CHAPTER 11
Kids stand near me, close enough for a few to reach out and touch the clay, if they want to. For protection, they hold their mothers’ skirts. I look up from my work. Men have stopped, office workers, some dressed as accountants, others as lawyers, the distinguishing mark between the two professions is the style of suit. The group carries discriminate faces of the old and young. They’ve formed a semi-circle in front of the park bench where I’ve sat since early morning, modeling clay figures. I’m near the 77th Street entrance at Central Park West. On a small table under which my knees fit well enough but my feet stick out the other side into the path, a life size clay hand and two feet face my audience. The terra cotta-colored clay is a manufactured substance, malleable for hours, that hardens into sandstone density with a change in color like Chicago brick.
I hadn’t expected an audience; at best, a few people might glance at me, or stop for a moment on their way through the park. The dog walkers don’t stop; pets don’t know art means anything.
New York’s street performers usually collect the crowds, the jugglers and magicians, guys on stilts dressed like Uncle Sam or in happy clown-face, occasionally a woman in statue-of-liberty costume (patina green, with matching face paint) standing motionless for hours on end. Street performers take spots on the other side of the park, near the zoo, where tourists swarm like migrating birds. But here I am at a lazy curve in the path, a through-point for the energetic, and I’ve got myself a crowd. This group is really into it, too, especially the kids, who pull at a parent’s grip to get closer. Others crane their necks, jockey for position. A few take my photograph. I want them to go away, all of them.
A young boy of six or eight implores his child’s reasoning on his mother. “Mommy, it’s a toy, can I touch it?” A gray Bugs Bunny sweatshirt hugs his chubby body, an orange carrot cutout sewn onto the chest that bursts off the fabric. “Ask the nice man, first,” the boy’s mother says, as if that will make all the difference, to the boy and for me. She’s short, with lingering pregnancy fat hugging her hips like shivering animals, a shape made worse for her having stuffed this human gelatin into skin-tight red stretch pants. Her hair is tied back, fly-aways catching in the subtle morning breeze. Gnats buzz the very ends. “Hey, mister,” the kid says, and advances on me. I’ll give him points for assertiveness. “Can I touch these?” He points at the sculptures, his hand inching closer in anticipation of my reply, the brat’s answer to everything. His hand is open and ready to grab … grab and run.
“Not now,” I say firmly. His hand draws back as if he’s touched fire, and his fingers grasp the carrot stalk. My warning is hypocritical, because I want to add, “Shoo!” to send him and mommy away for good. Take the rest with you! Instead, I find myself explaining to the boy what it’s all about, before he has a chance to cry, which seems likely by the look of his quivering bottom lip. “They need to dry, sonny. That’s why they sit on cardboard.”
If I wanted to drive people away, this was as good a method as the next. The boy’s mother gathers him in her arms and shoots me a look that screams, “If I could only charge you with child molestation!”
“Let’s go, Timothy,” she says, tartness in her tone. Timothy, I think, not Timmy or Tim. I blow out my lips and they flutter flatulently. Good riddance, Madam! The bitch’s stare turns glacial. To think that if I’d given him what he wanted, she wouldn’t have thought twice about letting sweet Timothy sit on my lap and get dirty fingers in my clay.
They barge through the audience, offering no excuse for colliding against people like a pair of drunks. The crowd grudgingly parts, not without their own comments. Just when I think their departure might encourage others to follow, three people fill the empty space. The semi-circle closes in. The faces are now two- and three-deep. If this is what I had intended, for show, I’m sure I could have paid people to stand here.
I stop making cuts along a finger pattern I’ve fashioned out of a thick slab of clay. When I pan the crowd, people smile at me. I smile back, a forced, disingenuous response. What I really want is to look through them to keep an eye peeled for Karen K. This is her homebound route, and my small chance to spot her is thwarted because this crowd has formed a phalanx. If this keeps up, she’ll easily pass by and not notice me at all. “She can’t recognize me if she can’t see me,” I scream noiselessly at the people. This mental protest echoes inside my head. My smile says, Get lost! Off to one side, a sanitation worker leans on his broom and sweep bucket. A man with a greyhound passes at a jog, the dog leaping along in its natural stride.
My idea is sound; my positioning ideal. When Karen passes, sooner or later, I’m going to say something to draw her attention. Maybe I’ll use her name. It’s the natural thing to do when someone recognizes a friend. It doesn’t matter that we’re not friends. She’s my celebrity sighting, the real thing, and I can’t help thinking that she’s not past, not part of the back then, not just a memory. Last week I saw her name in The Little Review, its summer edition. Her essay, “Panning for Electoral Gold” asked why political ads have been elevated “to an art form by a culture that has decided the only way to save education is to stop educating its children: one of the few ‘success’ stories to come out of America since Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.” Bravo, Karen.
Not a single bag lady, however, has come along since I sat down hours ago. My watch reads a midday hour. An hour from now I need to leave for a walking date with the little mutts. Yet the crowd waits for me to sculpt.
I stare at the remaining half-dozen people, their faces waxen with wonder: why isn’t he working, why is he staring at us like some … some performance artist gauging our readiness before he bursts into activity? The business suits give each other the nod — time is money — and then split. I rest my hands on the table and look sideways. Far into the center of the park, the noon sun drenches the open fields and lake, washing out the greens and blues in a hazy tint.
The forest along this path extends to the edge of West Drive, the park’s inner road that winds circuitously as far north as Lower Harlem. From my seat I can see clear to the Ramble, the park’s vast hillock of narrow trails covered in scrub and trees (infamous for being the place where gay men can “lock ass” with a knowing glance, and, hand in hand, disappear behind a bush for ten minutes of sexual glory). The separation between trees and lawn, blue lake and rising hill, is a black outline drawn in hard pencil, tree trunks and bushes, benches and people, rowboats, the bow bridge, each silhouetted. A shape comes through the haze, swaying like a mirage. It gets caught among other murky blotches, blends with the lines, and is lost. Then it reappears, a plump body, a human, walking fast along the path’s edge. A lone man is left to my audience of kids and moms, and he whistles to catch my attention. I give him a sallow stare, and look back at the lumpy silhouette. It’s my bag lady. The guy mumbles “Whatever” and hustles down the path. He sees the bag lady and moves over, makes a big bend in his route to avoid breathing the same air.
Karen K has come. Now I’m agitated. Go away, people, go away! Her silver hair is kinked with the curls I learned to recognize in a crowd of heads. Today it’s tangled and bunched against her temples as if they’re glued in place. My feet and legs tangle beneath the table. She’s not going to see me; Karen is going to miss this! My hands act without my eyes helping to guide them, and take hold of the clay mitten. Can’t you people go away!
With my thumb, I indent a spot where the palm’s cup should be. I watch Karen walk with that same unfailing purpose. Her brown shoes shine with fresh polish in the soft light. She is here and I’m ready for her, but now I can’t do what I’ve intended. Leave me alone! Go! I need to get up. No!! She’s nearly past … she has passed.
“Karen,” I blurt out, my voice crazy with emotion, strangled and weak, desperate. Her head turns, away from me. The four moms who remain, pram pushers, look around and at each other, confused or curious. Who is he speaking to? They have no idea what is happening to me. She is shying away, Karen K is,
because they’re here, blocking me from her. If they weren’t here, she would recognize me from the Lennon memorial. But she’s not even looking!
“Karen Kosek! Can you stop for a moment, please — Karen? I’m a great admirer of your work.” She picks up speed. My audience sees who I’ve called to. They scatter, horrified. Too late, you fools!
I yell, “Karen K, I see you inside that costume. What’s the game? Can I play, too?” This is bad. She won’t like this. I’m hooked, though; I’ve got the barb lodged in my throat like a big fish. But Karen doesn’t lose her stride to a hiccup.
Finally, desperate for time to reel back thirty seconds, I call to her receding back, as if I’m in a storm. “I like your shoes!”
Then she’s gone, she’s disappeared behind overgrown bushes at the sharp bend in the path. I bellow out a long breath. Shit. Shit. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
That’s not what I had planned. All she needed to do was notice me today. Tomorrow she’d do the same. Then on the third day — when the plan was to take hold — she would have stopped and looked. To see what I was doing, who I was. That’s when I was supposed to talk to her. What the hell has just happened?
“So now you’ve spoken,” I say aloud. “Well played, Minus. Now you can go home.”
The people; it was their fault. They didn’t give me the space I needed to work the plan. I wanted to be alone. Karen needed to see me alone. Alone, like her.
I look left and right. At the bend where Karen vanished, a pair of teens come along, ambling hand in hand. Their hips knock together while they walk, playing young-love games. The clay mitten still sits in my palm, a little crushed by my enthusiasm at bird-dogging the bag lady. And just what did you expect? A picnic lunch? But here I am, with another hour to kill, and waste not, want not. I fold the uncut half of the hand over, into a loop, leaving the third and forth fingers standing up. If I separate them, and fold the thumb into the palm, I’ll have a peace sign. Perfect art-in-the-park kitsch, and I’m embarrassed to hear a Brooklynese accent pander, “How you do’in?” that cuts through my palsied concentration.
After a moment, I look up. “Okay,” I say. The boy teen of the couple stares. Having come close enough to see what I’m doing, the pair have stopped to watch. Their arms are linked behind their backs now, the free hands worked into each other’s back pocket. The new emblem of love, or possession.
These kids are about the same height, same age, both thin and wiry like undernourished pets. Their jeans are wrinkled, faded, and hang down from their hips. Concert T-shirts advertise Def Leopard (him) and Nirvana (her) printed off-center and slightly askew on cheap black fabric. The kids look clean, anyway, not like scamps or runaways sometimes found begging or stealing in the park. Just teens out for a walk between classes, or harmlessly ditching school for the rest of the afternoon.
