Light Drawings—photographs of Pablo Picasso by Gjon Mili for TIME Magazine, 1949

Please welcome Sean Lovelace for this month’s Authors on Art, a series of creative responses by poets, novelists, and experimental writers curated by Blake Butler.

I prefer drawings, always have—take Andrée Bonnard, Albrecht Dürer, Pablo Picasso, Rochus van Veen, Paul-Marie Verlaine, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt van Rijn, Fragonard, Roy Lichtenstein, or even the contemporary Kara Walker. Drawings hold a direct and focused elegancy, the stark verve and fluid movement I find pleasurable in running, in fishing, in archery, in sex. The drawing seems to me serious, yet playful and mischievous. The drawing doesn’t strive for some grand gesture, but is content in a variety of sparseness, opening itself to empty space, to discovery. The drawing contains flair of improvisation, flux of immersion. The hand, the instrument, the line, or, to borrow a phrase from Yeats: How can we know the dancer from the dance? Or, to more aptly appropriate a drafting master, Henri Matisse, who sums it up with, “The essential thing is to spring forth, to express the bolt of lightning one senses upon contact with a thing.” The act itself is the essence of the drawings; the artifact of the drawing embodies the essence of the act.

I don’t prefer convoluted, overeager drawings, wrought with shadings or crosshatchings, overly done contour lines and what not. I’m not into blur. I want to see the art as physical manifestation, take for outstanding example, Picasso’s light drawings. In 1949, LIFE magazine’s artist and technical pioneer, Gjon Mili, devised a technique to attach and photograph lights during instants of movement (figure skaters, for example). He brought this innovation to Picasso, letting him “draw” images in the air, art that vanished as soon as it was created—but it didn’t really vanish. Mili captured Picasso’s motions by leaving his camera shutter wide open. The results are perfect realizations of yet another Matisse concept of graphic arts: “Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.” That’s it, exactly.

Light Drawings—photographs of Pablo Picasso by Gjon Mili for TIME Magazine, 1949

As I’ve noted, I admire starkness, lines slashed into the canvas, a shadow, a blade, all the crazy curves and re-curves and angles of the world rendered, inky spills and splotches, splats. I like contrast.

I even like the silly word ‘doodle’—a dream state of digging in and letting go—which leads me to another form of drawing, the literary. The drawings by authors. A favorite of mine is an artist who stumbled into his drawings by using them to flirt with women at cocktail parties (he would sketch on napkins), James Thurber. (Excellent Paris Review interview here.) Thurber’s drawings are generally light of tone, but always crisp, with integrity in the line, and always wonderfully weird. Some call his drawings “cartoons,” but I scoff. The juxtaposition in this image transcends. There’s something Rothko in those curtains, or supple lines of Van Gogh (a prolific draftsman). And all of us have a horse hiding somewhere in our living rooms.

James Thurber.

Charles Bukowski’s drawings were almost compulsive—“bolts of lightning” indeed, they were also highly profitable for his publishers and booksellers, who used his drawings to illustrate their catalogues, hence increasing their value. Bukowski could also be more abstract, as we see in WHAT MATTERS MOST IS HOW YOU WALK THROUGH THE FIRE.

Charles Bukowski.

The signature of Kurt Vonnegut—his hair, his cigarette—all iconic. Vonnegut went from doodling on manuscript edges to a much more serious intent and interest in graphic arts. He came about this honestly, his family visual artists for generations. He claimed to prefer drawing to writing. Like Bukowski (or even a great number of artists, in many genres), Vonnegut would go from fanciful sketch to a more abstruse form; for example, Tralfamadore #1:

Last week I was surfing literary blogs, an activity just banal enough to keep me for hours from my own writing (when I’m not making coffee or staring dumbly out the window). I visited the website of sometimes controversial (for reasons I will not wade into here) writer, Tao Lin. In one posting, Mr. Lin claimed he was bored, possibly depressed (I’m paraphrasing), and had nothing to do with his life. He found mailing things to others as his primary stimulation these days. (Or maybe he’s just broke.) Would I send him some money? If so, he’d mail me his writings, publicity campaign artifacts, other hipster accoutrements, etc. I sent Mr. Lin $15. I told him the truth: I don’t care for your prose, I like your poetry, but I greatly admire your drawings. Send me some drawings. This he did.

Tao Lin’s Jesus Hamster (note: this is my title, these were untitled)

I enjoyed his drawings for the same reason I enjoy drawings in general: They’re whimsical, fantastic and mundane, strange. In some ways, they remind of the poetry of Tao Lin, my preferred genre of his, as I’ve noted. In other ways they might represent the entire oeuvre of Tao Lin—whatever you might think of it. What is this art? People often ask when approaching his work.

But that leads us to the larger question: What is art? What is the power embodied, for me, for others? Some definition of beauty—and then what is beauty?—or an evolutionary game? An expression of emotion? An autobiography? Or simply a recognition that we are together; art as a conduit, lines actually connecting us as we share, the artist, the art, the audience for. I don’t know. I don’t need to know. I admire drawings, so what of it? Again, in the words of Matisse: Would not it be best to leave room to mystery?

Sean Lovelace teaches creating writing and is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Ball State University. Lovelace is the author of Fog Gorgeous Stag by Publishing Genius Press. His first book of flash fiction, How Some People Like Their Eggs, won the Rose Metal Press chapbook prize. His works have appeared in numerous journals. He is a contributor for htmlgiant.

The last art class I remember taking was in high school, so I probably don’t know what I’m talking about. I mean, I know my opinions, but I don’t know why I have them.

I’ve been reading a ton of children’s stories. I have a three year old. I’ve become an addict of tales. Aesop, Grimm, Andersen. Drip them on me like syrup. Precision and morality are effective as fuck. Concision in narrative provides a kind of welcomed negative space. Minimalism, you might call it, but only aesthetically.

John Casey is an Oakland based artist whose subject is humanoids. I don’t know what else you’d call them, they are most often a sort of grotesque human with exaggerated features. Think Rapunzel or Gogol’s The Nose. In seemingly simple compositions, Casey creates these tortured beings—humans destroyed by their own forms.

Take for instance Swinger, a (mostly) black and white pen and graphite composition of a man, whose nose is evolving into two petal-heavy, red flowers. He clings to a rope, knotted at the bottom. His hair, thin. His face, dark. His teeth, spare. A sort of medicated or stupid look about him. Who is he? Why is he there?

John Casey, Swinger, 2010, Pen and Graphite on Paper, 17×14 inches

Or, Forget-me-knots. A man with comically large hands stares at his fingers—which are reddening from loss of circulation—which have over a dozen strings wrapped tightly around them. Presumably, each string is a representation of a task to be done, yet the man’s expression yields only puzzlement. He is married; we can tell by his ring. He has a large watch. Perhaps he is henpecked.

The beauty in Casey’s compositions is they afford us enough detail to assume a narrative. There are hints for us to be mystified by. There are hints to show us the way.

With his sculptures, however, Casey’s work is often more over the top. Take for example First Born,  an 11-inch-tall head with legs smiles almost drunkenly. The belt of his trousers is cinched tight. His nose resembles a red dog boner.  Or another sculpture, Criss Cross, is a sort of hip-hop inspired man-finger hybrid striking a thug-life pose. The spot where his head should be, a finger-victory sign.

