"It is false to suppose that a child's sense of beauty is dependent on any choiceness or special fineness, in the objects which present themselves to it, though this indeed comes to be the rule with most of us in later life; earlier, in some degree, we see inwardly . . . ."
Walter Pater
The Child in the House
Visual experience plays a central role in the everyday lives of only a few people.
In their autobiographical writings,
Praeterita and "The Child in the House," John Ruskin and Walter Pater tell how they, raised in philistine homes, became
visually sensitive.
In philistine Victorian England, that was no easy task. Bill Beckley, who was born in 1946,
grew up in a very different but equally philistine culture. His aesthetic, conceived in large part by early experiences
with photography, was formed in the late 1960s.
And so it is interesting that in the 1990s, after a highly productive
three-decade-long career as a working artist, he published texts by Ruskin and Pater.
In trying to understand his art and life,
you could do worse than to begin with his introductions to those books.
I chose that combination of authors because whatever their differences in the philosophy of art and poetry at Oxford in the early 1870s-Ruskin a proponent of art linked to social evolution, and Pater proclaiming in The Renaissance art for art's sake-a sense of beauty united them.
The sense of beauty, or what Beckley calls "belief in the value of human pleasure, those fleeting moments in human experience
that are expansive, such as when a child appreciates the colors and transparencies of Lego," is the basis, also, for his own art.
His goal is to recover the living value of that way of thinking, in an unacademic way.
No one is born an aesthete, and in our culture few parents train their children to be aesthetes. How then do some people come
to make art the source of their values?
Bill Beckley offers an oddly straightforward answer to that question.
I decided to become an artist when I was five after I found a couple of my father's pastel drawings, one of his dog and another
of a parrot, stored away in a cabinet.
I understood even then that some everyday objects of life were more important than others.
Ruskin was fascinated by carpets in his father's house, the brick walls of neighbors' homes, and designs of bedcovers, dresses,
and wallpapers.
Knowing that he spent long hours contemplating these patterns, we learn the source of his later obsession with
the late-Medieval stone ornamentation of Venice.
As for Pater, as a child he was fascinated by bright colors and choice forms;
the lips of singers in particular attracted his eye. Already, then, the basis for his love of the musical qualities of the painting of
Giorgione was established.
When it comes to becoming an aesthete, the child really is father to the man.
In Ruskin's and Pater's England, aesthetes typically found themselves by travel to Italy and France to see visual art.
Praeterita describes Ruskin's frequent, extended trips with his family, which anticipated his later independent travels as a
hardworking scholar. Pater, who came from a less prosperous family, also traveled extensively in France, Germany, and Italy.
Beckley's travels took him to New York's art world.
Like Ruskin and Pater, he grew up in a home not much given to aesthetic
contemplation. But what most dramatically separates Beckley from these two nineteenth-century English aesthetes is his frank
acknowledgment of the intimate relationship between beauty and sexual pleasure. In the introduction to his anthology
Uncontrollable Beauty he quotes yet another nineteenth-century aesthete, George Santayana, a Spanish-born American,
from his lectures at Harvard in the late 1890s:
If one wanted to produce a being with a great susceptibility to beauty, one could not invent an instrument better designed
for that object than sex.
If people didn't have to unite for the birth and rearing of each generation, they might retain their "savage independence."
But sex endows the individual with a silent and powerful instinct, which carries each of us continually toward another.
Beauty and sex-who could deny it?-are intimately connected. But when Beckley arrived in New York, the dominant ways of thinking in the American art world had turned against the tradition of Ruskin and Pater. Few younger artists of his generation thought of themselves as aesthetes. A more happily sensual personality than Ruskin or Pater, Beckley grew up with photographs. When he was nine, he first saw a woman's breast in a photographic reproduction of Titian's Sacred and Profane Love.
This confirmed my respect for art and for photography.
He learned that visual art had real power. But this photograph also raised troubling personal questions.
I was denied mother's milk because breasts were not appropriate even in the home where I was born. I survived on formula.
Why, he wondered, was it permissible to depict breasts in works of art but not use them to nurse? Four years later, he found another sexy photograph that also mattered a great deal to him.
It was published in a magazine I found on the top shelf of a bookcase in a soda fountain on 4th Street and Vine in Hamburg. There were booths just next to the magazine shelves and we-who-were-under-sixteen had to sneak the so-called pornographic books from the top shelf to the lower shelves where, hidden from view of the counter, we could peek. It was a photograph of a couple of girls hanging upside down and topless from the branch of a tree. They were smiling. It seemed so innocent and carefree, not dirty, melancholy, or wrong.
Having discovered the visual potency of sexual images, Beckley was on his way to being an artist.
I tucked the magazine appropriately enough into the front of my pants-and walked out of the store. I kept it for a week or so, looking at it in a secret tree house in the woods behind our house. This photograph with its branch and dangling girls eroticized even the branches on which my tree house was perched. Then I returned the magazine to the bookcase, as if the soda fountain were a lending library.
But two decades later he was making art that drew upon these potent adolescent experiences.
The Philadelphia Story
Born in Hamburg, Pennsylvania, in the eastern part of the state, Beckley attended college in nearby Kutztown. He then went to graduate school
at Tyler School of Art, Temple University, in Philadelphia. Although not even eighty miles from these towns, Philadelphia was a very different world.