“You an artist?” the girl asks. Her boyfriend laughs. She elbows him in the ribs; it’s more play than irritation, but she won’t be patronized. “He could be anything, Chris. Shut up.” Good girl, I think. Chris takes it like a young man should, and shrugs. She nods at me, throws a second nod at the model hand I’ve continued to work between my fingers through their little sideshow. Blond fringe falls over her eyes. “So?” she says, and sprays the fringe off her lashes with an upward blow through her lips. She wants an answer, but doesn’t know how to ask politely a second time. I wonder what schools teach kids these days, if not at least manners after the formal history, math, and English has failed to stick. Maybe Karen K is more correct than I ever imagined; I was a kid in school once, and had thought I got a decent education, although now I think I might have been just like these two, and maybe these two represent the uber-teenagers of both recorded and pre-history.
The girl’s bangs have, predictably, fallen to obscure her eyes again, and just as fast she flips her head sharply to the right to make the hair jump diagonally before settling above her eyebrows. I wonder how many times she does this every day; I wonder if she, too, wonders. Chris shifts from his right leg to the left. He’s got thin eyebrows, thin lips, narrow eyes and a beaky nose — the gawkiness of youth, not yet grown into his body. She’s willowy, but shows hips and something womanly up top, though still a girl’s figure. When I sculpt them, she shall be resplendent as an Iroquois huntress, and he (in dull pewter) a Pilgrim farmer.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m a sculptor.” Why not talk if the day is busted. “Just hanging out and, you can see, doing a little work in the park. Art in the park.”
I look past them — a pretense to keep my mind from splitting; something nags me that I should make meeting Karen K a priority however I can. What’s just happened doesn’t matter. Now she knows someone is out here, in this big fucking city, this lovely cesspool, who acknowledges her, accepts her for who she is, remembers who she was. And I don’t know why this is so important, or needed at all, but I want to get some response, anything from inside that world where she appears real only because her name and words materialize in print every so often.
“Umm,” I say to Chris and his unnamed girlfriend, “What do you guys do?”
“Shit, dude, we go to, like, high school,” says Chris, mild sarcasm spread over this sentence. His girlfriend nods, or sort of nods. It becomes a toggle, the way Indians move their heads to signal affirmation. She says, “Sucks” in such a way that I take her to mean school.
This can become an excruciating conversation. I look up the path and — I see Karen sitting on a bench, forty feet away. She watches me with flaming white eyes; they glow brighter, become round with intense anger from beneath her hat and hair. My mouth opens and closes. I want to pick up the table and toss it aside, but I know that’s the wrong way to act. And there are these teens, too.
I ask the kids, “Do they teach art at your school?” and steal a glimpse of Karen K down on the bench. She’s leaned her bags against her legs, and sits at three-quarter profile, one elbow propped on the bench, a hand holding up her head beneath the chin.
“Art?” says Chris. “Angie, you hear that? Art. Dude, they took art out of school back when Reagan ran the country. Don’t you remember how he tried to get ketchup listed as a vegetable for school lunches? He didn’t even want to feed kids! Money for art classes. Ha!”
“Sorry,” I say, and admit that I don’t remember. “A bit after my school days. But that’s a shame. Seems to me there’d be fewer dropouts with more art and music, instead of only sports. A waste for all the non-jocks, right? But you know, don’t like give up on the ‘ole USA just yet. It has a few years left, anyway. Maybe a new president will help you out. Pump some money into the system.”
“Maybe,” Angie repeats, but she’s shaking her head. “Sort’a over for us, though … dude.” She frowns, a sign that she’s not sure that she likes parroting her boyfriend, or me. “We’ll graduate before that happens. I guess they tried to teach us a lot of math. We learned some English, too, if you liked to read, but, you know … so what’s your name?”
She catches me in a fuddle because I’ve been trying to keep up with her see-saw intonation and speed talking while watching Karen, ready to spring out of this fucking seat if she makes another move to leave.
I say, with a lump in my throat, “Minus.” The name coughs out at them, which they take in stride.
“Way cool,” Angie says. She labels Chris with a shin kick. A love stain prints itself in brown mud on his jeans. “Did you, like, change your name so people could remember it? Like you know, like Madonna … or –” She frowns again, deep lines above her bushy, lightly browned eyebrows. She asks Chris, “What’s another artist who uses just one name?” He shrugs. Kids do a lot of shrugging, I’ve found.
“Prince?” Chris suggests. He shrugs again.
“Prince is sort of an artist,” says Angie. “Not like a painter. You known Prince, right, Minus?”
I nod, and hope they don’t mean that I’m an acquaintance of Prince.
“I dunno artists’ names,” Chris says, a mock compl
aint. “Didn’t have art class, remember?”
Angie looks hard at him again. “We read the daily paper together. All the sections. It beats reading textbooks. But, you know, no art anyway.”
My sigh brings them around, before she can kick him again, this time without love. “Yeah, that … sucks,” I say. “But there’s always hope. You have to have hope. Believe in yourself. You know? College has art classes. Of course, you don’t need any classes if you want to make art. Study it by going to museums. This is New York, after all. There’re lots of things to see.”
Chris doesn’t seem interested in me or the conversation anymore. I can’t blame him. His feet scuff the asphalt, and he says, “Oh, yeah, I know … Minus. Hey, now I get it … like the math problem, right? You know, plus, divide, square root? Your name.”
I nod. I know my own name, kid. “Well,” I say, “it’s not a problem so much as a way to come to a conclusion.” My bright smile is something that’s a bit of an amusement so he doesn’t cop an attitude. His feeling the name out gets me to chuckle, too. Square root? I’ve never heard that one. Kids are smarter these days, I think, but wonder how they can be so slow at getting the drift sometimes. When I sculpt them, he can be the chrome guitarist and she the Grunge sycophant in bronze, chewing her nails in the front row, center stage. It could go the other way around, too.
“Your P’s must have had some sense of humor,” says Chris.
“Yeah,” I say, and figure out in a couple second that P’s are parents. “Real sweet.”
Chris nods. “Yeah, yeah. That is sweet!” His low-charged delivery means, I think, that he really believes having Minus for a name (or Squareroot) would be just that very thing.
“Art’s not something you just pick up,” Angie says, a sentence she’s put some serious thought into. “You sort of know, right? You have to know. Like if you’re going to be an artist, I mean, you think the way artists think. Always, like, seeing what you can do with people. Am I right? And you do arty things when you’re a kid, like make clay models.”
My hands are holding a clay model (calling it a sculpture makes it no more or less artistic in value); I have work gathering dust at the Beehive. Karen K shifts on the bench and leans into a new look she gives me, as though she knows me and only awaits her turn. I scratch my head, because what I want to say to Angie and Chris might be insulting, though I don’t want them to take it wrong.
“Do you know about Picasso? The weird faces, all the shapes? Right. So he didn’t start painting until he was thirteen. He saw his father painting one day. His dad took him to his studio, down among the trees near the family home. One day his dad had to leave the studio for a while, and left his son behind. Picasso looked at his dad’s painting, picked up the brushes, and just started painting. He finished what his dad had started, and when his dad returned, he was blown over by his son’s talent. He couldn’t believe how beautiful this painting had become. He’d never known this about Pablo! As the story goes, his dad never painted anything again, but devoted his life to helping his son become a painter.”
Chris and Angie unlink their arms. They’re all elbows and knees, pointy shoulders and narrow hips and twig ankles. When I sculpt them, they’ll be eaglets standing on the rim of their nest, with human faces that peer, horrified, at the long drop to the ground.
“Wow,” Angie says. “That’s like, way cool, Minus. My dad’s like, a stockbroker? And he says I should study law stuff. But I don’t know. Art isn’t my thing. I don’t know.”
“No,” I say. “Not for most of us. But a lot.”
Chris rolls his shoulders. I look sideways; Karen is on her feet, she’s moved closer. The teens are fidgety. “It was just a suggestion,” I tell Angie. I hold up the clay hand for their inspection, this unfinished wreck of a sculpture, rough and ugly but cool in its ugly and rough gesture of peace. I give it to Angie, and she holds the cardboard plug level so the hand doesn’t fall off. I don’t doubt that she’ll get it home somehow. I tell them, “I like to get people interested anyway possible. You know, the MET’s just across the park. You have Museum Mile, too. Viewing is as good as doing, I suppose, for most people. It’s all about appreciating the beauty. Borges once said that he was prouder of all the books he read than those he wrote.”
Angie smiles and raises her hand as her instrument of communication.
“That’s cool,” Chris says. “Yeah, whatever, like, you know?” He pats Angie’s ass, or hip, close enough to be both. “Say, we gotta, like, get going, Minus. Take it easy, dude.”
“Yeah,” I say, and try to think of something in their age group’s nomenclature. “Keep it light, you two.” They nod and walk away, headed into the park. I hear a bit of complimentary tones but no words hang in the air because they’re whispering. A laugh skyrockets, and another. I suppose I was much the same at their age, I think for a second time (or third). I turn my head. Karen is standing close enough to get at –
“If you come near me again,” she says, “I’ll fucking stab you.” Her voice is a vicious growl, a stone-scraping tangle of syllables. She pats her coat pocket. “I have a knife here that’ll slice through your neck like it’s a stewed chicken.” I look at the pocket for a bulge the size and shape of a knife, and notice the filth on her hand as it inches up to hook a thumb into the seam, and the white lines where the dirt hasn’t penetrated.
I bark my defense: “But I haven’t come near –” She cuts off my words with one swipe of her hand, close to my face because she has advanced on my position. It’s the chicken knife I fear, and rear back with the involuntary move of a breath because I’m stuck behind this bench, my legs exposed to any sharp object. I see the rest of my life in that swipe of her hand: wheelchair bound, knees a mass of scar tissue, a shredded groin and my wrists connected to a pair of prosthetic rubber hands — the real ones taken as wall trophies. All the NY newspapers will brand her the “Lend Me a Hand Slasher.”
Her movement is enough to intimidate me; my reaction has proved I’m no courageous knight or heroic victim. I stay still, and silent, while she hovers. I think I could act if she makes another aggressive move. If she were to really pull out that knife she says she has. I wonder how hard it would be to lift the table and use it as a shield, or a battering ram.
