Is this how I become a bank robber? The thought bellows then flips back and forth in my mind as I walk through the revolving doorway of United Bank of Switzerland on 6th avenue. Both hands are pressed against the glass while I tilt against gravity, using the force of my stature to urge forward the transparency. It is burdensome to the point of silence—doors that are so heavy they succeed all clamoring and reach that state of unworldly non-sound. The revolving doors of UBS are the closest I’ve gotten to hearing inside an inter-space airlock chamber. In this arduous moment, I realize I’ll never escape with the painting fast enough. Inevitable: I’d find myself sobbing, my hands cuffed behind my back while they pry the thing—worth more than the largest number I can fathom—from the weakened grip of my stress-sweat-covered paws.
UBS is one of the largest wealth management firms and private investment banks—my step-brother in finance tells me they are in process of merging with “Suzie” and “it’s a very big deal.” Coveted 1st and 2nd rankings on the international Financial Secrecy Index for Swiss and American operations. And, subject to countless tax avoidance investigations, and recipient of vehement criticism for encouraging tax noncompliance and off-shore financing. Spoiling my plan towards grand-art-theft, they also have doors with a weight barring swift get-away.
Every subway ride, I avert the gaze of other passengers by reading advertisements—Teeth whitening strips. Real-estate search engine. Blah-blah-blockchain something or other. App designed by a douche I painted over the summer. Class-action law office. Tv-show starring a douche I paint regularly. [1] LIQUID EYELINER! Chain BBQ restaur—Interrupting this predictable stream, I see Lucian Freud’s 1988-90 Double Portrait. The painting, warped to match the shape of an ad space, is how I learned UBS holds one of the most expansive (expensive) corporately-owned art collections (holding over 30,000 works)—from which, they are “delighted to share the majority of Lucian Freud’s late etchings, complemented by two paintings, for the first time.”
Once inside UBS, I’m greeted by a guard who asks if I have an appointment. I don’t. I tell him that I am here to see the art exhibit. With muscle memory, he presses buttons of a walkie-talkie and after the adult in-Charlie-Brown sounds that emerge from the speaker, I’m pointed just beyond him to free-standing walls freckled by etchings of Pluto (Lucian’s whippet), himself over many years, and bodies with bonyness that rivals that of the dogs.’
The greatest human invention is the fear of death—one that Freud (Lucian, that is) was famously unconcerned with. “I’m not frightened in the slightest of death; I’ve had a lovely time…I feel life insurance is absolutely awful, all based on fear, taking money away from people because they are afraid of what might happen… The notion of the afterlife is much the same, giving people the idea that this life—your actual life—is just an hors d’oeuvre in comparison with what comes later. As far as I’m concerned, the whole idea is utterly ghastly.” [2]
The fear of death is also the most profitable human invention. To participate in this civilization is to be afraid to die. To invest in stock and bonds. To go on a run if you care to live past 70. To force others into performing the labor which would otherwise strain your bones, muscles, and nerves. To drink green juice with acai berries and bee pollen. To have insurance policies. (Following the act prohibiting importation of slaves in 1808, [3] many insurance companies began offering policies to slaveholders for their chattel—being that the value was now higher, it was seen as fairly sensible to insure their “property,” just as one insures a watch or painting.) To apply rejuvenating serums if you care to look just-over-20 the whole time. And, most of all, to leave something behind.
With profound dissent to this profitable fear, Dawn Davenport ecstatically awaits the death penalty, urging them in Gilmore-ian fashion to hurry up and grant her final trophy. Dawn rejects the notion that to succeed is to sustain. Survived neither by Child or Patek, but instead by havoc, Dawn departs Earth in ultimate stardomhood. She comes into the world with nothing (forget ethics!), leaves behind nothing and yet, remains remembered. Her true heirs being: her utmost beauty, her sordid crimes, and her devotees of chaos. “I’m not going to die only for my fans of today, but for their children and grandchildren.”
Jasmine Gregory’s exhibition at MoMA PS1 Who Wants to Die for Glamour—which pulls its name from the screech Dawn Davenport releases right before her theatrical mass murder—furthers Gregory’s scenographic engagement with the blisters of luxury, racial capitalism, and Black Nihilism. [4] The ‘function’ of Jasmine Gregory’s work is pointedly its commodity-ness. In the same way that supply/demand strain in 1808 granted a more coveted-status to the enslaved body, Gregory’s works emerge out of a “sophisticated understanding of how best to exploit capitalism toward the ends of making a profit.” [5] Whether color-field-esque works composed of her studio-floor muck or champagne glasses covered in sebum-like ooze, the work is poignantly cynical in its re-performance of tran$formation.
