A Picture
A dark-eyed, dark-haired woman is sitting cross-legged in a chair, smiling at the camera. She is beautiful. Her pose is relaxed, elegant. She is wearing slim khaki trousers and smart loafers. What we can only imagine is the newspaper’s Sunday supplement is spread out on her lap. Her Eames-style armchair is large enough to allow her to cuddle two gorgeous young children: a boy in a white flannel pajama suit, his hand resting lightly on his mother’s thigh; and a girl, slightly younger than her brother, who wears corduroy overalls and a smile that mirrors her mom’s. A rakish potted fern on a low table, a thick beige carpet, a slender glass vase: casual glamour on the Upper East Side, circa 1962.
The picture rests on a shelf in a converted live/work space in Bushwick, Brooklyn, circa 2008, leaning against a row of books whose titles, read consecutively,form a sort of narrative, starting with Fifth Business A Feather on the Breath of God A Turn in the South The Night of the Hunter A Wounded Civilization, and winding down to Ripley Underwater Nothing, and Concluding on the next shelf over. If this doesn’t strike you as a happy backdrop for the picture—a downturn to its uptown—you might choose instead to think of the two as parallels, rather than opposites. Both construct a precarious mythology: the syntax of the family was probably revised just a moment after the shot was taken (the mother’s smile fading, the children wriggling free of her embrace), just as the shelves’ narrative might shift as soon as you grab a book. Looking down, you see something else: at the foot of the bookcase stands a bric-a-brac sculpture, its black pedestal stocky like a book’s spine, sporting hot pink block letters—GET THE FUCK OFF MY BED—whose implied scream is undercut by a toneless lack of punctuation, as if to say: I might mean this or not, depending what my next line is…
The sculpture is Amanda Trager’s, as are the books and the picture—she is, in fact, the overalled child—and, like much of Trager’s work, it’s a fragment that bears reading, re-reading, and, most importantly, reading-in-context. In her sculptures and works on paper, Trager lifts snippets of text from various sources (magazine and newspaper articles, books, graffiti, phone conversations, and so on), tweaking them slightly and then remixing them to startling effect, often alongside texts of her own invention. Far from a dry exercise in structuralist linguistics, Trager’s works gain their meaning not merely through the apt contingency of their textual elements, but also from the unexpected coherency of their implied speakers. Who is saying these things? we wonder. And why are we so drawn to reading them?
TMI
In Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster famously drew a distinction between flat and round characters: the typical, easily graspable, and starkly limned as opposed to the particular, complex, and three-dimensional. Trager, a master ventriloquist, creates characters that are as round as they are flat, or, to put it more pointedly, characters whose outrage at being flattened leads them to overstate their roundness. Look at how deeply we feel and think, they seem to say. Please, someone—anyone—notice and recognize this, us.
These are characters, we might say, who are prone to oversharing, trying to talk themselves out of the limited space they’ve been given. Not for them the radically understated first-person prose of a Joan Didion, to use another writerly example. Jews to Didion’s goyim, Trager’s people specialize in the poetics of Too Much Information, and the works’ roly-poly collage aesthetics only add to this sense of excess. I’ve Been Called a Fancy Lady from the Upper East Side (2004), for instance, is a large, freestanding plywood sculpture, covered over in expanses of paper and recalling a screen or maybe an open book. A run-on, variably sized, all-caps sentence starts things off with a bang:
I’VE BEEN CALLED A FANCY LADY FROM THE UPPER EAST SIDE
I’VE BEEN CALLED WORSE AND I’VE LET PEOPLE BELIEVE
THAT’S WHO I AM FROM TIME TO TIME IF IT SUITED THEM
AND IF IT SUITED ME AND TO TELL YOU THE TRUTH THIS IS
WHAT I AM WHO I AM BUT MORE ACCURATELY WHAT I HAVE
BECOME BUT A RUSSIAN JEW FROM EAST NEW YORK IS A
RUSSIAN JEW FROM EAST NEW YORK AND I’VE NEVER
PRETENDED OTHERWISE AND I’VE NEVER LET IT GET IN THE
WAY I KNEW PICASSO.
High strung verbosity hijacks you, ransom-note style, until the end of the plywood page, where it is finally arrested mid-sentence with broad, aggressive bands of black and gray sticky tape, as if to say, you’ll have to literally tape my mouth shut to make me stop talking.
Suffice it to say, then, that this character is not what we would call one cool customer. Indeed, it is partly the total refusal of cool, the hysterical insistence on self-definition, that distinguishes Trager’s work from other kinds of text art. Take, for example, a Richard Prince joke painting, whose deconstruction of the social, relational elements essential to successful joke-telling leaves just “bits” shorn of affect and character, odds without ends, patter without a voice. The gap between a disinterested art audience and its engaged, comedy-club counterpart is thereby made radical—as deep as the chasm between a cynical chuckle and a raucous belly laugh. Prince creates a meta-situation through his texts, lighting up their aesthetic autonomy while examining the impossibility of communication and the erasure of character (barring, perhaps, that of the savagely hip).
