Words Without Music: A Memoir (35 page)

ONE DAY, RICHARD SAID,
“By the way, Chuck is taking pictures of people and painting their portraits. Will you let him take your picture?”

I had first met Chuck Close when I was living in Paris and he was on a Fulbright grant to Vienna. Now Chuck had a studio in the building next to Richard’s.

“Sure,” I said.

We went next door to Chuck’s. It wasn’t a very elaborate setup. There was a camera and a chair to sit in—like getting your passport picture taken. He might have clicked the shutter more than once, but it seemed I sat for him for less than a minute and it was done.

Chuck told me, “You know, in the past, portraits were paid for by patrons. They were very famous people, and this was how they had their likenesses done. There was no other way to do it. They were usually dukes or kings or queens or whatever they were. I’m taking pictures of people who are completely unknown.” Ironically, it turned out that almost everyone whom Chuck took a picture of that day would become famous, something we would joke about.

In fact, what Chuck was actually doing was something much more radical: he was making portraits in which the process of painting became more important than the subject. He was able to do that through his highly developed technique as a painter.

Chuck had gone to Yale, as had a lot of other very good painters—Brice Marden and Richard Serra among them. They were all at Yale at the same time, and they all became very well-known. The painting of me was later sold to the Whitney Museum. When my daughter, Juliet, was seven or eight years old, she was taken to the Whitney with her class from school one day, and when she saw my picture on the wall she said to someone, “That’s my daddy.”

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” was the reply. But it was, indeed, her daddy.

Those portraits were very distinctive works, and Chuck began elaborating on the images very quickly, sometimes painting with dots, sometimes with fingerprints, and even using wads of white and gray paper. He found ingenious ways of reproducing that image of me in even more variations—lithographs, prints, and whatever he could dream up. He made over a hundred different works from that one image. He told me once that the reason he liked the image was because of my hair. I had naturally curly hair, and I had a hard time growing it long, because it never grew down, only up—it would get down to my jaw and then start to turn up and grow upward. It wasn’t as big as an Afro, but it was a very wild, oceanlike head of hair. That’s what you see in the pictures, and it seems that Chuck enjoyed the technical challenge it presented.

TO BE WORKING WITH RICHARD
was an irreplaceable experience. In the end, I believe Richard benefited from me as well. For one thing, since I was not an artist or sculptor myself, I “had no dog in that fight,” as the expression goes. I had not a drop of envy, jealousy, or feeling of “ownership” in anything Richard did. I especially loved his talent, eye, and skill. My own work was in another domain apart from all that, so I was completely free to help and participate and actually enjoy the time in his studio.

The curious but not at all surprising fact was that the development of my own musical language, at least conceptually (not at all a small point!), had a relationship to Richard’s development. How could it be otherwise? The two elements involved in Richard’s work, the materials and the process, were the same issues I was addressing as they presented themselves in music. Certainly the music I was composing from 1967 to 1976 was steeped in just those same two essential issues.

But there is more to it than that. I was also inspired by two artists whose work Richard and I knew quite well. My personal response to Jasper Johns’s
Flag
paintings was that the paintings of the flag and the flag itself were identical, and I couldn’t see it any other way. By conflating form (the flag) and content (the painting of the flag), I saw them as separate and the same in a single moment of perception. That is similar to Johns’s
Number
paintings and
Targe
t paintings. But the
Flag
paintings (including the astonishing triple flag) are more striking because the flag itself, as an iconic image with its own emotional baggage, is more loaded. Once the identity of form and content is understood (or “seen”), then this other emotional baggage drops away almost immediately.

