Perfection of the Life

Artists and art people we’ve known

Fiction by Marcus Civin | Illustrations by Nan Cao

The Professor

Dwayne always oversleeps. When he gets up, he’s nervous. Nothing seems to be in order. It isn’t until well after coffee that he feels fixed in place. Maybe that’s why he courts some disorder, to confirm his gut feeling about the world, that order is impossible, that a life lived will always be unstructured. It will fail to conform to a storyline. It will be a shelf of fragments and extra pieces.

Dwayne isn’t a photographer, but he likes taunting photographers. He prints his photographs on matte paper and draws on the photographs with an oil stick. He loves how the paint piles up on the surface and how the oil stains out around the pigment.

TITLE: The Problem With Alexander Calder
DATE: 1985
MEDIUM: Gelatin silver print and oil stick
DIMENSIONS: 20" x 16"
ACCESSION NUMBER: 88.37.1
LOCATION: Not on View

Dwayne likes the comedian Steven Wright, jokes like: “For my birthday I got a humidifier and a dehumidifier. I put them in the same room and let them fight it out.”

Dwayne imagines that all Steven Wright did one day was to carefully hone that joke.

Dwayne’s just over six feet tall, his height amplifying his aloofness. He used to go to everything, all the art openings and his students’ events. Not anymore. He has forgotten what to do there. He has nothing to say.

Occasionally, he teaches his students color theory. Mostly though, he makes up assignments depending on his mood at the end of class, listing elements the students should include as if he is composing a recipe: “Make a new piece. It should be neither a painting nor a sculpture. It should have six colors, at least, and as many nudes, or otherwise, it should be a non-narrative film culminating in a birth.”

Dwayne never grades, but he has his favorite students. For weeks, he might not talk much at all in the classroom, maybe mumbling something about meeting the best artist he’d met in New York at her loft when she’d been organizing a housing rights rally. Some days he’ll talk for the whole class about the gimmick of kinetic sculpture, or bar owners who he says do more for the arts than any curator, critic, or foundation, by giving jobs to photographers, guitarists, and dancers and teaching discipline.

Dwayne owns an artwork by every one of his teachers. He finagled them through trades and favors. He thought he could use a tax write-off one year, the year he made more than usual while he was Interim Associate Dean. He thought he could get the write-off by giving his teachers’ work to a museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver maybe. They had asked him to be on a panel once, The State of the Contemporary, but he didn’t go. Neither the museum nor his department would pay for travel, and he didn’t feel like arranging a substitute for his classes.

He lived in Los Angeles when all of his friends would have solo exhibits soon after they’d put together a substantial body of work. He lived in New York when being publicly outlandish at dinner parties often led to studio visits. This is how his career briefly caught some steam, and how he met his roommate, Terry.

With Terry, he hid out for the mid seventies on a beach. There, he conceived a son with a born-again Christian bartender he got to know. Since he was an insecure atheist, he thought her belief was beautiful. He went to Arizona to teach when Terry returned to New York. He fell in love with one of the Arizona graduate students. He wrote her long letters. He thought she understood him. After painting for days, they’d dance for hours. She returned all of his letters to his office one afternoon while the bartender was visiting with the baby.

He left for Minneapolis for another teaching job. The money was good. He imagined it accumulating over the years. Instead, he spent it on trips, wine, a vacation place, new sheets.

In Minneapolis, when he can hire someone new, he mostly hires alumni from the college. He doesn’t have to tell them what to do, how things work, or where anything is. If they squirm or bristle when he asks them personal questions about their sex lives or religion, he thinks it is good for them.

He invites some of the younger teachers to his vacation place, tells a long story about how a series of his photographs ended up at the Guggenheim, collected from a group show that included emerging New York artists at the end of the time he lived there.

Waiting for a meeting to start, Dwayne overhears a new Associate Dean talking on the phone. He thinks they are talking about firing him. Or maybe they’re talking about someone else. The students who like him say he knows how to get out of the way, that he helps them understand themselves by letting them be themselves.

Most semesters, he tells students they should try masturbating in public.

He will floss in class while the students are talking, or mend a sock, or staple handouts for another class. He likes to put his feet up. When he is invited to receive a teaching award, he gets stoned and has a laughing fit in the lobby. The Provost asks him to go home before the ceremony.

