August 29

My distance from New York the past year has not stopped me most mornings from reading the New York Times and The Independent from Britain online. I don’t know if the news is worse recently or the approaching return is alerting me to certain feelings, but the news of politics, the war, income disparities, etc. makes me sad. Maybe it has to do with coming back to some of what I was happy to get away from. It is raining steadily today. The river is very high and fast. (The last time it was like this after several days of rain, Katalin said, “Did you see the river? It looks like the Amazon.”) It began last night after dark, which is coming earlier. When I was first here in June, it stayed light until ten, now dusk is here at eight. In Vietnam and Cambodia, it was always dark before seven. It is something we do not often think about in the North: how night drops early and unvaryingly in the tropics.

I thought of fall in Hanoi as I began to wake up this morning. The seasonal change took place during my first weeks there, at the beginning of this long wander. It was still hot, but lovely days began appearing. Hanoians would comment on it, too. I connected this memory with my sense of anticipation at that time: of what the year would bring. Then once again the idea came of the Romantic as someone “Who would rather travel hopefully than arrive”. It is pleasant to monitor certain anticipatory feelings, and then follow them through their stages, from, ‘I wonder what being in that place will feel like”, to “here I am in that place where I wondered what it would feel like”, to “here I am remembering that place that I wondered how it would feel to be there, then was there, and am now remembering it.”

When I first began making abstract paintings I sometimes drew on a memory of a place far way that I had once visited. This was when I had not traveled in quite a while. As I began to travel again I would bring particular visual situations back to the studio that would inform the work, like the way that paint was sensuously applied to surfaces throughout the poorer parts of Mexico, for example. The job of art journalism gave me entry into studios when away, and I began to understand what a microcosm that space could be. For someone who is fundamentally a studio artist, I have spent an inordinate amount of time outside of it recently. Still, over half of this year away has been spent making my work.

When I returned to Hanoi in December after three weeks through the south and in Ho Chi Minh City, there was something that must have been on my mind. Hanoi was chilly and overcast. I had been through events leading up to the postponement of Saigon Open City by the Ministry of Culture. My participation in SOC was exciting at first; and hopeful, not just for myself. It first appeared that I was present at the beginning of a new, more open period for the art community in Vietnam. In addition, I had recently had an exhibition in Hanoi. I felt part of it. By early December it was clear that the government wasn’t going to change anything. In fact, now that they had gotten into the WTO there was no need to try. I became disappointed. I was visiting artists, researching, writing, but there was a strain underneath. Part of the delight of travel is in its superficiality and I had already found out too much about Vietnam. I do criticize myself for these feelings because one looks for certain feelings. The overwhelming evidence that I came across was of the energy and optimism of the Vietnamese and particularly Vietnamese artists. This is the attitude that I tried to underline in ‘Report from Ho Chi Minh City” that I last heard should be in the October AiA.

Museum night in St. Gallen, next week, will have at least one hundred people come through my studio in the course of the evening. I am treating it as an exhibition, and going through what I have done here. A lot of the work that I thought was finished has been rejected, and other work that had been taken off the stretchers has been restored. What I have kept has usually been more visually quieter work. A lot of the work that I thought was strong was simply obnoxious to me, and it has come down to what I am willing to accept. This constant shifting--criticizing, being lost, is all part of the process, but I am unable in the end to fully understand what I am up to. It mostly has to do with what I can live with. Which is why I don’t like looking at my catalog very much. I think I decided too quickly that some of those paintings were finished.

August 30. Reading about James Wood coming to the New Yorker as a literary critic. He likes Sebald and Hollinghurst and said that Rushdie is noise not style (well, Rushdie is a good essayist). It made me feel less alone. I see the Urs Fischers (he was here with Jeffrey Deitch yesterday, I looked up from my desk and there is Deitch in an ugly yellow suit looking at the river) and the Ugo Ronindones, and most recently, a Rudolph Stingel, who, admittedly, makes a beautiful noise, being manufactured at the foundry here and it looks like so much bad rock and roll. I read that Brice Marden listened to Puff Daddy while making his recent six-part painting. Rothko read Shakespeare and listened to Beethoven before he went in his studio. I am passing up seeing the Marden exhibition, seeing Berlin, etc. Spending a few week poring over the Marden catalogs was of no help to my own work or thought. As much as I admire a lot of the work it does not affirm anything I believe in. It makes me understand why artists like Rirkrit or Jun claim that they do not like to think like artists. Marden is hierarchical, hermetic, and precious. I still think he is very good, but maybe overly artistic. I feel this way about Schnabel, too. But not Ryman, and not Salle. Schnabel and Marden both make smart decisions in their work, but the aura around it is kind of fluffy or smarmy, there is a lack of economy that always stops me from being genuinely inspired by it.

I have a problem picking work to exhibit next week. The very latest paintings are more blunt, colorful and physical and I tried to talk myself into them, but they were too loud, I couldn’t stay in the room with them. So I took them down, and there is other interesting stuff I did. Now the newer work looks stronger, the work from last month too reticent.

August 31. The sun is out today and it makes a difference. I am starting to come around to the most recent work I have done, though in one instance, a painting is not recent, I had begun it in Phnom Penh. Also, contrary to what I wrote a few days ago, I am mounting it on the wall unstretched. Another painting is on smaller stretcher, and the back of the painting is now the front, this is also the case with a very large one that has also gone from being a horizontal to a vertical. So it goes. I don’t know what I think of this new work and the only way I can begin to understand it is by seeing it as my thinking about how Baudelaire saw Delacroix. These new, strange to me, impossibly colorful and childlike paintings are my version of Baudelaire looking at Delacroix. The fact that I don’t know quite what the hell I have here can only be a good sign, but it doesn’t make me feel relaxed, it makes me feel vulnerable and that is probably a good sign too.

I went to the Reitberg Museum in Zurich the other day in the rain. I walked up a hill with a gravel path through manicured woods. Zurich is a lovely city. A few weeks ago I met Huong and Karl Knuesel, who are partners with Quynh and her gallery in HCMC. When we discussed Vietnam, where Huong is originally from, she observed that Vietnam has held on to its European influence more than the other Southeast Asian countries. That is probably true, from my observations. Karl told me that Zurich was voted the best city in the world to live in by--Fortune magazine, I think. Vancouver was second. Every time I am in a new part of Zurich there is another park, or the lake, or a view. Too bad they keep having festivals full of football fans drinking beer and running around in jockstraps with their asses painted. At least that what was going on in the streets there last Friday night. Fucking Europe.

But the Reitberg Museum, that I had visited last September, had finished their addition that doubled the exhibition space, underground, and had a new glass pavilion that was covered with an emerald green abstract pattern of triangles. A special exhibition was about Angkor Wat. ¾ of the sculpture came from the collection of the National Museum in Phnom Penh. I don’t know whether Bertrand had mentioned this show, but I am sure he must have had to go to Zurich. There were some very beautiful figures, breathtaking, but what really kept my interest was a film that had a computer recreation on Angkor Wat in its heyday, where all of the gold was covering the towers and figures, and how it was situated among the residences surrounding it, with all the moats and pools. It reminded me of the short book I read in Phnom Penh that was a translation of Chinese visitors impressions of Cambodia in the tenth century. It was Chinese putdown of what they considered an inferior race; the women would sleep with anyone, no cleanliness, etc.

The Reitberg’s permanent collection had an open storage section with glass cases full of all kinds of things, including Japanese ceramics and a few early Romanesque sculptures that seem to look better than anything to me right now. The permanent collection also had a room of Chinese ink paintings including a masterpiece by my personal Cezanne, Gong Xian, one of the greatest painters who ever lived. The met owns two scrolls by him that are sequences of simple landscape views that are small horizontal vignettes in sequence on a long piece of paper with his accompanying poems. He is strange, cinematic, earthy, imaginative and poetic. He uses blunt, dumb, dabbing brushstrokes with dark grades of tonalities. He can also do mist with out over-poeticizing it. They had his painting “A Thousand Mountains and Myriad Peaks” which I had never actually seen, and I thought it was in Princeton, so this was a big surprise.

Another surprise was the concrete architectural relief in the entrance area that I had been looking at. Helmut Federle designed it. I had missed seeing his other architectural projects, a glass exterior that surrounds a building that is on the pharmaceutical company Norvartis’ campus in Basel, where I could not get permission to go on the grounds, and another Federle concrete facade on the side of the Swiss Embassy in Berlin. I wanted to see that, too. This interior facade was a good piece, and keeping with the theme of Asian art, which dominates the holdings of the museum, Federle’s facade is slowly being gold-leafed by anyone who would like to pay 10 francs to apply a square of gold.

I always buy Federle catalogs, and there was one at the museum from an exhibition in Vienna that was organized by the Danish writer and artist Erik Steffensen titled “Helmut Federle: A Nordic View.” Steffensen’s name was familiar, and I remembered his work, I reviewed it once when he had a show at DCA, the former gallery for Danish artists in New York. The essays were in English and German, and reading Steffensen on Federle there was no denying my attraction to him based on the romantic/spiritual attitude that seems to run through so much contemporary post-minimalist abstraction: Steffensen relates Federle to Gauguin’s expression of the “essence of this melancholic Nordic wanderlust…. Federle works and reflects on the world that has given him so much new input, such unique cultural baggage, yet which seems to sow doubt in him about his future direction. This seems to be permanent; the restlessness, however, is productive.”

On the back of the book it describes the Nordic romantic tradition as revolving around the subjects of religion, existence, longing, nature, and restless wandering. I came across this at the precise moment that I needed to explain myself to myself and am quite grateful to have come across it.

September 2. I am still swimming in the pond every day possible, (i.e. I do not go if it is pouring rain all day) though it is getting chillier. It hasn’t reached seventy degrees in over a week. Very few souls are at the ponds anymore and fewer go in the water. But I refuse to stop doing my laps. The distances get a little shorter, though I still swim for at least a half an hour. Colder water seems to require the limbs to work harder, almost like pushing through cold wind. But the sun on the water, the overhanging trees, the color and smell of the water itself is very hard to resist. It’s heavenly. I am still doing the breaststroke, as I never had the patience to re-teach myself the crawl. Earlier in the summer I downloaded instructions on how to do the crawl and was surprised that it was not introduced to the western world until the mid-19th century. It was a gift from the indigenous people in the far-flung colonies. I realized that the Romantic poets, who had a cult of swimming, Byron swimming the Hellespont, etc. did the breaststroke.

Another day through Zurich Saturday, this time out past the city along Lake Zurich to a town called Wädenswil, to meet Pierre-Andre Ferrand. This painter, whose studio I will not be able to visit on this trip because he is in the middle of moving, invited me here to the reception for three new apartment buildings by the architectural firm of Gigon-Guyer. It is a common practice among Swiss architects to collaborate with artists on aspects of their projects and Pierre-Andre chose the exterior colors for the three buildings: a dark lime yellow, a musty pea green and a chestnut brown. I walked around the mostly empty buildings before I went up to the reception space and admired the raw plaster walls, simple proportions and clean sightlines out to the lake. I introduced myself to Pierre-Andre and gave him a catalog. I also met Annette Gigon. We talked about cast concrete and about color and they told me that the builder kept insisting that the colors be lighter. Nothing is simple. It was early evening and I walked back to the train station along the edge of the lake, realizing a few minutes after it left that I could have taken a lake boat back to Zurich and had an hour on the lake instead of thirty minutes in the train. It was museum night in Zurich and they were all open late. I went to the Landesmuseum and looked through the period rooms, lots of inlaid wood and enormous tiled hearths, and then saw a special exhibition on Swiss emigrants contributions to U.S. culture, including the Rickenbacker guitar, Robert Frank, and the founder of Chevrolet. Museum night could not be complete without a bar in the garden with a big thumping disco bass so I got out of there and took the train back to St. Gallen.

August 25

My gallery faxed the review of my last show that just came out in AiA. It freshened the air around here even though it was not all praise. As someone who writes reviews for the same publication, I can pick out the slightly-not-true facts right away, like where (Hi Stephen!) he says that I paint really big or really small. Also, the most eye-catching painting has already been described like a cartoon several times, and for that reason alone I have grown to dislike that painting. I thought it was a generous and positive review even though it concluded at the end that I was “pulling my punches”. Roberta Smith, similarly, wrote that my use of other painters formats felt cautious to her.

It is odd to read this stuff because the work comes out of an attitude that foregrounds the process over the “image”. A few years ago I had studio visitors that would talk about the tall verticals and wonder about the “Newman reference”, and I would explain that the work came about from the limitations of the materials, i.e. the burlap came five feet wide, so if I wanted to go a greater distance, I had to piece it together, and one day decided to place another material in the gap between the finished edges. Someone who came on a studio visit a few years earlier, an artist, surprisingly, asked me where I saw the work going. I said, in all honesty, “Nowhere, I like it here.”

What I read from these comments is an assumption that there is something I am trying to do, or to get to, that there is an original image that I am striving for, when all I am trying to do is please myself. The work is, firstly, about the pleasure of the materials, and then about how the materials behave when I interact with them. Then there is the pleasure of solving the problem that the situations create. “Oliveros Night” the painting with the black felt stripe and the painted blue washy vertical, was redone three times. This means that I had to prepare the burlap with primer, go through the gluing of the felt stripe and the unstretching and restretching and then put the painted stripe on. Twice it was too heavy, and the third time it worked. But the painting does not communicate effort, which is part of the point.

But making art is communication, and it’s a dialogue, including a dialogue with critics, and this has changed the work, mostly making it more demonstrative. This AiA review has me rethinking the past months work, now the stuff I unstretched and rolled up seems better than the more recent work. I don’t think one is aware of what art they are influenced by. I keep hearing about Tuttle and Burri, and I have hardly ever spent any time looking at their work or thinking about it. This may be because their ideas were so familiar, or so ready for me to take that there was no need for investigation and my unconscious just swallowed it whole at first glance.

I went to visit the Swiss artist Roman Signer this morning at is house in St. Gallen; this was an appointment that was switched around and delayed through most of the summer. He is from Appenzell, on the other side of the mountain, and has now lived here for many years. He is about seventy, but comes off as a younger man. He is known, world-renowned at this point, as a sculptor who performs actions involving explosions, or other natural forces, like surges of water or air, or combustion. He also uses simple mechanical devices and tools, or recreational equipment in new, odd ways. I read that he had a job early in life in a pressure-cooker factory, when one gets to know the work this fact becomes more and more amusing.

Many of the actions, such as a piece where he sits in a kayak and is towed by a car on a dry road as the bottom of the kayak is scraped away, is recorded on short 8mm films. Or there are photographic series or objects. Since his youth he was interested in explosions. I asked him if he liked the smell of gunpowder, he said yes, and I mentioned the allure of the smell when I first experienced it as a small boy, he said, “Yes, elemental.” That was a word he liked to use in relation to his work. He took me to his workroom, which was in a large building attached behind his larger, bürgermeister-like house. He showed me a room full of sculptures, and said, “Well. This is all I have, it’s not very much, and much the work is out in exhibitions…”

In one corner of the long, low-ceilinged space was a collapsible mountain-climbers tent that was in tatters from an explosion, this is a “Ruin” of an action, he explained. I told him that it made me think of the Romantic trope of the ruin in the landscape, and how being that a lot of his work takes place out of doors, it made oblique references to the Romantic tradition. There was something of a language barrier, and he said, “No. I am not a “land” artist, I just use the land as my workroom sometimes.” There was a beautiful piece on the floor with a long iron pipe that had triangular legs welded on it, that was used, when filled with gunpowder, to shoot a black umbrella through a black briefcase, which was placed in front of the pipe.

Then he would say, ‘Well, that’s all” and then would take me to another part of the building and show me something else. One windowless room had a bucket full of sand suspended over an umbrella that would spin and sift the sand evenly around its perimeter. Nearby, was an old-fashioned weight reduction machine with a belt one places around one’s waist. He used the machine in an action where he put the belt on and as the machine moved his hips he would try to hit a can placed across the room with a pistol. There were circles with numbers highlighting the bullet holes on either side of the bright metal can.

