Kind of a Drag

I’ve been reading this book called ‘I am not Stiller’-- one of those stiff yellowing 1960’s paperbacks one hopes to find at a thrift shop for 50 cents  which have enough literary nourishment to sustain you until the next ‘discovery’.  This one is especially entertaining— smart, ironic, edgy, cruel, confessional, brutally blunt and oddly charming the way only a failed modernist existential self-deceiving Swiss narcissist narrator can be.  A six-hundred-page denial.

Anyway, I have this adopted stepmother who is perhaps Stiller's contemporary--- perhaps could have been his lover.  She is the embodiment of everything I would have wanted in a parent-- passion, honesty, intelligence, the conviction that art supersedes morality, that superiority is not inherent but must be earned.  Dessert first, if you like it that way; sex before love,  etc.  Swiss. 

She is now 94 and slightly less generous with her wisdom; appropriately grouchy.  Twenty years ago she commented during one of our Chelsea gallery tours ‘It’s so depressing; no one wants to fuck me.” Twenty years later, things have not improved.    Her ex-lover just told me she’s been lying about her age--- that she’s actually 96.   She has her vanities. 

Her great tragic flaw, besides the fact that she feels greatly under-acknowledged as an artist,  was her nearly fatal attraction for the man who claims to know her real age—a writer of some renown, notorious for massive sexual appetites and an impressive list of conquests.  And while she is pretty tough and equally tough on me, the fact that she describes this period of her life as ‘sheer agony’ brings me again and again to the Pandora’s box of her memories.   Some days she opens it, to my Gothic delight.

Coincidentally, this man who is either 17 or 19 years younger than my stepmother, is my neighbor.  Of course when I first moved in, with my adorable little boy and my black leather attitude,  he showered me with cryptic aphoristic postcards and invitations.  I am now, so many years later, precisely the age my stepmother was when she began the affair (give or take 2 years).  He had been married then—and most of their trysts were conventionally lunchtime, daylight episodes.   Her cold Swiss intelligence and her exquisite ex-husband tempted him.  But she began taking his famous writing class-- maybe just to sit at his feet, and because really he is at his sexual best at a podium.  You can almost hear hearts beating.  At the only lecture I attended as a guest,  I could feel his lovers envied me.  I was, he assumed, his future... but it was not to be.

According to her stories, he was cruel.  Insatiable as a lover, which is hard for a woman... it is his ultimate pleasure we crave, and this was beyond reach.  He was unfaithful even while they were going at it... and his writer's ear was relentless and searching for the kind of genius which always evades one.
To me, his heart was soft--- he was appreciative and sweet and kind and generous.  He piled wonderful books on our doorstep, and even tried to publish my middling poems.  He sent us food, lovely notes and quotations, even befriended my building staff.

But my stepmother continued to humiliate herself through the painful long seminars year after year,  continued to pay absurd tuition to turn in mediocre samples of post-Modern writing which tried for cruelty and only achieved the bitter tone of a desperate lover trying to feign non-chalance.   He slept with nearly every single student, in various combinations and sexual fictions.  She even tried a facelift--- very out-of-character-- but the more she carried on her version of the 1001 Nights, the less he considered her as a lover.

I once loved a boxer--- or thought I did.  I admired his grace, his intense focused force, the way he laced his gloves, the way he ran his fingers through his sweaty hair... the way he smelled after a fight, after a shower.  But when we were together--- he was gentle and sweet and tender and loving.  I needed the boxer.  And he lost our little fight.

It always fascinates me that cruelty elicits extreme kindness from some of us--- and excessive kindness is embarrassing and tiresome.  My stepmother is cold; some days I think she despises me; I am too conventional, I am mostly monogamous, I bring her flowers on her birthday and this infuriates her.  She hates holidays.  She is anti-maternal, and I am content to sit at her feet and receive her rebukes like a blessing.  Occasionally I cry.  On the other hand, my own father is mean and I despise him.   My real mother is quite mad and reinvents the past daily.  We know so little of one another-- and there is so little time to unravel the fictions we all wear like fashion.  My stepmother is childless and really never valued my attention.

So we look through our colored glasses, or our blindfolds, and we see what we see, we love what we choose to see, or what we cannot see.  We are what we are not, or are not what we are.  For some of us, we love what we love, even when or especially when it does not love us in return.  Is this teaching  the lesson, like a version of God, that there is no reward for love-- sometimes no answer on the telephone, nothing but a shadow in our bed when we awake?  Or, like Stiller, nothing but accusations and a jail cell, for the crime of either being the criminal or not being the criminal.

