by Chris Kraus
Gabi Teisch’s life was very hard.
She hardly slept or ate, she forgot to comb her hair. The more she studied, the harder it became to speak or know anything with certainty. People were afraid of her; she forgot how to teach her classes. She became that word that people use to render difficult and driven women weightless: Gabi Teisch was “quirky.”
On New Year’s Eve in Germany, 1977 it was snowing very hard. Gabi Teisch invited several of her women friends around to celebrate the holiday. The camera keeps its distance, circling round the table of drinking smoking laughing talking women. It’s happiness. A bright island in the snowy night. A real cabal.
This morning it’s my birthday and I drove out to Garnet Lake. Upstate March is the moodiest, most desolate time of year. February’s glistening cold becomes unsettled. Water in the streams and brooks begins to move under melting ice: stand outside and you can hear it rushing. The Torrents of Spring. But the sky’s completely gray and everybody knows the snow’ll be around at least until the end of April. The weather’s dull, resentful. I drove out through Thurman, Kenyontown, past the “burnt-down store” (a landmark and epistemological joke—in order for it to mean anything you would’ve had to be here 20 years ago when the store was standing), the Methodist church and schoolhouse where as recently as 30 years ago local kids between the ages of 5 and 17 arrived by foot and horse from within an 8 mile radius. “What do you consider to be the greatest achievement of your life?” a teenager from the Thurman Youth Group asked George Mosher, a 72-year-old trapper, farmer, handyman and logger. “Staying here,” George said. “Within two miles of where I was born.” Dear Dick, The Southern Adirondacks make it possible to understand the Middle Ages.
There were two guys out ice fishing on Garnet Lake, skinny speckled fish, pickering or mackerel. My long black coat open, dragging through the snow as I walked around the lake’s perimeter. When I was 12 it occurred to me for the first time it might be possible to have an interesting life. Yesterday when I phoned Renee up over at her trailer to find out if her brother Chet might be able to come over and unfreeze the kitchen pipes she said Yeah, but I don’t want to put a time on it because I’m high.
In all the books about the 19th century New England Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, they tell this story about her and the English critic George Carlyle. When she was 45 she ran away to join the Italian liberal revolution of 1853 and fell in love with Garibaldi. “I accept the universe,” Margaret Fuller wrote in a letter postmarked out of Italy. “Well she’d better,” Carlyle replied. She was drifting further and further on a raft out into the Caspian Sea. Today I’m going to New York,
Love,
Chris
KIKE ART
3/14/95
East Village
DD,
This afternoon I went to see the R.B. Kitaj exhibition at the Met. He’s a painter you’re probably familiar with because he lived so many years in London.
I went to see the show because my friend Romy Ashby told me to. She liked the charcoal drawing of two black cats fucking (My Cat and Her Husband, 1977). The show, which opened last year in London, was panned by all the critics there on weirdly specious grounds. Kitaj has followed Arnold Schoenberg in proclaiming “I have long since resolved to be a Jew…I regard that as more important than my art.” And his work’s been called a lot of things that Jews are called: “abstruse, pretentious”; “shallow, fake and narcissistic”; “hermetic, dry and bookish”; “difficult, obscure, slick and grade f.” Too much in dialogue with writing and ideas to be a painter, he’s been called “a quirky bibliophile…altogether too poetic and allusive…a little too literary for his own good.”
It’s hard to figure out just why Kitaj’s been criticized this way. His paintings are a little bit Francis Bacon, a little bit Degas, a little bit Pop Art, but mostly they are studies. Thought accelerates to a pitch where it becomes pure feeling. Unlike the Abstract Expressionists or the Pop artists who he’s been unfavorably compared to, his paintings never are one single statement or one transcendental thing. It’s like he’s conscious he’s the Last Remaining Humanist, using painting as a field for juggling ideals that don’t quite hold. Unlike painters of the ’50s whose works celebrate disjunction, Kitaj’s paintings recognize disjunction while in a certain sense lamenting it. Melodies floating across a cafe patio that evoke another world. Walter Benjamin smoking hashish in Marseilles to enjoy the subtle pleasures of his own company. An intellectual rigor that allows the possibility of nostalgia.
