ART FAIR SYNOPSIS
Last night I roamed in technicolor every aisle, booth and wall of an art fair until my feet hurt, saw every square inch of every large painting or painted bijou in cut aluminum and almost touched every millimeter of dripped plaster on melted plastic. I saw again the seductive faces of sometime friends who explained the importance of what culture they had to sell while holding their pockets wide open for deposit of my hard-earned funds in the unlikely exchange of garish color and twisted figures for elderly dollars. They call the movement post-contemporary. Last night I saw a silent movie in which nothing moved, the tail end of a recent market without much history in which almost all of its dollar value had shrunk by ninety percent in a single post-contemporary year. America was suddenly like Italy after the Renaissance or France after the war when quality imploded and art lost all invention and most of its intensity. When history repeats with true novelty it usually finds a different location and a new direction, sometimes even a new audience. I turned in my bed last night and watched the movie several more times until I got up to pee and the dream disappeared.
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Michael Salcman
Review by Manny Blacksher
I quickly warmed to Michael Salcman’s “Art Fair Synopsis.” It’s intriguing. A “synopsis” is a summary or condensed outline. It brings something that broadly includes lots of study and experiences, many careful looks, together (‘syn’+) into a single coherent appearance (‘opsis’). A synopsis is an ‘at-a-glance’ presentation of something that requires many glances.
Michael Salcman’s prose poem employs much word-play, many double-entendres—a real strength. Its context is framed as a dream in which the poetic persona, the ‘speaker’, wanders with Sisyphean determination through a familiar outside display and amateur market of artworks typically by members of the community. Salcman’s speaker takes pains to “roam [. . .] every aisle, booth and wall [. . . ] until my feet hurt [and see] every square inch of every [. . .] painting,” large and small. Indeed, the narrator examines every brushstroke and cunning application of materials to render each work, without finding much in the crafting of the art to comment on. The title indicates that the poem stands as a single all-at-once appraisal of a diverse exhibition that demanded many painfully attentive looks. The poem’s speaker has a wryly caustic, satirical personality. It’s a dream narrative; we can only speculate about what might have compelled the ‘art-appreciator’ to trouble with examining every artwork with painstaking attention. What’s plain is that, having completed the comprehensive survey and troubled to speak with artists, many of whom are acquaintances, the viewer regrets the chore and is disgruntled. He’s taken immense pains to ‘appreciate’ all the works on offer, and somehow the value of the combined experience has been less than the sum of the parts. With urbane but still caustic irony, the poem’s offered as a one-take appraisal, a brief but “fair” evaluation, of the ‘current’ state of art as it’s exemplified by an open-air exhibition/market experienced as a wearisome tour in a dream.
The poem’s speaker/art-viewer cannot show such incredible attention and interest in all the details [he] observes in each piece without, naturally, being drawn into conversation with the works’ creators, whom the speaker acknowledges are “sometime friends.” This ‘portrait’ (or ‘synopsis’) of interactions with eager, earnest, enterprising “friends” is an effective though nasty bit of careful wordplay:
I saw again the seductive faces of sometime friends who explained the importance of what culture they had to sell while holding their pockets wide open for deposit of my hard-earned funds in the unlikely exchange of garish color and twisted figures for elderly dollars. They call the movement post-contemporary.
To be direct, one plausible reading of this passage is that the syntactically end-loaded motivation of the artists is solely to induce “deposit of my hard-earned funds in the unlikely exchange of garish color and twisted figures for elderly dollars,” and this “movement” of somebody’s hard-earned cash—perhaps even an “elderly” pensioner’s finite nest egg—into a younger, ambitious, not-yet-‘bankable’ artist’s “pocket”. . . —transmigration of those venerable “elderly dollars” into the pockets of young artists is the direct antecedent of the following sentence: artists call that “movement post-contemporary.” With a little cynicism, we can read that the “post-contemporary” movement of art objects into an ostensibly ‘retired’ art-enthusiast/art-investor’s home collection involves the art-lover/investor’s enthusiastic purchase of ‘post-contemporary’ expressions in “garish color and twisted figures” in exchange for the aesthetically tedious, nigh-on artistically bankrupted mechanically reproduced traditional engravings of pyramids, eyes, eagles, arrows, and dead presidents’ heads on the commonest of artistic currencies, those old tight-fisted Yankee “dollars.”
