At the Strangers' Gate

by Adam Gopnik

  The younger artists were certainly not torn between abstraction and the image—that was a trap for graduate students to fall into. What was going on in those streets was in truth one more romantic rebellion against a classical style. How could one register strangeness without falling into set patterns of Surrealism? That was their big question, and it was a question I recognized as my own, too, in another form: how to register the cracks and faults and flaws in a beautiful surface without becoming merely a scold.

  It was easy to see, and to say, that what they ended up with was a form of Surrealism or Dada, as it had passed already into the American mainstream of art. But to say this—and I did—was to miss its urgency of feeling. In fact, if the art of the time could be summed up, it would have been in a simple and fatuous phrase: the young painters wanted to paint what they felt. Each of these terms of course was torturously complicated: What was it “to paint” in an era of mass imagery? What had you “felt” that wasn’t part of some general feeling already cheapened by overuse?

  One of the things they felt, of course, was the inability to feel—the way that feeling had been so crisscrossed and scarred with cliché and media images that even a firsthand emotion had become secondhand. Longing, needing, wanting, loving—each now had its set form. The hierarchy of emotions had become jumbled. Big things like weddings and wars and small things like celebrity divorces occupied the same space. The wisdom of Eric Fischl’s work was the easiest for me to recognize, since it flowed from his writerly desire to tell stories, along with a desire to find a new angle to tell the stories from. I disliked Julian Schnabel’s paintings—I still do, while admiring his movies—because they seemed so blatant, so farcically self-conscious in their desire to make a big picture by making a big picture. Energize the surface? Smash plates across it. Recover some of the aura of film noir? Paint on black velvet! But the first one over the moat to take the castle is rarely the safecracker with nimble fingers and fine tools. It is the guy with the big hammer, and skulls swinging from it. I recognized that there was a shiver of emotion there, a breaking through.

  Theirs was a clash in the perpetual war in art between classical system and romantic rebellion, between mysterious enthusiasm and the lucid laying out of parts. “The spell of the mysterious image”—that could have been the title of two-thirds of the SoHo shows at the time. My one epiphany—the one epiphany I had brought with me from uptown, taking it with me on the 6 train down—was that there was something intensely new and significant about the way isolated individual voices did not have to be choired together to resonate in the huge incomprehensible emptiness of mass experience. Their art had none of the mischief or the “look at me” of Pop Art. Everyone had to speak for herself, and if you didn’t you couldn’t be heard. What I had learned from the Blue Room was, in the weirdest way, what I was learning from the downtown art world. But it was the same thing: big towns amplify small voices. The experience of the Blue Room was the experience of the time. The analogies between the new art and the writing I was beginning to dream of doing seemed remote, but not entirely remote—because what I wanted to bear witness to, the one thing that I thought was mine, was that the distance between small spaces and big spaces was now so large that the emptiness had become resonant. All of the old middle ground of New York, all the intermediate institutions—from cafeterias to argue in, to art that people like my parents could afford—were being stripped away. This didn’t mean that you couldn’t be heard; just the opposite. It meant that the space between the Blue Room and the Big Store, being larger than ever, was more resonant, more likely to echo than it ever had before. Small shivers made big sounds. In an abandoned concert hall, press the sustain pedal down and a single finger on one piano key fills the room.

  I wish I had seen and said this more clearly then. But the things we know to be true we are sometimes reluctant to say. Or perhaps, inevitably, I was competitive: uncomfortable in the role of critic, essentially a storyteller, I didn’t want to cede too much impulse to my peers. I was right, I think, to mistrust art as political propaganda, or the attempts to “radicalize” the art world—not because radical polemics are unworthy but because the art world is the most hopeless place to make polemics live, much less make real politics happen. You could radicalize the art world, but it was like radicalizing the circus: even if the clowns might be made to frown and the lions to eat the lion tamers, a circus pushed to the margins of behavior is not a circus reformed. A circus made marginal is merely a sideshow.

