Ezra Maas

Chapter Ten

I now ascend the stage of the world of which previously I have been a spectator, but I come forward wearing a mask.467

‘Maas anxiety’468 was the headline in 1995, when rumours emerged that Helena had purchased a former warehouse in Chelsea and had converted it into a seven-bedroom villa, seemingly to live without her husband. Several newspapers suggested their marriage was over and subsequently referred to Helena as the artist’s estranged wife. In what may have been an attempt to end such rumours, Helena agreed to give an interview to The Sunday Times Magazine about ‘living with genius’.469 The article was the subject of a legal dispute and was allegedly a rare case of Helena and The Maas Foundation disagreeing.470 As a result, it was never published. However, I have managed to recover several key quotes from sources at The Sunday Times, which had retained a copy of an early draft of the article. These quotes from Helena include:

“Ezra is a genius and comes with all the problems of a genius…His desire for privacy is not about secrecy, it is an expression of his belief in authenticity…He is ready to give himself up totally for his art. He always told me you have to live with your work to the end of your life…Although he thrived on the manic energy of America, he felt England was his home…Ezra regularly works for sixteen hours a day and is so obsessed with what he is doing that nothing is allowed to distract or destabilise him…

“The picture of him in the press is completely false. Most have never met him. I think people see him as some sort of crazed cult leader and expect him to look like Charles Manson, but to me he’ll always be part English gentleman, part New York hipster…the first time I saw him I thought he was the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen, and I still feel that way…

“He worked everywhere, turning whatever space he was in at the time into a studio, an artist’s loft, like in Montparnasse or Greenwich Village…Sometimes I worry that he’s become more mythology than man…”

Although Helena’s article was generally positive, her attempts at presenting a fundamentally stable relationship were undermined slightly following a tabloid story that broke in the late 1990s. This was essentially a ‘kiss-and-tell’ story, which accused Maas of having an affair with aspiring actress, former stripper, and now turned contemporary artist, Mary Hurt, who described a very different version of the artist’s life to the image the Maas Foundation had portrayed for the last decade. However, the story ultimately became little more than a tabloid footnote when Hurt, the woman at the centre of the accusations, abruptly changed her story. Shortly after this, she bought premises in Soho, which she converted into a small art gallery to showcase her own work. This led to rumours that she had withdrawn her accusations after accepting a financial settlement from the Maas Foundation. When I spoke to her in 2012, Hurt denied that she had taken any money from Maas but did give me more of an insight into the nature of her relationship with the artist. Speaking of the “Maas she knew”471 she said:

“All those stories of Ezra barely leaving his studio in Hertfordshire were manufactured…if everyone thought he was there then he was free to be anywhere. That was the whole idea…

“It was hilarious…while the newspapers and his crazy fans were camped out watching his mansion, Ezra was travelling the world, drinking with artists in Paris, having twenty-four-hour parties in Berlin, painting landscapes in Switzerland, creating art and living his life in plain sight…

“He picked me up when I was dancing in a club in Soho…I had originally gone to London to become an actress, but it hadn’t worked out…I didn’t know who he was, but you could tell straight away that he was special, he just had something about him, a confidence I suppose…

 “His relationship with Helena was more of a business partnership…he disliked how big the Maas Foundation had become and didn’t want any part of it, he wanted freedom, from it, from her, from everything and everyone…

“Being with Ezra made you feel better about yourself, more positive. He wasn’t supportive as such…in fact, he could be very cold, very distant at times, but his presence in your life was inspirational, if that makes sense. It was because of him I decided to become an artist…

“I was angry with him when I went to the papers, it was impulsive, and I quickly regretted it, that’s why I decided not to go any further…He had secrets within secrets. It was hard to live with, and I didn’t feel like I could trust him. It took me a while to come to terms with the fact that the Maas I knew existed only in that moment, only in our time together, and that he was not one person, but a shimmer, a hundred million different people, changing all the time…”472

