main: December 2004 Archives

Jeff Koons, Lifeboat, 1985

    Whatever Happened to the East Village?

1960-62

I don't just mean the neighborhood, although I first lived there on Avenue D and 8th Street when it was still called the Lower East Side (or as someone tried to re-christen it, the Loser East Side or the Looser East Side), when there were jazz bars like Slug's and you could rent a huge, top-floor, walk-up corner flat, with heat too, for $60. I even had a separate room for my hand-cranked mimeograph machine. I was not generating anarchist tracts, but a poetry magazine and giving birth to my poetry career.

I am not being self-indulgent. Just remember: Autobiography is simply a more interesting way of organizing information.

This was in the early '60s, before everything west of Tomkins Square acquired that beloved bombed-out look, generated from a malign neglect that opened the doors to the low-end drug trade and a universe of muggings and burning tenements. There's not even an inkling of that now. The Second Avenue subway may not have been built, but bland in-fill has erased the vacant lots once strewn with rubble. There are even a few buildings with doormen.

1978-2004

I moved back, but closer to Second Avenue, 28 years ago and continue my happiness of place. The Dom and the Fillmore East have long been closed. The quality of the legendary egg-cream at Gem's Spa may have declined, but my neighborhood is still open 24 hours (as is the legendary Veselka restaurant, which at the turn of the 19th century was a saloon where Sophie Tucker got her start). 24/7 bite-stops and grocery stores, and newsstands still abound. We need a 24-hour bookstore a 24-hour laundromat and a few other things to guarantee historic designation as the neighborhood that never sleeps. Nevertheless, a shrinking yet historically ever-changing pool of students, actors, poets, and artists still call this neighborhood home, no matter what it's called, yuppies, or whatever they are now called be damned.

How the Lower East Side between 14th and Houston and the Bowery/Third Avenue and Avenue D became the East Village and why -- and why Loisada never stuck instead -- is more about real estate than art. Or, do I have it all wrong? Some would maintain that art is in fact mostly about real estate, but we'd better not go there.

1981-87

Fueled by the inflated Reagan economy, drugs, sex, ambition, and idealism, for what now seems like one brief moment or a blip on the screen of art history, the East Village was the future of art. It's what I call Mickery-and-Judyism: Let's all get together and put on a show. I am always a sucker for that, but as a long-time East Village resident who somehow did not manage to get born into a trust fund, I hated it. I particularly hated it when limousines from uptown clogged the streets and fouled the artist-run storefront galleries with Chanel No. 5 and the smoke from illegally imported cigars. It's hard to look at art, no matter how funky or cutting-edge, when there is all that Rolex glare.

And then when the bubble burst, when AIDS hit big-time, and Soho rents dropped, the East Village galleries moved or closed. The whole thing didn't even last as long as the hippies or the yippies or the yuppies.

The New Museum, now temporarily housed within the dubious cocoon of the Chelsea Museum of Art, is presenting a concise examination of East Village art called East Village USA (556 W. 22nd St., to March 19). I am not sure it increases the East Village legend, or inadvertently destroys it. Probably a little of both. It is a documentary survey, not a critical presentation.

The East Village cannot be associated with a specific art movement the way Tenth Street stands for Abstract Expressionism. It was an art scene encompassing styles as various as the "abstraction" of Peter Halley and Philip Taaffe; the ultra-Dada appropriations of Mike Bidlo (represented here by Not Pollock (Number 27, 1950), 1983); the hetero-camp of Jeff Koons' bronze Lifeboat,1985; Nan Goldin's tough photography; graffiti artists of not much account; and even Rodney Alan Greenblat's cartoony furniture. Thus, almost all points between the conceptualesque to the infantile were covered and are covered again in New Museum curator Dan Cameron's energetic, jammed-together sampling.

