All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley

Author:Patrick Bringley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2023-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

In the spring of 2012, we are celebrating the release of the third issue of Sw!pe Magazine, a journal of art, prose, and poetry produced and edited by guards at the Met. The editors organize a group show at a not-for-profit gallery in SoHo, and we drink heavily and merrily at a release party that doubles as a talent show. Colleagues play jazz together, noise out in a Sonic Youth–like ensemble, belt show tunes, perform stand-up, rap under the stage names Joey Jesus and Mike-rophone. Some are excellent, others less so; the audience is rapturous; the booze flows. Toward the end of the night, I get to talking with a Sw!pe contributor named Emilie Lemakis.5 Emilie has for many years been a working artist—not the kind you’ll find in the Met’s contemporary wing; that is, not a lotto-hitting artist. Rather, she is the kind of artist who, come what may, works and lives to think and make. Emilie’s three-hundred-square-foot Manhattan apartment is less than half the size of her studio space in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where she (illegally) spends some nights. She arrived in the city in 1977 at age twelve and spent her teenage years “in a boarding school for bad kids.” Since 1994, she’s worked at the Met, where she impresses all who know her with her levelheadedness. “It’s a full-time job having a full-time job and keeping a creative life going,” she says. “And it’s hard to do all that and be pretentious. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against pretentious art. I just don’t have the time for it.”

My favorite piece by Emilie was her entry at the 2011 Employee Art Show. Every few years, the Met invites its staff to contribute to these closed-to-the-public exhibitions, and guards are well represented. Tommy’s entry was an elegiac painting about the Liberian Civil War. Andrei copied works of the Dutch masters onto the backs of old frying pans. Chief Finley made large-scale color photographs of glitzy advertisements he captured on the dirty streets of New York. Emilie’s submission was hard to miss: a towering, almost ceiling-scraping birthday cake constructed of wood, wire mesh, foam, twine, bottle caps, wine corks, artificial flowers, and the dry-cleaning bags our uniforms are returned in, which she’d woven into long roping braids. The bottom layer of the cake contained a boxy television set playing “Dumb Belle Curls,” a video of Emilie in a homemade leotard pumping iron. And a sparkly cake topper high above clued us into the occasion: “50.”

“It was a self-portrait,” she tells me at the Sw!pe party. “The braids”—she always wears long braids—“the dry-cleaning bags, the video, the late slips…” (I hadn’t noticed this detail, but there were apparently bright yellow infraction notices stapled here and there.) “It’s all me.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.