Passing Time by Jason Mason
Adam Putnam Passing Time,
a series of lectures from February through May
Tracy Williams Ltd, hosted at 5 Ninth
In the art world these days people talk money. Who sold what for what price, what did it go for at auction, whose show was sold out before it even was made and where was the party. The new center of the art industry has changed hands, from the deep pockets of
Chelsea to Art Miami/Basel and the mob run piers of New York. The art fair has turned collecting into a one stop-shopping mega-event fueled by irrational exuberance and no one is eager to slow what is seemingly becoming a gargantuan economic art bubble. This bubble’s residual effect is the slue of mediocre shows in the past season in which artists, dealers, curators and critics have been more interested in the glamour of buying and selling rather than contemplating the art itself.
During these same winter/spring months when the art bubble inflated double its size, artist Adam Putnam organized a series of lectures entitled ‘Passing Time’ under the umbrella of Tracy Williams Ltd. Putnam is an artist out of the art fair loop. He is rare example in today’s art world of someone who is finding success without the polish and glitz of the gallery system. Putnam, a multi-disciplinary artist, asked his friends, artists, writers, and historians, to make slide lectures on whatever interested them. By doing this, his goal was to capture the back and forth of ideas that had often occurred in conversation between them all. What he accomplished was what the art world has been truly missing: a discourse on art.
Monday evenings became a little-known refuge where one could avoid the usual investors, scenesters and young museum circle collectors. Instead, “Passing Time” lecturers included Putnam himself, as well as Jesse Bransford, Susan Alberth, Alissa Bennett, Lorenzo De Los Angeles III, Seth Kelly, and Matthew Ronay. To his credit, Putnam neither edited nor requested topics from his speakers. Each speaker conducted a fireside chat of sorts, often speaking to the audience personally rather than academically. In certain cases the lectures proved to be an open door for understanding the more complicated concepts contained in the artists own work. For example, Seth Kelly’s ‘On Immensity’ focused on how the infinite mass of time and outer space exceeds our imaginations. Kelly peppered us with visuals ranging from pyramid ruins to the mapped surface of Mars. Jesse Bransford’s lecture ‘The Art of Memory’ diagrammed how we are thought to store and then visualize the world through our memory. Bransford guided us through Medieval archetype models straight to computer systems memory storage diagrams. Art historian Susan Alberth delivered an eye-opening lecture on her new book about aging surrealist Leonora Carrington. Alberth’s deconstruction of Carrington’s signs and symbols is a convincing argument that the artist is one of the most interesting and significant surrealists who has never been in the spotlight. Alberth’s detailed descriptions of Carringtons’ paintings are sure to influence the art of those who attended. Lorenzo De Los Angeles won the show with a low-tech lightshow entitled ‘The Meltyblend Oculus’ turning the lecture and the restaurant into a quasi “acid test” laser light show and art event.
Rather than in an academic lecture hall, Putnam deposited these evening events at the restaurant 5 Ninth which is situated deep in the meatpacking area. The third floor lounge/bar area was picked for its coziness and quaintness and at times resembled something of Sartre’s Café de Flore and at other times the incestuous ‘Central Perk’ of the “Friends” sitcom. Regardless, the lectures were a breath of fresh air in an art economy that is all but corrupted. Tracy Williams and Putnam are discussing a new group of lectures for the upcoming winter and if the current art market keeps pace, these lectures will be a much-needed oasis from it.