Mike Bidlo Not Pollock (Number 27, 1950), 1983)

The East Village Incubator

This is what I like about the East Village period: artist empowerment, pluralism, energy, collaborativeness. Many if not most of the storefront galleries, although never referred to as co-ops (as in the 10th Street days) or vanity galleries, were started by artists themselves. The most memorable was Meyer Vaisman's International with Monument, which launched Vaisman himself, Haim Steinback, Koons, and Halley. You can't argue with the long-term results, for these are artists who have survived the East Village periodization. There was even a gallery run by a couple of art critics. Some would say that the whole thing was more than a little bit like the lunatics running the asylum. I say more power to the lunatics. If you had to choose between the mad investors now running the art world or the artists who once called the shots, whom would you choose? A case can even be made for giving some power back to the poets and art critics, now sadly eclipsed by publicists.

Other winners, I can now proclaim, would be Kiki Smith, Bidlo, Goldin, Keith Haring and, although still underestimated, Taaffe. Should I give you my list of, let us say, also-rans? Better not. The art world is full of occulted superstars; sometimes, although rarely, there are miraculous resurrections .

But for the record (although I may regret it later), I have always been enormously bored by Jenny Holzer, George Condo, Laurie Simmons (except for her recent doll-house toy), and Ross Bleckner, who was hardly East Village. Martin Wong? Well, I remember liking his homoerotic painting in homage to firemen. But nothing else, alas, sticks in the brain, other than his dull paint-surface.

Here is another shocker: David Wojnarowicz, although nominated for sainthood, had almost no visual-art talent, and was better as a writer. Jean-Michel Basquiat? Let's wait until his Brooklyn Museum show this spring. I have my fingers crossed, although Julian Schnabel's bio-pic (Basquiat, 1996) has almost permanently done him in. Schnabel went on to a far better movie (Before Night Falls, 2000), but Basquiat, temporarily at least, seems to be trapped in a world in which Andy Warhol is forever impersonated by David Bowie and everyone gives bad line-readings.

In case you are wondering, I always hated graffiti art and still do. I am not against art-in-the-streets per se. I really can't be, since I sometimes still do Street Works myself. But graffiti always struck me as dumb, visual pollution, and moving it indoors, in most cases, only made it worse. I can get behind signatures as paintings since, satirically, paintings are signatures, but I don't think that's what the artists had in mind. Any art promoted by Norman Mailer (and many years before the Fun Gallery) can't be good.

There are also a lot of films and videos of night-club acts here too, which give a feeling of the party part of the period, but do little else. Jack Smith's delirious Flaming Creatures (1962-63) is meant to be a prelude, I guess. But what indeed had Smith wrought? Orgy scenes in Ken Russell movies? Well, maybe Guy Maddin, so we will have to thank him for that. But not the rants and nightclub acts at the Mudd Club and Pyramid.

Quo Vadis?

For all its faults, the East Village Moment now seems like a kind of art Eden compared to the art business now. Artists lived, worked and played in close proximity to each other. And then, as often happens in real life, everything went wrong.

As already noted, financial collapse and AIDS ended the experiment. Drugs may have gotten out of hand. But greed also played a part. The landlords jacked up the prices of those storefronts serving as galleries so that Soho rents suddenly seemed reasonable, at least in terms of square footage. And the apartments, once fixed up, became more and more costly. Cold-water flats became air-conditioned nightmares. Weird young people of both sexes, carrying briefcases to the Astor Place subway, suddenly appeared on those morning one might have been up early enough to see the doomed parade.

Some of the artists, when real art galleries called, simply moved on, and we do not blame them. Just remember this: Williamsburg has not produced an equivalent scene, or any list of artists of great repute. So far it is not the art incubator that the East Village was -- and, in fact, is over. I go there for the second-hand bookstores and to see what the recent escapees from Yale graduate school are wearing. Aluminum siding is not an advance over tar-paper brick. It is, after all, an ugly neighborhood and I hear the rents aren't even cheap. Polish food, thank you, I can get in my own neighborhood in Manhattan.

Then where is the art incubator? There is not one or even two, but many, spread all over the globe. When in the deep-dark past I yearned for art's decentralization, I was thinking of it decentralized all across the U.S.A. not all across the globe. My vision wasn't big enough.