John Casey, Criss Cross, 2012, epoxy clay and paint, 12 1/2x6x4 inches

I put myself through graduate school as a special education teacher. I have helped humans with strange forms. I’ve changed adult diapers. I’ve fed the blind. I’ve spent more hours then you could fathom trying to teach twenty year olds not to masturbate in public. I am always delighted by the oddity of humans.

Casey seems to crave similar oddities. With skill he creates beautiful beasts, and, with restraint that not enough artists (in any field) understand, he allows them to simply exist.

Casey’s compositions are not plagued by superfluous detail. They do not to attempt a narrative beyond what is necessary. He shows us the condition within the humanoid must exist, and he allows us nothing more than white space to develop the story on our own. If there are other details in each composition they are spare. A rope swing. A watch. Or, as in Baby Brother, a little wagon to be pulled.

Casey’s most detailed works are his pencil drawings. In Black Light, for instance, a drawing that uncharacteristically (for Casey) lacks any negative space, a boat carrying a lighthouse sails toward a coast of lighthouses, beacons blazing in myriad directions. And in Eruption Disruption, a man with a skin-less face shoots geysers from his eyes.

John Casey, Black Light, 2011, pencil on panel, 24×36 inches

Where Casey dictates narrative most often is through his work with GIFS. In Nod (Self-Portrait), the ink-rendered artist nods dramatically, looks back and forth, grows hair as his face is decorated, ultimately culminating in his appearance resembling that of a luchador. It’s a quirky little work that disrupts the audience’s ability to create a narrative. But, as if through compulsion, you find yourself nodding along with Casey. And he deserves to be nodded along with.

Brian Allen Carr lives with his wife and daughter in McAllen, Texas. His stories appear in Annalemma, Boulevard, Fiction International, Hobart,Keyhole, Kitty Snacks, Texas Review and other publications. He was chosen as the inaugural winner of the Texas Observer Story Prize by Larry McMurtry. He teaches at South Texas College.

Artwork by Amos Goldbaum. Courtesy the artist.

Please welcome Eric Raymond for this month’s Authors on Art, a series of creative responses by poets, novelists, and experimental writers curated by Blake Butler.

I came across Amos Goldbaum’s work at a time in my life when my own world didn’t quite feel real. He was on Market Street near the Montgomery Street Station in San Francisco in 2008, selling inkjet prints of his work from a homemade kiosk. I was reeling from yet another business meeting in which more than 50 percent of all spoken and written language was abstracted from any meaning. Something about his work seemed perfectly right for my life. I bought a $15 print with a menagerie of hippos and prehistoric copy machines.

In the four or so years since, Goldbaum’s work has blown up across the city, most recognizably in the form of t-shirts and hoodies emblazoned with his take on San Francisco icons—Sutro Tower, Dolores Park, the Ferry Building, and even the rogue beard of Giants pitcher Brian Wilson.

His most compelling images go beyond these familiar places, yet even in these more commercial love letters, his work is defined by something reminiscent of blind contour drawing. Recall that elementary art class revelation? When you were asked to draw an object without looking at the image or lifting your pencil from the page? In your mind, a magically transcendent turkey. On the page, the trauma of total disorientation, the hand betraying the mind. Why won’t the line behave? Why won’t it represent?

Artwork by Amos Goldbaum. Courtesy the artist.

Across all of Amos’s art is the warp of his sentient line, a swollen cant, a wobble, the quivering baroque of a concrete grotesque. His are not purely contour drawings, but they seamlessly connect mask, machine, and beast in workaday dreams.

You may, with a wry smile, wonder at Goldbaum’s strange portraits abstracted from their context. What could they mean? What strange logic is behind this scene? What explains these worlds?

What of the earnest technicians behind the industrial Rube Goldberg monsters making faces? What of all the hardware hailing from an era before the guts were tidily tucked in sleek plastics and Brazilian-waxed out of view? What of his anachronistic/futurist subjects in sensory simulation experiments? What of the heads of old men whose eyeless or all-eye-white regard somehow make you feel like the alien, the outsider, the visitor, the specimen?

On his page seems to be one continuous line, a line that describes the depth of a fully-formed world, a reality with rules and technology plainly known to its inhabitants—simply not to you.

Artwork by Amos Goldbaum. Courtesy the artist.

It would be easy to write off Goldbaum’s universe as an exercise in a kind of nostalgic irony built through lurid juxtaposition, the cheap happy-hour surrealist’s cocktail. And here’s where things get slippery.

You are, right now, living in a world where armies of rational people clad in spandex and lycra gather together in closed rooms under thundering techno music to ride bicycles going nowhere. In your world, a surgery exists to implant an inflatable silicone device around the top portion of your stomach to keep you from eating yourself to death. Right now, you are quite likely to spend a night out at a bar sitting next to people staring into screens while you also stare into your screen, hoping for messages or indirect updates from people elsewhere staring at their screens.

There’s something I return to in Amos Goldbaum’s art when I write, and it may well be the feeling that one continuous line can redefine the universe. That a whole world can be illuminated from a partial view. That it is possible, with effort and humility, to not take your eyes off of what you see in your mind, and along the way liberate someone to a more compelling insanity.

Eric Raymond lives and works in San Francisco. His novel Confessions from a Dark Wood is available from Sator Press.

Louise Nevelson, Sky Cathedral, 1982, painted wood, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of an anonymous donor. Image courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Today BURNAWAY welcomes Amber Sparks for this month’s Authors on Art, a series of creative responses by poets, novelists, and experimental writers curated by Blake Butler.

I always meant to be a painter. It wasn’t until I was, Christ, maybe 15 that someone finally took the brush out of my hand and said, “Look, you’re spectacularly untalented and god knows it’s not for lack of vision,” and so it was probably three days later that I started making stories and poems about paintings instead of making paintings. I decided, well, if I can’t be Rothko then I’ll be O’Hara instead and I will write the living fuck out of that orange.

I like looking at a painting like Mark Rothko‘s Orange, Red, Yellow and telling a story about fires and a girl with hair the color of wheat. I like the fact that Rothko refused to yield to the specificity of language, and that I have to do the work for myself, make a room of my own meaning. (Ironically, this quiet painting by this quiet, unassuming painter—who hated the commodification of his work outside of artistic merit—has now become the “most expensive post-war work sold at auction.” It is a devastating and beautiful painting, and the almost holy light it exudes is so strangely at odds with the dollar signs now permanently stamped next to its name.)

My stories are heavily influenced by visual art, specifically abstract art, because I like making up my own stories. I don’t like to be told what’s happening, to be given the exact curve of a girl’s hip and the sharp scarlet edges of the fire in the foreground. And the abstraction of the world through color is my favorite way to tell stories through painting.

Example: Earlier this summer, when I was asked to write a short piece that would be given to a pair of visual artists as inspiration, I turned to a visual artist for my inspiration. I paid a visit to the Smithsonian American Art Museum and stood for a long time in front of Louise Nevelson‘s Sky Cathedral. The strong black sculpture is like some alien version of the heavens. Then I went home and wrote a piece that evoked, I hope, what Nevelson called “the heavenly spheres, the places between the land and the sea.”  The visual artists then took that piece and made this series of videos, then I responded, and the whole thing went up on a gallery wall. It was a visual record of waving a middle finger in the face of the anxiety of influence.

