Why the museum store is the coolest place in the building: Part One
Just the other day I received an invitation from the artist Gary Baseman: me and his other 888 Facebook best mates would have the chance to purchase the latest in his commercially and critically successful series of vinyl dolls, based on his paintings. For 185 clams I could buy a 6 1/2 inches tall HotChaChaCha made of green vinyl and contained (for my own safety) in his own black coffin box. Of the edition of 500, the first 50 are available hand-signed by the artist with a limited edition edition giclée. Although I can’t afford one at present, I salute this as another example of the artist’s latest wrinkle in a fierce strategy of self-promotion and - more importantly - self-determination (even though my craw fills at his use of the term “giclée,” which is just bloody French for inkjet print. Get over it artists. Stop labeling your prints in French as if it adds some ethereal additional value. You’re full of merde.).
Baseman has long been an idolized fixture of that West Coast art scene of a hybrid and localized mix of pop art/fine art worlds. He controls his income generation and brand identity far more comprehensively than that of the usual artist; wherein the creator of unique works waits, generally passively, for his dealer to deliver an occasional sale. Baseman, on the other hand, gets down into the muck of things, and this is no bad thing it seems… Not only does Baseman have waiting lists for his paintings, but also for many limited editions - iterated as those many different vinyl figures, handbags, coasters, and so on.
Maybe it’s because Baseman’s moon-eyed anthropomorphic characters seem plucked from that surreal era of Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies - when cartoons were weird and scary before they became comforting - and therefore attract buyers across gender, class and Tim Burton lines; but whether you love or hate them they are symptomatic of the “pervasive school” (a Baseman-invented term) where artists are blurring the lines between what the ‘authentic object’ is; far beyond the academic deconstructionism of Marcel Duchamp and his pissoir.
With Baseman, or contemporaries such as SHAG or Mark Ryden, what is the dynamic - the endgame - here? What is that tarantula/wasp desert dance? Is it a resonance of the painting that you can’t afford? Or the doll you can? And if you can’t afford the doll, is it the fridge magnet? And does a Gary Baseman fridge magnet denote a different relationship between purchaser and artist - something more spiritual and shared - than the one between a buyer and Leonardo da Vinci when purchasing a fridge magnet of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre?
Which got me to thinking: that the coolest place to hang around in at the art museum is, actually, not in the galleries but in the store. In a recent visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, I spent more time in the store just off Grand Avenue - a wonderfully appointed affair, all glass and curved wood and those nice little stainless steel rivets - than I did the galleries. This is not to say that I didn’t spend adequate time in the galleries, mind you (most MOCA shows are well worth the visit. And the restaurant has these Joachim Splichal-creations that - I think, though my palette could have been a little ‘out’ due to an earlier wasabi incident - are some kind of drizzled aioli lettuce prosciutto with Serbian sun-dried tomato foccacio combos that are to die for); only that I spent more time in the store.
So how did I spend my two (okay, three) store hours? I pored over all those art magazines that (like 6 1/2 inch vinyl dolls) I also can’t afford, absorbing all that sumptuous and incisive… rhetoric. I agonized over the choice between different Murakami cushions (pink and huge at $899, or a rainbow medium size for $279), before realizing that I don’t know any retarded twenty-two year old goth chicks to smoke banana leaves on them with (note: if you are a twenty-two year old goth chick, retarded or otherwise, who wants to smoke banana leaves with me, please send photos to my wife’s Facebook page - Ellen Herbert - where she will defy my will and forward them to Gary Baseman’s page). I giggled at the prospect of buying Marcel Dzama’s Sad Ghost salt-and-pepper shakers ($75) and putting salt in the “pepper ghost” and vice versa (it’s okay, he’s from Winnipeg, Canada, and the only salt he knows about is the stuff you put on the roads in October…). I tried on so many t-shirts ($28) - Robert Rauschenberg, Yoshitomo Nara, Barbara Kruger - that I felt giddier than Julia Roberts in a montage. I deliberated over buying a Raymond Pettibon tote bag (also $28) but realized I couldn’t afford to put anything in it, and that without the odd Marc Newson Dish Doctor ($69) or Josef Albers plate ($37), that Pettibon’s Surfer image would fail to “carve the wave,” and flop in the most disconsolate way as I exited blinking into the downtown sunlight.
There are two really really great things about museum art stores. The first is that - unlike a porn store - a museum store is cool because the museum attendants (unlike the enormous Clydesdales that run the XXX frottage front counter) are nervous little horses who won’t bother you: all unisex emo hair, chin-piercings and lime green eco-fabric wifebeaters. They may well take affront at you spending three hours rifling through their mags, but the very thought of having to approach a customer and say “Hey, bud, this ain’t a lib’ry” sends them bowing backwards like sub-dressage Lippizaners, nostrils-flared, into their curved wood and glass stalls. You get absolutely no shit in a museum store. Go try it sometime. Toss the catalogues on the floor. Tell ‘em Simon Herbert fuckin’ sent you. Switch the lights on and off. Tell ‘em you’re the love child of the GuerillaGirls and Picasso’s melanoma and you’re cruising for some eternal verities mix-it-up.
Seriously: try it. The security guard they’ll sic on you will be glad of the excitement (he commutes from El Sereno for $8 an hour, loves cerveza not beer, and won’t know the difference between your fake mace can and a Frida Kahlo puppet), and will just hold your arm gently in the most polite manner as the manageress calls the curatorial department to find out if one of the ‘young turks’ has escaped. Once they’ve established you’re not part of a visiting legitimate arts group, you’ll shortly be released under your own cogniscence and, back on the street, can check your partner’s chocolate razr pics of your “Rage Against The Catherine Opie door” (this “unusually tall door combines brightly colored stain glass with elf imagery” at $8,000), high five, and scuttle off back to your artist’s-run basement and a most excellent powerpoint on digital Situationism over some two dollar upchuck. You don’t even need to buy a ticket to get into MOCA itself. Just walk past the box office and go straight into the store front…
The second great things about museum art stores is that they are just, simply… great: fantastic petri dishes in which museum-established artists make ‘stuff’ available to visitors, while other artists yet to be initiated into the museum fold with retrospectives or suchlike come in - as it were - through the back door, based on hidden and non-self-regulated rules of supply and demand and tribal assumptions of coolness, and also make ‘stuff’ available to visitors. The dynamics and manifestos attendant on these positions vary radically and with good cause; they’re by no means necessarily oppositional, but definitely formed from different perspectives and experiences. The rules of engagement, for artist, store purchaser and buyer alike, are quite complex (so much so that this is the first of a two-part blog on the subject).
When I interviewed Baseman a while back for a magazine article, he told me this in terms of institutional support for his art: “The museum stores have been much more supportive, actually, than the museums. The problem with the museums is that they have to program shows so far in advance they are terrified to create an “event” that may die out by the time the exhibition comes to fruition. Everyone is scared of making a mistake, they’re a different generation.”
Next week in Part Two: the concept of the Salon des Refusés in Paris 1836 (no giclées then, baby, and no surrender…), how it has impacted on artists since, and how nobody has to be refused any more no how…