Geoffrey Young : WHEN READING IS SEEING AND THINKING IS SEMANTIC

for Mel Bochner, 1940-2025

 

                               “Doubt, thy name is certainty”

Mel’s a word that rimes with tell, and gel, and sell, and bell.
When it rings, I think Mel!
When I’m in the city, where he was wont to dwell,
Tribeca means Mel!  And so on, for gel and sell.
And for smell, as well.

Rime can be trusted every time
to obscure the crime.  But Mel didn’t yell.
He lived in a domestic haven of art, not hell.
With attention focused on syllable and sense,
on gibberish and smarts, his endless lists
of idiomatic phrases, when brilliantly arrayed,
stuck like darts on the big target of American art. 

Just think how much the twenty-six letters of the alphabet
meant to him! And of the handful
of diacritical marks with which he fronted & fonted
his rogue meanings and vogue shapes. 

With so much talk to cull from and irreverence to mine,
being in a world of language was not unlike being surrounded
by music, albeit the music of goof & wonder, of fatuousness & blunder. 

Mel used more colors than anybody knew existed
to body forth verbal collisions in work after work.
Never less than exacting, still he courted accident.
He was as messy as the feeling of the moment demanded.

What Francis Picabia wrote of Guillaume Apollinaire a hundred years ago
pertains tonight, as we navigate Mel: 

“The memory of him that I preserve is one of a great freshness of heart,
of a great simplicity that only really blossomed in the intimacy
of friends, outside of any “gallery.”  As for his work, I consider that it is
at once filled with invention, and of the most intelligent kind.
He’s a friend whose absence I regret profoundly.”               

 

 

 

 

Geoffrey Young [photo credit: Dennis Kardon] was born in Los Angeles in 1944, and grew up in San Diego.

Before settling in Great Barrington, Massachusetts in 1982, Young spent student years in Santa Barbara (UCSB), and Albuquerque (UNM), then lived for two years in Paris (a Fulbright year followed by a six-month stint working for La Galerie Sonnabend). Married for many years to Laura Chester, they lived for seven of them in Berkeley (two sons born). Their small press, The Figures (1975-2005), published more than 135 books of poetry, art writing, and fiction.

He has taught literature and art at San Francisco State, Columbia’s General Studies Program, Vassar, and the University at Albany, NY. From 1992-2018 he ran the Geoffrey Young Gallery, where he presented hundreds of contemporary art shows.

Nadia Szold’s 80 minute film, The Figures (2023), features Young in the context of art and writing friends.

Recent chapbooks of poetry and drawings include LOOK WHO’S TALKING (2024); At Stake (2024); Monk’s Mood (2023); Money (2022); & Habit (2021).

Geoffrey Young : Three Dates

 

 

HENRY MILLER (Three Visits)

 

It isn’t far from the Pacific Coast Highway to LA’s Brentwood, the upscale neighborhood where Henry Miller moved in the 60s, after decades living in a cabin in Big Sur. I have the address, and I find the street. My father, Lafe Young, used to supply Henry with books when he needed them. They’d met in 1940, and stayed in touch as friends. After the Tropic Of Cancer got busted for obscenity, and after the sensational trial in the fifties, fate had made Henry a rich man in his early seventies.

A handsome two-story house on a curved street, 444 Ocampo Drive even has a swimming pool. I am twenty years old. I knock on the door. In a month I will take a student ship to England, then spend four months in France as a student followed by five months hitching from Madrid to Istanbul, from Zagreb to Copenhagen, from Florence to Brindisi, from Geneva in a snowstorm to Paris, among other improvisatory escapades, including Tangiers.

It is suppertime and soon Henry puts a gin & tonic in front of me, followed by a pork-chop. He urges me to read Jean Giono, Blaise Cendrars, and Camus (but not Sartre). He isn’t too busy to praise his peers, or ask a question. Brushes and colors and paper for watercolors cover the desk in his office, and on one bare wall he has scribbled all manner of quotes from his reading, in pencil and marker and crayon. Boho chic! We sip, we eat, we talk, I listen. After supper, as he smokes a cigarette, I thank him for dinner and the visit, and depart.

