It's All About Things

Now, I know many of my peers have harshed on Maldonado, but I’d like to take this opportunity to play devil’s advocate a little. I see the incongruities of his shantytown at Three Walls. I see the contradiction inherent in his commentary on the “art world” vs. the way this show operates, but I think there is a lot here that sparks some thought.

“It’s All About Things” was, one could say, an interactive, participatory installation, by Luis Maldonado, an MFA at Purchase College. It showed at the Three Walls gallery in Chicago for the month of March.

Upon my arrival to the gallery, I was greeted by a friendly young woman. She welcomed me to the gallery, briefly explained the gist of the show, and offered her help had I any questions. Continuing through a curtain that separated the nondescript West Loop building from the supposedly culturally significant pith (and the purpose of my visit,) I found a relatively unimpressive space.

“Maldonado’s bartering shantytown,” to me, sounds like a labyrinthian series of small structures, (I’d even allow many separations), breaking up a larger, unaltered space. I was expecting filthy treasures in dusty corners. Art that felt like used pots and pans. The phrase evokes feelings of necessity, use, functionality (dare I use such charged words as “relation” and “practice”?), but the “shantytown” I found felt much more like, well, a small gallery space with mild partitions for the sake of… partitions.

Here, “shantytown” operates in the very form of my personal evocation - in the contrast between my connotations and the reality of the space. In Louis Maldonado’s shantytown, the limited space and awkward quiet shared between a gallery hostess and art-consumer is muted by blaring Jazz and NPR.

From the floors, covered in varied cardboard checkerboard colors, to the blue tarped ceiling, the shantytown space was, in fact, separated from all surfaces of the institutionally ubiquitous white cubed gallery experience. Maldonado achieved this much distinction of his space vs. “theirs.” (The institution? The art marketplace? It wasn’t quite clear, but I don’t think it mattered).

Maldonado’s smaller pieces were scattered around the space. Watercolor sketches hung from a clothesline. Themed paintings filled a small “room” (there were separations, however spatially unimpressive/arguably ineffective). A television connected to a karaoke machine ran images of American pop culture icons with the text: “Welcome to the United States.” Toy soldiers and other figurines filled unmarked commercially charged display boxes. A small pile of miniature protest signs lay next to them, crying, in the loudest voice afforded by a two-inch piece of cardboard: “Say No to the Establishment!” “Question the Economic System!” “What Smells?” “I love you!” from their popsicle sticks.

As is apparently fitting for this era of the art-experience, a neat lounge with muraled walls, folding chairs, and a copy of Art Forum comically demanded a good portion of the limited space in the gallery.

I had the freedom to snigger if I wanted to (as well as to refuse to react if I didn’t want to.) I visited when Maldonado wasn’t there.

I visited the shell of the art event. I did not visit the art. I felt privileged for this, and markedly more able to navigate and interpret the space without a relation-crazed artist breathing down my neck to make me perform some stunt or another. I’m kidding, of course, but I do think my experience with this work was much more comfortable and a bit more personally interpreted having not encountered the entertainer himself – which is, of course, what Maldonado functions as when he hosts karaoke, theatrical trades, and confrontational interactions with all of these… things. (Which would otherwise be nothing but!)

In his statement, Maldonado notes that the “things” which his work is all about are derived from Heidegger’s use of the word “to debunk the phrase ‘a work of art.’” Here, I think the things are things. The work of art is about the things. = IT.

IT is not the things. IT is the work of art. IT is ABOUT the things.

IT is all ABOUT things. Is that a bit better?


I was not allowed to barter without the artist present.



***

So, feeling a bit like an archeologist finding traces of this so-called “art,” I moved through the space, looking for artifacts that would explain what made this shantytown function.

What I gathered was a sense of the effect of “It’s All About Things” as the most forcibly “real” art-space the artist could put together. This, of course, went well with the events that often occupied the space, though they were not occurring during my visit.

Recalling the Kwan essay we read early in the quarter, I interpreted this show as an exemplification of site specificity in all its contemporary glory. “It’s All About Things” functions as an installation – site specific in its installation by the artist himself. It functions as performance when he is there to barter, and it functions as a relational event – significantly more entertaining and performative than Tiravanija’s dinner, while keeping a similar level of participant interaction.

Maldonado’s bartering provides a market structure for the participants in his work. They may meet at a bartering session (a karaoke performance, or whatever). He interacts with them. They may strike up a conversation with one another. Regardless, they coexist. But Maldonado ups the ante Tiravanija lays down. He not only gets people together, but engages them in one of the most universally shared activities that connects us in reality: he creates a platform for trade – a makeshift market – and what could be more real? Site specificity qua time specificity qua event qua stuff. Solid stuff you can hold and put on your coffee table and wear and show people later. Be they Maldonado sketches (these are not his art. They are things.) or someone’s apartment keys.

Now, this may be taking things too far, but is this a new type of specificity for Relational Aesthetics?

Art: site specificity:: Relational Aesthetic pieces: tangible good-based interactions?

***

But I, the archeologist, can only see what’s been left by this artist and his stuff-patrons. I cannot see into his, or Relational Aesthetics’ futures to contextualize these things.

The young woman asks me again if I have any questions. I shake my head, sitting alone in a metal folding chair listening to a story on NPR about the marching of the elephants down 34th street to Madison Square Garden. They’re unloaded off of train cars in Queens and marched through the Midtown tunnel to Manhattan in the middle of the night, when the traffic is tame. Apparently scores of people come to watch the necessary parade. A brief time, weather, and traffic update let me know that this was not an absurd staged recording for the piece, but real time radio. I loved that I questioned this. This was everything specific, and it only happened to me.

Smiling with amusement and appreciation for the connection I had just felt with the elephant watchers, I closed my notebook and went back through the curtain to the symbolically defined real world. I didn’t get to trade my stuff, but I did have the opportunity to see some things as things – and think about what that meant - a unique experience of its own in that particular shantytown.