His website is out of date. Sometimes the only companionship he needs is sitting next to someone in a meeting so they can hear where he groans and chortles while someone else is presenting a new course idea. Sometimes he senses he might need much more. He thinks he has made a world through the accumulated influence of his teaching and what he thinks a larger audience will eventually see in his artwork. He also thinks he is wasting his time. He goes to museums and gets angry about the things he will never get to do: have a regular working relationship with a fine art printmaker, design a chapel or a fountain. His chapel would have had an electric organ, and comedians would have been memorialized as saints.

The Visiting Artist

When Terry meets someone socially, if he talks at all, he turns the conversation into a lecture on group marriage, materialist conceptions of history, or Iroquois farming methods. He quizzes people on the small details of the lives of artists they don’t know that much about: Charles Dana Gibson maybe, or Pliny the Younger. He insists on explaining social security to accountants, civil rights to lawyers, and academia to tenured professors.

He has a goatee. He makes enemies.

In 1984, when he was thirty, a few of his friends showed with a Soho gallerist who sold their work. When they were broke, she fronted them money for food, stretcher bars, and canvas. She asked Terry for a studio visit. He left her waiting outside his studio door.

She was persistent. He agreed to a studio visit and a show eventually. After promising the red and black hard-edged architectural paintings she’d loved so much in his studio, he brought over wooden boxes filled with burnt newspaper and, warning no one, hired ten teenagers to show up every day that was set aside for the show. The teenagers would come unannounced in the hours after school, spin in circles for half an hour or so, then leave. When the gallerist changed her gallery hours and locked the door in frustration, the kids performed outside.

“What happened to the paintings?” the gallerist asked on his voicemail, her voice shaking.

A month later, he responded with a message: “I buried them.”

Terry is angry. He knows he should relax. If he goes somewhere nice, he can see it falling apart. He imagines the people who built it. He thinks they must have hated their wheelbarrows and work gloves.

He always shows up late for band practice and hours early for band gigs, staring at the stage from the bar as if studying a fierce opponent. He plays guitar and drums, some piano. He sets up his projections to hit as large as possible behind the band. His favorite is a series of ads for furniture and clothing which he updates regularly: a firm mattress, what color suits a man needs.

Terry loves his bandmates. He thinks they probably don’t know. He thinks he should learn their birthdays. During the band’s heyday, he wrote bad checks. He never got caught.

People still come over to his place looking for cocaine. He stopped coke on his own. His neighbor suggests that he might not have an addictive personality.

People send him requests. He ignores them. Invitations to speak about his work, requests for statements, image permissions for books, a symphony that wants to perform a new arrangement of one of his songs, contracts for work he had agreed to in person...all these things go unaddressed. He figures if people really need something from him, they will figure out how to get to him. Most do.

The money is never much. If Terry goes to eat with someone, he asks them to spot him the meal and doesn’t pay them back. He never invites anyone to go for a meal. They invite him. Maybe it’s the photographs; they’re famous: his sweaty face in head shops on posters, postcards, and the occasional beach T-shirt.

“Mother is dying,” Terry thinks. He wants to call her. He doesn’t. He watches people on the subway: a new haircut, a bellhop half out of uniform.

Terry makes $12,000 for a video promo for a corporate rebrand, doing the lighting for a couple weeks on and off. When people from the production company recognize him, he looks at the floor. He tries not to talk at all on these kinds of gigs. He is afraid of what might come out of his mouth. His neighbor gets him the gigs, and he appreciates the reliable money.

He has a friend and sometimes-lover in San Francisco, an archivist married to an art installer. He takes a series of buses out West, showing up without warning, watching HBO for days in their living room while they’re at work.

Terry dated a model once who took him to Palm Springs for a party. They got stoned looking at the pool. He said he didn’t think there was only one woman on earth for him. She told him to find his own way out of the desert. He got a note from her in the mail a month later that said only: “What do you know? What do you do?”

In the early nineties, Terry made black-and-white videos speaking the lyrics of his songs from the early eighties. He sold these at house parties for rent money and most made their way into collections and are shown now in historical museum shows.

