Frank Juarez (and Friends) Ask: 'What Would Lynne Tillman Do?'

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“The Book Club: What Would We Do with Lynne Tillman?,” at Frank Juarez Gallery (running Sept. 1, 2018)

“The Book Club: What Would We Do with Lynne Tillman?,” at Frank Juarez Gallery (through Sept. 1), pulls its title from the essay collection, What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, written by, maybe you saw this coming: Lynne Tillman.

Tillman’s writing is some of the slipperiest, shrewdest and most self-referential contemporary prose you’ll read. Her essays are topically broad—addressing everyone from Karl Marx to William Eggleston—but tend to turn inward on both the author’s psyche and on the conventions of writing itself. Her fiction reads like a head dunk into Lily Briscoe’s stream of consciousness, only with added post-modern anxiety, post-industrial complexity and contemporary socio-political turmoil.

In short, it’s a perfect armature on which to hang an improvisational group show; a natural metaphor for the process of self-creation and art making in relation to social interaction and communication. Curator Kate E. Schaffer deserves applause for the ambitious show, but it’s the work of the five artists –– Peter Beck, Lois Bielefeld, Melissa Dorn, Jaymee Harvey Willms, Schaffer––and Tillman herself, ultimately consummate his idea. 

Just inside the small gallery-within-a-gallery on the sixth floor of the Marshall Building we are greeted abruptly by an oddly placed false wall. It’s not a practical divider of the space, and it’s definitely not structural—the studs on the back are exposed. It’s an interior wall-as-sculpture. A repurposed chair rests conspicuously in the foreground of the irregular wedge of gallery space. Both wall and chair are painted a crude plaid pattern as if to casually signify their domestication. A crude white L-shaped shelf on the wall holds five copies of Tillman’s text in various states of use (one for each artist?) and a piece of soap in the shape of a book by Kate E. Schaffer with a question mark on it. It begs a question. Its robin’s egg blue match with the spine color of the books forces one to see it as a decorative commentary. Do books and authors become objectified vanities like so many baskets of scented cockle-shell soaps next to the sink in manicured guest bathrooms?

A refrigerator covered with a collection of printed email rejection letters to the five artists hulks on the other side of the wall. It casts the gallery officially as a domestic interior, and that interior as a site of a certain career frustration. Deeper in the space a kitchen table sits suggestively in front of a wall of hanging skillets with bacon and eggs in most of them. The room is further accented with drawings and sculptural appliances that ultimately place the viewer in what feels like an inactive television sound stage for a surrealist three-camera family sitcom.

The camera on that implied soundstage in this case is our own mind’s eye. Eyes that look outward and minds that peer inward, toggling between public and private endlessly. It’s a paradoxical exercise to look outward to see inward forcing us to finally ask how one explores finer and finer personal details while still communicating socially. How do we do this and arrive at something other than solipsism? One might rhetorically ask themselves at this point: “What would Lynne Tillman do?” because she takes on these questions and treads this territory as elegantly as anyone. Finally, if one would like to hear what Lynne Tillman would do, there will be a Skype-cast reading with the author at the gallery at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 15.