To all artists, known and unknown
I remember seeing a threadbare individual sitting in the cafe of the San Francisco Art Institute in 1992. He was very different from the rest of the people there. He was old, old in hard years, there was none of the mellow patina of the well ensconced. He was in the cafe every day I was there, always sitting alone, always smoking and nursing a cup of coffee. He was most striking in his appearance because of the discrepancy between his physical and what seemed to be his psychic circumstances. He was worn, his physical being was worn, his clothes were fragile, almost brittle, garments that were different than the casually abused garments the students sometimes wore that said "I don't care," clothing understood to be a low priority in defining the things they stood for. His threadbare garments said "I do care," not only about preserving the garment for economic reasons but about the ritual of caring itself, a precious continuity expressed in the threadbare trousers worn at the seams, white at the line of the upturned cuff, perhaps pressed nightly beneath a mattress, His clothing and his bearing were a diagram of that of caring. He was always clean-shaven and fastidious in his appearance.
His flesh was another matter. It reflected too much sun, too much liquor, too many times taking in too much, not enough sleep, not enough food, reddened eyes that greet the dawn drawing another blank after a night of tumultuous inquiry, too much life to ever be arrested in likeness. His visage reminded me of some of the portraits by Ivan LeLoraine Albright, an obsessive curmudgeon and an astonishing painter, who invoked the mortality in his subjects by painting every molecule with such an accuracy and individuality that their teetering coherence into a personage embodied the fragility of life. His visage was comprised in just such a way.
This complexity produced a radiance about him which was abetted by the discrepancy between his clothes and his flesh. He seemed the temporary residence for an enduring elsewhere that was tangent to the worn but radiant frail man, and at times he shone actively with the brilliance of that elsewhere. He was always looking elsewhere, as if he saw things that we didn't, and I experienced one indelible impression of him as he sat at the cafe table with a cigarette smoldering in his lips, warming himself in the morning sun. He suddenly gestured, still sitting at the table, it was a gesture which was directed toward a heavenly choir which he was conducting, bearing him aloft with their song. His gestures were the traceries to some paradise via his tattered being, a deliverance beyond his or anyone's comprehension. This went on for a very short time and then he became still, smiling and smoking.
The strange radiant little man died at the Art Institute. I knew he was homeless and hanging out at the school, but I was unaware that he was living there. He died of exposure over the Christmas break, and when he was found beneath a concrete overhang on the Jones Street side of the school they found a number of "sketchbooks" in a backpack. He was an artist, a "street artist" as he had described himself to Greg, an employee of the school and one of the few people who had any conversation with him. An unknown artist thrust into our midst his own portable Lascaux, astounding images conceived and executed outside the channels of legitimacy and validation that so many of us need to sustain and guide us, challenging all our notions of the route to authenticity, indicating yet another depth of being in our midst. The sketchbooks reveal in obsessive detail the sweetness and mystery of the elsewhere which seemed to preoccupy him, a realm more compelling for him than our imperfect world, a realm of elsewhere we will only know through him, that seems to welcome us. The last fragment revealed to me in this puzzle that will never be completed was the his name, which became known only after his death, via his signature on a few of his many drawings- Wallace Allen Healey. Greg said that people called him Wally. Wally was cremated as John Doe because his family wouldn't or couldn't come from Oregon to verify his identity.
Wally's identity. Wally the street artist. What I knew of Wally through his physical being, the posthumous discovery of fragments of his life via others, his images and lastly his name, represent memorable components in an unusual order of encounter. They are fragments which cohere in spite of their spareness and intermittence. What is not there is as potent as what is.
I have glimpsed a foreshortened version of such a coherence in several chance observations of how the rooms of people who have been around for a long time can become a summary of their lives, not only by the accretion of memorabilia but in the alignment, in the order of all the things that constitute the whole of their room. The room diagrams an end game, the reckoning of the facts that someone raised a family, the family left, and a sequence of losses followed: kin, spouses, houses, possessions. An editing enacted by diminishing choices until the things in a life are down to one still room, its character informed by the spatial and psychic tensions of the things that endured, by choice and chance, in a lifetime. Those things are indispensable to one another, remnants and survivors charged with the lifetime trajectories converging in their room. An eternal completeness can be encoded in the being of such rooms. The geometric regularity of the room is to its contents what a frame is to its picture. The pared down fragments of Wally's life had no final room in which to reside because he didn't have a home, and yet those surviving fragments, of his images and his life cohere spatially to define in summary the sweet elsewhere that was in his images and his being, that can only be known through him.
I sometimes wonder if these events in their unusual sequence have compelled me to romanticize what might be only a wincing pathos, retroactively endowing it with a magic I hope exists because it is the only bearable reconciliation of Wally's pictures with what there is to know of him. A more remote memory returns in considering this question, by way of Famadou Don Moy, the percussionist with the Art Ensemble of Chicago. He performed solo at the Art Institute some years ago, he filled the stage with a an enormous array of percussion instruments, big, small, formal, informal, Chinese gongs and hubcaps, a night clerks bell and a trap drum set, among many others. He came slowly to the stage from the back of the auditorium, playing a drum in a sling that also was a rattle, bells on his feet and wrists, striking both ends of the drum with maracas, the movement of every extremity expressed in sound, and he chanted: "to all great Black musicians, known and unknown". Known and unknown. It was an invocation to acknowledge ALL those who gave their lives in pursuit of the great human service, the service of the artist, summarizing peoples experiences in time and space, turning the sometimes unbearable discrepancy between the way things are and the way they ought to be into something that makes us want to dance.