There Beckley saw the important permanent display of Marcel Duchamp's work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
And at Tyler he had two inspiring
teachers, Italo Scanga and Steven Greene.
Italo was a portly Italian professor of sculpture and a good artist.
He had been a teacher of Bruce Nauman. Steven Green, a painter, was a former
professor at Princeton where he taught Frank Stella.
Thanks to Scanga and Greene, Beckley became close friends with a number of people who would soon be important in the art world:
the curator Marcia Tucker; the future art dealer Larry Becker; and the artists Bruce Nauman, Dan Flavin, and Sol LeWitt.
This networking
proved to have immensely productive intellectual consequences. Tucker recommended that he read Ludwig Wittgenstein's The Blue and Brown Books,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Roland Barthes, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Ferdinand de Saussure, all authors who proved to be relevant for Beckley's
art and writing. And he found a lifestyle very unlike that of puritanical Hamburg.
Our drunken discussions in Scanga's basement sauna were seminal moments of my life. There, in the basement, Italo had his students flagellate him with reeds in the manner of Calabria, his home in southern Italy. Certainly we can call these the good old days. I can say this about him now because he is dead. He died while cooking for his students in San Diego.
Beckley learned much just from being with Nauman, Flavin, and LeWitt.
For this budding aesthete, Philadelphia was indeed a long way from provincial Hamburg.
Apart from the Duchamps, Philadelphia is also home to the Liberty Bell.
The city played an important role in the American Revolutionary
War and is near the famous place where George Washington crossed the Delaware and survived to fight and win, a story known to every
American schoolchild. In Philadelphia, Beckley, who was involved with politics-the antiwar movement and the fight for racial equality-as well as art,
made Myself as Washington (1969), his first significant work.
Long before Cindy Sherman created her role-playing photographs, Beckley depicted himself as George Washington.
He was thinking of Marcel Duchamp's self-portrait as a woman, Rrose Sélavy. Like Duchamp, Beckley was interested in erotic visual humor,
but his reference to Washington had more to do with his sense of personal liberty than it did with an overt political sentiment.
I did five works with Washington: crossing the Delaware, the self-portrait disguised as Washington, signing my name with the swirls of his signature, sleeping at the George Washington Motor Lodge with a girl named Mary, and chopping down a cherry tree and having a description of the act notarized.
"The Child in the House" was the first of Pater's Imaginary Portraits, which tell of Watteau and other historical figures, both real and imaginary.
In photographing himself as Washington, Beckley engaged in this tradition of aesthetic role-playing. But he also stumbled upon themes that it has taken
him more than three decades to unpack.
When I did the piece crossing the Delaware River, on foot, dripping paint as I went, the current took me under, and I lost not only the paint but also the camera I was using to document the work. I realized then that all I had left was the story.
Much of Beckley's future art would present such stories.
My work incorporated text and photographs, but it did not need to be true in the way photographic or textual documentation needs the pretense of truth
to back it up.
It could be fiction-and so began my involvement in what was later described as narrative or story art.
Working out the implications of these ideas took time. Before Beckley could develop as an artist, he had to move on to New York.
Italo introduced me to Jack Krueger, another former student. Jack was showing with Leo Castelli, and when I finished graduate school, I moved to New York,
or at least off-shore New York. Jack let me stay on his sailboat moored on City Island.
Every night I would sleep on the boat then row into shore in the morning,
get a bus, and look for a place in Manhattan.
When he got there, he found himself in an art world that was undergoing a dramatic transition. By the late 1960s, Clement Greenberg's formalism had worn out its welcome. It was time for more challenging art-for Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, for the pop art of Andy Warhol, and for minimalist painting and sculpture. But by the time Beckley arrived, the styles of interest to the most energetic young artists had changed still again. And the center of the Manhattan art world had moved from midtown to Soho, which soon was filled with artists' studios and galleries. Very quickly Beckley was in his first show in Soho.
Just three months after I arrived in New York, in June of 1973, Rafael Ferrer, another artist I met in Philadelphia through Italo Scanga, was, with
Gordon Matta-Clark, Alan Saret, and Jeffrey Lew, organizing a show in Jeffery's space, 112 Greene Street.
It was the first show, I believe, in Soho.
Bill Bollinger and Barry Le Va were part of it as well.
He found himself immersed in an extremely stimulating art scene.
I met Gordon Matta-Clark, Yvonne Rainier, Barry La Va, Louise Bourgeois, and Susan Harris through Rafi Ferrer and Jeffrey Lew at 112 Greene Street.
Gordon and I became good friends. He was at the center of a group of artists, dancers, and writers.
He was magnanimous, with a mysterious father,
and was a very good dancer himself. For several months in late 1972 and 1973 we each had a complete floor, 50 x 100 feet, in this building at 155 Wooster.
Paula Cooper; Weston Naef, then curator of photography at the Met who went on to be curator of photography at the Getty; and Jim Seawright, an artist, owned it.
Beckley had a great entry point into the emerging worlds of conceptual art and performance art.
