took to it for some reason, or because there was absolutely no art on the walls, or because the management had made the decision to put up with temperamental artists. They would gather in the back, in the dark leatherette booths there, and argue about art.”
“Who, exactly?”
“It varied. The ones who liked to argue best, who were best at it, were Bernie Nova and Roger Merebien. And Mahlon Strunk, though he had a slower tongue and seemed older, it may have been more that he was getting some serious attention from the critics and galleries while the rest were still pretty much ignored. Mahlon was the one who took the Surrealist theories most seriously, even though he was from way upstate and very quiet and down-to-earth and
married
, which was a little surreal in itself. He and his wife, Myrtle, walked around in the Village like a working-class couple on a Sunday stroll, in matching gray overcoats. He always carried an umbrella, that’s the kind of cautious person he was, but he believed in automatism. Masson was in this country by then, and had an exhibition at the BuchholzGallery, and he was the Surrealist we could take seriously, as opposed to Dalí, who as I say was technically everything we despised, though after Photorealism I wonder now why we all felt so superior. He was such a different kind of Spaniard from Picasso might have been the problem, though both were showmen, in their ways. I’m sorry, this isn’t the kind of thing you want, is it?”
“I want anything you can give me. It all helps make a picture.”
“It’s so hard, to remember honestly. After over fifty years, nearly sixty. Mahlon was quite nice to Zack, I remember that, and of course the idea that by letting accidents happen on the canvas you could let your subconscious speak was appealing to Zack, who was so messy anyway. Even in the ’thirties, he would draw right on the canvas with the tube. And go over and over a painting till its original image was totally covered up. We were poor but didn’t scrimp on paint. We weren’t so much interested in the craft or the finished product as in what the painting did for the painter. That was the thing, back then, that everybody talked about—getting the
self
out, getting it on canvas. That was why abstraction was so glamorous, it was all
self
. I know it must all seem very naïve to your generation, who don’t believe in the self, who think the self is just a social construct, just as you don’t believe there are writers, just texts that write themselves and can mean anything.” Feeling guilty over her resistant, counter-transferential feelings toward her interviewer, Hope does try to cast her mind back, into that opaque murk of the past.
In the dim back area of the leatherette booths, Roger Merebien’s puffy round face, younger than his years, seemed a white moon, glazed with sweat, insisting on itself in the haze of cigarette smoke and beer vapors. “The so-called‘aesthetic,’ ” he stated in his rather high, affected voice, honed on years of education, Stanford and Columbia and with some English vowels picked up from a post-grad year in Oxford, concentrating not in art but in philosophy, back to the Greeks, back to ontology, “is merely the sensuous aspect of the world—it is not the end of art but a means, a means for getting at, let’s call it, the infinite background of feeling in order to condense it into an object of perception. These objects of perception are basically relational structures, which obliterate the need for representation. The impulse from the unconscious, the automatistic moment, is only a moment, a way to get the painting mind going—probing, finding, completing. Collage is another way of enlisting the random, but how the scraps are manipulated depends on
feeling
, and here an infinite subtlety enters in, a really quite
breath
taking”—his round head seemed to rotate on its neck like a lighthouse beam, as if he dared objection to this girlish
“Who, exactly?”
“It varied. The ones who liked to argue best, who were best at it, were Bernie Nova and Roger Merebien. And Mahlon Strunk, though he had a slower tongue and seemed older, it may have been more that he was getting some serious attention from the critics and galleries while the rest were still pretty much ignored. Mahlon was the one who took the Surrealist theories most seriously, even though he was from way upstate and very quiet and down-to-earth and
married
, which was a little surreal in itself. He and his wife, Myrtle, walked around in the Village like a working-class couple on a Sunday stroll, in matching gray overcoats. He always carried an umbrella, that’s the kind of cautious person he was, but he believed in automatism. Masson was in this country by then, and had an exhibition at the BuchholzGallery, and he was the Surrealist we could take seriously, as opposed to Dalí, who as I say was technically everything we despised, though after Photorealism I wonder now why we all felt so superior. He was such a different kind of Spaniard from Picasso might have been the problem, though both were showmen, in their ways. I’m sorry, this isn’t the kind of thing you want, is it?”
“I want anything you can give me. It all helps make a picture.”
“It’s so hard, to remember honestly. After over fifty years, nearly sixty. Mahlon was quite nice to Zack, I remember that, and of course the idea that by letting accidents happen on the canvas you could let your subconscious speak was appealing to Zack, who was so messy anyway. Even in the ’thirties, he would draw right on the canvas with the tube. And go over and over a painting till its original image was totally covered up. We were poor but didn’t scrimp on paint. We weren’t so much interested in the craft or the finished product as in what the painting did for the painter. That was the thing, back then, that everybody talked about—getting the
self
out, getting it on canvas. That was why abstraction was so glamorous, it was all
self
. I know it must all seem very naïve to your generation, who don’t believe in the self, who think the self is just a social construct, just as you don’t believe there are writers, just texts that write themselves and can mean anything.” Feeling guilty over her resistant, counter-transferential feelings toward her interviewer, Hope does try to cast her mind back, into that opaque murk of the past.
In the dim back area of the leatherette booths, Roger Merebien’s puffy round face, younger than his years, seemed a white moon, glazed with sweat, insisting on itself in the haze of cigarette smoke and beer vapors. “The so-called‘aesthetic,’ ” he stated in his rather high, affected voice, honed on years of education, Stanford and Columbia and with some English vowels picked up from a post-grad year in Oxford, concentrating not in art but in philosophy, back to the Greeks, back to ontology, “is merely the sensuous aspect of the world—it is not the end of art but a means, a means for getting at, let’s call it, the infinite background of feeling in order to condense it into an object of perception. These objects of perception are basically relational structures, which obliterate the need for representation. The impulse from the unconscious, the automatistic moment, is only a moment, a way to get the painting mind going—probing, finding, completing. Collage is another way of enlisting the random, but how the scraps are manipulated depends on
feeling
, and here an infinite subtlety enters in, a really quite
breath
taking”—his round head seemed to rotate on its neck like a lighthouse beam, as if he dared objection to this girlish
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