I swallow and evade. “It is a pretty funny story, but I couldn’t tell it on there; it’d be, you know, kind of a big deal at my office.”
Gretchen smiles. “Not if you’re working with me, it wouldn’t.”
I tell her I’ll think about it.
9
I don’t change out of my work clothes when I get home Tuesday night. Gretchen called me twice at work today to ask if I was going to Josh’s seminar thing, and Katie, whom I’ve been messaging with all day, has been pushing me to go as well. I don’t want to admit it to myself yet, but yes, yes, I’m going.
Goddammit.
I told Katie everything about my lunch with Gretchen yesterday, and the meeting I had later with Mike. The Cippoletti people, he informed me, have been asking preliminary questions about “expanding the relationship.” If we do, and Mike thinks we will, he wants me to take over managing the account.
Golf land, bike land. Could I somehow do both? Right, Jess, that’s pretty funny.
I’m thinking I look maybe a little too casual for this seminar, or class, or whatever it is, but I’m having trouble coming up with an outfit that would hit the right note. The thought of mingling with donor wives is troubling; they’ll probably all be rich, and I’ll be flustered. I keep the black pants I’m wearing and swap out my top for a dark gray button-down; with this combination I can be elegantly dull or simply invisible. It all depends on who’s looking, I guess.
It’s quarter after seven and the thing starts at eight, and with my bag and my toggle coat I’m down the stairs and out the door and into the fog and to the bus stop with time to spare. No one else is on the crosstown, just me and the driver and the harsh bus light, and I only have a little walk to get to the Academy when I get off.
I’ve only been here once before, and never at night. The buildings are all oddly shaped and illuminated from the inside, and the light fans out in rays through the misty darkness. I walk around for a little bit before I ask a girl in a knit hat how to get to the Graduate Center. She points me back to a building I had already passed, and once I’m in I ask the very pierced guy at the reception desk where I need to go to find Josh.
“Josh?” he asks.
“He’s a printer?” I say. “Doing a seminar?”
“Oh, Dr. Hadden’s class.”
Dr. Hadden?
Pierced guy looks at a paper. “What’s your name?”
“Jessica. Zorich.” I don’t think I ever told Josh my last name. The guy looks down the paper and laughs.
“Are you ‘red-haired Jessica from Pat and Joe’s party with the two Murrant prints’?”
“That’s, yes, that’s me.”
“Studio 1411,” he says. “Almost all the way back there, before the atrium.” When he points down the hall, I see a constellation of scabby track marks on the inside of his skinny tattooed arm.
It’s just a couple minutes after eight when I slip into 1411, and Josh hasn’t started yet. He looks at me without looking at me when I come in and take a seat in one of the high concept wooden chairs, and I think I see him smirk as he works on setting up a laptop with a projector on one of the studio tables. He’s wearing jeans, again, and a dark cable-knit fisherman’s sweater. Seated around the room are maybe twenty well-dressed older women—donor wives, presumably—and I’m at least fifteen years younger than the youngest of them. They turn their scarved necks almost simultaneously and watch with vague contempt as I take my seat, but a couple of them do cock their heads and give me that “where have I seen you before?” look that doesn’t surprise me so much anymore. Two well-groomed men, the only men in the room aside from Josh, sit on the opposite side of the room and speak to each other in low voices. They’re good-looking, stylish even, both with black hair and olive skin. One is wearing a dark ribbed sweater, and the other has on a sport coat over a plain white shirt wide open at the collar.
Josh stands up straight behind the laptop and looks around the room. “Alright,” he says. “Are we ready?” Something is projected on the screen but the room is too bright to make out what it says. Josh holds up a little remote control and aims it into the high open ceiling and presses a button. “Is this? That’s it.” The lights dim, and now on the screen I see an old print image of an orchid next to the words “DR. JOSHUA HADDEN: Merging Traditional Lithographic Techniques with Modern Imaging Technologies.”
Oh God, I’m in for it. No, it’s only an hour, I can manage this.