Hurt also described a very different image of Maas physically, although there is very little to compare her account to, because of the veil of secrecy that had surrounded his appearance for the past few decades. Almost no confirmed photographs of Maas exist.473. The images that do are either hotly contested or conflict with each other. Other descriptions of Maas over the years, from people who claim to have met him, were contradictory to say the least.474 A journalist who claimed to have met Maas in the 1980s said he looked like a “biblical patriarch with dark, menacing eyes”,475 but the author Jacob Glass said he was more like a “beat poet” who permanently wore “a cotton fatigue jacket with multiple pockets with a T-shirt underneath, faded chinos, and running shoes.”476 Both differ from Hurt, who described a version of Maas who was:

“…surprisingly young looking, with dark brown hair that was almost black, large, intense blue eyes, a lined but handsome face, full lips and a killer smile…”477

Hurt, who went on to have a successful and controversial career of her own in contemporary British art,478 admitted she has had no contact with Maas since 2000, adding that she had no clue to his current whereabouts or intentions. Although Hurt’s full story never made the mainstream press, rumours of marital discord and even a feud between Maas and Helena were becoming a topic of discussion in the art world. Disagreements on both a personal level and over the direction of the Maas Foundation continued to circulate. One example was the supposed rivalry between the website for Helena’s Lacuna gallery and Maas’s personal site. Whereas Lacuna had a strong focus on supporting new talent, including interactive features where artists could upload their own images, win an exhibition spot at the gallery, and bid for funding, Maas’s site was arguably for fans of the artist only. Lacuna also boasted a forum, live chat, blogs, videos, photography, illustrations, a daily magazine, and even a television channel. In contrast, Maas’s site was described by critics as an almost entirely “inward looking multimedia playground for an artist’s obsessive preoccupations”.479

Maas launched the original version of www.ezramaas.com480 in 1999, with a revamp in 2001. The site was exclusive to paying members and featured short videos, artwork, and even daily weather bulletins supposedly recorded by Maas.481 It promised a unique insight into Maas’s life and art, although reactions were initially mixed, with some critics questioning whether the content justified the subscription and where the money was going. Eyebrows were also raised about the alleged rivalry with Lacuna, suggesting that both Maas and Helena were complicit in using the rumours of their alleged feud as a marketing gimmick. Other more positive comments described Maas’s site as art in itself and a “deconstruction of the internet as an abstract concept”,482 while another fan claimed it reinforced recurring themes of hyper-reality and simulation in the artist’s work. However, whether Maas truly worked on the site or whether it was maintained by one of his assistants is not known. Regardless, the site proved highly popular. In 2004, California-based web traffic and ranking company Alexa Internet483 ranked both Maas’s site and Lacuna Online as being in the top 200, worldwide. If the so-called rivalry had been a PR stunt, then it had clearly been successful.

It was around this time in 2002 that Maas was rumoured to have left his manor house on his first official trip away from England in several years. The reason was reportedly to meet with the American theoretical physicist John Wheeler (who he had first met at a conference in New York in 1967 where the scientist had coined the term ‘Black Hole’484). Wheeler had suffered a heart attack the previous year and felt his time was short.485 Subsequently he had resolved himself to tackling the big questions in the time he had left, such as, “How come existence?”486 and Maas apparently wanted to talk to him about his theory of a ‘Participatory Universe’, with a view to creating a piece of art, potentially a conceptual installation, in response to Wheeler’s work. The results of this conversation were never revealed, and the trip to Maine where Wheeler lived was never confirmed by the Maas Foundation. Any insight we have into this meeting now comes from Maas’s own journals, which explore his long-term interest in quantum mechanics and his desire to use art as a bridge to connect other disparate concepts in religion and psychotherapy. It was just three years later that Maas was revealed to be missing, after retiring from public life to concentrate on his final artwork, and while few had no knowledge of his meeting with Wheeler or his long-term interest in these concepts, it is now hard to discount a possible correlation between the two events.

