Nicolás Guagnini – The Walrus

About

The American rock critic Dan Graham emphatically dislikes The Beatles. When I was younger, I thought this opinion to be historically sacrilegious –– even if I’ve always really been a Stones person. Dan claims it’s a lightweight band fit to introduce children to popular music. Now that I’m middle aged and mid-career I find myself agreeing with Dan, on the merits. However, the opening stanza for “I am the Walrus” somehow haunts me.

“ I am he as you are he as you are me / And we are all together ”

What was meant to be read, and has been read, as a psychedelic appeal to identity dissolution is also a perfect description of the intergenerational system of legitimation between artists. I hold that construct in high regard because it sidesteps the market and general art world reception. It verifies equally across all kind of subject positions and genders, irrespective of where society is at in any given issue. This is an instance in which a relationship of friendship must be substantiated by work (and with Dan that of course includes writing), affect, and competition. The ghost of a fallout hovers due to internal or external pressures. Over decades, your intimate being and your public persona are in a perpetual status of mutual feedback in relationship to the other person. Yet elective affinities beat death, and there is a transit through influences and a dialogue with what has been as a perpetual potentiality of what must be. A friendship between artists is also the most amazing imaginary museum. Many people from many epochs sit at the table at any given time.

In the studies for this piece, and the piece itself, I attempt a direct, schematic and somewhat stupid representation of a walrus type art friendship.

Nic
Harlem, February 2018

This exhibition has been made possible thanks to the assistance of Bortolami, New York.