Sunday, September 28, 2008
Marian was family
from Nancy Grove
Just in case you hadn't seen or spoken to Marian for a while, this is what she did on September 7, the Sunday before she died.
She met me at Penn Station at noon, wearing her signature black and commenting, as always, on the amazing outfits people in the station were wearing. We took the train to Philadelphia - she was very excited about the trip because she had not been there for many years, and she talked about going to her uncle's house in Rittenhouse Square. It had a big window in the front and every evening at 5 pm her uncle would stand there and watch the pretty girls leave work...
We took a cab from the station to the Philadelphia Museum and had a lovely lunch in their cafeteria, then explored the American collection. She was thrilled to see the great Thomas Eakins Gross Clinic and the wonderful Copley portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Mifflin – all while she commented on the size, shape, color, and layout of each gallery and the placement of each object. That critical eagle eye never missed a thing!
We also went to the modern section, where she saw Duchamp's last work, the Etant Donnes, for the first time, enjoyed the spareness of the gallery with Duchamp's Large Glass, and thoroughly approved the Brancusi gallery (she disapproved of MOMA's Brancusi display...). We also attended a memorial for Anne d"Harnoncourt, the director of the museum, who, oddly enough, had unexpectedly died in her sleep, age 64,in June. Marian disliked the classical music that was played – she found it "turgid"- and could not hear the speeches, so when we were going back on the train I told her that one speaker had quoted Richard Serra's speech to the graduating class at Williams, about the importance of immediate perception, of keeping it real and staying in the moment. She loved that - she liked Serra's work and we had recently seen the documentary about him, which she loved, although she also understood why many people did not feel about his work as she did.
I also told her that another speaker had quoted Adam Gopnik's remark at Kirk Varnedoe's memorial, that the ancient Greeks did not believe that any life was too short or too long - that every life has a certain unique shape to it - and she loved that idea. We were all part of the shape of Marian's life, as she was an important part of the shape of all of ours. When we parted, she was full of plans to go back to Philadelphia - to the museum, to the Rodin Museum, to the Institute of Contemporary Art to see the R. Crumb show, which of course she knew about and I didn't...In short, she was her upbeat, indomitable, engaged and delightful self!
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Marian loved art and young artists, making the SculptureCenter at her time a space particularly geared towards exhibiting young unknown artists. She gave many artists including myself what I consider my first professional opportunities. She curated us into exhibitions such as SculptureCenter Roosevelt Island and LIU plaza summer sculpture shows. These projects came with budgets and were often reviewed by publications such as The New York Times.
I considered Marian one of my best friends. We had a special friendship and I was proud to have an 85-year-old friend. At a gathering in her honor at Hannah Tierney’s Soho loft so many people arrived whose lives Marian had influenced. I realized many people had a special friendship with Marian.
I was very intrigued by her history. She was very reticent about her past, but I pried. Every so often she would offer up a fascinating upbringing. For instance, she spoke of being a small girl in Italy and her Italian nanny teaching her fascist songs. Much to the embarrassment of her intellectual parents, Marian was once brought out to sing at a gathering of their friends. As an adult in Berlin she liked eating Profiteroles. She lived in Dumbo in the 1950s!
But despite a fascinating history, Marian preferred to live in the present, seeing every museum show and going to all the movies as well. She took a drawing class. I begged to see her drawings, no such luck. The last time I actually saw her we met at The Drawing Center to see Alan Sarets gang drawings. Typical of our meetings, we would stand for long stretches in the middle of a gallery and talk.
But maybe for me the one most significant memory has to do with my own commitment to art. She told me many years ago, back when I was a younger artist, that there was something about me that she could tell I would always make art. I wondered then, as I still do, how she could tell. What intuitive powers did she have, or was it just years of observing artists.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Memories of Marian from Anita Glesta
"Wind at your back," was one of the countless Marian phrases that I can remember. But the one I often heard was, "I am so proud to know you.” And that pat on the back from Marian meant so much because I knew she meant it.
Marian had the great ability to make everyone feel like the center of her universe. Sometimes I would wonder why would she want to see me knowing that I might spend a chunk of our time together as she would say, "just blowing off steam." But because Marian had the sensitivity, underneath her often stoic and minimal sentences, to understand what fed work, she knew that letting off steam was intrinsic to the creative process as much as looking and making the work. How extraordinary was the limitless passion that Marian had not only for looking at art but for what the process was.
