A GIFT

We received a gift. It arrived in a sturdy, weighty box in the mail from Taos, New Mexico. Unwrapped, we discovered a baker's dozen of secondhand books (well, probably third or fourth-hand, discards from some library dump), all unopenable, sealed tight, hiding their secrets forever, converted from their literary origins into the makings of a work of art. Included in the package was a fistful of velcro stickers and a template, indicating precisely how they should be installed on the wall. A book painting, in other words: Like this ...

Our good friend Gary Lloyd has been using books as the material for his art for many years--all 50 years, in fact, since we have known him. I have a special reason to be grateful to him, because it was thanks to him that I embarked on my long career as an art writer. I was new to "contemporary art" back in the early 1970s. I'd learned about Picasso and Matisse along the way of course, as a part of my general education. The Surrealists. And so on. But that was pretty much as far as I'd got. So I was um... shocked when I first encountered Gary's work at a small gallery in the San Fernando Valley. A total mess, I thought. Jars oozing disgusting stuff, an axe stuck into the wall, words scrawled on surfaces all around, books desecrated, vaseline smeared all over everything....

I was offended. So I went home and--I was a poet in those days--wrote a thirty-page poem. It was my attempt to come to terms with my discomfort and reach out and understand that which I did not, by putting it all in words. Somehow, I no longer recall quite how, my poem reached the artist. He read it, liked it, understood what I was trying to do, and said, "Let's make a book together." So we did. The result of our efforts was "Bob Went Home", was a big, clunky thing with a hatchet handle for a spine and broken wooden school rulers for edges, a galvanized steel cover dented with the back of an axe, and pages printed with the words of my poem in blue, gooey ink. The pages themselves were made out of every imaginable material, cork, felt, asbestos (!) Some of them were screened with tight mesh, making the text hard to read. You needed to interact, be physically engaged, to give it your full attention. So this was my first book experience with Gary. (There's a copy in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum, I think. And we sold a number of other copies, who knows where. This was 50 years ago!)

So Gary has a long history of fascination with books, their content as well as their heft, their physical presence. "Jane's Fighting Ships" was a major theme in that first show. Ellie and I also have one of his "pages" (I think this one is a page from Jane's Fighting Ships, altered back and front...

It was made long ago. We also have a more recent work, a version of his "Chomsky's Vessel" series, books hollowed out to form a primitive canoe and crimped together tightly with a chain...

So this new piece, this gift, fits in with a long history--of Gary, his work, our friendship. The front cardboard bindings of the books are covered with his familiar, closely written handwriting, a long, discursive pseudo narrative that wanders from personal history and the purpose of the piece itself to the threatened disappearance of the bees and the battle of Gilgamesh. I have not yet--forgive me Gary--been able to read the whole text. But maybe it's intended to be read as I have begun to read it, not only as an extended narrative, but spottily, hopping here and there to clusters of printed words. 

An artist whose aesthetic embraces not only genuine artistic issues (here, for example: what is a painting? What can it be, if not oil on canvas?) but also issues of pressing importance to a rapidly changing world, issues having to do with the meaning and means of contemporary media and communication systems, the ecological threat of man-made climate change to the planet, war and peace, the very future of humanity. These are just a few of the real challenges his work addresses--and invites us, in our turn, to address with him. He invites us constantly, too, to participate in his work; in this case I was simply provided with the materials and the instructions, the act of construction was mine alone. And I still have work to do, interacting with the text. It will take me many visits, a long time...

There's a big part of Gary that is the eternal schoolboy who scoffs at all the rules and delights in making the kind of mess that I describe in writing about that first show. Even wrecking things--like books. He's an iconoclast, always tinkering, making things or unmaking them, just to see how they work. Or if they work. His imagination is boundless, endlessly optimistic, endlessly engaged, and essentially joyful. I am happy to have had him as my friend and teacher all these years.

So this is my way of saying: Thank you, Gary, for this gift. Ellie and I are happy to have it in our lives.