I stopped in at Borders yesterday with some time to kill before heading out to Middleburg to get Louisa. I grabbed a fat Alex Katz monograph, found a chair and flipped around. A huge (eight-foot-by-six-foot) Katz painting hangs in a lushly appointed lounge at Wake Forest, my alma mater.
Katz has said the large scale portraits of his family and friends grew out of an “abrasive idea.” He intended them to be “in-your-face. It was like: You want my painting? Throw out your furniture. Stick a big head in your living room.” Katz did not want his paintings to be considered decorative and hung over living room couches. Although Wake Forest has a public space in scale with the painting, Vincent is still an imposing and even unsettling picture.
This painting was probably my introduction to Katz. The thing is enormous, and it looks just damn weird hanging there, this gaping person staring out into the room. I liked it. It was very un-Wake Forest. Well, that's not fair to Wake Forest, which has a reputation, I guess. Or does it? Babtist until the '50s, still tied to the Convention until the '90s, if I'm getting my facts straight. Lots of people there that a girl I recently met calls "white caps" -- I guess these are people who wear white baseball caps. But whatever. It's more complicated than that, as any place is. And one thing you can say for Wake Forest, they have a very nice art collection.
One year, someone pasted a fake bio of Katz over the real one that sat next to Vincent with Open Mouth. (Surely there is a word for the text that accompanies a painting, right? How do I look it up if I don't know it? The eternal conundrum.) The new bio said that Katz lived in a cave, hung out with lemurs and drank Grape Nehi. Or something bizarre like that. Wake Forest did have something of a lemur subculture going on. Eventually, the fake text was removed.
Katz's paintings are odd, and I haven't yet figured out how to explain in what particular way they are odd. The planes of color are flat and distinct, making faces look both unreal and too real at the same time. The look of Vincent sort of reminds me of the handpainted commercial signs I saw in Honduras (where the two restaurants I frequented most often were named "The Fly" and "Johnny Cockroach," and both had signs depicting their insect mascots, as well as a fair number of the genuine articles to be found inside). Or of those African hairstyle signs that adorn barbershops.
One cool thing about this Katz book: it had a clump of poems in the middle. They were sticky and crystalline, a little gluey, but I pried them apart well enough and held them up to the light, where they squirmed uncomfortably. One, a three-pager, was by Anne Waldman. I enjoyed its discursiveness, its quicksilvery nature, like a millipede in the dirt. One fragment that struck me: Hands are small frigates or huge mountains. Another: The way one wants to get entangled in more hair. (As a lover of women's long hair, I sympathized.)
Reading the Waldman poem reminded me of why I have been dissatisfied since signing up again for the Writer's Almanac daily e-mails. The poems lately have just blown. I would not call them "poems" in the true sense of the word. They are more like tepid prose writings chopped into lines and stanzas. They lack the rhythm, sound and quickness of mind that actually makes a poem a poem. Waldman's poem, while a little pretentious, had those qualities in spades (moreso the latter than the rhythm and sound, but that's fine). I want the Writer's Almanac that delivers those poems, please. Oh, that's right: I resolved some months ago to start that e-mail newsletter. Well, I'll get around to it, I swear.
Also, there was a killer James Schuyler poem, "Buried at Springs". It begins this way:
There is a hornet in the room
and one of us will have to go
out the window into the late
August mid-afternoon sun. I
won.
I like that. It's very much like a haiku by Issa, who often wrote about his small faunal friends. ("O snail / Climb Mount Fuji, / But slowly, slowly!")
James Schuyler's Wikipedia bio identifies him as a "major American poet," yet is only two paragraphs in length. Hmm. I've rarely heard him referred to as "major," but this poem is major. Then I went to find a whole book of Schuyler in the poetry section, but no, only an anthology of letters! A travesty. Mr. Schuyler is getting screwed wherever I turn.
New ways of seeing. Very important. Try one every day. As I walked through the surreal, brightly-lit supermarket yesterday, I was sad as I thought that most of us Americans are probably more at home in a shopping mall or supermarket, bombarded with commercial messages on every inch of available space, than we are in art galleries, where something revolutionary (one hopes) is in every space. Such is our conditioning. Which we must systematically destroy through a "long, immense and rational derangement of all the senses."
Posted by nedlog at July 17, 2006 1:30 PM | TrackBack