The Brooklyn Rail

Mountain rises, filling the view from the back porch.
Last season’s brush pile is waiting to be burned, overgrown
with bull thistle. A butterfly hovers around its purple
blossoms. As you’re talking, you and Peter stop to watch it
together. You remember the first time you ever noticed a
thistle: a little kid riding in the back of a pick-up through cow
pastures toward the river.

Jarrett Earnest’s slight but mighty book Valid Until Sunset is a book of sixty images taken with Earnest’s Fuji Instax mini camera. The images are paired on facing pages with spare, meticulous prose of 250 words each. There is a moment that strikes me in one spread where an image of a butterfly is hovering, maybe even entering, a bush of thistles. It is an image both banal and bitingly poetic in its everydayness, taken on an overcast day with flat light and muted tones. Here is a simple image… of what?… a moment? A moment lived in relief between a butterfly and a thistle bush… life crushed into an image? “Peter” is the late great art critic Peter Schjeldahl, who was a mentor and friend of Jarrett’s, one of several intimate friends as well as the author’s father, who died while this mid thirties writer and artist was living his life, loving, sexing, writing, and making images. The text adjacent to the butterfly and thistle bush—written in the second person—reads:

You asked about those pretty puffs and were told they were just spiky weeds. A nuisance. But you thought they were beautiful, and liked that they were difficult, that there were things that other people disliked, in plain sight, ready to be loved.

I am among Jarrett Earnest’s “spikey weeds,” his thistles. Among his many talents, Jarrett is a collector of difficult, older by several decades (ancient even!), perhaps self-destructive people, sometimes recovering addicts (like Schjeldahl and Dave Hickey¹). Some were overlooked when alive, as in the case of the late painter Jesse Murray, or the collection of gay artists he brought together at the Zwirner Gallery and in the publication The Young and Evil: Queer Modernism in New York, 1930–1955. This sentiment: “there were things that other people disliked, in plain sight, ready to be loved,” is Earnest’s theory of life and art, which is also what this book is about. It meant quite a lot for me to sit down in the air-conditioned bedroom where he and his wife/partner the poet and performance artist Candystore live. Upon meeting me some eleven or twelve years ago, after working together on an essay on the late poet and critic Bill Berkson, Jarrett did something astonishing. He took my writings to Florida one summer and read everything. That depth of commitment I hope was reciprocated here, as I sat down with this writer thirty years younger than me to discuss Valid Until Sunset. It is one of those rare books I need to read and reread.

There is a weird clarity to grief. Everything appears simultaneously loaded with and emptied of incredible meaning. Objects have their own syntax. Past, present, future. Pitcher, flower, book. It’s happenstance, how these things are here today, exactly like this, marvelous in raking light. Objects, biding their time until the fullness of their presence can open.
Valid Until Sunset (p. 127)

You wonder what will happen to your sex toys when you die.
Valid Until Sunset (p. 57)

04.23.2020 SAINT GEORGE, MAINE

The bed sits parallel to the rocky shore, alongside large
windows. Your eyes open facing the sunlight, looking toward
the small island in the harbor. On a barren tree you spot a
presence, a large bird sunning itself. When Candystore wakes
up, you say, “Look.”

Thyrza Goodeve (Rail): Now this is my idea of heaven, interviewing somebody while sitting on a bed.

Jarrett Earnest: Beds are so important to the book!

Rail: While we sit in your and Candystore’s bedroom, would you talk for a moment about what this book means to you right now, in the context of your other art writing?

Earnest: It comes back to my experience of being in art school at the San Francisco Art Institute. I always felt like I had a very intimate relationship to images and to making images from the time I was a small child. But I was never thinking about language in those terms and that’s why the curve for learning how to write was so steep. I didn’t start writing until I was in my twenties, which is late considering, so it felt impossible. I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t have the technical facility. I didn’t have the attention. But I had such a deep relationship to reading and to books and it seemed like, well, that’s what I should do. And it also felt like there were opportunities in the art world at that time, where there was more of a need for someone who would write about art rather than making it. I’ve dreamt of a book like this since I was in art school, but I just didn’t know how to do it. After a solid decade of continuing to make images privately and developing my relationship to writing, I feel like I have an understanding now of what it means to write—which is a funny thing to say because that’s the name of my earlier book. [Laughter]

Rail: The book of interviews with art critics: What It Means to Write About Art! So, that was research for you—I love thinking of Valid Until Sunset as your story of “what it means to write about art.”

