Unplugged Yellow

3

FleX was shooting the White Widow every 6 hours like clockwork. The other day a collector asked me why I didn’t try to stop him. All I can say is that when I’ve experienced self-destructive behavior, I’ve always considered it a valid confirmation of free will. And truthfully I took an artistic fascination in the spectacle of self-destruction, my own included. Not that I would go to the lengths that some have been known to. And finally I told myself I did not want to disturb whatever was going on in his head to produce those paintings.

Phil was cavalier about it all. He said

I don't like it, but who's ready to throw the first stone? At least it's better than all that Dr. Feelgood speed at Andy's. That's pretty tired. At least FleX keeps on working. Mike Leeson's photos are brilliant, by the way. He's a tad temperamental, but he delivers. We're going to use all 15. In color, my dear Zachary. We're documenting every damn painting in the show. 2000 glossy catalogues. 2000 is an exemplary number for a first catalogue. It's all being done by an uptown outfit. Best graphists in the business. They do layout work for Rizzoli and Abrams. They've got the photos bleeding right out to the pages' edge, no margins. I've got the text just about nailed down. I've given him the intellectual force of a new wave of expressionism with the naturalness of a naïf. Highly aware but not academic. Downtown but on the way up. Solid and yet tantalizing. I think we've hit exactly the right tone. Agnés has her caterers in action. They'll need to get in your place around 5 o'clock. We're going to keep the firewater flowing. Our guest list is solid gold and has been heavily RSVP'd. We're spinning a very wide web. Come up for lunch on Friday. Both of you. Agnés will be here, and a couple of business acquaintances. Collectors. You’ll be interested to meet them.

Anyone Phil wanted to introduce me to, I wanted to meet. He said

I’ll get Agnés to ladle out some caviar just to make it worth your while, you dreadful things. There’s only one rule; she’s mine, so keep your dirty little paws off her.

When FleX heard that, he took a tube of brown lipstick that someone had left lying around and rubbed it on his teeth. He also took a leather belt and cinched it around his head. That soon became his trademark crazy motherfucker look.

One thing about Phil, sometimes you had to take him literally. On Friday we found the limo idling for us downstairs at the curb. The uniformed chauffeur, not Tom Waits but might have been him, hopped out to open the door for us. FleX was freshly stoned, sucked in and whitewashed by the heroin. Everyone did a double take at the sight of him.

He said

Phil better not be thinking that a fucking limo ride is going to impress me.

We were both dressed in black and looked like a weird couple of X-rays getting out of the limo in front of the red awning with gold braid. This was obviously why Phil had invited us to his place. There were two doormen in the same red with gold epaulets, one of whom announced us. The building had a none-too-original name, THE PARK VIEW, but it was embossed everywhere in gold. The brass on the vast front doors gleamed with accents that said infinite attention was lavished on it. Inside the lobby everything was cool-white and green, marble and palm trees. There must have been 20 potted palms in that lobby, and between each pair of palms was a man in a red uniform standing at attention. The nearest stepped out and escorted us to a private elevator. Eyebrows rose in succession as we passed. We rose up through a shaft in the splendor to the penthouse. Phil was standing there when the door opened onto his private foyer. This marble hall had been stripped except for a wall of televisions by Nam June Paik that filled the place with lurid TV blues and greens. A B-52's record was playing. Phil was slick all right. He was wearing shades, a Hawaiian shirt, white pants, and he was bare foot.

Delighted to see you, boys. Love the belt! Talk about keeping your head together! And wow, gorgeous teeth! Damn! Some folks just got style! Welcome to the "Façade", as we like to call it. It's so pleasant out, I thought we should eat by the pool. I hope that suits you. Come along, Agnés and the collectors are waiting for us.

The "Façade" made Spike's converted garage look like a village crash pad. We followed him through the ambient music up a curving staircase to a multi-level room with wraparound windows and a 360- degree view. I scanned the art. A Kandinsky and a beautiful Blue Period Picasso were the highlights. Off the walls there was a bar, a billiard table, and, indeed, outside a sliding glass door, a terrace with a swimming pool and a Henry Moore sculpture. Agnés, wrapped in a blue terrycloth robe, was sitting at a table that was set for lunch sipping on an ice tea with a big sprig of mint sticking out of it. With her were two men. She was all smiles and kissed us on both cheeks.

