So many galleries, so little time. The reviews that actually make it onto this website, dearest Filthy Dreams readers, are only an itsy fraction of the excruciating, shoulder-popping exertion of heaving open countless, heavy-ass gallery doors. Don’t you wish you could come with us on these art excursions? Well, wish no longer! Swanson Kuball gallerist Laura Swanson and your faithful cofounder Emily Colucci take you along for a wrap-up chat about a recent tour of some of Chelsea’s most blue-chip galleries in what will (hopefully) be a new series bringing you thoughts on the good, the bad, and the boring:

Emily Colucci: Before we get into anything we saw within galleries, we need to pay tribute to all the many, many fallen lantern flies that lay broken and stomped next to the glass-fronted blue-chip gallery doors. RIP. This honor, however, does not extend to the live lantern flies buzzing around, which I found distressing (although I tried to mask it). EEEW–I don’t want them to land on me!!!! Can’t someone at Gagosian or Zwirner DO something about this? Don’t they have enough money to rid us of lantern flies once and for all? I also want to note that telling citizens to squish them when they see one is about as effective of a policy that the US can muster now. Clearly, that’s working…

Laura Swanson: It was horrific. The swarm of klutzy landings and carnage on the ground reminded me of the plague of frogs in Magnolia. There needs to be a blue-chip lantern fly task force to keep things tight in Chelsea. And not just the facility workers or front desk assistants, I want to see sales out there too. Everyone on the task force could wear black berets. It’d be very chic and good for the community.

Emily: We both know sales would not be involved in picking up those mangled spotted corpses…

Onto the art, should we begin with the sweet and move to the salty? The only exhibition that I can say is 100% worth seeing is Doug Wheeler’s Day Night Day at David Zwirner’s 20th Street space, although I enjoyed wearing the paper booties and waiting for 20 minutes in the snooze-fest of their upstairs Ad Reinhardt show much less. Couldn’t they have provided a more compelling upstairs show knowing that everyone would have to endure the Wheeler wait-around? It’s like they designed it to be as confrontationally boring as possible.

Laura: You got there before me and sent a text stating you were waiting upstairs and riveted by the exhibition. I thought, “Riveting? Ad Reinhardt?” Once I got up there and saw the work, I understood you were doing humor. The show was so drab that it didn’t seem worth venturing into the other rooms. Instead, I suggested we go downstairs and sit on a bench facing a wall. One could’ve curatorially had a lot of fun with what to pair with the Wheeler. I would’ve gone full cloud. I know he’s not represented by the gallery, but I would’ve put Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds on a monitor. Maybe add some Magrittes? You know, something fun to hint at what you’re about to experience downstairs. What artworks do you think would’ve made for a good pre-Wheeler opening act?

Emily: I did go into the two other rooms and you missed more squares! Not to get ahead of myself, but if I had organized the upstairs, I would have pulled some Zwirner strings and placed Medieval altarpiece loans to go with the transcendent pearly gates theme. The more overwrought, the better. But this speaks to the art I truly enjoy staring at for long periods anyway. If nothing else, they should have shoved some big-titted Lisa Yuskavage paintings up there for a dash of the profane with the sacred.

Regardless, enduring the square-a-thon was a small price to pay for the Wheeler. I’m hesitant to ruin the surprise for readers, but I will anyway. At first, we entered what I assumed was simply a room with two shiny, slippery squares painted on the floor and two other lighter squares on the wall. Think James Turrell style. I immediately felt disappointed. That is until you broke the illusion, a freaky moment in which you boldly stepped—or really, patted—what we thought was a solid square wall and then, entered. The rest of us were too timid to bash our faces into presumed solid plaster. What was your experience as the first one to go toward the light?

Laura: It felt like a cross between Alice in Wonderland going through the mirror for the first time and trying to find a bathroom at a relative’s house in the middle of the night. I had my fist in front of me, grasping at the air, hoping I would not hit a wall. Having worked for David Zwirner for eight years, I’ve been in a few of Wheeler’s previous installations and made videos about them, so I knew there had to be more than just the squares. He’s known for creating expansive, sublime spaces, but I hadn’t experienced an installation like Day Night Day before. I was hesitant, but I took a chance, and it paid off. I still felt a little fear though!

Emily: Once inside, it felt completely surreal and a bit frightening. The docent told us that we would feel the floor slope upward to let us know when we were going to go careening into a wall, but I didn’t trust it. I kept turning around, I realized later, to ground myself so I wouldn’t have a panic attack. Yes, there is an exit that still exists; we weren’t swallowed entirely by the misty pseudo-fog. Day Night Day is what I imagine it’s like entering heaven. Where is Saint Peter? Am I on the guest list? Santa, I’ve been good! 

Laura: Yes. It felt like we were in the waiting room for heaven, and God made a terrible mistake and accidentally let us in. Or it’s like we were in Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” video when the light goes bright. Once we were in, it was another test of wills, as one doesn’t want to walk into an actual wall. So we were all walking very slowly towards the heavenly void. One aspect I’ve always loved about these curved installations of Wheeler’s is the way the sound echoes. You’re actually in a space that isn’t that big, but noises like footsteps and talking sound like it’s miles away. I found it very calming. I actually wouldn’t mind having one of these in my house to decompress at the end of the day.

