Unplugged Yellow

2

Phil was funny, paranoid, always looking around and rearranging things with his hands while he smoked cigarettes and dispatched his Heinekens. Sometimes he looked like he had an extra arm or two. He habitually wore a tweed jacket and steel-rim glasses. When we first met, Juno and I sat across from him at a table at Buffa's Deli on Prince Street between Lafayette and Mulberry. This was about the time Nick Right, another of my painters, first mentioned the FleXibles.

Nick said

They’re a hybrid of the Velvets and the Dolls. Throw in some Gang of Four. They play a lot in this loft on Canal Street. It’s turning into a Mudd Club annex. There’s this whole scene happening there. Everyone’s going. These guys could make it.

Old Nick almost didn’t make it himself. But he’s still here, even if he’s got a couple of bullet holes in him. Cheers, Nick. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Buffa's was a classic, intact 1950s family-run luncheonette. The Buffa boys were all mild-eyed, pot-bellied, slack-jawed; the Buffa girls were bright-eyed, wise-cracking, gum-chewing, beehived and bejewelled. I starting taking Juno there back in the green ware days. It was half way between her place and mine; it became our favorite rendezvous spot. Ma Buffa called us "Zach 'n' Juno" and always asked me where Juno was if I went in alone. I had found Buffa's the first week I was in New York because it was on the way from Orchard Street to the flea market if you went by St. Patrick's Church (the old one) in Little Italy, a route I liked; the maples and poplars in the brick-walled cemetery around the church made it a quiet block. One of Joseph Cornell's movies starts in the alley there (behind the Puck building actually) and meanders on down Mulberry Street.

Juno wanted her collector and her critic to get together.

Phil is divine, only you've got to get to him before cocktail hour. He's like an encyclopedia crossed with the social registry. He knows everything and everybody. Agnés has all the money, though. She’s one of the Façade sisters. The youngest. 22. She's not exactly gorgeous, but she's got her own wine label and a line of clothes, FACADE. Not to mention that place on the park.

Over the course of that first lunch Phil demonstrated his renowned photographic memory by reciting a couple of paragraphs from Candy, the novel by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, and some stanzas from Dante's Divine Comedy in Italian. He quizzed me, squinting one eye and raising the other's brow, and went right for my weak spot.

How about land art?

I knew about land art, of course, but I wasn't serious about anything that I couldn't collect. Plus it all seemed so Californian. Lots of people felt that was my big limitation: I believed in "things" which would lose their meaning in time or only exist as symbols of meaning at a given time. The action was all with the isms, starting with conceptualism. I thought that was bullshit, and anyway by definition a collector sets limits. I was against what I called spin-off art - photos of site-specific work for example, or Christo's drawings and models.

I regret that now, and blame it on my youth, but it allowed me to concentrate on painting and sculpture. I wasn’t always right, but when I was…As for Phil, that day I barely registered on the photographic eye he called a brain. He remembered everything, and he was on a first-name basis with the Eupatrids of the art world. But to a flea market rat from Mass, he sounded a little too slick. The only difference between Phil and your basic charlatan was that Phil was more abstract, better dressed, and the numbers were bigger.

Artists are double constructions. First they are self-constructions: they make themselves up, either from inner compulsion or simple cleverness. All artists are self-created. And then the art system reconstructs them. Most artists feel relieved to be associated with a gallery. At first. But these relationships are often unequal and so degenerate completely or fall into a kind of stasis, which is worse. Galleries are in the business of business, of creating value, brand name value for product lines. But there are huge holes in the system. Castelli wants his name to be the stamp of approval for modern art. Hell, his name is a stamp of approval. But they all want that. Who are the real artists? Besides present company, bien evidemment. Today's prices are not so high. There's a fucking renaissance going on in New York, for God's sake, and it's just about to peak. Most people don't have any idea what art is, modern or otherwise. They've missed it all, but they know if Castelli is selling it, then it's a likely bet to go up in price and there's a chance it's the next Jackson Pollock. Castelli is more than a power booster; he constructs another artist on the basis of his raw material. There's no automatic bottom or sides or top to this. It's like the law; a lawyer creates money for his clients. Well, believe me a critic can create money for an artist. Think of it this way: the artist is like someone with a claim who's looking for representation. It's a question of language, our story against theirs. But an artist is not a client, and that's why a critic matters. A critic has to justify his sensibility, he has to make a science of it. We're talking fine writing here. Take a look at my graphs.