Phil said

Boys, it’s my pleasure to introduce you to Domingo Santiago from Colombia…

We shook hands with a short 35-year-old balding Columbian in Armani, sans cravatte.

…and Etienne De la Terre, from Haiti.

Ditto his younger, taller, thinner, darker more hirsute neighbor in Calvin Klein sweats and sneakers.

Margaritas and Pina Coladas all around, except Etienne, who asked for Evian.

Agnés said

Would you like to swim before we eat? The water is heated. 28 degrees.

FleX said

My makeup.

And smiled.

Agnés smiled back and said

Yes of course. How silly of me.

She stood up, walked to the pool and dropped her robe. She was naked. She had a sensational body, no one could have imagined it under all the loose Indian prints she generally wore. The B-52s stopped and Jethro Tull came on.

Phil said

Monsieur de la Terre and Senor Santiago are here for the old Masters sale at Sotheby's on Monday night. Monsieur de la Terre is Ministre de la Culture in Haiti. Senor Santiago represents a private buyer in Columbia. I’ve been advising them for a while and I’ve been known to represent them when something comes up. And I’ve been trying to get our friends interested in contemporary art, particularly New York painting.

Haiti and Colombia chuckled heartily and sipped their drinks. We all looked at FleX with his brown teeth and head belt.

Phil continued

I want them to see the catalogue. I’m glad they get a chance to meet the artist, as well. I’m trying to convince them to hang around for the show. But if not I’d like to bring them down for a private viewing.

Colombia and Haiti chuckled again. Colombia said

Jeez, Phil, twist our arms a little harder. That’s what we like about Phil, never a dull moment.

Haiti said

That, and his sure feet in the art market.

A Swedish girl brought out a tray of smoked salmon on toast and lamb brochettes. Agnés dried off and came back to the table in her robe. We ate and small talked about the up-coming Sotheby’s auction. After eating, Phil showed us FleX’s catalogue. It looked as good as he said it would. Haiti and Colombia made appreciative noises, shook hands and departed. Agnés walked them out.

Phil said

They can’t figure out why I want to get them into contemporary. But they are coming around. They have garbage bags full of money. How can they not be interested in contemporary? They buy art here and resell it in Europe and the cash is clean. Even if they take a beating by ordinary standards, it’s nothing compared to what the banks take to play their little shell games with it. Contemporary art is the single most unregulated market of such value in the world. You may be wondering why I’m mentioning all this. Eventually, Willis, I think we can work together. I want you to think about that. OK, time to talk turkey. I know Zachary has bought 3 paintings already.

He didn't know about "Unplugged Yellow."

Agnés and I are going to take 3. That leaves us 9, all in the same 5' by 3' format. To start I suggest we put the same price tag on all of them: 2,100. We split that 3 ways, 700 each, including any sales coming out of the show. After the catalogue and the caterer have been taken care of, that is. There will be a wait list, you know, and we'll double the prices for it. I've taken the liberty of having a small model contract drawn up. And here, in the meantime, is 2,100 cash; that's 7OO for each of the three paintings we're taking. The contract specifies that we get "Night Vision," "Fire Escape," and "Last Man." Take a look at it.

He tossed the contract and the envelope of cash on the table.

FleX said:

We split three ways, but no deduction for the catalogue or the caterer. That's your investment, and no bullshit, it's cheap. Everybody's bringing something in. I'm bringing my paintings, Zach is putting in his space and time, you do your thing. We split 3 ways.

Phil folded. We signed, drank a second bottle of Sancerre and took a taxi back downtown.

FleX said

Phil is so fucking cheap. If we paid off his damn catalogue, we'd go into debt. There's something really monstrous about the guy. Him talking about garbage bags full of cash, and trying to jerk us off for a couple of thousand bucks. His little eyes shining behind those glasses, his fuzzy teeth, the way he's always drinking and smoking, the way he never stops talking. That third eye he says he has. Critics like him should mean as much to artists as bird watchers do to birds. He thinks this time will be known as the Phil Grey era. Those graphs, those value fluctuations. And the drug goons! And Agnés. But you have to like her a little more. At least she's not a gold digger. And at least she doesn't drop names like Phil. At least she's got great tits and a couple of hundred million. He treats her like a Nazi. He's capable of bumping her off for her money. In fact, it's a recipe for homicide. HUBBY KILLS HONEY FOR HER MONEY. If I were her, I'd be scared shitless.

