STRANGE FRUIT
IT GOT COLDER AND THEN it got warmer, the fizz of pollen in the air. I left Times Square, moving instead to my friend Larry’s temporarily vacant apartment on East 10th Street. It was good to be back in the East Village. I’d missed the neighbourhood, the community gardens decorated with fairy lights and scrap sculpture, the way you could hear a dozen languages a minute on Avenue A. Urbanity: providing, as Sarah Schulman puts it in Gentrification of the Mind, ‘the daily affirmation that people from other experiences are real’, though the old diversity of race and sexuality and income was palpably imperilled by the unstoppable rise of condos and fro-yo outlets, the escalating rents.
Larry’s apartment was packed with an ecstatic clutter of Americana, a collection that included but was by no means limited to a lovingly assembled library of celebrity biographies – P for Dolly Parton, H for Keith Haring – alongside perhaps a hundred empty bottles of Jack Daniels, dozens of crocheted blankets, musical instruments and throw cushions, a bust of Elvis in sunglasses and a lanky blow-up alien embracing a bloated scarlet King Kong.
Arising from out of this joyful disorder were Larry’s artworks, chief among them a cape he’d been working on for all the time I’d known him. This cape was patchworked from hundreds of discarded embroidery projects gathered in thrift stores and rummage sales over decades, many of them unfinished. After stitching them together, Larry had begun to embellish the empty spaces with millions of sequins, each one of them hand-sewn. Aeroplanes, butterflies, ducks, a train drawing behind it a skein of coloured smoke: all these endearing leavings, these absolute discards of culture and good taste, had been drawn together, alchemised into a celebration of the anonymous, the domestic and the homespun.
The cape was an imposing presence in the apartment. It was huge, for a start, perhaps the brightest, most intensely coloured object I’d ever laid eyes on. I liked living alongside it. It felt nourishing, somehow, a totem object of a kind of collaboration that had not involved actual contact, actual proximity, but that had nonetheless created links, drawing together a community of strangers, scattered through time. I liked the way it gestured too at the invisible presence of the body, partly because it was so obviously a garment, hanging in the empty space of Larry’s studio, and partly because it had been made by dozens of human hands, attesting in every stitch to human labour, to the human desire to make things not because they are useful but because they are pleasing or consoling in some way.
Art that repairs, art that longs for connection, or that finds a way to make it possible. It was around this time that I came across Zoe Leonard’s extraordinary work of mourning, Strange Fruit (for David). Strange Fruit is an installation, completed in 1997 and now part of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s permanent collection. It’s made from 302 oranges, bananas, grapefruits, lemons and avocados, their contents eaten and their torn skins dried before being sutured back together with red, white and yellow thread, embellished with zippers, buttons, sinew, stickers, plastic, wire and fabric. The results are exhibited sometimes together and sometimes in small groupings, laid in state across the gallery floor, where they continue on their implacable business of rotting or shrinking or mouldering away, until in time they will turn to dust and vanish altogether.
This piece, which is clearly part of the vanitas tradition in art, the practice of depicting matter as it passes from radiance to decomposition, was made in memory of David Wojnarowicz, who had been a close friend of Leonard’s. They first met back in 1980, when they worked together at the nightclub Danceteria, the after-hours headquarters of the downtown New Wave scene. Later, they were both members of ACT UP, and were for a time also in the same affinity group, which is to say that they’d made art and talked about art and attended protests and been arrested together for over a decade.
David’s death in 1992 coincided with a period in which ACT UP began to fragment and factionalise, its membership buckling under the strain of trying to transform entrenched and toxic systems while caring for and mourning beloved friends. Many people withdrew around that time, among them Leonard, who left New York, travelling to India before spending stints in off-season Provincetown and then in Alaska. Strange Fruit was made during those years of solitude, arising if not in response to then certainly as a consequence of the mass losses of the AIDS years, the exhaustion of labouring to bring about political change.
In an interview in 1997 with her friend, the art historian Anna Blume, Leonard talked about how the first fruits came into being.
It was sort of a way to sew myself back up. I didn’t even realize I was making art when I started doing them . . . I was tired of wasting things. Throwing things out all the time. One morning I’d eaten these two oranges, and I just didn’t want to throw the peels away, so absentmindedly I sewed them back up.
