Skip to main content

There’s Always Dairy

Why not?

It’s rough out there for artists and writers right now, I know. There are days when you just want to throw in the towel, say fuck it, fake your own death, give insurance fraud a go, and live out of a Winnebago somewhere in remote Ontario. That’s a good plan—that’s a really good plan—but remember, you’ve got options.

You might just need a little breather, is all. Before you go permanently AWOL, consider Reuben Kadish, the artist, who died twenty-four years ago today. After World War II, when he had a family to support and couldn’t find a cheap place to live in New York or even on Long Island, Kadish decided to check out for a while: he bought a disused dairy farm in Vernon, New Jersey. Despite knowing nothing about the operation, he ran it, apparently with great success, for ten years. When he moved to the place, he was a painter; when he reemerged as an artist, he was a sculptor, his hands having imbibed the ways of farm life. This could be you. 

Best of all: no one really seems to know why Kadish did this, including Kadish himself. In an interview conducted just months before he died, he remembered the experience:

The main gist of my activity at that particular time, 45-'46, was to find a place to live, and unfortunately I couldn't find a place to live in New York, so I moved out to the country, New Jersey, and lost and separated myself. I could have been living in Kansas. I think it was one of the really major mistakes in my life—not that I didn't enjoy working with animals, I got a lot out of it … It was a dairy farm, and I became a rather successful dairy farmer, and it said something to me that I think eventually put itself back into my work. And the day came when there was only one thing to do: either forget about being an artist, or else chuck the whole dairy business and rent the farm out. And that's what happened. There was a public sale, the cows were sold, the machinery was sold, and that was it. And I began to teach.

The artist Herman Cherry, writing in a piece to accompany an exhibition of Kadish’s sculptures that same year, was also unable to discern his motives:

He became a dairy farmer for ten years. Why a dairy farmer? I have not been able to get a reasonable answer from him that explains why he derailed his talent during these years, why he dropped completely out of the art world.

Had Reuben, after so many years as a painter, lost touch with himself and with the inner struggles that had given him so much joy and pain and so much fulfillment? What could take its place? It is my opinion that Reuben used the farm years to reconsider his position … Dairy farming was back-breaking work, but in his spare time Reuben worked on some drawings. In other words, he kept his hand in. After five years he broke the mold and made his first terra cotta—a small nude. It would be five more years before he would give up farming permanently to devote himself fully to sculpture.

I know what you’re thinking: Kadish himself describes the episode, if a decade can be reduced as such, as a “big mistake,” and Cherry treats it with incredulity. I’m not selling it very well. But Rueben’s son, Dan, still owns the place to this day—he must’ve seen something in it. And in a memoir called Night Studio, Musa Mayer, the painter Philip Guston’s daughter, describes an appealingly bucolic experience on Kadish’s farm that does a lot to redeem it:

It was sometime during the summer of 1958, between my sophomore and junior years in high school, when I was fifteen, that I was taken to the Kadish family farm one weekend for a visit … In the barn, Danny tried to show me how to milk a cow, shooting streams of milk from a cow’s full udder into the open mouths of a litter of kittens lying in the hay nearby, and letting me try some too. I can still taste the rich, warm flavor on my tongue., I stood by the shed that served as a stable, admiring the horses, as Ken vaulted on the back of the pony, Buster, who bucked and kicked around the pasture …

All the outside work besides gardening was done by Reuben and his sons. Their ability to fix things was impressive. Danny and Ken had both rebuilt junked cars…. It was beautiful land, that farm, hundreds of acres of lush, rolling green fields and woods and ponds, of hillsides dotted with grazing cows, of pigs and horses and chickens.

That sounds okay. 

All I’m saying is it’s something to keep in mind.

Dan Piepenbring is the web editor of The Paris Review.

The post There’s Always Dairy appeared first on The Paris Review.



from The Paris Review http://ift.tt/2d0uS0n

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...
Post a Comment
Read more

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .   In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...
Post a Comment
Read more