Earnest: I think that’s true!

Rail: And yet this book, motivated by your father’s death, is about life, your life, the life you constructed in your early to mid thirties in New York and art that you are living when—brfftt—your phone vibrates in your pocket while you are telling your friend “Betsy” about your trip across the United States with Candystore and your wedding in Las Vegas. This phone call is a break in your life. It proceeds to tear open the space for the whole book. And during this time a number of very close people to you die but not all are memorialized. You write in the prologue—when you are with your family dealing with your father’s sudden death: “Your impulse is to try and make an image, something indirect that would mark this moment and also be a displacement of it.” What do you mean? Let’s say in relation to the theme of beds?

Earnest: The first imagery you see, before you enter the book, is the blueish detail of a photograph of rumpled bed sheets. It’s not necessarily clear that’s what it is. The book then opens with a sequence of similar abstract details, with a quote of Simone Weil running over them. I want to honor the designer Alison Hahn here because it was her vision to run the quote that way. We were talking about how much film means to me, how much more I think of these images related to film than to photography, so she came up with this cinematic unfolding of ambiguous details that appear later in the story as full images. The quote is from Gravity and Grace, where she imagines a “method for understanding images, symbols, etc. Not to try to interpret them, but to look at them till the light suddenly dawns.”

Rail: Which begs the question—is your book a methodology for “understanding images? And if so, how, because it’s so autobiographical.

Earnest: I feel like this book finally realized my form, where I can say what I need to say. I was so conscious of the fact that there is no other place where all these different aspects of my life can become visible on the same horizon—the part of me that wants to go pray at the Mary Magdalene cave in France, visit at renaissance altarpieces, look at a Roni Horn sculptures, go to a drag show, have an orgy. They don’t have to be the same thing, they just all have to exist at the same time. The space of grief really pushed me to try and find that place, which became the space of the book.

Rail: There is a great quote I use from Rudolf Arnheim that I think applies beautifully to Valid Until Sunset where he says something about how the writer “…does not have to worry whether the combinations he creates are possible or even imaginable in the physical world,” which I love, which is the point—it’s the craft of writing, of how to slice and sew and bring the world alive as you see it and feel it. Can you talk about the quote after this opening sequence, the epigraph from André Breton’s Nadja, “I myself shall continue living in my glass house where you can always see who comes to call; where everything hanging from the ceiling and on the walls stays where it is as if by magic, where I sleep nights in a glass bed, under glass sheets, where who I am will sooner or later appear etched by a diamond.”

Earnest: I added the epigraph after I had completely written the book. I remembered this famous section in Nadja where Breton talks about how barbarous it is that novelists take all the things from their life but change them a little so that they aren’t exactly recognizable. And he says not only is that childish, but it’s “monstrous” and not only will he not change the names and the hair colors to protect the innocent, he will go further, until he’s “sleeping in a glass bed.” That snapped all the other beds in the book into focus, and I started to think about the bed as a door. What is beautiful about that quote is how it moves, to go from the glass house into a glass bed is an almost alchemical transformation. It’s one thing to live in a glass house—it’s an idiom, and we all understand walls are made of glass—that’s modernist architecture. But we don’t understand a glass bed. And then it goes further where things are hanging in place “as if by magic,” which is interesting because later in the book there’s a number of things that are about hanging—particularly the stone that hangs from a string, holding a piece of paper. Or the chandelier made of the propane tanks from David Ireland’s house.

But Breton is a great poet; the image becomes elevated into this even higher place, where he sleeps “under glass sheets,” where we know what a sheet of glass is but it’s not something that you sleep under unless it’s like a microscope slide. Then you get this inscription through the transparent medium of the bed with this incredibly enigmatic phrase that “who I am,”— not what I look like, not my shape, but who I am, will become “etched by a diamond.” As I said, I didn’t add that until after the entire book was written because Nadja had this huge influence on me when I decided to drop out of school. I went to Paris and felt like I was role-playing Nadja.

