folio : Forty-five Ottawa poets
A
thousand-foot-square
of
hardwood, tall white baseboards…
Alice
Neel’s spattered smock
hangs
stiffly on an easel
in
the Upper West Side.
Objects
won’t contain what she thought.
New
York, Mexico,
the
biographical facts.
Her
first child’s death won’t contain;
subsequent
breakdown, ruined suicide
won’t
contain. She painted
in
the psychiatric ward until released,
then
consorted with highbrows, sailors,
and
addicts, painting Joe Gould
with
multiple penises to embody his bloated ego
while,
in unblinking detail, she reclaimed
the
female nude. Tubes of colour—
Cobalt
Velvet, Alizarin Red—
remain
in a tray with a palette of brushes
near
her yellow velvet chair, all
“untouched”
since 1984
when
she last exited the room.
A
half-hour commute, past
the
park, Wesselmann’s studio left
“largely
untouched” reports the Times,
his
track-lit glob of prime real estate,
nostalgia
or archive. Beside
a
paintbox of brushes
and
the blue painting gloves,
are
notebooks, a brace of canvas stretchers,
the
electric drill—
He
died in 2004, Christmas carols
warbling
over NoHo airwaves.
Assemblage,
collage, never “pop art,”
Wesselmann’s
shelves
of
cardboard maquettes and stylized
lines
remain hanging there, fierce
primaries,
hidden from the public, his name
still
listed on the intercom.
“Left
as it was,” since 1965, Milton Avery’s rooms,
the
framed paintings and van der Rohe chairs.
Shells,
ceramics, stacked books,
paintings
from the 40s, the muted light
on
upholstered surfaces of late afternoon.
Lucas
Samaras’s trinkets, clutter, pinned walls
of
gewgaws, “the formal exposure of my psyche…”
The
furniture and decor
designed
by himself, the cubbies
in
the headboard lined
with
thirty patent leather shoes,
a
Midtown abode on the 62nd floor
he
cobbled together from two
adjoining
apartments with a door cut
between
them, silver lamé curtains
and
two separate kitchens. Catalogued,
the
contents will be packed
and
moved, the skyline
reclaimed
by new owners
(who
will ever wear those shoes again?).
Jack
Whitten’s studio “remains
nearly
untouched,” evidence
of
what shuffled through his mind
toward
each prepared accident, sometimes
mosaic,
elegy, a thick wodge of acrylic
dragged
by a squeegee, an Afro comb,
and
later, a self-constructed rake
he
called the “Developer,” paintings
built
of “bright-color tesserae
and
pearlescent dust.”
From
floor-to-ceiling, his mixed,
unused
materials wait,
no
item without purpose,
photographs,
fish bones,
masks,
brushes, empty wine bottles,
and
placed
on
a high central shelf, his own ashes
in
a dark wooden box.
I’m working on a manuscript with themes of storage, junk, ephemera, keepsakes and/or landfill, all those terms for stuff we accumulate, differing in emotional register. In the past few years, I’ve moved a couple of times, while needing to clear a few parental homes of lifetimes (generations) of things. It has dramatically repositioned my relationship to clutter. Should I keep this object? Is it useful? Is it necessary? How is it essential to my life? In the midst of this, articles keep popping up about artists’ apartments, in New York especially, that have been preserved since the artist died. The majority of them are never open to the public, a non-museum of creativity. Questions: archive or junk? A monument or real estate strategy? What happens when these artists’ children or executors die? What, finally, is any object’s meaning?
David O’Meara is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently A Pretty Sight and Masses On Radar (Coach House Books, 2013, 2021), recipients of the Archibald Lampman Award and the Ottawa Book Award. His novel, Chandelier, is published by Nightwood Editions (2024). He is the current Poet Laureate (Anglophone) of the City of Ottawa.