Here are some of my notions, premises, and observations regarding being an artist and a maker of book art:
- Although my art was originally a home-made 'pornography,' in the late 1980's and early 1990's, what I added to it — my annotations, musings about trying to read them as ciphers — undermined, bypassed the purely pornographic aspect of it. The visual esthetics of my drawings also transcended any simple notion of 'pornography' — in fact, obfuscated it completely.
- I could see my anger in my art. I am slow to rage. What is tamped down in me has found its venting here: grappling with aspects of selves in me, identities I scarce acknowledged existed. The many tableaus and panel illustrations (comics) were surprises to me. Meanings elusive — seemed plain looked at one way, but read another told me something very different.
- Decades of donating my art to the Kinsey Institute and to other archival libraries in Manhattan seem to me documentations of entanglement, a record of my grapple with what I've perceived as transgressing social, religious and legal issues. I was also getting a glimmer of how I bought into cliche stereotypes — that there was a kind of bigotry to what I'd bought into. Being turned on was one embarrassment, but accepting as given what I ought to have reviled was something else. Hard to explain. Not just about promiscuity, but how lust chooses sex partners, gender preferences. Insidious. In the world outside, men are coming out. Declaring their 'identities.' Who you are is decided by the gender role of whom you court — desire. Layers and layers of denial to cut through. Evasions galore, discoveries which I never thought had anything to do with me! And then, on being faced down by friends who knew me, refuting their discoveries as their (friendly) psycho-therapeutic take on what my art really means!
To good friends (not my enemies) the meaning of my art was plain and obvious.
I witnessed my work transcending all my and their incomprehension. If it were only about societal or sexual polemics. I'm grateful it was not. Quicksand. Ever-shifting. At rock bottom, it was the artist's esthetic miraculously prevailing. As simple as that.
The esthetic embodied in these drawings, the sheer delicacy and energy and calligraphy, the tactility and physicality of those pen lines! Its holistic spatiality! I was aware of having danced dances and performed them very beautifully indeed. I loved these things I'd made. My appreciation of them only deepened over time. It was something quite other and made no reconciling with the adolescent worrying as how it could be misread, misinterpreted, who shuddered with dread and worried what the neighbors or his family would do and say if they saw this stuff. (They would simply never be given the chance.) It would not be said I was some homo pornographer, or risk disgrace with my family and those of my in-laws. Nor cause my loving wife and daughter that sort of horror show!
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