Nowadays, collectors fly-to-buy. Art fairs proliferate. The Miami Art Fair is, I am told, a must for Euros as well as greenbacks and pesos. For artists, I still think you pretty much have to make your way in either New York, Berlin, London or perhaps...Beijing? Berlin is fading; Beijing is rising (this week, anyway).

For artists and dealers, radical decentralization is great. Every trip is a tax write-off. Artist are fond of saying, Don't ship the art, just ship me. And if you are a collector who turns over artworks (to improve the collection of course, out of one side of the mouth, but to make profit, out of the other) you are also a "business" and can write off a chunk of expenses. One friend, who has seen it all, thinks Chelsea is going to collapse and the art fairs are going to take over: low overhead, no unfriendly desk-jockeys to put off the paying customers. But who will take care of those manila folders of reviews and press releases? Those mailing lists and secret collector-profiles? The slides and digital files? Just post it all on the internet. Well, maybe we had better not do that with the secret collector files or, come to think of it, with the actual sale prices and all the records of what the artist pays for announcements, catalogs, shipping, framing, et al.

On the other hand, figure out someplace that artists, dealers, and collectors want to hang out, then give them a business excuse to go there, and you are suddenly rolling in dough. I propose a Rio Art Fair. I'd go in a New York minute. And since I love Iceland, a Reykjavik Art Fair. Or maybe Maui (sorry, they already have a film festival). It can't be any of the regular places like L.A. (everybody already goes there once or twice a year) or Basel (so yesterday). How about someplace really exotic: Napier, New Zealand? They have plenty of art deco buildings there, and a beach. And winter is summer there.

The Other Martha ...

Martha Rosler, as opposed to Martha Stewart. The link is the home. For one Martha, the home -- and now perhaps the jailhouse -- is the theater of sales; for the other Martha, the home itself is a sign in the battleground of signs. A new survey of Rosler's telling photomontages at Gorney Bravin + Lee (534 West 26th St., to Jan. 8) presents generous samples of two of her classic sequences: one called "Beauty Knows No Pain or Body Beautiful" (1965-04) and the other "Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful" (1967-72), plus more recent works that, with some exceptions, are updates of "Bringing the War Home."

Sad indeed that BWH needs to be updated, cries out to be updated. A model prancing with a cell phone (shown in multiples of herself) is in a way an update of "Beauty Knows No Pain." But in spite of the still-thriving use of the objectification of women's bodies as sales tools (to both men and women), given the Iraqi quagmire, the former is more urgent. When both subjects come together, the effect is explosive, if you will excuse the expression.

Not surprisingly, given her thematic critique of capitalism, Rosler is one of those artists who has tried to resist packaging. She has perpetrated mail-art, performances, video, public art, and even garage-sale art, and most of these explore the notion of the politics of everyday life. For her, the domestic is political. But as her New Museum retrospective in 2000 seemed to demonstrate, there has been no Rosler handle beyond a certain righteousness; she at least (to give her credit) has never been self-righteous, the dangerous sin of the politically committed.

A text produced at the New Museum at the time of the retrospective pointed out graduate school (U.C. San Diego, La Jolla) influences: teachers Herbert Marcuse and Fredric Jameson. And then there was Jean-Luc Godard, who visited when he was in his most political and least communicative phase. No mention is made of artist mentor Eleanor Antin (already at the time engaged in mail art, pseudo-documentary photo art and performances). Working with a group of artists, Rosler developed "a working style that emphasized collaboration over individualism and transformation over consistency."

Where are those collaborations now?

Furthermore, Rosler "challenged the long-held romantic doctrine that artists should maintain a consistent style within a primary medium so that their work successfully reflects their identity, making it identifiable as their own and no one else's."

Did the author of the artwork really die?

Less importantly, it might be that Rosler's commitment to collaboration, to anonymous or at least unbranded art, and all of her political work, allowed her to produce the photomontages I now celebrate. Or did she produce them in spite of these ideas? I vote for the former.

If art is a method of communication, then galleries and museums are the major vehicles of that communication. Image-identity or branding is absolutely required by the systems themselves. Mass-media is another vehicle for art, but the way to enter mass-media is usually through the galleries and museums. They arrange the billboards and the fashion shoots.