FleX moved into the back of my loft to work because his place was too small now. We hung more lights from the tin ceiling. I rented a storage bin on 2nd Avenue where I moved the rest of my collection. The Yale lock clicked shut neatly on almost everything I'd collected in 5 years. FleX got together another 10 paintings by the end of the month. I wanted 3 more in addition to the 3 from the show, and Phil didn’t need to know.

Sometime around October 20th I brought FleX a sandwich from Katz's Deli. He didn't touch it. Warm day, Indian summer, the windows open as FleX painted in his jeans and sneakers and T-shirt. His drug works, the needle, belt, matches, lemon, bent spoon, were as normal as the turpentine and pots of paint. White spirits and the White Widow.

FleX said

Phil is an opportunist and a seducer. He doesn't need to know anything. He wants me, in any form, and that's all that matters. Art market erotics. You know, he was wrong from the start, I think it's even more violent than the music business, only the people all wear these civil-looking masks. We just have to keep teasing him along, giving him the little bit it takes to make him think he might get more. So I don't care what we arranged, you don't pay the same thing he does. Give me a couple of hundred. From each according to his ability.

The wait list for paintings on October 31st was 20 names long. We could have tripled the prices. At least 500 people passed through that Indian summer evening, a lot of them in costume on the way to other parties, and sometimes it seemed more like a 1000. Agnés's buffet was vacuumed up in 30 minutes. The paintings went almost as fast. There were clusters of people on the stairs all the way down, punks, monsters, mink-coats, witches, transvestites, suits. Andy showed up with his factory pack and started handing out copies of Interview. The gallery gangs came through and a lot of them stayed. I thought Phil was going to blow all his gaskets when Ivan Carp came puffing into the room with that big Havana and matching Barbie blonds on each arm (both of them half a foot taller than he). Spike Westman, Gary Roth and the Meisel crew showed up, dressed to the 9s. The buyers were fighting over the show. I discreetly sold "Ignition 3," from my private stock, to a friend of Spike's for $3000, realizing a $2,700 profit on one painting. Spike and I kidded about it, but 4 months later he bought in at better than twice the price. It was as if everyone had been standing around waiting for FleX, which in fact they were because he didn’t show up until most people had left. Phil worked the crowd like a politician. He was fast on his feet with half a bottle of scotch in him, closing in on the magazine and museum people. Mark Spenser promised Phil his coveted February slot for a major FleX show in his West Broadway space and signed Phil up to do the text.

And my mother came. It was the first time she'd been to Orchard Street. Despite her cosmopolitan take on random, one-night stands, my mother had always been anti-city. But she was a positive person. She could easily just take over once she saw how small town downtown could be. I left home at 16 for a reason.

She used to say

You're crazy to put up with the dirt and noise and pollution and crime. I know you can get more money for things, but I like it where I am. Let people like you come up and buy from me. I make less, but my costs are lower.

But it turned out OK. She showed up when things were in full swing. It didn't take her long to get her bearings. Once she did, she wanted to meet everyone. The big surprise was the way she hit it off with Spike. They talked to each other exclusively. Every time I looked their way they were tête à tête. I was stunned.

A kind of mantra started running through the crowd: WHERE'S THE ARTIST? The rumor started that he was the most beautiful painter since de Kooning, then the most monstrous since van Gogh. It was a kind of genius on FleX's part not to appear for this opening. The crowd would have smothered him or taken him apart. Instead they filled the void he left with themselves.

Blue, however, got there early and latched onto my arm, refusing to let go. We went behind the walls to have a snort from my private stash, and Blue yanked my pants down and started blowing me. Just as I was starting to feel pretty positive about the whole thing, Juno and Phil came back looking for some booze. At the time having one lover interrupt another's blowjob was no big deal, not much different from a painter finding someone else's work hanging on your wall.

But Juno cried

Oh Jesus Christ!

and ran out. I buttoned up and ran after her. Blue ran after me. Juno tried to be cool, but then Blue called her a bitch and a second later they were fighting. Juno's nose spurted blood. Hair flew. Phil helped me separate them. Juno clamped a handful of paper towels to her nose and stormed out. That was the first time Blue went wild, and the last time I saw Juno until after Nick Right was shot.

