How many classmates actually took the shots?

SEAMUS: Nobody.

ROCKY: That’s a shame.

SEAMUS:  I didn’t think so. Experiments with unexpected conclusions are the ones we learn from the most.

We all look around at one another. Does this kid even know how to engage an audience? Seamus finishes his beer. He offers the six pack to us again and we all wave it away, so he takes another and keeps drinking. I’ve never seen someone put away an Imperial Stout so fast.

Seamus seemed to be on the ball when we met earlier in the week, but today he seems so awkward. Maybe he’s just stressed, I know how it felt at the end of my schooling, but his drinking and avoidance of eye contact seems downright disrespectful.

ME: So tell us about the performance you want to do here?

SEAMUS: It’s currently titled “No Town, Town Hall”

Seamus pulls all the loose crumpled papers from his iPad sleeve and passes them out. Each is a five page packet, each page has long walls of daunting text, and headers like “concept,” “materials,” “execution,” concerns,” “influences,” “reference images.”

It was professional adderall fueled horror. I couldn’t even begin to read it. Seamus lights up a cigarette without even asking.

MELODI: could you at least do that by the window, buddy?

SEAMUS: of course, buddy.

He moves by one of our windows. The one that always gets stuck. He opens it and a gust of chilled air blows in.

SEAMUS: Communities are always built around something. Right? Like Minded people seek each other out, and build spaces based on cohesive wants and needs. But what if the space came first? How would that work? It’s not impossible. Early tribes formed out of a desire for survival. Childhood best friends may only have a street address in common. I say we bring everyone in for the town hall meeting, create an agenda for said meeting, then we build the fiction of the town and community we’re all a part of. Together.

ME: what kind of materials are you thinking you’d need?

SEAMUS: Just 30 or so chairs and a chalkboard.

We all nod, trying to look like we’re thinking about it. Trying our best to still seem convivial, but our patience has been tested.

ROCKY: and how do you plan to get the audience engaged?

Seamus shrugs.

SEAMUS: with working a crowd I always try to keep it light, riff, no clear roadmap. Especially with something that’s supposed to become fully formed in process. I figured I’d just ask them what they want to name the town and build from there.

We ask some more questions, let him finish his cigarette. We’ve smoked plenty of tobacco in here but the smell filling the room feels alien this time, invasive, unwelcome. We wrap up the conversation and tell him we’ll email him later. We pretend we have more meetings to attend that day. I walk him out.

SEAMUS: thanks so much for the opportunity, you won’t regret it! And let me know if you’re up to anything later?

ME: yeah, of course. Talk soon.

And I close the gate on him. The loud and boisterous rattle reminds me of the sound of a church bell at noon. By the time I get back upstairs everyone is laughing. The tension had diffused and the smoke smell was on its way out.

MELODI: we can all agree that was a bust, right?

CHIP: I have no clue how that poor kid could manage a crowd.

ROCKY: yeah. That was sad. Seems like he’s just lonely. His art is like a cry for help. Trying to steal our friends and community? Quit crying. Go make your own.

MELODI: definitely not our aesthetic. Definitely doesn’t have “The Spirit.”

ME: sorry everyone, he seemed more promising when I first met him.

MELODI: it’s not your fault he turned out to be a creep. Did you catch him misgendering me?

CHIP: I did.

ROCKY: so are we just going to skip this year then?

MELODI: we can’t, that’s a death sentence for The Apartment. I think we just whip up the best group show we can muster and crank up the bullshit machine when the Gatekeeper comes through.

We all nod, solemnly.

ME: I’ll write the rejection email for Seamus and send it tomorrow morning, so it looks like we gave it some thought.

It takes three of us to close the window, and even after nightfall, the apartment feels unusually cold.

It’s nearing opening day. We’ve all been scrambling, pulling all nighters to make something of substance for the show. Chip hacked a Kinect and was programming a basic game that reacted to people passing in front of it. It tries to make eye contact with passers by, but it keeps glitching out, the eyes seizure out, then roll back in a disturbing way. He’s trying to make it look intentional by adding existential questions about fate and purpose that pop up when the eyes wig out. He’ll have a working version before the show, but deep down I think he knows there just isn’t enough substance to the concept. Melodi is using some old work she’s shown before, it wasn’t received that well at its original opening, so I don’t know why she’s going for it. Rocky’s experimental soundscape is...fine. It’s not far from what you would find at your average DIY noise rock show in Bridgeport or Pilsen or Humboldt. Though I would never say that to his face.

I burned all my paintings in frustration. I thought at the time the burnt husks would serve as good art in their own right, but there wasn’t enough left afterward, and the smell was horrid. The manic headspace I had been in faded quickly and I felt like as much a fraud as Blake Brightly. I borrowed Chip’s projector, and tore out a bunch of tape from some scrap cassettes I bought at Village Thrift. When I project one of Chip’s dogme 95 videos on the pile of loose tape it casts an aurora all over the walls and ceiling. It looks quite nice actually, but it’s a complete rip off of something I saw years ago. I’m just hoping it’s been forgotten.

Word’s been getting out about the gatekeeper. I called him last night and invited him to the show. He seemed sincerely enthused and it was refreshing to not feel like I needed to sell something to him. The event page we created weeks ago played our lack of preparedness as a suspenseful veil of secrecy, and once the rumors started spreading, the invites got out of hand. None of the people we wanted to be clicking accept, though. Just more broke artists like us.

