Letter

I tell Kevin I lived in Logan Square ‘92 to ‘93. He says he can beat me: he was there a decade earlier. No matter how far back you go, how old-school you take yourself to be, someone will turn up who’s even originaler and authenticker than you. I bet whatever lungfish crawled out of the sea and decided to take a walk had some more ancient monster calling it a poseur.

In Logan Square in 1992 there were no ersatz bistros or repurposed boutiques. There were a half dozen all-you-can-eat Polish buffets, a bunch of taquerias, and shitty old Johnnie’s Snack Shop. If you wanted to put on airs, you went to Abril. There, you’d get your tacos served at a table with a tablecloth.

There was no bar where you could order an overpriced Manhattan inside the Logan Theatre. But you could pay $2 to see some shit Hollywood flick that had been out for a couple months. One of three or four creepy older men in mustard-colored sportcoats tore your tickets and also made change for the concession girl if you handed her a $20. They asked you to take off your baseball cap so it wouldn’t be mistaken for gang colors.

We lived right on the boulevard. The rent was cheap and it was quiet but I’m not nostalgic for that time. I never long to go back. I wonder whether that guy thirty years ago could conceive of his future self living six-seven miles south in the very same city. I can’t recall what that guy thought about.

One of the privileges of staying in a place a long time is tracking the changes. It would be odd if Logan Square stayed just the way it was. The current residents would laugh at the notion of Abril as upscale or chic or whatever they’re looking for in an eatery. In that same storefront right now is a wood-fired pizza joint and an expensive wine bar. If I went in and asked about Abril, I doubt the owners of those establishments will have heard of it. Maybe there’s no reason they should have. Their job is to sell you a good evening, not to be amateur archaeologists.

I have two paintings hanging at the expensive wine bar. I go there from time to time but feel little connection to either that establishment or the neighborhood it sits in. There are certain kinds of time-travel that yield diminishing returns. Not that I’m trying to relive old times when I arrive at Milwaukee and Kedzie.

It’s possible for new memories to supplant old ones in relation to familiar places, but for me, Logan Square will forever be stuck in the early 90s. I saw a shitty new movie at the Logan Theatre a few weeks back and all I could think about was those old men in their mustard-colored jackets. Where are they now? Most will be dead and gone.

When people talk about how it used to be it’s often really about how they used to be. Usually, they see whatever time or place they’re talking about as better than the present. I’m lucky in that I still haven’t gotten to the point of looking back fondly.

I’m glad the neighborhoods I used to live in aren’t preserved in amber. I’m not there anymore and they must become something different and when I visit I hope not to recognize them.

[There’s a new print from a collage and a video shot at my show and a talk about Keanu’s not-so-excellent adventure.]

[Compound Yellow (where my collage show was) is having a fundraiser. You can bid on a few of my pieces and a bunch of other work. They’re good people and deserve the chance to keep going. Help out if you can.]

About the time Jackson Pollock was breaking the ice by dripping and dribbling skeins of house paint over cotton duck tarpaulins on the floor of some barn on Long Island, millions of suburbanites could produce their very own masterpieces in minutes thanks to the miracle of step-by-step instruction. The Craft Master paint kit box tops proclaimed, “A BEAUTIFUL OIL PAINTING THE FIRST TIME YOU TRY.” Craft Master popularized paint-by-numbers in the early 50s.

Per the Paint By Number Museum: “Who is the most exhibited artist in the world? The work of paint by number designer Dan Robbins has been displayed on more walls than that of any other artist. This was true in the past, is still true today and is most likely a record that will stand in the future.”

As the New York Times notes: “In appealing to adults, they are marketed as ways to relax and shut down the brain.”

A few years earlier, Jon Gnagy broke a different sort of ice by going on TV and convincing viewers that that they were the artist. Every week he showed them how. He flamed out after a while, but others picked up his set of magic brushes and added their own accessories to make untold fortunes. All guys like Carey and Orso do is follow a well-trod path. Everyone who’s ever gotten into the art racket has quickly come up against the sobering fact that laboring away in some dingy garret for decades in the hopes of being discovered is a dream left only for the most romantic of fools.

Every new media innovation has pushed painting further and further up into the dusty attic. The only way to cut through the noise is to find the newest loudest megaphone and screech away as long as your lungs hold out.

Every man a Rembrandt, the ad copy promises and why would it lie?

Ray Johnson made up a word to call his artwork. The word’s definition, even its place in a sentence, is elusive and mutable. Like the man who coined it, an ever-moving target.

I’ve gone to see Johnson’s show at the museum a few times and intend to see it a few times more. It showed up at just the right time for me. I wrote a review, but unlike so many shows/books/movies/plays I’ve written about over the past decade-plus, I think this exhibit, and the accompanying catalogue, will continue to feed my own work going forward.

Not least of what I respond to in Johnson’s work is the humor. There’s wordplay, puns, satire, and a lot of poker-faced deadpan business of various type. It’s the thing I’m able to do with the collages that I couldn’t in painting.

There are funny painters out there, but I was never one of them. True comedy’s a lot harder than darkness in a picture to me. The darkness will always be there, but comedy is a way out and I can rarely get there.

I noticed a few visitors to the collage show sticking their faces close to this piece or that, then laughing. I didn’t ask what made them laugh. I don’t want the formula. But I’m glad it happened.

Aside from the humor, maybe the biggest thing Ray Johnson reminded me of is something I’ve always known: that art is not a part-time thing, nor a job at which you punch the clock at one hour and punch out at another. You have to live it all the time.

I do that.

I’m taking it down Saturday evening. Drop a line if you want to see it before then.

[RIP Louie Anderson. His Christine Baskets was one of the best characters ever put on TV.]

[I read a chapter from Evan Connell’s Mrs. Bridge into a microphone and wrote about a new TV show you shouldn’t watch.]