At the Strangers' Gate

by Adam Gopnik

  Which is a grand way of saying that, though SoHo looked like a market village, it felt like a cathedral town even on the market mornings, a small place in touch with a cosmic principle. Of course, the cosmic principle may have been the illusion of its inhabitants—or the inhabitants might have been the comic bearers of the cosmic principle. Was the life of the art village essentially a comedy with cosmic pretensions? Or was it really a chapter in a great advancing story of the closest thing the century had had to a real faith, the belief in the open-ended development of avant-garde art? Of such questions, half comic, half cosmic, as Trollope knew, cathedral towns are always made.

  The past was hidden, and yet all around. Sometimes it ran right to you. One night, two years or so into our residency, Martha and I woke up in the sticky air at around four o’clock to hunt for mosquitoes. We turned on the switch of the little Akari Light Sculpture on the night table, and as I stood on the bed, with a rolled-up copy of ARTNews, we both noticed that blood was dripping in sheets from the ceiling.

  When I say “blood,” I mean that it looked exactly like the stuff you find described in mystery novels and see in horror movies—something reddish-brown and thin and sticky, not the bright-rose-colored blood that bursts from a squashed mosquito but dark, claret-colored blood, the stuff that comes from deep inside a person. It was leaking down the wall around the heating pipe and turning into sinister-looking stalactites. My wife gasped, and asked if that could really be blood—what did blood smell like? As it happened, just before we went to sleep I had been reading an old John D. MacDonald mystery—a good one, with Bahia Mar, and a lot of deep thinking from Meyer—and had come to the bit where the broken body of the fragile young girl is found in the hold of the Busted Flush.

  “It smells metallic,” I said, remembering the way Travis McGee described it. “Like copper. It smells like copper.”

  She sniffed, and said, “Well, what does copper smell like?” Finding my trousers, thrown over the back of a chair, I reached into the pocket and got out a penny, and we sniffed that, and then we tried to sniff what was coming out of the ceiling. It was hard to tell whether they smelled the same.

  For the next two weeks, the ceiling kept hemorrhaging. Sometimes we would wake up and find it dripping slowly, slowly. At other times, it would really be coming down, as though a whole new vein had been opened, or else as though—and this thought struck us both at about the same time—a new corpse had just been stowed away under the floorboards upstairs. Our neighbors above seemed like the last people on earth who would stow corpses under floorboards, but, then, the people who look like the last ones on earth who would stow corpses under floorboards are apparently the ones who sooner or later make a point of doing it. We thought of calling the police, of course, but we could imagine the cops telling us with a sigh that our “blood” was just some kind of New York gunk you’re supposed to know how to deal with—a kind of gunk that is just part of grown-up life, like taxes. It was beginning to bother us, though. Fortunately, a meeting about the co-op conversion was coming up, and we offered to have it in our loft. We intended to confront our neighbors. On seeing the telltale blood, one of them might rise from his chair, like King Claudius.

  Our building was always going co-op and never getting there. For the latest round of negotiations, we had hired a real-estate lawyer, who, like a movie star profiled in Vanity Fair, was tough and yet movingly vulnerable. His feelings got hurt easily. He had called the meeting to tell us how upset he was about something or other we had all done. Our neighbors came into the loft: Marcia the painter of Expressionist seascapes, who lived on the sixth floor; Petah, the sculptor who worked in hay, and lived on the fifth, just above us; the framer, Frank; the still-life photographer, Seth—the whole gang. Everybody sat down. Nobody seemed to notice the blood. The real-estate lawyer talked about everything that had hurt him recently: our failure to sign no-buy pledges, our inability to agree on what we wanted from the owner. We all felt guilty and inadequate. The ceiling chose that moment to open up a new vein. The blood was dripping. Nobody said anything about it. Finally, Martha decided to deal with the issue directly. “Can anyone here explain why there is blood streaming from our ceiling?” she asked Marcia, the Expressionist, looking up at the blood. “That’s not blood,” she said. “It’s just molasses.” We asked her what she meant, and she told us this story:

  “Mrs. Franz”—the former owner of the building, who had sealed our lease with a double kiss—“warned me about it when I moved in, a decade ago. That the building had been a candy factory at the turn of the century, and that it still had odd oozes and memories. Anyway, one morning a couple of years ago, I noticed that there were long, pale drips coming from the ceiling. They were slithery and small, like the forms in a Morris Louis Unfurled. I got on a ladder and stuck my finger out, and then I tasted the stuff. It was sweet, as sweet as can be, like the sugar you use in a buttercream frosting, sweetness dripping from the ceiling.

  “And then I thought, My God, that’s it—sugar from the turn of the century! And I realized that when this was being boiled down, when they were making this right here in my home, I wasn’t born, I didn’t exist. It was thrilling, like the moment when they opened up the Dead Sea Scrolls and found them pristine. Sugar syrup from a century ago, bubbling out of the walls, and still so sweet.” As we all walked over to the little alcove where our bed was, Marcia added, “The thing that’s really mysterious is why up on the sixth floor we have sugar syrup while down here on the fourth floor you have molasses.”