He walks all over Manhattan. He does push-ups if the weather is too bad for walking.

He takes the train up to a prestigious graduate program to visit the art students. There used to be one Black or Latino student and one Asian student every year. Now there are a bunch. In their studios, he picks at his sleeves, chews his upper lip, doesn’t say much. What he says is discouraging. The students of color complain about him, say he is racist. In his hasty defense to the Dean, he says that these students don’t realize how hard it will be for them.

The students write to the College President.Terry writes a 4,000-word personal essay that is published by a group of young artists and given away for free at an exhibit at the New Museum. He is supposed to be writing about his family. He lies, writes imagined details about his father living the high life and gambling away the family fortune. The real story would be about a mediocre man, basic and unambitious. Everyone believes the fake story and later asks Terry how his father is doing.

Terry makes $8,000 for a small painting from his gallery in the Hamptons. He makes about that for a drawing from his gallery in Aspen. One of his band’s songs is being used in a commercial. A bronze foundry has invited him to make a project.

He writes on the back of a reimbursement form asking a museum for $78 back for a train ticket. He writes about the protective powers of amethyst then throws the form away.

There is a younger artist Terry doesn’t know that well, but likes. She has bootlegs of his early shows in New York and a couple from LA. How? She invites him as a consultant to the school where she teaches in Pennsylvania. They’re getting fewer applications for the graduate art program. They’re getting fewer undergraduates who want to major in art. He stays at an old hotel nearby the campus that the college owns. His meals in the hotel restaurant are free for four days. He notices that none of the administrative assistants stand up. He never sees them get in or out of their chairs in the art office. They don’t extend their hands or arms very far. His host says they’re all artists.

He finds a student who sells him uppers. He paces the rooms in the meetings held with the goal of revising the curriculum. He says maybe the college needs a diversity initiative to mentor and employ more artists of color.

He lies on the floor by some packages of clay and shop equipment waiting for pick-up in the office. He says he’d like a cardboard coffin. He asks for the password to the copy machine. One of the administrative assistants refuses, suggesting that he use the copy center across campus.

The Archivist

Khloe’s mother was a librarian. Her father lived in Mexico while she and her sister were growing up with their mother in San Francisco. He moved around—fed the tourists in Puerto Angel, led boat tours. Khloe learned Spanish when she and her high school sweetheart went off to paint houses and write poems in Arizona.

The church she lives next to is brick and stone. She doesn’t believe in god, but the confidence and endurance of the religious structure make her feel like life could be long, if small. Khloe thinks: It isn’t bad to feel small and enduring next to a solid edifice, however problematic the edifice.

She likes the overgrown plants tilting towards the light in her favorite café. She likes the train she takes to Berkeley. It is usually on time.

Still, San Francisco feels fragile.

The problem is her panic when the internet is slow in her apartment. The problem is the effects of so much Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Bush, and Trump. Watching all of their speeches has hollowed her out some, maybe given her the bags under her eyes. The problem is how old the living poets are getting. The problem is how few real junk shops are left.

Khloe takes the train, runs her index finger along fences and hedges, hangs up her coat, settles into her chair, thinks she ought to work out more, sorts some of the new queries that have come in for the archive, then updates her journal with the two things she has found most beautiful today: a countdown a mother gave to her daughter on the playground; where glue lost its strength behind a photograph and turned brown.

She likes best the boxes that are messy when they arrive at the archive, the piles that show no sign the writer knew anyone would ever pay attention; the papers, notes, lists, and books that are there and seem to be there because the writer couldn’t let go of them; they needed these things somehow, a puzzle of reminders to keep going.

Khloe notices the coincidences and series of chance events that led to a letter or a clipping ending up in these boxes and piles. That clipping or letter could be important to a student or biographer who might notice a connection between that language on a receipt, the notes on a gallery guide, and the popularly anthologized poem.

Khloe tries every restaurant that is recommended. She looks up everything her friends talk about over lunch. If an acquaintance at a dinner party doesn’t like her take on postmodernism or gentrification, she goes home, re-reads, renews a lapsed subscription, and considers revising her thinking. She finds the press releases announcing the obscure early exhibits of her now well-known friends.

