My grandfather and my mother
I was reading and daydreaming
in a small country library. There is nothing so lovely and comforting
as a small country library at dusk (I have never seen one) — its
red cherry wood paneling, the smell of the old leather chairs and
millions of pages slumbering snug against each other. The librarian is
always a kindly old woman. Her hands are wrinkled soft like two
sleeping hairless moles, and her eyes glitter if you ask her to help
you find a book on Etruscan art or the Villa of the Mysteries.
I don't know if I was reading a book
of short stories, or fables, or looking at the monograph of an unknown
painter. Now and then I looked up from my book at a small green
painting of a lake. It had the quality of an Albert Pinkham Ryder:
dark, overworked with a childlike earnestness that passed through
diligence into a sense of great experience. Maybe it was an ocean, and
not a lake. There was a boat, sunk heavy and mossy in the water, and a
solitary figure lying back inside it. But the sky was windless, the
water flat and full. As it grew later, the boat drifted to the edge of
the painting.
Drawing
My grandparents were artists. They were generous and had a natural ease
of living. Peggy was a bookbinder. Her books were like animals in a
silent zoo. Her work room was dark and cluttered with stacks of old
books, bottles of glue, sheaves of paper. The smell of cloves rose like
the muffled sounds of a conversation in another room. An old wooden
press stood on the desk in the center of the room. Somehow it still
looms there, heavy in my mind.
John was a painter. A front room was filled with paintings in progress
and stacks of dried watercolors, a giant easel, cups of dirty colored
water and bundles of brushes. When I was very young, I would sometimes
stay with my grandparents for part of a summer. My grandfather and I
used to draw together, sharing a notebook and filling its pages with
crude, lopsided, sometimes elegant, witty rag tag characters. I loved
to watchthe lines scratched from his pen slowly turn into creatures.
John had a gentle sense of humor. He understood the weird astounded
openness of a child. He drew dogs talking to men in rumpled clothes.
Cats studying bugs. Women juggling. I drew monsters, snakes, elephants,
tigers. Light skated across the pages as the sun climbed up the sky.
The cold of the morning dissolved. We read the cartoons in the New
Yorker. I was interested that two dots below the cartoon meant that
nothing needed to be said. Somehow now two dots always means nothing
needs to be said.
• •
One summer afternoon I followed John out into the garden. He had
brought his easel outside and was painting a head in green and blue. I
sat behind him as he painted, watching his mind come to life in the
paper. Watching the living liquid roll down and become part of it. The
air was warm and fragrant, and he was quiet and calm. He knew of a
profound simplicity, described in the movements of his arm to his wrist
and brush, from palette to paper. Somehow the sun and the sound of the
leaves and flowers around him were inside the picture too.
Now John is dead but we still have that painting. It's not enough,
really. There is no immortality in things left behind. But still it's a
good painting, it has its own presence and intelligence, it comes alive
if you look at it right. Paintings are always not enough and somehow
more than what you think. They are a terrible responsibility. You must
take them lightly.
John was a philosopher, a teacher. He was a good man in a deep way that
few people manage. Life around him had a magic air, a sense of
realization and possibility. I feel in many ways that I'm honoring him,
or even speaking with him, when I paint. The gulf of death is often no
wider than the gulf between living people.
Kindness
John was among the first soldiers who saw the aftermath of Buchenwald,
at the end when the Nazis had abandoned their camps and their victims.
He returned from the war and had a nervous breakdown. His face swelled
up, and then mysteriously returned to normal. Years later when he was
an old man he would be stricken with Parkinson's disease, and it was as
if his body were reenacting the numb horror of what he had seen, every
muscle straining against itself to produce a terrible, trembling
immobility.
Watching him try to walk across the room, he seemed to be in another
world, pulling his legs through freezing mud. There was nothing anyone
could do for him. Or that is what I tell myself.
I have only seen one small gouache that addressed the horror of the war
years, a slumping brick ruin burning with cold flames, a decapitated
soldier. No, there is another: a ragged black and white drawing of a
severed hand clutching a knife. It has a strange beauty.
Why do we so often need terrible things in order to make beautiful
things? Would there be any great novels without all of our great
stupidities?
My father said that one of the first things he asked John when he came
home from the war was whether he had killed anyone. John said he never
fired his rifle.
