Art Writing by Stephen Bracco

Dating at the Gates

It's not as politically savvy as wrapping the Reichstag, as photogenic as framing 11 Biscayne Bay islands pink or as audacious as wrapping a mile of the Australian coast. But Christo and Jeanne-Claude's temporary landscape artwork, the Gates, in Manhattan's Central Park is apt for a city of pedestrians.

That the work does not wrap around or cover anything is part of its tameness, and at 7 feet high, the bottom edge of the Gates' banners are the exact height of a toddler's reach astride Dad's shoulders. The Gates is also a work specifically American in that they suggest rows of advertising billboards.

The artists describe the Gates as offering "warm shadows" to those who pass beneath some or all of its 7,500 gates, and the illusion of a "golden river" to those lucky enough to view it from a nearby building. They also insist the color of all the gates and their pleated nylon curtains is not orange at all, but saffron.

While Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude call themselves landscape artists, not conceptual artists, their work over the years is right on board with conceptual art and its invitation to consider the alteration of space. (See Fred Sandback's strings and Richard Serra's curled steel). The Gates also draws us to interrogate ourselves and our assumptions; it is art built upon self-consciousness. Not ideal, I discovered, for a first date.

I met M on an online dating service. To avoid the usual first date disaster of interviewing each other in a Starbucks, I suggested seeing the Gates its opening weekend for an afternoon of innocuous highbrow fun.

She said she'd be wearing a black leather jacket. I said I would too and a cap I'd bought in Dublin. M ran her own new media company, and liked to shoot photos in cemeteries; she liked Britcoms and Amy, but not David, Sedaris. She did not wish to date a man who had grown up as an only child; she was adopted and had two tattoos, one around her wrist and the other, of course, in the small of her back.

Upon meeting, I saw that she also had that harried, wary look of a woman who's had too many hard-drinking, self-centered, insensitive jerk boyfriends with animal magnetism and no bank account. She did not remove her sunglasses. She spoke with a mix of toughness and caution — she seemed part dollar beer, part yoga class. She carried a messenger bag but it looked empty. Her jacket was soft black suede, not leather. I asked her if she wanted to go into the park to look at the art. She said she did.

A first date needs a sure thing as ballast. A dive bar, a bookstore, even a gallery hop. But not a site-specific conceptual piece of landscape art that draws your attention to your own self-awareness with a kind of sublime saffron-tinged paranoia. There was a festive atmosphere to the crowds in the Park, with plenty of representatives of the stroller class, athletic and cheery couples beaming up at the "warm shadows" and the "golden river" Christo and Jeanne-Claude assured them would be there. M said in her profile that she did not want children, a good sign, for me, as I'd found watching a friend's cat to be too distracting.

I told M I found the Gates less "aesthetically pleasurable" than I'd imagined/hoped. To view an array of them across the Sheep Meadow or fenced-in Great Lawn was kind of depressing. As I spoke, I felt I was actually critiquing the date-in-progress, with the orange landscape art as neutral stand-in.

I said the Gates were kind of distant, and not engaging. Was I talking about M? She did indeed come off as distant — those sunglasses and all. I said it was not what I expected. What did I mean by that? Was I dive-bombing the date as soon as it had started?

M and I had both brought digital cameras, as had most of the crowd. People got their friends to take their picture beside a gate as if beside Mickey Mouse. Would you have your picture taken beside a Richard Serra? An Andy Goldsworthy? Having your picture snapped beside a gate seemed suitable, and in fact the Gates is arguably an art piece designed less for the environment of Central Park and more for your picture of Central Park, the instant memory of it — a landscape art piece for the digital camera, for the creation of an instant nostalgic past. You take a picture of it and you can't wait to get home from the park to download it and see how it looks.

In my Gates picture I am squinting, looking lost at the head of a line of identical, square 16-foot-high frames. There are no warm shadows and no golden river; I'm a man with orange fabric hanging over his head wondering how he feels about the woman taking his picture and whether he likes the way she screws up her lips when taking the picture. I asked M if she wanted me to take her picture and she said No. She did not like pictures of herself, she said, nor videos of herself. Nor did she like talking on the phone; she always lets her machine pick up calls.

"I'm not a social butterfly by any means," she told me.

