·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
• • • • •

The “Comment” is closed on account of spam attacks. If you would like to personally comment, please use my email address in the upper-left sidebar.

To see my photos and comments on a day with Ann Hamilton at her new Tower at the Oliver Ranch near Geyserville, go to: http://stephenvincent.net/blog/?p=617

On Saturday, June 16, I was here. That is, I am the person behind the work table in front of 18,000 blue indigo cotton pants and work shirts, which are each neatly pressed and stacked on a large palette that sits on the second floor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The installation by Ann Hamilton, the sculptor, in fact, is called Indigo Blue. The work is actually a reconstruction of an installation that was first realized at the Spoleto Art Festival when it was held in Charleston, North Carolina in 1991. In that location the clothes were resonant with the local cotton, textile and indigo industries of the Old South. These used pants and shirts in this reconstruction were all acquired from local Bay Area providers of uniforms to workers in various kinds of service industries.

What am I doing at this table? Everyday from 12 to 4, a different person, a paid worker ($10.30 an hour), sits behind the table, in a white shirt or blouse, and systematically - word-by-word, line-by-line - uses a pink Pearl eraser to obscure the type from the pages of a manual, entitled International Law Situations, a Naval War College. This day I have been assigned to be the “eraser.” The book - which can be lifted a couple of inches off the table - is attached to a slightly slack, tethered string. From what I have previously gathered, this is a regulatory manual that defines the rules of entering and leaving seaports. Other than that, I do not know why Ann Hamilton is interested in erasure, metaphorically or otherwise. When I arrive, the volume is open to a chapter entitled: Supply Ship in Neutral Harbor.

I had taken in, or been ‘taken in’ by the installation on a previous visit in which I had received a brief training session with an assistant curator. The work’s substantial size and presence were immediately impressive. The cotton shirts radiated soft warmth, as if still recently enveloping the workers who had worn them. When I looked up - and this piece is practically half way to the ceiling - the variously shifting and rising levels of the garments took on an almost oceanic character. The sharp, upward angles of the pressed collars gave the impression of serrated edges on a large wave about to break. Indeed, it was if Ann Hamilton and her work staff had lifted a cross-section out of the ocean and, somehow, stabilized its liquid power and presence on to the foundation of the wide, barely perceptible wooden pallet. As an artwork, it struck me that it could be experienced and interpreted on multiple levels. Yet, at the same time - the work seemed to defy any easy definition that I or anyone else might apply.

Before I start my work as an eraser, I look to my front and sides. The Gallery is part of the Museum’s Permanent Collections of Painting and Sculpture. Indeed, in the adjacent Gallery, I can see portions of works by Jay de Feo, Joseph Beuys, and Gerard Richter. In front, and to the left of the gallery exit are two identical sculptures of a woman’s face and bust women’s busts by Janine Antoni. Apparently a self-portrait - she looks like a refined European lady, similar to the face you might find carved inside the locket of an antique necklace. One face is made of white soap, the other of dark chocolate. I am not sure of the symbolic value of the materials, but their spare twin, but opposite color appearances haunt the immediate space, as if they are ghosts or death masks. On the right side, a small, severe black painting by On Kawara with white letters, spells outthe date, March 16, 1993. My late, and youngest brother was born on March 17 and, again, the painting’s colors - at least for me - bring up the specter of death. I had already been told that the art works possessed and intended significance in their relation to the installation. I am not sure what that might be. I am still far from understanding the work’s intention.

I sit down and take out a fresh eraser from a plastic container situated on a ledge under my worktable. I also take a drink of bottled water that is also concealed inside a horizontal cylinder under the table.

The installation has already been up for a few weeks, and the previous workers have erased several pages. For reasons unknown to me, the book is being erased from back to front - almost as if the process is to make us work backwards to the point of the books inception. Some of the pages are perforated with holes from workers who have been too aggressive. The assistant curator has sent out an email message warning up to be gentle with our strokes across the page. Indeed, the type on the pages is variously visible, but definitely unreadable.

