sensibility jammed down our throats.
Itâs not that I begrudge Galella whatever cultural respect anyone wants to confer on him. Ron learned photography in the Air Force, then went to a commercial art college, while I went the fine arts educational route, where we learned early on to nurture our obsessions as the path to cultural respect. It was never precisely stated but simply understood that your obsessions were your bread and butter, your ticket to eventual gallery shows, and, somedayâhopefully before you were too old to enjoy itâreverential articles in Artforum and the attendant perks. The more obsessed you were, and the more committed to your weirdness, the more seriously people took you, especially the instructors.
I was doing some photography in those years too, though I never really mastered the technical stuff like exposure. For my final project in one class, following the tracks of my weirdness, I did something that in retrospect seems bizarre but proved to be the ticket to unimaginable success. I was living in San Franciscoâs Mission District, which also served as a landing strip for squadrons of the homeless and deinstitutionalized (though at the time they were still known as bums and winos), and somehow got the idea of asking one of these neighborhood habitués to come home with me and having him dress in my clothes, then photographing him for an installation project. There was an accompanying sound track Iâd written and recorded on the theme of brief encounters and dashed romantic illusions. The piece was called Brief Encounter.
I paid him of course, and he was pretty amiable about the whole thing, though looking back I donât know what I was thinking. I showed the piece to an influential visiting artist who was doing critiques of student work. She pronounced it unethical and reprehensible but also made a phone call that got me invited to a prestigious fellowship program in New York for budding artistsâIâd passed the âIs it art?â test with flying colors apparentlyâwhich eventually led to a grad school fellowship, then another fellowship, and then a teaching job. Looking back, I guess the homeless guy was sort of my Jackie.
Whatâs odd about it all isnât just the happenstance of how careers get off the ground, itâs realizing how much the themes of that piece continued to haunt my work, even after I drifted away from the art world and started writing books. When I came across the script for the piece in a box of papers from those years, there were lines almost identical to some in a book about love Iâd write twenty-five years later. Things turned out okay, I guess; still, I wonder whether Ronâs choice of muse was a little more propitious than mine. What does it say about our respective inner lives that his was a famously gorgeous woman and mine a local wino?
But that visiting artist was right: we exploit our muses and itâs not a two-way street. Itâs what Gast and Galellaâs other partisans resist acknowledgingâtheyâre eager enough to designate Ron an artist, yet want to sentimentalize away the aggression and egotism of art and make him cuddly. But itâs not exactly evident that being an artist and being an upstanding guy were ever one and the same thing.
Some of the Jackie images, out of his many thousands, were included in a 2012 retrospective of Galellaâs work in Berlinâthe exhibit is still traveling around Europe, speaking of artistic successâand in the sumptuously produced volume Ron Galella: Paparazzo Extraordinaire! that accompanied the show. Replete with admiring essays by a bevy of German critics, itâs a beautiful object in its own right: two hundred gilt-edged pages each the weight and thickness of shirt cardboard; 104 gorgeously printed black-and-white images with a running commentary on Galellaâs antics over the years. Though many of the original images were actually
Itâs not that I begrudge Galella whatever cultural respect anyone wants to confer on him. Ron learned photography in the Air Force, then went to a commercial art college, while I went the fine arts educational route, where we learned early on to nurture our obsessions as the path to cultural respect. It was never precisely stated but simply understood that your obsessions were your bread and butter, your ticket to eventual gallery shows, and, somedayâhopefully before you were too old to enjoy itâreverential articles in Artforum and the attendant perks. The more obsessed you were, and the more committed to your weirdness, the more seriously people took you, especially the instructors.
I was doing some photography in those years too, though I never really mastered the technical stuff like exposure. For my final project in one class, following the tracks of my weirdness, I did something that in retrospect seems bizarre but proved to be the ticket to unimaginable success. I was living in San Franciscoâs Mission District, which also served as a landing strip for squadrons of the homeless and deinstitutionalized (though at the time they were still known as bums and winos), and somehow got the idea of asking one of these neighborhood habitués to come home with me and having him dress in my clothes, then photographing him for an installation project. There was an accompanying sound track Iâd written and recorded on the theme of brief encounters and dashed romantic illusions. The piece was called Brief Encounter.
I paid him of course, and he was pretty amiable about the whole thing, though looking back I donât know what I was thinking. I showed the piece to an influential visiting artist who was doing critiques of student work. She pronounced it unethical and reprehensible but also made a phone call that got me invited to a prestigious fellowship program in New York for budding artistsâIâd passed the âIs it art?â test with flying colors apparentlyâwhich eventually led to a grad school fellowship, then another fellowship, and then a teaching job. Looking back, I guess the homeless guy was sort of my Jackie.
Whatâs odd about it all isnât just the happenstance of how careers get off the ground, itâs realizing how much the themes of that piece continued to haunt my work, even after I drifted away from the art world and started writing books. When I came across the script for the piece in a box of papers from those years, there were lines almost identical to some in a book about love Iâd write twenty-five years later. Things turned out okay, I guess; still, I wonder whether Ronâs choice of muse was a little more propitious than mine. What does it say about our respective inner lives that his was a famously gorgeous woman and mine a local wino?
But that visiting artist was right: we exploit our muses and itâs not a two-way street. Itâs what Gast and Galellaâs other partisans resist acknowledgingâtheyâre eager enough to designate Ron an artist, yet want to sentimentalize away the aggression and egotism of art and make him cuddly. But itâs not exactly evident that being an artist and being an upstanding guy were ever one and the same thing.
Some of the Jackie images, out of his many thousands, were included in a 2012 retrospective of Galellaâs work in Berlinâthe exhibit is still traveling around Europe, speaking of artistic successâand in the sumptuously produced volume Ron Galella: Paparazzo Extraordinaire! that accompanied the show. Replete with admiring essays by a bevy of German critics, itâs a beautiful object in its own right: two hundred gilt-edged pages each the weight and thickness of shirt cardboard; 104 gorgeously printed black-and-white images with a running commentary on Galellaâs antics over the years. Though many of the original images were actually
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