Letter

It’s never not strange to put up art somewhere out of my house——where it’s usually made. There’s a rawness to the process. Exposed nerve endings. Like the stuff hasn’t grown calluses or a thick enough skin to withstand the outside world yet.

I always think a hang will take an hour and sometimes that’s all it takes. This show took six. I was totally spent afterwards. It’s unclear what was so draining. It’s not exactly the salt mines to work pushpins into a wall. Perhaps the weight of the past two years caught up to me. While these collages aren’t about this plague, they’re undeniably borne of it.

I was all wrong. Thought no one would come see this show but they have. Saturday, Mark and Susan came. Then Noah, then Frank. All people I know over thirty years, going back to art school. I’m lucky to have these friends I go so far back with.

Sunday I had plans to make an audio tour of the show and write up this newsletter for Monday. Instead, there were visitors nonstop. Some I knew; others were friends of Laura’s. Supporters of Compound Yellow. They all wanted to talk. They also wanted to spend money. I didn’t expect to sell anything from this show but now I have. Enough for at least a month’s bills. This is one instance when having low expectations paid off in spades.

There are artists who thrive on fellowship and talking shop; I’m not one of those. Many of Sunday’s visitors were artists themselves and wanted to hash it all out. I’m rarely up for it. Over the years I’ve gotten better about being polite when asked questions I don’t want to answer or broaching topics I have no interest in. But I can’t fake enthusiasm in this part of my life. It’s too close to what really matters. Makes interactions with other creative types awkward sometimes. Hoping I did okay and no one was offended.

So much of this business is an internal battle. The pictures are hopefully the positive outcome of a fraught process. They need to live their own lives. Revisiting the moments of their creation is a thing I rarely want to do. Especially with strangers.

Am I being touchy or ungrateful? People show up and want to know what the things I made are about and I won’t tell them. I share fragments. Bits and pieces. I don’t want to guide their thinking. Have no clue what anyone who isn’t me could or should take from what I’ve made.

I wonder who will show up next weekend and what they’ll ask? Could be you.

[Masterpieces of Literature (Vol 1)]

[I made a page of process art for a book cover design on my site.]

Did you ever read a Jim Thompson novel? Everyone is doomed in them. Paranoid, fevered, striving for things they don’t need and will never get. On the rare instance they do get them, they spoil their chance at escape or redemption. It’s not the sunniest view of the world.

I haven’t read Thompson in many years. I don’t read much crime fiction these days. But there was a time when I inhaled Chandler, Hammett, McDonald, Highsmith, and Thompson. Couldn’t get enough. Now I mostly scratch that itch with movies. Usually old ones. I think maybe our contemporary technology kills off a lot of the poetry of the heist and murder plots. All anybody has to do is pick up their smartphone and the crime is solved.

Alain Corneau’s Série Noire is the best film adaptation of a Jim Thompson book I know of. Like all the better ones, it’s unfaithful to its source material. Set in the woebegone outskirts of Paris in a thoroughly burned-out 70s, it oozes desperate hopelessness. Everyone is on the make, ready to claw each other’s eyes out over table scraps. It’s so squalid.

Why do I love this movie so much?

Our hero, Franck Poupet, thinks all his problems are solved when he happens on a rich old woman keeping her young niece hostage, making her have sex with strangers as payment for odd jobs around her crumbling manse. He’ll kill the woman, take her money, and disappear into the sunset with the girl. Doesn’t quite work out that way, but Franck is so addled he doesn’t seem surprised or disappointed.

I turned this movie on the other night and it made me want to draw. Something about the lighting and the degree of disorder was inspiring. Drawing freezeframes off TV was a fun hobby I started in early lockdown. I haven’t drawn from many movies from the 80s or later. Something is missing in those.

What would the people in Série Noire do with a cell phone? Would they be any less miserable?

As dark as Série Noire gets, it’s got a magical ending. A rare one that sticks in my memory; I usually forget plot points even from favorite movies and books. Franck has lost all his money, killed three people, but he twirls his girl around and around under streetlamp light. The cops will be coming to take him away, no doubt. But for this brief moment he’s ecstatic.

Franck’s a manic-depressive loser, so you know a low is coming soon after this high, but the screen goes black before we see him crash.