Like any manual labor job - as I remember - it takes a while to get a rhythm to the work, as well as to define what it means to accomplish the task. No boss is on hand; so, in this case, it is up to me establish my standards and boundaries for making a successful erasure. As I start, I find it immediately difficult. The Pearl eraser, its thick trapezoid shape - with top and bottom angled edges - is familiar. It used to be always on my desk to correct work any work I had made in pencil. But that particular need has pretty much disappeared now that I mostly work a computer word-processing program and make most erasures with the “delete” key, or a key command to “cut”, “copy” or “paste. ” It does seem a contradiction, or just plain strange, however, to use the eraser to obscure printing made with industrial ink. However, after many a stroke - applying the eraser’s different angles and edges - the type does seem to blanch and grow lighter on the page, though there are obstinate letters, where the press of the ink is heavier on the page. I persist, pressing harder and harder. The process gives rise in me of an uncomfortable childhood memory of making a model plane out of balsa wood. I must have been 7 or 8 years old, and the instructions said to sand smooth the tail of the plane. My father - who made built boats and cabinets - was a perfectionist about working with fine woods. I brought myself to tears when I sanded the plane’s tail so smooth and thin that it broke. Pushing and pulling the eraser, I now found myself not wanting to repeat that humiliating experience with an eraser tear through the page!

In the face of the type’s resistance, I begin to wonder what are reasonable goals. In the next three hours, will I obscure - in reality eliminate - the text on two pages, or five pages? What have my previous counter-parts accomplished? And what am I really doing here? My only other instructions are that I am not to speak or make contact with anyone. Though, between us, I have told friends I will sneak a peek and a wink at them, if they come by. Ironically, until the last minutes, none come by. In terms of friends, indeed, the work site is a lonely place!

I can hear people come into the gallery, and pickup on their physical presence through my peripheral vision. Behind the installation, the strong voice of a woman docent introduces the Hamilton’s installation and speaks of a work by Doris Salcedo, a Columbian artist and sculptor. From my chair, I cannot see it. However, coming into the gallery, I had looked quickly at two white painted, metal bed frames on the wall with one or two white shirts twisted around the wires of the flat springs.

“Salcedo’s work is quite political. She speaks to the conditions of torture, and the hundreds, if not thousands of people who have been erased, who have disappeared without a trace. In Ann Hamilton’s work, she is addressing the lives of people, who do work, but whose lives and contributions do not appear in the formal history of a country, the kind of history that only speaks of political and military heroes and business leaders. She wants to address, for example, those who do manual labor, those who wear those shirts. The huge size of the installation is meant to create a substantial sense of the weight and magnitude of their contributions.”

Someone asks more about the condition of blue garments. “Since we have them on exhibit in the Museum, each of the pants and shirts have been cleaned and pressed.”
When she says that, I wonder what the exhibit would have been like if the garments had been left unclean, but folded. I mean what if we could smell the sweat, and more closely see and sense the dirt from work? On the other hand, the cleaning press represents another level, another contribution of the workers who have laundered and pressed them into shape. Then, as the docent added, it took eight Museum staff workers three weeks to layer and built the entire stack. The garments in the Museum may appear gentrified – say in contrast to the clothes worn on a worker at a ware house, or a hospital worker, for examples – but the installation does represent a substantial piece of work by many. I have yet to look to see if the names of the Museum installation staff are included on the wall label

I keep the eraser moving back and forth as she speaks. I am still trying to figure out the meaning of my presence when she talks about those in Columbia who have been erased from history. Here I am now working hard to erase the editorial and printed work of a publisher and a pressman - ironically these are both kinds of work that I have done ‘professionally’ in my various careers! But erasure it is! My hands are pushing the eraser back and forth as systematically as I can - blanching out the lines, turning the paper into a shimmery cast of not very interesting thin, white light. The white paintings of the minimalist Robert Ryman, it is not. As time passes, a small pile of eraser shavings falls on and off the pages. I scraped them into a barely visible mound already started by the previous worker. I vaguely wonder if this little pile is supposed to be an ironic counterpart to the huge stack of shirts? As a worker, I am making a veritably minimal contribution to the visual universe that is collected almost halfway to the ceiling behind me, let alone the paintings on the Gallery walls!