We joined a small crowd reaching for handouts of some of the one million commemorative limited-edition orange swatches. Like art-starved zombies, we surrounded the Gates worker as she placed little squares of nylon into our eager hands, a flattened version of the inescapable media images of Iraqi crowds or tsunami victims grabbing bags of food from the backs of trucks, now reduced to sublime, privileged gesture.

Another, less grasping crowd stood gathered around several large telescopes at the edge of the east side Boat Pond. Their lenses were aimed at the top of a Fifth Avenue apartment building, specifically at the Peregrine falcons that had recently been in the news after having their nest first destroyed and then restored thanks to pro-falcon environmentalists. A bunch of people aiming their telescopes at a 5th Avenue predator as it tore a pigeon to pieces — that was the visceral New York I knew.

M paid for my post-Gates coffee — a bad sign, I'd been told, and sure sign of her guilt over wanting to escape. She did take off her sunglasses and find us a table as I got the sugar. She had sad, tired eyes; it might have been all the saffron. We talked about Britcoms, about her tattoo, and her work, and a good nearby Mexican restaurant, and about how people look crazy talking into their cell phones' long wire extension on the street.

I mentioned a recent New York Times article about the wealthy parents of kids now headed off to expensive boarding schools. These parents up and move with their kids to the town near the boarding school, so as to avoid the pain of separation. M and I bonded over shared scoffing: these boomer parents simply refused to grow up. We felt good ridiculing those more needy than us, and yet, on the ride home, M told me that instead of taking the F with me all the way to Brooklyn, that she would prefer to stay on the C and change for the F, by herself, at Jay Street. I said that was fine and that it was nice meeting her and she said you too and I said I'll e-mail you and she said definitely.

Originally published by Flak Magazine, 2005 (http://www.flakmag.com)

Veronica
by Mary Gaitskill
Pantheon
Ever since Bad Behavior, her story collection of psychical and sexual irruption, was published in 1986, Mary Gaitskill has been one of the most transgressive American writers working today, shining a harsh light on the contradictory dynamic of desire and repulsion, awareness and blindness. She's focused primarily on the pain specific to women in her previous fiction, and Gaitskill's new novel, Veronica, is her first book-length work of fiction in eight years. Only slightly less obsessed with psychological and sexual trauma as her earlier writing, Gaitskill's also turned spiritual, and even hopeful in her latest work.

The narrator of Veronica, Alison drops into and out of and back into modeling, first in Paris, then in New York. She starts as a girl handing out flowers in storefronts, then she's in East Village parties and sharing an office with the novel's title character, a proofreader given to wearing bowties and men's suits. Veronica draws Alison into the "fiercingly ugly" exuberance of her world. The thrill of hatred as well as love is the closest thing to redemption for most of Veronica — the liberation of the psyche from oppressive norms. "Models are stupid cows," one character enthuses.

Alison's mother is also repeatedly referred to as a cow, a designation she earns falling flat on her face in a parking lot in front of her husband and young daughter. "She lifted her head and made a long, low moan, like a cow." Ten-year-old Alison looks to her father, who is "smiling, like it was really funny to see my mom fall on her face and make a stupid noise."

A few years ago it was the C word that finally buckled and went mainstream. Is the same thing happening here with the particular misogyny of calling a woman a "cow"? Gaitskill could be leading the charge, yet there's ambivalence in her work over appropriating male jargon — the self-hatred still stings even as the invective is aimed outward; bad karma's everywhere.

Gaitskill worked as a stripper and there's always been a detached self-exposure to her fiction. Nearly 20 years after Bad Behavior, Veronica still has its hand down its own pants — open an apartment door and a woman is sitting on the couch in dirty underwear; a pretty boy bears a canker sore on one lip; a chained masochist crawls around on the floor of a sex club. Alison walks around naked in front of her sister, who looks away. Pinpointing the moments of squalid sensation, Gaitskill's fiction runs roughshod over such twittering tales of love as Bridget Jones' Diary and her American cousin, chick lit.

