At the Strangers' Gate

by Adam Gopnik

  If Hughes was a man of fertile contradictions, Jeff Koons, at the very opposite end of the era’s sensibility, was an artist who seemed to have set in play contradictions that no one else had been crazy enough to know could exist—like a mathematician who, multiplying negative numbers, somehow discovers a whole new world of positive ones—or maybe just like the games counselor at a summer camp who somehow organizes a tug of war between two teams on either end of the camp, with one made of zebras and the other of leprechauns. You couldn’t deny the accomplishment, or, at first, see the purpose, or then, finally, understand how he had found the forces and put them all in play. If you bumped into Jeff Koons on the street of SoHo in the eighties, it was always surprising. He had a kind of sweet but slightly cartoonlike face—the kind of face you see more often on character actors, than on wary, sly creative people. His smile seemed one size too big, his eyes too open in wonder or surprise; the expressions seemed plastered on rather than simply articulated. It wasn’t at all the vibe or feeling given off by most artists, who, though they no longer cultivated a “bohemian” black-turtleneck vibe, certainly had a style that was meant to feel artistic, distinct. They wanted to seem cool. Jeff no longer wanted to seem cool. Cool didn’t matter. Cool is a way of defending ourselves against seeming too purposeful. He was all purpose.

  I had seen his famous chrome bunny of 1986—a polished silver balloon blow-up child’s toy rabbit, a bulbous carrot clutched in its hands, ears long and erect and yet molded, curved, cast in polished stainless steel, hard and shiny—at the Saatchi Collection in London, in an early show of what was then called “neo-geo” art, meaning neo-geometric, filled with a dour, punning awareness of abstraction’s resemblance to the logos and brandings of corporate culture. Most of the neo-geo art was diagrammatic; Koons’s wasn’t. Soft and hard, gleaming and repellent, at once a joke (I thought) about Brancusi’s streamlined Platonic animals and an assault on the whole tradition of “displaced” objects that had marked twentieth-century art. Since Duchamp, artists had been taking bicycle wheels and urinals and Brillo boxes and bringing them into museums and announcing them as art. In that way, anti-artists had been violating the sanctuary of art for a century. Koons was the first to see that you could violate the sanctuary of anti-art—that the displaced objects of Dada and Duchamp and Pop could be treated not as intelligent jokes but as visionary statements, so that your bunny was not merely a blow-up balloon bunny but a blow-up bunny transformed (by other hands) into a sleek streamlined sculpture, a shining luxury object, an empty, borrowed object that was borrowed from the deepest recesses of your imagination.

  The displaced ordinary object was, so to speak, now ready for its close-up—it was ready for its shrine, it shone; the joke was on those who thought that art had come to an end when Warhol announced a soup can as art. The announcement, it turned out, had actually been a herald, not the seventh trumpet; with the museum open to anything, anything could come in, not as jokes but as private fetishes, even as luxury goods. Warhol had made something of tabloid images, so that what looked at first like simple ironic displacement actually revealed itself to be a picture of American mythology—divine Marilyn and grief-stricken Jackie and Elvis, doubled, tripled, and even octupled. In the same way, Koons had, with minimal means, made something that became a maximalist mirror. The bunny looked like its time. It glowed like a CD. It was rounded like a Nike. It was shining like Trump Tower. It was, as Charlotte the spider would have written, some bunny, and one of my very rare prescient moments as a critic was to say so, and recognize that Koons was less philosophical than, in his own strange way, inspired.

  This was one of my few good guesses in the decade, and the conviction only increased when, after I’d written about him, we sought each other out—as artists and their admirers will—and I discovered that “weird” didn’t begin to capture it. He knew less about art than a graduate student might have, the obviously expected comparison of his bunny with a Brancusi seal got a slightly baffled, cautious response. But he had a long, absorbing soliloquy on himself and his art and its place, one that I did not so much respond to in conversation as dip into at various moments across the decade. “I am asked to lead, but not prepared to lead—chosen and yet somehow unready…” “The essence of my art is its formality. When I say formality, I don’t mean this in the sense of formalism.” He would look at you as though the distinction were transparent, hyper-lucid. “I’m a formal artist. Everything in my art has to do with forms. I mean by that their formation, not their form.” I groped to understand. “People keep saying my art is rich in images. I think of it as being a study in forms.” Well, that made sense, of a kind—every artist asks you to admire the forms, even if what is shown is a blood-curdling murder. “I’m much closer to Morris Louis than to Superman,” he would conclude, and you wouldn’t know what to say—what Morris Louis had to do with it, or where Superman had come from. The soliloquy was at once so earnestly delivered that you were sure it must have content and yet so arbitrary in elements that you half-suspected it of being what used to be called a put-on. “All of my interactions with you have been pleasurable and inspired by integrity,” he said at the end of one coffee.