Emily: Like an even more expensive sensory deprivation chamber! Though with all that perceived fog, it would be like sitting in a sensory deprivation chamber with Hunter Biden! 

Moving from one blue-chip monstrosity to another, I was also tickled by Hauser & Wirth’s Jason Rhoades exhibition, which featured his entire car series. I’m not at all a car person (we live in NYC), but I do like the thoroughly American romance of car culture and the most American of deaths: car accidents! The best part of this show wasn’t the individual auto objects themselves, though I will take a Ferrari, thank you very much, but the fact that the exhibition turned the bottom floor of Hauser & Wirth into essentially a car showroom. It made clear what these mega-galleries really are: luxury dealerships! Aren’t art dealers basically car salesmen?

Laura: When I first heard about the show, I was very excited to see it because Hauser & Wirth on 22nd Street definitely looks like a Maserati dealership. With their giant floor-to-ceiling windows in the front, it seemed like such a brilliant idea. I worked on a documentary about Jason Rhoades for his PeaRoeFoam exhibition at David Zwirner in 2014, and there is a segment about his car collection, so seeing them in person was a bit like seeing a celebrity in real life. What I loved about the cars was how well they were preserved. They were like time capsules, some with a pile of cassette tapes in the seat, air fresheners, and worn seat covers. I also loved the humor. The Pontiac Fiero masquerading as a Ferrari, the cute and humble Ligier with the passenger side front seat turned around. Every car had its own personality. 

Emily: There was some unnecessary fat that needed to be trimmed in the show, however, all of which unfortunately broke the dealership illusion. I didn’t watch the corresponding video at all, did you? That could go. The worst addition was the back wall of random Francis Picabia paintings near Rhoades’s revving CD-ROM porn-playing, seemingly trash-built, boinking cars, Fucking Picabia Cars with Ejection Seat. While Picabia may have been an inspiration for the work–and for Rhoades in general, I don’t think these Picabia paintings added anything at all. It’s all hot rod sex, careening death drive, consumerism, and manic velocity, and then, in a corner, Picabias as if you’re in MoMA. I’m not sure what they added more than shouting: Hey, look! We can get Picabias! 

Laura: I was already familiar with that video (Hans Ulrich Obrist interviews Rhoades while driving around LA in 1998) because part of it was used in the DZ documentary. Sadly, the interview wasn’t necessary to have in the exhibition. It seemed like extraneous exposition. But it’s a nice historical resource, and it makes sense on the website (where people have more attention span and more time to watch a video). But yeah, the further we went into the show, the more disappointing it became. Never thought Picabia could be such a letdown, but they seemed like an afterthought. Their modest sizes couldn’t hold up against Fucking Picabia Cars with Ejection Seat, the giant car sculpture installed right next to them. But the Picabias were most likely the only things for sale in the show, so that’s probably why they were there. I’d go as far as to say the car sculpture wasn’t needed. The car collection was strong enough to stand on its own. Perhaps these disparate aspects would’ve worked better in separate rooms? I suppose the car dealership-like open layout does have its drawbacks. Still was worth it.

Emily: Onto some less satisfied observations: Though I saw these exhibitions before we met up, I have to mention a couple of earlier disappointments, namely Gina Beavers’s Divine Consumer at Marianne Boesky and Monica Bonvicini’s Put All Heaven in a Rage at Tanya Bonakdar. The latter is an exhibition that asks: Can a wretched upstairs gallery ruin the entire show? The answer is a resounding yes! The downstairs features a delightfully perverse playground of chains, sex slings, fluorescent and wire Venetian blinds, chainsaws, and handcuffs, all recalling various kinds of power play. Lining the walls around this cavalcade of kink were mirrored pink wall-mounted works featuring long tongues jutting from the reflective surface and glory holes. Though I could have done without the tired wall-sized Richard Prince-like Marlboro Man, that complaint had nothing on my adverse reaction to the upstairs half of the exhibition that featured wretched mirrors with prints of chains emblazoned with phrases such as Goddess, Diva, Grrl, and, the worst, Girlboss. I walked around the gallery muttering to myself: “Yuck!” Were these supposed to be ironic? Sincere? They’re almost more interesting if they were completely serious, like awful “You go girl!” tat bought at Marshalls or hanging in the feminist WeWork, the Wing. 

Laura: Now I want to see this show, primarily because of the selfies you took in front of the mirrors. I checked out the exhibition on the gallery’s website too. That room was built to be Instagrammable. It’s like Paris Hilton meets the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles meets Christopher Wool. The silver chainsaw on the ceiling is screaming, “We made this space for you! Come take pictures!” And now I really want to go take pictures in it. I’d say this was a marketing success.