With Robert Rauschenberg, I understood a similar idea at work with a radically different solution. It is well-known that Jasper and Bob knew each other very well as young painters, and were constantly looking at each other’s work. And that went on for years before Leo Castelli took them both into his gallery in 1957—when I was just twenty, a good ten years before I had any idea what they were up to. It looked to me as if Bob was working out the same problem (form and content) but perhaps in an even more radical way. It was as if he was redefining painting in terms of how much he could put into the work and still keep it a painting. A door? A lightbulb? A goat with a tire around its middle? For all his efforts, it was a while before people, critics, and even other painters took his work seriously. So, if Jasper was poking around with images and canvases and their limits from the inside, then Bob was upsetting the whole apple cart by dragging things into the painting from the outside. Their strategies were wholly different, but it looked to me like they were fighting the same war. For me, a musician at the beginning of his own road of discovery, these two painters were monumentally important. And then, when you threw the work of John Cage and Merce Cunningham into the equation, everything made sense and lifted right off the ground.

For Richard’s show in Castelli’s warehouse, I made one small, but in the end, significant suggestion.

“Why don’t you try lead?” I told him, when he was looking for materials to work with.

The root of the word “plumbing” is “plumb,” and
plumbum
in Latin means “lead.” Lead has had a long role in the history of plumbing, and now it was about to have another history in sculpture. I took Richard to the plumbing supply store on Eighth Avenue where Sandy Rheingold had often sent me to buy materials. Bringing him there was actually all I did. Richard saw rolls and rolls of lead, as well as various implements and rigs for cutting and melting lead. He was unbelievably excited and happy and couldn’t wait to get his hands on the lead. On the spot he ordered hundreds of pounds of lead and heating equipment to be delivered to his studio.

“I’ll take some of that, and I’ll take some of that, and I’ll take some of that,” he said. It was a big order, but it wasn’t something out of the ordinary. Richard looked as if he could have been a building contractor, or the head of a construction team. He was strong, muscular, and clear-eyed. He didn’t tell them why he wanted it, and they didn’t give it a second thought. If we had been working for a construction company, we could have easily bought that much.

The next day the lead arrived. Fortunately there was an elevator, though a very slow one, and we managed to get the load up to Richard’s studio. I spent a little time showing him how to cut, bend, and “wipe” (join together two pieces) lead, and also how to set up a small pot to melt the lead. After that, he was up and running. A lot of the work (rolling and cutting the lead) could be done better with four hands than with two, so I was still an important part of the process. In almost no time, Richard got around to throwing hot lead against a concrete wall or corner. I became an important part of these “splash pieces” by just keeping the lead liquid and plentiful while Richard was throwing the lead into place. He especially loved making those pieces, and I got a big kick out of it, too. For the next year or so, I accompanied him—and kept the lead flowing—whenever he installed the splash pieces.

While we were working together, Richard was invited to be part of two group shows in Europe scheduled to open in the spring of 1969, one at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the other at the Kunsthalle in Bern, Switzerland, with a one-man show in Cologne at Rolf Ricke’s gallery right in between. This would all happen in a two-week period, and Richard wanted me along to help prepare the lead for the splash piece on the exterior of the Stedelijk Museum as well as the normal installation of some of the prop pieces, which would be for all three locations. I worried about being away from home, family, and music that long, so I asked Richard about the possibility of my playing some concerts along the way. I already had a program in mind—
Wavelength
, a film by Michael Snow; then
Come Out
, a tape piece of Steve Reich’s; and concluding with a solo performance of my own “Two Pages.” Richard was happy to help with that and suggested he could arrange a concert in each of the same venues as his exhibits. These would be my first concerts in Europe with the new music.