  One memorable night, at dinner, he politely and enthusiastically asked Martha, “What is irony? People keep telling me that my art has it, and I really don’t understand what it is.” She stumbled, taken aback, “I don’t know, Jeff, I think you should tell me.” To her non-answer he responded with an opaque and perplexed silence. He really didn’t know what irony was, and was hoping, politely, that someone would tell him.

  Through the mists and abstractions, a truth emerged: he was serious. More than serious, he was sincere. All of his formative experience of art had been ironic. The put-ons had been his pieties. Duchamp and Warhol, the borrowed and appropriated image—they weren’t anti-art to him. In a world where everything was ironic, nothing was. Once, over a plate of Terra Chips, he said: “Why did the potato emerge from all of these chips as the champion? Why not this beet? Why not the sweet potato? There was no logic. Was there a logic? I don’t see a logic. The potato was called. I’m the potato.” In a world where everything was held at a distance, in inverted commas, how could you tell irony from its opposite? All he had ever known as art was already ironic—it was suspended in quotes, demanding comment, and misunderstood if read too literally. He had seen the same yellow rectangles that I had seen.

  But though you were meant to become more sophisticated through this process, he had become the opposite. If everything was ironic, then nothing was, and what used to be called your buried, inner life—your sexual obsessions, your sexual dreams, your pet fetishes, long-remembered television series—could come bouncing out into the gallery, crafted by Italian artisans in the forms of manufactured kitsch, counting as art, sincerely your own. Inner life and outer life were one, a seamless web of kitsch images and adolescent appetites. In a way, the greatest transformation of the period came the moment when Koons was sued, successfully, by a terrible photographer for appropriating his postcard images. In the past, high art had poached on common experience freely. Now common experience was back with a lawyer. The post-ironic lay in that battle, the new world of imagery. For what was called “kitsch” in his work was not the knowing quotation of a borrowed demotic; it was the unmediated—and extremely expensive—creation of a naïve pantheon of personal symbols. The bunny was everyone. You were the bunny. He worked like Warhol and thought like Joseph Cornell. It was a compelling American mix. Wilfrid Sheed had once said that he wondered what would happen when kids grew up for whom the parody version was the only version they knew. And now we knew.

  So here, in one ten-block area, could be found three kinds, at least: pre-ironic man, passing away, with his love of Rome and wine, his sexual torment and social-democratic politics; post-ironic man, just coming into being, with Terra Chips and philosophizing and hedge-fund money; and between them mid-ironic man—not only unprepared to lead, but with no one asking, a mixed-up
bag of chips if there ever was one. Mid-ironic man, me, was still hostage to the old values but prepared to entertain new tastes, to embrace even the loony if it promised to lead us forward in a final parody of avant-garde advance, and so embody the age. Pre-ironic man, post-ironic man, with mid-ironic man (and woman) standing between the two, in doubt and wonder and worry.

  Art traps time; but food traps manners. The art lasts. The food rots. This makes it a much better bet to invest in the art than in the food—and yet, when you want to re-create the manners, the food, and its offering, tells more than the art can. So: the restaurants of SoHo at that time were a map of its hungers. The desire to eat well and act wisely—it was my generation’s particular contradiction of kinds. The generation before ours thought that eating well was a form of showing off. We thought that eating well was a form of acting wisely. The next generation, who take eating well for granted and want at all times to be fair, not privileged, think that eating really well is a way of enacting virtue.

