So, kind of forgot to update for a couple weeks. Such lapses in personal discipline- very disappointing. Perhaps it's because Elsewhere has spread its friendly jaws wide and eaten me whole, to the point where I have been incapable of speaking on any other subject. Fortunately, Elsewhere encompasses many subjects.
I was transforming the hotel lobby here in to a board room (for board meetings) and encountered a blank CD, and wondered aloud to visiting artist Jade Walker, "I wonder what's on this?" Apparently, JJ had left cd's with images on them tucked in to random corners with no labelling, and had told Jade that she was sure that I would be the one to encounter it and wonder what was on it. So JJ, if you're reading this, you were right.
What has happened in this in-joke factory since I last posted? We've had several lovely art openings. JJ's surveillance piece involved us setting up a thorough security procedure on the bottom floor so people had to get scanned, searched, bags checked, immigration forms filled out, and then wait in the airport lounge to go up to the third floor, where they had the fantastic opportunity to perform surveillance on themselves. All jokes were taken seriously. After that came Pritika's piece, which inovolved huge amazing piles and the construction of a lovely quilt of drawings of Pritika, visitors, and others. Then last Friday brought the opening of the Guggenheim Elsewhere, a celebration of the new relationship between Peggy Guggenheim and Silvia Gray, the respective founders/leading ladies of their respective institutions who at one point met in Paris; oh it was grand, we re-vamped the entire facade to bring a little class in to Elsewhere, Starbucks jazz was playing, a visitor's center was established by Eric & Stephanie, and the second floor hallway was revamped so that people could see a new piece by Jade, a tearoom of sorts with a record player and fabric camouflaged in to the wall to patch up cracks.
All these lovely openings aside, there's been crazy heat which left me effectively unconscious and dreaming for three days and a tremendous amount of miscellaneous work. Why is it so difficult to speak of Elsewhere to those who aren't also dreaming this dream?
Photographs to come.
Ms. Prits in the wardrobe with the clothing.
I quit smoking and am finding focus a little tough today, but this is something I've been wanting to do for a while. The only benefit I can see to cigarettes is that they're cool, and I don't really do cool properly.
Every single day here at Elsewhere I perceive dozens of new things here that were previously invisible, and I don't think it's likely to stop doing that; superstructures layered on base structures, patterns of decay enabled by habitual actions of individuals within the space, piles and re-piling of piles, piles of army surplus bags where the army stuff at the bottom of the pile is rotted and disgusting; bizzare assemblage, jingoism, truly indescribable books, cute toys, grotesque toys, utilitarian objects, piano parts, four tubs of legos, a jar of puzzle pieces that go to at least three distinct puzzles, defunct photo equipment, enough clothing to clothe all of Greensboro in dusty, dry-rotted clothing that has holes in it as long as some guys are willing to go in drag and shoeless, theory books, records, endless clutter, junk, clutter and junk transforming magically in to art through imposition of order, hours upon hours of work in the library thrown aside randomly due to insufficient signage, a surveilance performance in the making, latent work, explicit work, thoughts living outside of things because there are too many things for thoughts to come to rest. Does this sound like I'm complaining, or as though I'm slightly (pleasantly) delirious from nicotine withdrawal? It's not, it's as though I spend each day in a slightly different psychological space; the colors appear different, the architecture draws my attention in different ways as it shifts around, architecture and furniture that I had taken for granted as a constant becomes variable, my days open up to reveal one another like endless Russian nesting dolls.
It's come to me lately that to really see and know this place you have to live inside of it and do work related to the museum's curation. In some ways, it's impossible to merely visit in any meaningful sort of way; this must be what they mean by living art. There is so much here that is latent, unpacked, stuffed away in drawers, waiting for somebody to come make logic (or vivid screaming illogic) out of the unsorted madness, and recurating these things is a full time job. But these materials in their raw decaying form are interesting in their own right as well; to deny each individual object its own autonomy as a whole unto itsself and only view it as a part of some sort of larger curatorial is to overlook effectively infinite wonders. I imagine spelunking through shit continent (pictured below) as a mode of viewership, like watching a movie or listening to a record on headphones.
Alternatively, it is as though Silvia Gray, the woman who ran Elsewhere as a thrift store and acquired all this stuff, spent the bulk of her life fabricating the pieces to a giant puzzle. George is the grandson of Silvia Gray and has devoted at least four years of his life to the project unpacking what his grandmother spent decades of her life acquiring and putting away, which suggest to me that in some ways the project of elsewhere functions as the fulfillment of an ancestral obligation.