  “I think it must be heated up by the pipes,” our next-door neighbor, a cagey arts administrator, said. “They get hot, and that turns it into molasses. Well, it’s not really molasses, although we’ve called it that for years—this problem has been going on forever, since we moved in. What it really is, is caramel. It caramelizes on the way down from the top floors to the basement. So down there, probably, there’s a big puddle of caramel, like the base of a crème caramel.”

  I felt happy; I was living on the Big Rock Candy Mountain. But then Frank—the framer—pointed out that a vein of sugar syrup running through the walls probably wasn’t so terrific from an engineering perspective. “It’s a structural nightmare,” he said. “Can you imagine the engineers’ reports—what all that sugar is doing to the structure of the building? The way it’s eating up the walls? It alarms me.”

  We all brightened: this might drive down prices, right to the bottom. (For the first time all night, our lawyer looked cheerful.) Everybody stood around for a bit looking at the syrup, like Vermonters at a sugaring off, and then said good night.

  We were so relieved by this explanation that the strangeness of it didn’t strike us until later. Martha shook me awake at two in the morning. “Why is there sugar in the walls?” she asked. “How did it get into the walls? Did somebody inject it in the walls? If this had been a widget factory, would widgets get into the walls and come tumbling out half a century later? What kind of an explanation is that?” At four o’clock, she woke me again. “Why did she taste it?” she asked. “Would you ever taste that stuff? Isn’t that the last thing you would do?”

  So the next morning, before coffee, I called up Marcia and asked her why she had tasted it. “Oh, I was hoping it was sugar,” she said. “I had been hoping to find it ever since I first heard about it, years ago. It was so pure, so abstract—so refined: the past coming back to haunt you, only still so sweet.”

  Though SoHo proper was still filled with artists living in their studios, it was already ceding its primacy in art making to TriBeCa, a newer, sterner art village being forged from the old triangle of buildings below Canal. Its northern border was marked by a small triangular park—not a park, really, just a concrete space with benches, bridging the two neighborhoods. It was smelly and rat-infested, with rats the size of small rabbits. (There are rules for describing rats, as there are for tumors: the latter are the size of various fruit, the former the size of various other animals. A tumor is the size o
f a grapefruit; a rat always the size of a cat.)

  This park was the most trafficked of places. It marked the border between SoHo, then “established”—ridiculous though it might seem elsewhere that an entire anthropology could be established in a decade—and TriBeCa, emergent. Artists would bump into one another there, on the way from studio to gallery and back again. The painter Eric Fischl tells of having a violent, friendship-ending argument with his rival painter, David Salle, on those very benches, exactly where Kirk Varnedoe, my mentor and teacher, who became chief curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA toward the end of the decade, and I used to meet at midnight and exchange papers on the meanings of their art. We were planning a great show to end the decade with, about modern art’s relation to popular culture, and we spent year after year preparing for it.

  Some of the SoHo artists became friends, including David Salle and Eric Fischl (even better friends now than then), and through my own friendships with many, I learned that artists are the most interesting observers of art there are, with a minimum of theoretical hobbyhorsing and the most alert attention to the actual content of what they’ve made. (The fight between David and Eric was about the autobiographical content of David’s pictures, which he denied and Eric insisted was there, as indeed it was. Every love affair found its cognate in a borrowed image.)

  The official story of eighties painting, by which one “movement” succeeded another, the baton passed mysteriously from apostle to apostle, persists to this day. It insisted that the dry Conceptual art of the seventies was replaced by a richer, image-laden Expressionist art of the eighties. The young painters whom I knew hated this cartoon history from the first, which they understood evaded a deeper and more interesting truth. The art they pursued was not “Neo-Expressionist”—“Expressionism” in its early-twentieth-century form they knew so vaguely that it was hard to be “neo” about it. If anything, it was movies, particularly American film noir, that haunted their imagination. They had come of age in cinematheques more than in museums, had been knocked sideways more by Hitchcock than by Max Beckmann. You could get bored looks descanting on De Kooning, but a single reference to the best Robert Aldrich picture would light up eyes and start tongues; you would get a flat reaction talking about Titian, and blank looks talking about comics, but could start a violent argument on the relative merits of Robert Mitchum and Otto Preminger. To get that strange American shiver of feeling—black velvet and massed violins, city streets at night and snowfalls in blinding chases—into their work was their aim, not quite articulated even to themselves.

  The young painters were not at all obsessed by the “media image,” by the standard demotic of the supermarket and the tabloid, as it was understood, intellectually or instinctively, by a Warhol. To them, it was the indiscriminate energy of pop culture that seemed to mark the Pop generation: the Whitmanesque taste for getting it all in. This was not quite fair; the appeal of this soup can or that romance comic to its appropriators was more personal and entangled than the critics chose to know. (Warhol loved his soups, and his choice of icons was Olympian: Elvis Dionysius, Aphrodite Marilyn, and even a grief-consumed Demeter in Jackie.) But it isn’t false to say that the force of Pop Art lay in making you see a field of indiscriminate creative energy where you hadn’t before.

