A love letter
To art and lifelong friends.
Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made.
When I was 24, I spent about seven hours a day “guarding” the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, Italy. I was technically an intern — part of a libidinous international group — but they used us as fresh-faced guard-slaves.
I’d quit a job at The Metropolitan Museum of Art to take the Venice internship, right in time for Y2K. (Before quitting — giving up my great full-time job and a cheap apartment in the East Village — I asked all my colleagues: If you were my age, would you go? My lovely colleagues, in their 30s and 40s, did not hesitate: Go! Go before it gets harder to go! I can’t say that this made me feel great about the future, but it did the job. I went.)
Leaving a full-time job at the Met for an internship (and beyond — I moved there indefinitely) brought a lot of surprises, but none more so than the day a staffer in Venice asked me to go into the museum’s courtyard and wipe bird shit off a spindly Giacometti. At the Met you are trained to never touch the art. But hey, at the Met, they weren’t using 20-something randoms as guards either.
One of the rooms I felt most privileged to guard was one that highlighted Joseph Cornell’s 3-D wooden boxes, made between 1942 and the 1950s (I’d show you them here, but…copyright issues). His delicate collage, cutouts and newsprint appealed to my writerly side as well as my fine-arts fascination. I spent a lot of time guarding a room of Italian Futurists, like Giacomo Balla, and even more hours entranced by Max Ernst’s kind-of-disgusting-but-endlessly-fascinating paintings, amid the Magrittes and De Chiricos. My other obsession was one of Kazimir Malevich’s black squares, but that was quietly disguised amid the mad, multicolored Kandinskys and, my personal favorite, “The Sun in Its Jewel Case,” by Yves Tanguy.
The Tanguy, my absolute obsession, was subject to an assault by a wet umbrella, and I was unfortunately there to witness it. The tourist with the dripping umbrella leaned up against the gray paint and watched as a single drop ran down the canvas.
But it’s Cornell’s shadow boxes that have stuck with me all these years.
His boxes “conjure up fantasies of romantic love and historic pageantry,” the Guggenheim writes.
Cornell invites the viewer’s imaginative participation in the work through means such as a hatch that may be opened, or a tempting crank of a hurdy-gurdy that may be turned. In the present construction the imagined participation is not physical, but psychological and creative. The viewer may be playwright, choreographer, director, and performer in the spectacle of his choice. In a careful scrutiny of the work the mirrored surfaces not only offer the illusion of shimmering glass windows, but also engage the viewer in a multifaceted reflection and discovery of oneself.
In the 22 years since I left that museum, I’ve had a quiet itch to create my own Cornell-inspired box. I’ve always drawn — I come from an artistically talented family. But it’s been a very long time since I created anything other than writing. When we landed on I-don’t-even-know-what-number-lockdown, I decided I should buy a box to try to make my own.
So, here is my first box, which I call “Resilience 2022.” It’s about Covid, NYC, the vote and my mother (the black-and-white cutouts are from miniature photos of huge canvases she made in the 1970s). I can explain any detail in the comments if you want to know what anything is.
And today, I have a new work-in-progress, about Sept. 11. The black-and-white cutouts and some things in the background are prints of photos I took at the pile on 9/13/2001. The red, polka-dot scarf, if you can see it, was one I had on the day of the attack — it’s the silk through which I breathed chemicals and human bodies.
Some of the cutouts show Eastern Orthodox priests talking to army guys in downtown Manhattan. One shows a tank on West Broadway, another a crushed police cruiser and yet another (or two) the plume I watched from my window in Brooklyn for about six months. (There’s also a sneaky photo I took of women dancing in the streets of Downtown Brooklyn in November 2020, the day Biden was elected.)
The origami cranes and the wax face are gifts from a dear South Korean friend I made in Venice. All of us there in that crazy time made a tight international family, one that still exists today, through illness, sadness, triumphs and the creation of art. When I think of this family, I feel very, very lucky. It’s a short life, but sometimes you are given the gift of beautiful, supportive people, and you are fortunate enough to be at a point at which you are able to take them in. I accepted that gift, and continue to do so every single day, every single year, even decades later.
For my Venetian family.
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What a beautiful uplifting essay. Even though your shadow boxes are of the pandemic and 9/11, you have taken these tragic events and made something unique and meaningful. Whether its with your words or your possessions, you can create beauty from sadness.
I have had the good fortune to visit Peggy Guggenheim's Venice villa. To be able to go to work there EVERY DAY, in Venice, just takes my breath away. Talk about sensory overload. And it doesn't surprise me one bit that you've created not just art forms from your experiences, but great friends too.
Love the description of working in her Venice villa. And congratulations on making two "boxes."