Paper Monument

Paper Monument Number Three is now available! Order yours here.



Guy was a complete wreck in school. He made paintings, which he later destroyed when he did his first sculpture, the one with the panties. He used to date Ellie, and Ellie actually suggested the panties—Guy was going to use a scarf. The panties really made the piece.

The paintings were shit. Guy was not a very promising art student. He couldn’t keep up with the discussion, he name-dropped authors he hadn’t read, and his classmates hated him. He once called Sylvère Lotringer a fraud—to his face. He slept in his studio for his entire second year, because his roommates had kicked him out of the loft for being drunk and broke all the time. Everyone would come in for visiting-artist lectures on Monday mornings and there was Guy, in his bathrobe, brushing his teeth.

What did they look like? It’s hard to say because, as I said, he got rid of them. What I remember was like a Gerhard Richter humping a Frank Stella.

So yeah, Guy did a show of the sculptures with Robert, which Lucy saw. He showed the horse piece and the Steve Martin piece and the vacuum cleaner piece. Lucy brought Steve, who brought Max, who then came by Guy’s studio for a visit. Max put Guy in touch with Susanne, who worked for Francisco, and Francisco brought some of the work to Basel. Guy went there and people really liked him. He went to parties. He met people. He called Ellie from Jörg Immendorff’s boat.

—

We were trying to tell people they couldn’t smoke right in front of the landlord’s apartment when they told us: No, they had to smoke, and we couldn’t tell them to move, because their favorite artist had just died. We were of course stunned by the news, even though we barely knew him—just the one seminar, which frankly we hadn’t much liked. But we were also struck by their logic, as groundless and irrefutable as a work of art. These were bad times, we could do what we wanted. We went back inside.

—

Susan runs a gallery out of her car. She’s a half-time paralegal and writes restaurant reviews on her blog. Jack makes hyperrealist paintings of his boyfriend and teaches writing at a community college in Westchester. Mike did abstract concrete sculpture and interior decorator work on condos. The work got so lucrative he didn’t have time for the sculpture; now he’s essentially retired from art. “I’ve sublimated all of my sculptural impulses into decorative schema,” he says, “and I’ve never felt more like an artist.”

Kim does text-based installations around ideas of loss, urban decay, and the flâneur. (She’s a registered nurse in Ozone Park.) Louis makes neo-Neo-Geo assemblages with photographic laminates and decorative sponges. He used to work for Tim, when Tim was showing with Frances, until Frances closed the gallery and Tim stopped painting to do his furniture restoration full-time. Louis is now an art handler. He handles Chinese pottery. He handles second-tier Ab-Ex paintings. He handles pet portraits.

Bonnie makes photographs of Chinatown manicurists. She was a P.A. for The Bros of New York until it got cancelled. Her roommate Sandra does plein air landscapes and porn. They both did some fetish videos for a small, niche-market production company based in San Diego. They did one called Put Your Hand in the Flan, which was just what it sounded like. They did one called Ants in My Pantyhose, which was also just what it sounded like. Were these video-taped performances, in fact, a component of their art practice? They often wondered.

—

I was a visiting artist. I arrived at noon, checked into the hotel, and walked to the department office to turn in my W-9. The day was warm and the steps were thick with art students sunning themselves in small groups arranged by clothes and grooming: sinister preppies with popped collars, bright windbreakers, and knit skirts; East Village revivalists in leather and black jeans, with piercings and abstract tattoos; and something harder to identify, with tracksuits and chains for the boys and upswept hair and garish mascara for the girls—suburban English hip-hop? Post-Soviet diaspora chic? Art school is the recycling bin of fashion, I thought, noting that I had on the same jacket as a kid who was smoking sullenly against the wheelchair ramp, though I suspected he was wearing his as a gesture.

I gave my lecture at three. I went chronologically from grad school to the present, slides changing at thirty-second intervals, with occasional digressions to mention breakthroughs and high points, ending with a modest philosophical summation. I kept it light. I told the anecdote about Brice Marden meeting God. I quoted Pincus-Witten quoting Gilbert-Rolfe quoting Merleau-Ponty. I finished with the “if Painting is dead, then we are all its ghosts” bit, which never fails to get a murmur of approval from the audience. The lights came up; twenty-five students applauded dully while reaching for their phones.

After dinner I started on the studio visits. My first, a sculptor, had printed out huge pictures of wetsuits, it looked like from winter sports catalogues, which were behind a table heaped with multi-colored Japanese candy wrappers. I asked what the connection was, and she told me that there wasn’t one; her boyfriend likes to come in and gorge himself on sugar, and he leaves a mess. The next guy sat on the floor throughout my entire visit, holding a hammer until I asked him to put it down. (Later I found out that his father was a well-known art historian.) A painter told me that his work was about the difference between good and bad energy, and that to make the paintings he entered a trance state where he could see auras around people and objects. The paintings were all blue.

Strange, the things you find yourself saying in these situations. In four separate visits I told a student, “All you can hope for as an artist is to be six months ahead of a car commercial and a year behind Silicon Valley. You’re the end of one history, not the beginning of another.” Christ, do I believe that? It was time for a nightcap, some cable, and bed.

When I woke up, all I remembered from a series of terrible, art-historical nightmares was the phrase “Neoclassical, like a rapist.” I told this to one of the students, because he made these big allegorical paintings and barked at everyone about them, and I was sick of it. Art comes to us with the ambivalence of a dream, I thought to myself. We don’t know if the images appear so we can have them, or so we can finally be rid of them.

—

There were six of us in the collective to begin with: Stephanie, T.K., Karl, Olle, Sang, and me. Karl was the first to go; he was offered a show right after graduation, and he said he needed to focus on the studio. T.K. left on ideological grounds, citing our “reproduction of problematic hierarchies at the organizational level of the collective.” (Technically, she kicked everyone else out, declaring herself the sole remaining member of the group.) Olle was next (no visa), followed by Sang (nervous breakdown). This left Stephanie and me. Then Stephanie got a teaching position in the Midwest, which didn’t leave her much time for other pursuits, and I found myself alone.

The very next week, I was asked to speak at an event about political projects in the visual arts. The scene had a heavy semiotics vibe, lots of young men with enormous, owlish glasses, extreme beards, and plaid shirts. I read a selection of emails from various members of the group: Sang to Stephanie, explaining why he was moving back home to Toronto; Stephanie to Karl, accusing him of using the collective to offset his straight-white-guy image; Olle to everyone, asking us if we knew anybody who could get him a job. When I was finished, somebody else had his laptop recite passages from Gramsci in a high-pitched robot voice. It was clever, but then it went on too long, and people started getting agitated, putting on their coats, and leaving.

I stayed. I took a look at my watch. I thought, I’m going to be the last person left in this room, you little prick, even if this performance goes on for the rest of our fucking lives.

—

Phil was the superintendent of his building, and he collected all the things that departing tenants left in their lofts—CDs, paperbacks, second-hand clothes, cheap sandals from the dollar store—and showed them as found objects. He had a couple of exhibitions and sold some work; eventually, he passed the superintendent job on to Felix, the handyman for the building, and devoted himself full-time to his art career. He annexed the loft next to his, to make a two-room live-work suite. He hired an assistant. He was in a Biennial. Then things slowed down, fast, and he found he needed to scale back. He got rid of the second space, let the assistant go, and went to work for Felix as a handyman. Circle of life, he thought to himself.