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First of all, what name to call the place where my studio was after October 1959? In the early days, we called it Green Gates. Not only the gates to the street, but the many wooden balustrades on the terraces, the rejas over the windows on the ground and top floors, and all the wood on all the windows had been painted green. Yes, it was Green Gates; but the first thing I did when we moved in was to paint everything that was green cobalt blue--except for the garage, the balustrade along the driveway, the gates to the driveway, and the gate to the sidewalk at the lower corner of the property. But we liked the name of Green Gates and called it that… although because to have a house with a name seemed so pretentious, the name we used in public was the street name “Monte Vista” to distinguish it from Jean’s family’s place on Cervantes Boulevard in San Francisco which has always been “Cervantes.” My studio was in the room over the garage. Though a number of the larger old houses in our neighborhood had such rooms over the garage—I guess for servants—ours did not have a bath but only a sink. The local story was that the prior owner, Mr. Arnold, had been the building superintendent for the Bank of America on Polk Street in San Francisco, had retired just before the 1929 crash, had bought the place from the first owner (the man who had remodeled it from an early 1900’s Craftsman style with redwood shingles into an early 1920’s style Italian villa), and had used the room over the garage as a shop for maintaining the place. He had also taken in four male students from Berkeley to do the work, and gave each one a trip—which he accompanied—to Europe on graduation. After each student graduated, he was replaced by another. This system seems to have continued from the late 1920’s until Mr. Arnold died in 1959. We met the last one when we went to the open house when Green Gates was placed on the market. The room over the garage is about 13 feet wide by about 18 feet long. It has a 14 foot peaked ceiling with the rafters showing (if it were in a house they’d call it a “cathedral ceiling.”) However, the peak of the roof comes down so low that the side walls (of which one is all windows) are only a little over five feet high with the result that there is little room to hang work in progress. There are windows at the street end, windows on both sides, and a more or less French (some of the panes have been replaced with plywood painted green) door at the garden end. The room is hardly 300 square feet, but secluded—and so no children bursting in—and quiet except for the noise of cars… and the birds twittering and the dogs barking. Quiet, isolated at the end of a forest path in an estate designed in the early 1920’s according to the late 19th C. aesthetic of 16th C. Italian villas and gardens… that’s where I began to work in November of 1959, continuing the concerns of the work from Harrison Street —the transformation of the blood flower— in this new milieu.
Change is not instant; Rome was not built in a day and a lifetime of work takes a lifetime to make. The first things at Green Gates looked just like the last things on Harrison Street, perhaps even darker and more crusted because it soon enough was winter (we had moved in late October 1959)—so the cocks were buried in dark winter earth and there might be a mandala I had made up (before the inevitable clichéing of mandalas in the later 60’s) in faint silvery pencil drawn in the blackness that covered them—the work was living now in the world of the aesthete instead of the world of the pimp, but my problems were the same. To think about the early Green Gates work now more than forty years after I made it, that invisible except in a certain light mandala of circles and triangles marked faint in the soft but now hard blue-brown-black crust that buried the cock-sign… yes, the work of salvation. I had found and purchased at Fields book store on Polk Street in San Francisco—same place I got the idea for the “Roman Coins,”—a book, Spirit and Nature, Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, (Pantheon, New York, 1954), and in it found the words “eschatology” and “soteriology”—the first being the theological term for studying about the end of the world and the second for studying