Soho is a real place. By real I mean that it exists materially. Mr. Art is not a real person. By not a real person I mean that he does not exist materially. Nevertheless, where Soho is concerned I wouldn’t consider excluding Mr. Art from my observations, for in matters such as this he is my most trusted adviser and confidant. He is a dapper little fellow, perhaps a bit wry—and while it has been said of him that his manner cannot really support his mannerisms, he is, I can assure you, a welcome relief from some of these other types we get in here.
I will introduce you to Soho slowly by noting that this area of downtown Manhattan shares with Mr. Art nary a single characteristic. Up until a few years ago Soho was an obscure district of lofts used chiefly for storage and light manufacturing. It wasn’t called Soho then—it wasn’t called anything because no one ever went there except the people who make Christmas tree ornaments out of styrofoam and glitter or fabric trimmings out of highly colored stretch felt. And say what you will about members of these professions, they are generally, I am sure, very nice people who not only don’t make those things out of choice but also don’t go around calling obscure districts of Manhattan things like Soho. Ostensibly, Soho is called Soho because it begins South of Houston Street, but if you want my opinion I wouldn’t be too terribly surprised to discover that the person who thought up this name is a person whose circle of friends in 1967 included at least one too many English photographer. It was, of course, a combination of many unattractive things that led to the Soho of today, but quite definitely the paramount factor was the advent of Big Art. Before Big Art came along, painters lived, as God undoubtedly intended them to, in garrets or remodeled carriage houses, and painted paintings of a reasonable size. A painting of a reasonable size is a painting that one can easily hang over a sofa. If a painting cannot be easily hung over a sofa it is obviously a painting painted by a painter who got too big for his brushes and is in fact the very sort of painting responsible for Mr. Art’s chronically curled upper lip. Painters, however, are not the only ones involved here. Modern sculptors, or those chiselers as Mr. Art is wont to call them, must bear a good part of the blame, for when clay and marble went out and demolished tractor-trailer trucks came in, Big Art was here to stay.
One day a Big Artist realized that if he took all of the sewing machines and bales of rags out of a three-thousand-square-foot loft and put in a bathroom and kitchen he would be able to live and make Big Art in the same place. He was quickly followed by other Big Artists and they by Big Lawyers, Big Boutique Owners, and Big Rich Kids. Soon there was a Soho and it was positively awash in hardwood floors, talked-to plants, indoor swings, enormous record collections, hiking boots, Conceptual Artists, video communes, Art book stores, Art grocery stores, Art restaurants, Art bars, Art galleries, and boutiques selling tie-dyed raincoats, macramé flower pots, and Art Deco salad plates.
Since the beginning of the Soho of today the only people in New York who have been able to get through a Saturday afternoon without someone calling them on the telephone to suggest that they go down to Soho and look at the Art are those who belong to Black Nationalist organizations. As neither myself nor Mr. Art is a member of such a group, we consider it quite a feather in our mutual cap that we have succumbed to these ofttimes strongly worded suggestions so infrequently, and that on the rare occasions that we have we certainly have not been gracious about it.
A recent Saturday was just such an occasion and here is what we saw:
A girl who would probably have been a welcome addition to the teaching staff of any progressive nursery school in the country had instead taken it upon herself to create out of ceramic clay exact replicas of such leather objects as shoes, boots, suitcases, and belts. There was no question but that she had achieved her goal—one had literally to snap one’s fingernail against each object and hear it ring before one was convinced that what one was snapping one’s fingernail against was indeed ceramic clay and not leather. And one could, of course, choose to ignore Mr. Art as he hissed, “Why bother?” and struck a match across a pair of gloves in order to light one of his aromatic foreign cigarettes.
A young man who had apparently been refused admission to the Boy Scouts on moral grounds had arranged on a shiny oak floor several groups of rocks. He had then murdered a number of adolescent birch trees in order to bend them into vaguely circular shapes and hang them on the wall. These things were all for sale at prices that climbed well into the thousands. “First of all, imagine actually wanting to own any of this stuff,” sneered Mr. Art, “and then imagine not being able to figure out that with an ax and a wheelbarrow you could make it all yourself in a single morning and still have time to talk to your plants.”
Two boys who were really good friends had taken a trip to North Africa. They took a lot of color photographs of bowls, skies, pipes, animals, water, and each other. They had arranged the photographs alphabetically—i.e., A—Ashes, B—Bright sunny day—pasted them to pieces of varnished plywood, written intricately simple little explanations beneath each photograph, and hung them under their appropriate letters. I am compelled to admit that upon viewing this work Mr. Art had to be forcibly restrained from doing bodily harm to himself and those around him.
Someone who had spent a deservedly lonely childhood in movie theaters had gotten hold of a lot of stills from forties films, cut out the faces of the stars, hand-colored them, and pasted them to blow-ups of picture postcards from Hollywood and Las Vegas. “Too camp,” said Mr. Art testily upon being awakened; “they oughta lock ’em all up.”
Scores of nine-by-twelve photo-realist renderings of gas stations, refrigerators, pieces of cherry pie, art collectors, diners, ’59 Chevys, and Mediterranean-style dining room sets.
Mr. Art and I are presently seeking membership in a Black Nationalist organization. In the meantime we have taken our phone off the hook.