Usually people pour in slowly, but this time, by four, maybe ten minutes after we finished installing everything, an hour before the opening, we were getting texts like:

“Hey can I swing by early? Let’s catch up I have a great bottle of scotch to show you.”

“Do you know when your gatekeeper is coming thru? Can’t wait 2 meet, wearing my best dress [salsa dancer emoji]”

“Dude so happy for you, let’s celebrate this weekend just u and me! I’m buying”

Frankly, I was exhausted before anybody had even arrived. I spent so long installing other people’s art and then my own once I got home. Each time I was confronted with their craft and success and my own failures to meet that standard. I wanted to fail at my job, just once, just to watch the pain in the eyes of the curators and the artists as their countless dollars rested in pieces on a cement floor in the fakest part of town. And then at home, the critical voice was as loud and annoying as Lollapalooza. I felt like a fraud, usually it takes a measure of success to develop imposter syndrome. Jeremy B was going to see right through the bullshit as soon as he opened the door, maybe that’s what the B stood for.

When Jeremy B. Arrived, we had a sizable crowd gathered in the gallery, drinking and chatting. Everyone stopped to stare when he walked in. Some tried to play it cool, but before he had finished making his way around each of our installations, a small crowd had swarmed him. I played it cool and hung out in the kitchen, I sipped a mid-range IPA and talked with whoever drifted by my post.

When I re-emerged, Chip was unplugging the projector part of my installation. I walk up calmly and shove him away from my art, trying not to make a scene. I plug it back in, and the light comes from the lens, shaky in the dusty air, it hits my pile of tape and reflects off it. Multicolored shapes cast across the room again, filling the space and re-establishing my voice as the dominant player in our collective. I whisper in a hushed menacing tone.

ME: What the fuck are you thinking? If we don’t look like we’re all playing nice nobody is going to think we can handle the pressure as a collective.

CHIP: chill out I just had a neat idea I wanted to try out, don’t be such a control freak.

ME: you should have tried it out yesterday. Don’t fucking touch my art again.

After that, I made sure to stand in view of my art and Chip the rest of the night. Everyone else in the collective was playing it cool. Rocky seemed to be folding into himself with self doubt, as he always does at these events, but there was nothing we could do to pull him out of the pattern, and he managed to network just fine despite it, so I paid him no mind. Melodi was flirting with all the rich art kids. She could spot them from a mile away. She never slept with them, but considered it good hunting practice for when she found the right rich Wall Street bro to fund her creative endeavors. Chip and I continued the same ‘play it cool and let them come to you’ but we kept on catching the other staring at the other, perhaps scheming.

Jeremy B. darted from spot in the room to spot in the room like a dancing bee. Sometimes he was moving toward crowds and social groups, sometimes he ran from them to have more time alone with the art. For a while he stood alone in front of Rocky’s speakers, his ear tilted toward it, his eyes closed. I could tell Rocky wanted to approach but couldn’t bring himself to do it. Maybe it was Jeremy’s closed eyes, lost in the sounds, maybe it was the storm I could hear raging in Rocky’s soul. 

Eventually Jeremy B. settled onto a pillow on the floor against the wall and stared at my light piece as it danced across the ceiling. I watched from the corner, pretending to be interested in what one of my barista friends was saying. He was slowly sinking further into the floor as his gaze drifted further into the ceiling. I made sure to approach once he was 75% submerged.

I sat down right next to him on the hardwood floor, cross legged.

ME: enjoying yourself, Jeremy?

JEREMY B: why yes, I am, everyone here is so nice and friendly!

ME: we’re a welcoming bunch. And I hope the art has lived up to your expectations as well.

JEREMY: oh it’s absolutely wonderful, what is this piece called.

I freeze for a moment.

ME: It’s untitled.

JEREMY B.: And what tapes did you use for this heap here?

ME: They’re all copies of Jurassic Park.

(This is a lie.)

JEREMY B.: is that what you’ve been projecting on it?

ME: oh that’s nothing, don’t worry about the projector, it’s about the reflections on the walls.

JEREMY B.: yes, the reflections…

Jeremy and I stare into the lights a while. Most of the crowd has dissipated, except for a few stragglers and attention seekers. Finally I ask him:

ME: so, Jeremy, what do you do?

Jeremy B: I’m a translator! I just moved here from London. I know English, obviously, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Chinese, Italian, Korean, and Gaelic.

ME: and you are a collector?

Jeremy B: Yes! I have a sizable collection of fossils that I’ve found on the beach, and a few rare coins.

I’m not sure what to say.

ME: Oh, here I was thinking you collected art! My mistake.

Jeremy B.: Oh, I’m so sorry, no that’s my bad! I suppose I can understand how misleading my card must have been. I don’t make the kind of money to afford your art, unfortunately, I’m so sorry, I have nothing to offer you besides friendship and support! I don’t suppose it helps to hear I also don’t want anything from you.

It doesn’t help. Right then a buzz goes off in my pocket. It’s a text from Seamus:

“Hey man, sorry I couldn’t make it tonight, hope the show went great, I’m sure it did. Let’s hang out soon! My schedule is wide open, just let me know when works for you.”

I sink into the floor next to Jeremy B. And exhale.