“Have you ever worked at a job that required repetitive motion?” I hear a woman’s voice ask. Her woman friend answers, “Only once, and that was in the Discovery Museum where I had to constantly refill the brochure holders.” I have the sense that they are looking at me with sympathy. I reach for my water bottle to take a drink. My eraser arm is getting tired, the elbow must be always raised a little bit to get the right angle on the page. The left hand is constantly busy holding the page down to prevent a haphazard tear. I am less than an hour into my work shift.

It crosses my mind that I have not fulfilled one part of Ann Hamilton’s project. We were sent W-II forms so that we could be formally employed and paid. Though, as a poet and writer, I could use the $40 dollars, I thought I could donate my time for an Art project. Then it dawns on me that I was supposed to work from 12 to 4, and I arrived an hour late! I would have been cheating to take the full amount, or I would have had to explain and apologize for being late! I realize this is the history of much of my formal work life. I am always arriving at the last minute, or late. And, when I teach, I find myself unconsciously not wanting to be fully prepared. I have never been too fully supplicant to corporate structures, time schemes, data base programs, etc., etc!! It is interesting how all that work stuff is coming up with the eraser! For example, the curator told us we should notify the guard before we could take a break to go to the bathroom. If I was getting paid, I would be worried about how long I could officially take. And, certainly, with this kind of repetitive work, I think I need a real break, like 15 minutes - but will my absence for so long interfere, in fact, sabotage the significance of the exhibit and my part in it?? In a normal manual labor job, say a factory job, I wonder how much time you have to go to the bathroom, and whether or not the amount of time is normally spelled out in a company manual. And what are the punishments if you take too long? Then I go back to realizing that I am erasing a book of regulations, though I am still not sure of the significance of this, other than that Ann Hamilton does know how to pile on the ironies. This piece is not just about the visual power and weight of the empty shirts stacked up behind my table.

“Can we ask you questions?” This question happens several times. I don’t look up. I am very devoted to my job. I honor the obligation that I do not talk. I don’t even point to the wall text that explains that I am a member of the work. I am developing pains in my arms and hands. When the questioners leave the front of the table, I stretch my fingers, shake my hands out, and move my shoulders up and down. Other people in the gallery - I can see their feet in different parts of the floor - stand at a distance and watch me work. Possibly, they are also trying to make sense of this man in a white shirt with his back against this enormous stack of blue shirts and pants.

Two women come very close to the edge of the table. They stand hip to hip. I can feel their stare. Finally, I look up. “Good,” they both say at once. Then one says, “We just wanted to make you look.” I guess everyone has a job of sorts! To look at me, to order me to look at them. It’s a world full of orders and I am a subject, or is “I” an object, in this case, an animate, erasing object.

Occasionally I ask the Filipino-American woman guard for the time. She stands in the entrance of the gallery to the left. Beyond her I can see parts of a thick, molten-looking painting by Jay DeFeo - a painter whose regulations, or ‘order of being’, were quite different than mine today. It’s true that she kept erasing her work, particularly in “The Rose” so that she could build a thicker, richer, more resonant painting. All I have is a slowly blanching page and a growing, small pile of darkened, eraser flakes! The guard tells me it is, 2:30. Unilaterally I decide I will take a break. I go outside to the coffee shop, buy a big chocolate chip cookie for $1.95 (the value of approximately 12 minutes of what I would be paid) and go outside and sit at a sidewalk table in the fresh, foggy, San Francisco air.

