Figure It Out

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  (2011)

  AN EVENING OF SCREEN TESTS

  Start with Judy Garland. In her wardrobe tests for Valley of the Dolls (1967), a film from which she was eventually fired, she comes across as a charmer—lighthearted, cooperative, problem-free. On her behalf, I want to start campaigning. I want to lobby for a remake of Valley, this time with Garland restored to her role as wig-wearing Helen Lawson, a part that destiny gave to Susan Hayward instead. And I want to militate for a worldwide reinterpretation of Garland, the court of public opinion this time passing a “not guilty” verdict on her depressive tempestuousness. Garland screen-tests my eligibility for the role of interpreter who rescues tarnished goddesses, though Judy may now wish to excise me from her posthumous entourage.

  Barbara Lapsley, star of George Kuchar’s I, An Actress (1977), is no Garland, but she rivals Gena Rowlands. Repeatedly, Kuchar violates the firewall between director and actor; he wants to teach Lapsley how to emote, how to clutch her breasts, how to writhe on the floor. Maybe she is preparing for an audition, or maybe the audition has already begun. Maybe the audition has ended, and now she is actually playing the role. Maybe Kuchar is the real actress, the film’s “I.” Watching, we aim aggression at the wig and coat propped like a scarecrow on a chair; wig and coat are stand-in for Lapsley’s costar. Maybe our aggression is being screen-tested. Each time the wig, falling on the floor, unmasks a charade that doesn’t need unmasking, my heart leaps with elation, as Wordsworth’s heart leapt when he saw a rainbow. But there’s a photo—“of many, one”—that unnerved me as a child, and I can’t help but mention it now: the photo, appearing in Joe Morella and Edward Epstein’s 1969 compendium, The Films of Judy Garland, supposedly shows Judy as gingham-clad Dorothy in Kansas, but the girl in the photo looks like a wax-museum replica of Judy, or like a different child actress—say, Deanna Durbin’s unknown sister, living incognito in a Nevada ghost town. Perhaps the photo is a publicity still, or perhaps it is a fraud, engineered to send us downward into a vortex of identity-undecidability.

  In the video Tape 5925: Amy Goodrow (2002), the artist Eileen Maxson stars as (to quote from the artist’s website) “an asocial college student with a secret” who “submits an audition tape to The Real World.” This screen test’s highlight is the syncopation that Maxson’s mouth and eyes enact: eyes and mouth move at cross-purposes. The mouth announces nerd identity; but then the eyes twinkle, rescuing the face from nerd purdah. Irony flashes up from somberness, one gleam at a time. Maxson (playing Goodrow) obeys an irony-rationing edict: in hard times, the government apportions only a few instants of irony per month to each citizen. Have you noticed that many young people these days keep their faces numb and expressionless? Maxson allows me to understand that beneath a neutralized face may lie volcanic intensities. My daft assumptions about affect deficits are screen-tested by Maxson’s tour de force.

  I don’t have much to say about McDermott & McGough’s uncanny Alice Campbell’s Hollywood, 1938, except to speculate that the name Alice Campbell might have something to do with Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup and with Frank E. Campbell’s Funeral Chapel (Garland’s and Rudolph Valentino’s way station), and to confess that I am still in the dark about whether these screen tests—a mother instructing different child actresses to make a scrapbook from issues of Photoplay—actually come from 1938 or indeed feature the personages listed in the credits (including the 1980s-art-world scions Stella Schnabel, Lola Schnabel, and Zena Scharf). McDermott & McDough, as if inspired by the vertigo-inducing projector in Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel (which engendered Last Year at Marienbad), deny chronology its accustomed sway. The movie’s best line—it gets repeated many times—is the mother’s. With MGM intonations worthy of Norma Shearer, the mother warns the child, “Be careful not to get any scrap paper on the carpet.” I don’t understand this admonition. Isn’t scrap paper easy to pick up? A prohibition against muffin crumbs makes sense, but why deny scrap paper its right to dwell on carpet, in floorboard crevice, or anywhere it wants to reside?

