New Yawkish memories

I actually went out to New York in the early 70's when SoHo was just jelling as a cultural matrix. I earned a certain amount of street cred by living in abandoned buildings, painting on doors I found discarded in the bowery, reading poetry at St. Mark's Place, exchanging views with Edward Allbee and drinking beer with Willem DeKoonig.

Here is a Dekoonig story. He was pretty old by the time I would run into him. I tended to stay down at the Broome Street Bar where the pretty waitresses were. The Name artists would come down there at times, and sometimes they would set foot in the fancy decor of the Spring Street Bar, but mostly they stayed up at the Cedar Bar, tending the dimming flames of what they called Heterosexual Alchoholic Abstract Expressionism to distinguish themselves from the gay pop/ straight minimalist crowd. One day my friend Bill invited me to meet him at the Cedar. When I showed up, he waved from a corner booth near the door, where he was sitting next to a gnarled old guy in rumpled work clothes. "Jeff, meet deKoonig. Bill, this is Jeff" my friend said. DeKoonig, and it was him, looked at me with piercing blue eyes. I don't remember much of the afternoon, but I remember him telling me about how he came to terms with a certain shade of blue in one of his paintings. "I had this red, here" he indicated a spot, "and I wanted to put this blue here" he said, jabbing a spot adjacent to that where the red lived. "I asked myself how could I put that blue next to that red. I thought about what the guy that was coming over to look at my paintings would say. I said to hell with it and just DID IT." He laughed, and Bill and I laughed but we didn't know why we laughed and we all drank and we all knew exactly why we drank...

I met a lot of other famous and near famous artists, and worked briefly as a studio assistant to a guy who had about thirty shows going on all over the world at any given time. He had an aggressive agent in Holland who kept his work moving, and he made a ton of money painting floor to ceiling paintings of individual flowers in a kind of neo - manet style, think the bull fighter with its totally abstract background and curiously unsentimental rendering of a fairly dramatic subject.



Today "N" called and complained that an 80-year-old woman sculptor beat him out of a commission for the new library. Anyone who has ever entered a competition for real work can empathize with him for not winning. But you'd think he could crack a smile about being beaten by an 80-year-old woman. Nah. He expected me to commiserate, and I couldn't.

I told him about the ordeal of the move, including how I went blind in my left eye for a week after giving up the keys to the old place. He was very sympathetic, and asked if there was anything he could do to help me. I believed he meant it, and said if I could think of anything I would let him know.

The idea of "art" as an identity or career is not real high on my list of interests at the moment. I haven't reached the nadir of cultural disaffection that moved Goebbels to say that everytime he heard the word "culture" he reached for his revolver. But I am not likely to cross the street to see an art show these days.

Today, driving to work, I thought about adversity. I am tired of adversity, but I am always ready for it. I am not tired of art, but I am never ready for it.

Maybe I will do some drawing on the deck this evening. Who knows, maybe I will put some blue next to some red in the drawing, and laugh with the best of them.