The Brooklyn Rail

I never had a chance to ask your thoughts about my last painting. Mo sent me the picture and when I heard you sat before it for a long time, it unnerved me. I really wanted to hear your thoughts on it, but you were sick, and I didn’t want any final words from you to be about my work.

Sure enough, after our last convo by phone, you seemed to have mustered up enough of your ever-regenerating vigor (after all, it was enough to kick four forms of cancer, without a whimper or complaint) and still be willing to explore emergency rebellion within our deteriorating pathological society. I set up my trip to come back to Texas, expecting to encounter your grin, your wit and intellectual mojo still stirring me up. I imagined we’d get together, like we did so many mornings before, not wasting time with pleasantries, and with newspaper before you, you’d stab the latest affronts and start with a challenge. You died the day I landed; like Ann, departing a few hours before I got to see her.

Damn, I needed to express that over the nearly fifty years since we met, your moxie and madness were embedded in some of my best work. Works that I was excited to present to you because you had a part in them. The way you shared the best books and most remarkable friends had its orchestrated effect. I’m certain you could diagnose Norman’s attitude or Sal’s musculature, or blood from Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, all pulsing on top of the bones of years upon years of your impactful discourse.

I wanted to come down to thank you anyway.

Thanks for the big spliffs with your museum crew, while explicating your plans for the next show, motivating visions that cut through the thickest fog of that mandatory morning marijuana. Then demonstrating the right way to hang an artist’s work with your unerring eye. In this case, placing it higher, elevating it way above eye level to force a physical visual respect for this political artist’s message. The mastery of conceptual aesthetic placement you gifted us was pure dope.

You were a man of action, with sudden impulse starts and stops, and of reflection. Jumping into the car, not to rush off, but to make sure we had a quiet place to appreciate Mingus or a new Lil Wayne tune. Sitting on a hard stiff chair to read, absorbing a manifesto, with constant rereads, then barreling down to Central American war zones with a Chevy Blazer full of medicine. Fighting injustice propelled you through those hostile Central American jungles to deliver life-saving medicine, because it was the most humane and aesthetic action to take. You could easily shatter the smoke and mirrors of a trend and condemn institutional lameness but then you’d go off and prove it, taking a treacherous path in the Gaza strip, even pulling the responsible senior citizen act to extract your curators from Israeli IDF detention. Because the mission that time was to offset the label of terrorists foisted upon a people with a brilliant counter-presentation of Palestinians as artists.

You called in New York when I lived there: “Meet me on the steps of the Met at 10:00, I finally figured out the Metropolitan Museum!“ and we raced through the whole joint, to stop for exactly ten works, from van Eyck, to Cézanne, to de Kooning, coming to rest before the massive Greek Ionic capital, where you reeled out a hypothesis on the structure of Greek philosophy and its relation to art in an effortless exposition. I don’t remember what you figured out precisely, but there I witnessed and felt your greatest strength as I saw you were shaking describing a Cézanne. Your strength was never in the belligerence of your fists, it was in the unbreakable grip you had when you focused on an artist and their art, and that transcended any superficial academic posturing. The connection was a deeply critical observation, intellectual, emotional, and bristling with uncontestable belief in the importance of the artist.

You once mentioned in an essay that my conscience compels me to create tragic art. My conscience was also reacting to your ever-impressing demand that we must be aware and we must be brave to express our witness in the face of the horror of tragedies that abound in our world.

I miss you but cannot mourn you yet. You gave me too much fire, burning too big to put out. My debt to you will continue to be repaid.