  But at that time the restaurants in SoHo and nearby, though they may not yet have defined a new ethic, certainly defined a new aesthetic. “Yuppies” (a term no more useful for understanding the time or class than “rednecks” is for studying people in Mississippi) spent money on exotic olive oils and eating out as their one purchase of luxury; they were still unable to afford the apartments their parents lived in. There was the empire of the McNallys already taking shape in TriBeCa, a new kind of restaurant that was themed—more a branch of show business as dining, with big spaces, crowded tables, slinky servers, and good food. This was part of a New York tradition, the same one that Joe Baum and Restaurant Associates had started with The Forum of Twelve Caesars and even The Four Seasons. The difference, crucial and typical of the time, was that these new themed places were designed for the young and newly affluent rather than for businessmen—for artists, or dealers anyway, to dine at, rather than for Madmen to lunch at. Opening with the decade in 1980, The Odeon, down on West Broadway, was a restored cafeteria that created the new condition of crowding—where being packed in together with the right people was a good bit of what was being sold. The Odeon, over time, would give birth to Balthazar and Pastis and many beyond.

  The Odeon was famous, I discovered, for the drug activity in its bathrooms. It’s an embarrassing admission, but in all those years when everyone was trying cocaine, I never tried cocaine. I don’t think I was even offered cocaine. Or maybe I was, and was so dim that I didn’t know it was cocaine I was being offered. Our tipples were older, coffee and champagne and red, still then mostly French, wine. This was partly a backward-looking habit, but it wasn’t really from falling into an older crowd. Our best friends preferred champagne, too. It was a sort of counter-programming from the other side of a generation: not smoking weed but drinking Rhône Valley wines instead was a way of rebelling against our own parents’ too utilitarian approach to intoxication. We didn’t want to turn on and then tune in. We wanted to tune in before we turned on. We wanted a system of values reflected in a set of choices—this small bottling, this out-of-the-way peasant vineyard—so that, after the intoxication was over, you had still mastered an idea. It was another way of turning the dissolute into the disciplined—of making art, work.

  Closer to my heart, and more tenderly typical of the era’s aspirations than The Odeon, were the still-lively and possible smaller restaurants of the neighborhood, still expressing the dream or ambitions of a visionary owner, or a single chef, or, most touchingly, a couple conjoined in the religion of eating. Of all those places, the one that best captured the time and the place was the little restaurant that David and Karen Waltuck opened in 1979 on Grand Street. In the late seventies and early eighties, some small ground-floor room in a store on an obscure street on the southern fringe of SoHo was transformed—overnight, it seemed—into something new and beckoning. What had been one more dark corner suddenly seemed to glow, day and night, with the spell of the new. You could glimpse pale-apricot walls as you walked by, and read the italic menu penned in Karen’s extravagant calligraphy. It became a wonderful pilgrimage to walk over and see what was on the menu that night. For those of us who couldn’t afford the extravagance of dining there, it was enough to read the italic menu and imagine.

  What Chanterelle represented was several contradictions of the period, all of them fruitful. One was the attempt to reconcile a love of luxury with an aesthetic of austerity, minimalism with maximal pleasure. This was accomplished in many ways, some subtle, some obvious. The signature seafood sausage, all white on white, announced itself as a sausage while withdrawing the bad conscience of the pig from it. It was white, right through. The subtlety was an attempt, unconscious or reverent, to outdo French luxury traditions with American ones, or replace them—no register, no bar, no bottles on display, and no window into the kitchen. Commerce was extinguished even as luxury was celebrated.

  Dean & DeLuca persists, in all coffee bars across Manhattan, but I would have to explain to our children that the art gallery apparatus of it—the steel shelving and track lighting and handwritten spice cans of brushed chrome—these once meant something, when they were new in the eighties. An earlier generation’s ideas of luxury persist even after the originality of what they celebrated has vanished. Fortnum & Mason in London, now quaint and touristy, once represented the sheer bustle, the imperial reach—from Chinese tea to Madagascar chocolate to Turkish delight—of British commerce. In my own doubtless cockeyed view on the next generation, a certain kind of funky functionalism inhabits the cheese stores of Bushwick and Williamsburg—hand-lettered signs and ironic department heads. Their point seems to be that caffeine only fuels irony, and that luxury, being available only in small doses, should be inherently apologetic. Our forms of luxury apologized for nothing. They claimed their space. It was the most beautiful room in New York.