Suddenly she laughs. It’s a crazy, deranged sound, un-human. I can’t tell if this is for real or fraudulent. She stops and peers at my face, everywhere but my eyes. She doesn’t want to recognize me. I’m frightened to be mocked like this. Threatened and terrorized. Her laugh turns on again, only she drops its volume to an abrasive rattle. Then she steps back, turns, takes a few steps, and turns again.
“Maybe,” she says, and here she stands straight to make herself tall, nearly nine feet tall. “Maybe I’ll send Henry the Black over here to ass rape you. After that he can fold out your elbows and knees for good measure. You see, for the bother you’ve caused. To make a point.” She glares at me with beady, animal eyes. “Do you follow my logic, pal?”
“Ms Kosek. I- I … I only wanted to say hello to you. And … to tell you that I admire your writing. Maybe talk with you. I have nothing to offer you. You don’t need my help; you’re not a bag lady. My intention isn’t humanitarian. I’m an artist. It’s all self-interest. I’ve admired your writing. What it’s all about. I get it. The world and art, art as a piece of the world. Rotten and sour, ugly and dark. What beauty! All beautiful.”
Karen stands ever taller, twelve feet now, her head at the highest branch, as though a knotted rope connected to the top of her head has been pulled taut by an invisible hand. In this posture her yellow pants ride high on her ankles, while her hands and wrists shoot from the cuffs of another alley-rag jacket. What comes to mind is that she’s getting ready to talk to me. I’ve cracked her façade after all. She takes a step forward, another, over to the adjacent bench, where she slowly sits next to me, only two metal armrests between us, their curved aluminum design painted in black gloss, ugly and crude and beautiful now, but
once frilly and smooth and beautiful. My neck aches in its twist to see her, as my body has not allowed itself to follow. She inhales deeply, freely, eyes closed, and when she exhales I smell mint, chewing gum or mouthwash — I don’t know which — and this is a fresh mouth.
Karen leans in, looks steadily at me, and says, “Get lost, asshole.”
Where does such a phrase come from? To ass rape you. The words give a battering visual. Husky. Raw. Her stone-ground voice plays in my ears for hours afterward. Both the threat and her tone carry menace, quite possibly there’s a promise built into the threat. That it has spewed from the mouth of a woman like Karen K, whose book I have on my shelf, the pages filled with beautiful imagery and thoughtful understanding of literature and art and culture, this is disturbing. If it were Mailer or Kerouac, or Roth, I could see the connection, but Karen’s jacket photo doesn’t give any idea of the potential to invent that profane sentence. I don’t think I’m being naïve: we all know the words, but who says them so easily, and with such vehemence, and threat?
This incident is so bizarre that I want to tell someone. I look around the southbound bus I’m riding. I’m on my way home from walking the little dogs. The sun shines through the windows. We’re rolling down Broadway. Shoppers flood the sidewalks. Across the bus’s narrow aisle, two women hold Fairway Foods bags. An old man in thick, black-framed glasses works his way to the bottom of a peanut butter jar using a teaspoon. After each bite, he turns the spoon over in his mouth to lick off all the sticky food. Over his shoulder, a small girl of seven or eight, sporting a red jumper and pigtails tied at the ends with matching ribbon, begins to pick her nose with a narrow pinky finger. Her mother sits next to her leafing through a fashion magazine. My foldout table is folded and leans against my leg; the bag of art supplies lies between my feet. Three teenagers near the door talk with loud, barking teenage voices. These people aren’t my audience, although I like the old timer eating the peanut butter. He looks newly retired: he’s active, antsy, and checks each passing street corner with his nose pressed against the window. I can tell he’s no tourist; he has the moves of someone who wants to go to work, but has been led aside, away from the action, out one gate and in through another, where pasture grass grows sparse, clumpy, yellowish without nourishment or interest; he’s been led there to die.
His lined face is the color and texture of an eroded creek bed, bearing deep runnels from the silver hairline to a stubble-field chin. This was once a handsome face, but a lifetime of use has reshaped it into an oil rag. I want to sculpt him. His eyes have a life that I can make look at you from the three dimensions of marble. Caesar had this; Caligula did not. My camera is inside the zipper of my backpack, but the bus slows and my old man looks around wildly, like his hair has caught fire, and when the doors open he dashes from his seat and onto the sidewalk.
If a Keith Richards sighting at an ATM can get people worked up, what about the threat of sodomy by proxy? I can’t tell anyone what has happened. Not Peter N, who wouldn’t get the nuance or double meaning. He’d more likely ask (and rightly so) why I wasn’t working at my studio. Belinda would ask the same question, and have a follow-up. She’d be just as right as Peter, only more lethal in her delivery because, of course, I don’t sleep with Peter, and I’m in love with Belinda.
“What do you care if she dresses like a bag lady or Martha Washington, or even in Mother Theresa’s linen habit? Besides which, I’d carry a knife, too, with the sort of men a woman can meet in Central Park.”
Of that sort, Belinda means to include me. She isn’t happy. I had to tell her the story after all, because she’s my confidant and best friend, and because the feeling the incident had left in me had settled in my stomach like a gas bubble, and begun to hurt. Naturally, I’ve left out details, and focused on this afternoon’s “chance meeting” in the park. Everything after that — Karen K’s reaction, how she double-backed to watch me talk with the teenagers, and her sudden confrontation (the anus-expanding threat) — was in my story. This time, however, I expected a different reaction. Only now, suddenly, after I’ve heard my own version, it doesn’t surprise me that she has come up with the essential question: Who cares? Intriguing as Karen’s story is (if you’re me), I see that it matters nothing to others.
“You’re amazing, honey,” Belinda says. “Some people see celebrities once a week or once a year, but you see the same celebrity, and all by chance. So why were you in the park making clay models, anyway? Models of hands, or, what the fuh- Don’t you have anything better –?” She stops because she knows living with an artist comes with the odd events, admissions, and stories of the ex-ordinary and a mis-orthodox life (style). She sighs before saying, “Sometimes it’s best not to know everything.” She has told me this before. I see this phrase work its way through her mind, in reflection. She shakes her head, but gives me the benefit of the doubt, something I’m not sure I’ve earned.
“Are you hungry?” I ask. She clasps her hands together and pounds the air with her imaginary mallet. It’s a sign of relief that this business is over. Where’s the concern? she thinks. I think she thinks this. Lovely, stable Belinda. Truth to the wall (not that I’ve been asked), I couldn’t claim such savoir-faire if events had been reversed.
I pull out all my best paring and carving knives. An idea has been brewing inside me for days, one that combines carrots, avocado, horseradish, and a roasted eggplant. Does Karen cook? Does she have her own chef come in each night? There can be a culinary boyfriend, too.
The next morning I get to the same bench at the same time. I set up my table in the cold-front air through which my vaporized breath expands in the sun’s buttery light. Next to me, in a paper bag, I have two coffees and two bagels with cream cheese. She’ll be hungry was the thought that struck me on the way to the bus stop.
Riding to the park on the northbound bus, I saw the same old guy as yesterday, without his jar of peanut butter. Maybe he was on his way to get the day’s supply. He got on at 42nd Street and sat across the aisle from me. His features were as chiseled as I remembered, and in the early June gloaming, the fissures pulled deep shadows into his face. The effect was magnificent portraiture, and maybe stone wasn’t the right medium, I thought; oil on panel could best get his expressive age, that and a subtle sense of beguilement: a Sargent or von Aachen portrait, a Victorian or Rhinelander face. He noticed me staring, so I said something to make conversation — usually a mistake on city buses, places of sorrowful contemplation or the hassle of movement, impending destination. Listening to me, he pushed his glasses up on his sharply angled nose with one finger. He told me the weather was going to change today, get cloudy in the afternoon, that’s why he was up earlier than usual. He was on his way out of the apartment, for his walk. “Four hours, minimum,” he said. I expressed my envy of his free time, and he confessed he wished he didn’t have so much of that. “Sitting for hours at home reading or, worse, watching television, is sapping my brain. I feel stupid, and a bit useless,” he said, his lips a mess of doubt. “The walking helps,” he claimed. He told me he likes to smell the flowering trees at this time of year, and to feed squirrels with the seeds he gathers, and to talk to some of the ladies who watch their grandchildren go round and round on the carousel, or else he calls balls and strikes under his breath behind the chain-link backstop at the ball fields, and then, perhaps, he rents a toy boat to sail on the Conservatory pond, hoping a kid will come by and ask him a question. “The day goes by quickly enough,” he mumbled in a passion, “if I’m not careful.” And here he winked, his way to tell me it was all okay, he was alive; there are worse things that could have befallen him. He nodded at my bag and fold-up bench. I told him about doing Art in the Park, for the kids and moms. He liked the idea a lot more than I do, even if my enthusiasm was a lie to begin with. He introduced himself. “Alvin.” We shook hands. His voice was low; he spoke his words smoothly, with no hesitations or squeaks. He didn’t believe me when I told him, again, that he had an interesting fac
e, but he thanked me. And, no, he didn’t want to model for me. “That’d make me uncomfortable,” he said, but I saw in his eyes that he liked the idea anyway, and was flattered. I thought if I could have ten more minutes with Alvin, talk about sculpture and the subject’s essence, over a beer, that I would be able to turn his decision around. Before I got off the bus at 70th Street (he was going on, up to 110th from where he’d loop back through the park on foot), he allowed me to take a few pictures of him, portraits and profiles. He looked into the camera as casually as I expected he thought he could give me; his expression of “normal” — on a bus, in the morning rush, people staring, annoyed and spiteful. His face was never expressionless, and each snap was exactly what I wanted. As I looked through the viewfinder, I saw looking back at me a simple, magnificent gentleman who could have once been a powerful or important person. No one is ever always powerful, not at the very end.
