mettaartlove

loving marina abramovic

 

 

7 Easy Pieces

Marina Abramovic @ The Guggenheim Museum

November 9 - November 15 2005

SISTER

To my marina,

I often think of my sister, marina, lying in her bed across the room. I have written about her many times before. My childhood was not as austere, perhaps, as your own.  I grew up in an Italian American household on a block where almost every house you entered mirrored your own: had the same landscape, the very same form with the same couches and easy chairs encased in plastic. There was a spiritual poverty that my little soul railed against. But my sister, my sister, was the one sentient being I had access to and I craved her love.  We slept in separate beds but when I was afraid I knew she was there and I wasn't alone.

The inherent problem, of course, was that, in our tiny life, there was only one source of true love that we could understand -- the complicated and contradictory duality of our common parental fountain.  My sister stood in the way of me getting that limited obstructed life force.  It was not her fault, of course, but together we both learned that love was limited and that became everything we knew.  Even when we craved each other, we knew, some how deep inside that we would have to kill each other to get the true true love.  We learned that at the table, in order to eat, there was only room for one.  Even in America, in the affluent 60s, so unlike your childhood in Yugoslavia in every other way, there was poverty in the air. Like the smell of fear, the assumptions of deprivation permeate everything.

SENSITIVE

" . . . extreme sensitivity is a form of conceit - I think I am the focus of everybody's actions . . "

-- courage to change, al-anon daybook (please excuse any presumptions)

I am extremely sensitive -- like you my dear marina -- like you I carry the world around inside me.  I can answer, cannot help but answer, to the vibrations of someone I love, extremely close or far, far away. Whether or not these vibrations concern me, I place myself in the center of them.  I can answer and do, with urgency. The message in my body is that I must throw myself off into the chasm of this disruption in order to set the universe right.

Of course now this information, the information of how to solve deep personal female states of alarm is made public and is easily accessible through the internet, easy for any teenage girl to learn -- how to access, form and release the pain.  We had to teach ourselves how to plunge into oblivion, how to plunge into the chasm and we learned how to do it publicly -- me loving strangers alone and without protection, you screaming til silent, brushing your hair til you bled -- publicly and dangerously, in order to prove our sincerity inside our hearts, in order to be seen but most importantly and more privately, to feel.

Someone can only do something to us if we allow them to.  We can only hurt ourselves when we want to.  I hurt myself daily by my ruthlessness in the name of love (art).  Is it because I use my body for art (love) that I feel like there is no room for another in the path of love (art)?  I am sorry, marina.

PROTECTION

The last time I saw you, you were naked.

I was there on the final day of the house with the ocean view at sean kelley.  I had never seen you in public before.  I had thought you were my hero.  I watched you come down the stairs that day to your adoring public. I saw you lifted actually, by -- I hope I am remembering this correctly -- your man and your other man, mr. kelly and others, they seemed like body guards, as I remember it, but I am probably exaggerating.

The press, the throngs, your adoring public surrounded you, you spoke faintly, in your robe, into a microphone, for just a few minutes before you were whisked away --  into seclusion, I imagined.

The deification surprised me, that day and also at the guggenheim, the way you always place yourself above your audience.  I didn't expect that.  It is another form of protection that I never allow myself.  I am thinking it goes along with the ability to think so highly of yourself, to protect yourself through self–importance.  I envy that ability.  I always blame my mother.  I know only how to put myself on the train tracks in front of the locomotive.  I'm confused what is real.

Marilyn Monroe once said (this is loosely quoted) being famous is like being a baby put in the middle of traffic but I'm not quite so sure, maybe this was true in her day, maybe her management was not that good, maybe they really didn't understand the fame machine in those days, maybe they thought the adoration really was love, but now celebrity security it is an art . . but this kind of security is only functional from the outside and only works if those wishing to infiltrate are afraid of the consequences.

I have to admit, I still believe there is still time for me to be discovered, just for being me – still time to be a rock star, super model, superconceptualinstallationperformanceartist, be discovered maybe even there, right there at the guggenheim, I could be discovered, milling around with the glitterati and paparazzi, everybody whispering, standing, ignoring, flirting . . . everyone milling around the center ring of you, whispering like they were at some kind of hybrid championship prize fight/playoff/funeral, you with your rabbit and gold . .

I had to remember why I came here; my mission was to soften my heart, to love you. I sat at your feet and tried to give you all my attention, to focus. Inside I was alternately sweet and attentive and mean.  The mean feelings felt more real.  It bothered me when I recognized that I wanted you to fail.  Knowing that I would benefit from loving you did make it easier.

I enjoyed watching your man pace the floor behind you, even if it did make me jealous, watching him protect you from the cameras (or was he protecting your arrangement with the guggenheim or the inviolate protection of your documentation and the book that will come out of it all, which he had every right to protect, for that is your livelihood, is it not, and don't we all have the right to support ourselves). He paced the floor behind you, at one point going outside the front door of the guggenheim to stop someone from filming outside the glass.  sean kelly was on task as well, assisting guggenheim security by having polite words with those with cameras, everything very civilized and genteel, a slight reprimand, nothing confiscated.  I had to love you extra hard as I watched your men protecting you.  I had to pretend I was you and that they were there for me, and how good that would feel, just for a minute.

LOVE INSIDE/LOVE OUTSIDE

I loved you two ways, with my eyes open and closed.  When I really looked at you, I had to wonder, what was on the other side of your eyes, your stare inscrutable.  The soul empties itself through the eyes out into the world, and I thought I saw sadness.  I might have been projecting that, my own vulnerability, but I empathized with you and wondered if you ever worried, in the middle of everything if it -- the performance, everything -- was working. Sometimes I hate my own vulnerability and my ruthless hunger. I hate that inside myself, it perpetuates my isolation.

But the truth is, I did feel sad for you, and for me, the two of us utterly self-conscious, achingly self-conscious, aware of everything shiny and reflective.

I was the most sad when you moved your dead bunny, manipulated your dead bunny, as you held him close and tender, grandfather one minute, teenage girl the next, the bunny your only company in the freeway of your audience's gaze.  I was with you as you moved the ear and the paw with your fingers.  I had to love you with my eyes closed when you put the bunny's ears in your mouth and began to crawl on the stage. 

Ultimately, I could only love you from the darkness within myself; I could not look at you and love you with all my heart.  The darkness softened you and I was able to cherish you there, inside my head.  I could taste the sweetness of loving you and I have gratitude towards you for this.  It is in there, with my eyes closed, that I felt my heart surge forward and settle back rhythmically, the draw and pull of it, so familiar, that could translate as a form of love.