“Do a lot of people come up and try to ask you questions.” A young man - who apparently had already been in front of my table at the Hamilton installation - is now standing in front of my outdoor cafe table.
“Yes,” is all I can say, before looking away. Maybe my short answer made the man feel like I cut him short, erased him!

It’s suddenly obvious that I cannot full break away from this afternoon’s job. In fact, I am reflecting on the machine made, sugared flat character of the cookie. It does taste like a human hand either touched it or shaped its ingredients. Except for the person running the cookie machine, the homemade human factor and quality has been erased from its substance as a real cookie. I only eat half of the circle, and throw the rest away. Yet another erasure.

I go back upstairs to my job. I move right into the motions. My hand is quicker than ever. I am beginning to enjoy the task, the erasure. It becomes second nature. My mind goes elsewhere. Suddenly a tear appears in the page. An edge of the eraser has cut through, leaving wrinkled edges beside the perforation. I feel crushed. I was not paying attention. Or was it caused by the person who preceded me. Had he or she erased the opposite side of the page so much, that my eraser cut right through the thin stock? Who was at fault? Was there somebody I could blame?? There are vague memories of blame games from other job sites. Oh, well, I think, on to the next page. I have already decided that I will not try to do so many pages. I will just do one page real well. I mean there is nobody around to set and insist on a quota and give me a warning or ask for my resignation if I don’t meet it!

“Can I ask you a question?” I ignore the woman’s voice. I hear her turn to a friend. “This must be about the Holocaust. Except I bet they did not clean and iron the shirts when all that was finished.”

My movement of the eraser becomes systematic and aggressive. The letters seem to fall away. Strange or not so strange feelings come up. Certain people towards whom I still carry an unforgiving anger now appear in my consciousness. The eraser, its motion, keeps eliminating them. The erasure of letters, the erasure of persons. I am unforgiving and these executions give me what should be an odd pleasure. Is Ann Hamilton doing her job, or am I doing the job that Ann Hamilton wants me to be doing? I am so into the eraser, I do not even think of the question.

“You are blushing, sir.” I look up. It’s the Filipino-American guard. “You should drink some water.” It is her kind way of saying that I am over-doing it. My face is very hot and I suddenly realize that I am in another state of mind. I reach for the bottle and drink about half of the remaining water.

Out of impatience to leave this work site I look up towards the entry way into the gallery. First my eyes catch the dark legs of an African-American couple in casual shoes.

As my eyes go up, the man and woman are both wearing blue denim - one in shorts, and the other a knee-high skirt. Further up are blue denim jackets. They appear as a light hearted couple, wearing matching clothes, perhaps engaged or recently, happily married, who have, maybe for fun and pleasure, come to the Museum to see what is happening in the art world, as well as to celebrate their own sense of fashion for the day. Immediately I sense they are surprised and self-conscious to encounter 18,000 indigo blue colored work shirts and pants. They have met a mirror, an ironic mirror to their own weekend play-clothes. What can this mean? What is being said? The ancestors - the enslaved, the men and women of labor - have, like shadows, (again) shown up in the most unlikely of places. The couple stands still and look for a moment, then, gingerly, move on through the gallery.

I am astonished by the couple’s appearance and oddly pleased: the synchronicity of materials! Ah, Ms. Hamilton!