The results immediately recalled David’s own stitched works, which recur in a variety of mediums, among them objects, photographs, performances and scenes in films. A cut loaf of bread, the two halves loosely darned back together, so that the space between them is filled with a cat’s cradle of scarlet embroidery thread. A famous photograph of his own face, his lips stitched shut, the points where the needle has apparently entered marked with dots of what looks like blood. These are among the signature works of the AIDS crisis, pieces that attest to silencing and endurance; to the isolation of being denied a voice. Sometimes the sewing seems redemptive, but more often it is used to expose and draw attention to censorship and hidden violence, to the kind of sundering and shunning that was going on everywhere in David’s world.
The fruit are recognisably objects from the same war. The title picks up on the ugly slang word fruit for gay men, the strange produce, the outcasts of society. And it alludes too to Billie Holiday’s song about lynching: hatred and discrimination enacted physically, with extreme violence, on the twisted and burned bodies hanging in the trees. Billie Holiday, who gave voice to loneliness both personal and institutional, who lived and died inside it, a life short on love and brutalised by racism. Billie Holiday, who was called Blackie to her face and made to take the back door even in venues where she was herself the headline act, wounds that she attempted to medicate with the poisonous ameliorators of alcohol and heroin. Billie Holiday, who in the summer of 1959 collapsed in her room on West 87th Street while eating custard and oatmeal, and who was taken first to the Knickerbocker and then to the Metropolitan Hospital in Harlem, where she was left – as so many AIDS patients would be in the years that followed, particularly if they too had black or brown skin – on a gurney in a corridor, just another dope case.
The worst thing about this act of dehumanisation and denial of care was that it had happened before, back in 1937, when a stranger telephoned to tell her that her father Clarence was dead and where should they ship the body, the blood still staining his white dress shirt. Pneumonia, she recorded in her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues: ‘And it wasn’t the pneumonia that killed him, it was Dallas, Texas. That’s where he was and where he walked around, going from hospital to hospital trying to get help. But none of them would even so much as take his temperature or take him in. That’s the way it was.’
She sang the song ‘Strange Fruit’ in protest against his death, its lyrics seeming ‘to spell out all the things that had killed Pop’. And then all those same things killed her too. She never got out of the Metropolitan. She was put under arrest for possession of narcotics, and spent the final month of her life dying in a hospital room guarded by two policemen, the humiliations metered out to the stigmatised being apparently unlimited.
In its work, ACT UP attempted to address at least some of these things, to untangle and challenge the systemic forces that made some bodies matter less than others, that made the bodies of homosexuals and drug addicts and people of colour and the homeless seem expendable. In the late 1980s, it was agreed by the ACT UP floor that their work should broaden out beyond gay men, to become more inclusive and to address the needs of other populations, among them drug users and women, particularly prostitutes.
Leonard’s own work, which she describes in the ACT UP Oral History Project, was centred around needle exchanges, then a radical way of preventing the spread of AIDS. Though needle exchanges had briefly been established in New York City by Mayor Koch, under the zero tolerance ethos of the Giuliani administration they had become illegal, as they were in many other places both in America and globally. Leonard helped to establish a project that provided clean works and AIDS education for addicts, an activity for which she was arrested, charged, tried and risked a lengthy jail sentence in order to challenge the legality of syringe possession laws.
Strange Fruit is needlework of a different kind. It isn’t activism, not like attending a protest or willingly breaking the law, and yet it deals with some of the same forces. It takes the pain of exclusion and loss and isolation, and holds them, quietly. It is political, yes, but it is also personal, attesting to experiences that are the inescapable consequence of embodiment. Speechless, very silent, the fruit convey in their smallness, their particularity, the pain of breakage, of vanishing, of longing for something beloved that has departed and will not come again.
Their entreaty survives even the translation to a computer screen. Looking at them as .jpgs – a sutured orange, a banana wound absurdly with string – it is hard not to feel a tug of emotion, both in response to the damage and to the inadequate, attentive, hopeful, stubborn work of mending that had been done to them, stitch by stitch, zipper by button.
I was not the only person to find the fruit affecting. In a monograph for Frieze about Zoe Leonard’s work, the critic Jenni Sorkin describes seeing the installation for the first time while wandering irritably around the Philadelphia Museum of Art some time around the beginning of the millennium. ‘From a distance,’ she writes, ‘it looked like detritus. Then I got closer and stopped being annoyed and instead became very sad and felt suddenly very alone – despair hit me like a truck. The sewn fruit was absurdly, inexplicably, intimate.’