It’s eight-eighteen when I check the path for signs of her. She might take another route today, tomorrow, for a week, to get me off her trail. My feet stick out from the table, but I’m upright this morning, concentrated on two sculptures, and a lump of fresh clay wrapped in wet cloth, just so people walking past don’t think I’m sitting here collecting for some bullshit organization (illegal in the park), or giving away free palm readings (frowned upon by park police, I’m sure) or panhandling. People file past at speed walker, sleepwalker or zombie paces. Everyone is on his way to work this early, each an unknown name to the others; their hard-soled shoes go click-clop or tap-tap or crunch-scuff. The men wear muddy colors toward the indigo side of the spectrum, somber colors for such a sunny, cloudless morning. The women show their engaged sense of color, held fast to this season’s fashionable reds, bright yellows, and African and animal prints. Hair bounces with each step; bracelets jingle. Ties dangle and jump; red is their predominant color and base. The occasional hat I see worn, all by women, is cocked. The people walk both ways, some using long strides while others stroll through their pace, not in such a hurry to sit behind hermetically sealed windows, wondering how to live a different life (I can’t be the only person to imagine office workers think this way). Amidst this parade that’s terribly easy to caricature, a half hour into my show, Karen K shows up in her Skid Row outfit. She stops on the opposite side of the path, two overstuffed plastic bags hanging on fingers gone white and blue from the strain. People have to detour; she gets brushed across the shoulders. A few look at her, that same drift of disgust pulling their faces one way or another.
Her gray curls shine today. My guess is she hasn’t had the time to add hair gel & sand & park dirt & fireplace ash. A green goo (strange in its brightness, the color of plastic soda bottles) is smeared across the front and arms of a filthy white lab jacket pulled over a sweater. The coat is open and she’s pushed her arms through the sleeves like mop handles stuck on a scarecrow. The Duane Reade bags are filled to near splitting. Through the passing crowd she stares around me and at my hands laid flat on the table, at the axis of my limbs, my lazy feet and legs stretched out into the path. She maintains this random scrutiny until only my face is framed in her stare. I don’t think she believes I’m here, another day. I’m somehow familiar to her in the supernova of yesterday’s encounter. We stare across the path, our gazes deflected only by passers-by. I count to sixty, then to one hundred, and on to one-eighty. Finally I look away, down at my sculpture, and lift my hands to continue working the clay. I feel her stare, it gnaws, I wonder if she is crazy.
Within half an hour, when the work-bound walkers have thinned, and now changed over to old timers and teenagers off to school, some moms with prams, I finish a sculpture and set it on a plywood plug to dry. This is another hand (they’re easy, therapeutic, meditative projects), its index finger pointing up, though crookedly, while its fellow digits and thumb form a loose fist, perhaps cradling something in the palm, a note or morsel of food, or air that has been breathed on by imagination, a lover’s recent kiss. The creases and whorls, lines and cuticles, those subtleties that make a piece of clay seem lifelike, are yet to come (will never come, because this is practice, and, now that she’s here, something better can happen). Karen stands unmoving, I haven’t seen her blink. I sit back and look at her. My turn to stare.
The space of fifteen feet separates us from a lunge with her chicken-cutting knife. I pick the table up, move it forward, and stand with my hands held open: no weapons, no threat. She’s so still she might be a tree (or a statue).
“I’m ready to meet your knife,” I say.
“I’d rather have Henry ass rape you.” She speaks in that same graveled voice that has replayed in my mind over night. “Perhaps you’d like that,” she says, flashing a pimp’s smile of scorn and offer. Her words are no less disgusting today, but we humans get used to almost anything.
I shake my head, aghast at her crassitude. “How can such a compassionate woman –”
“You don’t know me!” she yells. Two women leading children grab their wee ones and make an about-face (“Mommy, I thought we were getting muffins?” “Mommy knows a better place; come quick now.”) Karen moves her jaw in jagged motion before speech comes forth. “You aren’t qualified to give an opinion on my personality.” This time her voice, a new sound, touches my chest as the words of a saint dying in martyrdom. This is the voice of normalcy. She says, “The mildly literate make this mistake.”
Quick to take advantage of any dialogue, I reply, “Yes, I’ve read your book. I learned your words and how you organized her thoughts. I think I can identify you behind them, up to a point. So I do know you, and I am qualified to say something about your personality.”
She snorts. “Up to a point.”
“You are a compassionate woman, with the voice of reason.” Silence. “Unless of course you really are crazy.” Silence. “No? Okay then, so how can this compassionate human be so violent?”
“I haven’t hit you, you big dummy.” She’s used the gravel-grinding voice.
“Okay, right,” I say. “Then it’s … intellectual violence. Why?”
She doesn’t answer. Then she snorts again. “Intellectual violence.”
My experiment — having the dauntless courage I lack — is to be completely other. I nod to her across the path, and she sets her mouth in a line. Three people pass between us, one after the other, and in the time they pass, Karen turns and drops her bags on the bench across the path from me. Now we stand facing each other, two gunslingers, hands close to hips, prepared for the next play, any move. But gunslinger Karen defuses this tension to set alight another: she walks across the space to stand in front of my fold-out workbench. She keeps it between us, nods at the sculptures and points at the hand I’ve just completed, nestled in a wet cloth wrapped around the plywood square. I step aside to give her more room, for her to bend down and look, or pick them up, without me hovering. This is progress. I don’t say a word.
People continue to pass to our left and right, their eyes on us because now we are these two New York characters — caricatures they see in magazine illustrations and laugh at, but can’t do so when they appear in the real world. We’re the skell and the weird guy, whose inherent kinetic energy crackles between us, across the table. They want to see what happens next, but we’re too slow for them. This is not an action movie. They give us the fast pan, otherwise reserved for museum paintings and women’s asses who aren’t their wife or girlfriend, and then they change direction to make space that we’ll need in case something does happen.
Karen squats to look closely at the hand. In her position, my nostrils get the full assault of her stench. I don’t ask her about her clothes, their origin, real or farce, but the questions are on my mind: Did you get the clothes at a mission? Did you find them in a dumpster or pick them off the pavement in an alley? Are they acquired from other homeless in trade? Can they be your own clothing from the back of the closet, “treated” in your Parkview condo’s bathtub with cat urine, vomit, months-old sweat, dirt, fetid sewe
r water, rotten food? And where does one purchase such alteration supplies?
I want to ask about her hair and her skin. Does the grime and soot come in bottles, labeled “hobo dirt” and “railroad oil” and “campfire ash” — all stocked in a cardboard carton picked up at the Five & Dime? Maybe she’ll tell me, I imagine now, that there’s a whole line of perfume called Homeless. (Who’s their spokes-model this month? Streetwise and Spare Change News carry its ads. There’s a scratch-and-sniff bar to entice budding bums.) Does she already have a branded collection up in her penthouse atop The Parkview? Names like “Au de Alley Trash” or “Crotch Sweat.” I can find a bottle of “Milk Vomit” next to “Used Diapers” beside a big-ball diffuser filled with “Feces Stew.” I want to tell her how bad these products are for her skin. They’ll age you beyond your years! Of course she knows all of this already; her manicured nails rest against the table (without a tinted polish, although holding to matte lacquer).
Her hands turn the plywood plug clockwise to expose each of the sculpture’s angles, and these hands are the contrasting evidence that she lives clean, knows what a bar of soap is used for, comes from money; she has a vital mind, in proof from the four essays I dug up at the library, all published over the last six months in Allure and The New York Review of Books, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Artisan. I want to ask her what she hates about America that she’s chosen to reject its motto. Something momentous, if rejection is the answer; certainly not the Democratic or Republican parties, or economic and social decline, or fast food. Because, Karen, whatever you’re doing cannot be construed as happiness. And Karen – Karen! – how did all this that stands in front of me — foul smelling, foul-mouthed, foul to the eyes, a stench to all senses and to basic humanness (cave people had more self respect!) — how did this person get here? I don’t know if I’ll ever learn why; I don’t know if I’ll get the chance, or if I should take a chance, to ask. I shouldn’t want to try so hard.
I open my mouth to ask. She shakes her head. I flinch because she has reacted in time to make me think she has known all along what’s been going through my mind. So my thought makes no sound. She folds her arms hard across her chest. She lifts her hand to hold her chin, a gesture of the intellectual brimming with thought. Her eyes peer into me, the eyes of a Columbia don, albeit dressed for a prank. I don’t know what to say, so I make a half turn while keeping an eye on her hands, and motion toward the bag.
“I brought coffee and bagels.” I shrug. “Are you hungry?”
“Later,” she replies, using the rocks-in-blender voice.
At least, there’s to be a later.
Her eyes move along my body, from the loose-laced high tops to my spiky, unwashed hair. I feel vulnerable under her inspection, and though I’m unwashed and soiled from sculpting these few hours in the moist park air, I feel positively baptized compared to her. Karen’s eyes don’t stop moving for a long minute. When she stops, once more settled on my face, I know I’ve been unbraided. She puts her hands on her knees and stands with easy grace. She’s done with me; I merit no time. She raises her hand in a sign of farewell. I utter a syllable of grief because this is it, this has been my chance, and I’ve promised myself (and her) that if she doesn’t want me around, then I’ll leave her alone. My voice is a child’s plea for attention, and I’ve been caught in a lie. Karen raises her hand higher, which I follow with my eyes, and then she whips her hand down hard on my sculpture. The sound is a drumbeat, a single tone that disperses through the trees as quickly as the violence it wrought. Death. I look at my work. The little hand is smashed beneath her palm, the extended fingers poking out in distress from the mashed clay, the kiss folded in, for memory and eternity.
I take a deep breath and blow it slowly into the air to let my seethe float off through the June daylight. Karen peels her hand away, and looks at the henna stain left on her palm.
“What’s your name?” she says. Her voice is soft, almost too soft for me to hear, and I almost say What? in that moment before speaking, but do hear the words through memory’s hollow tunnel; this is a third voice of hers, different from the chipped gravel bum and the martyred saint. This sound is the salon voice I’ve imagined Karen owning in those Sixties and Seventies photos, standing with one shoulder lightly pressing against a wall, her black hair grown past her shoulders, parted on the side with a curl at the bottom. In them, she tells the photographer to be truthful, but be kind: “I’m a woman,” I hear her say, “We are standard-bearers for this new generation.” Her voice is that of the radio-modulated raconteur. The look on her face is always that of one who knows how to listen, while in the foreground a man (always she’s with a man in photos from that era) is caught from behind, in quarter profile, sometimes with a beard and sometimes with horn-rimmed glasses; smoke hazes the air in these b&w pictures, martini glasses held delicately by their stems.