In another storeroom, near a workroom with a long table filled neatly placed tools, Signer showed me a deep freeze refrigerator, like the bottom half of a full-sized one. He tells me a story about when a few years ago he heard that a huge snowfall was coming. He brought the freezer outside, and lifted the lid and it snowed into the freezer. With the lid lifted, one peers down and sees the drifts of snow still preserved. He said that it was in a museum exhibition, a large refrigerator truck came to get the piece, that the temperature inside was -20 Centigrade, and it was quickly taken from the truck and plugged in to the gallery space. Then he said that the museum wanted to insure the sculpture for 20,000 Swiss francs, and Signer said, “That was very clever, but it cannot be replaced, it’s just snow.”

He showed me some of his catalogues that he had bound with metal bands and then placed an explosion cap inside. The eruption on the surface of the book, he said, was like a volcano. I asked him if he liked visiting volcanoes, and named some that he had, including Stromboli and a number of others, including one in Japan. Then I asked him if he had read Susan Sontag’s novel, the “Volcano Lover” and we talked about what a good book it was and how surprising that it came from her.

Then he took me on the concrete deck above the studio that served as a large patio for the residential part of the house and showed me his “participant” piece, where two hoses filled with water were connected to a pair of rubber boots mounted on a metal stand. Signer stood on the two hoses about 10 feet away from the boots and lifted his feet on and off of the two hoses, causing the boots to swing back and forth in a walking motion. Long spurts of water came from the heels of the boots, propelling them forward. I was admiring the piece as I was also looking over at the cab of a ski lift set nearby a large boulder, and looked over to the buildings across the way that formed a kind of tall amphitheatre that looked onto his patio.

As he walked me downstairs, he stopped and said ‘Oh, I must show you where I keep my explosives.” And he opened a door and I looked at a five-foot high pea green safe with a no smoking sticker on it. As we went out onto the street there was a black Jaguar parked in front of the entrance. We talked a few more minutes. I mentioned something about not having the language and missing a lot of middle-European irony and he said, “It’s subtle.” Then, “This is not my car, I only have a bicycle; and I have one of those three-wheeled cars from Italy, do you know them?”

August 24. I went to Lucerne again to see the Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba exhibition that is my next feature article for AiA. It was a sunny day and this time I took a towel and my bathing suit. My appointment with the curator wasn’t until 4 pm so I got on a local bus that ran out of town along the perimeter of the lake. First we went through lots of hedges and coffee-sipping patios and luxury goods shops and large private houses overlooking the lake. Switzerland is oppressively comfortable. Its suicide rate by means of firearms is second in rank, per capita, to the US.

The mountains behind were quite dramatic, though it was hazy or the air was dirty, like everywhere else on the planet. I got off the bus after it seemed close to a place that corresponded to the beach on a map I had glanced at, but it turned out to be the lakefront patio of a hotel across the road, charming enough, with a line of old twisted trees and no one about, except at the snack bar. There was lounge jazz coming from the speakers hidden in the trees, otherwise, how would I know that I was relaxing, without recreational music blasting at me as I looked at the water?

Moving on down the road I took some twisty paths leading up and down through fields and trees, but I came up against gates to private lake front houses that continually blocked egress to the water. I finally came back to the road and headed further along to the Hotel Hermitage that had a large lawn leading down to a marina and ferry dock. I came down a flower-lined walk past the outdoor dining area nonchalantly, thanking myself for remembering to wear my seersucker jacket, I always seemed to get treated a little better when wearing it, and noticed a boat shed over the left. I surreptitiously climbed a fence, quickly changed into my broad-checked Ralph Lauren bathing trunks under a tree next to the shed and dove in the lake. It was lovely, cool and clear, and I could swim out to a floating raft not far off. No one was in the water as I moved about, staring at the distant sailboats and surrounding peaks. After about fifteen minutes of this I came back to shore, quickly changed and went up the path to the bus stop. My head was clear as I met Susanne Neubauer, the curator of the exhibition.

We had a coffee in the area above the museum level, the eighth floor of this steel, glass, iron and mechanism-heavy architectural statement and Ms. Neubauer explained how the museum likes to feature career surveys of young, promising artists, and it is hard to find ones that can fill up the series of large rooms that constitute the temporary galleries of the space. Someone that does films and projections can cover a lot of space, she said. This was a great, unguarded way to talk about her choices, which of the past shows, in the painting category, included the redoubtable Anton Henning. When I told her of my interest in Josephsohn, she said she was surprised because these days everyone seems only interested in what’s new. Well. There it is, the sign of the times.

Walking through the exhibition again we discussed the show as I took copious, useful notes. Jun had done a fill-the room-with-a-bunch-of-the-same-stuff installation of chrome globes and replicas of consumer objects on the ceiling, but it was a very standard experience. Jun is a very good artist but was simply hitting the marks here, I thought. He had done two small magic lanterns that spun around showing shadows of the earth’s landmasses along with projections of moving imagery of boats on the Mekong that was a lovely piece. Mostly, I have to admit, I just liked walking through the show with Susanne Neubauer, who I had to make a conscious effort not to stand too close to.

On my way back to St. Gallen, I got off the train in Zurich, to attend the opening of that city’s art season. This Friday night segment of it took place in a converted brewery building that had four floors of galleries and the Migros Museum of Contemporary art,
Migros being one of the wondrous Swiss supermarket chains that has helped put extra weight on me this summer. I didn’t particularly like anything in the building but felt generous enough towards the general ambience. At de Pury and Luxembourg there was Jimmie Durham exhibition, which was mostly theatrical, as he was an artist that comes from a performance background. The most striking piece was a Volkswagen beetle with a boulder that looked like it had fallen on it. The white cube is just what it is; there is no way around it. This is very old news to just about every artist but me.

Though the gallery space as a phenomenon and frame was first exhaustively isolated by Brian O’Doherty, in his famous series of Artforum essays, the consciousness of context has to be given to Duchamp, who seems to me to be the Frank Sinatra of art. Sinatra famously said that as a singer his voice wasn’t his instrument, the microphone was his instrument. The singer, like the artist, like the actor, has entered the age of amplification. This new arena demands elegance, the ability to choose the defining gesture, nuance, figure, intonation, absence, etc. Any honest art teacher is obligated to tell his or her students that the gallery space, extrapolated to elsewhere, virtual space, the larger culture, etc. is their canvas. My attraction to Josephsohn came in part because of his definition of traditional sculpture as something with limited expressive possibilities. But, of course in his hands, that was not the case. I am attracted to abstract painting for similar reasons, its limitations. The same way that television sitcoms are interesting, there is specific form that can be only broken out of at one’s peril, it mostly needs the proscenium and the laugh track. I saw one in Cambodia about four years ago, with a family sitting around on the floor of a traditional aboveground grass hut. They looked like they were insulting each other and there was a laugh track. The Cambodians around me in the restaurant, where the television was, seemed to love it. This is a roundabout way of stating why I cannot work without the traditional rectangular stretcher.

I ran into Bruno Jakob, an artist I knew from New York, and Pham Ngoc Duong, whom I had spent time with in Hanoi almost a year ago now, at the beginning of this year away. He was with his French wife and had an exhibition across the street. After I found the show, I pressed the gallerist to look up my Vietnam writing that was available online. I took the train back, and it as the end of a long day, where I had happily made up my mind about a lot of things. I wasn’t going to go to Berlin, or Kassel for Documenta, or Munster for the important sculpture exhibition, or Venice for the Biennale. It would cost a bunch of money that I would rather hold on to than waste it rushing breathlessly, taking trains full of backpackers drinking beer and staying in strange B&B’s, to look at more contemporary art.

I have spent good part of the year writing about the art of others and I wanted to continue to follow the rather confusing path my present work is creating for me and I want to go swimming as many afternoons as possible. I was going to return to NYC a week early, on the 10 of September, two days after St. Gallens’ Museumnacht, where I will participate with an open studio. There are still opportunities to see things in Switzerland and I may still go to Geneva or somewhere else, but enough already with the traveling. Germany can wait.

August 13

“The difference between a good writer and a bad one—or, the difference between a writer (take your choice out of the millions around) and an artist—is that the former thinks the words are pictures, and so on. He thinks they “represent” things, and take their place. The artist is a slave to the fact (it takes a great while to realize this) that they represent nothing, and you pay homage to them on their terms.” --Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, a novel by Gilbert Sorrentino

“To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist” –- Jasper Johns

“The girl wore a fresh, pale blue smock uniform. She looked into his eyes as she set the cup before him, not in a flirtatious or even personal way, but in the way Ray felt all Italians at whatever age or sex looked at people—as if they actually saw them” –-Those Who Walk Away, Patricia Highsmith

“Mysticism and egocentricity are not mutually exclusive. I believe a person never gets past taking himself seriously, even as a mystic. Because in doing mysticism, he is interested in the fact that HE is doing mysticism. There is this gap between taking-oneself-exaggeratedly-seriously and the serenity of relativising oneself, putting oneself into perspective.” Ernst Tugendhat

News of the death of Elizabeth Murray, Roberta Smith writes a sizable obituary in the Times, “… her loyalty to painting, which was out of fashion, was unwavering. At the same time, her blithe indifference to the distinctions between abstraction and representation or high and low could put off serious painting buffs. [Who they?] Both tendencies enabled her to be one of a small group of painters — including Philip Guston, Frank Stella and Brice Marden — who during the 1970s rebuilt the medium from scratch, recomplicating and expanding its parameters and proving that it was still ripe for innovation, in part because of its rich history.” She goes on to write about the artist’s “dismay” at the enormous success of Keifer, Schnabel, Salle, in the ‘80’s.

The 80’s were the last time I remember being amazed by what she was doing, and subsequently cooled on it. The game had changed, and she kept pushing on, to select applause. I didn’t hear younger painters talking about her, much, but then painting is at low ebb, again. I have a feeling that the work will be reevaluated and she will be situated higher up, the work was very alive. I discovered rather late that my sensibility was the opposite of Murray’s. I began to admire restraint.

Smith puts her as making her biggest contribution in the late 70’s.The best work of the 80’s wasn’t painting; anyway, it was these weird hybrids from Salle, Prince, Levine, and Sherman. 80’s painting had this peculiar market-driven irony where painters were show-off hacks that were good enough underneath the theatrics to make the irony work: Schnabel, Fischl, Basquiat. Murray was outside of all that, seriously working. I was reading a piece by Molly Nesbit, who I met in HCMC, about the 80’s in an old Artforum and she got it right when she wrote about Salle, Sherman and Levine’s ideas. I arrived in New York around that time, ’77, when there was nothing much going on in the art world and there was an interesting freedom around. But the money arrived and killed the work.

August 19. This may be one of the reasons that Paris is interesting, and in a different way, Vietnam. That there is resistance: they are underdogs. They are pursuing their ideas though the rewards are not great. I was reminded of this when I was in Lucerne the other day; I had to see Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s exhibition at the museum, to which I have a writing commitment. The show was…fine; his films in particular are rather remarkable, but I had to be in Lucerne, which is kind of awful. It’s like a big Swiss Lake George with more dramatic mountains, less honky-tonk, etc. but it has the high-culture equivalent of honky-tonk, with a Jean Nouvel museum and performing arts center perched at the shore, oversized and looking like a big recycling center, completely out of touch with the surrounding scale, which is a strategy, but I didn’t like it. It just blared ‘architecture’ at you, and I suppose, echoed ‘performance’.

The town is very old and has covered bridges with flower boxes where you can walk across the inlets, and large, picture-postcard Victorian hotels can be glimpsed in the near mountains. I couldn’t bring myself to take any pictures. The town had expanded in the 19th century and is tenth most visited city in the world. Queen Victoria came one summer. Anyplace that is filled with tourists is like being in Hell. Everyone snakes through the streets with the sun beating on them, walking too slowly and looking but not really having any idea where they are or what they intend to do. It is oppressive. I was reminded of the line for the automated rail that takes you up to the Getty Museum.

The sun was out. I took the trip that day based on reports of rain and was wishing I was back in St. Gallen, swimming. I went to the Sammlung Rosengart and they would not honor my International Association of Art Critics card and I had to pay about thirteen dollars to see the sad collection of late Picassos, Klees and Chagalls. It is housed in a building that looks like it used to be a bank. There were many photographs of the Rosengart family with Picasso, who was also a tourist attraction, really, for 20th century sycophantic wealthies. What I was reminded of came when I saw one of his portraits of Dora Maar, which differed itself out from among the other emptily virtuosic works.

I love his paintings of Dora Maar because they seemed to demand something more of him. I identify with Dora Maar more than with Picasso, the same way I identify with Gwen John, another artist overwhelmed by a relationship with a huge artistic figure, Rodin. Gwen John like Dora Maar withdrew into devout Catholicism. My relation to 20th century art is that of being overwhelmed by huge artistic figures, and there has to be a better way of coming to terms with them than an anti-art position or broad irony which have a very strong tang of the right wing to me. I have read James Lord’s memoir, “Picasso and Dora” several times, and I think that my position in relation to overbearing 20th century artistic figures comes out in my admiration for introverted art and artists. One thing that is appealing about Matisse that his insecurity did not rein in his certainty. As Clement Greenberg wrote: “Unlike Cézanne, he does not try to reconcile…conflicting aims in each painting, but alternates from phase to phase, or even from picture to picture…This may account in part for the unrounded, fragmented, almost disjointed impression made by the total body of Matisse's work.”

I am hanging out in my structure here looking at my work and wondering what the hell I am doing. This is my job. I went to Zurich last week and was also forced to pay admission at the Foundation E. G. Bührle Collection. It was really a very good collection of modern impressionist and post-impressionist masterpieces. But I could only really see the Cézannes, some of which were not under glass, and the early Christian sculpture, the circa 1150 stuff was very imaginative and by 1400 they had already taken on a kind of naturalism and something had gone missing. Gauguin, even Manet, here, seemed anecdotal that day. I did look at Renoir, and as I have seen in every museum in Switzerland he is a sculptural, earthy painter. It is the curse of this era we are in that imagery is taken literally and no one notices what a profoundly interesting painter Renoir is. He knifed and slashed up the surface, used the paint like tar, strangled the flowers.

I also looked at the Delacroix paintings that the collection contained. I always look at him closely because I try to see him the way Baudelaire did. The Delacroixs that the Bruhles had were more helpful than most. I could see the hallucinogenic looseness in his brushstrokes that made his imagery seem like opium pipe dreams. Later I went along the shore of Lake Zurich and looked at how some of the cut stone was inserted into the landscape and then later, to the botanical gardens where the summer flowers were beginning to turn. It is already fall here, school is back in session and the water in the pond is getting colder. I will travel to Germany next week.

Paris part II

August 12. Paris, cont’d----Went to Marie-Claude Bugeaud‘s studio. She is one of four women who live and work in Paris that I have collected into an exhibition entitled “Paris on Paper”. I am looking for a venue. All of the work is concerned with light, materiality, and the act of making a mark on paper, and also gives the paper support as important a role as the drawing mark itself. Marie-Claude is the only artist of these four who concentrates equally on drawing and painting. I saw new large and small paintings and also a number of works on paper. The latter were composed of long painted lines or dots and dashes that encircled themselves or interwove. She used the word cheveux: hair; and talked about being interested in the earliest forms of art. I remember that she was always interested in finding ways that women were present in the canon, from past interest in the abstractions that took place in the pleats and folds of garments and the baskets and other domestic items in narrative paintings, to that of patterning and decoration visible in what was done to hair in ancient works of art. She told me that she considered this the earliest form of art. It must have even preceded cooking in clay gourds and basket weaving.

Marie-Claude alerted me to a temporary exhibition at the Louvre. There was newly restored bronze figure from the millennium before Christ, from an area that is now Yemen. I went to the Louvre that day. The museum is crowded now, like all major museums, the draw to treasure and to powerful representations is, I am sure, irresistible to present–day, image-worshiping materialists, but, on the other hand, any nation that has a respect for art as a cultural value is okay with me. My own country, by contrast, simply let Iraq’s aesthetic patrimony scatter to the four winds. Vietnam distrusts any but the most commercial Western culture--free-market propaganda--so it allows Stallone and Schwarzenegger but bans Durrenmatt.