John Gibson organized the first show of story art early in 1973. John and I, in a kind of artist-dealer honeymoon (his words), discussed the terms "story art"
and "narrative art" on a road trip from Basel to Baden-Baden in June of 1972. The first show, called Story Art, included Bill Wegman, David Askevold,
Peter Hutchinson, John Baldessari, and myself. It took place at Gibson's gallery on West Broadway.
I had already had a solo show with John in 1973 that
included my stories Silent Ping-Pong Tables (1971), A Story for Hopscotch (1971), and Short Stories for Popsicles (1971).
Thanks to this early critical success in New York, Beckley was invited to exhibit in Europe.
Through Willoughby Sharp, who followed the shows at 112 Greene Street and published my work in three issues of Avalanche, Yvon Lambert proposed
a show in Paris.
Holly Solomon opened a sister space at 98 Greene Street, and I did a performance there of Song for a Chin-Up and Song for a Slide.
Nigel Greenwood of London and John Gibson of New York came to Holly's and soon I had shows scheduled in Milan with Yvon's wife, Francoise, and in
London with Nigel. Gibson took my Silent Ping-Pong Tables to the Basel Art Fair in 1972 and a young gallery assistant named Benjamin Buchloh saw them
and asked me to be part of the inaugural exhibition of Rudolf Zwirner in Cologne.
This was a good moment for an American to be shown in Germany, for Beckley's performances appeared alongside the most important contemporary German political paintings.
Zwirner opened the gallery with Gerhard Richter's Baader-Meinhof Gang paintings and four of my Silent Ping-Pong Tables and performances of Song for a Chin-Up and Song for a Push-Up.
Song for a Chin-Up (1971) consists of a very short score, a one-measure, three-note song for a tenor.
I did not perform the songs because I wanted to make it clear that any capable, athletic singer could perform them just like a Chopin sonata. I did not want them to instantly become documentation.
Later, in Joke about Elephants (1974) and Prepared Piano (1987), Beckley returns to these musical concerns. Joke about Elephants, with its joke,
was very much a premonition of Richard Prince, who later developed similar visual humor.
Silent Ping-Pong Tables was the converse of these performances.
Anyone could play. But when they did, it was a silent game, excerpting the pings and the pongs.
Because of the spongy, bouncy foam on the tables, no sounds were made, but the ball bounced very nicely.
My First God
Most ambitious artists must wrestle with precursors, establishing their identity in this Oedipal struggle by detaching themselves from the influence of
father figures.
For Beckley, the crucial influence, the artist whose influence needed to be overcome, was Frank Stella.
My first god, so to speak, was Frank Stella. His influence was huge. But in order for me to become an artist, I knew I would have to work my way out of him.
Stella too, in order to go on, had to work himself out of the early Frank Stella.
But the system Stella set up as a twenty-two-year-old, in an attempt to set
himself apart from the nonobjective precedent of Malevich-one decision and only one, every stripe reflecting the origins of the first-was something that both
intrigued and handcuffed me.
It may seem surprising that Beckley mentions Stella and not Rauschenberg, Johns, or Warhol, artists whose concerns seem more closely allied to his. Like Beckley and unlike Stella, they too were interested in photography. Beckley was attracted to Stella both for personal reasons and for his minimalist aesthetic.
For a time those black stripes were my prison bars. (At the same time I was up for the draft, but a hernia and flat feet helped me escape from that nightmare.)
To escape this aesthetic prison, I started cutting holes out of my canvases.
They got bigger and bigger and soon there was no more painting, or at least no more canvas.
I started painting stripes of paint in the landscape, three feet wide and about an hour long.
I was completely influenced by painters, not photographers.
I admired Stella, Marden, and Ryman. But I knew I did not want to be a second-generation minimalist.
I admired their work a great deal, but I thought, perhaps incorrectly, that it lacked content: Ryman with his all-white paintings, Stella with his black, and Marden with his grays.
Faced with this endgame, the young Beckley sought his own way out.
Photography seemed the only way out: not to paint it, but to photograph it and to get it all in one grab-the instant of the shutter opening. Each photo panel of my works was like a stripe of Stella's or a painted panel of Marden's. Two paintings of 1969 titled Dear Julia were pseudo love letters to a fictional girlfriend, 96 x 48 inches each, written with a marker on stained brown linen. It was a nod to Stella, with the lines of the words like rows of stripes, but also an early narrative and a bridge from my paintings to my photo/text works-as were the Washington pieces. After worshipping Frank Stella throughout my undergraduate days, a break in my own aesthetics occurred when Scanga introduced me to Sol LeWitt and Bruce Nauman at recurrent barbecues in his backyard in Elkins Park. Nauman, a former student of Italo's, arrived one afternoon in an old black Citroen. I had never seen a Citroen before. When he turned off the ignition the car lowered itself to the curb. When he later got in to drive away, it rose again like a flying saucer. Nauman appeared to be from outer space. He had nailed a little plaque onto a tree that said, "A Rose Has No Teeth," and LeWitt buried a white cube in the ground. I fell in love with a black girl named Adrian McCoy and read Wittgenstein's Blue and Brown Books. Overnight, a rupture occurred in my aesthetics.
The painted bushes in Beckley's Rising Square: For Sol LeWitt (1969), a photograph very much in LeWitt's style, are a subtle tribute to his friend. Thanks in part to the revelations of these backyard barbecues, Beckley was ready to move forward in New York City.
