TWITTER BEFORE TWITTER

GETTING NEARER TO NEARISM

 From Superbad (McSweeneys, 2001), by Ben Greenman. All rights whatever.

 

Among artists, originality and talent are prized above all other qualities, so much so that it is rare to find a renowned artist whose work has an absence of original vision. It is even rarer to find a renowned artist whose work shows no sign of artistic talent or temperament—whose work is, in a way, defiantly artless. Paolo Legno was one of those rare specimens. The Parma-born, Rome-raised Legno spent his career producing works that can broadly be classified as prints, but which are more accurately described as copies: slightly altered replicas of previously published documents. Legno’s works were neither satires nor appropriations. Rather, they were exact-size imitations that differed from the originals only slightly. Legno’s first works, “Menus,” were near-copies of Roman restaurant menus in which he changed only the prices of the entrees, and only minimally. After “Menus,” he applied the same technique to street maps, tourist pamphlets, liner notes from record albums, and advertising circulars. Over the years, Legno was called a fraud, a genius, and “a Xerox machine with an impish sense of humor”; wary of being classified with Dada, surrealism, conceptual art, or media art, Legno coined a term for his own genre, “nearism,” and promptly became the world’s premier nearist. One afternoon last spring, shortly after the opening of “Phone Book,” a show that exhibited replicas of sections of the telephone directory, he sat down with the English painter and critic Paul Wood, a longtime friend, to discuss his career.

Paul Wood: Let’s talk about your new work.

Paolo Legno: “White Pages” or “Yellow Pages”?

PW: Let’s start with “Yellow Pages.” They are a series of sheets, eight in all, that look as if they have been simply ripped out from a big-city phone book. One is taken from the Locksmith section, one from Plumbing, one from Sporting Goods: Retail, and so on.

PL: Yes.

PW: But these are not actual pages from an actual phone book.

PL: Well, they are partly actual. In “Air Conditioning: Repair,” for example, I only altered the names of four repair companies and then the phone numbers of four different companies. I left the layout of the page, and the artwork, exactly as it was in the original version.

PW: So if I were to call these phone numbers, I would not reach air conditioning repairmen?

PL: You might. Remember, I did not change them all. It is possible that you might select one in which the name and the number are as they were in the original. 

PW: Tell me a little bit about your process. How do you create these works?

PL: I use the same process as the people who created the originals. I design electronic files in a desktop publishing program, and then I output them to the same kind of paper. In the case of “Yellow Pages,” I used the same commercial printer.

PW: So how are your works different than the originals?

PL: Slightly. And at the same time, entirely.

PW: Recently, the critic Linus Howard compared you to Borges’s Pierre Menard, who exactly rewrote sections of Cervantes’s Don Quixote.

PL: I saw that. Menard is an interesting case, but not the same case as me, because the original Quixote required an astounding amount of creative energy, and the second Quixote required considerably less. I use originals that required little or no creative energy, and I expend some creative energy in copying them, in that I must invent new names or words or numbers. Borges is writing about a man who is, arguably, less creative than their sources. I am, inarguably, more creative than mine. 

PW: You once said that you are simply making explicit the debts that are implicit in every artwork. 

PL: Every artist has sources. Picasso drew on African art. Rauschenberg looked at Johns. When I first started my career as an artist, I was a painter, and I was utterly indebted to Hockney. It was difficult to liberate myself from that. It took great effort, and almost cost me my creative life. Having unshackled myself, I was free to do whatever I wanted.

PW: But drawing stylistic inspiration from another piece of art is somewhat different than simply copying a piece of printing.

PL: The cardinal rule of this sort of thing is that the cardinal rule is an ordinal rule. What is first is first. Everything else is not-first. We have the original, and we have the others. 

PW: You could say that about any artistic representation. We have life, and then we have art. We have fact, and then we have fiction.

PL: Yes. But I like to think of my work as fact.

PW: Meaning that they are entirely true? But you know that they are not true, because you have changed information. The price of an item according to one of your “Grocery Store Specials” is not actually the price, nor is the time a movie is showing according to one of your “Movie Times” actually the time. You know that because you have read the actual information, and then changed it.

PL: Is a fact that which is indisputably true or is a fact that which assumes the stance of truthfulness?

PW: Is that a rhetorical question?

PL: No.

PW: Let’s talk a bit about counterfeiting. Do you consider yourself a kind of counterfeiter or forger?

