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Tim Maul
In the bleak NYC winter of 1973-4 I found desperate employment at a company that
placed security guards in temporary positions. As a recent SVA grad I was pleased to be
assigned to MoMA being well aware of the mythology around artists who had worked
there as guards. Arriving early, the darkened museum informed my nascent ideas
about how art objects operated beyond the studio. Now demoted to (Jasper) Johnsian
‘things among things’ the art snubbed me like fair weather friends at some opening at
this very address. However, one small painting would unexpectedly reintroduce itself to
me every time I passed (it is no longer displayed). Wasp and Pear is a Precisionist oddity
painted in the precarious year of 1929 by Cote d’Azur party boy Gerald Murphy. This
oppressive picture (or glyph) depicts a vaguely mechanized wasp humping a pear that
has been split open to reveal the white fruit and single seed. The foregrounded green
skinned half of the pear, if you squint, may suggest a sensual backside not unlike that
of Man Ray’s famous photograph of Kiki, an image the ex-pat Murphy possibly knew.
While certainly a proto-Pop curiosity W & P’s legacy is hard to trace and might only be
detected in an eccentric figure like painter John Wesley.
Like some art criticism Geiger counter my cursor halted over one of the thumbnail images Jill sent me. 11.20.22 is a bright, temperate gouache on paper with a serene Asiatic vibe. An immediate translation signals a bowl of eggs? oranges? balanced on a hockey puck. The small white bisected triangular form left of center functions as a Barthesian ‘punctum’ collapsing the picture backwards in time to settle in the file labeled Winter 1972-3. Can only photograph’s surfaces conceal ‘punctums’? Or does the fact that I’m engaging with 11.20.22 on a screen, a distant cousin of the original, allow for this analysis specific to personal memory? Toggling back and forth between the two paintings on my iPhone they unexpectedly rhyme between the demonic wasp’s wing and one or two of Jill’s circular forms ‘dripping’ into the ‘bowl’ from above. I remember LPs in the Jazz bin at Caldor’s having beatnik Ab-Ex covers forging a long association with improvised music to improvised painting. If these paintings were albums the music in Jill’s sleeve would be lush, perhaps ambient like early Eno or later Ryuichi Sakamoto. The Murphy? Maybe over-determined 70’s ‘Art Rock’ from Pere Ubu. (In the mid 90’s an older artist friend strongly suggested a novel featuring a schizophrenic museum guard. I remember little about it beyond the unfortunate guard spending his days walking in circles amid a cacophony of voices heard from the gallery walls. My friend never bothered to finish the book- I did, and If paintings could talk, I’d bend an ear to 11.20.22).
Like some art criticism Geiger counter my cursor halted over one of the thumbnail images Jill sent me. 11.20.22 is a bright, temperate gouache on paper with a serene Asiatic vibe. An immediate translation signals a bowl of eggs? oranges? balanced on a hockey puck. The small white bisected triangular form left of center functions as a Barthesian ‘punctum’ collapsing the picture backwards in time to settle in the file labeled Winter 1972-3. Can only photograph’s surfaces conceal ‘punctums’? Or does the fact that I’m engaging with 11.20.22 on a screen, a distant cousin of the original, allow for this analysis specific to personal memory? Toggling back and forth between the two paintings on my iPhone they unexpectedly rhyme between the demonic wasp’s wing and one or two of Jill’s circular forms ‘dripping’ into the ‘bowl’ from above. I remember LPs in the Jazz bin at Caldor’s having beatnik Ab-Ex covers forging a long association with improvised music to improvised painting. If these paintings were albums the music in Jill’s sleeve would be lush, perhaps ambient like early Eno or later Ryuichi Sakamoto. The Murphy? Maybe over-determined 70’s ‘Art Rock’ from Pere Ubu. (In the mid 90’s an older artist friend strongly suggested a novel featuring a schizophrenic museum guard. I remember little about it beyond the unfortunate guard spending his days walking in circles amid a cacophony of voices heard from the gallery walls. My friend never bothered to finish the book- I did, and If paintings could talk, I’d bend an ear to 11.20.22).