Mary Heilmann

Surfing on Acid

I have two images of Mary Heilmann. The first comes courtesy of Norman Rockwell. He painted it for the cover of a Saturday Evening Post, and I know it’s corny, but the timing is right and Rockwell’s pitch is perfect. So I always think of Mary as that schoolgirl in pigtails sitting on a bench outside the principal’s office with an enormous black eye and a smile of sly triumph on her lips. In my lexicon, that’s Mary. She was that girl then and she is that woman now. The atmosphere of that sly smile brightens the offhand insouciance of her paintings; it enhances their tomboy dishabille, and inflects their self-possession with an impish kind of glee. The first thing I know, in fact, when I see one of Mary’s paintings, is that, however daunted I might feel standing in front of it, Mary is happy with it. Whatever it cost, she considers it worth the price, and, whatever it means, it does mean something. It’s not just a design or another “contribution to the discourse” but something more like graffiti tag on a stucco wall, a private mark whose very opacity bears with it a promise of the artist’s perfect candor.

My second image of Mary is a real one, a story she tells of being a Catholic schoolgirl forced by the demands of hipster fashion to shop at an ecclesiastical clothing store for black nun’s stockings that she and her friends so anxiously desired so they could masquerade as beatniks in the bars and coffeehouses of San Francisco and listen to poetry and jazz. This, of course, is a classic strategy of improvisational rebellion. When at a loss for defining what’s new, one simply appropriates the local iconography of power to serve a subversive agenda—the way British Invasion rockers appropriated Victorian cavalry jackets, the way Black Panthers affected fatigues, and punk rockers sported business suits. It is also the way Mary Heilmann would ultimately appropriate the august historical discourse of geometric abstraction. She would deftly subordinate its spiritual and conceptual pretensions to the contingencies of the hand and the heart, and, in the same fiat, adapt the fluid elegance of Greenbergian color-field painting to a willfully inorganic, geometric idiom.

Mary Heilmann, Surfing on Acid, 2005. Oil on canvas, 60 × 48 in. © Mary Heilmann. Collection of the artist; courtesy of 303 Gallery and Hauser & Wirth. Photo credit: John Berens.

As Thomas Carlyle was fond of recommending, she maneuvered herself into the most unfashionable position imaginable to make it new and to make visible the chains of fashion in which we languish. To this end, she would subvert the minimalist agenda of her own friends and contemporaries by returning to painting at the absolute nadir of its vogue, and as a friend of mine said at the time, “Painting was so dead. That is so punk.” But with a difference, always with a difference. In Heilmann’s case, the canvas support upon which she paints somehow manages to remain, in the minimalist tradition, a literal object—a literal object, however, that has been impudently decorated with painted marks. So, in the presence of Heilmann’s paintings one is always noticing the raw physicality of the stretched canvas support, the occasional scuff, flutter, or warp that leaves the inference that Mary might have found the canvas in the street and wasn’t much bothered by the fact that she had. This blunt physicality invests her work with an atmosphere of professional unprofessionalism that has less to do with the history of painting than with the raggedy ambience of work by her contemporaries like Keith Sonnier, Eva Hess, and Bruce Nauman.

In apparent contradiction to this minimal toughness, Mary has always given her paintings fifties-type evocative titles of the sort favored by Laguna Beach abstractionists, titles like Enchantment, Music of the Spheres, Waimea, and Save the Last Dance For Me. The result is a low-tech, rat’s nest of ambiguities: semiautonomous, semiautobiographical titles are appended to semiautonomous, semiliteral canvases to which semiautonomous, semigeometrical designs have been applied. Amazingly, though, Heilmann’s hierarchal dissonances and cavalier informality invariably reads as absolutely knowing. The all-too-fashionable, deeply parental, assumption of innocence that allows bad craft to be read as a signifier of youthful sincerity is simply not an option with Heilmann’s paintings. The titles, as dissonant as they are, contribute to the ambience of the paintings, and to their wily, surfer sophistication, by pointing out all-too-obvious figurative cues in the abstract image. The execution of the image, by virtue of its chromatic and formal sophistication, evokes the ebullience of Matisse rather than the incompetence of youth.

As to the craft of painting itself, don’t get me started. Heilmann readily admits to knowing nothing about it. She never studied it and never planned to do it. At Berkeley, she studied ceramics with Peter Voulkos who specialized in the earth, in its brutal, tatty grandeur, so, when she started painting, Heilmann began painting canvases as if they were ceramic objects—as if, more specifically, they were pots, informal domestic accouterments with no specific shape and no vertical edges. The trademark “look” of Hielmann’s paintings derives from this casual, vaguely oriental aesthetic, from Heilmann’s contempt for the rectangular enclosure of the support and her willful refusal to address those “problems of the edge” that have obsessed every painter since Manet. The confluence of these wildly eccentric appropriations from the past, guarantees her work’s stylistic currency. She has never set up housekeeping in the past, and as a consequence Heilmann’s work remains resolutely high-style American painting in that tradition. She has never appropriated an image, juxtaposed anything, or interrogated anything. She has never trafficked in the “new nostalgia” of current European painting or participated in its self-conscious longing for the “lost” attributes of expression, gesture, and figuration.

The canons of geometric abstraction, color-field painting, and minimalism are honored in spirit but not in the letter. In Heilmann’s synthesis, they are straightforwardly looted as available precedents. So it is fair to say, I think, that Mary never looks back except for something to steal. One may rest assured that she only dons her nun’s stockings in hopes of looking young and hot and trashy, and that the unladylike blemish of the black eye is, for her, a badge of honor. So, these are my images of Mary, and they will explain perhaps why the attribute of her paintings that I feel more urgently than most is the residue of their history. The inherited traces of the impudent schoolgirl, the beatnik Catholic, the surfer slut, and the hippie chick tending marijuana on the roof are all present in the paintings for me because Mary is my sister in time and space. We share a tiny arc, a traverse through the historical world. We rode the same waves on adjacent beaches in Southern California. Alive with terror, we launched ourselves off the same diving platforms. We listened to the same music and read the same books at the same time in our lives. We shared a circle of friends and floated in the same centrifugal cultural currents—the ones that invariably lift you up onto the crest of the breaker.