I would never say that the function of a museum retrospective is to package an artist, but certainly coherence of some sort is a requirement, no matter how an artist may want to resist. The vehicle determines not only the route, but the goal.

Ironically, what the current gallery exhibition of Rosler's work proves is that the photomontages are her best efforts and could easily serve as signature pieces. They are firmly rooted in art history; they use the language of photomontage with new effectiveness, toward new ends. We think, of course, of photomontage works by the Germans of the 1920s (John Heartfield and Hannah Hoch) and Herbert Bayer's commercial and noncommercial but basically apolitical illustrations. But we are also in Pop territory, for we cannot avoid Richard Hamilton's iconic 1956 photomontage Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing. There's that magazine living room, but invaded by a muscle-builder rather than a soldier. The consumerism is the same. We also recall the Situationists in France who, as part of their attack on the "spectacle" of media-capitalism, altered comic strips and advertisements.

Comparisons Are Obvious

Can we compare Rosler's two bodies of work? Yes, indeed. In "Beauty Knows No Pain," bare breasts and crotches collaged on to sleek fashion-magazine models certainly make a point. Oddly enough, that point now seems historical. Not only has the air-brushed view of the sexual body continued, it has expanded to include men's bodies as well. Think Calvin Klein. Or the air-brushed, photo-shoot, pumped-up hairless torsos on the covers of men's "health" magazines. Sex sells, but it has to be fantasy sex.

Yes, then (c. 1965-90?) as now, women are more vulnerable to this kind of exploitation of their bodies and libidos. I include the latter because many feminists ignore that the fantasy female sexuality in advertising is to sell things to women, not, as was once the case, just automobiles to men. Women dress and "cosmetize" for other women as much as for men, maybe more so. We already know that men work out to impress other men.

The series called "Bringing the War Home" works better. The stage, the closed set or sound stage is the shelter-magazine home: perfect, up-to-date, immaculate, as can be created only by photography. Not the home as love-nest or womb, but the home as design tomb.

Photography, because it is not particularly good at capturing the fingerprints, dust, odors, pollen, bacteria, frayed threads and animal hairs of ordinary domestic reality, has created the impossibly impeccable environment that is the housekeeper's burden. With the aid of the proper products and cleaning appliances, this environment can be yours. Must be yours!

A friend says he learned all he needed to know about media, particularly television, when as a tike he got to sit on Uncle Bob's lap live on the Howdy Doody show. The sets were in reality so grubby, the people so grouchy. I had a similar anti-epiphany when as a tike I saw the Today Show live through a plate-glass window in Rockefeller Center: the set, which looked so solid on the TV screen, in real life looked like, and possibly was, cardboard.

Having one's house photographed for the New York Times is another confirmation of photography as evil. Even photographed by a Long Island crime-scene photographer, our '50s living room with its see-through fireplace looked impossibly glamorous, spiffy, just crying out for Kim Novak.

Another time, strapped for cash, we rented out our ranch-house for a magazine shoot and were surprised to learn (as proved by the snapshots left behind) that they had replaced all of our Eames furnishings with junk from hell and added huge bouquets of flowers, hanging plants, and weird throw rugs to fill-in the picture. The check did not bounce, but the photos never ran. Our souvenir was of a trial Polaroid of an out-of-context model camping it up in Cynthia Rowley clothes with an Electrolux vacuum cleaner, possibly bought that afternoon.

Now that I have established the scene, only picture windows are required. Rosler, through the photomontage trick, gives us views of the Vietnam War and now Iraq. They could be photomurals or outsize photo-realist paintings situated in these art director created perfect homes, but we know these are meant to show horrors happening in our own backyard or what stands in for same. Even worse, soldiers and victims (and in once case a certain world-famous, leash-wielding party girl in army clothes) invade the fictive space that through media has become our space, the kitchens and living rooms that we occupy in our heads.

Rosler's media manipulation aims to be homeopathic. A little bit of the same poison that is making you sick (image manipulation) may cure you of the disease.

