Artist Poems
By Marc Straus
Marc Straus only began writing poetry seriously in 1991 when he joined a workshop at the 92nd Street Y. Within the next year, his poems were accepted to major literary journals including Field, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review and TriQuarterly.
In 1993, he was the recipient of a poetry fellowship at Yaddo. He frequently writes about cancer medicine, about the dialogue between patients and health care providers, about ethics, and most importantly, about how information is conveyed and received.
Louise Bourgeois, The Runaway, 1998 Glass, steel, mirrors and pink marble 84 x 79 x 54in
THE RUNAWAY
Louise Bourgeois
Pink feet ─ what was I thinking ─
you can’t run barefoot in Aruba:
hot sand, the sun so strong, she’d
blister instantly, and those ankles,
stiff, a bit arthritic, and what
was I thinking to place them on
a pedestal, a thin steel shelf, up
on tip-toe no less, just the slightest
nudge and she’d fall over, and who
exactly did I think could stand there
that way, all her weight on tiny
metatarsals, on tightly stretched hamstring
muscles, and then, unexpectedly placed
in a cage, not even an ordinary cage, this
from discarded gating: steel, rusted
remnants, perhaps part of some massive
Cyclone fence ─ who knows, maybe a mile
around, maybe the innermost links around a vast
prison complex, with doors on heavy hinges, with
some windows ─ why? now nearly opaque,
shards of glass, a corrugated view perhaps
to the damp cemetery beyond , and
which is better it begs, being inside
or out, and three large circular mirrors
that swivel, that I now acknowledge
I added at the end, one center top,
two to the sides, so that the last light
before nightfall will catch the pink feet,
so that from outside everything inside
is visible, fully exposed, not even
a centimeter to hide, like our darkest
memories, our hidden souls, my mother’s
forefingers on the loom, my father’s fine-silk
red-striped tie, the 17th century French tapestry,
a hunting scene, the accordion- breath of
each day, of vanity, stepping, stepping
forward, rainclouds in the breach, all is
entropy that begins with vanity, and this
Runaway I made at age eighty-seven, my
Youth, stepping, stepping, forward.
John Newsom, The Great Divide, 2005-6 Oil on canvas, 90 x 120
THE GREAT DIVIDE
If there is sky or ground then it is all orange blaze
slashed with cords of white, a mid-afternoon July
gleaming and bright, great burning globes of red
etching our retina, spiders black and brown, lithe
and playful, caterpillars, larvae, cocoons, and flowers,
lots of flowers in full bloom, and finally in this miasma
of effortlessness, an absence of a wheat field, river sluice,
windmill ˗ nothing made or grown purposely, and,
perhaps that’s it, this is the great divide,
an unabashedly brilliant world unsullied by man.
John McCracken, Black Plank, 1967, polyester resin, fiberglass, and plywood
PLANK
John McCracken
April 2011
I bend my bone against the plane. It is as if
I am leaning and the plank is straight. The blue resin
is the color of my veins and the red
is my hair.
There is a hill I remember from childhood, brown
and spare with a single majestic pine that had
no business being there but then nothing could be
the same without it.
I think about that pine, I think about sitting beneath it
and feeling as though now it’s just the two of us
against the barrenness and sky. Love
is like that.
How everything might be simplified and how
I am only a few molecules amongst so many
others. Some day scatter me and leave
a couple of planks behind.
