Figure It Out

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  A new realization tempers my unhappy conclusion that gender and line conspire. In Picasso’s works, there exist cease-fire instants when an indescribable bloom enriches, muddies, and tranquilizes the painting’s underlying texture, the abstract substrate beneath the human figure. Picasso’s line, whether drawn, painted, or incised, rests on an ambiguous ground, resistant to code.

  The ground halfway un-genders the line; the ground—existing in a molten, uncreated, latent state, not quite shaped by describable intention—evokes the informe, the unformed, the not-yet, the reluctant. The line performs its own baroque monologue, as if deaf to the underlying ground; the substrate, sometimes cooperative, sometimes oblivious, emits a cloud of John Cage–scored static through which we hear the incongruous line of a Sephardic monodist.

  Picasso’s line is—perfect. (See Elizabeth Bishop’s “The End of March”: “A light to read by—perfect! But—impossible.”) Picasso’s line—perfect, impossible—ignores its ground. Line not only surpasses or subsumes the ground but also fails to match its earthen inexactitude.

  Many viewers—myself among them—might prefer the ground, not the lineated figure; for years, I, too, preferred the inchoate underlayer, for I found its murmurings more contrapuntal, more receptive to distraction’s profundity, than the didactic, prowess-proud, Beaux-Arts-trained line. But now the line—and the realization that a complicated human being can decompose to the status of mere line—offers greater comfort.

  Mere line—contour line, without modeling—gives pleasure, though in the case of Man with Pipe, the face and the pipe-holding hand receive shadowy gray modeling, as if migration from pure contour into volume’s compromised empire caused heightened melancholy.

  The beauty of these delineated figures may ring kitsch alarm bells—or threaten, in fearful capitulation, to reject earlier (pre-World War I) innovations.

  Once, I can’t remember where or when, a critic accused Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List of being kitsch. I remember seconding this judgment. But I wouldn’t agree if a killjoy shamed Picasso’s neoclassical figures by calling them kitsch.

  Picasso’s line in 1922 and 1923, but not only in those years, offers a method of paying attention to human beings as not cargo, not corpse, not machine. Line, as Picasso handles it, has the status of lone remnant, of solitary vessel. Only line, among the ruined, remains standing. The surrounding white or gray fog threatens to obliterate the figure. You can call the fog beautiful, or you can ignore its grisaille. The fog condenses everything you will never be able to name or to remember. The line—the last survivor, always the same—resists erasure, including the erasure I might commit by deciding not to side with its wiry or fat proclamations.

  Picasso’s line continues someone else’s line; it doesn’t matter which forebear’s line Picasso’s line continues.

  Picasso’s line summons the sheer force of continuation. The line speaks one thing; it speaks that we continue. (We continue to speak; like the Ancient Mariner, or Dickinson’s pale Reporter, we continue to tell.)

  Picasso’s line—whether in Guernica, Man with Pipe, or Draped Nude Seated in an Armchair—speaks the absence of color. Even when color exists, the line relishes color’s secondariness, its irrelevance, its bracketed sick-day.

  I’d meant to say, earlier, that I drafted this essay on the day of my first colonoscopy, an exam I’d put off for years, a procedure I should have undergone when I was fifty, though I waited until fifty-four; I decided not to mention the colonoscopy, not only because colonoscopy is such an ugly word, at odds with Picasso’s linear finesse, but also because I rhetorically over-rely on direct witness—“odd secrets”—to juice up my argument or to lend it a photorealistic urgency. A colonoscopy lacks singularity; possibly you have undergone or will eventually undergo a colonoscopy, if you can boast the good fortune of living past the age of fifty, a temporal boundary I once considered as pernicious and uncanny as the fact that Egon Schiele died at twenty-eight years old, and that his ultimate drawing, done on the eve of his wife’s death, and two or three days before his own, consists entirely of lines, quickly executed, in real time, with black chalk on paper, October 28, 1918.

