The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  Vantage and Strike also attacked Salem and Marlboro’s results, with gusto and glee equal to that with which they set themselves against the unaltered originals. That other presences labored at the billboards only exhilarated the younger men, but the solidarity they felt hardly precluded destruction of the older artists’ works. This defacing was another conversation, a sign of life worth itself, no matter what might be obliterated in the meantime. The city around them, after all, burned. Here it was always night, and gangs roved the suburbs. More cars lay on their backs or sides than not. Vantage and Strike didn’t have the luxury of Salem and Marlboro’s sunburned vacancies, nor Kent’s population-choked ennui. They wouldn’t have known what to do if they had.

  FOR YOU HAVE IT YOUR WAY WE DO IT ALL

  Perhaps inevitable, Salem and Marlboro could envision an end to their work, not because it had failed but because its success reframed not only the wasted city but their own vision of their places in it. They grew in different directions until it was evident their partnership might begin slipping from them, ungrudgingly, in the manner of the desert’s and the sky’s widening influence. Salem had become compelled by these dawning blank spaces, the sand and sky, and so he began to contemplate billboards along vast lines, billboards to replace the sky or wrap around it, frames the viewer might be tempted to enter and be lost in. Salem contemplated the commercial power of natural history itself, the sales job implicit in Darwin’s theory, each creature a refurbished model outmoding the previous on the showroom floor, the sun’s irresistible advertisement for growth and mutation.

  Marlboro went the other way, to the billboard as microcosm. It seemed to him that cars flashed their own little emblems and ads, the hubcaps, hood ornaments, and particularly license plates, and so Marlboro began subtly altering these last, beginning with the coastal state’s vanishing moniker: CALL I’LL PHONE YA, KILL FOR NADA, CAR PORN TRIVIA. Clothing and eyewear, too, turned out when you looked to be riddled with tiny billboards, minute invasions of commerce into the subliminal life of the body. Even with eyes closed, flashbulb phosphenes burned into vision’s screen by an unsetting sun might consist of a medium, one far beyond Madison Avenue’s wildest dreams. Marlboro began scheming on this virgin re(tin)al estate, plotting to erect the first billboard of the inner eyelid.

  UNKIND DOUGHNUTS

  Kent, still in his car, began unexpectedly dreaming of his apartment. In its architectural lineaments the place was a marvelous specimen, a sixty-sixth-level floor-through with picture panes on four sides, which had once featured panoramic views of ocean at one hand and mountains on the other, while downtown’s spiny tangle unfolded vertiginously below. The last time he’d been there, however, Kent had noticed that obscenely huge and towering billboards had crept both higher and nearer to the apartment’s windows, though he’d once been guaranteed that by signing the lease he’d decisively risen beyond their reach. Now, in his dreams, the apartment had expanded, its floor extending on all sides from his tiny oasis of furnishings as if it were in fact the surface of an abandoned planet or moon, while the walls had dropped away, leaving him starkly surrounded on all sides by the tremendous billboards. These had now become the functional walls of his apartment, and yet as familiar as this should have made the billboards, he found himself enthralled with their unexpectedly overripe color, their fractal complexity, and, though this should have been impossible due to the static nature of the medium, their absorbing narrative implications, which seemed richer by far than the events of his own daily existence. In fact, Kent couldn’t take his eyes off them. Somehow this came as no surprise.

  CHEW BUBBLE GUM AND KICK ASS AT THE SAME TIME

  Vantage and Strike, digging in an alley’s refuse to make a nest for sleeping off their latest bender, found to their surprise a cardboard box full of apparently unused sunglasses. The box, though buried beneath mounds of rubbish, seemed placed carefully, as if hidden. Sunglasses, however, were hardly an object of particular value in a city ruled by eternal night and regular power failures, one so frequently lit only by the flares of burning vehicles.