And it was in my quietness that I faced myself and shared my true communion with you, and it was not pretty or anything I was proud of.  By loving you, through that complete and utter narcissism -- to believe that I was the one, the one, the only one that could really see you and love you, that I traveled all this way to love you, that this was my triumph, to be the most special and to claim you as my own.  In this way, I would win; I could lift myself up with you on the pedestal  -- so good, so good, better.

NEXT LOVE: TRACEY EMIN "I CAN FEEL YOUR SMILE" @ LEHMANN MAUPIN NYC

loving tracey emin or fucking like narcissistic oblivion or more importantly how can fucking be really good and worth it

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

The artist, Emin, was dancing in this sort of drunken stripper way. It made me feel sort of lesbianish. I wanted to kiss her so I tried coming on to her by telling her she looked great and I liked her dance moves. She sneered a Billy Idol sneer at me -- my send off for the evening.

                                            ELIZABETH HAYT,  AUTHOR OF "I'M NO SAINT"
                                                         

Tracey Emin
I Can Feel Your Smile
Lehmann Maupin
November 5 - December 21 2005


WANT TO BE WITH U

OK, Tracey, what I really want to know is, who is U, who is you, who is you, you and U and I don't mean I want to know the identity of your lover, or everyone you have ever slept with, I want to know who is U, when we are in love, who is U, the lover or the audience or is U just the haze, just that stuff the sun burns off, that fuzzy narcotic red in morning or at dusk . . I want to know, Can I Be U?

I can sit in bed, just after deep sex, and then smoke and then eat something fabulously sweet and then get on the computer and check my email and then watch something fabulously decadent in my bed with my lover and then, and then and then I'm still scratching the sheets, still sniffing, hungry still and empty spot, me . . U

Marion Woodman, Jungian Psychoanalyst once said, "The body knows the lover is never, never, never going to return."  She used that fact to illustrate the roots of addiction, specifically at that moment, feminine addiction to food, food related trauma and, as she put it,  "The Addiction to Perfection".

Everytime I press my thumb into the 8 key twice in a text message, I see that U like a cup and I love how easy it is to just hit that U, no spelling. I get the immediate pleasurable gratification to finish that loving sentiment, love U, C U, thinking of U.

Tracey, I am writing to U today, today I am thinking of U, I love you.

THE BED

The ridge of my back is bristling Tracey, but I have to remind the two of us of how long hatred and contempt can stay in the body.  My contempt of you is not in the present, it comes from long ago, and, as mentioned before, the body does not forget anything. I don't know if we are actually speaking hatred here, anyway. I use hatred to juxtapose with love but it is all love, isn't it, this attention, this compulsive attention, running my tongue along a nagging empty space in my mouth -- this attentiveness to pain is a form of care. 

It is often said that where there is an extreme negative reaction coined as hatred, it is just another veil of love, for the opposite of love is not hatred or contempt or jealousy or bitterness -- all forms of love in their intensity -- but indifference.

Tracey, can I say this right now -- with love, without seeming mean --  it is easier to love you more directly when your work is not as strong, then I can eliminate my covetousness from the work, if not from your rock star London lifestyle – the friends, the home, the cash .  It shows I am getting better, healthier, now that I can soften my heart when the work is not as good, it shows that, although competitive, at least I have my values in the right place.

In 1999 I stood in front of your bed at Lehmann Maupin and I was consumed with possessive love/rage at your audacity and How Come I Didn't Think of This First.  That and the pages from your journal framed, Shit, What A Good Idea.  I wanted to both have you all to myself and eliminate you, terminate you, like that maniacal rage that caused Sleeping Beauty's Stepmother the Evil Queen to send The Huntsman out to kill Sleeping Beauty and bring back her heart.

That's it Tracey, like two slutty girls that always go out together, who obsessively groom and provoke each other, who cannot party without the other, who have to end up making out with each other just to wrench the other out of circulation, I wanted to own you in that divine possession -- a different kind of love than the divine proposed here, the metta love, the love I am trying to learn, the new love I am practicing.  I wanted to own you in the old way I used to know how to love, using my love to stop my lover from doing anything that does not reflect or benefit me. 

The bed and it's evidence of how much sex you had, I just couldn't handle it, how could I ever keep up with you?

WHY DID YOU STOP ME FROM LOVING YOU   

I love your sheets, Tracey, the faded faded flowers, the white. My sheets, now always white, used to be baby roses, peonies, cabbage roses.   

As I began to haughtily raise myself up the other day @ "I Can Feel Your Smile", me all in black and high and mighty, rising over the precious beauty of your objects themselves, the exquisite and expensive framing, I was struck by this simultaneity, the sheets, just one more simultaneity – another, along with the loss of dignity around the deep need and sadness and loneliness that comes when we connect (or not), and then sex itself and then the pure hurting.

How can we stand coming up with the same ideas all the time, any of us?  I guess it makes a difference if the work is selling and who is paying it, but even still . .  we're all born on the same planet at the same time, are we not -- sisters, lovers, ufo abductees . . isn't the object of this metta love to prove that we are probably the same person even, are the molecules really all that different, just a different organization, differing concentrations of slightly differing DNA . . .

So does it not make any difference that we make similar art, that we have such simultaneous impulses . . does it make any difference who is first?

I did find it strange that not one art writer, in all the press I read around your show, mentioned the similarity to Jack Pierson's work, I guess it doesn't really make any difference after all, who is first, because we are all lonely together, oh I'm not sure if I can believe it but I'm truly trying to work it out, for I know I must love if I'm going to survive, and I must believe we all deserve to find ourselves, at our own pace.

INSANE REFLECTION

And who am I to judge anyway -- the fucking, the repetition, the intriguing (a new verb a sexually addicted lover introduced me to – intriguing: when you are pulling someone in and virtually fucking them with your mind and words while maintaining a certain chasteness or celibacy), the addiction to loneliness, the manipulation of the world through your own despair . . . I still play, and play and play all those game, my motives are still suspect. 

This is how I can love you.

