May 22, 2010

TB invited me to a lecture on Ray Johnson at the Black Mountain Museum. The lecturer, Frances Beatty, is VP of a New York gallery who knew and clearly loved Johnson, and the lecture was excellent. I was convinced that Johnson was a passionate and committed artist, but not, alas, that he was a very interesting one. The lecturer’s miscalculation was to put up comparison slides of Klee and others, and Johnson suffered by comparison. Johnson was clever and innovative, but you needed the story behind the works–and a certain proportion of excuse-making-- for the works to be as fascinating as the lecturer clearly thought they were. I was sitting in the darkened room thinking two things while the lecture unfolded. One is that you could almost put your finger on the moment when artists began to believe art was life rather than vocation, when they began to think that art was lived rather than made. Although it sounds dramatic and romantic, I believe it was a wrong turn, that did neither art nor any artist any good. Johnson backstroking off into oblivion is viewed as a gesture of art, I suppose understandably, but it seems to me to miss the point of art, not to mention of life. Art is always the thing made. The notion that it is a gesture of making, that it is the will to make, that it is a way one lives one’s life, all seem to me hubristic on one level and infantile on another. Even a fanatic such as Blake makes a clear distinction between the man and the material manifestations of the imagination of the man. If the thing made is good, the artist is good; if not, not, no matter what the artist’s intentions were. And part of “good” for me is the ability to stand on its own, to be comprehended and enjoyed in the middle of a desert, where there is no one to explain what the artist intended. Maybe the burden is on Johnson, maybe it was just the emphasis of the lecturer, but I can’t wrap my head around why he was so important as an artist, however lovable (or, as I take it, NOT lovable) he was as a man. The other thing I was thinking about was collage. I like collage elements in art–I’ve stuck sticks and leaves and postcards to my own art, with wax or acrylic medium– but for the artwork to BE a collage (rather than just to include collage elements) has always left me dissatisfied. It is the ultimate end of Cartesian fragmentation– the affirmation that we express nothing by fragments and regurgitations of what has already been expressed. Some believe that, but I do not. And with the exception of Romare Bearden, I have not seen a collage that didn’t look like a high school art project, if sometimes a very good one.

TB took me across the street to Sazerac, a new (to me) restaurant with a lovely roof terrace where we sat and chatted and drank cocktails named after the Muses. Dark clouds scudded across a darkening sky, and happy voices came up from the street. I was happy to be where I was.

In the Commencement procession I was supposed to walk before Bill Hass, but someone said that he had metastasized cancer, and could not march, then or probably ever again. My mind went back several years to a time when Bill found me walking to school, picked me up and gave me a ride. I told him I was walking for the fun of it, but that was not the truth, and he fathomed it, and looked out for me whenever he drove to or from campus. He was kind and solicitous to me always after. When his name was mentioned, I remembered that, and I hope a hundred others do the same, so that his next journey may be easy, quick, and end in safe harbor.

Saw a wood thrush in the trees on campus when I went to the farmers’ market

Drove to Hendersonville to attend a meeting of the Lost Playwrights. I sounded like an asshole when I was reciting my recent credits, but I swear to God everything was true. The pieces were not uniformly awful, and a musical version of The Pied Piper for children seemed to me quite workable. I am never reconciled to the truth that serious application does not, in art, necessarily yield results. The most awful scene read was as sincere and labored over as The Magic Flute, even more so, but with nothing near the end. It is not fair. It is what is. Maybe heaven is the place where such things are evened out.