Example: When Borges was going blind, he liked to paint yellow, because it was the color he could see best.

Example: Early silent film used tinting to achieve mood in certain scenes. Amber, lavender, red, and blue were commonly used. One of the stories in my collection, “The Effect of All This Light Upon You,” uses tinting to achieve mood in a story form instead, taking abstract colors and applying them over language to change the mood or meaning.

Example: William Gass said blue and green have the greatest emotional range, that there was nothing much you could do with yellows and reds. Maggie Nelson, of course, wrote a beautiful book entirely about blue, called Bluets. Blue is the color of the sky and the sea and also sadness; so I suppose it makes up more of our world than any other color. It’s my favorite color, and the dominant color in my favorite Basquiat painting, Untitled (Blue Airplane). A city is blue; there can be no other kind.

Example: According to The Greatest Theft in History, Hitler believed that modern art was made by “degenerates,” as he called them, racial inferiors who couldn’t see and therefore paint colors properly. When he came to power, he had over 16,000 works of modern art removed from museums in Germany. And more than six hundred of these paintings were selected for a public exhibit on Entartete Kunst, or Degenerate Art. The point of the exhibit was “to increase public revulsion for art that was presumably contaminating German culture. The exhibit was wildly popular and was seen by nearly three million viewers.”

Example: Nabokov had a kind of synesthesia in which numbers and letters are perceived as being attached to certain colors. He said, beautifully of course because he is Nabokov, that in “the brown group, there are the rich rubbery tone of soft g, paler j, and the drab shoelace of h. Finally, among the reds, b has the tone called burnt sienna by painters, m is a fold of pink flannel, and today I have at last perfectly matched v with ‘Rose Quartz’ in Maerz and Paul’s Dictionary of Color.”

Example: The ancient Egyptians thought that gold was a sacred color, because it represented the brilliance of the sun. They believed the deities themselves had skin made of gold. They painted the walls with gold, and stuffed the tombs of kings with it to honor Ra, the sun god. I’m writing a story now about a golden temple, an idea I got from seeing an ancient Egyptian tomb decoration of a sun in the foreground and an eye in the background. Like the best art, to my mind, it seems to suggest that staring into the sun might be the best way we have of summoning something to worship. Or at least a hazy reflection, a burned-in corneal image, brutal and fleeting as the gods themselves.

Amber Sparks‘s fiction has appeared widely in print and online. Her first full-length short story collection, May We Shed These Human Bodies, will be published by Curbside Splendor in October.

Anonymous, “Recovery,” c. 1950, carved applewood. Permanent loan to the American Visionary Art Museum by the Edward Adamson Collection. Image courtesy the American Visionary Art Museum.

Today BURNAWAY welcomes Matt Bell for this month’s Authors on Art, a series of creative responses by poets, novelists, and experimental writers curated by Blake Butler.

His doctor remembered that he took no interest in making art until he encountered a fallen apple tree during a walk on the hospital grounds and asked for help in dragging it indoors and getting simple carving tools…For a month, the patient whittled the wood down to this figure. The artist, in his thirties, committed suicide about two years after leaving the hospital. This applewood figure is his only known work of art.

You can’t take pictures inside the museum, and until recently I couldn’t find any pictures of Recovery online. (There’s now one very small one on the Museum’s website.) Without being able to return easily (I live in Michigan) or to otherwise refresh my memories, the half-life of the experience approached and then passed: I’m never good at remembering visual detail, and it doesn’t take long for me to start letting my imagination fill in the blanks. Eventually I have only something less than the original object: more a sort of Rorschach blot designed in reverse, starting with the thing and ending with only its shadowy suggestion.

Cover of Matt Bell’s “Cataclysm Baby,” 2012. Photo courtesy the author.

Sometime during the drafting, Recovery came back to me. I remembered how powerfully I’d felt a kind of longing while looking it, a want to be seen. I thought I’d projected into that sensed longing my idea of the creator’s want to make something lasting, a permanent memorial to a temporary thing: his own diseased and distressed flesh.

I wondered, What would it feel like to be such a person? And then: What would it feel like to be in the opposite situation, where the carver is the only one left, and it is his own fading memories he has to fight to preserve in wood?

In “Walker, Wallace, Warren,” my story inspired by my memories of Recovery, an amnesia-addled widower and carpenter narrates his situation: “All around me: only stilled wood, dead branches over dirty ground. Only this lonely world grown atop my buried children, my planted wife.”

He says, “With awl and adze, with hammer and chisel, I carve my oldest out of the first tree. I remake him as best I remember, shaping the roundness of his cheeks, grooving out the spaces between his teeth and toes.”

And later, after all his lost children are carved into the other trees of his orchard: “On the first day of fall, I cut my wife’s body free of the center-most trunk, using my tools to recreate the inverted ribs of her diseased chest, the long-ago smoothness of her oft-emptied belly. With every skill I’ve learned, I remember her upon the wood: her eyes exactly the proper shape and size, exactly the right tilt to complement the laughing smile last heard too long ago. Her nose alone I work on for days, slicing curl after curl off the bridge until it is the same nose whose tip I kissed goodbye every night, even at the end, when there was so little of it left.”

This carving of the wife’s image contained the most direct homage to Recovery. I could fit into the story, giving the narrator’s long-missed wife the same scarred chest the creator of the applewood figure had, the same smoothness everywhere else that makes that chest so striking when seen in person, preserved in the wood.

More than anything else, it was this contrast that had stayed with me, that I picture immediately when I try to bring Recovery to mind.

Now it’s almost all I can remember without prompting my own memory with the picture from the museum’s website.

He says, “It was not their names I loved. It is not their names I miss.”

Someday after we are gone, there will be no one who will remember our names either, no one who will speak for us, or tell honestly of who we were, of what we said or did. It’d feel like a tragedy if it wasn’t going to happen to all of us. Too often it still does feel tragic, because we want it to be different for us, because we believe ourselves the exception. But of course we’re not.

We can’t live forever, but we can perhaps live on a little longer, in just a few ways: by remaining in the memories of our families and friends, by entering the logs of history, by making a lasting work of art. The anonymous artist who carved Recovery is lost to us by name, or at least his name is not revealed. But something of what he was continues to resonate from that applewood figure. I know not everyone who sees it will extract as much feeling from it as I did, but surely some do. For them, perhaps the memory of what they’ve seen lasts for some time, changes them in some way, even if only temporarily. It’s not immortality but perhaps it’s the closest we can hope for. Perhaps it’s enough.

Matt Bell is the author of Cataclysm Baby, a novella, and How They Were Found, a collection of fiction. His debut novel In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods will be published by Soho Press in Spring 2013. He is the Senior Editor at Dzanc Books, and teaches creative writing at Northern Michigan University.

Gregory Crewdson, Untitled (Ophelia), 2000-2001, digital chromogenic print, edition six of ten, 50 x 60 inches. Claire and Gordon Prussian Fund for Contemporary Art, image courtesy www.artic.edu.