I look at the page. Except for the last paragraph on the left hand-side, it’s practically a clean state. The Guard tells me it is four o’clock. A friend who has shown up sneaks the photograph of me (top) sitting down at work. Also breaking the Museum rule of not taking photographs in the galleries, I take a photograph of my clear, senselessly clear pages. After all, I find myself insisting, don’t I, as a worker, have the right to take a photograph of my own work? I do not stop to think why workers on most work sites are probably forbidden to take photographs. In corporations it must be something about company secrets, property and the rights and protections of owners and bosses. Such is no doubt also probably true of the Museum, its protection of the art and artists, reproduction rights and so forth. Frankly, as a person, I am glad not everyone was taking a picture of me at my work as an eraser - perhaps this resistance would be on account of the obnoxious stuff of what I was doing to a book (those executions of each of the letters, even if only in a manual of regulations!). As to regulations, when my shift was over, I confess I even forget to turn in my Museum employee badge, as well as sign-out at the Museum guard’s office! My friend and I were immediately off and gone! Ironically, when we go across the street for a drink at the St. Regis Hotel, I cannot resist ordering a glass of wine called Prisoner, which, though expensive, as I sipped it slowly, tasted very good and a great way to end my work day.

**
Today it is Monday and two days since I accomplished my part at the Installation. What remains? Consciously or not, I continue to feel the presence of the huge weight, substance and force of that stack of indigo blue shirts and pants that were behind my back. Frankly, I was not so conscious of the power of the piece while I sat - essentially as the installation’s “animate” actor - at the table in the middle of the gallery during an afternoon while being witnessed by several hundred people. I was not conscious – as was probably true - that the people, the surrounding art and the garments were feeding into the movements and energy of my arm and hand as I gripped the eraser. The title of the book’s chapter, Supply Ship in Neutral Harbor, now appears so deceptive and ironic! If we substitute “Table” for “Ship” and “Gallery” for “Harbor”, there was absolutely nothing “Neutral” about the space and all its various components! Perhaps my ‘eraser’ role in the exhibit was similar to that of an electric switch or a trigger. My activity (again, perhaps) was there to trigger a possible set of thoughts and/or relationships between the viewer, the stack of shirts, and some sense of the larger history of work as revealed in the sight of the stack.

The installation - its labor, craft and magnitude – continues, in fact, to communicate a mass of enormous energy, something - for example, pouring forth in this writing, this specific work this afternoon. The force, indeed, of Indigo Blue as an installation is quite astonishing. I recognize this power from being a close witness to other great works of art - both ancient and contemporary. On a personal level it makes me remember the incredible force seeming to pour through my daughter’s head when I caught her as she emerged from her mother’s body in labor. (Pearl - as per the name of the eraser - turned 27 yesterday!). It is wonderful how Ann Hamilton achieves this power through such a simplicity of materials, ones that contain and reflect the force of history. It is the power and labor at the core of what continues to attract us to make - and value the process of making art - and make its presence felt within the public realm. It is the power of which one can both stand before and receive in awe. It is also the power of which one can make good use.

Ironically, finally, I have to add, when I finished writing this piece, I emailed the Museum’s coordinator for the project to ask if she could give me Ann Hamilton’s email. I wanted to send her a copy of this piece and express my appreciation for having participated in the project. My request - no doubt for reasons of privacy and protocol - was denied. As much as I pressed, no alternative means of contact with the artist was offered. I like to ask for permission, as well as respect privacy, but, at the same time, it was curious, and seemed so corporate that I, the worker, in this case, could not have direct access to the installation’s creator and ultimate boss! Ironically, maybe a year or two ago, I had met Ann Hamilton socially. We had exchanged cards. At that time she was looking for a poet with whom she might collaborate on an upcoming project.

Unintentionally, it now appears, the artist and the poet have done it!

Friday evening I took to reading some poems to my mom - some Jack Spicer, Denise Levertov and Allen Ginsberg. Previously I have been astonished by some of the things she has had to say about pieces from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons and poems in Kenneth Rextroth’s Love And The Turning Year: 100 More Poems From the Chinese. Her manner is to listen closely, and then, when I ask about the poems meaning, to make an authoritative take on her sense of what she has heard. Recently, for example, I read her two poems from Walking Theory, my new book, and, when I asked her what those poems might mean, she answered, “I really don’t know. Aren’t they a little like going to China without a menu?”
I assume “China” was her code word for complex, and “menu” was her word for a guide. I am not sure what she really meant, but I thought it was both funny, and maybe a little sad that she could not be more articulate about her son’s poems! This particularl evening, however, she is very sprite, and quickly engaged with the poems I read.

