Late Letters

L1

Dear Moe,

I miss you. We had it good and despite our best efforts we never fully realized how good we had it. So many years later I still feel bitter rays of pleasure when thinking back to the playful joys and pratfalls of our youth. Right now, I can’t say which I’d prefer more; a double-eye-doink, a rapt slap upside my head, tossing a pie into your face or getting one tossed into mine.

I still have regrets about the last time we saw each other. It was autumn and I thought that we were on the same page. As it turned out we weren’t even in the same script and I’m still kicking myself. Your friendship and kindness after that episode were greatly appreciated but I knew that things would never be the same again. And, boy is that an understatement for the ages! Historians are piecing together the big picture of Nazism and mass murder, but a few tiers below were the slowly eroding dreams of young men whose lives fell apart in a progression that went from misplaced yearnings and ambitions to completely collapsed families and extraordinary loneliness. I still can’t believe that I lived through it all and I wish I could have done more to help you and so many others.

I think about Curly a lot too. You said he went to France. Have you seen him?

Best,

Larry

L2

Dear Søren Kierkegaard,

I am so grateful for you and your work, especially books and essays on irony and anxiety. Aside from the content, I really appreciate your use of pseudonyms to establish different sides to various arguments and present different perspectives on pertinent issues.

For my part, I imagine a painter in the near future whose work operates as the other side of the same coin of my work. His name is Matthew Girson and he is especially interested in a quotation from Hegel that reminds us that artists and their communities rely on each other to clarify and define their themes and concerns. Even though Girson lives and works in the future, I am confident that the aesthetic values and social issues that inform my work are pertinent and meaningful for him. At least, this is how I think about the concerns of an artist in the early decades of the twenty-first century. As I see it, every work of art is an attempt to make our lives a little more meaningful. In this way every artwork and poem is a message to the future…hopefully, found by thoughtful and endearing recipients.

It’s a shame about that whole Corsair affair. Sadly, your brilliance blinded the mechanisms of power.

Respectfully,

Hilarius Bookbinder

P.S. Here is the Hegel quotation. I think I’ll follow this note with a letter to Mnemosyne.

Mnemosyne, or the absolute Muse, art, assumes the aspect of presenting the externally perceivable, seeable, and hearable forms of spirit.  This muse is the generally expressed consciousness of a people.  The work of art of mythology propagates itself in living tradition.  As peoples grow in the liberation of their consciousness, so the mythological work of art consciously grows and clarifies and matures.  This work of art is a general possession, the work of everyone. Each generation hands it down embellished to the one that follows; each works further toward the liberation of absolute consciousness...He (the artist) is like someone who finds himself among workers who are building a stone arch, the scaffolding of which is invisibly present as an idea.  Each puts on a stone.  The artist does the same.  It happens to him by chance to be the last; in that he places the last stone, the arch carries itself.  By placing the last stone, the artist sees that the whole is one arch; he declares this to be so and thereupon is taken to be the inventor... So is the work of art the work of all. There is always one who brings it to its final completion by being the last to work on it and he is the darling of Mnemosyne.

From Eric Kligerman, Sites of the Uncanny: Paul Celan, Specularity and the Visual Arts (Berlin: Walter DeGruyter, 2007), p. 308.

L2.1

Hey Girson,

What’s happening? What’s the world like in the next century? Are racism and antisemitism studied in the history books and experienced in the streets? Do the speeches of Martin Luther King still resonate? Do people still revere him? Do they even know who he was? Do they teach about Nazism in schools? Have young people ever heard of Auschwitz? For my part, I’m just trying to work my way through the ruins of modernism as the shadows of its failures refuse to retreat. I get up in the morning and go into my studio because that’s what a painter does, but I feel the pangs of privilege as I consider the hatred, racism and violence in the world outside. I am full of hope – and what is a painting or any work of art if not a hopeful gesture toward a better future. Against all of the bravado of recent modernist PAINTING I prefer to talk about paintings with a lower case ‘p’ and I aspire to make paintings without arrogance, pretense, or dogma. At their best the paintings I am making surprise with intimacy and tenderness.

I wonder how a painter like you navigates your time. I think about the infinite conversation that is the history of painting and how the narrative has been organized, how the plot has been structured, and who the main characters are. I dream of another plot structure and that you are crafting it. Don’t change the grand arc but shine the light on the characters who refused to fall into the traps of formalist essentialism. If you can, bend that arc toward justice as MLK and others have suggested.

Write back, lol,

Larry

L3

Dear Mr. Frenhofer, Mr. Bataille, Ms. Mendieta, and Dr. Faustroll,

Perhaps you can help me. These words, all words, carry us to edges. Some approach low curbs and some narrow ridges above precipitous cliffs. The subtle shifts in weight as we navigate the former are completely different from the complete physical awareness of our bodily selves on the latter. Such awareness is in the moment, the kairos, above an abyss, the abyss, and this is where I need your help.

Searches through the Dictionary of Pataphysical Terms and the Pataphysical Encyclopedia offer no entries on the word “abyss” and this seems fitting. Any attempt to know ‘abyss’, to plumb its depths, and understand its contours is inconsistent with what it might actually mean. For me, abyss has become an instance of reluctant onomatopoeia.