  Yet Vantage and Strike were curious and tried the glasses on. The result was revelatory, or consisted of hallucination disguised as revelation, or else in some manner illuminated the zone where the distinction between hallucination and revelation broke down permanently, or at least as long as one wore the glasses. The sunglasses seemed to render the world transparent of disguises. Businessmen were revealed, for the most part, as lizards, surprising no one. Commercial media exposed itself as a set of mind controls, as barren and direct as commands to Eat, Consume, Obey, Reproduce, and Remain Asleep. Yawn. The most fascinating, for Vantage and Strike, were the billboards: those they’d altered, and those they’d not yet reached, the ones on mile-high stilts or fenced in by armed sentry towers. They showed pictures, more vivid than the world itself, of the city sprawled and stretched in blazing noon, the streets empty apart from a few crouched figures or fugitive market stalls, the desert gaping between buildings that had once stood side by side. Then again they revealed the endless traffic jam, a huddled nightmare of smog and population. The billboards had become the last opportunity for the concurrent cities to sense one another: that one bereft in solar flares, the other choked with occupants straining to unreachable off-ramps, this one savagely wrecked in moonshade. The divergence of the three was a lie, or so the sunglasses and the billboards seemed to claim.

  Vantage and Strike each poked out one lens so they could observe their city all ways at once, reality, dream, and illusion in strobe simultaneity, a trick that quit giving them pounding headaches just a few days after they first tried it. No doubt this was not the use the glasses’ manufacturer had intended, but the view was fucking outstanding that way.

  —artist’s catalog, 2011

  I rescinded my boycott on art crit just once for this ranting rave for Todd James, who is a kind of brother to me (and to my brother). Todd’s paintings catch what I’d wish stories like This Shape We’re In or Amnesia Moon to look like if they’d been paintings—the wall art I wasn’t, finally, talented enough to create myself.

  Todd James

  The territory of Todd James’s singularly enraged and expulsive outpouring of protest images may be generally that marked out by Goya, George Grosz, and Ben Shahn, but the neighborhood of his line’s garrulous cynical squirming splendor, as well as his vernacular idiom of cartoon outrage, recycled advertising castoff, and corrupted child’s scrawl is, unmistakably, a bit closer to home: Peter Saul, R. Crumb, Ralph Bakshi, Philip Guston, Red Grooms, and the notebook drawings of Claes Oldenburg. Of course it’s also got a hot-wired lineage to the unruly mob of neighborhoods Todd James and I grew up in: ’70s New York City in chaotic overripe decline, its streets explosive with native font which seemed to turn the place into a Joycean stream-of-consciousness doodle, as if the urban undermind’s brainwaves were making themselves not only visible but into calligraphic floral or animal logos and brand names for mysterious products not available on any shelf in our tired cultural supermarket. In fact, James here gives fresh evidence of the continuity between the graffiti impulse and the critically sanctified “mark-of-the-hand” tradition in midcentury American painting, raising the question of what a Pollock or Gorky might have done on the side of a moving train. James’s blacks, his death-inky warplanes and aircraft carriers, have the chunky authority of a Franz Kline, but as in de Kooning’s Woman—that mighty joke that American painting can never stop getting—where the maelstrom of abstraction conjures up a Marilyn Monroe seduction more vertiginous than anything Madison Avenue dared unveil, every seemingly innocent surrealist gesture in James desublimates itself before the dreamer can even awaken: Yes, that warplane is jacking off bloody semen over your cities; yes, Marvel Comics’ Red Skull has appropriated Captain America’s son’s sailor suit and gone unpunished; yes, the latest interrogation outrages are being hosted by bikini models and cuddly chipmunk faces ready for Saturday-morning cartoon syndication or McDonaldland.
This new work (again, like Goya, etc.) is by its nature literary, too: Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, or Norman Mailer would have recognized in James a kindred drinker at the American stream, intoxicated and exhausted and exhilarated again by the mysterious complicity and mayhem of our manifest destiny’s fever dream. These paintings smash the distance between death and jokes, between ingenuous-idealist protest sympathies and indifferent “first-person-shooter” couch-potato apathy, and, finally, between the viewer and what he or she probably goes around trying not to know about the present state of things. Welcome to the orgy of the real, sensationally inappropriate and unembarrassed, as always.