To find L’Homme de Bronze, I had to ask the guards. The Louvre is a frustrating museum to find anything in, the signs are so discretely placed and so pale a color in relation to the marble walls, I kept losing my way, and there were other things I wanted to see. Finally a guard who was sitting amid some stone reliefs from Persepolis changing the band-aid on the heel of his foot pointed me to “Lawm Brun”.

Here was an index of the chief concerns in Marie-Claude’s work, the repeated patterning of the hair of the figure, a different pattern for the beard, the interweaving of the thick cord around his waist and the stylized, ordered folds of the garment that covered his lower torso and legs. The figure had a deep green patina, was dramatically lit and was displayed at a 45-degree angle. It was the kind of archaic personage that Josephsohn was attracted to: static; with naturalistic elements that were encoded in such a way that a kind of decorative improvisation was evident and made it very alive.

There are certain things that I can only see in museums, like Islamic pottery, and the Louvre had some beautiful examples. These bowls with simple dots, dashes and dribbles inspired early abstract paintings of mine, where I thought about how a painting is an object that holds paint and reflects light. These objects were my only artistic models for this idea; otherwise I was looking at things like fire hydrants and tugboats, painted things, not paintings. I also returned to look at the Etruscan figurative sculpture, which I found even stranger than when I was here last year, and was once again was more interesting because of the time I had spent around Josephsohn’s reclining figures. In both cases the reclining man or woman is whole, though appears to be a bunch of disparate elements cobbled together, barely adhering.

Then was the search for the Braque ceiling that I had read about in the biography. He executed it when he was seventy, climbing up a scaffold every day. Nicolas De Stael thought it was a failure. The guards gave me various locations and it took a good half-hour to track it down. There were five black birds surrounded by blue and white shapes, and/or the sky, in three different ovals--two pairs and a loner—framed by the ornate ceiling. I looked at them for a long time. There were a few stars in the background of the central pair of birds. I thought of how I would mention them when I saw Shirley Jaffe on Saturday, the Braque ceiling reminded me of her work. I then went to look at the Corots, an area of the museum that Jerome brought me to a few years ago. It is so easy to forget about Corot and he is so quietly good. Everyone always talks about Cezanne in relation to the invention of cubism but there is just as much Corot in cubism. And I love his sobriety, the earthiness of his touch with paint, the sleepy models, all the buildings and plains baked and bored by the sun. There was a show of his drawings there that was not interesting other than to demonstrate that he could draw, and I have no interest in the Corot of the poetic underbrush of Barbizon, but I love the plainness of his sunlit landscapes and women in costume holding jars. They look dull, but its such a good dull, an alive dull.

One late morning I was in Chaillot and ran into an old friend from New York, Nancy Jones, a writer, who also writes occasionally about art. We had a long lunch and I had my foie gras for the week, which I can still summon up the taste memory of as I write this. As it turned out, she has a very old friend who knew Martin Barré, who is perhaps the single most important French painter to me. She was supposed to meet this person--and perhaps, Barré’s widow--for dinner that evening and invited me. I changed some plans and went to her friend Ann Hindry’s apartment that evening. Both Leo Castelli and Clement Greenberg had courted Ms. Hindry and it was very easy to see why. She was now married to a Frenchman in the advertising business, whom I was told, knew everything about everything. I would have been happy to meet him too. I was shown around the apartment and looked at her two very nice Barré’s, her Kelly plant drawing and her Michaux painting and we went out to dinner. The widow, Mimi, as it turned out, was still in the South.

Barré, I learned, spent a great deal of time sitting in his café sipping Cotes de Rhone and chain-smoking. That is where one would meet him. It all sounds very Parisian, but there is nothing provincial about his work. It does sound like he was in his own world and somewhat helpless. I know the work well because I have every book on him and have read just about everything I could on him in English. Ann wrote the piece that was in the roundly ignored “As Painting” exhibition in Columbus, Ohio in ’99. His work moves along, through five decades, always quite preoccupied with an idea about painting that every so often produced a series built on what was learned in the previous one but radically different.

According to Ann, he was afraid to fly, he thought that he needed to buy a ticket for his own retrospective at the Jeu de Paume, and when a he was young man, he once wandered his usual way with his dog on the beach near his boyhood home in Normandy on June 6, 1944 and passed by a section of D-Day troops. The story goes that he came home and said, “Momma, there are men in khaki uniforms on the sand.” This sounds apocryphal. He wouldn’t ever say much, would be just as interested in Hollywood gossip as anything else, and would sometimes come out with the statement that he had an idea for a new series of paintings. Barré never showed the work to anyone until the entire series is finished. When it was, Ann would be invited for dinner, and afterward she and his wife and he would go to the studio with a bottle of Cognac and see the new series. No one would say anything.

I told Ann that I thought of him being the American equivalent of Ryman in the sense that what he did was a little too idiosyncratic to really provide a direction for painting, as important an artist as he was. She agreed on the hermetic part. I went to the Centre Pompidou and there were three Barré paintings from one of the last series in a room with a large Andre on the floor, three Ryman’s on the right wall and three Agnes Martins on the left. This was very close to my personal pantheon. It was a great room, though a little small for all of this work. The Barrés had pride of place, on the central wall, but all the paintings, unfortunately, had little stands and ropes in front of them to protect the delicate surfaces. The only other room nearly so glorious was a room devoted to Malevich. There was a big tondo down the end of the contemporary section that I thought was a large recent Howard Hodgkin but turned out to be a Katherina Grosse. She seems to have successfully stolen his fire.

Lunch that day was at the Ambassade d’Auvergne, where I always get a good meal. I had two lunches there, the first with Mick Finch, painter from England who has lived in France for about fifteen years. He speaks and reads French and he has read and understood a lot of the theory that is behind French painting of the last thirty years. I had been looking over his ‘studio notes’ that are on his website, mickfinch.com. He makes distinctions between Greenberg’s specificity of painting as being comprised of flatness and opticality, and describes the French alternative, the concept of the tableau and how “In a French context ‘thickness’ is privileged as the key specificity in painting”. Hubert Damisch: "Dubuffet… liked working in the thickness of the ground - I mean of the tableau - to reveal what is beneath: scratching the paper, incising and beating up substance, skinning it and whipping it up to reveal layers below… But what does that mean? …. Thickness here really does open up the possibilities for thinking through painting - the notion of work in relation to the surface adds up to an idea of excavation of the tableau as well as of the painting” Finch: the surface of painting, epistemologically and as the objet de connaissance, was to become for many French artists and particularly those associated with Supports/Surfaces.

Damisch's description of the working of this surface as a material entity in itself, throws into question the flatness of painting as being in itself a specific limit of the medium as well as an a priori condition. Greenberg's centering of specificity around flatness and the subsequent hyper-realization of the optical illusionism that he claimed was inherent to painting, shut down the possibilities of materially working painting in terms of surface as a 'thickness'. Supports/Surfaces in a restricted sense was a demonstration of just such possibilities where the material manipulation of the surface was seen as a site of inscription in painting that undermined ideas of ground and field that were at work in the USA.

Damisch's use of thickness throughout a number of texts from the early sixties on is accompanied by an oscillation of its relationship with painting and the wider term tableau. The use of tableau in lieu of painting is highly significant, as well as complex, in relationship to French critical thinking.”

We didn’t end up talking about the concept of the tableau very much but I heard more speculation about what is going on at Jean Fournier Gallery. Jean Fournier died about two years ago now, and the gallery remains open but its direction is unclear. Fournier was the outstanding figure in post-war French Abstraction. I remember I heard one story about him seeing the future of painting in the fragments of cut and colored paper that Matisse, in his final woks, had attached to pieces of cloth with safety pins. Fournier liked my work on paper enough in reproduction that he wanted to put them in show with James Bishop’s works on paper. Alas, it was not to be.

Mick was interested in the works of Aby Warburg that are appearing in English for the first time. Warburg’s research, he died in 1929, involved a lot of very contemporary ideas about high and low culture, interdisciplinary studies, and interestingly, the survival of antiquity in different cultures. Philippe-Alain Michaud of the Pompidou has written a book about Warburg for Zone Books and has curated two shows that I have seen, including Le Mouvement des Images, where the permanent collection was used to sort out a relation to filmic movement, and an earlier exhibition called Comme le reve, le dessin, that was also at the Louvre and attempted to explore the dream in relation to drawing and film, that I reviewed for the increasingly questionable Art on Paper magazine. The idea of the painted or drawn image and its interaction with film sequencing is an idea that I immediately am wary of, but may be something that is inevitable, i.e. looking into using sequences in my own work. The set lunch included saucisson on green beans and for dessert I had stewed rhubarb in a fresh mint broth that was quite lovely. I asked Mick if he would write something for ArtCritical.com.

I began reading a copy of “In Cold Blood” the first night at Agathe’s and a few days later I picked up my own copy and it kept me company in the parks and on the metros. I had never read it and was impressed with how it was such a portrait gallery, how well the victims and the murderers were portrayed, how the one, Perry, was sensitive, interested in language and music and a psychopath. He was artistic, or had artistic leanings, as did the murdered daughter, Nancy Clutter. The book is about how mysterious humans are. Of course I read it because I loved Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance, but I think Capote never succeeded with another novel because his alcoholism caught up with him and ruined his capacity for extended effort. So there was this narrative plus Bryan Ferry’s version of “These Foolish Things” constantly running through my head as I criss-crossed Paris, keeping appointments and occasionally ducking into churches to look at windows during this week of beautiful weather.

One evening I finally did catch up with Jerome for dinner at his house with his wife Martine. They had stayed at my place in New York for part of my time in Cambodia and in Switzerland. He said something about the difference between French and American painting that I had not heard before, that the French tend to be artisanal and the American, industrial. In other words, the French tend to be preoccupied with how one goes about crafting a painting, or in my interpretation, what is it, and how does one go about beginning it? The Americans in how to produce it, what comes out of the work process, and how does one perpetuate production. It is a pretty simple explanation of why I like French painting more than American painting, The French way is easily more contemplative and philosophical and the American more illustrational and dynamic.

Shirley Jaffe had heard this distinction before, and seemed to respond to the idea with some impatience. She seems of two minds about French painting. She has participated in the Parisian painting dialogue for more than fifty years, has been in Paris since shortly after WWII, was a good friend of Joan Mitchell and Al Held and many others, including Janice Biala, and was one of the artists who showed at Jean Fournier. But I do think that she considers herself an American painter, because she is an American. Almost every time I am Paris I go to the studio and we get a meal. She doesn’t take her work out, though if a painting or a drawing is up, I can look at it. But she doesn’t offer to show me more, usually. I think this has to do with the first time I met her she blindsided me by asking me directly what I thought of her work and I said I hadn’t figured out what I thought, yet. And now that I know her, I still haven’t. But I think the work is maybe a bit like Josephsohn’s, in this time but not of it.

We have had discussions where we have clearly stated our differences: She makes paintings that attempt to include as many contradictory elements as possible and through the painting process wrestles them into a kind of joyful, but also ambiguous, order. She told me about how it is a way of controlling the chaos of life itself, by taking an overwhelming complexity and making something orderly and beautiful from it.

I, on the other hand, have come to see painting as a place that has nothing to do with life or me. It is a place totally removed from daily existence, with its own rules, its own traditions and its own order. I keep making paintings because there is something I am trying to figure out on its terms. I suppose the difference is between her struggle and my search. But we seem to get along. I was very happy when she saw my show in Paris a few years ago and approved and understood what I was doing.

The catalog of the exhibition that laid out the history of Jean Fournier gallery is in the museum bookstores, and seeing Shirley’s work in that context gave me a new perspective on it. She was showing with a bunch of strong, idiosyncratic painters and her paintings held their ground. She has taught me what tough paintings Riopelle was doing, and criticized me when I wrote that Al Held’s late paintings had landscape space in them. This time, we mostly caught up on people, and what I had seen. She had gone to see the Steve Parrino exhibition, and I was more curious what she thought about it than anyone else. She thought he almost had something there, but didn’t push it enough. Shirley is someone who has put her curiosity about where her work is going ahead of everything else in her life. I suspect I am more like this than I am willing to admit.

One of the more interesting spectacles this time was the projection of images of medieval sculptures on the covered scaffolding surrounding Eglise Ste. Paul. I often walk near Notre Dame late at night but the summer crowds were out late. I am usually here in the off-season when plane tickets are cheaper. I was happy on my final day to go to the obscure suburb of Gambetta to visit Gabriele Chiari, who I also want to include in “Paris on Paper”. I got lost and happened by the Place Edith Piaf before I retraced my steps and found her ground floor space.

Gabriele, who is from Austria, was a student of Bernard Piffaretti. She has been in Paris since she was at the Ecole de Beaux-Arts eight years ago. I had heard about the jobs she took, including one as a guide at the Palais de Tokyo. At present, she works in the north of the city with schoolchildren as a German tutor. I was sitting in her refurbished storefront studio for the first time, though I had been hearing about it over the last few years, since she bought it, cheaply. I had been thinking all week about moving to Paris. My time away has just about ended, and the question becomes what’s next? It was interesting that she told me she had no great attraction for Paris, she decided to come for school and then gradually decided to stay. These were the same reasons that Shirley originally gave, that she had come with her then-husband and then didn’t leave. It may have been the lowered expectations that made the difference.

So I ended my time there once again looking at work I admire and enjoying another meal. I looked a Gabriele’s new works on paper and felt the warm light come through the old frosted glass in this former shop on the Rue de Capitaine Marchal. I don’t know if I will ever live there but I will return.

Paris part I

August 7. My reading material for the train to Paris was “A Moveable Feast”. I had not read Hemingway in a very long time, maybe twenty-five years. His this-and-that-and-then-this-and-that rumbling style reminded me of Gertrude Stein which was curious because with Stein this method always smacks of domesticity, like a rolling pin going back and forth over a sentence like she is making a piecrust, but with Hemingway it becomes something different, not masculine per se but so strangely close you seem to smell his breath as you read. This may have to do with this particular book’s purpose, an evocation of a time and place that addresses the senses, and it is written in first person, but the underlying sadness is ingrained. It is harsh prose. I was surprised at how the language flowed but had the effect of making me feel like I was looking at some creature without skin.

I had attempted to read “A Farewell to Arms” in ’99 in Provincetown and had to put it down because I thought I was pretentious, and tried it again this past winter in Ho Chi Minh City, where I started reading a copy I had bought there and after forty pages I discovered that it was a faulty printing and the pages were hopelessly shuffled. After I finished “A Moveable Feast” I was in an English language bookstore on the Rue de Rivoli stocking up on new paperbacks and was about to buy “A Farewell” again and stopped myself because I simply couldn’t take any more of Hemingway. I did not want my heart torn out again just yet and didn’t know that that was how the book had left me until that moment.

Arriving at the Gare de l’Est, I changed some money, shocked at how little the dollar is worth, and then bought a weeklong “Orange” pass for the metro, which I took to Felix Faure. I stopped at a boulangerie, purchasing a baguette and three little fruit tarts and headed to Jerome’s apartment where I was to have dinner with him and spend the first night. The last time I was in Paris was in May ’06. I have been visiting at least once a year since 2000. I felt myself ooze as I heard French spoken around me when the passengers got on the train in Strasbourg. I always seem to be happy in Paris, and was feeling contented as I walked to Jerome’s through his subdued quartier, my heavy bag over my shoulder, baked goods in each hand.

Jerome wasn’t home, and I went out to buy a telephone card and called him in between scouting the neighborhood for a place to eat and a hotel should the need arise. By about nine I went to a bistro called La Murmure. There were tables on the street and it was full of what would be called both an upscale and a neighborhood crowd in restaurant review parlance. I had steak frites, a meal that I had been anticipating for the past few days. It was good, but the frites were soggy rather than crisp, and I thought I might have picked the wrong place. Later in the week, I was informed that the frites issue was quite a controversy among Paris restaurant owners this summer. It seems that because of excess rain, the pomme de terre crop was holding more water and though the potatoes were quite good they did not crisp well. There was discussion as to whether frozen potatoes should be used to satisfy the tourists, and most decided to go with the fresh.