Two years later, it’s the spring of 1966, and there is an important show of works by Henri Matisse at UCLA. I’m a student in Santa Barbara where Hugh Kenner smokes two Salem cigarettes per lecture on Jonathan Swift or Beckett or Pound. And my folks are in San Diego. We agree to meet at the gallery on the UCLA campus at noon. It is the first chance for any of us to see “The Red Studio,” among other works. The show’s a knock out and we’re all reeling. Then we get in our cars and I lead them to 444 Ocampo Drive. My father raps his knuckles on the door. I don’t think the visit has been planned. Henry opens the door wide and steps out, an unfiltered Chesterfield cigarette wet in his lips. He looks at my father and mother, stands back a step, notices me slightly behind, then with a big smile on his face, gives my old man a big kiss on the forehead. We are ushered inside.

He tells my parents that he’s been married to a Japanese woman half his age, but that she recently moved out. Henry shows us around. Office, kitchen, living room. We don’t go upstairs. Now there is a ping pong table out by the pool. Don’t think my father and Henry have seen each other in twenty years. Much talk, easy camaraderie. Henry’s Brooklyn roots still evident in his measured sound, a gutteral vocalese punctuates things he says.

Then a year or two go by, and my father says, “Why not stop at Henry’s on your way through LA and ask him to sign the watercolor we’ve had in the house for years?” We grew up with this watercolor, an imaginary laurel-crowned self-portrait, with a gnarly blue homunculus animating one side of the work. Henry hasn’t signed the work. Probably a gift given to my folks in the forties.

It’s noon. I knock on 444. A tall black man wearing a white jersey answers the door. I state the reason I’ve come, and the man says, “Wait a minute.” He takes the watercolor to Henry. Pretty soon I hear Henry say, “Ah, I almost remember doing this one.” Henry is in bed, suffering from a late-life bout of shingles, seeing no one. He’s a few rooms away. I can hear, but not see him. A few minutes later he has signed the work in the lower right corner. The man hands it to me. I raise my voice a few notches and project, “Thank you, Henry. Feel better!”

And as the man ushers me out, I thank him as well, for all he’s doing.

 

 

 

MIKE BLOOMFIELD & JANIS JOPLIN

 

The only chance I had to hear Mike Bloomfield live was at the Earl Warren Showgrounds in Santa Barbara in 1967 when he and ex-Wilson Pickett drummer Buddy Miles lead the band called Electric Flag at a three-band concert featuring Sweetwater and San Francisco’s own Big Brother & the Holding Company. Stepping out onto the stage, Buddy sat behind the tubs and Bloomfield, still in an overcoat, grabbed the mike and said, “We’re gonna start this set with “UPTIGHT,” cuz I am!”

Seconds later, Buddy Miles’ downbeat was a blast of drum-sticks on taut skin, then Bloomfield, amped to the max, started sawing on his ax and “Uptight” was in the air, as antidote or necessary evil or nervous launchpad or ice-breaker complete, who knows. The Flag’s show had begun.

It had only been a short while since Bloomfield had gained notice with Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and, more important for this account, Bob Dylan’s mid-sixties transition from folk to rock.

Decades go by and somehow I’ll hear a Dylan song from that short-lived period

in 1965 when Bloomfield was his lead guitarist and I feel it all over again, the brash confidence and raw emotion of the Bloomfield guitar lifting the Dylan book into the rock and roll music he loved as a teen. Who can forget the playing on “Maggie’s Farm” at the Newport Folk Festival that year? You Tube hasn’t. Maybe you gotta be my age to remember it? To care about it?

For a short spell—how many months?—Bloomfield and Dylan were close, their recorded versions elevating the songs to new heights, and their live concerts insane. Later, as careers moved on, I followed Bloomfield at a considerable remove. There were bands and gigs and travels and disappointments about which I know very little. But a few years later, in Rolling Stone, I read that Bloomfield had died in the Bay Area of a drug overdose.

“Uptight” cleared the air that night, then the Flag’s set-list took us to blues joints with broken hearts and other soul theme-parks. There was no dearth of big drum beats from Buddy, and no end of scorching solos from Bloomfield. If people were dancing in back I didn’t see them. We were in chairs, seated somewhere in the front five rows, digesting the brownie we’d eaten during Sweetwater’s set, following every wind-blown ripple in the waving flag.

And up next? Embarrassment of riches? Janis Joplin and Big Brother. With that great name, the Holding Company was huge already. Janis was the reason. The audience was clearly up for it, but song after song, nothing happened, the evening didn’t catch fire. Either the band was dragging, and she couldn’t feel it, or she was bored with yet another repeat performance of the material.