  I see that I have lost track of my heroine among these dense thickets of art theory and food memories, having shown her, after finding our loft and spotting the molasses, only asleep, and then putting a hand over my glass, and bouncing back a question to Jeff Koons. In truth, Martha was happy and busy. We had room to look at each other—no treat for her, it was for me. After almost three years when we had been on top of each other in every imaginable way, we now had what felt like vast savannas of space between us. I am blind to her in the Blue Room years—scarcely a single isolated memory of her eyes or smile or even clothes remains—because we were so close. I could not always separate my eyes from her face. Now she had rediscovered her best friend from teenage years, the novelist Meg Wolitzer, and they would have rapt, malicious phone conversations about New York people every night, sending Martha into paroxysms of laughter, while still trying to be “kind.”

  She now had a canvas to work on, and made our place even more beautiful. White was her signature, white with poetry of a slightly whimsical cast. Lights of white fiberglass fabric made by my mother glowed from floor to ceiling; a mosquito net—there of necessity but looking ghostly good—covered the bed; a single midnight-blue sofa and a white rug with two sober hares looking out from it. I still think it was the most beautiful place to live. I tease her today, but it’s true that she always spent every penny we both made, and we always lived beautifully. We have always been in debt, and always in the midst of lovely things. Someday the debts will overwhelm us, but the memory of beauty will, I hope, remain.

  She graduated from Columbia to work as an assistant film editor on a Balanchine documentary in an editing room of the Maysles brothers. There is a pleasure in watching someone you love doing something well that has nothing to do with your love for her. The husbands of singers marvel at their reaching notes; I once saw a great professor of Shakespeare see his inamorata give a lecture on John Donne, and his eyes popped out of his head. It isn’t surprise; it’s that when we love someone we really do love them whole, for who they are, and what they do seems a bonus, an extra, undeserved.

  Her hands had a second life on the deck of the Ste
enbeck, where she would trim away obnoxious traits—I once spent six hours watching her remove an over-hearty laugh from an interview with a ballerina, while still preserving the continuity of the sequence, with side shots and inserts so subtly introduced that I’m sure no viewer could tell that it was anything but one continuous interview, barely touched by an editorial hand. (I learned, too, that movie critics have as little understanding of movie mechanics as, well, art critics do of drawing: what is praised as exciting film editing is almost always already in the camera when it comes to the editing room, and what are praised as great performances are often crafted by the woman with the Steenbeck. Editors win best-actor prizes for actors, and screenwriters win best-editing awards without getting them.)

  I see her now mastering her craft, and I wonder as I write this whether this was not the larger, truer, overriding point of all the smaller SoHo points. Admiration for artisanal craft is one of the few surviving universal emotions—it has survived even the loss of the artisan class. Invariably, when someone did do something well—a dessert beautifully plated, a wicker rocker well re-caned—it was the source of amazement even among those critically committed to believing that craft was an old-fashioned hobby and the well-made object a sentimental diversion for art. Human beings can’t help admiring something well made. It occurs to me now that what I made well may have impressed her, too—indeed, may have been the only impression there was to make.

  Our excitement over the artisanal may be a displacement of unconscious dismay over what has happened to our art. The critic with a microbrew in his hand is praising, instinctively, something well made, demanding, and delicious that could only have been produced by years of craft, hard-learned and delicately applied. The more artistic our art—the more imaginatively free and indifferent to traditional skills—the more artisanal we ask our objects and products to be. The artistic and the artisanal are always in a strange zero-sum game: when artistic acts of unbounded imagination rise to the top, the artisanal finds a form to return in everyday life; when high art is again artisanal, carefully crafted freedom of imagination returns to the everyday. The nineteenth-century academic masters, the great ones, Ingres and Delacroix, would eat happily from standardized recipes and took pleasure in the advance of industrial agriculture, or were indifferent to it. They had all the craft they needed right there on the canvas. (Champagne, the great product of the nineteenth-century Bohemia, is a remarkably standardized, high-tech product.) Even the Impressionists at their cafés never asked where the coffee beans had been grown or whether the absinthe was double-distilled.