  End with Susan Sontag, or Warhol’s two screen tests of her elliptical allure. In my perhaps faulty recollection of these documents, Sontag momentarily tries to keep her face inexpressive—a deadened, behaved face, masking its restiveness. Abandoning impassivity, she unabashedly smiles, a big, awkward, star-envying, North Hollywood High School grin. When we can extract a smile from a scornful face, ambrosia seems to rain down from the heavens, as Wordsworth or E. Y. “Yip” Harburg, lyricist of “We’re Off to See the Wizard,” might have said, had either man been fortunate enough to read Against Interpretation. An untimely death in 1850 prevented Wordsworth from encountering it; Harburg lived until 1981, so he had a chance. Just now I googled “Harburg Sontag” to see if I could find a rendezvous between these two American Jews (“Susan Rosenblatt” and “Isidore Hochberg” were the disguises they wore when they first entered the universe), but Google showed results for a different search, “Hamburg Sonntag,” Sunday in Hamburg, tips on how to spend your touristic Sunday in the only German-speaking city that Thomas Bernhard, my role model in rant and reverie, truly loved.

  (2013)

  RAUSCHENBERG’S SQUEEGEE

  In the studio, Robert Rauschenberg rolls his shirtsleeves above the biceps. Elbow dimples and chunky arms add up to charm, success, the luxury of being beheld. Brice Marden, assisting today, beholds him. So does Mel Bochner, the unseen photographer. Twice-beheld, Rauschenberg refuses to smile. Images emerging from his squeegee catch the 1968 sunlight and send it into convulsions that won’t end tyranny. And yet Rauschenberg intends to end tyranny by spreading imagery far, in concentric circles, away from his unified self and toward a multi-souled conglomerate of flutterings that constitute the “enlarged Bob,” the decentered artist, the prolific repeater. Rauschenberg’s shoes—black leather—veer toward finance, respectability. His pants—are they jeans, or mere slacks?—govern the atmosphere by refusing to negate the atmosphere. Pants stay above the fray by being rolled up to expose the Rauschenberg ankles, clad in “dress socks.” His hair, without frill or flaw, affords a frame. His hair, like Johnny Cash’s, takes a loose, soulful stand; Rauschenberg’s hair will permit pugnaciousness—for ceremony’s sake—but would prefer to take a pacifist route by lying down, a protester, in the middle of the highway. I place my body, a potential victim’s, on the road of art history, the hair of Rauschenberg might say, if it had the will to confess. But his hair remains silent, creating a vacuum to be filled by the volubility of his flannel shirt, which, untucked, has the stalwart élan of a Paul Bunyan theme-park memento purchased for a squalling boy who suffered motion sickness on the merry-go-round; Rauschenberg’s flannel shirt proposes a neutral, forestry-oriented consolation. The artist, like Mount Rushmore, occupies a vast, lonely space; his studio is a chapel of the former St. Joseph’s Union Mission of the Immaculate Virgin, on Lafayette Street. Many virgins live on Lafayette; Rauschenberg is not among them. Capable of sexual acts we can’t sketch here, he solves the mystery of the Immaculate Conception by conceiving his art with Marden’s assistance. Marden—hidden, like a bodhisattva, in a corner, lest his beauty overstage the prima donna’s—holds God’s seed in a headband wrapped around his sweaty brow. The headband—which will appear, a year later, in Easy Rider, or will threaten to appear, but then fail to show up—contains a tiny pouch. Sewn inside this pouch, a thimble-sized vial holds the blessed seed, which will trigger the conception of anything you wish to occur. The pressure of a squeegee on a screen is a sensation contained within my wish; a squeegee, when it rubs against a screen, exerts a steady, hard pressure whose ineffable physicality kills off any imagery that the silkscreen itself will depict. Rauschenberg’s unwavering hands enjoy the squeegee’s pressure. We pretend to be governed by images; we pretend that images seduce and construct us. Physical pressures, however, have a power surpassing the visual image’s. The squeegee dominates and subsumes any image it creates, even if the squeegee, later, vanishes from the scene of concept
ion. Stained and nude, the squeegee will have no biographer. Rauschenberg doubtless loved this squeegee above all others, even if he gave it no proper obsequies.

  (2017)

  EIGHTEEN LUNCHTIME ASSIGNMENTS

  1.

