Report #10: The Phantom Of Liberty

In early July, I took a morning train back to Philadelphia. I’d been wanting to revisit the Philadelphia Museum of Art since 2016. On my first trip there, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) wasn’t on display. Seeing Gallery Rrose Sélavy again was a real treat. I was surprised at how small Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) was. It seemed almost invisible while in the same room as The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass). A note by Duchamp’s readymade Bicycle Wheel said something about how Duchamp would look into the moving wheel for inspiration. I can see that inspiration in a painting like Nude Descending a Staircase where motion is paramount. But this note also made me think of Burroughs and Gysin’s stroboscopic Dreamachine. Perhaps Duchamp, in his earlier years, had similar ambitions?

Of course, Duchamp’s masterpiece is The Large Glass. Seeing the shattered glass in person, I find it amazing that he took the time to put it back together. Currently, it’s only held in place by the pressure of the additional panes it’s sandwiched between. This constrained way of displaying the piece gives me a feeling of anxiety as if I have to tiptoe around it. Many people walked by Duchamp’s other masterpiece, Étant donnés, without a second glance. They didn’t realize, when you get closer to the two doors, as if by magic, eyeholes appear, and looking inside them you’ll see a reclining nude holding a lantern. My friend Ron Kolm has a haunting interpretation of this piece. In his book Night Shift he sees the nude woman as The Statue of Liberty herself, stripped bare and eroticized for the viewer.

There’s another masterpiece at the Philadelphia Museum of Art: Paul Cézanne’s The Large Bathers. I wrote a paper about this piece in college. My interest in it then was due to art critic Sidney Geist’s cryptomorphic interpretation of the painting, where he sees a pareidolia of a woman’s head taking form amongst the composition of the female bathers. Today I’m still intrigued by Geist’s point of view, but seeing the painting in person brings out its true power, which can’t be reduced to a simple visual trick. The Large Bathers is an imposing piece that dominates an entire wing of the museum. It seems as if it were carved from stone. Cézanne turns the subject matter of the bathers, which I generally find bland, into something sacred and ancient. The painting almost feels like a half-remembered dream on the verge of disappearing into amnesia.

Feeling good from my trip to Philadelphia, I decided to take another day trip to New Haven to see an additional work by Duchamp, Tu m’. Unfortunately, the trip didn’t go as planned. Despite what the Yale Art Gallery’s website said, the painting wasn’t on display. The trip was not a total waste though. Unknown to me at the time, the gallery had Vincent Van Gogh’s The Night Cafe. This painting is important to me for several reasons. First, when we moved into the Chauncey Street apartment several years ago, I salvaged a reproduction of this painting from the garbage outside our building. Second, it was painted in 1888, my recurring number.

In September I made a second trip to Pennsylvania, visiting Pittsburgh for the first time. Upon landing, I took the bus out to the Phipps Conservatory to meet with my friend Jeff, his wife Kait, and their daughter Levi. While walking to meet them I crossed an overpass covered in combination locks. Each lock had a pair of names written on them. Apparently, it’s a tradition in Pittsburgh to leave these locks on bridges. I guess it’s a ritual to secure a positive relationship between two people. You could call them love locks. Also near the conservatory was a statue of Christopher Columbus covered by a white tarp, which reminded me of something Christo might do. A sign recognizing the original sculptor, Frank Vittor, said he was born in 1888, my recurring number.

The next day I went to the north side of the Allegheny River to visit the Andy Warhol Museum. Although the museum lacked a lot of Warhol’s classics, it did have a few of his oxidation paintings and a bunch of punching bags that he painted with Basquiat. Each punching bag had a drawing of Jesus on it with the word “judge” written multiple times in different sizes. After I was done at the Warhol Museum, I walked up to the Mexican War Streets neighborhood, where I visited Randyland. It’s an outsider artist’s takeover of an entire building and yard, which he filled with dolls, mannequins, and brightly painted objects.

Only a short walk away was the infamous Mattress Factory. This contemporary art museum is spread out over the neighborhood between three different buildings. They had some great installations by Luftwerk, Meir Tati, Yayoi Kusama, and Greer Lankton. The one installation that stood out amongst them though, was Andréa Stanislav’s Surmatants, Mars Rising. I won’t pretend to understand the piece, which is done in three acts, but the minute I entered the opening room I knew I was in the right place. In that room is a spinning upside-down white horse. The horse’s head has been removed and replaced with a mirror. Beyond the horse was a red room with rows of circular curtains automated to turn and rotate as you walk among them. Even further down is the last act of the installation, which has three videos playing about immigration, and if I remember correctly, industrialization.