For these reasons, her friends and acquaintances take her for granted. They expect her at every opening reception. They expect her at every panel because she usually attends so many. They expect her trenchant critique because they know it is possible. She is frequently asked to curate exhibitions because she is detail-oriented and organized, not because anyone wants to give her imagination free authorial reign.

These activities take energy.

Khloe knows how to establish distance, to succor herself and gird against negativity and fatigue: letting certain friendships go into hibernation mode, taking a week submerged in Hitchcock or World War II epics, or translating a previously untranslated poem from Spanish to English. Her translations are often published by young editors in small-run journals.

If she were an art student now, she’d probably study graphic design. Because she sends the poets collages after their poetry readings, they ask her to do some of their book covers. She used to do them by hand, with scissors and glue, then photograph them. She would collage collected ticket stubs, newspaper headlines, and tissue paper, tear out and use the backgrounds of Christmas cards, images of her friends from Xeroxes of photographs, and brush strokes from an old sketchbook she used when learning calligraphy to address the envelopes for her sister’s wedding.

Five years ago, she learned a couple of the graphic design programs on her computer. It took her a year or two to teach herself well enough. Everything is faster now. Designing feels like a roller coaster or a live performance. She can find images of anything, flip everything, and do what used to be a month’s work in a night. It is exhilarating. She eats pistachios and listens to girl groups as she works. The Ronettes are her favorite.

Her husband Tom is in the union of art handlers. He is a slight man with great strength. He knows just how to position his weight to move a sculpture crate. He can frame anything or pack up anything in a few hours. He lifts her up. In the morning, he’s always awake first and makes yogurt with fruit for the two of them, packs salads for their lunches. She makes dinner. Or, sometimes going out for tacos is easier.

They don’t talk much, Khloe and Tom. Over a beer or two, walking, or around the house, they find comfort in silence. They go to dance concerts together at the alternative spaces that dot the Bay Area. It is different enough from what they do, they don’t feel they have to be experts; they like the extraordinary buzz of the mostly small audiences.

Neither Khloe nor Tom are monogamous. Khloe hates Tom’s drawings. He makes one every night, a graphite landscape he recalls from his rural youth in Wisconsin.

The Mount Makers

Her father’s tape measure. His tape measure she hopes will make it with her to her next apartment. Him, she doesn’t need.

And her shelves. The ones she’s fashioned from found wood and L-brackets.

If her bed feels hard to make, Bev sleeps on the mattress without sheets. If her backpack is on, her cat lingers by the door. She slumps in her chair at work and at the movies. Her cover letter with applications has always said “please” twice and uses the phrase “thank you for the opportunity” somewhere near the end. She wants to write instead that everything good in an artist’s life is uncredited, imperfect, part of a life grinding along, a winding path, just something unremarkable in process, far from heroic or impressive. It is easy to be a good artist. All of her friends are. But to live an artist’s life and live it decently. That is the accomplishment. That is what deserves a paycheck or reward.

With her best friend, she goes to the woods and collects big sticks and pieces of broken plastic. They make what they call torches from what they find and shout at each other, holding up sticks with broken water bottles on the end. “Aloft water bottle!” They laugh.

She always has some money but never much. If she fully ran out of money, she thinks she would unceremoniously kill herself rather than go into debt to anyone or be a burden. Like Borges wrote, “humbly seeks death as one would seek sleep.”

The night train goes by. Her dozen or so T-shirts now covered in paint from the museum jobs—the maroon spots from the Mayan show, the light blue from the Diebenkorn cases, the white from everything else.

She lived in Florida. The museum where she worked asked her to come back. She couldn’t go back. She lived in Texas. She has her eyes on New York now. Still, she thinks more about where she’s been than where she is or where she’s going.

She goes to a gallery that has no sign. It is next to a hardware store, so everyone who knows the gallery calls it The Hardware Store Annex. She starts going by on Saturdays. Eventually, she gets to know the two older artists who run it, starts writing their press releases for them, then small pamphlets, expressive and abstract responses to the exhibiting artists. Days at the gallery with beer turn into nights lying on the floor of the closed gallery smoking cigarettes or pot and looking at smoke rising up to the ceiling.

