All Odysseus had to do was to slay an ox. Orpheus only needed to slip past Cerberus, the ultimate in junkyard dogs. And Dante? He had Virgil to sweet talk their way into hell.Getting into the Black Acid Co-op installation this summer, you ran a similar gauntlet: the Deitch Gallery Girls, demanding not a blood offering, but the modern equivalent: a signed release. The transaction put you on notice: abandon hope all ye who enter here.
Stepping into the first rooms was like entering Dante’s first circle – alarming enough but, as it happened, only hinting at the misery to come. A kind of Limbo, this antechamber reminded me of an old-school student apartment the day after graduation. The province of an indifferent landlord, the place had fake wood paneling and stained wall-to-wall carpets. But it was the litter – torn newspapers (in Chinese, no less) strewn across the floor, faded photographs suggestive of better days, a terrarium on its last legs – that gave off the scent of life abandoned.
The Deitch release billed Black Acid Co-op as “a counter-culture enclave embedded in the metropolis. In this incarnation, the artists shift the focus from the production of illegal drugs to sites of sub-cultural groups and how they are situated in the larger urban environment.”
A collaborative endeavor of Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe, the Deitch installation (covering 14 rooms on three floors) was the reincarnation of an earlier piece, Hello Meth Lab in the Sun (with Alexandre Singh), that debuted in Marfa, Texas. A second variation, Hello Meth Lab with a View, appeared in Miami in 2008.
Not having seen either of the earlier pieces, I’ll take it on faith that they focused more on drugs than did the New York installation did, and I’d certainly grant that Black Acid Co-op served as a kind of tripped-out gallery of countercultural dysfunction.
But if you believed the press release, you might have expected a sociological study when, in fact, you were treated to a 21st-century take on the inferno.
Once past the antechamber, you walked through a series of burned-out rooms – past a melted toilet, through a scorched mobile-trailer kitchenette/dinette, through a blasted-out refrigerator – into the heart of the installation: a functioning meth lab, complete with glass beakers and plastic tubes, aluminum ducts, and emptied-out Sudafed packets. Progressing from burned-out trailer to drug lab, you traveled back through time: from the tragic end of the story to its not-so-innocent beginnings, from the wreckage to the source. 
The entire installation implied a similar narrative – a descent from hope to desolation. On the second floor, you stepped back into the earlier blissed-out dream of an alternative life: the all-natural, geodesic-domed hippie commune. Although not without its dark shadings (i.e., some fairly creepy specimen jars), the upstairs scene evoked a far more optimistic historical moment when quite a few apparently intelligent people believed in alchemy. Drop out and escape the depredations of modern life. Turn on and peace and love will rule the planet. What transpires downstairs gives the lie to all that – not simply in the burned-out meth lab but in the other rooms as well. Next to the lab is what many observers have described as a take on Ted Kaczyinski’s lair: a library of books, their spines obsessively hand-lettered with titles like Society Never Advances, and a workstation with video screens where the paranoid recluse can monitor activity in the gallery rooms.
Through a hole ripped in the library wall, you enter what seems to be an uptown gallery showing an exhibition of black-and-white photographs. You might think you’ve stumbled on a red-carpeted refuge of civilization, but then you study the images and think again. The people populating them are fashionable and decidedly wealthy, but the world they inhabit is a decadent one, very Eyes Wide Shut. No one, not even the elites, can escape the wreckage.
Beyond that, through another hole ripped through the wall, a once-grand space – a cosmic ballroom? – is emptied out. It reminded me of the Sainte-Chapelle's azure vaulted Lower Chapel, painted to resemble the star-studded heavens, but here the azure is peeling off the walls, the red carpet is ripped and soiled, and the stars are nowhere in sight. Abandon hope, indeed.
A Kind of Joy
There’s more – more rooms and more associations. I haven’t described the Chinese herbal-emporium-cum-sex-shop in the basement or the wigged-out wig room. I haven’t talked about the imagery that recurs through the rooms – the coyote, the horse, the unicorn, those Sudafed packets. I haven’t mentioned other artists who are creating similar trompe l’oeil environments, people like Gregor Schneider and Christoph Buchel. And I haven’t invoked Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Joan Didion’s account of the Haight that, like Black Acid Co-op, paints a world of lost souls.
Instead, I want to invite you into another suite of rooms created at a different New York gallery. The year was 2002 – I believe it was at Christmastime – and I dragged my mother and sister to the Ace Gallery, on Hudson Street, to see David Hammons’s Concerto in Black and Blue. Mom was 82 then and game (she still is) but, I think, a little perplexed by the experience.
Once again, the sleek gallery girls guarded the entryway, but this time they weren’t asking you to sign away your life. They were handing you a tiny (thumb-size) LED flashlight that cast a pinpoint of blue light when you pressed on it.
The door they guarded opened into a city block of gallery rooms – Ace was originally the longshoremen’s hiring hall – with 20 foot ceilings. Inside, though, you couldn’t see a thing – except maybe some pricks of blue light cast by fellow gallery-goers. The title riffs on Fats Waller’s Black and Blue – What did I do to be so black and blue? the singer asks – and much of the commentary about the piece focuses on issues of race. Hammons, an African-American artist with a Duchampean flair, addresses blackness in his work but always from an oblique angle: he’s sold snowballs on the street, used garden spades and basketball hoops, and recast the American flag in black, red, and green. At the RISD museum this fall, I finally got to see one of his Rock Heads, a series of portrait sculptures made of stones on which he glued hair swept up from Harlem barbershops.
What’s fascinating – and just plain wonderful – about Hammons, though, is that he’s about far more than race. Concerto in Black and Blue was all about blackness: you were plunged into an entirely black world – not a light anywhere except those blue pinpricks floating off in distant space. So, this piece was about black experience but in the same way that, say, Freeman and Lowe’s is about white experience. Emerging from very specific contexts, both speak to a larger vision as well.
In Hammons’s case – or at least in the case of the Concerto – that vision is elegant, magical, ephemeral, and a far cry from a paranoid landscape populated by blasted-out meth labs and failed utopian communes.
Glenn Ligon put it this way: “Concerto and Black and Blue forced us to acknowledge that to live in the world is to live without guarantees, to face the unknown, to grope around in the dark. The darkness of the gallery was the darkness of the world, and yet, Hammons made us embrace it, find meaning, or even a kind of joy in it. As I stood in the center of one of those empty rooms, I thought “‘Oh, this is what it means to be alive.’”
P.S. In writing this piece, I came upon this wonderful quotation from Hammons: “The art audience is the worst audience in the world. It’s overly educated, it’s conservative, it’s out to criticize not to understand, and it never has any fun.”