[I read a poem by John Ciardi into a microphone, then Mallory and I talked about all the body snatchers.]

[My collage show continues at least two more weeks. Here are some photos my friend Noah took when he visited. I plan to be there Saturday and Sunday afternoons and by appointment other days, so drop a line if you want to meet up and see it.]

The tryouts are being held at the vacant old Carson Pirie Scott Building on State Street. They put notices in the Repeater and Facebook and Twitter. All of Orso’s young helpers are excited. They daydream about what they’d do with the $10,000 prize money. How a museum show will launch their careers. Assure them a spot in the history books. One day, some kid will fall asleep during their art history survey lecture as the lucky winner’s slide fills the auditorium’s gigantic screen.

The big man rolls back in from lunch and as soon as he catches wind of what they’re talking about he blows his stack. Bellows about how art isn’t sports. That you can’t win at art the way you can at football. Tells them in no uncertain terms that if he finds out one of them auditioned, they can pack their bags. Their names will be mud at the Honeypot.

Piece of Work is a reality show from one of the stars of a popular sitcom. The tiny one with the giant head. I didn’t know about that until sharing an elevator with her and her children one time at the museum. Something about the lenses in cameras distort human proportions like funhouse mirrors. I noticed a similar effect when I worked at the art supply store. There was a modeling agency next door. Those girls looked like giraffes out in meatspace, away from the glossy pages of Cosmo and Glamour.

The premise is Survivor/Bachelorette in the art world. Ten contestants live in a fancy sprawling apartment—donated by a posh realty, which is one of production’s underwriters—and are put through a series of trials and challenges, when not badly performing the conflicts the non-union writer’s room cobbles together for them. Each episode prominently features brands that partner with shows like this to right the karmic balance the way warmongers lend their names to hospital wards and opera houses. Synergy abounds.

Orso’s upset because he thinks he’s got integrity. He takes courageous stands against the sellouts and opportunists. Built his fame by charting an uncompromising course through the hinterlands of storefront and apartment galleries, en route to the blue chip climes of auction houses and museums. He suffered no fools and stuck up for fellow artists he felt were taken advantage of by gate-keepers.

This is the mantra he pounds into the malleable craniums of each child-helper who darkens the Honeypot’s doorstep. Each one of the current crop know his spiel by heart. They recite it in his voice while blowing off steam at the bar. They bitch about how controlling he is, but don’t dare to contradict him or call him out for the ways he bullies them. Maybe they see this dumb reality show as a way out of Orso’s art bootcamp.

If any of them sneak off and try out, no one hears about it, or maybe, the ones who braved it didn’t make it past the preliminary rounds, and thus were not shown on air. I know for a fact the big lug watches the show. I’ve been to his house and laughed as he yelled at his flatscreen while the contestants competed in “street art”, “collage”, and “4-D” challenges. It’s ludicrous but we can’t look away. The art racket isn’t portrayed much on TV because it’s a relic of a different century. For the most part, it’s now the domain of outcasts and money launderers. Not typical reality show fare. So anyone who’s ever carried a sketchbook around will tune in because few can resist watching a version of themselves on screen. If there was a CPA challenge show, every accountant worldwide would watch.

Orso makes me swear I won’t let any of the kids know. Is he just mad because he wasn’t chosen as one of the judge/experts? Remember, this is the guy who measures the walls of any museum he enters to imagine how his pieces will look there.

He wants to wager on who will win. His money’s on the Native former lumberjack who chainsaws wildlife sculpture from dead tree trunks uprooted after a gas pipeline was cut through his family’s ancestral land. He cheers when his guy fails to comprehend an effete critic’s artspeak objections to his latest creation. Orso nearly jumps up from his La-Z-Boy, before thinking better of it.  He wants the lumberjack to give the critic a swirly. This from the man who had his Art Forum review blown up and prominently displayed in a gilded frame in his living room.

When his lumberjack loses out to a near-mute Goth girl who painstakingly reenacts scenes from her childhood via videos shot on an outmoded camcorder, Orso explodes. He throws the remains of his Italian Beef at the TV, then lumbers out of his throne and outside to smoke. He keeps promising his wife and his doctor he’s quit, but there are instances of injustice that can only be assuaged by what he insists on calling ‘smoky treats’.