Rail: Who were you in the book?

Earnest: I guess I was everyone—both Nadja and Breton but also Robert Desnos waking up, the twisted glove… I went to all the addresses listed in the book and made rubbings of the doorsteps. At the time, as I was leaving an art history PhD program, Nadja felt like a dazzling solution to a problem about how to live your life as an artwork, or how the making of art should be an extension of just doing whatever you want, like being alive, which is what I most wanted to do. So, as fucked up as Nadja is for the way he’s instrumentalizing a woman for his art project, it’s a really beautiful book, because it’s alive to desire and to the unconscious. And the thing is, if you take desire and the unconscious seriously, it is not always nice or correct, and that messiness doesn’t go away by pretending otherwise. I think that art is a space where we can visualize those complexities and attend to them. It’s like the place where things can get very complicated, the place where you can have desires that are wrong for you or bad, because human consciousness is so vast and layered. Otherwise there’s no place in which we’re allowed to deal with those complexities as a culture outside of an isolated “self."

Rail: I’ve read Valid Until Sunset countless times and I’m still discovering connections, associations, layers. It is a feeling book. A sexy book. A funny book. A sad book. An intellectually stimulating book. It is an honorable book but it is a book about your life, about art and looking as a kind of attention (Simone Weil) done alone but within a context. So, the question is: what is it that images hold? Especially these images made with a toy instant camera you bought after seeing Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency with Peter Schjeldahl! I’d like to discuss the image and text on pages 86 and 87.

Earnest: The detail of the Frank Moore painting?

Rail: Is that a painting? I couldn’t even tell. But it is where everything gathers like the bloody water whirling around the drain in Psycho.

Earnest: And it really is the thesis of the book in some ways. It falls in the middle of the book. It’s not really a famous painting. Frank Moore was one of the founders of Visual AIDS—it was his idea to start their archives project, which to me is the most beautiful thing, to try and save all these artist’s stuff. I use it all the time in my research. It’s a huge resource and inspiration. Frank Moore had a vision and was an amazing painter, although he didn’t really fit in with painting discourse at the time because he was making meticulously crafted allegorical paintings. If you just look at my picture, there’s almost nothing there to tell you that it’s a bed except the text. And this relates to the Nadja quote again, because for Breton, it’s the bed that turns into glass, and what you have here with the Frank Moore image is the bed that turns into clear water, and you have this sort of rippling transparency of the bed that’s the water.

Rail: Which is critical because your book is about being a gay man in the wake of the eighties and nineties AIDS crisis, right?

Earnest: I saw that painting, Patient (1997–1998) by Frank Moore in Austin, Texas when I was there for Drag Festival. I was born in 1987. I feel that my generation has an obligation to the people who died because of AIDS, because the loss of creativity and intelligence from all of those who died is immense. It is the vacuum I walked into when I entered the art world as a gay man. The people who really should be our lovers and mentors are dead. And everyone who knew them and loved them are deeply traumatized in a way that has made it very challenging to show up for younger artists. So my experience as a young gay guy initially was a lot of alienation from older gay people in this sense, and not understanding why. Now I realize if they started talking about it, they would never stop crying because they’re doing all the work they can do to just hold on to the memory of these people and the work that they made and the weight of the work that they never made and how to hold a space for that. The art and ideas that I’m interested in, because of the life that I’m interested in, took me back into this cataclysmic horror show to understand the largely invisible trauma that everyone around me is living with.

Rail: As someone mauled by the cruelties of heterosexuality, you know how I love and think a lot about the world you and Candystore have made and inhabit. Maybe it is also that I met you before you were with Candystore. When I met you you were, what, twenty-five and you lived in a 250 square foot studio that you weren’t supposed to sleep in, so you were hooking up nightly for a couple of years.

Earnest: Right—being free. I am so conscious of the fact that the culture war pendulum is swinging the other way in America at this very second. I felt I had this little window in which to do a project to advocate for this kind of life, for the life that I have built with others and for which I have such deep love. Queer people, and especially trans people, are perfectly positioned to be scapegoats and I feel so aware of the fleeting transience of this moment.