What may at first seem a tired post-internet gesture of laborious by-hand reproduction, turns out to be something far more complex: capital-tactic-coaxing embodied. The history of painting is the history of commodity and vice versa. The history of desire is the history of telling someone that can’t have _____. You tell someone a painting is worth having by not allowing them to have it. The oiled surfaces in Who Wants to Die for Glamour hang on the wall like countless 0s in the nether of a stock-portfolio, each awaiting their own accruing value. Notably, Investment Piece 7 is planted in the museum from the depths of a private collection—in its short stint of fresh air from captivity. How spectacularly more-valuable now that it’s been in PS1! Artworks, the closest thing to the replication of someone’s internal proceedings, traded back and forth and…
Bait for a magpie, the watches in Gregory’s reproductions of Philipe Patek advertisements are scrawled across the canvas like consumerist cave drawings and smeared over in glitter. [6] It hits me as a pitiful gesture towards beautifying, like a child putting lipgloss on it’s “lips” (i.e.: buck teeth, cheeks smacking spaghetti-os all the while, and still-becoming eyebrows). The “look how pretty” is almost as pitiful a gesture as the advertisements themselves—deceptive in promising to their buyer: legacy, futurity, and good fortune for generations. “Oh, how forward thinking you were!” the hospice nurse tells the dying, as she is begged to pull the plug by the nephew inheriting all which grew from mere cents at NASDAQ.
Longevity. We are a species, just as a camel came equipped with it’s hump, predestined to store. Ours comes in the form of stocks, bonds, watches, paintings, and children. My computer's scratch disks are full: I store it elsewhere. My underwear drawer can’t fit my new Calvin Kleins: store it elsewhere… right?
Commodity’s hold on the psyche only ever tightens—up until… Imagine a language-less place, something like the Tower of Babel in the shape of a big-box store. Toothbrushes and apples and hair gel and LIQUID EYELINER! and. and. and. Here comes the micropanic of the unfamiliar commodity: without the ability to read, how do I know which to buy? After “language” comes “color.” Then, the tomb that holds “shape.” “Material” is the next victim pummeled into nothingness. The disappearance of one burgeons the forefrontness of another—with fateful confession I say: there will always be something. And here, we have the history of painting, no?
The process by which the functionality of any given commodity is overcome (something like that) is outlined in a never–sent letter from Gilbert Simondon to Jacques Derrida. A jaguar-12v as the prime example: choices are made that render the vehicle increasingly useless, but more desirable in its visual register. Indeed the uselessness has much to do with its desirability. I can’t believe I even have to say it… painting? But now, even the most inconvenient of art-objects have been subsumed by the oh-so formal system of who-has-the-biggest-cock. Luxury and inconvenience: the marriage proving divorce’s sinfulness.
Gregory’s paintings of UBS advertisements—like that which brought me to Lucian Freud on 6th avenue—reiterate questions asked to consumers, questions like “Am I a good father? Can I have it all?”, “Will our money make our children’s lives easier? Or too easy?”, and “Will the world always be this unpredictable? Will my portfolio weather the storm?” Though none of the UBS paintings (all titled Estate Sale) appear in Who Wants to Die for Glamour, I see all of Gregory’s advertisement replicas as the same in that they correctly conflate the art-object with the asset-status of a luxury timepiece or high-yield savings accounts. By replicating capitalist-communique in the form of paintings (something agreed upon to make us feel [at least when it’s good]), Gregory brings out the manufactured affective quality that Bernaysian advertising relies so heavily upon. To make us feel lack → to make us feel want → to make us feel buy.
During my second visit to the exhibition, a guard’s walkie-talkie is going berserk and that same grating distortion from earlier emerges. On the way home, I see more advertisements—Hair extensions. Furniture rental service. Hammers made from osmium. LIQUID EYELINER! Air conditioning repair.— I draw little devil horns on every man and woman I see, finalizing my masterpiece by making it appear as if they’ve all had their front teeth knocked out. This whole shitshow we’re in isn’t their fault, I know, they’re just the models. But, it made me laugh and that was enough to convince me of the innocents’ deservedness.
[1] Every time, I act startled. “You see what you made me do?!”
[2] Gayford, Martin, Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud, Thames & Hudson, 2013.
[3] Mind you, just as a refresher: the Clotilda, carrying 110 enslaved people, arrived from the west coast of Africa to Alabama in 1860. The ship was burned upon arrival to destroy evidence of the passage. Additional research by Dr. Hannah Durkin has also found evidence of ships harboring enslaved people into the 1870s, landing in Cuba.
[4] In his 2018 book Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation, Calvin L. Warren presents us with an ultimatum: do away with both optimism and metaphysics, stating the claim that “metaphysics can never provide freedom or humanity for blacks, since it is the objectification, domination, and extermination of blacks that keep the metaphysical world intact.” In the metaphysical construction, “Blacks have function but not Being—the function of black(ness) is to give form to a terrifying formlessness (nothing)... The puzzle of blackness, then, is that it functions in an antiblack world without being…I argue that blacks are introduced into the metaphysical world as available equipment in human form.”
[5] Murphy, Sharon. Slave Insurance. (2020, December 07). In Encyclopedia Virginia.
[6] In an interview with Caroline Elbaor, Gregory says “These ads are bizarre because they raise questions about what links wealth and financial success to conflicting social or environmental issues. The similarities between the financial world and art in terms of the superficial manner they attempt to tackle social and environmental issues interests me in one way or another. I call it zombie activism. At the end of the day, it’s all about money.”