His book of graphs traced the "VALUE EQUATIONS" for 46 artists. It was continuously being updated and expanded to include new artists. Each graph came with the artist's bio and photo. A video of the artist in action was available for $49.99. The graphs came out twice a year, with an original cover and lithograph for each issue by one of the newer artists. Phil was tacky. He was out to best the dealers by acting like he could reduce the level of risk they offered. He couldn't resist the idea of being an art guru, of making his voice the ultimate reference for the money that was just starting to come back into the downtown market as the city recovered from the 70s (“FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD”) and the yuppies found themselves with pockets full of discretionary income. The art impresario is an old game, but Phil was an original twist. He remembered more than anyone else, never forgot a name, always came up with the right figure. He was a celebrated poker player. Phil tried to insert the organs of order into a chaotic world where greatness is fugitive; he at least managed the illusion of order. He knew how to hit all those yuppies right between the eyes.

Little did I suspect at the time his role in laundering a couple of million dollars a year in Haitian drug money. But we’ll get to that.

He figured, despite Juno's enthusiasm for me, that I could do nothing for him. After that first lunch at Buffa’s, Juno and I went back to Orchard Street and slept together. Juno wouldn't stop talking about Phil. She even called me Phil once, and then laughed.

Phil's bi. Could you tell? Rickie Jones told me, so I know it's true. She says he wears women’s panties. He doesn't hide it, but he's not in your face about it either. Nobody really likes him, and everybody uses him, except Agnés. He married her for her money, but also because she's easy to manipulate. I wonder sometimes how he gets away with it. His conflict of interest, as my husband would say, is so obvious. Probably all the Façade money keeps him clean. People think he's too rich to get into trouble over paintings that are selling for a couple of hundred or a few thousand. She spends more than that on her average party. Everybody needs him. Do you think people always resent someone they need? Phil's not so bad. He takes risks. He reviewed my show when no one else would. He's like Robin Hood. You've got to give him a chance. He can help you too. Not that you need help, doll.

She left in the late afternoon to go back to her apartment in the West Village.

The next time I saw Phil was at Tom Dehavonon's gallery in February of '78 when Tom printed a book of his poems with original lithographs by David Greenberg, one of the first pattern painters, a nobody in my opinion. The poems were aphoristic, little word machines. The lithographs were geometric, red and black. Title: Head over Tail. Paper edition of 500. 30 copies hardcover, numbered and signed by the artist and poet. They were $5 for paper and $30 for the hardcover. I bought 1 hardcover and 4 paper and had them signed. The edition eventually sold out; my copies naturally went up in value directly. At the opening Phil bragged to me that his raison d'etre was the novel he was writing in gray hardcover notebooks that he got on the Rue du Pont Louis Philippe in Paris.

He said

Sure I’ll come see the collection. How could I resist?

He showed up the next week on Orchard St., manicured, barbered, in a crisp shirt, shoes shined, smashed. The first thing he noticed was the bottle of Jack Daniels on top of the refrigerator. I took him through the collection. Glass in hand, he batted a perfect score. Every single one. Not even Sz'Cool/8, an ultra-esoteric graffiti collective from Detroit, escaped him.

Willis, your taste in art is even better than your taste in bourbon. Don't tell me that's the last bottle!? How far is Fenelli's? And by the way, talk to me before you waste any more money on mid-western graffiti.

We became occasional drinking buddies and hung out with Juno together. In early '79 Phil wrote a review of Juno's exhibition at Magnum, a gallery in Soho, for Art Decorum. He was pushing her hard, and Art Decorum was a national. Almost everything he spouted was rehashed Duchamp, but he shouted "Art!" loud enough and the public followed him. His name appeared regularly in Downtown, the Voice and the Soho Weekly News. He did catalogue introductions.

And I was caught in the web.

So when I called about FleX, Phil knew me well enough. He'd never heard of the FleXibles, of course. He wanted to come down right away. I told him to wait until we had the show hung because then he could give us a fresh reaction. That would frustrate and intrigue him.

FleX and I saw each other every day, repainting the black brick wall and the gray floor. FleX always came to my place. He spent the rest of this time painting and playing music.

Then Spike Westman called in the middle of the month to tell me he'd just bought a country place in Woodstock and he was looking for a Deco bedroom set, something really glamorous and slick. He still got in touch with me for good pieces, and I always kept an eye out for him. I called my mother and she express mailed me a set of Polaroids she had of just the kind of thing Westman would go for. This wheeling and dealing amused FleX. I took him to Westman's place because I wanted Spike to meet him and I wanted FleX to see Spike's set up. Spike was working on a stainless steel sculpture 30 feet high for the city of Atlanta. I gave FleX a tour of his converted garage. All the Deco lamps and furniture I'd found made the place look like a movie set from the 1930s. This was a side of me that FleX had not seen before. Spike liked the Polaroids and we set a price. Half of it would go to my mother, but I stood to make a grand and a half, which I needed at the time. I had been coasting for almost 2 months and was broke.