The Liberating Power of Photography
Some influential art historians argue that 1970s postmodernism depended essentially upon the invention of novel media. When the traditional painted
canvas and materials of sculpture were replaced by photography, they claim, art was free to move in radically new directions. Beckley rejects that way of thinking.
The way Caravaggio worked also depended entirely on technology: pigment grinding, linen weaving, trapping poor little sables, etc. It was just different technology.
Photographic and pseudo-photographic techniques are expedient methods of making referential imagery. That is why I used the photograph in the first place-because style,
or the way you get it down, doesn't become as self-conscious as it does with paint.
And there is no "space" issue. Space is something you simply get automatically
when you take a photograph.
Having created something brilliant, few of the conceptual artists were prepared to develop it. As Beckley has written, "art history is as susceptible to narrative structure as
fiction," which is to say that understanding an artist's development requires telling a convincing story, not unlike a successful novel. Melancholy Ending (1975) illustrates this
idea in a wonderfully literal way. Reading from left to right, we get three pictures and the story, which, set in that context, is nicely elliptical.
Who is speaking-and what
do these straightforward visual-and-verbal narratives mean? Those questions are not easy to answer.
Development, a special concern for American artists in the 1970s, had also been a problem for some painters.
Stella and Caravaggio had to radically innovate to keep going.
Conceptual artists faced a more serious problem. Insofar as their art was inherently ephemeral, how could they move forward? How might they have ongoing careers?
Beckley found a way to answer these questions. As Caravaggio's medium was oil painting, Beckley's would be photography. And so the state of this technology in the 1970s
provided some significant openings for his art.
I was using a Hasselblad and a 4 x 5 view camera. In 1973 the color process called Cibachrome came into being. It was good because you could print from color slides and
transparencies instead of negatives. It was also contrasty like advertising, and it was archival.
I made a processing drum for a 30 x 40 print but then realized the chemicals would kill me. So I found a lab that was processing it and exposed the paper in my studio,
rolled it up and boxed it, and took it to the lab on my bike.
I paid them ten bucks a foot to send it through their processor. That's how I could afford to do all the prints in the 1970s.
As much as Caravaggio or Stella, Beckley was both constrained and liberated by the available technologies. The simple problem faced by conceptual artists, and other artists who did performance or earth art, for example, and did not want not to make objects, was finding a way to create permanent records of their activities. Unless you create such documentation, your art will disappear. And in our commercial art world, the artist needs to create sellable objects. When Richard Serra made sculptures, and LeWitt created wall drawings with certificates and instructions for collectors and museums on how to reproduce them, they identified solutions to this dilemma. Beckley's insistence on the objecthood of photography provided another way to develop conceptual art.
I never had the problem making a transition from
conceptualism to making objects because I always knew the photograph was an object. A thin object!
Undermining the galley system was not a motive for my work
because my parents were from the working class. I had little material inheritance, only their love and their dignity. Though these are the most important things in life,
somehow one must go on and make a living.
This concern with the nature of photography as an artistic medium, with properties that must be acknowledged, runs though all of his art.
In Drop and Bucket (1975) the photo of the drip becomes a funnel, and in
Rabbit-Turtle (1974) the white space in front of the turtle wins the sequential race.
These pieces reflected my attitude about a photograph being an object.
Elements of Romance (1977) was inspired by a work of Sol's, The Black I (1974),
that I traded him for. I turned the shape of Sol's work on its side and made two H-like forms-symmetrical, like a minimalist. But on the left side all the photographic
content is fresh: the flower blooming, the candle lit, the wine full. In the set of photos on the right everything is fading: the rose wilted, the candle out, and
the wine empty.
So it is a dialogue with the outside edge of the photos, symmetrical in both sets, and the inside content, the right a decadence of the left.
This idea of the photograph as sculpture is still integral to my work in more recent pieces like Gothic Attempt 14 (2004). The vertical spaces between
the photographs in the triptychs echo and reflect the curving forms of the lily stems.
The deep contradiction in the practice of conceptual artists, which Beckley needed to overcome, was that although they claimed to abolish the art object, the work of art, they still needed photographs. For painters or sculptors, the photograph merely provides a convenient record of the actual work of art. But for the conceptual artist, the photograph effectively defines the work of art, in the way that a recording memorializes a musical performance.
I always maintained that the medium was the message. I felt that it was an important issue with the earth/body artists that the way their work ultimately
reached their audience was through the documentary capabilities of photography.
So it was the photograph and text that was the "thing" for me-as Shakespeare
maintains that the play is the thing in Hamlet.
For Beckley, then, it was important to think about the nature of photography, not just as a way of documenting happenings, but in order to understand its own aesthetic qualities.
With conceptual art, the photograph is the residue of the work. But that residue is what is experienced by the culture at large, hardly ever the original act or work itself-even with Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty. With conceptual art, the photograph is like a refrigerator, a means of preservation, not the art itself.
Although always a leftist, Beckley became very suspicious of the political pretensions of his artist-contemporaries. Here we come back to the implied politics of Myself as Washington.
With the George Washington series I flipped right to the medium of photography and text, to the lie that all mediums are capable of, even though little George said he could never tell a lie.
