The Professor and Other Writings (17 page)

Yet Martin's story has always enthralled me. Born in rural Saskatchewan in 1912, she moved to New York in the 1940s to study art at Columbia. After a spell as a graduate student at the University of New Mexico she moved to Taos, where she supported herself for a number of years—barely—by painting and teaching. In 1957 she was discovered by the Manhattan gallery owner Betty Parsons and moved back to New York. There, alongside Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Ellsworth Kelly—fellow Abstract Expressionists seeking a new way forward after the death of Jackson Pollock—Martin won acclaim for her delicate, somewhat cerebral experiments in geometric form. She was touted by the critics and attracted the attention of wealthy collectors. Success notwithstanding, however, Martin was repulsed by art-world gamesmanship and one day in 1967 simply loaded up a pick-up truck and drove back to New Mexico. There she built a small adobe house with her own hands at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo mountains and began a new life as a hermit. She stopped painting and for seven years wrote poetry and studied Eastern philosophy. (Hatje Cantz published a book of her writings in 1992.) When she began producing work again in the mid-1970s—her prices having escalated astronomically in the meantime—she refused, despite the pleas of dealers, to relinquish either her privacy or the ascetic mode of existence she had embraced.

The modern world left her cold; in the stark New Mexico landscape she found a spiritual clarity unmarred by material entanglements. Daily life was spartan. Though she liked classical music she never owned a stereo; nor did she have a television. She had no
pets. One of her obituaries reported that when she died (in 2004 at ninety-two), she had not read a newspaper for fifty years. Two years before her death she allowed a persistent woman filmmaker to shoot a documentary about her: it was entitled
With My Back to the World
. Leaving no survivors, she directed that her estate be used to fund a foundation for artists but insisted that it not bear her name.

The paintings are reticent in turn—pale, spare, barely there. (Martin rejected the term Minimalist in favor of Abstract Expressionist, but if she wasn't a Minimalist, it's not clear who would be.) Her pictures seldom reproduce well, and at first one looks much like another. This similitude is due no doubt to the fact that Martin's basic technique stayed the same for years. She began with a square canvas precisely six feet by six feet, and primed it with plain white gesso. On top of the gesso she then laid down faint horizontal lines in pencil, followed by exacting, ultra thin washes of oil paint or acrylic. Sometimes she added vertical pencil lines, creating delicate grids; at other times, she made simple horizontal stripes. The bands of pigment were usually matte white or off-white, sometimes tinted a pale gray or yellow. Later in her career she added a nearly invisible coral pink and a faint blue pastel to her palette. And that, kids, was that.

It is impossible to overstate their self-effacing beauty. Martin herself wrote that she believed the function of art to be “the renewal of memories of moments of perfection.” Making art seems to have been a kind of meditation for her: she meant her paintings as aids to contemplation—“floating abstractions” akin to the art of the ancient Chinese. And it's true, though they are built up line by line, by almost imperceptible increments, that after a while her pictures begin vibrating on the retina with strange energy, flipping gently back and forth between metaphysical registers like one of Wittgenstein's playful visual paradoxes. The sense of calm they evoke in the viewer is similar to the liturgical mood Rothko's work can produce, but Martin is less morbid, theatrical, and self-consciously “profound.” Facing down
the void, Rothko can at times be downright bombastic. Martin is more humane and in some way stronger: smaller in scale, indifferent to sublimity (though her paintings achieve it), uninterested in making statements. It's the difference, perhaps, between Lowell and Bishop.

Yet there is no doubt that Martin's work will always be caviar—the very palest of pale fish roe—to the general. Who better, then, to serve as my guardian angel? The artist would no doubt be appalled to hear it, but admiring her work aloud is now a fail-safe way for the upwardly mobile poseur to signal intellectual depth and all-round ahead-of-the-curveness—like subscribing to
ArtForum
and actually reading it. Martin is the sort of artist show-offs show off about, know-it-alls know about. I think
I
like her—the whole chaste package—because she was so obviously unlike me, so seemingly unencumbered by envy or the need to strategize. Thinking about her has a soothing effect, like imagining myself reincarnated as a smooth and shiny pebble glinting in sunlight at the bottom of a cold, clear mountain stream.