I couldn't just throw away the sheets as too pretty, too well framed, too much of a Jack rip-off, I was to busy copping to my most recent simultaneity, the evidence of my own power-art-fucking-sex-gamesmanship, one I claimed as my last, my most recent last, but one nonetheless, a minor infraction at best, in the last couple of months, nothing too spectacular, just a online flirtation with a young, cocky curator that got really personal really fast, even though it was clear from the beginning that he had a serious girlfriend, neither of us cared, we played quite readily, a very explicit truth or dare game that went on for days while both of us were at work:

(my response below to one his dares –
describe in detail your last sexual encounter)

you did rock my world baby, she texted him as she left

he was dancing in just his jeans to Shaggy, a CD
he stole from his daughter, the music
was old but pretty naughty and she laughed and
danced too. She told him he had to keep all his
clothes on for at least the next three hours and
she was going to as well . She kept laughing, her
hands over her head and grinding her ass into him
he was delirious begging, renegotiating the
clothing rule, but she held firm. In spite of
this, she ended up in just her underpants, she kept
laughing til he was out of his mind, the shaggy record
repeating

they didn't make it to three hours but by the time
he laid her down she didn't remember anything
other than the compulsion to be fucked and that
didn't matter anyway because his whole self sunk
into her in an osmosis kind of desire that caused
a sort of blackout that was unfortunate cause it
all was incredibly yummy, she kept coming back out
to pull his hair back and look into his eyes to
make sure he was still with her. sometimes once
the fucking began he became only cock and his
eyes only black, which was to be expected. she was
cerebral at heart, as sensual as she may
seem, and these kinds of psychic withdrawals or
disappearances threw her off her rhythm.

The riffs would come and go, they laid under the
open window even though the rain outside was damp
and cold. she woke to find herself on top of him,
naked, no blanket. he reached around her back,
flipped her over and pressed himself down on her,
darling, darling

she never told him that sometimes she fantasized
that he was her father, not her actual father, but
some father somewhere, it was the way he said
darling when he came . . .maybe because she kept
telling herself she didn't care . . 10/12/05


Later that week, when he dared me to send him a love letter complete with a scandalous gift, I ripped a tiny corner off the white sheet of that unmade bed, stapled it to a piece of color xerox of my tattoo and mailed it to him, the young cocky curator, not the daddy.  I wasn't thinking of you, Tracey or your sheets, at that time, honestly.

I dared him to call me. He didn't. 

I didn't really care, I didn't, Tracey, but I will admit it here, to you -- I hate to be left alone and empty-handed. 


NEXT LOVE:  MIKE KELLEY "Day is Done" @ GAGOSIAN

 

loving mike kelley & the gagosian gallery(ies) and/or the spectacle of loneliness

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

a purple room
in purple gloom
a distant voice
will echo forth
dimly toning bell
like the muffled cry of a kitten
drowning in a well
Oh it’s you I crave
encased in amethyst

-sang the teenage witchy girl sitting in the dark beautiful purple satan/satin velvet living room

@ DAY IS DONE/ Mike Kelley @ Gagosian Gallery/Chelsea  November 11 - December 17 2005

 

THE WOODS

Mike, I have been fighting loneliness lately.   I am always fighting loneliness, it is just that sometimes I am lucky enough to fight it with someone.  Then it feels like love and all it is all about us and them and it doesn't really feel like loneliness inside.  It is all lit up and on the edge of hallucinatory and the big cliff we are hanging over feels exciting and we stay a long time, to see just how far we can hang over.  Sometimes we are drunk on our outsiderness and it feels quite lovely.  That is not how I feel right now.  Not lovely today, but sad and full and a little bit brokenhearted.  But that's not your problem.

I remember the first time I got stoned in high school.  No it wasn't the first time actually, it was the second but it was in the same weekend as the first.  It wasn't the first time I smoked of course, but it was the first time I figured out how to inhale and got high. 

It was winter and it snuck up on me through the cold.  The first time was bright sunlight and I was tobogganing with my friends and the speed came crushing through my forehead and the whole field was white inside me, laughing.  I remember standing up at the bottom of the hill, feeling like the beginning of evolution, like I was growing from some kind of  one celled organism into just one cell of the mass arbitrary teenagedness that seethed around me, stoned, in the snow.   I tried to let go. 

The second time was two days later, still cold and still outside – we were always stoned outside – in the woods of the Palisades Cliffs over the Hudson, walking, looking for a waterfall we had heard about.  I was exponentially stoned.  It was overcast, not  as startlingly sunny as the day with the toboggans, and we started way too late.  We trudged single file, hooded against the black trees, into oblivion, no one speaking as we got more and more lost.  I was freaking out inside my hood, spinning out with barely a tether to anything.  I didn't know how to be high.  I wanted to go home, but being stoned only reinforced that the home I craved was just a dream.  It was a dark long time before we found our way.

It’s hard to be a teenager groping around in the dark, you almost need to be high or pretend really, really hard to be someone else.

NOT BELONGING TO

In Day is Done, the room was filled with cold high school tableaus, towered over by large (often empty) video screens and the room was filled with pretty much indecipherable screaming.  The room filled me with a proportionate degree of reverse calm and familiarity: the empty couches, the still, unadorned fireplace (also empty), the empty bleachers, the flat home with carport (empty) and the window filled with black and white static.

You know all the signs of belonging, Mike, but I know you are lonely too.  It is so great that you could make your spectacle of loneliness and separation, and I mean that in the most genuine way.  I actually had very little envy of you when I visited your show at Gagosian.  I had expected to have my usual rage over the economic inequity of the art world but I didn't, not really.  Like I said before, it helps when I’m not that moved by the work and I don’t say that to be mean.  I had fun and everything, there was a lot to look at and I love the pit that stays inside, like after the roller coaster.

The girl at the desk was particularly dismissive when I tried to buy one of the the tshirts on the racks, the ones that were really part of the exhibition and I felt like being mean to her, but I wasn't.  Of course, I kind of knew that the shirts were probably a piece of art by their proximity to the other spectacles included in the show, but really these days, how can you ever know for sure?  It could be a trick or just some coded information and who wants to be tricked or shown to be out of the loop, so I took a chance and asked the question and I was proven wrong – tricked and so uncool.  Luckily, Mike, I've finally developed some resources around the uncool thing and I can handle it, even if it stings.  The t-shirts on the racks were so much cooler than the ones really for sale, and I wanted them so much, it was worth it, to be patronized by the pretty girl behind the computer.

I DIDN'T DO ANYTHING

Not too far away from her, all alone and abandoned, was that one little blond boy on the screen, the one who cried “I didn’t do anything! I didn’t do anything!”  over and over again while being chased and I actually felt shame and loss that I couldn’t help him.  It was my favorite moment.  I thought maybe that was a piece of you, or many pieces of you. I am a hopeless romantic when it comes to art.

Where are you Mike? I longed to be closer to you.  The guards, all cool and all black, black as in suit and tie and black as in African American, elegant and super cool, not the usual museum guard uniform, kept strolling popping up, raising a finger or a whole hand and stopping me from loving you as much as I would like.   What’s with these black guards anyway?  They’re all over Chelsea . . . to say it's awkward and loaded when everybody looking at art is pretty much white is a gross understatement. What is going on?  I couldn’t wait to get out of there, the timing was all off and I couldn’t find my way in, so many things I felt I had no access to, standing in front of portals, screens, waiting for them to open.