  —artist’s catalog, 2009

  Writing and the Neighbor Arts

  My footing in the visual arts encourages me to treat each story or novel as an artifact in the making. Not to hang on the wall, okay, but still needing a plastic-formal agenda, whether hidden or on its sleeve, to justify getting first in and then out of my studio. The Fortress of Solitude, for instance, spatially mimicked the shape of a two-CD box set enshrining a soul group’s career and breakup. This didn’t need to matter or even be legible to anyone but me.

  The same synesthesia infected my critical frameworks, when I began to have those. I first got hold of what Stanley Kubrick meant to me when I heard him referred to as an abstract expressionist. The only narratives that never interested me at all were open-ended serials or series television: no frame equaled no art. (They had only to announce that Lost would intentionally end after six seasons and my pulse quickened—there might be something happening there.) I never knew how to even begin taking journalistic hyperventilation about literary plagiarism seriously—wasn’t the whole twentieth century a victory lap of collage, quotation, appropriation, from Picasso to Dada to Pop? Who hadn’t gotten what memo?

  Me, maybe. In the larger culture, journalism enclosed the world of book-writing, a prisoner art. Newspapermen on deadline curated this museum. The Books Section might seem a privilege, while other estates jostled for pages in Arts, but it inscribed a miserable proximity, critics working in the same medium—sort of—as creators. The problem with most writing about books was that this proximity, and the vanities it inspired, meant you couldn’t joke that the stuff was “dancing about architecture.” Only it was.

  Live Nude Models

  Be careful what you wish for; you may turn out already to have had it. That’s to say, to have had it before you could make intelligible use of it, perhaps before you could get your synapses to parse it for what it was. By the time I was seventeen years old and had a girlfriend who would take her clothes off (there had been one at fifteen who, serially, entrancingly, wouldn’t), I’d been envisioning women with their clothes off, ravishing them with the secret lidless eyeball of my brain, for at least five years. Though these were five long, aching years, which I took entirely personally at the time, I do realize how mundane such a confession must be. Is. There wasn’t anything baroque or complicated in my pining visualizations, or the procedure by which I took their edge off, and it’s surely the case that a savvy person glancing my way would guess I did pretty well nothing else at the time.

  Here’s what’s unmundane: In that same span, through my rude, ripened, teen-prime years, there were live nude models appearing nightly in my home—women to whose unclad forms my ordinary, lidded eyeballs had regular access. My father painted them, upstairs in his studio. “Nightly” exaggerates, but through those years nudes were the main subject of his large oils on canvas, of which he painted dozens—sometimes from memory or from studies, but often with the body present before him—as well as generating many hundreds of nudes on paper or vinyl, in pencil, oil crayons, or gouache, or combinations of those mediums, nearly each and every one of which was done in the presence of what at eight or ten I would have still called “a naked lady” (or, rarely, but it bears mentioning, in the presence of a naked man).