In Paris in the ’50s, upwardly mobile ghetto Jews like Sylvère Lotringer suffered a terrible dinner party dilemma: whether to announce the fact that they were Jews to offset possible racial slurs and jokes and be accused of arrogantly ‘flaunting it;’ or say nothing and be accused of deviously “hiding it.” Kitaj the slippery Kike is never just one thing and so people think he’s tricking them.
It amused me that Kitaj has wrapped himself around the idea of creating “exegesis” for his art, writing texts to parallel each painting. “Exegesis”: the crazy person’s search for proof that they’re not crazy. “Exegesis” is the word I used in trying to explain myself to you. Did I tell you, Dick, I’m thinking of calling all these letters The Cowboy and the Kike? Anyhow, I felt I had to see the show.
The exhibition was presented by the Met with a huge amount of explication that served to distance Kitaj further from his viewers and his peers. Curatorial excitement mixed with apprehension: how to make this “difficult” work accessible? By introducing us to the artist as an admirable freak.
Entering the exhibition, the viewer encounters the first in a series of large-scale placards explaining Kitaj’s strange career. A sentimental pen-and-ink portrait of the not-yet-dead artist is displayed beside a text describing biographic landmarks. Kitaj grew up in Troy, New York and ran away at age 16 to be a merchant seaman. He enlisted in the Army, then attended art school in Oxford on the GI Bill. After school he moved to London, painted, showed. After the unexpected death of his first wife in 1969, Kitaj stopped painting for several years. This fact is disclosed in a tone of awed surprise. (Why has every single life that deviates from the corporate norm—from high school to an east coast BA, followed by a California art school MFA, followed by a cheerful steady flow of art-production—become so oddly singular?)
The placards in the second room continue amplifying Kitaj’s oddness. He is “a voracious reader of literature and philosophy” “a bibliophile.” The facts of Kitaj’s life are sketched so bare that he becomes exotic, mythic. The text is telling us that while it may be impossible to love the artist or his work we must admire him. Although his work is “difficult,” it has a substance and a presence; it can’t be entirely dismissed; it holds its own. And so at 62, in his first major retrospective, Kitaj becomes revered/reviled. All the rightness of his work is undermined by singularity. He’s a talking dog domesticated into myth.
(Am I being too sensitive? Perhaps, but I’m a kike. And isn’t it well-documented that those kikes who don’t devote themselves to power-mongering and money-grubbing are hopelessly highstrung?)
The placards go on to apologize/explain Kitaj’s prose. After years of fucked-up readings of his work, he was forced to write his own. The placard suggests you spend some money to access Kitaj’s texts (buy the catalogue, rent the audiocassette) but in reality you don’t have to. Because in the middle of the second room there’re multiple copies of the catalog displayed on two long library tables complete with shaded reading lamps and chairs. How perfect—a tiny architectural slice of the New York Public Library or Amsterdam’s grand American Hotel. (You too can be a kike!) This display was so archaic that the catalogs weren’t even chained, and I contemplated stealing one, though finally I didn’t. Because although Kitaj’s friends include some of the greatest poets in the world, I didn’t like his texts that much. His texts spoke to someone not quite real, the “perplexed but sympathetic viewer.” You either like the paintings or you don’t. Kitaj’s writing
pandered so it was disappointing.
But Kitaj’s paintings never pander and they aren’t disappointing.
My first favorite, painted in 1964, was called The Nice Old Man and The Pretty Girl (With Huskies). What a terrific painting to own! What a lot it says about your life circa 1964 if you were somebody significant in the art world! It’s a painting that’s seduced by the frenetic energy and glamour of this time while mocking it.
The colors of this painting—mustard yellow, Chinese red and forest green—were high fashion in their time. The nice old man sits facing us in 3/4 profile from the depths of a mauve Le Corbusier-inspired chair. The Nice Old Man’s head has been replaced with a side of ham that makes him look like Santa Claus. Over it, he wears a gas mask. The chair is expediently correct, Roche-Bobois, but not remarkable or beautiful. Perhaps chosen by an uninspired decorator. The Nice Old Man’s body extends across almost the entire frame, ending in one of those Nordic furtrimmed boots that go in, though mostly out, of style. And this boot is pointed squarely at the knee (Claire’s Knee by Eric Rohmer?) of the Pretty Girl, who is completely headless. Her coat is Chanel red and almost matches the Nice Old Man’s seedy Santa outfit. Except it’s better cut—tight at the top, then flaring. Her dress is mustard orange.
