loving bec stupak, jack smith, jeffrey deitch and overcoming the baghdadian/hollywood rock star complex

                                 


Bec Stupak
Radical Earth Magic Flower
Deitch Projects
January 12, 2006 — February 25, 2006


GOOD METTA/ BAD PARANOIA

I apologize for being so remiss in my metta practice, at least here on the page.  Sometimes life gets away from you.  It's not like I haven't been loving overtime, praying, trying to get past myself and my desires towards some kind of freedom but there has been a rush, a flurry of other paid love work that has come up.  Which leads me to wonder about the immediate (and often undiscussed) payoffs of loving unconditionally . . I mean not that we should love for our own personal benefit, but it sure goes a whole lot better when I'm working the love than when I'm not.  It's kind of hard to miss.

I'm really beginning to not be a hater.  Just naturally without thinking.  I've been busy making things, my own things, in a much more focused manner than usual and it's easy then to just love automatically, with enthusiasm and generosity. There's not so much of a sense of urgency to fight, to defend, to compete.

I haven't even checked whose in the Biennial yet and here it is a month or so later, after the opening.

Last night I got into a long conversation with my old love collaborator peacock!revolution!is!our!revolution!   I was feeling under the weather and tired and tried to cancel but he needed to talk and I probably did too, even though I thought I didn't want to. 

He hadn't gotten into grad school and neither had I and we were feeling very niggers of the art world and we allowed our paranoia to flourish for just a few minutes, to think, well, it must be because we're so threatening, so difficult for people to get their heads around, blah, blah, blah . . . more out of perverse delight than anything else, to hurt so bad together, feeling left out, marginalized, abandoned and ignored by some big daddy of art recognition out there somewhere. We rubbed up against each other til we bled a little bit.  It was neurotic but sometimes it's like that between good friends.  Like an old girlfriend of mine used to say, "Just because I'm paranoid, doesn't meant they're not out to get me."

I did encourage him to be unstoppable, though.  I really think it's the only way to be an artist today.  To figure out your assets and a reasonable way (legal or illegal) to make some kind of living that gives you the flexibility to make art and then don't stop. Ever.




SUPER NARCISSIST LOVER GIRL

So way back in February, I decided to love Bec Stupak who was having a show at Deitch Projects. I didn't know anything about her, actually didn't even know she was a her . . Jeffrey Deitch was actually my main hit, from the very beginning of the whole metta project, just because I have had the super narcissist feeling that he should be representing me and the True Love Project from the very beginning, who knows why exactly, probably because he is a kind of rock promoter with that whole Citizen's Band thing and yes everybody else, I mean you just have to go to his website and you will find it hard to not start praying immediately for yourself and him, I mean you would have to be in a coma to not have rock star envy, or maybe that's just me and I will never let it rest til I become a rock star . . this is a problem, this is the problem: one can never truly be discovered as a rock star or movie star, this is a myth, the rock star must come, undeniably and without question, fully born from within and cultivated with an unwavering belief in oneself.  Then everything falls into place.

So it makes no difference, Jeffrey or Bec, I am loving you both from the bottom of my heart, I loved you that day and I am loving you still.

I'm taking a moment to let a little buddha smile come to my lips from deep inside as I relax enough to really absorb how much I can love you.

It took a great leap of faith because the whole show, radical earth magic flower, was an homage to Jack Smith & Flaming Creatures and I was feeling all possessive about that . . I was feeling possessive about Jack and about being a young precocious darling, like I could be the only young precocious darling EVER, and first and foremost at that moment the young precocious darling that Jack had discovered way back in 81 when I was just an art baby and I still had a chance to be unaccountable and truly romantically narcissistic.  Maybe I was a true little diva discovered by Jack or maybe it was just that I made myself indispensable to Jack (just one of a long line of perpetually helpful young starlets in his baghdadian Hollywood path) way back before any of us knew what co-dependent was and way before I could stop myself from being compulsive, before self-examination . . when I was young.

