"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
No comments:
Post a Comment