Art calls to art; the conversation remains by design ongoing, unfinished. I’m thinking about all pieces I didn't address.
The very last visit I made to a museum was local--the Harvard Art Museum--to meet a friend to go upstairs to visit the conservation lab (where my better half works). Here’s a glimpse:
Leaving the museum, not knowing it was about to close down, I looked across the inner courtyard at one of the more amazing recent acquisitions, a self-portrait by Kerry James Marshall (Untitled, 2008).
Six feet tall and five feet wide, Marshall's painting is utterly compelling, a yin and yang of dark over light. The outstretched palette reminds me of Parmigianino’s outstretched hand, here a microcosm of a working space. The angled paintbrush dips into the black circle on the palette, black like a hole, black like the black circle of the painter’s hand.
Two years ago, I visited a class of undergraduates sharing their final Museum Studies assignments: ekphrastic poems informed by technical study of works of art. “My palette is the milky way,/ and my canvas is a blank slate” wrote a student who had focused all semester on Marshall’s painting:
I am a shadow of my own image
under the light you shine on me.
“Everyone and everything we see is a self-portrait,” suggests Terrance Hayes in his poem, "Self-Portrait as the Mind of a Camera," after the work of photographer Charles "Teenie" Harris (How To Be Drawn, Penguin, 2015). The poem continues:
...What if, in your previous life,
You were born a black man's camera? Suppose you lived
As something filled with a light and darkness that's defined
By what it touches. What if you could hold everything
You behold in a chamber inside yourself: a sense of the existential,
A sense that color sometimes conspires against you, a sense
There are people who would be anonymous without you?
Perhaps the best poetic analogue to the self-portrait is the sonnet, that form with just enough room for a face, an about-face, and a final reflection. How do we fit ourselves into or fight against the framings we inherit? What room do we have to choose? In Hayes’ stunning recent book, American Sonnets For My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin, 2018), one sonnet begins, “I lock you into an American sonnet that is part prison, / Part panic closet,” and I think about locking gazes. The poem ends:
I make you a box of darkness with a bird in its heart.
Voltas of acoustics, instinct & metaphor. It is not enough
To love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed.
This reminds me of Ashbery’s final address to the artist in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” The chamber in the poem where self and reflection are facing off has become the kind of chamber that holds a bullet:
Therefore I beseech you, withdraw that hand,
Offer it no longer as a shield or greeting,
The shield of a greeting, Francesco:
There is room for one bullet in the chamber:
Our looking through the wrong end
Of the telescope as you fall back at a speed
Faster than that of light to flatten ultimately
Among the features of the room, an invitation
Never mailed, the "it was all a dream"
Syndrome, though the "all" tells tersely
Enough how it wasn't.
What is the end or the aim of a self-portrait? In another Hayes sonnet, one obsessed with endings, every sentence in the poem ends with “life.” The poems Hayes reflects on challenge us to reflect on our life sentences:
Rilke ends his sonnet "Archaic Torso of Apollo saying
"You must change your life." James Wright ends "Lying
In a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island,
Minnesota" saying "I have wasted my life." Ruth Stone ends
"A Moment" saying "You do not want to repeat my life."
A minute seed with a giant soul kicking inside it at the end
And beginning of life. After the opening scene where
A car bomb destroys the black detective's family, there are
Several scenes of our hero at the edge of life. A shootout
In an African American Folk Museum, a shootout
In the middle of an interstate rest stop parking lot,
A barn shootout endangering the farm life. I live a life
That burns a hole through life, that leaves a scar for life,
That makes me weep for another life. Define life.
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