Coin Toss

Andrew J. Greene is holding a “Yes or No” coin in his hand as he leans forward on a leather chair in his bungalow-turned-studio in central Los Angeles. Vintage scales line his mantle, old fortunes are clipped to a note-card tree, and two early ‘90s novelty talking characters—the Yes Man and Whipping Boy—stand by ready to be turned on and either belt out affirmations or take the blame. Choices are abundant, but the artist doesn’t offer answers. Rather, he presents a series of existential questions embodied in objects, both found and made, that become metaphors when placed in new contexts. In a world obsessed with all figuring it out, Greene’s work asks: Is the myriad of choices improving our lives?

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Freshly returned from a trip to Shanghai to open his exhibition “Taste” at Cheruby, Greene is at home seated amongst his neatly organized collection. Behind us, his dining room is empty save for a long table stacked with countless folders of weather-worn costume catalogues that the artist rescued from a now-defunct Hollywood store. He pulls out a small puzzle-globe keychain, a souvenir from a Chinese market, and lists out all the buttons, zippers, ribbons that he wishes he took with him, too.

At Cheruby, a wooden table hosts a small screen embedded in a tall, rectangular mirror that plays a loop of an animation of a swan tying its own neck into a knot. Another coffee table is disassembled and placed on the floor. Uniform, black dress shoes zip-tied together sit atop one fold-out version; another holds six vintage scales, held in place by strings and holding lighters and various knick-knacks, such as roses, a lottery ticket, cufflinks, a pocket watch, peanuts, cigarettes, and face cream. Metal race horses line the walls, with alternating “Yes or No” buttons centered on their bodies.

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Much deliberation went into translating the title of his exhibition into Mandarin, for which there was not a ready-made Chinese equivalent of “Taste.” The dilemma fascinated the artist. “I started thinking more about how appropriation functions—and how symbols and images get translated over time,” he muses. “Over time meanings can degrade, and they end up becoming something else entirely.” He brings up the linguistic theory of False Friends—when words look or sound similar in two languages but have different meanings.

“Having good taste can be a shortcut to being well-educated or being properly mannered, and I think that there's something really cynical about that,” he offers. The notion has followed the artist from his early twenties when he would commute from Ridgewood, Queens into Manhattan For his gallery job at Andrew Kreps. On his way in, he would photograph the shoes of business men on the train. “I was this young man from the Midwest in the big city and trying really hard to fit in,” he recalls. His childhood, he admits, was the suburban ideal—all the John Hughes movies were filmed within a 10-mile radius of his Illinois home—but beneath the surface, there was a tension Greene could never shake. “My parents are both from super blue collar families. They really scratched and clawed to give me and my brothers a nicer life,” he says. The pressure to assimilate followed him even though the differences were barely recognizable. “We're living in a very literal time,” Greene observes. “Maybe it's a reflection of our society becoming more conservative or being scared because of the realization that we as Americans are part of an imperialist culture; our economy's built on the exploitation of a lot of people.” He sees today’s art market as a byproduct of this didacticism. “But in my mind the most interesting art experiences I've had aren't easily resolved and don't give answers but ask a million questions.”

So how do you do this without alienating the viewer, in a white-cube space nonetheless? For the artist it’s through familiar images and everyday objects: clocks, swans, keychains, coins, shoes, scales, and political memorabilia. When it comes to appropriating symbols, Greene operates under the premise that an accepted interpretation exists only to reveal, over time, that it fails. “Ultimately it's a game that is about creating a moment of self-reflection.” A mirror is a mainstay in both domestic and commercial spaces, and as Greene jokes, it can come off as a cheap trick in art shows, but sometimes it just works. He points to a collective anxiety about a lack of consensus about what's true. “The reason I make art is because it is something that can be inherently non-linguistic,” he says.. “There is no way to talk about meaning and language right now without it getting political..”

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In the last couple of years, Greene has been collecting more used things. An ethics of art-making that rejects the idea of producing new materials rather than up-cycling from what already exists. It’s only natural then that the artist is returning to curation, too. He and his girlfriend, Elora Joshi, launched their eponymous design studio this month, and are working on launching their first collection online later this spring.

Greene is also working on debuting a project space, Matinée, which will feature 2-3 month-long solo exhibitions that re-evaluate works produced in the 1980s and ‘90s. Located in a glass storefront inside of a 1920’s Beaux Arts vaudeville theater-turned-jewelry exchange in Downtown Los Angeles, he sees it as a durational project, which will come to an end in two years, culminating in a book. The building “is a living document of the history of Los Angeles– tracing over a century of social and economic circumstances that help shape our understanding of the city,” says Greene. While he can’t reveal specifics, his studio holds works that hint at the inaugural exhibition set to open this summer.

In a way this project is a return to form—Greene first curated two shows a decade ago, one in James Fuentes in New York, and one in Los Angeles at Michael Thibault. Both focused on art from the ‘80s and ‘90s, with works from Ashley Bickerton, Gretchen Bender, and Jonathan Lasker. “It is still aesthetically and conceptually relevant,” he says of their work. “It deals with appropriation and how the media manipulates us, so I’m picking up where those projects left off about 10 years ago.”

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“Taste: 闲置符号, 临时成果” is on view until May 25, 2025 at Cheruby at Building 1, No. 10 JianGuo Middle Road, HuangPu District, Shanghai.

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