Loss is a cousin of loneliness. They intersect and overlap, and so it’s not surprising that a work of mourning might invoke a feeling of aloneness, of separation. Mortality is lonely. Physical existence is lonely by its nature, stuck in a body that’s moving inexorably towards decay, shrinking, wastage and fracture. Then there’s the loneliness of bereavement, the loneliness of lost or damaged love, of missing one or many specific people, the loneliness of mourning.
All this, though, could be conveyed with dead fruit, with drying skins on a gallery floor. What makes Strange Fruit so deeply touching, so intensely painful, is the work of stitching, which makes legible another aspect of loneliness: its endless agonising hope. Loneliness as a desire for closeness, for joining up, joining in, joining together, for gathering what has otherwise been sundered, abandoned, broken or left in isolation. Loneliness as a longing for integration, for a sense of feeling whole.
It’s a funny business, threading things together, patching them up with cotton or string. Practical, but also symbolic, a work of the hands and the psyche alike. One of the most thoughtful accounts of the meanings contained in activities of this kind is provided by the psychoanalyst and paediatrician D. W. Winnicott, an heir to the work of Melanie Klein. Winnicott began his psychoanalytic career treating evacuee children during the Second World War. He worked lifelong on attachment and separation, developing along the way the concept of the transitional object, of holding, and of false and real selves, and how they develop in response to environments of danger and of safety.
In Playing and Reality, he describes the case of a small boy whose mother repeatedly left him to go into hospital, first to have his baby sister and then to receive treatment for depression. In the wake of these experiences, the boy became obsessed with string, using it to tie the furniture in the house together, knotting tables to chairs, yoking cushions to the fireplace. On one alarming occasion, he even tied a string around the neck of his infant sister.
Winnicott thought these actions were not, as the parents feared, random, naughty or insane, but rather declarative, a way of communicating something inadmissible in language. He thought that what the boy was trying to express was both a terror of separation and a desire to regain the contact he experienced as imperilled, maybe lost for good. ‘String,’ Winnicott wrote, ‘can be looked upon as an extension of all other techniques of communication. String joins, just as it also helps in the wrapping up of objects and in the holding of unintegrated material. In this respect, string has a symbolic meaning for everyone,’ adding warningly: ‘an exaggeration of the use of string can easily belong to the beginning of a sense of insecurity or the idea of a lack of communication’.
The fear of separation is a central tenet of Winnicott’s work. Primarily an infantile experience, it is a horror that lives on in the older child and the adult too, returning forcibly in circumstances of vulnerability or isolation. At its most extreme, this state gives rise to the cataclysmic feelings he called the fruits of privation, which include:
1) | going to pieces |
2) | falling for ever |
3) | complete isolation because of there being no means for communication |
4) | disunion of psyche and soma |
This list reports from the heart of loneliness, its central court. Falling apart, falling forever, never resuming vitality, becoming locked in perpetuity into the cell of solitary confinement, in which a sense of reality, of boundedness, is rapidly eroded: these are the consequences of separation, its bitter fruit.
What the infant desires in these scenes of abandonment is to be held, to be contained, to be soothed by the rhythms of the breath, the pumping heart, to be received back through the good mirror of the mother’s smiling face. As for the older child, or the adult who was inadequately nurtured or has been cast backwards by loss into a primal experience of separation, these feelings often spark a need for transitional objects, for cathected, loved things that can help the self to gather and regroup.
One of the most interesting things about Winnicott’s account of the small string-obsessed boy is that though he’s at pains to insist the behaviour is not abnormal, he does perceive dangers associated with it. If contact was not renewed, he thought the individual could potentially topple from grief into despair, in which case the object play would become instead what he called perverse. In this unwelcome state of affairs, the function of the string would change ‘into a denial of separation. As a denial of separation string becomes a thing in itself, something that has dangerous properties and must needs be mastered’.
When I first read that statement, I immediately recalled the big wicker bin in Henry Darger’s room that I’d visited in Chicago. It was filled with the salvaged coils and snippets of string that he gathered from gutters and trash cans across the city. Back home, he spent hours each day unravelling them, smoothing out the strands before tying them together. It was an occupation that he found deeply emotional, to judge from his journal, in which he records not much more than attendance at mass and tangles and difficulties with cord and brown twine.