Meanwhile my mother is emitting plaintive yips. Even as we propel her round Santa Fe, B. and I—wheelchair-pushing novices both—keep rolling her into unexpected cracks in the pavement. Each time she pitches forward melodramatically and gives a little squeal of fright. Is she faking it? Hard to judge—we
are
pretty inept. I make feeble jokes about getting up speed and running her off the top of a Pueblo cliff dwelling to her death. She huffily maintains she can walk a bit, but after one or two arthritic attempts, is happy to plop down in the chair again and gaze about expectantly. B. and I are both reminded of Andy in
Little Britain
(we just got the DVDs)—the dough-faced, lank-haired, supposedly paralyzed invalid who climbs trees, assaults people, swims in the sea at Brighton, and even bounces on a trampoline whenever Lou, his kindly yet moronic caretaker, has his back turned. We try to explain the joke to her and even act little bits out—B. doing Lou, me Andy—but Mavis isn't really paying attention. We're outside a Häagen-Dazs place and she wants one.

I get my first inkling that my daughterly
snobisme
(it sounds even worse in French) is about to be compromised when my mother spots the rubber-stamp store. We've been indecisive so far about what museum to do first; just then Stampa Fe floats into view. One of my mother's polymer clay pals has said it's great and she's instantly psyched. Panting a bit, Blakey and I hoist her and chair up the stairs (it's on an upper floor and there's no elevator) and I wheel her in—unable to suppress my own rapidly growing excitement. For I, too, I'm chagrined to confess, am a rubber-stamp addict. As Bugs Bunny might say: a weal wubber-stamp fweak. I've got hundreds at home; they're taking over all the drawers in the work table in the spare room. Blakey rolls her eyes, sits down, pulls Richard Rorty out of her bag, and prepares to wait for several hours.

I guess I left this part out earlier: that I'm as “arty” as my old mum. Can't help it—it's a mutant gene, like homosexuality. And though I can neither draw nor paint, I'm fairly good at working around my limitations. Like numerous five-and six-year-olds—or Max Ernst and Hannah Höch, as we “creatives” prefer to say—I do collage. Rubber stamps, along with scissors and glue and glossy pages ripped out from
The World of Interiors
, are an essential part of my praxis. (I have the art-world jargon down pat.
Yeah, I work in mixed media. Gagosian's doing my next show
.) It has not escaped my notice that even in London at the very center of the intellectual cosmos—the London Review Bookshop on Bury Place—there's a rubber-stamp shop right next door. Titillating to admit, but as local surveillance cameras would no doubt corroborate, I have sometimes been seen to nip into Blade Rubber (“the biggest range of stamps and accessories in London”) even before I go next door—game face on—to peruse the latest tomes on Stalinism or global economics.

What sorts of subject have I tackled? Blakey informs me that it is called “blog whoring” to publicize one's blog in print, so I won't even mention Fevered Brain Productions, my digital art Web site. Oops,
it popped out. Let's just say I'm a neo-Surrealist—a bit dark, a bit Goth, a bit grunge—a sort of lady Hans Bellmer. As a child I was enchanted by the Surrealists' Exquisite Cadavers game—the one in which you make comic figures out of mismatched body parts. This love of the grotesque has never gone away; even today, I enjoy putting dog or cat heads on human bodies and vice versa. Always on the lookout for detached torsos, legs, feet, hands, eyeballs, lips, etc.—anything to
dérégler
the senses, if only a teeny bit.

In Stampa Fe my mother and I go on a mad bacchanalian spree. Piling stamp blocks into my basket, I am even less restrained, I'm sorry to say, than she is. (Given her eyesight problem and seated position, she has to struggle and claw a bit to drag things down to her level.) I try to pretend that the stamps I'm grabbing up are “cool,” that my choices express my highly evolved if not Firbankian sense of camp. Thus I eschew the ubiquitous Frida K; ditto anything with Day of the Dead skeletons on it. I avert my eyes from a stamp showing Georgia O'Keeffe in her jaunty gaucho hat. But somehow I end up with things just as bad: a Japanese carp; multiple images of the Virgin of Guadalupe; a slightly dazed-looking cormorant; a sumo wrestler kicking one of his fat legs in the air; a woodcut-style picture of little people with sombreros on putting loaves into a mud-baked Mexican oven. Despite a longstanding ban on rubber stamps (or coffee cups) with sayings on them—
Cherish Life's Moments
,
Happy Easter
,
You Make Me Smile
—I succumb to
A New Thrill For The Jaded
. I'll stamp the envelope with it when I send off my next property tax bill.