But then, somehow, how? a few songs later, something clicked. Janis wanted more and the musicians dug in and found it. Now she responded with passionate versions of her big hits. She’d shimmy and shake with the feeling as she pushed it and the song built. I’d never seen anyone inhabit a song so desperately, so driven to be the quivering sensitive edge of it. She was sweating, she was moving, she was a heart in tatters. Music was a vehicle, not of transference (to what?) but of ecstasy. Feeling oozed from the center of her body, radiating outward like after-shocks from an earthquake. Finally, she was free. Finally, Janis, the band, and the audience were one.

 

 

 

DUNCAN HANNAH

 

It was in Soho, at Barry Blinderman’s gallery, Semaphore, that I first saw Duncan's work.  Don’t remember who urged me up those steps to a second floor space on West Broadway near Prince, but it must have been the mid-80s.
        Among other paintings, Semaphore was showing Duncan’s portrait of the great tenor saxophonist, Lester Young, upright in a small room.  Was Lester sporting his porkpie hat?  I haven’t seen the picture since.  “Prez” had died in 1959, a jazz legend.  I asked the price of the picture—it seemed fair—but I couldn’t afford it.
        Then somehow, how? In 1989 Duncan sent me a copy of Duncan Hannah 85, which he described as “an old chestnut.” I looked closely at every picture in this catalog.  It gathered his recent paintings and drawings, and provided a smart essay by Carter Ratcliffe.
        From then on I saw his shows as they happened in New York.  Once I opened a gallery in Great Barrington, MA in 1992, I would include Duncan in many a group show over the next twenty-seven years.
        In 1996, Duncan made sixteen drawings for Arts & Letters, the name of his collaborative book with Michael Friedman’s prose poems, published by The Figures.  That chapbook remains a great juxtaposition of like-minded sensibilities.  Terrific to look at, charming to read, and right at the level of feeling.  I showed all sixteen drawings at the gallery in the fall of 1996 where they were bought by the collector A. G. Rosen.
        Always good to visit Duncan on W. 71^st.  Just inside the entry-way there was usually a stack of completed works leaning against the wall, as well as a work in progress on the easel.  One of a number of cats over the years would be there, sometimes as a drawing on an easel, most often asleep on a sofa.  When my cat Eartha had six kittens in 2013, Duncan and Megan took the dashing young eight week old Tarzan off my hands, to be paired with their Jane.
        Duncan worked and read every day.  He always said yes when I invited him to be in a show. He chose his subjects carefully.  His passionate interest in certain periods of the recent past set him apart.  Sober and thoughtful, his paintings told sympathetic stories that ranged from childhood nostalgia to youthful beauty to the precarity of a Hopperesque loneliness.  Tradition mattered, just as flesh did; old movie stars—or Italian models--back when they were young, were made eternally so, under his brush.
        It was a pleasure to see the variety of works in his collection, as well—some English, most American—together with art books on table tops and shelves.  Studious but not pedantic, his memory was legendary. An impeccable dresser, Duncan’s pleasure in draping himself tastefully, as if imported from an earlier time, was nonetheless invariably compelling. None of us yet knew that his diaristic memoir, Twentieth Century Boy, would show up to great acclaim in 2018, making the phrase “riotous youth” so attractive.
        In a handwritten note dated Oct. 17^th, 1989, after I’d sent him a letter defending his work, he wrote, “Sometimes it feels just like the pool is full of sharks, their irony meters running, and I’m found wanting. I certainly never set out to be an anachronism.  I paint for a fictitious audience in my head and hope they’ll understand.  Hope they’ll exist!  You do. Thanks.”

 

 

 

 

 

Geoffrey Young was born in Los Angeles in 1944, and grew up in San Diego. He has lived in Great Barrington, MA, for the last 40 years. His small press, The Figures (1975-2005), published more than 135 books of poetry, art writing, and fiction. Recent books include Monk’s Mood (2023), DATES (2022), and Pivot (2021). After twenty-seven years, he closed his contemporary art gallery in 2018.

 

Geoffrey Young : Four DATES

 

 

 

ALFRED JARRY

 

You can thank Roger Shattuck for including him in The Banquet Years, because it was there that I learned about Alfred Jarry’s apartment at 7 Rue Cassette, in the Sixth, an apartment known for one extremely odd feature.