By ten Jerome had not returned. I called France, the wife of Guillaume Lebelle, a painter I was going to meet who had lent me his apartment as they were staying in Montmartre, in a studio at the Bateau Lavoir for two months. I was supposed to meet them the next night, but decided to try them rather than spring for a hotel and cut into my restaurant money. I met France at the Place de Clichy and we climbed up the steep stairs and narrow streets to Agathe’s, Guillaume’s sister’s place, also in Montmartre, on the Avenue Junot. I was to stay there for the night. So, I calmly spent the latter part of the evening with three people I had not met before, other than the introductions that had been made previously by our respective work. I had seen Guillaume’s at an exhibition at Jean Fournier gallery a few years previous. He had seen mine, indirectly, when Agathe, who has a boyfriend in New York, had picked up my catalog when she was there over Christmas. I sat and watched them eat a late dinner in the small apartment as we got acquainted. We split up the tarts I bought for dessert. I worried a bit about Jerome, who, as I discovered the next day, had an important appointment and had forgotten about me. He arrived home shortly after ten and had been calling all over town looking for me.

The following morning I went out to find a café. I had spent very little time on the butte; I could see why painters were drawn to the light on this highest point in Paris. Later I met France and Guillaume at their apartment down the far side of Montmartre in the 18th arrondisement. The neighborhood still had its working class aspects but it was heading towards the higher end of the market like everywhere else. The friendly, cluttered ground floor flat was in an older building on the Rue Belliard, a few doors down from a famous Art Nouveau apartment building noted for its facade of bold, decorative tile work. Designed by the architect Henri Deneux, it was completed in 1913. Interestingly, Deneux was primarily an expert on historical restoration, mostly churches, including the timber roof and interior of the cathedral at Rheims that the Germans nearly destroyed in WWI. This superficially ugly building becomes serious and exquisite after a few minutes. It is the only structure credited to Deneux.

On the other side of the Rue Belliard is the remains of a below ground railroad track that encircled the city in the 19th century before the metro was built. I remember seeing traces of it in Pierrette Bloch’s neighborhood at the other end of town, the bottom of Montparnasse. Whenever I get to the far reaches of the city I note the massiveness of Baron Haussman’s project. It was visible from the vantage point of this neighborhood in how he built around the base of Montmartre and did not attempt to run apartment buildings and boulevards up the steep hills.

The city had also initiated a bicycle program, where near every metro station there was a collection of clunky gray bicycles that rented for a Euro an hour. Less than an hour was free, one had to simply return them to any of the many new bicycle depots that had been installed around the city. I never could get my credit card to work in the automatic rental kiosk and spent most of the week mildly jealous of the carefree souls I saw everywhere scooting around Paris on my preferred mode of transportation.

The Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, which I had not visited since it reopened after refurbishment, did not look a bit different, which is probably a good thing. It is a thoroughly French collection—often sober and cerebral, sometimes emotionally direct, usually physical, occasionally unbearably witty--and one of my favorites, as much for its sparsity as for what is in it: Braque, Fautrier, Sonia and Robert Delauney, Hantai (a roomful), Viallat, Martin Barre. There is a permanent installation in an odd-shaped room by Niele Toroni that looked like Islamic patterning. I particularly wanted to see the Braques, I had just read the biography that is very good but has an awful cover with gold lettering and a cubist portrait of him by Picasso that seems wildly appropriate. Downstairs I was very happy to find nearly an entire room devoted to the work of Pierrette Bloch. There were three very long strips of mounted paper with splotchy black marks and three framed drawings that collected rows of dots like carefully laid stone walls.

I had already heard about an interview with John Cheim in The Journal des Arts; it came up again and again whenever I talked to Parisian artists. Apparently he was asked why Americans do not respond to French painting and John replied that they seemed to consider it “too decorative”. True enough, I suppose but he was making an approximation of what an American art audience thinks. I suppose that a workable distinction between modernism and post-modernism is that the former’s audience was the ideal viewer while the latter’s audience was the mass, uninformed viewer, where the work of art either manipulates them through undermining a given familiarity with mass culture or with verifiable responses.

There is plenty of French art that does this, and does it well, but I come to France to see work that combines economy and visual delight with a degree of thoughtfulness that I don’t find anywhere else. I would have said that American art audiences are accustomed to being entertained by art but their vanity must also be reassured by being told that what they are looking at something that is transgressive or disruptive in some way, as long as they are not specifically told what it is. Also those American art audiences like to see some actual work. You know--elbow grease, or they think they are being fooled, which explains the immense popularity of Chuck Close, the Williamsburg school, and John Currin. But you have to do some thinking and feeling to become involved with French work and most Americans associate that with pain and that makes for a big problem.

My first appointment was with Bernard Piffaretti. I went to his studio in the 10th, a busy immigrant neighborhood near the Canal St. Martin. It’s quiet once you go through the courtyard to his ground floor studio that always seems to have winter light. I have visited him any number of times and I think he is the single most important French painter of his generation. He was rolling up paintings that were to be shipped to the Musée Matisse in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, where Matisse was born, in the north, and Bernard was going to show 20 paintings accompanied by his choice of 20 Matisse quotations. He also had a show up in MAMCO in Geneva that I am to see in a few weeks and was working on a proposal for an extensive stained glass commission. I keep hearing about these commissions in France, but they do not come up that often in the US. I remember Al Held was working on one when I had visited him about a year or so before he died.

The next days were what has become the usual week in Paris, studio and museum visits and lunches and dinners with artists. It has become a very important part of my artistic life. Alix Le Meleder’s studio is in Tolbiac. My French is close to nonexistent as is her English, but the puts the paintings up one after another and I look at them for a while and say “Beautiful” after each one. She works in this studio all day, every day but Sunday. Painting to painting the work changes very slowly. There is a schoolyard or playground behind the studio and there are noises of children playing all day every day. I asked her once if the noise bothered her and she said, “Non.”

Paintings in two sizes are stacked deeply in the studio and there is only thin corridor between them to squeeze through to get to the painting area. The paintings are dominated by a red color though there are many colors if you look closely. She liked the review I wrote about her work so much that I am given a small painting, which she wraps for me and I say merci and goodbye until next time.

I met Guillaume Lebelle at the Palais de Tokyo where there is an exhibition of the late Steve Parrino’s work, an artist who was a big influence on me and I have also written about. Actually, he became an influence on me as I wrote about the work, I kept thinking, “Physical, yes, physical.” Parrino is kind of a proto-punk support/surface artist, and I remember his dealer telling me that “somebody had to play out the Greenberg card so Steve chose to do it”, but I think that the work is bigger than any stylistic move, or strategy. For all of its mimetic violence and shiny black gloss there is very little irony or rhetoric. Also, there is not an excess of work or any falsity. It is not about production, he thinks through every move. I really liked being around it; Guillaume seemed to like the drawings.

That night we went to dinner in Montmartre with France and Agathe and I had tete de veau, one of the dishes I have had in a long time, another reason why I keep coming here. I have been looking at Guillaume’s paintings in three different locations, the apartment I am staying in, in his large temporary studio in the Bateau Lavoir and in his winter studio about a block from his apartment, the second floor of a woodworker’s shop around the corner form the Rue Belliard. This small structure looks as if it was originally agrarian and must date from when the area was still the countryside. I do not know whether this aspect of Paris is so enticing because it just is or because there have been so many good paintings made of it that told us how to look at it. When I first came to Switzerland, many of the innocuous rural landscapes with mists and bans looked like Gerhard Richter’s landscape paintings. I cannot disregard Richter because he tells us how Europe looks at present; he is like reading Sebald, the historical consciousness seeps in everywhere. Tuymans figured out how to foreground the historical over the photo-representation, a way out of Richter, but now where to go?

It is not my concern; I am still looking at painting as painting. Jerome came with me to Guillaume’s studios. He is a very good painter; he has, from my point of view, not enough analysis going on, and does not edit himself or focus on one aspect of his work, so that the paintings sometimes contradict one another. But there are things that he does that I do not see anywhere else and it made the time spent of value.

July 29

In the new Braque biography there is a wonderful passage that tells how whenever Picasso visited Douglas Cooper at Cooper’s house in the French countryside, the Chateau de Castille, he would go to the bedroom and stare at Braque’s “Studio VIII” over the bed. Asked what he thought, he would only mutter to himself, “Don’t understand. Don’t understand”. I do not remember this in John Richardson’s book about his early post-war years with Douglas Cooper, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”, but I do remember the part where Picasso comes to dinner at Cooper’s and takes out the fish bone during supper and plays it like a weird musical instrument on the side of his plate. God, he sounds like a pain in the ass.

The book repeats Braque’s well-known put-down of Picasso that he used to be a good painter and now he is “merely a genius.” Braque has all my sympathy. There is talk in the book about the French term, ‘metier’ that I believe has to do with one serving one’s trade. In painting terms, this would mean being interested in the craft of painting, not in a subservient way, but not to suborn it to one’s ego. This is what is going on in the world of art, that all is being suborned to a concept, on one hand, or to one’s ego, on the other.

I went to see David Lynch’s “Inland Empire” a few nights ago and was taken with how he was present in every frame of the film. I have been reading “Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things” by Gilbert Sorrentino, where the presence of the author, a very fictive presence, keeps busting into the narrative so you think that a story is not actually being told, though it does move along, and the film does the same thing, there is actually a story taking place but most of the movie consists of the character walking around inside of the narrative, finding holes and alleyways in it. The point being that Lynch has his métier, he is a craftsman as interested in his medium as in his ego.

I have rejected most of the work I have done here except for a small painting and a very big one that has an interesting chastity, I don’t know how else to describe it. It must come from looking inside these churches and from looking at all the Swiss hard-edged painters.

I like the fact that Braque treated Francoise Gilot, Picasso’s wife, like a fellow-painter.

“Say to yourselves: I am going to work in order to see myself and free myself. While working and in the work I must be on the alert to see myself. When I see myself in the work I will know that is the work I am supposed to do. I will not have much time for other people’s problems. I will have to be by myself almost all the time and it will be a quiet life.” Agnes Martin

July 28, Saturday. I am going to Paris for two weeks on Monday. I fell in love with someone the first time I was there. Almost twenty-five years ago, I hope that I don’t feel compelled to go into that one, too. I have been living partially in the strong memories of the time when I was in eighth grade, maybe it has to do with the beginning of adolescence. It so happens that I have access to a library of Beatles recordings on my computer and have been playing them, especially the early stuff, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” up to the Rubber Soul album. The two things that stand out is how they are all some kind of love song and how stirring they are, and what an amazing singer John Lennon is. Another memory that continually seems to entwine itself around the others at every turn is my father’ incessant criticality, I don’t know how I survived it.

On my paper route, I delivered about 35 Daily News, 6 or 7 New York Times and about as many Herald Tribunes. The Tribune’s Sunday magazine was “New York” that spun off into a separate entity later in the decade after the paper folded. It already had a lot of the important writers of that era publishing in it, and it was where I first found out about Andy Warhol, Pop art, happenings, and experimental film and theatre, everything that was going on across the bay in Manhattan.

What must have happened that year was I found out that someone that was attracted to me could be someone that I wanted to be attracted to, and on a different track, I must have decided in some unconscious way to be an artist, that is, I decided that to be interested in what I was interested in was all right. It doesn’t mean that I immediately accepted it, but that time may have been a where the tipping point was reached.

The previous year my mother took me to Manhattan to the Museum of Modern Art and to the Met. A public school friend from a few doors away came along. He was from Greece and had come over with his parents and older sister when he was young, but still had the trace of an accent. We dressed in our black raincoats and orlon sweaters, our open collared button-down shirts with dickies tucked in around our necks, and combed our hair down on our foreheads, feeling sophisticated. I remember very little about our time in the museums, except that my friend took the large paintings of nudes at the Met more in stride than I did, I had to make some silly jokes. What I do remember is standing in front of the museum and seeing two boys around our age looking over at us, with derision in their eyes. I looked them over, and was able to see for the first time, that one could get a real modish haircut, not a standard shaved around the ears one that you altered later, and that they were wearing better quality raincoats, and shoes, and sweaters. These two kids, probably from that neighborhood on the Upper East Side, were looking at what we had put together from Korvettes. I could feel the clothes on me cheapen. Who knows if they had ever seen anything like us. I had never seen anything like them before, or had any idea that the world had such things to offer. I was outclassed, quite literally, and I never forgot it.

“Europe was the great American sedative” Henry James

“Traditional attitudes towards the natural environment make Indians, like the Japanese, more disposed then Americans to pursue happiness modestly.”
Pankaj Mishra

“The life of an artist is inspired, self-sufficient, and independent (unrelated to society).
The direction of attention of an artist is towards mind in order to be aware of inspiration.
Following inspiration life unfolds free of any influence.
Finally the artist recognizes himself in the work and is happy and contented. Nothing else will satisfy him.
An artist’s life is an unconventional life. It leads away from the example of the past.
It struggles painfully against its own conditioning. It appears to rebel but in reality it is an inspired way of life.”
Agnes Martin

July 26. I have been on the verge of meeting the local world-class artist Roman Signer who is from Appenzell, where I am told that up until recently only men voted--by raising their swords in the town square--who has a big house in St. Gallen. I can’t receive phone calls, so when he had to cancel our last appointment, he drove up here to leave the message that we would have to reschedule. I found his house on the way back from the ponds one day.

The mid-summer quiet of this small city keeps bringing me back to life on Staten Island at the time when I was at the end of grade school. It is as different here from that place as it could possibly be, but it’s like riding through a cleaned-up memory of it, without the bad air from Bayonne, the enormous swaths of tinderstick houses and thick, invisible blanket of sexual repression. The ponds, like the swim club on Staten Island, is dominated by children and adolescents—the former making noise and the latter engaging in their first social and mating games. I actually pass by a public pool that is more like the place I went to--packed with people and deafeningly loud—but I prefer to remember it as bucolic, like that time in my life that was anything but that, except internally and in retrospect. The houses are bigger and older here, as are the trees, and the emotional war that began in my childhood and adolescence so long ago has ended.

The summer that “Satisfaction” was number one on the charts and was played once an hour on WMCA radio, I was 12 years old and had been noticing girls for over a year. It seemed that I went from a desire for toys and playing army to an interest in sweaters and records overnight, the next maturation of significance didn’t take place for another thirty years, when one day I could no longer abide rock and roll and figurative painting, remarkably similar, that. But that is another story.

I worked for my fathers’ construction company on Fridays that summer, but it did not overwhelm my time at the pool, where I would sometimes talk to the girls that were in the other class in my school, St. Clare’s, where the grades were segregated by sex. We would, a few male friends and I, make forays to where the girls hung out and make shy and bold conversation.

I have always found it easier to talk to girls, now women; this is where that began. With the girls I could talk about the Beatles and the Stones, and they showed me their pictures, taken with brownie cameras, of the Beatles at Shea Stadium the previous summer--little blurry specks on a fuzzy field. I had to talk about the Yankees and the Mets, of which I had no interest with the boys. An attraction developed with one of girls. At this time and place this mostly consisted of hearing from the others, when she wasn’t around that Chris, that was her name, liked me. The visits to their area of blankets and folding chairs began to have a heightened quality because of her presence. I remember that Chris had pale blue-gray eyes and blond hair that was cut just above her shoulders, and she was good at letting it fall over one eye, in the Mod way. She had pale white skin (was this possible, in the pre-skin-cancer-conscious age of the deep tan?) and long legs. She wasn’t tall.

