Hey Ho! Let's Go! (To the Art Gallery)
The residential house concert has been a staple of punk rock scenes since the 1980s. House shows are equal parts practical and philosophical. On the practical side, they reflect the lack of venues for folks, especially underage kids, to play and listen to abrasive, loud, and socially maligned music. On the philosophical side, they reflect the Do-It-Youself ethos of punk, a communal resistance to mainstream culture and its institutions. As noted by historian Kevin Mattson, punk rock youth “created culture by developing their own concrete institutional means of cultural production.” Along with their own zines and record labels, punks started their own venues in whatever spaces they could: churches, community centers, VFW halls, and their own homes.
Punks weren’t the first the seize the means of cultural production—writer, especially, have a history creating their own journals, magazines, and Substacks—but the visual arts have seemed less determined to create an alternative culture. Artists still strive for establishment gallery shows and the acclaim of establishment critics. Maybe this is because galleries and the artworld at large have been more receptive to the avant-garde. While DC punk legends Minor Threat played in YMCAs and basements for a lack of industry attention, Jean Michel Basquiat, the most punk of major artists, found himself almost immediately on the international stage, his work displayed alongside Warhol and his notoriety garnished by profiles in major art magazines.
It’s impossible to compare the cultural arts scene of forty years ago with today’s, but lately I’ve been thinking about how we encounter and engage with that finest of the fine arts, painting. I’ve recently experienced paintings in two pop-up galleries more akin to punk rock basement shows than rarified spaces: a gallery in a church hallway and a pop-up gallery in a house.
The hallway of Tuscaloosa’s Canterbury Episcopal Church offered a beatific place to hang the paintings of Rachel Ann Wakefield, perhaps my favorite Alabama artist. The entire event had a lovely shabbiness to it: there was a cheap cooler full of craft beer, supermarket hors d’oeuvres, and a well-used white board with the (appropriate) name of the show, “Passage,” scrawled on it. Rachel held court upon what was surely a Church donation sofa and regaled the small gathering with portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-woman tales. We learned of her shift from sculpture to painting spurred on by an attempt to run a studio in Florence, Alabama. It was a cozy, warm, and intimate affair lacking entirely the pretensions that art openings manifest.
In contrast to Canterbury’s low key non-chalance, the events at the Ora Mae Gallery in nearby Holt, Alabama, are flat out parties, complete with a bonfire. Held the first Friday of each month in counterbalance to an officially sanctioned event in downtown galleries, Ora Mae really answers the command “Punk rock house show but make it art.” Indeed, music plays a part in the gatherings. Home owner and organizer, Patrick O’Sullivan, has envisioned the gatherings as celebrations of both art and music: he invites an artist to hang their work and a musician to play a set in the gallery.
Patrick named the gallery in honor of the house’s previous owner, a woman named Ora Mae. I have not idea what she’d feel about his use of the space, but I think Patrick’s got a great thing going. Partially, this is a result of the constraints he’s imposed: his rules for organizing require him to invite at least one person he doesn’t know and to ensure that at least one person isn’t a cis male. I suspect these constraints might sustain the gallery. Too often in small town scenes, good ideas fizzle out through repetition: the same people do the same things over and over again until everyone stops showing up. By inviting in folks from outside the circle, the Ora Mae Gallery should keep things perpetually fresh.
On February 3rd, the Ora Mae Gallery will present “Portals & Dreaming in Skagastrond,” works by Hannah Warner and feature music by the great Wanda of Wanda Band. It will be the place to be in Tuscaloosa County and, really, anywhere. I’ll be there and you should be too.
If you can’t make it, start a gallery of your own.
ENTHUSIASM OF THE WEEK!
Provel!
I have long mocked St. Louis-style pizza with its cracker crust and its mysterious processed-cheese food topping. Frankly, St. Louis deserves most derision cast its way, if only because of the pomposity of Cardinals fans. But folks, I repent for everything I’ve said about St. Louis pizza! I recently received a piece of contraband smuggled into Alabama by a dearly appreciated Missourian: a large chunk of Provel. This Velveeta-like substance is mostly flavorless, strangely textured, and, when melted atop a rigid crust and layer of tomato sauce, it is weirdly, beautifully, beguilingly perfect. It’s almost a non-Newtonian fluid, kinda sorta oozing around the mushrooms and peppers, strikingly shiny under the chandelier’s glow. It’s also delicious. I’m sorry, St. Louis. I was wrong.
That said, Go Reds!