  The new generation in the eighties didn’t see pop culture as a field of indiscriminate creative energy. They were connoisseurs of pop culture—those B-movies in particular, seen in grindhouses or, probably more often, in the still-thriving repertory cinemas—where Warhol’s fandom was purposefully indiscriminate. The new generation had grown up as cinéastes. Discriminating fandom was their religion. Not as a camp alternative to the pieties of high seriousness, but as art forms that were self-evidently mature and manifold. Pop music, from Joni Mitchell to Dylan to the Talking Heads, wasn’t a bracing alternative to concert music. It was all the music we knew. It rewarded us as art does, with metaphors for our own experience, allowing us to recognize it as experience.

  This taste for B-movies was one that the art critic and, later, painter Manny Farber had first inserted into the imagination of the art world, and he, far more than the fashionable Frenchmen, was a hero to them. Having begun writing about art and movies for The Nation all the way back in the forties, he would have a much more profound effect than all the writings of Baudrillard. I sought out Farber myself, oddly, later on, thrilled by his commitment to the non-art sources of art. But all he wanted to know was why I never wrote about his paintings.

  I had begun writing about art for various journals and soon learned that the relation between artists and writers, even when the artist is a writer himself, is like that between editors and writers. Editors are grown-ups; writers are children. (Even when the editor spends his daylight hours being a grown-up, he is still a child as a writer. I know.) Artists are angry supplicants, angered by having to ask for support. Writers on art are more often mystified by the artists’ anger, thinking that it is the subtlety of their discernment that artists admire, not their capacity as advocates. This is a basic confusion, not easily or quickly cured. The artist wants the critic for the same purpose the accused wants a good lawyer—to win his case. The critic wants the artist for the same reason the judge wants an interesting accused—to show off the subtlety of his reasoning. This misunderstanding never ends, and costs more in hurt feelings and sundered relations than one can easily imagine.

  Why Farber’s paintings had so little of the quality of his writing is mysterious, or maybe no more mysterious than why anybody’s work in the form they love is never as good as their work in the form they’re good at. (Edmund Wilson’s novels, Frank Sinatra’s paintings fall into the same conundrum.) But the pictures had a dry, inventoried feeling, like a Wayne Thiebaud without the descriptive virtuosity or the unpretentious purity of spirit. I couldn’t praise them, and praising him wasn’t the praise he wanted. (Not long ago, David Salle, who knew him, too, had a good, blunt explanation: “Manny just wasn’t a good enough painter to articulate his ideas.”) The truth is that we are all what we are, and the effort to be another is the effort that unmakes us, as writers or painters or musicians. It is impossible to disguise anything. We are all naked, all the time. Nobody has pants on. I was learning that, too.

  It was not that the young painters envied filmmakers—though almost all of them sooner or later made movies, or tried to, and it was no accident that the first complete poetic realization of the sensibility they shared was Cindy Sherman’s mock movie stills, black-and-white staged images of imaginary moments from stock fifties movies, the young woman newly arrived in town. It was that they recognized that their emotions passed through the stylized light of the movie projector. Just as their predecessors among the café-concert painters in the French 1880s saw that some secret of their civilization could only be seen in limelight and gaslight, the eighties artists saw that some truth of the American psyche only appeared in the light penetrating from the projector in a grindhouse—not in the wash of television, which made all things look alike, but in the tempting thrill of the peep-show revelation. To get that feeling into their work was the battle.

  The world had altered, but it wasn’t money alone that was doing the altering. Entertainment was no longer sealed off from art, not because standards had “slipped” but because critical vision had sharpened. If you couldn’t hear why pop music was as interesting as concert music, you couldn’t hear. Artists expected to be auteurs. Selling out seemed a nonissue. Talking Heads emerged from RISD as an art project with a pop edge to become superstars and then, themselves startled, could spend a lifetime pursuing art. This turned out to be an illusion, too, as a generation of embittered musicians would discover when their record deals ran out; but for twenty or so years, from 1970 to 1990, it was a very powerful one. The eighties were the height of it. The good fortune of a David Byrne wasn’t typical, but cultures aren’t shaped by the typical. They’re shaped by the thematically atypical, the extraordinary things that resonate w
ith ordinary hopes.

  “Presentational” was the most damning word the young painters I came to know used for all they didn’t want their art to be. Meaning, I came to grasp, the same thing that, decades later, when I wrote for the theater, I understood actors to mean when they condemned another actor for “indicating,” or what playwrights mean by the word “expository.” The art of the previous generation, they thought, in being “presentational,” kept no secrets, made the subtext text. It wasn’t supposed to. “What you see is what you see,” the slogan of the minimalist Judd generation of the sixties, seemed not too simple but too much of a straitjacket, too solipsistic, too obvious. Even the art of Warhol or Oldenburg or a Richard Serra seemed to the young painters of the TriBeCa eighties “presentational” in just this way—all it had was “presence,” telling its stories with no stories to tell. Its strength was its straightforwardness, and life was not straightforward. The irony was that the earlier generation had sacrificed everything—metaphor, story, even mood and feeling—for that effect, for a “what you see is what you see” in which the pure presence was the one thing that the work possessed.