I tell her my name.
“Sounds like a girl’s name,” she replies almost immediately, as if she’d been waiting for any reply, any name. Moreover, I get the tone of the principal acknowledging the talented student’s rebellious prank with a verbal challenge aimed to jab his chin, make him take notice of himself: You’re a lot less than you think you are.
“It’s not,” I say. We move our feet the way people do in cold weather, which squares us up across the table. I say, “My name is unique. It’s a name of someone who’s important, someone you’ll want to meet. Minus is the sculptor whose chisels transform a block of stone into anything that’s in his mind, my mind. He peels away truth to reveal truth’s essence, which is how the sun peels off your eyelids if you stare at it too long.” I’m feeling my schoolyard muscles and sass from fifteen years back. This isn’t quite High Noon menace, but she’s affronted me and I want her to know that she won’t get away with it, bag lady or famed writer or Humpty Dumpty. I don’t care anymore. Karen is nearly a foot shorter than me, I have bulk against her thin frame; if she has a knife and can take it out quickly, from some hidden pocket inside all those clothes wrapped and pulled and shoved into, even then I can take her.
Was this the lamest way to get a person’s notice? A woman’s? My intentions are entirely honorable, as a feeling at least, even if I don’t yet know what those intentions are. I can want Karen to be my mentor, but in what incarnation? She has only written on the visual arts, and has never, to my knowledge, molded a head from plaster, or hammered the ass end of a steel chisel until her hands can’t grip a cup of coffee the next morning. I can’t want her as a lover — a notion that is as laughable (by description) as the image is infelicitous. I see her in this moment as inspiration, the inspiring figure of art’s values — the muse I’ve only recently renounced and disavowed — a cutout for Belinda. Floating up through the bubbles of these liquid thoughts comes my mantra: life & art as experiment. Nothing is asinine, I think, and have always believed, if you can get work from its natural force of character. And there is self-discovery to consider, too, a process that cannot be forsaken.
She lifts her chin so I’m able to notice her visage, her expression — passivity; amusement — through which she nods at the ruined clay hand. “Make another,” she commands. Before I can refuse, or reply at all, she turns and walks back to her discarded bags on the opposite bench. A shit-stain the size and length of a banana greases the ass crack of her pants. One bag has drooped and fallen on its side, producing an orange that lies tangled in the loops of the white plastic handles. The effect is a dynamic partnership in color — green, blue, orange, white — that is a still life worthy of any canvas. Fuck the camera and silver gelatin solvents. Light resolution and focus is not my medium. Anyway, I’ve brought only clay and honing spatulas with me.
I talk to her back as I sit down. “Nice shoes, by the way.”
She stoops to gather the still life into the bag, and she says into the air, “Shut the fuck up and get to work.” Her gravel voice.
There’s mustard-colored gunk on the back of her lab coat, pressed, drawn and
smeared into the shape of Illinois. I pull my bench against my waist. The sculpture she has smashed is embossed with her palm print, the lines and gullies flow with mapped precision. I wonder, suddenly, if I can emboss my fingerprints onto the clay fingers of this sculpture. They could be ever so shallow, slight, as the veins of autumn leaves found on dew grass.
Karen plops down next to her bags. She reaches into the nearest and pulls out an orange and a bottle of mineral water. The orange fascinates her; she feels its weight with an up-and-down motion, turns it in her hand — I can see the dimples absorb the light into shallow pools that fire like diamonds when the sun catches the fruit through the foliage whispering on a breeze. She drops it into her lap, where it hits silently, and works at opening the bottle. It comes open with a hiss, and she upends its mouth against hers. Her throat ripples with action. She guzzles a third of the water, and smacks her lips with a small “Ahhh …” while twisting the cap back in place. She looks at me without the need to turn her head, a practiced move I’ve seen the homeless use to spy on the world they’ve left, without wanting to notice it all, or claim ownership to life. Suddenly she attacks the orange, rips open the dimpled flesh, peels the rind back from the navel. She drops each piece in her lap.
She’s hungry and so am I, but I don’t get offered a wedge. While the dog walking retirees look fatigued and ready for a nap, the pram-pushing mothers have now joined the late-waking joggers, and map-toting tourists dressed in bright, mismatched reds, ochers, lavenders, and browns, spring colors of the holiday-making shiftless, they look around as though they’ve just gone blind. My bench and clay sculptures get casual glances; idlers stop for ten or fifteen seconds, and before they move on they pay me with a smile or a flash of eyebrow. Karen K gets the rare glance of pity or menace. She doesn’t notice them, they’re fast to ignore her, but I’ve seen Karen look at me twice. I have yet to move.
From an inside pocket of one of her shirt layers, she pulls out a sheaf of notebook paper, folded into small squares. I see blue lines and black letters. She gets a pencil from another pocket and, setting the sheaf on her knee, thumbs through it and starts writing. I’d never seen her do this before, write in the open like this. Her hand moves slowly across the page, making painstaking jerks of the pencil. I realize she’s printing each word. In my mind I see small letters, finely shaped blocks running unevenly across the page. “Get busy!” she yells. Her sub-society persona is so trod — hopeless — that I think she’s called this out to the world at large. Heads turn but quickly right themselves, and she is once more ignored. The non-person has made a noise. She looks up and speaks to me in her raconteur’s voice: “I haven’t got all day.”
If I don’t do something while she’s here, watching me or not, Karen will finish her orange, pick up her bags, and leave. And when she leaves I won’t get more from her. She’ll blend into the New York world of normal and abnormal, become again the non-person into which she’s dressed the part. My chance to speak with her — to get her to speak to me — lies in this challenge, issued for God-only-knows why.
The world detours between the two of us.
I dig a ball of clay from the bucket, scrape the sides to get a good mix of gritty clay with the center’s dense, wet stuff, and get down to work.
The first clay hand had only taken me forty minutes. I don’t know if I should be faster here, or just be good. I’ve seldom thought about speed. The brain is focused on the integrity of the shape that each sculpture must radiate. Form is the goal, beauty its release. Now is when I feel a lazy smile settle on my lips. My hands become nimble and dexterous. Pat, dap, dent; fold, smudge, pull; cut and scrape. The fingers splay in the act of a wave, a wave pulled back, stopped at the beginning of a hand’s most congenial gesture. The wrist is narrow, that of a child or small woman, and extends upward in tree-trunk grace from the plywood plate. I turn in the middle, ring and baby fingers, a fraction further from the center of its outer range of movement, a nearly unnatural angle; the hand has finished its wave, but holds itself on the air of delay, awaiting some reply — but this wait, this hope, is in vain; none shall answer her — only the hand won’t let go so easily as the object of its gesture had (turned away, ignored), as the thought of abandonment crushes its jubilance.
Done. Twenty-four minutes. “Okay,” I tell Karen, and put some force into my command: “Come and get it!” A group of Italian tourists wrench their necks in worry, and chatter as they walk on.
She stands, shuffles over to a trashcan to dump her orange peels, and takes out a sandwich bag from the lab coat pocket. From its open mouth she pulls a wet washcloth to wipe her hands clean of sticky orange juice and pulp, working the edges up under her nails like dental floss between teeth, and ends with a red stain from clay taken off her palm. Finished, she puts the soiled cloth back into the bag and folds the top of the bag closed and puts it into a different pocket. I’ve never before seen a bag lady do this.
Now she notices me and stands tall; she’s the famous writer, dressed for Carnival. She walks over, eyes on me all the while, and, in a winding motion like a big, slow animal, lifts her leg high, her foot rising to a balletic height, up above the table, high, higher, until at its peak, when I think she’ll wrap the foot around the back of her neck, she drops her heel onto the sculpture. Stomp goes the foot, riggle goes the table, wuffle replies the echo. Karen looks at me as she scrapes her foot against the table’s edge and the stuck figurine, smashed cow-pie flat, slides off the edge and drops onto the ground. Her foot is encased in the leather shoe, its shine fresh and gleaming. The clay is a pile of shit, with pebbles and paper bits stuck to it like sugar sprinkles on a doughnut.
“Do another,” Karen says, quietly. “Make yourself full of care this time.” I look at her, crazily, but she shields my anger with the white glimmer of her eyes. She says, “A third of your life is over, which doesn’t matter to you because time stands still. This won’t matter either, because time cannot trip forward until you know what you’re doing.” She looks up at the sky, through the treetops. I follow her gaze and see the blue of a lighted heaven behind the black, veiny tree branches and less dark teardrop leaves, their edges trimmed in mantis. Before I know it, she’s back across the path, sitting on her bench.
What a witch! I think, but suddenly wonder at how I’ve had to force the words, and anyway my reaction is fleeting. Her antics are more scabrous than violent. They even amuse me. Why not see what she’ll do next? This shall cost me another ball of clay. Evidently, she thinks I’ve got the time. Can she crush each new sculpture I make, all day long? She probably has more time than me. There she sits, pencil stub in hand, writing on the slats of wrinkled notebook paper, wrinkled and stained like herself.
Two police officers walk along the path from the center of the park, as lazily as if they were out killing time at a supermarket, smelling fruit, reading labels. Their black clubs swing against their hips, the sides of their mouths are in motion. Then they see me, and, across the path, her. “A crazy lady,” I hear one say. Their pace slows so they can take in the table, the finished sculptures and the flattened lumps, and the bag lady on the opposite bench who’s hunched over a pencil stub that scratches like a chicken in a coop. Their expressions are benign. These people are no problem, they decide, and regain their pace, fall back into the conversation they interrupted, resume their Sunday shopping.
