SILVER LININGS
One Piece #6: Anne Libby's These Days, 120.3
This piece by Anne Libby was like a shot in the arm.
I was wandering around Night Gallery with a friend last February. The gallery was like a compound with big, intimidating structures, concrete gardens well-lit from below —succulents glowing — and multiple rooms. We were in search of a large glass eye, which had been the image on the opening postcard that drew me to the event. It took a while to find in this half-maze of rooms, what with the largest of them filled with paintings of horror. Strange all blue works where figures, including children, were nightmarish and clown-like. Despite all the craft and whatever intent, they overpowered the already huge room, and the people in it shrank into tiny dolls wearing clothes, ourselves included.
The only person we both talked to was the person serving the drinks out in the courtyard. Red or white wine in clear plastic cups. In this short conversation, we noticed other parts of the yard included sculptures that looked like benches. It was too cold to sit down. So we stood for a second to talk about why more people don’t come to these things, given the offers. In New York, I’d glommed onto Chelsea, with the free beer on Thursdays. My friend had gone to other kinds of parties, and I realized then that my life had been a series of looking in from the outside.
Historically, this has been fine. It’s only more recently that I’ve been dying to be a part of something; a family, a world, if only to give this same thing to someone else to whom I actually owe it.
On this night, though, I had a hankering to go back to an old feeling, to be pathologically not scared of me out of place.
As we walked out of the main gallery space, we stood in the intersection of a few buildings. There may have been a fountain on in the center. I could feel the pull from my right side — a kind of back entrance to an unannounced room. I drew us closer, and there was a wooden beam with a tiny sign that had the name of an artist on it in small typewritten letters. There’s something in there, I said, but this feeling I had, my friend had felt differently. She had known not to go in.
I went in alone. There were the men (boys). Two playing ping-pong and two standing by, those heavy hoodies that were also fresh. No one even looked remotely in my direction. Two more sat together on top of a wooden flat file; I’m sure one was smoking.
Moving closer to those two sitting down on the files, I asked whether this room wasn’t part of the show, and one responded: We all work here, so….
Then I looked around. Behind another desk in the back, I could see four or five abstract paintings in dark colors, and I asked, Is that the work?
Those are mine, and this is an opening. For my friends, he said.
In hindsight, there’s nothing wrong with any of that. This did not stop all the embarrassment of everything from middle school to high school, and maybe beyond, from rushing to my face. Of course, I turned around and high-tailed it out of there, but not before I heard him say something like, Wait, that’s not what I meant, from his perch on the files at the side of the room.
Well, that didn’t go well, I said to my friend, who truly, gratefully, did not make me relive the story with a detailed account.
We ambled on into the last room of the gallery, where we hadn’t been. That was finally what I was looking for - these hanging glass eye pieces, like oversized pendents. In the very same room were these other pieces: strange, heavy, but also alive.
One was hanging flat on the wall. It was a regular blind, recognizable as such, which seemed to be dipped in liquid silver. It was slick, smooth, and also an object, conjuring the possibility of a missing subject. I knew about that.
The blind had these beautiful silver strings, which made them seem sexy, and the uniformity of each line was so satisfying, as if it had been hand-made to look like it was machine-made. There was a softness.
The shape was kind of off-kilter, like the type of blind that you’d try to pull up in an anonymous hotel, or maybe pull down. Even as I describe this, I can hear the way that movement sounds, trying to get the blind down, and instead of both sides falling, having only one fall with a swoosh. After that, the inevitable jangle of trying to relift the whole thing, which it of course will not do, until you decide that you must do whatever you’re planning to do with only the curtain.
Oh, this is punk, my friend said, and I was mad right away about how good she is at putting the right words to things.
But I think I also felt something more: I felt a sharp split between being exposed on purpose or exposed by accident, and how the ones that happen by accident house all vulnerability, and how the ones done on purpose hold all the power. Or even the accident might hold as much of the beauty. It all depends on whose pulling the strings.
We both turned around, and then we saw the same kind of sculpture, but this one was on the floor, like what happens next when you get mad and pull it all off the wall.
In an afterthought, I noticed that these were all from 2021. A year etched in every single person’s mind on the face of this planet. Inside, outside, who gets to go where? Was there beauty in stillness or just agony? The sameness: a trap and maybe also a portal.