That night I went to a place called Collision for a punk show, but I still managed to wake up early the next day to go to the Carnegie museums. The Carnegie museums are split into two museums, the first being the natural history side, with the second being the art museum. To begin with, I’m not a fan of natural history museums as I see many as just graveyards for animals that have been stuffed. But there was one fun exhibit in this one about Native American astronomers and how Native myths mixed with their interpretation of the stars. It was a very simple domed show, with pinpoint lights representing the various constellations that would light up when a taped Native voice would explain the myth and how it related to the constellation.

The art museum side had works I liked from Magritte, contemporary artist Didier William, and Pittsburgh surrealist William Baziotes. The big surprise though was their CoBrA exhibit. This is the first time I’ve seen such a collection of work by CoBrA artists. Constant, Pierre Alechinsky, Asger Jorn, Enrico Baj, Raoul Ubac, and Karel Appel were just some of the artists represented. Unknowingly walking into this exhibit gave me the chills. I spent the early evening, my last in Pittsburgh, riding the two Inclines on the South Shore, and then I bussed to East Liberty to have a drink with my friend Chi Chi. After talking to Chi Chi for sometime I noticed two red and black flags stealthily hanging in the front of the bar.

In October, after my housemate had a narcissistic meltdown, I moved out of the Chauncey Street apartment in Bed-Stuy for a room in Bushwick, my third apartment in Brooklyn. New York can be a very challenging place to live. After what happened with Allison all those years ago, and now this, I’ve often wondered if my experience here is cursed. Luckily, my new housemates seem chill. One is a rapper and another is a painter. The Bushwick neighborhood is very vibrant and artistic. Not far from me, at Willoughby and Central, there is a strange automaton show that happens irregularly. Sometimes at night the window display curtains open, revealing a mannequin-like female figure that moves and dances to music. It’s like something out of Musée Mécanique in San Francisco. When this happens there is usually a man sitting outside the window with a row of six chairs around him. He’s always holding a camera. I believe this man is the artist, Rob Ebeltoft, but I’ve never spoken to him, as I like to let the work speak for itself.

Lastly, October 5th was my friend Doug Misner’s birthday. I hadn’t heard from Doug in many years, but when Googling his name I learned he passed away the previous year. I first saw Doug in 2007 at PDX Pop Now, thrashing to Black Elk. I was surprised at his age and the audacity he had to mix it up with the kids. We quickly became friends, and he started tagging along with me to house shows in northeast Portland. He loved live music and had an extensive respect for musicians. When he first started coming to punk shows I thought it would be hard for him to fit in, but he made friends fast and wanted to meet creative people and young artists. Sometimes, he'd come to my house with two bottles of tequila and drag me out of bed to go to some party. He had a real lust for life. Around 2011, Doug disappeared from the scene. He no longer had a phone and it was impossible to contact him. He was squatting at his dead mother’s house and was having some health problems, so perhaps those factors contributed to this. The last time I heard from him was on Facebook around 2013 where he said he was enjoying a “monastic life" in Gresham. I've missed him these past eight years and will continue to miss him.

What I’ve been listening to on the subway:

  • Delta 5 - Singles and Sessions 1979-1981

  • Depeche Mode - Music for the Masses

  • Mission of Burma - Signals, Calls, and Marches

  • Richard H. Kirk - Black Jesus Voice


Movies I’ve been watching:

  • Wojnarowicz: F—-k You F-ggot F-—ker (Chris McKim, 2020)

  • Venom and Eternity (Isidore Isou, 1951)

  • Pig (Michael Sarnoski, 2021)

  • Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over (Beth B, 2019)

  • Fire Music (Tom Surgal, 2018)


Publishing note:
A blog post I’ve been working on for some time, “Notes on Vertigo,” is now available to read on my website.

Notes On Vertigo

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I was an undergraduate at Portland State taking a seminar class on psychoanalysis and art when I first saw Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. It was 1998, forty years after the movie’s release, and a year after my first trip to San Francisco, where Vertigo was shot. Before this, I had a cynical view of filmmaking. All that was accessible to me were blockbusters, which seemed to serve the single purpose of wasting time, and I was beginning to see movies as a second-rate art. Vertigo changed that. It felt like something I could perform an autopsy on. I could look inside its guts and start to make sense of the pieces. Vertigo opened a new path for me. Peering into it, I could see something human in the San Franciscan landscape.

