Bill Beckley and Narrative Art

Recognized as a pioneer of Narrative Art, Bill Beckley (Hamburg, Pennsylvania, 1946) was one of the first artists to use photography as a means of expression in the context of painting and sculpture, by juxtaposing images with writing.

This book, edited by Studio Trisorio, Naples, tells the evolution of his work through a selection of more than one hundred works of art and is enriched by critical texts of David Carrier and Andrea Viliani. Furthermore, in an insightful conversation with Laura Trisorio, Beckley retraces the salient phases of his career and describes some of his most iconic works through anecdotes that embellish the story and reveal the working method of a conceptual artist.

Bill Beckley’s works are in the most prestigious international museums and art collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and Sammlung Hoffmann in Berlin.

BILL BECKLEY AND NARRATIVE ART

Bill Beckley

To my sons Tristan and Liam, To my dear friends Laura Trisorio and Gianfranco D’Amato, In memory of Pasquale Trisorio who I last saw walking in late afternoon sunlight, beside the bay of Napoli

Bill Beckley and Narrative Art

The Word-Image Riddle and the Aesthetics of Beauty

“Bill Beckley” David Carrier

Chapter One – Entry Points

Chapter Two – The Word-Image Riddle

Chapter Three – The Aesthetics of Beauty

Chapter Four – Neapolitan Holidays

Works

From the 1960s to the 1970s

From the 1970s to the 1990s Stems

Neapolitan Holidays, 2019

Florilegium: A Story of Art, as Told to Us by Bill Beckley Andrea Viliani

A Conversation Bill Beckley Biography

“Bill Beckley”

David Carrier

Chapter One Entry Points

We’re looking at Myself as Washington (1969). This small black-and-white photograph shows Bill Beckley dressed up in formal, old-fashioned clothing with talcum powder sprinkled on his hair. It’s a seemingly straightforward picture with a familiar subject. Every American school child has seen Gilbert Stuart’s various paintings of George Washington. And so, initially it’s not hard to recognize what’s going on here. Beckley made a photographic self-portrait imitating one of those paintings. In truth, however, the young Beckley doesn’t look very much like those images of Washington, who is shown as a much older man. Sometimes movie actors transform themselves elaborately to play roles. But here Beckley doesn’t try to elaborately make himself up. And so it’s unclear how to understand this image. Without the title it wouldn’t make sense. Reflection is required to make sense of Myself as Washington

President Washington was famously supposed to have said, “I cannot tell a lie.” Since this statement itself is, so it turns out, a lie concocted by an early nineteenth-century writer, maybe it’s appropriate that here Beckley has constructed a photographic visual lie. At least, that’s the case if we take him to be George Washington. Remove the title and we have here a photograph involved with play-acting. Then, considering the artwork to be the photograph plus its title, we have what might be an allegorical commentary on late 1960s American politics. When Richard Nixon was elected, questions of lie telling by the American presidents were very much in the news. From Washington to Nixon, leftists said that too often presidential lies were as American as apple pie. Maybe, then, Beckley is making an elliptical political statement about the untrustworthiness of American presidents. They tell lies, as does his photograph.

Fourteen years after Beckley made this photograph, my first book, co-authored with Mark Roskill, Truth and Falsehood in Visual Images (1983) took up this very topic, the relationship between true statements and falsehoods in art. And so, it’s unsurprising that I was (and am) much taken by this photograph. As a young conceptual artist, Beckley makes a sophisticated statement. To identify Myself as Washington as a visual falsehood is suggestive but misleading. More exactly, it’s false if you wish to be clearer. For Beckley doesn’t present himself being our first president,

but rather truthfully says that he is posing as Washington. No lie is involved. He doesn’t aim to deceive us into thinking that this is a photograph of Washington. It’s an image of Beckley engaged in an act of pretending.

Still, this implied assertion itself, “I show myself as President Washington” is, once we reflect, surprisingly complicated, at least if we take it in a literal minded way. Here we have a form of visual metaphor, treating one person, in some way, like another. Given the photograph of Beckley and the title, we look for similarities between Beckley and George Washington. As Arthur Danto says in his treatise of aesthetics, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981), metaphors set the viewer’s mind in motion, asking that we identify these similarities. That’s a natural way of understanding the significance of the word “as” in the title. Beckley asks that we seek similarities between his appearance and that of our first president. Were the work’s title Myself as Wittgenstein, we would simply be puzzled, for Beckley doesn’t look anything like that philosopher. But Beckley dressing up with his clothing and hair so that he looks a little bit like Washington. He is, if you will, like an actor who plays someone that he could not readily be confused with.

Myself as Washington works as an artwork because there are some vague similarities between the appearance of the two men. Both are white male adults. Beckley couldn’t plausibly present a photo entitled Myself as Mao. But maybe he looks a little like a very young George Washington, as we might imagine him. After all, the Stuart Gilbert paintings portray the president as an older man. As I said, metaphors ask us to look for similarities. When Andy Warhol did the photograph Self-Portrait in Drag (1981), he cross dressed to play that part. A person can be said to be like a donkey if they’re stubborn, like bamboo if they’re supple or like an oak tree if they’re unyielding. But being told that a person is like a light bulb is a conversation stopper, because it’s not easy what similarity is being identified. Similarly, to spell out this point, titling Beckley’s photograph Self-Portrait as a Woman would be puzzling, for he isn’t in drag.

Here it may seem as if I am commenting rather elaborately on an inherently simple photograph. And so refusing to play the game involved here in play-acting. Myself as Washington is the sort of goofy gesture that a smart young art student might make. A party invitation may say: “Come as some historical figure.” That’s the kind of game Beckley is playing. Like any good joke, it’s easy to understand but (maybe) hard to explain. Four years later, in Cake Story (1973) Beckley puzzled over the commonplace truism: “You can’t have your cake and eat it too.” Why, he asked very reasonably, would anyone have that desire, which is obviously contradictory? Here we ask another question: Why does this joke about Washington work? So far as I know, it hasn’t been much written about. And so we have to look and think for ourselves.

What makes this Beckley photograph art is, in part, the fact that it readily solicits so much discussion. Artworks exist, at least nowadays, to be interpreted. A passport photo normally just functions as an ID. No discussion is required, unless it’s a fake in a spy film. The function of Myself as Washington, it might be said, is to engage reflection. It’s no accident that Beckley would go on to teach semiotics, for even here at the start of his career we see that he was

Myself as Washington, 1969 Black and white print 20 × 16 inches (51 × 41 cm)

engaged with such linguistic concerns. Note, to take just one point, his use of the indexical pronoun, “myself,” in the title. Indexical words, “here,” “now” or “me” are tricky because their reference depends upon who is making the statement when and where. The same photograph with the title Bill Beckley as Washington would be a rather different work of art. That title indicates that it’s Beckley speaking who is to be seen as Washington. At least that’s the case if we treat that title as akin to a statement. Beckley’s title, with the indexical pronoun makes it seem that whoever makes the statement is seeing themselves as Washington. And that, like the statement about both having and eating your cake doesn’t quite make sense.

In the late 1970s, Cindy Sherman became famous for her photographic self-portraits involving play-acting. These Untitled Film Stills have been much written about. Some commentators thought that they allude to recollected scenes in particular B-movies. When that turned out not to be the case, some interpretations focused on the psycho-analytic implications of role playing by a woman. Perhaps her art was making a complex statement about gender. Women, she may be saying cannot escape role-playing. And when Richard Prince employed photographs of Marlborough Man cigarette advertisements, it was possible to look for suggestive comparisons with cinematic male role-playing. Beckley’s early photograph turned out to be part of what became an American tradition. When recently Kehinde Wiley, an artist who is African-American, presents Black youths play-acting in poses adopted for old master European painting, he works within that ongoing tradition.

By the time that Sherman and Prince took up play-acting photographs, Beckley had moved on. As we’ll see, finding a novel theme, developing it and then advancing quickly has often been his style. And since my present concern is to describe the creation of conceptual art at this time from a perspective focused on his art, Myself as Washington is a good starting point. Let’s start by placing this work historically.

Why was it the case that Myself as Washington was presented as an artwork only in 1969? Black and white photography had existed for more than a century. And so it would have been physically possible for some earlier artist to make this work. Often in art history it’s interesting to trace precedents. When was the first monochromatic work made? The first abstract painting? The first pure European landscape, as opposed to the landscapes that are behind sacred narrative scenes in Renaissance paintings?

