Peter Schjeldahl had something he called gang theory. Step One: Move to a city. Step Two: Go to a bar. Step Three: Make friends. Make Art. Make a movement. Simple. Ideally all your friends are geniuses. But the point is that you’re part of a tribe. And a tribe is useful when you spend most of your time alone. Even if it’s only in theory. The tribe. The friendship.

Bars were the place to go to begin. Whether or not that was because unsteady artists needed a glass. Or because in a big bad city where you’re all alone. Where else do you go to have a fighting chance of meeting compatriots? At twenty-five. Thirty.

Of course everything has changed. And the essence of the bar. The tavern is almost gone. Has it been replaced? To some. But to artists? Have we replaced leaving your domed spire. Really leaving it so you’ll have the chance to come back again.

In the 90’s Dieter Roth told Hauser and Wirth to build him a bar. And it was for the gallery to be not just a gallery but an experience that the bar came out of his labor-backed practice. He built the bar with his son. His grandsons now build them. They’ve spanned Hauser and Wirth galleries for generations now. 

The curator of Cock N’ Bull, James Mcbride, wants us to speculate on the space. And perhaps an answer based on alcohol isn’t the answer for our future. But space surely is. For space is the stuff that brings art to life. The only thing that can hold it. And sometimes we tend to mix that up with place. Too often eulogized. A street. A district. A city that can easily typify a group. Of individuals found together.

The new art critic for the New Yorker. Jackson Arne wrote recently in a piece on the Coenties Slip that he suspected talent is as common as dirt. And that it’s taken a bleak state of affairs to stunt it now, and it took remarkably little for it to flourish then. New York after the Second World War. Empty warehouses ceilings high enough to build sails in. Rats and dead bodies were there too. Don’t forget the smell if you’re going to picture the past. 

Place is often enough used to organize artists' lives amidst the chaos that usually surrounds them. But place is for legacy. Space is what we need now. Floor and walls and windows if you’re lucky. Margins for people to fill. To compete. And we might not have as much of it as they did in those oft hallowed years. But maybe that’s better. Maybe it’ll make our genius a little more refined. 

Or maybe the tribe hasn’t formed yet. Or it is only ever formed in retrospect by people lucky enough to look back on the past. By you. Maybe. If you’re lucky enough to look back one day looking more like bones than blood. With a smile perhaps. Cause maybe it’ll be true. That in the past we had it. The space to be friends (and more importantly bloody bloody rivals). The space to make a movement.

By Kazden Brackett