Was it really only six years ago that I watched, ceaselessly, that incendiary music video by Lady Gaga, trying to wrap my head around both the brilliance of the visual spectacle and the flagrant, transgressive despair of the underlying statement?
I was trying, desperately, to fulfill an exhibition commitment — my portion of a juried three-person show at the Pierro Gallery in South Orange NJ. I had just travelled to Idaho, for a group glass installation, and came back to a basement work space two inches deep in ground water — not only was there no time to create another whole body of glass-centered material, it was an almost insurmountable challenge simply to do a day’s work, in wading boots, against the relentless demand of an opening reception, looming in the not-nearly-distant-enough future.
What to make: a) to fit the ‘Corporeal Connection’ title of the new responsibility; b) to fill my share of the gallery space; and c) to resonate with the core issues at play in my own body of work? I turned to an old interest in insects and metamorphosis, protective coloration and other forms of mimicry, and of course, that reliable bugaboo, my generalized fear of death. Using the simplest, least expensive and least weighty materials I could think of, I began assembling human-scale, vaguely figurative objects, meant to be viewed as suspended mysteries. Larvae? Gigantic chrysallidae? Recently unearthed pharaohnic remains? My experience of my work is that of multiplication of questions
But, to return to the unexpected musical fertilization: I generally prefer to listen to 16th century polyphonic motets — their inherent self-contained mystery lull my inner critical voices. But something about the sheer brutality of the Bad Romance narrative, and the conscious yielding to a thankless love seemed oddly resonant with the devotions of a Josquin Des Pres or a Guillaume Machaut. ‘I want your love and I want your revenge’ — she could be singing to the Calvinist God in whose presence I spent so many Sabbaths, wondering at the multitude of sins I must have committed, in the little bit of living I’d yet done, to earn His constant, distant, but pointedly personal disapproval. No matter how convincingly bland His smile, from the posters in the Sunday school classroom, I was pretty sure Jesus didn’t want me for any sunbeam.
And then, there’s Francis Bacon, and his decision to refract his life own experience directly onto the unprimed surfaces of his room-scale canvases. No pretty sublimations or evasive decoration for him — but instead, a blank confrontation with treacherous flesh and the reliability of betrayal. (On the night of his solo opening at the Louvre, Bacon’s splendid lover dies from an overdose of heroin, slumped over on a cold porcelain privy seat — not the typical congratulatory bouquet, not the usual commemorative subject matter…)
By comparison, I feel a rank amateur in terms of trauma and lived suffering.