What ultimately counts are not isolated innovations, but getting the art world to take seriously novel art forms. And premature innovations are impossible to understand. To cite one important case, when Duchamp presented Fountain (1917) and the other readymades, they gained little attention; not until the 1960s was the art world ready for these works. Nadar (1820–1910), the great French photographer whose career overlapped with that of the Impressionists, certainly had the skill to make such a self-portrait, say Myself as Napoleon. But in the art worlds of Manet, Seurat or early Matisse, it’s hard to imagine that such a gesture would have been received with interest. Nadar was acquainted with Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), who was mischievous enough to have commissioned a photographic portrait called Myself as Napoleon. But the art world of his day wasn’t ready for that work of art.

Could conceptual art like Myself as Washington have been done in NYC in 1948? In Paris circa 1910? In Rome around 1520? The further we move away from the moment when it was actually made, this becomes harder and harder to imagine. Could Poussin have been doing some conceptual art on the side? Might he have made a joking painting Myself as the King of France (1640)? I think that claim’s impossible to understand. Conceptual art couldn’t have fitted into seventeenth-century Roman artistic life because too much art had to be made before it was comprehensible. Here, then, let’s spell out what was needed.

Around 1969 conceptual art was born in New York. Three concerns are important here for our account of this birth. We will discuss the idea of an entry point, that historical moment when a new artist enters the scene and learns what is possible. We will use the concept of the artist’s brief, as developed by the art historian Michael Baxandall. The brief is the artist’s intended goal, which may be as specific as the Renaissance commission for a portrait with donors identified, or as vague as the command famously given to Pablo Picasso: “Astonish me.” And we are interested in the concept of an art world, that community of artists, critics and dealers that the artist joins. These three concepts will do lots of work.

Thanks to Lucy Lippard’s magnificent Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, originally published in 1973, we have a record of a great many artists who can be associated with conceptual art. And more recently a number of historians have described this movement. This book is something quite different. An historian of this movement would need to consider a large number of artists. Since, however, our book is about Beckley, we focus on him, with side references to other artists. As will become clear, the details of his challenging development soon became entirely singular.

An artist enters an ongoing art tradition, responding to some of his predecessors and, if successful, creating a response amongst his successors. The Shape of Time (1962) by George Kubler, a book famous amongst artists of Beckley’s generation, describes what I will call an artist’s entry point, that moment when she or he enters the art world. This, to say the same thing in revealingly different words, is what’s involved with calling art making an essentially historical activity. What you can then accomplish and how you can accomplish it is a function, to some degree, of what tools are available in your visual culture. Artistic success requires making effective use of your entry point. Choice is involved, for you cannot do everything. Focus is required. And to choose one option is often to exclude others.

Kubler was a specialist historian of the Spanish-speaking world, but his analysis proved to be of significant general interest. Since my account will focus on Beckley’s art world, it’s useful here at the start to briefly note that Kubler’s account is relevant to some of the old masters and the modernists as well as also to contemporary art. In some ways as regards entry point, Nicolas Poussin’s situation when he arrived in Rome, the center of the European artwork in the 1620s was not so different from Édouard Manet’s experience in 1840s Paris, or Beckley’s in 1970s New York. (Of course, the art itself was very different.) There had been in the recent past a grand tradition. Many varied options were on the table, and so the situation of a young artist was exciting and challenging. Just as Poussin could look back on the High Renaissance,

and Manet at the achievement of Delacroix and Ingres; so Beckley knew that the recent American tradition had been very rich. Deciding what to do next was difficult. And in all three cases, the recent development of the art world meant that there was potential patronage for young artists.

To focus just on the American situation: once the market was established for the Abstract Expressionists, and then in the 1960s for the Pop artists and the Minimalists, it was natural for dealers and collectors to ask what was coming next. In this situation, two thoughts are likely to occur to a young artist entering the art world: success is going to be demanding, given the high level of previous art; and, since this recent tradition involved radical innovation, probably that will continue to be the case. And, of course, there is sure to be competition. Many believe that they are called, but only a few are chosen. Early on, the conceptual artists rebelled against making high priced commodities. Soon enough, however, some of these artists were embraced by the art market, which needed to identify novel art forms.

It’s useful, next, to distinguish between the larger history revealed in the art museum and the history of the immediate past, the works of direct relevance to a young artist. For Beckley Frank Stella’s early black paintings, circa 1959, were very important. Some artists, including Stella himself, saw these pictures as developing the Abstract Expressionist tradition. But it was legitimately possible, also, to see them as marking the end of that tradition, or even the entire tradition of painting. Once art was made by applying black paint in wide regular linear patterns, perhaps that was as far as the art of painting could go. On that reading of this history, the next step was conceptual art.

There’s an important distinction here between such potentially influential precursors and earlier other significant works, which, for one reason or another, are irrelevant to a young artist. Beckley was not interested in doing painterly abstractions, like Willem de Kooning; nor in making Pop works like Andy Warhol. Nor, to look at much earlier art, did he seek to do to cubist portraits like Pablo Picasso or history paintings like Nicolas Poussin. Those prior traditions were simply irrelevant for his immediate practice, however much he might have admired some of this art. We are describing Beckley’s entry point circa 1969. Nowadays of course, the passage of time means that the entire situation has changed. If in 2021 some young artist is taking up the concerns of early Stella, then that artist will have to respond in some way to the large body of work, including some by Stella himself, that has engaged with these ways of thinking. And, also, there are complicated cases of doubling back, as when in 1990 Elaine Sturtevant appropriated Stella’s black paintings, remaking them within her oeuvre, opening up room for a new interpretation of these now canonical works. But Beckley has never been interested in doing appropriations.

An interesting example of crossover of art worlds occurred in the 1980s, when two very different abstract painters, Frank Stella and David Reed took a serious interest in seventeenthcentury, Italian, baroque art. They were not making altarpieces, but the use of space and color in this sacred art was relevant to their works. And Hilma af Klint made both traditional landscapes and radical abstractions. Imagine finding that Beckley had done figurative works on the side.

Would we think him a divided soul because he would be an inhabitant of two different art worlds? I’m not sure. Such crossovers can be tricky to understand.

Mere temporal proximity does not, in itself, determine an artist’s sources. Often artists are most interested in work of their immediate successors. But sometimes they look further back historically. Bob Thompson (1937–66), an African-American painter who at one time lived and worked in Italy, made Poussin one of his key sources, but working in ways that decisively reflect the influence of modernist figuration. What options are available at a given entry point depends, in large part, upon an artist making personal choices from amongst the traditions. And only after the fact is it apparent which were the most promising such choices. Kubler describes how there are better or worse entry points, depending, in part, upon the match of the individual talent with the potential of the tradition. For a painter with figurative skills and interests, 1969 was an unhappy entry point, while for someone with conceptual skills, it was ideal. At least, that’s obvious now after the fact when we observe Beckley’s success.

The phrase “art world” is typically used to identify the community of people interested in the making, interpretation and display of art. Understood in such broad terms, which can be useful, everyone involved with any sort of visual art is part of the art world. Here, however, I adopt a much narrower denotation. For our present purposes an art world consists of that much smaller group of individuals who share more parochial concerns or a sense of how to proceed. As we shall see, the larger art world consists of a number of such smaller art worlds.

In some ways, these art worlds can be productively compared to religious groups. Just as a Catholic can argue about Christian theology with other Catholic believers, but perhaps not with Buddhists or Muslims; so, a conceptual artist can critique and evaluate works by other artists in that community, but not so readily with those from other contemporary or past communities. From Beckley’s viewpoint, for example, however interesting is the recent development of abstract painting, it’s mostly irrelevant to his concerns. And as we’ll see in chapter four, when we get to Caravaggio’s art world, Beckley admires that artist’s paintings whilst acknowledging that their concerns are very distant. It’s very unlikely that he will make a photographic altarpiece. Sometimes there is a certain drama when someone leaves an art world community, as happened when the eminent Minimalist painter Jo Baer decided to abandon abstraction; or, when Philip Guston left abstraction to do his late figurative paintings. Here perhaps there are analogies to a religious person losing their faith.

That said, this analogy between art world and religious communities needs to be used with some care. It’s obviously impossible to be a Catholic believer and a Muslim, because those two religions have opposed beliefs. And so while a non-believer might find, say, Thomas Aquinas an important philosopher with marvelously well-developed arguments, by definition such an outsider would not be a member of the Catholic-community. It’s one thing to admire his claims and another to accept their implications and become a believer. But for an art critic, at least, it’s possible to admire contemporary works coming from diverse communities.

Some such smaller art world groups can be face-to-face communities. In 2012 the upscale art dealer David Zwirner organized an exhibition with catalogue 112 Greene Street: The Early

Years (1970–1974) that provides a good picture of Beckley’s early art world. When Beckley entered this Manhattan art world, SoHo living lofts were large and very cheap, the market in conceptual art had hardly developed, the conceptual artists were young, and bold experimentation was possible and called for. And that these artists had rough, post-industrial spaces encouraged the development of installations. It was a good time and place to make funky art. Needless to say, that has now all changed radically. That within forty years a grand dealer supported an exhibition including some of these artists from 112 Greene Street indicates the magnitude of the change. Zwirner recreated the rough textured world in the posh spaces now fashionable in upscale galleries.