“Thanks for coming,” he starts, pressing his hands together. “I’m Dr. Josh Hadden. I’m a lithographer and I am currently the Academy’s Staynor Visiting Scholar in the Print Arts, visiting from the Camberwell College of Arts in London, England, where I’m a member of the faculty and principally teach lithography and design.” He’s pacing, comfortably, as he speaks, and the women’s heads follow him back and forth like a flock of dumb birds.
“Before I begin,” he goes on, “I’d like to take this opportunity to give my thanks to the Academy, and especially the Staynor Endowment, for supporting this program.” The ladies clap and glance at each other, pleased with themselves, and Josh smiles at them, then he looks back at me with the most fleeting eye-roll expression of “don’t worry, I understand how cheesy this is too” and I almost laugh as I look back at him and clap my hands together three times slowly. The two guys across the room just sit with their arms crossed.
“As I said,” Josh continues, “I’m a lithographer, a print maker, and tonight I’m going to give you a quick introduction to the lithographic process. I’ll give you a little history, show you some prints, show you what can be done with this very old technique, how people working with it right now are taking it in some very exciting directions. And Thursday night we’ll get our hands dirty and make some prints of our own. Sound good? Alright.” The women are rapt, almost quivering, as they listen to him, and it’s sort of funny to see the way they lean toward him as he speaks. It’s pretty easy to believe that any of these donor wives would like to take this handsome, well-spoken young artist home and make him a trophy.
But I’m the only one who will.
No, I did not just think that!
Did I?
Josh presses a button on the remote and the image on the screen changes; now it’s another orchid in that old style, washed-out colors with a curlicue Latin description to the lower right. Josh turns and looks at the projection.
“Lithography was invented in 1798, in Germany, by a guy named Alois Senefelder. It’s one of those great accidents of history that the reason Senefelder came up with it was because he was a writer, a terrible playwright, and no one would publish his work. He figured if no one would print his stuff, he’d come up with a way to print it himself, and in trying to do so he invented the whole lithographic process. Sort of the original vanity press.” The women titter and Josh smiles as he brings up a new image. This one is a map, printed in black and white, and says “München—1860” across the top.
“I love these old maps,” Josh says. He looks at it for a moment before pressing the remote again, and now it’s a picture of Josh in a studio, working over a square slab of rock. He’s wearing a tee shirt and surgical gloves and a heavy apron, and he has some sort of paintbrush in his hand. “Traditional lithography is a flat process, a chemical process, using polished limestone to hold and transfer the image. An artist, or failed writer, can prepare the image directly on the stone instead of needing to rely on a craftsman to prepare an engraving, as in other styles of printing….” He goes on, using words like “etch” and “intaglio” and “offset,” but I’m not listening so much anymore. Just looking at the pictures. I’m mesmerized as he flips through them on the screen, and I’m trying to make up a story around them.
They’re all taken in a studio, his studio in England I’m thinking, and it’s autumn; the trees outside the many windows are almost overpowering in their reds and yellows and oranges. He’s showing a picture now where he’s lifting one of the rock slabs, and I can see the muscles in his arms and the stra
in in his neck carrying through his chin into a little grimace. They can be kind of heavy, he’s saying. Care must be taken.
In the next picture the slab is in some printing press–type contraption, and Josh, photo-Josh, points at it, mouth open in mid-sentence. His dark blond hair is messed up and his other hand rests on his hip near a black smear of ink on his apron. There’s a girl in the background, seated on a counter before one of the great, golden leafy windows; her hands rest on her knees and she laughs at whatever Josh has said. Girlfriend? Student? I’m thinking student. She has a crush on him.
Now the screen shows a young bearded guy with a serious look on his face, definitely a student; he’s pulling a lever on the press as Josh looks over his shoulder. Easy there, take it easy, photo-Josh is saying.
More photos. Rollers and ink and brushes and gloves. Leaves of paper lain in place and peeled away, negatives and positives. A crack through the center of one of the slabs of stone, and the bearded student with his hands thrown in the air shouts well fuck it all while the others laugh.
