Canvases
Methadone Cirkus (1982)
We lived young. I was Downtown. Everyone lived Downtown in those days. Especially the youthful.
It was summer. The streets emptied out to let the heat inside. Then came twilight. Twilight of the superstars. You walk down the street with your soul hanging out. Soul rents the body. And people take pictures of you.
The city has too little light in it. Downtown there’s no light at all. One made a virtue of it or went West, where the sun burns holes in your negatives and retinas.
Toni wanted to spend time with me. I was trying to sleep with Toni’s friend, Downtown Mary. It was one of those hot summer Saturdays when everyone just wants to lose their minds. I was planning to wander the flea markets until the wine ran out, then take a nap on the beach, swim, and eat down in Brooklyn bay when Toni called me begging to help her move to the Village.
“Sure,” I said. I always said sure.
Flights of hash and pungent rooms, hysterical laughter and utter silence, sun and black stairs in no particular order later, I sat naked on her leather sofa. Like a sweaty Havana expressionist painting lost in my own reveries from winter and spring and wild lonely nights surrounded by loved ones.
Across from the couch sat an unremarkable enigmatic little portrait of a sad little clown, inept elephant splayed out, clown smoking, peeling peanuts, fading makeup in an ugly way, wig creeping crumbling at the hairline of the caption, that of itself caught my attention:
World Famous Circus M — Comes To Town April 22 - May 21
The portrait of a poster of the clown Levitan, whose faded green tattoo of a woman on his forearm protruded from the jaundiced worn sleeve of his undershirt, perhaps a dead newspaper on the floor once used to hold something still crumpled into the shape of it, bearing news of the defeat at Tiananmen.
Then a solid background of some clean neutral color, fully premeditated, presided over by Masonic calm. Calm? But the clown looked like a waterfall. I was still recovering from the 70s.
Toni fell asleep on the bed I carried up four flights of stairs and put together as she slept. If I was doing it correctly I should have checked that she was breathing and left, but I sat there pinned to the fading light until I wasn’t sure if I was awake or asleep.
In my mind Levitan was thinking about his car rotting away in the grass yard, and him rotting away within it. Something as mundane as the money he’s owed for all the times he’s broken his legs falling off the ladder.
Only the dumb show ponies licking his hand could be this innocent, he is saying.
None of you else in this ring can come close.
Ronald Reis, West Haven, CT: Savin Rock Amusement Park [contact sheet], 1962. Duke.edu.
Retrospectych: An Exhibition (1985)
When I was young my mother was busy. My father, I think, raised me with a contempt for Art because nothing could penetrate his taste for kitsch—nothing I could make, no Art I could make. It was like his membranes were closed to where nothing could enter, nothing could penetrate to the heart.
I think Art is important, by the way. There are things I’ve learned from taking pictures, especially from taking pictures, that I’ve never gotten from everything else, like how to frame an arm, for example, what I would call Fascinationism if I were a critic, which I am, and to recapture in some way some memories I’ve lost is a goal of mine: To re-smell the avenue air in Paris, prewar Budapest, postwar Vienna, or Rome the eternal, already turning to cold, the sun slanting down on a lane, driving around older Madrid near the Calle de Covarrubias looking for a post office that takes subversive stamps and some liquid glue, shadows of de Gaulle. To recapture the smell of uninhabited places I saw long ago. They tell me my grandfather looked like Picasso. He was from Romania. Or Rumania.
Amsterdam always reminds me of the filthy canals of the sentimental office clerks in Nescio, which is Latin for I don’t know.
I should come clean. I was the source for the espresso material in the Sartre biography. We were friends in Rome. The woman who was writing the slab wanted to know how many espressos he drank at breakfast (three doubles) and I needed the free drinks.
I used to write letters to people with money. “All the words I’m using now have been used before,” I’d explain. I think you should know I’ve been spray painting fish. Acrylic on millet; mackerel in the shape of the letters of Arabic. I’ve been fondling stray dogs lately. I want to see if they will sell out for food, I’d say in opening. I’ve been thinking about charity. My work is acquisitive and disbursive in nature, by nature I’m attracted to creative work that requires a return to the primal scene of birth, rather than the crime scene of collage. Dear patron, I wrote and wrote. I hope you get my letters.
So much has happened since I started out. The gap is growing between what occurs and what can be said about it and what I’ve written, between me and it. I’m not sure even I know what it means, but my instinct is to leave on good terms with the world and the structure of the Buddha. I don’t want to be estranged from you, I don’t want to be a stranger, I used to write. After a stint in the Jewish Navy.
I’m living where I’m living now. I think it’s a hotel, formerly a different hotel. Several books surround me. They’re arranged in the form of an anti-shrine. One says: “He himself now believes in this attack and actually sides with Nature against art because civilization, as he has found it, has given him only one thing: acclaim.”
“He has remained a living example, and this involves far more than not dying.”
Joan Jonas, Organic Honeys Vertical Roll, 1972, video still. Kunsten.
Night Shopping (1949)
There is much to be said on the subject of green in the work of Edwin Foster, an American painter of large, enigmatic portraits. The melancholy hue is put to good use in the breakout Night Shopping (1949), where it casts a clean, pale shadow over the brightly-lit aisles and neat rows of identical vegetables to suggest a perfectly intangible sense of longing — “skyscraper boredom,” Thomson calls it in his monograph on postwar painting in the city.
Every picture presents an obstacle to the viewer. The obstacle of this midnight scene is its effortless familiarity with emptiness and visibility: every item in Night Shopping is inert, as if suspended; the one thing they have in common is a certain aesthetic validity. Individuals caught between waking duties and personal phantasms. Sleepwalkers with laundry lists.
Identity is not the hero of the picture; identification is. It reminds more than one old GI of Berlin department stores lit up like trees at dusk, and more than one art critic of Tulips, Foster’s most iconic image and the second star of the show — twelve years ago now — at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. where, in the sober light of the Irene and Abel Feldman room, spectators could admire the apparent indifference of one work to another, one brushstroke to another, as well as the crowning audacity of Night Shopping, whose greatness lies in its attempt to convince us that we understand this woman.
Wegman’s in the 1960s. Epicurious.
Self-Portrait as Someone Else II (1978)
The despair of a man, for example, who, waking up to a woman not his wife, fails to respond to her question about his dream — the dream in which he was suddenly unable to paint a portrait of himself as an ordinary vampire because of the mechanical problem encountered upon attempting to depict the white of the sneakers.
Eric Fischl,The New House, 1982. MCAChicago.