When we finish our sweep and I'm swaying groggily at the cash register—my mother slumped in her chair behind me like a satisfied pythoness—I'm forced to confront a terrible possibility: that Mavis and I may actually be more alike than I prefer to believe. (B. has sometimes intimated as much.) Even as the little machine regurgitates my Visa card with a malevolent whir, I'm flooded with self-doubt. Whom
am I kidding, after all? Is a lurching sumo wrestler in a loincloth really any less vulgar, aesthetically speaking, than my mother's mermaids or kitty cats? Than a frog wearing a top hat? A poodle playing a tuba? An abyss seems to open up for a moment: I see, as if in Pisgah-vision, the appalling triteness of my sensibility. Forget Agnes Martin: I'm as banal and bourgeois as any of the hundreds of thousands of middle-aged ladies who do “scrapbooking.” (See Google for the depressing lowdown on this new billion-dollar U.S. leisure industry, the postmodern white-suburban-female equivalent of cyberporn.) And with my mother egging me on, just as she did when I was a child, I clearly can't control myself. When B. finally comes to drag us away from the place, we look like the survivors of a jungle plane crash who have had to resort to cannibalism to survive: the same foam-flecked lips, hollow cheeks, and shifty, demented expressions.

After Stampa Fe I am chastened, subdued. Despite fifty years of walking and talking on my own, I realize I'm already starting to devolve, to morph back, as if inexorably, into that hungry, unkempt, much-loathed thing: My Mother's Daughter. All the familiar insecurity is surging back up in me, along with the lower-middle-class family mania—seemingly inbred in both of us—for talking endlessly and anxiously about what things are “nice” or “not nice.” Infantilization hardly encompasses it. Even as we trundle from boutique to boutique I find myself reflexively chirping back my mother's aesthetic verdicts, in part (I tell myself) to make her feel secure in a strange place, in part for the simple reason that I am becoming more and more disoriented. We're like a mother-daughter ventriloquist-dummy team, only one in which the ventriloquist, for some odd reason, is sitting in the dummy's lap. Delivered trillingly yet forcefully, over the shoulder, Mavis's opinions become my opinions; as I push her along, my wooden jaws—loosely secured by pegs—start clacking up and down in a strange parody of the maternal speech. She's sitting down but leading the way. I'm getting blurry by comparison.

Connoisseurship—the whole fetishistically cultivated power of judging for oneself—goes out the window. Which would look “nicest” in my living room, I hear myself asking: the primitive figure made of wire and bottle caps or the little wooden cross studded with
milagros
? (
Well, you know I don't like
religious
things. Some of the people in my polymer clay group do
crucifixes.
I don't like that, do you? Still, I am not an atheist: I'm an agnostic. Maybe there's a God but we can't know. Your little guy is cute but I like
this one
better. Of course I do pray to your grandmother for help when I've lost my keys or something. I missed her so much after I married your father and went to America. I ask her where they are. Hah! She always points me in the right direction!
) Should I buy two of the Pueblo Indian street vendor's embroidered table runners since they are Both Nice? (
Ooh! Why not? That might be extravagant, though. Your sister's got a horrible lot of credit card debt. I'm so worried about her. The three of us love to shop, don't we! We've got the shopping gene! I think if you
really love
something you should get it. That one you're holding up is
quite nice
but I think this one is better. This one is
nicer,
too. Do you really need two? Why don't you go ahead and splurge?
) Though confidently broached, the sibyl's recommendations are not always compatible with one another; I am filled with mental confusion as well as shame and guilt.

Blakey—who will increasingly leave the pair of us to our own devices over the course of the week—is amused but mostly indifferent. She has the aristocrat's disdain for shopping and no urge to acquire little sentimental knick-knacks. Or even big sentimental knick-knacks. Her own aesthetic preferences are virile, insouciant, unworried—majestically upper-class in the classic down-at-the-heels way. She happily wears ancient sweat pants from her Yale days, moth-eaten pullovers, and frayed Oxford cloth shirts—the last sometimes put on accidentally, with a charming lack of paranoia, inside out. She has no interest whatsoever in home decoration or in what color the dog's leash should be. Her academic specialties notwithstanding
(eighteenth-century literature and the theory of mind), the contemporary art form she holds in highest esteem is no doubt the Pixar feature: marooned on a desert island and starved for companionship, she would take Wallace and Gromit over Locke and Hume any day.