  Some of Schiele’s lines seem smeared, edged by uncertainty; unlike Picasso’s firm outline, Schiele’s chalk lines participate in the unformed realm they depict the traveler embarking toward, even if the traveler doubts that formlessness is the direction toward which she has embarked, formlessness the shore her vessel is skirting, a conveyance hesitant to broach the mode of direct address.

  Schiele’s drawing attains eloquence not through line but through the line’s liberal ability to stop.

  The line depicting Edith’s hand, as that line reaches southward to describe the arm, becomes merely one of those expressive curlicues underlying Klee’s oft-circulated notion that a line is cognition out for a stroll; the line of dying Edith Schiele’s collar, as it descends to describe her torso, becomes a smudge. Indeed, a line—when exercising its full freedom as an errancy fleeing captivity—can deliquesce into a smear.

  I’d thought to begin this essay by mentioning my colonoscopy, but then I decided to avoid vulgarity; bringing up this unappetizing procedure would have the unfortunate side effect of asserting an equivalence between the alimentary canal—the colon’s curves and involutions, like involuntary memory’s—and the written or drawn line. I don’t think that Picasso’s line boils down to digestive health or unhealth, or to the passage of food away from form into formlessness, or the transformation—the reverse sublation?—of food into garbage, into what doesn’t deserve to be said, seen, or thought. However, because I’m in the habit of including the events of the day in whatever essay I happen to be writing, you see that in this distended digression I have managed to include the medical haruspication I’d decided it was vulgar to mention, and I’m including this back-end divination because the day of my “prep” for the procedure, a day of chicken broth, Jell-O, and Gatorade, I killed time by imitating—copying by hand—the drawings of Schiele and Alberto Giacometti, paying special attention to places where their lines deviate from delineation or accurate description.

  While I’m dwelling within digression’s hospitable embrace, let me mention two books I recently absorbed, two books that determined the tone and subject of my present ruminations: the aforementioned Medieval Modern by Alexander Nagel, and Georges Didi-Huberman’s Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. I read Didi-Huberman because Nagel cites him, and I decided that I wanted to catch up on recent discussions that approached with equal doses of anxiety and authority the untimely, tenacious afterlife of images.

  One of the four photographs analyzed by Didi-Huberman, a photograph taken by a Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz, conveys, at first glance, very little information—simply a blur of trees and light.

  Reading Didi-Huberman’s sober treatment of these photographs—his argument for talking and writing about them, exhibiting them, continuing their operation of testimony—I found myself imagining a sacrilegious and unthinkable aesthetic procedure: I imagined abstracting from a photograph of trauma those formal aspects (angles, vanishing points, lines) that seemed irrelevant to historical testimony but that thrust themselves forward at me, their viewer, with a directness I can’t gainsay. Extracting these formal substrata, I might turn them into paintings; or I might construct verbal arguments upon this borrowed fretwork, thus using the photo’s formal données as scaffolding, upon which I’d build my own ephemeral, adjectival filigree.

  By isolating these formal aspects I aimed not to aestheticize disaster but to observe form’s capacity to carry on an articulation that opens another door in Being, a door unlabeled, though I doubt that it leads to quietism, indifference, or callousness.

  4.

  In the New York Times on the consecutive mornings of December 5 and December 6, 2012, I noticed two unrelated obituaries.

  The obituary appearing on December 6 marked the death of architect Oscar Niemeyer at the inspiring age o
f 104. Alongside the death notice, the Times published a photo of the Oca Pavilion in Ibirapuera Park in São Paolo; this pavilion curves so flamboyantly that it rebuts linear hegemony (though we, as mature adults, certainly understand that a curved line qualifies as a line). Niemeyer’s pavilion, turned by photography into a linear composition, like a Brancusi photograph of a Brancusi sculpture, must in real life appear so conical and curvaceous that a visitor would perceive the building not as linear but as rotund, like sculpted limbs.

  One sentence in Niemeyer’s obituary caught my line-dominated eye: “The design also heralded Mr. Niemeyer’s war against the straight line, whose rigidity he saw as a kind of authoritarian constraint.” Klee, partisan of deviation, posthumously concurs.

