shelflife by visitor

Walk into a gallery and it isn’t. It’s a floor in the hamperless bedroom of a parentless 15 year old fashion-addict with an anaphylactic aversion to hangers, drawers and the associated errata that exist only to contain and mask things intended to be seen.

I said addict. The pile reflects addiction. 15 feet long, 4 feet deep, 5 feet high–almost entirely composed of couture–balled-up, knotted, wrinkled and summited–Wallabee-shorn foot after Walabee-shorn foot.  Mark compiled the mound and invited available humans to engage it. The two things I liked best about Sizzler as a kid were all-you-can-eat popcorn shrimp and the dodecahydrant of soda that invited cup-upon-cup of concocting. An invitation to be photographed playing dress-up was adulthood’s Sizzler.

A few portraits of me made it into the book. Most are reflective of the hours spent spraying Sprite into Mountain Dew, Dr. Pepper and grape Hi-C as a kid. Here’s a snap of the book and one of the mirrors of my anally-explosive childhood that Borthwick edited in.

1999. The Columbine shootings and the Trenchcoat Mafia who brought the war to the cafeteria against a foreground of possibilities in a future-unknown of mind-dicing via the personal computer, FPS videogames and KMFDM records were still piping hot in the collective conscious. Aaron Rose was re-re-re-opening the Alleged Gallery in its then-latest incarnation. A group show was slated. He’d faxed out the mission briefing and the mission was Coup d’État.

As scene troubnologist, I was saddled with making a low-rent, low-tech, anxiety-inducing invitation. Aaron gave me a single photograph, a show title and basically told me to go to town. Computer viruses were in the news daily. PC users were hating life. BIOS chips were being re-flashed in a string of particularly virulent infections and people were losing everything. The invite would capitalize on that and the prevalent tech-gimmick-lust via the lure of art as interactivity.

I made a set of four fonts that weren’t. They were more like autistic etch-a-sketches that only did one thing. If a user followed the instructions, each font would draw a different picture. Type out some crap. Type it out again with caps lock on. Select everything and change the font. That was the gist.

First, they’d draw a picture of Bill Gates–”gates=ham”. Then they’d draw a picture of Gates with the Piggly Wiggly face–”ham=gates” (Bill was in the news constantly–so much so, that in ensuing years, he’d be forced to step out of the Microsoft limelight to rest a weary army of publicists and go poorly do good for the poor). When an invite recipient selected the keystrokes comprising the two portraits, they were suddenly met with a pre-Columbine to-do list and an equation declaring that guns + jocks = a trenchcoat.

All good and well. However this… convenient and completely unplanned stroke of luck fell into our laps. A vicious virus started infecting computers within days of the invite being mailed out. Anxiety came gratis in pre-Y2K America so long as your timing was right.

Here’s what we gave the people. I’m working on something completely apropos of this project right now. It involves me programing hundreds of IC chips and laser etching tons of tiny PC boards to make custom, compact, troublemaking circuits that I’m pretty certain nobody’s exploited yet…

It was a teepee teahouse. We were washing dishes in the shower of a gallery that had, just a tenant earlier, been the last gay-sex-friendly free-weight body-building gym in the not-yet gentrified meat-packing district. I wore a block-printed pink apron and fry-cook cum elf hat. Slippers–I was also styled in slippers. Maybe they weren’t so much slippers as they were oversized wool moccasins. It’s possible that they were even worn atop a pair of New Balances laced in a pair of hot pink fatlaces that I picked up in Milan. The details are as fuzzy as my prep-cook, dishwasher, waiter and documentarian job description. Anyone who attended could tell you that the only event I could possibly be describing was Susan Cianciolo’s amorphic and ever-mutable Run Restaurant.

Susan’s runway shows are rarely ever seen on anything resembling a runway. She’s always generated events just a unicorn-short of fantasy to showcase the ever-widening quiver of products she’s endlessly stitched, printed, bottled and stuffed. Run Restaurant epitomized her approach. The creative possibilities afforded by an ephemeral restaurant were ideal for showcasing clothes and a home line.

Jason Scandinaro, Susan, Mark Borthwick, Libby McInnis, Simone and Amadeo Pace and Stefano Giovannini were a few of the chefs whose grub was dished out in the gallery. I need to go thru some of the footage I recorded during that show. Mark, his kids and I made a little film–traveling around to produce, meat and fish markets to buy groceries and then filming the prep/cooking at his and Maria’s old new place on the west side as well as the ensuing cooking and eating over at Alleged. Below is the invite that Susan and Alleged sent out to announce the show. I still have one of Libby’s petit fours archived in the freezer.