this is Thursday night art space station

"Enough," I say to myself. It's a waste of energy to think about doing something, remind yourself constantly to do that something, formulate procedures and protocols for making that something happen, and then berate yourself for not actually doing that something. I've had enough of this: thinking about writing, planning out when I am going to write and what I am going to write, and then not actually writing, an exhausting meta-exercise that no one should ever put herself through.

Last Thursday night I went to an art show in the Mission, one of those art shows that has a two-word name: a generic noun followed by "The," which is archaic and singular and abstract all at once, brief enough to be cool, mysterious enough to be edgy. I arrive three minutes after it starts, which isn't fashionable, isn't cool. Showing up early means that the event is a priority, or at least that you planned on going; it's clearly not an afterthought. Promptness can be read as eagerness, or overeagerness, and neither are fashionable. Earnest people can be unnerving.

One hour before the show starts, an email goes out to the entire guest list, which is a bounded list, without wiggle room, or at least that's what the email says. The email includes directives about where to smoke (the assumed object of this directive is cigarettes, not marijuana) and how to act towards the doorman (compassionate, respectful). Please don't bring friends, it says. The message is welcoming but firm; the word "private," not "secret" is used; the only capital letters are reserved for the name of the space itself  (all caps) and other proper pronouns, a stylistic choice I've always thought represented aloofness, quietness, discreteness.

The space, which is a warehouse loft, is marked with a light green balloon. I stroll as slowly as I can to the front gate because I have again miscalculated how long it would take me to walk from my apartment to this location. I had intended to be prompt, but not this prompt. I check my phone, and then think myself silly for trying to use my mobile device to loiter, so I go in. After I tell the doorman my name and he checks me off the list, I reciprocate, asking his name. "Gary," he says. "Nice to meet you Gary," I say, even though I'm confused. Didn't the email call him Polly?  I walk upstairs.

The warehouse is dark, not a single open space but a series of contiguous compartments, the first compartment being the sink and the kitchen and a misplaced couch; around the corner the larger gallery space, and behind that, a back area where drinks are being served. I walk up to a tall blonde who is wearing a short turquoise dress. She is in the far right corner, hanging up a piece of art. From behind, she looks like one of the Sweet Valley High twins with generic long yellow-blonde hair, leggy. I know she must be frazzled, just moments before the show, but this is the girl who invited me, who I'm supposed to meet, so I tap her on the shoulder. She spins around, and from the look on her face, it's clear I've caught her at a bad time. "I'm Natalie," I say, "but I'll let you do your thing. You look busy. Let's talk later." "Sorry!" she says, "we'll talk later."

I turn back around, and in front of the food table, there is an Asian guy with a boyish grin, with his hands folded across his chest, standing and watching as people are scrambling around trying to put finishing touches on the show, setting up the food, draping large pieces of cloths on the walls, moving equipment. "Hi," I  say to him, "I'm Natalie, I don't know anyone here." (Earnest people can be unnerving) I know who he is, but I pretend I don't. I want to hear him reveal himself. The day of the show, I realize I've read about this kid before, so I know who he is, the host of this party, the proprietor of this space. He introduces himself and welcomes me to the space. "Well, now you've met one of the hosts," he says, "and there's Alex," he says, as another guy walks by us." He also lives here."

Alex comes by and introduces himself. He has tanned olive skin, big eyes, a sharp, long nose, and he's wearing nothing under a buttoned up suit-vest, like a Chippendale playboy. Later, Alex invites me up to his room, which does not interest me as an innuendo, but as an artifact of the space itself, which I'm curious about. A gaggle of his friends are gathered in his room, which is a lofted space, with a low ceiling, no more than three feet in height. The ceiling is splattered with colorful paint, the floorboards painted white. Alex shows me some photographic negatives that he's working on, which are scattered like detritus on the floor and on an old light box. Two guys are sitting on the floor, one trying to melt plastic candles, which isn't really working, another on the couch, sitting next to a brown-haired girl wearing brown boots. They're passing a pax around, and they don't acknowledge me, even when I plop onto the couch next to the girl, whose name I find out is Brittany. I don't know what I'm doing here, I pass the pax along but don't partake, this is a situation I have been in more times than I can count: overwhelmed by a situation most people consider normal, trying to make sense of all the stimuli around me, made uncomfortable by the sheer number of things going on, but too intrigued to escape, as is my foremost impulse.