Marcuse and perhaps the entire Frankfurt School (to be disrespectful, sometimes called the Frankfurter School) did not realize that people are not all that easily fooled. We pick and choose. We make new worlds out of the media worlds. We don't have to be puritan to be political.

Gilbert & George, 1971

Titles and Sermons

Speaking of image-altering, Gilbert & George, old Brit favorites since their "Living Sculpture" days, are now using digital imaging. A two-gallery extravaganza called "Perversive Pictures" is at Sonnabend (536 W. 22nd St.) and Lehmann Maupin (540 W. 26th St.) through December 18.

Gilbert & George, the world's most successful collaborators, have come a long way from when, as Living Sculptures, they inaugurated the original Sonnebend Gallery downtown in then newly developing SoHo art district. With golden faces, the lads did a little dance on a tiny platform to the strains of an awful Victrola rendition of a Victorian ditty called Underneath the Arches.

What they look like, which is consciously square, was always at the center of their art, even when they moved to slick photo blowup grids of themselves. Now they have aged. They may have gotten out from underneath the arches, but have never escaped the arch. Here, through the magic of Photo-Shop or some such program, they butterfly and Rorschach themselves on similarly treated fields of graffiti or slogans, some of them offensive.

Here's a found poem made up of some of the titles of their new digital blow-ups:

APOSTASIA, BRICK LANE, CHICHIMAN, CLAN ME, DIE BUFF DIE! DROSS, FINGLE-FANGLE, GOTHIC LONDON, MOONSTRUCK, PEST DICK, SKY TAG, WHITE BASTARDS.

Or you might prefer some slogans from the artworks themselves:

      CAPITALISM NEEDS WAR. DO YOU?

      ALL YOU HAVE TO LOOSE IS YOUR CHAIN STORES.

      EXPECT NOTHING...TAKE EVERYTHING.

      IF YOU CAN'T BE BOUGHT YOU CAN'T BE SOLD.

The Other Martha ...

Martha Rosler, as opposed to Martha Stewart. The link is the home. For one Martha, the home -- and now perhaps the jailhouse -- is the theater of sales; for the other Martha, the home itself is a sign in the battleground of signs. A new survey of Rosler's telling photomontages at Gorney Bravin + Lee (534 West 26th St., to Jan. 8) presents generous samples of two of her classic sequences: one called "Beauty Knows No Pain or Body Beautiful" (1965-04) and the other "Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful" (1967-72), plus more recent works that, with some exceptions, are updates of "Bringing the War Home."

Sad indeed that BWH needs to be updated, cries out to be updated. A model prancing with a cell phone (shown in multiples of herself) is in a way an update of "Beauty Knows No Pain." But in spite of the still-thriving use of the objectification of women's bodies as sales tools (to both men and women), given the Iraqi quagmire, the former is more urgent. When both subjects come together, the effect is explosive, if you will excuse the expression.

Not surprisingly, given her thematic critique of capitalism, Rosler is one of those artists who has tried to resist packaging. She has perpetrated mail-art, performances, video, public art, and even garage-sale art, and most of these explore the notion of the politics of everyday life. For her, the domestic is political. But as her New Museum retrospective in 2000 seemed to demonstrate, there has been no Rosler handle beyond a certain righteousness; she at least (to give her credit) has never been self-righteous, the dangerous sin of the politically committed.

A text produced at the New Museum at the time of the retrospective pointed out graduate school (U.C. San Diego, La Jolla) influences: teachers Herbert Marcuse and Fredric Jameson. And then there was Jean-Luc Godard, who visited when he was in his most political and least communicative phase. No mention is made of artist mentor Eleanor Antin (already at the time engaged in mail art, pseudo-documentary photo art and performances). Working with a group of artists, Rosler developed "a working style that emphasized collaboration over individualism and transformation over consistency."

Where are those collaborations now?

Furthermore, Rosler "challenged the long-held romantic doctrine that artists should maintain a consistent style within a primary medium so that their work successfully reflects their identity, making it identifiable as their own and no one else's."

Did the author of the artwork really die?