She dates a man who gets off on asking her about her other dates. She dates a man who hangs himself in a motel. Asked to be a best man in a wedding party, the suit is too much for him; it pushes him over the edge. He tells her before the wedding party that the suit makes him feel like a fake and a failure. She dates Tom, an older art handler at the museum. They go for tacos. He lifts her up. She thinks it won’t bother her that he is married. It does.

The neighbor’s baby is crying.

She is late for drinks with someone everyone at the gallery says she should meet, an art historian and curator from Chicago who is supposedly just like her. She doesn’t go.

Her lover Quinn relates to people best in short bits, one hour at a time offering critiques to the students instead of delivering the Art Appreciation lectures he is supposed to. He’s perfect writing letters (succinct and funny), wins residencies and makes friends at the planned dinners, but in longer, looser engagements with family, her parents, or Sunday in front of the TV, he’s prickly, excruciatingly petty.

Their pajamas together on the floor. When Bev says pajamas, she says the J like a Z in some kind of cartoon of an unknown European accent. Quinn laughs.

They fight in a bar, in another bar, over a bottle of wine one night on a porch in Las Vegas.

Quinn transcribes an interview he conducted with a ceramic artist and sometimes curator. He writes wearing shorts and T-shirt despite the snow outside. They’re on a ski vacation with some of her museum friends. She goes to the mountain store wearing blue glass rings and a shirt lacey with flowers under a fake fur and one of his scarves.

The interviewee said: “There were his photorealist homoerotic drawings incised in the clay and piles of mud everywhere. Years before, I had seen him perform his half human/half wolf character at a space in Soho. I had loads of film of the performance and projected it as part of the show, too.”

Bev thinks she will make a dinner for everyone she knows and likes best from the museum, but she cleans her baseboards at home instead. With other people around, nothing seems hard. Alone though, everything seems hard. She is good at her job at the museum. She gets a raise and an assistant. Every February, the education department sponsors an evening adult sculpture class she teaches.

Quinn works from her childhood desk, pink with the green flowers. He makes phone calls, conducting research for an agency that tests the market viability of making certain changes in higher education. She leans against the wall watching him, piles her long black hair on top of her head.

With Quinn, she wants to feel she can take off her extremities and hold them in her lap. Arms off, legs off, she wants to hear her heart very loud through the holes at her shoulders and where her legs used to attach.

She thinks he sees her as a picture, just a picture, not a person.

When Quinn gets stressed, he puts on weight. When she does, she loses it. They are together and not together. Together, they are not completely alone. Elbow-to-elbow if not heart-to-heart.

They write a play together about a couple. In each scene, the man and the woman take on the qualities of different Christian saints.

They take a catering gig a friend says is good money. One Saturday, they iron their clothes, ride the bus, cut limes, set out neat lines of soda cans, pour Arnold Palmers, discuss the difference between a Sea Breeze and a Madras, get in trouble with the boss for packing into their backpacks four bottles of vodka the other boss had said they could take, and resolve to never take a catering gig again. They don’t get paid.

Bev likes watching the curators and the other art handlers standing around arguing about how to hang a Rauschenberg Combine without harming it. She is more interested in their strained faces, their cutting each other off, and their quick pencil calculations than she is in the hardware she designed or seeing the piece on the wall.

Quinn’s aunt is distant to them but well-known among other artists. Bev likes to look out for one of her cryptic letters to arrive. She reads and re-rereads the return address. Nann from Houston Street in New York.

Quinn likes to pretend not to speak the language of attendants at airports or waiters at restaurants. He just points and frowns or answers direct questions with silence and staring.

Quinn goes to the emergency room, then the city mental hospital. With the doctors, he talks about incarceration for unpopular ideas—Ezra Pound’s, Emma Goldman’s. He chooses quotes, paints them in gouache on Bristol board, donates them to a local art organization’s annual auction. This one from Emma Goldman: “Unless I am very much mistaken, I am sustained in my contention by the fundamental principles in America, namely, that when a law has outgrown time and necessity, it must go.”

Quinn gets ideas from a group of painters who sell eerie boat scenes on a street corner, makes similar paintings but never credits the inspiration when the new paintings are reproduced in a magazine accompanied by a short interview.