As he has recently added:
Little did I know that thirty-five or so years later I would be so suspicious of another George's lies and that sometimes those lies would upset me enormously.
Photography, the source of so much aesthetic pleasure, is, for the politician a way to present lies. All art, it might be said, is a lie, but there are truthful and false lies.
The Pleasures of Narrative
Very soon after moving to New York, Beckley was included in major exhibitions.
Two shows that included my work soon defined the conceptual movement: Art of the Mind (1969) in Oberlin, Ohio, and The Information Show (1972) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. My piece in the earlier show was simply the title, My Ears Are Clogged, in Masonite letters nailed to the wall. It was, perhaps, an incomplete surrender in the realm of the senses. I knew conceptualism had its limits. This was the start of my using language.
For politically concerned artists, conceptualism was liberating, for it promised a way to get away from making decorative, collectable objects. But as Beckley soon saw, the refusal to make attractive sensuous artifacts also was limiting.
The employment of new mediums such as photography was expansive-why paint it if you can photograph it?-but conceptualism's denial of retinal pleasure seemed close to the puritanism of my hometown from which I had just attempted to escape.
To flee the puritanical limits of conceptualism, he needed to tell stories, bringing into visual art his long-standing concern with literature. Most American artists write only reluctantly, and then mostly about themselves. Beckley, by contrast, has created an important publishing project, the books he developed and introduced for the School of Visual Arts and Allworth Press. And so, it is unsurprising that already in the 1970s he had brought language into his own visual art. Words have always mattered to him.
Through language, we can make love, tell jokes, or we can preach.
A tendency toward the latter took over in the eighties when politically
motivated artists became pious and narrow, as Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe observes in his book, Beyond Piety. Musicians, even while evangelizing,
as many rap artists do, still get off on harmony, dissonance, melody, and rhythm.
When in the early twentieth century art history was taught in slide lectures, some scholars insisted that black-and-white photographs were more truthful than color images. This strangely illogical prejudice-why should black-and-white photographs be truer?-resurfaces in October, the house journal of the leftists associated with Buchloh. October uses only black-and-white photographs. No doubt there are practical reasons for that policy, but since black-and-white photographs lack presence, the effective result is to subordinate images to the text. With color photography, by contrast,
for artists, the lure of the irrational lies, as Jacqueline Lichtenstein eloquently suggests, in color. Color is the element most conceptualists neglected. As conceptualism turned to agitprop, lacking not only color but sensuality and humor, a new disease infiltrated bodily fluids, and it was everyone's worst nightmare. Perhaps we needed a postmodern update of the anti-aesthetic as an intellectual rationale to foster a fear of pleasure.
Consider, for example, Avoidance of Ann (1972), which uses two black-and-white photographs and words to tell a complicated story about sexual adventures. Or look at Cake Story (1973), which employs color photography to tell a funny story about dining alone-about having your cake and eating it too. These are funny, sensual works of art. In the 1970s, Beckley made a lot of art using words and photographic images. Like comic strips, often his conceptual art used word-image sequences to tell stories. But he also made works with a solely visual narrative. Rising Turtles Watching the Setting Sun (1974) juxtaposes a sunset against turtles rising from white photographic space. And Rising Sun, Falling Coconut (1978), had to do with two equally sized photographs and the relation of two orbs, the sun rising from the lower photo to the upper, and the coconut falling from the upper to the lower.
And Beckley did some explicitly erotic subjects. Not surprisingly, some of his former champions were unhappy with these works of art.
Buchloh criticized works like Hot and Cold Faucets with Drain (1976) because there were two faucets and a drain; i.e., two males and a female, or to be more precise, two cocks and a cunt. And on top of that-saturated colors. Actually Ludwig Wittgenstein's book On Color inspired the idea. There he discuses the cultural meanings of colors and the language games in play.
Buchloh seems to have been nonplussed by the erotic play he found, or perhaps projected into these images. What, one wonders,
would he have made of Beckley's
Up Down (1974)?
The work was sixteen-feet across, with a flaccid penis on the left and an erect penis on the right-both given the same amount of photographic space, again an assurance that the photograph, like a penis, is a viable object. This was of course pre-Viagra and truly avant-garde.
What now seems most striking about Beckley's art from the 1970s is that its meaning remains oddly difficult to pin down. Mao Dead (1976) may initially seem a political work, but what are we to make of the narrative to the left of the New York Post headline? Beckley himself describes Mao Dead in almost formal terms.
On the left is a streetlight, on the right is a misty field of winter wheat, in rows like Frank Stella's stripe paintings but with pictorial penetrable space.
The photo on the right was meant to represent the weather conditions, referring to the weather conditions on the last page in the text.
Here he reads the narrative like a scene in a comic strip.
Of course none of the photos in these fictional works are meant to prove any condition of the text in the way that the text/narratives of documentation prove something or in the way that text and image in advertising reinforce each other.