Less importantly, it might be that Rosler's commitment to collaboration, to anonymous or at least unbranded art, and all of her political work, allowed her to produce the photomontages I now celebrate. Or did she produce them in spite of these ideas? I vote for the former.

If art is a method of communication, then galleries and museums are the major vehicles of that communication. Image-identity or branding is absolutely required by the systems themselves. Mass-media is another vehicle for art, but the way to enter mass-media is usually through the galleries and museums. They arrange the billboards and the fashion shoots.

I would never say that the function of a museum retrospective is to package an artist, but certainly coherence of some sort is a requirement, no matter how an artist may want to resist. The vehicle determines not only the route, but the goal.

Ironically, what the current gallery exhibition of Rosler's work proves is that the photomontages are her best efforts and could easily serve as signature pieces. They are firmly rooted in art history; they use the language of photomontage with new effectiveness, toward new ends. We think, of course, of photomontage works by the Germans of the 1920s (John Heartfield and Hannah Hoch) and Herbert Bayer's commercial and noncommercial but basically apolitical illustrations. But we are also in Pop territory, for we cannot avoid Richard Hamilton's iconic 1956 photomontage Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing. There's that magazine living room, but invaded by a muscle-builder rather than a soldier. The consumerism is the same. We also recall the Situationists in France who, as part of their attack on the "spectacle" of media-capitalism, altered comic strips and advertisements.

Comparisons Are Obvious

Can we compare Rosler's two bodies of work? Yes, indeed. In "Beauty Knows No Pain," bare breasts and crotches collaged on to sleek fashion-magazine models certainly make a point. Oddly enough, that point now seems historical. Not only has the air-brushed view of the sexual body continued, it has expanded to include men's bodies as well. Think Calvin Klein. Or the air-brushed, photo-shoot, pumped-up hairless torsos on the covers of men's "health" magazines. Sex sells, but it has to be fantasy sex.

Yes, then (c. 1965-90?) as now, women are more vulnerable to this kind of exploitation of their bodies and libidos. I include the latter because many feminists ignore that the fantasy female sexuality in advertising is to sell things to women, not, as was once the case, just automobiles to men. Women dress and "cosmetize" for other women as much as for men, maybe more so. We already know that men work out to impress other men.

The series called "Bringing the War Home" works better. The stage, the closed set or sound stage is the shelter-magazine home: perfect, up-to-date, immaculate, as can be created only by photography. Not the home as love-nest or womb, but the home as design tomb.

Photography, because it is not particularly good at capturing the fingerprints, dust, odors, pollen, bacteria, frayed threads and animal hairs of ordinary domestic reality, has created the impossibly impeccable environment that is the housekeeper's burden. With the aid of the proper products and cleaning appliances, this environment can be yours. Must be yours!

A friend says he learned all he needed to know about media, particularly television, when as a tike he got to sit on Uncle Bob's lap live on the Howdy Doody show. The sets were in reality so grubby, the people so grouchy. I had a similar anti-epiphany when as a tike I saw the Today Show live through a plate-glass window in Rockefeller Center: the set, which looked so solid on the TV screen, in real life looked like, and possibly was, cardboard.

Having one's house photographed for the New York Times is another confirmation of photography as evil. Even photographed by a Long Island crime-scene photographer, our '50s living room with its see-through fireplace looked impossibly glamorous, spiffy, just crying out for Kim Novak.

Another time, strapped for cash, we rented out our ranch-house for a magazine shoot and were surprised to learn (as proved by the snapshots left behind) that they had replaced all of our Eames furnishings with junk from hell and added huge bouquets of flowers, hanging plants, and weird throw rugs to fill-in the picture. The check did not bounce, but the photos never ran. Our souvenir was of a trial Polaroid of an out-of-context model camping it up in Cynthia Rowley clothes with an Electrolux vacuum cleaner, possibly bought that afternoon.

Now that I have established the scene, only picture windows are required. Rosler, through the photomontage trick, gives us views of the Vietnam War and now Iraq. They could be photomurals or outsize photo-realist paintings situated in these art director created perfect homes, but we know these are meant to show horrors happening in our own backyard or what stands in for same. Even worse, soldiers and victims (and in once case a certain world-famous, leash-wielding party girl in army clothes) invade the fictive space that through media has become our space, the kitchens and living rooms that we occupy in our heads.