about salvation, just as “entomology” is the scientific term for studying about bugs. I had been thinking a lot about eschatology ever since the College Avenue days and my painting in homage to the early Kandinsky—like Franz Marc thought the Apocalypse could cure the sickness of Europe (his projections induced by his father), I had thought I guess that eschatology could cure my sickness of lust projected out upon the world. As for salvation, I had somehow in the Harrison Street years stopped calling in my work for Apocalypse to save the world, and had set out only to save my self… and several of those dark crusted buried cocks I called “Soteriological Fragment” as the objects of my salvation. And on several others (perhaps here Green Gates had begun to have an effect) I had written, “None but the aesthete, with his frequent and perfect come”—the sheer orgasm of the aesthetic experience, the event of beauty as salvation. So, the issues of sex boiled as ever—the alchemist’s work always aches to continue—but subtly, slowly the issues of sex began to change and so their imagery changed also. And other images and other concerns—the aesthetic as the sense of beauty (whatever that is) began to become ever more powerful. Thus, as I had earlier added the eschatological (as the break from everyday life into the eternal) to sex, and had begun in the late days on Harrison Street to add the soteriological as the personal achievement of that eschatological break, I now began to add to sex the aesthetic as the experience of the beauty of world—but in a nostalgic past Several books were key elements in my developing aesthetic life. The first was Majorcan Houses and Gardens, a large 1920’s picture book for architects to show to clients for suggestions for their homes and gardens. We bought it just before we moved into Green Gates, and kept it on a table in the library as a kind of talisman. (At our housewarming, someone set a champagne glass on the red cloth cover. The ring is still there.) I found the next two books a year later at my favorite Holmes Used Book Store. They were a two volume set published for the same purpose as the Majorcan, for architects to get ideas and to show to clients. These two came from the office of John Galen Howard, the 1920’s-30’s architect and planner of the UC Berkeley Campus (whose son Robert Howard was the “Old Master” of modern sculpture in the 1930’s-50’s Bay Area and a friend of young artists—even me, he had bought several things from my 6 Gallery shows). Anyway, from John Galen Howard’s estate had come two volumes of Italian Villas and Farm Houses, published at the beginning of World War I—after which such an aesthetic forever was derailed by the Bauhaus and French Moderne (Art Deco) Then there was an object that mattered to me, a majolica (but not like the bright shiny wriggly stuff you usually see) vase. I bought it in an art gallery in Sausalito during the summer of 1960, our first summer at Green Gates. It was (is, I still have it) about 18 inches high, warm earth tones with flower patterns sgraffitoed into the clay. I thought it was enormously beautiful, as much a talisman for Green Gates as the books of Majorcan and Italian villas and gardens, because this was a real and beautiful object from one of those places. And one last thing from the late 19th C. Mediterranean world that came into my aesthetic world in the early days at Green Gates: Vernon Lee’s Studies in the Eighteenth Century in Italy. Vernon Lee, as Violet Paget, had been John Singer Sargent’s childhood friend in Italy where both were expatriate children. She had also been in later years a friend of Henry James although they had a falling out over James’s espousal of Edith Wharton. I don’t know how I came upon Vernon Lee’s work at the Holmes Used Book Store, but it made a strong impression on me, including the use of Bosca Parrasio—the name an 18th Century Florentine academy of scholars, poets and aesthetes called their meeting place—as the theme words in a collage that was in its way a description of Green Gates and my art life in our first years there. Two of Vernon Lee’s later books, The Spirit of Rome and The Enchanted Woods, had a profound effect on my later writing, that there could be prose images of powerful aesthetic experiences, and that those images could be enough.