Around eighteen months after Maas’s meeting with Wheeler, Helena curated an exhibition in Moscow, The Image Tells Me Death in the Future, featuring a film that may or may not have been created by Maas. The highly controversial, and famously uncredited film, entitled Absence,487 has been the subject of intense critical debate, with more than one hundred academic papers dedicated to its content and possible ‘auteurship’ since its one and only screening488. One study in particular was brought to my attention because its author, the academic Dr TJ Watson, disappeared shortly after it was published in 2002.489 This paper, on the film, entitled, The Image Tells Me Death in the Future: Absence, Dead time and the Deconstruction of mortality, was his last published work. Below are a number of quotes from Watson’s paper on this notorious film, which may have been the work of Maas:

“…because the film is forcibly separated into three parts, there is an inherent form of violence embedded within the very fabric of the film. As these temporal gaps exist, there is no way of telling what exactly occurred in the absence of the visual image. What becomes interesting is not so much that which is visually presented, but that which is absent. As Georges Farber has suggested ‘we can only perceive reality through fragmentation, we see our lives through the prism of fragmented segments’…490

“…The space between these sequences may be codified as a form of dead time, the absence of the image between sequences referring to what Gilles Deleuze has noted as the ‘out of field’. Describing those events lying beyond the film frame, dead time also encompasses a dead space in which the visual image is absent, the reality beyond the frame drawn into question…”491

Two years after Absence was screened for the first and only time, in Moscow, Maas announced through his website that he was withdrawing from public life to concentrate on his “final and most important creation”.492 This caused considerable speculation amongst the press, international art world, and Maas’s legion of fans, although no further statement was ever issued to clarify the exact nature of the project, and the original iteration of ezramaas.com was shut down. Naturally this only magnified the interest in discovering what Maas was planning. One of the theories suggested that the announcement itself, his proposed vanishing act or absence from the world, was his final gift to art. Others were convinced Maas would return with a game-changing creation, a new form of art that would come to define the 21st century. Some critics also noted that, considering Maas had barely been seen in public, officially at least, since the early 1980s, his new ‘withdrawal’ from public life was somewhat ironic. Following the flurry of media coverage following his announcement, the Maas Foundation continued to maintain his legacy through retrospective exhibitions, as well as commissioning various reprints and limited editions of his back-catalogue. Helena’s solo career, and her role in supporting emerging art, also went on as before, with high-profile shows held at The Serpentine Gallery, White Cube, Gagosian Gallery, The Nationalgalerie at the Hamburger Bahnhof, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, among others. Maas himself remained silent and was generally thought to be working in solitude in one of his studios, presumably at Gorhambury Manor. However, the silence would soon come to an abrupt end.

In January 2005, police were called to the Maas estate in Hertfordshire after reports of a disturbance. Records show an ambulance was also called.493 No arrests were made, and no one was taken to hospital, but the resulting media coverage forced the Maas Foundation to acknowledge the incident, especially after the speculation about the final project Maas was working on in seclusion.

The response came later that month when Helena, via a spokesperson for the Maas Foundation, confirmed the growing rumours that her husband was missing. The biggest revelation however was that Helena had not seen or heard from Maas in three years, which made his last confirmed sighting in 2002. Although there was some debate whether Helena and the Maas Foundation could be trusted on this, if their admission was true then it would suggest that Maas operated with a much greater degree of autonomy than anyone had previously imagined. It could also be seen to confirm suspicions of a division between Maas and his own Foundation.

Once again, cynics suggested the disappearance was little more than a marketing stunt to hype Maas’s latest artwork. As evidence, they pointed to the creation of new Ezra Maas pages and accounts on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter494 to promote his eventual return, as well as what appeared to be a viral marketing campaign featuring messages embedded in web pages, QR codes, and geocaching.495 In the months following his disappearance, Helena Maas was also perceived as attempting to capitalise on the additional publicity generated by her husband’s disappearance, as she oversaw the launch of the Maas Foundation for Consciousness-led Peace and Education centre, in Los Angeles,496 and the opening of a nightclub in the historic heart of Paris named Missing Persons,497 at 142 rue de Montmartre. The club, allegedly designed by Maas before he disappeared, consisted of a series of underground rooms for artists of all disciplines.

