San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, August 30, 2002
My most artistic moment in the S.F. Museum of Modern Art today was in the de Kooning exhibit during a film of him explaining the procee he went through while painting “Woman II,” and I was watching it and thinking, “Okay I get it–he was painting a woman with gleaming razor white teeth and menacing eyes and a formidable and almost square body. And then, right in the middle of the film, a beautiful young woman sat down between me and the film, and I looked at the images of “Woman II” and then I looked at this woman, and how soft she was, her blond hair falling past her shoulders, her long slow neckline and below it the shadow of her breastbone and a silver necklace with a white bone pendat, her cashmere sweater with its sleeves so long that they fell into the center of her palms, her pale fingertips curled into the fabric.
And another thing, in the film of Yoko Ono’s performance of “Cut” that was filmed in NYC in the early Sixties by the Maysles brothers, I thought that was the film that she should have called “Rape.” I don’t mean to trivialize the word “rape” because she set up the situation and she was really in control and never in any real danger, but the audience’s response was too often a sort of gloatingly
aggressive opportunism—the guy at the end, for instance, who cuts away everything above the level of her breasts, and how she looked so vulnerable, the nervousness in her eyes, the surprising and gentle modesty of shielding her breasts with her hands once the material fell away—and in the midst of that to have a man like him cutting so close to her skin.
The music in the de Kooning film was by Morton Feldman and I thought about how early electronic music really dates a film the way clothes or smoking, for instance, do not. But I also thought that at least in those days artists were trying to accomplish something—they had their theories and they were working them out. They had an idea or two. They were serious about their theories and it was no longer about music, really, the way painting is no longer really about painting. Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’s operas, perhaps, are what we have left of that idea, but even they have not really changed in almost twenty years.
But when I went upstairs to see the Ellsworth Kelly exhibit I smiled all the way through and everyone in the gallery was smiling, looking at so many wonderfully wall-sized works of gentle humanity all at once, and how joyful it was, and how it made me dizzy. I thought of what Kelly said about not representing anything else but making something that was only what it was, and how people were sometimes smiling or laughing at Yoko Ono’s work too, but it was a different, brittle laughter, because her work still made them nervous almost fifty years later in its audaciousness and its self-confidence and (maybe more than ever) its mockery of middleclass values and art pretentiousness. But how with Kelly they seemed to be smiling with the work.
Yoko’s work was still about something other than what it was—which is what most art is; I don’t mean to single her out—but how with Kelly there was something very different about his work. How Yoko’s pieces were conceptual and active in that they were created in the mind and had very little to do with what was seen, but they were still “about” it rather than being it.
And how it once again became clear to me that art should only be seen in a form that totally overwhelms the mind and becomes it—that art is not to be seen as an individual piece representing an artist before going on to the next painting. Art must become our experience—we must live as the artist for a period of time until we see like they did, move and change and evolve as they did, until we become them. Until then we can only think we understand.
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