by Jerome du Bois
[I wrote this way back on March 4th, but for some reason I decided against publishing it. I really can't remember why; perhaps I was feeling strangely merciful. Well. That's over.]
I usually don't bother with locals anymore, but I must come to the defense of word art, which Catherine and I practice, and human dignity, which we promote, and human intelligence, which we embody.
Major local drama queen Gregory Sale continues to exploit his dead partner Ronald James Winterrowd, a long decade gone, only now he uses excerpts from some journal in four-foot-high "paintings" of red lowercase letters run together without spaces. You can see two photos in the NT studio visit here. (But not at the gallery site where they're showing now --only a one-line announcement. Great promotion, JRC.) I'll get to the content in just a sentence or three, but first I have to note the discrepancy between what he put on the canvas and what he says here:
Why typography jazzes him: I'm interested in the spacing of the letters. It's a little bit like a crossword puzzle. . . . My partner who passed away, who I wrote about, he was a graphic designer. So I certainly had a chunk of time when I lived with it. I've been exposed to it a lot.
It didn't stick. This is the Director of Visual Art for the Arizona Commission on the Arts, remember. We pay him big money to make aesthetic judgements, and his are lousy. Some clown over at Writers Bloc --maybe even Sale's colleague Kevin Vaughan-Brubaker, we dunno-- wrote that Sale was known for "his distinctly witty critiques, ironic observations of modern life, and for his public work in arts administration." Hard to believe. I've written elsewhere about my love of letterforms. The spacing between the letters --that's deep, man. But the only reason to keep everything lowercase and no punctuation and no spacing between the words is so that everyone knows it's Art, and not just an enlarged journal entry. Plus, if it's hard to read, so much the better. Undermine every reason for having an alphabet, every hard-earned rule. Use words against themselves and make the reader work for every one, for increasingly diminishing returns.
But what the reader deciphers is lugubriously icky, at least to Catherine and I: a death scene, with Mr. Sale rubbing his bedbound, wasted partner's third eye. (He doesn't even mention the guy's name in the "interview," by the way.) It really was beautiful. I hurt. I knew beyond anything else that it was his time.
Awww. And you couldn't keep this unrepeatable transit and transition between yourself and your beloved, could you, Mr. Sale? (I don't even know if Ronald would object, actually. Maybe he was a drama queen, too. And knew beyond anything else, as an English phrase, mystifies me.) Because we're in the Rebarb and you apparently embrace it, you have no compunction about sharing a private moment with the world. You feel you have to, perhaps, even now, even though he's been dead for years, because you're out of ideas, Mr. Sale, if you ever had any; so that even a human life you loved is art fodder.
Oh, reader, do you think that's harsh? You must be new to this blog. How's this? Why didn't he enlarge Mr. Winterrowd's death certificate to four feet, festoon it in off-center ways with bedheadshots of Ronald near the end of his tether, photolithograph it all to a canvas, and overwrite an inscription in his AIDS-infected blood? Wojnarowicz weeps.
You want to read more? because this stranger to reason, supported by lots of taxpayer dollars, provides plenty of fodder himself --for satire and for indignation. The idiocy flows freely . . .
From Leanne Potts's typically supine and complacent "interview," with her comments in bold:
If you want to be noticed, paint your story instead of writing it. We have text all around. It's everywhere. We drive down the street and we just kind of block it out. It's like white noise. I'm trying to find a way to rejuvenate it somehow.
Start, dumbass, by speaking for yourself. We? Who we? How about you? We --King & du Bois-- notice all kinds of stuff on the street. How about you start by not blocking out the text all around you on the street? You live downtown, Mr. Sale. Our second piece in the Pride of Phoenix Series focused precisely on the signage of local art galleries, right in your newboorhood; a large part of your job description and statutory charge, wouldn't you say? Oh, but you're blocking it out. Well, give yourself one upside da head, and wake up.
Oops. Too late:
He's not staring into space. He's making art. Because my text pieces are based on story, on thoughts, I can be working on that in my head. My studio is in my head.
Extraordinary news: Gregory Sale thinks. We have it on record, now.
