Remember that one gallery?
They call it that because they can’t remember. And in a way they don’t want to remember. They remember who showed there, they rattle off the names and if you were there you remember those shows and probably which pieces sold, if anything did, and there was that one show you can even recall the placement of the pictures, the red one was up front by the door and the blue one that your date liked was further back and why did they bother hanging two blue ones, it kinda ruined the show. And the artist went on to have a show at that bigger place, remember? Yeah you remember that place. Until you are asked, “What was the name of that bigger gallery?”
Complete blanks are the predominant color of the landscape when it comes to art history. There aren’t holes, it isn’t Swiss cheese, there are blanks, they’re different than holes. Blanks are composed of matter and memory, they happened and they still might even be pertinent to the contemporary dialogue. And every once in a while, almost always when looking at some artist’s CV, you see the name, the blank is filled in and the memories trickle about, watering the cactus.
Sometimes you forget that one gallery and you forget that one artist but you remember that one show. It changed the way you look at painting or it turned you off of the idea that there could be redemption in Pop Art or you saw a celebrity at the opening who you will forever thus associate with that stupid stick figure drawing by that one guy at that one gallery. More often you forget that one gallery and that one show but you do remember the artist. All you recall is that he or she did show there. Maybe you are at a red light in the passenger seat and you nudge your friend, bored behind the wheel, and he looks over and you point “See that second building from the corner, the yoga studio?” He looks over and you tell him that is where someone who now shows at museums had a show way back when. It is always better if it was that famous artist’s first show, but the bigger the artist, the more important the second, third, fifth and seventh solo shows become. You don’t need to be in physical proximity though. Any trigger can bring up the question. You see a bald guy in a nice suit and he looks like the guy who ran that one gallery who gave that one artist who is big now their first solo show and you turn to your date and you ask “Do you remember that one gallery?” And the bald guy walks by, oblivious to his place in history, even though he isn’t the guy who made history.
And history is all it is besides a real estate lease. History is an empty bottle, long drank, drunk done, hung over, recovered and moved on. It is rare someone would consciously recycle one of these bottles. Oh, some physical spaces are taken over by another gallery but a space that can hold an art gallery can also hold an art studio and the lower the rent of the gallery the more likely it is to become a private studio once the lease is up and the game is lost. and of the rent stays the same and another gallery opens there you can bet the proprietor hears every so often a question along the lines of “Wasn’t that one gallery here before you?”
And then, even when nobody can remember the name of that one gallery, someone will explain why it closed. Divorce. Wife was funding husband’s hobby of playing gallery. Drug problem, had to go to rehab, family cut off the funds. Thought they had an eye and instead of playing the game they just picked art they liked and bought ads and then closed, embittered that there is a game instead of purity. But the one reason you hear a lot (when you really get into it, get talking about why that one gallery closed) goes something like this: an artist moved on, moved up, and while they did not expect that artist’s loyalty they suddenly realized that they were in the same spot and… (now this is the worst, the darkest revelation) they realized that they always would be in that spot.
You remember that one gallery because there was never champagne sweeter served there than on the first day they opened. They set the bar and could never even do a chin-up on it. Artists move up and down, there are cycles that if you watch will make you believe in biorhythms or cosmic forces aligning. But galleries are hard-pressed to take even one small step up. The cement dries so hard so fast that the length of the red carpet you roll out on opening night is like the height chart on the side of every mugshot. You might get uglier, you might get exonerated, but you never get any bigger unless you get lucky, and you only get lucky when all the other galleries have left town.
The only way to create that type of luck, then, is to last. They can’t forget a space’s name when they ask where the openings are at tonight and someone mentions that space. The art world expands in dizzying, rapid advancements and then it contracts in merciless purges, black holes eating stars that cannot escape. Galleries big and small go POOF into the night. Non-profit spaces and artist collectives are not spared. The ones that last are not necessarily tougher, better or more intelligently managed. They are usually just luckier and when it gets really dry, really deep into a recession, many just close because the whole contraction has been a buzz kill.
The spaces that last, the galleries whose names are still on the building when you drive by racing to pick up the dry cleaning or are dawdling with old friends on a stroll after a nice meal, those spaces are the lifers. They have nowhere else to go. The art they show is not any better or worse than the art shown by the hundred galleries that kept regular hours until six months after a stock market crash or other depressing market calamity, a real estate boom that priced them out or a lover’s spat that stopped a cash spigot. The lifers waddle on, rarely thinking about that one gallery, you remember it, right? But even the lifers pause when they realize that the path they have been walking on is a circle, stuck on the same level they were on the day they got that first listing in the art gallery guide.
So it takes a lifer to last and it takes luck to ever move up the food chain. You just can’t eat a fish bigger than you but you can get bigger by nibbling on the corpse of that dead whale – just never be too too close when that bigger fish knows it is dying and is taking those last flailing bites. It is dangerous to be too little around anything big and desperate.
Once a little luck lands your way and you feast at the feeding frenzy that is a proper downsizing (proper when you survived, tragedy when you closed) there will be scant rewards, but you may as well enjoy them. The biggest reward to moving up is to meet all the people in the art world that would be at that one gallery if it was still open… but instead they are at your gallery, because that one gallery is closed. And if you are doing it right at your gallery it is forgotten. The artists come and go, the press comes and goes and the money comes and goes, but their forgetting is one of the two rewards of lasting and the only other reward to lasting is that nobody will ever stand in your gallery and ask you if you remember that one gallery and be referring to you.