And there were very soon after the books, three portfolios that fed me. I found the first two by accident. In those early 1960’s days, the library shelves at the Art Institute had places along the bottom for extra large books and portfolios of the kind that no one looked at anymore. One day looking for nothing I looked in those lower places—they were like remainder bins in a used book store. There was a two volume portfolio, in very elaborate but dusty worn cloth binding with ribbon ties, in French, of Mussulman Ceramique. Seventy-five to a hundred color plates of the very finest and most expensive late 1920’s color printing (collotypes). It had been a special purchase for the library at about the time it had been published and the library opened. No one had looked at it for years. I had been attuned to Muslim ceramics during my time at the Oakland Art Museum when I had cataloged the Rietz collection of Iranian wares, and the work in these two portfolios was breathtaking. I looked for other old portfolios, and found a smaller one of primarily Turkish work—the portfolio marked inside as “Purchased by Mr. Macky (then Director of the California School of Fine Arts) or was it Lee Randolph (then Executive Director of the San Francisco Art Association), when the 1927 building of SFAI was being first opened and equipped with what they then thought was beautiful and needed. These three portfolios had survived Cubism, Social Realism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and our then just dying local craze, Bay Area Figurative, at least five revolutions in the aesthetic values of the art world, and by then at least three near bankruptcies of the institution. Yes, I thought, beauty triumphs—especially if it’s not too prominent. Forget it in a back room where the next wave won’t destroy it in order itself to live. I went looking in the SFAI card catalog for Iran and found the Arthur Upham Pope late 1930’s Survey of Persian Art, a massive five volumes of everything from rugs to mosques to bridges to metal work to paintings to manuscripts to ceramics… plates and iconography. That work became part of my “givens,” just like for the geometer, certain things are given in advance, for me the it was the domes of Isfahan, the prehistoric wares of Susa and the 12th Century mina’i wares of Kashan, the lost garden carpet of Ctesiphon (“fragments for sale in the bazaars of Baghdad for a century after the fall of the Sassanids to the Muslims”), and the manuscripts of Shah Tahmasp would become permanent foundations. There was one more book—and, sure, lots of others, but this is the list of those that mattered most—Henri Corbin’s Avicenna and the Visionary Recital (Pantheon, New York, 1960), also purchased at Fields in San Francisco. I picked it up because of my attraction for Iranian ceramics and the tiled domes of mosques. I did not understand very much of it intellectually, but the poetry of the prose and the imagery of its metaphysics became as permanent for me as the Iranian ceramics and the rugs… soon enough beginning to appear (how could anyone recognize it?) in the 9 x 12 inch collages made in the early years at Green Gates, then later and more directly in the Asia pastels of 1972-3, and then in the watercolors for and text of A Travel Book (Arion Press, 1977), and one more time in My Place is the Placeless, my trace is the Traceless… a fantasia adapted from sources in Islamic mysticism (Green Gates Press, 1990).
* So, the impulse to my work in the early years at Green Gates:
The resources of my work in those years:
The outcome of my work in those years:
During the late summer of 2002, and in preparation for the selection of work for my 2003 Retrospective at the Oakland Museum, I brought all of the surviving 9 x 12 collages together in my Oakland studio, organized and reviewed them, and selected a few to photograph as keys to all the rest. When I had finished, I had 600 digital photographs out of perhaps 3000 drawings and collages from the early 1950’s to the early 1960’s. However, it is the nature of that old and very oxidized paper with pale pencil lines to photograph very badly. For that reason, I have chosen only a few to include here as emblematic of the rest of them. * Examples of my work in the years 1960-61:
*
The Bosca Parrasio
And just below,
separated by a line but in the same box:
*
*
*
From “Mass of Aesthetic Material from Green Gates Basement (part one) 1960”
And when I counted the paintings in the "Mass of Aesthetic Material" folder, there were 21, and when I looked at the marks on each one, each one was marked once or many times with the sign of my cock and my come. (click the image for selections from the series) *
From the folder of “Autumn Stuff, Majolica, Goodbye Betty May, and Some Dark Summer Stuff, 1960”
And the mark of my cock was there. *
*
*
*
And fully, without Memorial.
With your father, too. You’re on down the drain LUXAETERNA And then some words
falling out of the central darkness… *
And if you ever wanted to know what my work was (is) about, it’s right there in this folder… The phallic, the aesthetic, and the lost.