Andy Warhol's Mao portraits present the Chinese ruler in a work of art that has a complex relationship to the enormous political painting above the north end of Tiananmen Square, at the entrance to the Forbidden City, the traditional home of China's rulers. By using a newspaper headline and telling a story that seemingly has an ambiguous relationship with the life of Mao, Beckley creates a more elliptical narrative. The subject of his work of art is less Maoism, I think, than the relationship of words and images in Manhattan conceptual art, circa 1976. Words and images have complicated relationships within European art. Seventeenth-century aestheticians spoke of the struggle between painting and poetry. How can the painter, who can represent but a single moment of an ongoing action, compete with the poet, who is able to tell the full story from start to finish? One answer to this question is that the painted image is an illusionistic representation, while the poem merely translates the story into the conventional signs of words. Painting is in this way inherently more powerful than poetry. Nowadays, of course, thanks to semiotics, we understand the rivalry of image and word differently. For Beckley, words and images always had equal power within his works of art.
I never appropriated texts from anywhere else-they were written for the works, and the works evolved from sketches that included notes on the texts and prospective
photographs, as well as the arrangements of the photos. The text developed with the piece as a whole. Neither the text nor the photographs came first.
They came together, although in some cases I would sort through already taken photographs and in others shoot a photo, like the candles, specifically for the work.
In China, where both paintings and poems were composed using ink on paper, these problems were understood very differently. There, words and images function at the same level. But certainly that is not the case in Mao Dead, which is only to say that 1970s New York is very far from Mao's China. Bus (1976) seems to come from a world closer to home, the capitalist world of Manhattan advertising.
I was thinking of different levels of meaning. Thus the different levels of the bus-a rare New York double-decker that was not a tourist bus but a regularly scheduled one that parked in front of my window on Houston Street in those days. So I had levels of meaning and levels of the bus and levels of the photographs-the way they were placed. I hired the girl from a modeling agency to do a typical model shot, again referring to advertising, a place where we find combinations of text and photo.
Looking left to right, from the bus to the text to the image of the handsome woman, we are told a story about advertising and glamour. And in The Bathroom (1977), similarly, the body fragments depicted in the photographs are assembled into a complete narrative with the aid of the text. At this period, Beckley was fascinated with assemblages of fragments. In The Kitchen (1977): The whole work was meant to be shaped like a can opener and of course was a reference to Andy, as was an earlier story, The Origin of And, with its dark romantic photo of a can of soup.
Having made these photographs about the bourgeois household, Beckley then did art about body parts.
First The Underarm (1977), now in a group called Parts of the Body (1978) that includes The Armpit, Shoulder Blade, The Nose, and The Ear, and finally Deirdre's Lip.
As earlier he took the house apart, so here he deconstructed the elements of the body. And here, again, unity was created or restored by adding a text to the sequence of photographs. Deirdre's Lip (1978) was inspired by a red English phone booth (are they extinct now?) and was written around Christmas when I was staying with my first wife in St Leonard's on Sea near Hastings. At first I hired a model from the Wilhelmina modeling agency for the lip photo. But ironically the model had a hair lip, and Deirdre, my wife, was a little suspicious of my motives. So to resolve the problems I asked Deirdre to pose for the close-up lip shot. Thus, Deirdre's Lip was one of my best pieces-thanks to jealousy and my attraction to most anything English.
As he explains, this narrative work of art has to do with the breaths of air representing the phonemes and the line of words in the text, the line of words-broken-in her phone conversation, and the line of teeth, and the line of train cars, which we assume would be beneath the smoke, and the continuity of the smoke and "twilight," "forget," and "darling."
It is difficult, still, to connect the words to these images. As in The Underarm and Shoulder Blade, body parts are juxtaposed to words and landscapes, as if our identity as persons was linked to these verbal and visual settings. And, once again, we see the ongoing power of his erotic fascinations.
Speaking of skirts: When I was in fifth grade we would pay this kid Jackie Seltzer to pull up girls' skirts so we could see them. We paid him not in cash but in crayons-the black crayon being the most valuable. This eroticized the act of making art for me to this day, although I use cameras instead of crayons.
Notwithstanding his everyday concern with progressive politics, which has never faltered, Beckley became skeptical about the claims of
art-world leftists.
In some important ways, Beckley's concerns are closer to Jeff Koons than to most of the conceptual artists he started showing with around 1973.
My dear friend Jeff Koons, who I met at the Museum of Modern Art in 1979 when I was having a Projects show there, has been very clever and humorous
about commenting on the art market, capitalism, etc.-and in assuaging his collectors to buy what are essentially enlarged tchotchkes: things you might
find in a middle-class German home, something they paid a few precious euros for. Jeff, of course, made tchotchkes for the rich: bigger and much more
expensive, in proportion to an upper-class income-a great comment on consumer culture.
Jeff owns The Underarm and Shoulder Blade, and I've thought about what it was he liked in my early work. It's possible that in the hard-core puritanical
atmosphere of conceptual art we both escaped from, he felt close to the way I used photographs and texts in an attempt to undermine advertising by
employing its iconography. Because his work also spins off media culture and throws ironies back in its face. In 1991, we were both in a show at the
Whitney called Art and Media Culture.
I showed Deirdre's Lip and he showed that girl in a tub.
The Death of Love
The late 1970s were for Beckley a time of the death of friends, a relationship, and an aesthetic.
Gordon Matta-Clark and I had some great parties. These were not elegant parties like Truman Capote's-not black and white; we were too scruffy.