I parked my mobylette on the street and rang a bell. When the concierge answered, I explained to her that I was interested in confirming that Jarry had lived here, and what’s more, in an odd apartment. She’d never heard of Alfred Jarry, but knew about an eccentric apartment. She reached for a phone, dialed, said a few words, and soon a man who worked at the building appeared.

“Follow me,” he said.

We climbed a few floors, then he found the right key and opened an apartment door. “Watch your head,” he said.

We entered, and, as advertised by Shattuck and Apollinaire, the ceilings were at best five feet high. We had to stoop to enter and remain stooped to stay. With just a few rooms, the man explained to me that years ago the owner of the building thought the ceiling too high, and had lowered it. One reason was, more things could be stored there, and in the altered space above, and maybe more rent could be generated with the rooms done that way?

Apparently, Jarry didn’t mind the lowered ceilings as he was, for a writer concerned with royalty, a short man. Shattuck wrote that Jarry’s head just rubbed against the ceiling, “And he collected the flaky plaster like a severe case of dandruff.”

Apollinaire, in his account of visiting the room, noticed that rather than a bed, there was a pallet on the floor. He wrote, “Jarry said that low beds were coming back into fashion. The writing table was the reduction of a table, for Jarry wrote flat on his stomach on the floor.”

A few books, his portrait by Rousseau, and an enlarged stone phallus were all the things the poet noticed.

The rooms were all but empty in 1973, the year I visited.

 

 

GERTRUDE STEIN

 

It was only twenty-seven years after she died that I knocked on her door in Paris. Everyone knew where she’d lived in the 6th Arrondissement, at 27 Rue de Fleurus. I walked to her street, found the number, and knocked. What I didn’t know was, she hadn’t lived in the building that lined the street. You got to her celebrated studio by walking through a corridor to a building in back. This passageway was patrolled by a concierge who pointed the way to Stein’s door, twenty-five feet across a courtyard. Quiet back there, far from the street, I knocked on the door. After a few seconds, a woman opened it with inquisitive eyes. It wasn’t Alice B. Toklas or Gertrude herself or even Hemingway or Picasso or Juan Gris or Sherwood Anderson looking at me.

It was the current inhabitant. After the pleasantries of “Bonjour,” I explained that I was reading Gertrude Stein, knew she’d lived here for years, and just wanted to see the place. And to my surprise, the kind lady said, Well, come in, and have a look. The door led directly into the big room in which Stein wrote, and whose walls had been covered by paintings she’d collected. But nothing now resembled the fabled photos of Stein sitting in that room with works by Cézanne, Picasso, and Henri Matisse, et al., even if the space was the same. Polite furniture turned the studio from salon to bourgeois living room. The few paintings on the walls were generic, but the woman who now lived there couldn’t have been nicer.

Writing can take place anywhere, at any time of day. Gertrude was known to write by hand at night, then pass her chicken scratchings to Alice in the morning, to be typed up. It was enough for me to see the room, get a feel for its dimensions, notice the beige walls, the wainscotting, the rug on the floor. I thanked the lady for letting me in.

“You live in a marvelous place where important adventures in writing happened years ago,” I said, in French, though I was pretty sure she knew that already. “Your kindness means a lot.”

As I turned to go, she followed me to the door.

“Merci, madam. Au revoir.”

 

 

John Baldessari : Waving Goodbye

 

What would make the tallest artist in the world think to have a camera set up behind him as he stood at a channel connecting a bay to the open sea? And why would the artist stand there, all six-feet seven of him, waving goodbye to any boat moving through the channel? John didn’t know anyone on those boats. He had no business being there.

Protected in the bay, tied up, sailboats of all kinds bobbed gently. And through the channel, not far away at all, as big as a dream, was the Pacific Ocean. Baldessari’s idea was to film boats leaving the bay, motoring slowly through the channel. As the boats passed him and camera, he would stand there like a fool waving goodbye to them.

John wasn’t a sailor, though he grew up in a Navy town. Surely there was some hidden meaning to this ridiculous gesture, but what was it?

With the camera stationary, the boats moved slowly from right to left. And John, standing between the blue water in the channel and the camera-- unseen by anyone in the boats--kept waving goodbye as they passed. How odd, how out of the blue appeared this gesture, whatever the reason. And to think that a mere six years earlier the artist was still making big abstract paintings.

