ceviche on a spoon
If I’m going to be completely honest with you, I wasn’t expecting anyone to show up to that gallery opening. In fact, when my aunt told me a friend of hers, a sculptor, was showing in a gallery in Chelsea, Manhattan, New York, the freakin’ United States of America, I couldn’t fucking believe it. “Do you know what kind of people, what level of artists show in galleries in Chelsea? Richard Serra shows in Chelsea, for crying out loud.” I wanted to say that, but I didn’t. I have to swallow comments like those because they make me seem obnoxious, entitled, and all those adjectives that people associate with know-it-all personalities. I face that problem every day. I don’t know it all, of course, but I like to sound like I do. It’s terrible.
My point is, and to this day I feel ashamed to admit it, I was very skeptical of the fact that a forty-plus year-old artist from Lima was showing in Manhattan and, if she was, that a significant amount of people would be attending the exhibition. Yes, it was a group show, but I still wasn’t expecting the crowd when I walked through those doors. More than that (and this is me atoning for my assumptions), I wasn’t expecting her sculptures to be so exquisite and mesmerizing. I honestly wasn’t expecting her to remind me why I fell in love with art in the first place.
It was a Thursday morning and my aunt had come all the way to New York from Lima. We were at my apartment discussing what we were going to wear to the opening. She suggested a black dress. I said, no. Gallery openings in Manhattan are chill. Same as going to a Broadway play is chill. People here dress for multiple events in the same day—never too elegant, never too laid back. People plan their days to make sure they look decent in every scenario. “Such is the case with gallery openings,” I explained to my aunt as we went through items in my closet, “you have to look casual-chic.” She chose a black shirt and black pants. I wore a crazy-patterned skirt that I got from the sales rack at Anthropologie and that, curiously enough, looked like a design pilfered from the Andes. “Your skirt looks very Peruvian…” my friends would say when they saw me wearing it. If they knew it came from a basement on the corner of 18th and Fifth it would ruin the surprise. I’d rather enjoy the irony of it all inside my own head. I always do.
When I finally arrived at the event, my aunt was already there. Once I hobbled to the top of the stairs some guy asked me if I was looking for a man. Flattering, right? But also, the idea that guys will go to gallery openings to pick up girls was the second most hilarious thing after Humanitarians of Tinder (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, stop reading and google it right now, it’s truly terrifying). Anyways, on I went to say hello to the artist, say hello to her mother, her sister, her girlfriend, everybody. And then there was MJ, the daughter of my aunt’s friend who I’d met the night before. “You should be friends with her,” my aunt suggested. Fuck that shit.
Ever since I arrived in the city, fellow Peruvians have been implicating me in this thing I like to describe as social babysitting. Basically they tell me who I should be friends with. They’ve been forcing these coffee encounters with both boys and girls, smart and stupid, saying we should be friends because we’re from Lima and both live in Manhattan. Has it ever occurred to them that I, perhaps, can make friends on my own? That I actually have been going to a school full of amazing, interesting people for three years now and that I, to be blunt, do not give the slightest fuck about being friends with people in this city just because they grew up in the same place I did?
I think what bothered me most about MJ was her desire to belong to a world that was obviously not meant for her. You could tell by the way she moved, what she wore, how she spoke about art, that she was out of her element. “I went to school for interior design, I love art,” she said fifty-thousand times. I wanted to respond, “But you still work for a medical staffing center, or whatever you want to call it. You sold your soul already. You love art like that guy who asked me if I was looking for a man, loves art. You love the idea of art. But you don’t love art. Because you don’t understand it. If you understood art, you would, for sure, hate it.”
Take this gallery opening. It’s an excuse to get drunk and serve fancy appetizers. “Would you like some ceviche?” one of the servers asked. In Peru, ceviche is a laid back meal. It’s the embodiment of a bright, summer Saturday at the beach, without a care in the world. In this gallery it was served in one of those spoons that you usually find in your miso soup. The chef was placing a common, usually home-cooked dish in a fancy frame through the use of these spoons. It was elevated to an almost platonic existence, where spoon and raw fish were meant to embody their ideal forms—much like what galleries do with art. But hey, at least it didn’t taste so bad.
Most of the work in this gallery was by Latin American artists, and a lot of the paintings were in my opinion folkloric, provincial. The level of technical ability was there but the courage wasn’t. I thought what separated artists from entertainers, as John Updike would say, was the willingness to give into one’s obsessions. In the paintings on the walls I saw colonization, I saw submission, I saw artists that didn’t know what they were capable of because they were too busy being the artists the market expected them to be.
And this is the point in the essay where we get to the fact that I haven’t described any of the art to you. But I don’t know if I have to, and that’s kind of the point. The industry, as annoying as that may sound, has established itself as an inside joke, a mutual agreement—an agreement that consists of elevating mediocre bullshit. Raising it on a big, bright, white spoon just like they did with the ceviche, just like they do with Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst.
But then, in the middle of this ocean of art students and art critics alike, family, friends, and too much plastic-tasting ceviche, I saw the proverbial light. Forget all my ramblings about provincial art, my lifelong quest for meaning. Sometimes, when you’re staring at a hand-carved sculpture that suggests a face, and two, small, silver girls swinging from bronze hands, you forget all that academic shit. This is the reason I fell in love with art: the feeling you get when you see a piece by Patricia Olguín (you should google her before you google Humanitarians of Tinder). This piece subtly and effectively transported me to my childhood. It had an aura, something that drew me near. I looked at the piece, and then its shadow. I remember thinking the shadow might be even more beautiful than the object.
I’m not sure where I’m going with all this, but Patricia’s work felt important, and I was glad to be there even if I was babysitting MJ and sifting through other derivative art. It was worth it to see Patricia’s sculptures and have that moment with her work. I guess in the end it’s not all total bullshit, and the ceviche wasn’t so bad.
Note from the author (2022)
Creo que este ensayo atestigua mejor que nada que haya escrito en el momento, lo mucho que la universidad te empodera para hablar con propiedad sobre cosas de las que en realidad, sabes muy poquito. Sobre todo, una que está a 5870 kilómetros del lugar donde creciste. La mayoría de los statements en este ensayo son cosas que ya no me atrevería a decir, que tomaría con pinzas y sobretodo: que buscaría corroborar con investigación cualitativa y data dura. El tema es que creo que ya hago demasiado de eso en mi trabajo como Product Manager y ahora, cuando leo esto me siento tremendamente refrescada de saber que no siempre busqué ser cuidadosa con mis palabras. Me da gusto saber que me atreví a asumir millones de cosas sobre las industrias culturales que, por más que me duela admitir, todavía sospecho que son ciertas todos estos años después.
Inicialmente también pensaba decir que me he cambiado de bando y que, la señorita que separaba a quienes entienden “el arte” vs. “la idea del arte” estaba muy equivocada. No sé qué tanto lo haya estado en realidad, porque continúo conociendo gente cuya relación con el proceso me desconcierta y mucha otra, que parece ya haber adoptado a su personaje como persona. Creo que ser artista no te hace sensible y ser sensible tampoco te obliga a ser artista, o inclusive artista full-time. Capaz esa es una de las conclusiones más bonitas de haber cumplido treinta años, aprender a separar las conductas (?) de la profesión y de lo que esto podría o no comunicar de cómo es una persona. He conocido artistas insensibles y muchos de mis amigos de saco y corbata, por así decirlo, me abren más el corazón que todos los que consideran que lo tienen siempre abierto. Creo que, quiero pensar que la actividad económica que desempeñas para sobrevivir realmente te da cierto nivel de identidad pero la verdad es que ya no sé qué tanto creo en eso.
