David Petersen Artworks

Yikes, who needs a drink?

Well, it has been four or five days since returning from the South, and I haven’t had an adult beverage since we crossed back over the Mason Dixon Line, which in my book is Highway 62 in south Minneapolis. And believe it or not, I believe the lack of spirits is hampering my hankering to describe our trip to the city of St. Louis. Which is a crying shame, considering all the things we saw and the people we met and the parties we crashed and the hotel room we destroyed. Straight cash homey.
After a total of 10 treacherous, white-knuckle hours driving through southern Minnesota and Iowa, and then into Missouri, get off Interstate 70 at Grand Blvd. and hang a right, heading further south, beginning to notice the blight that massacred north St. Louis in the 90’s, building after building after building bombed out, no windows, no doors, just empty black sockets like those of skulls, and after about a mile of this the guilt starts to burrow into the belly, and we are going to a freaking art museum conference for crying out loud, oh there it is, the big shiny metal structure, with giant windows to boot, standing out like a brick of white gold in the pile of shitty crumbled up bricks that we just drove through with our heads hung so low you’d have thought we were working on the car’s exhaust.

Did I bum you out? There’s no beer in my house, so go to hell.

Seriously, St. Louis needs a hand. Fortunately, there are a few pretty sweet individuals down there that are attempting to do some pretty sweet stuff, fixing up buildings, activating neighborhoods, exhibiting some art that is totally out of place, but what the hell? Now, don’t get me wrong, I understand the whole ‘gentrification’ cycle and how the decimated neighborhoods that were once thriving, usually minority neighborhoods get neglected by city and state officials who have developers whispering in their ears about how in five years they can turn that ‘crummy, crime-ridden’ part of town that is always giving them grief in the newspapers into a great big civic hand-job if they play their cards right. And I understand how the artist types are usually the unintentional foot soldiers in this war on the poor and their homes and maybe they should share some of the blame, but usually they are renters and they have no choice when the warehouse is sold and ‘River Heights’ or ‘Greenwich Metropolitan’ are conceived.

St. Louis has a little different story that is only beginning to be told. The artists are just buying the buildings themselves. Which, sure, is a testament to how rotten it must have gotten, for the developers stuck to the downtown portion of the city. But out in the neighborhoods, the artists are stepping up, no more renting for them. They are going all in, as they say on the riverboats, investing in their projects, themselves and their neighborhood, not to mention the city that will certainly come calling in the future. Just don’t sell out, don’t sell the fuck out!

A couple quick shout outs to Boots Contemporary and the BootPrint they are leaving behind. It’s the real deal. Yeah I’m talking to you Juan and Georgia. Also, I gotta mention the Cheshire Hotel, in all its 18th century English Inn glory, thanks for the towels and painting. And lastly, to one hot momma running the Shangri-La on Cherokee St, damn you got it going on. (p.s. I’m the one who had the Moroccan stew).

Due to some unfortunate and infuriating technical, web-based difficulties leading to malfunctions, temper-tantrums and finally consumption, the -and you will have to trust me on this one- completely amazing and thoroughly critical rant on the recent atrium installation of Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s piece, Inopportune: Stage One, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim in New York, vanished into thin internet ether. Godfuckingdammit. I am not rewriting it.

Which is a terrible shame considering the amount of effort and hate that went into the posting. Maybe hate is an inaccurate term. How about ‘ire.’ My writing was filled with ire. If you would like to become acquainted with the source of this ire, please visit the NYC Guggenheim website to see the short video on the installation and adoration of Cai’s work, a nine-Chevy Metro, electric light rod monstrosity dedicated to inducing the Upper East Side set into a state of conscience-cleansed drooling. The janitorial staff is busting their asses just to keep the floor clean. And that’s not all, because while visitors head straight for their masseuse after craning their necks for 45 seconds at the suspended automobiles, the museum administration is at the chiropractor getting a readjustment from patting themselves on the back. Again. Next season, maybe they’ll just have one big hand-job fest.

But that is not what I wrote about the first time I wrote about what I am writing about.

It doesn’t really matter anyway. It doesn’t matter how upset I get with Peter Schjeldahl turning all warm and fuzzy about the beauty of car-bombings because Cai is such ‘an elegant and pleasant man,’ so Taoist and not at all ‘defensive about indulging aesthetically contemplative viewpoints on terrorism.’ It will never amount to jack shit how vehemently I disagree with Curator Lady Alexandra Munroe’s assessment of the work’s harmonic transcendence of the violence it is meant to portray. Two tears in a bucket ain’t gonna do squat to help me explain to anyone who thinks the victim of a car-bombing, whether killed, maimed, or related to one killed or maimed gives a spit about what someone who is driven to work at an art museum calls ‘beauty’ or ‘violence.’ Because, apparently, they are way off.

And that is what I wrote about, like a week ago. Before I reminded myself who I was all hot and bothered about. The self-sheltered delusionals at the Guggenheim. Goodnight Guggenheims, certainly you will sleep well.