ft ground

When I finally arrive at UT I wander around to try to find Leach’s studio. From the foyer I see the glow of narcotic incandescent light washing into a long ambulatory. Only a gallery would spill that. It is silent in the after-hours. I have the sensation and trepidation of walking through a funeral parlor to a wake and seeing the pink saturnine light bathing the wallpaper from a side portal in the middle of the hallway and searching for an excuse to bypass it, to go spend time with mourners in the hallway, or to walk past without indulging in a glimpse into the room. A glimpse of the body casts moving, living memories in the crushed petals of a dry mauve flower, and dust. It introduces a lifeless dummy into their name’s evocation. Recalling their smile a brittle stitch-snapping leer arises; recalling an embrace I feel cold and satin. I had spent almost a solid eighteen months straight with Perry and then only saw him once for eight to ten hours since. I didn’t want to turn him into paper.

Even though I had seen him more recently, the way he haunts me is through the last time I saw him in Los Angeles. It maybe was mid-February, one month after my studies wrapped up. We had made plans to have lunch together. I met him at his house in Silver Lake. Instead of work my days were measured by the preindustrial drift of the sun. The shocking liberation of the days created such a monumentally sloppy month that seeing him again already felt like the seamless subduction of lapses in long friendships. We went to lunch at Fred 62 then back to his house to talk. Amy returned home and joined us in winter daylight and the white afternoon dimmed quickly. We lingered quite a while into the evening. Perry ran to Trader Joe’s and we cooked dinner and continued talking. In the first day of Perry’s studio he shared a truth with us that I remember in intent but not in phrasing. “As much as I will dedicate my time to you and your work, nothing will ever be as important to me as my own work.” This made faint sense to me until this night that I was able to engage Perry outside of our professional relationship. As I watched, somewhat separate, as though through the storefront at Fred 62 or the windows of the Kulpers’ house, his wasn’t a life passing or the drift of a pawn on capitalism, this too was an effort, a life project. Our free existence in this evening, merely living, was ‘The Work.’ I learned that there was work and ‘The Work.’ In the mind of a subscriber to the project of life, the wash of the senses was not a loss but a less filed amalgam, an impressionistic paste. ‘The Work’ was the critically detached, but retained, experience of life. The ongoing nature of the transformation of his life into his work caused the work to remain in flux by the moment. It seemed difficult to talk about, dumbed by an infinite buzz of voices like a tree in sun and breeze. His work drew people because it was alive as he lived. The paralyzing horror at finishing a piece or suite is overarching because it is the euthanasia of a string of memories. The unfiled sheet of mylar is the fulfillment of others’ idle wishes “that this beautiful day could last forever.” Coming from an academic setting where talking about one’s work was its realization, Perry’s indulgence in listening and the experiential vocality of his work characterized him more as a builder, a stoic practitioner, than an academic showman. Especially in the growing tendency of global culture to allow the unfiltered document of an experience to stand as an artifact, the physical transformation of a working life into something other than the original experience was an invitation more than the closed door of pastiche or capitalistic lifestyle baiting that comprised much of the rest of the decade’s work. Perry’s work became part of my life rather than a recognition that a life was merely occurring parallel to mine.

Of all that half-day’s conversation only the admonition that he left me with lingers, again in intent rather than phrasing. “Stay with your work, don’t let anything get in the way of it, there will be a lot of people and forces that see it as their right to change you or distract you, but you have to stay with it.” I thought, “of course I will, what could stop me on this journey?” But in retrospect, as I cast my eyes into the courtyard, I don’t see it as a call to take the vows, to eschew everything that didn’t express my thoughts directly in graphite on mylar, but a call never to relent in transforming all of those experiences into The Work. The things that get in the way should be digested; the things that feel warm on my neck should be admitted into the skein. Do not escape; indulge. It has been a rather crippling struggle. But when I sneak past the glass-walled gallery on to the stairs with an a nessuna cosa glimpse of drawings ranked, arranged, filed, their mineral eyes beginning to glisten, Perry’s admonition means something slightly different, “I am doing exactly what I want to be doing.”