Today BURNAWAY welcomes Jac Jemc for this month’s Authors on Art, a series of creative responses by poets, novelists, and experimental writers curated by Blake Butler.

In 2002, I went to the Art Institute of Chicago to see the photograph above by Gregory Crewdson.

But I also found this work by Jeff Wall:

Jeff Wall, The Flooded Grave, 1998-2000, silver dye bleach transparency, aluminum light box, 89 15/16 x 111 inches. Promised gift of Pamela J. and Michael N. Alper, Claire and Gordon Prussian Fund for Contemporary Art, Harold L. Stuart Endowment, through prior acquisitions of the Mary and Leigh Block Collection, image courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago.

I had gone to the museum for the obvious death and literary resonance of the first photo, but, in person, I became enamored of the second. The artists have a similar appeal: staged photographs presented as transparencies in light boxes. The replications here don’t do these images justice. The light boxes really change everything. Those sea urchins and starfish mounding the walls of the grave are vivid and shocking in person.

The Flooded Grave and the story it told were so much more subtle than Ophelia. It was more subversive. Here was this grave you’d automatically associate with death, and it was full of appalling life.

That life would go on was harder to think about than that life could end.

It’s strange that this is the photo that introduced me to Jeff Wall. So much of his work plays with the presence of the human. He makes images that live halfway between a snapshot of something no one was meant to see and something intentional, carefully composed film stills. When viewed in their light boxes, they shine at you. The images feel like something horrible on a sunny day.

I saw these images right around the time I started writing, and so it seems silly not to find connections. The same impulse that drew me to these, was wanting to start stringing words together to say something. These images are spooky and lively. They create a truth that reality can’t show on its own.

When I write I use images as shots of energy. Don’t know what comes next? Look at an image. Probably it has something to tell you. All the better if it’s a lie.

In 2005, I started working on a novel. I got about three quarters of the way through a draft, and wasn’t sure what to do, so I started flipping through art books at the library and I found this image:

Jeff Wall, The Destroyed Room, 1978, transparency in lightbox, 62 1/2 x 92 inches. Image courtesy www.gallery.ca.

The photo catapulted me to a solution. I knew what else had to be written and what would need to be rearranged. I understood why I’d been so off balance. I needed to move the center.

This photo was another Jeff Wall without a human being in it. What’s left behind in the image is like the shed skin of a snake. Or it’s like you can tell something hungry was there, but they couldn’t find food. Or it’s like you can see that nothing in this room mattered as much as whatever destroyed it.

So much of Jeff Wall’s work contains human life, but the real surprise is when he takes the human being out of the picture. You can still smell that animal in the air.

While I worked on the next draft, I started looking at old still lifes.

Pieter Cornelisz van Ryck, Kitchen Scene, 1604, oil on canvas, 74 1/2 x 113 1/2 inches. Herzog-Anton-Ulrich-Museum, Brunswick. Image courtesy http://m.braunschweig.de.

They all seemed focused on a gluttony that was closely related or even a stand-in for desire. I became obsessed with the slaughtered animals hung or laid out in the scenes. They may be limp, but they struck me as anything but still. In van Ryck’s Kitchen Scene, an ugly man tears into an apple alone, while across the room, a woman fends off a plaintive, lecherous-seeming beggar. The woman is hoisting a leg of mutton, and, if you look for the beggar’s hand, you’ll find it caressing the meat.

The laid table, rather than the kitchen or market scene, lacks the gore, but still appears somehow lewd. It’s an opulence and concentration that’s only needed when someone’s trying to prove they’re alive. And why would you need to prove such a thing if you didn’t think that you might be dead?

Jan Davidsz. de Heem, Still Life with Fruit and Lobster, 1648-1649, oil on canvas, 37 1/2 x 47 1/6 inches. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Desks, too, can evidence a gourmandizing of a different sort, a similar unrest, an urge to gobble everything up.

Meister Leiden, Still Life with Books, circa 1628, oil on panel, 24 x 38 1/6 inches. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

I think of the way we misunderstand vomitoriums, of people filling themselves and then purging so they can load up again. In reality, vomitoriums were just additional exits for a theater full of patrons to quickly leave after a performance, “spewing forth.”

I think of the way a train car fills itself up with warm bodies breathing and pulsing at each stop, only to flush them out when the doors open again. I think about how many times I’ve had to step off a train before I get to where I’m going because I’ve felt certain I might pass out.

Even flowers can be nauseating, gorey, violent.

Jan Brughel, Bouquet, 1603, oil on panel, 49 x 38 inches. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

An image like this can suffocate you. It can make you feel like it’s pulling something too large up from your groin and out your throat.

Looking at these images of objects—for that’s what an animal, a flower, a human being becomes once they’ve stopped living—I focus on all that still buzzes and decays and adds up. This new obsession is what carried me through to finish the novel.

What does it feel like to want to look at something that makes you ill?

Where does the impulse come from to stare straight at a thing that’s begging you to look away?

Looking at something dead, reminds us of life. Grief exists not just because something has ended, but because everything else continues to go on.

It’s sickening.

Jac Jemc lives in Chicago. Her first novel, My Only Wife, is out now from Dzanc Books, and a chapbook of stories, These Strangers She’d Invited In, sold out at Greying Ghost Press in March 2011.

Eric Fischl, Brother and Sister, 1991, oil on linen, 98 x 74 inches. Image courtesy the artist.

Today BURNAWAY welcomes Melissa Broder for this month’s Authors on Art, a series of creative responses by poets, novelists, and experimental writers curated by Blake Butler.

Many years ago while vacationing on the right coast of death I swallowed my timeline front to back. Numbers shattered into waves. My carcass sped up and what was left was space: infinite and horror-conscious. This is the problem with living in cities and visiting oceans only occasionally. Galleries have made a pact with surface. Museums cannot really prepare you for time, because they have no throat. You’ve got to have your body eaten into infinities at least once before you go to the ocean. Otherwise you’ll have a very bad trip.

Eric Fischl, Birthday Boy, 1983, oil on canvas, 89 x 60 inches. Image courtesy the artist.

Not narcissism. Mammalian emergency. I imagine Jesus receiving a lecture on boundaries. I will not be prime til I’m near dead, the deader the wetter. A boy is reading The Story of My Life by Giacomo Casanova. He says Casanova had to fuck a woman who was beautiful but very old. She was 32! I ask gawd to please make me a whore and gawd turns me into an elder statesman. I try to venn diagram my life and I get one circle and a mirror. But in the red hotel I do not reflect. I absorb. I am a shank digester, a cock cake with liquid legs. Filling milk is mental health and I am milkful. Dick. Ball. Ball. My sweet little bowelhole handler. Make a fist. If you know how much I think of you, you’ve already left the room.

Eric Fischl, The Women, 1982, oil on canvas, 66 x 96 inches. Image courtesy the artist.