He is wretched about the president. He attends an anarchist reading group, draws illustrations for the leftist newspaper they’re sometimes associated with. He can’t back down at the bank or the 7-11, angry as hell when someone cuts in line.

He saves up for a trip to a faraway beach at a quiet time of year, goes without Bev. He sees a turtle on the beach, takes fresh leaves and cuts them up into isosceles triangles, wets them and presses them on the wall.

He writes poems on paper, puts them under strangers’ doors, hangs them with rubber bands around door knobs. Bev asks if she can go with him one time. He says no. One of the poems says:

This time leave the missiles!
Bad orders are bad orders!

Another: 
For all that is holy!
For all that is holy!
For when I am free! 
For when I am free!

Drawing. In ink. In chalk. In charcoal. With the side of a crayon. Often some version of the same two chairs, their seats like nets intermeshed; their feet like wheels; their backs rising to stacked orbs, then heads.

“Everything is OK,” Dad says in a letter.

“Everything is OK,” Bev says in a note on the mirror above the dresser.

Quinn builds chair sculptures, using older drawings as plans. He writes a string of low-paid art reviews, gets a deal on a studio when a coat warehouse closes, finds a studio mate he didn’t know before, divides the studio in half, builds walls and primes them white.

Drawings scratched in metal. A studio visit. Drinks. Car parts sculpted in paper pulp. White shirts painted drippy black hanging on metal meat hooks.

A studio visit. Telling a tale of a costumed walk through the Dallas airport from end to end.

Another studio visit. Another tale of a similar walk through the airport in New Orleans.

Quinn tutoring families at the library, mothers, fathers, and two twin brothers learning English. Quinn asking the neighbor couple, just out of college and in love, to improvise on Sundays in the park. Bringing along a boom box and extra batteries. Pulling the names of characters from a baseball hat. Taking each name as instruction and moving like the character in exaggerated gestures without talking, only laughing and watching each other—erratic figures caught on shifting ground, eccentric bodies in gusts of rough wind.

Applying for a residency in Shanghai. The neighbor couple moving to Santa Barbara for more school and some surfing. Getting asked by a magazine to predict the best upcoming exhibits of the year. Applying for a residency in Omaha, three up and down California, one at a storefront in Seattle. Applying for a visiting professorship at a university in Singapore.

Getting asked to have an exhibit in San Diego. The young curator, tan, asking to include Quinn’s poems and pages of his notes. All of it going in, though Quinn feels embarrassed not proud.

Leaving Bev for an Assistant Professor of Classics with a big smile and an even bigger dog. Moving into a Craftsman Home in North Berkeley that seems to be held up by books. Getting a two-foot circumference orb at a flea market. The orb, milky and covered with elegant swirling numbers.

The neighbors yelling.

The Classics Professor getting a new job as a consultant in Washington, D.C. Moving to Washington, D.C. Walking around the monuments trying to hear something, anything. Taking day trips to Baltimore and Philadelphia. These cities feel the same or similar. Inhospitable.

Swimming at the YMCA. Looking at a monograph of Ad Reinhardt, his blues and greens before his blacks. Drawing a human head every day, heads with long tongues, tongues that are shovels.

He can’t back down in relationships anymore, accused of being unsupportive, lacking generosity.

He saves up for a trip to the beach. He makes a pencil rubbing on top of a picnic table, picking up the grain of the table. Wondering how to feel, he thinks Tuesday is Wednesday. He wants to draw but can’t think of anything to draw, so makes a page of hash marks. He goes to the local art school and stares at the old pedestals covered in year after year of drippy paint. He finds the pedestals more beautiful than the artworks on top.

Marcus Civin would like to thank Mary Anne Arntzen, Catherine Behrent, David Bogen, Mikita Brottman, Saehee Cho, Dino Dinco, Denny Farber, Maggie Foster, Martha Gever, Francois Ghebaly, Tanya Hollis, Ailish Hopper, Paul Jaskunas, David Kelley, Joyce Lee, Yvonne Rainer, Bill Schmidt, Josh Smith, Ella Snow, Michael Smoler, and Bob Williams who helped inspire his imagination and sharpen the stories published here.