Speaking of which, I’d seen a show of these abstract paintings in San Diego in the mid-sixties, at the Art Works Gallery on Adams Avenue. What was memorable about that show was the fact that each of the big paintings had a dramatic black X painted on its busy surface, as if to cancel everything in it. They weren’t bad paintings; they just weren’t anything but paintings.

Later we’d all learn that John took those “X-Sign” works and other old paintings to a crematorium and had them burned. Done with painting as he’d inherited it, John saved the ashes from his life’s work to date and deposited a portion of them in an urn. Then he had a bronze plaque fabricated in the style of a grave marker that recorded his full name and the dates “May 1953” and “March 1966”—thereby putting to rest the early, pre-breakthrough phase of his career.

“The Cremation Project,” dated 1970, became one centerpiece in the conceptual shift from a studio based practice to a post-studio way of working. He would not paint again, nor make, as he repeated over and over in a hand-written page, any more boring art. That statement, filling the page, was made by John the school-kid, punishing himself for accepting the conventional role of painter.

Like some Fluxus artists before him, John was conversant with MARCEL DUCHAMP, Robert Lebel’s influential monograph on the French-American artist, published in 1959. And, from his own generation, he was well aware of Sol LeWitt’s early idea-driven conceptual pronouncements. In fact, one of Baldessari’s terrific early works was a film of him singing LeWitt’s conceptual sayings.

Suddenly the idea game was on, and it didn’t require canvas, gesso, brushes or paint. Thus began the work that made Baldessari’s name. Brave enough to risk calling what he made art no matter the conceptual brain spasms that generated it, a post-studio way of thinking about what Art could be took over.

Like the very early deadpan video work of William Wegman, made in Venice, CA in the early 70s, Baldessari’s short films from the same period are filled with poetic inspiration, art smarts, and throwaway charm. I wonder if these artists had met yet? By 1973 they were both showing at Sonnabend Gallery in New York and Paris. In one color film John repeatedly tosses three orange balls in the air and photographs them just as they are about to fall back to earth, trying to capture the orange balls making the shape of a triangle against a blue sky. With four balls, in another flick, he tries to photograph the tossed balls in the air as they approximate the shape of a square. It doesn’t matter that a perfect triangle or square is never caught. It is enough to get close. A viewer’s judgment is part of the experience. Does the effort succeed, or fail? The daft thinking redeems the effort, or vice versa. And in another little known two minute movie shot in autumn, he has himself filmed standing below a tree picking up its fallen leaves and throwing them back up into the branches. The film isn’t about futility, or failure, though. Nor about time passing. But what is it about?

Gallerists had no idea how to sell these two and three minute Super-8 films. Bundled in threes? Editions of 25? And how long would they last, if played often? As much as anything, a collector would be buying synapses of a brain working at a serious remove from the old paradigm.

We walk into the Dome, in Montparnasse, get a table, and order Courvoisier. A famous cafe is the perfect backdrop in which to talk about this new thinking. John says the art world is way more fun than the literary or academic world. Not only is there more curiosity, and more risk, there are more drinks. A generation of Post-Pop artists is beginning to think in new ways. And, as galleries in Europe and the States begin to be aware, there’s a growing quantity of wall space upon which to document the new, to educate the populace. John is 42 years old. He is teaching at Cal Arts, no longer at a college in remote, unheralded National City (near the Mexican border). He reads everything. He likes people. And he likes to laugh. There is no end of things to think about. Of new ways to make language and photography and film embody fresh meaning, amusing sport.

A year later I invite John to do the cover of Stooge #11, a poetry magazine I edit with Laura Chester. In no-time he provides a two panel photographic work (front and back cover). Derived from an early series about choosing from like-minded things, John has arrayed three walnuts on the front, and three on the back. Nearly indistinguishable from each other as things (their crenellated surfaces resemble brains), the finger of the artist points at the top walnut on the front cover, as if declaring it the one. Turning the mag over, the viewer’s eye is drawn to the walnut at the bottom, which has been moved slightly aside to reveal the name of the magazine, “Stooge,” printed in pencil. Clearly, the finger has not chosen the “right” walnut, the one concealing the mag’s name. But what if John is thinking, do you really want to pick the right stooge?