29 March 1968: ‘Tantrums over tangles and tied knots slipping in twine. Threaten to throw ball at sacred images because of this difficulty.’ 1 April 1968: ‘Over tanglement of twine, difficult to do. Some severe tantrums and swear words.’ 14 April 1968: ‘From 2 to Six P. M. undid tangle of white twine to wrap around ball. More tantrums because sometimes the two ends of twine won’t stay tied together.’ 16 April 1968: ‘Had trouble again with twine. Mad enough to wish I was a bad tornado. Swore at God.’ 18 April 1968: ‘Lots of twine and cord. Not tough tangles this time. Did singing instead of tantrums and swearing.’
There is in this record such emotional intensity, such profound swells of anger and distress, that one gets a visceral sense of what it might be like to regard string as a dangerous material: to see it as something that must be subdued, something into which larger anxieties could be channelled, something that if handled wrongly could unleash an outpouring of overwhelming grief or rage.
But according to Winnicott, this kind of activity could do more than simply deny separation or displace feeling. The use of transitional objects like string could also be a way of acknowledging damage and healing wounds, binding up the self so that contact could be renewed. Art, Winnicott thought, was a place in which this kind of labour might be attempted, where one could move freely between integration and disintegration, doing the work of mending, the work of grief, preparing oneself for the dangerous, lovely business of intimacy.
*
It seems funny to think that healing or coming to terms with loneliness and loss, or with the damage accrued in scenes of closeness, the inevitable wounds that occur whenever people become entangled with one another, might take place by means of objects. It seems funny, and yet the more I thought about it the more prevalent it was. People make things – make art or things that are akin to art – as a way of expressing their need for contact, or their fear of it; people make objects as a way of coming to terms with shame, with grief. People make objects to strip themselves down, to survey their scars, and people make objects to resist oppression, to create a space in which they can move freely. Art doesn’t have to have a reparative function, any more than it has a duty to be beautiful or moral. All the same, there is art that gestures towards repair; that, like Wojnarowicz’s stitched loaf of bread, traverses the fragile space between separation and connection.
In the final five years of his life, Andy Warhol also worked with stitching, sewing photographic images together to form 309 organic, homespun versions of the old multiples. One of the most beautiful in this series is a patchwork of nine black and white photographs of his friend Jean-Michel Basquiat. They have been made a little imperfect during their passage through the sewing machine: the edges crimped, uncut threads trailing from the margins.
In the photograph, Basquiat is eating, tucking into a fantastic spread. His eyes are closed and he’s almost crouching at the table, propelling into a mouth so open you can see his molars a forkful of what looks to be French toast. Full flash, a blur or shadow at his jaw. He’s dressed all in white, white light bouncing off his face. On the crammed table in front of him are piled plates, which only slowly resolve into the classic components of a diner brunch. Fruit cup, chrome milk and coffee jug, salt and pepper cellars, a jar of paper twists of sugar and a foaming glass of liquid, maybe beer. The impression is of opulence, richness, plenitude: all the abstract qualities, in fact, that Basquiat craved in his headlong pursuit of the never enough, his insatiable hunger that neither money, drugs nor fame could fill, and which was partly about being a black man trying to achieve recognition in a society that continually rejected him even as he was lauded and encircled.
In both the shape and cause of his hunger, Basquiat was not unlike his hero Billie Holiday. Like her, he was dogged no matter how famous he became by racism: mistaken for a pimp; refused entry to smart parties; unable even to get a cab to stop on the street, but forced instead to hide while white girlfriends did the hailing. His exquisite, inscrutable, magical art was set against all that, formulating its own deliberate language of dissent, creating a spell of resistance, speaking out in a rebellious tongue against systems of power and of malice. No wonder he was haunted when he discovered that Holiday didn’t have a gravestone, spending a consumed few days designing one to suit her: an object that would rightly mark the manner of her living and the manifest cruelty of her death.
Warhol may not have understood all this, though he certainly witnessed scenes in which Basquiat was humiliated and excluded, collaborating with him too on a portrait of Billie Holiday, reclining in red shoes over a blued-out Del Monte sign. All the same, despite their many differences, these two men became inseparable.
Warhol loved Basquiat, in the same way that he had once loved Ondine. They first met in 1980, when Jean-Michel, then a grubby young graffiti artist who went by the tag SAMO, Same Old Shit, came up to him in the street and hustled him into buying a painting he didn’t want.
‘One of those kids who drive me crazy,’ reports the first diary entry to mention his name, 4 October 1982, but soon it is went to meet Jean Michel at the office, or cabbed to meet Jean Michel; soon they are working out at the gym together and having their nails done; soon Jean-Michel is calling at all hours, sometimes to gossip and sometimes to spill a circuitry of anxiety and paranoia, of which Warhol observes: ‘But actually if he’s even on the phone talking to me, he’s okay.’
