Ann had converted much of the budget for her show into pennies, because she was ambivalent about the lavish budgets for such projects. The 750,000 pennies that $7,500 dollars translated into would be put on display, then scraped up and taken to the bank to be washed, counted, and converted to currency that could be donated to an education project. In the meantime, she was filling much of the floor of the space with a vast rectangle—forty-five feet by thirty-two feet—of pennies laid down, one by one, on the cement floor “on a skin of honey.” Honey was the adhesive, but also a way of referencing another system of circulation than money, of putting together how bees store their labor and how we do. Ann had been much impressed by a bricklayer in her childhood, and then gone into fine art through textiles. She was interested in how a small gesture repeated enough made something large, and so three quarters of a million gestures laid down that many bits of currency in a shining skin of money.
Somewhere during that process, I got down on my knees and started laying out pennies, and a while later Ann ended up doing the same next to me and we began to talk. We laid the coins out without an attempt to make a pattern, but the natural variation in the long lines made them take on a texture like waves or snakeskin scales, and they shimmered in the light, and the smell of honey rose up from the floor. I don’t know what had changed, but at the beginning of the 1980s I had hardly been able to connect to anyone, and I hadn’t found my people or the conversations I dreamed of. At the end of the decade, I could and I did.
The piece Ann made with many hands’ help was called privation and excesses, and at the far corner of the great carpet of cash was a performer, a person in a white shirt sitting with a wide-brimmed felt hat full of honey in her lap. The performance consisted of wringing one’s hands in the honey and staring off into the distance—of maintaining a calm disengagement from the viewers. To include a performer meant that the grammatical tense of the piece was in the present of making and doing, rather than the past tense of made and done. Later on in other pieces of hers, the performers would be undoing something, unraveling, or erasing, so that the work was being unmade as well as made for the duration of the exhibition.
Later on, Ann took some of the pennies converted back into practical currency and gave it to me to write an essay about the piece. But before that she asked me to be one of the performers. Thinking back it seems enchanted that she invited me into both an ongoing conversation and into silence. To do the latter job, you sat in a straight chair for three hours, looking ahead, blessedly instructed to ignore all the visitors’ questions about what the art meant. There was a pen with three sheep in it behind the sitter, and the sounds and smell of the sheep, as well as the smell of the honey and the pennies, were part of what you absorbed when you took on the task.
As a child you’re told not to get sticky, not to play with your food, not to make a mess, and sinking your hands up to your wrists in honey was a wonderful transgression against all that, as well as a sensual pleasure. If you were the first sitter of the day, the honey was cold and a little stiff at the outset, but it warmed up from the heat of your hands and began to flow. You can hold a double handful of honey, though it will drip, but your job in that artwork was not to hang on to it but to let it move, to lift it out of the hat and let it trickle back, to keep it moving while the rest of you stayed still and silent and looked ahead with a thousand-mile stare.
Restless, nervous, impatient by nature, I had thought I would have a hard time sitting still for three hours, but I found that the instructions protected me from my own sense that I should be available to supply information (and people did come up and demand explanations of the show) and that I should at every waking moment be busy and productive. I found instead that I resented the person who replaced me when I was the first performer of the day or the gallery staff person who told me to wrap it up when I was the last.
One day many years later those hours sitting still with my hands in warm honey came back to me as a recollection of the calmest moment of my youth, a few hours of pure existence as sweet as the honey stuck under my nails, a moment of being rare among all the busyness of doing and becoming.
2
Hopscotch: back up a little, cover the same ground again. My father had died while traveling on the other side of the world in the first days of 1987, and with his death it became safe enough to thaw out a little and to open up what had been closed. I was finally having emotions in response to events from long before, as if they had been something frozen into the ice in that bleak earlier era, and because I could finally classify the events on my own terms as cruel and wrong. Later that year, my longtime boyfriend moved to Los Angeles, the rest of my family was particularly difficult for me, and I was living off unemployment insurance from the job I’d been laid off from after I left the art magazine, some savings, small sums dribbling in from reviews and essays in local magazines, and some work as an office temp in businesses around the city.
I decided that when you had nothing left to lose you were free, and that what I wanted to be free to do was write a book about the community I had discovered—and many of whose members I had met—when writing that graduate-school thesis about Wallace Berman four years earlier. I sent a book proposal to City Lights Books and it was accepted in early 1988, and I got my first book advance, for $1,500. I had wanted to write books since shortly after that first-grade anti-marriage essay, because I loved books more than almost anything, because I regarded them as a kind of practical enchantment, and the only way to be closer to that enchantment than reading them was writing them. I wanted to work with words and see what they could do. I wanted to gather up fragments and put them in new patterns. I wanted to be a full citizen of that ethereal otherworld. I wanted to live by books and in books and for books.
