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I
met my painter wife, Alice, in 1965. We lived on New York's Lower East Side. She studied at the New York Studio School, an abstractionist enclave, while I worked at the 8th Street Bookstore, an avant-garde haunt of poets. At that time, poets and painters were great friends. The covers of books by Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, Ted Berrigan, Ed Sanders, and scores of others were graced by the art works of Red Grooms, Alex Katz, Joe Brainard, George Schneeman, Donna Reed, and many others.
The mid-sixties were a playful time. Poets played with words, artists played with their materials, poets played with artists, and artists played with poets. What made these playful times significant was that this playfulness was serious business. The adult world was going to hell. Young men were dying in Vietnam, young protesters were teargassed on the streets, the Soviets pointed their nukes at us, we pointed our nukes at them, and, according to most thinkers, the world as we knew it was going to end in a heap of rubble in our time. Our response to this state of affairs was to question “the world as we knew it,” and to see if there wasn't some way out of this grim agreement, by uncovering worlds as we didn't know them. The key to such uncovering was in play. The seriousness of doomsayers was challenged by a myriad of artistic alternatives. Art burst the confines of canvas, questioned patronage, privilege, and aesthetic definition. Museums were regarded with as much suspicion as police stations.
The revolutionary playfulness of art in the sixties was not new to art. It proceeded from the very beginning of the consciousness that saw fit to create artifacts that were separate from nature and that fixed the forms of an artist's perception into some kind of material. That consciousness is as old as art itself and is present in all art, including ritual and religious art. In ritual and religious art there is inscribed also a mnemonic of the ritual, but that is the art's most fragile characteristic and tends to disappear as soon as the ritual is no longer practiced.
Some of the most enduring conventions of art were challenged successfully in my own time by the spirit of play. Andy Warhol's paintings, collages, silkscreens, and films, for instance, challenged the separation of art from commerce, daily life, other arts, and drawingroom seriousness. Joe Brainard's extraordinary number of small collages, including some on matchbooks, questioned the value and pricing of art objects. Some of them sold as cheaply as ten leis, if I remember correctly. The high-minded purism of abstractionists was deflated by pop artists. Going back in the history of art one can make an easy argument, of course, for the succession of styles under the pressure of new aesthetic convictions. But this is not what I am talking about. The period I am describing aimed not just at overthrowing the aesthetic conventions of the older generation, but art itself, including the products of the artists themselves. The surrealists had discussed this issue at length and they had resolved, at least theoretically, that the process of the imagination was more important than its products. The irony of the present, which is that the products are now valued as products with little or no regard for the process, is only one of the many ironies that were self-evident to us in the sixties but are no longer either self-evident or important enough to uncover.
Which brings me to the true subject of this essay, which is irony. Just kidding. But to mention only one night in a long series of nights in the midsixtiesâa time that consisted mostly of long nightsâI went to visit the great American poet Ted Berrigan at 3 A.M., his favorite hour, and I found him in the process of rearranging the pictures on his walls.
“You're here just in time,” he said, “to help me rearrange the pictures on my walls.” Besides being one of Ted's favorite late-night activities, the rearranging of his artworks was one of the great Socratic occasions that we younger poets drew spiritual sustenance from. Along with the rearranging of pictures came great disquisitions on art, the artists who had made them, and
the general philosophy of art as it applied to our own attempts to making it. Ted had a couple of Andy Warhols, three Alex Katzes, a Fairfield Porter, many works by George Schneeman and Joe Brainard, collages and photographs by Rudy Burckhardt, paintings by Donna Reed. All these were gifts and he prized them highly. Rearranging them was a way to see them anew, to discover previously unknown relationships between them, and to view them metaphorically and literally as descriptions of our minds at this particular time. The reason I can never remember exactly what artworks Ted owned is because in his disquisitions he rarely mentioned the names of the artists or the artworks we were rearranging. There was obviously no need of it since we were looking at the works as we were rearranging them. Later, however, both memory and tapes fail to yield the specifics, while tending to highlight the brilliant, aphoristic quality of Ted's mind, which proposed such things as: “All portraits would look better if they had a balloon over their heads that said, âHi, Folks!'”