And people, because of the raw energy of that time, were fucking in every corner of the room.
One afternoon in the summer of 1976, Gordon's identical twin brother-he was a painter-threw himself out the window on Houston Street just as
Gordon was coming home from the Grand Union.
The window was just above mine and I remember seeing a whoosh.
He split in half on the sidewalk right in front of Gordon. Things were never the
same after that. It is my theory that because they were identical twins, Gordon was deeply and physically affected by the incident.
Two years later Gordon died of cancer.
His death coincided with the death of an aesthetic. It was the end, really, of what had become
known as conceptualism (the idealistic sort). For better or worse, art became much more market oriented, and in 1980 I applied for an
American Express card.
I also, after living together for four years, married my first wife, Deirdre, in 1980.
A year later we were divorced.
The turn to the eighties signaled a loss of many of the things I believed in and loved. Perhaps Frank (1987), a memorial to those deaths,
got me out of it. Frank was an homage to Frank O'Hara, someone I never met, but who I loved through his poetry. I drove out to that
cemetery in The Springs-the one where Pollock, Reinhardt, and Lee Krazner are buried-and I photographed a dried rose on his gravestone.
I put it in a large frame next to some wallpaper of white roses from the forties. I built a kind of air-conditioning duct, a vent for the whole thing,
and propped that up with a stack of New York Times-all from the day I finished the work.
I showed it at Tony Shafrazi in 1987 and with Hans Mayer
in Dusseldorf along with some other three-dimensional photographic work.
The Return of Beauty
In the 1990s, beauty returned, which is to say that Dave Hickey, Arthur Danto, and some other influential critics wrote about the power of beauty.
Many of these essays were republished in Beckley's influential anthology, co-edited with David Shapiro, Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics (1998).
I knew it was unfashionable in the art world to discuss beauty-and that made it all the more interesting to me. Because of what I was saying in my lectures on aesthetics, Roberto Portillo, a graduate student from Mexico, brought Hickey's first book, Enter the Dragon, to class. I also know that over the course of my life I had made several aesthetic decisions with respect to love, and if they were so important, why then shouldn't art have something to do with beauty as well? I was attracted to Ruskin because he was so eccentric and perverse, but also because aesthetics and political-social issues concerned him so much. Social issues did not negate aesthetic issues and vice versa. But I was also attracted to him because he was such a beautiful writer. Turner said that Ruskin was the only writer whose writings about the paintings were often more beautiful than the paintings. Proust also loved the style of his writing, and one can see that Proust probably learned a lot from Ruskin's Praeterita-his final three-volume memoir-as a kind of "in search of lost time."
The sublime, which in the late eighteenth century was often contrasted with beauty, had been discussed by some abstract expressionists but then dropped out of the art world vocabulary. And so, when in 2001 Beckley edited Sticky Sublime, he reintroduced another way of thinking that proved productive for contemporary visual artists.
Tom McEvilley said that my generation of conceptually based artists was out to save the world from the sublime-from nothingness and from the endgame
of abstract expressionism and totally flat minimalist painting. He is right, because through unselfconscious photographic space we regained space.
Still, the sublime-and the fear of nothingness-attracted me, but I did not know then to call it the sublime.
I didn't understand the historical reference to the sublime as I do now, but certainly my works were going for the sublime rather than for beauty.
It is just that no one was talking about either beauty or the sublime in 1974.
I am sure that act of Gordon's brother was not a reference to Yves Klein staging the building dive, but one can inevitably associate the two.
After all, his father was a brilliant surrealist.
"Sublime" was a key word for Klein but anathema to the vocabulary of conceptual, minimal, and pop art.
The Sublime Power of Flowers
Around 2000, Beckley's situation changed dramatically. Having found his great subject, he began to create a body of magnificent photographs,
focusing in an unprecedented way on this theme and its many variations.
For thirty years, Beckley had made conceptual art using multiple photographs, pushing his imagery toward advertising images and incorporating
texts he wrote that subverted the images.
Then, in fall 2000, he saw a vase of small, long-stemmed calla lilies outside a flower shop near his studio.
He started photographing flower stems.
Flowers are frail, but Beckley's photographed stalks appear strong. These very-in-focus images make no attempt to disguise that they are real
images-you see the textures of the stems against neutral backgrounds. And yet, they appear curiously unlike the familiar flowers we see upon dining tables.
The two parts of Beckley's working life, writing words and making photographic images, had for a long time existed effectively in isolation.
But now these components came together in his photographs of flowers.
In the Golden Age of Holland, lavish domestic objects-precious silver, Chinese plates, and expensive flowers-were a common subject for painters.
Later, other still life artists, Chardin and van Gogh for example, preferred ordinary, even banal things. Right now, Beckley is doing large vertical-format
pictures of flower stalks seen close up and set against monochromatic backgrounds. His elegant compositions, quite unlike any earlier still lifes,
are also reminiscent of another genre of Dutch painting-portraits. These very large photographs are as tall as Michael Jordan, and with their slim
elegance, Beckley's flowers have a curious resemblance to Kate Moss. As Thomas McEvilley has observed, they look like pictures of sculptures.
The story of how Beckley found this subject is very personal.