PINK CURTAIN

The only place I could love you, and by love I mean, photograph your work and own a little piece of you and take you home with me, was in the little dark amateur stripper room in the front of the gallery, near the pretty girl and the t-shirts and to the left of the altar of puke (guess that’s a story for another day) . . I had a truly yummy moment of privacy with you there, like locking the door in the bathroom at a party -- inside the sculpture room of PINK CURTAIN, the material rotating and whipping slowly, pink theatre curtains around a stripper pole, circling in a black redness, actually impossible to photograph, no matter how hard I tried.  The silhouettes of sexy dancing girls, hard to make out, vulnerable, the sound of the whipping fabric.   No one came in for a long, long time. I loved it in there. 

I really love that you got the opportunity to make something so big, so epic, and I have to love Gagosian for making that possible as much as I spit at his conglomerate when I’m feeling sorry for myself, not that I really know anything about him really.  I know the money’s got to come from somewhere.

I get it, like making a movie underwritten and financed, where you can conjure up anything you could possibly imagine . . let’s go!  Hold my Hand and We can fly together across the Land!  Higher and Higher!

That's the thing about a level of prominence in the art world, at the point that your work can call such a high price, you can make work that pretty much defies objectification but can still be sold as objects because the collectors at that level can afford to design their house or warehouse around the piece, thus freeing the artist from the constraints of what is feasible, what is conceptual, what will support them.  It all becomes so fluid, this imagination, this landscape.  I am so happy for you, Mike, that you have this freedom.  I am so happy for you that you have the freedom to make this big work and let your imagination run wild and be made real.   

THE LONELY POOL

I have compassion too, for the isolation that comes with this.  I don’t know you at all, but I can imagine and I can be so codependent.

We can float above the abyss as long as we believe that there is something that will save us: beauty, sex, god, athletic prowess . . we can float and sleep . . . protected by belonging.

The relationship between loneliness and money cannot be avoided.  Of course, money really, really helps in the precise moment of being lonely, because it can be so distracting.  You can always try something else, buy something, some opportunity or someone else, when things don’t work out.  It just doesn't stick.  At the bottom of the lonely pool we are all together.  We really are. Let’s stay together.

For a little while or a long time.

love you, me

ps I don't know who was in the bunny suit outside the gallery, I didn't go to their website and I didn't mean to exploit them, but the guards wouldn't let me take any pictures inside and they wouldn't let me sit on the floor to pray and meditate, so I had to do it outside with the bunny.  S/He was sweet.

NEXT LOVE: Robert Rauschenberg "Combines" @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art

loving robert rauschenberg or the blue light and the powercord

Robert Rauschenberg "Combines" @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art
December 20, 2005 - April 2, 2006

BEAUTIFUL MAN

Robert Rauschenberg, you are a beautiful man and I love you.

I was flipping through a Vanity Fair a month ago and I saw you in a photograph and you were old and fragile and I thought of how it is hard in America to love your ancestors.  I don't know why exactly, we all love our grandmas, our grandpas, but we just don't see people as majestic in their old age or not easily as a culture, we don't see them, we see them but refer to the younger image, we flashback, we don't really look.

You were a beautiful man and you still are a beautiful man.

This love letter to you may not be true mettaartlove under the premise I put out originally, the premise that arises from my bratty contempt and struggle with the art world and my attempt to put right that attitude – to separate myself from jealousy and from my own fears of success.   However in actuality, true metta is about sending love to everyone and anyone and thank god, really, thank god that alongside my insecurities and competitiveness there can be a more pure and substantive love, an admiration and more pure longing, thank god I can have a moment where I just long to join my tribe, my lineage, long to crawl into the pink cloud of the artist's studio with my brothers and sisters, with my grandmas and grandpas and nest there, safe, challenged, fed.

Bob, when I was in the museum looking at your work I ran into a fan of this project, mettaartlove, which was really, really exciting for me.  It was exciting for him too and I took that as a good sign.  He laughed when I told him I was working, by visiting your show and he said, "What's your problem with Rauschenberg?  I thought metta was about loving people you were pissed off at." and I laughed and said "Even mettaartlove artists need to rest."

SENSITIVE LINING

When I was a kid I didn't know how to draw and art supplies just intimidated me. I remember one day I was in art class, I think I was in third grade and they gave us these precut shapes in all sorts of different colors and some of that amber mucilage for glue, the kind with the pink eraser nipple top that you pressed to the paper gently to make it stick.  I was spacing out, as usual, not expecting anything from myself, but the freedom of moving the shapes around like puzzle pieces relaxed me.  I remember my art teacher making a big deal about the picture I made that day and showing it to the class.  It was the first time I ever made art that someone noticed and it was the first time I was able to make a fluid connection between the shy world inside my head to an audience, pretty much bypassing the technical coordinated use of fingers and I thought maybe I am an artist and this thought rose inside, first hitting the ceiling of my diaphragm with a light thud, then passing through and rising to the inside of my skull and hovered there, brushing against its sensitive lining.

I remember the first time I saw your work, Bob, at an art history class when I was an undergraduate at BU.  It was 2 classes before the slide show on conceptual art when Professor Wiseman showed the slides of Schwarzkogler cutting himself and when my head completely spit open, never to be 'repaired'.   The room was cavernous and the class size immense, probably close to 100 students.  I was a freshman.  I didn't know anything about art history but I thought it would help me understand my two other loves: rock and roll and the movies.  The class started and ended in the dark.  Professor Wiseman would sit in the projection booth and drone nasally into a microphone while dropping the slides, a disconnected voice that reeked of the cigarettes I know he was smoking up there, the cigarettes I watched later when I got him alone; hanging out of the corner of his mouth with inches of ashes that matched the color of his face dangling over his bottom lip.

I don't know if that class was the one on abstract expressionism or pop art, when I saw you for the first time, I remember it was through BED and MONOGRAM that I found you Bob, and I remember thinking boldly but I believe genuinely, joyfully and without ego -- I could make that.

MADE BED

It was at around that time that I had been photographing my bed every morning when I left it. My bed  laid lengthwise under two windows and I liked the way the light looked on the sheets and pillow.  It was a skinny twin bed.  I lived in a dormitory.  The pictures were black and white and I thought they looked kind of Japanese.  I was 18.  I craved a lover for those sheets but had only one, one night, and he never came back.  I had a roommate.  The room was small.  But I loved my unmade bed, the left bed and I loved your BED.

I remember visiting your BED at the old MOMA and it was one of first times I went to a museum to see a piece of art that I loved in person.  I liked going to MOMA and I went back.  They showed photography which I understood.  I had grown up visiting the Metropolitan with my parents, visiting the mummies, sometimes looking at the Impressionists and I was confused about what that meant, the mummies and the pretty paintings in this huge building that reminded me of the mausoleums on Dark Shadows and vampire movies.  MOMA was clean and smaller, and had a cool cafe and garden. BED was downstairs in a dark intimate room and it was often empty. 

