There were warning signs as early as dusk on Friday night, and certainly Saturday morning greeted my body with a rare but telltale dry creakiness, but it wasn't until around 1 am on Sunday morning that I realized art might actually kill me.
Fortunately I was feeling too good to really be concerned about it. The setting was a warehouse near Siler Road, home to infamous design squad Meridian Six. Drinks were flowing with assembly line aplomb. ***image2***Many people were dancing but a conceptual/minimalist photographer and a local tango instructor were making the DJ work overtime and the atoms in the concrete floor dither with heat. Behind me was a pantheon of local hooligans, neighborhood artists and a smattering of international cosmopolitans. Above me, film projectors manned by Basement Films junkies out of Albuquerque whirred and spun images out onto the walls. These were dynamic projections, the contraptions mounted on Lazy Susans, the projectionists (no slouches here-a pack of over-educated jackals with razor-sharp aesthetics and 25 years of consumer pop culture, 100 years of film criticism and 2,000 years of art history bleeding out of their bodies like gorgeous, unstoppable wounds) physically controlling each barrage of photons, an improv image jam happening across the crevices and walls of a clean, white space for design. The executive director of a major, respected arts organization was gamely going head to head on tall pours of single batch bourbon with someone-me, I think. Everything, in other words, was perfect: It was a multi-generational, multi-city, multi-national, multi-genre art throw-down in the middle of Santa Fe where no one was uncomfortable or out of place. So I figured perhaps I was hallucinating, that my body and brain were doling out a false sense of pleasure as they degenerated into a kind of moist silt.
After all, the previous 80 hours had contained the Wednesday night launch of the BLOC-BUSTA catalog (and attendant after-launch antics) as well as the Thursday night vernissage (opening night) of ART Santa Fe, essentially a brutal crush of art, cocktails, hors d'ouevres and mutli-lingual mayhem at Sweeney Convention Center. Friday not only played host to the public opening of said international contemporary art fair, but a hair shy of 30 unique gallery and art space openings throughout Santa Fe. I had made it to around 8 of them and finally, like many, wrapped up the night in the beige but beguiling, country, Tom Ford-esqe confines of the in-jokey but challengingly named Señor Lucky's. At the height of the evening, performance art struck as a solemn man clad in bright soccer garb blew his whistle to signify a foul and red-carded the entire party.
Saturday featured two artist discussions at two different group shows, the first at the Center for Contemporary Arts at the unartistic hour of 10 am. CCA's dogs are apparently hairless as promised mimosas never arrived, but the discussion proved significantly livelier than cheap sparkling wine, which held true for the second artist talk as well. Without those brain boosts, I certainly would never have made it to five more openings and a generously hosted, high-end picnic complete with Frito pies, Coronitas, paper monkey plates and, yes, barrels (literally) full of art. The last opening-but far from the last stop-of the night was at the temporary Wall-mART space on the corner of Paseo de Peralta and Guadalupe where the queer, dangerous and perfect scope of the day and the ensuing evening began to take form. It was Austrian art dealers and Warehouse 21 punk rock betties. It was cheap wine and hard-edged comic repop art work. It was a drunk, injured Swiss dressed like a farcical Navajo shaking his ass for all he was worth while Noah Devore, aka Keyboard, sat cross-legged and plonked out his white-bread yet soulful, boyish yet sophisticated, Jonathon Richman-from-an-alternate-universe routine. And then it was Cherry Tempo (see J Spot, page 21), set up on the loading dock in front of the old James Kelly Contemporary and using tight bass, deadly percussion and feedback so well-timed and subtle it was tinged with irony, and playing at the street, at the empty park, at the Allsup's, at the streets beyond and out to Eldorado and Galisteo and Cline's Corners and through Texas and over the ocean, and playing right off the edge of the planet, answered by solar flares and dying stars. It felt that good.
And it continued to feel that good, which is why, walking between the flying film at Meridian Six and feathery bass beats up the street at Open Source, I thought maybe I'd ingested enough art to die. But then Sunday morning rolled around and I was good to go, wandering the halls of ART Santa Fe and sucking it up like an addict, especially the filthy, smart and orgasmically abominable drawings of Amy Morken from Claire Oliver Fine Art in New York and the well-balanced combination of craft, satire and science bouncing out of the project space created for the art fair by Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins, artists from Toronto. More pleasing still was that, while galleries who I would expect to do well actually lagged in sales, work like Morken's, Marman's and Borins' flew off the wall-collectors were buying edgy work, art filled with the kind of humor, violence and self-reflection that characterizes, but also prods, a real world.
It turns out such things were tangible enough that, on a tour of the fair, the governor "got it" as well. And if state marketing gets truly hip to promoting contemporary art (and state support was much improved already this year), well, there must be hope for city marketing to jump on the bandwagon as well. Everyone at the city, please repeat the following five times while taking deep breaths: "young creative professionals and affordable housing." Without those two things, you got nothing. And when you do find a storm of such energy burbling up from the dry desert, it turns out too much is never enough. They say you can drown in a puddle, but why not choose the sea?