In some ways Warhol shared Basquiat’s greed for sensation, though not when it came to sex or drugs. According to the evidence of the diaries, in which Basquiat appears on 113 of the 807 pages, his heroic consumption both fascinated and repelled Warhol. Describing Basquiat’s lengthy holiday with a girlfriend, he asked querulously, ‘I mean, how long can you suck dick,’ a question that tripped him into a very rare statement of regret about his own withdrawal from the arena of the physical: ‘Oh, I don’t know. I guess I’ve missed out on a lot in life – never pickups on the street or anything like that. I feel life has passed me by.’
He worried over Basquiat, longed for his company, and fretted over his heroin use, the times he’d come up to the studio and slump over a painting, taking five minutes to tie his shoe, or curling up and falling asleep right there on the Factory floor. What he loved most was the creativity of their friendship, the way they made work together, side by side or even on the same canvas, their lines merging as Warhol increasingly adopted Basquiat’s vernacular, his fabulously distinctive style. Basquiat brought him back to painting, introducing him too to a more creative crowd, the kind he’d been surrounded by in the 1960s and had lost touch with over the course of his vacuum-packed, tinsel years.
Some of this ardency leaks into the photograph, along with a palpable concern about where appetite is going, what its final destination might be. It often seems that there is a body-snatching quality to Warhol’s portraiture, something vampiric about his desire to snap other people’s countenances, to store and reproduce and multiply their essences. But I sometimes wonder if what he was trying to do was snatch them out of danger, by which I mean the danger of death that lurks everywhere in his work, from the paintings of electric chairs to Empire, his slow-motion, single-shot eight hour and five minute film of the Empire State Building over the course of an entire night, that long steady look at time washing over the face of the world.
One thing to confront it in your art, quite another to do it in real life. Warhol was always jittery around illness or any sign of physical decay, still the little boy who’d hidden under his bed right through his father’s wake. His terror of death drove the phobia of hospitals he shared with Billie Holiday. The place, he called them, demanding that cab drivers make detours so that he could avoid catching so much as a contaminating glimpse of their front doors. His friendship with Basquiat coincided precisely with the gathering AIDS crisis, the entries interleaving in his journal.
Death and disappearance everywhere; death and disappearance explicitly yoked to appetite, to eros and to the fleeting, unstoppable ecstasy of getting high.
Warhol must have felt an intimation of threat, some premonition of potential loss, watching his friend twisting on the hook of heroin, shuttling between paranoia and somnambulance. As it happens, though, death being perverse above all things, it was he who died first, slipping quietly away in the early hours of Sunday 22 February 1987 in a private room in New York Hospital while recovering from apparently uneventful emergency surgery to remove his damaged gallbladder, an operation he had tried desperately to evade. Unlikely as it might once have seemed, Basquiat outlived him by eighteen months before overdosing on heroin in the summer of 1988 in the building on Great Jones Street, in pre-gentrification Soho, that he rented from Andy.
In its obituary, the New York Times observed: ‘Mr. Warhol’s death last year removed one of the few reins on Mr. Basquiat’s mercurial behavior and appetite for narcotics.’ Perhaps Warhol’s sense of being a rein on Basquiat, a tethering thread, is part of why the stitched portrait seems of a piece with the Extinction silkscreens he made in 1983, at the behest of environmental activists: a series which also communicates his anxiety about beloved creatures being lost or snatched away. Each one displays a species that was imperilled, that was running out of time, among them an African elephant, a black rhino and a bighorn ram, the sadness and gravity of their regard undiminished by the pop colours, the commercial cheer. Mementos from a time of disappearances, the first intimations of the uncountable losses with which we’re now confronted, the unimaginable loneliness of being left behind in the world we have despoiled.
Against this omnipresent, quickening threat of extinction, against the mounting risk of abandonment, Warhol summoned things, a ballast of objects, a way to check or trap or maybe even trick time altogether. Like many people, among them Henry Darger, he treated his separation anxiety, his fear of loss and loneliness, by hoarding and collecting, by shopping obsessively. This is the acquisitive Andy immortalised in the silver statue in Union Square, his Polaroid camera around his neck, a Bloomingdale’s Medium Brown Bag in his right hand. This is the Andy who before taking the cab to hospital with what must have been an agonisingly painful infected gallbladder spent his last hours at home on East 66th Street stuffing his safe with valuables, the Andy whose house after his death was found to be crammed on every floor with hundreds and thousands of unopened packages and bags, containing everything from underwear and cosmetics to Art Deco antiques.
