Yesterday, as I was describing the sheer mechanics of My Own Little Flood, what I didn't mention was the nature of all the stuff I had kept intending to put up on stilts, but which, in fact, I ended up shifting hither, thither and yon, and back again, to keep it from dampness or contamination, or both.
This, for me, is where things shift from mere inconvenience or annoyance, to become more grievous.
Some of you may know that I have identified myself as an artist for much of my life. Within the last twenty years or so (!), I have been able to work with blown glass as a major part of the sculpture I make -- when, that is, I'm not obsessively drawing, and dreaming about using paint (the 'real art', in my imagination), or collecting cheap fabric, so I can make that pieced quilt that the all of Irvington and the greater part of Newark can use, on those chilly evenings. As is often the case with artist-types, I prefer to work at home (someday I'll write about 'the perfect day', and you'll understand); in our externally respectable Dutch colonial, with the nice fluted columns on the front porch, the basement has become my in-house studio. With space for the laundry, and some cans of baked beans.
When this last flooding began, I was preparing for a trip back to Moscow Idaho, and the University of Idaho's main gallery, where a long-anticipated group glass exhibit, 'Slag -- Anti-Art Glass', was winding up its run. I'd been there in Feburary, and had installed a large wall-mounted installation, and two tall mixed-media pieces, on the gallery's main floor. Upstairs, in another small room, I'd been able to hang nine smaller wall pieces, and two modestly-sized floor works, both created for this show. I was hoping to get back to see the show one more time, do some extensive documentation, and then put myself (and any feckless volunteers I could bribe) though the hell of packing everything for the trip back to New Jersey. Glass is a fabulous material to work with; it is sheer hell to wrap and ship.
I was also, at the same time, making some brand-new work, for a three-person exhibit, titled 'Corporeal Connection', at the Baird Center's Pierro Gallery, less than a mile from my house. Right here in South Orange. Because I knew I didn't have time to construct the kind of complex work I usually make, when I'm incorporating glass, I'd decided to go back to some nature-based ideas I'd touched upon, many years ago, when I was studying Art Therapy. We'd had an assignment (the nature of which I've completely forgotten), and I made two small suspended chrysalis-like shapes, from painted papier mache, yarn, and that heat-sensitive plastic they use on Easter baskets -- I even bought a heat gun just for the purpose. Those first works themselves had long ago disintegrated, but I started building larger ones, of more durable materials, and had maybe three of them, suspended from the overhead heating pipes in the basement, when...
But now, it was water, water, everywhere -- and none of this would you want to drink. (Unless, of course, you were Tchaikovsky, and had a metaphoric gun to your head...)
So, to make clear -- documentation/packing trip to Idaho? Cancelled. Preparation of new work for impending new exhibit? Interrupted and relocated. Outside. To the garage door, actually, which I'd propped open, so it wouldn't come down on my head, as I continued to work on these hanging forms. Each was roughly five to six feet high, and resembled nothing so much as flayed road kill -- maybe a small herd of black-tailed deer, perhaps. I daubed with shellac, I stretched more plastic, I wielded my heat gun with something between unthinking recklessness and a jeweler's precision. Trying not to trip on the heat gun's long extension cord, unrolled down the driveway and back to the house. Where, every hour or so, I had to return, back down to the basement, trading the heat gun for the shop vac hose, and suck suck suck that water. Dump and repeat. Dump and repeat.
Making the art was easy -- the part on which I could concentrate with the greatest keenness. What was so taxing, and stressful, and confusing, was moving all the materials and tools and equipment, partly-finished work, the rows and rows of blown glass 'pods' that inhabit my glass sculptures. Drawing pads. Paints. Rolls of paper (whoever thought it was a good idea to put those in a basement? I raise a guilty hand); shelves full of paint and stain and shellac. Everything that made up what, to a casual observer, seemed to be a huge, chaotic mess, but which to me, of course, was all in legible, sensate order. (Notice who's always asked where the screwdriver is?) (And who always -- usually in about a minute -- finds it?) Reach for a can of shellac -- it's there. Look for a stirrer -- it's here. Wipe with a bit of towel -- over there. And so on.
