036 ☼ Elegy to a museum location

once my thriving third space, soon to be an events location on Kumeyaay land

I worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego—specifically the downtown location—from 2014 to 2015, from one spring to a fall. I was there 2-5 times a week. I was spectacularly broke and singularly hot as I was in my mid to late 20s and had the face of a baby. I was struggling to finish college. I had bad skin and low self-esteem, but I was determined to be an art person, and to be in the art world, and I had to start at the very bottom and so I did.

An acquaintance recently tipped me off to the fact that the lease of one of the two MCASD downtown locations had been sold to the Navy SEALs for their own museum, used as a recruitment tool. I reported on it for The Art Newspaper, which you can read here. Here’s what I couldn’t include in my report.

It was the first job where my boss was a woman who liked me and who I liked. I had worked at multiple museums up until this point—having landed this job was what I felt was my final form as a museum girl, my gateway to my then dream of being a curator. Before that I stood for hours on hard cement floor making sure children didn’t hit their heads on sculptures at the New Children’s Museum and then later, on marble floor as a museum guard for the San Diego Museum of Art. I was a holiday hire at the San Diego Model Railroad Museum where tiny kids came in crying with excitement and left screaming in despair to leave so many tiny trains.

At the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD), I combined the art I saw in classrooms at community college with the art whose rooms I was tasked with managing, turning on lights and counting cash. Starstruck, I volunteered when Liza Lou visited to make her Color Field, a sheet of small beaded sticks placed on a grid on the floor like blades of glass grass. I sat next to her for a few hours and told her my life story up until that point, and she told me about Marcia Tucker and making Kitchen (1991-1996) after her tiny L.A. apartment was damaged by the Northridge Earthquake. She told me I was a self-made woman. I carried that compliment with me until I didn’t need it’s talismanic properties any longer. It was my first interaction with a famous, successful artist and she had been so cool and kind.

People used to think the entrance to the museum was also the entrance to the train depot as the Museum shared a building with the historic Santa Fe Depot which ran the trolley and Amtrak lines. Men in business suits and attaché cases used to fling open the glass doors, running for their lives, then stop, confused, having found themselves in the center of a Do So Huh installation or blocked by a sculpture. A man once crushed a corner of Liza Lou’s Color Field running for the train. He looked horrified, confused, but still late and fled the scene (the security guard let him out the back way just to get it over with). I think the curator cried.

Do So Huh, “Unit 2, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA”. (2014) Installation view at Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 2016

One of the most vibrant but hardest and brokest summers of my life was spent in the basement doing research as part of my internship with Jill Dawsey who encouraged me to list my work as “curatorial research assistant” on my resume, instead. I learned about so many artists I now love like Lorna Simpson, Martha Rosler, and Dan Graham’s Homes photos. I loved digging through the archive closets with the registrar Tom who confessed he carried a near-constant thrum of anxiety because at least seven significant and expensive works of art were in transit or in other cities and every document had HIS name on it. That summer I organized a project where my artist friends made trinket-sized versions of their art based on a memory and we sold them at the swap meet.

I found a rare Allan Sekula slide of a shot of one of his San Diego performances that no one ever talks about even though its good and in his peak career years. (I also found slides of Bob Irwin’s elusive paintings whose compositions I’ve since banished from my memory, at the behest of whoever I turned them into). Parking in La Jolla that summer (my internship was NOT at the Downtown location), had earned me so many parking tickets, the amount of which was more than what my old Volvo was worth.

Clocking in and gazing out the window walls to the street. Always a scene outside the train station like standard poodles, Mennonite girls in braids, and people in military uniforms, and once a man two-stepping by himself.

Back downtown, I was the front desk girl. I studied Marxist pedagogy and then memorized the faces of museum donors at the $500,000 plus level. I had yet to learn what the term “ontology” meant. Devendra Banhart came to the museum once, and I met John Baldassari for the first time, his hand engulfing mine when he shook it. He was nicer to me than the Director was at the time who, despite seeing me nearly every day, could never remember my name. Working there almost crushed my love of art. I hate hot dogs from the 7-11 across the street because I was so broke. Towards the end of the day, the museum was often empty, and the light was very beautiful streaking through the Spanish Mission-style train depot windows, casting weird light diamonds across the walls while skateboarders left their Sprite soda bottles atop the hulking, metal Richard Serra squares sitting heavy on the train platform. They’re still there (the box-sculptures, but probably also the Sprites).