Rosler's media manipulation aims to be homeopathic. A little bit of the same poison that is making you sick (image manipulation) may cure you of the disease.

Marcuse and perhaps the entire Frankfurt School (to be disrespectful, sometimes called the Frankfurter School) did not realize that people are not all that easily fooled. We pick and choose. We make new worlds out of the media worlds. We don't have to be puritan to be political.

Titles and Sermons

Speaking of image-altering, Gilbert & George, old Brit favorites since their "Living Sculpture" days, are now using digital imaging. A two-gallery extravaganza called "Perversive Pictures" is at Sonnabend (536 W. 22nd St.) and Lehmann Maupin (540 W. 26th St.) through December 18.

Gilbert & George, the world's most successful collaborators, have come a long way from when, as Living Sculptures, they inaugurated the original Sonnebend Gallery downtown in then newly developing SoHo art district. Covered in gold, the lads did a little dance on a tiny platform to the strains of an awful Victrola rendition of a Victorian ditty called Underneath the Arches.

What they look like, which is consciously square, was always at the center of their art, even when they moved to slick photo blowup grids of themselves. Now they have aged. They may have gotten out from underneath the arches, but have never escaped the arch. Here, through the magic of Photo-Shop or some such program, they butterfly and Rorschach themselves on similarly treated fields of graffiti or slogans, some of them offensive.

Here's a found poem made up of some of the titles of their new digital blow-ups:

APOSTASIA, BRICK LANE, CHICHIMAN, CLAN ME, DIE BUFF DIE! DROSS, FINGLE-FANGLE, GOTHIC LONDON, MOONSTRUCK, PEST DICK, SKY TAG, WHITE BASTARDS.

Or you might prefer some slogans from the artworks themselves:

      CAPITALISM NEEDS WAR. DO YOU?

      ALL YOU HAVE TO LOOSE IS YOUR CHAIN STORES.

      EXPECT NOTHING...TAKE EVERYTHING.

      IF YOU CAN'T BE BOUGHT YOU CAN'T BE SOLD.

The Death of James Lee Byars

If you were to design your own memorial, what would it be?

It is not clear if James Lee Byars (1932-1997) meant The Death of James Lee Byars as a memorial, but it now functions as one, the way the Ana Mendieta silhoueta of lit candles placed at the end point of her Whitney exhibition earlier this year did. The Death and a few other Byars works are now at the Whitney (945 Madison Ave. at 75th St., to March 5). For those interested in the Dada/Fluxus wing of art or the spiritual in art, this almost willfully diffident exhibition is essential.

The Death is the residue of a performance. What we see is deemed "a traveling copy" of the artwork now in a private collection. It came about because of a 1994 performance in which Byars reclined in a gold-covered room, clad in gold lamé and wearing his signature black hat. He referred to the performance as "practicing death."

The sculpture now on view is a boxlike room with the fourth wall removed: in other words, a stage set. All three walls, the floor and the ceiling are covered with something called composition gold in a slightly peeling grid. If you've every tried leafing something, with real or ersatz gold, you will recognize those clinging, super-thin squares and the way they flutter and refuse to stay put. Mere breath will interfere with wrinkle-free placement. And you had better wear a mask (not a gold one!), because the little particles can get in your lungs and they stay there forever, no doubt doing golden but deadly damage. A lung of gold is not the same as a heart of gold.

At the center of the tomblike, womblike room is a rectangular casket or bier also covered with gold leaf. On it have been placed five nearly invisible crystals. The Death of James Lee Byars may be a self-made memorial, but it is also anyone's, since death, absence, disappearance, and departure is our lot.

The room you dare not enter is golden and gleaming, both sunset and sunrise. I like the fact that the current incarnation is dated right there on the wall label as 1994-2004. Is Byars, who supposedly died of cancer in Cairo in 1997, still alive? Or are some mysterious death-bed instructions being followed? Is someone channeling him? You thought art was about life. Wrong. In a sense, every artist's every artwork is a memorial.

