Last summer, while visiting my parents in New Jersey, my mom gave me a copy of Kafka’s The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces. I started rereading it again this summer and realized that I needed more (I’d also recently discovered uncanny visual similarities between Koji Yamamura’s animation of A Country Doctor and Maurizio Cattelan’s, like, entire oeuvre).
A couple of weeks ago, while visiting my partner’s former professor’s home for a bbq, I noticed a handwritten list on a table that included writers and their books. “Kafka, The Castle” jumped out – Linda confirmed that it was a must-read (and that there was a film version also worth watching), so I ordered it online. I ended up going with a used paperback, mostly because it was the most affordable and, perhaps, the most comprehensive of the many translations available. Even though there was no picture of the book on the website (I don’t really judge a book by its cover, but if I have options, there are ones that I’d prefer displaying on the subway), I felt o.k. parting with the ten-or-so dollars for the book.
Sometime between ordering the book and its arrival, I attended the Second Annual Chelsea Art Walk. I had attended the first one (it was really an ‘end-of-the-gallery-season-before-the-buyers-go-to-vacation/Basel’), and the second one was equally well-attended – though certainly with more people on "staycations” than the previous Walk – and was struck by the number of meals-on-wheels (vans serving food) parked all over Chelsea proper. Some of them blasted music and even had pop-y/psychedelic visuals/commercials playing on sidewalk-facing screens that were installed directly into the broadsides of the vans’ hulls (cannoning the pedestrians w/images?)…
The show at Matthew Marks was my favorite of the Walk. Thomas Demand curated it, and his masterminding/ethos/hand was evidenced in the architectonic/trompe l’oeil/real-fake spacial mindfuck/labyrinth occupying the gallery (which last housed Jasper Johns’ varying light/weighty, though uniformly expensive - and institutionally reserved - sign/symbol endgame pieces, including Shrinky Dinks).
I felt lost the moment I entered the gallery and, after plucking-up a copy of Central-Park-recorded birdsongs on vinyl (offered Gonzalez-Torres-style on a stacked/shingled grid on the gallery’s floor), proceeded to wander the gallery gone daedal.
Yes, I wandered through this gallery-maze (would there be a minotaur? Perhaps some cheese?) and peered into the trapezoidal, dish-liquid blue windows that penetrated many of these interior walls. There were lots of small photos and/or postcards in identical frames with oversized beveled mattes – I remember potted plants and railings and aesthetically-pleasing hallways gone to seed. I also recall a black and white video of a cactus having its spines shaved with an electrical shaver. At least two of the paths terminated in darkened rooms haunted by sound and projections. Somewhere else, a vitrine displayed rows of porcelain botanicals. The northeast (?) gallery walls – the “true” walls? – were comprehensively wallpapered to look like high, thick theatre curtains.
Emboldened by the abovementioned birdsongs-on-vinyl souvenirs (and, somewhere deep within, the myth of John & Yoko’s first encounter), I opened a refrigerator that stood sentinel in another terminating (but well-lit) gallery. It was facing a wall, and the photos sharing the room depicted various doors propped enticingly ajar – I took these works as signs and permissions: I opened the refrigerator door.
And I was rewarded for my efforts: the interior walls of the fridge’s belly were lined (upholstered?) in a gorgeous blue fabric that echoed the dish-liquid windowpanes – an oddly placed but also blue sequined trim glittered as it cut across the top-back surface of the sumptuous upholstery (a glamorous suture?).
Before I could climb into this unlikely transporting wardrobe, this blue-velvet secret, a man who was otherwise preoccupied with his iPad rushed over saying “No no no!” He closed the refrigerator and I, hopped-up on Discovery & Significance, refused to cower and apologize. “Why are there only photos of doors being opened?” I asked, my arm sweeping towards the evidence. “Why is it so beautifully lined? Why can it be opened?” I went on and on. Finally, with a slight smile, he mustered: “It’s pregnant with possibilities.” WTF?
Of course, the gleaming anchors, touch- and keystones of the exhibit were the triad of Rene Magritte paintings. As aloof, knowing mystics, these Wise Men collapsed and absorbed and refracted every theme, conceit, concept, style, palette, mood, and tone reiterated by every other work in the show.
Once it arrived a few days later, I was only mildly surprised to find that the cover of the used paperback of The Castle I had ordered featured a cropped and flipped image of Magritte’s The Castle of the Pyrenees.
*Original eternally-falling door GIF by Jasper Elings (a.k.a. jeeeelings) - above remix by j1p2m3 (a.k.a. moi)
Update: Supple mental reading
Update 2: AFC edit