112 Greene Street reveals many promising artists. Gordon Matta-Clark’s architectural deconstructions, which made active use of the decayed New York architecture, became famous. And a number of these artists, including Beckley, became highly successful. But many of them have disappeared. In that way, this near contemporary art world was like Caravaggio’s Rome in the 1590s or Poussin’s in the 1620s, where, as recent exhibitions have revealed, there were many good painters who did not become well known.

Needless to say, patronage such as Zwirner’s is a double-edged sword. Thanks to this support, the artists could support themselves by selling their works or teaching. And their art becomes well known and much written about. But the gentrification of New York made bohemian lives like those of the pioneering conceptualists impossible, and so it destroyed the conditions of such a community. In this situation, nostalgia is a bad guide, for the entire world economy has changed too much to make going back to the past possible. If the art world is to continue, the next generation will have to learn how to form communities in a very different environment.

A community is a group of people in touch, one with another. And often the function of the art school is to put people in touch with one another. In an art world like Beckley’s where change was rapid, teaching traditional skills was not helpful; he didn’t want to learn to paint like Stella. What art schools, where the faculty come from the previous generation, can teach may be limited. You might say: students need to learn what skills to reject, for that’s the key to moving on.

Let’s place Myself as Washington historically. A photograph like this could, as we said, have physically been made much earlier. But the work of art, photograph plus title, Myself as Washington could, I think, only have entered the art world, the conceptual art world, in 1969. Earlier I spoke of the art world as being ready for a work of art. Just as a person should arrive at an appointment neither too early or rudely delayed, so the same is true of an artwork. The right moment is usually apparent only in retrospect, after the world sees what an artist makes of his entry point.

You might call this early Beckley an imaginary portrait of George Washington. As we’ll see some decades later he took a great interest in Walter Pater’s Imaginary Portraits (1887) a collection of fictional biographies of historical figures. This blurring of the line between historical fact and fiction has remained an important concern for Beckley. It’s characteristically original for him to take an interest in an English literary figure not much discussed in the contemporary art world, and to find a way to employ his concerns in his own art.

Beckley’s description of the origin of this photograph involves an elaborate story. He was painting lines in a Pennsylvania field. When he tried to draw them across the Delaware River, the rushing current took away his paint can. Coming to shore, he found a plaque identifying this as the spot where Washington crossed that river. He celebrated by staying at the George Washington Motel in Pennsylvania and by chopping down a cherry tree. In his photographic narrative works he will develop numerous such shaggy dog stories.

What are we to make of this good story? Perhaps it’s as fictional as Pater’s account of Watteau, as presented in the imaginary diary of a woman who was in love with him. If you think about it, the idea of trying to paint a flowing river doesn’t make sense. Sometimes, of course, it’s a mistake to think about art’s anecdotes too hard, for it destroys the pleasure. Maybe it’s appropriate that Carter Ratcliff, an art writer who is fascinated by the fictions of writing, records this mischievous story. Why, still, does he date this 1969 work to 1971? Is that another fiction? And it seems apt that Beckley is a great reader of Vladimir Nabokov’s fiction, which often plays with alternative realities. To be an aesthete is, perhaps, to see the potential of such fictional realities.

If an artwork is too far ahead of its time, then it may be incomprehensible. In 1855 a Nadar photograph of Baudelaire Myself as Napoleon would, at best, have seemed a puzzling gesture. Such a photograph could have been made, but the art world wasn’t ready for it. And, conversely, if an artwork is too far behind its time, likely it looks derivative. At least, of course, unless some young Beckley student made a photograph Myself as Washington (2021) as an appropriation, or homage to his teacher, responding to his work as Sturtevant did to Stella’s black paintings.

To say, then, that Myself as Washington (1969) entered the art world when it was made is to write a promissory note, a claim that we can offer a plausible historical narrative. There are many histories of conceptual art. Because it became an international movement, with many active participants, a full account would need to be elaborate. Here, however, very briefly, I cash that note, offering the sketch of an account of the origins of conceptualism focused on Beckley. For those purposes I simplify some details, foregrounding discussion of some important philosophical concerns.

Imagine a young artist coming to New York in the late 1960s who in art school has studied the history of modernism in close detail and so has some understanding of the recent history. He knows that recently Marcel Duchamp’s readymades have belatedly become much discussed and influential. He is aware that although some of the Abstract Expressionists continue to paint, that movement belongs to the relatively distant past; and, also, that Pop Art and Minimalism of the early 1960s is now well established. What this history teaches, he knows, is that there is a premium on radical innovation. By 1969, it’s too late to become an Abstract Expressionist, Pop artist or Minimalist, for those positions are well occupied. Belatedness is unlikely to be promising.

This young artist is inspired by his art school study of theorizing to plot his future. Often, he has learnt, new significant work is made by “going further.” Abstract artists went further when they eliminated the subjects of traditional figurative art. Earth artists like

Dennis Oppenheim went further; instead of depicting their sites, they acted directly to modify these landscapes. And monochrome artists went further when they abolished or abandoned traditional composition. Needless to say, that’s a tricky phrase, “going further.” Most such “furthers” are unproductive; only a few yield success. That said, one reading of the history that this artist might adopt looks to a tradition defined by the readymades, Carl Andre’s plates, Andy Warhol’s silk screens and Donald Judd’s boxes. His aim, then, is to extend this tradition. This was Beckley’s reasoning as now spelt out.

Here is a line of thought justifying this procedure. Traditionally there were two parts to art making: the mental part and the physical part. An artist planned what to do, making drawings or sketches, and then physically executed that plan. In principle, then, the two portions of this activity could be separated. And in some cases, after the artist had done the planning, the execution might be left to someone else. Sometimes, for example, Michelangelo made sketches for paintings executed by other artists. And a number of famous old masters, Rubens and Luca Giordano to name two, had an army of studio assistants. They prepared the canvas, organized the studio and sometimes did the less important parts of the paintings.

When then we get to contemporary art, in some prominent cases the physical part of the activity could be delegated because it was of secondary importance. Warhol’s assistants worked with his silk screens, and Judd farmed out the manufacture of his works; it was Warhol’s concept of working with those photographic images and Judd’s designs for three-dimensional works that mattered. This division of labor goes along with a related development, the deskilling of art making. The influential American art critics associated with the leftist journal October have discussed this concern. In place of “traditional emphasis on virtuoso draftsmanship and painterly finish,” we find “the marks of manual labor.” The dividing line between industrial production and art manufacture was often abolished. In their different ways, Warhol and Judd were involved in deskilling. To speak of deskilling is to identify this transition from manual to physical art making activities.

This process of going further can be tricky, for of course it’s possible to go too far. Imagine someone who, observing that traditionally artists began by establishing a studio, proposes to do just the first step, engaging a studio and nothing more. That person perhaps has not done enough to make art. I say “perhaps” because now there is a tradition of exhibiting empty galleries, showing displaying nothing but that space itself; and so, perhaps having an empty studio could also count as making art. Imagine, for example, that the artist uses the space to develop concepts for artworks.

Or let’s tell a slightly different story. Why not, this young artist thinks, go one step further. If what’s most significant is the artist’s mental activity, then why not skip the physical labor entirely? Why not simply provide some record of the idea and identify that record as the artwork?

A great deal of conceptual art follows exactly that plan. Indeed, Beckley’s Song for a Chin-Up (1971) is one such example. He composed a very short song to accompany chinning, and hired a singer to perform that work whilst chinning himself. And although he made the self-portrait

for Myself as Washington, to some degree that artwork employs the same general way of thinking. A photograph of yourself is easy to make. It wouldn’t matter, I think, if Beckley had hired a photographer, for it was the idea, the concept that showed Beckley’s visual intelligence. Here a brief discussion of my personal background is useful, for nowadays art worlds include not only artists, but also art critics. And so knowing a little about my practice as critic will help us understand this account of Beckley’s artistic development. In the 1980s when I started publishing art criticism, I initially focused on a particular contemporary art world, that of the younger abstract painters. For these artists, the concerns of the grand Abstract Expressionist tradition were a given. The slightly older abstractionists, Brice Marden, Robert Mangold and Robert Ryman, esteemed seniors, came from a different world. The conceptual artists had very different concerns.