On my block there is a strange woman who puts her little dogs in a pram and wheels them around.
She mutters and shakes her head at me--- wonders where I think I am going with that instrument I carry on my back and my stupid black boots.  And why I talk to that kind white-haired writer whom she has described in an under-her-breath whisper as a 'murderer'.    I do not fathom to know what prompts her charade with the dogs who seem quite morose and unfriendly.   I do know, as does the writer, that she is not Stiller.

Where Art Thou

I've taken to reading anthologies. I'm low on fresh 'log', appalled by the Times lists, the New Yorker...David Foster Wallace has been dead nearly 2 1/2 years. So the ones I choose are the so-called alternative collections--what I like mostly is they don't separate fiction and non-fiction, poetry or graphic narratives. It's random-- the catchword of our culture, and the former title of a publishing gargantua. Only now, post-mortem, do I get the humor.

It's not the writing per se, but the reminder that all these niche-writers co-exist---post-Katrina journalists, Haitian activists, torture survivors, doodlers, animal rescuers, ex and future cons, sadists, perverts, and those compelled by unbearable lives. I like trusting Eggers et al to muck through Esquire and Slate issues and reprint with font democracy-- no ads, no boldface bylines.

Walking through Chelsea today I am reminded about our challenged language and why, despite the OED addition of colloquialisms and IM acronyms, we rely on strings of adjectives to describe the enormous range of objects which ally themselves under the noun 'Art' (which I first mistook, having heard Shakespeare at an early age, as a verb; maybe closer to some meaning). Galleries today are anthologies at best... but the whole system of nomenclature needs an overhaul. The auction houses have for years been struggling with a soft-focus line between Photography, Contemporary, Latin, Chinese...when a huge number of works wander across borders.

And for those who actually follow the philosophical progression of what art is or is not (I had the course in grad school--- with the anthology that is so dated it's become current)...the true vanguard can be unexhibitable. I'd even suggest that non-marketability might be a prerequisite. But that's like recording music only mosquitos can hear... one risks deleting a huge audience which has not just made 'art' as necessary as a household TV, but a virtual Wall Street institution. The incredible thing is---unlike fine and large diamonds which are only for the monied--- it's the same $10 paint and canvas--- or whatever... and who sets the line between what is auctioned at Hotel Parking Lot $19.95-and- under sales...or the top lot of the evening Contemporary auctions. Piles of wrapped candy, dead fish--- basketballs... what if a Hirst spin-art piece found its way into the Marriott ? How many Hedge Fund masterminds would pick it out?

So what is art? Should it be domesticated, like lap-dogs, for the rich? Is it 'decorative'? I admit to loving my paintings. I love the colors, the composition--sometimes the subjects make people squirm, but there's an element of aesthetic priority there...
Still...I expect the artists on the edge to be doing things that are hideous, disturbing, provocative. I also concede the concept of the art 'market' can only support some conceptual projects. Of these, we need souvenirs for our walls--- drawings or even photos or bits of hair and blood. Saleable things. In the old days, foundations supported public art projects. Now corporations support them--- the same corporations which own and trade these artists-- whose CEOs sit on museum boards and allocate funds for their artists' exhibitions. Is this different from insider trading?

Am I getting old or do the endless columns of reviews seem to be rehashing the same praise in the same language for the same cyclical reinventions of the past 2 or 3 decades? We have copyrights for music, but the mindless glut of pop melodies has us audio-tranquillized so we scarcely care whether we've heard a song last week or 25 years ago. And does it matter? When a forgerer can't even get away with an exact copy...is unintentional imitation anti-art? Sherrie Levine and Mike Bidlo have made a career of it...

I spend less and less time in galleries... I am in and out...can't find much to dwell on, and I am less well-dressed than the average weekend gallery gawker these days. Not to mention the staff. Larry Gagosian really does resemble a Duane Hanson real-estate agent. And obviously he has his own tanning bed. Something truly inapppropriate and downright sleazy about these new gallery moguls. Caveat emptor. The business is self-regulating. Dangerous. Greedy. I pity the artists. Other artists envy and pity the artists. Some artists ignore it all and keep their work under their beds. This is the work we need to see. The unpublished, the unphotographed, the unanthologized.

When I was 21 and graduated with awards from my highbrow Art History program, a well-known philosopher/aesthetician called me and asked me for a date. He was rather old--
not handsome but huge on brain-appeal, and I guess I was bohemian-hot back then, and I was new in New York City, single, and fair game. Of course I was terrified and overwhelmed. Flattered. He took me to see Rocky. By the 4th raw-egg drink, I realized he was putting me in my deserved place. He's now been dead for decades but I wonder where he'd have taken a Gagosian to lunch. McDonald's? Maybe the dumpsters behind Chelsea Piers which one could see from his galleries were anyone to open a window and let some reality and fresh air in.