Monet's Cathedral

I remember as a little girl being very confused about Monet's cathedral. I have a vague memory of looking at a book with these pictures of the Cathedral, wondering why this book repeated the same picture in different colors. There must be some mistake, I thought; the idea of misprints already present due to my father's monologues on Saturday afternoon book browsing excursions. I decided against telling the hostess that she had a bad book as I knew she had chosen it to entertain me while she and my father spoke.

I would later become similarly confused about haystacks, though the haystacks I think resolved the distress because they were sufficiently dissimilar. The thought seems to have occurred to me that the artist chose to keep painting these haystacks, and from different angles, though why haystacks my mind could not explain. Haystacks were itchy and those paintings still make me slightly uncomfortable as if I am sitting on a stack in the hillside, observing the folk company my father has chosen to chat with as a part of his anti-communist diplomatic countryside tours of Eastern Europe, waiting until I am permitted to run around with the gypsy children, only later to eat the meat grilling, smoke curling into the cool evening air.

We would visit many small churches on these weekend tours and they looked much alike to me, my religious discomfort already growing, righteous when I was almost seven and realized that I would never again intone the words "I am not worthy to gather up the crumbs beneath thy table" in a country where there were so many hungry people of whom I was painfully aware, where this sentiment riled because it represented an authoritarian attitude that I resented, already believing myself fully capable of determining my own best interests. The churches are misty in my mind, their fogginess fading into forgetfulness. Only last year when I saw a 14th century church in England did I understand why my father and his friends might have had interest, besides religious, in visiting these ancient testimonies of belief. More than belief, these small, local, stone or wood structures engrave marriages, births, baptisms, many of the actual events of life that culminate but continue to be remembered in death, into the communal memory, representing a faith in the acts of this life, as much as the word of the next.

Monet's cathedral paintings were not misprinted. I doubt that it was frustration on his part that he could not paint it just so. As André Aciman's essay "Remanence" suggests about his own Saint-Urban in New York City, visiting becomes re-visiting in order to experience the same as different, but same as well. It is not necessarily about what you see, but how you see it that grows with you into overlapping memories of what you see, so that I smile when I see images of the Cathedral in Rouen because I still see the same picture in different colors, even as sections of the Flaubert story are included, or wonder how the Huysman book might change it, or what it might be like one day to stand in front of it myself, to see it in full sunlight and then come back again, and then again later.

The Artist Speaks

I had the unfortunate pleasure of hearing Wendy Mark and Andre Aciman speak at the James Gallery this evening. A pleasure because I like her work. A pleasure because he wanders well through diverse ideas. Unfortunate because, despite the MFA degree from Columbia in writing with which she introduced herself, words are clearly not her medium. She was painfully incomprehensible.

Aciman started the conversation explaining how they are working on a project together, loosely shaped around Lavender. They had decided, however, that this was not a good topic for the conversation they would have and so picked blue. After he had shared his thoughts on blue, she apparently decided not to speak about blue. She introduced her work, having brought pieces to show but incapable of figuring out how to show them until Aciman distributed them to the audience. She could not figure out what to say and floundered until he obliged by beginning to interview her. But even that did not help as she could not respond simple questions such as:

How did you find your form?
What about monotype was so appealing?
How do you pick your colors?
What is your process?
How do you work with the authors who produce essays for your limited edition books?

Simple questions. And yet each one required her to peruse the air above her head with the abstracted wandering gaze of a stoned Annie Hall, as she started sentences only to interrupt them and begin somewhere else. This was not a conversation but a strained interview where even the most eloquent and persistent interviewer has to eventually accept defeat.

This brings me to the surprising inelegance with which most artists speak about their work. I realize that words are not their medium but in a world of words, they do need to be able to express themselves at least a little bit. Without their own words, the artwork can become co-opted by curators, journalists and that is only if the work stands out enough to be noticed without some description to help move it there.

I like Wendy Marks' work. It is light. Despite the small size of her pieces, there is much space in looking at them. They become, as she intends, a little world of their own. They are produced in series but each one does stand alone. They are fun and if you get a chance to look at her work at the James Gallery then I encourage you to do so. Perhaps if you find yourself wandering through mid-town and need a respite from the wind, you might wander through the show.

She was quite clear that she does not like to illustrate writers' words. She prefers writers to produce from the inspiration of her work for the limited edition booklets she produces. This and her focus on works that are so completely self-contained may lead to the autonomy that makes her incapable of participating in a conversation. Though this attitude works well in her art, it is an embarrassing disaster in a gallery dialogue with another artist.