The nightmare of simplistic duality creates the stifling quality of Gaitskill's work — her characters are frequently trapped, either by someone else's emotional demands or their own self-blindness. Adding to that familiar raw style, Gaitskill has taken up Joan Didion's territory of epiphanic despair. Didion's narrators were usually observers of a well-to-do American woman who'd gone through Third World hell and come out bruised yet with an austere dignity. Gaitskill stakes a claim in that territory: Alison knows how the whole story ends, and characters are framed in their mortality. Recurring phrases, reminiscent of liturgical responses, end the occasional chapter, lending a fractured quality, while the repetition bears a sliver of hope, of placing the disparate moments into a pattern.
Veronica becomes both child and mother to Alison, and both martyr and anti-martyr. In the Bible, St. Veronica wipes Jesus' face on his way to Calvary, his image staining her shawl forever. There's transcendence in that, but also diminution.

Originally published by Flak Magazine, 2005 (http://www.flakmag.com)

Charlton Heston: 1200 B.C. - 2022 A.D.

If ever there was a Hollywood actor who belonged in period costume, swinging sword or scepter, who looked utterly lost within the domesticating confines of, say, a chair, it was Charlton Heston, a.k.a. Moses, El Cid, Judah Ben-Hur, John the Baptist, Michelangelo. Heston spent most of his film time where he belonged: on a horse, behind a chariot, in the desert, in chains with muscles greased. Custom-made for the late 1950s and early 1960s sword-and-sandal epic, Heston set the standard for the hero who wears his salvation on his torn sleeve. In The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur, El Cid, The Agony and the Ecstasy and The Greatest Story Ever Told he forged an interpretation of Christianity as colorful epic adventure, yet by 1968, past his box-office prime, he took a weird detour with a trio of sci-fi dystopias: Planet of the Apes (1968), The Omega Man (1971) and Soylent Green (1973). Heston was, by summer-of-love standards, a corny relic and perfectly suited to these films’ central conflicts of the old world versus the new.

The transition from Bible epic to apocalyptic adventure is a smooth one, considering science fiction’s end-times themes and concern with the nature and fate of humanity. Heston goes out still playing the determined, tortured hero of his earlier days, except the image references now are not to the Bible, but to societal concerns—the bomb, war, the environment, and above all, permissive youth culture. Yet by the time Heston had gone from the beginnings of Christianity via DeMille-style epics to the end of the world, his grit-teeth religiosity has been replaced by harsh fatalism. Not only had the world come to an end, it probably wasn’t worth saving to begin with, and since “the world” is other people, these late 1960s and early 1970s films serve up a portrait of American alienation a long way from Heston’s confident early portraits of sweaty salvation. In the later sci-fi films, the Heston persona is at odds with a world gone wrong, and he battles not only bad guys but also the isolation he once cherished but which now fails to satisfy. By the end of each film he learns to love again, 1960s style, but society will have none of it, and he returns to the isolation from which he came, defeated but unbowed.

At the start of Planet of the Apes, Heston, as Taylor, is a bitter astronaut who, just before dropping into hypersleep to awaken in ape-world, wonders into his flight recorder just how low mankind has sunk during his deep-space absence. Yet he’s no peaceful philosopher: “If this is the best they’ve got here,” he says, judging the alien world’s mute humanoids, “in six months we’ll be running this planet.” Right on cue, the ape hunting party appears and cancels his coup with a bullet to the voice box. The first look Taylor gets at his new masters—a gorilla on horseback—and the first ape-speak he hears, “Smile,” says it all: not only have the monkeys taken over the zoo, they demand that you like it.

Co-adapted from Pierre Boulle’s novel by TV’s high priest of alienation, Rod Serling, Apes is an extended Twilight Zone, more down-the-rabbit-hole allegory than sci-fi adventure, with Taylor as the standard Serling hero dropped into a society so xenophobic that it has no place for him precisely because he is its utter manifestation. Assimilation is impossible for Taylor and not just because he’s a “freak”; he’s a misanthrope and his hatred for society has achieved its purest expression. Ape world is, in a sense, all Taylor’s creation. The joke behind Apes is that, of course, toothy and ripped Heston is superior to the hunched simians. Yet Apes is a comeuppance movie and Taylor must eat humble pie throughout. The story is essentially over once his voice returns and the genre’s action-adventure instincts kick in: Taylor breaks free on the night before he’s due for a gelding, with his cynicism—and his balls—intact.