For example, I read her Jack Spicer’s now famous poem from the book, Language. This partiuclar poem has been the Rube Cube of many a critical analysis, and I was curious what she, too, might say:

This ocean, humiliating in its disguises
Tougher than anything.
No one listens to poetry. The ocean
Does not mean to be listened to. A drop
Or crash of water. It means
Nothing.
It
Is bread and butter
Pepper and salt. The death
That young men hope for. Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.

I actually read the poem three times. Each time she gives these different, interesting responses:
1.
“The poem makes itself very friendly. It makes a whole place for itself. Don’t you think?”
2.
“I think it’s really very good.”
“Why”
“Nobody wants to give people the idea that they are putting the word out that they have a say in things.”

3.
“I think the man wants to make a splash that will bring up a whole core of people who want to listen to it because it brings a relief that they like.”

4. She laughs, then says,
“That’s quite cute.” It’s as if the poem is saying, ‘Might as well stop and shake hands or
let me put my arm around you so we can be closer, because that will give me more and
give you more, which is what we both want.”

Frankly, I find her interpretations a curious kind of subtextual reading of the poem. (In her reality, she might have actually thought I was reading a different poem each time). But, to me, it’s as if she is seeing right through Spicer’s ‘hard as nails’ tone to liberate what she hears as the poem’s call for a companionship with the reader. She is not going to be deceived, or humbled into quiet by the poem and speaker’s overt insistence on an ‘isolation’ from any kind of worldy aesthetic or humanistic kind of implication. But, then, she may also be reading her own lonely desires into the way she hears my reading of it.

Then I read her Denise Levertov’s, The Muse
“I kind of liked it,” she says.
“Any thoughts?”
“No. I was just enjoying it. So I did not raise my ears.”
I think it’s kind of sweet that she parallels critical tresposne and thought with raising her ears - which is, in fact, when I read a poem closely, or listen to a poem at public reading.

Then I read her Allen Ginsberg’s Wales Visitation, a longish. 1967 Whitmanesque poem that he wrote after or during an LSD trip. I listen to my mom definitely go into a zone on this one:
“He had what it said. I think that it had meaning that lines had when I was young and wanted to write them and it was awfully exciting.
I have to say the lines were very strong stories - and I will call them stories because I don’t think they were deeper than that. They were snap shots. They came across the ocean and we were all happy and proud of him. I don’t thnk that Allen Ginsberg can happen again. We got a close touch with everything that happened. No one wss prouder than the other person, and that was a nice feeling.
At the same time another good friend of ours (who she cannot name) was declaring the tremendously important way for special places to hold, cooperate and enjoy these young people. Who knows, maybe he was a deity.
But he disappeared. He was very pert to see what people did with things that were unfamiliar but had acute attempts to make them come true.”

I am not sure if this ‘other’ person - in her mind - is still Allen Ginsberg. But I am kind of in a state of disbelief. I don’t remember what my mom was like or what she was doing in the late sixties when this poem was first published. Though I am sure she knew of Allen Gingsbergs’ name and that I had read “Howl” in the late fifties in High School, I cannot believe she was much involved in either Allen’s mythical stature, nor a reader of Wales Visitation when it first appeared. On this Friday evening in 2007 - some 40 years later - it is as if she is talking about the impact of the poem and how fresh, timely and important the poem was to the consciousness of the then Vietnam war-ridden culture.

In such an up, sprite mood, I asked her if she wanted to write a poem. “Yes,” was her answer. As usual, or necessary, I gave her a verbal prompt, or what becomes a kind of chorus line. “Amy” is the nameof the person - a Filipino-American - who kept her company during the day. So we started:

Amy, Amy
Eyes are blue.
What does any of this mean to you?

