Letter

I go to the museum every few weeks. Sometimes there’s a specific show to see; other times it’s just because. This is one of those. I don’t know what I’m looking for.

I get a coffee in the weird little pocket cafe on the second level of the Modern wing. It’s situated in a pass-through between the new and old buildings and all but three or four tables are in a dark hallway. I keep peeking around the corner, then pounce when one of the ones in the light opens up.

I spend a bunch of time with Robert Rauschenberg’s Short Circuit. It’s one of his 50s combines, made in the small window when he was one of the best painters going. I think back to the awful freshman art history survey lecture in which the teacher introduced him and Jasper Johns as “those two gay artists”. It was the last one I attended. Spent the rest of the semester antagonizing the poor grad student running my discussion section.

Since getting into collage a few years ago, things like Short Circuit are newly resonant. Art will change with you that way. It’s why a visit to the museum can feel new even when you’re looking at things you’ve seen a thousand times before.

Brice Marden’s Study for the Muses is a long-time favorite. I go up to the wall-label and am surprised to see no death-date. I text Frank to double-check and he confirms Marden’s passing. Yet here in this room he’s alive and well. (He’s dead on the museum’s website; maybe their printer is out of paper.)

I follow the pink, green, and blue vine lines from the edges of the painting into the middle and still can’t tell the moment they go from flat to volumetric. By bunching them along the borders, Marden makes a kind of ornamental window frame, sort of Deco in its gently expanding curves. But in the middle, the continuation of those same strands become plant-like. They form a kind of fence, through which you can see echoes of other lianas in the beige areas in between.

I don’t know that it’s truly possible to make a completely abstract picture. Even something absolutist, like an Ad Reinhardt monochrome, can’t help but suggest physical space. Or maybe it’s that I can’t conceive of anything but seen reality, no matter what I’m looking at.

I’m writing this the morning of my fifty-fourth birthday. I lopped off my beard a few days ago, leaving a dumb handlebar mustache. I saw a photo of myself a decade ago with one and wanted to see if I could still pull it off. The jury’s still out. All I know is that in a few weeks I’ll get tired of shaving and grow the beard back.

It doesn’t mean much but even a silly change like this underlines the passage of time.

I was a guest on the Virtual Memories Show and you can go on a short video tour of my artwork currently up at the bookstore.

There are now digital versions of some zines/chapbooks up on my site. Most of these are long out of print and unlikely to be reprinted anytime soon.

Every time I finish a book I think it will be my last. The expense—be it financial, emotional, durational—never seems worth the result. But then I remind myself the result’s not what I’m in it for. I mean, I want everybody to read and look at my books, of course, but I make them because I need to make them. After they’re done, they have to lead their own lives.

That’s easy to forget when you have a house filled with boxes of books. My problem is mostly one of logistics. It’s how to get them out of here and into the world. The economics of it are such that in order to manufacture these things at the quality I require, I have to order hundreds at a time. Then it takes years to unload because my distribution system consists of a bunch of cardboard, a scale, and an app to buy postage. I keep thinking there must be a better way.

The last couple months have largely been spent pulling people’s coatsleeves about the art book. It’s difficult to concentrate on making something new while promoting something old but the idea for the next thing has been germinating at least a year.

So much of my last couple years have revolved around the bookstore that it’s a no-brainer that the new thing is about that. I’ve written often here about my experiences at Tangible. Those posts serve as note-taking just as tweets once did for the cabbie book. The internet is a great sketchbook that way. But until I’m drawing, typing, cutting paper, etc the thing isn’t real to me.

Last week it became real. The way I’m looking at it for now is that I’ll make a bunch of artist books and short-run zines and see what it adds up to.

I hope that going back to an incremental approach will keep the thing at a scale and pace that I can handle and that will be worthwhile creatively and financially as it goes.

Eventually, there may be enough of these small parts to add up to something like a traditional book, but I’m not looking that far ahead. For now, I have to decide what kind of paper and cardstock to use for the zine, what the next story will be, and to check that the typewriter has enough ribbon and the printer enough ink.

Those seem like manageable goals but you never know.

I read Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” into a microphone.

Mallory and I discuss Eyes Without a Face.

I’m not one to move furniture around. I tend to leave things where they are. Once, I lived with a woman who changed the living room furniture around every other week. It was crazy-making. I like things the way they are and want them that way forever. Still, there are times when you have to move some shit around.

It started with my decision to get rid of my library. The newly-empty book case—which is at the beginning of the narrowed hallway-like space that connects the living room to the kitchen—kind of asked to be turned outward. Now, its contents are visible in the main room.

Past the bookshelf is a giant wooden desk. Having it in the hallway narrowed the space to a pinch-point or bottleneck. Also, whenever I worked at the desk, I felt separated from the main workspace out front. It’s dark, so the overhead has to be turned on. I never liked it but didn’t know why or how to fix it, until I turned the bookshelf.

To the left of my armchair was a Craftsman workbench on wheels. I bought it initially to put my palette on and store paints and materials, but because I don’t use the big easel much and don’t paint with oils inside, it’s become an under-utilized storage surface. I swap the office desk and the workbench out and now the apartment feels much bigger. It’s sort of a magic trick. An illusion that’s actually real.

Next, the small book case that housed my Chicago book collection moves from the back of the hallway to kitty-corner to the shelf, flush against the left side of the flatfile. Now I’ll be able to see almost all the books I still own from the armchair. This is crucial, because part of the reason I’m getting rid of books and other belongings is that when they’re out of sight, they’re truly out of mind. If I see them every day, I’ll know whether they’re useful.

The main studio area is next for upheaval. I’ve rearranged this area the most in the four and a half years I’ve lived here. This new configuration is the best yet. Now I can access the deep bay window in the southwest corner that was previously blocked by a work table. The view of the in-progress wall is as unobstructed as it’s ever been. All these small adjustments add up to a huge difference. It feels like a new place though I’ve made it so mostly by subtraction.

I don’t really understand the idea of feng shui. Wikipedia decries how the concept’s been coopted by interior decorators from its old spiritual beginnings. There’s poetical stuff about wind and water that goes way over my head. All I know is that I moved some furniture around and feel renewed.

That’s religion enough for me.