As art-objects, worn slips of industrial linen with green-grey allegorical emblems and sly water-marks are still mostly available ‘wherever finer commodities are sold’. Why hold onto those old lamps when you can trade a fistful of the wretched things for excitingly “garish” new art with defamiliarized figural subjects, sure to confuse if not dismay your less-post-current visitors.
The speaker relates another memorable experience at the dream art fair: [he watched] “a silent movie in which nothing moved.” The late-modern ‘experimental project’ of filming an immobile object for a long time period—like Andy Warhol/ Jonas Mekas’ 8-hour cinematic ‘exhibition’ of the Empire State Building at different times of day— is now almost as venerated as the dollar bill’s fading pyramid and eye. But Salcman’s viewer means some things more. First, whatever this cinematic spectacle was that was immobile (or maybe endlessly repeating with so little difference frame-to-frame) it didn’t affect the viewer, who was left “unmoved. ”Second, this overly-familiar filmed object isn’t a dioramic scene that suggests no ‘change’ but narration of a trend Salcman’s art-appreciator is too familiar with to be “moved”: “the tail end of a recent market without much history in which almost all of its dollar value had shrunk by ninety percent in a single post-contemporary year.” It’s as though watching the lights change over eight hours of filming the Empire State Building could be as tediously un-innovative and depressingly inevitable as the perennial fable of the art-appreciator who rushed out to the familiar (“sometime friend”) artist to trade his terrible, pointless old dollar illustrations for the finest exemplars of ‘bankable’ post-contemporary sensibility in exquisitely startling representational-or-abstract unique art, only to discover in the course of the next “post-contemporary” year that the value of last year’s bleeding-edge art pieces is now curtly assessed by the art market (another ‘synopsis’) as worth only 10% of what the amateur paid. In his eagerness to get ‘market’ value for the piece[s] [he] labored over to exemplify the avant-garde’s current moment, the good-friend artist might not have been so considerate or as forthcoming as his investing pal would have liked.
“Art Fair Synopsis” ends with a few art-historical claims I’m not educated enough to assess: that America’s contemporary art has suffered a “quality[-implosion]” such that our most ambitious, forward-seeing “art [has] lost all invention and most of its intensity,” as the viewer/speaker/synopsizer judges was the case with post-Renaissance Italy (after the Medicis?) and “France after the war.” Here I just don’t know which war is referred to, much less exactly which implosion in aesthetic value is denoted. If the viewer is referring to French art after the Second World War, I’ve done the most superficial synopsis-level inquiry, and nothing significant postwar enthuses me except for widespread recognition of Art Brut. But if the viewer is referring to art in France after WWI, I’d put up my dukes, because DADA and Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism are among my favorite artistic movements.
The viewer opines that “When history repeats with true novelty it usually finds a different location and a new direction, sometimes even a new audience. I presume the narrator means ‘art history’ as the daily object lessons of current American history suggest that our ‘new’ history isn’t entirely novel, is returning like the horrifying things nice relations at home never spoke of but always(-already) knew about. And is happening most appallingly in the old familiar places, among the old familiar faces. Even the praxis-oriented claim of post-contemporary art, that it seeks to look to and aspire beyond our present conditions and integrate promising potentials of future conditions in renovated humane art doesn’t engage with the simplest, most inevitable circumstances impinging labor demands now and (I’d argue) can’t be trusted to advocate for benign society-transforming social-organizational and technological changes that are too close for us to judge with discernment (like AI-‘enhanced’ *everything*).
Here’s where I confess that when I get back in bed after having gone to pee, I often dream new iterations of the previous bathroom-break dream, and Michael Salcman’s conclusion with this event was, for me, an immediate entree. Last, I’ll say that satisfying myself with the likelihood of my own ‘plausible’ interpretation of a poem is no great feat. Salcman likely knows much more about art than I. And I’d be pleased to discover the many things that I’ve mistaken.