I told Blue to exit. She came back half an hour later, skulking around and watching me. I told her to get lost again. She said it was a public event. I threw her out. She bounced back. I don't know why I never called Juno.

Around midnight my mother came up to me. She said

He is the most interesting man! And good God, that body! He's in incredible shape! He says you've done his whole place over. He says you're a genius. Zachary, I can't believe you've been hiding this from me all these years. I had no idea. We're going to have a drink together, Spike and I. Do you think FleX is ever going to show up? I'd like to see him again, but I can always catch him tomorrow.

She and Spike left together. FleX didn't show up until after 2, wearing the belt cinched around his head and brown lipstick on this teeth. A core of 25 people remained around the restocked bar. The aura had been conferred. Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” was playing – the first rap song I ever heard.

With FleX was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. To this day she is the only woman I have ever loved, except for our daughter. She was tall and blade-thin and deep black, her long hair in braids. She looked like a black Modigliani woman, with wide-spaced, cat-like eyes and coral red lipstick. You couldn't say if she was up or down, into making the scene or shy of it, bored or satisfied. She didn't seem to notice anyone. She might have been walking in the jungle. FleX introduced us. Her name was Rachel Aufan. She assessed me with an open, withering look. She just X-rayed me. The music stopped. My ears were ringing.

If you had told me then that we would be together I would have laughed. Or cried. Rachel might have been carved in black marble. Everyone's eyes, mine included, were riveted on her.

Phil said

We just had a major sold-out opening in an unknown loft without the artist. This is history. It's a first. We have a list of people ready to pay top prices for paintings that don't exist yet. The less visible and the more mysterious FleX is, the brighter his aura will be. He is like electricity: only his effects are apparent. The signature is the authenticating element. But what authenticates the absent artist's signature? Another signature! I shall sign the backs of all FleX's works from this day forth! A double signature!

FleX started to push Phil around. Like he was looking for a fight. Like he knew then what we later learned. The Clash came on. Phil was so drunk that he kept falling backwards. Then it was like they were doing some weird dance together, stumbling all over the place in each other's arms. They fell apart and Phil turned into a big hapless grinning doll. FleX went back to Rachel.

The rest of the night FleX, stoned on heroin, just sipped his Guinness and chain smoked the Camel filters, sitting on the window sill, Rachel beside him, like statues starry-eyed with love.

I met Charm Russler that night too. We yelled at each other over the music. After my mother she became the second greatest influence on my collecting. She bought a FleX that night. She was a big collector, but didn't have the stiff, overgroomed look of most big-time women collectors. Her husband was an arbitrage lawyer. He had his own financial newsletter. He was often on TV. She said she was Hungarian royalty, but I know her parents were actually Romanian circus performers. Later I saw some old photographs of them performing in an album of press clippings slipped in among the art books in her library. We agreed to compare collector's notes in a couple of days at Locanda di Giotto, an Italian coffee place on Lafayette Street just south of Prince.

The sun came up, turning the wired glass windows milky behind FleX and Rachel.

Two days later Charm and I were sipping cappuccini and quizzing each other. She had Rothko, Lichtenstein, Stella, Bourgeois, Beuys, Cornell, Chamberlain, Pollock, Nevelson, Newman, Warhol, Twombly, Kline, all blue chips. It seemed wider than deep, but it obviously had something by just about every important artist after WWII to the early 60s, when it thinned out. Still by any standard it seemed like Charm and her husband Wally had a world-class collection.

She paid and we got in a cab to go and see it. We sailed over the Brooklyn Bridge as the sun was starting to set. It was much colder than it had been on the 31st, the wind was blowing and the air was crystal suffused with color. She did the talking.

Most collectors buy contemporary because they are afraid to miss out on the next Picasso. They don't know that there is no next Picasso. They don't know that they themselves are what's coming next, that they are already here. Collectors are the future. In another ten years the word collector will have dropped all the bullshit negativity. Collectors will stand next to orchestra conductors and choreographers as great artists. Collecting is as intense as painting. A collector's materials are the works of other artists. It's not easy. Collecting has nothing do with simple buying. My husband doesn't understand. For him the collection is an investment. The fact is art doesn't matter to him at all. It could be oil wells. He collects those too, actually. But the sensibility at work in my art collection, my sensibility, is not apparent to him. Anything that's not as tangible as a rock is not apparent to him. He doesn’t even understand that a collection can make an artist immortal. A true collector is a god, and a good collection is an immortality machine. I love this bridge. Down there is where Hart Crane lived. Do you know his father made Life Savors? And he couldn't save his son. That is American culture. We're not far now.