Years later, in 2013, I would move to San Francisco, but before that, I lived in Brooklyn, where I had a partner who became increasingly toxic. She had borderline personality disorder and was an addict. Our relationship became codependent and unsurprisingly, she split me black. It was like, without reason, I went from being her hero to being seen as the central source of all that’s negative and disgusting in her life. This was followed by the typical narcissistic discard. The irrational situation was too much for me to handle, and I decided to get as far away as possible. I returned to the west coast, bypassing my hometown of Portland for the Bay Area. 

As I said previously, I had only visited San Francisco once before, in 1997 with my friend Heather, but back then I hadn’t seen Vertigo. Even before seeing the movie, I had a strong love for the city. But after seeing it, San Francisco became a more potent thing, full of real and cinematic emotions. I spent my first months in the Bay Area exploring the city and visited most of the sites from the film: Mission Dolores, The Empire Hotel (now The Vertigo Hotel), The Palace of the Legion of Honor, The Palace of Fine Arts, the top of Nob Hill, Scottie’s apartment on Lombard Street, Coit Tower, Claude Lane, and the site of the demolished McKittrick Hotel. I visited the iconic location under the Golden Gate Bridge, Old Fort Point, where Kim Novak jumped into the bay in a fake suicide attempt. Much of the area was fenced off, possibly because of the movie, or because the Golden Gate Bridge and its surroundings have historically been magnets for suicides, as documented in the 2006 film The Bridge.

I knew what to expect from most of these sites. But there was one location I visited that was an entire mystery to me. At the beginning of the film, Gavin Elster tells Scottie that his wife sometimes sits by the lake in Golden Gate Park. Elster mentions her looking at some pillars that rest on the far shore. “You know,” he says, “Portals of the Past.” Like Mrs. Bates in Psycho, Rebecca in Rebecca, George Kaplan in North by Northwest, and the real Madeleine Elster in Vertigo, Portals of the Past is never shown in Hitchcock’s film, only mentioned. Because of its lack of visual inclusion, I’d never given the location much thought, but I decided to track it down regardless. Across the small Lloyd Lake in Golden Gate Park, I found a columned entryway surrounded by vegetation. It’s displaced, like some kind of René Magritte painting. Once part of a Nob Hill mansion that was destroyed during the earthquake and fire of 1906, the entryway was relocated to the lakeside as a remembrance and rechristened Portals of the Past.

Portals of the Past

Portals of the Past

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the title, Portals of the Past, summed up much of Scottie’s problem in Vertigo. Everything relies on the past. In the film, he’s diagnosed with acute melancholia. In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud describes melancholia as when someone is chronically looking back at the past and obsessing over an unidentifiable loss that they can’t make sense of. Unlike someone who is mourning, someone who suffers from melancholia can’t put the pieces together. They’re unable to process the past and move on. They’re stuck in the past. After Scottie’s release from the mental hospital, he wanders San Francisco, trying to figure out what happened. He’s stuck contemplating Madeleine’s death. This ultimately leads him to Judy, who he uses as a canvas to retrace his steps, to make sense of his loss. Once she’s transformed into Madeleine he mentally returns to the scene of his loss, San Juan Batista. Then, when he puts Carlotta’s necklace on Judy and uncovers the lie, his neurosis is broken, and he’s “free of the past.”

But something I never understood in all my years of watching this film was why Judy went along with this cold transformation of her identity. Why does she accept the abuse? At the beginning of the film, Scottie acted as a caretaker for the imposter Madeleine (Judy), who is herself believed to be possessed by the past (a ghost), but in the second half of the film the roles are reversed and Judy becomes the caretaker for the mentally unstable Scottie. The codependency of their relationship is flip-flopped. Judy goes along with Scottie’s requests because she believes doing so can return them to the honeymoon phase of their relationship. She too is obsessed with the past and wants to step back in time. She wants to return to the good times, but as with all abusive relationships, those days will never return no matter how hard the caretaker tries. And when that caretaker can no longer provide security for the dependent or is no longer needed, they are discarded, as Judy is at the end of the film. 

Wandering San Francisco, reflecting on Vertigo, I unpacked that I too was a survivor of a domestic psychic violence. Like Judy, I was used, manipulated, and discarded. Unlike her, I was also physically assaulted. But what separates the film world from reality is that in our realm, there is usually no healing or conclusion. My abuser will likely repeat her destructive patterns infinitely, moving in and out of dysfunctional relationships her entire life. I don’t believe she’s this way by choice. I think it’s connected to the fact that she also was once a victim of some kind of abuse. In that vein, let’s not forget that Scottie, in the first half of the film, is the one being manipulated and used (by Elster). It’s because of this I can’t condemn Scottie or my former partner in an extreme fashion. I believe in accountability, but I realize we live in a world of damaged people who end up damaging other people. I see this in Vertigo and I repeatedly see this in the real world.