I saw time fold into a carful of women and they dropped their cunts like husks. I’m afraid of turning purple. I don’t want to hear any alarms under my hair. O sanctus sanctus sanctus varicosis-minimus lolitas roseus coralus salmonus tightest pinkest jonbenet jonbenet jonbenet. PINK—1. Pale red. 2. The highest degree. 3. Prime. 4. To prune or trim. 5. Beefcheeks’ maiden voyage. There is no need to be pink when another woman is already pink. Jealous women jealous me into being jealouser. If I soften I get to meet Joan of Arc. We snow into an ashtray til she asks whose ashtray is this? You must learn to love all the women. I am proud of my me in Joan’s hair tonight. I am proud of my no-game. The universe hums the theme song from Platoon but so what?

Well okay I care. I will maybe stop being of service to illusion. I am uninterested in the ways that numbers fail until they fail. Heaves of mourners form villages around the dead numerals. At the funeral I finally find my eyes. The game of my small coal needs drops down. I am defrocked by prayer emergency. The nudity is a wholesome pyre.

Eric Fischl, Duck, 1987, oil on linen, 70 x 60 inches. Image courtesy the artist.

One companion of romantic obsession is Walt Disney. Walt in your cubicle with rilly bad boundaries. Walt closing a pink desktop folder labeled NOT PORN. Walt with his hands on the good side of your spine. Walt making peace with rot (for now). Walt busts a sperm, stares at gawd’s big belly, and wins the dynasty. Still the neck of his suit is going to rip rip. Still the bones of his neck are going to break break. Still still. Yours too. Get eternal.

Melissa Broder is the author of two collections of poems, most recently MEAT HEART.

The final scene of MTV's The Hills allowed viewers to see the Hollywood artifice that pervades reality television but is rarely shown onscreen.

Today BURNAWAY welcomes Kate Durbin for this month’s Authors on Art, a series of creative responses by poets, novelists, and experimental writers curated by Blake Butler.

“[I]t is going to be a very interesting day indeed when … EVERYONE has a TV show …!”
— webcam celebrity Ana Voog, as quoted in Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched by Mark Andrejevic

“At one point or another I kind of feel like everyone has, like, kind of hated each other.”
— Lauren Conrad, MTV’s The Hills

Reality TV: the most disgraced, disgraceful art medium in the world.

Reality TV: heralded by no one, watched by everyone. This makes it a total shame. Uh, I mean sham.

Reality TV: takes as its subject “real life,” then subjects real life to BLATANT manipulation.

Reality TV: simultaneously makes of and reveals life as construction. This is offensive to those who view themselves as elite victims at the blind hands of a private fate.

Reality TV: a brave new world where there are no victims, only co-conspirators. Where everyone is witness, and destiny is public, participatory, sympathetic, savage.

Reality TV: WE ARE IN THIS TOGETHER WHETHER WE LIKE IT OR NOT.

Reality TV: gleefully reveals the man behind the curtain. He is wearing a flatscreen for a face.

Reality TV: in the center of that face are all our faces. Also, Snooki’s.

Reality TV: reveals what has always been true of our actors on every screen. From the first filmstrip of a man and his horse galloping in flickering black and white, to Marilyn Monroe’s subway grate dress flip, to paparazzi shots of Princess Di’s car crash, to Lindsay Lohan’s “F-U”-painted fingernails in court: THEY R US.

Reality TV: DUH.

Reality TV: goes back further than the galloping horse; goes back to the marble statues, to the cave paintings, to the first gaze into the lake (the first Laguna Beach).

Reality TV: the final scene of the final episode of MTV’s The Hills is the medium’s masterpiece for its meta-reveal. It is also its failure, for revealing ON PURPOSE the medium’s intentionality, its forceful little paws playing with the pixelshit of life. This scene is more radical than the occasional glimpse of a microphone pack in the back of Lauren Conrad’s halter dress. This reveal opens its mouth to show Reality as always tongue-in-cheek.

Reality TV: the final scene of The Hills led me to recognize the genius of the medium. Led me to finally understand Reality TV as none other than life itself.

Reality TV: in the final scene of The Hills—one of several endings shot by producers—Brody Jenner says goodbye to Kristin Cavallari, on a palm-lined street in Los Angeles. The camera then pans out, and the street is shown to be a set. A grip rolls away the Hollywood sign.

Reality TV: in every movie set in Los Angeles, you can see the Hollywood sign from every vantage point. You can see it in the dark.

Reality TV: one day this life of yours will end, and the grip will roll away the Hollywood sign for you.

Reality TV: explodes our concepts of time and space, collapses false binaries. These include but are not limited to: real vs. fake, public vs. private, technological vs. natural, good vs. evil, high art vs. kitsch, dead vs. alive, on vs. off, Team Lauren vs. Team Heidi.

Reality TV: promotes the totalized life of the actor-singer-dancer-clothing-designer-wife-mother-REALITY STAR.

Reality TV: wouldn’t you like to be a star at life, to walk the walk of fame? You already are.

Reality TV: the lie of the screen is that in Reality there is no screen.

Reality TV: the world is watching. The world is your pixelized oyster. What are you hiding in the bathroom on your iPhone for?

Reality TV: just as technology is an extension of our bodies, so is Reality. We construct the world we live in by placing ourselves strategically within it, and in relation to others, our audience, our co-conspirators, our doubles.

Reality TV: so, like, when our “actors” do something we don’t like, when they “act” in debased ways, like when Heidi and Spencer tell the press that Lauren and her boyfriend made secret porn tapes, or when Kim Kardashian divorces that baseball dude 70 days after her most-watched-thing-on-TV-ever fairy-tale wedding, we must ask ourselves: why did we do that?

Reality TV: demands we ask ourselves, not Kim, not Speidi. Ask why we want to watch the fairy ending shit glitter static all over us. Ask why we have projected the Roman Forum’s crumbing hologram over and over and over.

Reality TV: if a show isn’t a hit, we didn’t want it. If it’s a hit, we wanted it. To watch = to want.

Reality TV: more than watching, reading the medium can help us destroy it. Not “it”self—the culturally dismissed, dismissive idea of it. Because it is us.

Reality TV: is why I wrote a book called E! Entertainment, which takes as its subject Reality TV. Which subjects Reality to the operating theater.

Notes:

1. While I was writing this piece, my fiancé was in the other room on his BlackBerry talking to his sister-in-law, trying to hook her up with this producer for a new reality TV show, Navy Wives. This correlation was entirely unplanned.

2. All the screen captures in this article came from Google searches. If you would like credit for your image(s), please contact me here.

Edward Mullany, dude who helped me when my raincoat got caught when train doors closed on me in subway, 2011. Image courtesy the artist.

Today BURNAWAY welcomes Mel Bosworth for this month’s Authors on Art, a series of creative responses by poets, novelists, and experimental writers curated by Blake Butler.

Art. It’s the twigs pebbles knotted up lips dark holes in your face bright yellow mustard behind you. I mean it’s the small things, the petty details like the sun. It’s also the big things like fleeting, selfless kindness. It’s the nameless stranger in dude who helped me when my raincoat got caught when train doors closed on me in subway by Edward Mullany. It’s just as much the text that goes along with the image. The two are sticky partners, humid high schoolers pulling at each other in some geographic blackness. Much of the time, for me, it’s a lot of I don’t know what but goddamn, and that’s okay too.

Edward Mullany, beach scene, or lecherous man nears woman in bikini, 2011. Image courtesy the artist.