But today you are at the Metropolitan with the mummies and I have to tell you Bob, we had a hard time finding you there.   The museum was hot and filled with heavy-coated throngs too impatient to brave the long lines at the coat check.  It was the day after Christmas.  There were signs everywhere for Van Gogh and when we asked the people at the information booth where your show was, they said to ask the guards and the guards pointed us to some stairs and then turned away.   

THEORETICALLY NOT ACTUALLY OPEN

We finally found you, threading our way through the crowd, waiting at the head of the Van Gogh line, as if we were at a traffic light or at a levee of a great river, waiting to pass.

The show was beautiful, of course, big work and everything was laid out chronologically with tons of signage.  Museums are great about that.  It really gives you perspective. Of course, I'm always backwards and I came in through the gift shop which was really the end of the show, but we figured it all out.

Sal and I stood in front of BLACK MARKET, the piece with all the clipboards, the ohio license plate, and the suitcase that says OPEN.   We wanted to open the suitcase although everyone was standing about 2 yards away reading the signs.  Sal asked the guard if the suitcase wass meant to be opened (at least I think that is how she put it). The guard said yes.  Sal looks around and then approaches the suitcase. The guard steps in front of her and says:

"Theoretically, not actually."

But of course.  It was the day after Christmas and it was the Met and there was a gift shop and signage and everything.  That was the new theatre for your interaction right there.  And the guards.

We had to be content with the text and our imaginations.  The instructions said that we were (if we lived in 1961) to take an object out of the suitcase, then leave a record on clipboard (either drawing or writing) and also leave an object of our own so that there would always be objects in the suitcase to be retrieved.  It reminded me a little bit of that strange and lovely show at Leo Koenig last fall, TANTAMOUNTER 24/7, where there those young Viennese artists GELITIN built themselves into a room-sized copy machine of their own design, where they manufactured three dimensional copies of what ever was sent into their "machine:"  My daughter put in a fragile charm bracelet and received back a gold pleather disco with charm facsimiles cut out of a gay porn magazine.  Everybody loved it Bob, and you would have too and I'm sure they were grateful to you in there, at least somewhere in their cellular art memory.

KEY TO THAT ROOM WE WANT TO LOVE

But the thing that really, really breaks my heart Bob, is that you had your painting too . . that  really rang inside of me, that you had all this high concept and fun and that you could paint and that wicked sense of formalism that gave you the key into that secret art lineage.  Like those special lounges in the airports, I don't have a key to that room.  You know sometimes I hate the object but I totally romanticize the physicality of paint.  I know, I hear, that one can fall in love with it.  You can put your hand in it and move it around and it creeps into your blood stream. I only know the shy feeling inside my head and I move that around.

I love you Bob, I love the blue light bulbs and the ever present powercord.  I love the feeling of lightness inside me when I stand front of CANYON with the eagle and its wide wings spread, the cinch of the rope around the dangling pillow.

What is it about art -- it either makes up open up inside or glaze over and move on.  What is that opening.

Like the feeling of love in my solar plexus, even if it's not particularly pretty or singing, all tingling and connected and believing in the absolute, the best possible opportunity for everyone.

Thank you.

NEXT LOVE: MIRANDA JULY "LEARNING TO LOVE YOU MORE" & " ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW"

loving miranda july or the sticky heart

MIRANDA JULY:  ME AND YOU AND EVERYBODY WE KNOW & LEARNING TO LOVE YOU MORE

"I am totally captivated by other people and their lives"  MJ

READ THIS FIRST:

MOM IS HERE


Assignment # 52 (from LEARNINGTOLOVEYOUMORE.COM)
Write the phone call you wish you could have

report:
Chris Kerr
San Francisco, California

Me: Mom! How . .

Mom: I know that you loved me.

Me: Thank you.  I did and do and will. . .  How is this happening

Mom: I don't know how, but it is happening because you need it. .  I do now know why you were angry and sad so often.  And I love you for that too.

Me: You realize I'm standing right where I got the call that you died? At the same terminal at      Oakland Airport.

Mom: Yes.

Me: Thank you for that message months ago.

Mom: Which was that?

Me: You mean there have been lots?

Mom:  Oh, yes.

Me: I'm talking about the last time I was at this terminal and I got the text message that said, "Mom is here"

Mom: Yes, you were right to believe in that.  To believe even though it was written by a stranger for someone else.  It still found it's way to you for a reason.  That is a good way to live.  Keep it up.

Me:  You didn't catch it in the air and redirect it to me?

Mom: No, I didn't

Me: I don't understand.  You're saying to me to believe there was a reason even if there wasn't anything supernatural.  Which is what I did. But you also said there have been other messages  -- which I missed! And you're talking to me now!

Mom: I'm saying I don't have to send something to be in it.  I'm saying don't worry about what is real.  That world is not the reality you need to remain loyal to.  Make it into what you believe, what you want to live in.  To any degree.  On any scale.

Me:  Okay, I'll try . . So how are you?  I've been dying to know.

Mom:  Happier, but I miss you and your sister.  Your dad, not as often.  The world, not one bit.  You remember how I totld you I believed the world was hell . . .?  Well  . . . I guess I shouldn't get into that . . Did you know I'm proud of you, that I think you're as amazing as humanly possible?

Me:  Even this year?

Mom: Certainly.

Me: But why'd I have to go through this year?  I almost suffocated staying strong.  I worked too hard. I kept distant.  I have stress fractures in my teeth.  Why are you calling me now, not then?  I mean I'd rather lost all my limbs than do a year like that.  I needed more calls.  And my heart still beats like a threat . .

Mom:  You went through it so you can be even more angry and more sad and more loving.  And you should know this: you've hardly even begun.  I have to go; I love you.  Take care of your heart.

Me:  Wait! Why wouldn't you ever go to a doctor? We begged you to.  Grandpa had tons of heart attacks.  Why didn't you try not to have one – the one?  Why didn't you take care of you! Don't you think you had too much faith?

Mom: (gone)

Me: (still here)


CONGESTIVE HEART DISEASE


This isn't even you, Miranda -- you didn't even write this, but I give up the fight now, anyway.  You (and your collaborator Harrell Fletcher) left a tiny crack open in the world for this missive from Chris Kerr in San Francisco to come through and this is what broke my sticky heart open 3 more millimeters, just a tiny bit more but that little rip, like a ventricle episiotomy, a space that has birthed the rest of my life and I am eternally grateful.

