It’s 1986. An art critic is sharing his opinion of another art critic with another art critic…

“…..The other thing I think is important about Rene Ricard is that he represents a kind of sordidness that it’s important for the art world to believe that it is still capable of. The art world is supposed to be alienated, to be on the periphery—and it’s not. In fact, it’s very much integrated into the mainstream of culture. It’s not that most people like art; rather, it’s that the art world has found a secure place in ordinary life—which goes against all the avant-garde’s claims to being adventurous and in opposition. At a time when artists bring in architects to design their lofts, a flaky character like Ricard is very important. He makes it more believable that art is odd and weird and challenging.” (Carter Ratcliff in Janet Malcolm’s A GIRL OF THE ZEITGEIST—II, The New Yorker, 1986)

That was 1986; this is 2022: just saying.

Now… in all the years writing art criticism I have never once used the word ‘seedy’: believe me I’ve checked. From childhood to adulthood I remember coming across seedy situations without the vocabulary or experience to name them; situations when you cross the threshold of quotidian cleanliness to dirty diabolical, innocence to experience.

For instance.

In the village I grew up in, there was this back-alley video store that I hung out at, day in, day out. Culture was thin, and not on the surface. In hindsight the video store was super seedy on the spectrum of childhood innocence. You could spend hours there reading the blurbs on greasy-backed VHS video cassettes with their tacky images and tackier textures; those sheepish customers that you never heard asking for the under-the-counter-porn, but were edging in the aisles building up the seeds and courage to ask: desire beats denial every time.

The word ‘seedy’ came into my sights when I was trying to organise a location for the book launch of Madder Lake (2016), what one IMMA curator referred to on the night of the launch as the Irish art scene’s first book of porn. One of the artists involved suggested a nightclub or sex club in keeping with the tone of the DEEP—SEATED series of public and private conversations that took place in 2016 at Limerick’s Ormston House, Cork’s Crawford Art College, and Dublin’s Temple Bar Gallery & Studios. Long story short, psychoanalysis undergirded the conversations which led us into all matter of things sexually and critically charged. Even though the events where public, we were mostly sitting by ourselves, confessing our private desires under the white page of our artist statements.

There was something else too.

I had recently read an article in The New Yorker—circa Down and Out in Beverly Hills(1986)—that follows the trail of Rene Ricard. Ricard was a mover and shaker in the New York art scene after emerging from the Warhol Factory fabulously scathed. He was also a maker through his writing, as well as cavorting with such bluechip artists as the One whom everyone loves to hate, Julian Schnabel, and the One whom everyone seems to love, Jean-Michel Basquiat. Beside all that, Ricard was blessed with a Wildean wit and equipped with Cupid’s bow to deliver a line that kissed the mind and bit the lip. The author of The New Yorker piece gives us an image of the 1980s New York scene along with Ricard:

“On this night, the Palladium has been turned over to a party for Keith Haring, and it is filled with beautifully and/or weirdly dressed people from the art world and its periphery. I come upon Ricard in a room that is apart from the discothèque proper, called the Mike Todd Room, which has a large bar, small marble-topped tables, and wire-back chairs, and is where the celebrities of the art world like to congregate. Ricard, resplendent in a white sharkskin suit, is sitting at one of the tables, in a state of high, almost incandescent excitement.”

When you go a little deeper into the world of Ricard, his exploits (and prose) have a dirty romanticism to them when contrasted with the wholesomeness of, for lack of a better known quantity, our very public, albeit virtual, art scene. Saying that sounds like I’m placing some value on seediness for its own sake, and that the art scene is a big ivory boner, always auto-polishing itself to appear publicly toothy, but underneath, privately decayed. Maybe…

The only time the artworld is branded seedy is when, in the global news media, there is a corrupt gallery director or art collector involved in some shady dealings. “That, sadly, is a market at work, and suppressing it would only bestow the seedy glamour of the underground.”

Taking into account that the meaning of words change over time, especially in a time of word hijackings for the protest and pronoun economy, ‘seedy’, even when #seedy is used on Instagram as the personification of being #dirty/#sexy, the word still retains the essence of those handed-down meanings, from originally defining a flower that has lost its vibrancy after shedding its seeds, to being the adjective that loiters around sex shops.

Personally I’ve never personified the word seedy in casual speech; the word has always been embedded in a setting rather than a person, like the word ‘uncanny’, i.e., David Lynch’s seedy undertow that threatens to take you away or save you from the shore of hyper normalcy. TV taught me everything.

I am still not certain why I have decided to side with seediness here. Perhaps it stems from seedy not fitting in; that seedy is another aesthetic that art cleanly rejects or lacks. Strange thing is, I would call a lot of Bruce Nauman’s art seedy, but Paul McCarthy’s less so. Bruce and Paul get me thinking about how art students sometimes embrace seediness, but if they graduate into the art scene proper they generally clean up their act. Maybe seedy, like it’s namesake, is small, undramatic, private, contained within a pod until its efflorescence as a public, natural ornament to consume.

In my case, it could be the case of being around too many white walls and artist statements so that seedy emerges in the cracks of my consciousness as something lacking.

The DEEP—SEATED discussions of 2016 opened up a discourse that was less concerned with discipline and impressing on the public a notion about art and the artist being public and wanting to be public. In a sense it was about reigning it all in; not shedding the seeds so the vibrancy and potency remain contained: “sub-cultural” intimates underneath culture, not flagrantly for all to see. There’s something intimate and close quartered about seediness that can’t go beyond the width of a video store in some back-alley in some backwater village.

I think what Glenn Frey of The Eagles said about Hotel California says a lot about continuums of experience and exposure: “It was a journey from innocence into experience.” It’s also like what pornstar Puma Swede says in her memoir My Life as a Pornstar: “Then, while the rest of the [porn] staff was eating dinner, we went over to US Video, a notoriously seedy porn shop…”.

James Merrigan