The night passes quickly. I've strategized ahead of time: I will talk to people for at least twenty minutes at a time, and in between the long conversations, I will recede into dark corners and rest. Besides Alex, I talk to Schuyler or Skyler, who is a film director. We talk about horror movies, and how much I hate them. "You know, I have this theory," he tells me, "that people who don't like horror movies are pretty cool. They're more sensitive." "I'm a highly sensitive person," I reply. "I hate sci-fi too, but I don't have a good reason for that." I talk to Brian from Lansing, Michigan, who now lives in Korea and tries to speak Korean to me because I am Asian. I stare blankly at him and tell him I have no idea what he is saying. I talk to Laura and Chris, who are a vocals-bass duo. That night they are the first to perform, Chris wearing an atrocious mask, Laura in her black bat-wing shirt screaming into the microphone while staring into the eyes of random people unfortunately exposed in the front row. They seem so different onstage (terrifying, bold) than in person when I talked to them (docile, gentle). Later I run into my friend Amy, a skinny, skittish redhead who knows her way around this place; I can tell she is more comfortable than me but less relaxed, a product of expectations and experience, of which I have none. Later, as Amy is dancing in the middle of the gallery space, I fill up my plastic cup at a sink full of dirty dishes, over and over again, trying to drink as much water as I can, trying to avoid the crowd, the noise. I spend ten minutes staring at a collage of C-list celebrity faces, a multivariable polka-dot formation, before I decide I am tired, and I walk home, but not before saying bye to Gary the doorman.

these are O'Keeffe's leaves

There's a Georgia O'Keeffe painting at the DeYoung Museum right now called Brown and Tan Leaves, 1928, which she painted while at Lake George, the family estate of her photographer-husband Alfred Stieglitz.

Unlike some of her other paintings--luminous abstractions of lilies, magenta-pinks highlighted with iridescent whites--this painting is not particularly dashing or impressive. Not haunting like her skulls, or sweeping like her flowers. The leaves are ordinary and homely, fallen slips of foliage with torn and tattered edges, fading, dying, drying out; in their last phase of life, they are the leaves that would dissolve under our reckless feet.

But the story that accompanies this painting unnerved and captivated me (don't stories always make grand and mythic the most banal of objects?). According to the exhibition curator, the leaves symbolized the players in a love triangle O'Keeffe was caught in: the biggest leaf, her husband Alfred Stieglitz; the medium leaf at the bottom left, herself; the small leaf in the upper corner, Dorothy Norman, the woman with whom Stieglitz was having an affair with at the time. Stieglitz was forty years older than Norman, and O'Keefe despaired at news of this affair. Her expression of this despair was through painting, using these objects and forms to convey the ideas, feelings, and circumstance--that she did not know how to put out in the world in any other way. More than mere projections, the leaves were a blind man's cane, doing her bidding, touching the treacherous surfaces around her in ways she could not*.

Earlier in the exhibition, there was an O'Keeffe quotation printed on the wall: "I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say in any other way ... things I had no words for."

I am fascinated by this: the way we birth our deepest pains and desires and secrets in the world, in myth and symbol and story--and how so often the pathos of those channels is more rich and expansive than if we told the story itself, as a literal chronicle. That there is some other way to convey who we are--by metaphor, by symbol, by allegory--somehow makes the story that much more powerful because it is proto-typical, archetypal, mono-mythical, universal, legendary (this is nothing new, I know, but lately the power of symbolism has impressed me like a fiery brand)--and I use all those words with their etymologies and associations in mind: proto, meaning primal; archetypum, meaning first-molded**.