But like every ordinary activity in which he participated, Warhol also alchemised his hoarding into art. The largest and most extensive artwork he ever made was the Time Capsules, 610 sealed brown cardboard boxes filled over the last thirteen years of his life with all the varied detritus that flooded into the Factory: postcards, letters, newspapers, magazines, photographs, invoices, slices of pizza, a piece of chocolate cake, even a mummified human foot. He kept one on the go in his office at the Factory and one at home, moving them when full into a storage unit, though his intention was eventually to sell or exhibit them somehow. After his death they were transferred to the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, where a team of curators have been working since the early 1990s to systematically catalogue their contents.
While I was living at Larry’s, I decided I wanted to look at the Time Capsules, to see what it was that Warhol wanted to preserve. The project wasn’t yet open to the public, and so once again I wrote a begging letter to the curator, who agreed that I could spend five days viewing but not touching some of the contents.
I’d never been to Pittsburgh before. My hotel was a few blocks from the Warhol, and each morning I walked to it on a street that ran parallel to the river, wishing I’d brought gloves. I fell in love with the museum at first sight. My favourite space was towards the top of the building: a maze of dimly lit, echoing rooms in which a dozen of Warhol’s movies from the 1960s were being projected. I’d never seen them full-size before, flickering and granular, the colour of mercury or tarnished silver. All those lovely things his eye had eaten up. John Giorni’s dreaming, somnolent body. The beautiful Mario Montez, resplendent in a white fur headdress, slowly and erotically consuming a banana. A naked, cavorting Taylor Mead, whose memorial service at St Mark’s Church I went to the next year, wanting to pay my respects to the diminishing Warhol circle. Nico in Chelsea Girls; the sky behind the Empire State Building growing infinitesimally more light. Time in the room was running palpably slow, hanging heavy, because of the way the films were projected at half speed.
The Time Capsules themselves were kept on metal shelves in the archivists’ lair on the fourth floor. At the end of the room, a man inside a plastic tent was carrying out the delicate work of conservation, and at a table near the front a young woman with a magnifying glass was identifying people in Warhol’s photographs. The artist Jeremy Deller was also visiting, resplendent in a Barbie pink Puffa jacket. He’d known Warhol in the 1980s and among the pile of pictures he found a couple of them hanging out together in Warhol’s suite at a grand London hotel, Deller in a stripy blazer and Andy with a floppy, slightly foolish hat perched above his wig.
To view the Capsules, we had to don blue plastic gloves. The curator took down the boxes one by one, laying out each item on a protective sheet of paper. Time Capsule –27 was filled with Julia Warhola’s clothes: her floral aprons and yellowing scarves, a black velour hat with a rhinestone pin, a letter that began Dear Buba and Uncle Andy, Did Santa Clause come up there? Did you see TV? Old satin flowers, a single earring, a dirty paper towel, many of them packed away in plastic carrot bags, a lasting record of Julia’s eccentric storage solutions, her stubborn thrift.
In Time Capsule 522, there were remnants of Basquiat, including his birth certificate, which he had tagged, and a drawing he’d done of Andy all in blue, his arms wide open, holding a camera with the word CAMERA in block capitals beneath it. There was a letter from him too, on paper from the Royal Hawaiian hotel, three sparsely written pages, that started HI SWEETHEART, HERE IN WAIKIKI.
But alongside these seemingly precious relics were other boxes filled with hundreds of stamps, with hotel pyjamas still in their wrappers, with cigarette butts and pencils, with pages and pages of jotted notes containing names for Superstars that never were. A used paintbrush, a ticket stub for the opera, a New York State Driver’s Manual, a single brown suede glove. Candy wrappers, not quite empty bottles of Chloé and Ma Griffe, an inflatable birthday cake signed with a Sharpie, Love Yoko & Co.
What were the Capsules, really? Trash cans, coffins, vitrines, safes; ways of keeping the loved together, ways of never having to admit to loss or feel the pain of loneliness. Like Leonard’s Strange Fruit, they have something of the feeling of an ontological investigation. What is left after the essence has departed? Rind and skin, things you want to throw away but somehow can’t. What would Winnicott have made of them? Would he have used the word perverse, or would he have seen their tenderness, the way they work to arrest time, to prevent the quick and dead from slipping too far, too fast?