“And a crack like that is really the worst case scenario,” real Josh says. “But they do break sometimes, it does happen.” He presses the button and now the room is confronted with a print of a grinning skeleton wielding a sword beneath the words “LA MORT.” Josh crosses in front of the projector, and as his shadow passes over the screen the image of the skeleton is projected for a thrilling instant on his body. The effect is so perfect I wonder if he planned it, but he doesn’t linger and continues right away with his talk.
“So,” he says, “the lithographic process caught on in Europe just as a real explosion of understanding in human anatomy was under way. You’ve all seen a copy of Gray’s Anatomy, I’m sure, those plates are chromolithographs, nicely executed, but pretty dull. A hundred years earlier than Gray’s you had artists and anatomists collaborating on these just incredible atlases, the work is almost unbelievable. This guy”—he points at the skeleton—“is from the frontispiece of an 1831 French atlas. I study a lot of these. They’ve been a pretty big influence on me.” He takes us through some anatomical prints and again I watch, the bones and dissections and fetuses flash by, real but not real. Josh shows a print of the human circulatory system, and then with a press of the button it’s an 1899 map of Poland; the transition is stunning as veins turn to roads and arteries become rivers. He jogs back and forth between the two a couple times to drive in the effect, and then it’s forward again, maps and more maps, colors and squiggles and topographic demarcations. He shows a detail from a corner of a map, a dusty red rose, and flashes from this to a full-sized illustration of roses and zinnias and poppies beneath the words “Lannier’s Seed Catalogue—Philadelphia, 1902.”
“These seed catalogs, as you’ll see here in a bit, have been a pretty big influence on me too. They really represent the peak of American commercial lithography, traditional lithography anyway. It’s a shame, these guys were working mostly between 1880 and the outbreak of the First World War, and we have no idea who most of them were.” He zaps through pages from the catalogs, colorful varieties guaranteed to grow, flowers tomatoes cucumbers eggplants all flashing by. And suddenly, the image shown is very different: a jagged pale spiral, centered a little to the left of the image, winding down into something that looks organic, but isn’t quite. The almost garish text from the earlier catalog pages is gone, and there’s something very familiar to it.
“This,” Josh says, “is a modern piece by a guy named Greg Murrant, and while it looks pretty different from the older prints I’ve shown you, Greg’s work, his merging of sources, really ties those styles into the work I’m doing today. Murrant takes digital sources—in this case, it’s from a digital map of the Hudson River—and arranges them into novel presentations bearing very little resemblance to the original material.” Josh moves through a few of Greg’s prints on the projector until he gets to one that makes me sit up: it’s a bunch of leaflike forms arranged in a fan shape, just like the print I have over my bed. This one is different, though, a little bolder, a little more certain. I think Josh looks back at me while it’s up there, but it’s hard to tell in the dark.
“Now, any of you who have seen my current work might wonder how this relates,” he says, and someone up front laughs. “But bear with me.” A new slide is projected, just text that says: “JOSHUA HADDEN—NORTH AMERICAN FLORA.” “These chromolithographs debuted in an exhibit last summer at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and were made from digital source materials I collected four years ago while traveling from Canada to Central America. I know we’re running a little short on time, so I’ll just advance through these without commentary and anyone with questions can come up and speak to me after. So. Right.” Josh thumbs the remote and there’s an audible gasp from the front of the room; what shows on the screen is so unexpected I almost gasp myself. It’s a print of a giant, uncircumcised penis, but presented in a perfect imitation of that hundred-year-old seed catalog. The image is framed by a leafy border, and in the lower right, in that florid, old-style lettering, it says: “Denys, Calgary. Hardy Root System!” A new image, another penis: “Arthur, Vancouver. Easy to Grow!” Now a bulging vulva: “Marcia from Boise, Resistant to Frost!” And on and on, the cornucopia of genital varieties moves southward: Janice from Denver, spread wide open. Harold from Las Vegas, slightly erect. Leticia from Juárez has a pelt of black fur, and Ramón from San Salvador bends to the left. And by the time we get to Antonio in Panama City (“Pendant Fruit! Big on Color and Flavor, Low on Heat!”), I don’t know whether to laugh or cover my face. The images are an assault, almost too much; fifteen minutes of these grotesque representations with their ridiculous descriptions have worn me out.
