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Archibald Motley Junior

– June 23, 2014

The Art Institute of Chicago has a number of treasures and, near those treasures, hitherto unknown treasures, such as the work of Archibald Motley Jr. I was standing near Sargent’s 1897 portrait of Elizabeth Swinton–a relative of Tilda’s–when I felt my energy being re-directed to another painting, smaller, less “monumental” in presentation, but gravitational in its colors, form, psychology. Painted in 1920, Motley’s self-portrait is not only a portrait of the artist, but of the dandy-fied Negro, a city creature standing on the crossroads where Africa and Europe meet in that new land–America. I had never heard of his work before. I had never seen hands the way he painted his hands in his self-portrait: like vertical bats in action, a flurry of intention and then execution. Born in New Orleans, Motley was a Harlem Renaissance era painter who never lived in Harlem, and who never fully identified with being black or white–he would not choose. (His nephew, Willard Motley, was raised as his brother. Willard Motley was a “raceless” novelist, the author of “Clash By Night,” and the scary “Let No Man Write My Epitaph.” I have always wanted to write about his work.) Motley’s portraits were definitely about “the race,” but also his European-ness, those masters he felt close to (Rembrandt, etc). I am less inclined to be interested in his scenes of “urban,” life, they feel forced, noisy in a way that is not him so much as a him he thought he should be (racial uplift or ideology as corrupting to art). All of this I learned and wanted to learn and think about after I saw his beautiful self-portrait, thought about the shape of his mouth, the handlebar mustache, and those hands so anxious to get their work done.

Wystan

Hilton Als

– March 25, 2014

For years I did not “understand” W.H. Auden; his work did not sound like “poetry” to me, which is to say I could not recognize his “feeling,” the wellspring of his language. But I kept buying his books and putting them on the shelf; something other than “education” kept me going back. In any case, I found his biography easier to absorb than his work; there one found what one could easily recognize as poetry: the broken heart, the faithless loves, Wystan’s dogged determination to be accepted by those who could not care as he cared. Last summer, I took Auden’s “Nones,” with me somewhere, and my heart opened up to this: Auden wrote essays in the form of poems, and poems in the form of essays; he was a pre-Godard figure in his belief that the poetic essai (French for: attempt) could contain many things all at once: narrative, poetry, analysis, dreams, autobiography. “Nones,” is a thin book, filled with information and observation after brilliant observation concerning time–time eroding not only our bodies, but eating itself. Limestone drips time. Poetry makes a line of time. Our tits sagging tells us it’s time to face who we are, too. Today, after an afternoon of reporting, a thin young white American man-boy gave me a ride in his country cab; he eyed the women who were walking nearby, saying he didn’t like American women, he wanted a European woman. “Like, from Russia. Or Asia.” Then he said, “This is a weird conversation to have with a client.” The conversation wasn’t strange; he was using the metaphor of his displeasure with the sameness that surrounded him as a way of telling me how my different presence affected him. I’ve been that object before and heard that anger before and waited longer than a cab ride for any number of drivers to admit that to me. This afternoon’s driver said a number of unpleasant things, he was very unhappy in his (silent) desire for men and so blamed it all on his dissatisfaction with women. Despite my discomfort, there was empathy: I imagined being trapped in his body, trapped in his car, trapped in this state. Then I remembered Auden and how he took his personal unhappiness about public and private matters–faithless lives in a godless state–and made it something else, including making work that made us feel something else.

Fats

Hilton Als

– March 25, 2014

Fats Waller. Even when he couldn’t get his feet off the ground, he walked on clouds. He was irrepressible in his joy when it came to music, voices, the sweet and sour smells of backstage life; his clergyman father’s disapproval of his son’s chosen style of music only brought more joy to Waller’s enterprise. This didn’t mean he denied the truth–listen to “Black and Blue”–but Waller didn’t wallow. Why do that when there were other options, such as good looking women and good music and rent parties and stories to be told and his big face? One loves him as one does a relative–the uncle who slips you a five against your mother’s wishes. You bury your child face in his big suit that smells, equally, of sweat and violet candy and hair tonic, and that is the smell you look for forever. Waller’s songspiels–his patter–is as significant as Brecht and Weill’s, and just as joyful in its made-up-ness. When Fats died, his family carried out his wishes, which was to be cremated, and have his once solid body spread over Harlem, which changes and does not change, like home.