I thought I might like you when I first heard of you, even though the stickiness started almost immediately.  Like congestive heart disease, my arteries are clogged with a lack of forgiveness (to myself mostly but I expose it by hating you and everybody else). This is supremely unfortunate because I am sure you know by now about the Love Artist thing, or at least in my fantasy world where I dream of being rescued and lifted up, you have heard of me.  I wouldn't be writing to you if I didn't really believe in the deepest cave of my congested heart, that we really know each other.  That somehow by making art about love, that by making art about the meaning of life, that by the sheer willpower of our integrity, we are related.

We have to be related, you have to know me and recognize me. Then I can put down the fight, lower my fists, for if you truly recognize me and see the true vulnerable me without any myth or pretense then you are who you say you are and you can become softness and goodness and then we can become everything and everybody (me and you and everybody we know) and then there is no one on the other side, no one humiliating, or making fun, or using, or being jaded, or hating secretly, or trying to pull something over, or trying to distract so they can win . . . if we're out here LEARNING TO LOVE YOU (ME) MORE then I am safe and I can be a total infant in the arms of your premise and I can let down my guard. 

Because I want to, god I really really do, the yearning that comes up in me when I even consider that you, Miranda July, can be trusted and believed, that the cuteness in your film and on your website and in your sound pieces and videos, that they are for real, their earnestness --  I say I want truth, I say I know I have integrity but still, still, I am so fucking ridiculously competitive EVEN ABOUT THE TRUTH, that I when I see someone being tender and soft and true and boldly loving, I WANT TO ANNIHILATE THEM, god it's so true.


UNREASONABLE CUTENESS


When I first saw the film last summer, I hated it and you, I am admitting it here and my truth is that I was uncomfortable with the film just like I was uncomfortable the first time I encountered the Learning to Love You More website.  My 13 year old daughter turned me onto it, and she is the coolest of the cool.  She read about it in something like Teen People or Teen Vogue and she said, Mom there is a website about love in here, it sounds awesome, and it was, Miranda, it was and I was immediately uncomfortable, my heart sinking as if there was no more room in the world for anything else that was fun and warm and loving, no more room for my own quirkiness, no room for my obvious specialness, because that is the thing I don't get about specialness, how can we all be special? 

Like after your film, you were so unreasonably quirky, I couldn't tell if I liked you at all, I couldn't see any room for me in the face of your cuteness, your individuality, your loveliness.  And then your lovely stars, the children, all so interminably special, but so true.  I thought you were fake, I thought the film was fake and now that I have come to you, with full intent to pray and project my metta, my loving kindness, I needed to be responsible and really show up for you. 

I have watched the film again and again and I see, now I see, that you and your art, you are not about fake at all, you are about reaching through the veil of what is not real to what is real, you are about the real.  The beauty of you, though, is that you do not judge the unreal, you accept the lure and the tendency to get sucked in and how it is wrapped up in the gorgeousness of hope.  You do not judge the fight inside, you accept that this fight with the self and the yearning for both the real and unreal simultaneously is a growing process and you make lots and lots of room for us both (and everybody else) to be fragile and strengthening, and right and wrong.

FANTASTICALLY HOPEFUL


hi baby girl, you are a precious creature

Forgive me for judging you harshly, for competing with you rather than opening my heart, for reading your 10 page resume with hatred and brutal (to myself) comparison.

I felt so tired in front of your hopeful breadth of vision, your lack of unreasonable limitation.  You are so young and so wildly succesful. But then I don't know you at all, I'm sure you get scared sometimes, I'm sure you get frustrated and feel alone, like when you wrote FUCK on the inside of the windshield in the movie, but then that wasn't really you or was it?  It's so confusing.  It is the only you I have right now and I am trying so hard to keep my heart open those last three millimeters, I am trying so hard to be free, I am trying so hard to believe I can do anything and I want to hold your hand and soften my heart so it can open even a little bit more, so that I can keep making art and staying on my side of the computer screen and so I can learn to love myself a little bit more.

FEARLESS DELVING

I could tell you were good because you give back.  I was blown away by the generosity of the LEARNING TO LOVE YOU MORE grants:

"Everyday, all over the world, people are delving into projects that they have no idea how they will finance.  If you listen carefully you can hear the sound of all that fearless delving. . . hopefully (the LEARNING TO LOVE YOU MORE grants) will express our admiration for your reports."

Like Joanie4Jackie, your other web project where you try to support girls who make movies to the best of your capability, you and your collaborators are giving back and I want to believe that this gesture is pure.  I love that the LEARNING TO LOVE YOU MORE grants are without application, that by merely contributing to the site you are a contender for the small amounts of (I am sure) much appreciated cash that arrives, virtually out of nowhere.

This utter and complete generosity, like the opening of the sky, like the childhood magic of being seen suddenly for who you are, being lifted up is gorgeous and inspiring:

"The movie was inspired by the longing I carried around as a child, longing for the future, for someone to find me, for magic to descend upon my life and transform everything.  It was also informed by how this longing progressed as I became an adult, slightly more fearful, more contorted, but no less fantastically hopeful . . "   MJ

OK, I get it, I give up,  you can be good and wildly successful and I can be too.

I am laying my thick and heavy head in your lap.

Thank you.

NEXT LOVE:  BEC STUPAK -- RADICAL EARTH MAGIC FLOWER @ DEITCH PROJECTS January 12, 2006 — February 25, 2006

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.

loving kathe izzo: the wilderness of loving yourself

 

"The stories we sit up late to hear are love stories.  It seems we cannot know enough about this riddle of our lives.  We go back to the same scenes, the same words, trying to scrape out the meaning.  Nothing could be more familiar than love.  Nothing else eludes us so completely. . . My search for you, your search for me, is a search after something that cannot be found.  Only the impossible is worth the effort . . . It has a wildness in it and a glory that we want more than life itself.  Love never counts the cost, to itself or others, and nothing is as cruel as love.  There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet.

Merely human love does not satisfy us, though we settle for it.  It is an encampment on the edge of the wilderness, and we light the fire and turn up the lamp and tell stories til night of those loves lost and won.

The wilderness is not tamed.  It waits - beautiful and terrible – beyond the reach of the campfire.  Now and again, someone gets up to leave, forced to read the map of themselves, hoping that the treasure is really there.  A record of their journey comes back to us in note form, sometimes just a note in a dead man's pocket."

Jeannette Winterson
Power Book


DEAD MAN'S POCKET



When I was much younger than my obsession with love, I lived in Brooklyn with my parents.  We would visit the Central Park Zoo and I loved the seal pool.  I loved their hard slippery bodies and the way they slapped themselves down onto the platform, lifting their heads up to the sun, their cat-like whiskers moving as they sniffed at the air. I also loved the squirrels because they could run free and I loved the helium balloons for all the obvious reasons, and we all know what happens to them.  There probably is not anything like buying a balloon for your child if you want to ensure some small amount of post traumatic stress.

