After the Post-Avant-Garde

The last pre-covid exhibition at the gallery Reena Spaulings Fine Art in downtown New York was titled Paint-It-Yourself. The exhibit, showing new work by Merlin Carpenter, consisted of ten large, blank canvases and a box of paints in the center. During the opening, the crowd took up the paints and made childish paintings of stupid, ironic jokes: a scrawled “BANKS ARE COOL,” dollar signs, a vomiting head, an alien head, a crude rainbow, text written by one person and crossed out by another, etc. If I rolled my eyes at Paint-It-Yourself in 2020, in retrospect I can see it as a mildly brilliant exercise in art-scene recursiveness. The paintings were made by the audience and for that same audience, expressing the id of a social scene, the idiotic glee of a specific time and place.