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© Jenny Kanzler 2011
Monday, April 27, 2026
Saturday, April 25, 2026
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.
Friday, April 24, 2026
On being painted as David II
A few more things to say about The Fall. Axiomatic things. Like, for instance, that Mary Evelyn Harju’s representation of me as David is just that, and precisely that. The similarity is there, and unmistakable. Mary’s fascination with the Renaissance is already well-documented. As is her sense of erotic fascination with ideal male nudes. Also notable that who I am in The Fall, as someone being represented, is someone true to life. I really am 5’9, slightly over 5’9, actually, with a pronounced tendency to lankiness. I’m not secretly 5’6, and chunky. Or 5’8 and a half. Those who might see me will not be surprised. These tokens of complete aesthetic legitimacy have to be established, in a country where carnival-rules have made show biz standards the norm. The Fall has a number of ways of being for real that are striking ones. No show biz.
The other thing I wanted to discuss is more interesting. The Fall was modeled for and painted in a co-op studio in the Spring Garden section of North Philadelphia in 2007-2008. On a narrative level, the painting suggests Mary and I in the garden of Eden, and locates a portion of its narrative in the Bible. Mary coming out of a Christian Right family is significant, as is the outre Aughts-Philly peccadillo of her Renaissance obsession and eroticism. The sense of Philadelphia as an Eden, or as Edenic, is an intriguing one. If there is one facet of Philadelphia as a city which establishes that it can manifest as an Eden, or as Edenic, it is the sublime nature of Philadelphia’s architecture. What a city is, primordially, is a collection of buildings. Because Philadelphia, from City Hall on out, was constructed, at its best, of buildings meant to endure over decades and centuries, and to fulfill rigorous aesthetic criteria, it creates a physiology, in Philadelphia, of levitation, transcendentalism over the mundane, and of an atmosphere in which history moves forward, lives and breathes. Because Philadelphia is built, at its best, of living, breathing history, it offers a sense of shelter and amnesty to those who wish to pursue living, breathing history itself. Thus, it could be an Eden, or Edenic, for those of us in the Aughts, who wished to create to do something other than degrade, or reenact show biz. Philadelphia, in short, is built past swinishness. It’s a real city, by world standards. The Fall could not have been painted, I would tend to say, anywhere else, nor could David manifest as David, or Mary and I as Mary and I. Even the inbuilt sense of doubleness in The Fall falls into place with the idea of history which subsists as history, but also lives and breathes. Is, thus, double. And tolerates the phenomenology of doubleness.
Thursday, April 16, 2026
Wednesday, April 8, 2026
Philly Free School: catalog page
Otoliths 16
Venturi, Scott, and Brown Assoc.
Golden Notebook (Hannah Miller)
PAFA (Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts)
Highwire Gallery (Calendar 2004/2005)
Kate the Great's Book Emporium
Bowery Poetry Club (August 13)
Cavalcade of Poets & Independent Artists (e-mail group)
Venturi, Scott, and Brown Assoc. (2)
Late Late Capital Bootleg Sessions
Golden Notebook (Hannah Miller)(2)
Late Late Capital Bootleg Sessions (2)
Rhode Island Notebook (Gabriel Gudding)
Venturi, Scott, and Brown Assoc. (3)
SoundCloud (The Esthetic Apostle)
Thursday, April 2, 2026
Goodbye Blue Monday
This portrait of me was taken by New York poet Amy King in 2009, at the venue Goodbye Blue Monday in Bushwick, Brooklyn. I am reading from When You Bit..., the month is August. Also on the bill: Nada Gordon, David Wollach. Like my tat?
Wednesday, April 1, 2026
Introducing Dawn Gailey
My friend Dawn Gailey, originally from Phoenixville, took several portraits of me at the Last Drop at 13th and Pine Streets in Center City in the fall of 2008. The bottom one here captures me looking quite like a rebel without a cause. More to say on the Drop, as we called it, in the months to come, as a crucial hang-out space in the Aughts, and site for day-to-day mischief. The basis, also, for Letters to Dead Masters.
Portraiture
This is Mary Evelyn Harju's masterful portrait of me on Avenue A in the East Village, also in 2007. Turns out, for several months in the spring of 1999, I had lived on Avenue A in Alphabet City, as the neighborhood is called. At that time, nothing had really coalesced around me and books. By 2007, I was a much more consolidated presence. The way Mary set up the pictorial composition here is amazing, and had to have been done on the fly. For a visual artist who took heat for being too plodding, too methodical, it proves that Mary could be inspired in an impulsive way, too. The wackiness of Mary's balance of elements often meant that when she had a camera rather than paints, she could indulge herself in impulsive moves, against the idea of too much conscious craft. In this case, all the elements came together in such a way that she managed to set up a compositional structure as satisfying as the ones in her best paintings. She was happy to let elements fall in place as they may.
Mariposa-worthy
You can see here, in the attached pic, that Mary, by the time we were back again as a couple in 2007, wasn't making an attempt to incinerate anyone anymore. She was OK being plain Jane. There we were, at Stain Bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for a Mipoesias reading. The collision of Mary Evelyn Harju with Mary Walker Graham, as is also seen here, was notable. Ms. Graham was in New York for some kind of publishing conference. Briana Winter being there, from the Nineties Sidewalk Cafe anti-folk crowd, is amazing, too. After the reading, I took the train with the two Marys back to Manhattan, and we stopped for a bite to eat at a random East Village diner. The two Marys were cordial with each other, but Mary Evelyn's then-new restrained style meant that no sparks needed to fly. Were we completely sedate? That's not really fair, either. As people might have guessed, coke was out, for Mary Evelyn then; but all her earthiness and Mariposa-worthy vegan purity did not preclude the continuation of Mary's cannabis habit. We smoked together semi-constantly, even though I was also working as an academic at the time, and pursuing books along a careerist track that took us to New York and elsewhere in 2007 many times.
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