Rail: Do you think images mean different things to us? My generation (who grew up in the theory eighties) was so caught up in the trauma of representation, “the image made flesh” but for you a film like Videodrome is prehistoric—it came out five years before you were born. Sinéad O’Connor comes in as the one person mentioned in your dedication who was not a close friend and who just died!

Earnest: In fairness, when I added Sinéad to the dedication I also added Leonard Crow Dog, the great Lakota leader, who I met but was in no way “friends” with. However, he was mentioned in the book, and I thought everyone who was named and died in the span of the book should be listed in the dedication.

But back to Sinéad: I have a hard time not feeling a little chagrined by everyone’s reaction to her death at fifty-six because I’m like, where were you for the past twenty years? I’m really happy for the justice of people’s reaction to her shifting and the way they think about her culturally but when Carolee Schneemann or Peter Lamborn Wilson or Genesis Breyer P-Orridge or any of these people drop dead, we wait until then to celebrate them, but can we just treat each other like that right now?

Rail: Which might explain the reaction I had to reading your book—it made me high and super alive. But the fact that you do not write or select images about Carolee Schneemann or Bill Berkson tells me something about your process, your rigorous concision. Someone else might have sought for images in order to write about them, but then that wouldn’t be your book because ultimately your book is driven by the image selection. You culled these over how many months?

Earnest: About six.

Rail: Six months out of how many photographs?

Earnest: Probably eight thousand.

Rail: Are you kidding me? After the prologue, which is only text, no image, what is the first image that begins the book and how did you choose it?

Earnest: The image of Sean from early 2016. When I was going through the photos, every day, sorting, labeling, and putting aside ones that felt related to this book, I pulled that one out. There was a lot that I liked about it. It’s such a sweet picture, with his broken arm and laying naked in the bed—we had such a sweet kind of crush dynamic that I think you can feel in the picture. I originally intended the book to be non-chronological, but I didn’t know where to begin. I knew images that happened later should have meaning in relationship to things that happened earlier. I laid them all out chronologically and just started writing. I imagined the language would very directly address the image in an almost Georges Perec way, like his book An Attempt at Exhausting a Location in Paris where this bus went by, this person had a green hat—a kind of dumb and literal approach. My book was going to be about what I could see and what I couldn’t make out and then as the book went on, I started realizing that it was more and more about the things that are not in the image or images that emotionally come up for me in relationship to this image.

Rail: Okay—so how does that relate to the hilarious photo on pages 78 and 79 of you under an umbrella on the beach!

Earnest: Oh! That’s taken on my birthday—that was about taking mushrooms and talking with Candystore about Sinéad O’Connor, which reminded me of seeing her on television when I was a small child and not knowing who that was, not knowing what it was, but having this really strong sense of an image I was drawn to. My mother claims that I was a very colicky and unhappy baby who didn’t sleep, so she stayed up with me watching MTV. The music video for “Nothing Compares 2 U” is just a close up of her face, crying. It was like, is this an angel? Is this an alien? Whatever it fucking was, it was like a signal of something in the outer world that was for me. So, I was writing about this image of my birthday on the beach and somehow it reached back to how it felt seeing Sinéad O’Connor on television and how that represented something.

Rail: Which was?

Earnest: Which was, how you can move metonymically through images emotionally, to something very far back that doesn’t visibly resemble it at all. Then, because Sinéad appeared there, she could come back later in the book, when I describe listening to her audio book while driving to see the Titian show in Boston. The structure of the book grew organically like that, what was and wasn’t included.

Rail: But did you have the writing by then? Or you selected the images and then you started writing about each image?

Earnest: Yeah, I wrote them in order after I had selected the images.

Rail: Such discipline. It’s the unconscious without surrealism. Valid Until Sunset is not a personal expressive stream of consciousness writing!

Earnest: No, I had a system—a rigorous system.

