The Long Wait for Fall • Elizabeth Herring at Ojai City Gift a.k.a The Basic Premise

Sep 24

Sep 24 The Long Wait for Fall • Elizabeth Herring at Ojai City Gift a.k.a The Basic Premise

Review, The Basic Premise, Think Piece, Ojai

On Friday, I received terrible news. The Basic Premise had closed. It is no more. Shut down. Thank you for the good times, but it is time to say goodbye. Shocking as it was, it was by no means a unique occurrence. For months, news stories of galleries and museums shuttering, of artists fleeing the cities, and the art world being effectively shut down, dominated. The Basic Premise was just another victim of terrible circumstances and inopportune timing. Yet another gallery that did not make it through the crisis.

It was all a ruse—one that was perhaps more than a year in the making, a clever ruse, an evil and delicious ruse that would have happened whether Covid happened or not. But because Covid did happen, the fictitious closing of The Basic Premise and its replacement with yet another Ojai retail store had taken on a new dimension of in/appropriateness. On many levels, the exhibition negotiates narratives of belonging, niche culture, marketing, branding, obfuscation, gentrification, humor, critical theory and yes, the pandemic.

So, what occurred? The Basic Premise sent out Instagram posts vaguely detailing their closure and in the same breath urged its followers to support and follow the store that will soon be taking over its former space on Ojai Avenue. Lots of condolences, disbelief and comments followed. No doubt some gnashing of teeth. Then, The Basic Premise opened its new exhibition Ojai City Gift, a site-specific installation by the Ojai native, then Berlin-based, now Ojai native-again artist Elizabeth Herring, which mimics/is/functions as an Ojai retail store, with a heavy dose of in-jokes and tongues-in-cheeks.

Ojai paraphernalia abounds, some of which are readily available throughout the city in other stores while much is unique and specific to Ojai City Gift. Items were made by the artist to look like objects, trinkets and random tchotchkes that tourists to Ojai revel in and Ojai residents wear and consume ironically. There is way too much here that a non-Ojai native will not get, I being one of them—though as a transplant who began his journey into the Ojai ‘heart of darkness’ by reading the authoritative history book The Ojai Valley (a book one can probably purchase from the ‘store’ as well), I still only get a part of the joke. But make no mistake, the installation is far from a simple joke, though it can be read as such if one is looking for surface-level narrative. The story gets more complex the more one reads into the mash up of objects on display in the gallery window.

First, the ‘store’ occupies only the window level of the gallery space. It remains resolutely foregrounded even though it recedes beyond the window itself. One cannot actually enter into the space. There is a door that leads into the gallery, but this door is shut. The ‘walls’ of the store are made of shiny tassels that delimit the space just on the outside of where the door would actually lead into the store itself, thus the door would only lead one into the ‘back’ of the store, which is empty gallery space, the abyss, part of our current reinterpretation of interior spaces which in times of Covid remain prohibited.

These are the dark cabins in the woods, full of potential danger and uncharted terror. We are thus quite literally forced to be outside of the experience of enjoyment that is the raison d’etre of the retail store, though we are in full compliance with the symbolic order of the day. By symbolic order we mean the social norms, rules and regulations imposed on us by ethics, moral codes, government regulations, religious mores, and so on. As such, the indoors are today something like the site of the unspeakable, the potentially dangerous, dimension of the virus and its various forms. The show is thus hysterically prescient and timely, despite the fact that its form was decided on in advance of the pandemic. It simply fits within the reality of Covid without the need to comment on it.

Second, the same impossibility to enter into the space, its foregrounded, stage-like presence, perfectly illustrates the concept of the ontological incompleteness of reality itself. My friends will surely pardon yet another Zizek reference. But isn’t the fact that when we can shop ‘at’ the store, see it, experience it as such, interact with it visually, be adjacent to it, but never actually enter it, the same as the idea of an augmented reality that is common to video games in which the background is rendered, say, as a building with doors and windows, but one cannot enter into it, because there is no need to do so?

This is how Zizek describes the ontological incompleteness of our structured reality. He claims that if there really is a god, this god ‘made’ reality precisely in this way, like a video game in which certain parts are left incomplete. There are elements to reality to which we simply do not have access and about which we can only theorize. Certain aspects of quantum physics are structured in this way, to the point where knowledge itself is a dimension to which we may have only partial access. Psychoanalysis, for example, was supposed to be one of the ways by which to enter into these prohibited zones of the human psyche. The interstices or gaps in this ‘forbidden’ knowledge are therefore filled with concepts like the devil, conspiracies, etc. The example Zizek gives, is of the human head. From the perspective of the experiencer, where there is a human head, there is really a void. Here is where I see the world and everything in it but when I see myself in the mirror, what I see is a reverse, a perfect copy of myself, but not ‘really’ myself.