  On December 5, 2012, the day before I read about Niemeyer’s death, the newspaper published an obituary for Jack Brooks, “Former Texas Congressman,” famous for standing behind Jacqueline Kennedy on Air Force One, November 22, 1963, post-assassination, as LBJ took the oath of presidency. The Times reprinted Cecil Stoughton’s memorable photograph, so we could see traumatized Jackie, whose iconic face and grief-shocked posture obliterate the presence of everyone else in the photo.

  This image, which I have examined intermittently for decades, long ago involved itself in my brain’s chemistry; this image dwells inside me, as a determinant, however tiny, of my consciousness. On this photo, to a minor extent, my percipience—my sense of being alive to myself—hinges.

  On December 5, 2012, however, when I resaw this photo in the Times, once again marshaled for funereal purposes, I realized that I’d never before noticed the strong diagonal line of the airplane’s inside door or wall—a line that articulates movement toward a vanishing point, despite the cramped circumstances. No verdant Tuscan prospect lies behind the bowed Mater Dolorosa; instead, this photo thrusts us into the captivity of a small plane, carrying more human cargo, and cargo more aggrieved, than a lens can accommodate.

  Jackie looms forward because the photographer looks up to her from below; the strong diagonal line of the airplane’s wall (or door?) surreptitiously leads the eye to Jackie, and, with less emotional pungency, to LBJ.

  As I considered mentioning this photograph, it occurred to me that I’d need to face the consequences of my argument, if my intimations and avoidances added up to an argument; I’d need to come to a decision about the relationship of trauma to formalism. Formalism is a heavy word, too heavy to lift, too alluring to drop, too contentious to leave unclarified. Call formalism my choice, as viewer, interpreter, bricoleur, to highlight formal aspects of visual and verbal artifacts. Simply put: does formalism frame trauma? Does formalism enhance and construct trauma, or distract us from it? Must our decision to notice a line always qualify as a formalist gesture? Why, however, do lines, in a photograph attesting to a traumatic scene, seem to mobilize toward ends other than those, strictly speaking, of witness?

  I’m always boxing myself into this same corner, this formalism versus ethics corner; I wonder if I’m the only person stuck in this cul-de-sac. I used to consider an invocation of Adorno to be sufficient to rescue me from this trap, but now I don’t know what guiding spirit to invoke.

  I think, for expediency’s sake, I’ll invoke Giacometti, not because he was a nice guy (James Lord’s memoir, A Giacometti Portrait, depicts the master’s exacting temperament), but because his drawings tirelessly use line for the sake of line. Perhaps his lines seek to escape—or to depict—a historical predicament; perhaps his lines materialize a spiritual vision, or delineate reality, or sublimate suffering. Indeed, Giacometti’s line escapes, depicts, materializes, and delineates, but above all it wishes for continuity. Line, in Giacometti’s hands, begs for extension—a state of amative, indebted congregation with all the other lineators in the history of the world, all the other lineators who have ever lived. Giacometti’s lines, whether they reach toward description of a figure, or toward destruction of a figure—Giacometti’s lines, whether they be form or informe—belong to everyone who came before and everyone who comes after. Giacometti’s lines, like pieces of candy that Félix González-Torres leaves on the floor of a gallery or museum for strangers to take away, embody freely traveling wishes. I refer to a sculpture, Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991, composed of a pile of “multicolored candies, individually wrapped in cellophane”—according to the Art Institute of Chicago, which will eventually own one version of this piece, if, indeed, it can be owned.

  González-Torres’s work, a pile of freebies, literally gave itself away, decomposed itself, as memorial to the man whose death it marks, while Giacometti’s drawings enjoy the status of priceless originals, whatever the foul and self-disregarding mood that overtook him in the process of making them.