This next hand needs to be different. Rodin chose hands as objects of sculpture for expressive abilities, and the kinetic energy inherent in each of the fifteen joints. Nimbleness engages form even as it creates the form; it mocks convention, where there is play as much as industry, and where dialogue-by-movement tells a story through dancing digits that reach out from a cupped palm. This sculpture I do right, better than the others; exact — instead of quick. I have nothing to prove to this woman, but maybe something to gain by pleasing her (although I’ve never quite been the student to the master, I’ve read about its effect on a number of artists: most resented the rela
tionship, in time). It matters a great deal, to me, nevertheless, to know that my life has been consumed, up to this point, by looking for, and at, beauty, in whatever métier I find it and from each angle she appears….
“Bagels!”
The voice jars my concentration. Karen sits forward, elbows on knees. I point a thumb at the bag but don’t say a word. I won’t serve her two ways. She uses a stiff finger to scratch her temple; her hat moves, her hair shimmies. I proceed with my hand, but soon I sense her cross the path and hear her open the bag. She looks inside and stares, as if what she finds is the answer to all sublime questions. She leaves my sight and I hear only birds up in the trees, twitting and singing, wings flapping to launch from branch to limb to trunk to ground, before retracing their paths; a few squirrels scuffle behind me as they forage under the bushes, and far off come the sounds of teenagers tossing a Frisbee across the open field. “Run, run!” “More wrist!” “Good catch!” Across the path, deli paper crinkles, and coffee is sipped with a satisfying “Ahhh …”
Fifty minutes pass, between which neither of us speaks, although I hear her belch after she finishes the bagel. I feel my stomach gurgle, but this is no time to break off from the work. My fingers mold clay, and I find the process captivating. As much as large projects can mesmerize and challenge, this simple hand takes powers of concentration I haven’t used in years (a feeling that amuses, deflates, and revives my art senses because of what I have and have not achieved — or tried to create — for a couple years now). There’s a certain movement that the sculptor’s hand makes when it has clay between its fingers, or when it rolls a piece against a palm, makes a column that becomes a leg, a branch, an arm, flower stem, torso, a vein or penis or lock of hair, the lips of a maiden or the lips of a lamb. I’d learned that when I join my thumb, index and middle fingers together at the tips, they pinch the clay just so, and make a universal shape, a crease, versatile for many parts of the body; pinch it in two successive places along a cylinder, and I’ve formed the knuckles of a finger. The pinch is perfect in scale for miniature figurines. A four-fingered pinch scales the knuckles to a life-size hand. I’ve found this skill important, as important as the accountant’s need for double ledger notation, a journalist her shorthand, the cook his flavor palette.
This sculpture is somehow taller than the others. The fingers extend proudly, Homer’s rose-tipped metaphor. They define their expressive essence (more even than the human eye) while they resemble the ribs of an abstract fan: the hand has answered a question with a gesture, its meaning left to the imagination. I think I’ve finished. Time: two hours, fourteen minutes. Karen K is gone when I look over at her bench. Her bulky bags lie propped against the backrest, and inside them could be two sleeping infants, or their corpses. The sun is overhead, with the day’s heat all at once apparent around me, as I’m yet dressed in a sweatshirt against the long-gone morning chill.
A crackling sound strikes behind me, too large to be a squirrel but it could be a bear. Knowing that no bears live in Central Park, I turn around to confront what beast there is and see Karen stepping through the break between a trio of dense bushes, behind which there must be some space, hidden from the path’s view. She’s back from leaving a pee puddle, I guess. She stops, looks at me, and pulls nuts from a pocket to scatter on the black dirt beneath the bushes. Squirrels appear quickly from different directions, three grays and a red tail. They compete tamely for Karen’s tossed morsels. Mouths stuffed, they race off, one chasing the other who’s chasing the third, up a tree trunk to wind around and around, their bodies nearly touching nose to tail as they run furiously, claws chattering against the thick bark like sewing machine needles.
Karen doesn’t toss the nuts in her hand glibly when I stand up, but returns the bunch to her pocket. She looks both ways down the path. We’re alone. She puts her hands on the back of the bench and leaps over with a track star’s agility. The sculpture is at her striking distance, and I wait to be reprimanded, somehow, resigned to watch helplessly while she releases her easy anger as retribution for my having followed or recognized her; or maybe because she doesn’t like my style of clay sculpture. Anything is possible.
She squats low, appraising the sculpture at eye level. Her hand comes above the table’s edge and I take a fast breath. Her fingers touch the edge of the plywood base and turn it a few degrees. She does this three more times, examining the hand with each quarter rotation. Her eyes melt into the figure and blink only when necessary. They follow the lines of the fingers across the joints, from nail tips to third knuckle, one by one. Her nose twitches as she draws her face closer still, to see how I’ve made veins beneath attenuated skin, and tendons stretch from knuckle to wrist down the back of the hand.
Karen says, “I want this one.” She picks up the plywood base. I detect a smile on her mouth, or maybe it’s the squint in her eyes that has pulled at her cheeks. She turns heel and walks six paces, stops, and makes a turn in the soot of sunshine. “You’re not going to hound me into submission,” she says, her salon voice cracking from so long a remission. “I want to be left alone. Not because I’m full of my own shit-eating ego. I have no explanation for you.” She walks away again but again stops and turns. “Thanks for the hand.” Then she does something unexpected. In a look pressed through the daylight, her expression softens, and she becomes a conciliatory auntie. This is a look she’s made for, even in the clothing of a bum. She lifts the sculpture and nods at me. “Take what you learned today and do something with your life, Minus the artist.”
At the loft I hunt through the shelves in the living room. Karen K’s book is somewhere among all these titles. I remember sliding it between two smaller books a few months back, maybe as long ago as the New Year. As I scan and dig, pulling out volumes whose titles are darkened by the shadows of use, I think, I heard your voice. That bag lady act won’t intimidate me. In my gut, beneath these same shadows, Karen K the intellectual has harried me. I don’t like to feel harried. Half of me wants to shout “You bully!” the next time we meet, only she’ll tell me I’m a whiner, and to grow up. My manhood-half doesn’t let this go far, and takes over. No one can imagine how this little admission works on me. I don’t carry intellectual superiorities (or artistic ones, for that matter), but standards, yes, these I cop to.
I suppose if I were a real New Yorker, I’d call my shrink. A Californian might bicycle off to a yoga class. In the Rockies they go shoot a moose for solace, I suppose. In Chicago, on the other hand, we punch people in the nose when we’ve been wronged (my pony-league football coach taught us: “If you’re losing, you might as well get in a fight!”) Call this the Blue-Collar Syndrome: knuckles first, friends later. This bluster is apropos to feeling picked on.
Then, while adult emotions settle in, I take Karen’s tactics as part of her philosophy. Which is what? How about, Once more into the breach, lads.
My hands change pigment in the work to shove big books aside, from their stained peach flesh to a dusty gray, to get at the short and thin volumes crimped between the fatties, like younger siblings placed on a sofa for a family portrait. I’d lost count of how many art books I have, so to keep my mind at rest while searching, I begin a mental list of the unusual and special. The exhibition catalogue to Warhol’s final show (it might have been a gift). The Uffizi’s book of Michelangelo’s sculptures is, at three-inches thick, the centerpiece of my collection. A more recent sculptor graces the cover of Modern Queens and Captives, an encyclopedic volume of the Ideal-Sculpture movement of the 19th century American experience. Just what did teetotalers and the mystically chained masses think when they saw nude women in chains, or a mother and child shipwrecked? Their sentimental (and hypocritical?) notions of womanhood came later, which, from all likelihood, grew out of popular literature’s depiction of women (not a picture modern women enjoy dwelling on, I trust from experience — prairie husbandry while eight-months pregnant, four children trailing along like sickly ducklings; or as city-factory slaves, corseted
and locked in sunless, airless chambers six days a week; or daughters of industry married off to competitors’ sons, as if these men were European kings tying fiefdoms into knots of solidarity — although I cannot help thinking that few enough understand what their forebears had sacrificed; after all, I’m no better).
In a fit of pique I yell out to the room, “Why don’t I have these books on the coffee table?” My Midwest nasal bounces against the bare corners and beamed ceiling, striking me with a flat bell-tone response. Sound dampening has been left to inhabitants to cure, or suffer. The room demands tapestries, but who wants to live like a medieval duke? My answer tornadoes through my mind: I do, sometimes.
I find the book stuffed in the center of the lowest shelf. She was hiding her chocolate-colored spine between a dog-eared copy of the KJV Bible and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. How it got shoved down here I don’t know, but if New Year’s was nearest to its last reading, my clue could be wine, Belinda, and song. We’d stayed in that holiday to avoid conflagrations of humanity and witching-hour taxi droughts. And morning hangovers. I open Karen’s book as the winter memory fades, stand up from my painful crouch, and turn my shoulders so the window’s light brightens the pages.
Karen Kristine Kosek, an ingénue writer born on the west coast, published What Beauty? in 1969. Its table of contents lists twenty-seven essays. They’re grouped into six categories, arranged thematically, themes generated by their titles: “Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder” and “When Worlds Collide” and “Equatorial Winter Solstice” seek, respectively, the explanation for bad acting in major films, gross values of art lost during World War Two, and color variations in Gauguin (marking the contrasts between hue, value, and chroma). This skinny book, with its broad ideas, was cobbled together from essays published in the newly flourished “little magazine” market sprouting like meadow wildflowers in America’s Northeast, Midwest, and South. Her introduction explains how the magazines New Yorker and New York Review had only just got a taste for her grade of essay when the book hit the shops and libraries. (Ten years on, she would work as contributing editor for both magazines, while no longer courted by the NYC literati whom she’d given up as “incestuous” and “larcenous.”)
