It was the seventies. I was a young and untested art critic when John Coplans, then editor of Artforum, asked me to fly to Cuba, New Mexico, one December, to write an essay about a few of Agnes Martin’s early figurative paintings. The essay was to be published in their April issue the following spring, in order to coincide with a show opening at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Philadelphia, curated by Suzanne Delehanty. Agnes had been invited to give a talk there in mid-March, which she’d titled, ‘Reflections’, about “the perfection underlying life”. Once there, I was meant to transcribe an abridged version of the talk that would appear in the magazine along with my essay.
Agnes soon made it clear that the only time I’d be allowed to use a tape recorder would be to record this talk. The only time she let me take written notes was when she answered my questions about her paintings, since my piece was not to be about her personal life. But when I went to bed after post-dinner discussions that went on late into the night, I scribbled down whatever I could remember in a loose-leaf notebook, from the privacy of a camper van at the end of the driveway.
I’d forgotten about the existence of this notebook for decades until I found it in storage, alongside my correspondence with Agnes and the few photos she’d eventually allowed me to take with the Nikon that Coplans had handed me just before I got on the plane. I’d taken Polaroids before but had never used a professional camera. I was afraid everything would be out of focus.
All photos by Borden
*
Nervously stepped off the plane in Albuquerque. See Agnes. Short, with grey hair flecked in white. Softer looking than I’d imagined, her features less harsh. She is quiet during the long drive to Cuba in her old foreign sports car. Then she opens up. She talks about inspiration, about what she knew and what she didn’t. She speaks freely of her “madness”.
We stop off at the post office before continuing along the long bumpy road to her mesa. No houses along the way, just snow in every direction. At the top, the only buildings are those Agnes has constructed for herself: a stucco-covered one in which she cooks and sleeps, a wooden one she keeps for storage, an unfinished building she calls a “mushroom house”, a partial greenhouse, a privy, a camper – this is where I will sleep.
In the evening, we drink May wine and eat berries, a mince pie, and some of the gumbo that simmers all night and day on the burner. She keeps adding to it. She talks, on and on. I sense she likes me so I don’t want to push it by asking too many questions. She is original – (for someone who has been original all her life, I sure long for someone to tell me what to do.) She talks about periods of going crazy, periods spent in trance-like states, like being in a coma, about being in Bellevue, and having amnesia for a month and a half in India.
*
The next morning, we get up early (Agnes rises with the sun). We sweep freshly-fallen snow off the path from her hut to the camper. We have breakfast. She shows me several of the small grid paintings she’s recently finished, after having destroyed over 500. Every day we talk, chop wood, and take walks in the snow. Agnes is a mechanical whiz: she drives her own tractor, fixes up her saws. The temperature is below zero, but the cold here is clean and pure cold, unlike the hard, biting winter of New York City. I haven’t brought the right clothes so Agnes gives me extra layers. She has a truck and a sports car. We use her truck to get around the mesa, but drive the sports car into Taos for lunch at a Mexican restaurant with some old friends of hers: painters she knew from living there. She says she needs me there for protection because they pick on her. I think they’re envious of her success.
*
Agnes talks about her personal life in bits and pieces. She was at university for eight years. She worked in logging camps. She taught Spanish to Black kids, was a tough disciplinarian. New York was where she really became an artist, living and working on Coenties Slip around other serious artists. This is also where she started to go wrong. It became the difficulty of, taking something in the mind, like pride, and trying to hold it by the neck. When she could no longer do that, she had to go into retirement.
She says, that’s what success does to you. If she had kept on working in New York, she would have kept on drinking: artists often drink themselves to death.
When we talk about the collective unconscious she tells me that she bears the echoes of her ancestors in her ears. She has been an ape and a cannibal, lived both those lives. She had held these visions in her mind until she understood what they meant, back when she had fallen ill with a fever for a month and a half on Coenties Slip. She’d been sick from fear and had had to hold the fear in her mind until she could grip it. They put her in Bellevue because she’d seen what she was, what we all are, that we are weak and selfish. This is why we must admit we are weak. Suicide is a form of pride.