It turned out to be a very good tour for Richard and myself. The lead splash piece made a big impression on the artists and art public, as did the prop pieces. This was Richard’s early work from today’s perspective, all of it really challenging. For me, this would be my first time among the new European artists and musicians, many of them older artists and well known from the generation before us. I met Joseph Beuys from Germany for the first time and also Mario Merz from Italy. Beuys, who had settled in Düsseldorf, was by then a huge icon in the art world in Europe and was becoming known in the States. Richard and I were doing a big splash piece outside the Stedelijk Museum, but we would go inside and see Beuys making his own installation. I was completely taken by him and his work, which was also process work where the materials became the subject. Beuys was easy to spot because he had a work costume—trousers with suspenders over a shirt open at the collar, boots, and a hat, which he wore all the time, making him seem like a cartoon of himself. After the outdoor splash piece was completed, Richard and I were given a room to work in. One day Beuys came and sat on the floor with his back against the wall opposite us, watching us for a long time. He didn’t say a word while we were working, but later, as he was leaving, he came over and shook our hands. I don’t remember whether he came to my concert the next day, but he was a very kind man, gentle in his manner, famous for being dedicated and very single-minded in terms of his art. The work was very radical. Sometimes it was hard to even tell what it was. This was during the time when he was making art out of huge pieces of margarine melting on the floor. Richard and I knew his work from books, and we were impressed that he had come and spent so much time observing us. I realized very quickly—and Richard did as well—that Richard was bringing something new to Europe, something that they hadn’t seen before. And there was obviously great respect for Richard and his work.

Over the next decade I was often in these kinds of museum shows that brought together artists and, soon afterward, performers from all over. In 1974, at Project 74, a big festival in Cologne, I met Jack Smith, the legendary underground filmmaker and performance artist, and saw for the first and only time one of his big slide shows with the Hawaiian music he loved. Later, I did see some of his smaller pieces in New York, but far too rarely.

The concerts that Richard had arranged for me were, on the whole, enthusiastically received, though there were also, at times, enthusiastic rejections, which could lead to downright rowdy encounters. In the concert at the Stedelijk Museum there were whistles and catcalls during the showing of
Wavelength
. The film was a forty-minute single zoom from outdoors, through a window, onto a photograph on a wall, and finally ending on a tiny detail of the photograph.
Come Out
by Steve Reich was an early and beautiful extrapolation of a vocal phrase, re-recorded and pulled out of phase with itself. There was ample audience support, too, but the show’s detractors’ attempts to disrupt the performance and deny the audience the opportunity to see and hear these works was almost achieved. Clearly, the music deniers had had enough by the time I began playing “Two Pages.” Before I had gotten even halfway through my performance, I noticed someone had joined me on the stage. The next thing I knew he was at the keyboard banging at the keys. Without thinking, acting on pure instinct, I belted him across the jaw and he staggered and fell off the stage. Half the audience cheered and the rest either booed or laughed. Without a pause, I began playing again, having lost the momentum of the music for not much more than five to six seconds. My assailant didn’t come back and I was able to complete the performance. Meanwhile, Richard was sitting in the front row the whole time. I was a little annoyed with him after the concert, and I said to him, “How come you let that jerk climb up on the stage?”

“I think you did pretty good,” he laughed.

That was the first time someone actually tried to stop a concert of mine, but not the last. That kind of outrage from audience members went on for years. I’ve never been entirely sure what the outrage was all about. The reason might have been that I didn’t “sound” like what they thought new music was supposed to sound like. I think they thought I was teasing them, trying to make fun of them, which was a ludicrous idea. Why would I go all the way to Europe to make fun of a bunch of yokels there who didn’t know anything about world music or even new music? They hadn’t spent time with Ravi Shankar. They hadn’t gone to India. They hadn’t made the journey I had, opening myself to all different sounds of music. They didn’t know anything. Still, even though Amsterdam was our first stop, nothing like that happened again on that tour. This was really the beginning of my European touring and, thanks to Richard, I immediately became part of the art world, just as I had in New York.

One of the last weeks I spent working with Richard was also the most memorable. Jasper Johns invited Richard to install one of the splash pieces in his home, a former bank building at the corner of Houston and Essex Streets. Richard and I spent a week there, more or less. I remember that one day I was downstairs for some reason, and when I looked in a room that had been the vault of the bank, I saw that it was full of Jasper’s paintings, including one of his famous
Number
paintings, still on an easel.