Waiting

can I dare a paean to the love of a child

Waiting, 1989. Found linoleum, found chair, found softball plastered into sheetrock wall

A few months after I spotted the posters for Richard’s slasher films, two young women who ran a gallery in the East Village and were assembling their stable of artists came for a studio visit. Stable. We artists were the horses. Were we draft horses or race horses? We did the physical work, yes, but also, we were the ones to be bet on. The right bet meant huge financial reward. At this time in New York, I was in something of a transition in my work, making some pieces that included words as sculptural objects –– cut from plywood; found plastic letters from old signs –– but also meaning-compounding objects. Language had been consistently present in my work for ten years, first scrawled or printed, later physically cut out or built in. Mostly at this time, this strategy offered me an opportunity for understated humor. But as much as I loved and depended on language to amplify or even undercut the work, I had begun to be pulled toward works with no words, works that suggested something beyond the social/cultural and asserted the ultimate insufficiency of language to get at the deepest levels of human experience. One of these two gallerists was very drawn to the language-based work, but was quite hostile to the pieces I considered “silent.” I felt they touched something deeper, something beyond thinking, but they were harder to parse, less readable. For this woman, they were enough to allow her to dismiss me. “I have a hard time even calling this art,” she said to me.

I had heard this before, of course, but I had come to New York in reaction to having heard statements like this in the South. To hear it in New York and from the director of a gallery who was herself an artist, this was a shock. I had been musing for months about the idea that for art to be successful it had to activate both hemispheres of the brain. It had to appeal to the intellect but it also had to appeal to the emotions. I postulated that the measure of an artwork’s success could be the degree to which the neural activity evoked in response to a work was located in the corpus callosum, in the communication between right and left hemispheres, between intellect and emotion. But now I decided that if I could get this kind of reaction, I must be onto something. I stopped making the language-based work altogether. I decided to try to cleave that bitch’s tongue to roof of her mouth.

Using slides of some of these pieces: a pair of slacks pinned to the wall above a series of broken broomsticks; a thrift-store shirt printed with an Old Master motif hung above leaning red dowels, shapes of light projected above leaning broom sticks, I received a Fellowship from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. This came at a crucial moment and the confirmation it afforded was very seductive.

Having floundered around, barely able to make rent, with temporary gigs: serving as the site coordinator for Art on the Beach trying to get the artists to remove their works after the show was over, hiring on as a carpenter with Blazing Hammers, Dean McNeil’s tiny company, to build Bruce Nauman’s Room with My Soul Left Out at Castelli Gallery, I had finally found a stable job as the secretary for Angiola Churchill, the Chair of the NYU Department of Art and Art Education. A powerfully built woman who spoke fiery and fluent Italian, Angiola’s personality inspired great fear in the department. An adjunct instructor came in one day to complain about his pay and she ripped off his head and told him about the fifteen other people waiting in the wings to teach the black and white photography class he was teaching. It was Richard Prince who would soon burst onto the scene with his iconic Marlborough Man photos. She screamed at the administrative assistant of the department for being slow gathering materials for the departmental review and assigned me to pick up the slack. I spent time one day helping an artist from Cuba negotiate the bureaucracy of the department and got scolded for wasting my time. That guy was Felix Gonzalez-Torres, soon to be another art world darling. Last year one of his pieces sold at Christies for thirteen million dollars.

These blow-ups would happen at the least provocation and I was at Angiola’s beck and call, so I was in a constant state of agitation and paranoia, amplified by the fact that I had a difficult time getting to work by the requisite eight a.m. Then Dale McConathy arrived in the department. Dale had been the storied director of Storm King and was his own kind of force. When he’d had a falling out with a board member of Storm King who threatened to quit if he didn’t get his way, Dale called a news conference to announce that board member’s resignation. So Angiola respected his ruthlessness and treated him with more deference. Dale created the first Doctorate for studio art. He envisioned it as a step beyond the MFA that would give studio artists the Doctorate many institutions required for tenure and he soon began recruiting people to the program. As an employee, I could take classes for free and had already taken classes with Richard Prince and Peter Campus, the pioneering video artist, so I was on Dale’s hit list. He invited me to co-teach a class with him. It was to be the first of three courses on the principal elements of visual art. This one was called Light. That offer nailed me. I was in. I abandoned the Master’s degree NYU offered and signed on as a DA candidate.

The other power broker in the department was Marilyn Karp, the wife of the owner of Ivan Karp Gallery. She and Dale created an alliance and were often in one another’s office with their heads together. Marilyn oversaw the exhibition program of the department, 80 Washington Square East galleries and Broadway Windows run by two Doctoral Fellows. Marilyn took me aside one day and told me that one of the two had quit or had been removed and since I was now a Doctoral Fellow and had “proven my mettle” by being able to work with Angiola, she wanted to offer me the position. Strikingly attractive and brimming with the sort of confidence that comes from being on the inside, Marilyn usually got what she wanted. For me it was a god-send: no more eight a.m. clock-ins, no more detail work, no more Angiola.

I had been doing this for more than two years and had completed the course work for the Doctorate. Now with the Pollock-Krasner grant I had to decide if I would go through with a dissertation and commit the time and aggravation it called for. In my mind, this would mean making a decision to become an art professor rather than an artist. I had seen up close how difficult it was to do both, Peter Campus, already famous and offered an easy teaching load, perhaps the lone exception on the faculty. The Pollock-Krasner award offered me a sign. Combined with having been selected by Bill Arning, the curator of White Columns, the country’s first and most venerable alternative space, to have a solo show that would introduce me to the New York art world, I became convinced now it was only a matter of time before people had to view my work with the same seriousness with which it was made.