But now... Paper to the attic perhaps? Paints and drawing materials, and easels too, to the 'guest room'? (Sorry, but don't get your hopes up. Unless you travel in your astral body, or have already been cremated, or would enjoy sleeping against the ceiling, this 'guest room' is not, alas, for you) Shelves of glass work wedged onto the three-season back porch, where they look like some alien growths, waiting to be stored in the root cellar. All the paint (the high-grade, mis-mixed latex stuff I buy from Home Depot, cheap) goes out to the already strained garage, stacked onto a series of plastic shelves. I felt so clever and organized. The miscellaneous stuff? Stick it with the other miscellaneous stuff, in one of the miscellaneous plastic bins with the folding lids, and... pile it temporarily on the patio? Up against the other garage door (the one we never open, because who knows what would tumble out...)? It's amazing, really, how much art-related material I'd collected down there. Amazing that I was still able to work.
And I did have to work. My portion of the new 'Corporeal Connection' exhibit had to be ready for installation... in days. The street-related sewage-related drama was about over. I was soldering in the driveway -- an activity not requiring extension cords -- and the art van from Idaho arrived. All the work I hadn't been able to pack, that had been wrapped by student volunteers (gentle group shudder, please), and that was now being brought out of a moving truck (with a nicer floor than in any of my old apartments), and carefully deposited on the only sliver of the driveway I wasn't currently using.
Turn off the propane torch. Put down the solder. Pick up a box (with God only knows what fragile thing inside it). Look around in dismay. Start another pile.
Well, somehow, the work got done (which always includes last-minute primping). The installation was perfect, and handled by the curators (call me for names and numbers). I even had time for a shower before the opening. For me, 'Corporeal Connection' was a raving success -- the wall-mounted pieces I made, in spite of inches of water on the floor, and shifts between working indoors and out? Those pieces I expected would prompt the neighbors to call the police, so they could report evidence of a brazen axe-murderer next door? The things I expected to be forbidden to show? They looked, if I do say so myself, spectacular. I also used six other small glass/n/stuff works, a disturbing three-part glass-centered wall piece, and a new floor cart, with glass involved as well. But it was the big plastic things, hanging there, that really surprised me -- which, I understand, sometimes happens to artists, when work leaves the studio. It must be kind of like seeing your sullen loser thug of a teenage son, dressed in a tuxedo for the prom, and suddenly exuding a distinctly corporate potential.
I also met one of the other artists, Bryan Christie, a designer whose business was located, at the time, in Maplewood. Although, as the exhibit title would suggest, there were body-references in all the work in the show, Bryan's and mine could hardly have been more different. Where mine looks disturbingly... actual (don't bump into it, or you'll have to send your suit to the dry cleaner), Bryan's is computer-generated, high concept and distinctly hands-off. In spite of this approach though -- so radically alien to my material-centered way of working -- there was still, in Bryan's imposingly gorgeous large-scale black-and-white body images, a kind of relentless, piercing 'looking'. Well, of course, they look mainly like very romantic x-rays, lyrical and relaxed, or strangely evocative of the sacred. And we're literally seeing both the outside contours, and beneath those surfaces. I was very impressed.
Actually, more than impressed -- I was scared, really. The week I'd learned I was actually in the exhibit, I saw one of Bryan's illustrations, in the magazine section of the NY Times. With his name underneath. Big. (Like a scrawny, 4'10" teenage boy, with bad skin and greasy uncooperative hair, who secretly yearns to be both Captain of the basketball team, and Prom King, I'm afraid I'm really something of a fame-whore) If I hadn't picked up Bryan's cell phone off the gallery's back porch -- it had a spectacularly shattered screen, and I was so wanting to put it into my newest piece -- I probably would have been too intimidated even to talk to him.
(Oh -- don't forget the flood, by the way -- at this point, we're just getting the basement dried, emptied and decontaminated. What materials haven't been hauled outside, for the workers' convenience, have been shifted, first to the south wall, then back to the north, so all that spraying and wiping and mopping and drying and fanning can take place) (Overnight, it was like living upstairs from a WWII Air Force base, all prop planes on alert) (But it was getting... clean...)
Bryan and I did talk. I returned the phone, and we talked. And talked. He, about some technical difficulties he was having with the speakers for his exhibit. Me, about the emergence of My Own Little Flood, and how I was thinking about killing myself. He said that wasn't such a good idea. As I pictured the stacks of stuff in the driveway, the back porch, the garage. On the patio. In the attic. Plus the months of basement work still remaining to be done, I said I wasn't so sure. And so on.
I visited Bryan's office/show room, right above the Maplewood Theater marquee, and was further impressed with what he was doing, and what he was planning. Art plans. Business plans. We talked and laughed, and talked some more. And then, in an act of generosity that still makes me shake my head, Bryan made a proposal.
About which, it seems most appropriate to tell you... tomorrow.
© 2011 Walter Zimmerman
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