Letter

I found this listing: ‘Dmitry Samarov (20th/21st C), Bookshelf #2, O/C’ while searching for something else. I clicked through after making sure the link wasn’t spam and saw a painting I’d totally forgotten about making. It was part of an auction to be held in the coming weeks in South Carolina.

Under provenance: Purchased from Judith Racht Gallery, Chicago, IL, for $500.

I don’t care much for this painting and find it surprising I allowed it to be shown. This was back in 1997 or 1998. The show it was part of was a forgettable experience all around. Perhaps the only notable thing is my prices have gone down rather than up in the intervening decades.

I don’t know who bought the painting because the gallery didn’t bother to keep records of such details. I reached out a few years ago hoping to track down the buyer of a couple sketchbooks and found out this confounding factoid. Out of sight, out of mind, I guess.

What it made me wonder is how much else of what I’ve made, said, or done has been forgotten. The internet is good for sometimes burbling up fragments of discarded past this way.

The same week I found the auction entry, a visitor to my Buena Vista show revealed that he’d recently bought a house in Beverly within a couple blocks of where I used to live. I looked up the old house and was greeted with a weird surprise. The address and exterior were the same but none of the many interior photos featured on the real estate site were remotely familiar.

The sunny generic decor was galaxies away from the way my ex furnished the place. There’s a good chance that these photos were stageset and perhaps even digitally doctored but the uncanny valley feeling of disconnection were undeniable. I kept scrolling through the pictures trying to match them up to my memories with little luck.

In ghost stories, past occupants haunt houses they left under unhappy circumstances. If that’s remotely true, whoever lived in this house after me would have gotten spooked shitless over and over again. A lot of misery embedded within those walls. The listing said the house sold for nearly half a million a couple years ago. That would be one sale after my ex sold it and for a lot more money. Perhaps the saging, exorcisms, and deep cleaning worked. I still get the creeps biking anywhere near the place.

Every dwelling with a bit of age is at least a little haunted. Something of every past occupant must linger one way or the other. What confounds me looking at the scrubbed-clean realtor images is that if the street address weren’t included I’d never have recognized these rooms I spent so much time in.

No realtor in their right mind would point out the worn away bit of hardwood in the living room where a dog had repeatedly urinated or the spot in the yard where a beloved cat was buried. Their job is to present a place full of possibilities rather than one full of baggage.

What their photos show is a house no one has ever lived in, whether happily or otherwise. I found the drawings, paintings, and photos from my time there and have juxtaposed them against these capitalist fictions. No one would buy the house from my visual keepsakes, but selling it wasn’t ever my intent.

Among the detail photos included with the painting they call “Bookshelf #2”, the auctioneers have included one with a smiling woman. She’s probably just there for scale but I wonder who she is. Is she the one who owned my forgotten painting these last twenty-five-plus years? If so, why is she now selling it? Maybe it belonged to a relative who recently died and she’s tasked with dispersing their property.

I always hope to come upon one of my paintings at the thrift store while looking for frames. It will mean it has gone through at least one full cycle of its life and been spit out the other end, to be reused or otherwise disposed of. I guess an auction is a higher class version of the same thing.

This is the first of a series of conversations about a friend’s harrowing childhood.

I have to deliver a piece of art in Beverly on Saturday so I start biking south. I take Racine through where the stockyards used to be, then cut west to Damen and take it most of the way. It’s way too damn hot for October and it’s making me irritable/sunburned.

I get an Italian sub from Calabria Imports as a delivery fee from Libby for dropping off the collage, then decide, because I think it’s on the way, to swing by Old Fashioned Donuts. In my memory, it’s a straight shot east from Beverly; turns out it’s a mile and a half south at 112th & Michigan. I buy a dozen glazed and get back on the bike.

I assume there’s a way to the East Side from Roseland but hit one dead end after another. I keep having to dogleg north until 103rd, where there’s no bike lane and a bunch of road-ragers unwilling to let me be. I get to Buena Vista pouring sweat, not ready to smile or make nice with anyone. Lucky for me, in the four hours I’m there babysitting my show, no one comes in. I chat with John and treat him to a donut.

The next afternoon I take CTA south. That turns into an adventure because I misread the bus sign to say that the #30 doesn’t run Sundays. This necessitates getting back on the Red Line, taking the #95 bus east, then bumming a ride from John the last mile to the gallery. We watch busses drive by in both directions all afternoon.

Skyler and Alicia arrive a couple hours after me and I help unload musical gear from the car. Sam shows up a half hour later. John and I have brought up chairs from the basement and gamed out where the band should set up.

