Blog

Interested Party

Notes on the hero artist.

We who knew him called him friend, and we did this with relief, in celebration. Look, we were saying, there are still some who make their own rules. It is still possible to live a dream.

No, he would say, it is not possible. Only necessary. As he saw it, this was the point.

Why would he spend so long, some wondered, in certain conversations? We could not pull him away, and all he had to say for himself was, it was all so interesting.

***

Adapted from comments made by Betsy Sussler in celebration of the life of Michael Goldberg, appearing in BOMB’s Summer 2008 feature, In Memoriam: Michael Goldberg.

In Passing

Overheard between dreamers.

You look cold. Here’s a bonfire. I’ve been carrying in around in my chest all this time. 

You sure?

Take it. Really, I have no use for it but this.

Thanks. I keep falling into wells.

But you always climb out, yes?

Yes, but wet and cold.

I am trying to be more of a tree, really. But the fire keeps getting in the way.

Hmmm. How?

I mean to put down roots and draw some order from––everything, which is too much.

That is a lot.

But at the top, see, there’s the crown. The leaves. If I get it right, I could be a sort of mediator between the soil and the leaves.

Huh.

Here. Check this out. It’s my first clear vision of reality.

Um. It looks different. Not like any reality I’ve seen. 

That’s kind of the point. 

***

Inspired by this feature in Daedalus: Statements and Documents: Artists on Art and Reality, on Their Work, and on Values (Winter 1960).

Out of Sight

With Italo Calvino.

The cities were born a little at a time––not unlike poems, you said––of various inspirations. You had a habit of collecting odd strangers and mythical heroes, and notes on places that you had been, might be, would tend to imagine. What happened was not a book exactly, but a geography to move in. You mapped cities of memory, cities of desire, cities and signs. There were continuous cities and hidden cities. These cities were braided: cobweb cities across an abyss, a microscopic city, spreading. 

Watch that one, you said, and as it grew, it revealed concentric cities like tree rings. Sometimes, you said, you would come across a city that would write itself.

Into what? We wondered, and you said yes.

***

Inspired by Calvino’s Invisible Cities, in honor of his birthday.

Lost in Translation

Meaning-makers in transit.

It wasn’t like each word was a moving train on schedule to a given destination, the challenge a matter of timing the jump. We thought our losses happened in our leaps from one to the next, like keys falling from sideways pockets.

But words themselves were the vessels, and they held their own gaps within them, and us too, but only tentatively, like so much loose change. So we were always falling out, into sky.

Another Sound

Humming, deep and low.

It was a time of release and collapse, confusion and the search for new bearings, and many painted aftermaths in words. There was much emphasis on resilience. Aspirational? Perhaps. It seemed a sort of mask. Something unraveled.

What is happening now? Someone asked. Attempts at description became profiles in shapeshifting practices: power and truth, dreaming and living, and then language. Interesting uses of words like safety raised questions.  For whom and from what and by what logic are these questions obscured?

This is what we were wondering on the morning that we left our homes to walk into the fog. We seemed to be going to its source, but we could not see it. No one spoke at the time because the words were not there. Not yet. There was a humming, deep and low. It was not clear if it came from some hollow behind the heart, or somewhere outside. Perhaps this distinction, too, no longer mattered.

Sound Painting

Holding beyond reach.

Near the end, you explained that something strange was happening. You had grown accustomed to a powerful presence. One day, without explanation, it left. What followed had more force but no face. You called it sound.

Later, people wondered if you were letting go or just beginning something new. But even when a body means to hold, so much of what happens slips through. 

Before you left, you painted reminders. You pulled us into its rough color. You said, listen.

***

Inspired by the sound paintings of Anne Truitt.

Expanded Expansion

The artist makes room.

Your aim was an art that would not behave as art. While dying, you made your untitled rope piece, layering industrial latex like paint over string and wire suspended from the ceiling. It resembled a decimated fishing net after a storm, or the work of an overworked spider gone mad. You welcomed unseen others into a shadowy space, inviting us to attend to what crawled, flickered, and flashed. You did not specify how long to look, or where. How is it possible, we wondered, to feel so in the way in a mostly empty room? 

Touch, you said, and meant it. Who could do that now, with all the insurance? Come in, you said. But try another door. You left it to us to find it. There are other openings, you said, and more hollow spaces than we were accustomed to noticing. 

What do you know? One skeptic asked and you said Nothing.

***

Inspired by the art of Eva Hesse, and by Mignon Nixon’s article “Eva Hesse Retrospective: A Note on Milieu,” (Spring 2003 in October).

Abiding Patterns

The work of hands and hidden forms.

I am trying to clarify the pattern, the artist said, in reference to the shape of living here. The artist was after this great unconscious form. The artist saw this form everywhere. It wants uncovering, the artist said.

And what will happen when you find it? Someone asked. I can tell you one thing, it won’t be a retrospective. Then the artist posed a question: ever been to a Shaker retiring room? Tell me you don’t see it.

Point being, the ideals of a people are to be found in what they make. To enter the room is to see belief in action. Among these, to work is to pray. Among these, a reverence for simplicity. The wood is pine, abundant and unvarnished.

It evokes the old reminder: never paint a ladder, because you won’t see the cracks in the wood. Here is made by climbing hands. You can see them at work in every joint, in the weave of the seat, the file of the arm of the chair.

Feel them, even in this room empty of all but the furniture they once made, for the living. 

***

Inspired by the work of artist Tom Sachs, especially his furniture.

Painting Time

Lights over water.

Of all your characters, you were most interested in Time, the fifth elemental substance latent in all things. You aimed to chronicle its flow by detailing refractions of brilliance on the river and its bridge, one forever changing and the other reaching toward permanence. You noted symbols in the shadows where one overlapped the other: the river, the bridge, their people; the hope of construction and the tragedy of collapse; the continuance of water and this incomplete permanence in concert with all forms, its eye a chorus.

***

Inspired by the work of Ivo Andrić (1892-1975), whose birthday is today.

Exit mobile version
%%footer%%