In addition to writing poetry, most of us poets also made collages, drawings, paintings, little sculptures, and lots of other, undefinable objets. The reason for this, I am not ashamed to say, was that we smoked a lot of marijuana, which focused our attention on the details of our world like nothing else could. Marijuana made us playful and took us back to our childhoods. Later, it did other things, like make us paranoid, but this is not the subject of this essay. Big History may not look indulgently on our efforts, but the history of art may not dismiss them entirely, if for no other reason than that they were unique objects with limited distribution and we all know how rarity makes its own value. We didn't care much about historyâat least I didn'tâwhile being acutely conscious of the deployment of history above, below, and in us. What our activities aimed for was the sabotage of history, its overthrow, whichâas some philosophers now tell usâhas come about through overproduction. I can argue with this, but this is not the subject, etc.
What I do know, from having lived through this playful and unusually grave period of the twentieth century, is that it was possible, for a brief moment, to reconnect with the imagination of childhood and have almost as much pleasure as a lonely Transylvanian child in a dark museum full of torture instruments. I say “almost as much” because the pleasures of art-making in the sixties were interwoven with an active sexuality that could never be quite as free as pre-sexuality.
Which brings me back to my wife, the painter.
Her work was fresh, forceful, colorful, and simple. At first she painted big and abstract, the way they taught her at the Studio School, but you could always tell that flowers and people were trying to push through the thick pigmentâtexture was Studio School gospelâand assert themselves. Colors and light and real shapes were natural to her, so as soon as she left school and we went to the West Coast, she started painting flowers, plants, clouds, children, and the Russian River in different lights. Northern California was particularly suited for watercolors. She also drew witty and somewhat skeptical cartoons, the skepticism being a survival ingredient in a milieu of mystically inclined counterculturists and naturists who, not content with being young, rebellious, and naked, also spouted many happy clichés. Alice's artworks surrounded me in California, and it is almost impossible to think of those days without seeing her bright, energetic, happy colors.
Between 1970 and 1975 the light in California had a quality that I haven't seen after that, a quality some have called “psychedelic,” and which, I have no doubt, proceeded from a certain induced perception of the world but was there nonetheless. This quality was in addition to the fifteen obvious qualities of light that are still there. This kind of light left the state around 1977 and it hasn't been back since, making Alice's paintings of the time documentary as well as unique.
After 1977, American life became museumified for me, though I am willing to argue that it became so for America as well. A sociopsychological study of a certain loss of innocence might be in orderâbut this, again, is not my subject. Museums, on the other hand and since we are in one, are part of my subject. Museums, and I might as well speak plainly here, are the enemies of art. Libraries, let me clarify, are not the enemies of books, but museums are the enemies of art.
The ambiguity of the relationship between artists and the institutions or people who patronize them is nothing new. One of the best expressions of this ambiguity may be found in Alice Neel's series of paintings entitled Men in Suits. Alice Neel's men in suits cover the range from art collectors to famous artists to notorious radicals to her own son, Richard, who became a banker. All these men, indifferent of their occupations, live within the straitjacket of a suit. The painter, while bemoaning the loss of freedom symbolized by these suits, does not, in any way, simplify the men within. She paints their complexity and also her dependence on them as an artist and a woman. The ambiguity of love for her subjects and contempt for the lives
they've chosen recapitulates the ontogeny of the artist-state, artist-society, and artist-museum relationship. This ambiguity may be found in perfect form in La Fontaine's fable “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” which he got from Aesop, so we know that even the Greeks felt it.
So what is my subject? Only this. A museum, a society, a state, or any institution in the business of art should try to re-create a state of preadolescence for its audience. The happy coincidence of an encounter between a collection of torture implements and an overwrought imagination is one possibility. In a certain sense, no matter how many experts there are carefully tending to art history, the arbitrariness will manifest itself soon enough. In the last two decades, arbitrariness has, in fact, speeded up like almost anything else in contemporary life. Nothing looks more dated than certainly willful formal experiments of modernism that aimed, paradoxically, for timelessness. On the other hand, innocence and (pre) sexuality, as well as wisdom and sexuality, are rarely available to those who take themselves too seriously. Money tends to make people serious. Art does the opposite. If the twain shall ever meetâand sometimes they doâmoney should adopt the playfulness of art, and never, never, the other way around. When art adopts the seriousness of money, it becomes money. When money becomes as playful as art, it becomes art. And that, in my opinion, is the way to live.