Amy, Amy
Let me see you,
precious correspondence..

Amy, Amy
Give us a chance
to talk aain
without being afraid
that the world’s problems
will have any effect on us.
They won’t.

Amy, Amy
I had not though about that word
since the little girl came bouncing
across the stage.

Amy, Amy
Come sit by me.
Let me know
that you have plenty to say.

Amy, Amy
Let it be O so important
to know that you are in love
as well as we.

When finished, she confesses she’s tired and wants to go to sleep. From starting with Spicer’s poem to her “Amy” poem, I think she has come full circle. And so have I!

Please email comments to email address, top of left sidebar,

World Finance Center, New York City, sunset, May 2, 2007

It’s hard not to have a love/hate relationship with Sol Lewitt. As a Californian, it is also hard not to have a love/hate relationship with the sublime! Much of the “Eden” of the west - Anselm Adam’s photographic celebration notwithstanding - has been steadily damaged by corporate greed from the nineteeth century on to the present! The WFC - about a stone’s throw from the site of the World Trade Center - is an ode to both Sol Lewitt and the Sublime. (Without knowing a thing about the WFC’s architectural history, it’s hard for me to know if the building’s design was shaped by Lewitt, or the reverse! Not in the way, for example, that it’s known Elsworth Kelley’s abstract shapes in the fifties were made from looking closely at the shadow shapes cast by the roofs, stairways, etc. of Parisian buildings.) To say the least, on a visual level, at this particular hour the WFC is extraordinarily sublime. Like a tall Sierra mountain peak covered with a summer sunset’s alpen, soft roseate glow, it’s impossible not to be awestruck, no matter what one might think of the building’s internal offices and unaesthetic sorts of financial business’. I suspect the WFC offers no space for either artists or writers - a kind of contradiction in the presence of to its external formal beauty. Though I also suspect there is plenty of fine, expensive art that variously enhance the internal corporate offices.
But I also continue to have an ambivalence about Lewitt - the formal, attractive power of his structures, and yet the severe absence of any complicating human presence - other than the conceptual framework of the artist. The work is so clean and alert. Maybe the operative aesthetic is to set up a formal frame - lines, color implants or not - and let life, sharpened by the physcial presence of the art - play itself out in juxtapostion to these abstract frames. Or compel one to make other art in response, such as the work of Eva Hesse, which, at least at one point in her history, made a human comedy of out of the ’sublime’, formal structures in Lewitt, Donald Judd and the works of other fellow minimalists.

I do think it would be fun for New York City to declare the WFC as a Memorial Site/Sight for Sol Lewitt! It could be done at little cost - the building is done. Even if the City cannot provide this honorary status for the WFC, at least, we can do so privately as citizens and visitors! Gosh, as I say all of this, even where I see limits, I remain grateful for Lewitt and the dynamic presence of his best work.

Street Abstraction, San Francisco, May 2007

*
It’s not the completed step.
It’s the step that follows.

*

Walking Theory is my new book from Junction Press (84 pages, $12)
For convenient ordering information, go to:
www.junctionpress.com
Order directly from me if you want a signed copy!

… these are the poems Stephen Vincent has been preparing to write his entire life. They definitely pass the “take the top of your head off” test. I went cover to cover without even sitting up. Ron Silliman, Silliman’s Blog, http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/ Go down to the entry of May 15, 2007

At long last is Walking Theory, Stephen Vincent’s observant, large-hearted poems bundled into book form, engaging architecture, people on the move, the seasons and other transience, the talk that binds the day: Goodbye, rhetoric, the desperate,/what can the poem do, walking, step-by-step:/ witness, suffer, hope.
Urbane and companionable, rare virtues flaunted here, curbside delight. Bill Berkson