  And anyway, I had come to think that one can be a thoroughgoing elitist in the arts and a thoroughgoing egalitarian in politics. The two are not only not restrictive of each other but in a real sense dependent on each other. It’s exactly because we recognize that talents are unfairly distributed that we want to be sure that the necessities of a good life are not. But I also felt sure that, whatever its slogan, betting against new art is always a fool’s errand, not because all new art is good, but because somewhere in it lies—like it or not, believe in it or not—the psychic image of its time. Art traps time. It just does. The mood of a moment can’t escape the shapes of its chroniclers. To say that it’s the wrong art is to say, unbeknownst to the speaker, that we feel we are living in the wrong time. But, then, we always are. And then you will look back, and there will be the time, trapped in its art. Art reflects life by reflecting light. Jeff Koons’s bunny had exactly the same shimmer as the small face of a CD of the same period; the light in a David Salle is the light of the movies of David Lynch. I had figured that out inside, I think, but hadn’t yet found a way to say it. It required more independence—more lightness of mind—than I had yet acquired.

  Two men, wildly mismatched, most fully recall those streets for me. One was the critic Robert Hughes, the other the artist Jeff Koons. They existed at opposite ends of the village—Bob in a loft he had bought on Prince Street in the early seventies; Jeff at restaurants and galleries along the Gold Coast of West Broadway, and then in his studio on Broadway itself, along the border of the Village. They despised each other—well, Bob despised Jeff; I doubt that Jeff knew enough to despise Bob, and anyway, despising people didn’t seem to be in his arsenal of emotions. But they were the alpha and omega of the period: one the perfect embodiment of pre-ironic man, infuriated by anything that seemed merely outré or mannered as violating the righteous passions of art; the other the first embodiment of post-ironic man, enraptured by the outré and so enwrapped in the mannered that he couldn’t know it as such. In the mid-eighties, knowing both, I tried to navigate, or triangulate, my way through the decade with the two of them, a north and a south star, each giving opposite information about the ocean.

  Bob Hughes I had admired since college, intensely, for the authority of his art writing in Time and even more for The Shock of the New, still, almost forty years on, by far the best synoptic gospel of modernism—though it had been far from admired by my avant-gardist family. Bob’s essentially pessimistic view of modern art—as a failed attempt at Utopian transformation that left many lovely things along the unconcluded way—was not ours. It was scandalously skeptical. We met on the street at Dean & DeLuca; I recognized him and screwed up the courage to say hello, and he, in turn (as of course I secretly hoped), allowed he had heard of my early efforts, written though they were in a tone of strenuous midget exhortation. After what was becoming a familiar look of slight surprise—I was younger and smaller than my juvenilia’s tone of having all the bases covered and all the goods in the shopwindow out, and every allusion already fully alluded to, might have suggested—he offered me his hand.

  Realizing we were near neighbors, he made an instant invitation to dinner, which he quickly accelerated to an invitation to come out fishing at his place on Shelter Island that weekend, to carry on the conversation. There were family from Australia arriving; it would be a colonial party! (He knew we were Canadian.) “Nothing like a boat and a sunburn to carry forward the exegesis of Die Brücke,” he said, laughing his whale’s laugh, chin
turned way up, revealing his oddly stubby baleen teeth. I accepted, of course, and then, to Martha’s great relief—fishing boats being her idea of hell, and fishing boats with hard-drinking Australians her idea of its final inner circle—he called on Friday to apologize. Victoria, his very long-suffering wife, had a hideous headache; could we defer our plan for a week or so? And meanwhile meet for dinner at a Japanese restaurant around the corner? I needed no special insight to recognize that Victoria’s headache had been contrived—though certainly a husband with an urge to invite total strangers for an already overpacked weekend party was one who could induce headaches at will. Over the years, we received many more strenuously impromptu Wednesday invitations to fishing weekends, invariably canceled at the last moment by Victoria’s headache/streaming cold/migraines and beyond. Martha felt for her.