PL: I suppose. But  great forgers work hard to mimic the style of the works they are copying. I do not work hard. It is easy, because the work is without style. No, that’s not right: not without style, but without a hard style. It has an easy style: a certain kind of paper, a certain font, a certain piece of art. This is what I was saying before about the relative difficulty of these works. It is much more difficult to forge the Mona Lisa than to forge a poster promising specials on Granny Smith apples. The Mona Lisa forger might give himself away by not exactly capturing the folds of skin around the eye. I could create a verisimilar grocery poster with ease, but I choose to change it slightly: maybe these apples are 99¢ per pound rather than $1.09 per pound.

PW: Does your work, after it is created, become its own original?

PL: Of course. And I will tell you something. I had a student a few years ago who decided to make artworks that stood in relation to my works as my works stand in relation to, say, the public telephone directory, or the newspaper ads. He took my work and he created his own electronic file, and he changed a few more things, and he printed them, and he showed them as his own. 

PW: Did he get an A?

PL: He did. He was a clever student. But he started me thinking about this, and since then, I have been working on my own second-generation works, in which I work off of my own copies and change the information again 

PW: So there is even a greater distance between the original and your work?

PL: That’s what is interesting. The second set of changes has, for some reason, been exactly counterweighting the first set of changes. So the second-generation copy ends up being exactly the same as the original.

PW: So will these be your next works?

PL: No. Next I will exhibit a different set of pieces that I have recently begun. They are catalogs from past shows, and I have collected them, and reprinted them. I am thinking about binding them into a book. 

PW: And they just have a few details changed?

PL: No. When it came to the catalogs, I changed almost everything. It is the incontinent version of the controlled experiment I have been performing for the last decade, and it is an exciting departure. I tell you, it is incredibly liberating to be able to change your name, the titles of your works, the dimensions of them, everything but the pictures. I have recreated a version of my restaurant menus where the works exhibited are, according to the notation in the catalog, twenty feet tall. Can you imagine these monumental menus? You would need a waiter more than a hundred feet tall just to carry them to your table.

* 

Soon after the opening of “White Pages/Yellow Pages,” the Spanish collector Pablo Madera invited Legno to speak at a symposium in Barcelona. Legno agreed. When he did not appear as scheduled and would not answer his phone, Madera had police enter Legno’s hotel room. They found the artist in his bathroom, dead by his own hand. “Those who take their own lives,” he once wrote in a letter to the Polish critic Inek Drzewo, “should go by pills, because pills are painless and free of mess, and because they have a printed label that lends itself quite nicely to nearism in a way that other instruments of oblivion, whether gun, rope, or automobile, do not.” Legno was perverse even in death. He did not use pills, but rather a pistol, and the fatal course he plotted was hardly free of mess—the officer who discovered his body said that the scene was “like a landscape painting made with blood.” To the pistol, Legno had taped a small label on which he had typed the word “gun.”

STRUGGLE IN NINE

By Ben Greenman

Originally published in Superbad, 2001

I. 

Cautious, he picked up the magazine. Interested, he read it from cover to cover. Amused, he laughed. Transfixed, he gasped. Gratified, he wrote a letter to the editor commending the magazine. Eager, he picked up the next month’s issue. Surprised, he found that his letter was printed in the Letters to the Editor column. Emboldened, he wrote another one. Amazed, he saw that his second letter was printed as well. He took a long look in the mirror. The mirror had a flaw on the right hand side that always looked like a scar on his skin. He traced the scar with his right hand. Altered, he was. Altered, and changed. What he had been before, he no longer remained.

II.

The eagle of communism swooped down and grabbed the rabbit of capitalism. The general woke up sweating. He grabbed his gun and ran into the garden. Was there an Arab? Was there a killer? Was there a point to be made? The general sat down on a bench and hung his head. In movies he had seen, generals were always brave. They were often corrupt, but they were always brave. Their faces turned red when they were accused of cowardice. They pounded their fists on tables and stood ramrod-straight when they inspected the troops. The general felt an ant skirt the flannel edge of his pajamas and he began to shriek, for ants had killed his son and now they were coming for him. 

III.

Girl in bar: Are you a good writer?

Me: Yeah. I mean, I think so. I have good ideas and attach good words to them.

Girl in bar: I am a good dancer.

Me: Really?

Girl in bar: No. Not really. But when girls say they are dancers, boys tend to like it.

Me: That’s funny. That’s why I said I was a writer.

Girl in bar: You’re not?

Me: No, I am. But that’s why I said it. Sometimes there are happy coincidences.

IV. 

