Art and the Homeless

This is two stories, both about the Twin Towers. Everyone has a 9/11 story. I have more than two. These two are related by workplace, my "day job," at the time.  I arrived at the office on 9/11 shortly after 7:00, as usual, to open the door and turn on the lights. I looked forward to continuing a Quark tutorial before the executives arrived at 8:00.  The office was located on the west side of Union Square, at 14th Street, on the 12th floor. Most of the office windows faced south, towards lower Manhattan, with panoramic views of the World Trade Center.  I was immersed in my tutorial when the first tower was hit. I didn't notice until associates started arriving at the office. Earlier, my attention had been drawn by an aircraft flying at low altitude. It was loud -which caused me to look up from what I was doing. It was as large as a commercial jet airliner, but the underside had a drab-color appearance, resembling a military transport plane.  Reconstruction of the fir...

It's hard to tell what Karl Marx thought of Art. The safest that can be said about Marx and art is that he did not think it had anything to do with the class struggle. He was not wrong. Relevant comment by Marx may be found in the opening chapter of Capital, in which he writes that as soon as people start to work for each other in any way, their labor assumes a social form. It is socialist . The Russian modernist art movement of Constructivism was the first conscious manifestation of the socialist theory of Art. Russian Constructivist artists met regularly to argue about the future of Soviet art. A contradiction developed over the role of the artist as individual, opposed to utilitarian purposes of art, what today would be described as industrial design. The role of the individualistic artist was becoming an object of scorn to the Russian Constructivists. Their Institute of Artistic Culture debates of the 1920s peaked in the theory of Productivism, which demanded direct participati...

My newest painting is titled “Fatigue.” It's a homeless man sleeping on a doorstep. He's freezing. You can tell by his posture. It's a look of determination. He might not make it. He is not dressed appropriately. He has no baggage, no backpack, nothing, not even a paper bag to keep him warm. No way to be certain, but from the look of him, he's a veteran. Anyone can tell from his posture he has slept on the ground before -possibly “in country.” He looks fit. He could be suffering from PTSD, maybe going through an episode, a relapse. From the robust physique of the man he can't be old enough to be from the Vietnam era. More likely one of the indecisive wars since Viet Nam. It never ended for him. Fatigue originally meant manual, or menial, labor performed by military personnel, represented by the loose-fitting work clothing worn by work crewmen. Fatigue is literally to be, or become, tired, exhausted from effort. Combat fatigues are outfitted specially for servicemen ...

The title of my latest painting is "Weeds." The subject is a back lot of a three-story apartment building, in an intermediate zone between the city and the suburbs -the Dilapidated Building Belt. Most doors and windows are boarded, many are voids, a structure occupied by an aged owner, here-and-there. Alternate title: "gone to seed." If the homeless are revenants of a meaningful life these buildings are husks of formerly vital neighborhoods. At one point they became economically viable to build, later, not economically viable to occupy. To put a finer point on it, at some point in the economic cycle the residents either moved up to greener pastures, or were evicted. Values never recovered. Until now. Not with reference to gentrification, unless a second look artistically be considered gentrification, but nostalgically. I see a late wave of national expansion, as poignant as the wagon trail ruts of the early settlers of the Old West. Where a Marxist sees a Capitalist...

I am expanding my repertoire of subject matter to include street-scapes. Streetscapes is a play on "landscapes," of course, because landscapes by definition are void of subject, and streets are normally populous with subjects. To right the analogy, therefore, I should say I have been airbrushing homeless subjects from the picture. The effect is similar to that of viewing an empty room. If the occupant is absent, the room has a completely different feel, than if the occupant was unknown, or if the room never was occupied. An absence which is palpable is what makes landscape painting poignant. Those who entertain notions of the paranormal assert that ghosts are not people, but an impression left upon reality by a person, like a holographic imprint. The remains of an improvised sleeping place left on the sidewalk made by a homeless person has a similar effect. The residue casually deposited by the homeless after moving on has an unpleasant effect similar, I take it, to that of g...

It was without a plan that painting the homeless began, other than the expectation of an emotional catharsis. There had to be meaning in the clump of signifiers. A direction would certainly emerge from the confusion. Academic art students draw or paint a human model, posed in front of a back wall, optionally draped for a touch of color. I tried this approach with the derelicts I saw immobile on the sidewalk. It did not achieve the intended effect of an academic study. Any reclining pose is a challenge. A figure in a fallen posture can look like it will itself fall off the canvas, off-the-wall, literally onto the floor. An academic painting of anything other than a human model is a nature morte , a still life, an inanimate object. That term comes from the study of anatomy, corpses, to be exact, at the core of the academic curriculum since Leonardo. A dead body, unlike a sleeping person, has a distinctive appearance. It is an object. We do not relate to an object the way we relate to the...

My paintings of the homeless and street people began in New York City, where they can be seen sleeping or, for whatever reason, laying on the sidewalk. It leaves an impression on one's memory. It wasn't even necessary to work from reference photos or sketches. I was still able to see them, in my mind's eye, in the privacy and comfort of home. The images doggedly persist. Sketching pitiful bundles of flesh and bone wrapped in rags just felt natural to me. I made a series of sketches, which I intended to submit to galleries, including a design for a 3-dimensional piece, consisting of a black plastic leaf bag stuffed with wadded paper, and tied in such a way as to look like a figure. It would be tossed, like a rag doll, on the gallery floor. The show was to feature a selection from a series of 20-30 oil paintings of modest-size, on canvas, of images of prostrate bums.  They were to be simplified, a solitary figure on a monolithic ground, in neutral colors and black and white. ...