And then there’re those huskies, visitors from a David Salle work that’s travelled back in time, panting, grinning, moving, even though each is trapped inside a white rectangle, towards a snow-bank rising from the bottom right corner of the frame. Between them there’s a red square displaying some of their possessions: a model of a monolith for him, a Gucci scarf for her. What a modish pair. And what could be more modish than Kitaj’s acerbic portrait of them? Except that the acerbic-ness seems to go too far, beyond the effervescent skepticism of the period towards a moral irony that lays it bare.
And, perfectly, appropriately to that first adrenaline rush of art & commerce that characterized the art world in 1964, the painting’s circle of meaning is completed by its ownership. Nice Old Man was loaned to the exhibit by its owners Susan and Alan Patricoff, prominent members of the mid-’60s New York City/East Hampton art and social scene. Alan Patricoff, a venture capitalist, art collector and early owner of New York magazine is a great supporter of Kitaj’s. According to the writer Erje Ayden, he and Susan Patricoff gave the most amazing parties in East Hampton, where writers, art-world luminaries and miss-outs mixed with famous socialites.
And what an edgy choice this painting must’ve been: a painting that both disparages and contains the witty effervescence of that scene. As if to say, they’re capable of taking an ironic distance from their values and their fame, this scene they made; powerful and secure enough to pat the mouth that bites the hand that feeds it. It’s deadpan wit with cynicism at its core. And isn’t it cynicism that makes the money, while enthusiasm spends? To buy such cynicism confirms that Patricoff was no consumer, but a highly self-reflexive creator of this scene. Nice Old Man draws an outside circle around the giddiness and wit that characterized Pop Art, a movement read by some as the closest thing the art world’s come to Sophisticate Utopia. It’s a painting, finally, for victors, reminding us that there’re winners & losers in every game.
LATER—
Oh D, it’s Thursday morning 9 a.m. and I feel so emotional about this writing. Last night I “replaced” you with an orange candle because I felt you weren’t listening anymore. But I still need for you to listen. Because—don’t you see?—no one is, I’m completely illegitimate.
Right now Sylvère is in Los Angeles at your school making $2500 for talking about James Clifford. Later on tonight you’ll have a drink and he’ll drive you to the plane, because you’re about to speak in Europe. Did anybody ask me my ideas about Kitaj? Does it matter what they are? It’s not like I’ve been invited, paid to speak. There isn’t much that I take seriously and since I’m frivolous and female most people think I’m pretty dumb. They don’t realize I’m a kike.
WHO GETS TO SPEAK AND WHY?, I wrote last week, IS THE ONLY QUESTION.
Sylvère’s in California for a week and I am writing you from 7th Street and Avenue C, where I am living in the independent poverty I’ve believed since I was 12 to be my birthright. I don’t have to spend my days thinking about money, or dream about it multiplying overnight. I don’t have to work at menial degrading jobs (if you’re a girl menial always turns out to be degrading) or pretend to believe in my career in the third-rate world of experimental film. After building up my husband’s academic/cultural career and investing all his money I have enough to live on so long as I don’t spend too much. And luckily my husband is a very reasonable man.
And I have brilliant friends to talk to (Eileen, Jim and John, Carol, Ann, Yvonne) about writing and ideas but I don’t (will never have?) (this writing is so personal it’s hard to picture it) any other kind of audience. But even so I can’t stop writing even for a day—I’m doing it to save my life. These letters’re the first time I’ve ever tried to talk about ideas because I need to, not just to amuse or entertain.