At its simplest, though, it’s unfettered inspiration, a knowing that you’ve opened yourself to something that’s bigger than yourself but also exactly yourself, a well-tailored garment. It’s playing on a playground—or a beach like the one in beach scene, or lecherous man nears woman in bikini—that begins in the soft pink of your mind and then rolls out like ten thousand tiny red tongues to every fleshy surface on your body. And you can be as serious or as silly or as sad or as dead as you want. The only rule is: Relax so you don’t have to.

Edward Mullany’s images. Often ripped clean of superfluous details—anything more than a few strands of hair or two proper eyes. Most of the time one will do. One with the slitted hint of another. And then the self portraits, portraits of others, grubby, rubbed like beautiful vagrants or shining shits. Sometimes Edward tells us what materials or applications he’s using to create his works and sometimes he doesn’t. And hey you know what, that’s okay. The image is pouring into my skull and there’s not much for me to fret over in terms of texture, the varying roughness of the wood or canvas. I can’t touch these things with my fingers anyway. I can’t lick them. Not where I sit.

Edward Mullany, self-portrait with bright yellow to help stave off depression, 2011. Image courtesy the artist.

What I get from Edward’s work is a feeling, a good feeling, usually, that reminds me of awe or something as close to awe as I can express. Life is well-represented with minimalism. Life is well-represented with exaggeration. Warped faces. Elongated spines. Loose limbs like rubber bands that twist around your body. And then of course there’s God, a nail-clipping moon in repose, stretched way back, inviting some naked, shimmering star to stumble on over. These are our dreams. This is my dream.

Mel Bosworth is the author of the novel Freight, 2011, available through Folded Word. He lives and works in western Massachusetts.

Hieronymus Bosch, Last Judgment, central panel of a triptych, N.D., oil on panel, 64 1/3 x 50 inches, Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna. Photo courtesy ibiblio.org.

Today BURNAWAY welcomes Robert Kloss for this month’s Authors on Art, a series of creative responses by poets, novelists, and experimental writers curated by Blake Butler.

My mother introduced me to the works of Hieronymus Bosch back when I believed God lived in our church, where I thought He stuck mostly to a room filled with money from the collection plates. I cannot remember why she showed me a book of Bosch’s paintings. I do know I snuck the book from the shelves whenever I could.

Whenever I remember the world the way I imagined it during my childhood, I recall a world of devils riding nude women, a world of bodies piled on the scorched soil of burning landscapes, a world of cages, monsters, fires. The world of a young boy is already one of innocence teetering on the edge of ruin (especially our world in the 1980s, with nuclear obliteration looming, jobless fathers stumbling home with mean fists, and strangers ever lurking in the mall shadows); so the world of Judgment that Bosch promised was a world that seemed entirely possible and true.

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights: Ecclesia's Paradise, 1504, central panel of triptych, oil on panel, 86 1/2 x 76 2/3 inches, Museo del Prado, Madrid. Photo courtesy ibiblio.org.

Certainly, as a boy I did not believe in salvation so much as momentary escape, and I do not know how much salvation is promised in the paintings of Bosch. Christ, as depicted in one of the painter’s works, does not extend a hand so much as hover over the ruin.

And even as a boy I understood that a landscape of nude men and women frolicking and fondling each other—stuffing themselves with enormous fruits that doubtless left them dripping and sticky and giggling—was a world of great sensual delight (and what a confusion to the mind of a boy, this endless impossible orgy). I cannot remember whether I found these illustrations arousing, whether I traced the lines of hips, of breasts, whether I dreamed my body inhabiting these worlds. Since then I have certainly written of boys who dream of such pleasures, who long to burst, sinful and sticky, from their innocent husks.

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights: Bird-Headed Monster, 1504, detail from right wing of a triptych, oil on panel, Museo del Prado, Madrid. Photo courtesy ibiblio.org.

I see now how Bosch is a great one for juxtaposing paradise and hell, sin and judgment in his triptychs, and I realize how profound it must have been for a young mind to move from the mindless titillation of paradise to the scene in which those men and women remained nude but vomited blackness into bottomless pits; or slumped seemingly lifeless, groped by strange beasts; or found themselves stuffed into the beaked mouths of birdlike monsters, only to be defecated into deeper pits. From then onward, on some level, I must have appreciated that any paradise, any world of pleasure, was surely a world doomed.

Certainly it is possible I have, to some extent, conflated the images of Bosch’s triptychs by overlapping the delights and the torments until they seem entirely one. Perhaps they are already, in some sense, different reflections of the same image. Certainly the lesson has stuck; recently I wrote a story including a fictitious book titled The Art of Lovemaking, which I imagined to be illustrated with images of nude corpses piled and intertwined with each other. As I wrote, I believed I was describing photographs of mass graves and industrial-scale murder. Now I wonder: Are those piled bodies , in truth, Bosch’s tormented souls? Does the smoke coiling around them come not from smokestacks but from those volcanoes rimming the horizons of Bosch’s obliterated landscapes? I certainly remember little, if anything, of those long-ago Sundays spent in church, other than my attention shifting to God in his room of money, as He watched and judged us in our pews. But perhaps the lessons learned from such paintings, once taken in, are impossibly deeper than the deepest cadences of pastors and priests.

Robert Kloss is the author of How the Days of Love & Diphtheria (2011) and The Alligators of Abraham (forthcoming in 2012) from Mud Luscious Press.

Most mammalian species last about 2 million years, and so far we humans are nowhere close to even half of that. In our current form, we’ve been here for 0.02 percent the span of the existence of horseshoe crabs, for example, who are doing fine after 445 million years.

So what’s primitive? How can any art be called primitive when all art is primitive to life on earth?

The name for the kind of art done by Mose Tolliver is notoriously debatable. “Folk” is a popular term, and it’s the term the High Museum of Art uses, the first major museum to devote an entire curatorial department to it. But implications of craftsy-ness or the traditional art of “indigenous” populations makes it seem inaccurate here, as does “self-taught,” simply in that I think all artists, pressed through official systems or not, are self-taught. I happen to like the term “outsider art,” especially in how it frames its own opposite: “insider” art—how awfully sleazy that sounds! This is our English approximation of art brut (raw art, “uncooked” by the processes of schools, galleries, exhibitions, agents, dealers, etc.), a term specifically made by Roger Cardinal for Jean Dubuffet. Dubuffet defined it as “works created from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses—where the worries of competition, acclaim, and social promotion do not interfere” and so “we cannot avoid the feeling that in relation to these works, cultural art in its entirety appears to be the game of a futile society, a fallacious parade.”

It’s true that outsider art often comes from the South (where Mose Tolliver is from) or really anywhere rural and poor, or in the solitary living that is often concomitant to mental illness, because these are places where there is simply no one there to tell you that you can’t paint. Sorting artists by self-awareness, or by deciding who is and who isn’t “naïve” about art and their own art-making process, seems like a pointless and impossible game—what matters more is that some art ends up being outside the code of art. Some art forces you to deal with the definition of art, and some doesn’t. Some of it is fine with the code, and some wants that code to get a little bit bigger. Standing in front of a painting by Mose Tolliver at the High, watching other patrons moving uncomfortably through the Folk Art wing (some visibly disgusted or confused, some plowing through politely but quickly), I simply feel happier there in that space, where Art’s sacred cue of intention is garbled.

