Facade Figures

Next week we will start conserving the figures on the facade of a major museum. These limestone guardians, 18 ft tall repositories of the virtues of our culture, frequently look gangly or insignificant from the ground but, up close, their forms, stretched to overcome the viewer's perspective, have a power and surprising intimacy. On their lonely perches for so very long, these forlorn souls look to be crying for the company that we will provide them for the few weeks we are there. Its a sweet task, despite the pigeon crap and accumulated atmospheric soiling, but I am approaching it with dread.

The last time I did this was on the Brooklyn Museum of Art. I worked on all of the pieces, many allegorical figures posed by Audrey Muson before she went mad, and many by the fine sculptors of the period. Daniel Chester French's program for the 30 figures and pediment group included images representing the cultures whose contributions to world culture were ensconced within the building. There are figures that represented in the Beaux Arts mind the cultures of exotic foreign lands and times on one side of the central group, and those that represent the Classical tradition and our culture on the other. Its a ambitious and expansive program for a lot of sculpture while remaining remarkably innocent in its underlying beliefs. From many sources, times and peoples, a common thread of art, science, creativity; humanity, can be found and these silent giants literally embodied the hopeful sense that the then dawning 20th Century was reaching the culmination of this glowing past in a hopeful American future.

It was from there atop the scaffolding, at what was the highest point in the borough, that I watched the World Trade Towers burn and fall. On that September day I was working on the figure of Mohammed, a blasphemy I know but, in the context of the program meant as an homage. An innocent tribute to a foreign culture, an open hand of admiration, yes in a colonialist context, but no less honest for it.

Now that culture was killing thousands of innocent neighbors and friends while I watched. I won't go into reliving the horror of that day and the days afterwards but, instead want to consider the meaning of that innocent tolerance for a religion and culture which, still, we hold as a legitimate difference from our own. After 4 years of study has shown the arrogance, perfidy, lies and cruelty that underlies much of the current expressions of Islamist culture; the death cult celebrations of violence, the beheading pornography, the insane cruelty of sending children to blow themselves to pieces in order to kill other children, we still carry a delusion that there are admirable cultural differences that we should respect.

Well, whether there are those admirable traits, and no one will gainsay the lasting virtue of the poetry and mathematics that has came from Islamic cultures, what I am mostly struck with is the nobility of OUR culture to find virtues where they may or may not lie. I can guarantee you that there are NO figures celebrating the awesome beauty of Jesus’ teachings, or the majesty of Moses’ stern directives, not to mention monuments to Confucius, Buddha or Plato erected in a Moslem country. Nor will one find the celebration in another culture but its own anywhere but in America. We have always sought the good in others because the essence of ourselves is the seeking of the good within us.

So, ok, perhaps I will overcome the lingering dread and say "Yes" let me polish the ideals of our American hope that these sculptures represent. Innocent, wrong-headed perhaps, certainly naive, we do remain a people of infinite goodness and optimism. And it is why we also remain the beacon of the world. And why I think that these slowly dissolving limestone piles MUST be kept whole, at least for the bit of time I can help to give them. They represent enough to warrant all the care I can give.

Artists and Models and Film Noir

My sister is telling me the story of the Black Dahlia, an as yet unsolved gruesome murder in LA in the late 40's that was explored by a detective, the author, who ultimately came to the conclusion that it was his own father who committed the crime! A tale of incestuous criminal doings in the blank time after the end of WW II when the Greatest Generation returned in stunned silence to the changed world of their bitter past and tried to create lives shrouded in the silence of their shell shocked souls. Most of the tales were kept hidden, and horror was only made worse by the giddy prosperity and mindlessness of the next decades. Within this contrast, the traumatic Depression and war ravaged past and the shiny Formica future, lies the fertile soil for Noir. Settings are always tied to artist's studios and department stores, places she says are public places of dress and undress.

