Proven: Two Artists In Montreal

 A portion of Something Solid tracking Mary and I away from home. 

Henniker Heat

Henniker, New Hampshire is located eighty miles outside of Boston. This Something Solid sequence recounts Henniker and its inhabitants, transient and otherwise, in the mid-Aughts. From the Miscellaneous Sonnets section of the book. 

Picture to a name...

CATCH

The wind turns the water into an animal
& the boat rides the back of swells,
bucking wetly.
My legs absorb the push & pull,
thinking only of the fish,
sleek & dripping on the line,
neon green parachute ballooning
from its mouth.

I arch my back
& the rod dives.
The fish lifts, slimy as an egg,
spinning like a ballerina
on a silver thread,
its marble eye mute,
fixed on white.

How many times have you watched this world,
blinded, terrified?
There are hands on you
& pliers in your mouth,
metallic, blood-washed.
How many times have you waited
for the water
while everything lurches around you,
brilliant white, like the inside
of a hospital, like the underbelly
of a dream, gasping
to break the surface
toward that cold & sudden light?

© Becky Hilliker 2005

Adam Fieled (Logan Square, Philadelphia): "Mary Harju on the Rue St. Denis"

 

                                             © Adam Fieled 2003-2026

The Disfiguring Gaze

Not to be a wag, but stands to reason it's an appropriate time to point out that Mary Evelyn Harju's 2006 portrait of me, done in her co-op studio space in Spring Garden, North Philadelphia, does the nifty trick of fusing my face, as painted by her, with Abby Heller-Burnham's. Is the personal situation behind this contretemps a soap-operatic one? It is. Without being unduly personal, it is enough to say that Mary did not appreciate what happened between Abby and I while she was stuck, outside the Center City scene, in East Falls, with a reprobate far shadier, and nastier, than John and I. The East Falls, mid-Aughts period was not a culturally rich one for Mary. When she rejoined the scene, it was with an eye towards looking at who had done what while she was gone and taking the piss. Rather than Davidean (Michelangelo, Renaissance, not Jacques-Louis David)  elegance, I'm comically warped and gauche looking here. No pin-up at all. Instead, from her, what might be called a disfiguring gaze. The disfiguring gaze amounts, from the painter's perspective, to a radical power trip, a revenge fantasy fulfilled, The Other's energy is tamed and muted, if not decimated. The resentment at having missed all the mid-Aughts fun nonetheless plagued Mary H for the rest of her life. But made, disfiguration-wise (not decimation-wise), for one of the more intriguing fuck you-s in American art history.

...................................................................................................................................

Having ascertained what the pertinent cultural evidence is, the conclusion is inescapable— I was Mary Evelyn Harju’s muse. Or: she used me, my physical apparatus, as a site to start from in exploring the issues she found the most interesting. A muse-site. The sense of intimacy with me thusly implies a preference Mary had for warmth or nearness. A purgation of the objective in favor of a warped, sexually charged, polyglot subjectivity. The exploration of the subjective as a labyrinth would’ve been valued by Miss H as a way of building depth (self-contained, self-perpetuated depth) into her visions. Humanism, the Renaissance manifested again, against the arid frigidity of the post-modern art which dominated East Coast gallery spaces during the Aughts.

How I react to being a muse, or, to not belabor the intimacy involved in this instance, a Muse— no sense of drollery, but a sense of bemusement nonetheless, that I relate to my own physique, rather than my brain, as having accomplished something culturally meaningful in the world. Mary and I, indeed, were physical people together, physically involved. The recognition, which includes bemusement, is that Mary Evelyn Harju regarded me as a body first, a brain (a perhaps distant) second. As a nascent writer in the Aughts, with my own set of socio-aesthetic concerns (starting from Symbolism and English Romanticism, but encompassing philosophy, literary theory, including Deconstructionism, as foundational materials in a self-made matrix), it is amusing that Mary needed naught but my body to be delivered into an expressive realm where she had leave to say what she wanted to, to the world and the times she lived in.