The leading younger abstract painters I met in the 1980s included Thomas Nozkowski, David Reed and Sean Scully. For them the critical question was how to develop a way of painting that had come under critical attack. The three of them responded in very diverse ways to these attacks. But for all of them the account of the birth of conceptual art that I’ve sketched was entirely beside the point. The concern with the distinction between the intellectual and physical acts of making, like the whole account of deskilling didn’t provide them useful guidance. Whatever their personal interest in conceptual art, they really faced different concerns. What Duchamp, Andre, Judd and their successors were doing was essentially irrelevant. They really had a different view of history, for they were in another art world.

Some moralizing critics insist that only one way of making contemporary art is legitimate. For them there is only one art world. Often that’s how practicing artists think, for if you’re an abstract painter, looking at the history and options of conceptual art is just distracting. It’s important, however, as an art writer to adapt to a multitude of standards, a variety of criteria. In my experience the richness of the present artistic life lies in the variety of contemporary art worlds, which co-exist. What defines an art world positively is a shared sense of what visual concerns are worth taking seriously. And, negatively, since for members of one such an art world, the concerns of other art worlds are essentially irrelevant. Right now, to take an extreme case, icons continue to be made for Orthodox churches, but the world of icon makers has little connection with the contemporary art gallery world.

Here having a community is important for validating your activity. Joachim Pissarro has discussed the ways in which for such different artist-pairs as Camille Pissarro (his great grandfather) and Paul Cézanne and also for Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg the sharing of ideas is essential. We are only generalizing that account. What’s fascinating and problematic about outsider artists is that they often lack such a community. Having a community is linked to a certain sense of objectivity. Just as I know that you see the same objects as I do, so within one of these communities, discussion reveals that you and I identify the same problems. At 112 Greene Street many other young artists who had similarly concerns validated Beckley’s pursuits. Such validation is especially important for young artists, who need to sort out their influences.

As an art writer who has written about diverse periods and places, I’m very aware of how the critical agenda varies from one community to another. We Poussin scholars have a wellestablished agenda, a starting point for ongoing research. Two generations ago Anthony Blunt established a paradigm, which has been extended and challenged by more recent scholars. Making a distinction between study of Poussin’s intellectual concerns and study of “Poussin as an artist,” he offered a suggestive framework. Thus, one recent Louvre exhibition argued that in fact Poussin was, contrary to Blunt’s analysis, a seriously religious artist. And a recent book, Poussin as a Painter: From Classicism to Abstraction (2020) by Richard Verdi supplements Blunt’s analysis. As its title indicates, its thrust is an examination of Poussin the painter. Both of these revisionist interpretations thus employ (and critique) the general established ways of proceeding, which have very little to do with the concerns of contemporary artists like Beckley.

If you look just one generation earlier at the Roman art world, when Caravaggio entered that scene, you find a strikingly different perspective. Poussin did, of course, famously denounce Caravaggio, that destroyer of painting, but by his time, the late 1620s, Caravaggio’s immediate influence had been effectively spent. And if you look elsewhere at other periods that I have written about, Jacques-Louis David’s Paris in the late eighteenth-century or Manet’s art world in the mid to late nineteenth-century to mention two examples, the research agendas were strikingly different. For the writer, as for the artist, there are many different art worlds, generally with strikingly different concerns.

“My work arose from the Minimalist Art of the late 1960s. At that time, the medium of painting was experiencing a crisis. Conceptual artists painted directly on the landscape or their own bodies. While attracted by them, I found it disturbing their work depended on documentation. What I wanted in my works was that the photograph be an object of art and not a documentation of art. In 1969 I took a photograph in the likeness of George Washington. In considering this work I thought: ‘This is not documentation, this is clearly invention. I am not George Washington.’ That’s when I started my narrative work.”

Works From the 1960s to the 1970s

Painted Shrubs for Sol LeWitt, 1969

Painted shrubs

C-print

16 × 20 inches (41 × 51 cm)

Painting with Blue Aquares, 1968 (wall)

Painted Bushes for Sol LeWitt 1968 (floor)

C-print

13

Twigs Painted White, 1969

Painted branches

C-print

13 × 19 inches (33 × 48 cm)

Vertical Horizon, 1969

Painted branches

× 19 inches (33 × 48 cm)

From Sunrise to Sunset Looking West at Midday, 1969 36 inches wide × ½ mile (0.91 × 805 m) line painted on fields from sunrise to sunset C-print

13 × 19 inches (33 × 48 cm)

From Sunrise to Sunset (sunrise), 1969 36 inches wide × ½ mile (0.91 × 805 m) line painted on fields from sunrise to sunset C-print

19 × 13 inches (48 × 33 cm)

Washington’s Crossing, 1969

Photo album, postcard, ink on lined paper 13 × 12 inches (33 × 30.5 cm)

Six Minute Paper Punch Lines April 21, 1969

Ink and graph paper

4 × 22 inches (10.2 × 56 cm) each sheet

Song for a Chin-Up 1971 Performed by a student from The Juilliard School, NYC

Song for a Chin-Up, 1972 Photocollage and pen on cardboard 20 × 29.7 inches (51 × 75.5 cm)

Song for a Sliding Board, 1971 Performed by a student from The Juilliard School, NYC

Turtle Trumpet 1971

Performed by Bill Beckley

Brooklyn Bridge Swings, 1971

Installation view at the Brooklyn Bridge, NYC

Study for Short Stories for Popsicles, 1971 Wrapper, silkscreened popsicle stick and strawberry flavored popsicle 12 × 16 inches (30 × 41 cm)

Silent Ping Pong Tables, 1971 Installation view at John Gibson Gallery, NYC (top)

Short Story for Hopscotch 1971 (bottom) 104.7 × 108 inches (266 × 275 cm)

The Origin of And 1972

Black and white prints with written text 30 × 80 inches (76 × 203 cm)

An Avoidance of Ann, 1972 Black and white prints with written text 28 × 42 inches (71 × 106.7 cm)

Chapter Two

The Word-Image Riddle

However satisfying were his early black paintings, Frank Stella soon wanted to move on, developing more complex compositions, adding other colors. Analogously, while Myself as Washington was a brilliant invention, obviously Beckley could not be satisfied with repeating that picture, in the way that Stuart Gilbert repeatedly did his painted portrait of George Washington, because it was much in demand. Myself as Washington was a great one-shot conceptual work.

Beckley’s Cake Story (1973), which comes four years later, is a two-part artwork, a photograph of one piece of cake on a table and, below, a full paragraph long printed narrative about eating cake. When we see words within a visual work, it’s natural to connect them to the image. Sometimes, as in cubist collages, these words are physically on objects depicted in the painting. Often, also, Chinese old master ink-on-paper landscapes had both images and calligraphy. And in other Western art, the artist’s name is written out. Here, however, it’s natural to think of Beckley’s words as a separate element spelling out the significance of the photograph, in the way that our earlier account of Myself as Washington provides an interpretation of that photograph. We see a photograph of a piece of cake and read a story about someone eating cake. It’s revealing that we use two different verbs to describe our one activity, responding to a single presumably unified artwork.

Upon reflection, however, the statement below this piece of cake offers what is certainly an odd statement. Beckley’s narrative is built around the commonplace saying, “you can’t have your cake and eat it too,” one of those statements whose very banality is a little puzzling if you stop to ponder its meaning. Consider a simple variation on this statement, “you can’t have your cash and spend it too.” True enough, but who would say that? Or, “you can’t drink your wine and save it too.” That’s also true, and also too obvious to need to be said. There’s something in this statement about trying to have your cake and eat it too that hits the spot, so to speak. Substituting cash or wine for the cake doesn’t achieve the same result.

Gustave Flaubert built his last, never-completed novel, Bouvard and Pécuchet, around received ideas, clichés like this saying about eating cake. He thought that their repetition in print demonstrated the idiocy of contemporary journalism. And so Flaubert loved to collect these examples of stupidity, and make fun of people who used them. That on some occasions most of us

repeat clichés doesn’t necessarily demonstrate stupidity. After all, even great creative writers need now and then to repeat themselves or speak in commonplace ways. But Cake Story is an artwork, and so it promotes critical analysis even of a silly statement.

Sometimes foolish repeated ideas can be funny. “A quarter of an hour before his death, he was still alive.” Would that it were my creation! But that remembered example of a foolishsounding cliché comes from Jean-Paul Sartre’s critique of Flaubert’s book. You’d have to be a little thoughtless to say that. And yet, “you can’t have your cake and eat it too” is only slightly more sensible. If someone asks you, “can you eat your cake and have it too?”, it would be natural to doubt their intelligence. Or, maybe at least, to question this speaker’s mastery of the English language. If someone asks, “what does that chocolate cake taste like?”, then their question is sensible. But if they ask, “can you eat your cake and have it too?” it’s not quite clear what they’re really asking. Do they propose to eat their cake and then see if they still have it? Who could want to try to do that?