Death
John died at home. He was half curled on the bed, just as he had been
so often in the weeks before. He was turning into a shell that you
would find on the beach, elegantly twisted into itself and sea washed,
broken open so the imprint of the ripples of the life inside were
exposed and emptied. When I arrived, there was still a presence of life
hovering uncertainly around him, as if confused and directionless after
the death of the body. I went into the kitchen for fifteen minutes to
be with my father and grandmother, and when we came back into the
bedroom there was nothing left of John, just the empty body like
discarded clothes.
Childhood
I was concerned with beauty from the beginning. In the bathtub, the
water filling up and my legs extending only halfway to the end, I
looked from them to the door jamb, where someone had put a sticker of a
skeleton. It was not a beautiful image, it was not original, but a logo
for the band "The Grateful Dead." And it stuck in my mind, made me
wonder about the stranger who had lived there before. I understood then
how every single gesture is essential, and I was amazed that someone
would uglify their home in such a trivial and haphazard way. This was
among my first impressions of people surrendering their minds, to
something I didn't yet understand. At the same time I was growing an
aesthetic of sound: I didn't like the word "adjacent" because it
sounded like the name Jason, a neighbor boy who was cruel. And it made
me think of an empty hotel on a street corner. I knew cruelty was a
form of stupidity. And stupidity to me was expressed by the
unaesthetic. But I didn't use this word. I used the word tacky. "Tacky"
is tackier than "unaesthetic," stronger.
But my life at this time was mostly a feeling of beauty. I remember the
purple flowers of the artichokes in a row outside our front door. The
cactus bloom in front of the house of my best friend, Mia.
Strength
When I was seven or eight, my mother and I moved to San Francisco from
Berkeley. We lived near Chinatown, on Washington Street. I went to
Spring Valley School, a beautiful old yellow brick building which was
right across the street. It is the oldest school in the city. The walls
are thick, and the floors are deep plum red. Each classroom had little
coat closets, just the right size for children.
Every day I walked across the street to go home for lunch and walked
back for class. I liked being the only one who left the school grounds
in the middle of the day. It seemed the other kids felt I was somehow
breaking the rules, that I was different.
In one way I was different: I was white, and there were maybe two white
kids at school, including me. Only two black kids that I could remember
— one in my class named Maurice. He was quiet and thoughtful. A
Mexican kid. Everyone else was Vietnamese or Chinese. My friends' names
were Stanley Eng, Deland Lee, Wong, Lee, Chung, Nguyen. Around the
block was a corner store called "Ng's" that we would go to for ice
cream sandwiches, etc. The sights and sounds of this time were a rich
tapestry of languages and faces, the smell of incence, frying fish and
rice, seaweed. In class I loved the isolated feeling of sitting within
an incomprehension of sound. The teachers would sometimes look at me
with sympathy, as if I were unhappy that I couldn't understand what
everyone was saying. But in fact I felt I could understand everything
and everyone much better this way.
We lived in a small apartment facing the street. Our building was made
of the burned, lumpy purple bricks that had been salvaged from the San
Francisco fire. Igneous rocks with their molten moonscape faces. Each
brick had a story of another home from another time. Our apartment
managers were an old Chinese couple who could barely speak English.
They were extremely nice, and we tried to convey our affection for them
without language. On a school field trip one day my class went to the
piers to fish, and I caught some strange monstrosity that was red and
spiny, almost all bone. I presented it to our apartment managers, who
accepted it with a graciousness that could not have been taught to
royalty.
I was stronger than the other children. I would wrestle with four or
five of them at once, and it was like swimming through butter. Their
arms and legs seemed soft, untrained. I was a monkey, an animal. I felt
older than the other kids. My hands were always blistered from swinging
on the metal bars. I was skinny and often dirty from playing outside. I
exercised obsessively. I could do three hundred sit ups in a row. A
hundred pushups.
I once did so many pushups in a row that my nose started bleeding and
my stomach spasming. I could roll my stomach like a contortionist, a
wave would begin at the top and move down. I was intensely interested
in the human muscular system. It was a beautiful, mysterious machine. I
drew pictures of muscle men, boxers, monsters with invented biologies
pictured for scrutiny, as in a medical textbook.
Isolation
When I was ten my mother and I moved to Wyoming with her boyfriend. I
remember leaving my father Hart and my stepmother Kate, on my last day
in San Francisco, and my godfather Myron was there. He kept saying that
I was "cool as a cucumber" because I wasn't showing any emotion. The
truth was that I was terrified, and I had to make a show of bravery. I
knew my mother was making a mistake. But there was nothing I could do.