Andy’s nephew Donald was giving a talk at the museum while I was there, as he did most weeks. One afternoon we sat down in the café together and he told me about his uncle, speaking slowly and distinctly into my little silver tape recorder. What he remembered most was Andy’s kindness, how he liked to joke around with the kids, as his two beloved dachshunds, Amos and Archie, ran barking round the room. His apartment had been crammed from top to bottom with fascinating objects, and Donald remembered thinking even then that it was a microcosm of New York, the city that seemed so thrilling to him as a child.
Uncle Andy had a knack for listening, for getting whoever he was with to speak about their lives, even if they were children. ‘I think he didn’t like to talk about himself, because he just found other people more interesting,’ Donald said, adding later that he thought Warhol had found himself boring. Andrew Warhola, that is, the vulnerable human self still resident beneath the silvered wig and corset.
He touched on Warhol’s Catholicism, something that he shared with both Darger and Wojnarowicz: how every Sunday was a holy day, on which he would invariably go to church. This information aligned with references in the diaries to spending repeated Christmas days doling out food in homeless shelters, an aspect of Warhol that tends to be eclipsed by tales of party-going and celebrity friends. He talked too about how much Andy had missed his mother after she died, how he had learned to live around the loss.
I asked him then if he thought that Warhol was happy and he said that Andy was at his happiest in his studio, a place that Donald described as his playland, adding that he thought Andy had sacrificed a great deal to become an artist, including the possibility of having a family of his own. Later, after I’d turned off the machine and we were walking out of the café, we began to chat about the Capsules, and he said musingly, maybe they were a partner to him.
Maybe they were, or at least a way of occupying the space a partner would have inhabited. Or maybe it was just reassuring to know that whatever happened, whoever vanished next, he had all the evidence in order, boxed and ready for the case against death.
*
It’s easy to forget that Warhol was a stitched work in his own right. On the last day that I was at the Museum, one of the curators showed me a box of the corsets Andy had no choice but to wear every day of his life after Solanas’s bullet passed right through him, clipping organs, ricocheting through his interior and leaving him with a permanent hernia, a hole in his belly. Bauer & Black, Abdominal Belt, Extra Small, Made in the USA, the label read.
They were shockingly tiny, to fit his twenty-eight-inch waist. Many had been hand-dyed by his friend Brigid Berlin, also known as Brigid Polk and the Duchess, B to his A. She’d picked cheerful colours, tomato red and lettuce green, lavender, orange, lemon and a pretty bluish-grey. They looked like the sort of thing Marie Antoinette might wear – a post-punk Marie, anyway, off to Danceteria in a towering pink wig. ‘She does a beautiful job on them,’ Warhol told the Diary in 1981. ‘The colors are so glamorous,’ adding regretfully of his then crush: ‘but it looks like no one will ever see them on me – things aren’t progressing with Jon.’
The corsets made me more aware than anything of Warhol as a physical presence, a body that was always on the verge of falling apart. He spent so much of his life trying to stick himself together, an assemblage of purchased parts: the white and blond wigs, the big glasses, the cosmetics he used to conceal his patchy reddish skin, his ugly open pores. One of the most prevalent phrases in his diary is glued myself together, which is to say the nightly routine of taping on his wig, putting together the finished Andy, the public production, the camera-ready, professional version. Towards the end of his life, he often spent evenings playing with cosmetics in front of his mirror, giving himself better and brighter faces, the same benevolent, flattering magic trick he’d performed for hundreds of celebrities and socialites, from Debbie Harry to Chairman Mao.
The glue only failed him once, on 30 October 1985, when he was signing copies of his photobook America at Rizzoli bookstore. In front of the queue, in front of the entire store, a pretty, well-dressed girl ran up and snatched his wig off, exposing his bald head, a signifier of shame, permanently concealed since he first began to lose his hair as a young man.
He didn’t run away. He pulled up the hood of his Calvin Klein coat and carried on signing for the crowd. To his diary a few days later, he began by saying: ‘Okay, let’s get it over with. Wednesday. The day my biggest nightmare came true.’ He described the experience as agonising. ‘It was so shocking. It hurt. Physically. And it hurt because nobody had warned me.’
No wonder. Imagine being stripped, having the most excruciating portions of your body bared to hostile or amused witnesses. Back when he was a little boy, Andrew Warhola had once refused to go to school for a whole year because a girl in his class had kicked him. But this was worse; not just violence against his person, but rather having the pieces of himself torn apart, literally disarticulated.
