Sunday.

Erasure...

“A master of the edge”.

“You could not find a more difficult way to paint this.”

“Baselitz paints the world upside down, like a human retina in reverse; his visual field is upended and projected, one mark at a time, onto the canvas.”

So. I was thinking about what it means to have a body of work. But I was interrupted happily. An old friend visited today from the high desert where he lives in solitude. I made lunch, some orchiette from last night, with fresh ricotta and some roasted tomatoes, and a salad. We talked for hours about life fifteen years ago, when we both were less adverse to drugs and drinks. We talked about one bad night of driving in a canyon in LA. He needed to pick something up. You can guess what. I was clueless. That’s all long gone.

He left. I swam. I have these gadgets for exercising in the pool, like weights. I did that. I got out. I was thinking of mistakes I have made; using the wrong words, being too brash, well intentioned but prideful, swanning, chaotic. Public positions taken loudly out of love and loyalty, but ill-advised in many respects, certainly very costly. A kind of (earned) contempt I have encountered has made me retreat into a kind of exile, which I am savoring as I think about my commissions, my omissions and repair. Also, I am getting a divorce, with a degree of decorum and kindness and civility that lets both of us hold onto our dignity and what we love about each other. In this period of plague, I am alone almost constantly, save for my weird-o dog, and I have work to do. I do it. I work. It is fits and starts but a lot. Two projects moving closer to their starting gates. A third needs some work. I drift in and out of their ambits.

In 1954 the young Robert Rauschenberg knocked on the door of the much more famous Willem De Kooning and asked if he could have a drawing of his to erase. De Kooning took some persuading, and they discussed this act of ‘destruction’ as De Kooning saw it. Rauschenberg insisted it was an act of creating, and eventually the more famous painter agreed. Rauschenberg worked on the De Kooning for months, wearing out erasers, and eventually there was this great scarred empty ghost surface. It eventually became a wildy and deservedly celebrated piece of art. Jasper Johns, before that happened, framed it for his friend, and added a label with a duplicating machine.

I have been reaching an inflection point, a decision to step aside in my work soon, to make room for artists of color in the theatre who have not been given the space, beyond in the most token way, not been given the space to grow into old masters, like Katz, Baselitz and Morely. It takes time, and productions and true patronage by institutions to build a body of work, and I am almost done, a few more plays left to write. Or maybe more but I can do them in little tiny rooms, basements, or something. (My new play was supposed to go into rehearsal in the Fall in New York, but of course it has been pushed at least a year.) But I want to experiment with my own erasure, my own vanishing, so that the best of me is almost invisible, and hidden by the new, the young artists who need to take over the temples.

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