FleX came with me in the van to my mother's place in Mass. Village People’s YMCA was a hit at the time, and it seemed to play every five minutes on the radio. I told him about my mother, in particular the men she had gone out with. It never surprised me to see someone I didn't know at breakfast. I was the flea that came with the market, one guy told me. A couple of them were really crazy. She picked up a telephone lineman when he was stringing phone wire by our house. He beat her up when she told him to get lost. I was 12 and took the car to try to find him. Another guy shot at our house with his hunting rifle. I called the police and they arrested him.

None of her men lasted long.

My mother was a little less hyper than usual, and she was happy to meet one of my friends. I rarely went home, except to pick up something to sell in the city, and I had never brought anyone with me. She made us tuna fish sandwiches in the kitchen, which was done in Depression chic. Her stuff was all over the place. She had her favorite 100 salt and pepper shakers displayed on shelves. She surely thought FleX's name was a little odd, and his black, ripped, paint-spattered clothes a little extreme, but she didn't say anything. She talked about her most recent affair.

He's illiterate. I didn't realize it until a month after I'd met him. He's developed a whole system for dealing with situations and people. Of course, eventually you can't help but find out. You might know someone who's illiterate without realizing. And what do you do, FleX?

He said

I paint. I'm having a show at Zach's loft. Why don't you come?

I had avoided ever inviting my mother down to New York. She jumped at the chance FleX offered her. There wasn't much I could say. She and FleX really hit it off after that. She showed FleX around the house, which was like a flea market itself, crammed with her treasures. My old room, still papered with maps, made him laugh. He threw his arm over my shoulder.

Like mother like son, eh, Zach?

After lunch I drove around behind the house to the old barn my mother used to store her stuff. We got the dismounted bedroom set into the van and I told my mother that I'd send her the $1,500 as soon as Spike's check cleared.

She said

No problem! I'm counting on you, FleX! I'll see you at the end of the month!

We dropped the bedroom set off at Spike's new place in Woodstock and he wrote me a check for it. The house was built around a group of telephone poles. He had hung rooms off of them like a cubist sculpture with odd stairs and halls connecting them. He had built in the Victorian arched windows, 18 feet high, extremely rare, that I had found for him a year before. I tried to talk him into bringing Meisel to FleX's show.

Meisel? I can't promise that, but I'll come. When is it, again? End of the month? I'm going to write it down. Anything I don't write down these days...when your memory goes you’ve got to build a paper one. And I'll get Gary to come with me. Don't worry, kid. FleX, right? In my opinion, you should use your real name, these days everybody needs a gimmick. It's ridiculous. I mean, everybody calls me Spike, but it’s not a gimmick. Just a nickname. But if Zach says you're any good, that means you are. He's got the eye. I know dealers on the coast who would sell their souls for his eye. An eye like that is a gift. People like Zach can walk into a barn full of shit for sale and pick out the one thing there that's worth anything. That goes for art too. Look at my place. I thought I knew something about decorating. Until Zachary started coming over and putting up this and that, moving things around. Look at that wall of lamps, those girls holding milk glass moons. 100 of them. Imagine! Outrageous! And Zach's idea! Different colored bulbs, all on a dimmer. Tell me that's not art. That's some fucking collecting. So I'll come and see you, and I'll bring Gary. But Meisel, he doesn't get out much to see work. But I'll talk to him anyway.

When we got back to the city I took FleX out to dinner at an Italian place on Thompson Street.

I like the way you make your money, Zach. It's out of the circuit, you're not working for any asshole, there's no negative violence, you're ok. For me, there's negative violence and positive violence. Most people think this is crazy. But it’s like this. Negative violence is violence that weakens you, breaks you down or puts you out. Like some killing 9 to 5 gig. Or like living in nowhereville U.S.A. That's negative violence, a kind of violence like being smothered in the cradle. Positive violence wakes you up to new worlds, birth violence, the violence of change. Volcano violence. Gives me a hard-on just thinking about it. Violence is necessary to life, a non-violent life is death. That’s why I always say peace kills more people than war.

FleX amazed me. I mean, I had never even seen him kill a roach. Lots of artists have wacky theories about all kinds of weird shit. His ideas about violence seemed so far from his abstract paintings. But as we worked to hang the show, the calm surfaces of the paintings started to seem like a veil to me. Or was that just because I was getting to know him? Hanging the work I realized too that all his paintings had opaque, colored, odd-shaped disks in their centers, about three inches across. A signature.

When we were done painting and hanging, 15 major FleXes adorned the walls.

Phil came down and did a slow turn around the room, scotch in hand.