The problem with friends is that they grow too fond of you and are no longer honest.
An artist must be by himself (Agnes uses “he”, not “she”). He can be solitary or live in society if he doesn’t let it affect his work. Solitude for six months will drive anyone crazy, but it is good: it makes one face up to what one is. But, she says, it is even harder to live in society and not be hurt by it, to not become an alcoholic or be destructive in some other way.
Agnes talks about artists as if there were only a few “real” artists. The rest are not real. She can recognise a real artist when she sees him. She hates the word “genius” when applied to artists. A “genius” is an artist who never grew up, is erratic, can’t take care of himself. When I ask her what she means by a “real” artist, she reels off a handful of names:
Larry Poons, for example: Unconventional. Agnes likes the anti-naturalism of his work but also likes the justness of where everything goes in the grid paintings. She has great admiration for Warhol. While Agnes’s paintings show awareness of perfection, he paints what is common to everyone. The sounds she hears…Warhol captures some of that. He’s not ahead of, just reflective of.
Likes Calder, Reinhardt and Rothko. Reinhardt is a little person, like fairies and brownies.
Carl Andre: inspired, but doesn’t trust what he says. Talks too much.
Tony Smith: likes his grey rectangles.
Bradley Walker Tomlin: respects him. Not enough attention paid to him.
Josef Albers: too civilised.
*
As for her paintings, she had to eliminate everything and ended up with only horizontals and verticals. She doesn’t like diagonals: they are in space. She doesn’t want space. She used to paint the mountains, lightning and fire. She tried to make these paintings strong, then realised that what she liked was the plain, the horizontal line, without anything; the beach with no objects, just the ocean and millions of waves. Doing the rectangles, she saw that everything was nothing and thought of Isaiah: “Surely the people is grass.” Then she got prideful because that show was successful. She destroyed two shows after that. When she began working again, drawing lines, she discovered that what she liked best was the horizontal line, that it was the freest: no form, nothing. After that, that was all she did. Only some weren’t good, the scale was all wrong. She stopped looking at people, at the landscape. She went after the perfection in our minds.
*
Stretch five canvases and lay them against the wall. Think, and when inspiration strikes, paint one and then turn it to face the wall and do another, even if you have to stay in bed all day. I stay in bed because there I’m not distracted. Stay in bed until inspiration arrives. You can tell right away, in the first minute, whether the painting is successful or not. None of this nonsense about one part working and another part not. Either it works or it doesn’t. Bad paintings can destroy the goodness of others. Don’t get into the destruction of them. Destroying paintings is a form of passion.
*
She was anxious to die but now she no longer wants to. Dying is nothing. We go on is easy. You go on, there is nothing to it, it just happens. She is all right, now. No longer crazy.
She doesn’t like to be talked about – neither her life nor her work.
She’s against ego, is anti-sex.
She was raped four times when she was young but fell into a trance each time. She feels that sexual masochists aren’t awake when they’re going through that, that they first black out when threatened, are in a trance state the whole time and never know what happened.
She doesn’t speak of masochism as a possible sexual choice.
She talks about temptation. This is why I must sleep in the camper. It is not personal. But I am female, so I must.
*
Agnes on her tractor
When she was in New York, she had to put herself out of the way of temptation.
She has a strong ego. A masculine presence. Tells me the Indians on the mesa accept her as a man, take her where they would take no other woman.
She saw herself as a fellow cannibal and followed him around everywhere. He would go out and look for young women to eat and when he’d meet them, before he killed them, he would feel a kind of love for them. He would rub their intestines all over his body and drag them all over the place, but eating them was about love, not sex. Sometimes he’d look at his wife whom he loved and would be reminded of the lust he felt for his victims, but then he’d remind himself that it was his wife and this would pass. It was destiny that prevented cannibals from eating their wives, that prevented women from eating their children, even though women would sometimes want to eat their children. But they never got a chance to go after victims the way their husbands did.