Staten Island was overwhelmingly Catholic and there were six children in her family, not unusual. I remember her having to take care of a younger sibling, sometimes. I don’t remember her mother. Her father was one of those men who went up and down the aisles of St. Clare’s during Sunday Mass and took up the collection, shooting a wicker basket attached to a long pole down in between the benches through row after row of seated parishioners. I seem to remember graying temples and an out-of-date suit. I don’t think he was a fireman or a policeman, as were about half the fathers of members of my class--a father seemed to die in a fire almost once year, the surviving family’s picture would appear on the front page of the Daily News—he was probably a white collar worker in lower Manhattan. A good many from Staten Island died on 9/11. But this was long before that,when the tip of the island was made up of stone buildings, one stared at a cliff full of windows arriving on the ferry, and the Beatles took the train from the still extant Pennsylvania Station to Washington on their first American tour.

Chris once said, “My father is very handsome,” defiantly. We hardly ever spent a moment alone, but there was something about the admiring energy between us that was new to me. And she was new to me. Where did this person come from? I guess this is what is meant by ”noticing”. We were not, in this clique, completely unsophisticated. We were already cynical and pessimistic. This was probably a part of the Catholic education of that time where one spent eight years with nuns who knocked you down over and over if not physically then by reinforcing the idea that you shouldn’t think too much of yourself. This was internalized into not being too impressed with anything. This is an exultant, traditional Staten Island attitude, accompanied, oddly, by a warm cordiality that is perhaps a result of a life spent running from christenings to weddings to funerals.

There was one point that summer where Chris got interested in someone else, someone from public school that was, in fact, a friend of mine. I remember looking across the crowd at an open-air party at the swim club one Saturday and seeing her looking up at him and being all absorbed attention. I was warned about it, but there was still the shock of it, like a hunger pang with humiliation attached, heartache.
Within a short time, it must have been long summer, she had lost interest in O’Brien--that was his name--and I was rewarded with her attention again.

That fall St. Clare’s changed its policy and made the classes co-ed. Chris was assigned to the other eighth grade, but I would see her in the schoolyard. At one point she said to me, “I like you” and I was floored by the directness of it, we were all habitual ironists, (I had a black raincoat and being that I was Joseph I called it my “coat of many colors”) I managed to say something like. “I feel that way about you too.” But I could never get her to meet me anywhere, not for sex or anything, we were nowhere near that, but for time to be with only her. I would drop hints about when I would be at the public library but she never showed up.

I would go home after school and be with my neighborhood friends who went to public school, by seventh grade they were in junior high where classes changed all day. They would talk about what girl they know “gives” and what they “got off” their girlfriend, and would want to know if I got anything off mine. I was getting information that was of absolutely no use to me in my crowd of that moment. In late November Pope Paul VI made a visit to NYC and all of the students in the catholic schools of the diocese were instructed to go to Central Park and line the roadways that his motorcade would pass through and we would get blessed.

Chris had on a green tam and a matching coat that day. Her blond hair stood out against it. I was next to her on the rope line and put my artificial-leather-gloved hand over her knitted wool-gloved-hand and she did not take it away. One of the nuns saw us and glared at us.

Then Christmas came and in January I got pneumonia. I read John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” and every book the library had about nuclear war. The Young Rascals “Good Lovin’” went to number one. I missed a lot of school. When I returned Chris was interested in someone else, her hair was longer and even blonder and she had a dark red hat and a matching coat. I remember seeing her as if at a great distance. At night, under the covers, with radio I would think of her when Nino Tempo and April Stevens version of “Stardust” played on my transistor radio. I had no way of identifying what the feelings were that I was having. I did not know or want to talk about it to anyone. But I remember watching her for the rest of that year. We never spoke very much after that.

My family moved away at the end of that school year and half a lifetime went by until I was in the Adirondacks, a place that I knew since early childhood, a few summers past and I woke up with the most vivid memories of Chris, the flood of feeling was so strong I had to tell D., who was next to me, that something very strange was happening. For that day and the next I was possessed by vivid memories of her, I was speechless. I went over the past and considered that I must have been in love with her and had never “processed” the feelings.

I speculated that the nun must have thought that there was something unhealthily serious going on. There was no one else in the class that had been paired off, at least in the way we seemed to be, and maybe Chris was told to stop paying attention to me. Maybe she just went away. Distant memories become stronger as short-term memory gets weaker in old age, which I am not in yet, and this incident in the Adirondacks was isolated. A few days later I spent a lot of time searching for her online--one really expects this magic box to turn up everything--but I couldn’t find any references. Not that I would contact her. After a few days the whole thing faded, like it was a virus.

Sunday July 22. Pay particular attention to the things that you hate, they most likely contain ideas that you are almost ready to accept. Ten years ago I read some of Alan Bennett’s diaries and couldn’t stand them or him, now I am doing something similar. Then again, I didn’t like his attitude; he was too good at making withering observations on the pretentiousness of some figure that you happened to like. Two, I remember, were at the expense of Philip Larkin, describing his self-sequester as a librarian in the provincial town of Hull reminding him of the Monty Python sketch where Greta Garbo would ride through residential neighborhoods in an open car with a bullhorn exclaiming “I want to be alone.” Or another one where he said that Larkin has gotten more spiritual points for living in Hull than Dr. Albert Schweitzer ever got for living in the Congo. Very, very funny.

This is another attribute that my father had, cruel cutting remarks that were undeniably hilarious. He could tell you something about yourself that was brutally undermining, but it was so funny that you would be crying from its humor and humiliated at the same time. It’s a quality--if it can be called that, sarcasm is actually a form of anger, I have learned—that I could use if anyone would let me. English writers often snipe at each other but New York artists act like a bunch of lawyers these days, so careful and kind around one another. As it is I try to keep my mouth shut and smile but I am no good at it. I am in a business that has a strong social element and it is to my disadvantage that I play it so reluctantly. The old man ran his own construction business. He could shoot his mouth off to anyone and it didn’t make a lot of difference as long as the bid came in low enough. But what I do involves a lot of politics and I can’t get myself to do anything I don’t want to do and I am stuck with me.

I rode my bike through the very quiet Sunday atmosphere in St. Gallen, and after I stopped at the pond and did more laps than usual I went further across the mountain above the town where Sunday walkers--couples, children—were strolling through the woods and walking along the trails that reveal the panorama of the Canton with Lake Constance in the distance and the Austrian hills beyond. Further on was a vast 17th century mansion with a windily bowing roof and a long row of tiny dormers, nearby, of course, was a little restaurant in exactly the right place where people had ice cream or wine and looked at the view.

I feel a bit like the character played by Sylvia Miles in the film “White Mischief” about the decadent Happy Valley English in Kenya. She would get up and take a shot of heroin and look at the gorgeous landscape before her and say “Another goddamned beautiful day.” This temporary dip in mood may be because there has been some news.

Josephsohn has good days and bad days I am told. And just a few weeks ago he was sitting across from me dining alfresco.

I got an email from Gallery Quynh in Ho Chi Minh City. Quynh has spent the past four months renovating and then re-renovating their new quarters in a former furniture warehouse near the French consulate. The site is now, suddenly, scheduled for demolition next month. This is how it goes there, where there is no transparency in government, no understandings in how to run businesses, and no right to recourse, to demand one’s rights in a courtroom for breach of contract. The landlord probably just wanted to keep the rent going as long as possible and either didn’t know or held back the information on the property.

Watching Ozu’s “Record of a Tenement gentleman” the scenes of Japan after the war made me miss Asia, already! It is about a woman who takes in a stray young boy. The boy wets the bed and the woman has to hang her old futon on the line to dry it out. It was the most inspiring object I have seen since I left Phnom Penh.

My girlfriend has emailed me that she does not want to continue. There have been backs and forths for weeks and I knew something was up but I was waiting for it actually to be stated. One needs that, to hear it. She was supposed to come over the beginning of August but that’s it. This is the end of a long relationship that has been sporadic at best for three years or so but very steady for the five before. We only recently attempted to try it again. We never really seemed to get along during the long period we went on. It was a constantly frustrating, puzzling situation. I had the best evening in the studio I had had in a while after I got the email.

July 19

I have a new pastime where I take a chair at six and sit by the river right behind the studio. It doesn’t get fully dark here until ten PM. It’s an obscure view but not a bad spot to read. I cannot stay up at the ponds where I swim for too long and read there because it’s too distracting and noisy. The river spot is for reading harder things: philosophy, theory, James. I try to make it to the river. I take my bike every day with sun to the ponds.

And I have stopped indulging myself in every available gelato, croissant, torte, and chocolate bar I cross and concentrate on the cherries, raspberries, peaches, charcroute rouge, fresh fish and vegetables that are widely available. With the exception of the place I was taken for dinner on my birthday, prepared food here is very good but undistinguished. The ingredients are great, though, the cheeses, yogurts, etc. They have the hardest working cows in the business. Their contentment seems to seep into the culture, it’s like all the edges have been rounded off of things here, I feel like I am in a retirement village, that I haven’t taken off my pajamas since I got off the plane.

After I have gotten something done in the studio I don’t go near it for days. I keep spending time in there, but I hardly touch anything. I go through these work cycles where I can’t get anything done that works, and spend much of the time looking at things that I don’t like and eventually reject. When something comes along that I don’t reject I take lots of time looking at it half expecting it to turn bad, which it often does. If it stays good I don’t seem to want to disturb anything in the studio for a while. Perhaps I am afraid that I will wake it up and it will get angry and make me unhappy, like it’s a sleeping father on a Sunday carpet.

I just finished reading a contemporary novel called “The Welsh Girl” by Peter Ho Davies. I had seen a capsule review in The New Yorker and noted it. I don’t know why. Then as the English bookstore in Zurich was closing, everything is always closing before you expect it to here, I grabbed a copy of it that was displayed because I needed something to read on the train. I read it more slowly than I expected to and though I will most likely not keep it, I hardly ever hold on to fiction after it’s finished, I felt an admiration for the writing.
It took place almost entirely in a small town in Wales during World War Two and switched off chapter by chapter between two characters, with a third occupying mostly the prologue and epilogue. The prose was calm, clear and almost colorlessly transparent. Certain contemporary observations were made about war, racism, language, and at one point I felt that it was a little too confidently film-ready. If there was feeling, sex, violence, anger, it was dealt with factually as it turned up. This was perhaps because the narrative was always conducted through the interior of one of the three characters each that had no one to talk to about what they were going through. Of the secondary characters there was one who seemed a device for comic relief but he deepened as the story progressed and was one of the minor surprises. The writing had no distinguishable style, it held so close to the story and its characters. It also gave Rudolph Hess a few cameo performances, which I suppose was something of an accomplishment. What I came away with was a sense of satisfaction that was very different from being impressed.
The book was not an experience so much as it was a fully and quietly articulated place.


I am slowly moving away from the fairgrounds

of the world

And I notice in myself a distaste

For the monkeyish dress, the screams and the

drumbeats.

--from “Eyes” Czeslaw Milosz

“Perhaps the true society will grow tired of development and, out of freedom, leave possibilities unused, instead of storming under a confused compulsion to the conquest of strange stars.

It is not man’s lapse into luxurious indolence that is to be feared, but the savage spread of the social under the mask of universal nature, the collective as a blind fury of activity.”

Minima Moralia, 156 Theodor Adorno

Wednesday, July 18. It has been sunny and warm and my journal writing hours have been replaced by time spent taking my bicycle up through the small city into the hills beyond where I swim. The spring and stream-fed water was noticeably cold, and from it I am getting a cold again, or at least cold symptoms. But I can’t stop myself from going every day. I measure how good my summer is by how often I get in the water. I mentioned this to one of the Sitterwerk people and she said, “Well. I guess an excellent summer is when you are sick of swimming.” I don’t exactly understand local humor.

I had a dream last night that my Josephsohn piece that I have worked on endlessly was being replaced by a short review by someone else, an American sculptor who doesn’t write. I found out about it when the news was delivered to him while I was bent over tying my shoe and the editor didn’t see me. The dream woke me and I got up from bed and emailed the editor to see how the piece was going. The Armleder is much easier, and has been almost fun to write.

I had lunch with an American, Mark Brandl, another painter who also writes about art. He has lived in St. Gallen for a number of years and he said that the jail Armleder was put in for being a pacifist was like an institutional hotel and he sat around on Ikea furniture and made drawings. “It wasn’t like being in prison in Texas.” We sat in an outdoor restaurant in a plaza that was the center of a new bank complex. There was a competition, and two Swiss artists, Pippolotti Rist and Olivier Mosset, got commissions to do projects, Rist covered the area with a red rubber carpet, some that formed outdoor couches (it is certainly the lounge era, another idea that does not interest me) and suspended some white abstracted egg shaped spheres overhead.

The facade of the most interesting building, (that looks a little like Markli, but I have been unable to find out who it is,) is cast concrete broken up by windows framed in wood, a brutalist technique, a counterbalance of materials that Louis Kahn was fond of. There are grill insets between the windows; Mosset’s solution was to vary the patterns of perforations and used every Mercedes color available for the painted metal. I have been back to admire the building a number of times.

Going through the library shelves shortly after I arrived I came across two books on the painter Ferdinand Gehr, who was a Catholic and did a lot of work in churches around this part of Switzerland. The paintings in the book looked very good, early on, in the thirties he was quite the modernist, painterly bright colors and no shading, flat shapes, some almost Etruscan-looking decorative touches. He was a friend of the Arps; Jean owns some of his work. I saw several of his paintings in the St. Gallen Kunstmuseum today. Earlier in the week I went to a church in St. Georges, a small town up the mountainside from St. Gallen where I swim, to see Gehr’s work there, which I heard about from Brigitte Schmid, who interviewed me for the newspaper. Gehr, who died in ’96 at 100, (I remember when I mentioned him to Josephsohn he said, “I want thirteen more years, too.”) apparently did all the church decoration in several styles.

The side walls are frescoes done in a Puvis-type naturalism in powdery colors, the wall behind the altar is neo-cubist, with figuration towards the middle and a sandy, liturgical abstract pattern for most of the rest, in endless subtle variety, and then there are the stained glass windows, the best modern figuration in stained glass I have yet to see. But these damn churches are creepy. Something from my youth makes me very uncomfortable in them. I did not spend many happy hours in Catholic churches. But I am still surprised when this reaction takes place.

And I have been looking at a few Brice Marden books, drawings, mostly, and workbooks. I have always seen all his work and have a few books on him but have been wary for a lot of reasons, being so artistic, for one, though Jake Berthot is like that, too. But what ultimately gave me pause was that he was incredibly good but too uptight, I thought. I just did not think he came up to, say, Sigmar Polke or Per Kirkeby or George Baselitz, or Markus Lupertz or Claude Viallat or Howard Hodgkin, his European contemporaries who were less constrained, less afraid of materiality. Now is there a European who has reconciled painting and minimalism as good as Marden? Federle, he’s the same generation, maybe a touch younger. And, of course, Palermo, nobody’s as good as Palermo.

So I am going to have to go to Berlin and see this Marden show because I was in Vietnam when it was at the Modern, and he has gotten under my skin and is helping me do my work here because I have discovered what he does: he locates a problem for himself and then tries to get out of the tight spot that it is. I have been moving so slowly here, there are only two paintings after five weeks that I am at all happy with and one drawing, maybe two if the one I am working on holds up. If nothing else, Marden’s work speaks to the person working in his studio, the work is about the nature of working, among other things. It’s like the way Leonard Cohen writes songs that are so conscious of the activity of writing songs. And you can feel the work behind the words, or, more accurately, the pleasure in experiencing the crafting process.


Saturday, July 14. Bastille Day. It has mostly been raining for three weeks except for the weekend I had in Basel. I have moving my computer over to the library building to write about John Armleder, putting in two hours a day, treating it like a job, which it is, though my admiration for the work is increasing. I was in Zurich yesterday talking to one of his gallerists, Susanna Kulli, who said that he has amazing energy and concentration, and treats everyone the same, whether an assistant or museum curator, “everyone likes him, and it is how he has been able to get so much accomplished.” This is a talent that I have heard much about in reference to contemporary artists, being people persons. In interviews he talks about being shy and sensitive, and was surprised that he had spent seven months in prison for avoiding Swiss draft conscription.