My loafers are falling apart. Sprawled alone with long summer dusk still high and slow through the trees beyond the Kimbell with my back against a bench and my legs flat stretched out across the floor toward the burbling pool I fingered pits in the travertine. I can’t address giants when I am right up against them. The built-in delay to ratifying my experiences is the most troubling part of my tendency to discursion. As satisfying as its blossoms are, fertile enough to perpetuate themselves, dusting forgotten pollen on the longing stigmas of each moment’s flowers, discursive thought is so mired in the tedious process of reflection that the sacrament of mass with an experience comes only through the layered epiklesis of simmering old images or concerns, like layers of immaculately marked onionskin forming a still approximate figure when pressed flat to a sunlit window. The full exposure takes more time than the situation itself occupies so does not quite lend itself to indulgence in the immediate tingling satisfaction of momentary experience. Hedonism this isn’t.

I stumble over those gauzy figures much later as their tortuous profiles overgrow the simple filing system for the rest of my brain’s detritus. Iridescent grackles fluttered and splashed on the far end of the pool then reared up, whistling. I had been traveling in Texas for days. The Kimbell was a giant enough for me to talk back to its thunder in another day or week. (more…)

I recall spending an inordinate amount of time below the horizon in a concrete trench. Even if the proportion of time I recall it occupying is flawed it remains a delightful prompt and a sign-off PK uses a great deal in his ‘e-flares’ to me “from below the horizon.” Like most plains cities (except the terrifyingly blind approach to Chicago from the west) Fort Worth rises up slowly, almost endlessly, from the south. A railroad could make the ascent across the rising peel of its roofscape. It rises so gently that I was dizzied by the immediacy of its presence like the chance palpation of some tumorous mass. “Where did that come from?” It might seem more likely that a city like Pittsburgh erupting out of the Fort Pitt Tunnel nothing would promote the effect more. However the lull of the slow creep towards something improbably contradictory to the surrounding milieu (either of the story (like the drive)) or of the cultural context (a piece of disruptive art that functions by virtue of its exploitation of convention (banality, Koons)) is more unsettling (effective?) to me. I prefer transitions and unapparent distinctions to sore thumbs. I prefer to generate my own stopping points over landmarks and guided tours. I drove straight to the Modern. My head was almost so clear that I didn’t know where I was, where I had just been, or what my hopes were with an empty sky that would be too easy to forget. (more…)

When the only remaining light in the sky seems to be thrown back over the horizon like the strangely peaceful hair of a drowned woman the light in the windows of the studios stacked in the north wall of the courtyard arises. I’ve had an affinity for the archetype of the glowing window at dusk since I worked a construction project on a farm in central Georgia in my early twenties. Their warmth and their ability to telegraph a completely identifiable spatial tone I felt was strong enough to humor the guts like a pull of brandy from a real St. Bernard as I died across the snow from a Swiss chalet and its twinkling purr. Of course that transcendent interior space of milkglass lamps, wood and upholstery settees, and beapron’d grandmothers pulling hot olive boules from the oven to nibble with some Glühwein is a statistically improbable confluence. It is the obstruction of the sheer curtain that makes this illusory phenomenon possible. It both allows the light to escape and protects the reality of the situation. The process of uniformly distributing light across the fabric surface turns the window solid, an object that distinguishes itself from the night air and from the building being consumed by shade. It is alone and it speaks. The windows of the architecture studios weren’t doing quite that. They lacked the sheer curtains and a worm’s eye view of the rooms could be seen through them, mostly ceiling. They still transmitted a uniform glow from bouncing throughout the large white rooms that seemed to hit the glass and stop there, halted by the not-yet-complete darkness of the courtyard. (more…)