One night about ten years ago, I was looking for drugs.  I'm not making excuses but this was something I rarely did.  It's not that I don't like drugs, particularly the kind I was looking for, the kind conducive for both random and focused loving, but I'm rarely shopping for them.  I just wait for the accident that brings them my way and that usually keeps me out of trouble.  But this night I was looking for the kind of loving and drug participation that works on obliteration, the doorway of compensation that causes you to forget what you are compensating for.  In my search for these drugs I ran across a drug dealer with a penchant for compassion & introspection.  She was surprised to hear from me and, while trying to be helpful, she was curious as to my desperation. 

Me (deciding to be honest):  I need to connect.

DD:  With who?  Me?

Me:  No not that kind of connection.  You know, connect.

DD:  You know this isn't real.

Me:  It doesn't matter.  It will feel good.  I'm like a balloon that's starting to float over the horizon.

DD:  Don't you want to see what's on the other side?  Some people never get that far.



MY SKIN IS ON FIRE


My skin is on fire.  For some reason, particularly the skin that sits above my heart.  Not from love, in this moment, but from overexposure to the sun.  A life source that has increased in intensity in my lifetime and yours.  Although it was once nourishing it now could be seen as dangerous.  This health warning is one that fills some with fear and others with an inordinate amount of denial and recklessness.  I am one of the latter, obviously.

I'm sitting by the ocean in a little shack and despite all attempts to soak up the sun and listen to the ocean, or more actively, absorb the little glistening light fragments into my heart like love, I am full of anxiety.  I was given the gift of this shack by one friend and the time and money to enjoy it by another, because they love me, of course and this is beautiful, and, also, because they believe in me as an artist.

This love, lost in my own cavernous heart, becomes an expectation.  If you are an artist, you know how this feels.  Hopefully you might be a writer and you might be sitting in front of your computer at this very moment, taking a break from your work, or needlessly procrastinating.  What is sometimes an invitation, a glistening body of water on a really hot day or a week stretched in front of you with endless time to write becomes the ravenous roiling sea with animals as big as 10 or 100 times yourself that either inhale their body weight in search of food or devour it mercilessly in a hunger for blood, a hunger unfathomable to even the most passionate among us. 

There we are. The gaping mouth of the page.

I have no one to be jealous of today, no one to resent, no rent to heal, not with another artist anyway, at least not at this moment.  I haven't even glanced at anyone else's work in months or read an art magazine.   I haven't had time.  I had three successful engagements this spring, was paid to love the world and I was royally cared for, put up in hotels, fed and fawned over.  I fell in love with people as an act of durational art in one hour time slots, one person at a time for sometimes up to 8 hours a day, after which I would run on the heady steamy of that til late in the evening, going out to dinner, in conversation, walking the streets late of whatever city I happened to be in. 

I am so very very lucky.  Don't think I don't know it.

One night in London, while talking about what we are doing here, this mettaartlove and about working my heart past the fear and resentment of artists I envy, a woman across the table from me leaned over and asked me if I was finished now, now that someone out there could be resenting me, seemingly all glamorous and taken care of, paid for.  I took this a compliment.  But, of course, I still didn't feel like I was there yet.

That's why I am here.  More metta.  Help me.

 

YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE GOOD

I love as art and it looks like this.  I make a cozy and/or seductive environment in a public space, could be a lobby of a hotel or theater, a department store, a gallery or museum.  There is usually only room for two, maybe you can squeeze in another person if they are well behaved.  I will love anyone that crosses that threshold, that sits in that chair.  It's not as hard as it sounds, especially compared to sitting here and writing about it.

It's only an hour after all.  There is a natural momentum that carries you through, even if it can be very very trying, like when you are loving someone who, on first presentation, appears difficult to love, who makes your heart cranky and sticky immediately.  Actually this is actually a very busy time – more busy than usual . . to love someone you don't like is hard work and you need to pay attention, you can't sleep through it –  you have a lot to do . . you make the tea, but first you have to build the fire, you know what I mean.

But there is nothing crankier than an artist who is stuck and there is nothing harder for me today than being patient with myself.

I find it hard to love myself because I feel like I need to be productive.  I feel like I need to be productive because I am afraid of not being held by the world.


AVAILABLE TO EVERYONE


There are two kinds of flow, the flow that is available to everyone and the flow that is available to everyone.  So simple, but let me be an idiot today. 

Let's break it down.  There is the first flow that is available to everyone that is the teaser.  This is play.  We all had it sometime as a kid, no matter how miserable we were.  It is like pretending but we think it is real.  That is why it is effortless, because we just do the next seemingly normal thing.  Because if we were a princess, pirate, robber, troll that is what we would normally do next.  Of course.  And then we joyfully do it, even if it causes us to automatically snicker in a villainous way. 

Of course we forget how to play and we become self-conscious.  This is called growing up.  The self-consciousness is so normal, just like my awkwardness in front of the open page.  Just like the pit in my stomach when I slow down.  It's like the tiny repetitive inverted negative space that formed the shivers up my spine when I connect, the opposite. Actually, growing up is the other kind of flow that is available to everyone, but we don't recognize it.  It feels like loneliness or abandonment.   We are floating over the horizon.  And the weird thing is, we are all doing it together, even though it feels alone.   

Love is like this.  We get so crazy about someone and everything appears effortless.  Then later we scrape ourselves together, loving like looking in a meticulous mirror.

I can get that crazy in my love appointments too, in the best of situations.  I can ride the infatuation by just letting someone into me so totally that I don't have to think about anything else.  We're tripping over each other on our way to God. My intoxication becomes theirs and we are on a lightning bolt through the cosmos.  Hour after hour.  So beautiful.

So special together, sometimes after we part, I forget: I am you and we were perfect long before we started.

Thank you.

 

loving ian campbell: hot time summer in the city

stay gold gallery, 451 grand street, williamsburg
june 20 - august 20 2006

 

   

 

In a tiny room in Williamsburg, without air conditioning and on one of the hottest days of this century, in early August 2006  I sat with Ian Campbell as he prepared to ride his prescribed day's agenda of miles on his mounted bike at STAY GOLD gallery.  Beginning on June 20, Campbell had lived in this tiny adjunct room next to the gallery, riding equidistant lengths of a cross country bike trip from NYC to LA.  He had not left the gallery since that day – as a matter of fact he had hardly left his room, except for the requisite shower and pee.  In addition to his internal dedication to this project, Ian furthered his commitment by weaving hair with lengths of string into a cord that anchored him to the copper frame surrounding his mounted bike.  He finished his trip on August 13.  His head was shaved & he left the gallery on August 15.   

