Abscess & Abuse from "Adriane"

Adriane sat on the stool in the studio again after lying in bed for an hour. She got off it... taking to the easel with renewed energy. The blank canvas held no fear for her as she swathed it in blues, blacks and greens… framed by zigs of yellows… and zags of red energy… another portrait but not exactly angry… more of an agitated distance with a hint of pathos. The conflict was gone and she was no longer suffering. Yes, a junkie doesn’t suffer addiction. Up to a certain point addiction is the solution to suffering for the likes of Adriane. When heroin leaves the body it exits the same path that it entered… only it leaves with a vengeance. Every cell, muscle and nerve-ending cries out as the hunger makes itself known.

The sad fact for her was that she needed to paint and heroin helped her do that. “Why did I need to paint? It certainly wasn’t for the fame or fortune of selling any of these paintings.” She did have a dealer in Paris but, “that fucker didn’t think I was doing anything progressive or avant-garde enough by painting…” she thought again, “Or by painting at all.” Painting on a canvas with oils was more of a fetish to her than it was a devotion to art. “Is it a fetish for retrieving something of the past, perhaps?” After all, she’d heard them expound from the cafes and bars that painting was obsolete with the first Daguerreotype. It was obsolete until Braque and Picasso blasted our perceptions. After the Dadaists and surrealists took art out of the studio and onto the public stage this action made the idea of ART to seem somewhat silly and arcane. When Jackson Pollack came along and splattered his canvasses with action paintings, it made the act of painting a self-obsessed hobby for the moronically elite that would be better off if all the painters went to go get a job in a factory than to toil away trying to find relevant meaning with oil on canvas. Andy Warhol didn’t mistakenly call his loft The Factory. He made it clear that the highest purpose of art in the latter half of the twentieth century was to make money... an investment like a stock certificate. The cathedrals of this religion became the auction houses where the works of dead artists were celebrated with astronomical bids. He made himself even clearer if ever it was posited, “My five-year-old can do as well as that!” His answer could have very well been in a spaced-out tone, “Oh, that’s interesting.” That was all he would have had to say but that was enough to imply, “Can your five-year-old make the kind of money I make with it?”

“And, art schools! Psshhhaw!” Art schools had become to Adriane, places where semi-affluent parents put their kids before finally making up their minds, before going out into the world to get a real job. These places create in each student the delusion that there is a wall... a ceiling... somewhere (a holy place... a Sistine Chapel) to put their self-indulgent scribbles. The big secret is that the “Art World” only opens the window of opportunity to a few selected artists each decade and then slams it shut. These artists are touted as the winners of the lottery and are encouraged to believe that what they do matters somehow. Artists who stumble or get diverted… loose interest… or see through the guise… are pushed aside for the next crop out of New York, Berlin, London, Paris, or Los Angeles.

Why then should anyone have imagined that painting was any more important than keeping a personal diary? Either desires, intuitions, experiences, are universal and have an appeal to other people; or, it is all a vain pursuit and the painter was just spending time between birth and death, pretending to be more important than all that.

She wrote in her journal, “Between birth and death… between one fix or another… I no longer wonder what it is that I am doing here. It is a dreamscape I occupy for a spell… a spell cast by an illusionist… the master illusionist… you call it God? Max calls it the Great Whazoo. How many theologians can we count dancing on the head of a pin? But in the dreamscape something else is going on. Angels or Demons, I can’t tell which”

The doorbell chime broke the reverie. She descended the stairs, pulled her robe over the purity of her nakedness…. ala Duchamp… and closed it with a strap. She opened the door. Two police officers stood close, noses nearly touching the door, trying to peek in through the peep hole.

They stepped back startled, “Eh hem, I’m Officer Dan Richards. You are Mrs. Adriane Baker… Nicholas’s Baker’s wife?”