The Lighthouse Drinking the Fuel / On the Rocks
The lighthouse is a metaphor. It’s a sign, a signal—but for what? The shore is here. You’re almost home. But also, watch those rocks. §
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When the artworld came unmoored in March, taking strange new shapes online and outdoors, many panic-stripped their projects to their profiteering hulls. This was happening already. Hauser & Wirth began to develop its proprietary ArtLab exhibition software, HWVR, in 2019. The first order of business was to digitize their newest gallery, the retrofitted outbuildings of an 18th-century naval hospital on Isla del Rey, a speck of land in an inlet of the small Spanish island of Menorca. Clicking between 360-degree renderings of white walls, “visitors” might glimpse the lens flare from a skylight; or, visible through the glass of an exit door, the stones of a Roman foundation sprayed with wildflowers. Their latest VR scheme is far bleaker: for Frieze London, H&W’s presentation was titled A New Reality, where, and I quote, “visitors can journey into the iconic Frieze tents in Regent’s Park to explore exact replicas of last year’s booths that now exist in a virtual world.”¹ It’s not the internet that alienates us—it’s the market. The brick-and-mortar gallery has always channeled the undertow of capital. In non-pandemic times, traipsing art’s archipelago of redoubts, resorts, and utopias, we’re buoyed along by friends, drinks, and discourse. Without those things, the art world can be a desert. Some have gone mad
Travis Diehl
with disease, others with loneliness, lust, and sun. We see patterns where there are none, while messages bob in their bottles. Sometimes, though, a message reaches you on a tiny glass screen. A couple months ago, I attended a press preview for a new installation by Samara Golden while sitting on a bench in a rose-scented park in Thousand Oaks. Golden is known for intricate dioramas that, like exploded dollhouses of the mind, obey dreamlike gravity and reflect ad infinitum by way of huge mirrors on the floors and walls. This particular exhibit, Upstairs at Steve’s (2020), installed at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, opens wedge-like toward the viewer as if emitted by one of the building’s extant windows. Mirrors on all sides spread the scene as far as the eye can see, turning the gallery’s stained glass into a faceted, floating beacon. It looks, improbably, like a lighthouse. The sunlit center is ringed by wrecked bedding, furniture, strings of lights, and wooden decking that move rhythmically across what are in fact the joists and sprinklers on the ceiling—in this context, the fixtures resemble the berms and wire of some traumatized beachhead. I saw the piece remotely, which is largely how Golden saw it, too. Most of the assembly took place as museum staff and the artist swapped pictures and made adjustments via email. This much is the new normal, or whatever, but in the case of Steve’s, I could sense, in the catastrophic illusion of the work piped into the crunched insufficiency of my iPhone, the tang of collective madness. It was reassuring. If the subjects of virtual walkthroughs in early pandemic days tended to be hastily repackaged versions of art from more superficially “okay” times, here, in September 2020, was a work born in isolation and illness while the summer’s uprisings roiled outside. It’s already a cliché to point out that the pandemic has, like a rising tide, mostly served to widen the cracks of already shaky social institutions: from healthcare, housing, and electoral 1. Hauser & Wirth, “Frieze Art London 2020,” press release, accessed November 6, 2020, https://www.artsy.net/ show/hauser-and-wirth-hauser-and-wirth-at-friezelondon-2020.