  Me, I opened the door. I walked through. My father’s studio was part of our home. I did this, probably, beginning at twelve or thirteen, when I would have learned to refer to the naked ladies in question as “models,” as in a mock-casual formulation like “We can hang out in the kitchen, my dad’s up with one of his models” or the defensively sophisticated “Sure, I see the models with their clothes off, it’s no big deal.” I do recall forming sentences like these, just as I recall the slightly widened eyes of the models themselves, a few times, as they met the eyes of the would-be-jaded twelve-year-old who’d pushed through the door without knocking. I can also bring up a good portion of ambiance (visual aspects of which are confirmed by the paintings themselves): the musty throw rugs and scarred chairs and hand-carpentered easels and exposed-brick wall, the upright, bolted-iron wood-burning stove my father later installed; the jazz or blues or (less often) leftist news and culture gab of WBAI seeping from the cassette-playing boom box; the savor of brushes marinating in turpentine and tangy odor of the cake of Lava soap—the only brand, my father explained, that would gently strip oil paint from human skin—at the shallow porcelain sink; the bulletin board layered with valentines from my mother and with enigmatic newspaper clippings (the death of Karl Wallenda was one) that would inspire later work of my father’s, etc. What I can’t supply, despite the clamor I by now imagine I hear from my reader on this point, is account of any parent-child consultations on the topic of the models and how I was or wasn’t supposed to feel about them. I can’t supply these because, I’m fairly certain, they didn’t occur. Nudity Is Fine, like Nixon Is a Vampire or Grown-ups Smoke Pot, was a truth floating in our house, the sort I gradually inferred was somewhat more true inside our doors than out.

  I not only glimpsed the models. At twelve or thirteen I declared myself an apprentice artist and began to draw them myself. Not in the studio upstairs, in our own house. Or, well, rarely there. Mostly I went along with my dad on “drawing group” night, to the home of his artist friends Bob and Cynthia, a loft space on Atlantic Avenue with square footage enough for a model to stand encircled by seven or eight artists sitting with sketch pads braced on crossed legs or seated before small easels. Specifically, seven adult artists (though my father was their elder statesman, likely at least a decade older than any of the others) and one teenager. Young teenager. I began before high school—I know this for certain because there were nudes in the portfolio of sketches I used to win entry into the High School of Music & Art that year. I was a regular at drawing group for three years, I’d guess. By the time I was sixteen I was through hanging out with my dad, for a while at least. But for three years I soaked my eyeballs in live flesh—not even a kid who’d grown up at a nudist colony could have been invited to stare like I stared. After all, I was an artist.

  No one balked at my presence. This was 1977, 1978. The models, so far as I can rely on these memory tendrils I’m chasing, were blasé. These were mostly art students themselves, settled into an easy if boring gig. Likely posing for a group of men and women together was more comfortable, generally, than making a private exhibition for a solitary male, and evenings at Bob and Cynthia’s were convivial. The routine followed the lines of every life-drawing class since publication of Kimon Nicolaides’s The Natural Way to Draw and probably long before it: a series of rapid-fire poses so the artists could loosen with gestural sketches, then five- or ten-minute poses, then a few held long enough for a study—also long enough that the model might pause to stretch or even don a robe and take a five-minute break before resuming. Between poses the artists wandered to see others’ work, and I did this, too. Sometimes the models roamed, too, in their robes. Other times they were uninterested in the results. I worked with Cray-Pas or gray or colored pencil, or compressed charcoal and, less often, painted in watercolor and gouache. I was less patient than the adults—I was there learning patience as much as anything—and remember feeling “finished” with studies before the longer poses were done and then watching the clock. Apart from that lapse I worked in absorption, and as with all absorbing work since I recall precis
ely zero from the mental interior of the experience.

  What I wasn’t doing—I’d know—was mental slavering. The Tex Avery wolf of sexual voraciousness not only restrained his eyeballs from first swelling like dirigibles and then bursting like loaded cigars; he slept. Any account of the evolutionary “hardwiring” of lust is stuck, I guess, dismissing me now as an outlier, or just a liar. The super-extensive actuality of women’s bodies before my eyes was either too much or too little for me to make masturbatory mincemeat of. Both too much and too little: The scrutiny was too much, the context too little. I don’t mean they weren’t sexy bodies. I’d guess they were. But Jonathan-seeing-them wasn’t sexy at all. Even as I recorded with my charcoal or crayon the halo of untrimmed pubic bush and the flesh-braid of mystery that it haloed, I attained a total non-purchase on those bodies as objects of desire. The palace of lust was a site under construction—that’s what I was off doing at night or in the afternoons, fantasizing about girls I knew who’d never even show me their knees. Then I slavered plenty.