A Portrait of the Artist at the Center of the World

and the most famous male body in the Western world

A Portrait of the Artist at the False Center of the World

In February, on the day she turned twenty-one, Sheila and I spent the morning climbing the Acropolis in the bright winter sun, walking among the ruined and crumbling white stones of the buildings, looking down at the Agora, the cultural and political center of ancient Athens. I carried with me a hard-bound sketchbook that I had been using as my de-facto studio and exhibition space, my repository of ideas and conceptual artwork. A page from that day will give you a sense of the kind of art I was struggling to dream into existence.

By recounting and documenting this specific trek I took, leaving the heights of the Acropolis, seeking the lower wisdom, the earthly wisdom, of the Agora, I was asserting that the act itself was an artwork. Not the drawing, not the description, those were just documentation. As you see, descending along a dirt path, skirting the Areopagus, the closer I got, the less I could see. When I got to the bottom of the hill, I found myself fenced off from my destination by chain link.

Earlier, we’d hiked all over the side of Mount Parnassus exploring the ruins at Delphi. Sheila was dual major in French and Greek and she had a burning desire to experience the ancient world of Greece. I was mainly just ecstatic over the sweeping vistas. We had Delphi mostly to ourselves and spent hours seeking the exact spot of the Omphalos, the center of the world that Zeus had established by releasing two eagles from opposite ends of the earth and marking where they met. We roamed over the terraces and temples, steeping ourselves in the ancient wisdom of the oracle in letters carved around the door of the temple, “Gnothi seautón,” Sheila said. Know thyself. “Medén ágan.” Nothing in excess.

Why do people not talk about the third pronouncement carved at the entrance? Engia pára d’ate? It’s more cryptic, more open to interpretation. “Make a pledge and mischief is nigh,” or “certainty brings ruin,” or “give surety, get ruin,” surety sometimes interpreted as pledging one’s body against a debt –– a caution against indenturing oneself––or marrying; or perhaps it’s a warning against the fundamental problem of human nature: being cocksure of one’s own ideas. No matter, Delphi looked like the center of the world! I spent a while formulating an artwork proposing that artists should be at the center of the world, but more importantly, that the received wisdom as to what, exactly, should be taken as central needed to be subverted. Aligning with some of the conceptual art of the moment, the piece existed virtually nowhere but in my own mind. I posed and Sheila took the photos that I would later make into a photographic diptych, but one in which the photos are intended as documentation rather than as art objects; the expression of an idea rather than an object of beauty.

A Portrait of the Artist at the Center of the World

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Before leaving the states, Sheila had heard from one of her childhood friends about an estate near Glasgow where college kids were given room and board in exchange for picking daffodils. So she made contact with the family and lined up a gig in Scotland starting in the middle of March, allowing her several weeks to travel in Greece. When her parents objected to her traveling there alone, she’d invited me to accompany her—probably not exactly what her folks had in mind. I’d finished college in December and had saved some money from one job at the UNC library and a second job washing pots at a restaurant in Carrboro. Having no specific after-college plans other than figuring out how to be an artist, I decided to take her up on the offer and then to continue on myself to Ireland, which, I’d heard, was trying to attract artists.

With no fixed place to receive mail, forget a telephone, we had to create a plan far in advance. I proposed we meet in Florence on January 30 at 2 pm under Michelangelo’s David––apparently everything I did needed to be filtered through the lens of art. Although we had become very close in the months before she left for Dijon, I now realized Sheila and I were assured of not being apart for more than a few minutes for weeks on end, needing to share meals and train rides, not to mention hotel rooms. I saw how this could become quite awkward and even the agreement to go had some baked-in assumptions that I now questioned. What was our relationship, really? We had backpacked along the Appalachian Trail together, swimming naked in the cascading pools of the south fork of the Pigeon River; we’d fumbled each-others’ clothes off among the canoes and tents of the Wake Forest Outing club storage room, but now?

I had arrived early and was hanging around in the Accademia wondering what the first moment of being re-united after many months would be like. I was quietly standing along one wall when a young man walked up.

“Hi, where are you from?” American accent.

“North Carolina.”

“You studying here or just traveling?”

“Traveling. I’m meeting a friend.”

“I saw you outside on the street and I thought you looked a lot like David,” he said, motioning toward the sculpture.

This was weird, especially considering I was wearing a flannel shirt and baggy suspendered wool pants, but he kept talking and because everything I was doing was filtered through that lens of art, I recognized that this incident was a gift to me, an artwork of poetic coincidence. I handed the guy my camera and asked him to take my picture in the same pose of Michelangelo’s David as a document of this art incident. Sheepishly I assumed the silly pose right there in front of the enormous David, meanwhile I’m looking at the faces and reading the minds of people watching: here’s the guy who has enlisted a stranger to document just how much he resembles the most famous and admired male body in the Western world, and of course as I waited uncomfortably for him to snap the picture, Sheila walked up. Bundled in an orange down jacket with a scarf around her neck, she stood to the side watching this all unspool, her hands held together girlishly in front of her, her head tilted ever so slightly to one side, the blonde hair in waves, the hint of a smile playing about her lips. After the guy walked off, she listened politely as I tried to explain. Then she made me pose again as she took the same picture herself.

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We spent the rest of the day wandering around Florence, strolling on the Ponte Vecchio and visiting the Maria Novella, then we collapsed in a pensione we found for 2000 lire in the via Faenza. Two days later, we shouldered our backpacks and stuck out our thumbs headed to Ravenna to see the Byzantine mosaics at San Vitali, and that evening, we caught the night train for Brindisi and the ferry to Corfu.

As we rumbled through the night with a cabin to ourselves, my jet lag and travel weariness finally caught up with me. I stretched out on the bench seat and put my head in Sheila’s lap. The extinguished cabin lights, the wood of the walls and leather of the second-class seats polished to a low sheen by years of human touch, her winsome face illuminated only by the light flickering past outside the window, Sheila put her hand on my head and began to sing to me. Part torch song, part lull-a-bye. I glanced up; she was looking out the window, the light green of her irises encircled with brown the color of the freckles across her nose. Not since childhood had someone sung to me, and even then, never in a voice so sweet and pure, like felt-covered hammers on magnificent hand-bells. The generosity of this simple gift in the intimacy of our rolling cocoon wrapped me in a sweet euphoria and held me, in thrall, at the center of the known world.