In being able to extract the essence of a feeling, a situation, an occurrence, and turn that into a symbol--another story--you are recognizing the universality of your experience, and of course by that--you understand that you are not alone and that you do not exist singularly and that there is someone else out there--many someones out there--with whom your experience is resonant, even if you do not know it yet. You are supporting someone, now or maybe a century later, and that someone is kindred or will have kindred feelings--how those feelings are borne over and over again through our descendants as labors and tear and sweat. The details are changing; technologies develop; circumstances evolve; trees are dying, and yet the myth remains; it is re-enacted again.

We have primal urges to tell our stories; Knowing that this urge is instinctive, natural, ordinary is a relief (how many times I've wanted to write that short story to tell of my pains; how many times have I loved a character because she seemed to understand my insecurities).

Who knows for a fact if O'Keeffe's leaves are symbols at all? Who knows if her objects were the mythical objects we want them to be? But alas, they are out of her hands now, and they are ours to steward and keep; so may they be the stories we tell ourselves and each other, over and over again.



*The other analog I thought of for this was the Patronus in the Harry Potter books... a spirit animal guardian of sorts... not only a protector but a communicator, and I feel like the objects that O'Keeffe found in nature often became her talismen, or at least I'd like to believe this to be so, even if to indulge my own myth of O'Keeffe herself. 
**And then there are Jungian archetypes, which are "universal, archaic patterns that derive from the collective unconscious [...] autonomous and hidden forms that are transformed once they enter consciousness and are given particular expression by individuals." 

this is the authenticity of absurdity

*Cindy Sherman's work did not resonate with me when I first encountered it four years ago. By "resonate" I mean I did not care for her work the way I care for Mark Steinmetz's photographs or Lieko Shiga's images, images that have been usurped by my consciousness because I believe they are as a part of my life as they are of the photographers who created them. I thought I understood the basic gist of Sherman's work: the theatricality, the drama, the self-consciousness, and the alienation, but looking back, I realize I had merely taken a glance and then looked away.

*On a recent visit to a retrospective on her work at the MOMA, I spent an entire afternoon with four decades of her work. Spending this amount of time just observing and pondering is like taking a swim in an artist's consciousness. It takes this kind of investment for me to actively engage in a mental wrestle with an artist's work, rather than let it be a fleeting sensation or afterthought.

*The MOMA retrospective traces her work from the 1970s to the present and includes 170 photographs, with focus on her key series, including "Untitled Film Stills" (1977-1980), her history portraits (1989-90), and her society portraits (2008). Though her "Untitled Film Stills" are smaller in size, her more recent work is larger-than-life, whose highly saturated and contrasting palette magnifies the grotesque nature of the ideals and types she portrays.

*I want to talk about Sherman's later work, the less famous work that followed "Untitled Film Stills," because upon seeing these works I was able to understand her previous works better. Some of these works are at first glance disgusting and unnatural. There is a historical portrait in which Sherman is dressed up as a busty medieval woman. She wears fake rubbery breasts that hang limply off her chest, a barely visible stream of milk spraying from her nipple. There are portraits of society women dressed in flashy, metallic colors; these are images you wish were caricatures but aren't. Some photographs are sans Sherman in them, messy images of vomit and debris that are suggestive of dark but familiar narratives that elude our day-to-day conversation. We are disgusted at first because these images invade our consciousness even though we often ignore these kinds realities to preserve our own identities. It's easier to evade the absurd tragedies that surround us than to be okay with the dissonance that the absurdities cause. The subversiveness of these images becomes palpable when we realize that this absurdity is a tangible reality.

*The hyperbolic self-costuming and makeup are intentional. That grotesque artifice in plain view is magnetizing and alluring; it turns viewers into voyeurs, with the same affectations of reality TV. On one hand, we sense a difference in the image, an aura that rebels against our sense of cultural propriety. On the other, we recognize this grotesque artifice within ourselves and identify with what we see. This recognition is polarizing: it can be the realization that leads to embrace or the rejection that leads to repression.

*In some ways, the entire exhibit felt like one big hallucination, which is an irony unto itself because the very definition of a hallucination eludes self-awareness. But if the definition of a hallucination is the perception of an absent stimulus, then it very well makes sense that there was part of me that wanted to believe it was a hallucination, even as it was one of the most surprisingly real photography exhibits I've seen in a long time.