I hear my wife, Valerie, calling my name. “Oh, Wi-i-ll,” she sings, in a high, melodious warble reserved to signify the advent of the strange and the amusing. “Look what you just bought.”
She’s returning to our car with a print I inadvertently purchased at this year’s Fine Arts Work Center auction. Jack, a friend who was sitting behind us, says that what happened was this: I held up my paddle at pretty much the same time as somebody on the other side of the room, but the auctioneer didn’t see my bid. Then, somebody from the Work Center cued the auctioneer, and my bid became the second one. It turned out to be the last.
No biggie, I thought: a good cause. Also, the postage-stamp-size photo in the auction catalog made the print look like a shadowy landscape, a few rolling hills, a bucolic scene.
But maybe I knew it wasn’t quite what I expected. Maybe that’s why I waited in the car while Valerie went in to get it. That and the chance to sit with the air-conditioning cranked up to take the edge off the 90-degree heat.
Valerie turns the print around, doing her best Vanna White imitation, and sits down in the passenger seat.
I’m at a loss for words. I’ve just purchased a print of a hairy nude man. He’s in profile, bending over in the shower to pick up a bar of soap. On the plus side: no wieners in view; no unpleasant ass crack; nothing erotic, really. The overall scribbly quality makes the whole scene seem somehow –– I’m groping here, no, not groping, searching my database of suitable art-speak — like a study for another work. A stylized depiction of something you don’t see in art too often: a nude body stooping down to pick up a bar of soap.
Anyway, it’s decidedly not a landscape. It offers no suggestion of the crepuscular. No sense of the perspective of an undisturbed, composed countryside.
“I guess this means if we want to bid we should go to the preview,” I say, trying to rush this purchase along to the category of learning experience as fast as possible. “We can always stick it in the closet,” I say, intending no irony.
Talking to a local artist at a party a few days afterward, I mention my mistaken purchase. It’s become the stuff of anecdote. I deliver my punchline, and she pauses a beat and says, “Oh yeah, I remember that print. I thought it was excellent.”
I pause, and then do that thing you learn to do in conversation, where you suddenly jump to considering the merits of a topic you have just presented as a joke.
“Well,” I say, “it does provide a decidedly unerotic context, and it’s kind of an interesting commentary on art history’s fondness for depicting nude females.” My artist friend nods. I guess I’m on to something. “And,” I add, “I like the way it includes a bar of soap.” I make a note to myself to take it out of the closet and reexamine it.
When I do, it still looks like a grainy, unfinished moment of candid disarray: a man stooping to pick up something that slipped out of his hands a moment before. But I notice that when I describe it, it sounds interesting: a slippery moment; a person doing so casually what we do every day without thinking: We compensate for small errors, adjust our tools, reconfigure our bodies to make use of their quite miraculous abilities to bend and stretch and turn and jump. Not that jumping in the shower would be such a wise choice.
The more I consider the print, the more interesting I find it. The only problem I have is in looking at it. Looking just somehow fails to focus the theme the way that my noodling does. The story I compose for myself on this visual work holds more appeal to me than the work itself.
I’m reminded of a game a neighbor sent me a few years back. It’s a three-column mix-and-match tool for providing commentary on art, called something like a Chinese Food Art Menu. It allows you to say stuff like, “I enjoy the delineation of the plasticity of the figurative in this work,” or maybe, “The sculptural gradation in the linear vocabulary is striking.”
I have words. But what I really need is a way to own up to my mistakes, take various art purchase failures out of the closet, and let them go.
My senior year in college I rented an off-campus apartment that was one floor down from another tenant, who did not like me. His feelings seemed to have something to do with what he perceived as a pronounced Philistine bias in my outlook.
“You think you know what beauty is,” he sneered at me during a small party I’d invited him to when I moved in, “but you have no idea.” I admit I didn’t take it well. We never spoke a civil word again.
Apparently, what I’d done wrong was wear a faded navy-blue Chemise Lacoste. In a moment of some sort of consumer rebellion mixed perhaps with a drug-heightened sense of industry, I’d carefully removed the little alligator logo sewed tightly over the left nipple, leaving a darker blue spot where the alligator had once frolicked.