But I also remember Shirley Jaffe talking about being in Paris in the 1950’s and witnessing an art movement that a group of painters and critics dominated and everyone took it for granted that they were the important artists of the era. “And now”, she said, they are all gone, nobody’s heard of them. Not that I think he is just a passing thing, how do I know? I have no claims on having an overview or of even really understanding the nature of contemporary experience.

July 8

Sunday. My birthday. 55. I am just getting started. I hope I am just getting started. Quiet earlier this morning and sunny then clouded over, looking like rain, it rained most of the week, now sunny again and the tractor across the creek is working the field. Most of the trash from the festival was gone by Tuesday afternoon; you would have hardly known it was ever there.

A problem this past Wednesday. A couple of the kids, well, they are in their 20’s and 30’s, but are like kids, in a nice way, from the foundry were in the large studio next to my space cleaning out a paint sprayer with thinner and it ended up going on all afternoon. The whole building filled with fumes and I got a headache and was feeling woozy, and also had some psychological effect. I got in an angry panic, not knowing how it was supposed to be handled. Katalin wasn’t around, she was out doing errands in anticipation of her and Felix’ vacation to their house in Amalfi, and I could no longer stay in the studio because of the fumes, so I went to see Philip, who had talked to me about photographing the Rondinone in my studio a few weeks earlier.

I saw him over in the workshop and told him that the fumes were killing me over in the other building and he said they were about finished. It went on the rest of the afternoon. By the time Katalin returned I was beside myself and started yelling when I saw her. I wasn’t yelling at her but letting off steam but she took it personally, she feels responsible for whatever reflects on the residency. I said something about being driven from the one home I have within five thousand miles for the second time in a week, the festival was the first time, and that didn’t help matters.

The worst part was that I felt out of control of myself. From the apartment painting I had done when I was younger I have lost all physical tolerance for these kinds of paint fumes. I seem to get an immediate reaction, and it seemed coupled with a feeling of being on some kind of nasty drug. This doesn’t seem to be in the realm of the local behavior, getting emotional in this way, angry, confrontational, and I had to apologize to Katalin and talk to the others about my physical reaction to the fumes. I felt sheepish about it, but took care of it quickly. Perhaps it is for the good

I also learned that there is not a hierarchy in the foundry, that everyone seems to work things out without an exactly in-charge person except, I guess, for Felix. The guys who were creating the fumes said, why didn’t you just come and tell us? It made me wonder if I naturally look for hierarchies, or assume that they are in place, or project them, the remnants of living under severe authority? The situation also made me angry. I thought I was not being considered. This was an odd reaction because I am being treated very well, very carefully. I got an email last night that Sitterwerk is taking me to dinner for my birthday but being that Katalin and Felix are away the librarian, Marina, is taking me. It’s pretty sweet here.

I went to Zurich yesterday and visited Le Corbusier’s final house, which I didn’t particularly like, but because of that it was easy to look for what might interest me, such as the combinations of architectural and sculptural space that also encompassed aspects of large scale painting. There was also the play of shadows and light, including reflections from the decorative pool on one side of the building that threw patterns on the underside of the architecture. This is a conceit that now enthralls me whenever I come across it. I never knew it existed before I noticed it at the Alhambra two years ago.

The Kunsthaus had a Fischli & Weiss retrospective and I already knew most of the work and I never found them so interesting other than the studio cause-and-effect film “The Way Things Go”. There was another film where they put on animal costumes and drove around and looked at things and it made me wonder about how we represent animals in humorous ways. Reading the later works of J. M. Coetzee, especially “Elizabeth Costello” you get indoctrinated into some of the attitudes of animal rights activists. It made me wonder if Fischli & Weiss animal dress-up act might not look like an “Amos n’Andy” routine in the future.

There was a large room at the museum full of big horizontal paintings. I have been trying to make horizontals so it was good to see them. There were three Polkes, a Katz and a Kiefer, which I ignored, as I usually do. I had just come from looking at a big painting by Robert Delaunay, who always stops me cold. No one ever seems to mention him. His contemporary, Picabia seems to be everywhere. It was what was then called a mural-sized painting, I know several of them, the Guggenheim takes theirs out now and then and the Beauborg usually has their mural-sized Delaunay on exhibit.

In the Picasso biography, he and Jaime Sabartes, disdained all the “academic” cubists, like Gliezes and Roger de la Fresnaye, but Delaunay, I remember, they took seriously, he was doing something, they thought. To my mind they are the most exhilarating paintings of that era. Well, there is Matisse but the ultimate Matisse exhilaration is the cutouts and tapestries, which come in the late forties and early fifties. Analytic and synthetic cubism may be a lot of things but it is the opposite of exhilarating, freeing, yes. Analytic cubism is sometimes compared to jazz, but it is not, I think, comparable to the jazz of the twenties. I think you have to wait until the early sixties for all that heroin-tinged hard bop that was recorded on Blue Note to find the hermetic, urban, intellectual/visceral soundtrack for the discovery of cubism. Johns ‘55-‘65, too.

The Polkes were almost thrice as big as the Delauney, but they were completely contemporary in that they were just big, like Home Depot is just big, there is no scale at all, no proportion, you may as well be walking around in virtual space. Polke is one of the great artists of our time but he is not about internal scale, for these paintings he just moved the opaque projector further away. The Katz, on the other hand, was doing its inimitable thing, with beautiful airy brushy space. Funny how he’s for the ages, really, you almost don’t need to render a judgment on him because you know he’s not going to go away. I used to think that about Serra, too.

I picked up a copy of the International Herald Tribune while waiting for the Zurich train yesterday and noticed on the back page that there was an exhibition of 99 paintings and gouaches by Serge Poliakoff at the Jewish museum in Munich. The last day is today. It was one of these birthday messages, it seemed like it was meant for me. I could have gone, it’s 3 hours by train, and was set to, but after pounding around Zurich I couldn’t put myself through another day of it. I was always drawn to the Poliakoff’s I’ve seen. I read online how he was friends with Delaunay and was interested in stained glass. But I wanted to be in the studio, or just around here.

I have a horizontal painting that is bugging me, I can’t figure out if it’s a keeper or not, what it has to do with what I am doing. This is an old-fashioned artistic problem, many of the artists I know don’t have this internal art critic, and many others have this very contemporary problem of having to be careful of what they are doing because they are doing so well. I been told more than once that “You know, I don’t know if I am doing any good work or not, I sell everything.”

Once again, thunder and rain has arrived. I thought I might ride the bicycle into town and even go up the hill to take a swim, but now I am lucky I didn’t. It is just far enough, over half an hour and mostly uphill, that I would have been stuck in the rain, which is not warm enough to enjoy. Katalin said that the nature of the weather here is that if it is a hot one day a rainy day will soon follow. Josephsohn is reported to be doing fairly well. The stroke has left one side of his body slackened, but he is aware of what is going on, wants to see his friends and although he has months of physical therapy ahead of him, he has informed the practitioner that she will need to see the films on him so that she will know the movements he will need to do to continue making sculpture.

I have been allowed to take one of the smaller Josephsohn half–figures from the foundry and it is on my writing table here. It is overcast and 4:30. I get picked up for dinner in an hour. I can look out and see green foliage. Summertime, but it hasn’t been that warm. I have been wearing a sweater indoors for two weeks now, though the days I was in Basel and Zurich it was warm and sunny. I am now writing an article on John Armleder, the survey/installation I saw in Boston. I have given myself two hours every afternoon to work on it. I take my materials over to the library and work there, which is where I went when the fumes got bad.

There is no emotional compensation to having 50,000 art books at your disposal when you are in a bad mood, I have discovered. I think perhaps another library, one full of literature, might provide some distraction, but books full of art don’t, any more. I can here the river outside, and the squawking of some birds. Sometimes the foliage parts and there is some movement in the fields through the trees, once I looked up and there was the rear end of a cow switching flies. Church bells are heard regularly, the hills soften them but they are a presence, a lovely one.

It cleared and early this evening Marian from the library took me to Appeznell, another Canton with an eccentric reputation, it was the last place in Switzerland to give women the vote, but has the best music. Roman Signier, who lives in St. Gallen, is from Appenzell. We drove up into the high hills and then walked up some more, and over a bluff the Massif was before us on the other side of a dark valley: high cliffs, grey stone outcroppings. Over to the left, past the plain where the Rhine flowed, the Alps went on and on, getting snowier in the distance where the Austrian Alps began. I remembered the romantic poets came here to contemplate the sublime. Freidrich came here to paint.

After a very good meal back in St. Gallen I am back in the studio trying to figure out of this painting is any good. I have been looking at Augusto Giacometti’s (Alberto’s cousin) stained glass in the choir of the Grossmunster in Zurich, taking pictures of the books in the library, buying postcards of color works by Johannes Itten, trying to understand what I am up to. Not a bad birthday, peaceful, a little lazy: a Sunday birthday.

July 3

Returned from three nights in Basel yesterday. The city depends on visitors for its trade fairs and museums and is a destination for business and cultural tourism. In this regard, it even has a central agency for booking Bed & Breakfasts which I took advantage of, arranging one eight days previous. A thick envelope arrived a few days before I left for Basel with the contract for my two night stay, a map of the city and a free pass for all public transportation, which is given to all visitors when they book a room in the city. I walked through a working class neighborhood near the train station and as I approached a large park, turned left onto a shaded tree-lined street and found the address. I walked through a drive that went under a park-front apartment house from early last century and into an open car park, there was a two story U-shaped building behind, 145 Gundelingstrasse. I went up flight of stairs and greeted Mrs. Tschudi, a woman in her late sixties. I was shown the bedroom that appeared untouched from when an adolescent, artistic daughter had been in residence, and lay down for a nap. As quiet as it was in the neighborhood, under the large old trees and flowerboxes, Mrs. Tschudi first engaged in a rather loud conversation in German with her cat outside my window and then answered the telephone and spent about twenty minutes speaking at the same volume. I gave up on the idea of taking a nap, but beyond that, I couldn’t help thinking that there was a territoriality being established, that I was being told that even though I was a paying guest, she was going to go about her house audibly in charge. I wondered how old the daughter was now and how often she visited, and thought about the early mornings of my adolescence when my father would noisily begin his day with the radio at high volume, long before his children needed to get up for school. It was a clear message that we were not to be taken into consideration, because if we were, it would amount to some kind of capitulation. I thought there might be something of this, some kind of resentment, attached to Mrs. Tschudi’s behavior. My own history with my father’s authoritarianism made witnessing the Vietnamese government’s manipulation and repression of its artists particularly painful and sad. The personal is political and vice versa.

I was supposed to meet the artist Daniel Gottin at the B&B at two but with no nap coming on, I changed plans. As I got up and ready to go out, Mrs. Tschudi got off the telephone, so I used it and called him to set an earlier time. We met by the train station and walked to an outdoor restaurant behind the Kunsthalle, where I had Vitello Tonnato under the generously spreading black limbs of the large old trees. We later went to his studio. Enroute, he showed what was to be the single most valuable thing I saw in Basel, St. Antonius church, a modern cast concrete building, rather brutalist and ahead of its time (c.1925) with a tower as tall as that of the Munster, city’s preeminent cathedral. We had drinks overlooking the Rhine, where a lone swimmer was pulled along downstream by the swift blue current. Minutes later she walked up past us, soaking. She was about Mrs. Tschudi’s age and appeared to do this every day.

Later, I met Felix and Heidi. I had heard about European people like this, i.e. intelligent, educated, haute-bourgeois or maybe just comfortably well-off professional/business people with genuine love of what is now called high culture. We sat in their large, lush garden behind their modest house, probably a few hundred years old but simultaneously modern, and had a few snacks and then Felix took me through the house and began to describe the meanings of the art they had taken possession of. He had very clear things to say about each, and also described where and why it was placed where it was. I had given them my catalog shortly after I arrived and Heidi had later mentioned one painting that she thought I would particularly like. At dinner I learned that she was a social worker and he studied law but had spent his life in the insurance business and was now retired and on the board of the company. He had a range of interests, including philosophy and astronomy.

The part about the insurance company explained how clearly he spoke, and how he would always meet my eye and wait for silence before he spoke, and did so most seriously and intently, just like an insurance man. The lecture continued after dinner, as we went through the rest of the collection, and my reservations about the whole odd (to me) event gave way and I came to feel that it was an honor to listen to him and would be to be in the collection.

The collection leaned towards monochromes and they had the inevitable Marioni. There was a terrific Rudolph De Crignis, a really lovely blue square, and Heidi was right, I liked Pierre-Andre Ferrand, they owned two of his paintings, one had a small square of unprimed jute with hole in it. The stretcher was carved or milled on a special form so that it bowed top and bottom. It made the center of the support slightly concave. Ferrand lives in Geneva and Krakow and is a devout Catholic. The hole in the painting signifies the wound in Christ’s side from the crucifixion. They gave me his catalog, which contains an essay about a Russian philosopher living in Germany who explains modern painting in terms of the Passion of Christ, all painting was one painting, put through torture, scratched, cut-up, singed, burned, made laughable. I was so taken with the work that I am considering making a trip to Krakow.

I got back to the flat around eleven-thirty and Mrs. Tschudi had gone to bed. I let myself in and put out the hall light as I was instructed. In the morning She had a very large breakfast prepared for me with fruit, croissants, eggs, toast cheese, ham, air-dried beef, a pitcher of orange juice and coffee. I was wary of her, and didn’t continue our morning conversation very long, the day before had set an unfortunate tone and I sensed she wanted to talk and felt affronted that I didn’t.

The first museum I went to was the Kunstmuseum. Most of the special exhibitions in town were of Americans and were all artists I admired but wasn’t overanxious to see, which in some ways is a plus, because one can get something unexpected from them. There was a show of Marden drawings that featured the working watercolor studies for the stained glass in the Munster, the Basel cathedral. Only three artists were invited to make proposals, his was chosen and then it was decided that the original glass was restorable so the Marden designs were never executed. I want a stained glass commission to the point where I am considering building a chapel, so the Marden studies were of value to me. I was in Vietnam for the retrospective, and I could still see it if I choose to go to Berlin. What is so attractive about Marden is his seriousness. Those drawings are full of deep regard for Cezanne and Newman and Li Po. Such a rare quality nowadays when artists seem to be modeling themselves after Eddie Haskell.

Upstairs was a Jasper Johns exhibition called “An Allegory of Painting 1955-1965”. It was a way of walking through those first ten years again, and one of the interesting things was the photographs of him painting in his loft, which I assume was in Coenties Slip where he lived in the fifties, it was still that early in his career, and how the ceilings were low, so that the drawing “Diver (For Hart Crane) ” which was not in the show, was only a few inches above the floor. The drawing is seven feet high and six feet wide and in the photograph it almost goes to the ceiling, which must have been only eight feet high. There is amazingly articulated space in that drawing, and the fact that he achieved it in that cramped space, and that there was such breadth in it, is extraordinary. Looking at the targets again, I thought of them as being like Zen exercises, the Cage influence, so that he was trying to think of something to paint that was nothing, that was blank; he could paint and empty himself at the same time. There was one very impressionist yellow and green target that he owned that was as pretty and as empty as a high school cheerleader.

His famous irony comes from the acutely self-conscious theatricalization of the gesture, how he makes the gesture an object, rather than an expression, by attaching objects. Then those rulers, scraping, measuring, punishing, but lovely how the paint splashes up onto the edges of the them and the attached raw wood, like islands. There was another small heavily waxy painting that he also owned I have never heard of or seen before called “Painting Bitten by a Man” that reminded me of Paul Thek. Also, a rainbow-hued handprint made in Tokyo and a vertical painting, ‘Slow Field” that was pretty, too and full of surface light. What stopped it from being too much was its delicate draftsmanship and weird detachment, because Johns is an expressionist, a schizoid one. I know of no other artist whose work makes you feel like he is watching you watching him make the painting. A drawing called “Edisto” appeared to be improvised around the impression of the bottom of shoe.