  But we did have dinner that Friday, and then many compensatory, post-migraine Friday-night dinners after, either at Omen, a Japanese restaurant he loved, or else at an Italian place farther down the street whose name I can’t recall, perhaps because whereas, at the Japanese place, you could sip the warm rice wine politely, the nameless red Italian wine at the Italian place was too good not to swallow, glass after glass. Like all ambitious Australians—Clive James was another—he was a natural Italophile, and my Francophilia, then and later, left him uneasy. The fussiness of the French seemed tiresome to him rather than fastidious; the openness of the Italians to pleasure unmediated by too many rules chimed with his New World sensibility. Over the years, I came to know Clive—his exact contemporary and equal as antipodean homo universalis—even better, and was fascinated by the way in which both of them seemed to have swallowed Western culture whole, like the Chinese boy who swallowed the ocean in the fable. The almost absurd absoluteness of their erudition was a form of generosity; they had swallowed it all to spit it out elsewhere. (They shared an admiring, officially friendly, deeply competitive wariness of each other’s existence—with each, I always felt, secretly suspecting that two antipodean homines universales was one more than the world quite needed.)

  Red-faced and so resonant of voice that other tables would stare over at our table with looks of varying annoyance and indulgence—one of those people who can achieve the effect of a debating team at table while sitting alone—Bob spun conversation that drew effortlessly on an inner well of aphorism, insult, opinion, snatches of Australian folk ballad, and a limitless reservoir of modern English verse. He reached down with the bucket of his argument, and there, always, was the apropos instance. He had memorized more poetry than any man or woman I have ever known, and long stretches of it would come pouring out of his lips between the imprecations: he knew all of Larkin by heart, so thoroughly that you could have saved yourself the cost of a paperback copy of The Whitsun Weddings just by prodding him into reciting it, usually by first getting a few lines wrong yourself. He put it down to his Jesuit education. “They beat verse into you with a stick,” he said, and I sensed that the beatings had produced more than just verse. A Johnsonian air of sexual torment radiated from him after the second bottle. He had been an angelically handsome young man, I knew, and drink and salt air and a sedentary life had plumped him out more roguishly, until he looked like Robert Shaw playing the part of a canny Australian sea captain in a movie. The kind of cultural omnivorousness that he displayed was, in the Village, slightly embarrassing—one choice line from Kristeva or Deleuze carried more weight in the art world than the whole Book IV of Pope’s Dunciad. He didn’t know that—or, better, didn’t care.

  He hated irony in all its forms save his own favorite ones. We would argue, sometimes late into the night, running over the same material, remaking the same debate. It was an ongoing argument about the artisanal in art, the significance of craft to inspiration. He had come to hate, rather than merely discriminate among, the current generation of artists. I worried sometimes that his insults sprayed into the air would bring immediate (and understandable) retaliation from a stray subject of them who happened to be hanging around nearby—“Call that drawing? Chewing gum made two-dimensional.” Or, on Koons: “All the fully articulate emotion of an autistic child banging his head against the corner wall, and getting paid for each drop of blood produced.” Or, on another occasion: “Write for the Times? Write for the TIMES? Mate, it’s like sticking your dick in a Cuisinart.”

  But he honored the great Johnsonian distinction between wit and mere abuse, and he had a serious, developed argument in mind. The great modernists, he insisted, had been masters of the full range of visual craft, men and women who saw and drew and chose. Each decision to “break” the describing hand—to be honestly clumsy, to draw “badly” rather than well—was a choice, fully conscious and realized. Each rule violated was a creative discovery knowingly dared. “Artistic choice is now autistic compulsion,” he intoned. “The good guys drew as well as they needed to; this generation couldn’t draw better if they tried, mate. I won’t say that they couldn’t draw better if you offered them a million dollars. Because they have been offered a million dollars not to draw well, and have taken it, thank you very much.”