  As always, at the end of an essay, I feel boxed in: here, a false binary entraps me, a contest between perishable and imperishable art, between art that consists in a supposedly inimitable human trace, and art that traffics in replaceable, machine-made parts. From this discursive box, an exit door suddenly proposes itself: the line, in its most individual iterations (“Just lost, when I was saved! / Just felt the world go by!”), can take comfort in its secret identity as a piece of replenishable candy. Where one line came from, another line can be found; the factory of lines keeps operating perpetually, because all lines recapitulate and plunge again into the fountain of lines. All lines continue one line, and this fact does not diminish the line’s happiness or individuality, but testifies to its negative capability, its comfort with losing identity. I like a line when I can say, looking at it, “I’m back, here, in the presence of a line. Lineation holds me again in its secure, continuous embrace.”

  Even a spiral or a wheel consists of lines. When Dickinson ends her “odd secrets of the line” poem by invoking a wheel—

  Next time, to tarry,

  While the Ages steal—

  Slow tramp the Centuries,

  And the Cycles wheel!

  —she acknowledges that the line’s odd secrets involve circularity and recirculation, cycling and recycling, an ecology of perpetual replenishment, perpetual relineation.

  The year in which I’m now writing, 2013, marks the hundredth anniversary of the first readymade, Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel, a piece described by the Museum of Modern Art as a “metal wheel mounted on [a] painted wood stool”; this dumbly resonant sculpture composes lines against its background. The piece, though three-dimensional, attains clarity and “artiness” from the lines that it describes in space—as if the spokes of the wheel, and the legs of the chair, were lines writ by pen or brush on paper. Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel offers me the getaway vehicle I’ve awaited, the limo, or hearse, or speedboat, that can rescue me, a pale Reporter, a line hoarder, trapped in a rhetorical box with no Adorno to release me from captivity; in the nick of time, Duchamp’s wheel cycles by, kindly stops for me, and I hop on its deathless circumference.

  (2013)

  MAKING MARKS

  for Todd Shalom

  We’ll begin our walk at 441 East Ninth, right where Frank O’Hara lived when he wrote his monumental poem “Second Avenue,” which opens with a startling, enigmatic description of his own wild wish to turn acts of playful making into the center of his life: “Quips and players, seeming to vend astringency off-hours, / celebrate diced excesses and sardonics, mixing pleasures, / as if proximity were staring at the margin of a plea. . . .” We will behave like quips, like players. While walking, participants will write, draw, talk, and accumulate—mixing pleasures and celebrating excess. We’ll experiment by making spontaneous marks of our ruminations and observations, whether with pencil, pen, stick, stone, scrap, spit, or other found (and offered) substances. Our goal: to liberate and unhouse our repertoires of verbal and visual markmaking. In the process, we’ll compose a document (or a bagful of documents) to take home afterward and keep as a record of our adventure.

  Each walker receives a Canson “Mix Media” art pad, as well as a selection of pens, colored marker
s, watercolor pencils, and other simple materials. The focus of the walk is the pad, its sheets separable and sturdy.

  To summon energy, begin with a resonance exercise: find a note, hum it, feel the vibration in your nose, cheeks, and lips.

  During the next ninety minutes, make as many marks as possible. A few of them will be ones that you love and that will inspire a new direction in your aesthetic life.

  Stand in front of (or near) the apartment building where Frank O’Hara once lived, on the north side of East Ninth Street, between Avenue A and First Avenue. On your pad, make an identity mark—a mark that signifies your identity or attests to your existence.

  Find an event on the ground, on a wall, or on a building’s surface; with a mark on your pad, acknowledge the event. Find two events juxtaposed, and interpret the juxtaposition.

  Close your eyes, experience the air, the temperature, and then make a mark to acknowledge this atmosphere.

  Walk a few paces and stop when you see a color that you like; acknowledge the color with a mark.

  Write down the name of a person who represents the great unconsummated, unreciprocated, or shattered romance of your life—then surround that name with a series of very messy marks, or otherwise commemorate that person with whatever marks you choose to make.

  Make an untidy mark. Make several ungoverned marks. Spit on your page.

  Write while walking, with your eyes open.

  Draw a grid. Look at the sky, find an event to draw or describe, and mark it on top of the grid.

  What did you dream last night? Mark it.