Or, the triumph of duty linked with guilt, over comfort and personal inclination...
I may have mentioned that our next door neighbor is putting his house on the market. He's lived there for over fifty years, but now wants to move down to Florida (where he already spends half the year anyway) to be near friends and relatives. Without needing a snow shovel.
To help with this major transition, he contacted the real estate agent who helped us buy our house, some 11 years ago now. She's very sharp, very personable, and also interested in seeing that her clients get the house that's really right for them. And, when we ran into her at a party recently, she nudged us toward refinancing our house, when the interest rates were at yet another all-time low. So, I feel a kind of pleasant obligation to this woman.
Except -- when she was going over the house with the prospective seller, and they did a tour of the outside, and the back yard, she couldn't help but raise her head, turn it slightly to her left, and BLAM, there lies the suppurating heap of oddments that linger next to the garage, at the more private end of our driveway. Plus, a rickety patio chair here, another one there (they don't match), a heap of sycamore branches, some empty planting containers... I mean, it doesn't look exactly Appalachian -- no major appliances, no broods of puppies, no possum tracks -- but let's say this isn't likely to add value to the house in question. Not my house -- the neighbor's.
She is reported to have said, 'Tell Walter to clean up his back yard.'
Well, as I think I've already mentioned hereabouts, I've been cleaning up my back yard, though sometimes I admit it seems to be proceeding at the molecular level. But in this case, there's a different kind of motivation -- I told my neighbor that I didn't want to cost him or the agent even so much as fifteen cents' worth of income from the eventual sale, because of what the new folks will be living next door to. (Of course, they're free to put up a fence. Or a hedge. Or a wall of bamboo. Or wear sunglasses...) Never mind that the house on the other side has been unoccupied for some months now, and is in foreclosure, and that the Newark city border is less than seventy feet away. None of which is especially my fault, I might add.
So I went out today, and assigned myself one hour of... let's call it inspired fakery. I lugged those mismatched chairs around to the back of our house, and out of the neighbor's sightlines. I did the same with some of the sycamore branches. Some of the larger ones, I just stuck upright in among the bare hedge of rose of sharon, that John hates -- I doubt anyone will discern one bare dry branch from another. I 'organized' some other things, figuring that, even if people don't really know what something is, if it seems to be rectilinear, with lots of right angles, it's more reassuring than something that looks as though it's recently fallen over, and may fall some more any time soon.
Then I began the really difficult part -- disassembling the outdoor studio that I used to make for myself late every spring, when I was teaching. The summer was the only time I could spend on my own work, and I much prefer to work outdoors when possible. I put some wooden braces on one of the garage doors, and then screwed homasote boards onto the wood (fewer holes in the garage doors themselves that way), and worked on that neutral grey surface. I had a few things hanging up there -- the bases for two of the knotted garden tubing I've enjoyed using, and five or six backboards for a set of 40 or more mixed media pieces I made for a small solo show I had in Philadelphia in 2009, I think it was. I girded myself for resistance both physical and psychic. I found a pair of work gloves, a pair of reading glasses, and a working ratchet screw driver, and set to work.
It wasn't as difficult as I'd expected. I was mainly afraid that, after so much time out doors, the screws would be immovable, but they came away rather nicely. I've made a nice blank space, now, where there'd been a lot of... 'visual interest' just an hour earlier. If I can continue at this pace, I should have things looking, if not presentable, then at least less frightening, than their current state.
I also picked up two large brown tarps from the paint department of Home Despot -- not that I need more tarps, but I've noticed that the blue ones are a bit shrill, visually. Where I think the brown ones tend to 'lie down' as it were, and look more calm and rested. Like big, rectangular dogs with lots of right angles, I think. I haven't put them to use, but I'm glad to have them in reserve.
But of course, what can't help but resurface, with this kind of exercise, is the pain of my self-perceived artistic failure, and the burden my work and, frankly, myself, continue to be.
The backboards I mentioned, for the Philadelphia show, will be easy enough to store, I guess, but of course, as I detached the ones from the wall (a couple others had been on the ground, got wet, and twisted in kind of interesting ways...), I relived to some extent their development, and the teeny hopes they represented.
I hadn't wanted the show in the first place -- it was a small, fussy, cluttered 'handicraft' gallery, with little winged fairy figures posed here and there among the ceramic tea sets and hand-painted silk pillows. I'd only stopped into the gallery to recommend the work of a talented student of mine, and had brought along some printed materials about my work, to establish my credentials (for what that might be worth) and to underscore both how disinclined I was to show my kind of art there, and how badly my work would clash with the owners' tastes.
But don't you know, as we were chatting, one of the guys looked over his computer calendar and asked me what I was doing in September of the coming year, and I said, well I'm teaching of course. Then he allowed as how someone who'd been scheduled to use their special exhibition space, at the back of the gallery, had cancelled, and would it be possible for me to kind of... stand in? And, partly out of perversity I guess, and party because this so fit what had, until then, been the prevailing pattern of my exhibition career (I've had several major opportunities that arose simply because another artist bailed, or irritated the curator, or had a bad scallop...), I said yes before I really even knew what I was doing. We worked out the details of schedule, I took some measurements of the little art alcove, and went away, in a bit of a daze.
But an exhibition opportunity is an exhibition opportunity, and the chance to show in Philadelphia might make it easier, or so I thought, to interest some New York galleries to take a peep. I mean, it's barely two hours by train, one way. And I began, almost instantly, to fantasize about a really forthright installation, something that would set off such dissonance with the fairy-festooned finery in the front room, that... well, something would surely happen. And I had quite a collection of small, tortured, burnt-looking blown glass objects, accumulating -- how perfect to be able to put them to work sooner rather than later...