My questions involve the pata-mology of the word. Where did it come from? Where is it going? Is the prefix “a-“ as in amoral and atonal, or is it “ab-“ as in abnormal and absence? Is the root “byss” or “yss”. “Byss” is not now, nor has it ever been, a word and this is appropriate but “yss” is an archaic spelling of “is” and therefore rooted in being in the present, in present-ness, or being-ness.

I write. These words. They have some gravity. They are also inert things in the world. They demand cognition on certain levels that get in the way of feeling and other undervalued flows of experience. I also paint and that is where the physical and metaphysical flows of the abyss are best embodied and most fully immanent. That medium is physical like we are: with body, viscosity, different skins, varying degrees of opacity and translucency, and an extraordinary and powerful range of colors that include a range of intensities and the depth and nuance of grey and greyness. Painting is all about touch and like a caress, massage, or punch, it is pre-linguistic. The discipline of painting demands constant groping through the abyss of unknowing. The most charged paintings present the viewer with a record of the painter’s inability to know what they were looking toward when they were painting and a radical uncertainty about what they were seeing during the process. In short every painting is an abyss or it is no painting at all.

I thank you for your time.

Bookbinder

L4

Dear Mr. Warhol,

A few years ago Theodor Adorno wrote that “even the most extreme consciousness of doom can degenerate into idle chatter.” He was speaking about the barbarism that permeates our society and might as well have referred to Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex”. We get to see that on the evening news as whole communities in southeast Asia are violated and destroyed while willful blindness allows our political leaders to advance on the graves of American racist imperialism. At the same time racial unrest in America reminds us that horrors are not so distant and the scent emanates from right under our noses.

On the other side of the same coin, your work functions like a virus of barbarism that relies on our culture as its host. But instead of doom degenerating into idle chatter your work bleaches the glory of painting and sanitizes it down to mindless banter. In your hands Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley are washed into shallow puddles of their beauty and talent while Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is stripped of her grace and dignity. Even more disturbing are your paintings of the 1963 race riots. Through excessive repetition and mechanical, commercial techniques these paintings gallingly ask us to see past the gross police violence and inhumanity perpetrated in Alabama toward the possibility of asking which we prefer; the silver Race Riot or the red Race Riot? As if the formal choices in your paintings matter more than their horrific content. In your callous hands the actual suffering of the black men and women in those paintings is reduced to idle chatter while the artworld banters on mindlessly. Silver? Red? Large? Small? Over the sofa or in the bedroom? Do you want coffee with that? Scotch and soda?

I wish Adorno could have lived long enough to see Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed and the symbol of societal entropy that it became after the shootings at Kent State last Spring. I wish he would have written about your work and framed it as the clear reflection of the distracted, disinterested country that America has become. He may have framed you as a genius of late 20th century America in ways that mirror the genius of Michelangelo in Renaissance Florence but make no mistake he would have called you out as the shallow, empty vessel of barbarity and callousness that you are.

As much as I love the promises built into this country, I am sickened by the baked-in racism, and the excessive reliance on violence to advance it’s imperialist agenda. Your callous work and my sickness will be with me until the day that I die.

Bookbinder

L5

Dear Ms. Sabbatino,

I want to congratulate you on the excellent work you are doing on behalf of the late, great Aña Mendieta. Her work operates on such a high level emotionally, conceptually, visually, and politically and finding more museums to fold her into their collections is noble and important work.

Included with this letter are slides of my recent paintings for your consideration. This work is an attempt to straddle positions on either side of the dogmatic, academic Americanization of abstract painting. On one side, working after that history, there is the smart and playful conflation of seeing and knowing of Jasper Johns. On the other there are the early experiments of Paul Klee, John Marin, and so many other painters who opened doors toward abstraction while still connected to the great traditions of representational image-making. Johns is a latter-day pre-war Modernist exploring form and meaning through flatness and space, mark, color, surface and subject: a true painter.

Each of my paintings is rendered from life, with no preliminary sketches, and painted in no more than 2-3 sittings. They are small in scale, rendered with subdued values that avoid drama and anything heroic. The subject matter is party ribbons and strings of holiday lights. Each painting owes as much to the painters mentioned above as they do to Manet and Courbet in technique and Suellen Rocca, Christina Ramberg, and Ed Paschke in undervalued, easily dismissed sources.

The darkest values in the palette do not get close to the extreme of a true black. Thus the darkest greys in the paintings operate as black in a faded field. The other hues are at their brightest when they are the same value as that darkest grey. Though the value range in these paintings has been truncated, that narrow space opens to a full range of intensities. When they work, the visual effect is full of surprises.

Thank you in advance for your time and consideration,

Bookbinder

L6

Dear Mr. Stella,

Your black paintings have always struck me as the quintessential late Modern American paintings: they are dogmatic and severe. Titling some of them in German with references to Nazism opens them toward Modern European history and the ethical and aesthetic traditions that led up to them. These titles make them more interesting historically, but their scale, obdurate flatness and unwavering singular gesture ground them firmly as paintings to be looked upon as strictly aesthetic objects.