Stephen Vincent’s work here preserves and enhances the ancient association of the foot as measure of the poetic line. In Walking Theory measure becomes metaphor: “…foot ever to the ground, image by image, /thought by thought, word by word…” This is the measure of the continuity of a poet’s life as he moves through the days, from the grief-stricken rhythms of the opening section of elegies to the more expansive tours of the San Francisco neighborhoods where he lives and works. Vincent celebrates the beauty of these familiar landscapes, as well as strange, unexpected and sometimes mundane details. In a wonderful pun that arises in the midst of the naming of spring flowers, “the dotted eye” suggests the I of linguistic convention as the seeing, moving body’s eye transformed by language.
Beverly Dahlen

I have been haunted for a while by these three photos I took in the new Greek & Roman Gallery in NY’s Metropolitan Museum. Ironically I did not take down the name of either the sculptor or the subject. Is it the mother of Dionysius? I will have to query. But, in truth, I was taken by the woman as a subject. I was much for focused trying to capture her with the camera. Why?

The pathos is so transparent: her age, grief, the sense of ravage in her face, indeed, an anger. In the context of Greek sculpture, her presence is so counter-heroic, and, yet, nothing short of heroic. Nothing is concealed. Yet, either on account of, or in spite of the pathos, there is an insistence in her posture – as if she will get somewhere, perhaps a place where she can either impart her question, or unload, that is, to dispatch her lament and/or anger. To whom? Who could know? Perhaps to an oracle who could either deliver the woman’s message or plea to the gods, or, conversely, give her a riddle that will resolve her anguish and give her a genuine piece of solace.

Whether it’s a mother’s or widow’s grief, maybe, other than to continue to walk – as a form of witness, as a form of revelation - perhaps then, and certainly now, she can really go nowhere with it. Except to us.

Of course, I am thinking of my ‘work’ with my mother, the revelations of her poems, her own face.

I will be reading from Walking Theory on Monday evening, June 11 at 7 p.m.
Place: Noe Valley Ministry (1021 Sanchez, near the corner of 23rd Street in San Francisco). Followed by a book signing.

For further reviews and ways to acquire Walking Theory , scroll down to the May 20 entry on this blog.

We live in a fading country.
My wife said that.
I am not married.
My country is an ex-wife.
She has moved in with a violent man.
She lives behind curtains. Flags. Signals.
Not a ghost.
Not a ghost of a chance.

Window on 22nd Street, between Guerrero and Valencia, San Francisco, California.

This entry was originally posted as “Signals” on this blog on November 24, 2005. The other evening I shared it during a “Salon” at Gloria Frym’s in Berkeley. (We had a monitor on a coffee table so I could read and simultaneously show pictures from the “Ghostwalks” series). As I read the piece, I felt that it struck a deep emotional chord. “Deep” in the sense that I felt that we were all on the edge of crying. It’s that curious paradox now of living in this country where there is this almost visceral hatred for the government/regime, while simultaneously there remains a deep love of country, a love so wantonly betrayed, leaving us with a profound well of sadness, though once touched with language and image, putting each of us right there on the edge. A level of despair that is, say, so different than the anger and melancholy, the hacksaw power and rebel optimism of Jimi Hendrix, as when he played the National Anthem at sunrise at Woodstock in 1969.

Which brings up a more recent revelation, another, this time, New York City, “street insignia”:

OSAMA BIN BUSH, stencil on corner wall, Lafayette near Canal Street, New York City, May 2007.

Spookily enough, the image looks like a prophetic map of the New World Order under the domination of an alliance of two medieval, tribal clans! Such is the collective apprehension of the day, or so it seems, Bush-Cheney and their military satraps in Iraq and Afghanistan predicting a global war without end. Some people give the use of Imagination a horrible name. If there is a Hell, before they are ever forgiven, or permitted compassion, I can hear them under a pool of dark mud, the rising bubbles popping, a successive series of sounds, “plop, plop, plop.” Enough of darkness, enough of “insignia”. Outside, it’s beautiful and sunny, and the mocking birds in my neighborhood are much busy, whistling.