The same can be said of recording media. I get to see myself through them but again only as a copy. This may be precisely the point behind the notion of the camera taking one’s soul. In order to actually see myself as I appear to others, a split would have to occur, but this split is already a move beyond, in which I am not myself, and so the void remains. The most difficult thing to do in real time is to see the back of one’s head. To glimpse oneself, to see oneself, to see one’s face, as it were, from the point-of-view of the other, is an impossibility, and every attempt is simply projection that intensifies the gap. Therefore, the face/head is the abyss of every human being and the door of the fictitious store leads into the prohibited abyss of the gallery space, not the store itself.

Third, the concept of this exhibition falls into a type of critique in which obfuscation functions as revelation of its subject. The opening of a retail store in place of an art gallery certainly raises eyebrows given the fraught history of gentrification and the role that artists and galleries are said to play within it. From New York to Bucharest, Moscow to Beijing, gentrification seems to follow on the heels of art communities. But whether they actively participate or passively observe, the dynamics of gentrification are not so much an issue as they are the driving force behind the critique of art itself. Without gentrification (the objectified fetish, the fantasy ‘object’) many issues surrounding social issues, wealth disparity, hierarchies, etc., would have to be reevaluated or would simply disappear.

Art needs gentrification for its own subjectivity to function. Gentrification normalizes the subject of aesthetics and aestheticizes the subject without actually changing the way that gentrification functions. Gentrification itself is a term that is used positively within the real estate industry. But because historically artists are typically on the receiving end of the stick and not the carrot offered by the industry, gentrification has been systematically used, debated and entrenched within the dominant discourse as a term for a slow, churning evil, responsible for social inequality, community displacement, and unrest.

Ojai City Gift is a poke in the eye of this generalized critique turned conventional wisdom of market economics and social dynamics. Of course, a retail store would open up after an art gallery had made the neighborhood cool and safe. Whether this statement is true or not seems to be a question beyond debate. It is so much part of received wisdom that one of the shirt’s memes—“I grew up in Ojai and all I got was priced out of the housing market”—underscores this tension between joke and truth perfectly. The slew of other objects in the store, the postcard rack showing only photos of other storefronts, Ojai for Dummies book, the Star Map, horse straps, and so on, add to the ridiculousness of the scenario, and yet reveal the dark potential truth within.

Fourth, the interplay between the death of the gallery and the birth of the retail store points to a larger narrative playing on the anxiety and unease within modern Western culture. It is the interplay of forces that shape and mold people from citizens (cultured society) to consumers, and there is a big difference between the two. In 2004, two Czech documentary filmmakers showed precisely what it means when the fantasy space that constitutes consumer society is broken down and when the illusion that separates culture from brutal market logic is shattered. The documentary Czech Dream followed a two-week-long blitz marketing campaign for a brand-new shopping mall, called a ‘hypermarket’ in Czech, aptly named Cesky Sen (Czech Dream). The date was set for its grand opening and hundreds of people turned up in a field where the façade of the building was gleaming in the far distance.

As the crowd started approaching, many soon began to get the joke. The façade of the building was just that, a façade, supported by wooden beams, like a Western movie set, and the Czech Dream was just that, a dream and not true reality. Though this is precisely where the documentary really begins. The filmmakers keep the cameras rolling as they navigate the crowd and start asking questions. ‘What do you think about this?’ ‘What are your reactions to the fake campaign?’ and so on. The reactions themselves are what make the film so potent. About a third of the people are angry at being duped and wasting their day on a fool’s errand, while another third consider this an amazing joke and clearly love the idea. The last third has mixed feelings about the whole scenario.

The Ojai City Gift feels a bit like this. Being had and feeling duped is an emotion that many will find objectionable, while others will find it absolutely brilliant. The point is to not focus too much on this aspect of the exhibition. It was afterall a clever, attention-grabbing maneuver by The Basic Premise. The point is to examine the world we are living in without resorting to hypernormalizing tendencies that are all too prevalent these days and get over the sting that surely arrives when being punked. I for one am glad that the long wait for fall is over.