The radical sense of physicality was vertical for Mary here. The Muse Mary Evelyn Harju was looking for, to exalt, mystify, or disfigure, was centered, as the Italians had been, on physical dimensionality. On another level, my emotions cannot not be engaged by the realization of my servitude as Mary’s Muse. It is with a combination of pleasure and pain that I begin to understand the sojourn in her towards flesh-spirit, soul-body unity, through art and sexual intercourse, back and forth. Pain, because staying grounded in physical reality cost Mary the better ride she could’ve had, had she been more attuned to intellect, dissevered from physical presence, and presiding over physical presence as well.

To be the enfranchised Muse as raw meat does put me in a false position— I myself am dissevered, as aesthetic Object, from the kinds of cognitions that see and manifest bright vistas on all sides beyond just Bodies, or my own body, and sexual intercourse. Becoming a major Muse based on raw physical presence is thus only semi-empowerment. Nonetheless, for what Mary Evelyn Harju’s particular sensibility was, which could only take the Bible and the Renaissance together and channel them into revelations of carnality (which could also be seen to ricochet back and reveal the feminine or Woman), I served, at a younger age, as fulsomely as anyone could. Even as the recognition of what was in my brain, my own cognitive capacities, had to be consigned to the shadows, or to the chiaroscuro of half-existence.

Jenny Kanzler (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA): "Untitled #1"

                                                         © Jenny Kanzler 2011

On being painted as David III

 

Acutely worked into both the surface and the depths of The Fall is a semi-obvious contradiction— to the eye of the painter, I can be both Adam Fieled and Michelangelo’s David. The work of art is a conduit to a color-form reality in which a frozen moment allows this apotheosis into doubleness. Yet hewn into The Fall is the troubled and troubling narrative of a relationship gone wrong. This narrative itself is skewered and doubled by Biblical intimations. Mary Evelyn Harju was, in fact, raised on the Bible. So I, as a figure in the painting, split into a triumvirate: Biblical Adam, Adam Fieled, and David. If you look closely into the depths of The Fall as a work of art, the emotional heart and soul of the painting is not the Biblical or Renaissance resonances. The felt core of what is being expressed is about the vicissitudes of my relationship with Mary. The creation of levels in the painting is important— as high art is supposed to do, it classicizes and historicizes what in itself is unimaginative, overly familiar material. Yet beyond the sense of levels to be engaged, the most central and centralized level is a genuine human relationship— a marriage—gone asunder. Mary and I were never legally married. We didn’t need to be. We were married in blood and in art. The terrible conflict in Mary— what is forcing her to stumble in the painting— is a complex congeries of material and psychological realities which made it that, in the Aughts, Mary could paint only intermittently. Ferocity and delicacy were oddly mixed in her.

Remember: Mary and Abby were plugged into the mid-range at PAFA. As usual, an academic context was not prepared to handle to emergence of something profoundly new. But the criss-cross of influences built into The Fall— Bible-Renaissance-Aughts Philadelphia— are a soul’s potential journey into a world never felt or experienced before. Inappropriate, I feel, to speak too much of what I went through with Mary then. I’ve done that abundantly elsewhere. Back to the main, where David fits in is its own criss-cross, for Mary, into the issue of perpetual temptation, and potential damnation. David tangibly manifests for her, as a male ideal, her own potential sense of physical, consummated deliverance. David, for her, is about lust. Mary was not a delicate woman about fulfilling her lust. She was libido-empowered by a Manifest Destiny attitude attendant on the realization of Renaissance ideals, and notions of the body. The Humanistic, at its extreme of expressiveness. Courageous, also, given her background. The Fall, is, in fact, a courageous work of art. Classicizing and historicizing the personal, and indeed, as boldly personal as any feminist could wish or hope for. The David level, about lust, melds back into being Adam Fieled, and us being co-joined as partners. Returns, in a loop, to the beginning, and to the singular. Other eyes will see how it moves in other ways. But the points of origin, I prophesy, will remain roughly the same, where The Fall is concerned. They are, or will be seen to have been, sturdy ones.