Recently I learned that notes you had written for these paintings referred to them as “the final solution.” This seems perfectly – and painfully – appropriate. They are to the history of western painting what the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” was intended to be for the Jewish people under Nazism. Relying on a purity of form, you excelled and the Nazis – thankfully! – failed in their efforts to further purify their bloodlines. Sadly, their brand of hatred, anti-Semitism and racism continues to fester. Maybe this is why I am so uncomfortable with people who continue to make purely abstract, formalist paintings. I see all of that history in their work and I have trouble separating a romance with formalist abstraction from the reductive logic of Aryanism.

I know my position is limited. Human expression takes many forms and none is any better or more correct than any other. That said, I wish more people were awake to the tragedy and barbarism upon which our culture was built and through which it continues. I’m reminded of Martin Luther King’s commencement address to the graduating class of Springfield College in 1964. In his speech he referred to Washington Irving’s story of “Rip Van Winkle” whose eponymous protagonist slept for 20 years and completely missed the American Revolution. King challenged the graduating seniors not to sleep through the revolution of American Civil Rights. He challenged them to think globally, to work to end hunger, and finally to “remove the last vestiges of racial injustice from our nation and from the world.” According to King the only way to do so is to remain awake, or to use another parlance, to be woke to ourselves and others. These sentiments ring true throughout King’s work and we do his legacy justice by staying awake woke, and alert, and owning the meaning of our work as citizens and also as painters.

One woke painter is Philip Guston whose recent turn to representation aligns with my thoughts exactly. When speaking to students he said,

There is something ridiculous and miserly in the myth we inherit from abstract art. That painting is autonomous, pure and for itself, therefore we habitually analyze its ingredients and define its limits. But painting is 'impure'. It is the adjustment of 'impurities' which forces its continuity. We are image-makers and image-ridden.

The impurities of painting are what can sustain us as painters and the refusal to exalt purity of races and bloodlines are what can sustain us as a people who respect otherness, value equality, and celebrate democracy among various races, religions, and creeds.

Your recent works open more color and shape than the black paintings but they still adhere to strict formalism, albeit prettier and more decorative.

I trust that the painter who made Arbeit Macht Frei and Die Fahne Hoch! will awaken soon and see past the legacies of Modernism both aesthetically and ethically. Remember Walter Benjamin: “There is no document of civilization that is not simultaneously a document of barbarism.”

Thank you for your time,

Bookbinder

L7

Dear Steven Berg,

Enclosed with this letter are several new poems that I hope you will consider publishing in an upcoming issue of American Poetry Review.

I was an American long before I arrived here in the late 1940s with no money and two shirts. Since then I have been channeling the losses of my European upbringing through my American adulthood in paintings, drawings, letters, and poems that operate as bridges between times, cultures, and narrative possibilities. It’s hard to tell whether these bridges are fallen logs over cool streams, thin rope contraptions over misty mountainous valleys or epic steel structures over the deep watery abyss.

Like all art – and especially poetry and painting – America is full of contradictions that shed light on other contradictions. Sometimes I have trouble knowing whether the Three Stooges are Moe, Larry, and Curly, or Pollock, DeKooning, and Greenberg.  I share the poems and I thank you for your time and consideration.

Regards,

Bookbinder

L8

Oh Moe!

I miss you! I think so much about some graffiti that I once saw on the Berlin Wall. It read, “Art is our only salvation from the horror of existence.” Art is certainly a salvation, but so are friendship and love. I miss you, Moe. I miss Curly. I miss us.

Love,

Larry

L9

Moe,

Just a quick note here to wish you a Huzzah! A Woot! Woot! and a HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!

Your celebration falls in the same week as American Independence Day. Woot! Woot! This means more than usual celebratory fireworks from my neighbors. Dogs will howl and wet the floor. Cats will hiss and hide under beds. ‘merkans will crack open a collective Bud. Inevitably, the news of next few days will include big illustrated stories about patriotic expression and a few small, almost incidental, stories about patriots who mishandled some colorful explosives and lost a finger or two, maybe an eye.

Huzzah!?! (Ouch!!)

These roman-candle-lovin’ patriots seem to have forgotten that “the rocket’s red glare/the bombs bursting in air” from their national anthem refers to an actual war in which their country’s Capitol Building was torched by enemies of the State. Golly, let’s turn that violence into song from sea to shining sea. The aestheticization of violence seems particularly strong in this country. In fact, the whitewashing of violence is in the air we breathe here. It’s absolutely amazing how quickly violence becomes aestheticized and then safely, numbingly, anesthetic. Purple mountains majesty. Amber graves of Wayne.

What? You want more? Louder? More oooomphh!!! I can’t go on. I’ll go on. Those sparklers on your birthday cake are direct descendants of the War of 1812, the fire bombs in Dresden, and Enola Gay’s great load. Take a deep breath and blow the candles out, be the master of violence in all of its forms, douse the flames, then, tuck in your napkin and enjoy some cake.

I can’t go on. Huzzah, woot, woot, whimper, whimper, happy Independence Day, happy birthday.

Endearingly,

Larry

P.S. I’ll go on.