 

 

 

 

IT WAS HOT

We ate cold black grapes and sat on the floor, looking out the open door onto the street.  Across the way, Ian pointed out a pigeon coop on a roof that he would watch while he rode his bike.

I hadn’t any coffee yet, a radical commitment for me. I didn’t want to stop on my way there, I wanted to get there and be with him before anyone else stopped by.  I knew he opened his door to the public at around eight in the morning.

When I walked in he was crouched next to his record player, the rope that connected him to the copper housing around his bicycle laying on the floor beside him. The bicycle he rode was a regular, ordinary bike with the back wheel mounted with a counter. The room was rectangular, measuring approximately 5 x 10 feet with a door at both ends, one opening out to Grand Street, the other into the larger Stay Gold gallery space. One long wall was lined with Lps, lots of vinyl.  Against another leaned a few bags of art supplies, some handmade clothing and some fabric.  Across from the LPS was the record player and a hot plate, the makings of some food . . it looked like some granola and maybe some rice.  There is a sewing machine tucked beneath the hot plate. All very functional, nothing fancy.  Above the records is a large, hand-drawn map of the United States, where Ian charts his progress each day. We sat on milk crates between the record player and the bicycle.

Ian sleeps with the light on, in a tiny space right next to the bicycle, on a heavy black blanket with a black & white checked sheet on top.  It's really too hot for the sheet but it is easy to understand the need for something to cover you, alone at night.

His hair is growing, weaving continuously into the rope.

He is wearing cut off shorts with bike shorts underneath, penny loafers with pennies and short socks, It seems like there is a blue and green globe on his socks, but I'm not sure. He sews his own shirts out of white cotton sheets, designed with buttons at the shoulders so he can slip them down and off over his feet, as the rope attached to his hair makes most clothing removal impossible.

ISOLATION & ACCOMPLISHMENT

I had dropped by casually a few afternoons before.  Even though the room has become Ian's living space it's not exactly like dropping in. It's more formal than that.  The isolation of the room, the frame of the physical effort and discomfort makes it scary, It can't not be scary & a little intimidating.

Like a junky with no smack, I was immediately envious of the high in his eyes, the high from doing something hard, from pushing himself, from depriving himself of comfort, from saying what he is going to do and doing it, from telling the truth. 

At this point he had already been there for two weeks and he had about two weeks left to go.

I have often slept in galleries and odd commercial spaces, depriving myself of creature comforts for art.  It's uncomfortable and Spartan but it usually works to bring about the altered state necessary; one that releases a distillation of life experience – an almost opaque vapor -- into the world that is thick enough to be swallowed whole, something palpable.

I remember one time, in 1998, climbing out of a vinyl hammock, hanging 8 feet above the ground in a gallery for 4 days or so and a friend asking me why I felt like I had to punish myself for art.  I was incredulous (and slightly nauseous due to an newly discovered latex allergy) as I felt so happy & high from my isolation and accomplishment.

                         

                              

TETHERED

He was a little scary-looking, so fatigued and drenched with sweat in the heat, with the rope hanging down his back. The rope appeared almost like a poorly connected tail, the braids leaving his head like electric wiring, a little bit like those monkeys you see in the PETA ads or the prisoners at Abu Ghirab, as if he was being used for the electricity against his will -- but the slightly drugged ecstatic look on his face spoke otherwise.

The rope couldn't help but remind me of the day years ago, in my naïve art youth, when I glanced down at the floor while waitressing at the Ear Inn and noticed an odd coil of rope laying there casually between two people I was waiting on. Just a few days later I coincidentally read about Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh's One Year Performance, Tied with a Rope, an endurance piece where the two artists, unrelated by love, blood or previous collaboration, spent a year tied together by an eight foot piece of rope. I was really lucky to see that.  Of all the art I have seen in my life, I put that one pretty close to the top. It was so real, so ordinary, so electrifying.

 

                                       

Looking at the tangle of the individual strings coming off Ian's head, wrapped by constant motion and sleep, now normal to him, now his constant companion, now coiled by his feet on the floor . . . it made me wonder if the coil helped protect against fear and doubt, against loneliness, if it made him feel more grounded and safe in the face of both the excitement and exhaustion of this endeavor. Or if he hardly noticed it anymore.  We get used to things so quickly in the everyday.

On the first day, the day of the quick visit, I felt that horrible feeling of being on the other side of the glass.  Of watching.  I know I am the only one I can blame for holding back.  I want to get closer. IAN asks me what I have been up to, I say I have been very quiet.  Then we are interrupted by another visitor, someone else dropping by.

DO SOMETHING NICE

I decide to reach out and do something nice.  It feels good.  I offer to buy some cold beverages and Ian seems so grateful.  It feels good to walk on the very hot street and buy something refreshing for the boy.

While I'm walking, I think to myself that maybe some people in the neighborhood have become used to Ian being around, inside his open door, and drop in regularly, bringing gifts and some refreshments, getting stoned.  Ian is very generous with his pot.

He wakes up and usually vaporizes some pot to begin his day, before he opens shop. 

He is a firm believer in getting high.  He says it enables him to forget himself.  He has visions when he is high, sees things, hears things, makes art in his mind so he can recreate it later.  There is nothing he likes better than to get stoned, play music and talk to someone else.  This is a lot of what goes on here on the road trip.

Due to a chronic throat condition, it is necessary for Ian to inhale the pot through a medical vaporizer.  The machine sits on the floor along with the other detritus of his life.  It keeps all the good stuff, even intensifies it, and eliminates the abrasive toxins.  You are not really smoking. It's like being one with the herb.  I've vaped before and I went right into hallucination.  Not unpleasant but I decline Ian's invitation.  I hate to miss out on anything but I was having a trippy enough time dealing with all that heat.

When not riding his bike, IAN vapes his visitors, if they are so inclined, and then plays them some music.  He has hundreds of records lining one wall although he was born after the birth of the CD.  He loves to touch the vinyl, the liner notes, the photographs, to feel the weight of the album cover.

There were some vague insinuations about some Brazilian girls staying late into the evening on a few occasions and another girl from SF too as well as other descriptions of late nights on the Stationary Tour, so I assumed that there had been some wild rope sex under the bike, or on it, with IAN tethered to his rickety copper construction but Ian said he was lonely more than once in our conversation.

It didn't seem sad/lonely.

It was human/lonely.

 

NEXT:
HOT TIME, SUMMER IN THE CITY, COMMITTED PART 2:
IAN CAMPBELL & THE LOVE ARTIST TALK ON FEAR OF THE DARK, GETTING HIGH, LOVE (OF COURSE) & ACTIVISM