As Beckley’s narrative rightly notes, it’s natural to ask why someone would have what he calls “the double desire of having and eating a cake.” But what then is really strange is his proposal to order a cake “trying to resolve this question,” as if this was the description of an experimental question. If someone says that they want to learn whether you can carry water in a sieve, one might tell them: try it! Beckley’s question seems as preposterous, which is to say that this “double desire” is a nonsensical non-starter. But why, then, does he propose to order a cake to resolve it? If someone asks you, “is it true that a rolling stone gathers no moss,” you don’t tell them to find a stone and roll it to check.

In Cake Story this obviously silly question, what Beckley calls a double desire, is put in context, in a narrative about loss. The narrator, who is alone on his birthday, has recently been in Rome, not alone, staying near the Pantheon. We get a two-sentence description of that well-known monument. And the narrator remembers dinners with someone, who isn’t identified. These words fit together in a way that naturally allows us to construct a little story. Like most of us, the lonely narrator, who doesn’t like being alone on his birthday, remembers other happier times with companionship in Rome. It’s customary to have cake on your birthday. And so, as he says, he orders cake and broods. In this context, “Can you have your cake and eat it too?” then maybe sounds like a question about the difficulty of sustaining relationships.

Here, as any scholar of rhetoric will immediately notice, I’ve fallen into a trap, a real pratfall organized by Beckley. We’ve not been told by him that the authorial “I” is unhappy. Nor, to spell it out a little more, do we know that traveling with someone made him happier, or, indeed, made a difference at all. We may imagine he traveled because he is involved in a love affair. But perhaps the travels were with a sibling, a parent or a child who had to go home. And in truth, in any case, this narrative framework doesn’t really explain why the narrator broods about this commonplace saying. Traveling with someone can be great or miserable or great-then-miserable. But what has that to do with brooding about “having your cake and eating it too?” Proust’s great novel written in part in the first-person is about a character perhaps named Marcel who is very different, in some ways, from Marcel Proust the author. (Unlike Proust the author, he is straight and has no siblings.) Even to identify the narrator as “he”, as I have done so far, is a questionable assumption.

Cake Story, 1973

Black and white and Cibachrome prints 32 × 20.5 inches (83 × 52 cm)

After all, women too travel and they too may have cake for desert. Here, as in Myself as Washington, the indexical pronoun does a lot of work, aesthetically speaking.

In any case, there’s no reason given to think that this is a truthful autobiographical narrative about its author, Beckley. After all, Cake Story is an artwork. We don’t think that this picture shows a piece of restaurant cake photographed on Beckley’s birthday. So why believe that the written words must be truthful? In verbal as in visual art lies are permitted. By definition, fiction is not true. Here, it will seem, in focusing on the words we’ve gotten further and further away from the photograph of the cake. Let’s go back, then, to link this discussion to our account of Myself as Washington. In identifying that photograph as an artwork, the philosopher Alexander Nehamas has observed to me, it’s arguable that our analysis was slightly misleading. What is an artwork is the photograph plus its interpretation, such as we provided. Minus that interpretation, all we have is a photograph involved with role-playing. Which, also, is what we have in the upper part of Cake Story. Taken alone, the photograph just shows a piece of cake; without the words, there’s no story. This shows that our analysis needs to interpret the words.

Beckley’s development in the four years between Myself as Washington and Cake Story no doubt was an intuitive process, one that I reconstruct now in bookish art historical terms. Rather quickly, at the start of his career, Beckley made interesting art. But that first development, satisfying as it seemed, was, upon reflection, incomplete. For, while Myself as Washington was an artwork, that photograph’s status as art could only be understood with reference to some theory of art, which was made explicit by Beckley or by his commentators. What really was the artwork, then, was Myself as Washington plus some written commentary. Beckley needs the collaboration of a writer who offers an interpretation to create that work. Of course, he could play that role of the commentator himself, as he has done in response to my recent queries. But there’s no record of it immediately available in the artwork itself.

Here it’s possible and interesting to briefly situate Beckley’s development within a broad historical perspective of Western art history. In his Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550) Giorgio Vasari tells a funny story about the minor Florentine painter Buonamico Buffalmacco, who was active 1315–36. Asked for help by a simple-minded colleague, Bruno di Giovanni, who had difficulty making his figures appear lively, Buffalmacco “made him paint some words issuing from the mouth of the woman who is supplicating the Saint, and the answer of the Saint to her.” Here, the great contemporary Vasari scholar Paul Barolsky notes, we find the invention of the modern comic strip. Much later, in the early twentieth-century visual artists made works combining words and images to tell stories. But starting in the early Renaissance, in general European painters expelled words from their pictures. There was a widespread belief that painting should communicate using just images, without any need for words. And so, adding words to paintings is a device roundly ridiculed by various later scholars, including the famous modern connoisseur Bernard Berenson.

Barolsky has written repeatedly about the role of fiction in Vasari’s writing. Maybe this story about Buffalmacco is Vasari’s invention, a mere fiction, but whatever its truth, it’s a good explanation of why words were expelled from Renaissance painting. Whatever the truth of this story, I am saying, a very strong sense had developed that visual art should communicate using

just visual terms, leaving words to literature. The formalist ideal that each art should be pure, making use of only the concerns proper to its medium, is a modernist updating of this traditional belief. In Clement Greenberg’s famous account, not just written words but also storytelling should be left to literature, allowing painting to become an abstract art. This is why, to pick up Barolsky’s point about comics, theorists soundly scorned that art form. To tell stories with a combination of words plus images was to make art as if the pictures alone did not suffice. Comics are a bastard, impure art form, meant for children or adults with poor reading skills. And that’s why in the 1950s, comic books were attacked for combining words and images to tell their stories.

This story of the word-image relationship continues into the present, for what often defines post-modernism is the admission of words into the picture space, as printed or painted distinct visual elements. And Beckley’s combination of photograph plus written narrative in Cake Story is merely one of many recent variations on this theme. It would be easy to compose a long book devoted entirely to these examples of visual art using words. Such varied recent figures as John Baldessari, Mel Bochner, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha and Christopher Wool use words, sometimes alone on the canvas, sometimes like Beckley in conjunction with images. Because this practice is so familiar, I doubt that Beckley needed to be inspired by reading Vasari to add a text to his artworks. Cake Story and Beckley’s other storytelling works are part-and-parcel of the distinctive recent visual tradition. And so, he didn’t need to look far to find validation for his general way of proceeding. Just as Myself as Washington could only be recognized as an artwork at a moment when conceptual art was developed; so Cake Story achieved success only when many visual artists were involved with presenting words. Cake Story could have been made once photography existed. Physically speaking, it could have been made in 1880, but no one would have understood it then as an artwork. As we said in the previous chapter, entry points matter. Yet, what this general analysis leaves marginal is our primary concern, namely the focus on Beckley’s distinctive personal development. The danger of generalized survey art histories is that they too easily fail to do justice to individuals. Baldessari, Bochner, Prince, Ruscha and Wool developed very differently from Beckley. As we’ve presented this narrative, it might seem as if Beckley merely needed to move an interpretation into the artwork, as if adding a panel with words describing Myself as Washington by quoting the account we provided would resolve the problem. With the added words, its identity as a proper conceptual artwork would be secure. But already our account of Cake Story has revealed why there needs to be more here to the discussion.

Our words in the previous chapter about Myself as Washington aspired to be a truthful interpretation. Any errors about facts were purely unintentional! But the words at the bottom of Cake Story are, so we have seen, artful fiction. Beckley’s narrative is one part of that twopart conceptual photographic narrative, not an explanation or interpretation of that artwork. This conclusion should be unexpected, for after all they are components within an artwork. Now we have a two-part work: the concept, as revealed in a photograph; and the text. But whereas in conceptual art the narrative came from a critic, now, provided by the artist, it was internal, as it were, to the work. Cake Story is a two-part work, photograph plus fictional narrative. It is, in the positive sense, a bastard artwork, a visual work and literature both at the same time.

And that means that we need to analyze it using the skills of both art historians and literary critics. Let’s begin by looking at its literary significance.

Often novels come with an editorial disclosure, reminding the reader that they are fiction. Before the text of the recent English-language translation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1955 The Street Kids, an editorial note reads: “This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.” The novel, set in the proletariat life of boys in suburban Rome, a scene frequented by its author, who in 1975 was murdered, perhaps by some boys like those he loved, names many real places in that city. And the fictional characters are, one assumes, much like the boys Pasolini knew. But that novel is a fiction.