Are my feeling about The Death in any way determined by the fact that I met up with Byars once or twice? I saw his strange talking performance at TheArchitectural League in New York. He just sat there days on end answering any question that was asked. He was wearing, I think, his black hat and some kind of red garment.

And then the next year for the Fashion Show Poetry Event in 1969 (which I co-organized), he was our climax. His wedding dress was worn by 20 people. Even with this jolly work, Byars demonstrated his fondness for questions rather than answers.

John Brockman, author of The Late John Brockman (1969), dedicates his World Question Center to Byars on his Edge website. Originally the World Question Center was one of the Byars' rare "failed" artworks. Byars wanted to lock 100 of the world's most brilliant minds in a room and have them ask each other the questions they had been asking themselves. But when Byars attempted contact by telephone, Brockman reports "70 people hung up on him."

Byars was one of those artists who kept on disappearing, getting on and off my radar. A legend. A nomad who allowed himself to own only four books at a time. Too strange to be a friend; missing in action, as it were. I remember that he had, while teaching English in Japan for 10 years, studied papermaking, Noh theater, Zen; his roots were in fiber art, the fact of which has been conveniently buried, probably with his own help. He embraced the role of a Zen mystic, but crossed it with that of the dandy. His block-long Soluble Man, done for the American Craft Museum's 1967 "Made on Paper" exhibition, was made of water-soluble paper and was, after its brief existence, dissolved by two street-cleaning trucks.

In spite of his "participation clothes," such as the already mentioned group wedding dress and the two-person, silk wearable on display at the Whitney -- Two in a Hat (Breath), 1969 -- Byars was a loner. Some might say he was hypnotized by his own self-regard. Crazy, but crazy like a fox. A lot of his work, once you remove his presence, his posturing, and his performativeness seems to be about emptying out. If you remove all the energy from a form or a material, what new energy comes in to fill that vacuum?

The first piece you see in the Whitney sampling of Byars' work is The Little Red Angel of Marseilles, 333 red glass spheres arranged on the floor like a voodoo insignia or a medieval angel symbol, straight out of practical alchemy. This angel sign relates cleverly to Paul Viola's Five Angels for the Millennium that is projected in the room next door.

Then we come to three drawings Byars made on large sheets of Japanese paper when he was in Japan: Myron Stout writ large. The next room offers eight relatively small marble sculptures, from 1986 to 1994, displayed in vitrines. Although all severely geometrical, three of the sculptures purport to be books: The Star Book, The Cube Book, and The Triangle Book. These are, of course, books without pages, books you can't open. The smoothly rendered surfaces make the marble look like sugar or Ivory soap or Styrofoam. What do they mean?

And then you arrive at The Death of James Lee Byars.

If you were to make a memorial for yourself, would you have a statue carved of your naked body and then use it on your grave? What age would you choose for that representation? Perfect youth? Diseased senescence?

Would you buy some threatened forest and name it after yourself? Would you endow a chair of art criticism? Would you have your body burned to ashes on a barge in the middle of the Hudson River and then have photos and films sent to family members? Ex-lovers? Enemies? Would you...

Would you finance a perpetually available edition of your collected poems; in print and in cyberspace. Your art criticism too. And then a special museum just for your art.

Or barely nothing at all: an anonymous footprint, a scent of roses in the air.

"James Lee Byars: The Perfect Silence" does not include his The Rose Table of Perfect made up of 3,333 red roses left to wilt, or his 100 unanswered letters to Joseph Beuys, but is, in its own way, perfect.

If only there were some way we could add the following reminiscence by Stephan Köhler (full text is included in thecatalogue for the 1999 Byars exhibition at the Toyota Municipal Museum in Japan):

"For months on my way to work at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, I observed a tall man dressed in a black velvet suit with a black hat and his eyes covered with a scarf of black silk crossing the Grand Canale in a ferry boat, a black Gondola. He never sat down, but always stood in the middle of the shaky boat like a sculpture. He was conscious of every move he made, aware of every detail of his posture as well at the energy he emanated into the surrounding space."