Sarah

Hilton Als

– March 25, 2014

Sarah Lucas. Historic. Couldn’t be happier about this. See Sarah’s show at Gladstone. As always whenever Sarah puts something on, I burst out laughing because why not, our bodies, not to say minds, are very funny, particularly if you don’t have the thing you’re looking at but you think about it more than your own junk, thank you for that, Sarah, and the egg breasts and your spread legs, the chicken pussy and the oversized cocks, a kind of Roald Dahl “Chocolate Factory,” world filled with real things; thank you, Sarah; we met in London many years ago when she used to work with Tracey Emin, and I loved Sarah from the time I saw her round, open face and her tendency to laugh at what was laughable, and also her exquisite manners, the cigarettes and her inability not to laugh, and then she and Tracey made a piece called “Gone to Morocco with Hilton,” in homage to our lovely meeting, I can’t remember how old we were then, we just ran around London like mad things, no one was out of breath because we had lungs to spare despite the cigarettes, and what I remember if I close my eyes is Sarahs’ brown hair short and lank in the English air, she really does love England, and I don’t think America could have produced her because her humor is very English, Americans think irony is cruel, particularly if it’s verbal, and while Sarah is, of course, a superb visual artist, her work rests, profoundly, at the intersection of the visual and the verbal–a world of associations, jokes and puns and the like and then breasts and cocks and space as a kind of joke that we want to fill or dominate with the oddness of our very weird same and individual selves.

The Gift

Hilton Als

– March 12, 2014

The thing freely given often isn’t. It’s rare to find a gift giver who doesn’t want to be congratulated for their generosity, which usually includes the generosity of their charm. None of us escapes this impulse–we have all been children and what is a child if not built to seek mother approval–and altruism is often a dream, not a reality. But sometimes we can connect through the truth of those complications, thereby establishing a bond that has something to do with reality and less to do with the theatre of the giver’s “I,” let alone the receiver’s. It’s very odd, but wouldn’t you say that in today’s universe of worked out bodies and worked out minds, that to be receptive is looked upon as being suspect, a “weak” or passive relationship to the self, let alone the world? So, instead of embracing the generosity inherent in being able to receive–to accept—-the receptors among us punish themselves for it, and call themselves “needy.” In fact, being needy is a perversion of their role in the give/receive dynamic, a way of making reception a negative hole. This perversion is acted out in a number of ways, largely by becoming whiney, unpleasant, a bringer of news, usually of disasters not one’s own. Instead of saying, Oh! I miss you! Give me YOU for however long you can, the perverse receptor–the “needy” one–says: You must see me now! X is being consumed by guilt or cancer and will expire at any moment unless you have lunch with me! Part of Tennessee Williams’ genius was in getting those voices right–the voices of reproach and recrimination–and showing us how the polite victim is in fact a bully, a once generous giver/receiver who didn’t like the vulnerability that went with that and turned it on its dirty ear so it became something else. The something else one is subjected to is the lie of social interaction. Or, more specifically, the dishonesty of the object who “wants to get together” but has to use the excuse of a crisis, or a hunted out, potential “rejection,” to make the evening worth while. What are we supposed to do with this negative hole? Stare down in it? Put flowers in it? Shout down it that there is nothing wrong with SAYING what one wants, including love? I don’t know. Just don’t call me until you’re ready to receive, and I’m ready to give. Still, all of that can happen in a moment’s notice. Yesterday, while walking through a second hand bookstore, I came across a poster I wanted to give my full attention to. I was drawn to the woman’s receptivity. And it took me some moments to realize that the face staring out at me was Tori Vasquez’s, someone I “know”–the aperture in my mind cruises friends, I can’t help it, and then it closes when I realize I know the object “in society”–and she was the face of her husband, Richard Maxwell’s, new show, “Isolde,” and I was so moved to know that in that hideous country of perverted desire, there was something as pure as her face asking to take me in with no hesitancy of heart, without blinking an eye.

Petulia (1968)

Hilton Als

– February 25, 2014

I’ve struggled with this film for years, and it’s not only because of Julie Christie’s lips, which have always struck me as being filled with embalming fluid. It has something to do with the world of “hip” vs. “square,” that a lot of American films shot in the nineteen-sixties sought to “examine,” but the real world of San Francisco hip the movie believes it’s delving into happens in the first three minutes–when Janis and the boys of the Holding Company do their thing. Exquisitely shot by Nicholas Roeg, the film was directed by Richard Lester, a British-based American who, obviously, knew how to make cinema, but is it cinema if there is no real tension between the status quo and the marginalized–the story Lester meant to tell? All of the characters are rich in problems and money; when, in the end, Christie’s emotionally frozen partner, beyond well played by Richard Chamberlin, indirectly kills a poor Mexican kid, we feel less than we’re supposed to feel because there’s been no set up: for the previous hundred minutes we’ve been in F. Scott Fitzgerald land, but without the troubling underpinnings that would make that death resonate. The characters drift through the beautiful San Francisco locale, sometimes in feathers, and there is talk, and there is talk, and, as in much of American cinema of the nineteen-sixties, there is a great deal of hair doing some thinking, too, but the guts have been removed at the expense of certain performers who live their guts in their eyes, including a young Kathleen Widdoes, Austin Pendelton, Shirley Knight, and the late Barbara Colby, completely brilliant in a very small roll. It has taken me years to understand and love George C. Scott’s nose, but I suppose an essential problem with the film is that Christie, coming off her Oscar win for playing a conniving kook, was too pre-determined a choice to give much freshness to the title role. She loves the language, but her heart’s not in it because she can’t find the film’s heart, and so our hearts can’t be in or near her, either.