I spent many nights in the camp. I wrote out letters for the soldiers. They told me great stories of their youth. There were many soldiers from Brooklyn and Long Island. Their past became my past, and mine theirs. I sat beside them as they lay dying. The light was darkening in my eyes too. The blood that ran through my veins and spilled from theirs was the same. The sound of the men, the groans and screams, laughter too, was the same. All people who are and who have ever lived and who would ever live existed in that tent. I slept in their beds. When they died I died. I have died more than a thousand times through my connection with these men, yet I continue to live. This is how I know that life is eternal. Other people will continue to live even when I don’t. The light has grown dim, hasn’t it, Bucke? We are sitting in darkness.
Day’s End
(1975)
GORDON MATTA-CLARK
The interior of a Hudson River pier is a vast space. Shafts of light cut through the darkness, streaming in through openings in the roof. The Hudson is visible through holes in the floor.
25
Back home in Jackson, Tennessee, Milton Moore knew his place. He was anonymous, his family large, his future uncertain. He looked for other places to go. Eventually, exchanging one confinement for another, he joined the US Navy. He sailed the ocean on a ship filled with men. He dutifully wore his uniform. He manned and scrubbed the deck. He drilled and followed orders, not knowing who the hell he was. He bided his time waiting for the ship to dock, and made his escape through the Hudson River piers.
Now, Milton is swept along on a brand-new tide, the surf of 42nd Street. He passes the men who holler the plots of movies outside the movie houses. Bright posters depict oiled and bronzed women shrieking in horror, fear, desire, their mouths are wide open, red, black hollows for throats, heaving chests, long legs, nails. Men grimace in the cold: the taut lines of their faces crack. Raw hands clutch admission tickets. He looks at the hang-low, slung-back featureless faces of boys too young to know any better.
Milton passes through the movie lines, breaks the crowd apart, cuts through the laugh and talk, the steamy breath of strangers intent on looking. The movie is about to begin. They wave dollar bills, a mere formality for the night they will have, their bodies sitting in a dark room filled with other bodies, watching bodies fucking on a screen. Milton is not inconspicuous here. He stands right out. Predators look. They do it quickly, clocking this guy then that guy. Milton is both the competition and the prize. On this street, he walks a little taller.
Milton stops for a drink in a dive bar, fresh off the ship, hot off the press. Men try on his hat. Men reach for his uniform, the space where medals should go. The bar is very loud. He cannot distinguish music from speech. He walks through to the back of the bar and into the restroom. He catches his reflection in the mirror. His suit is already sullied and ridiculous, this white uniform with this black body underneath. The guy at the urinal looks a second too long. Milton locks himself into a stall. He climbs on the toilet bowl and pushes the window open. He shifts and shimmies out.
Milton sticks to the dark side of the street, walks east. He throws away his hat and his medalless coat. He wants it all to fall away from him, the whole of him. He walks all night and all day. He thinks: Milton Moore was born. One day he was produced. His hands are the same. His heart and his head are the same. They have not been exchanged. This is the body he will have for the rest of his life.
Milton hangs out at a bar on West Street in the Village where he enjoys the closely pressed bodies, which obscure his own, the loud music and low light. The men there are shadows, nothing more, and the drinks are cheap. One night, after leaving the bar, as he is walking down the street, he hears footsteps running in his direction. He quickens his pace, hurries towards the subway.
Wait! a voice calls. Wait!
He glances over his shoulder and sees a slim white man wearing a black leather jacket running after him, waving his arms in the air.
Wait! the man shouts again, and Milton stops.
The man halts and tries to catch his breath.
Please, he says. I’m Robert Mapplethorpe. I’m a photographer. I think you’re perfect.
Back at Robert’s studio, Milton strips.
Milton is perfectly in proportion, ribbed, tight torso, hard muscles, gigantic cock hanging there, partly erect.
Milton is nervous.
