JOYCE BLUNK
Susie was very interested in the show at Little Animals Gallery by an Asheville artist who made her own wooden boxes with glass fronts into which she put found objects. Joyce BLUNK spent much of her life in Asheville and was well known, exhibiting her boxes all across the United States and abroad. Susie had tried to go to the opening a week before and had gone by mistake on the day before the opening and missed it so was determined to go to the closing. She invited me along.
The opening, which we assumed would last a couple of hours, was at 5:30 p.m. While Susie was parking I got there at 5:50 p.m.. Immediately I noticed a high excitement stirring among the thirty or more people who were there. It took me five minutes to discover that there was a silent auction going on that was going to close at 6 p.m., in five minutes. I was told that Joyce BLUNK had died a year ago, leaving a house full of beautiful boxes, that had to be disposed of somehow. When alive her boxes sold for thousands of dollars. The auction sounded like fun to me but before I could even discover how the auction worked it was over.
It turned out that if you had come to the opening a week before and really wanted one of the 100 boxes on display you could buy it outright for $300 and have a red dot placed beside it. Then you could come to the closing and pick it up. All of the other boxes would be bid for on line during the next week, starting at $50 each. When the auction was over at 6 p.m. the high bidder on each box would be notified and able to pick their box up. This left a number of boxes that no one had bid on, but it was only after red dots were placed on the boxes with the winning bids that it was possible to know what was left. At this point you could offer what you were willing to pay. I found one with the title “Angst” that I liked and offered $30 for it, which was accepted. Susie liked one with a number of shoes jumbled into it. $30 bought it. I found a second one for which I offered $20. Accepted. By now lust had taken over. Susie told me to stop, that I had no room left on my walls, but when she was off getting the car I found one more that I really liked for $10. I would have kept going but on my next two tries found that the ones I liked were already sold, just not marked yet. So I gave up.
It was only when I got home that I looked at the back of “Angst”. There was a label there from an exhibit where the box had apparently been on sale. It gave the artist’s name, address, the title of the work and the price for which it was on sale, $12,000, 400 times what I had paid for it.
All three easily fit on my walls, displacing objects I moved somewhere else.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 