It’s Goddamn perfect. People need to go slumming again. It's good for moral. I like the sweatshops downstairs. The end of October. Don't worry about the cold. It should be a little cold. People will freeze a little. It'll help concretized the insider/outsider thing as architecture. This is what I call signature work. It's got a recognizable signature. But it's not redundant. Look at those amoebae-like disks! That's an artist who's going to make it! Recognizable but not repetitive. Look at the way the colors are pigmatized. The intensity of the value juxtapositions. Look at the sprung geometry. The density of the information. The push/pull thing is perfect. The lovely painterly gestures. The way each painting revolutionizes the others. This is the artist who will change the name of the game. The 70s have been a parody of an art decade. This is the 80s. Look here at the identical formats. What does the inhabiting of such a format signal? That the artist is spiritually at home in himself. He has reached a certain limit, but not a limitation. This is the fullness of a full thing that will attain more. The surfaces of these paintings are as taut and finished as the surface of a seed. This is the artist we have been waiting for.

FleX played it straight. Phil smoked, his elbow braced reflectively in his other hand as he squinted at each painting.

I always squint when I look at a painting for the first time. It juices up the retinal impact. Brings out the geometry.

I opened some beers. I put on one of the FleXible's tapes.

Phil said

The only thing I know that's worse than the music business is prize fighting. Look at poor Sid.

Sid & Nancy, 6 months before.

The same mixture of devastating labor from the performers exploited by cut-throat lawless business people soaked in insane hype. You just got into rock because of your ambition for public acknowledgment of your abilities. Utterly foolish. I don't believe in categories, including sexual. I'm a musician, I play the piano. But it's not a calling. Look at Larry Rivers and his sax: that's the way to go. Larry's problem is he was born Jewish, not black. But that's another story. Stick to the music and your mediocrity is assured. You’ll end up like the rest of those poor bastards at CBGBs. A painter is above ordinary mortals. You walk among men, but you are not of them. We will give you your aura, like the Dali Lama you will be apart. I know what you think: old Phil is full of shit, that if you drop the music, the painting will fall through and you'll be left with nothing except pity for your abysmal situation. Don't worry. You're a survivor. I'll take care of you. And as for you, my friend Zachary, to really get FleX out of the art ghetto we're going to need to breach the museums, put a traveling show together with a blue chip catalogue. The dealers are not above biting the hand that feeds them. Most collectors, not all of course, but most, are suckers or social climbers, weirdos and outsiders who want to buy their way in to the inner circle. Even in the best of times dealers treat you like customers. At the moment prices are so high that even uptown people are talking about the old verities, a revolting display of sentimentality. It's all because of "Blue Poles."

Before his recent flight from the Peacock Throne, the Shah of Iran had offered 8 million to the Australians for Pollock's "Blue Poles." They turned him down, and as someone said, he had to find another way to ruin himself. The prices for Pollocks doubled, confirming the then-still-valid double axiom: a fair price is what someone will pay, and the market adjusts upward to a high price.

We hadn’t seen anything yet.

Phil's insinuations didn't bother me. My reputation was spreading artist by artist. Artists respected me as a purist. A piece in my collection conferred the best kind of underground status. I almost never bought out of a gallery, but when I did I liked to buy as much of a show as I could. Once I bought an entire show of Erika Fumm's paintings at Julian Pretto's Thompson Street space. I learned as much about real estate as about art from Pretto, and that little gallery was a gold mine. He gave me 25% off. 1 year later Fumm was part of a show at PS 1 of downtown women artists at the same time as she was showing solo at the Wooster Street Gallery. Both shows had decent catalogues. I privately resold most of the paintings from the Pretto show for 10 times what I paid, keeping the best. No true collector is by nature a dealer, but I needed money to get to the higher-priced artists.

So I worked my corner.

Phil wanted to fuck FleX. It was grotesque but droll, a travesty of soap-opera innuendo and sly insinuation. We started in on a bottle of Jack. Then Phil pulled out his ultimate weapon of seduction, art power.

I've just been named editor-in-chief of TODAY'S ART. And I'm going to devote a good part of my first issue to you. Today there isn't a spokesman for any point of view. Do you know of one? I don't. And I put my money where my pen is. You know, when Tom Hess was editor-in-chief at Art News he actually awarded prizes--best show of the year, best drawing show, etc. I think a critic should stir things up, and I think artists should be rewarded. The suffering artist in his garret is a medieval idea, like spanking children. The insane New York art world may look like an economist's daydream of random democracy, but that's not what it's about.

Nothing else happened that night, and the next day FleX told the FleXibles to change their name. Phil started hyping FleX as a radical change from pattern and decoration, the downtown painter to invest in. A lot of wallpaper and linoleum pieces started to look embarrassing.

End of Chapter 2

A new chapter will be published each week.

Copyright (c) Richard Dailey 2008. All rights reserved.