I initially envisioned turning the room into something like a forensic lab, perhaps hastily set up to deal with an influx of body parts from an unfortunate event nearby -- a plane crash, an overturned train, a military invasion, it didn't really matter. Attached directly to the walls, I wanted some fixtures I knew I could afford to make with basic hardware elements, and then I would drape or tie or otherwise incorporate the glass. Floor to ceiling. Wall to wall. There was space for, easily, 150 of whatever foul contraptions I was sure I could create.
So I stopped back by the gallery, to make sure that, even though these fixtures I was planning would probably weigh less than an ounce apiece, I wanted to be completely comfortable that the walls would support both these little bits of stress, and whatever weight the glass would add. Glass being, after all, fragile and prone to breaking. What, I asked, are your walls made of?
You would think I'd begun to baa like a sheep, there were such blank looks on the faces of these two gallery owners, who had occupied this self-same space for something just over 20 years. 'What are the walls made of?' they repeated, with the same intonation one might expect from a parent who'd just been asked to donate its newborn to science. 'Why, we have no idea...'
Ah. Change of scenario entirely. And even thought I knocked and listened, on the three walls, and one partial wall, in question, there weren't any tell-tale echoes or resonances or lack thereof, to tell me what I needed to know. What I was fairly certain of was that no one, in that twenty years, had put up sheets of 3/4 inch plywood, and then covered that with drywall, to make a nice, stable, practically indestructible base on which to mount anything I would be exhibiting, that was for sure.
So I backed up, and began to strategize. What about bringing in some big (relatively cheap) sheets of homasote, attached them to the mystery walls, paint it ($$$$$. It soaks up paint like a drunk in a distillery), and then proceed as planned. But... bringing said homasote in, through the winding passageway of poised porcelain peris, was going to prove daunting. And there was really no guaranteed that, on the mystery walls, the homasote would have any greater purchase than my original idea.
The solution which resulted was, I thought, kind of perfect. I picked a more or less manageable, kind of arbitrary size of 12" x 18", and decided to create little individual wall sections, onto which to mount the hardware supports, and from which to hang my little glass confections. It had already occurred to me that a single thickness of homasote, at less than 1", wouldn't be sufficient to secure my work, so I would have to double it. Not a huge expense or difficulty, really. But because I'm such a slob about measuring and cutting (working outdoors seems to encourage me to forget where all measuring devices have hidden), I soon had, oh perhaps eighty or so not quite identical boards to join into little homasote sandwiches.
I really didn't want to spend a lot of time, fine-tuning these things, and I'm kind of a firm believer that, in my art, I want to be prepared for the viewer to see and notice everything in my work. So, I found the brightest red paint I had, and painted each board red on one side. The plan being, then to turn those red sides toward each other, and emphasize what, normally, I should try to fix. To make the sloppiness even more apparent, I cut some pieces of used drop cloth plastic, already coated with varnishes and paints and gessos, and stuck that between the boards -- sort of like foul lettuce on a really bad, bad sandwich.
The work then began to emerge, and although I fell short of my personal goal of 60 of these gruesome little confections, I did have something like 42, and ended up not being able to fit all of them into the (repainted) exhibition alcove. It was wonderful to have extras from which to choose.
Oh, and there was one window in the space, that had been covered by a huge metallic gold drape, suspended on a heavily-carved gold-painted rod with ornate ends. Of course asking permission, I took all of this down, even though I'd been warned, unspecifically, that what was underneath wasn't pretty.
It wasn't pretty -- it was perfect. An old tall sash window, facing out onto an unused, walled-in couryard, with bars on the inside, and between the bars and the window panes, a tall chipped mirror, much of its backing long gone. I don't think I could have imagined a more perfect built-in accessory for this collection of what I thought of as the remnants of combatants in the Middle East conflicts -- little groupings of glass shapes, each with a draped cloth coated with asphalt repair material, and a piece of plastic, shrink-wrapped to a tight fit. Many people felt that these were disturbingly testicular. Maybe, like Georgia O'Keeffee, who denied that there was anything sexual about her flower paintings, I'm too close to the works to see this -- but they certainly had an impact. Plus, two of them were sold! One, to the new President of the University with which I was employed!
In any event, all these reminiscences came back, as I detached the spare backing pieces from the garage. With the same old questions that have been plaguing me of late -- if I'm correct in evaluating my own work, it's actually quite solid, and strong, then... shouldn't I be more... successful? From a monetary standpoint? Of course, I can answer my own question -- that answer being, 'Are you kidding me? There's no necessary connection between art work's aesthetic merit, and the responsible artist's fiscal well-being.' A gallery owner, who included my work in the last three of his annual expositions of new work, said my creations were given the 'kiss of death', because other artists liked it so much. And of course, if other artists like it, it's sure to offend anyone who's done well enough, financially, to be able to afford it. The seemingly never-ending quandary. If I make more work, I only present myself with the problem of not having enough room to store the work I already have, let alone new items. If I don't make more work, my life seems meaningless, both in the present tense, and retroactively. I'm wasting my time creating now; I have wasted my time, having created ever.
Well. Maybe I should eat something, so my blood sugar will rise a bit, and along with it, my state of mind. And who knows -- when I go out to the garage again tomorrow, to resume this much-belated stripping away of artistic process, I may discover something that completely upends my train of thought. Although what that could possibly be (a machine to shrink things to one one-hundredth their original size? An anti-gravity device?) proves difficult to imagine.
Meanwhile, I'll try to be the best possible neighbor, at least from the vantage point provided by the back of the house next door. I guess it's a motivation. Maybe someday I'll be grateful for this. But for now, that seems to be something of an extremely long shot...
© 2013 Walter Zimmerman
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