Imagine this: You're at yet another gallery opening because someone is showing some artwork that you've heard you ought to care about because, well, you're not really sure why, but you're meeting some people here later so you'll stick around. The scene, despite that fact that it's, you know, art and it's supposed to be interesting and cool, is about as stimulating to you as another trip to the frozen foods aisle at Albertson's; certainly the color and composition is expert, but the same is true for fish stick packaging.
Now imagine that instead of clean white walls and just-so halogen lighting and polished wood floors that the room is an abandoned warehouse with steel beams spanning the ceiling. Imagine that, instead of an obsequious blowhard in a bowtie serving vegetarian pate off a platter, there's a crew from Second Street Brewery working a two-fisted tap to fill beer cups to the rim off of a crazy, wavy bar built by a cowboy named Bill. Instead of a prim gallery assistant in throat-high black stockings, skirt suit and such an overwhelming air of contemporary style that even her hair looks tense, there's a guy in Carhart pants and dusty shoes, his angular geek-chic reading glasses crooked at the base of his untended, blond ruckus of a hair-do and he's telling everyone who'll listen why the art in the room is so great that it makes him sweat and giggle and twitch. And the art is pretty great, or at least it would be if it would sit still-the bass from the sound system helmed by local DJs is making paintings bounce on the walls, leaning first one direction and then another. But that's OK, because while it's an art show, it's also a party. The other people in the room aren't the same people you were with at that plain old art opening. No, this crowd is thick with work jackets, wool hats, blond streaks, full-color ink sleeves, short vinyl skirts and Aeon Flux boots with pigtails. This crowd is swollen with animation, with honest laughter and engagement, not the nervous niceties of gallery convention. Even if you don't know them, these are your people. This is the scene that pours out of Santa Fe when you crack the brown plaster veneer. Everyone is wandering the room, looking at approximately 100 artworks by something like 25 artists-mostly New Mexico- and West Coast-based-and at the same time they are dancing. They are looking at, for example, a post-tribal cartoon paint brawl on wood panel by Blaine Fontana and their heads are swaying in and out of the painting's frame while their feet are walking them into and out of the mashed up world of a dozen artworks during a single long tangle of drum and bass. Stranger still, they are interrupting their dance reverie from time to time in order to buy art.
If you were there, you know we're talking about the opening party for Feral Gallery (1302 Cerrillos Road, 577-4774), occupying the former La Puerta building on the Baca portion of the city's Railyard property through, at least, the end of the year. After that, Feral (which is sort of a guerilla incarnation of Skeleton Art) intends to become a moveable feast, popping up in abandoned buildings, studios and street corners, building on the success of the current launch. But why is it such a success? Did the people laying down the dosh for an actual art purchase know that 1) the low-brow, iconic style that Feral specializes in is the defining art of a generation that will eventually be sought after with the same fervor that baby-boomers reserve for classic rock? Or 2) the art market has a cruel and ironic tendency to perform equally as well and entirely independent of the stock market or 3) that lower-priced works from lesser-known artists actually increase in value much more rapidly than blue chip purchases and with prices as low as 750 bucks for a budding, internationally respected, hot-shit painter like Van Arno, it would be impossible, barring the total economic collapse that the president is angling toward, for such a purchase to lose value? No, it's unlikely people were considering any of that, but still, they whipped out the credit cards and wrinkled balls of cash that were stored up for a new X Box or mom's organic, gold-leafed Thanksgiving turkey or whatever, and dropped it on art.
One factor is that this genre of art, certainly pop-but more populist than popular-doesn't give a rat's ass about the academic and critical theory that keeps the art world pumping but tends to make other people's eyes roll back in their heads with boredom. It is an art that is about a world and a life that people recognize which makes it vital and worth owning to a whole group of people who might not accept a free Gerhard Richter, but are ready to give up a plasma screen TV in order to stare forever at Gerrit Krusemark's rascally blend of graffiti and robots. But the more important factor, I think, is a big picture sense of belonging. Not only does the art fit, but the whole picture fits. At a swank, million-dollar gallery on Canyon Road, trying to get down with a painting that's more about a graduate school thesis than the experience and perceptions of the artist, the conclusion I see most people come to is that the thing that doesn't belong in the room is them. At Feral Gallery, the artwork has open, if sometimes creepy, arms and you know the art is easy to live with because the gallery itself-rather than being cold, dead space-is alive.