Wolfgang Laib, Rice House, 2007, granite and rice, 6.7 x 5.5 x 36.2 inches
RICE HOUSE
Wolfgang Laib
Black stone I found in a little Madras quarry, which
Mr. Ravikumar owns, such a bright laugh, only half
his upper teeth, through which he says that I always
select a fragment that is unsellable and therefore
it is forbidden for him to charge me anything, with which
I cautiously remind him, that I am an alchemist, I will take
his forty-six inch long, nine inch wide, seven inch high
uneven stone and blacken it even more with thick black
cobbler’s oil, that I will set it down and layer it around
with coarse uncooked rice and then pack it in my studio
in a fine crate and ship it to New York where a gallery
on West 29th Street will sell it for more money than most people
make in a year, so as for this bitter rock that nobody else wants
he is obliged to charge me to recirculate it’s worth, to feed
his family and workers and perhaps something left over to thank
his Gods for my Rice House, for finding this rough but
necessary stone, for reminding me of my roots, a medical
student from a quaint village in Germany, a surgeon, Herr Laib
expected me to be, and my mother, always tired to the bone,
her youth extinguished in a terrible war, a war in which Germany’s
soul was lost, after which she gave birth to me six years later
in a quiet vacant room, wanting no worldly clamor, only
a place to soak up acrid memory, and then one morning
back just after my medical studies, she served me breakfast :
an empty plate, an empty bowl, a white porcelain coffee cup
set down perfectly and nothing inside and when I walked out
that day the sun full and yellow on the fields, I went to
India ─ two years in silence and then I returned
and slowly gathered fresh beeswax ─ it was everywhere,
tiny droplets like earth’s breath, and I shaped them
into small mounds, and then pollen, everyday out
in the fields, a month’s journeying to fill a plateful,
and then milk stone, and rock like this, and eventually
I placed them on floors, stone floors, oak floors, concrete
floors, bowls of pollen, staircases made of pure wax,
wax mounds up on trestles, rocks with hand-sprinkled rice
about the circumference, whispers, prayers, the rock
and the pollen and the wax perfectly still, the puffing
of millions of bees, the mating of sunflowers, the remnants
of a volcano, atoms of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen
grafted from trees and living and porous things
from millions and billions of years ago, new life and
sustenance, and here we are in an angstrom of time
and it is only we who have the capacity to reorganize
what God set down, gently and quietly, a ceremony,
so that and in our brief journey we are timeless too,
an uneven rock left behind, perfect and magisterial, set down,
oiled, surrounded by a few grains of rice by hand.
Marin Majic, Bild, 2011 Oil on Canvas 73 x 88.5 inches
YELLOW COUCH
Marin Majic: Bild, Oil on canvas, 2012
The fabric maker slept here
while the bird perched on its pedestal
and the black cat licked her paws
listlessly near the yellow couch −
yard goods, tickings, and flounces
piled high, gone now, looted
during Crystalnacht, youths
with no use for them except
to tell their friends,
and this photo by one of them
who has returned at age ninety-one:
silence, rafters, coruscating light,
the yellow couch still there, and the
bird, perhaps even the same black
bird with a memory of that fabric maker
so many years ago.
Carl Andre, Aluminum Square 8, 2008 64 copper plates each 0,5 x 40 x 40 cm
64 Aluminum Squares, 1969
CARL ANDRE AND DONALD JUDD
in Andre’s studio
July 11, 1970
CARL ANDRE:
When I first made my twelve inch copper plates
last year, I admit now I was thinking of Rothko, those
magisterial canvases of magenta and red, and
I wanted to genuflect in a Jew’s studio: the silence
of the paintings was almost unbearable, and I told
Mark that until these works only Titian and Botticelli
had license to such red, and then on February
25th – it is impossible to forget – he lay in a bathtub
of blood, the porcelain saturated with crimson,
as though he was saying, that’s it, there is no more
to do, and then last week Barney died, and I have
this exhibit in two months at the Guggenheim
and it is hopeless because Newman never compromised,
not that son-of-a-bitch who painted those stations
over ten years that will breathe for hundreds more,
and me, I have a stack of bricks, (’66), my copper
squares, lead squares, aluminum, and just now I know
I am a charlatan, a sycophant, a fucking brakeman
on the railroad for four years, an idiot from Quincy,
Mass. of all places, who is presumptuous enough
to have quoted Brancusi and even Henry Moore, but
you know what – and I may be drunk as hell and if
you ever repeat this I will say you kissed up to
Clement Greenberg, and that is about as evil
as anything I can think of – my favorite work
is my aluminum plates, the 64 eight inch squares
sitting over there, and they are nothing without Rothko
and Newman, and what Waldmann will write