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I
n a dramatic tableau worthy of the sixteenth-century still-life master Juan Sánchez cotán, three tied-up mozzarella cheeses lord over five black olives, three onions facing three other onions, and a long-tailed garlic clove. The drama is really a farce, yet the tension is palpable. The cheeses are so ripe, their juice is overflowing. One of them has even cracked, so rife is it with power, age, and whiteness. The olives, like a fearful gang of thieves, are advancing on the cheeses with obscure intentions, intending either to rob them or beg them for favors. On a separate field of battle, the two onion threesomes are pursuing some kind of quarrel as deeply obscure as the shadow that lies between them. The onions are aroused, their tails and stalks are ruffled and standing. One gets the feeling that this is only a mock argument for the sake of entertaining the cheeses that protect them. Only the garlic looks (uncertainly) aware of the farcical nature of the relationships involved and, perhaps, of the illusory nature of all existence. This philosophical garlic is attempting to formulate a proper response to its devastating vision of tenuousness. One possibility is to escape from the tableau altogether, and to this end, the philosopher-garlic has already positioned itself (with the help of its creator) at the edge of the table whence a leap into nothingness is only a flip away. But the other possibility, expressively conveyed
by its tail, is some kind of accommodation with the all-powerful cheeses whose attraction it cannot deny.
Salvador Dali called garlic “the moon-flower of the Mediterranean,” and explained that El Greco became a great painter only when he encountered the mystic spirit of Spain, just like an insipid snail, which is nothing before it encounters the mystical force of garlic. Amy Weiskopf, riding the centuries-old pictorial gastro-philosophy of the Mediterranean, gives garlic its time-honored philosophical role.
Still Life with Mozzarella
is a Garlic Farce, a time-honored form which, like the sonnet, never grows tired, because garlic is immortal.
The paradox of food in paintings is that it never rots, though the painter might push it to the very edge of ripeness. The aged mozzarellas have improved with time, though their decadent status raises interesting questions about power, freshness, and centrality. The aesthetics of the nearrotten cheeses and the pickled but penurious olives does battle with the juicy, young onions and the philosophical garlic. Looking over three hundred or so years of history, one can have little doubt of the outcome of this encounter. The onion, the postmodern vegetal par excellence, has won the metaphorical victory. The onion, consisting of layers, has no center. The soul, as embodied by garlic, has been relegated to the outside of the discussion, and the overripe cheeses have been assigned to the class enemy. But if one looks over three hundred years of culinary history, one finds that the garlic has triumphed, the onion has never been demoted (not even by shallots), and that mozzarella has remained confined to the Mediterranean (despite the success of its powdered simulacrum kin used in the New World over spaghetti).
Amy draws shameless attention to the numbers of her vegetables because you cannot be taken seriously in this world if you're not backed up by numbers. Every dabbler in the occult sciences from Paracelsus to John of Patmos to a marketing researcher knows the power of numbers. You can't sell without numbers, but for the purposes of persuasion any numbers will do. Are there five olives because the humble and the puny always draw together in such unstable quantities? Are there six onions divided in two groups because peasants are generically factional? Are there three mozzarella because big cheeses always rule by triumvirate? And is there only one garlic because philosophers are always lonely and irreducible? The numbers (any numbers) are a red flag to schizophrenics that the structural underpinnings of the universe are present and that they, like vegetables, are available for reflection.
P
ainters, just like poets, have never tired of
vanitas
, because the persistent presence of Death has always put in question the material world. Just how thick or how transparent is matter? How do forms change under the pressure of mortality? If all is in vain, why not party? In the Middle Ages, Christianity produced an overabundance of symbolic reminders that Death and Judgment were at hand. Death was certainly at hand, but Judgment was another matter, reserved mainly for those who couldn't afford indulgences. The painters who undertook to depict the material luxuries that would surely pass as “a flower of the field,” took great delight in their objects. The lesson, delivered usually by the skull, was just a rhetorical flourish. Quite often, the skull was itself a delightful and vain object. The wellaccoutred study of a philosopher or even of a student would have been remiss without a skull. The skull authorized any debauches, whether intellectual or carnal, precisely because it was a reminder of the transitory nature of life. Drinking from a skull was de rigueur for bon vivants, and using skulls for candleholders was a cliché of student life that remains to this day.
The
vanitas
were debauches under the guise of morality, just like overly detailed descriptions of sins that aroused the worshippers to desires they sometimes undertook to satisfy right in church. The Protestant revolution was certainly aware of this Catholic excuse for pleasure, so
vanitas
were discouraged. Purged of sacred reminders, the
vanitas
became just still lives. Why anyone would undertake to paint
vanitas
now, as Amy Weiskopf has done, is an interesting question.