Maybe the guy was in the apparel industry. I don’t know. Certainly, I could never claim to have had more than a mild interest in my appearance. Nobody ever nominated me for “best dressed,” or even, “in the running.” Still.
I will admit the neighbor’s put-down shocked me, and maybe even made me think. A little. About whether I did, in fact, know anything about beauty. What if I was totally mistaken about all aesthetic considerations? What if I was walking through life randomly offending strangers with my unnoticed fondness for the ugly and the dull?
Mostly what I thought, of course, was that I’d run across a head case.
Oddly, at a more advanced age, I’m willing to accept my neighbor’s assessment, though in a somewhat diluted form, without the original acid mix of disdain and hostility: I may know nothing about beauty.
I may be confused about Keats’s line from the “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Is truth beauty? Is beauty truth? I may not even want a theory. I may have concluded after some time that not having all the answers demonstrates some level of honesty and perhaps truth. Maybe even some sort of beauty.
So, I pull my small collection of graphic art, including the nude man picking up a bar of soap, out of the closet.
I select some I think I might like to let go of. Then I consult Valerie, who speaks up for one of the prints. And then another.
Pretty soon I decide it would just be easier to stow the whole bunch back in the closet, but more neatly this time, and in an arrangement that indicates which ones are most likely to get culled the next time I feel the need to tidy up my aesthetic life.–Will Walker
Will Walker lives in San Francisco and Provincetown. This story is a slightly adapted version of one he read at Story Night in 2016.
THE STORYTELLERS
Celebrating Provincetown Story Night
BY GAIL STRICKLAND
Provincetown Story Night began as a vanity production. My acting career had been sabotaged by a voice disorder, spasmodic dysphonia, leaving me wretchedly frustrated for a creative outlet and desperately in need of the unique high of a live audience’s laughter.
I had done a little stand-up and loved getting on at the Comedy Store at midnight, hanging out with funny people. But I had a nice husband and a baby girl and pursuing that seriously meant going on the road. Not an option. Still, I discovered I could write funny and own an audience.
A friend suggested I check out Sit and Spin, a monthly evening of memoir readings at Comedy Central’s 99-seat theater in Hollywood. Your story could be on any topic, with a 1,500-word maximum. I was amazed to be given a slot with my first submission. Then I panicked: What if there was no voice? Or worse, what if it was strangled and unintelligible? Maisy, my daughter, now in college, insisted that I introduce my distressed vocal cords, give them a little shout-out and smile. I would relax, and so would the audience. She was right. I was weirdly coherent and generously rewarded. They invited me back.
At an ArtStrand Gallery opening that summer, I floated the idea of doing a story night here to my friend, the artist Anna Poor. She thought yes and convinced her fellow owners at the gallery to allow a one-night event there. WOMR, conveniently upstairs, lent their chairs, a microphone, and a speaker.
Who would want to join me? Poet, cellist, and neighbor Will Walker jumped in. Then three others, Judge Maria Lopez, artist Donna Pompano, and NPR legend Tony Kahn. Alice Malone traded waitressing shifts so she could play her violin to introduce each story. It was a magical evening.
“I found I had set my expectations too low,” Will told me afterwards. He continues as a co-conspirator in these “evenings of discovery and delight.” Will always finishes the show.
July 16 will be the 10th anniversary of Story Night, with six memoirs to be generously shared for friends and neighbors. David Drake will kindly welcome us as guests at the beautiful Provincetown Theater, as he has since 2014. I hope all our storytellers can come. I want to thank you all for creating this shared history. It is so much more than I ever imagined.
Tell All
The event: Story Night’s 10th anniversary celebration, with storytellers Salvatore Del Deo, Bette Skandalis, Gail Strickland, Peter Donnelly, Emma Fillion, Will Walker
The time: Sunday, July 16, 7 p.m.
The place: The Provincetown Theater, 238 Bradford St.
The cost: Free, first come first served