I have a friend. She writes miniatures. I love them. I love her. Her pieces are short. Ten words at most. But they sing. This piece, the piece I am writing, is already too long. Even Section IV is too long. “You are bloated and incontinent,” she said. “You don’t know how to control yourself. A story is about a flower that bends slightly under the breath of a dog. No more than that. ‘A flower bends slightly under the breath of a dog.’ Man, that’s long. I want to cut out some words. I will cut out ‘slightly.’ Now it has nine words. Now I am happier with it. Will you take me to dinner to celebrate?” We go to dinner. We drink too much wine. We end up at her place, on her couch. She takes my head in her hands. My lips rise to meet hers. 

V. 

Birds don’t write. They are God’s creatures, of course, and God’s chosen creatures, in some sense, for they fly more closely to His Divine Providence than any of us can hope to, but despite their privileged station they cannot write. When they see a rabbit on the ground, they can only choose whether or not to kill it. Is this a form of writing? It is certainly a plot. It most certainly reveals character. Time, someone once told me, is what keeps everything from happening all at once. History, I retorted, is what ensures that everything has happened. We each thought ourselves the cleverer.  

VI.

I have a friend. She writes miniatures. She tells me that my pieces have too much plot. I cannot understand what she means. To my eye, they have no plot. “You are always sending and receiving like a radio station or a radio,” she says. “You are always doing what should never be done. I am going to put on my pants and leave.” She leaves. I turn on the radio. There is a song on the radio about a girl who leaves. I turn off the radio. There is a bird flying outside. It banks in the air and heads right toward my window. I close my eyes, afraid of what I will see. 

VII. 

Me: Yes, I do love you. But not the way you need me to. I think that sometimes you’re too afraid.

Girl in bar: I was afraid of that.

Me: Not everything is a joke. That’s why I wish you wouldn’t talk. 

Girl in bar: Yes. I know. But when a girl decides not to talk, she disappears. And I’m afraid of disappearing.

Me: Really?

Girl in bar: That’s why I never finish anything I start, so that there’s a reason still to be here.

Me: No. I mean, I don’t understand. You leave things undone so that you will not vanish? You’re in a bad way.

Girl in bar: Are you in a good way?

VIII.

The third of March fell on the second of March. It wasn’t a very common occurrence, and as such it was noteworthy. The man on the telephone was eager to make a sale, and so he divulged the secrets of the calendar. Would the lady be interested in learning how one day became the next? Did she possess an understanding of midnight? The man on the telephone hung up and took a deep breath. Most of the women he called demonstrated no interest in the calendar. They asked him if he knew of a place they could buy shoes, or books. Occasionally they had a thing for carpets. The man felt the telephone looking at him and felt afraid. He pounded a fist on the table and felt even more afraid. He picked up a magazine and began to read.

IX. 

When he began to read, he knew that he would soon begin to write. But when he began to write, he knew he would not finish. Would not, and could not. He forced his mind ahead in time. He saw the seam where the day turned into the next day, and tried to imagine that his writing was a bridge across that seam, which was widening by the second. He saw the scar where one day was ripped away from the day that had preceded it. He went for a walk. He sat down, exhausted. He continued on again, rested. He searched for a place to stop and eat, famished. He spoke to an old man in uniform, lonely. He spoke to a pretty girl, attracted. He wandered, disoriented. He saw a bird, comforted. He thought it God, converted.

FUN WITH TIME

By Ben Greenman

Originally in Superbad, 2001

Obtain a watch without fluorescent-tipped hands. Go into a pitch-black room. Hold the watch to your ear. Then close your eyes. Is the ticking any louder?

Locate a small child who can speak but not yet tell time. Ask the child what time it is. When the child answers, believe him. 

Find an ordinary kitchen timer and set it for three minutes. At the conclusion of the three minutes, divorce your wife or husband. If you are not married, marry the first available person, reset the timer, and repeat the exercise.

Each time the minute hand overlaps the hour hand, pretend that the hour hand has disappeared. As quickly as possible, work yourself into a panic imagining a world with no hours, only minutes. 

The next time you feel happy, look at a clock and note how long it takes until you are miserable. 

When a friend asks you what time it is, say, “Time to take off my watch and put it in my pocket.” Then take off your watch and put it in your pocket. 