Look, Mr. Sale: This is real word art. And this. And this. And this. And this. And these two, by Catherine King. Your tired, timid letterings are mere mutterings in the basement. Oh, and Fort Guerin --Screw you, too, squinty scribbler.
Why some of the words in the finished paintings of text are crossed out: I wanted to keep [the text snippet] alive. This wasn't just a copy I came up with, it's still an active thing. Plus, after I got it this big, I realized it could be further edited.
It's only when the words got bigger that he noticed the sentences needed editing? What horse manure. A finely-tuned and finally-edited sentence or phrase is the most alive --active, allusive, vivid-- version of the thought it embodies.
This man evaluates proposals presented to him by aspirants. They have presumably made sure to dot all their i's and cross all their t's; but Gregory Sale can drag a brush through his lowercase droning the livelong day, and then reject some poor near-perfectionist who didn't get the rules about the 35mm slides right.
Yes, it really is all about me: If I'm going to really look at the topic of love, let me go inside. Let me look at Gregoryland. What have been some of Gregory's journeys?
So far as I know, just one, which he's been vamping on for about ten years, by my reckoning. Gregoryland is Gaywasteland, apparently. And even if it wasn't, his motivation inevitably leads to mediocrity. Because really, is his connected, kozykool, covered-by-insurance life a worthy subject for art? The answer is no. Where has he been, what has he done that's different from a hundred thousand other wannabe aesthetes? Nothing that shows. The gay struggle is over, especially in the art world. He's coasting, lah-dee-fuckin-dah. Just as real people should rise above themselves, real art should reach beyond the subjective toward universal human values. We all share the experience of death and, if we're lucky, the experience of love. Gregory Sale shortsells both by acting as if he --this stalled and stunted man-- invented them. But his soul is too shrunken for such swollen notions.
Hail, Mary: This is a watercolor stain [in the painting Walking Through Water]. It's thinned with holy water.
How edgy. You smell the stink of the cheap pomo perfume he gets off those two words? But maybe it's just more horse manure. This is a guy who lies, after all, for some of his art, impersonating people on the phone or allowing his gender to be misunderstood telephonically. So maybe he's lying about the holy water, too. Who could tell without him telling it to them? And how would holy water change the damn lousy "painting" anyway?
Use your time wisely. One of the ways I've maintained my creativity while I've had a full-time job is I can't plan these huge sculptural projects because I just don't have the time. But I can sit down at my office/studio/desk and draw or paint for an hour. That way you don't need all of Saturday to make art. A lot of little moments add up to a larger block of time.
What a dimwit. For starters, he left out a crucial phrase in the first sentence, between "full-time job" and "I can't plan." He should have said,
One of the ways I've maintained my creativity while I've had a full-time job is by realizing that I can't plan these huge sculptural projects because I just don't have the time.
This is funny:
But I can sit down at my office/studio/desk and draw or paint for an hour. That way you don't need all of Saturday to make art.
"So the guy's a Sunday painter after all," says Catherine, "and he admits it."
I can't tell you how many hours of Saturdays and Sundays and every day that Catherine and I work on art --the making of physical objects-- no matter what else is going on in our lives. This paper-shuffling bureaucrat Sale --dippity-doo-dah, dippity-A-- is just a piker when it comes to putting in the time, the bust-ass labor, of making art. All of Saturday. Shite! This is an artist?
Master, schmaster: I like tossing myself into something I don't really have mastery of. I can grab a mistake and follow it, and see what it tells me. It adds realness. There's possibility there.
Unbelieveable.
I like tossing myself into something I don't really have mastery of.
And it's got you hired into a cushy job, probably more by your schmoozing than your tossing.
I can grab a mistake and follow it, and see what it tells me.
It's telling you that you've made a mistake, over and over, but you won't listen and it doesn't matter anyway because these days they reward your kinds of incompetence and lack of imagination; it's reassuring to them; your foreseeable future is assured.
It adds realness. There's possibility there.
Your recent paintings resemble the work of a five-year-old learning the alphabet. You are forty-four. And the way you talk here is on the same intellectual level. That's what's real. And there's no "there" in "There's possibility there," nowhere man.
Posted by Jerome at April 14, 2006 11:15 AM | TrackBack