She had a plodding bass line for a mouth and would power fish for any way to inject particle physics into a discussion.
A leg cramp would prompt a three-thousand-word essay on her own trauma, which consisted mostly of leg cramps and Billy Whitmore telling her her butt was too skinny in eleventh grade.
Those were just a few of the things that made Tinc Bitram hate Aezra Coll.
He pulled the Umlaut gallery door open.
It stuck, momentarily, and he was mad at himself for forgetting it always stuck.
The building was over 200 years old, designed and built by Aezra Coll’s ancestors, owned by Aezra Coll’s mom.
The gallery had hosted many prestigious openings by fantastic artists over the years: Mattie Armstrong, Bunkley, Fournier, Nader, Halprin, Chorkey.
Tonight, Tinc surmised, would be neither prestigious nor fantastic.
When the door was fully open, Tinc motioned with his head for Cindy Vella to enter first.
The motion was unnecessary. Tinc was unfailingly polite in person, kind and loving to Cindy, and absolutely brutal in print to artists whose work he didn’t like.
Cindy, who read Tinc’s reviews and art criticism for years prior to their relationship, resigned herself to the fact that one day he would be killed in some creative or at least randomly chaotic way by a deranged artist.
As they entered the gallery, Cindy had two missions: Place a couple of the Umlaut’s beloved brie and venison jerky ball appetizers into a baggie so she could reverse engineer them in her own kitchen and convince Tinc not to review the show at all.
Cindy knew she had a better chance of making venison jerky out of her own eyelashes than silencing Tinc’s typewriter.
In fairness, neither Cindy nor Tinc had ever seen Aezra’s art, other than her handmade nametag when she worked at Needlez, the record store her uncle owned in the strip mall her grandfather owned.
For someone as bombastic and full of herself as Aezra, Tinc thought it was beyond odd that she had never publicly displayed her work, some sort of Olympic Reverse Salinger move.
Cindy’s eyes went left, toward where the Umlaut always had their legendary nosh spread set up.
Nothing.
The space was bare.
The space was dark.
An installation of some sort had been set up, a tunnel made from heavy black cloth, like a mini Christo.
Tinc hated Christo. Aezra was off to a bad start.
Cindy wondered where the appetizers and white wine were hidden.
A person in a black latex head to toe bodysuit with a glow in the dark ball gag handed Cindy and Tinc a small rectangle of glossy paper.
It was instructions for viewing the installation in a forgotten Mongol dialect, with a QR code to a web page with an ancient Mongol to English or Spanish translation.
Cindy smiled beautifully at Tinc, as though she had seen swan eggs hatch on the shore of a peaceful lagoon.
“Let’s just go,” she said.
Tinc looked at Cindy.
He was motionless, but in his eyes Cindy could envision a wounded soldier in a movie putting his last banana clip into an automatic weapon before he sprinted into the open laying waste to the enemy.
They entered the black tunnel.
Within ten feet, a single light shone on a dangling banana with a vintage Girl Scout pin piercing the peel.
After 30 feet of darkness, and a hard left turn, a single orange plastic W rested on an easel, a remnant of some child’s alphabet learning game.
Tinc turned to Cindy. His nostrils were flaring.
She smiled that smile of idyllic contentedness again.
“Let’s just go,” she said, knowing that Tinc was going to ride out this charade to the end.
The tunnel veered back to the right.
A man in a grey suit, and immaculately tied crimson tie emerged from a small black curtain within the black cloth tunnel.
He held out his hand, stopping Cindy and Tinc like a crossing guard.
There was no visible art.
The man did not seem to be starting a performance of any kind.
Cindy, against her own wishes, scanned the QR code and began typing in the words for translation. The translation tool spit out:
#3: Spend twenty minutes basking in your own emptiness.
The man disappeared behind the black curtain.
Cindy tugged Tinc’s sleeve.
“There’s a 9 Ball tournament at Willie’s.”
The man emerged from behind the curtain.
He held up a sign. Plastic letters, the same kind as the earlier W glued to a piece of cardboard.
SILENCE
You could now drive a truck through Tinc’s nostrils with no danger of touching the sides.
Tinc and Cindy began to walk further into the tunnel.
The man again did the crossing guard hand.
Tinc said “Fuck outta here.”
The man nodded, reached into his pocket and handed the couple each an index card that said “Demerit” in red marker, then swept his arm, indicating they were free to go.
They walked along the tunnel, looking at each other, lips pursed, amused despite themselves.
The tunnel took a hard right then ran for twenty feet before another hard left and a brighter light.
On a table with a black plastic tablecloth stood a chrome cake tray.
On the tray was a rectangle of green Jell-O with an arrow, a recreational archery arrow, through the dead center, the Jell-O obviously molded around the arrow.