I was leaving behind my best friends and my family. My mother and I
took an Amtrak train to Laramie. The trip took a couple days, and on
the day of our arrival we sat in the observation car watching a
lightning storm sweeping across the plains beside us. I had never seen
land so flat and wide. The sky was a thousand shades of grey, blurring
to black where the blinks of lightning silently flashed. The rain came
down in dark elegant smudges in the distance, dragged down by wind and
gravity.
The world inside a crushed tin can.
For a while we lived in the mountains, ten miles from the nearest
neighbors in a town called Centennial. Sometimes I would see mountain
goats and herds of antelope running like clouds far away across the
valleys. There is a silence that presses close around your ears in the
mountains. I slowly began building a circular stone wall that I would
sit inside, sheltered from the wind that always howled through the
valley. The cold was something I wish I could have stayed with longer.
It was interesting to feel my body slowly go numb. Snow came and
covered the wall, and I left it unfinished.
In the freezing mornings the cat would sit in the center of my back,
crouched like a delicate Buddha. One morning I dreamt the cat had slept
inside the wood stove and burned up. Cats were essential friends to me
then. They have a silence and a simple wisdom. Their eyes are electric
jolts that move through your head.
Some days I would play with a husky dog who would run with me through
the trees and around our trailer house. A dark and musky barn beyond
the trees housed a few sheep and chickens. I remember seeing an
enormous deer, skinned, gutted, and hanging upside down from the
rafters by the tendons in its hind legs. It's lean, dry muscles were
dark purple. Now when I think of that I see the photo of John Wayne
Gacy's victim hanging upside down and gutted, and there are some
similarities and some differences.
A large rooster sometimes would attack me — to impress the
chickens I suppose — and one day I fought with it for a long
time. I was afraid, remembering a time when a rooster as big as I was
had jumped onto my head. The claws digging into my scalp and the
pungent wings beating a small storm around my face. But now all of a
sudden I realized I was bigger. I was wearing pointed cowboy boots, and
I kicked it again and again. Yet it always came back, its spirit fiery.
It seemed our fight would never end. I kicked more and more savagely.
And then, suddenly, it stopped, it ran from me.
There was blood on my boots, and the rooster was afraid of me. Suddenly
I awoke from my savagery. I felt as if I had lost my soul. I will
always remember this. I had ruined something beautiful — I had
become horrible.
Tenderloin
I had a small studio in a six story building in the tenderloin. This
kind of building is generally filled with the most miserable, isolated,
transient, and fearful wretches, and this being the case for years it
emanates a dense, filthy horror from every hallway, closet,
cockroach-infested basement and strangely designed kitchenette. There
are people who come and go by the week, and there are people who have
been there twenty years, who are like dull nails pounded into the
cracking wood of their memories, who will be there another twenty, at
the end of which someone will complain about a strange smell. Directly
below me lived a couple who would regularly try to murder each other.
I was painting portraits. Faces began to appear on my walls, making
them smaller, closer. Eyes all around, oppressive, the gaze assaulted
me, closing me in. I wanted company, but the attention and the silence
accused. I was never alone. I felt claustrophobic. I needed space, room
to breathe, expansiveness. So I began to paint landscapes, and they
functioned as windows, opening out and releasing the tepid air.
A window looks out onto the ocean.
Art Institute
I was eight years old. My father and I were walking the pitching decks
of San Francisco, climbing down from Coit Tower and up again through
North Beach, the smell of coffee and pastries from Victoria bakery,
perilously near the greasy wet fish smell of Chinatown, which slides
over the street like an animal without thickness. We walked down again
to the bottom of the Art Institute, and my father picked me up and held
me so I could see over the wall into the sculpture garden, green and
filled with strange ceramic apparitions. Delicious unknown
possibilities seemed open to me, the kaleidoscopic sweep of an entire
life. The smell of oil paint and earth wafted down across time and told
me I would someday return as a student.
Theory
Painting is too stupid. Sometimes I'm frustrated by how limited and
tedious it seems. It's like digging a hole. You can stand around and
talk about digging a hole all you want, but you don't get a hole until
you put your foot on the shovel and dig.
Then you realize painting isn't limited or tedious at all. And you find
strange, wonderful bones and shells in the dirt. But the labor itself
is not glamourous. It takes a rib cage and muscles wrapping around and
straining, looping around the shoulders, the scapula sliding back and
forth and the lungs filling and emptying.