The sun breaks through clouds outside and, in the new indoor brightness, my shadow strikes the title pages like a faded tattoo. I remember something. On my first reading all those years ago — maybe I was seventeen, still pimply and struggling with my identity — everything about her subjects was unusual to me. Re-read through this past winter’s darkness, however, I absorbed why the essays were peculiar choices. In the parlance of the day, she chose “offbeat” subjects to create irony with the times: Goethe’s Faust and Neil Simon comedies, but not Beckett or Albee or even Stoppard, the three introspective dramaturges who ruled the 1960s; Picasso’s sculptures but not his paintings, and no other influential sculptor of the twentieth century; Preminger’s film noir and John Ford westerns, but not David Lean’s bio-pics or Sergio Leone’s popular spaghetti westerns, nor the recently hot Stanley Kubrick; in architecture, van de Velde and the Bahaus movement but not FL Wright or Minoru Yamasaki; Graves but not Wordsworth or Auden.
Her dissociation was purposeful and, I realized, poignant. What was popular twenty years before her book appeared was no more artistically valid, she argued, than the recently new or fashionable art. Naturally then, What Beauty? made its noise in the ArtCrit world for topics it didn’t cover (fashion counted for Karen, but for its intrinsic value, not sales figures or schmaltz; or its profundity).
My copy is the twentieth-anniversary hardcover reissue of 1989. Its jacket is a stylized collage of the iconic images she’s written about between the covers. An afterward by Karen explains some of the negative criticism her book got. My fingertips find these paragraphs. Her detachment was not neglectful, she writes in response to critics’ claims that she hadn’t anything new to contribute to the ‘masterwork dialogue’; such was the vogue nomenclature for cultural ontology discussed on campuses, and likewise published in university journals. To this, her response is an italicized “Please! Art is what it is just as God says ‘I am who I am’ with little value placed on particulars.” Even this isn’t snarky, she claims. She had never planned to isolate herself as some paragon of critical temperament. In fact, the opposite had been her goal.
The irony of those essays was to reach behind the scenery that our 1960’s “of-the-moment culture” had put up on four sides, like bad wallpaper or theatrical backdrops leant against their corners to satirize the house of cards they were propping up. I wasn’t making aware to people how good or bad Kubrick or Graves were, only that they had overridden Preminger and Wordsworth because mainstream critics wrote exclusively about “new” art, and left “old” art to the academics and their pupils. And of course they didn’t, but who was to notice? However you see this argument, by ignoring the depth of their artistic forebears those ‘icons’ lost their position once held by the masses. And such problems had always been thus. This only mirrored modern culture’s landscape, but I was not ready to let go of the importance our past was to our present, and middlebrow art forms stood up to the canon, filled with heavyweights few read anymore.
Nevertheless, the loudest roar was heard from critics and academics whose stature was threatened by Karen Kosek’s central argument, upon whose eponymous title showed the real problem, as she saw it: “art is in fact the purview of everyman” — viewers and artists and “housewives” alike — “not the critics, academics, students, architects, dealers, collectors, or moneyed insiders, whose tenured influence has sought to define and redefine art and art-value according to whimsy or ‘visions of the year’ — akin to fashion seasons straight from chic Milan, Paris, and London runways.”
The first time I read her prose I felt enlivened. She armored her ideas with evidence, citing the critics’ (et al.) “interpretive nomenclature so laden (leaden!) with jargon and crypto-shibboleths that your average art lover is made to feel uneducated and inferior, or worse, plainly stupid for not ‘seeing’ the same things the steadfast ‘experts’ can see (i.e., value, taste, good art vs. bad art).”
Her main thrusts and parries struck at the natural meeting (and connection) between high art and popular art: there’s nothing wrong with enjoying both, so get over your pretensions — “this means you in your Ivory Tower and you on your gum-littered sidewalk: whether you prefer cave drawings, glossy magazine advertisements, and televised theater productions, or Botticelli’s Venus, the London Symphony, and Shakespeare, art is wondrous, accessible, and needn’t be cluttered with interpretation or high-mindedness.” It seems to me her book loosened many keystones holding up the passageways to the canonical gold mines: critics who talk amongst themselves, publish unreadable texts, and accrue high salaries for teaching university students to be self-appointed critics themselves (always a disaster, in my experience).
The public accepted Karen’s ideas, and loved her outspokenness for them. The media lauded her; and why not, because weren’t they slinging the same hash? Academia barely tolerated her. (She writes, “What could they do? I didn’t teach, I didn’t need their tenure committees, and my essays and books stood side by side with their own boring theses, each available for their students to choose. To use the cliché: I was having my cake and eating it, too.”) Meanwhile, arts critics and insiders hated her, and let their venom drip publicly. New is threatening, unless “NEW” is what the powerful, the elite insiders, have put up for consumption. A pity, really. Anyway, Karen accepted every ounce of their attention as if she were eating a triple-dip ice cream cone on a summer day. (As a sculptor on the fringes of my own success in this world, I understand why the powers retaliated.)
Three months later, with her book riding the number four spot on the best-seller list, Karen Kosek changed her by-line to Karen K. Abused critics disguising themselves as academics labeled her change pretentious, and one critic re-named her “KKK” for her “di
slike of any subject she isn’t writing about at the moment.” Having myself helped Peter N deal with the same bullshit, I can empathize with Karen. Nevertheless, she let the loudmouths steam in their own hot air, and her reasonable contemporaries excoriate the loudmouths (right or wrong).
I flip through the book, watching the vanilla pages fan in a slow arc, until I come to one of my favorite essays. In “Hollywood Back Lot” Karen takes the New Critics to task for setting up “avant-garde” realities to the simplest and most basic points of a literary education: reading books for story, entertainment, and what the author has to say about a life.
Linguistic systems are beside the point for ninety-nine percent of readers who want a good story told well. In the words of Joseph Conrad, “My job is to make you see.” Okay, and what there is of the story that needs to be understood is the job of each reader, sitting alone, with a cup of coffee close at hand, or standing in a subway car jostled between other straphangers, or under the covers at night with a flashlight to read so that mom and dad can’t bark, “Lights out and get to sleep!” This is our world, the readers (Readers of the World, UNITE!), and gummy words pressed on us by over-educated “thinkers” needn’t knock, nudge, or publish texts inviting circular logic that few care to read outside humanities classes.
Please, please, please, authors: tell us your stories without the encumbrances of signposts or morality. We want to have fun, we want to cry, and we want what Kafka sought: “The books we need are of the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation—a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.” Thanks for your nightmares, Franz. We wouldn’t know what to do without you. The critic knows this, and for that, I’m sorry.
If she hadn’t intended to alienate critics, as she claimed, I have a hard time believing her. Her words read to me as calling on battle flags to fly! I close the book on my finger. My knees hurt and I’m thirsty. I want more of this book, however contradictory her late ideas struggle against the recent explanations … even as her present street life has filled my own ass with birdshot. My mind dandles with all sorts of retorts for the next time we meet. I need a drink and a comfortable sofa.
In the kitchen, I lay the book down open-faced at the edge of the sink. Two beers sit in the fridge on the bottom shelf. I find a can of Spanish peanuts in the cupboard, and shake the can to listen for its maraca voice that makes my stomach smile. Back on the sofa, my feet wedged in the center of a pillow on the coffee table, with one hand in the peanut can and the beer crotched, I flip through Karen’s book, back to front and front to back.
If the TOC was risky, the index runs rich, deep, and polymathic. Let your fingers walk from Aristotle to Zeno. In the alternating streets, cafés, and alleyways, you meet Ruskin and Lippard and Bukowski, Fragonard and Baudelaire, Roger Fry and Leo Stein and Karen Wilkin. At best, I know by sight only a third of the names she lists like a personal address book, used by Karen as associations and examples, some to quote and others to meditate upon. I haven’t heard of half of them, and back at Christmastime, if I remember right, I visited the library to learn whom I had missed in my education. Karen referred to them with the approach of casual respect, mixed with chords strummed like a folk singer instead of the historic method of plucking individual strings.
In her essay cornucopia, two oaks rise and spread their capacious limbs. In the first, Karen K lifts Faust from the humanities department grave, from which the play had sat for at least a century, into a how-to on designer selves amid America’s social upheaval while the summer of love saw flower children and freaks descend on “suburban sensibility” — Kosek: “A misnomer by definition.”
I haven’t read much Goethe, and never his Faust. Too old-fashioned for me — I mean the language, of course, not the story. Give me Woody Allen riffing on Faust instead of wading into some nineteenth century German sentimentalist. Please! I remember reading parts of The Sorrows of Young Werther in a Lit Survey course in senior high school. Fucking boring. The voice didn’t translate to my Me Generation attitude, walking America’s second city streets. I got a C- in the class because of a sub-par term paper in which I’d compared Moby Dick to that vapid sci-fi adventure Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. I’m sure the essay sucked — I’d spent my afternoons painting old panels (before I could afford canvas) or using my dad’s wood chisels to carve gargoyle faces in the tree trunks across the street from our house that bordered a pair of baseball diamonds.
Karen’s essay “Faust Finds Feral Friends for Feisty Forum” almost made me go buy Goethe’s damned play (I opted for a well-worn library copy). Her argument came through more clearly on rereading this essay from the power of adulthood. Its premise makes more sense to me now than it had at age seventeen, when motivation for me was the kind that moved on curvy pegs sticking beneath a short skirt. Karen opens the essay with the line “Beware poodles following you home” and quotes some repartee between Mephistopheles and Faust, in which the striving scholar is asked to mimic the devilish scarlet cape and trousers worn by Hell’s favorite prince.
Faust complains (as if he ever stops), “In every dress I well may feel the sore / Of this low earth-life’s melancholy. / I am too old to live for folly, / Too young, to wish for nothing more. / Am I content with all creation? / Renounce! Renounce!”
I think this is a good bit of romantic self-pity, but there’s something here that illustrates the feelings coming from the complaint. I’ve felt them before. Karen, too, (I think) because she wanted her readers to see life through Faust’s eyes (for a moment of recognition), and take at least two things away:
The essence of free will, as seen through the prism of free will itself, represents the confluence of desire and labor. Mephistopheles says to Faust, “Trust me … take a shot … What do you have to lose?” Faust’s answer is “Denial is all that can be lost! Must be lost!” [How long will you stay content?] Surely the end of Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) had not come twenty years earlier, but has lived on in the belly of Faust.