  Go into a store where you would never buy anything (because you can’t afford it, because you don’t wear women’s clothes, because you hate candy and toys), and write a poem about the merchandise—maybe just a list of it.

  2.

  Stand near the entrance of a church or temple or mosque and make an inventory of what the people walking in and out are wearing. Permit envy, confusion, and desire to enter your descriptions.

  3.

  Ride the subway and get off at a stop you’ve never tried. Write a poem whose title is that stop’s name. In the poem, include the reasons you’d never disembarked here. Speculate on vistas and opportunities you’ve forfeited.

  4.

  In a crowded museum, stand in front of a painting for fifteen minutes and write a poem that includes all the phrases you overhear from fellow museumgoers. Don’t describe the painting.

  5.

  Take an elevator in a building. Not your usual elevator. Not your usual building. Write a very quick poem while in the elevator. Get out of the elevator when you’re finished with the poem.

  6.

  Take a walk and make a list of all the trees you see, identifying each tree (“the birch tree in front of the Clearview Cinema where Dark Horse is playing at 5:10”).

  7.

  Find a seat in a public place. Sit for ten minutes. Describe or annotate or simply list some of the noises you hear—not words, just noises.

  8.

  Strike up a conversation (however brief) with a stranger. Afterward, write down the conversation in as much detail as you wish. Include a description of this stranger and indicate why you picked this person as your experimental subject.

  9.

  Find a seat in a public place and write down the first memory that comes into your mind, especially if the memory is stupid or embarrassing. After you’ve written down the memory, describe where you are seated. Describe the next place you’re headed.

  10.

  Stand up in a public place where you can find a surface to lean on. Write down the ten people you’d most like to see today, in no particular order. Give a brief reason for why you’d like to see each of them. Then mention exactly where you are standing.

  11.

  Sit down somewhere and drink a hot or cold beverage. In the vicinity (within your range of vision) find three people whom you’d like to meet or whom you find attractive or interesting. Say why. If you can find only one appealing person, that’s OK. If you find none, that’s OK, but speculate why right now there aren’t any potentially enchanting people around you.

  12.

  Find a magazine or newspaper. Write down a few headlines or stray phrases, whether alarming, stimulating, comic, or bizarre. Write a short poem, very quickly, using these phrases and little else.

  13.

  Stroll for five minutes and write down the names of signs, and any other words you see around you. Take another ten minutes and put these names and words into a poem.

  14.

  Go into a pharmacy. Choose a specific kind of product. (Shampoo.) Write down fourteen aspects of this substance: brands, ingredients, peculiarities. Compose a fourteen-line poem, each line mentioning one of the listed characteristics. Now you’ve written a sonnet.

  15.

  Sit in a park or garden. Write down everything you’ve done today, starting from the moment you woke up. Be quick. Let the last line or sentence of the poem include the name of an artwork about which you feel ambivalent.

  16.

  Describe what you’re wearing. Why did you choose these clothes? Which item do you like most? What would you rather be wearing? If you could change one item, which would it be?

  17.

  What did you eat for lunch? Why these particular foodstuffs? Defend, praise, criticize, mourn what you consumed.

  18.

  Take a walk. While walking, keep a list of whatever music you hear—tunes in your head, sound systems in stores, songs on car radios. Write a quick poem that speculates on how these tunes predict your future.

  (2014)