© Richard A. Berger. All rights reserved.
His flesh was another matter. It reflected too much sun, too much liquor, too many times taking in too much, not enough sleep, not enough food, reddened eyes that greet the dawn drawing another blank after a night of tumultuous inquiry, too much life to ever be arrested in likeness. His visage reminded me of some of the portraits by Ivan LeLoraine Albright, an obsessive curmudgeon and an astonishing painter, who invoked the mortality in his subjects by painting every molecule with such an accuracy and individuality that their teetering coherence into a personage embodied the fragility of life. His visage was comprised in just such a way.
This complexity produced a radiance about him which was abetted by the discrepancy between his clothes and his flesh. He seemed the temporary residence for an enduring elsewhere that was tangent to the worn but radiant frail man, and at times he shone actively with the brilliance of that elsewhere. He was always looking elsewhere, as if he saw things that we didn't, and I experienced one indelible impression of him as he sat at the cafe table with a cigarette smoldering in his lips, warming himself in the morning sun. He suddenly gestured, still sitting at the table, it was a gesture which was directed toward a heavenly choir which he was conducting, bearing him aloft with their song. His gestures were the traceries to some paradise via his tattered being, a deliverance beyond his or anyone's comprehension. This went on for a very short time and then he became still, smiling and smoking.
The strange radiant little man died at the Art Institute. I knew he was homeless and hanging out at the school, but I was unaware that he was living there. He died of exposure over the Christmas break, and when he was found beneath a concrete overhang on the Jones Street side of the school they found a number of "sketchbooks" in a backpack. He was an artist, a "street artist" as he had described himself to Greg, an employee of the school and one of the few people who had any conversation with him. An unknown artist thrust into our midst his own portable Lascaux, astounding images conceived and executed outside the channels of legitimacy and validation that so many of us need to sustain and guide us, challenging all our notions of the route to authenticity, indicating yet another depth of being in our midst. The sketchbooks reveal in obsessive detail the sweetness and mystery of the elsewhere which seemed to preoccupy him, a realm more compelling for him than our imperfect world, a realm of elsewhere we will only know through him, that seems to welcome us. The last fragment revealed to me in this puzzle that will never be completed was the his name, which became known only after his death, via his signature on a few of his many drawings- Wallace Allen Healey. Greg said that people called him Wally. Wally was cremated as John Doe because his family wouldn't or couldn't come from Oregon to verify his identity.
Wally's identity. Wally the street artist. What I knew of Wally through his physical being, the posthumous discovery of fragments of his life via others, his images and lastly his name, represent memorable components in an unusual order of encounter. They are fragments which cohere in spite of their spareness and intermittence. What is not there is as potent as what is.
I have glimpsed a foreshortened version of such a coherence in several chance observations of how the rooms of people who have been around for a long time can become a summary of their lives, not only by the accretion of memorabilia but in the alignment, in the order of all the things that constitute the whole of their room. The room diagrams an end game, the reckoning of the facts that someone raised a family, the family left, and a sequence of losses followed: kin, spouses, houses, possessions. An editing enacted by diminishing choices until the things in a life are down to one still room, its character informed by the spatial and psychic tensions of the things that endured, by choice and chance, in a lifetime. Those things are indispensable to one another, remnants and survivors charged with the lifetime trajectories converging in their room. An eternal completeness can be encoded in the being of such rooms. The geometric regularity of the room is to its contents what a frame is to its picture. The pared down fragments of Wally's life had no final room in which to reside because he didn't have a home, and yet those surviving fragments, of his images and his life cohere spatially to define in summary the sweet elsewhere that was in his images and his being, that can only be known through him.
I sometimes wonder if these events in their unusual sequence have compelled me to romanticize what might be only a wincing pathos, retroactively endowing it with a magic I hope exists because it is the only bearable reconciliation of Wally's pictures with what there is to know of him. A more remote memory returns in considering this question, by way of Famadou Don Moy, the percussionist with the Art Ensemble of Chicago. He performed solo at the Art Institute some years ago, he filled the stage with a an enormous array of percussion instruments, big, small, formal, informal, Chinese gongs and hubcaps, a night clerks bell and a trap drum set, among many others. He came slowly to the stage from the back of the auditorium, playing a drum in a sling that also was a rattle, bells on his feet and wrists, striking both ends of the drum with maracas, the movement of every extremity expressed in sound, and he chanted: "to all great Black musicians, known and unknown". Known and unknown. It was an invocation to acknowledge ALL those who gave their lives in pursuit of the great human service, the service of the artist, summarizing peoples experiences in time and space, turning the sometimes unbearable discrepancy between the way things are and the way they ought to be into something that makes us want to dance.
© Richard A. Berger. All rights reserved.