He is cold. The coldness only extenuates the hardness of his muscles. His nipples are hard. His cock is getting harder.
How would you like it if I photographed you? Robert says.
Robert takes a photograph of his head and his chest, his dick, his ass, and his hands.
Do you still have your uniform?
Milton shakes his head.
Robert tosses him another. He wears it for Robert. Then he takes it off, garment by garment, exposing himself in parts.
I don’t want my face and my body to be photographed at the same time, says Milton. I don’t want it to get back to my parents; I don’t want them to see.
So Robert will never show Milton’s face and his body in the same photograph and he will never tell anyone his name. From now on, Milton is never Milton, just a list of body parts.
Milton soon develops habits. He writes complex words on his hands in black marker pen. When he has covered his left palm, he covers his right. Robert doesn’t like it. He says it’s like being rubbed down with the inside of a book. He gets Milton to clean his hands before they do it, but sometimes he doesn’t. There is also the handwriting, the awkward, childlike scrawl, which Robert hates, though it is no worse than his.
Robert introduces Milton at parties but it is clear these people cannot understand why Robert is with a man like Milton because Milton is not articulate and he is not very charming.
Robert says he mustn’t worry. This is not an English lesson. He is not a school kid. This is not a test. Milton doesn’t think this is true. Everything is school. Everything is a test.
When Robert goes away he locks Milton in the apartment. A man called Edmund comes to check on him. Milton pours him a drink. Edmund tips his glass and asks him questions. Milton thinks he is a psychiatrist, the way he talks and tips his drink, but he says he is a writer. He asks if Milton has ever read anything by him and Milton says no. Edmund walks over to the bookcase and pulls a book down from the shelf. He looks at the spine then flicks through its pages. Milton rubs the palm of his hand on the couch, scrubs the words off. Suddenly, they seem absurd.
Milton sees his own reflection in the fishes and the vases of Robert’s glass collection. His face is distorted in bulges and elongations. He is black, green, blue. He is the head of the fish and the body and the tail. What else is he supposed to do all day? Robert has told him to stay inside. He looks at the glass. Milton surveys the room. It is a fucking museum. Here is the picture, Man in Polyester Suit. A cheap grey suit with matching vest and a white shirt. The man’s stance is active. He looks like he is strolling somewhere. His fly is undone and his cock is sticking out. The long vein that extends down the black shaft is the only part that really seems alive.
Milton cannot get out of Robert’s apartment. The door is locked and bolted on the outside. He presses his body against the door as if his body will again provide the answer. He shoulders the door. He studies the smudged words on his hands. He presses them against the door. He tries the handle but the door is locked. He looks at the glass collection for an answer. He is trapped. He is surrounded by glass too precious to break, much more precious than him.
Milton opens the window and climbs down the fire escape. He runs all the way to the Hudson. He stands there on the edge of the abandoned pier looking into the black water, the swirls and eddies, the random movement of the water against the posts, hurried and frenetic. He jumps in. The water is warm. Forever the sailor, he swims to New Jersey.
26
Edmund White is standing in the huddle on the sidewalk, sheltering from the rain under the awning of an executive midtown hotel.
He is forced along the sidewalk by the crowd and forced down the slippery subway steps, through the ticket barrier, down the escalator. He enters a long tiled tunnel where a man is playing a saxophone. He presses himself against the wall. Music echoes in this underground chamber. He sees a mosaic depicting the roots of a tree plunging down from the ceiling. The brown roots reach outwards. Beside the mosaic are the words of Goethe – ‘The unnatural – that too is natural’.
Oh God.
He remembers.
The club lay buried deep underground. The deeper he descended, the more it resembled his subconscious. The floor was sticky with drying blood and semen. He wore nothing but his shoes. Men were phantoms in the dark. Rooms were furnished with slings for fisting, meat blocks, chains and whips. Rooms were divided into separate cubicles. Here was one room. Here was another. Here was one body. Here was another. Each room and each body had its own place there. Every space was filled to its internal limit. He wandered through the busy corridors. These men were no more real to him than the dreams he had at night. He passed displays of dicks. As whole men they were unreachable but the individual segments of their bodies were OK – he could deal with parts. The dick was the part he wanted most. It does not represent anything else.