  LITTLE ELEGY

  This episode might not be intense enough for your purposes. On a warm autumn day in the mid-1990s, I wandered, seeking unsanctioned stimulation, down West 22nd Street toward the Hudson River. A new world began here: amid defunct warehouses, I discovered three mysterious doors. Pat Hearn Gallery was the middle door; I opened it. Pat Hearn is now dead. In the mid-1990s, when I opened the door for the first time, a young, lanky, bespectacled guy named Daniel Reich worked for her. Daniel is now dead. “Lanky” isn’t quite right. Though not tall, he was thin, like an unstuffed puppet, and he seemed nervous inside his body, as if it formed a newfangled cage he hadn’t yet figured out how to maneuver. “Art” seemed to crystallize and redeem his confinement; the art surrounding us, the art we both believed in, the art supporting the conversation we launched into, gregarious yet jittery, underwrote our claustrophobia, but also proposed an exit from disembodiment. Daniel appeared disembodied, as I, translating this memory of meeting him, am ambushed by a sensation of ice—a frozen separation from that moment of first discovering Jimmy DeSana’s photographs, which, that mid-1990s afternoon, hung on Pat Hearn Gallery’s walls. DeSana is now dead. He was already dead when I first saw his work. I can’t talk about art without mentioning the people who surround and animate it, and who turn the mortified object into an opportunity for entranced hyperstimulation. These three figures—personalities, legends, ecstatics—all died young, and for different reasons. Is there ever a reason? Jimmy DeSana, 40, AIDS; Pat Hearn, 45, liver cancer; Daniel Reich, 39, suicide. In some photographs, DeSana was naked; in others, he wore disguises. My favorite photograph was Jimmy, or his double, with his head in the toilet. The posed figure wore a white jockstrap and nothing else. The toilet, not filthy, overflowed with suds. Another person—also Jimmy?—stood on the toilet’s tank; of this companion, all we could see were his red-striped athletic socks and his sneakers. The bathroom was suffused, like a swimming pool, with reddish orange light, a color not of carnage but of contentment: shame’s antithesis. Seeing this photograph, I suddenly knew that I wanted to turn my life in a flaming—carmine? scarlet?—direction, toward keener demonstrations. Photography, so DeSana indicated, gave us a way to be more transparent, more theatrical, more diffuse, more divided, more torn apart. (I never questioned the postulate that a person wanted to be torn apart.) I’ve torn this paragraph apart and then reassembled it to embody the afterlife of Jimmy DeSana, Pat Hearn, and Daniel Reich, three adventurers committed to provocation, display, transformation, and the private forge—the smithy of art-making—where ordinary materials, including one’s own body, treated with patience, delicacy, and formalist procedures of estrangement (aimed at comforting rather than enervating the maker), can create an atmosphere I usually clothe with words like nudity or carnival, though today I am feeling rather somber and am not quite equal to nudity or carnival.

  (2014)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wish to thank the stellar PJ Mark, for believing in my seaworthiness; the clairvoyant Yuka Igarashi, for choreographing my circus; and my collaborators at Soft Skull—Wah-Ming Chang, Sarah Jean Grimm, Katie Boland, Sarah Lyn Rogers, Michael Salu, Dustin Kurtz, and the entire convivial gang—for bringing this book to life. I am grateful, as well, to the inspiring editors and allies whose assignments, invitations, and suggestions led me to write many of the essays in this book: Thomas Beard, Laura Beiles, Tom Bishop, Gregory Cowles, John D’Agata, Gabrielle Dean, Jeff Dolven, Lee Edelman, D. Gilson, Donatien Grau, Bruce Hainley, Peter Halley, Ed Halter, Charles B. Harris, Sheila Heti, Paul Holdengräber, Heidi Julavits, Christian Kobald, Michelle Kuo, David Lazar, Patrick Madden, Matthew McLean, Michael Miller, Jason Schneiderman, Todd Shalom, Jared Star
k, Rita Vitorelli, Nicole Walker, and Linda Wells.

  I also thank the editors of the following publications (print and online), in which portions of this book appeared, sometimes in different versions and under different titles:

  After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays (University of Georgia Press, 2015), ed. David Lazar and Patrick Madden: “Of Smells”

  Allure: “Swimming with Nicole Kidman”

  Artforum: “‘My’ Masculinity Remix”

  The Believer: “My New Glasses”

  Bookforum: “On Futility, Holes, and Hervé Guibert”

  Commie Pinko Guy (Raven Row and Koenig Books, 2015), ed. Bruce Hainley: “Liza in Rehab”

  Frieze: “Rauschenberg’s Squeegee”

  index: “Game of Pearls” (reprinted in Harper’s Magazine)

  The Iowa Review: “Punctuation”

  John Barth: A Body of Words (Dalkey Archive Press, 2016), ed. Gabrielle Dean and Charles B. Harris: “My Brief Apprenticeship with John Barth”

  Light Industry: “An Evening of Screen Tests”

  Merry Art (Hannah Barry Gallery, 2015), ed. Hannah Barry and Donatien Grau: “Little Elegy”