9:00 a.m. - 2002-10-10
master P
I, unfortunately, am not a genius. And, maybe even more unfortunately, I know this. A humbling enough realization with regard to the great minds of science, literature, and philosophy; but still...some little pip of ego held forth that given the time and the resources, I too could isolate quarks or reconcile being and time or write the great american novel or whatever. Maintained that what I lacked was motivation, not intellect. It wasn't until I was older that I began to appreciate a mode of genius that silenced that last fallacious squawk of misplaced pride.
I think it happened at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where I worked as a gallery guard for a short while. A short while full of excruciatingly long minutes. The Met's policy was to hire only college graduates as guards...not because you were expected to enlighten visitors with your knowledge of art history (au contraire- we were forbidden from speaking on post, damned to mutely endure critical commentary from all walks of philistine) but rather because Museum management recognized that any individual possessing self-respect enough to better themselves via something like an education would eventually flee in horror from a job as human statuary. This guaranteed a turnover in staff and helped to prevent "old guard syndrome", a condition manifested by a gang of elderly Italian gentlemen from Bensonhurst who, when they weren't sleeping on post or sharing nips from a little schnapps bottle, were playing pinochle down in the break room. It was a union gig you see, and by the time you'd become truly burnt-out, lazy, or indifferent, you'd also become virtually un-fireable and locked into a schedule of guaranteed pay-raises. So these guys would sit and gamble their 20-years-in-the-union paychecks back and forth and count the days until their next vacation while group after group of bright-eyed liberal arts majors withered into zombi-fied husks of their former selves. I've got some theories on why that job took the toll it did on us, but I'm not here to expound on them. So instead of talking about the guard who publicly defecated on the roof garden, or the guard who shot himself in the atrium, or the guard who masturbated in front of a giant hand-carved canoe from New Guinea (oh wait, I think that was me); let me just say that I spent many, many, hours in front of some great paintings (in fact, the experience taught me to reserve judgement on any work of art until I've spent at least 20 silent hrs. in contemplation...preferably in uniform).
So it was on post at The Met that I had this epiphany, that I learned to appreciate Picasso.
"But Ernst," you might ask "I thought you studied art history and all that rubbish? How is it that you had yet to develop an appreciation of Picasso?"
Um...there was a lot a stuff I didn't "get" back in my school days. My creative mentality circa ten years ago was symptomatic of a lot that was (and is) wrong with studio art. It seemed like every one of my sorry paintings came with its own little manifesto; with its own art-critical user's manual. It wasn't enough that my paintings be "about something (mistake #1), they also had to contain a subtext expounding on what it meant to "be" in a state of being about something. I think I was just getting high on the rhetoric of critical deconstruction...being able to justify my uninspired work via feats of semantic gymnastics felt like...like I'd learned some sort of secret handshake or something. A secret handshake that guaranteed admittance to an elite club, a cynical highbrow brotherhood who threw intellectually-exclusive-but-swingin' parties in some penthouse in some metropolis somewhere over the horizon. Far away from the little cowtown where I went to school. Well, I did eventually find that penthouse party, and it just made me homesick for Texas...but whatever, back to Picasso. I finally got it. Being a guard forced me to just shut the fuck up for a minute and look; the job beat my ego out of the art-critical equation and left my uniformed carcass propped up in front of some great paintings. It started with a big Picasso cubist still life, I believe. Hung, in accordance with curatorial tradition, next to a Braque canvas of the same size, style, subject, and palette. (Poor Braque, man. Such a good painter...destined to hang for eternity next to Picasso. Destined to hang at 35" next to the yardstick of genius). And I dunno, one day it just hit me. Like, every fucking line. Just so effortless.
And maybe that's why I didn't "get" his work earlier. Because traditional art criticism teaches us to examine the process for clues to a painting's meaning, and Picasso doesn't "show his work". He just paints the right answer every time, you know? It's like, why are you looking for "clues", man, just look at the fucking painting! It's right there! ( I think that's why at the end of all his style flippin' Picasso settled on synthetic cubism. A style where you're only marginally beholden to tradition or subject matter, and there's no pretense of philosophic underpinnings to the work [implications, yes, underpinnings, no]. You just paint what looks right to you...which, when you're a genius, is a pretty good game plan.)
A few years later I would read Susan Sontag's Beyond Interpretation, and if you're interested in hearing a brilliant professional thinker flesh out the same revelation this late-for-work carpenter just attempted to describe, you should read it too.
So I confess to coveting the genius of not showing the work.