Mose Tolliver was working at a warehouse when a crate of marble fell on his legs and permanently disabled him; he started painting because it was it was an easy hobby for someone immobilized. He used plain house paint, keeping a few cans of it open at a time, using those up before changing his palette, and using soda-can tabs as hanging devices nailed to the back of the plywood he painted on. All of this would have been schooled out of him if he had formal training. His teacher probably would have told him he needed to draw the human form 3,000 times before even picking up a paintbrush. But “awkward” shapes are the ones the hand naturally makes first, controlled for sure, just not by academic conventions.

My favorite painting by him, All the Way from Chicago 1. Paul Ling Low 2. Annie Low 3. Charlie Bee Low 4. Chestafel Low, 1987, makes these fancy people seem wildly alien in their plain forwardness. Flattened into marks by a broad unwashed brush, the brown and blue and yellow house paint streaks unmixed in their hastily reduced hair and clothing shapes. The negative space around their bodies is simply decorated-on, with dots like target color tests and a weird bulbous border that seems to press them in. Without a clear relation to a horizon and with that horrifying sad emptiness in their eyes and mouths, they seem like stickers on the picture plane, just stuck disturbingly. If I look again, though, they are goofy and warm, almost singing.

In this painting are the “tells” that art dealers love to catalogue in cases of disputed authenticity: as with most outsider artists who attracted followings, Tolliver’s family would often paint in his style to beef up their offerings for buyers and tourists. His relatives, his son Charles especially, painted peoples’ heads too oblong, without heels on their shoes, and rounded the characteristic square noses seen in the originals. Tolliver didn’t seem to mind; if asked for a commission, he would often give the assignment to his son. “I’m not interested in art,” he said in an article published in 1981 in the Montgomery Advertiser, “I just want to paint my pictures.”

Besides people, Tolliver loved to paint animals and regular objects, and how these things are made weird in his hands helps to reset my perceptual routines and comfortable habits of feeling the world. He uses a snake to reduce a portrait down to a gut: a wild toothy mouth and winding digestion tube, collapsing lightly to fit into the frame, erupting somewhere outside of it. The same snake shape appears under the fat eye-like wheels of an empty bus, active but empty, with nothing but comically straight-backed chairs being driven wherever by one of the same chairs, all in an unsettling tonal range of cheery greens.

What if there’s still going to be art not just 1,000 years from now but 50,000 years from now? How blurred will our fine distinctions of terminology and movements look from way up there? I hope that the Tollivers will be stored right next to the Fragonards and that no one will look at them the same way we are looking at them now.

Molly Brodak is the author of A Little Middle of the Night (University of Iowa Press, 2010) and is the 2011-2013 Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University.

Joseph Beuys. Luftwaffe pilot gunned down in his Stuka dive-bomber over Crimea. Believed he survived because he wasn’t wearing his seat belt. He was sucked out the back of the plane. Claimed he was rescued by tribesmen who covered him in felt and animal fat to keep him alive. They tempted him to join their clan and become a shaman. In fact, he was recovered by German search planes and spent weeks in a hospital. No such tribesmen lived in the area at the time. A genius liar like Faulkner, Beuys became his own myth first. In his action “I Like America and America Likes Me,” Beuys tries to co-exist with a coyote in a gallery space for eight hours. The only other things in the pen with him besides the coyote are felt, a stack of Wall Street Journals, a bed of hay and a staff. The best detail is that he came to and from the gallery and the airport in an ambulance, strapped into a gurney, wrapped and blindfolded in felt. He never set foot on the street, or saw anything other than the gallery. Never interacted with anything other than the coyote. Beuys. Explaining paintings to a dead hare.

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Vito Acconci. Started out a poet. Got his MFA from Iowa. Tried to capture the page. The page is really another picture frame. Art is the frame. Art is the line you draw between art and life. Acconci blurred it. Seedbed, his most famous piece. He’s under a ramp in a gallery masturbating, speaking his fantasies about the people walking above him over a loud speaker. Or Acconci in a basement, blindfolded, shaking a stick and rambling, staking his territory, trying himself into a “state where anything is possible.” What has become of him? An architect. Poet to performance artist to architect. Sculpture as the redefinition of space. Acconci.

Donald Judd. A Minimalist who hated the term Minimalist. After the Abstract Expressionist’s orgasm, what to do? Get back to the elements. Size. Color. Material. Shape. Make everything a box. See who can make the best box. A box of steel two feet tall means something different than a box of steel that is twenty feet tall. Judd. Had people make his sculptures for him. A taboo at the time, now common place. Must we see the artist’s hand? He was a conceptualist. Art is the idea. Judd. Concrete boxes out in the sun making weird shadows. He started out a painter and made furniture. He created a modern American Stonehenge in Marfa, Texas. A place they will point to in three hundred years and say, “Here is what they thought was beautiful.”

Matthew Barney. The easiest artist to hate. High school football and wrestling hero. Went to Yale to play football but quit to model in New York for J. Crew, Ralph Lauren etc. Studied to be a plastic surgeon but changed to art. His earliest work, Drawing Restraint. Barney is strapped by ropes and must crawl up a ramp and use a long pole to reach up and draw on a small canvas. Restraint. The body. Athletics. Restraint makes you stronger. The Cremaster Cycle. The cremaster is the muscle that raises and lowers the testicles and in early prenatal development decides gender. The Cycle is a meditation on the idea of decision. Gender. Five long films with little dialogue. Norman Mailer as Harry Houdini. Richard Serra plays the Architect and Barney’s character kills him. The Cycle incorporates Gary Gilmore, Free Masons, the Boise State football stadium, Johnny Cash and Budapest. Has a kid with Bjork. Rich, handsome, athletic, talented. Barney on a Japanese whaling ship, long beard, short hair, fur coat.

Also, Louie CK’s show is as valuable as any art. The hand wringing over meaning and methods could rest awhile. We could all just relax and enjoy our poor wonderful fool, Louie. Freud alleged tragedy is when the falling piano kills the man, comedy is when he gets up. Louie.

Michael Butler is the author of Simple Machines and Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City.

Cai Guo-Qiang, Fallen Blossoms: Explosion Project 2009 Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, December 11, 2009, 4:30 p.m., 60 seconds, gunpowder fuse, metal net for gunpowder fuse, and scaffolding, explosion area (building facade) approximately 60 x 85 1/4 feet. Photo by Lonnie Graham, courtesy The Fabric Workshop and Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Today BURNAWAY welcomes Sarah Rose Etter for this month’s Authors on Art, a series of creative responses by poets, novelists, and experimental writers curated by Blake Butler.

And here we have a man who makes everything explode.

The first time I heard of Cai Guo-Qiang, it appeared he was blowing up the front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The steps of the museum let out explosion sounds, belched out fat smoke and fire. I didn’t know any better at the time, thought the whole building was collapsing.

But the burst wasn’t a bomb. Guo-Qiang had rigged a wall of safe explosives, had strung up strands of gunpowder in the shape of a blossom that let off gunshot sounds.

After that I was hot hooked, stalking his work.

