Week 4: MEND

R.B.Kitaj

Last night's class--another good evening. Many of you are doing ambitious work. A couple need to push harder. Remember our various discussions of materiality. And Christina's question--about the "defamiliarization" of the representational image in order to be able to see it again as form... And whether there's ever a form without some kind of representational implication... Leonardo spoke of looking at the shapes in plaster walls--seeing their possible meanings. It's easy to do this with maps as well--the shapes of countries for example (an abstract concept to be sure, especially since an overview at that scale is never available to us). Siberia and Alaska (this was my own childhood image, from a map my father had framed and mounted on the wall above our beds)--a goat leaning forward to kiss a moose...

But seen the other way, take any seemingly familiar representational image--squint at it, or turn it upside down--and suddenly you've returned it to the world of form. In other words, we work from both approaches--as in R.B. Kitaj's charcoal drawing from about 1980, below. A good place to be... 
______

The new word: MEND

Which has a very physical component--but relates to the word heal--which in turn is related to the idea of making whole... Whenever and wherever possible. But why is this so? Relationship between fragment and whole. What makes a work complete? How do we get it there?

Pierre Renoir film (1915):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK12sFDOU54
________

 

The Day Lady Died

Frank O'Hara

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday

three days after Bastille day, yes

it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine

because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton   

at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner

and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun   

and have a hamburger and a malted and buy

an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets   

in Ghana are doing these days

                                           I go on to the bank

and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)   

doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life   

and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine   

for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do   

think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or   

Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres

of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine

after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE

Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and   

then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue   

and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and   

casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton

of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing


Frank O’Hara, “The Day Lady Died” from Lunch Poems. Copyright © 1964 by Frank O’Hara. 
Reprinted with the permission of City Lights Books.