And now it’s springtime and I want to tell you a little bit about this neighborhood, the world outside: the tiny Spanish gardens with their ramshackle pavilions built on vacant lots, the rutted streets, Adela’s, a Puerto Rican nationalist cafe. There’s a panaderia and a carniceria, bananas cost 15 cents apiece and the white people who live here do so without too much avarice or display of wealth. The panaderia on C and 9th sells cakes of the most amazing brilliant colors. I’ve started wearing underwear that’s green and pink, like Guatemala. And even though there’s sadness wafting through this writing, I’m very happy here.
I want to talk to you about two paintings in the second room of the exhibition hanging side by side: The Autumn of Central Paris (After Walter Benjamin) 1972/1973 and If Not, Not, a painting about the Holocaust painted several years later in 1975/1976. I question the sense of historiography that installing them this way implies. As if there’s any correlation between chunks of history, past events. As if somehow if we just looked hard enough we could discern some immanent causality between the Autumn Years of Paris in the 1920s, early ’30s and their subsequent annihilation in the War. Wasn’t modernism’s greatest coup to destroy the notion of progression? And yet it still comes back in history books, in dialectical materialism, in the New Age’s recycled Confucianism—the hope that all of us are travelling through concentric rings of knowledge towards some greater truth. And beneath that hope, the biggest lie: that things are getting better. Portentousness is only retrospective.
In Walter Benjamin:
This painting is a dictionary of everything we know about the brilliant cafe world of Paris and Vienna in the ’20s. All the images and tropes we’ve read about this time are closely flanked, jammed up against each other, sliding down from the top left of the frame to the bottom right. History as a Jumble Sale. At the bottom of the pile Kitaj paints red cut-out silhouetted icons of the Communist Revolution: red hammers and red sickles raised by Red Worker’s arms. Right above them, Walter Benjamin sits presiding at a cafe table with a young man turned away from us and a doe-eyed, pretty, serious young woman. She’s one of the few attractive female figures in Kitaj’s work accorded any dignity—most of the pretty girls are naked curving cat-like creatures without any barriers of resistance to the painter’s gaze, and Kitaj’s serious women are mostly totally asexual and middle-aged. I guess he likes to characterize us, as male kikes do, as either sisters, mothers, aunts, or whores. The young woman’s looking up at Walter and she’s listening. Though his mouth is momentarily shut, he’s obviously Holding Forth and he looks terrific in his tinted eyeglasses, waving a cigarette beyond his fleshy sculpted face, so poised. And above these two, at the top left of the frame, the painting cuts to EXT SIDEWALK SAME DAY, a small assortment of EDUCATED JEWS, spanning the spectrum of the middle class transplanted from Europe to Long Island, Skokie and Canarsie: there’re the middle aged, smoking women in big hats and basic makeup (the well-to-do aunts, the Canasta-kill
ers); a shy and sheepfaced guy in cap and shirt-sleeves (the skilled worker, union organizer brother).
But there’s a terrible rupture in this picture, between the world of the cafe, imperfectly protected by its gorgeous gray & mustard zigzagged awning, and the world outside. At the cafe’s outdoor tables, and beyond them out along the street leading to a residential suburb, we see people of a different order, a little more attenuated, brink-ish, all poised in some relation to a nameless future that opens at the top right of the frame.
Seated alone, at a sidewalk table there’s a rakish, yellow coated punk (that’s me!) with shocking bright red hair. This person could be male or female and her/his back is turned towards us, so that s/he can clearly see the future at the top of the frame. And closer to the future there’s a young blonde woman in a big black dress (a big sister or a nanny) holding a small child against her chest. She’s facing us, of course, in order to protect the child.
And what about this future? Dark green poplars line its streets, met by a bird’s-egg blue, cloud strewn sky. This future’s purely European: the sky is borrowed from Magritte, the poplars reek of secrets and opacity of the Alain Resnais and Robbe-Grillet kind. And just like in Magritte, there’s a man walking straight into this future, a generic European man in a shabby cap and overcoat. And like the future, and unlike the paintings of Magritte, this image is both liberating and extremely scary. He’s like the fucked-up heroines in Fassbinder’s Lola or Bette Gordon’s Variety, hobbling on high-heeled shoes towards a fate that the audience has long since guessed but they’re completely unaware of. But unlike the fucked-up heroines, this man seems to have no expectations.