for the Guggenheim catalog is that the work
is part of a new American post-modernism- Judd
and Flavin, not to slight you Donald, but she will say
that Flavin was first, his ’64 fluorescents, the Tatlins,
his homage to you, and I was second, and your stacks
were last, which are ironically, aluminum, at least most
of them, and though you deny it, have you ever thought
that they are really pictures as well, thick canvases
on the wall, and as much as you may say that Beuys
is a fascist, let’s face it, he lined up objects like salami slices
before you or I even dreamed of aluminum objects,
which in my case is admittedly more about the material
than the fabrication, more about a reflection of our
humanness, our earth, our natural elements, the gravity
that keeps our feet to the ground, without embellishment,
without Plexiglas which you have added to those stacks,
which doesn’t mean that I don’t like them, which I do
very much, it’s your constant need for perfection, for every
angle and joint to be perfect, everything is perfect, and me,
I just wanted a bunch of aluminum plates, store bought,
store cut, maybe 3/8 inch thick, with any imperfection
that may be intrinsic to the aluminum, and then we line
them up in any order as long as they form a square, and
then you know what, I don’t give a shit if they walk on it,
in fact I would prefer that they do because then my 64 squares
come between humans and the ground they walk on, to
step on my canvas if you will, and yes, there is some Beuys
here and some Duchamp, but look, Marcel didn’t mean for
anyone to use his shovel, to use his bicycle wheel, and as
much as he deobjectified the object, the clever bastard always
foresaw its museum context, its preciousness, and I think
that art really is more than thinking it is art, it is a connection
at its best between the molecules of being human and the molecules
of the earth that makes our living possible: sand, aluminum,
lead, copper – and if not for gravity then we wouldn’t have bones,
we would hover without form, and I am not certain then
how humans make love, how they eat and regurgitate and begin
over, how they will understand art unless they understand
it is in their cells, in the frigging dirt under their feet, and when
they look down at the aluminum the sky and the lights
are reflective, exactly because this has nothing to do with
mirrors, this is about collecting tickets on the train, this is
about walking along Broadway, going in and out of each shop
on Canal, the linen stores on Grand, peering into the pastry shops
on Mott, and you know what – at the Guggenheim they will
cordon off my aluminum, a guard with epaulets won’t let
children near and they will grow up thinking that art
is the pastry paintings and doilies in the Met, that art is about
people with talent who paint with brushes, landscapes
and still lifes and they will never know that the kickstand
on their Schwinn is elegant, their grandmother’s
kneecap, the arc of Koufax’s throw to home plate, which is
why I made these fucking things – 64 aluminum squares.
DONALD JUDD:
Just six weeks ago Eva Hesse died, May 29th
to be precise, and it is she that I constantly bicker
with, not Rothko or Newman; Eva, only thirty-four,
(brain tumor, for God sakes), and that twenty-eight
year-old, Bruce Nauman – both of them – latex,
cement, rope, rubber, fiberglass – discord, finger-
prints, footprints – they are everywhere in their art,
and I am removing myself as far as possible –
not a mark, not a finger scratch on my new progression,
and to be perfectly truthful I don’t think it’s Barney either,
or even Rothko that you struggle against, I think it’s Warhol –
your 64 aluminum squares in opposition to his 64
Jackies, the Marilyns, postage stamps, soup cans,
all so orderly and squared off, especially the grey ones,
the grey Elvises, and all you did was rant and rave
when we first saw them at Leo’s in ’62, and you and
Flavin were stone drunk as usual threatening to draw mustaches
on the Marilyns like Duchamp did to a Mona Lisa drawing,
(I had to remind you), and thank goodness for Bob Rauschenberg,
who slapped you hard on the back and said take it back
to your studio kid, kick the shit out of these, make these Marilyns
disappear, and that my friend is what this aluminum work is,
the negation of the 64 Warhol images, the Marilyns and Jackies
flat on their backs, gone, exactly where they belong,
and today I can tell you that it was a truly lucky turn of events,
and really lucky that we had forgotten at the time
that Bob Rauschenberg had destroyed a Duchamp.
CARL ANDRE:
We are at war: 10 boxes, 64 squares, it doesn’t matter
really whose head we piss on, as long as they are crushed
beneath our feet – Beuys, Newman, Warhol, Rothko, and
in my case, all carefully hidden under aluminum plates,
stepped on, a memory trace at best, and let’s face it,
it’s always been this way, Picasso standing on Cezanne’s
head, Henry Moore on Arp, Rothko on the Fauves –
and if I am lucky a whole lot of shitheads not yet
in those prissy art schools will try to piss on me.