In Hiroshima, he created and set off black fireworks during the day, a strange, melancholy vision that faded to a gray blur.

In New York, he produced a black cloud to hover over the heads of the crowd on a clear day.

And when he took a break from the fire, his hands sculpted 99 life-sized wolves crashing into a Plexiglas wall, their bodies scattered, frozen broken on the floor after impact. (Picture: http://artasiapacific.com/image_columns/0000/7433/cai-guo-qiang_headon_larger.jpg)

Guo-Qiang has said his hometown, in Quanzhou, China, celebrated every event with explosions—births, deaths, weddings. The gunpowder and fireworks are in his blood.

He is also said to be making a commentary on both Eastern and Western societies, traditions, histories, religions.

And much of this work, without doubt, is political. The black fireworks were to commemorate those who died in the bombings of Hiroshima. The Plexiglas against which the wolves collapse is a reference to the Berlin Wall.

But stripped of the politics, his work exists in a place of beauty and violence.

Cai Guo-Qiang, Head On, 2006, glass sheet and 99 life-sized replicas of wolves, dimensions variable. Installation view at Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, 2006. Photo by Hiro Ihara and Mathias Schormann. Courtesy Cai Studio, New York.

The concept of daytime fireworks sounds wonderful, glittering—then Guo-Qiang turns it into a dark burst, an explosion of gray, a moment to remember the dead.

Here is a man who manufactures clouds with his hands. But he chooses to make them cruel black in the sun, constructs foreboding puffs.

Here is a man who controls wolves, but directs them into glass. The soft fur is less appealing once the bones of the animals are broken, splayed out, useless.

Here is art as invention. Guo-Qiang dreams up the fantastic, creates the fantastic, and then delivers the fantastic by the true definition of the word: huge, unreal, odd, bizarre, remarkable, grotesque.

And the temporary nature of his work only adds to its impact. Much of what he builds only lasts for moments. The result: creations that brim with newness and hope while simultaneously acknowledging neither can last any longer than a firework, or an orgasm.

“The explosion process obviously could be equated to the climax,” Guo-Qiang has said. “Immediately afterwards we’re trying to clean it up, put out the flames, put out the sparks, clean up the pieces, clear it away so you can see the work. Afterwards you have either great satisfaction or you have disappointment as to your entire performance.”

Sarah Rose Etter’s chapbook, Tongue Party, was published by Caketrain Press this year. She lives in South Philadelphia and co-curates the Tire Fire Reading Series.

William Eggleston, Near the River at Greenville, Mississippi, 1984. Photo courtesy © Eggleston Artist Trust.

Today BURNAWAY welcomes Ryan Ridge for this month’s Authors on Art, a series of creative responses by poets, novelists, and experimental writers curated by Blake Butler.

The idea of home—where it is, what it means to “be from”—is one that interests me. The prospect of returning is a pleasant one, particularly the thought of my old Kentucky home with its deep roots, fast horses, old porches, college sports loyalties, oversized Sunday dinners, and familiar drawls. Now that I’m living at the end of the line in California, the mythology of Southern hospitality (and my own roots within it) has swelled in my mind. Yet, Memphis photographer William Eggleston makes me reassess these sentiments with so many of his domestic shots. As Thomas Wolfe says: you can’t go home again. But we do. Endlessly. And while Kentucky remains for me a place of benevolence and charm, Eggleston’s work makes me feel like a stranger in a once-familiar landscape. Eggleston’s South is an inhospitable one—sparsely populated, and more than a little frightening.

Cooking out is a tradition of “home.” And (in my eyes at least) it’s a particularly Southern tradition: Folks gather in the early evening to roast pork, drink beer, joke, flirt, and laugh until the wee hours. Some of my fondest memories are set at Southern cookouts. However, here at Eggleston’s cookout, in his 1984 photograph Near the River at Greenville, Mississippi, we notice that the gathering is sparsely attended. There is no family or friends in the frame. No food. No drinks. No fun. Instead we have tools: a grill, a shovel, an orange extension cord (which, from a distance, looks like a trail of blood) snaking through the frame, and in the center of the shot we have a red hatchet. That hatchet coupled with the shovel takes me to a dark place (but I suppose that says more about my own sensibilities than the shot itself). As Eggleston would say, “It is what it is.” Indeed: a hatchet on a grill. No mystery there, and nothing overtly menacing. Yet, after spending hours contemplating this shot I don’t think I’ll be able to stand around a grill again without getting the fear that something could go awry.

Traditionally, living rooms are the most hospitable places in homes: rooms in which to sit and drink and relax and sometimes entertain guests. However, I remember that no one ever stepped foot in ours except for the occasional holiday or when my middle-school principal dropped in.

William Eggleston, Untitled, 1980. Photo courtesy © Eggleston Artist Trust.

I was a fairly professional hell raiser for an eighth-grade kid, but the problem was that I got caught (and got caught a lot)—so often that my principal had an assigned seat in our living room. The chair where he sat during his visits was not unlike the one pictured above in Eggleston’s untitled 1980 photo (from his Troubled Waters series). Again, this photograph scares me. Here’s a shot of a stereotypical suburban living room, but something about the picture makes me feel small, anxious—like it’s 1993 and I’m sitting in our old living room dreading the arrival of the goddamned principal. Eggleston must’ve taken this photograph from the floor, and while it’s comical to imagine him on the carpet with his camera, there’s nothing funny about the shot. The odd angle—somehow emphasized with a flood of yellow light on yellow walls on yellowed objects—makes a commentary on family; on the spaces we inhabit at home; on expectations; isolation. That organ in the center of the frame looks like an altar to the death of music. Those chairs? Intimidating; the absence of people? Unsettling: Because is a living room really a living room without people? This picture is a purgatory.

Meals are big deals in the South. Especially dinner, which is often a communal affair. Folks regale one another with small victories and tall tales while nourishing themselves. Here in Eggleston’s photograph entitled Dinner, we notice that, although there are several place mats, it appears only one person will be eating.

William Eggleston, Dinner. Photo courtesy © Eggleston Artist Trust.

And it’s a ridiculous amount of food for one: ham with a side of greens, a plate of pasta, a baked potato, bread, cornbread, and a giant soft drink with ice exceeding the glass’s lip. While the shot initially suggests a welcoming home, someone near and dear inviting you to the table to share in this ritual of sustenance, there’s something extremely unappetizing about the food in the shot. It’s not simply excess; nor is it neglect or haphazardness: the plates have been placed carefully on the table and the empty placemats arranged around white flowers. So perhaps no one showed up for the meal or an unexpected phone call interrupted it? This is a scene that anticipates family, but at the same time, family is conspicuously absent.

And surely Eggleston himself anticipates us bringing our memories of familial warmth to bear on the experience of a dinner table, just as we bring our anticipation of finding Southern hospitality and the embrace of home in his vacant frames. This friction compels us to revisit the same rich image again and again. It’s also the reason we feel forsaken when we walk away realizing we can’t go home again. Not to that place, not anymore. No way.

Ryan Ridge is the author of the recently released Hunters & Gamblers (Dark Sky Books). In 2013, Mud Luscious Press will publish his novel(la) American Homes. He lives in Long Beach, California.