There’s no other way to put it: the prints are undeniably brilliant. What does this make Josh, though? Pervert? Genius? Both?
I must confess that I’m curious.
Josh aims the remote into the ceiling again and the lights slowly come up to reveal the shell-shocked women in front of me. “Thank you all very much for coming,” he says. “And don’t forget, Thursday night, in here, same studio, we’ll be making some prints. Be sure to wear clothes you don’t really care about; the materials can get a little messy. Thanks again.”
The two men stand up and leave the room without looking back. Everyone else rises slowly and a few of the women go up to talk to Josh while the rest file out, some looking titillated as they giggle and chatter in twos and threes, others looking weary as they shuffle toward the door. I bend down to get my bag from the floor, and when I rise I come face-to-face with a stooped, silver-haired woman.
“You were on that catalog, weren’t you?” she asks.
Sometimes I act stupid about it, but this time I don’t. “Yes,” I say.
She grabs my wrist with a trembling hand. “You’re a beautiful young woman,” she says, then she lets go and walks away, leaving me with an odd, unsettled feeling. Maybe I should just deny it all the time from now on.
There are only two women left with Josh as I stand there against a work counter with my bag hanging down by my knees. They’re leaning in to him, listening closely, nodding ferociously at every word out of his mouth. I could leave, now, while they talk, just slip out the door and go home and give him a call later and say thanks, it was very interesting.
But I don’t.
One of the women is asking Josh about his plans for the future, is he doing any big projects while he’s here in the States? Josh gestures with his hands as he speaks to them, and they listen so intently it looks like they should be taking notes.
“I’m interested in going back to doing something with maps,” he says. “That old cartographic style, you know, work it into something. The Academy has some imaging equipment that I don’t have at Camberwell, so I’d like to take advantage of that while I’m here. We’ll see.” They chat for a little bit more and the two women thank Josh profusely; they don’t even look at me as they leave.
Josh clicks his laptop sh
ut and walks over. “Well?” he says, with a half smile. He loops his thumbs into his pockets and shrugs, and the ropy collar of his sweater rides up to his chin. “I guess I do take monster cocks, and make them art.” We both laugh.
“I thought Joe was just being Joe,” I say. “I didn’t think he meant it, he says weird stuff all the time. He’s kind of—”
“Yeah, he’s a freak,” Josh says, and we laugh again. “Did you like it?”
“Yes,” I say. “Yes, I did.”
“Some people think it’s kind of a gimmick. Kind of precious.”
“No. It’s…it turns everything on its head. It’s weird, it’s like, you can’t look away from it, it’s so in your face. It’s confrontational.”
“Thank you,” Josh says. “Thank you. That feels better than a thousand good reviews. Or any bad one.”
I’m blushing, I think, so I turn to pull my coat from the back of the neighboring chair.
“Have you eaten?” Josh asks.
I could say yes. I could say I have plans. I could say I need to get to work early tomorrow.
“No,” I say.
“There’s a Salvadoran place just off campus. Have you ever had Salvadoran food?”
“There is such a cuisine?”
“You’ll like it,” he says. He grabs his laptop and slides it into an orange bike messenger bag, and we head out. The reception desk is unmanned now, and it’s still foggy outside.
“I’m staying in that place up there,” Josh says, pointing to his left at a building that I can’t really see.
“They have housing here?”
“Guest housing. It’s plush. Private studio too.”
We walk along, through the mist; my hands are jammed down into the pockets of my coat and Josh’s messenger bag bumps into my side every few steps.
“How long does the visiting scholar thing last?” I ask.
“It’s a full year.”
“Does your school in England have a problem with that?” I guess I’m not too clear on how this academic stuff works.
Jessica Z Page 8