Jenny in Corona by Stuart Ross

Author:Stuart Ross [Ross, Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781948954068
Publisher: Tortoise Books
Published: 2019-11-24T05:00:00+00:00

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A Philip Guston retrospective comes to the Modern. I go to view Guston’s picture of the composer Morton Feldman, and then Jenny and I go, and then I go again, alone, twice. One day I stand in front of it listening to Part 4 of Feldman’s composition For Philip Guston. The piece goes on for an hour before that, it goes on for hours after it, but it begins and ends with Part 4.

That picture. Guston’s portrait of Feldman with the pipe in his mouth. It’s the cover photo of Feldman’s collected writings, Give My Regards to Eighth Street. I go back to the Modern again with Feldman’s book, free admission for me and a guest with my corporate perks.

I look at the picture.

I look at the book.

Guston painted the portrait when the two friends didn’t like each other. They had an argument over late style. It’s like Guston, revenge by way of style, decapitated Feldman using Feldman’s head. Everything is red. The picture says red, not green, is the color of jealousy. Feldman’s eyes are bloodshot, but also his eyebrows, his plume of cigarette smoke, his Bubblicious forehead and his hair it’s all red, with some kind of triangle off to the side of his sideburn that looks menacingly extraterrestrial, like a communication device found on a distant planet that no one can get working again.

This is the problem. There is no longer two-way communication between painter and sitter. That’s the most important conclusion I come to while staring at the portrait. Feldman could be only one man, painted by another man. I want to be one man only, and I want to be alone for just one more hour. But when I’m with a woman—I meet another during one of my solo Guston visits, a petite French tourist with a vintage camera and hip bones like weapons—I think about, during sex, standing not by myself in front of Feldman, but standing with Krista Kaplan in front of Feldman, and I text that to Krista the next time I’m at the exhibit with Jenny.

“Does it have audio guides? I need audio guides, Ty. I can’t talk to other people in museums.”

Audio guides. Of course. Krista is just the type of person to want an audio guide. To get the ten key bullets in time for the massacre. Audio Guides. Sponsored by Audi. A way to drive yourself around a gallery under luxurious protection. An aid to blocking your eardrums, which is an important sense for seeing a picture. A guide to altering your first impression before heading to the gift shop for an even more distorted second impression.

I wonder what Feldman would’ve thought of audio guides. As long as it was his music, he probably wouldn’t have cared. One of Feldman’s central quests was to have no quest, to expel forward motion, ruin associations, ruin the build-up, ruin the character arc, the cross-cross-reference and most of all, to ruin motivation. Motivation is square, one of the devil’s tools. The devil is alive in Beethoven.

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