Cindy thought about using the translation tool again, but decided against it when Tinc reached for her hand.
His palm was sweating.
If Cindy had to guess, and she was guessing, Tinc’s review of Aezra’s art was going to be so negative he wouldn’t be allowed in the Umlaut gallery ever again.
They walked past the display, followed the tunnel right and back out into the gallery.
Two black velvet ropes led directly to the exit.
Tinc opened the exit doors.
People stood in the small private employee lot of the gallery.
Aezra was not among them.
There were no refreshments, no wine, no brie and venison balls.
Just people milling about, mostly with WTF looks on their faces.
“What did you think?” a man asked Tinc.
Tinc, never one to divulge his true opinion until his review was published in Rustbelt Culturewatch, stiffened.
“We’re wondering where the wine and brie balls went. They always have wine and brie balls.” He said it like they had been held hostage.
Cindy heard a creak and turned behind her.
She was hoping beyond anything it wasn’t Aezra appearing to ask Tinc what he thought of her art.
No one was there, it was just the old door of the ancient building, painfully inching closed.
Cindy had time to dash and catch it.
If the Umlaut Gallery, for the first time ever, wasn’t going to treat them to brie and venison balls, she was going to reenter the tunnel and help herself to some Jello.
***
Ok, let’s do something a little different:
I wanna hear your critique of the art show I described. Don’t hold back. Discuss any element of this.
I had a different ending to this story, but I decided that by writing that ending I was critiquing the art myself. I want to know how you would react if you had gone to a respected gallery and experienced what Tinc and Cindy did. Love it? Hate it?
You can also check out the artwork of some of my friends, linked above and discuss that if you’d like.
Just saw Aezra Coll's exhibition at the Umlaut. I'm a sucker for any experience that gets me out of my head - the further out the better, so I had to check it out despite its evisceration by Tinc Bit in Culturewatch.
So you don't need to skip to the end, my overall? Two out of five stars. Too empty. Potentially offensive (though this isn't a terrible thing by itself). Got me out of my head, a bit into my heart, and left me with some things to ponder until my next monkey-minded binge.
This exhibit is as spare as Bitram describes in his scathing review. I like Christos, even on a small scale when done right. This is definitely small scale, and I'm talking about the materials. Coll's going for an eat the rich, postmodern feminist, minimalistic critique of our culture by (FYI, I used the translator EVERYWHERE):
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SPOILER Alert - skip down past the stars below to be safe!
- Presenting an esoteric Asian language guide w/ QR code translator to the visitors, given by performers in S&M gear. The commentary? "You like sex and/or the idea of kink, you need technology, and you have no real culture. You're probably an over educated stuck up socialite (like me, Aezra Coll) who can wax snarkily about history and irony, but, ultimately, you need to Google everything and the idea of liberated sex is just another fad you and yours are trying on for the evening."
- The W or M? Who's upside down now? A commentary on gender, politics, queer theory, and hierarchy Meant to make you question your perspective and the perspective of others. Or not. Maybe it's just an orange M. Or a green W, as it was when I went. [translator says: "what do YOU think?"]
- The well dressed gent stopping visitors. [translator says: "spend twenty minutes basking in your own emptiness."] This was one I was prepared for and which I think would offend unprepared folks the most. I like to meditate. I like to bask in my emptiness. I would have liked a chair, so, while I made the full twenty minutes, I spent a lot of it basking in the soreness in my left leg which I've always favored. I get it: be grateful for everything, even a lack of comfortable seating!
- The arrow in JELLO. Mine was green, too! I think green is the color of money and envy, and the arrow hits the mark on what motivates so many people in Coll's orbit (and the world's). [translator says: "there will be no venison balls or refreshments waiting for you"]
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So, all in all, I had an experience. Thankfully, I was able to go on the Umlaut's "free Friday", one week before the exhibit closes. If I'd needed to pay the entry fee, I'd probably have gotten the full experience: feeling cheated and forced to look at my own privilege. Maybe that point has some merit, but it loses some of its sharpness, or rather, the point feels a little lost and it like it should be pointed back at the artist because she is really, really, really, wealthy and her family owns half the city including the Umlaut and, thus, even if you go out to eat at McDonalds and work in the vintage record store...those are your choices. Maybe it's about choice? I knew what to expect, and I went anyways.
And it wasn't that bad!
2/5 stars would go once, alone or with friends.
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Having just seen Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian,” I wasn’t impressed with the banana. The black tunnel looked like it took more effort than any of the “art.” Would have been worth the effort if the guy in the suit had jump out and scared me.
Hated it. Won’t see anything of hers again. Worst wannabe haunted house ever.
FYI: They do NOT offer refunds; I asked.