Tents
I haven’t had a full time job since August. Unemployment was actually very nice for a while, but the sense of relief I felt after leaving my last gig has since given way to more…existential emotions. I bought a copy of The Artist’s Way a few weeks ago, if that gives you an indication of my mental state. I’m not in dire financial straits or anything, but the fundamental underpinnings of my life all feel very provisional, very tentative. For the first time in more than a decade, I’ve seriously considered pulling up stakes and leaving New York. Given the right opportunity, it might be wise to flee the whole fucking United States.
Anyway, untethered as I am, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about tents. And when I think about tents I think about Markus Lüpertz. Way back in 1965, when he was just 24, Lüpertz began a whole series of juicy paintings that muddle the distinction between representation and abstraction, inspired by illustrations of tents in a department store catalogue. I don’t think he was concerned at all with the themes of impermanence that are preoccupying me lately, but I just find them totally irresistible. This is one of my favorites:
I’m writing this looking out at the chunky little snow drifts that have accumulated on my neighbor’s windowsills. I’m not a fan of winter (I left Chicago for a reason), but this weather reminds me of the Chicago-based artist Michael Rakowitz’s paraSITE project: inflatable shelters for unhoused people that attach to the exhaust vent of a building’s heating system, constructed from not much more than tarps, trash bags, and duct tape. A lot of artists who “interrogate” social and political issues just make work that ends up sitting in a gallery, but Rakowitz and his collaborators have distributed hundreds of paraSITE shelters in New York, Baltimore, Cambridge, and Chicago since the project began in 1998. They somehow feel particularly relevant right now, as we all watch the citizens of Minneapolis (that other famously frigid city) react to a campaign of state terror with bravery and solidarity.
I spent some of my blizzard downtime yesterday flipping through a few neglected books, including the 2019 exhibition catalogue for The Young and Evil at Zwirner. I like this photograph of the painter Jared French behind a tree in Provincetown, its branches covered in the silky web of a colony of tent caterpillars. I hadn’t thought about tent caterpillars since I was in middle school, but if you also grew up in central Kentucky, you might remember these ugly little fuckers because they cause Mare Reproductive Loss Syndrome, a condition that can make a pregnant mare lose her foal. From 1999 to 2001, nearly 30% of the Thoroughbred foal crop in central Kentucky died from conditions related to MRLS, which made them public enemy #1. Horses are big business down there, and even people with zero connection to the industry feel a weird cultural loyalty to it. I remember marching around my suburban cul-de-sac dutifully stomping on every tent caterpillar I saw, leaving little puddles of green goo all over the street.
Speaking of bugs, I love Randi Malkin Steinberger’s photo book No Circus, which captures buildings in Los Angeles that have been shrouded in fumigation tents. Some of these “termite tents” emphasize the underlying architecture like a Christo installation. Others transform structures into carnivalesque blobs. They all look very jaunty, though of course they’re pumped full of poison. Something very LA about that.
Tent caterpillar thing giving me 2020 latern fly flashbacks…
The Artist Way should come with a few warnings—for tears and unexpected change. Still, I think I prefer life after TAW.