Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning(31)
* * *
—
When I was in my twenties, I knew a guy named Joe. He was an artist who also sang in a band called Cheeseburger. He was short and stumpy like a Maurice Sendak character, yet onstage he convulsed and howled like Robert Plant, wearing his jeans loose enough to expose a palm’s length of plumber’s crack. The spotlight suited him. In 2008, I saw his solo show at Canada, a Lower East Side gallery located right where the Chinatown buses used to chuff off to Boston for fifteen dollars. When I walked into the chilly gallery space, I thought the show wasn’t installed yet. The walls were practically empty except for a few dirty unprimed canvases. One canvas had a faint scrawl of a happy face. Another canvas had a childish “S” sign for Superman. Even his bandmates were irritated by the show: “Joe totally did this last minute.”
His solo show blew up. Joe was later dubbed one of this generation’s “bad-boy avant-gardists with machismo to spare, rebelling against aesthetic conventions, social norms, or both.” His paintings were described as “primitivist” but still somehow captured “the atemporality of our digital age.” Critics marveled at how much “he got away with” by doing so little. More recently, I asked Erin’s partner, a painter and installer, what he did that day, and he said, “I moved a Joe Bradley.” “Since when did you start referring to Joe as an object?” I asked. He said, “Since I moved a Joe Bradley into Ivanka Trump’s penthouse.”
The avant-garde genealogy could be tracked through stories of bad-boy white artists who “got away with it,” beginning with Duchamp signing a urinal and calling it art. It’s about defying standards and initiating a precedent that ultimately liberates art from itself. The artist liberates the art object from the rules of mastery, then from content, then frees the art object from what Martin Heidegger calls its very thingliness, until it becomes enfolded into life itself. Stripped of the artwork, all we are left with is the artist’s activities. The problem is that history has to recognize the artist’s transgressions as “art,” which is then dependent on the artist’s access to power. A female artist rarely “gets away with it.” A black artist rarely “gets away with it.” Like the rich boarding school kid who gets away with a hit-and-run, getting away with it doesn’t mean that you’re lawless but that you are above the law. The bad-boy artist can do whatever he wants because of who he is. Transgressive bad-boy art is, in fact, the most risk-averse, an endless loop of warmed-over stunts for an audience of one: the banker collector.
* * *
—
Art movements have been built on the bromances of bad white boys. Their exploits are exhaustively catalogued: boys who were “fizzy with collaboration” and boys on “their decade-long benders” in bars that are now hallowed landmarks. From a young age, these boys speculated on their own legacy and critics eagerly bought their stock before they matured. But the importance of women is recognized belatedly. The female artist is given a retrospective postmortem. Archaeologists must unearth the crypt and announce they have discovered another underrecognized genius.
As I read about the friendships between Kelley, Shaw, and McCarthy, or de Kooning and Pollock, or Verlaine and Rimbaud, or Breton and éluard, I craved to read about the friendships where women, and more urgently women of color, came of age as artists and writers. The last few decades have ushered in legions of feminist writers and artists, but it’s still fairly uncommon to read about female friendships founded on their aesthetic principles. The deeper I dug into the annals of literary and art history, the more alone I felt. But in life, I was not alone. I realized that I had already experienced that kind of bond through my own friendships with Erin and Helen.
* * *
—
By chance, Erin and I ended up at Oberlin together, but we didn’t become close until our second year because Erin, to my disappointment, arrived at orientation with her tattoo artist boyfriend from Long Island. When I first saw her on campus, Erin was even more baroquely goth, with new chin and septum piercings and a battalion of spiny arm tattoos. Her boyfriend was equally pierced and tattooed. He was also so white he had white dreads.
This boyfriend spent all hours of the day in their closet-sized dorm room. Because of him, I thought, Erin was antisocial, microwaving vegan curry with him in the tiny dormitory kitchen instead of eating with the rest of us at the dining hall. When she wasn’t making art or studying, she slept at all hours under her black velvet blanket that looked about as snug as a dust cover. Thinking back, it’s hard to reconcile that drowsy soft-spoken Erin with the loud and opinionated Erin I know now.
I thought her passivity had something to do with her boyfriend, who I suspected was controlling and probably psychotic. Maybe I was a little possessive of her too. Erin attracted that in her friends, this envy, this sense of proprietariness, especially later from Helen, but though her boyfriend was kind of a jerk, it wasn’t because of him she was so narcoleptic and passive. Her boyfriend was actually the only one there for her while she grieved.
Helen said she first noticed me in our sophomore year, in a gut course called Chemistry and Crime, where the professor droned on endlessly about the O. J. Simpson trial. She observed, “You were that girl who snuck out of class to do coke every morning.” This was a curious take on my habit of going to the bathroom and sitting in the stall for five minutes because I was so bored in class. I said that I didn’t know she was in that class even though I did. She had long, yellowy dyed hair and wore a beige Burberry scarf, the required status accessory for all Korean international students. Her look was confused. A preppy music conservatory student trying to look arty.