There, I Fixed It

I appreciate the press release for Horacio Alcolea Crespo’s show at the Bushwick apartment gallery Triest. It reads:

They’re good paintings. They deserve better than misfit stretchers. But they’re good enough to get a pass. The hastiness reads as giddy urgency rather than a reluctant overdue assignment.

There’s a lot of school desk dicks and balls (in fact most elements seem ripped from a trapper keeper) but the coloring is nice and there’s a love of line that endears me to the infantile disorder.

The attitude is reminiscent of the twenty-teens failblog product there, I fixed it: hacky household fixes that do just enough, hopefully for just enough time. Taboo porn for a generation of insufferable try hards.

Marina Adams’ pictures at Timothy Taylor have similarly just enough is just enough attitude.

Double reed players know that oboes won’t sound unless every piece of hardware is exactly perfectly screwed tight but basoons work only when the seals and screws are not quite exactly in place. Marina Adams’ paintings are bassoons. (Stephen Westfall, to use a counterexample, is in the oboe business.) As graphic objects, her paintings are too pristine, dangerously close to the formal vocabulary of corporate memphis. She saves it with sloppiness. (I tell my students they can be shitty but never sloppy; Crespo and Adams are the rare talents that can skirt that rule.) Hastily laid down fields with uneven color, anarchic gaps and overlaps. Monumental canvases several sizes too big for their britches. Good painting that doesn’t need to be to good. Good painting that does what art does best: invent its own useless problem, and solve it.

Adams’ show is titled “Cosmic Repair,” which is aligned with her anxious title scheme: NO KINGS, Anti-Fascist Flower (For Alice Notely), etc. Even in Beauty is Its Own Excuse For Being, she endeavors to excuse herself, or at least her work.

There I fixed it has gone out of fashion because so few things can be fixed and the few that remain are rarely worth fixing. In the absence of down and dirty fixing there is a fixation with repair. Severed from the handy neighborhood petit bourgeois repairman, repair floats untethered from reality in a progressive politics discourse (read: humanities papers and recently published Verso books) that has long ago abandoned progress. Where fixing invents, the conservative force of repair dreams of a return to some primordial past.

There’s a tale that goes around from time to time that when composer Philip Glass was working a day job as a plumber a client recognized him as he was fiddling around with their pipes. “You’re Philip Glass, I love your work!” the homeowner exclaimed. To which Glass replied something along the lines of “shut the fuck up and let me fix your sink.”

We demand so much from art. Everything under the sun. Except for the one thing that art can do, which is nothing.

I’ve been told I don’t publish enough, so there, I fixed it.