The show of paintings and small sculptures I curated my last summer in San Diego, “Having a Coke with You” featuring work by Claire Loder, Kim Westfall, Chantal Wnuk, and Nihura. Really special shit. My finest work and my final exhibition/show/party I organized.

By the end of summer my car had been towed and my Grandmama had to help them get it out of the cities dungeon, only a mile from the downtown location. I had organized and created a painting show based on Frank O’Hara’s time spent working at the front desk of the Museum of Modern Art and his relationship to the painter Grace Hartigan. We had rebuilt a model of his desk for people to sit in and stare at the paintings, in the exact way I had sat at the front desk at the Downtown location for hours on end, stomach growling, homework waiting, my love for art waning and changing. A magazine took a photo of me sitting on it while pretending to talk on the old black telephone—the exact model O’Hara had. I didn’t know it then, but I experienced the best of the “art world” in the friends I had made, in the scrappy little projects we organized in the borrowed lofts and storefronts in a not-yet gentrified San Diego. We made it to Los Angeles, then Manhattan and upstate New York. By the time grad school was over six years later, I realized I had had it made back home in those days of being the underpaid front desk girl, desperate to fit in to a world I wouldn’t care about in ten years, loving art more than I ever would and reaching for a place that simply just no longer exists.

Window view of the exhibition, This Is How We Walk on the Moon: Colter Jacobsen, curated by Jill Dawsey in 2014 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.

Rumor has it the second of the downtown locations went up for sale last week, meaning the chapter on downtown has officially closed. MCASD is still open in La Jolla.

Here’s the ending to my Art Newspaper article that got clipped for word length:

No longer will frazzled commuters accidentally run through the foyer of the museum at 1100 Kettner, looking for the train platform on the other side of the building's glass facade, but rather finding themselves surrounded by and surprised by, contemporary art. ☼

Recommendations: Well shit, that was sad. Ten years goes by quick. Here’s what I’ve been up to lately:

• I wrote about bunkers becoming middle class again and why we need to buy less stuff for Dwell.

• An exhibition popped up in Mountain View Mausoleum in December and I lamented the lack of artist’s spaces for Hyperallergic, AND THEN two different writers each wrote great pieces about artist spaces that do exist.

• I visited a gallery in a former water tower out in the desert that was filled with mushrooms, also for Hyperallergic.

• I’ve been reporting on protests from art fairs to The Oscars, as well as about open source posters of Palestinian martyrs. 🍉

• I visited Desert Christ Park, some MCM houses in Sarasota, and the Eames Archives!!!!

• I’m trying to write this newsletter more. What would you like to hear about? Drop me a note in the comments or respond to the email. I’m a crowd pleaser. I should probably take more road trips, right? Y’all wanna hear about gator farm?

035 ☼ Sublets

I lived in fifteen places in two years

A few months ago, my friend Ellen and I went on a walk. We’re the type who can easily talk for hours but our conversation revolved around the precarity of renting, being attached to ephemeral things through objects (dating, ugh), and the amount of plastic in our bodies. I encapsulated our conversation into an essay for her exhibition Garage Exchange Vienna—Los Angeles: Plastic, Plastic, Plastic at the Mackey Apartments in Los Angeles.

In collaboration with her friend Kerstin von Gabain, their delicate but hardy sculptural work considered the idealization behind the designs of Rudolph Schindler, the architect behind the apartments, and the way we live in contemporary Los Angeles. A lit reading was held to commence the run of the show, but I was out of town, so Ellen read my work on my behalf. I’ve included the excerpt that she read two Sundays ago among her artwork (featured in images) about the two years I sublet across the cities of LA and New York. Also, please immerse yourself in Ellen’s art work!

Kerstin von Gabain, 2023. Image courtesy of Josh Schaedel and the Mak Center.

Sublets*

I lived in more than fifteen places for a year and a half across New York City and Los Angeles in 2021-2022, during and after vaccinations for Covid-19. Some apartments were borrowed, others were sublet; I stayed in hotels once or twice at discounted prices just to avoid moving again. In between cities and sublets, I slept at my parents in San Diego or on the couch of my friends' apartment in Manhattan. The pandemic had left me houseless and job-seeking—I could afford therapy but not rent.  