Memorial
(2001)
The photographs appear all over the city. Where one is posted, hundreds soon follow. They are stuck onto lampposts, fences and walls. They are protected from the rain by plastic wallets. Despite this precaution, the rain has turned the bold ink into cascading rivers. Each poster displays a collection of individual instances. There is the instant the person was last seen alive, and the instant of the first collision, the instant of the second collision, the instant of the first fall, and the instant of the second fall, the instant of the rescue, the instant the rescue was over and the instant the rescue became a recovery.
27
From 1941 right through to the ’60s, Robert Moses wants to build the Lower Manhattan Expressway, a ten-lane elevated road over Broome Street in the Lower East Side, built forty feet above the ground. It will link the Holland Tunnel on the west side of Manhattan with the Williamsburg Bridge on the east. A branch will separate south along Mott Street, across Canal, and connect to the Manhattan Bridge, cutting through SoHo and Little Italy.
Moses says this is the only way to ease congestion. Manhattan is missing vital cross-town roads. Streets like Spring, Prince and Bond have had their day. The factory buildings there are no longer used. The Lower East Side is a slum where the children play out in the streets. Better to build new housing blocks on the outskirts of the city, build gardens and playgrounds, move these people out.
Jane Jacobs storms down Broome Street with fliers in her hand. She points to the elegant cast-iron buildings and describes in detail to passers-by the intricate mouldings and the history of its inhabitants – all this will be lost, she says, and all for a highway. The homes and businesses you see around you will disappear. We will lose our city. Is this what you want?
She arranges to meet an artist on the corner of the Bowery and East Houston Street.
As they walk through the neighbourhood, up the Bowery, across Bond Street, Jane is thinking: Let the businesses reflect the local community. Let the blocks be short and low. Improve public transportation. Stop people from getting into their cars. Listen to the women who live in this city. They are the ones who understand how it works.
She looks around her and imagines industrial workers going in and coming out through the heavy factory doors, the grind of machines, soot-heavy, rank air. Today, a different activity has taken its place.
The artist explains what’s going on.
We’ve made improvements to the interior spaces, she says. We’ve installed plumbing and electrics, redecorated, fixed elevator shafts and air-conditioning units. We’ve reconstructed doors, rebuilt partition walls, found beds and cleaned them, rewired stoves, sewn bed linen. We’ve used the trash from the street, brought it in from outside, re-formed it.
In the artists she passes, Jane sees newly established buds pushing their way through the hard earth. She sees a city reclaiming itself.
These people are turning New York into a work of art but it is not the kind of art that can be confined to a frame. Art comes from communities where the rent is cheap. If the rent is cheap, people can afford to live there. Artists have more time to spend on their art. The consequence of this is that their art improves, their art moves on, their art gets someplace. If they raze this neighbourhood to the ground this community will be destroyed and there will be no more art.
The city is not a work of art, thinks Jane. It is not an object. It is not static and still. It is not something to be admired from a distance – it is a process. It is a place for art to be created, but the borders of this island are not the borders of a painting.
Jane gathers together a great force that sweeps through neighbourhoods with a petition against the highway proposals. Men, women and children hand out fliers and talk directly to the public.
She tells reporters that the planners mustn’t be allowed to build this highway. Building another highway isn’t going to reduce congestion. It is senseless to encourage more people to drive. What we need is better public transportation. Invest in the city’s buses and the subway. Tell people to leave their cars at home. Commissioner Moses belongs to another age. He does not understand the modern generation. Ask ordinary people what they want, and they’ll tell you. They want a city that’s easy to live in. They want their kids to be able to play safely in the street.