Emily: It did have a funhouse element, which is more than I can say about Beavers’s show at Boesky. Beavers has transitioned from revoltingly thick and trashy paintings of corn cob nails, aggressively plumped makeup tutorial lips, and thick hunks of raw meat to deadened, uninteresting piles of towels, yarn, and upholstery. The press release provides an explanation for this subject shift related to the boredom of our current consumerist-driven Internet of algorithms and social media product shilling like online yard sales. This includes a quote from Jia Tolentino: “But when the internet moved to an organizing principle of opposition, much of what had formerly been surprising and rewarding and curious became tedious, noxious, and grim.” While Beavers’s fixation on textures allows for a bit of formal interest, tedious is the right word for these new works. And, to me, I can only see the show in the context of: Boesky wants sales! 

On the subject of easy selling, Mitch Epstein has some perfectly pleasant photographs of trees at Yancey Richardson. They reminded me of something you might see in a hotel lobby. Mitch Epstein, I should note, used to be represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co. when I worked as a gallerina way back in 2011-2012. My main memory of that also tree-centric exhibition was how every day a new viewer would come in and ask me if I could identify where every tree was in the show. Ha ha ha! So funny and fresh! 

Laura: I had high hopes because I love Mitch Epstein’s older work. He’s responsible for many iconic photos of American life. But this reminded me of a RISD MFA thesis show of a photographer who entered the program making tree pictures and left the program making tree pictures but printed them larger. They also happened to take a video class. The photos of the trees were pretty and safe, and I agree they will probably have no problem selling. The few seconds I saw of the video looked pretty banal. Montage of nature, I think? However, there was an older gentleman in the inefficient broom-closet-sized video room seemingly transfixed by it, so I didn’t want to disturb him. Perhaps the video is good? I’ll never know now.

Emily: I’ll never know either since, by that point, I had reached my art limit and it might have been our previous visit to Fischli and Weiss’ Polyurethane Objects at Matthew Marks that did it. Strewn industrial materials and scattered garbage like peanut shells, milk cartons, Newport packets, candies, and Advil bottles are all rendered in polyurethane in a way that looks as if the install has yet to be finished. It’s a purposefully constructed version of my favorite unintended part of Petzel Gallery’s also overblown-yet-tedious Pieter Schoolwerth exhibition: the Werthers Original lying on the floor as if it fell out of some grandmother’s pocket! That was certainly much more of a statement about age and teeth-rotting vices than the awful attempted spectacle of a bathroom on its side. Yawn!

Fischli and Weiss’ works, though, would be much funnier within a house or a group show–somewhere without the context of the exhibition as a whole in which a clean freak might try to tidy it up! I mentioned to you in the gallery that it reminds me of work that John Waters would own. They do scream his beloved quote: Contemporary art hates you! 

Laura: What’s funny is how underwhelmed I was at first. I didn’t take any pictures because nothing was shouting at me. (Instagram has ruined how I see!) But I’ve thought a lot about the show since our visit and wished I had spent more time with it. There was a pair of tiny rain boots I can’t stop thinking about. Their placement was very understated and cute, hidden between a chair and a crate. Same with the small green juice box hidden behind some boards. The humble, anti-art presentation creeps up on you. While we were there, I mentioned I was reminded of the scene in Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know, where she goes to the art gallery and attempts to talk to the owner while they’re installing an exhibition of anti-art. Similar to John Waters’s Pecker, July satirizes the absurdity and pretentiousness of the art world in a hilarious and deadpan manner.  

Though Fischli and Weiss were among the first to exhibit studio detritus (Polyurethane Objects debuted in 1982), the show felt diluted because there are quite a few exhibitions on view now that have similar anti-art presentations. In addition to flotsam and jetsam being scattered about, I’ve noticed recent shows with work installed in an ostentatious manner, the most common being paintings hung extremely low. You would think someone short-statured like me would appreciate it, but I do not. I wonder if this return to anti-art is an attempt to stand out in the neverending sea of exhibitions. It’s important to note that Fischli and Weiss are different, though, as they are masters of trompe-l’œil (they handcrafted all the objects) and have always had humor in their work. 

Emily: You’re right—at least Fischli and Weiss have a sense of humor even though we’ve been almost too overwhelmed by the anti-art schtick to fully appreciate it. The hacky “Look, I’m exhibiting trash!” or hanging things awkwardly could be fun if it wasn’t so self-serious. For instance, I saw R. Jamin’s show at David Peter Francis, which includes a drawing hung at a height ideal for genuflecting. While I like this play with religiosity, there wasn’t enough of a pay-off: a pretty drawing of a hand with a drop of blood, the most safely bland stigmatic imagery imaginable. Where is the overblown Catholic punishment of, say, Gordon Stevenson’s unwatchable film Ecstatic Stigmatic? I want writhing on a bed to a piercing soundtrack of wolves howling! But I’m stepping outside the boundaries of our Chelsea-focused jaunt here…

Laura: Perhaps we should do this again? Maybe we could hit up the galleries in “lesser Chelsea” aka Tribeca? I’ll pack a flagon of wine so we don’t have to wait until afterward to get our drink on. Art viewing will be more fun that way too. Until next time!