First, the phallic—that first collage in the folder: with the sign of my cock marked across the gold of heaven, on its way from earth to sky and God. Second, the aesthetic—“Day after day, the old slow closing up of the world (ivory, incandescent) there on the other side of the horizon—dim now and dark and dull with rose.” And the majolica—the urn I had just bought from an art shop in Sausalito and that was broken in the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989—was also the powerful sign, as an object fully expressive of Green Gates, the powerful sign of the aesthetic. Third, the loss— And what is my work about?—that I can’t stand (in the deepest, deepest sense) that kind of loss. Thinking of Betty Mae then in 1960 (and it must have been sometime in the very early 1950’s that Betty Mae’s father had visited Jean’s family when I was there) and thinking now of why Betty Mae came up in a 1960 collage, it is clear that my work comes from fear that I too will be lost as she was. She is now nothing but a name known to no one but me, all the others are dead and their memories gone. And she was only a name and not a person to me, a name as a symbol of a horror I could not bear. The horror of loss I
cannot bear-- The loss of the phallic: all the life forever roiling in my crotch and rolling up my body, the eros that has driven me since I was a child… The loss of all that the heart holds—and that is what Betty Mae meant (and also my mother, when I made a collage that year about Leona and it conflated in my mind with the Betty Mae collage)—the loss of all that the heart holds is the loss of everything. Yes, I cannot stand that kind of loss. Yet, it is inevitable and absolute for all people and all things. Vincent Van Gogh said, “What does it matter if a man [he was speaking of painters] dies, because another rises in the same place?” Yes, another does rise, but he is not me. And so my art is about loss. It is the cry of my soul to God: NO! ****** From Studio Notes 1960 I had been keeping my studio notes in the same book that Jean had given me shortly after our marriage in 1950. By the time we moved into Green Gates, the book was nearly full. I thought, new house, new book and bought one of the 8 ½ by 11 black leatherette bound ones they still sell (I haven’t seen one of the “granite” covered books like my first one in years). To round out this image of my first two years at Green Gates, here are some selections from the first year there. February 16th.
February 19th.
March 3rd.
Undated in fall
1960. Limpid in late September: light all through the pines and quivering upon the tiles—The whole world is centered in each experience of the individual, and so the touch of the sun upon a page and the sound of the words thereon, the sky caught there and the aging year making its mark become the whole, and I am their beloved. [To be beloved of the All.] * I visited the two goddesses today: Flora and her sister of the reaping of autumn fruit. Their aprons are full, their sad faces gaze over late fields. Delicate and deeply cut, their brows already solemn bear also the moss and lichen of abandonment. They turn from us (and we from them) as they stride off to the harvest barns of the experiences of our lives. And so there is a Woman moving through the World, gathering our experiences in her apron and carrying them to the threshing. Her name is Flora. Pomona, her sister-gatherer of the fruit (pear and pomegranate, peach, apple, and apricot), stationed at the other end of the semicircle, shaded by autumn trees, face turned skyward toward the hills of the West, with lichen upon her lips and brow and in the folds of her gown and caught up in her cornucopia among the immortal fruits of our lives, bears her riches directly to the Angel of the Year. He feasts and holds his court. [I must realize a Montalvo of the spirit.]
* About cock-book— * A step toward knowledge: what I say here will be only mine, its leap toward beauty (a capture or a dwelling) will be only for me. It will lack beauty and/or meaning for everyone else. And even in its failure for me, it will have made its accomplishment—to mark the spaces and times of my life for me: to establish the sole world of my dominion. Because this is my way of raising the moment to worth. And I shall walk in silence, passing unnoticed through the complex lacings of my time. Nor shall I speak above the gentlest sound, nor shall my words be other than aside and into the dark. Mine is the private world of my 33 years. * It is for mixing come on an autumn afternoon, mixing my semen with light, with air, with space and fading time… Were you late then at the well of the world's end, where I was given the water of the well that is the water of eternal life? "Seldom may the aesthete..." I need not have declared for him, I was already an inescapable he, convicted clear through and with out possibility of escape from his sins of the senses. Just trite old nature pictures, that’s all they are, about drinking the waters of heaven. |
My
early work at Green Gates, 1960-61