ONE-SENTENCE STORY

by Ben Greenman

The books on the shelf looked as if they were scattered haphazardly when in fact they were subject to a complex principle of arrangement with an equally complex history, one that the young man sitting in the next room watching TV would have been delighted to explain: how he had been approached by his father, a writer, who preempted concern over the rather wild and desperate look in his eyes by announcing that he needed help taking control of the books that had accumulated over a lifetime of reading and rereading; how the young man had responded to his father’s request not by rushing into the other room to sort and shelve but rather by thinking long and hard about how books were consumed, usually while he was sitting in the next room watching TV (this provided him with a fruitful comparison—other media, of course, came forward invisibly, via airwaves or electrical wires, and did not encounter difficulties resulting from their use or misuse of space); how he devised a plan for sorting and shelving, one that did not index the volumes by author or by title or even by subject but by frequency of use and, just as importantly, by size, to prevent the smaller specimens in back from being permanently concealed by the larger ones in front; how he took a break between shows to play around with a few shelves and determine if his ideas about visual access and clean sight lines were valid; and most strikingly, how he quickly learned that they were, how his initial assumption that his tentative plan would be revised once implemented, sanded into a different shape by multiple rounds of trial and error, was gainsaid by the facts of the matter, to the point where his first hasty implementation of his plan was also the final implementation, this despite his father’s protestations that the task was not complete in the least and that the young man had not only failed to do what had been asked of him but had in fact introduced more chaos, an argument that was repeated with the same wild and desperate look in his eyes that could not, even as it became wilder and more desperate, dislodge either the young man’s confidence in his system or the tenacity of his true interest, which involved sitting in the next room, watching TV. 

AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE ORAL HISTORY

by Ben Greenman

Originally written in 2004

Bill DeLisle: The idea came about when I was talking to an old man on a bus. To say he was garrulous is an understatement. I mean, blah, blah. He had so many stories. Some were even interesting. I mentioned it to a friend of mine, Alan Lomax, who had just finished up a project with Woody Guthrie. "Someone should take down all these things that are being said." I said. "So many people, so many stories." He looked at me like it was something he had already thought of.

Ruth Kaminsky: In the building there was little Louie Terkel. He was, you see, supposed to help with things around the place, but he spent all his time out in Bughouse Square listening to crazies. Once the stove went on the fritz and I asked up Louie. He said people were calling him Studs. "Well now Mr. Studs," I say, "fix my stove." He did but not well. It broke the next day and I needed to call a real fix-it man.

Fred Jenkins, cab driver: I was in the war, the Big One, and then I came back to New York and I started to drive.  In 1948—I remember because it was the year the Indians beat Spahn and Sain—I had a guy in my cab what was a famous historian. Albert Nevins, I think. I was talking about my ex-wife and how she sued me for half the medallion. He took an interest. "I have written about great men," he said, "but maybe this is the true American story." I dropped him off near Columbia. Not sure if he ever did anything with the idea. Decent tipper.

Albert Nevins: I live near Columbia but I'm not a historian. I'm in fruit importing, so I guess you could say I'm a historian of that. The Romans brought in oranges but after the empire fell no one in Western Europe thought about them for almost a thousand years. There’s a more famous guy with my same name who works at the university. Is it him you want?

Louis Camras: My uncle was the famous electrical engineer Marvin Camras, who pioneered the wire tape recorder. He had a joke: "The name is Camras, the game is recorders." That's because our name sounds like "cameras." He was an electrical engineer, not a comedian. The government used his inventions--they recorded battle noise and put it near where the Normandy invasion was going to happen to confuse the enemy. Oh, right, oral history. A guy he worked with at his college used his recorder to take down stories of Holocaust survivors. I think his name was David Boder. My uncle never said much about the guy.

Martin Perez, tailor: Oscar Lewis used to come in to the store. Very nice man, 42 long. He wanted me to tell him about my family in Mexico. I didn't say much because I'm Puerto Rican.

Rebecca So: I studied Alex Haley in graduate school, especially the controversy over whether he took Roots from his own family history or from Harold Courlander’s "The African.” That’s not oral history exactly, but it’s history, and it raises some of the same questions. Can memory be collective? What does it mean to objectively represent events? Who owns history? Who should profit? I now work as an entertainment attorney, and these issues still pertain. That's about all I'm willing to say without a better standing of where this will appear, and who will control its future usage.

Sean Robbins: I'm seven. I don't know what any of this is. Why did you bring me to this room? Where's my mom?

Elaine Bunton: I always thought oral history was designed to help us recover vital parts of our nation’s past that would otherwise have been lost to obscurity. Makes sense, right? But the other day I was looking around and I saw oral histories of Chipotle, Extreme’s “More Than Words,” and The Facts of Life. Some things are better left undocumented.

Mark Simonson, editor of this piece: I suggested this article, at least the title, in an email I sent to the writer on a Thursday night during a football game. Usually he turns things around really fast but this took him almost a week. The morning he turned it in, I had a strawberry smoothie that tasted a little like banana, as if they had neglected to properly clean the blender...Wait. What? This isn't "An Oral History of 'The Oral History: An Oral History'"?  Never mind.