Over the course of my time posted on the sidewalk outside last night’s opening of “The Patriot,” a 200+ artist, 100 percent bonkers open-submission group show at the Lower East Side gallery O’Flaherty’s, I heard a couple variations on the same refrain: If the police showed up this fast, it must be a pretty good party.
It wasn’t just one or two cops either. At peak, there were multiple squad cars and at least five policemen lined up outside the space, which drew a line before opening and reached capacity almost instantly. Lower East Side gallery openings don’t typically come with a line snaking around the block and a band of cops. But O’Flaherty’s, which is less than a year old and helmed by the rising artist Jamian Juliano-Villani along with her friends, painter Billy Grant and musician Ruby Zarsky, is not typical.
It’s something else, something somewhat rare: It’s fun. And completely insane.
When I arrived at 8, the line was already in full force, with an almost comical number of people fighting to get through the doors. Outside the gallery, a contortionist, flanked by neon-pink alien sculptures, wrapped her leg behind her head as progressive house music blared over a nearby boombox. I spotted Grant close to the entrance, and he ushered me through the throng.
Upon entering the darkened gallery, lit like a haunted house by attendees’ flashlights, I was bombarded with the first of at least seven rooms of art, five of which were hung salon-style with a dizzying array of work ranging from what looked like known contemporary art entities to the kind of artist who might, say, submit a fairly straightforward-looking portrait of Tom Petty. I couldn’t get a hold of a checklist, so who really knows.
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Image Credit: John Chiaverina/ARTnews One room bore a glass case containing what one person referred to as the “Lincoln death pillow, on loan from The Morgan Library,” though I have not been able to confirm that and I doubt I ever will. The Morgan Library does not list the pillow in its collection. Continuing the haunted house analogy, that same room had a floor that rumbled and shook intermittently.
Then there was the bathroom, which, judging from Juliano-Villani’s Instagram, included a work from the artist Dan Colen, who incubated his art career well over 15 years ago in Lower Manhattan and now runs a farm upstate and shows his art with the blue chip uptown gallery LGDR. He became known in the early aughts, though, for making “hamster nests” with the artist Dash Snow: rooms full of drugs and alcohol and shredded phone books that the artists would live in for days.
Colen’s piece at O’Flaherty’s consisted of lipstick smudges on the underside of a toilet lid. Sadly, when I entered the bathroom, the toilet seat was down. Whether or not this was an intentional choice by the artist or the gallery, I was not sure. But I respected it. I kept the lid the way it was. The work was not meant to be seen.
“What could you possibly say about this show,” said Pali Kashi, who runs the Chinatown gallery Europa, when I told her I was covering it. “Like, how do you even write about it?”
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Image Credit: John Chiaverina/ARTnews It’s a good question. There was a lot to think about: the absurd combination and sheer volume of work; the fact that the exhibition itself serves as a parody of the dreaded summer group show; the claustrophobic environment.
Out on the sidewalk in front of O’Flaherty’s, I heard people comparing the show not to anything contemporary but rather to the New York in which Colen came up, one roughly after 9/11 but before the recession, when Deitch Projects (who sponsored the Colen/Snow hamster nests) was throwing massive exhibitions that often prized scale and countercultural energy over academic or socially conscious concerns.
And so it shouldn’t have been a total shock to learn that Grant was a member of the legendary psychedelic art collective Dearraindrop, who threw one of those infamous Deitch blowouts back in the day.
“It’s some kind of social thing,” Grant told me, when I asked what the current moment has in common with the Deitch era. The gallery’s impetus for doing this group exhibition was more practical. “We had to make a show really fast,” Grant said. I asked him if any work stood out as his favorites, he responded, “There’s fast burn and slow burn on this. Some days certain ones are bad, then there’s other days. I don’t know. They all look better —” He paused. “— in the dark.”
This in itself seemed like something of a flashback—to the Dark Art Fair at the Swiss Institute in 2008.
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Image Credit: John Chiaverina/ARTnews Possibly the only section of the show not cloaked in darkness was a room that you had to enter through a doggie door adorned with industrial curtain flaps. Inside was a very bright sculpture that spanned from floor to ceiling and was made using, among other materials I’m sure, white LED club lighting mounted on a configuration of trusses and stands; chains; and a bag of Sheila G’s Brownie Brittle . It looked like something out of an overnight construction site or an aggressively oppressive discotheque.
Adjacent to the sculpture was an animatronic cat with a monkey’s head pawing inside of a litter box. Though I overheard some theorizing that this was the work of yet another “art world bad boy,” Jordan Wolfson, who was announced to have a piece in the show on social media, Juliano-Villani told me that it was actually a collaboration between her and Grant.
“We just use [Wolfson] to lure people in,” she told me. When asked if she thought some people might be slightly confused about authorship, which seemed to be the case judging from of the reactions I witnessed. “Probably, because they’re dumb, yeah,” she responded.
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Image Credit: John Chiaverina for ARTnews “Jamian is one of the most psychotic people I have ever met, and I say this as one of the three people here that knows her well,” artist Borna Sammak, who had work in the show and has spent his career examining the vernacular language of American culture and the internet, told me. “95 percent of what she’s said over the past year has come true and that’s more than we can say for the rest of us … That’s real power.”
Sammak compared the scene on the sidewalk to that of the Vans Warped Tour.
“I think, like everyone else in the line, I have a piece in the show,” said Stephen Jesse, who stood at the end of it. When I asked how long he was prepared to wait, he joked, “I mean, I have like three beers in the bag, so 15 minutes.”
Sometime after 8:30, multiple squad cars pulled up and police spent over an hour dispersing the crowd. At one point, an officer attempted to move things along with a megaphone.
“It’s the only way it could’ve turned out, honestly,” writer Al Bedell said, surveying the scene as the crowd dissipated. “A good party.”