Occasionally, however, fiction presents real people, identified as such. Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time presents artworks, people and places close enough to reality that it has inspired repeated, book length searches for its sources. All in vain, for as Proust explains explicitly at one point, in his novel everything is invented, the paintings of Elstir, the music of Vinteuil and much more. With one exception: He presents a touching story of nationalist familial devotion, the account of a privileged older couple who, during the Great War, come after the death in combat of its young owner, to manage a café day for night. Thanks to such self-sacrifice, we are told by Proust, France survived. Here I deliberately don’t give a textual reference, for if you don’t know this magical long novel by heart, then I urge you to read it in search of this great brief scene. Just as a large painting will sometimes include a small self-portrait of its artist, so here Proust introduces a tiny element of reality into his elaborate fiction.

In general, however, the convention, which Cake Story obeys, is that when a narrative is presented within an artwork, then usually it is fictional. Of course, a visual artist also could choose to reject that convention. Indeed, one important group of recent literary productions blurs the line between fiction and prose with true narratives. But, as we have seen, the little story Beckley tells is a fiction that needs to be interpreted. What gives Cake Story its unity is its conjunction of a playful photograph and a first-person narra<tive story about playacting. Precisely because the words enter into an artwork, they are fictional, unlike our merely prosaic interpretation in the previous chapter of Myself as Washington. And yet, the real world and what I am calling the world of art are not entirely distinct, but overlap. George Washington existed and so does the piece of cake photographed for Beckley’s artwork. Proust’s imaginary art, places and people are rooted in reality, and so, also, are Beckley’s words in Cake Story, which describe a real place, the Roman Pantheon.

The most poetic description known to me of this relationship between fictional and real worlds is found in the novels by an author much admired by Beckley, Vladimir Nabokov, who loved to construct alternative worlds. And the Nabokovian novel of most immediate relevance for our present purposes is Pale Fire (1962). That book, like Cake Story, is a two-part artwork, a relatively short poem and relatively long commentary. At first blush, the commentary seems entirely mad, a story which has nothing to do with this relatively banal, apparently straightforward poem. This novel has inspired an army of commentators. Nabokov, it is often said, was parodying the academic industry of literary criticism, which he despised.

The commentary in Pale Fire tells about an exile from Zembla, an imaginary kingdom, which has maybe some similarities with Nabokov’s lost Russia. The title comes from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens: “The moon’s an arrant thief, And her pale fire she snatches from the sun” (Act IV, scene 3). And the commentator, Charles Kinbote, cannot recognize that Shakespearian allusion because his Shakespeare text is an (imaginary) Zemblan translation of Shakespeare’s plays. A further twist in the story, so I have argued in my previously published account, consists in the clear explanation of how that translation was carried by the commentator from Zembla to this world. The Nabokovian lesson is that when texts move from the world of art to reality, so called, their identity is changed, but in recognizable ways permitting an attentive reader to chart their passage. Zembla, Nabokov’s fictional creation, is linked to this world in which the poem “Pale Fire” is written. People and also books like the Shakespeare text of Timon of Athens can move from one world to another, changing in the process.

Knowing that Kinbote is reading Shakespeare, we can recognize the source of the title of the poem, “Pale Fire.” Those words are in the text of Timon of Athens. Nabokov’s procedure, here and elsewhere in his fiction, is something more than a clever authorial trick, it’s a statement about the nature of fiction in art. And, so I am suggesting, this novel helps us understand Cake Story. To apply this way of thinking to our present discussion, when an interpretation of a conceptual work moves from the world of prose interpretation into that artwork, it changes. This, then is why Beckley’s statement that appears in the lower portion of Cake Story is a fiction, not an interpretation of the photograph. And what this means for us is that an interpretation of that twopart artwork must deal with both word and image. Here, I hasten to add, I am not imagining Beckley to be a Nabokov-scholar though, as I have said, he has a long-standing interest in the novelist. Rather, I am thinking of him as employing in his own visual art a Nabokovian way of thinking in this conjunction of picture and text. The idea that the borderline between truthful narrative and fiction is porous is often seductive.

We need, then, still to interpret Cake Story, taking into account both photograph and words. Here it will help to look at a second Beckley example, another photographic conceptual narrative created the next year. De Kooning’s Stove (1974) shows, on the right, the photograph of a stove with one burner on, and on the left panel a narrative by Beckley about Willem de Kooning and stoves. Beckley’s text has in effect two parts in its one long paragraph. There is the story that de Kooning was afraid of a blank canvas, and so liked to write the name of something in his studio on that canvas. The note adds that there were two kinds of Abstract Expressionists, those like de Kooning and others Beckley admired more, who were precursors of minimalists and conceptualists. Those artists in the latter group would include Barnett Newman, who later, as we will see in the next chapter, became important later to Beckley, and of course Stella, who, as we have seen, had been important for him earlier. Beckley’s text says that he removed all the furniture from his studio, except for the stove, which he uses to keep warm. And his chair, which we see reflected in the shiny red stove.

In a more complicated way than is the case with the narrative in Cake Story, this too is a nonsensical narrative. Since it comes a year later, it’s possible to legitimately imagine that Beckley refined his mastery of this technique. Again, let’s start by being oddly literal minded.

Assuming, as they say, for the purposes of argument!, that the story about de Kooning’s fear of the blank canvas is true, why in the world would that artist have emptied out his studio in response to his fear? How, I wonder, would that procedure have helped him master that fear of putting something on the canvas? And why, given that Beckley, as he says, admires other different Abstract Expressionists more, would he, too, have emptied out his studio, except for the stove, which the narrator says that he uses to keep warm. Why then would Beckley imitate de Kooning in this way? None of this, neither the story about de Kooning nor about the narrator makes any sense.

Here too, as in the story about eating cake and Rome we have nonsense accompanying a photograph, which is a sort of illustration of the words. And, again, also, we have a firstperson narrative which need not be about Beckley. No doubt Beckley has visited Rome and so it’s likely that he saw the Pantheon. So the narrative in Cake Story has some roots in reality. And for all I know, perhaps sometimes he traveled with someone and at other times alone. A similar account maybe is true of the narrative in De Kooning’s Stove. Many de Kooning stories have been told. Beckley, too, has a studio and when very young he did paint, so maybe he too had a stove. But so far as I know, he doesn’t need to turn on the stove to keep warm in the studio where he makes photographs. And even if his studio is sometimes too cold, the story of de Kooning’s fear of the empty canvas doesn’t seem to be relevant to Beckley’s working procedure.

Again, of course, the “I” here, the person making this statement doesn’t need to be identified with Beckley himself, for this text too, like the one in Cake Story, is another fiction. The question, then, is how to understand De Kooning’s Stove. When, over the years I’ve looked at Beckley’s artworks from this period, I’ve often thought of how they are close to being funny. Close but not quite funny. His narratives remind me of some of the jokes involving illogic that Freud analyzes. Consider one from his Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905). A rabbi at Cracow cries out that the rabbi in Lemberg has just died. However, when people from Lemberg arrive at Cracow, they reveal that in fact this rabbi is still alive. In response, one of the Cracow rabbi’s disciples says: this “makes no difference… Whatever you may say, the Kück (distant view) from Cracow to Lemberg was a magnificent one.” Freud’s making fun of rabbinical wisdom is a very Jewish tradition. And, analogously, maybe Beckley is joking about de Kooning. Both stories, it seems to me, are almost funny. But here of course, as always one’s response to humor is personal. When I taught philosophy and discussed psychoanalysis, I needed examples of jokes. Then I discovered that many of Freud’s jokes were very much an acquired taste. First Jew, “Did you take a bath?”; second Jew, “Why, is one missing?” That joke only makes sense if you know that poor Eastern European Jews, who didn’t have bathing facilities in their homes went to the public bathhouse. Obviously, a bath, unlike a jar of gefilte fish say, isn’t the sort of material thing that one can steal. But many of Freud’s Jewish jokes need some explanation if they are not to seem simply nonsensical. We often make sense of the nonsense in jokes, Freud argue, by recognizing the role of aggression. The two jokes I’ve presented are both good examples. To laugh at a joke, he implies, is to interpret it, by acknowledging how it permits us to say something that if said in so many words would be simply hostile. This, of course, is why the goyim should resist trying to tell Jewish jokes. But we non-artists can tell de Kooning jokes.

Joke about Elephants 1973 Black and white prints 25 × 18 inches (63.5 × 46 cm)

Another Beckley, Joke about Elephants (1973) seems a commentary on this situation. It contains the photograph of a piano and a narrative about the story: “How are elephants and storks alike” Answer: they both can’t play the piano. The narrator says that initially he didn’t find this joke funny. But then after his piano technique improved, he came to understand such humor. Again, the illogic is transparent. There’s no reason to think that improving your piano technique helps you understand jokes about playing the piano. And it’s obvious why neither elephants nor storks can play the piano. That’s too obvious, surely, to need any explanation.