Rail: It’s like the moment the image becomes purely autobiographical or purely an act of art writing, it also becomes obscure, a fragment of memory and affect which is why it is absolutely essential that your prologue carries no images and ends with this description:

you saw that butterfly sunning itself on a footbridge, inside a grid made by shadows of wire railings falling across the wooden planks. You pulled out your camera and took a photograph when its wings opened like an illustration. It trembled, the wings opening and closing very slowly, and you wondered if it was dying. But seeing it now, as a picture, you’d never know.

There is something utterly haunting, and supremely meaningful, about this last sentence:

“But seeing it now, as a picture, you’d never know.” Is this what you mean when you say you’re looking for “permeable images”?

Earnest: Yes, ones that can accommodate a certain relationship to language and can be moved through. It is like that scene in Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet where he goes up to the mirror and then falls through—which to me is about how images work in the unconscious. Cocteau creates this effect by cutting from a rectangular mirror to a pool of water the same size—the camera is turned to make the horizontal a vertical. It’s so cheap and easy, the way it’s done, but that doesn’t diminish it. Instead, I think it makes it better because there is no mystery as to how it is achieved. Look, I’m in the process of coming to terms with what a huge influence early twentieth century French writing and art has had on me.

Rail: Which brings us to Barthes’s Camera Lucida. How conscious was it as a touchstone? I mean your book begins with the death of your father and Barthes, with the death of his mother, and both of you are addressing photography, desire, autobiography, and images.

Earnest: To say to someone, “Oh yeah, I’m really engaging with Camera Lucida,” it’s like, oh, okay, are you ready for the bumper cars next?

Rail: I brought my copy—a first American edition published in 1981. When did you first read it?

Earnest: When I went to the San Francisco Art Institute, I took a lot of classes on photo theory and psychoanalysis. I wasn’t interested in photography. I just gravitate to whoever I think is smart, and there was a woman teaching there named Krista Lynes who is brilliant—we’re still friends to this day. She was finishing her degree at Histcon with Donna Haraway and Teresa de Lauretis, and teaching theory at SFAI. I took her photo class even though I didn’t like photography. We read Camera Lucida for that class. I was really trying to figure out how to make stuff at that time and I didn’t know how to write. So, after I graduated from art school, I got this little typewriter that I carved the letters down l so that they just made little shapes and I would retype things just to have the feeling of typing them, to try and find a relationship with them. And one of the things that I retyped was Camera Lucida.

Rail: Do you have that?

Earnest: I have some pages.

Rail: And do you have the typewriter?

Earnest: I have the type wheel because it was an electric key typewriter that had the wheel. I also made watercolors of all the photos in the book, which I think was also about understanding the translation of images between mediums, which I’m still very interested in. But, when I think of Camera Lucida, I have a certain amount of antagonism toward Barthes and the status that he holds. When I read something like A Lover’s Discourse I feel his limitations emotionally and erotically, which are also the limitations of his historical moment. Frankly, I just wish he were funnier and sexier and not so hung up on his mom. There, I said it. He was a very cloistered academic. My aesthetic is much closer to someone who took life itself as the great experiment of their ideas, with Simone Weil as the limit case.

But I’m so happy you brought this edition of Camera Lucida because the most important thing is this frontispiece, a beautiful blue polaroid of light coming through a curtain beside a bed. I always interpreted this image as a skeleton key to Camera Lucida because it is the way you enter the book. The image works as a deeply personal portal, and I’ve never gotten over it. For the rest of the book, you get all these very authored images of people, mostly but they’re all black and white, and none of them are printed really well. I’ve thought about this polaroid for years and retook it in an unconscious way in several pictures in my book. Barthes doesn’t ever address it. Some later versions don’t even have it, or they don’t have it in color. It’s by someone called Daniel Boudinet and I never even looked him up—I think the mystery of it was more important to me.

The thing about Camera Lucida is, it’s kind of an embarrassing book—that’s what I like about it. Analytically, the least interesting part is where he’s trying to make an ontological argument about the photograph, where you get people arguing over where to locate the punctum or whatever, which actually doesn’t seem important to me.

Rail: Really? Less important?! To me your whole book is about the punctum—writing that out. I have it here when Barthes says the punctum “rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.” He even says the photographs he is speaking about are punctuated, “sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points; … A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” What’s shared here is the photograph not as object but as an affective fragment. I mean aren’t these photos about contingency, and isn’t that why there has to be writing? Like when we’re reading the paintings, sometimes we don’t even know what the paintings are or who they’re by.