Trager, meanwhile, is deeply invested in the situation itself: both the one described in the work, and the one between the work and its viewers. While her bits, taken individually, might seem noncommittal, they are always coupled with complementary pieces to form something larger: a narrative that lays bare a particular emotional landscape. She is interested in pathos just short of bathos, in the ability of language to create figuration, and in the myths created through the spinning of yarns. Mostly, though, she is into the response-soliciting specificities of character: the half-endearing, half-annoying tics and rhythms of a performer seeking to engage her audience.
Namedropping
Trager’s focus on character always implies a fascination with personality. As the historian Warren Susman has suggested, the shift from the former to the latter term as an organizing cultural principle is one of the hallmarks of modernity, signaling the ascendance of the public, charismatic subject over the private, morally centered individual: “somebody” over “nobody.” Trager’s grammatically and stylistically inappropriate character-rants are dotted with references to personalities both known (Picasso, Baselitz, Bataille, Colin De Land, Jesus Christ) and unknown (Dorothy Hirshon, the guy who thought handicapped people should be killed, my boyfriend). Regardless of their real-life fame quotient, these figures are all accorded the status of celebrity in Trager’s world. Their names serve as the staccato to her sentences’ long-winded legato, the conversational equivalent ofreading a tell-all Hollywood biography with only partial recourse to IMDb.
But beyond these chatty dividends, the surplus of names also yields a conundrum for Trager’s narrators. Yeah yeah yeah, I’m glad you’re letting me express myself for once, they say. But wouldn’t it be easier if every once in a while I could be a personality rather than a character? If I were the namedropped, not the namedropper? If I were “strutting, priapic, primping, pimping, Picasso,” rather than “A Russian Jew from East New York” who, for all her verbal shenanigans is still a Russian Jew from East New York, and, in any case, a beleaguered I instead of an impervious He? This ongoing tension between personality and character comes to the fore in Basically Colin De Land and I Were (2007). Using acrylic and pen on paper, Trager fashions something like an abstract wedding cake painted a rosy palette of pinks, creams, and reds. The eponymous all-caps fragment (referring to the legendary, now-deceased art dealer) sits entire on the cake’s top tier, but then is gradually disassembled, losing most of its words as it reaches the bottom of the structure—petering down first to “Colin and I” and then, twice, each time smaller and with more finality, just “Colin.” Rather than pile on, the piece strips away, and the meeting point between character and personality, between He and I, suggests both the tenderness of betrothal and the poignancy of a dead letter: a eulogy that for all its brevity signals at infinite reserves of sweetness. Ultimately, though, the process of subtraction means that He stays foreground while I remains background. The name, once dropped, is what lingers on.
Family Romance
Sometimes in Trager’s work, the hope seems to be that choosing just the right He will turn the life of I around. But who is this He hovering continuously over the proceedings? A “quite peculiarly marked imaginative activity,” wrote Freud in 1908, is that of the family romance, in which the child “becomes engaged in the task of getting free from his parents … and replacing them by others.” The fantasy’s “many-sidedness, and its great range of applicability,” Freud continued, “enable it to meet every sort of requirement.” The utopian, universal usefulness of this fantasy of transformation figures in much of Trager’s art, as does its inevitable dashing, which follows an inevitable routine: What if my parents weren’t my parents? What if I can find other, grander, parents to replace them? But, then again, what if these new parents turn out, for all their difference, to be inherently failed and failing (just like me), and I have to start imagining all over again?
Buckets, Holes and Coffins (2003), the largest sculpture in Trager’s studio, seems to be playing an impossible game of catch-up with the enormous edifices of Richard Serra, the piece’s resident personality and fantasy father figure. Three wood panels, painted black, rest against a wall, two of them bound to each other by chain-link hardware. “It happened the night I slipped into a tiny rowboat with Richard Serra (Richard Serra) off the coast of Labrador to go whale-watching,” our protagonist recounts, “Alone together at midnight the motionless sea was and the moonlight he peers at me with a hard intellectualized ardor and hisses out a sentence with such vehemence that tiny pelts of spit lightly spray my face, he says yo you yo—you know in the end it’s all about buckets and holes & coffins & and I can really I can only really.” I can really I can only really what? Sperm whaling Richard Serra (Richard Serra) doesn’t have the answers. The projectile, phallic vehemence of this Ahab-like father leads neither to satisfying articulation nor to reciprocal recognition, but rather to a hole, a bucket and a coffin, where meaning, apparently, goes to die.
Or does it? Trager, I think, is telling us that meaning happens exactly at these moments, when we find out father isn’t a God but a spittling man—a figure who’d rather hail us (“yo”) than recognize us (“you”), but ends up splitting the difference (“yo you yo”)—and the disenchantment sends us looking for yet another parent, yet another encounter. Meaning, in other words, happens when we realize he is not only a He but an I, a fellow flawed protagonist of fiction, attempting to read and master the world, inevitably failing, and then trying again. And with this, we can return to that first picture. Father is the one presumably wielding the camera. His wife and children are lovely—and he recognizes them as such—but as time goes on, they slip out of his grasp. His camera is now resting by his side; his eyes are closed, and his power to capture is partial and ebbing. Ultimately, Trager’s work is about that longing to fix—capture and correct—life’s grammar as it is lived, if only for a moment. The story would be heartbreaking if it weren’t also very thrilling.