Johns acute self-consciousness has led him to become deeply invested in trompe-loeil: drawn illusionisms and tucks of strokes underneath other strokes, it’s all amazingly virtuosic, (which is how I felt about a lot of the Marden drawings too, but not the stained glass studies) and in this way the comparisons to Cezanne are slightly off because Johns undermines the modulation of surface that Cezanne sought through Johns endless illusionistic puns. He literalizes the digits of the mark into typography, true, and is constantly combining and switching mediums to do this, but I came away being taught something, as always, but not feeling much. The “Watchman” painting was probably the best thing in the show, because it was blunt and dark and unfussy.

Elsewhere in the Kunstmuseum was their world-renowned collection of Holbein paintings, the master of the face, and two paintings by Adrien Brouwer, the funniest painter in the history of art. In his poem “The Card Players” Philip Larkin might have been looking at Brouwer:

"Jan von Hogspeuw staggers to the door
And pisses at the dark.
Outside, the rain
Courses in cart-ruts down the deep mud land.
Inside, Dirk Dogstoerd pours himself some more…”

I sat outside in a side street of the old city and stared at the side of a church, read from John Updike’s “Self-Consciousness”, a series of essays about himself, his childhood, his psoriasis, adulteries, social-climbing, phobias and in “On Not being A Dove” his personal experience of the Sixties. I have come to admire his writing style while barely liking him, which I think makes him a very good writer. I have not forgiven him for a review of the new MOMA or his other art writing, which I will not go near, but these personal essays and the novels where he portrays what he knows well. I have read “Couples”, for example, three times.

I finished my mineral water and salad with poached fish, had an espresso and some dense nut cake, a local specialty, and decided to go out to the Foundation Beyerler, a trolley ride into some pleasant countryside. I have heard oohs and ahs about this place from a number of people. It’s another Renzo Piano museum, with a canopy style roof and natural light.

I got off the trolley and across the road from the museum was a public park with a temporary stage set up and a terrible rock band was blaring away like the idiots that they are. Apparently when one raises a child it is to be expected that they will spit and dribble their food all over themselves when they are being fed. It’s something they eventually grow out of. In western society at this point in time, people need to hear really loud stupid music until they’re about fifty or so, and then one hopes they will grow out of it. Until that time, much of both commercial and even more rarefied forms of contemporary culture will aspire to this condition in the hopes of appealing to this feral sense of pleasure.

The infantile bass line continued inside the temporarily blighted museum, and I walked into a room that had a three-panel “Water lilies” on one wall and a long couch across the way. I looked over its length (I am thinking about making some horizontal paintings) and at the dry brushstrokes and thought about how this was the Monet that was such an influence on Jake Berthot back when. I went up to it to take a closer look at the brushstrokes and an alarm beeper went off. As I continued passing through the other rooms of the museum I could occasionally here it getting tripped again. There were gardens and paths surrounding the building and the rear of it faced a big cornfield. As is common with most new museums, there was a long corridor with couches in order that on can look out on it. The new Boston ICA has the same thing where you can look over the harbor. All of the smaller paintings in the museum were under glass; including those in the retrospective of fearless Edvard Munch, a much better selection than had been in NYC.

One could not take advantage of the countryside with the music blaring through it, so I went back to the city and decided to perform the errand of picking up a book on the poet Robert Lax that was a publication of the Tinguely museum. The building by Mario Botta had the obligatory glass porch looking over the Rhine. Though there was not much there of interest to me, I wanted to pay my respects to the artist; after all, I had come to his museum, so I went up to the third floor. The guard told me I could start the sculptures, I said, “Yeah. I know”, and I pressed my foot on the floor button and looked at “Lola T. 180-m Memorial pour Joakim B.” a memorial to Joakim Bonnier, a great friend of Tinguely’s. The sculpture as assembled from pieces of the racecar that Bonnier died in. I stood there and tried not to somehow like it, which wasn’t possible, but sympathize. I looked at the animal skulls turning, the urns flanking either side, the dancing wooden cross in the middle, and the praying kitsch figure on the track moving back and forth in the rear and could only relate to the impulse to memorialize the dead with one’s art, which I have done.

There was time remaining to go to the Kunsthalle, and then I had another meal at the restaurant under the trees and went to see “Ocean’s Thirteen” a movie I would have never seen in NY but I didn’t want to spend the evening listening to Mrs. Tschudi.

I headed out to Schaulager on Sunday morning. The invented word “Schaulager” means viewing warehouse and it is an art open storage facility for a foundation with an exhibition program. There was a Robert Gober survey that had a lot of work from the past three decades and included two of his installations, one they owned and was permanently installed in the basement. I was glad I got there early, there was only a few people in the exhibition spaces and his work requires some calm, I think. I had included one of his litter bag sculptures in the first show I curated at Apex Art and I had noticed that he had signed the book at my show so I wanted to look the show over, though, like the Johns, I was not inclined to. Once again, because Gober is such good artist, like Johns, and his work is like Johns’ in many ways, it was time well spent. I thought about his debts to Edward Hopper and to Donna Dennis, but mostly about his Catholicism, which of course I could relate to. The sinful aura of the body, it strangeness and forbiddenness is everywhere in the show, including a piece I had never seen of children’s legs on a hearth. The urinals that are like baptismal fonts, and the covered chair with the hand-drawn flower patterns, it occurred to me, was Buddhist—a lotus throne.

A number of early works from the seventies were included and the drawings were astounding, in the style of naïve line drawing and finger shading from high school art classes, but immensely sly and observant. Views out the window on the city, cigarette packs, a bottle of Ivory liquid where he brings out the bridal, wedding dress shape, a drain rack of dishes with the cup handle pinched around a prong. I kept slowing down more and more, watching the visual rhymes appear, the teeth on the boy on the large Farina Box looking like the sinks, the inks are enamel like teeth, etc., entering the waking dream atmosphere.

Then I remembered the dream I had the night before. Scott Caan, the actor from Ocean’s Thirteen, who I also saw in something else and plays vulgar jerk in both, is in my dream and somehow puts me under so I can get a haircut. When I come to, my hair has been dyed jet black and slicked back in some awful punk way and my eyebrows have been replaced by little steel bb’s with steel hairs coming out of them. I know I can grow my hair back but am upset about the plastic surgery. The dream must have something to do with feeling victimized by ubiquitous rock and roll culture. Haircuts in dreams are symbolic castration.

To return to Gober, thinking about the urinals as teeth and the cribs as jails, and then going downstairs to see the Virgin Mary statue and the flowing water and the early sculpture of the church with the roof open titled “Prayers are Answered” that he is, in fact, looking for God. The visual correspondences he continues to find are a form of Gnosticism; the search for a distant all-powerful force through observing mysterious coded emanations.

I returned to St. Antonius and it was open so I spent time looking at the interior, with all its stained glass and cast concrete, which informs my painting more than looking at paintings or contemporary art. Then I strolled around ancient Basel, walked by the Rhine some more, looked into the Munster, where the Marden stained glass would have been very effective, it has an interesting austerity. Then went to the Kunstmuseums annex for contemporary art where I watched a twenty-two minute video by Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson called “East/West” where she challenged everything he said, and he, very drunk and stoned, told her she didn’t know anything and was going back to California where people were real.

That evening I returned to the Beyerler where I had purchased a ticket for an evening of string quartets. I sat in a small audience, of about one hundred and fifty people over fifty and thought “I am down here with Ravel and Beethoven and Newman and Rothko are above me in the galleries.” Most of the quartets were made up of students from the International Music Academy of Switzerland; I was in very good hands. It is under the direction of Seiji Ozawa, who impishly conducted the assembled string orchestra for the final Bartok “Divertimento fur Streichorchester”.

The next morning it was raining I had a friendly chat with Mrs. Tschudi. She told me I should learn German and thought I was English because I speak so well. As I got on the train to Zurich, a kid flopped down in the seat across from mine, threw off his backpack and applied roll-on deodorant to his underarms by reaching in through the neck of his shirt. Later, I couldn’t stop staring out the window. Upon my return to Sitterwerk, I was able to watch a casting being made of a Josephsohn half-figure. They even put flowers around the opening of the mold before they pour in the liquid bronze. I am going to borrow a small Josephsohn to keep here in the studio. It’s good to be back and I am already at work.

“I admire Pasolini's humanity and I certainly would feel lucky to achieve in my life one-tenth of what he did, but I am, quite sincerely, allergic to the grandiosity of the artist-as-public-conscience as well as the artist-as-pop-star, these are roles that require a certain degree of self-delusion and a great deal of relentless self-promotion.” Gary Indiana

June 26. It has been close to chilly here for almost a week and I have temporarily stopped swimming in cold ponds, as lovely an experience as that might be. This is mostly because I have a cold that has gotten so bad it kept me up through most of two nights. Then a good nights sleep last night after a trip to the pharmacy. I asked the English-speaking pharmacist for cold pills for daytime and for nighttime. I was brought a Swiss product that combined both in the same package. The nighttime capsules were dark blue and had a tiny yellow crescent moon on them and the daytime capsules were white and had a little yellow sun. One can buy the same combination in the US, but if you lose the box, and don’t remember the color-coding of the capsules you could become sleepy all day and up all night.

This is one of the ways that Europe can be satisfying: situations that are considered; thought through, and why being in Southeast Asia was just harsher than the US but not so different. There is the same lack of integration of the social fabric. Still, the more I travel the more I like the US. This has a lot to do with simple familiarity, and missing it, as much as I couldn’t have picked a better place to recuperate, if that’s what I am doing, than here.

The article on me came out in the local newspaper today and the rough translation sounded pretty good. Whatever it said “Der amerikanische Kunstler Joe Fyfe” is happy with any print that makes him sound like someone whose paintings one would want to buy. The studio photograph is rather dramatic and borders on being broodingly lit. I look like I might lunge at the camera. Der Romantik Kunstler. There is finished and unfinished work behind me on the studio walls and on the floor.

I am going to Basel tomorrow for a long weekend, hastened out of the region by “Open Air St. Gallen” the rock festival being set up right over the river from here. I can already see through the trees that people are arriving and there will most likely be some unwanted bass pulsations coming through tonight. I am on the last day of my piece on Josephsohn. News came on Saturday that he had had a stroke. He is at present out of intensive care but there is no saying yet how severe it is. He is aware of what I being said to him, and it is entirely possible that a full recovery may come about. I hope and pray that is the case.

So it has been about five days of sitting around nursing my cold and changing words in the piece. I don’t know if I have ever gone over 3500 words so many times before. I did a version last October and then it sat all winter when I was away. Being here brought new information and I have been working on it all month. I sent it to my editor last week. He said he couldn’t get to it for a week or two so I went back to work on it and I have been revising over and over, it’s like molding clay, it is only now that the process is beginning to feel like it has a plasticity.

June 21

This morning I had a very good breakfast of a croissant with butter and jam and espresso and I thought, “Just the thing before a trip to the gallows.”

This might be an infection of a sensibility coming from reading the very strange Weldon Kees biography. Among other bits of ancient gossip one learns that Mark Rothko told a group of friends one evening that the news of the Holocaust had not affected him at all because it had nothing to do with him. It was in the text perhaps to illustrate how Kees, who was a poet and painter and an outstanding figure of the same post-war generation, became alienated by what he perceived as the self-absorbed opportunism of his peers.

Anthony Lane who wrote about the biography, described how in Kees life, “So many famous names enter the story… He seemed to drift into their orbit for a while, then spin away… what can they add to our knowledge of a man who seemed, even when alive, like a dapper and dissatisfied ghost?” I have been curious about him since I came across excerpts of his writing in the art paper that is published in Provincetown when I was there in 1999, also that when John Ashbery was asked what poets influenced him he said ”Weldon Kees”.

He disappeared, probably by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in 1955. Reading the story of Kees reminds me of a confused time when I found talented, intelligent, enigmatic figures attractive. Rothko sounds like a sensitive man who cannot help but hide his deeper feelings from others, and perhaps himself. Al Held said that he was great in private but at parties he would work the room like he was running for mayor.

My studio gets interruptions and visitors. I am beginning to understand is part of life here. Last week I was asked if I could give over the studio for a few hours in order that a Hugo Rondinone light bulb sculpture that was being editioned could be photographed in my space, where the previous ones were, for the sake of continuity. This was fine, I wanted to take my bike into town that afternoon anyway and I found the paint store and also came across a tiny funicular that takes you to the top of the town. It begins at the bottom of a small mountain waterfall near the cathedral. Wild.

The light bulb object, which has different colors in each its twenty-five versions, is homage to Philip Guston. Hugo was here briefly and I was introduced to him. “Put out your hand.” he said and shook it. We were in the Kesselhaus Josephsohn, the large space that has a changing array of Josephsohn’s sculptures. It had been altered so that it was cleared of all but a group the reclining figures that Rondinone was putting in an exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo. Seeing all of the reclining figures isolated this way, in a physiognomy, made me think that there is a kind of ruthlessness to Rondinone’s vision but there is no denying he knows what he is doing.

Yesterday the cultural reporter for the St Gallen newspaper interviewed me. Katalin was supposed to see her but was too busy so I got to go on about myself. The hardest part is to cover my reprobate years, a large blank on my life resume. What were you doing when everyone else was moving into second or third gear with his or her careers? So I just dissemble, what else can I do? I went into the whole Fulbright project and what I did in Southeast Asia and how it influenced my work, but was reminded that my time there is much more mundane to Europeans than Americans. Americans aren’t very adventurous travelers, like Europeans are. An artist that works in the office here just returned from Africa and India and this reporter, Brigitte Schmid, who was very nice, had just returned from three months in Bangladesh, where she had traveled alone and had received permission to film the huge harbor area where tankers are dismantled for metal scrap. “It was unbelievable” she said, “All of these thousands of workers in rags and bare feet, doing terribly dangerous work. It was a world of slavery.”

Then a large group of people that are on the cultural board of UBS, the Swiss bank conglomerate, came through and I talked about my work for a few minutes or rather, more than a few minutes, as I finished, I said, “Well, that’s the short version,” and they all laughed. I guess I had gone on for a bit. I was only a small part of the afternoon’s presentation of the foundation. I heard that it went well, and they might get some money and I was happy that I was able to do my part.

I took my bike the back way through farmland to the WestCenter, a local mall, to get groceries. An asphalt bike road goes past a barnyard at one point. There are ribbons that are pulled up across it when the cows cross from the barn back to the pasture, or vice versa. This past evening, from that spot, it was the first time since I have arrived that it cleared enough to see the distant high range of mountains. They looked out from behind a long line of stone in front of the peaks and valleys that were still in snow. The huge rock outcroppings were like an endless line of upturned gray teeth. Extraordinary.

June 20. Other than those two nights of thumping bass it has been very quiet here, very peaceful. Switzerland is just ridiculously pleasant. On Sunday I went to over the border to Germany, another country to add to my list, having never been there, and went swimming in the Rhine at a place where it enters Lake Constance. The semi-transparent aqua blue water was cold. I could smell mountain and stone in it. There was a line of old hotels behind where we jumped off the docks. Sunday boaters passed by mid-stream, heading towards the lake. There weren’t many yachts; size modesty seemed to prevail among the private owners, though large boats could navigate the tributary, as I discovered when the excursion vessel to Schaffhausen came through.

Two large tables were just built to accommodate the foundry staff and visitors in order that we all may have lunch al fresco throughout the glorious summer. There were temporary folding tables previously, and I noticed that over in one of the rooms of the foundry squared steel pipe was being welded together to make base and legs for two long tables. I came to lunch yesterday and was surprised that the tops were of cast concrete: long rectangular slabs of fresh gray semi-porous surface that had retained a subtle impression of the plywood mold. The tables were set with bright white plates and polished stainless knives and forks.

Hans Josephsohn had come from Zurich and was at lunch, as was Daniel Rohner, whose huge art library is part of Sitterwerk foundation, as is my artist residence. For the inaugural lunch there was roasted local bratwurst and lots of garden-fresh vegetables, even the zucchini was good. I had not seen Herr Josephsohn since I visited his studio with my mother last September. We spoke through Katalin’s translation. He asked me how my mother was and I said she was well, making her paintings and seeing her boyfriend. He said that she seemed to have very young spirit. I said yes, she is young but wise. “Good combination” he said, in English. Then he asked me if I had seen the Edvard Munch exhibition in Basel. I said no, but I saw it at the Modern in New York and wrote a review about how insensitively it was installed.