In realist painting the tension between representation and abstraction
creates an alternate presence, one that slides in between two and three
dimensions, the objective and the imagined. But no objective painting
exists. A painting is the sign of an arcane language whose
communication is the illusion of meaning. The sign is not read, nor can
it be — only the architecture of its intention, somehow silently
present in its substance. Painting is the distance between
configuration and composition. Painting is when the mind completes what
isn't there.
Pure abstraction attempts to collapse reference and material into one.
But its claim of self-identity bends into a self contradictory stance,
where claiming establishes the negating idealization outside of the
object. In other words, there is no such thing as pure abstraction. Its
obstreperous children multiply, arranging distance with skeins of
language. But the distance that never existed never existed also in
figurative painting. Nevertheless, we like to see things. Abstract
painting proves this by not being ashamed of its body. In this sense it
is liberated. Still, it must explain itself. Simple self equivalence is
for the happy few (or the completely oblivious), and few abstract
painters have been happy. Few anyones have been happy. To the happy few!
When we accept or understand something without explanation we have
zeroed the distance between ourselves and what is thought of as art.
Purely abstract painting carries a tension between reference and being
like the wake behind a boat — something that is not exactly an
object but rather an interaction between presence and energy. We
remember that painting refers to things, but that it needn't refer to
mundane things. The painter's eye is revolutionary, transforming the
everyday into the miraculous. This is why we can speak of compositions,
relations of colors, etc., without talking nonsense, without laughing
at the stupidity of our words. And yet the words are stupid; that is
why we paint. The mind grasps the sharpest unknown question, a
boomerang edge on which we fling ourselves into invented space. We find
ourselves at home.
Illusionism refers to a witnessed fact or event. But illusionism in
service of the imaginary or symbolic transforms its typical function
into a paradoxical synthesis of the eternal and the incidental. Somehow
the incidental (i.e., the particular view presented) must sufficiently
stand for the eternal, by becoming both a fact and a sign. This is
surrealism, divorced from the extravagant signature of its style.
Surrealism made this paradox obvious, but a less overt imaginary
rendering amplifies the potential significance — no Mona Lisa
ever existed. Abstract expressionist painting has its own signature,
that which we accept as a particular presented view. So has minimalism,
pop, etc. All these signatures are mistakes, or mistakes of
interpretation. Which is not surprising since interpretation will lead
to mistakes. The question is whether the mistakes are interesting.
Biological history of the whales and seals - they too have undergone an
interesting evolution, from sea to land, and then back from land to
sea. They grew limbs and lost them again. What would lead a land animal
to evolve back into a sea animal? The sea, the great subconscious, the
great mother, seat of mystery, cradle of all life, treasure house of
all forms. Flood.
What's an innovation if it doesn't serve something?
The art world has its own codes, which have been repeatedly redefined
in short spans of social and political change. What codes does an
artist live by? There are external codes and internal codes. Do the
evolution of these codes interact? and if so, how? Often it seems an
artist must code real (or personal) meaning inside the external
appearance of conformity to an accepted formal or social artistic norm.
Then the work of art becomes like steganography.
steganography, n. [Gr. ? covered (fr. ? to cover closely) + -graphy.]
The art of writing in cipher, or in characters which are not
intelligible except to persons who have the key; cryptography. --
Steganography: the art of hiding a secret message within a larger one
in such a way that the adversary can not discern the presence or
contents of the hidden message.
I am haunted, and I want to make works of art that are haunted.
Painting Notes
August 1994
I must paint a large painting of a giant black octopus. I see it now,
luxuriant, elegant. It unfurls itself down the canvas. Its skin is
mysterious, smooth, blotchy in places. All of the painting is black and
grey, muted green.
January 2002
About Vito Acconci's "Following Piece": I think it was a way of taking
an alien perspective, and yet a compellingly human one, a way of being
an auto-voyeur. What might my life, which is after all an ordinary
life, look like? How can I follow myself, and where will it lead me?
The attitude of the perpetual student, the artist. Always learning,
always stepping back through perspectives to redefine what it is to
exist here, as we are. And to work with old materials to illuminate our
perpetual newness.
Elephant and Hyena, 2002?
from the series: "The end of the game"
Last night I just finished a painting of an elephant and a hyena, the
elephant solid and still and the hyena ephemeral and hunched in flight,
like a blurry comma set on its side. It's a small painting six and a
half inches high and eighteen inches wide. There's something
interesting about making such a small painting of a huge animal.
...