McQueen, Chamberlain, Monk

It was not what McQueen was wearing, it was how he talked.

Ticket in hand, I stood in line waiting to enter the Monterey Jazz Festival on a late afternoon in early September, 1964. Standing behind me was a woman with chestnut-colored hair, and behind her, with his date, looking exactly like himself, was TV & film star Steve McQueen. Seems that this fictional Josh Randall, of “Wanted Dead or Alive” fame, after 93 episodes on TV and a role in “The Magnificent Seven” in 1960, and his date, were surprised that they knew the woman standing in front of them. They began to exchange small-talk, starting with the surprise of being there at the same time. Then Steve asked her, “You got your admission, baby”? So effortlessly hip was his sound—the exemplar of cool, the avatar of anti-hero ease--that it should be spelled, “You gotcher ‘mission, babe?” The woman was the same height, same age, and same hair color as his date. The two women could have been sisters.

“Yes,” she said, lifting her left hand, showing him a ticket.

Aware of me looking at him and listening, Steve’s eyes, missing nothing, stayed focused on the two women.

Over a beige checked shirt he was wearing a light jacket. The cut of his hair, never long, never short, fit his fair head perfectly.

Once inside the gate, I wandered forward, passing a grandstand on the right, filling with fans, and on the left a sea of chairs arrayed in the middle of a vast outdoor setting. At one end of the grandstand, standing not just tall but very tall, was Wilt Chamberlain. Did he like or dislike his nickname “The Stilt”? He looked out over the scene like a sentinel, clearly waiting for someone to join him.

And then, for a second, he looked down at me. And I looked up at him. I couldn’t help but smile. I was wearing pants cut off at the knees. And Wilt was wearing short pants too! Not the kind he wore on the basketball court, but not slacks, either. My cut-offs were cast-offs; Wilt’s were tailored to fit his extraordinary seven foot two inch tall body. With hair cut short, and quiet eyes, his arms seemed to hang from his broad shoulders as if from somewhere north of the Canadian border, only to appear, finally, half-way down the coast of California as beautiful hands, doing nothing but standing there at a Jazz Festival.

I thought of Wilt dunking with ease, of his scoring 100 points in one game, and of his many defensive battles with Celtic Bill Russell. I remembered Wilt missing free throws. And reading about the mirror on his bedroom ceiling, and of this bachelor’s legendary accumulation of lovers. Covering his legs, up to a point just below his knees, the Stilt sported expensive beige socks.

I wanted to get closer to the stage, so walked farther down an aisle, finally finding a seat in the middle. Next up on stage was none other than the Thelonious Monk Quartet. There were other groups that evening, no less on the bill than Monk, but I don’t remember them.

Thelonious hadn’t yet appeared on the cover of Time magazine, but would soon. I knew the songs, sometimes by name, but always by Monk’s legendary time and accents. At one point deep into his set, while Charlie Rouse was taking a long tenor solo, Monk got up and started dancing, spinning trance-like around the stage in perfect time to the rhythm and feel in Rouse’s solo. It was something Monk did for a while, this dancing on stage, until not long after Monterey, when the Time article appeared in print, making particular mention of the pianist’s free-spirited Terpsichorean thing. Only then did Monk stop doing it.

Rouse is winding down, playing the last measures of his solo, Monk’s still spinning like a dervish in the middle of the stage. Where is he? Will he come back? His arms are flying, his feet are free. Then just as Rouse plays his last note, Monk bolts toward the piano, and while still upright, hits a flat-fingered chord with both hands in the exact perfect groove, a split-second before his body slides onto the piano bench and the beat goes on.

The word “timing” is not strong enough to account for the dramatic effect of that chord, of Monk’s body in space, of that slide on the bench, of the hat still on his head. Of the audible gasps and serious applause that followed.

 

 

 

 

Geoffrey Young has lived in Great Barrington, Massachusetts since 1982. From 1992 til 2018 he presented hundreds of shows of contemporary art at the Geoffrey Young Gallery. His small press, The Figures (1975-2005), published more than 135 books of poetry, art writing, and fiction. Recent chapbooks of his poetry, prose and colored pencil drawings include Thirty-Three (above/ground press, 2017), DATES, ASIDES, and PIVOT. Young has written catalog essays for a baker’s dozen of artists.