Whatever we make of Freud’s theory, what by contrast is revealing here about Beckley’s nonsense is that it isn’t funny, at least, not in my experience. In some of his narrative paintings, Richard Prince writes clichéd psychiatrist jokes, which are intended to be funny. Such humor often, of course, involves hostility to psychoanalysis. But Beckley’s stove story isn’t hostile to de Kooning. It’s slightly silly, a bit of nonsense, which is close enough to sense to be puzzling, but not, on reflection, clear. Here, as is also the case with the narrator of Cake Story, it’s puzzling to realize that the narrator’s mental processes are illogical, as certainly were de Kooning’s. Many artists were much inspired by de Kooning, but so far as I know none of them were inspired to remove the studio furniture except for their stoves. Maybe that’s Beckley’s point: making art is inherently illogical. Often de Kooning’s recorded conversations had a charming illogic. Here maybe, as with George Washington, a literally false story may be revealing.

This story about de Kooning’s fear of the blank canvas, which leads into an account of the two schools of Abstract Expressionism, is a short shaggy dog story. Maybe that phrase “shaggy dog story” is an oxymoron, for by definition shaggy dog stories are supposed to be long! More recently Beckley has published some longer shaggy dog stories. The source of this illogic is worth identifying. I mean: It’s not really clear what this account of that artist’s desire to look at a stove, or some object depicted on the canvas, has to do with Beckley’s desire to have a stove in order to keep warm. Here, as often with jokes, with such statements one feels oddly literal minded, foolish in fact, in spelling out the meaning, which doesn’t make sense.

In the 1990s, two decades later, Beckley happened to find in a used bookstore a late nineteenthcentury book that intrigued him, Walter Pater’s Imaginary Portraits (1887). Although known to academic scholars, Pater’s book is not one likely to be read by contemporary artists. But Beckley was fascinated, and so reprinted this volume with his new introduction, in 1997. His reprint offers a subtle characterization of Pater’s prose. Pater’s imaginary portraits, fictional accounts of real individuals, use this supplementary information to provide an interpretation of that person’s work. Often biographers add surmised information to enrich the story. Pater makes the implications of that procedure explicit, by making it clear that his stories are of imagined lives based upon real history. In particular, “A Prince of Court Painters” is an imaginary portrait of Jean-Antoine Watteau (1686–1719), the great, relatively short-lived French painter.

Relatively little is known about Watteau’s life. In an essay published in 1856, the brothers Goncourt, champions of old regime painting, published what they claimed was an old missing life of Watteau. Building upon that account, Pater’s life is an imaginary diary by the sister of another painter, Jean-Baptiste Pater, his namesake. She is imagined by Pater to be in love with Watteau. Watteau, she argues, depicts that world with such grandeur “partly because he despises it.”

To understand Watteau’s subjects, you must know, she says, that he always remembered once being a poor boy, who was outside of this grand world. This is a plausible speculation. Pater’s imaginary life makes sense; it isn’t funny. Beckley offers in De Kooning’s Stove an imaginary, almost nonsensical portrait of that artist, supplemented with a photograph. But unlike “A Prince of Court Painters,” it doesn’t claim to be possibly true.

How complex De Kooning’s Stove is! This short narrative and simple-seeming photograph inspires a whole chain of reflections about semiotics. And our analysis has barely begun, for each point here could be developed at much greater length. Beckley has developed numerous satisfying variations on this theme, narrative photographic art. Combining words and images allowed telling funny stories, as Cake Story (1973), and erotic scenes such as Bus (1976). Clearly this was a marvelous form of art making that might have been extended indefinitely. His prior development from conceptual to photographic narrative art was occasioned, I think, by the felt insufficiency of the conceptual works lacking, as we have noted, the supplement of a narrative explanation. But here that problem had been solved.

And yet, Beckley’s ability to be self-critical meant that there was more to come. Beauty had been expelled from his art. But since ultimately he wanted beauty, not just humor in his art he needed to bring it back. Beckley’s reprint of Imaginary Portraits included a related short story published separately, “A Child in the House.” As Beckley explains, that essay gave him some ideas about how to bring beauty into his art. Pater turned out to be an essential resource.

“1969 marked the beginning of my so-called ‘narrative art.’ I was basically writing a story and taking pictures at the same time. The text evolved with the photos. Some of the works didn’t have text, but they were still narratives. In the 1980s, I used various materials, and my work became more sculptural and pictorial. By the end of the 1980s, I had found a way to integrate these materials with photography. The integration of photography and pictorial surfaces is an important aspect of all my works.”

Works

From the 1970s to the 1990s

De Kooning’s Stove, 1974

Black and white and Cibachrome prints

41 × 61.8 inches (104 × 157 cm)

Roses Are, Violets Are, Sugar Are, 1974

Cibachrome prints

37.4 × 89.8 inches (95 × 228 cm)

Paris Bistro 1974

Cibachrome prints

73 × 40 inches (185 × 102 cm)

Circle Line, 1974

Cibachrome and black and white prints 40 × 120 inches (102 × 305 cm)

The Elevator, 1974 Cibachrome and black and white prints 65 × 120 inches (165 × 305 cm)

Snake Story 1974

Cibachrome and black and white prints 30.5 × 20 inches (77.5 × 50.8 cm)

Rabbit Turtle, 1974

Black and white prints

38 × 205 inches (96.5 × 520.7 cm)

Sad Ending, 1975

Cibachrome and black and white prints

23.6 × 78.7 inches (60 × 200 cm)

Drop and Bucket, 1975

Cibachrome prints 187 × 60 inches (475 × 152.4 cm)

Cibachrome

40 × 90 inches (102 × 229 cm) and

60 × 150 inches (152 × 381 cm)

Hot and Cold Faucets with Drain, 1975 and 1994

prints

Mao Dead 1976

Cibachrome and black and white prints 40 × 120 inches (101 × 304 cm)

Boat, 1976

Cibachrome and black and white prints 40 × 120 inches (102 × 305 cm)

Bus, 1976

Cibachrome and black and white prints 80 × 90 inches (203 × 229 cm)

Elements of Romance, 1977

Cibachrome prints

40 × 120 inches (101.6 × 304.8 cm)

The Bathroom, 1977

Cibachrome and black and white prints 51 × 120 inches (130 × 305 cm)

The Living Room, 1977

Cibachrome and black and white prints 50 × 120 inches (127 × 304.8 cm)

The Kitchen, 1977 Cibachrome and black and white prints 110 × 80 inches (279.4 × 203.2 cm)

Roses Are, Violets Are, Sugar Are, 1978

Cibachrome prints

96 × 135 inches (243 × 343 cm)

Rising Sun, Falling Coconut, 1978

Cibachrome prints 120 × 40 inches (305 × 101 cm)

Shoulder Blade, 1978

Cibachrome and black and white prints 120 × 40 inches (305 × 101 cm)

100

Deirdre’s Lip, 1978

Cibachrome and black and white prints 70 × 120 inches (177.8 × 304.8 cm)

Pipes and Hics 1980

Cibachrome prints and aluminum pipes 107 × 87 inches (272 × 221 cm)

Cah Beneath the Grass, 1980

Cibachrome prints and aluminum pipes 105 × 92 inches (267 × 234 cm)

Cherubs V.S. Saucers 1985 Mixed media on Arches paper 41.3 × 29.5 inches (105 × 75 cm)

History of Handles and Spinning Wheel of Fortune, 1985 Mixed media on Arches paper 41.3 × 29.5 inches (105 × 75 cm)

Peaches, 1985

Mixed media on Arches paper 41.3 × 29.5 inches (105 × 75 cm)

Mixed media on canvas

73.6 × 32 inches (187 × 81.5 cm)

Mixed media on canvas

73.6 × 32 inches (187 × 81.5 cm)

Gardens of Pompeii, 1986

Gardens of Pompeii, 1986

House of Pompeii, 1986

Mixed media on canvas

73.6 × 32 inches (187 × 81.5 cm)

Villa of the Mysteries, 1986 Mixed media on canvas 60 × 40 inches (152.5 × 102 cm)

House of the Red Capitals, 1986 Acrylic on canvas 60 × 40 inches (152.5 × 102 cm)

BiPlane or How to Tie a Bowtie in Four Easy Lessons 1987 Plywood, rubber, black and white prints 120 inches (304.8 cm) wingspan

Bess Truman Having Tea with Her Friends, 1987 Black and white prints, plywood, cloth and rag dolls 51 × 60 inches (130 × 152 cm)

Sunday Paper, 1987 Black and white prints, plywood, cloth and wood 51 × 60 inches (130 × 152 cm)

Frank (Homage to Frank O’Hara) 1987 Black and white prints, wallpaper, piano leg and “The New York Times” (all from the same day) 80 × 120 inches (203 × 305 cm)