  I argued back, or tried to—he could aphorize after two bottles, while two glasses had me blotto, with Martha discreetly reaching out to put my glass beyond the reach of a repour—that the important thing was not that Matisse and Picasso could have done “better” if they chose—that was true of any number of other forgotten painters—but that they didn’t choose. The broken hand might be whole and sometimes might not be, but its accomplishments were freely made, whatever the technical acquirements. Technique was a value, not an absolute virtue, and only one value among many others, including originality of vision, intensity of communication, and a grasp of the historical moment. It was comforting and reassuring to see that the modernist masters could have done otherwise, but not doing otherwise was the whole point of what they did do.

  Irony, he argued in turn, is a toxin to the imagination, formaldehyde, killing the butterfly even as it fixed it down. Art made of secondhand experience, things held in quotation marks and borrowed sincerity, betrayed the material of lived experience. “Lived experience” was a holy phrase for him. “The unexamined life is not worth living, and the unlived examination not worth looking at.” I learned from listening to him something else, that the real gift and goal of criticism lay in the capacity—half knack, half skill—to tell what is genuinely contradictory in art, and thus rising from the intensely lived poles of a specific human personality, from what is simply muddled. Being a good judge of art lies in having the ability to tell vital contradiction from vitiating confusion. Since all strong art is contradictory—the contradiction between piety and physicality being the most common kind in religious art, beautiful flesh denying the flesh—the critic must be double, too. Matisse is nothing but contradictions: childlike drawing and North African color, voluptuous sensations with an ever-anxious touch, rising from the complete personality and whole of a French bourgeois who wants to touch, fears being touched. Late Picasso, on the other hand, is nothing but confusion: decorative and human and narrative and storytelling all crowded together with logorrhea expected to do the work of eloquence.

  Bob could see in a second the vital contradictions in Francis Bacon—the play between despair and décor, between all that melodramatic scenery and the genuine core of angst it enclosed. He could perfectly articulate the contradictions, the fruitful, life-giving tensions, in his beloved Bob Rauschenberg—obscenity and transcendence, the goat and the De Kooning touch. But the very same kinds of contradictions articulated in a remarkably parallel manner in a Salle or a Koons enraged him. They were simply not the contradictions he knew in his own character, and so he could only perceive them as confusion. He knew what it was to drink hard, consume poetry like pasta, and enter into rivalry with the great Mediterranean traditions. Fishing for tuna off Montauk and talking about Henry Moore were continuous for him, life-enhancing complementarities. But he could not know what it was to eat well, love B-movies
, accept popular culture or the “media image” as a normal rather than threatening part of visual experience, or, for that matter, at the same time to like big outsize suits and suave, tightly wound paintings. The new set of contradictions looked to him not just like confusions but like deliberate contempt for the older set, which by now were no longer known to him as contradictions, merely as another truth.

  The paradoxes of our own personalities get entangled in the art of our time, and then tangle and trip us up. Critics date not because our eyes fade but because our sense of the living contradictions grows stiff. Bob knew this, even in the midst of his damnations. After a body-and-soul-breaking automobile accident in 1999, he would give up writing about contemporary art, for what had become for him the more felt subjects of cities and the civilizations they induce. The contradictions of Rome seem eternal, which they were.

  To what degree, or how entirely, did I believe the case against craft and skill to be true even as I made it? The truth is that I struggled every day, all day, not just to get the right words but to get the words I wrote in the one right order they desired. All that I admired in writing was pure craft, the fiendishly hard-acquired skill of sentence making: those ten right words in that one right order, the difference in weight between Latinate ones and Yiddish ones, the single short closing sentence of monosyllables that could have the wit and authority of a winning drop shot in tennis. To be single-mindedly devoted to a classical craft standard in writing while using that same craft standard to deprecate craft standards in art seems to me now a slightly self-consuming activity—even, in a way, an absurd one. The realist painter who could get one leaf of one tree down right I patronized, even while I knew how insanely difficult it is to get one leaf down right in writing. I like to think that this was a pregnant contradiction. But it may not even have been a hopeless confusion. It may have been no more than plain hypocrisy, held up by village blindness, as so many village values are.