Standing in my studio, Bill shook his head at one of the little pieces made from a row of half-smoked cigars glued to a scrap of linoleum found on the street and said, “You will either make way too much money, or no money at all.” Then, to re-assure me, Artists’ Space, perhaps the second-most famous alternative space in the city, had selected me from the slush pile of unsolicited slides to be part of the “Selections from the Artists’ File” exhibition, whose purpose was to identify the most interesting “non-affiliated” artists in the city­­­­––meaning those without gallery representation. I quit the NYU job and left the doctoral program.

The Mind/Matter show curated by Bob Nickas opened at Bess Cutler Gallery in Soho. The dinner after the opening felt like arrival. Bess had taken the artists and their partners to Chinatown for a big dinner where David Diao had ordered for all of us from the Chinese characters written along the top of the walls. Sheila and I were agog. Bess had even arranged for a photographer to make five by seven transparencies of my work to show to collectors. Nothing sold, “but something will!” I assured Sheila. And sure enough, because of interest generated by that show, Bill Arning himself came to my studio and bought a twelve-foot multi-panel linoleum and mop-handle piece called Two Cultures. I had to go over to his apartment to set it up, never imagining that requiring a collector to pay me to come to their house to recreate the artwork whenever it had to be moved (or got knocked down) might be an impediment to sales.

Two Cultures. found linoleum, found mop handles and tar, on canvas

To increase my chances of becoming recognized, I put in as much face time as I could stomach going to openings at other galleries. I knew that those artists who could schmooze were the ones who would sell, and I watched with admiration and dismay as others glad-handed across a crowded room. Did they all know each other? At one of these openings, I spotted Alfredo across the room, his red hair and elegant South American accent pulling people to him. This is someone who is part of my cohort, I thought, someone I have some tiny actual connection to. I might be able to have a conversation. He and an artist I recognized as someone who also wrote criticism in one of the downtown magazines were in animated conversation. I walked up to them and their conversation continued, with somewhat less animation. I stood there waiting for Alfredo to acknowledge me but he did not. I looked at him, pleading with my glance like some adolescent hoping to be accepted by one of the cool kids. He swiveled his head toward me, then without changing his expression, he swiveled back, took the slightest step so his shoulder shifted to block my gaze and then went on speaking to Howard in the elegant South American accent. Howard looked straight into Alfredo’s face as though he were wearing an invisible pair of horse blinders, his thoughts written legibly on his face. There is nothing you can do for us, nobody knows you, please evaporate yourself from our presence before someone important sees us together.

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Not much later I found myself in our storefront apartment on East Ninth looking at our finances while watching two-year-old Julia. Sheila was across town at Marcia Tucker’s loft singing with Marcia’s a cappella group The Art Mob. It was pretty clear we were running low on the cash from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and, oops, now we had a second child in the oven, due on New Year’s Day. When Sheila lumbered her rotund belly out of Marcia’s loft onto Sullivan Street, the old Toyota wagon we’d moved to New York in was gone. Stolen. “Off to a chop-shop,” said the cop. “You’ll never see it again.” No insurance, of course. Every New Yorker who’s ever owned a car knows the game of alternate-side-parking, where every other day, from nine to eleven, say, you can’t park on the north side of the street. You get up, grab a coffee and double park on the south side until the street sweeper goes by, then grab your spot again, remaining in the car until eleven in case the traffic cop comes along. Sheila’s response at nine the next morning was “It sure is easier to double park this police report than that Toyota.”

Galleries were still visiting my studio; Stephen Stux, Andrea Rosen, but so far, no offers. I began to have the feeling I was playing some high-stakes game. With the correct answer, I might win the big prize, but I also began to wonder if the prize might be something of a trap. Every artist hears the story of the gallery dealer that pushes you to make the kind of work that has sold well and each of these artists tells himself or herself it will definitely not happen to me. The pressure to sell intensifies as the stakes get higher, but I had become blinded by the desire for it. The need to be a successful artist had created its own counter-gravity, like a big black moon eclipsing the bright reason I had wanted to be an artist in the first place. I didn’t recognize I had stepped off the path.

Journal entries: I am depressed – despondent. Adrift. I am facing financial crisis. Not enough money in the bank to pay the rent, not enough money to pay off the loans we have already accrued to buy computer, air conditioner. Not enough to pay the midwives who will be delivering the baby due January 1. I… keep hoping for and expecting some sort of financial break from this goddamned artwork….something had better happen soon financially or we might not make it in NY. That wd be a real shame since I have gotten this far and now have been labelled among the most interesting artists not represented by a commercial gallery by both the major downtown alternative spaces. To get this close and then to bust and have to go home wd be tragic. I don’t think I could sustain this level of art activity in the South…I now cannot envision myself in any other occupation on a full-time basis. Have I painted myself into a corner?

The prevailing winds I faced now in this quest were those of irony and cynicism. The playfulness and guerilla-like subversiveness of the East Village art scene had collapsed into a Neo-Conceptual irony and while I considered my work idea-driven, it was not overtly “intellectual.” Drawn now to the mystery of the physical world, it felt more and more to be an homage to love, a celebration of the unification of opposites. “Must I pose as cynical to be taken seriously?” I ask myself in my journal, a one-month-old baby in my apartment. Is this what I want? Is this practice something that should nourish me spiritually or financially? Can it be both? Can I dare a poetic sensibility? Can I dare a paean to the love of a child?

Waiting, January 1989. (detail) found chair, found softball plastered into sheetrock wall