Obviously, she relishes the formal play of so many variously shaped objects, but that is a discussion for specialists. I am more intrigued by the stories this work suggests. There are several. The first is that the
vanitas
continue to say something about our time, despite the postmodern abolishment of simple dialectical opposition. The Reformation and the Counter-Reformation continue to battle for souls even now, long past the Enlightenment and well into the Information Age. The sly comment of this
Vanitas
is made by the position of the table, which makes it certain that everything on it, including the skull, is going to topple any minute. In fact, it's a miracle (of art) that the objects haven't yet toppled. This is
contra naturam,
just like the persistence of Manichaean debate. The joke is that everything, not just the stuff on the table but also the
vanitas
genre itself, didn't long ago slide off the edge of the world. It is possible that when the first
vanitas
were painted, the world wasn't yet round.
The objects themselves are not particularly wicked to the contemporary viewer. The drinking goblets are collectible (besides, they are empty), the book is not from the Index Maleficorum, the plates and the bottle are clean. The skull is dust-free. There is a lemon on the table, looking very much at home except for the fact that it should have rolled off a long time ago. A lemon, a starfish, an olive, and some dice are balancing on a ledge under the table. The objects under the table do not look as if they had rolled off the table. On the contrary, they seem to want to roll off on their own. The dice, especially, are very eager to roll, but like everything else, they are subject to the amused control of the painter.
In this painting, as in many other of Weiskopf's works, the faux-solid shapes that are about to topple laugh gently at our certainties. They will never topple, but the threat gives us vertigo because, on the one hand, we would like to see them fall, and on the other we know that we can't do a thing about it. The painting is laughing at us but also at itself. The cups are so proud, the plate is so exhibitionistic, the lemon so rollicky. The objects are so serious, so grave, so well represented, that they are inevitably funny. They are businesslike and stolid like Dutch burghers with watches hanging over round bellies. You gotta love them, but they are going to fall. Not really. Let them eat paradox.
E
very Christmas in my black-and-white childhood we had the Miracle of Oranges. Direct from Haifa in the Promised Land, big, thickskinned oranges appeared in the bare-shelf stores of Romania, and people queued up for miles to buy them. The four orangesâthere was a limit of fourâbecame the centerpiece of our table. No one would have dreamed of eating them before five days of contemplation had elapsed. At the end of those five days, at midnight on Christmas Eve, we peeled the bright round miracles and sucked in slice by slice the bright sun concentrated in them. These oranges cured fevers and set the year on its path.
The magic of my Haifa oranges clings to Amy Weiskopf's satsumi, in
Merlitons and Satsumi,
although her small, sweet Louisiana oranges follow a different agenda. They are actors in a sexual drama involving a complex and amused cabala. The merliton, or “alligator pear” of Louisiana, straddles the border between fruit and vegetable. It is a squash that looks like a pear or a large crab apple. Together, the satsumi and the merlitons proclaim the region, but just how do they do that? Individually, their specificity has already been invested with all the meanings they might hold. Satsumi can be popped in the mouth whole, peeled and sectioned, or put in the fruit salad. The merliton can be stuffed with crawfish or meat or cheese or another vegetable. Like any squash, it can be boiled, given a supporting role in a soup or a stew, or can be used to baffle the outsider who never saw one before. As individual products, both merlitons and satsumi are complete.Their charm as foods is that they have a limited range, so their meanings are not diffused by corporate universality and vagueness. They hold their shape because they aren't everywhere.
But put them together, and you see them at war with the cookbook cover. No cookbook cover would dare to establish this particular relationship between satsumi and merliton. In the first place, they are culinarily incompatible. They are practically incongruous as much as they are formally related. But even their formal relation is unconventional. The oranges and the squash are attracted to one another because Weiskopf's agenda is creolization. She has decidedâfor political reasonsâto make sexy a New Orleans reality that is, de facto, sexy, but conventionally dangerous.
An art critic would never mention such grossly political notions in the presence of Weiskopf's obviously formal universe. But herein lies one of the ironic pleasures of her art. While this painting clearly draws its spectator to the virtuosity of her brushes and to the painterly world that references itself without seeming concern for narrative, there are yet intentions that call for non-art-historical comment and stories. It's not a guessing game either: Like any serious art, this painting operates on several levels. To the specialist, it is a cornucopia, one can expand the whole range of a critical vocabulary on it. But to the outraged food critic and to the carnal spectator, it represents an opportunity to throw fruit at the enemy.
(The enemy is boredom.)