I experience the world through images. If you catch a glimpse of my camera roll—forever at the cusp of its storage capacity—you will see collections of people lying on orange benches, shapes of shadow and sunlight, my father in his blue-and-white striped pajamas.
I call myself an “artist.” I am caught between my idealistic wish for artmaking to be a simple career path and my understanding that art does not ensure financial stability. My fantasy is that art will exist apart from the world of capitalist consumption.
It was with this thought in mind that I entered Galerie LeLong & Co. on 26th Street in Manhattan. Here, between September 5th and October 19th, Leonardo Drew mounted a solo exhibition, purposefully untitled. Though born in Tallahassee, Florida in 1961, Drew was raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He attended Cooper Union College and Parsons School of Design, and now builds installations from seemingly scrap material.
This fall, Drew split Galerie LeLong into two areas: a central installation space and a small room on the right-hand side. Initially, the pieces of broken wood at the end of the hallway rendered the latter space invisible. As I walked into the installation, I found myself stepping on black-painted plywood skins and gazing at two massive towers of thinly torn sheets of the same material. As soon as the tallest of the two structures hit the ceiling, it curved over the viewer in a concave-down parabola. I felt enclosed, hugged by the wood. On the walls, Drew pastes more black plywood and other unrecognizable shapes of wood and plaster. It was as if the wall adornments constituted excess material that could not fit into the towers. Graphite tracings of these shapes covered the white walls. With these pencil lines, Drew evoked outlines of brooms and hammers found on wood shop walls. I slowly began to assimilate into the ecosystem that Drew had created; black wood scraps permeated each plane of my sight. I was in Drew’s studio. I could smell sawdust, evidence of building. I had drifted into this intimate space of process—a space so often hidden from the viewing public. The work held me and asked my mind to wander.
A tour group on the other side of Drew’s towers, however, tore me from this fantasy. I cannot recall what the young guide and the elderly visitors were discussing. Regardless, the voice of the guide bombarded me with the acute awareness that I was standing in a store. The piece of art with which I had begun to engage in a relationship became impersonal. I was no longer in Drew’s studio. Fluorescent light bulbs and clean white walls announced themselves to me. I re-entered the gallery space.
Reflecting on my visit to the gallery that night, I realized that I never ventured to the other side of the towers—the side that the tour group truly inhabited. To my subconscious self, the towers became objects that these elderly couples were purchasing. While I could not determine whether these individuals were art collectors, the institution of buying and selling that they seemed to represent felt separate from my lived experience. Perhaps my aversion to the capitalist enterprise of the gallery manifested itself, for me, in terms of what space I occupied.
The anxiety about consumption is central to the set-up of this installation. The gallery, in generic terms, is a public institution—open and free to enter. Simultaneously, it is a space in which to purchase art. Like any other gallery installation, Drew’s piece challenged the gallery’s commercial identity. His work most likely could not be sold and, even if it was marketable, it could never exist in the same way that it existed in Galerie LeLong, once moved.
It is common for artists to place installations in gallery spaces. Think James Turrell’s Night Passage or Chris Burden’s Bed Piece, for example. In comparison, Drew imagines a different kind of intangibility into being. Turrell asserts the impossibility of holding light, and Burden creates an aura of discomfort. Drew, in contrast, stages a central tension between art-as-experience and art-as-product. The massive quantity of wood suggests that this space is not simply designed for a single artist. Rather, it is a factory-like site of construction. It is a place to build and replicate those objects. Notably, this factory is not presently in use, leaving a post-apocalyptic site of industrialization standing in its place. The blackness of the plywood evokes charcoal after a fire. The wood is splintering and the towers are falling. Drew seems to fear the factory and wishes for its collapse.
The exhibition’s press release comments, “At once monumental and intimate in scale, [Drew’s] work recalls post-Minimalist sculpture that alludes to America’s industrialized past and can be interpreted as reflective of the current environmental crisis.” Even the title of the piece, Number 427, alludes to the impersonal and reproducible, qualities often antithetical to artmaking. Perhaps, then, Drew does not call into question the entire project of capitalism. Instead, Drew criticizes the contemporary culture of mass production and mass consumption—which contributes to greenhouse gas effusion. Installation art may ostensibly be a way to escape the craze of producing ‘stuff’ for the market.
Still, though Drew erects this small revolution, he also includes a secluded room in LeLong devoted to what appear to be ‘sellable’ objects. On the white walls hang square conglomerations of the splintering plywood. While the wood pieces are not uniform in shape, they come together to form aesthetically precise grids. What once was chaotic is now clean and systematized. I can imagine one of these elderly couples making an offer, musing about hanging the work above their dining room table.
I cannot blame Drew for the production of these grids. After all, his square works are strikingly beautiful, powerful in their own way. More importantly, Drew is a 21st-century artist who needs to make a living. I do not walk away from writing with any clarity; where I may exist within the art industry is murky. Like Drew, I am stuck in contradiction: I attempt to create the experience of art as environment amidst a society devoted to things. The photo of my father in his pajamas lives in my camera for my nostalgia; it is not an image for sale.
