The Brooklyn Rail

In undertaking the dual biography of his aunt and uncle, the artists Cindy Suffoletto and Andrew Topolski, Aidan Ryan looked in two directions: backward at the arc of their too-short lives and forward into his own potential as a writer. All three of them are products of the unique artistic milieu of Buffalo, New York, during different acts of its own drama. In I Am Here You Are Not I Love You, the city too is a prominent character in this largely melancholy chronicle. In the lives of Suffoletto and Topolski and the declining city alike, near-misses are a defining occurrence. Topolski’s ambitions to hit it big in the art world of the 1980s and ’90s were frustrated by factors that did not always have to do with the often remarkable quality of his exacting Post-Minimalist works. In turn, Ryan attempts to answer a question that came to dog him: why Suffoletto voluntarily gave up making art for years in favor of supporting her partner’s career. Buffalo is revealed as a sort of analogue to their lives: overflowing with ultimately unrealized promise, periodically buoyed by cultural ferment, in the end losing out to other, shinier places.

Among the cohort of artists that coalesced in the mid-seventies around Buffalo’s Hallwalls artists collective who would go on to greater acclaim were Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo. (Along with others, they would be designated the Pictures Generation, after an exhibition of the same name at the Metropolitan Museum in 2009.) But after giving birth to a movement, Buffalo was the parent left by its artist children seeking their fortunes elsewhere. Suffoletto and Topolski headed to New York City too, but although the latter worked at a grueling rate and found some success with corporate sales, shows in Germany and France, and curatorial favor, the big breakthrough eluded him. His assemblages and large-scale constructivist works on paper—deploying elements of scientific and musical notation, text fragments, and kinetic suggestion—resisted easy interpretation. In the words of a curator, they were “arcane”—“a cross between John Cage, László Moholy-Nagy, and Joseph Beuys.” His personality could appear similarly difficult, although he was always patient and loving to the young Ryan. As the author grew older, now possessed by his own powerful drive to become an artist of the literary variety, he would look with keen appreciation on his uncle’s almost bullheaded dedication to his work.

I Am Here… (its title taken from an enigmatic note left by Ryan’s aunt after her untimely death in 2012 at the age of fifty) is a detective story, a bildungsroman, a critical reappraisal. It reawakens past times and places, recreating scenes of Gilded Age Buffalo and later the old ice house on Essex Street that would become the center of a dynamic arts scene; Ryan is adept at revivifying quotidian details of Topolski and Suffoletto’s life in New York City even down to the décor of their apartment in Williamsburg and the ebullient evenings of conversation with other artists they hosted there. He evokes the giddy ephemerality of a creative “scene,” artists pulled toward some magnetic center from which they will eventually detach by centrifugal force to their separate futures. (He describes such a milieu as having “an atmosphere of collision, collaboration, confrontation, collage.”) The book also seeks to situate their work within the larger sweep of postmodernism, and throws light on the often dark politics of the art market. Ryan writes with uncommon perceptiveness about art in general and his aunt’s and uncle’s in particular, persuasive in his argument that Topolski’s work represented a significant contribution to art in the final quarter of the twentieth century that was unfairly ignored.

Naturally one wants proof. Examples from both artists’ catalogs can be viewed on the website of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at Buffalo State University, yet no reproduction can give an adequate sense of any work whose attention to surface, and intermedia three-dimensionality, is essential to its meaning. Ryan, also a filmmaker, has made a short film (of the same title) based on the investigations he undertook to write the book, and it is there—again, unfortunately not widely viewable—that his case appears conclusive. The camera’s pans and zooms permit a sense of the physicality of both artists’ works that nears what I imagine is its effective reality. That of Topolski, who at fifty-six died four years before his wife was also taken by cancer, is commanding, almost epic, and delicate at once; Suffoletto’s is movingly and mysteriously personal.

Ryan’s book is a valentine to the couple, to the idiosyncrasies of the city that made them, and to the idea of artistic community. It is itself an artwork of surprising ambition, an attempt to push literature to the limits of its ability to reanimate memory. He layers the biography form with a multivalency of literary objectives: memoir, critical theory, history, even a judicious measure of prose poetry. I never cavil about jacket design—it is ultimately irrelevant, notwithstanding that many of us do judge books by their covers, or at least rely on them to telegraph a book’s intentions—but in this case the plain and almost amateurish look of a slapped-together template does a disservice to the scope of Ryan’s boundary-pushing book. (It is also somewhat ironic that such a resolutely unaesthetic cover should attach to an inquiry into the nature of visual creativity.)

Notwithstanding its packaging, Aidan Ryan’s first book is an original and deep exploration not only of the world of two underrated artists, but of the power of the creative mind to reimagine others’ realities. The unified project of the book, conveyed by its subject matter as well as the author’s expressive treatment of it, is about the courage—author’s and subjects’ alike—to undertake art at all.