The hardest thing to remember in every house is which way the faucets turn for hot water. I learned the hard way every time. My fundamental ignorance on the topic of plumbing made this fiddling routine of faucets a magician’s feat, a thrill-drip of dopamine deposited into the folds of my broken, Proustian brain. I pictured mazes of tubular pipes with the right angles of Modernist paintings, sinking deep into the earth beneath the tub I had finally gotten to fill with hot enough water—using a rubber band and a ziplock bag that a woman on YouTube taught me to do. I learned the timing of water heaters; I repaired toilet johns, re-seasoned skillets, buffed beat boards, tightened doorknobs, folded towels over and over until I left bathrooms looking like hotels. 

I refused the term "digital nomad"— I was not employed enough for my subletting phase to feel luxurious enough or even accurate to earn that title. I was more of a cowboy or a traveling salesman. My standard of living dropped very low—but in a fun way, I liked being efficient and minimal and tuned-in to everything around me. The novelty only wore off once a month and it was when I had to pack my suitcases again, crying about failure and what a psychic called a "weak root chakra." 

Ellen Schafer, Flock and Patterns (both 2023). Images courtesy of Josh Schaedel and the Mak Center.

I envied people with habits and long term plans. I started traveling with odd comfort items to generate a sense of continuity and permanence. For example, I carried around a mug from a thrift store for an old TV station that said "Paris News" with a tiny radio antenna drawn on a tiny state of Texas. I liked thinking about the news anchors and if they were still alive, where it sat on their desk and how it sat wherever I took it. It kept me distracted. I also kept a clock radio in my suitcase that could only find one radio station at a time, but only in one specific spot that I had to find in each home. I noted the way different types of counter marble felt under my palms—its smoothness comforting me. I attached my feelings to ripening fruit trees. I overshared with the people who made my coffee.

My memory, like many people's during this era and after, began to fray at the edges. My historic dyscalculia (the failure to understand number-based information) worsened to a comic degree: I sent packages to places that didn't exist, sent friends to the wrong side of the block—petty inconveniences that stacked up behind me like a silent diagnosis. I'd imagine I'm not the only one who routinely walks into a room and forgets why they did. I became like a child without object permanence, but I felt attached to everything around me. Confidence became a coping mechanism. I relied on my wit and my leg exercises. Did my friends and colleagues think I fell off? Do I think I fell off? Yeah, I definitely fell off. It was too painful to call it a crisis or a flop era, because in plain sight, I think it probably looked pitiful. My mother called it floundering, my friend said it was chic; a guy who slept in the backroom of a gallery and whom I shouldn't have slept with even though I did, said the one-suitcase lifestyle was enviable. Even though he lived in the back of a low-budget gallery, he still had more house than I did.

As I entered each place—each condo, each brownstone, each converted multi-family unit, I tried to imagine what tenants were like when no one was around. I embodied my voyeurism, I improvised the choreography of other people’s days. Or tried to. I imagined all the people who lived here before me.  The interiors of people's homes say less about their taste or decorating skills than it does about how they live inside it when no one is around to see them. The way a space is used, imprints a pattern onto its aura, like if you took every single frame in a film reel and stacked them on each other and shined a light beneath it. A hazy way to see everything that happened in that room, visually, at least for one second. Then it's gone. 

Installation shot of Garage Exchange Vienna—Plastic, Plastic, Plastic at the Mackey Apartments Garage Top gallery featuring work by Kerstin von Gabain (pictured above) and Ellen Schafer.

By my seventh sublet, I was at an old friends' house who kept her vitamins in her silverware drawer. I dropped a tube of lipstick on the floor and it rolled away from me as if pulled off stage by fishing wire. An uneven foundation or a ghost, who's to say? How long was stuff just stuff? Where did she end and I begin? My clutter on her counter, stirring my coffee with her grapefruit spoon. Tightening the screws on her table like it were mine, trimming the plants, sleeping on her pillows and changing the sheets. 

I liked looking at her jewelry, at the old photos of her relatives in black and white. The routines of her neighborhood outside her living room windows became mine: When the dry cleaner pulls the rollup garage door down, the sky turns a dusty blue. When the sign for the Korean restaurant lights up, radios on the street get louder. The illustration of a snarling tiger delivering a take-out box with a green silk scarf grins through her office window with an orange glow through the potted palm leaves. I sit in her chair, with its screws tightened, and stare out the window, pretending it's my life. This is my life. This is my life in her house, with her stuff. But this is my life—with the tiger and the radio and the roll-top door; this is my life. ☼

Beautiful Ellen reading Sublets!

*Inspired by Lucia Berlin's, “The Trouble with All the Houses I’ve Lived In” republished by The Paris Review, October 29, 2018.