Letter

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.]

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.]