From the time of Maas’s initial announcement that he would not be heard from again until his final work was complete, to his official disappearance three years later,498 there was a global resurgence in the guerrilla street art and satirical graffiti first attributed to the artist and his followers in New York, in the 1960s and 1970s. The new variation of this trend saw words and images associated with Maas and his art, as well as original work inspired by him, being painted, stencilled, and displayed on public spaces, buildings and landmarks around the world, including in London, Newcastle, Liverpool, Manchester, and Leed in the UK, as well as Paris, Brussels, Bruges, Berlin, Bilbao, Sydney, Melbourne, New York, LA, Chicago, San Francisco, Montreal, Toronto, and Anchorage.

Although denounced as vandalism by police, local authorities, and other organisations, the creations were also assessed as serious works by the art world. One critic even suggested the graffiti and tags were the work of Maas himself using different pseudonyms, and that the whole endeavour was essentially a conceptual art project, with Maas ‘performing’ the persona of an international street artist. Others drew attention to instances of anarchic vandalism and violence around the creation of these pieces, suggesting they were instead the work of Maas’s cult following, potentially new factions made up of young people inspired by similar subversive groups that had existed decades earlier. This was also accompanied by a newfound interest in the search for hidden messages in Maas’s work, with a number of media sources suggesting it was all part of a concerted plan to promote the artist’s inevitable return.

The Maas Foundation denied a connection to the street art, vandalism, and violence, and continued to distance itself from the artist’s more extreme fans, who claimed his re-emergence would be the “21st century’s Second Coming”.499 One senior member of the Maas Foundation, who did not wish to be named, spoke to me about his understanding of what Maas had planned. He said that while he did not know the exact nature of the work, he knew Maas’s vision would have nothing to do with violence or anarchy but would “prepare the future” by helping us see the world as he has always seen it. These words recall and echo two famous quotations from the art world, one by the art historian Robert Hughes and the other by Russian philosopher P.D Ouspensky:

“The essence of the Avant-garde myth is that the artist is a precursor; the truly significant work of art is the one that prepares the future.”500

“In art, it is necessary to study ‘occultism’ – the hidden side of life. The artist must be a clairvoyant: he must see that which others do not see; he must be a magician: must possess the power to make others see that which they do not themselves see, but which he does see.”501

In many ways, these words serve as a fitting epitaph, both for Maas and this book. Next year, 2012, will mark seven years since Maas was confirmed missing.502 Although a death certificate can be issued at any point following a disappearance, an estate can only be settled in the High Court after seven years.503 At the time of writing, Ezra Maas has yet to return.

THE END504

Notes

467. René Descartes.

468. A playful reference to one of Maas’s works.

469. The Sunday Times, (1995) Quotes recovered by Daniel with help from George Wallas.

470. Helena wanted to run the article, the Foundation did not.

471. Daniel interviewed Mary Hurt in 2012. All quotes in the manuscript attributed to Hurt were taken from this interview.

472. Hurt’s quote strongly reminds me of something David Cronenberg said. The director, talking about characters in his films, said: “…we look on ourselves as being relatively stable. But, in fact, when I look at a person I see this maelstrom of organic, chemical and electron chaos; volatility and instability, shimmering; and the ability to change and transform and transmute.”

473. The photo Daniel recovered from a restaurant in Bruges in 2012 is one of the rare examples.

474. As evidenced by Daniel’s oral histories about Ezra Maas, which appear in between chapters. These recollections of Maas are notable for being so diverse and different, each one seeming to cancel out the other – Anonymous.

475. As quoted in an interview in The New York Observer, 1999.

476. Daniel interviewed Glass in 2011.

477. From the aforementioned conversation between Daniel and Hurt in 2012.

478. Hurt has been compared to Andy Warhol due to her blend of pop art, celebrity culture, and fairytale iconography, and has sold paintings to Charles Saatchi and other high-profile collectors, including a number of celebrities. She recently exhibited at Modern Art Oxford.