It was a lovely goal or rather orientation when it was far away throughout my childhood and teens and college years, but when it came time to do it—well, the mountain is beautiful in the distance and steep when you’re on it. Becoming a writer formalizes something essential about becoming a human: the task of figuring out what stories to tell and how to tell them and who you are in relation to them, which you choose or which choose you, and what the people around you desire and how much to listen to them and how much to listen to other things, deeper in and farther away. But also, you have to write. I had published a lot of essays and reviews by that time, but a book—it was like going from building toolsheds to a palace.
That first book began with that work of art I had seen one day in 1982 on a wall by the staff offices of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It was a square black-and-white collage by Wallace Berman, a grid of sixteen images of a hand holding a transistor radio, four across, four down, the same hand and radio each time with a different image where the speaker should be on the radio. Among the images were human figures, including a nude, a football player, a frail figure that might be Gandhi, a human ear, a bat hanging upside down, a hypodermic, a gun, and the same sinuous snake twice on the bottom row. They were negative images, so that everything seemed a little dreamily unnatural. It was as though each image was a sound translated into sight, as though each was a message, a warning, a proclamation, or a revelation. Or a song. A few Hebrew letters written in white on the black background insisted that the mystical and esoteric could coexist with pop culture, that some of the old divides were unnecessary or illusionary. It had been made with an early version of a photocopy machine called a Verifax. It was titled Silence Series #10.
Berman was, like my father, the child of immigrant Jews, raised in Los Angeles. Unlike my father, he was slight, subtle, choosing to live a life on the margins of society and the economy, first in the swing and jazz scene in L.A., then among mystics, dropouts, artists, and rebels. He had, as he’d predicted, died on his fiftieth birthday—been hit by a drunk driver in a truck as he drove in his sports car on the winding, narrow road to his birthday party in one of the canyons on the edge of Los Angeles that evening
in 1976. After being prosecuted for obscenity for his first art exhibition in 1957, he’d chosen to keep a low profile. My original title for the book was Swinging in the Shadows, taken from a postcard he wrote to the painter Jay DeFeo, in which he told her that he was going to go earn some money and swing back into the shadows again, but my publisher overruled me on that.
For the thesis I had pieced together Berman’s life from what people around him had to say, what the art itself told me, from archives and oral histories, exhibition catalogues and old postcards and letters that people still had on hand. In so doing I realized a number of things, including that there had been a California avant-garde in the 1950s that had been overlooked in official histories, a series of coteries and communities involved in film, poetry, visual art, esoteric and non-Western spiritual traditions and practices, and mind-altering drugs. An avant-garde that helped give rise to the counterculture of the sixties, a realm of experimentation and rebellion and reinvention. This was what I wanted to write a book about, not one artist, but a community of artists.
Back then, cultural history was supposed to be a linear business that had unspooled in Europe and then in New York, and California was a despised hinterland, a place in which nothing much was supposed to have happened. Someone once sneered at a friend of mine doing a thesis on western history at Yale that People in California don’t read books, as though all the poets in the mountains and the scholars in the cities and the indigenous storytellers in the ninety-nine native California languages from the desert southeast to the rain forests of the northwest boiled down to one empty-headed sunbather on a hot beach. In 1941, Edmund Wilson wrote, “All visitors from the East know the strange spell of unreality which seems to make human experience on the Coast as hollow as a troll nest where everything is out in the open instead of being underground.” In 1971, Hilton Kramer wrote in the New York Times that the San Francisco Bay Area was characterized by “the absence of a certain energy and curiosity, a certain indispensable complexity and élan” and dubbed the style of one of the artists “Dude Ranch Dada,” though dude ranches were mostly a phenomenon of the intermountain West, many hundreds of miles away. Things seen small at a distance lack detail, and growing up when I did you saw California through eastern telescopes when you saw it at all. That era of disdain and dismissal had not yet ended when I was a young writer.
In the course of writing that book I worked out for myself why I was grateful that we shared a border with Mexico and faced Asia and were farther from the influence of Europe that was supposed to convey legitimacy, and that I suspected imparted conventionalizing impulses, and I came to understand how many writers, from Mark Twain to Seamus Heaney to Alexander Chee, had come here to get free of something and gone back changed. Many years later a student who’d just moved to the Bay Area from New York (and had before come from Mumbai) relayed her distress to me at no longer being in the center of things, with the implication that centers are what matters. I went home and thought about the value of margins.
