"In the Palace of Excess Imagination"
NY Times 9/11/09
October is the month without gods the Japanese say,
But this is September, month of the equinox,
light and dark measured in equal measure.
Rational, balanced. A month of record lows,
but record highs, too.
And the tourists are back--
it took them years--filling the New York streets
with their small, democratic opinions.
And William Blake is here, too, in town at the Morgan.
Beautiful, demented Blake. Who is easily bad
ten times more often than Vermeer and Monet
and Warhol and Oldenberg (who are also in town)
put together. Blake, that heaven of one.
Who felt often like Job--underfunded,
picked on by God. If Blake had invented
the camera, he'd have documented his fuming
and called it a day. But for the Romantics
suffering as performance wasn't a concept:
Keats coughed, Byron limped, Wordsworth lay
in bed with migraine, Coleridge rehabbed,
Shelley was nearly dead swimming laps for the big race.
I know an artist going to Finland for the weekend;
for three days he'll walk Puijo Hill as an artistic act.
It's a kind of race but no one can tell who wins--
But in photos he's posed his friends wearing
racing bibs with numbers like 219 and 383.
He doesn't have 383 friends, but the ones he has
will be with him conceptually, suffering,
thinking of him at 5:00 p.m. Sunday, his final climb
in the brilliant, egalitarian Finnish light,
the last gawkers and talkers gone home for fish soup.
And he's hot and the shadows are long
and the gods of walking and conceptualism
and realism, the gods of silhouettes
and full frontals, and of history and sculpture,
and the gods of the two and three and fourth
dimensions will have deserted him, all packed
for October, already. What do they care?
And the first stars will surface then, and the sky
will finally match the depth of the ocean,
and the dipper will come out like a long-tailed "Q"
and he will walk home under the stars because
Walking is what he does--And without gods--
without irony--he'll say to the sky and the path
"Look what I've made. Isn't it beautiful?"
Barry Flanagan is dead today of ALS--
that nightmare suffocation, the body closing
and closing its rooms--Flanagan,
who forged those goofy hares sailing like supermen--
who loved pulling his airstream, the obituary says,
through the capitals of Europe, but who
loved sculpture more. Suffering is what artists do best
unless it's rabbits or women pouring milk into bowls
or walking or waterlilies--miles of them--
trailersfull of them that Monet drove to Paris
where a grateful French nation built
a house for them where they burn like stars.
And I sat there alone and godless once--
It was October, 1988--And I drowned in them.
-Keith Ratzlaff