“Don’t trust anyone over 30,” Taylor advises a young radical chimp in his farewell scene. Happiest aping such youth-culture skepticism, it’s only the first time in these three sci-fi incarnations Heston tries to ally himself with the younger generation’s politics while maintaining his favorite role as lone hero. Taylor has by the final reel become a supposed friend to those struggling for truth, having fought for—and lost—the respect of the ape elders. If Taylor’s changed at all, it’s in his willingness to give a goodbye kiss to she-chimp Dr. Zira; sure, his heart’s been defrosted by his ordeal, in good Christian fashion, but there’s nothing left for Taylor to do except drop out of a society that in the end finds him “so damned ugly”.

In The Omega Man, mankind’s abuses have again brought civilization to a crashing halt. A more haggard Heston plays military scientist Colonel Robert Neville, and at one point a little girl asks him, “Are you God?” It’s a natural question for the actor who got plenty of sand in his eyes as Moses/Judah Ben-Hur/El Cid. Back then the baddies were, respectively, Egyptians, Romans and Muslims, but this time they’re bloodthirsty albino penitents led by TV anchorman turned Luddite big mouth, Matthias (Anthony Zerbe). A military virus has killed off nearly everyone and an empty Los Angeles is Neville’s oyster: for fun he watches Woodstock in a movie theater, ubiquitous machine gun as his date. He recites the film’s words of universal love along with the now-dead flower children, teeth bared in Heston’s trademark squint. The longhairs are better off idealized as celluloid memory. Burning the books and art of the old culture, Matthias’ Family damns the technological world, of which “Neville-the-devil” is a last reminder. In long black drag with mirror shades and facial scabs, the Family’s members stand in as threatening urban hippies, bombarding Neville’s home with accusing chants and catapulted fireballs. Refusing to play scapegoat, Neville rises to the challenge, machine gun in hand, showing the black-robed freaks what a last stand really looks like. Guns are sinful to the group-minded Family, but it has always been the rugged individualist’s weapon of choice.

Yet Neville’s victory is short-lived. Though he finds a woman and soon gets down to repopulating the world over cocktails and heavy-stringed bachelor-pad music, like Taylor in Apes, Neville’s rediscovered humanity leads to a dignified failure. While in Apes it’s off on a horse into the sunset, in Omega Man, it’s martyrdom for the sake of the good hippies: rural, apple-cheeked children who will live off both the land and a jar of dead Neville’s virus-free blood. “Man, you’re hostile,” one kid says on the eve of Neville’s final battle. “You just don’t belong.” In fact, the Heston persona would have it no other way: He belongs in the pre-hippie world, and the lingering final shot of his lifeless body in military flak suit is meant to score points with the boys currently saving the world over in Vietnam.

In Soylent Green‘s final scene, Heston, as New York detective Thorn, cries the immortal line, “Soylent Green is people!” revealing the film’s awful secret of state-sponsored cannibalism. The line just as well could be identifying the real enemy: The year is 2022, and New York City has a population of 40 million impoverished welfare parasites. Heston’s future world is again too far gone for saving, and “people” are the problem, or more specifically, the mass youth culture that has no respect for over-the-hill heroes. In this future, riots are dispersed by police-driven plows, and detective Thorn becomes radicalized only when, after the death of Ten Commandments  co-star Edward G. Robinson (in his last role), he follows the old man’s corpse to the factory that transforms it into the titular crackers. The only role left for Heston on the cusp of the environmentalist 1970s is whistle-blower. Will paternalism free the apathetic masses? The future is as uncertain as the final shot of Thorn’s bloodied, upraised hand—power to the people or take a bite?

Together, this trio of sci-fi films was Heston’s lowbrow swan song, and what lingers are his iconic poses: Taylor on the beach with nuked Lady Liberty, Neville’s Vietnam-homage death, and Thorn’s raised activist hand. But despite their social themes, however, these stories resolve in a very private space: the loner route is seen as the best defense against social upheaval, a viewpoint that gloomier sci-fi films shares with the western and film noir. The cast-of-thousands muscular religious faith of Heston’s epics in the end was supplanted by the individual’s exhausted shrug. The only solution offered by these films is a dignified withdrawal. “Don’t try to follow us,” the future N.R.A. spokesman Heston says at the end of Apes, as he displays his rifle, “I’m pretty handy with this thing.”

Originally published by PopMatters, April 9, 2008 (www.popmatters.com)