Even more difficulty in focusing came from the call of the owls from either side of the courtyard. I wanted so much to see one of them coast by. I thought back to my mother and I at the Merritt Square Mall in the parking lot at midmorning, both of us looking at a decoy owl on the coping thirty feet up for ten minutes tricking ourselves into seeing it turn its head or ruffle its feathers. Things out of place in the sad order of our world have the power to become far more fertile grounds for memory (or exaggeration) than their contextual counterparts. I think this is maybe one of PK’s draws on surrealism. These things set off chain reactions of assumptions that can quiver the foundations we rely on in other systems or entities. I recall reading about a coyote wandering into a Quizno’s in Chicago and nosing its way to a cooler full of drinks. (more…)

Also, as my life continues on, day after day like the grey suit of the genius, the sameness builds up in columns of like items where an occurrence that was long ago a ‘one-off’ is now in a stack of familiars that are warmed by their approaching a constant ‘room temperature’ and ooze together into a single item. That unforgettable visit to the Marquis as a youth, wandering alone to Peachtree Center mall to look at Stephen King books in B. Dalton is now, although still distinct as a base, the beginning of a long dive through what now must be hundreds of visits, no one separable from the others. Conversations, even those with friends or those with stimulating content become grouped together. As Merrill spoke on the terrace over Congress at the Stephen Austin one night I sadly told myself that I would forget every word she said. Unfortunately it is not as easy as flipping the switch to the recording mind. That mind has contextual controls. I don’t think conversations can be picked up this way unless their grain is somehow concurrent with the material of the experience (either reflecting it or shaping it, more likely the latter, see the numerous ‘getting dumped by your fiancé in the Zocalo ruminations’). Conversations are more of a way of marking time. They are necessarily fleeting. They don’t create space. (more…)

Leach and I left the gallery behind and it was still dusk. Spring dusks are Arctic. Instead of the sun racing (visually) as it gets closer and closer to the horizon, like it does over the ocean or the desert, it seems to slow asymptotically and sometimes almost move backwards. It felt brighter now than when I had first come into the CoA. It was a brightness that filled the air like a mold seeking the detail and texture of the scabby crust of the world about us. Leach and I moved through it. It was the kind of inescapable light captured beneath a rainless thunderstorm with the omnipresence of effect that throbs in a room lit with incandescent lights after just leaving a room solely lit by fluorescents. But the sky was cloudless, endless, and blue even seen out of the viscous, icteric streetscape. With the city in shade but brilliant, the ascian (to misuse an adjective describing the shadowlessness of equatorial noon) clarity made immediate all of our surroundings. (more…)

Leach and I regrouped towards the front of the gallery near the landscape selection. More than the field drawings these went flat behind the glass, and more than those other orthographic works, these pushed my stationpoint beyond the room, to the convergence of rays, and somewhat flat on the wall, shed a mysterious frontier at the glass by reaching out to other landscape or texture works (like?). I recall that these works were done as daily reflections or meditations on themes over periods of time. The format remained the same as the media and the objectives migrated. Perry would, at points during the school year, gingerly lay these wafting leaves across the concrete floor of the long gallery at SCIArc’s Marina Del Rey outpost. (more…)

It was upon stepping away to about six or seven feet from the drawing that both its voice and intent, or is invocation, became something concrete, or something approaching concrete by letting its content initiate something outside of its boundaries, less focused on its own making and its sense of hermetic fascination. The drawings coalesced into a painterly organization of form, not organized in a way that would initially bespeak productivity (in that they were arranged this way to produce something through their use), but if I can recall in a detached enough fashion, seemed to be messes in conflict or in contrast to, or idling gaseously over, a more Cartesian absolute, which in turn was corrupted by the mess or sometimes by a virus of its own, as if even the dependability of reference points that could transpose this mess into our world through analogy of scale or measure was at risk. Why? (more…)

It was silent in a hush that can only come in single rooms which you cannot see the whole of from any vantage point. The lights sang like insects. It recharged that funereal overtone that had arisen when I had first scurried past in the hallway. The room was populated with freestanding white walls like the Standing Stones, in ranks like the Terra Cotta Army in Xi’an just unearthed. (more…)