Everything does lead up to the flowers. Their development corresponds to the birth of my second son, Liam, who is now five. Actually, I was walking my first son, Tristan, to school one day, pushing Liam in the stroller. I dropped off Tristan at the door of the school and pushed the stroller around the corner past a little outdoor garden and flower shop. A slim, clear glass vase with fading white calla lilies caught the early morning sunlight. Their stems curved gently. I remembered the violet stem I photographed some quarter century before.
Like Caravaggio, who found in Naples a genial world, Beckley-who has exhibited often in that city-discovered in these lilies a congenial theme. Not surprisingly, the discovery of this great motif allowed him to become extremely productive. Beckley here was influenced by Barnett Newman, whose "zips" are echoed by these vertically rising stems. The artist himself associates these photographs with Eastern ideograms. There is no literal text-or language as image-in the works any longer, but the images allude to language of an Eastern sort, of a language in formation, as language first evolved from image.
Who would have thought Barnett Newman, before Stella, an artist of an earlier generation, would turn out to be the key?
It was an homage to Newman and an allusion to Who's Afraid of Red Yellow and Blue. When I returned to the stems in 2000, I called the first series Stations and did fourteen of them.
Newman, too, was very involved with the sublime. But where he painted abstract vertical "zips," Beckley photographed real flowers.
Soon I did a series called Fourteen Stations after the series by Barnett Newman and showed this work at Hans Mayer, who has always been the most important person in my career, in Berlin on August 28, 2001. And then at Tony Shafrazi in Soho on September 14, 2001.
Here, as often happens, the sublime terrors of politics intervened into art-world life.
On September 11, I was getting ready for the shipment of photographs to come from the lab on Fifty-second Street to the gallery on
Wooster Street just below Houston.
I couldn't wait. I knew it would be my best show in the U.S. A few days before, I had come back from Berlin,
where the show with Hans had been my best in Europe.
I had just taken Tristan to school, pushing Liam in the stroller. After we dropped off Tristan,
we stopped at a little coffee shop on Barrow Street for some milk and coffee. When we came out, everyone was looking at the sky.
We watched the whole thing happen at the corner of Prince Street and West Broadway-a clear view of the burning towers and their fall.
(I had my video camera with me and photographed much of it and haven't looked at it since.)
Later, despite all the blockades between Fifty-second Street and Soho, I managed to get the work down to Soho, and Tony, George,
and I hung the show amidst the dense smog of burning buildings and burning bodies.
We had a little reception at Barolo with Tony and his director,
Hiroko Onoda; my wife, Laurie; Tristan; Liam, then six months old; Tom McEvilley; and those other friends who managed to get admission into Soho.
We were the only table at the restaurant.
It was the most surreal evening of my life.
The art world had moved a long distance from 1960s politics, in ways that no one could have predicted. Still lifes, portraits, abstract paintings, ideograms: Beckley's very subtle photographs condense into relatively simple images a great deal of both his history and the story of American art over the past thirty years.
I have done more works in the four years since that catastrophe in September than I did in my lifetime previously, even then working constantly.
Maybe it's because the subject of much of this recent work is stems of lilies, and lilies are redemptive.
And I feel a need to be redeemed.
Maybe because seeing those people flinging themselves out of the towers-what a decision to make, burn or jump-I realized the cliché that life is short.
And maybe it is because seeing Liam there in a stroller on Prince and West Broadway and knowing that Tristan was somewhere still in school on the lower
West Side, I was reminded that in a decade or so I would have to help with their college tuition.
But let's not forget that lilies and poppies are also some of the sexiest flowers on earth, and well, there is nothing wrong with getting your Eros,
while from some indefinite sin, you get your redemption. Having your cake and eating it too.
Thus it should be apparent that the ways of thinking behind Beckley's lavishly beautiful photographs of flowers were implicit, already, in his early
conceptual works of art.
But here we return to the writings of Ruskin and Pater, who agreed that art is transcendental, and to "The Child in the House."
From the time I found those drawings by my father, I have always known that art transcends, and anyone who argues otherwise faces this paradox:
When you argue eloquently-or inelegantly for that matter-that art is not transcendental, you are arguing using words. Words by their very nature
transcend the guttural sounds of the voice box connected to the palate and lips that produce them.
(The tip of the tongue taking three steps down the palate to tap on the teeth, for example.) So do the erratic black-on-white squiggles that
represent these sounds on the printed page, transcend that printed page. They do this even if they are badly written. But if they are written well, like the
words of Proust, Nabokov, Dickinson, or Stevens, then the reader gets lost in the meaning that somehow evolves from those erratic black squiggles,
and transcends that page. So in arguing against transcendence you are using the very objects-words-that are a human's means of transcendence.
Each of my series, Gothic Attempts, Old Warriors, Heroin Trade in Afghanistan, and so on, are attempts at an alphabet, but an ur-alphabet.
It is an alphabet as a child sees it, like my son, Liam, now five years old.
It is an alphabet where he knows from Doctor Seuss that "foot" begins
with f and "feet" begins with f and that "all alone" could possibly end with n but doesn't.
For him, all the sounds in the middle are still up for grabs,
as yet unconsigned.
It is somewhere in the space of this ambiguity that I would like to make my house, where I would like to live.
Consequent ululations are numerous.