Kosek is relentless:
Never satisfied with his own life, Goethe asks rhetorically as a self-guiding challenge to Faust, “Am I content with all creation?” To this the answer must be “no” — is “NO!” because, as the polymathic Goethe does, Faust has aims, too. Ah, but then the libido gets in the way, as it always does, and a woman is his design — Faust and Goethe’s (like any master artist, Goethe didn’t waste a good story, and used his life as a sometime map for his major work). Like all good pacts with the Devil, there are winners and losers. The Romantic appeal of Herr Faust gives us a winner.
I wonder at Karen’s subject and intent. Is she mocking people’s lust for recognition in 1960s America? Vietnam; the Sexual Revolution; Beats and Hippies, Freaks and Dropouts; campus protests and youth riots. Nothing could be less profound, nowadays, even while the media-born “Us Generation” turned into the news-saturated “Me Generation” (recall, if you will, the wave of college journalism students following Watergate). Therefore, social criticism found in the verse-play of an eighteenth-century German cannot be overlooked, I somehow think.
This moment, my discovery, calls for another beer because my thirst for German art and culture requires a brew from the fatherland. When I open the bottle at the kitchen counter and watch its foam rise from its brown throat, my idea of Karen levels into the typical artist-subject relationship. If I were to sculpt Karen K (I mean a bust, not a bag lady), I have a feeling she would give me complete license of shape.
I open her book to the pages I’d kept a sweaty thumb between and find its oily print in the margin where I’d left off.
The Goethean ideal is work, experimentation, striving, and the desire to use all things and everyone for personal enrichment. He felt used by others, so he used friends and women for his own enrichment: intellectual, sp
iritual, physical, psychological, scientific, and ultimately artistic. Goethe had precursors (Epicurus, to name one), but afterwards we can look back to the German from Frankfurt (even his contemporary, Shelley, sparks a mental flint) for our pre-modern sense of egoism.
Making Mephistopheles your intimate takes the reigns of a many-headed beast. KK lives up to Goethe’s dramatics by moving on to a grand finish. What Beauty? ends with a booklet-length essay on the strange concept of ugly-as-beautiful. Its title, “The Grotesque as Beauty” fits wildly within the book’s dramatis personae. She wants us to reflect on how we find those compelling images most ugly in the world. This is not only a visual prompt:
We’re compelled by the images themselves to think of … the society we have always lived in. Nothing has changed since the cave drawings of hunters poking at a raging saber-toothed tiger, Christ on the Cross, Moslem war atrocities, Crusaders’ revenge atrocities, Elizabethan history plays, Japan’s samurai culture … right up to, and including, modern music, literature, and photography.
Karen continues:
Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, we are taught. Beauty is that much at least, and is not that at all. Society has perennially minted standards of beauty like a lot of drachmas, centimes, francs, and pennies. Their edges steadily wear: so too beauty, our notion of its existence, its scale, its composition, and value — of copper, tin, nickel, silver, or gold. In the end, there is another beginning. Always, another re-genesis. This is not sophistry. The practical application of our senses describes beauty as flawed, and ugly as meritorious.
I find her demonstrations a prize, like a child plucking the sealed decoder ring from the bottom of the cereal box. She has scaled the ancients in a paragraph, and then settles on Matthew Brady’s American Civil War photography, Frank Zappa’s early recorded albums “Freak Out!” and “Lumpy Gravy,” and Gerhard Richter’s photo-realistic “death” paintings.
Zappa is her headline. He’s equally “of the moment” and “progressive” — making music that is ugly to the established canon of Rock ‘n Roll (itself having taken years to get mainstream approval, though by 1969 you even heard outrage over The Rolling Stones’ “cheeky” marketing slogan, “Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?”).
Kids love Zappa, Karen K informs us, “and that’s all it takes to make a nobody into a household name.” She dislikes Zappa’s music, is passionately dismissive toward its discomfiting rhythms and electronic sounds. Nevertheless, he’s a brilliant musician by her own standards of musical taste, which has nothing to do with album sales. I have a hard time believing in the intellectual exercise of extolling the virtues of something you hate. It’s wishy-washy, playing in gray areas when a simple black-or-white position sets you apart, gives you legs. Karen hasn’t won me over — even as I stand with book in hand, her threatening expletives fresh in my mind, and my more-than-ever desire to learn what she’s about — but I see her point of ugly as beautiful because, in his notes, the melodies, and the disharmony that branded Zappa’s sound, the music makes sense of a country that was splitting at the seams from an un-winnable Southeast Asian occupation, the home front Culture War, the Generation Gap battle, and Dirty Politics, all made into dinner conversation.
Kosek writes, “Zappa and his Mothers of Invention trade the Sixties’ 2/4 beat, blah, blah, blah […] for imaginative lyrics linked to chord structures and dissonant syncopation we aren’t used to hearing. Good for us, I say, because soon we will hear this kind of music everywhere, in every genre. The mainstream cannot make sense of him without comparisons to the mainstream bands, themselves outsiders at one time.”
She keeps the pressure on the reader because she wants — at least I think she wants — to make connections while we think she’s breaking connections. Gerhard Richter’s death paintings, she argues, are a cross between Zappa’s innovative songwriting and media imagery — advertising & marketing that Zappa and his Mothers targeted for its “pornographizing food, teenage girls, race riots, and astronauts.” In Richter, Karen finds a friend:
Following the vivacious “everyday life” photo paintings that brought suburban jocularity into frame, the German artist gave us “death” — his now trademarked, innovative photo-inspired oils based on newspaper clippings.
And why not death? It’s part of everyday life. I can only imagine he thought this, too (I don’t interview artists, only their art), perhaps in a melancholic mood after learning of a friend’s death. Better yet (for one’s melancholy, that is), a lover’s death. However, a lover lying in a casket, with stricken-faced family members walking past, is not what Richter painted. Instead, we got the portraits of the eight student nurses murdered by Richard Speck in Chicago in 1963. The paintings have nothing to do with the murder scene, but are oil renditions of the eight portrait photos used by news agencies to publicly identify Speck’s victims. What we feel as viewers is left behind the scenes, given to our own imaginations if that’s how far we would take a “fantasy” such as Speck lived out in his night of rape and murder. What is beautiful in this grotesque display are the women themselves, smiling into the camera, giving their gleeful expressions for family and friends who, it seems likely, still keep these very photos framed on the living room mantel, or tucked inside their wallets.
I can’t help thinking, Now why didn’t I think of that? The ugliness of life, given pictorial essence, is ancient. But in this guise we’re asked to be an intellectual participant. Richter’s oeuvre through the Sixties is given two coats of Karen’s prose. She appears smote by the German’s vision, though a thorough critique of the man’s critics shows her sense of fair play; she agrees more than disagrees with the criticism (painting from photographs “is a paint-by-numbers exercise; why bother?”) but she never strays from the elegance of Richter’s theme — “Terribly appropriate for our times.”
Then she shifts gears, of a sort, through a portal that leads back more than a hundred years because, she says, there’s precedence for the ground Richter treads. “Can you guess?” she asks. The question titillates her readers, given all that the twentieth century has catalogued of death: the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre; the Baton Death March; the Rape of Nanking; Nazism’s Final Solution; Pol Pot’s killing fields; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; Saddam Hussein’s gassing a town of Kurds. No, no, KK teases — reach back to that unexpected pleasure: the American Civil War!
For Karen, Matthew Brady did more for photographic art in his documentation of soldiering and its furies than all the cheap pornography coming out of Parisian studios at the time.
Is the ugly-rendered-beautiful a matter of form, capture, or/and visual extrusion of point of view? I don’t think so. The question, though, is neither limiting nor unfair. There’s simply more to beauty than opinion – more to beauty than meets the eye. Take for example the shadows and shading of Brady’s Gettysburg Battle photography. These are violent images — the results of war and vengeance. Grotesque faces of death peer at us through silent eyes and waxen complexions. Desolation and abandonment gather the dead like a bouquet. There is no mistaking their unmoving eyes with the unmoving eyes found in a family portrait print: lifelessness is intrinsic no matter what medium is used. The visual oddities that we find unfamiliar in daily circumstance become representative of what is missed. Art, real or imagined, strikes our aesthetic bell in the tower of reason and emotions.
All grotesques do not project beauty any more than traditional art taste defines beautiful as arresting. Beauty comes from a connection between our sense of the natural world and our sense of self. In that, there shall always be a nexus of high, low, and middle art. It is the dying tree amid the vibrant autumnal arboretum. It is the fly on the cherry-topped ice cream dessert. It is the nudist family that relaxes in the beach’s falling light. It is each of us who look in the Monday-morning mirror.
My beer is long gone, and sits, strained and filtered, in my bulging bladder. My knees feel hyper-extended, and I hear them crack when I pull them
into my chest, then roll forward and make a tentative rise from the sofa. The slow move gives my head a rush, and a dizzy spell comes over me, only to leave like clouds dissolve shadows.
In its place is left a question tapping at the inside of my skull: Is Karen’s book a lot of popular criticism given at a time when pop-psychology and pop-art and pop-this-and-that was, well, the popular rage? If so, perhaps her time has long since died.
I don’t have the experience of growing up wise through the late Sixties to successfully answer this question. Her critics tried to answer her, and fell flat against the wall of sales figures Karen K put up for nearly a year. She became the flavor of the month, then the seasonal flair, and that year’s itch. She rode her success by writing more essays, giving university lectures, appearing at NYC culture-type parties on into the following decade (on another burgeoning industry, the television talk show), in fact doing all the same things her detractors had done, and continued to do. This went on until, that is, she left the scene she had criticized and had enjoyed. What does it all matter, now? This is the question I really want to have answered (for me alone), and the only person who can give me satisfaction is, pardon the expression, the horse’s mouth. Perhaps Karen Kristine Kosek was more Goethean than even her critics could fathom, considering their anger. She used them all, and for good measure. As a teenager, I didn’t know what Karen’s book could do for me. Now, though, I think I have the answer.
The book on ugly isn’t complete.