I had come across an article in the New York Review of Books on Meyer Schapiro’s lectures on Romanesque architecture and sculpture that has been very helpful in the essay on Josephsohn that I am trying to finish. The work of this period has been his defining influence, and I told him how the article mentioned that Renoir told his son that Cezanne was the most important artist since the Romanesque sculptors. “I agree.” He said.

June 16 I am on the train to Basel again on Saturday morning. I got out the door about 8:10 and walked up the steep hill, out of the Sitterstrasse (the road by the Sitter river) settlement to the trolley stop: about a ten-minute walk past a few old houses. I suspect that they contain small apartments that cater to the people that work in the advanced metal shop, which is part of the collection of yellow brick buildings of various vintages here in the green valley. If I am on the upper floor of my studio I can see them in a large open second floor (first floor in this country) full of machines and computers across the way. One very bright screen is left on all night and it interrupts my darkness when I am ready to go asleep: another aspect of the mix of country and city here. The tram comes in 13 minutes and I get to the Banhopf to watch the train to Zurich leave but there is another in 20 minutes.

It rained all day yesterday and I have a touch of a cold or flu, but today promises sun, which contradicts the weather reports. I seem to have finished a painting and continue to rewrite the piece on Josephsohn, remembering Adorno’s paragraphs on writing in “Minima Moralia”:
“No improvement is too small or trivial to be worthwhile. Of a hundred alterations each may seem trifling or pedantic by itself; together they can raise the text to a new level… It is part of the technique of writing to be able to discard ideas, even fertile ones, if the construction demands it… Should the finished text, no matter of what length, arouse even the slightest misgivings, these should be taken inordinately seriously, to a degree out of all proportion to their apparent importance… Properly written texts are like spiders’ webs: tight, concentric, transparent, well spun and firm. They draw into themselves all the creatures of the air. Metaphors flitting hastily through them become their nourishing prey. Subject matter comes winging towards them.”

I found an essay on the painter James Bishop online written by Holland Carter for A.i.A. in 1994. This means that the magazine will not want another long piece on him, such as I anticipated when I learned that a retrospective on his work would be coming to the US in ‘08. No matter. The Cotter text is a beautiful piece of work. It was the first time in a while that I have read a piece of artwriting so good that it made me think I had no right to be doing it:

“And evident throughout is the astringent, ideated lyricism of Cezanne. The results are a materialist rather than a spiritually oriented art (though the two need not be mutually exclusive), grounded first and last in the physical process of painting and in the associational values of color. But Bishop's work is also deeply personal. Like Cezanne's, it doesn't so much describe a life as reflect the presence of a distinctive if elusive consciousness.”

Katalin and I went to her favorite restaurant in St. Gallen last night. The dining room had old wood paneling that had been scraped and repainted, properly, any number of times over the years so that the wear of time was evident but the lines and edges were still clear. The present color was complex pea green applied in low-luster enamel. The simple L -shaped room had long tables covered in white cloths and was hung with a series of lithographs, handmade color-field variations of black, orange and green done in blocks with alternating vertical and horizontal lines, that also owed something to Newman and Marden, that I identified as being by Günter Forg, who also did the menu.

We had roasted skins of baby eggplant, served cold in oil, with a little chopped raw onion. She had gnocchi, homemade with tomato sauce. I kind of wanted her to have the other gnocchi done with Gorgonzola, because I had made it once many, many years ago, back when I was still victim to romantic obsessions, as opposed to my middle-age self that is preoccupied with unnecessary noise.

It was at the end of an affair that had as an element the shared interest in 19th century French literature. I had put together what was one of our last dinners, replicating a meal that the title character in Zola’s “Nana” had, which consisted of Gnocchi with Gorgonzola and dry Rose champagne and some other things I don’t remember.

The previous week there had been a fire in the tenement apartment below mine. I had been living on the top floor of a building on Ludlow Street in two tiny illegal rooms. I had no fire escape. The deadly smoke had risen through the stairway one morning and as I opened the door I faced a wall of black smoke. I took one poisonous lungful, dropped to the floor and escaped through the adjoining apartment by banging on the door, alerting my neighbor. We ran up onto a nearby roof, the flames pursuing us. The firemen had discovered my truncated apartment and I couldn’t return to it, except to get my things.

A friend allowed me to stay in a room with a kitchenette that he rented out. It was between tenants. I spent a week with domestic cleaning products and paper towels spraying and wiping all of my possessions, record albums, (It was that long ago) dishes and a collection of Mexican papier-mâché masks, trying to rid them of the insidious burnt odor that clung to everything. It was here that I assembled this close-to-the-last dinner I would have with the surface of my projections.

I had the Osso Bucco, with mushroom risotto and spinach, right for someone with a cold on a wet, chilly summer evening. I mentioned the phrase ’stick-to-your-ribs’ to Katalin. The meat was good and rich but in a dowdy way; it was little dry. Slow-cooked meat can still have fresh flavors. I have had it with moist collapsing filaments of flesh and hints of fresh tomato and even lemon. This had a winey dark sauce. It was still good but I was looking for great. I have naïve expectations of European restaurants.

This is the first time that I will be spending any span of time in Europe. One season. Two years ago a spent a month in southern Spain. I am just as disengaged here as I was there. I am not in a hurry to pick up the language. Katalin talks about her five years in New York City and then about her parent’s origins in Hungary, how they left during the crisis in 1954. Their parents took them out, but they were old enough to have memories. Katalin said she and her siblings were led to think of it as a golden land and when they finally were brought back many years later they were disappointed.

She told me about the self-pity and sense of superiority of Hungarians. She said they didn’t produce very good artists. I was thinking of Alfred Kubin but couldn’t remember his name. I discovered after that he was Austrian. Well, Eastern Europe was a shifting place. The Black sea, the Carpathian mountains, it’s a place I am curious about, ever since I got a taste of it in Eastern Turkey the ten years ago. I asked her if she knew the writer Gregor Von Rezzori, who wrote about being born into in the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I said he wrote a book called “Memoirs of an Anti-Semite”. She said it the anti-Semitism was characteristic of Hungarians, as was irony. I said he wrote another book called “The Death of my Brother Abel” She thought that was hilarious. But Rezzori turned out to be Romanian, sort of.

Returning to the fair I was able to look again at some of the good work I had seen earlier: the Jerry Zeniuk painting of bright colored dots on a white ground. Making that interesting isn’t easy. A large Günter Forg with a painted frame around a variety of individual brushstroke marks and a small one that was orange and yellow and had a piece of glass glued on it. There were two Marcus Lupertz crayon drawings on cheap-looking paper that I liked, too. I left Basel at a little after eight and switched trains in Zurich. After I arrived back in St. Gallen shortly after eleven. I bought a tram ticket, boarded and was soon on the way out of town toward Hotel Schtocken, my tram stop. From there it was a walk down the step hill past the faint cowbells to bed.

June 13

It was not a bad day after all. On the train to Basel I watched the green mountains go by as I sat in the dining car at a table with a clean white cloth cover and had a cappuccino, a banana that I brought with me and a piece of pastry. I was wearing the new running sneakers and a new seersucker jacket that I bought retail and one of the six shirts I had made for me in Vietnam. Having the sleeves altered on the jacket in New York cost more than the six shirts. The thread was already coming out of its top button. Everyone in Vietnam must be working at an absolutely frantic pace. Over here in the jewel box, I would be arriving for the first hour of the fair, called "First Choice" where the avid buyers pace the gate salivating to enter. felt vaguely indecent, dolled up and off to watch billionaires bob for baubles.

And like everyone says, this is the best fair. I saw good work by Donald Moffet, who I have heard of but don't know the work, Louise Nevelson, Cheim and Read had another great Joan Mitchell that was blue and black and I have never seen. Whenever I saw a good painting and didn't know who it was it was a Kippenberger.

Things I had half expected to see and only get to see at a place like this: Fausto Melotti drawings, a great Michael Heizer painting from the early sixties, ditto a James Bishop, the only time I gasped all day. Big Surprise: Andrew Kreps is going to be showing Martin Barre, one of my absolutely favorite painters. There were good things by people I never heard of including Djarme Melgardo, Michael Schmidt, Jacob Bill (related to Max, I think), Camille Braeser (1892-1980), Robyn Denny (1960's), Gotthard Graubney, Reto Boller, Gunter Umberg, Norbert Scwontkowski, some of the gestural Lee Ufan paintings, someone named Meuser, one small Antoinetta Peeters, Yuko Shiraishi, Friedrich Vordembergh-Gildewart, Georges Vantongerloo (historical, actually, I know of him) and Martina Klein, a monochromist.

There were a lot of extraordinary Basquiats in various booths. That show at the Brooklyn museum did him a big disservice, it really lowered my opinion of him but it was just a very poorly selected show. A retrospective is supposed to give a fair representation of an artist. The Brooklyn museum can't do anything right anymore.

I saw lot of people I knew but if they were working their booth their eyes soon rushed off elsewhere. But that was no surprise. And, anyway, my pulse barely fluttered all day. I get close to nothing from what's going on now. I went up to see the new Serge Jensens at Gallery Neu and wish that people would stop sending me to his paintings; we have only the most superficial things in common. I only took pictures of the kind of one-liner items that always show up at fairs that must be there for impulse buys, a Duchamp bottle rack made from neon and a Disney gnome sculpture covered in fresh cigarettes. These things make me want to go work for Doctors without Borders or something. The whole thing can be too "Magic Christian" for me. I only have a limited sense of irony or the absurd, it doesn't go very deep.

June 12: Very quiet for the last few days. I am slowly understanding my new environment: Switzerland is urban/rural, at least this part of it is. Streetlights and graffiti, cows with bells jolting at their necks, graze in the meadows above the apartment buildings and corporate offices. Bike paths furrow through farmland, I take one to the mall to buy a printer. Schumann goes through my head whenever I am out in the landscape. Today I go to the Basel art fair and see the Rhine for the first time. I am smack dab in the middle of an awful lot of cultural history--Enlightenment, high Romantic--that I never directly paid much attention to. I am rewriting the essay for Art in America on Hans Josephsohn. A lot of his work is cast here at the foundry, and a gallery with a shifting selection of bronzes and plasters is only steps away. I sat in the large room on Sunday and spent more time with the work. The Kesselhaus, as it is called, is where I first saw a wide range of his work collected together.

The only other time the work of an artist had such an effect on me as Josephsohn's has was when I looked closely at Blinky Palermo's "Times of Day" and "To the People of New York City" twenty years ago at DIA. When I saw the four Josephsohn half-figures at Peter Blum last spring, I had to almost immediately discard a lot of ideas I'd been carrying around and admit to myself some things that I was feeling. I could barely go to Chelsea, other work seemed stupid by comparison.

Josephsohn's work, which I have been thinking about for a year now, has succeeded because he has learned how to vacate a certain prejudice towards naturalism from the perceptual information that he receives in order to realize his sculptures. In the Carrier book there is a passage on Chinese painting where a traditional Chinese artist is shown hundred of years of Western painting and it all looks the same to him because none of the work reveals the artists feelings toward his subject. Josephsohn has managed to de-codify enough of what we expect from western figurative sculpture that he is able to reveal his feelings toward his subject directly in the materials. This is the final point that I have to make in the article, I think.

I would rather be sitting around the studio and reading James Reidel's "Vanished Act: The Work and Life of Weldon Kees" than going to the art fair. "Kees life was peopled with forgotten writers, artists and musicians to a degree not consistent with his better known contemporaries. They figured for him both because he aw them as self-destructive victims of a monolithic American money-success culture and because his contact with individuals such a Walter Winslow reinforced the subtlety with which he operate his own career—trying to be successful without the Life magazine fame."

The river is high and opaque today. I can ride my bike to a small dam upstream that regulates the flow. There is an arched railroad overpass there that could be in a John Sell Cotman watercolor.

June 9, 2007: St.Gallen, Switzerland. I had an evening swim in silvery Lake Constance, where the flat water met the rising mist and silhouetted mountains. After introductions to new companions, we changed clothing standing out on the wide lawn of the lakeside public park. We did this quickly, surreptitiously and modestly. Later, we had a twilit fish dinner in a nearby restaurant, where above the rosebushes silent snake lightening erupted from between the cloudbanks.

My studio and living quarters is in a converted industrial building, most likely early 20th century. The working area is about twenty feet high. The walls are unpainted plaster over wood. A small kitchen is under a metal stairway that meets the upper floor where there is a writing area and a bed. Katalin, who is in charge of me, has a studio next door. (She introduces me around as "The new monk". I like that.) A bathroom with a shower is in the hallway. On the other side is a large sculpture studio with a loading dock and a winch. I was informed that the workers from the foundry sometimes grind pieces of sculpture in that studio. We shall see.

From where I sit and write I can see a muddy river through overhanging trees. I can hear it too. I am in another Waterland: in a deep valley ten minutes by car from a medium-sized Swiss city about the size of Poughkeepsie. I have been furnished with a remarkable Swiss bicycle, its gears mesh gently and accurately, like all the doors and windows that I have encountered: dreamily, almost erotically responsive mechanisms. At one time I defined the chief advantage of being rich is having all one's windows and doors close accurately and quietly with no strain or pressure. This state has been achieved for nearly all here in Switzerland.

I go to the supermarket and there is bottled sparkling water made with herbs and flowers, chewy artisanal breads, organic produce and big chunks of Gruyere on sale for a dollar. The following afternoon I went to the farmers market and got air-dried beef, fresh strawberries that taste like strawberries rather than cucumbers, and a jar of bright gren homemade pesto. I looked up to see alpine meadows above the line of downtown buildings. Everyone is friendly, seemingly relaxed and speaking what sounds like German but is a regional dialect. They say "Merci" for thank you. I was taken swimming again above the city, up winding roads through a neighborhood of very large bourgeois houses from the last three or four centuries. There were three swimming ponds. A wooden Victorian-era changing pavilion was on one side by the boat launch. Striped canvases hung in front of the wire mesh lockers. Across the lower pond, where I swam among the other quietly breast-stroking citizens, small gardens tucked into the hillside among miniature chalet-style potting sheds.

Another new country, another language I have to at least learn to say "thank you" in. I am slowly learning to use my Mac after 10 years on a PC and I am not a patient person. I have two articles to write, one to revise, I am here to make paintings and drawings. There are art fairs and other such things that are emotional minefields. The quiet here is lovely.

But my demon arrived last night. It came in the familiar form of the vibrations of rock and roll bass. I noticed it when I was sitting in the studio about nine o'clock. It was quiet enough I thought I must be hearing my own heart beat and then I walked outside and began to understand that it was a disco or something up the road. I couldn't hear any music playing, only the pulsing presence of the bass. Fucking stupid rock and roll riffs, varying somewhat, pauses of a minute or so or longer when there was a break. I walked partway up the road and determined it was somewhere up the valley, bouncing around the walls of the hills, down the river's banks and into my new residence.

It started again late this afternoon and is still going on at nearly one in the morning. The intimacy of it makes it so awful—an unwanted, relentless pulse that is an undeniable presence, an aural equivalent of a bad smell. I hate rock and roll. I hate how it has been sold as rebellion. I hate the idea of something that rocks. When someone says that something rocks, what it really means is that it is something that an idiot might like.

I remain surprised at my sensitivity to sound, or thoughtlessness in other forms. I don't remember having it when I was younger. It has become a preoccupation. In the Adirondacks where I really can hear my heart beat it is so quiet, someone shooting at targets ten miles away would get me angry. Later it was the lights left on all night by the neighbors across the road, ruining the night sky and putting silhouettes of evergreens on my bedroom wall. There was a time when I was afraid that I would never stop becoming romantically obsessed, but that has long past and I am no longer afraid of it.

Now I think of Hell as being full of sleepless people buried alive where the bass speakers above them never stop. Their minders walk around overhead, turning bright lights on and clipping their fingernails.