Coherence was never her strong suit, but she got to the point as we rolled off the bridge.

I want you to work for me. I have a new project. I want to begin another collection, of paintings and sculpture, and I want to start it with FleX. I want the collection to contain nothing that predates FleX. FleX is the flood, and my collection will be Noah's ark. I have at last understood something very important, something that you probably already have realized, but it has taken me all these years. A true collection of contemporary art projects itself into the future, it shapes its own future and the history of art. A collection of established artists projects itself into the past. It confirms the past, it gives the past weight. But who wants to live in the past? I want you to advise me on the collection. I am putting all my chips on FleX because I think there is the real potential for a movement, and for a collector to be there at the birth of a movement is the greatest thing there is. I missed minimalism, I missed post-minimalism. I'm not missing FleX. Here we are.

Here was a 5-story brownstone on Columbia Heights along the promenade. The basement, 1st and 2nd floors held the core of the collection; it was an astonishing blend of 19th century baroque plaster work and gilt mirrors with the heavies of late modernism and abstract expressionism, a total of 75 paintings. It dazzled me, this encounter with another painting collection that was more than the simple sum of its parts. We made the rounds and she recounted each painting's acquisition. Her ownership was thrilling to her, but she went farther: not only did she live in her paintings, but they came alive in her. She believed that the most important thing that could happen to a painting was to enter her collection. The longer I followed her around and listened to her, the more I felt like a rube, a cowboy, a dabbler. It was incredible to me that she would drop all of this and start again with FleX.

She said

Drop it? Never! I will put it somewhere it can never be touched. In a museum. I'm talking to several people about it, but I'm afraid I may have to create my own museum. One can, of course, but a wing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Contemporary Art would be so much more advantageous. Something like the deal they gave Count Lippo Lippi would do fine. The one true, absolute test of a collection is to transfer it. Only the very best can stay together once the collector is gone.

If I had any criticism of Charm, it was that she didn't realize that once it stops growing, a collection is dead. She wanted a mausoleum (at least for this part of her life, which was inextricable from the paintings), not a museum (or are they the same thing?). Charm and Wally's divorce and court case involving the collection are now well known, but at the time the Russlers still lived in the 3 upper stories of their brownstone with an unobstructed view of the harbor, downtown, the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. Here were his paintings, the old masters, the dog paintings, the family portraits. Wally Russler favored solid-gold Americans like Singer and Hopper, but he also liked American naïfs. This was more along the lines of what I would have expected from collectors in the Heights. Wally and Charm had two children, a boy and a girl, ages 4 and 6. They were in the Hamptons with him for the weekend. Charm called the River Café and had them send us some dinner in a taxi--the chef was a friend of hers. We opened a bottle of St. Emilion and sat with it on the 2nd floor in a room where hung a Pollock, a Rothko, a Gorky, all New York artists who had died violently.

I call this room contra nature.

The harbor and downtown skyline shimmered through the French windows. The pigeon pâté with pistachios and raw oysters and grilled lobster tails arrived with all the trimmings. We opened the 2nd bottle of St. Emilion and ate everything. I felt like I had been translated up to a higher sphere. She got up to dead bolt the doors and check the alarm. We made love on the floor, in her bed, in the shower.

As the sun was coming up I left and walked over the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan. I thought about that room full of work by artists who died violently. Contra nature. I thought about FleX, Chris Price, the kid from New Jersey who was painting in my loft and making me more money in one night than I had made in the last 6 months. I thought about Rachel Aufan. With one contact she had left an empty place in me, like a spot on a wall no picture but hers could fill. It seemed clear to me in that dawn light that everything was just starting, that a wave was swelling up to something that looked tidal on the horizon. Life's randomness, urban and terrifying as looking down the barrel of a mugger's gun, had vanished like a whimsical illusion: fate had marked us for its chosen ones.

The night we met, FleX said

I don't believe in accidents.

FleX was a mirror in which people saw themselves. We are the hasty and inexperienced creatures of the moment.

End of Chapter 3

A new chapter will be published each week.

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