Michael Stipe’s Infinity Mirror (Photo: Toby Tenenbaum/Brooklynvegan.com)
There was a time when art was cool—books, movies, music, paintings, sculptures—you could love what you loved, proudly and without reservation. For me, as a child and then a teen from a small town, I wanted to pull all of it into me, to make it part of who I was, or who I was becoming, or who I wanted to be. And this feeling stayed with me right up until I made it to graduate school. Critical theory killed me, or nearly did, because it made it wrong to think anything was cool. Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence was a wrecking ball. “What we used to call ‘imaginative literature’ is indistinguishable from literary influence,” he writes in the preface. Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” was another. “To give an Author to a text,” Barthes writes, “is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing.”
There were other such texts, of course, texts which were read (or misread) to deny the very act of imagination itself, as if art was simply a structure built by social and political forces, ultimately designed to be used for some other intellectual purpose—to make a point or to tear down another. I found it difficult to understand why anyone would ever want to discount the author of a work, for it felt—and still feels—like a denial of the best of what art really is: the singular and individual act of a heart, a mind, a soul reaching out to grasp hold of another heart, another mind, another soul.
Which is to say that I still think art’s cool. Books. Movies. Bands. Literary magazines. There’s a lot of cool stuff out there and cynicism is death.
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Earlier this month I had the good fortune of being on the East Coast during the run of Michael Stipe’s new art show, The Infinity Mirror, at the Journal Gallery in Brooklyn. Then I had the double good fortune that my friend Julie Panebianco was in town, and since she is friends with Michael, he made himself available to show us around. Emily Nemens, The Paris Review’s new editor, joined us and I told her I was so overwhelmed by the prospect of meeting Michael that I was afraid I’d burst into tears.
When I said earlier that I still think art’s cool, what I really meant to talk about was Michael.
I discovered R.E.M. with the 1987 release of Document. There were no college radio stations where I grew up and so it took me a little longer than most to discover the great music of my own era, but once I did there was no going back. Document changed my heart and I dived backwards into their previous albums (all on cassette): Dead Letter Office, Reckoning, Murmur, Chronic Town, Life’s Rich Pageant, and Fables of the Reconstruction, an album so goddamn miraculous that I felt I had fallen into a fever dream each time I listened to it. That a band from distant Athens, Georgia—a place I had never heard of and still have not visited—could speak to me so profoundly, and in language I did not even know I needed to hear, was itself a kind of unparalleled weirdness, a shock of strange recognition I would later feel when encountering the work of Joseph Cornell, the blues of Blind Willie Johnson, and the poetry of Rilke: a crossing-through of time and space to sink directly into the hot, thick muscle of the heart.
Part of my interest in R.E.M. was literary, for I had just discovered William Faulkner and Flanner O’Connor and James Dickey’s poetry and all the rest. The American South seemed a strange and wonderful and terrible place to me, and it also felt distinct in ways that my rural Northern California upbringing did not. The South had a culture and I could not locate the culture of the West.
But R.E.M. knew exactly where they were from and their music seemed to churn out of that swampy mystery. I was overwhelmed by the sound of it, by the feel of those album covers, by the enigma of the lyrics, and especially by the vocalist, Michael Stipe, whose tenor was so fraught with emotion that the very sound of it would bring me to tears. It still does.
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Michael Stipe’s work as a photographer and curator begins, at least for me, with the cover of R.E.M.’s first album, Murmur, which is graced by a darkly evocative photograph of kudzu overtaking a concrete structure. The image that greets the viewer upon entering the Journal Gallery is a different frame than that now-iconic album cover, but taken in the same location. Where the original is stark and devoid of clear subject, The Infinity Mirror version—which runs from gallery floor to ceiling—contains a centered figure dressed in a coat, hat, and scarf, looking almost like some bewildered Doctor Who. This was my first introduction to Jeremy Ayers, a name which was often repeated as Michael led Emily and Julie and I through the gallery, through two huge walls of black and white photographs, many of men, the frames of which boxed hard upon their naked forms, and to an open series of clear, colored shelves containing a great collection of ephemera that, as a whole, are a showcase of Michael’s artistic development and influences.
Patti Smith is present everywhere: a 7” single, lyrics, various photographs of her that Michael has taken over the years of their friendship. Other influences are present as well: pyrite cubes mirrored and sculpted in cardboard, a plastic figurine of the Hunchback of Notre Dame, books on film and photography, texts by Jean Genet and Joan Didion, a People magazine with David Bowie on the cover, a Blade Runner comic book. Warhol is here, as is Ginsberg, James Dean, Marlon Brando. And here is Jeremy Ayers again, not only as himself but, in drag, as Silva Thinn, part of Warhol’s Factory. Michael calls Ayers his first love and the man’s recent passing, in October of 2016, transformed this great unpacking of influences into a tribute of mourning. There is more death creeping among the ephemera: Michael’s father, for one, and Kurt Cobain and River Phoenix, the latter photograph accompanied by the lyrics to “Nature Boy,” a song made famous by Nat King Cole.
What is clear is that there is no anxiety of influence here and the author is very much present in the work. This is a physical diary comprised of objects of deep and persistent personal meaning—often physical, tangible, specific, but just as often metaphoric, imagistic, referential—like a private apothecary cabinet unlocked, all drawers open. It is as much about awakening—to the artistic, to the physical, to queerness, to love—as it is about the passage of time and how influences, connections, and experiences individually and collectively make an artist.
The through lines are myriad but Ayers is the clearest of them. A multifaceted and multitalented artist working in performance, drag, collage, sound, movement, writing, and drawing, Ayers may well have been an early blueprint for the kind of artist a much younger Michael Stipe longed to be, an artistic father figure, a mentor, perhaps even the mentor, since throughout The Infinity Mirror one feels Ayers’s influence in both the variety of objects assembled and in the disconcertingly personal quality of that assemblage, the quality of secrets laid bare for all the see.
My own Infinity Mirror would include a stack of cassettes and the book Michael Stipe gave me at the end of our visit: Volume 1 of his projected series of art books, this one in collaboration with Jonathan Berger. Who knows what the rest of the mirror would contain, but I know that Michael would be there. Emily and Julie would be there. The whole experience would be there, somehow, shimmering like such memories do. Because cynicism is boring. And I still think, god help me, that art is cool.
from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/2NFfruJ
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