A friendly voice beckons you down a narrow gray hallway festooned with square advertisements for seemingly every exhibition opening in New York. The tiny corner office feels curiously expansive—chalk it up to the searing exposures on the twentieth floor, above the editorial offices. Confettied storms of white letterhead with whorls of red pen—a name, an exclamation point, the initial K, or just lists upon lists of proper nouns. It’s all too bright. A small man sits in the eye of this information tornado amid blond wood and glossy white drawers. He is dressed warmly. (Was the suit he was wearing canary or tangerine?) Framed artworks casually lean here and there; concern with damage, much less cost, is negligible. “You did well in the interview,” he says. “Perhaps too well.”
In May 2017, artist Juliana Halpert surreptitiously took eight photographs of former Artforum publisher Knight Landesman’s personal office. She had worked at Artforum for three and a half years and given her notice one month prior (as I would ten months later). It was five months before the old debacle, which was nearly six years to the day before the next one. These were indeed exciting, even “Bountiful Years,” per the title of Halpert’s show of square prints at Sebastian Gladstone Gallery. Their dimensions—echoing those square advertisements—reminded me that this space was styled for intimacy, a staging of transparency and enclosure within a cocoon of knowing. That’s how you get away with revealing nothing. A lifestyle brand’s shopping bag is starting to buckle with trash, and out of focus is a framed family snapshot. What do these photographs prove? His clogs? Made in Sweden. His desk phone? I had the same one. Rather than revealing Landesman, these photos reveal the viewer to themselves, their own anxieties about not knowing or knowing too much. Meanwhile, power moves on; another cozy suite, a different letterhead. Close your eyes, or examine the evidence—same thing—and imagine.