There are very few images I can think of in which Warhol shows this aspect of himself willingly, divested of his uniform, exposing the same vulnerable human form that both the corsets and the Time Capsules protected him against. Back in New York, I hunted out the series of black and white photographs taken by Richard Avedon in the summer of 1969, in which Warhol in a black leather jacket and black sweater flaunts his scarred abdomen, posing like St Sebastian, his arms akimbo.
The other portrait of undress was painted by Alice Neel in 1970 and is now owned by the Whitney. In it, Warhol is sitting on a couch, wearing brown trousers and gleaming brown shoes. He’s strapped into his corset, but is otherwise naked to the waist, revealing a scarred and dented chest, marked by two deep intersecting purple gashes, which divide his ribcage into triangles. Running on either side of them is a ladder of quick white dashes that represent the ghosts of stitches. Neel’s eye, Neel’s brush lingers attentively on his ruined body, beautiful and damaged. She gets it all: the slender wrists, the bulging corseted belly, the delicate little breasts with their pink areolae.
I loved how Warhol looked in that picture, the careful reticent way he holds himself. His eyes are closed, his chin is up. Neel has done his face in a lovely muted palette of pale pinks and greys, with thin shadowy blue lines running along his jaw and hairline, giving him the exquisite pallor he’d always craved, and emphasising the remarkable fineness of his bones. What is the word for his expression? It’s not exactly proud or ashamed; it is a creature tolerating inspection, at once exposed and withdrawn; an image of resilience as well as profound, unsettling vulnerability.
Strange, to see such an adept gazer submitting to someone else’s scrutiny. ‘He looks a bit like a woman, male and female in one,’ the painter Marlene Dumas commented of the portrait. ‘Warhol was also enigmatic; there is a total fake, artificial aspect, then there is the lonely aspect of an alienated character.’
Loneliness is not supposed to induce empathy, but like Wojnarowicz’s diaries and Klaus Nomi’s voice, that painting of Warhol was one of the things that most medicated my own feelings of loneliness, giving me a sense of the potential beauty present in a frank declaration that one is human and as such subject to need. So much of the pain of loneliness is to do with concealment, with feeling compelled to hide vulnerability, to tuck ugliness away, to cover up scars as if they are literally repulsive. But why hide? What’s so shameful about wanting, about desire, about having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness? Why this need to constantly inhabit peak states, or to be comfortably sealed inside a unit of two, turned inward from the world at large?
In her discussion about Strange Fruit, Zoe Leonard made a statement about this business of imperfection, about the way life is made up of endless failures of intimacy, endless errors and separations, that anyway culminate only with loss. At first, she says, the sewing
. . . was a way to think about David. I’d think about the things I’d like to repair and all the things I’d like to put back together, not only losing him in his death, but losing him in our friendship while he was still alive. After a while I began thinking about loss itself, the actual act of repairing. All the friends I’d lost, all the mistakes I’ve made. The inevitability of a scarred life. The attempt to sew it back together . . . This mending cannot possibly mend any real wounds, but it provided something for me. Maybe just time, or the rhythm of sewing. I haven’t been able to change anything in the past, or bring back any of the people I love who have died, but I’ve been able to experience my love and loss in a measured and continuous way; to remember.
There are so many things that art can’t do. It can’t bring the dead back to life, it can’t mend arguments between friends, or cure AIDS, or halt the pace of climate change. All the same, it does have some extraordinary functions, some odd negotiating ability between people, including people who never meet and yet who infiltrate and enrich each other’s lives. It does have a capacity to create intimacy; it does have a way of healing wounds, and better yet of making it apparent that not all wounds need healing and not all scars are ugly.
If I sound adamant it is because I am speaking from personal experience. When I came to New York I was in pieces, and though it sounds perverse, the way I recovered a sense of wholeness was not by meeting someone or by falling in love, but rather by handling the things that other people had made, slowly absorbing by way of this contact the fact that loneliness, longing, does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive.
There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings – depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage – are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.
I don’t believe the cure for loneliness is meeting someone, not necessarily. I think it’s about two things: learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many of the things that seem to afflict us as individuals are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted.
Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. Loneliness is collective; it is a city. As to how to inhabit it, there are no rules and nor is there any need to feel shame, only to remember that the pursuit of individual happiness does not trump or excuse our obligations to each another. We are in this together, this accumulation of scars, this world of objects, this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell. What matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open, because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last.