First and foremost (and as quaint as this might sound), we thought of ourselves as Americans. We are members, in fact, of the last generation for whom being an American seemed an intriguing and exciting proposition—and we continue to share, in Mary’s phrase, “the loyal yet yearning patriotism of the outsider.” As outsiders, we were, in sequence, beach kids, hipsters, beatniks, hippies, rockers, druggies, drifters, burnouts, and late bloomers. Finally, blandly, boringly, and mostly by attrition, we became what we are now: transnational art personalities. Back in the day, we hung out at Max’s Kansas City bouncing between Bob Smithson’s table and Andy’s. We took in the air and a lot of other things on the balcony of Norman Fisher’s drug emporium and penthouse, chatting up the two Davids, Bowie and Johansen. We dabbled in the drug trade, behaved badly, worked feverishly, and detonated relationships out of sheer craziness. Then we felt it all die and fall apart. Then we watched it keep on going and wondered just what had died, along with our friends, that it should keep on going so effortlessly and relentlessly?

This is a question I feel qualified to answer by virtue of being Mary Heilmann’s sibling in time and space. What died, I would suggest, was a culture with a very specific architecture of ambition. It had to do with “be there or be square”—with the allure of what philosophers call “limit-experience” and Mary calls “facing death.” It also had to do with promiscuity, serious fun, and the exquisite joy of absolute permission. To this day, Mary remembers her delight at sitting in a room with Bruce Nauman watching his “bouncing in the corner” video, reveling in its delicious weirdness. I remember a night at the Factory when Ondine dissuaded Eric Emerson from jumping out the window with four words: “Not in those shoes!” I also remember a joke that went around Max’s after Bob Smithson died in a small plane crash out near Amarillo. According to this joke, after Bob went down, the heavens opened and the booming voice of God announced,“Sorry about Buddy Holly!”

This was the Max’s modality for facing death, after which everybody went back to work because once you were in the right place, surrounded by the right people, and informed by their generous permission, you had to believe that this was some serious shit, otherwise the anguish and ruthless competition would have been silly. Otherwise one might become a silly celebrity and everybody at Andy’s table knew what celebrities were, how they were made and how little one had to do to be what they were. So you made it serious. You embraced the imperative of passionate labor through which pleasure was redeemed and recreated with enough physical intensity to blanch the paper world of governments, museums, academies, and press celebrity into a sepia-toned backdrop. As Lou Reed once sang, echoing Andy in a parody of Springsteen, “Fools like us, baby, we were born to work.”

So we worked at weird, promiscuous, permissive, facing-death kinds of work so we could be someone at Max’s or Norman’s and not care about anywhere else. Then it died and everyone kept working although all of us who had lived in the grip of that peculiar brand of American ambition could see that it was over as a cultural phenomenon, that all of its elements were inextricably intertwined and could not survive singly. So weird died of really weird, of being so weird that you would shoot poor little Andy. Promiscuity and casual intimacy died of AIDS and herpes. Facing death died of air bags, seatbelts, helmet laws, and total surveillance. Absolute permission died when the “art world” became the “art community” around 1975—when everybody had a “little wife” or a “little husband”—when we all started intervening, and nursing one another, with or without permission. Passionate work died when passion died—on the day someone actually believed in celebrity. For those of us who survived that moment, however, people like Mary and me and Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, John Chamberlain, and Keith Sonnier, the effect of this death only reconfirmed the validity of our lost project. As a consequence, the remnants of a whole generation of American artists, in a country not famous for artists with second acts, embarked upon second acts in their careers, and of all these second acts Mary Heilmann’s has to have been the bravest and the most subversive, the one that actually raises the bar. Unlike the products of contemporary practice, which strive at best to surpass the products and standards of popular culture, Heilmann is still competing with and working within the deep history of Western art. Life or death, win or lose, the bloodline of her practice dates back to Raphael while looking back to the beach.

So it makes perfect sense to me that Mary’s most recent painting is the one that looks back the farthest. It’s called Surfing on Acid—a title which, in my book, offers a perfect definition of fluid, passionate, outsider work under extreme conditions of maximum risk, maximum attentiveness, and radical disorientation. For those who do not share Heilmann’s arc in time and space, the title of the painting can easily be read as a painterly allusion to multicolored, psychedelic waves, but the reference is thicker than that. As T. S. Eliot wrote, in our end is our beginning, and anyone who grew up in the surf will tell you that it never goes away. It remains a primal metaphor and defines a whole canon of exquisite connoisseurship. All disasters feel like wiping out, gagging, bouncing off the bottom and breathing salt foam. Anxiety expresses itself in dreams of a careless glance that reveals a mountainous rogue wave rolling in, sucking up five stories over your head and too late to do anything about it. Anything that goes well feels like dropping perfectly into the wave—like giving yourself up at the exact instant. And triumph? Triumph is always a sweet ride up onto the sand. It happens or it doesn’t. You can only romance the liquid, lean into it, and keep your head up. For me, the confidence, anxiety, and relaxed intensity in Mary Heilmann’s work speaks this physical/intellectual language. It embodies the surfer’s ethic of finding the moment to fall and never trying too hard to save your life since you’re surfing dizzy. In this lexicon, life and art are a sequence of daring little rides—daring little events. The challenge is always there because of the never-ending sets of waves rolling in.