Earnest: They’re blurs, smears of paintings in time, and the writing is not aimed at explaining. What is important to me is Barthes’s deeply faggy introspective voice which is why Camera Lucida has such a checkered status within real art history and philosophy. Because you can’t extrapolate a system, right? No, no, no, what’s important is that it’s writing.

Rail: Writing yes, not criticism or theory or art, but writing. Before we end, can we discuss clichés in your images like the butterfly, the rainbows, the flowers?

Earnest: Sure, the thing about this book is that there’s no escape hatch. It’s not ironic. I’m not making a joke, although there is a lot of my humor in it. If I had been trying to hedge my bets it would be pretty horrible because I’m talking about some of the worst things that ever happened to me or some of the best things that ever happened to me. The thing with cliché—it’s like something that Jasper Johns said about using numbers or the target, which he famously describes as something “the mind already knows.” So, as a culture we’ve identified clichéd images, like a rainbow or a flower or butterfly, not because they’re powerless, but rather they are too powerful, and we’ve made this construct to insulate us from that power. When we experience intensities of emotion like falling in love or death, authentically in our life, it just hits something very deep and supersedes our conscious mind. It supersedes our own taste.

Rail: Not to be too annoying with the punctum but at one point Barthes does describe a certain punctum that “shows no preference for morality or good taste: the punctum can be ill-bred.”

Earnest: Obviously I completely agree with that. That’s great. But a given “punctum” is not really transferable, because what pierces one person is not the same detail as will pierce another—we all have such different and idiosyncratic relationships with our own histories and the world. To me that shifts the weight to subjectivity and narrative form. Maybe clichéd images are the place where we have the most overlap in these responses. The point is, when you are stunned by a sunset or a butterfly, those responses are physiological, almost self-evident, and in both cases they have a very specific relationship to time. A butterfly or a rainbow or a flower are extremely transient and if you have to have your camera right there, it turns out it’s a miracle. Obviously the fact that they’re instant pictures means that the indexical function is very strong. It’s funny because you’re not looking at the actual instant photographs in the book, these were rephotographed, turned into digital versions for it to be printed into a book. So theoretically the image could have been fucked with, but I think the fact that it retains, even if it’s at the level of mythology, this direct link, the indexical link is clearly important to me. It’s like, oh, this really happened and I really saw it.

Rail: And here we are, the last text entry, the last image: it is of the butterfly and the text about your final moment with Peter Schjeldahl. I just realized—it is the image described at the end of the prologue when you are wrestling with the death of your father and what taking images means, and not wanting to make them art.

Earnest: I think images, our memories, but also our memories of images, are all we have to understand what happened. Schjeldahl once told me that “form is just the shape we give to something to remember it.” I think that’s right, and why I’m so devoted to form.

Rail: Which for some of us is this experience of art and life? That fantastic Robert Henri quote on the T-shirt his museum sells.

Earnest: On sale! Two for five dollars, with a quote on the back: “I am interested in art as a means of living a life, not as a means of making a living.”

Rail: Okay, to conclude—even though there is still so much we could talk about—we haven’t discussed the title!

Earnest: I find titles really hard, so I carry a number of titles in my head for years, even though I don’t know what they’re for yet, waiting for the right project. This one came from a nude beach in Miami called Haulover Beach; it has a gay section. When you park your car in the parking lot, you get a slip from the little machine and put it on your dashboard and it has the date, and it says, “valid until sunset.” The slips don’t say this any more and I wish I saved one. So for years I’ve had that title in mind. I like the lowbrow association with the parking slip and a beach which never gets spelled out. But it’s also about light and it is about transience and about the dying of the light, as the limits of visibility. But then there is the mystery, a kind of promise, that something else will happen too, after the sun goes down.

1. Jarrett Earnest is the editor of Peter Schjeldahl’s last book of collected writings: Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings: 1988-2018, as well as Painting is a Supreme Fiction by Jesse Murray, and the collection of Dave Hickey’s writing, Feint of Heart forthcoming from David Zwirner Books in 2024.