479. The Independent, Tuesday 21st, November 2001.

480. The website still exists but was redesigned in 2017 and bears little resemblance to the original version that Maas created as a subscription-only site, fifteen years earlier.

481. Although because of the poor quality audio, it is almost impossible to tell.

482. Fowler, Mark, Multimedia Maas: The Artist and Hyperreality, New Hampshire Press, 2008.

483. A subsidiary of Amazon.com.

484. Wheeler insisted the name had been suggested to him by someone else, but he was definitely responsible for publicising it.

485. He did not die until 2008, as it happened.

486. Wheeler: “I had a heart attack on January 9, 2001. That’s the signal. I only have a limited amount of time left, so I’ll concentrate on one question: How come existence?” From an interview by Tim Folger, Discover magazine.

487. Watson wrote: “Allegedly produced sometime in the mid-1970s and never gaining any official release, Absence is something of an anomaly within the field of film research and theory. Because the film itself has never been credited with any one director, or claimed by anyone as a specific authorial work, Absence has garnered a very forceful mythology surrounding its origins and intent. The date of the film is also something of an ambiguity, making it harder to frame the film in terms of any specific context. The mid-1970s has been adopted as a guide, based on the condition and subsequent degradation of the film’s only surviving print (no archival records have ever been found suggesting the existence of another).”

488. The film’s singular screening has in itself been seen as a piece of conceptual or performance art.

489. He was never found.

490. Dr T.J Watson from his paper, The Image Tells Me Death in the Future (2002).

491. The Image Tells Me Death in the Future.

492. An excerpt from the statement published on: ezramaas.com in 2004.

493. Daniel put in a Freedom of Information Act request for the transcripts of the emergency calls, but unfortunately this was indefinitely delayed by legal action. The Maas Foundation clearly did not want this information to be released.

494. The Maas Foundation’s Twitter account can be found @MaasFoundation.

495. Geocaching is an activity in which the participants use a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver or mobile device, and other navigational techniques, to hide and seek containers, called "geocaches" or "caches", anywhere in the world. Geocaches are currently placed in over one hundred countries around the world and on all seven continents, including Antarctica. After almost twelve years of activity there are over 1,760,033 active geocaches published on various websites. There are over five million geocachers, worldwide.

496. Located at 121 S Wetherly Dr. Beverly Hills, CA 90211.

497. The name of the club itself was, of course, highly provocative in the circumstances – Anonymous.

498. In 2002, Maas announced he would not be seen again until his final work was completed, but was not officially reported missing by the Maas Foundation until 2005.

499. The Maas Journals. Vol. 9, p.221.

500. Hughes, Robert. The Shock of the New.

501. P.D Ouspensky.

502. This was the original planned release date of Daniel’s unauthorised biography of Maas, when it was due to be published by William Wilson and Company. It may have been that Daniel’s anonymous client wished for the book to be published before settlement of the Maas estate and the legal ramifications of his death. However, for reasons unknown, the deal collapsed, and both Daniel and the manuscript disappeared, until now – Anonymous.

503. See the letter from Westminster Coroner’s Office earlier in the manuscript explaining ‘Death in Absentia’.

504. Note to reader: Daniel’s biography of Ezra Maas ends here. It is clear from his notes that several hundred pages were written in addition to those presented here, including further chapters on his childhood, time in America and Europe, the controversy surrounding Oxford University, his refusal of the Nobel Prize and Turner Prize, his seclusion in England, and his eventual disappearance, as well as expanded versions of everything you have read so far. Unfortunately, more than two thirds of Daniel’s manuscript have been destroyed, and I have not been able to locate any other copies, or the original ‘Maas Journals’ from which much of the biographical chapters were taken. The surviving pages you hold in your hands have been reassembled over the course of the last five years, based on Daniel’s notes, but much is missing. Perhaps one day, the lost chapters will be discovered and restored. However, for now, the biography is over. All that remains is to conclude Daniel’s own story – Anonymous.