In this story, Black Dahlia, the artists are John Huston, Man Ray, and a third tier fellow who, it turns out, was someone my mother studied with when she was a 26 year old zaftig hottie living out of Brooklyn for the first time in her life. She looked just like the victim then, and this book claims that this artist was one of the perpetrators in this ring of sick murderers, killing this woman and others.

"I don't believe it" my mother says, denying lots about her past in that statement.

I recall my own brush with artists, models and murders.

There was the pair in the 70's who I worked with at the art supply store, selling paints to Salvador Dali and helping to create his then degenerate canvases while he tottered around the Saint Regis in his leopard print bathrobe. I later learned while reading page 3 of the NY Post over someone's shoulder on a crowded 6 train that they were found hanging upside down in an abandoned warehouse in New Jersey, drained of all blood in their bodies. Still unsolved.

And there was Amy.

THE LIFE MODEL

We said good night the evening before

the news reported that Amy was killed.

She modeled at the drawing session while

I silently sat trying to preserve her young body

in lines and measured tones on paper sheets.

The sessions move at a ritualized pace.

The poses are quick at first to loosen the hand but then, increasingly, they become longer, and slower until the model, Amy, lay hardly moving

like fruit on the rumpled cloth of a well laid table

not life drawing but nature morte.

It was probably a mugging gone bad. She lay still surrounded by spilling bags, stopped forever while innocently heading home. The sidewalk was unstained with blood, her heavy shrouding coat caught the flow.

The night had turned bitterly cold, she accepted a ride wedged beside me on the collapsed bench of the pick-up, her bicycle stowed in the back.

We talked of her efforts to help battered women in the Bronx

by painting a mural and my work restoring public statues

but polite ideals of justice, healing and virtue expressed through art

were unable to deflect the forces moving a 10 inch kitchen knife

on its cruel path.

Amy's death leaves worthless eddies of contradictory feelings

Our few moments of conversation made us acquaintances only,

hardly more than strangers

yet the exposure of her nakedness, rightly reserved for lovers,

produced a semblence of intimacy I reexperience

in the photos of her smiling eyes that accompany the news reports of the killing.

I've tried to look at the drawings again but can't find her in them.

Real gestures are replaced by her imagined final pose

and I was only able to represent my own limits in the

graphite and conte crayon stains spread like evidence across pages

in a book of her now stilled life.

Florida thoughts

Morning in Miami. My stuff is spread around in this white carpeted and painted concrete room. Out the window, the International Bank of Miami building, a very nicely designed modern office tower that looks like a 1920’s Spanish revival structure but 15 stories tall and taking up an entire city block, catches strong sunlight against a sky the color of Curatrix’s eyes.

Strange day yesterday. We traveled to Curatrix’s old work colleagues for a kid’s birthday party. Not very interesting, then drove through Palm Beach, Delray Beach and back to Miami. Saw charming small courtyards by Meizner, via Roma, Via Parigi. Venetian flavor but beautifully small scaled. Wood bracketed eaves and arcades. Small porches and flying walkways. Fancy stores filled with god awful yellow and orange clothes (why do the rich always dress in the most hideous tones?) and lot of diamonds.

On the way back, passed a pick up filled with Rednecks with an immense alligator in the bed, tail gate down. I tell Curatrix to slow down and we let it pass us so we can see it. Its monstrous, perhaps 12 ft long, its mouth and eyes covered with electrical tape. I assume it is alive but there are no signs of movement until we both see a hind leg move and then the beast rolls over, twisting in its thin ropes and losing some of the tape from its mouth. Not only is it alive but it is about to get loose, I can see the huge bastard rolling off the truck bed and onto Curatrix’s Volvo, crushing the hood and breaking through the windshield and we veer off to get away from this disaster about to happen. Cletis and Homer pull off to the side of the road as we continue on our way. Florida.

Hello

I thought that this would be a place to post thoughts, ideas, work in progress, its public and well, out there.