Then the seats are filled with friends and the music starts and for forty-five minutes there’s nowhere else I’d rather be. Getting Mute Duo to play surrounded by the work I made at Buena Vista has to be a peak life/career moment. I joke when introducing them to the audience that I only made all the crap on the walls so it could be a background for their music. But I’m kind of not joking.

The reason I didn’t bike down is that I have a bartending shift at Rainbo and would never make it back north by 8pm. I bum a ride with Sam. He punches in the address into the GPS and we circle around a bit until he asks me for directions. Eventually, between Google and me, we make it to the highway. We talk about how dependent everyone has become on the apps. Alicia won’t drive a block without her Waze. I can’t bear any of them. If I absolutely have to, I look up the directions, then write them out in my notebook.

But more often than not, I just blunder through. I know the city better than most. Not nearly as well as I’d like to think though.

I’ve been putting in time on Instagram, trying to figure out if it’s worthwhile. Most of what I do is vomiting up the archive of drawings and paintings in various groupings. The other day I posted a few cleaned-up images of Hardboiled Coffee bag drawings. That prompted a redesign of the entire section of my site devoted to that project—nearly two hundred images. Takes me all day to get it more or less the way I want. By midnight, I’m done but feel like I’ve just returned from the moon. A few days later I delete my Instagram.

Kitchen Table Quarterly features three of my collages in their new issue, my new book is mentioned in Frieze, and Mallory and I discuss The Wolf Man.

My Buena Vista show is by appointment only until it comes down the 22nd. Drop me a line if you’d like to see it.

Dumpster Fire/Blank Slate———work by Dmitry Samarov

September 23—October 22, 2023

Buena Vista Projects, 10056 S Ewing, Chi IL

When I first visited John Salhus’s Buena Vista Projects, I was struck by the sense of possibility the space inspired. I’m not the sunshiniest individual you’re likely to meet, but this place and the neighborhood it’s in made me strangely hopeful. I immediately wanted to be involved in some way. Salhus wasn’t interested in a traditional gallery situation; this would not be yet another store for luxury items. What he wanted was to host artists trying to stretch or take a left turn. A kind of experimental lab rather than more of the Art World same old-same old. 

My idea was to haul a bunch of material to the storefront and make as much as I could make in three weeks. The south wall is a mixed-media mural that extends the collage alphabet I’ve been fashioning since COVID lockdown. Made up of personal ephemera counterpointed and enhanced by spontaneous mark-making, it is an attempt to breathe some life and find new connections from dormant material. The east and north walls are hung with paintings and drawings I made in and around the building.

I don’t know whether these two sets of work complement, clash, or even relate with one another, but look forward to thinking on it during the monthlong run of this show. I hope a few others will join me in the rumination.

As John read the above show text after printing it out for gallery visitors, he cringed a little over the appearance of his own name. He was thinking of ‘Dmitry Samarov, art critic’, worried about being judged. I laughed and told him I was trying to quit the critic racket.

Back in elementary school I resented being forced to offer opinions or analysis in book reports and essays. My gut reaction was always: if you wanna know what it’s about, read it yourself. Imagine my surprise when sometime in my early forties, after my first book was published, I began to be paid to write book reports. Pretty soon I was rendering judgments on movies, art shows, and plays as well. It became a part of the routine. When I questioned myself about it I reasoned that it was better than driving a cab.

Then years passed, editors came and went. I got along with some better than others. Sometimes it was easy; other times, like pulling teeth. At no point did I delude myself into thinking that this writing was creative expression. At its best it pointed a reader to something they might get something out of or steer them clear of a thing they didn’t need to suffer through; at its worst, it was a trying and inefficient way of paying some bills.

I’ve written enough articles by now to fill a book but doubt I’ll ever subject anyone to buying such a thing. There are a few critics who elevate the form to a sort of minor art. There are very few and I’m certainly not among them.

This summer, when I decided to go back to bartending part-time, one of the reasons was to cut back on the journalism. It’s been diminishing returns for quite a while. Maybe I can cut it out of my life altogether.

The other day I went to a movie. It was just okay. A low-key thing I’ll probably forget I ever took in after a week or two. But the greater joy that struck me as I left the theater was the realization that I don’t have to render judgment on it in any public or professional way. Knowing that I would have to write about a thing always cut into the experience of the thing.

Later that evening, I went to a play. This is what I wrote about it.

Weekend gallery hours continue at Buena Vista Projects on Saturday, 1-5pm.