She encouraged artists (and it is really not enough to say sculptors because not only does it limit the scope of the artists whose lives she touched but also, the breadth of her love of visual art) to push boundaries by extracting the essence of the work. And, while loving the raw and the edgy in work, she had a great understanding of the restraint required to achieve this.
She would never use words like this to say what I just did. That would be too flowery and fancy for her language. She just knew when something worked and was able to convey that to us in her positive and excited timbre, in her gestures, in her exuberance, and the warmth that came through her few, but cleverly arranged sentences. It was that extraordinary understanding that set her apart from being just a curator, critic, or administrator of a gallery. It was what made Marian unique and able to navigate in the minds of visual artists. She surpassed her role as curator or gallery director and somehow, in a minimal way, was maximum in delivering praise and support of even just the seed of emerging work. And encourage, and encourage, and encourage she would!!.
In as much as Marian could determine what was raw, wild and extraordinary, she knew that the most effective way for an artist to express this was the restraint that is the hardest to achieve. As a curator and critic of work, Marian knew how to look and to understand work. And as a friend, even though she was partially deaf, she knew how to listen.
Sometimes I would get a little frustrated by the minimalism of her remarks. Usually it took me less than twenty-four hours to realize that Marian's perceptions, her clipped and sparse responses were remarkable and that damn it, she was almost always right. Was it the wisdom of her age? Maybe a little because, (though she was careful about the information she shared of her personal life), she had had a very full life. However, the wisdom of her years was only a fragment of why she was so often "right". A keenly perceptive and intuitive woman, Marian was on the mark because she had a great eye and the energy to understand visual art, regardless of her age.
The great lucidity which was Marian's mind, was always switched into the young channel. Nothing in her day-to-day life, and what I imagine were the aches and pains that began in the last five or so years, would ever eclipse that. So, with the politics and seriousness that was the world, she was always finding the place that could yield a chuckle, whether it was fashion or politics because she loved a good laugh.
And, there was the Marian of the rotary phone and the newspaper, the answering machine that always was on overload, which were her only vehicles of communication technology. And she could control her world that way. The same Marian who didn't own an air conditioner, no less a TV.
That same person who was so of the moment, so keen in seeing and experiencing the new and not just for the sake of the new but for its bottom line freshness transmitted through whatever new forms. Like all artists she was also, full of contradictions. But that was Marian and she knew her limits better than any of us and really, no one could tell her anything.
I believe that Marian knew, before our stock market dropped and whoever will be elected would take office, when it was time for her to exit. And Like the light which she was, Marian turned herself off. She went out, generously listening and talking until the last minute. She was so blessed to move out of this world with her dignity and privacy. And, we were so blessed to have had her in our lives.
A few weeks ago I met her at the Phillip Guston show at the Morgan Library. She was as fun as ever at lunch. She ate well as she always did, talked a lot and asked a lot of questions about my personal life and my work. I had my recent work downloaded on an iPod. She saw it and liked it so much she had to call the next day to tell me it haunted her and that I need immediately to go see the Serra movie at the Film Forum and the New York Historical Society show of Audubon's drawings. Boy, did this eighty-something-year-old get around!!!
Like so many other artists she has left behind in this world, I wish that she could have actually seen the work in real life in my studio and not on a tiny image on the iPod. But she managed to see it anyway on this little bit of technology. I stuck the little earphones into her nearly deaf ears and she heard the loud strange sounds of Australian birds which I had in this little gadget. She had never put these little disks into her ears before. And, she of course, being Marian was tickled by it in every sense of that word.
This remarkable eighty-something-year-old woman who was so child like and full of curiosity, excitement and love who never put a little headphones in her ears, who didn't believe in computers, push button phones, air conditioning, TV or pills for her ailments was hooked into an iPod on the steps of the Morgan Library when I last saw her. She didn't believe in or need all the crap of technology that was out there. It wasn't for her though she was not intolerant of it either. She knew what she needed and again, what her limits were and what her beliefs were.
She believed in art and in artists. I was so fortunate that she believed in me!
She was a light that I will always carry, and I know it will be the same for all of us who have been lucky enough to have her in our lives. She was a gift. And, in addition to the joyous spirit of her company when she was alive, she left me with the tools that will allow me to make work with more clarity than ever.
Marian, I am so very, very proud to have known YOU!
ANITA GLESTA 9/20/08