I’d written about them in my work on hope and social change, because I’d been following how ideas move from the shadows and the fringes into the center and how much the center likes to forget or ignore those origins—or just how those in the floodlights can’t see what’s in the shadows. The margins are also where authority wanes and orthodoxies weaken. My first education in how all this worked came from Wallace Berman, who had consciously chosen to live on various edges—economically precarious, subcultural, often literally on the edge—homes perched on stilts in the canyons of Los Angeles and the salt marshes of the Bay Area. From those locales he had been influential for people who plunged into the limelight—poets, artists, actors such as Dennis Hopper, Russ Tamblyn, and Dean Stockwell. One sign of Berman’s influence is his inclusion in the collage that is the album cover for the Beatles’ 1967 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; another is his small role as a sower in another iconic artwork of the era, Dennis Hopper’s 1969 film Easy Rider. (The name of Berman’s hand-printed magazine was Semina, from the Latin for seeds and semen, and he was a sower of seeds—that’s literally what he does in his cameo in Easy Rider—but also a cultivator of the seeds others had sown.)
To delve into his life and milieu meant interviewing, first for the thesis, then for the book, people who I still thought of as grown-ups—adults intimidatingly older than me. They were my parents’ generation but they were people who had lived their lives as great adventurers, taking risks, not chasing stability, and not regretting it. My parents were, even after decades in the middle class, so governed by old Depression-era fear of poverty that their lives were cramped and cautious. These extravagant peers of theirs provided a fine alternative model of how to live your life. When I began that book four years after I graduated, I didn’t know that I myself would never really get around to getting a job again. I would have endless work, and write a lot of books, and a lot more essays and articles, and I’d do some activist work and some teaching, but I’d never really go back to being an employee with a salary and a boss.
3
The North Star is so far away from earth that it takes its light more than three hundred years to reach us, and even the light from the closest star takes four years. A book is a little like a star, in that what you read is what the author was passionately immersed in long before, sometimes only because of the time it takes a book to be written, edited, printed, and distributed. And because often the time it takes to make a book means that it represents the residue of interests that preceded the writing. By the late 1980s new interests were eclipsing the ones that came before; I was engaged in a new way with ideas about nature and landscape and gender and the American West.
This first book was about revisiting and completing something significant that I had found years before. I focused on six artists—three from Southern California and three from the Bay Area—whose lives and work and ideas had overlapped as they became friends and sometimes collaborators in the 1950s: Jess (who’d abandoned his surname when he left science for art and a life as an openly gay man when that was a superhumanly bold thing to do), Jay DeFeo, Bruce Conner, George Herms, Wally Hedrick, and Berman. Each of them had chosen in various ways to lead a low-profile life, to find out what making art could mean and what a life full of it could be and then making it and living it. Conner, Hedrick, and DeFeo had opportunities to go to New York and become stars, but they declined the opportunity.
Their idealism was underwritten by the affluence of the era and their own frugality, by white flight that left cities full of cheap housing, and wages high enough that couples and families often lived tolerably off the income from one part-time job. Even in the 1980s, the kind of freedom to come and go, to stop paying the landlord for months and then find another pleasant place to live, to drop in and out of the economy seemed like the strange customs of an ancient free people. The artists I wrote about had moved on the edge of Beat circles or passed through them, and the story often told about the Beats as a group of male writers from the East morphed into something larger and more interesting that included these visual artists and experimental filmmakers and the poets who were part of other movements, notably what got called the San Francisco Renaissance, including Jess’s life partner, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, and Michael McClure, who moved through many worlds.
I learned from these characters that before you can make art you have to have a culture in which to make it, a context that gives it meaning, and people from whom to learn and to whom to show your work. Through short-lived galleries, tiny magazines, screenings, poetry readings, friendships, they made culture happen among themselves—among themselves not because they were exclusionary, but because they were excluded. I came to understand some general principles about how cultures evolve and shift and how ideas migrate from the margins to the center. They overlapped with jazz musicians, rock bands, drug dealers, biker gangs, gay subcultures, social experiments, countercultural heroes. They had that camaraderie I stil
l sometimes recognize in small towns and conservative communities, where the outsiders stick together because their differences from each other are insignificant in the face of their differences from a hostile mainstream.
Research is often portrayed as dreary and diligent, but for those with a taste for this detective work there’s the thrill of the chase—of hunting data, flushing obscure things out of hiding, of finding the fragments that assemble into a picture. Your shards are stories, facts, manuscripts and letters, photographs, old newspaper clippings, the bound volumes of magazines no one has opened in years, something someone says to you in an interview they have not said to anyone else quite that way. For my early books, I was amazed to have neglected topics to write about that seemed significant to me, and it came to feel like an advantage that I was in a place that had been so overlooked and dismissed.
Some of my early research adventures were comic. When I was working on my thesis, I kept calling up the actor-director Dennis Hopper in New Mexico, hoping to talk to him about Berman, and he kept answering cordially, saying he’d be happy to talk, but could I call back later, until, dozens of calls later, the phone bills grew alarming and I gave up. I didn’t try again when I turned the project into a book, though he was living in Los Angeles, because I had been so terrified by his performance in the film Blue Velvet, but his assistant was helpful to me and got me six prints from his original negatives—Hopper had been a talented photographer in his youth—to use in the book.
Recollections of My Nonexistence Page 11