I was feeling possessive and cranky about not being young and unaccountable.  I was yearning for a time that, perhaps, never really was.

I think the jealousy comes more down to the fact that Bec was being cared for, nurtured even by Jeffrey, my elusive daddy and then, then and then on top of that had laid claim somehow to Jack . . . that she thought she was so cool (forgive me my infantile rage Bec for one moment) that she had the dealer and the idol, that big screen idol, Jack Smith.

I was young once.  I was a whole lot less cool than I am now.  I was really hungry then, falling over myself hungry.  But there was a coolness in that.  I am really learning to love myself.



LUSH OOZING RAW FOOTAGE & OATMEAL

I was working at Boston Film Video Foundation in the early 80s and studying film at Mass Art and I knew that Jack Smith was coming to show some footage that had never been seen before and everyone was in a flurry.  Not just in anticipation but also in apprehension . . he was some kind of loose cannon, someone to be both feared and protected.  He showed up with a bag of 16mm all tangled up and creased in the bottom of a duffle bag and Steve Anker and I sat with him at a Steenbeck, not talking between ourselves for fear that we would scare Jack's sweet yet reptilian presence away with our adoration and with our not so secret drooling over the lush oozing raw footage we were pawing through.  I was a little punk, a little glamorous with a goth/vampirish predilection for black eyeliner and swaths of net and silk and ripped stockings and somehow I was allowed to take him back to my apartment to take a bath.  I cooked him oatmeal and he stayed for weeks.

I visited him in New York in the famous apartment/movie set on first avenue and he cooked me oatmeal often, on this little open flamed bunson burner.  Our mutual love of oatmeal was the seat of our caring for each other.

I did love him.  I was enamored as many were but I can't say I didn't want something from him.  It was hard because he continually dangled an elusive starlet role in front of me, even if it was just in private, up there in the bathtub under the roof of hanging plastic hibiscus or in a rowboat in Central Park.  Jack loved the rowboats.  I was always auditioning for him and his love.  He promoted this ruthless need for stardom in me.  I think he really enjoyed it.

Jack, more than anyone was so in love with stardom.  He told me he never meant to be an artist, but he couldn't get a job in Hollywood.  He showed me the headshots.  It was hard to tell what was real.



SO PURE AND UNTARNISHED

Jack and I did a little play together in Boston, PENGUIN PANIC IN THE RENTED DESERT where he totally exploited my need for an auteur of my life and cast me as the secretary of a major motion picture studio who has a small window to be recognized as a beauty. . . only he never let me really shine, not once in the 5 night run . .it would always come up to the moment where he would take the "bun" out of my hair (an actual sticky bun from South Station) and I would begin to have my Hollywood moment and then somehow we would get bogged down in some kind of method acting swamp of mundane activity, like squeezing oranges or peeling carrots.  It always came back to some kind of servitude.  I suppose he was teaching me something.  I know he was trying but I caused a ruckus everynight, I would never give in.

He called me a castrator and my boyfriend, Tony Millionaire, a shark.  Jack accused Tony of stealing his hat, this long stocking hat that he cherished.  My mother knit him a new one and Jack told her, Marguerite you are a beautiful woman, so pure and untarnished.

We are all stars.

I hold Jack in the that tiny slit of my heart, like a seed, in that green place.  It's soft there.

And for you too, Jeffrey, and you, Bec.

Bec, I don't know if I fully understand your gesture of recreating Flaming Creatures as you did, but thank you Bec for the bed in the darkened gallery and for the privacy to be with the work, so generous and luxurious.

And Jeffrey, thank you, no black guards in suits just a bunch of seemingly clueless and good-natured club kids behind the front desk, got to love that, no one cares what I am doing in here.

I really love being alone with the art for hours, just being able to lie around and snooze with the art, figure out a few things for myself and lick down a few rough patches of fur.

Thank you.