Robert Moses has built his headquarters beneath the Triborough Bridge on Randall’s Island in the East River. This office is not the Gracie Mansion. This office is not Shangri-La. It has been built solely for utilitarian reasons. His office sits under the northern section of the bridge. Automobiles run overhead. Further south, Moses has built sports facilities: baseball diamonds, a soccer field and tennis courts. Pathways have been laid for walking. Even Hell Gate to the east, through which the East River gushes at a pace, seems artificial, like nature is working in reverse, stripping everything back, the water not wet. One feels compressed by the Triborough Bridge. The bridge exists to move the traffic and the sports fields exist to move the people.
Robert Moses works in the stadium theatre at Jones Beach too. Here, he shows important guests how things are done in New York. They think, If this man can build this beach then he can build anything.
He tells them, I used to say to my engineers, I know you can build bridges, but can you build beautiful bridges?
They like to listen to his stories. They like to hear about important men.
I said to the President, you might be set to spread this money around the country but you won’t find a better location for it than New York. Roosevelt is a man who knows when he’s beaten. Oh, these politicians complain about me to the press but I’m the one they call when they want something done. I always say you can draw any kind of picture you like on a clean slate, but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat axe. You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.
He shows his guests to their seats. He can tell whether he’s got them by the time the curtains separate. Moses doesn’t stay to watch the performance. He retires to his office where he continues to work. A newspaper reporter once asked him what he thought of relaxation. Robert Moses said, You mean, besides a waste of time?
Tilted Arc
(1981)
RICHARD SERRA
Tilted Arc is a twelve-feet-high steel wall that stands in the Federal Plaza. Because of its position in the plaza, a public space used by office workers going to and from work and taking lunch breaks, the arc has caused many problems. People are forced to navigate around it. The tilt of the arc causes a strong effect. It makes the arc seem like it is moving and this changes the nature of the person’s perception of the surrounding space, not only through the interruption of movement but also because the arc appears
to change shape as they move around it.
Some people say the arc attracts vandalism. It creates opportunities for crime. They say, I don’t want to walk around the other side of that wall only to see a gang waiting. I don’t want to be mugged because of your art.
We would just like to get from a to b without having to walk an extra one hundred and twenty feet around a piece of rusting steel.
Others say it is just like this city to give money away for idiotic projects like this, taking up public space with a hunk of filthy metal, when all people want to do is walk from this side of the plaza to that side without a problem on their lunch break.
But others say that this obstruction is exactly what we all need – that is the point, that is exactly what all good art should do – stop you in your tracks.
Eventually, the arc is removed.
The sudden space, the opening up of the plaza, is overwhelming to those who had grown used to the arc.
Some still walk the long way around, following old pathways. The secretaries who occupy the lower ground floor say they miss it. Yes, they can see out to the street now, but they say they liked the surprise.
28
I sense destruction, Bucke thinks. I sense an end coming. I sense that all things must end. I have written many endings. I have taken it upon myself to clarify how things must end.
Tell me about censorship, Bucke says.
I refused to give in, says Walt. I refused to take one line out. Each was integral to the overall sense. If I removed one I would be removing them all. If I removed one I would be removing limbs. I would be removing myself. Without the words I have chosen, there is nothing. If you deny me words, I cannot speak. If it is not written down, it did not happen. If a path is not laid, there is nowhere to go. If you don’t remember, there is nothing to forget. It did not happen anyway. It is not over. You cannot just extract parts. Where the colour is, where the music is, where the bridge leads to, where the weather goes, what the tide is for, where the tops of buildings reach, where the rain lands, hitting us in the face, salt stains, tears and the ocean. Everything is connected, Bucke. They banned me in Boston because they said my work was explicit. But this was only because they didn’t understand that all things are connected. Physical love is the same as the changing seasons. It is the same as the movement of the tide or the evolution of a city. By banning my work, they were dismissing all nature. All things in nature are good.
Everyone is Watching Page 8