Friday, December 9, 2011

My Own Little Flood, Part Three

(Before we resume, let me just say that part of my point, in writing all this, is to make clear how fortunate I've actually been, in terms of things like water damage and so on.  I think what I'm trying to suggest, by my own experiences, is the unimaginable trauma suffered by those who have had true disaster strike.  In his book 'Man's Search for Meaning', Viktor Frankl says that suffering might be seen as a kind of gas, which naturally expands to fill all available space.  And, he says, we all have our own capacity to suffer, which we do to the fullest extent of which we are capable. 
I also feel that, in a number of ways, my life has been unalterably changed by this relatively minor event. End of little digression)

I think we were talking about my getting to know Bryan Christie and his work, over the spring of 2010, as a result of the show in which we both had work.  My work, as I've said, having been constructed in somewhat desperate conditions, because of... my own little flood.

Then, in about May, Bryan had a chance to move his whole advertizing business into Manhattan.  This left him, however, with the space over the Maplewood Theater, because the lease couldn't be broken, and it ran until November.  In what I can only describe as an unbelievable act of generosity, he suggested that, as I effectively had no studio at the time, I could use his empty room, either as a work space, or for an exhibit.  Just make sure to turn off the air conditioner, he said.

What a freaking miracle!  I was so excited!  To have a place to make more stuff, and to add to my collection of gruesome hanging objects, was unbelievable.  Besides, it provided an iron-clad excuse for me not really dealing with the rotating collection of things all over the back yard and driveway.  In my world, influenced as it has been by my experience in the theater, the performance (or, in this case, the exhibit) supercedes everything else.  With this large, wide open, unobstructed room, I could create an entire environment -- experiencing which, my new friend Rick Parker quipped, would 'ruin people for life'.  Nice.    

I threw myself into the new works, working wherever I could -- except, as it happened, in Bryan's studio.  It was just too complicated, trying to transfer all my materials and tools (the ones I could locate at the time), up the steep stairs to the big room, only to have to remove them all again when it was time to install the work.  Besides, there's something about being able simply to walk downstairs and enter a kind of creative stew pot, that resonates with me (much to my partner's dismay, I might add).  To give myself a sense of how the works would look for the exhibit, I temporarily installed a couple of them, but the basement quickly filled with large,wrapped shapes, almost the scale of a human being, hanging from the overhead hot water pipes.  The place smelled of shrink-wrapped plastic and shellac.  I thought it was great.

(There was at least two visitors who weren't particularly thrilled with what greeted them, as the came down the stairs to the basement.  The insurance adjustor, a lovely woman of color, whose male colleague was accompanying her on her calls that week, seemed genuinely shocked, when the motion-detector light went on, and she got a good look at these plastic shapes.  "Are they real?" she asked, a little worried.  Then we all laughed, because of course they're real -- they're just not real carcasses, or sides of veal.  Once the ice was broken, so to speak, we had a lovely talk about the way they were made.  I thought that was great.
Then, it was time for the gas meter to be read.  By then, I had nearly twelve of these suspended figure-like things tied to anything that was at least seven feet off the floor.  The back doorbell rang, and I stopped my work to go up and let the young PSE&G meter man into the house.  He knows where the meter is, so he headed down the stairs ahead of me.  Again, the motion detector light went off, and there he was.  He literally froze, with me on the stairs behind him, looming like some latter-day Norman Bates.  All he could get out was 'Is this art?', in an irreproducible tone of voice, kind of 'fear of immediate death' mixed with 'tentative curiosity'.  Even though I assured him that, yes, this was art, he still may have done the quickest meter reading in the history of South Orange)

As I worked, of course, I did do some other, flood-related moving and shifting, but my real focus was the work.  I set a date in early October for an opening reception.  Another wonderful designer/artist/builder friend, Pete Mars, helped me curate the arrangement, and with the actual installation.  Where I'd had a grouping of five figures (dedicated, in my title, to Francis Bacon, by the way), the Maplewood show allowed me to gather fifteen of them all together, plus some other smaller related work.  John took care of the reception details -- we ordered pizza from right downstairs, and on the night of the opening, I just wandered around, thrilled that so many people showed up (the stairs were killers!), and that the work looked as good as it did.  I was also able, of course, to have a few 'private showings' , to dear close friends from Harrisburg PA for example, or for local artists who'd had to miss the opening.  Back at home, in the basement, the French drain/sump pump installation had all taken place, and I was fascinated by the way, at the edge of the floor, where it used to meet the wall, there was now a gap of at least an inch, all the way around the room.  It made the floor seem to float.  But the plan, now, was to scrape the cinder block walls of water-damaged paint, and to begin repainting as we went.  I dutifully worked with the scraper, and tried to make sure that the old paint chips (green under white) didn't fall into that nice clear gap, to spoil the floating sensation.  (I was using an old plastic bucket as a receptacle for the old paint, expecting simply to dump it after every scraping session, but as often happens when I see something that's otherwise useless or in danger of being thrown away, I began to see this paint/gravel as having a potential future in my work, so I kept it. 

And because we wanted to keep the walls clear, until we finished with the painting, I started filling the shelves, that had been pushed to the center of the room so the cement could be poured.  And of course, that is a kind of 'kiss of death', at least for me.  Once a shelf has something on it, I become reluctant either to move what's there. or to move the whole shelf unit.  With a dismaying speed, the whole center of the basement because, instead of potential storage space in the conventional, intelligent sense, turned instead into a kind of openwork iceberg, wedged into place and immovable.

The things in the yard, and on the driveway, too, had somehow achieved a kind of stasis.  While I had been emptying the basement -- countless trips up and down the stairs -- I tried (or so I thought) to organize the outdoor 'temporary' shelters, mostly by material.  Plastic things on one set of sawhorses, topped by a piece of MDF board.  Metal objects were clustered around another, similar makeshift surface.  Cloth, paper and softer stuff went on the table closest to the back porch and, of course -- because I seem incapable of doing ordinary things with any degree of foresight -- I completely blocked that backdoor, from the outside.  (It would have been a tiny bit worse, except that, in moving all my glass elements from the basement, I'd also blocked the porch door from the inside as well)  (By the way, I am officially a card-carrying member of Mensa.  Smarts ain't necessarily all that)

Do you remember the winter weather of 2010?  I'm not sure I do.  Was it particularly rainy?  Or did it start snowing really early, and never stop?   Goodness, I'm the last person to know what's going on in my own life -- all I know is that, in terms of all my possessions displaced by the flood, about all I managed to do, in preparation for rain, was to drape everything with big blue tarps.  Secured, I thought, with bungee cords, or weighted down with things I knew were simply too heavy to move, even in the worst of storms.   It truly made my heart sink when, as winter set in in earnest, what I saw from my upstairs back window was yet another immobilized, iceberg-like clump, variously glistening from the rain, or heaped with snow.  I was sure my next-door neighbor hated me -- a man who'd lived in his house for over fifty years, whose mother used to grow roses where I had now stacked odd bits of plastic, under a squalid tarp the color of a blueberry slushee.  I felt like such trailer trash.          

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