When Agnes asks me whether I think people see her as a cantankerous woman whom everyone has to please, I say no, that people might just find it hard to argue with her because she has such strong convictions. She says she doesn’t have convictions but revealed knowledge.
Agnes says she is a vehicle for knowledge, that suffering is not to be pitied, that it is good, just like deprivation is good – there is a kind of ecstasy in both. A murderer is not to be pitied because he has got closer than other people to what we all want to do.
There is no such thing as helping others, all anyone ever wants is perfection. Everything else – family, friends – is purely incidental. This is how she’s managed to grab remorse by the throat. She stays away from friends, they cannot help her. Love is the desire to eat other people but to swallow them would be selfish. Ego is dangerous to the artist.
The only real love is impersonal: the drive for enlightenment, for everyone. Enlightenment for oneself alone would be ego. Sometimes she cannot bear to read the Chinamen – Lao Tzu, Du Fu, or Zhuang Zhou – or the Old Testament because it makes one believe Enlightenment is at hand, that one can just reach out and touch it, which just leads one into hope and back into pride again.
When I leave, she says, you won’t be too fond of me, will you? Let’s not be friends. Let’s be companions of the open road. She tells me to write the essay the way my inspiration tells me to.
*
Lizzie by Agnes
*
I send Agnes an early copy of my piece before it appears in Artforum. I receive a postcard from her.
A masterly report. I think you are a whiz. Very interesting and instructive for me. I even enjoyed the illustrations. You made a wonderful choice with them… It is just right just right like Baby Bears porridge first best understanding. Respectfully and Gratefully yours. Agnes.
*
In March, Agnes receives an early issue of Artforum with my essay and transcription of her talk, ‘Reflections’, and I receive an angry letter from her.
Artforum has printed:
[…] in our minds there is awareness of perfection;
when we look with our eyes we see it
and how it functions is mysterious to us and unavailable.
In her letter, Agnes has underlined her original statement:
[…] in our minds is awareness of perfection
when we look with our eyes we see it
and how it functions seems mysterious to us and unavailable.
Agnes has written in blue ink over her original typed statement…
Not right it is unavailable, that is the thing to say.
On the back of her statement, she has written, in blue ink:
You have failed old girl… I insist for both our sakes that the statement be exactly as it is recorded. Because artists are not understood they are continuously misquoted even when the words are the same. Consider how much more misquoted when the words are changed. I consider that to be lack of integrity in journalism, no matter how innocent. I warned you three times but you went your own way.
In black ink:
It was fated I guess in order that you would look to real journalistic practice which you never could learn by just being in your present position. What is the journalist’s ideal?
And last of all:
Well I am so grateful for my hotel reservation that I will take you to dinner if you have time.
Agnes means dinner when she’s in Philadelphia, for her lecture at the ICA.
Soon, another letter arrives. She has scrawled over the announcement card for her talk and taken curator Suzanne Delehanty to task for titling it, ‘The Underlying Perfection of Life’ instead of ‘The Perfection Underlying Life’:
[…] You see Suzanne did it too. I wrote “The Perfection Underlying Life.” She thinks it should be the underlying perfection in life but that contradicts what I will say. There is no perfection in life. We see it as perfect sometimes because of the awareness of perfection in our minds. Everyone wants to think that perfection is attainable. That is the sadness of life.
*
After I found my notebook, I wrote to Suzanne, now living in Miami, about what she remembered of Agnes’s visit. She, too, had kept notes.
She wrote that Agnes’s neighbour in Taos had taken her shopping before her trip, so she’d arrived in a “brand new, dark green, plaid, pleated Pendleton skirt and a new tan trench coat.” For her talk, Suzanne remembers that Agnes “spoke clearly with a slight tremble” and read her speech “written in her clear hand on the pale green line sheets of a stenographer’s pad, her cadence slow and steady.” At the dinner afterwards she was “convivial, surrounded by friends.” She enjoyed the hotel and flew home the next day.
Lizzie Borden is the director of Regrouping, Born in Flames and Working Girls. She is the editor of an anthology of writing by strippers, forthcoming from Seven Stories Press.