Front Porch, 1987

Photographs, ferns, and screen 60 × 192 inches (152 × 488 cm)

The Juggler, 1990 Cibachrome prints, plaster, lead and snake skin 96 × 96 inches (244 × 244 cm)

Study for # 5 of Seven Sins, 1991

Mixed media on museum board 39.7 × 32.2 inches (101 × 82 cm)

Study for # Seven of Seven Sins, 1991 Mixed media on museum board 39.7 × 32.2 inches (101 × 82 cm)

Study for # 3 of Seven Sins, 1991

Mixed media on museum board 39.7 × 32.2 inches (101 × 82 cm)

Study for Apple Pie, 1991

Mixed media on museum board 39.7 × 32.2 inches (101 × 82 cm)

Study for Chopsticks, 1991

Mixed media on museum board 60 × 40 inches (152.5 × 102 cm)

Study for Fish Fry # 3, 1991

Mixed media on museum board 39.7 × 32.2 inches (101 × 82 cm)

Bloody Mary, 1994

Cibachrome prints, felt and bronze with patina 29 × 60 inches (73 × 152 cm)

Mixed Drinks: Margarita (Gabon, Mexico, United States), 1994 Cibachrome prints, cloth and bronze with patina 29 × 60 inches (73 × 152 cm)

Niçoise at Sunrise, 1997

Cibachrome prints

54 × 109 inches (138 × 278 cm)

Down the Drain “Weeping Woman,” 1997 Wood construction and Cibachrome print Ø 90 inches (229 cm)

Down the Drain, Black, 1997 Wood construction and Cibachrome print Ø 90 inches (229 cm)

Chapter Three

The Aesthetics of Beauty

Up to this point, so we have seen, Beckley’s conceptual art was heavily involved with innovative uses of words. His distinctive works shared this concern with a great deal of contemporary art. Myself as Washington needed an accompanying text to be an artwork. And Cake Story and his other conceptual photographic narratives incorporated texts directly into the visual work, which then still required written interpretation. But the art we will now consider, his photographs of beautiful flowers involved the apparent escape from this reliance upon words. These works were highly original, and so were our discussion needs at the start to deal with two distinct questions. Why did Beckley develop this new interest in beauty? And given that interest, why did he make photographs of beautiful flowers? To answer these questions, we start by looking at his amazing literary activities. In the 1990s Beckley edited four books, and wrote introductions to all of them. This writing informed his art.

Beckley’s own turn to beauty circa 2000 seems to me doubly determined. He rebelled against the refusal of the mainline contemporary New York art world to deal with beauty. And in response, in part to his readings of Pater and Ruskin that caused him to reflect critically on his own aesthetically impoverished upbringing, he became fascinated with visual pleasures. A 2015 essay in ARTnews presented photographs of his art-filled SoHo home, with its displays of works by Sol LeWitt and some other artists he admires and knows. LeWitt was a conceptual artist, but some drawings including those in Beckley’s collection are dazzlingly beautiful. Beckley, it was clear, had become an aesthete. And so his art reflected that major personal development. Rejecting the Puritanism of conceptual art, starting in 2000 Beckley made color photographs of beautiful flowers.

In 1998, in collaboration with David Shapiro Beckley published Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics, an anthology of recent writings, with his substantial introduction. Beckley’s book offers us both a practice and a theory of contemporary beautiful visual art. He discusses various interpretations of beauty. Which essay is most relevant to his art? Uncontrollable Beauty leaves that question open. And soon he also edited Sticky Sublime (2001), a second anthology. And here, incidentally, in a gesture that would suit one of his favorite authors, Vladimir Nabokov, his introduction alludes to the narrative that we discussed in the previous chapter, in our account

of Cake Story: “Now, you can have your cake and eat it too.” I think that Beckley is saying: his beautiful flowers resolve the interpretative dilemmas posed by that earlier visual narrative. If we look at his photographic narratives with the eyes of Ruskin, Pater and a reader of Beckley’s anthologies, what’s missing is beauty. Now, then, beauty enters his art.

For our purposes, the cover of Sticky Sublime is revealing. Sticky Sublime has on the cover a detail from Jeff Koons’ Puppy (1992), his gigantic sculpted puppy whose steel frame supports a forty-foot high display of flowering plants. Koons was an old friend of Beckley. In 2000 Koons’ Split-Rocker a planter filled with flowers composed of two enlarged toy rockers, was installed as a temporary public sculpture at Rockefeller Center. Puppies and flowers- what more sentimental subjects are imaginable? But the art world was changing. Just as Duchamp didn’t pick just any artifact for his readymades, so Beckley didn’t choose just any beautiful subject for his photographs. He didn’t photograph beautiful men or posh cars or grand houses. And he didn’t use just any vegetation. Had he used photographs of other growing things, say green beans, pumpkins or weeds he would have created quite different artworks. Like Koons, he was interested in flowers and in making beautiful works. But to understand their shared interests, we need to say a little bit about aesthetic theory.

As we have seen, in the 1990s Beckley republished Walter Pater’s Imaginary Portraits. In this period, he also republished another major Victorian book of aesthetic theory, John Ruskin’s The Laws of Fésole (1877–79). Beckley was not attracted just to contemporary writings, but also to this writing at some historical distance from the immediate present. Literary scholars have devoted much attention to both Ruskin and Pater, but they are not regular subjects for art writers nowadays. In the late nineteenth-century, Ruskin was Pater’s great English rival. From our present perspective, however, the intellectual differences between these two rivals are less significant than their shared concerns. Both of these important theorists write and theorize about issues and using rhetoric that now are dated.

Ruskin, the great champion of his friend Joseph Turner (1775–1851), argued that his landscapes, which may look like proto-abstractions, are truthful depictions of skies and waters. And later in his life, Ruskin passionately praised the Pre-Raphaelites. In his Introduction to The Laws of Fésole Beckley says: “For Ruskin … art is a way to appreciate nature through learning how to express it. Ruskin was suspicious of the new medium of photography, because he believed photography bypassed the efforts of observation. Drawing, on the other hand, is work …”

Here, then, we see the vast distance of Ruskin from our present visual culture. Ruskin was born in 1819, before the invention of photography; in his lifetime, many critics argued that photography could not be a legitimate art, a claim that is not often made nowadays. But since Beckley himself is a photographer, and not especially interested in appreciating nature, what use could he make of Ruskin’s aesthetic?

As for Pater, his great essay “The School of Giorgione” (1877) in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry is an historical account, perhaps anachronistic in its viewpoint, of that Renaissance painter. In arguing that Giorgione’s Venetian painting, like music, achieves a perfect unity of form and content, Pater developed an analysis that anticipates some concerns of modernism. Pater’s account, also, was part of a developing interest in carpets, an important

Heroin Trade in Afghanistan (Lineup), 2008 Cibachrome print

77 × 48 inches (196 × 122 cm)

concern for some visual artists at the time. But, again, his arguments are not much discussed by present day art writers. Unlike Ruskin, Pater had only a limited interest in or experience of contemporary art. It had long been suspected that although Pater never refers explicitly to Charles Baudelaire’s seminal account of modernism, that he made use of that discussion. More recently, however, the literary scholar Patricia Clements has demonstrated that in fact Pater appropriated phrases and ideas from Baudelaire in one of his Imaginary Portraits. And yet, unlike Ruskin (or Baudelaire), Pater doesn’t explicitly discuss contemporary artists. And here, again, his immediate concerns are distant from Beckley’s.

Traditionally aestheticians have treated beauty and the sublime as distinct, kindred subjects. Beautiful things are pleasing because they are attractive, while the sublime creates pleasurable terror. While offering in his introductions many suggestions about the importance of beauty and the sublime, Beckley leaves open their application to his own art. The commentator needs to decide, then, how to use these tools, Beckley’s four introductions, in his republications of Pater and Ruskin and his anthologies devoted to beauty and the sublime, and the texts they present, to understand his works. And that is not an easy task when there is so much varied writing at hand.

I know of no contemporary artist who provides his commentators with so much exciting material. Beckley makes interpretation of his art a richly rewarding challenge.

In his Introduction to Uncontrollable Beauty Beckley attributes his initial awareness of the importance of beauty to reading of Dave Hickey’s The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (1993), a book whose accessible, unbookish argument made it widely read and reviewed. A short selection was republished in Beckley’s anthology, and then another selection appears in his book about the sublime. At this time a number of other writers, including Arthur Danto who also is included in Beckley’s first anthology, and some other academics who weren’t, wrote about beauty. Indeed, in 1996 I published High Art, Charles Baudelaire and the Origins of Modernism, a book that began by presenting and critiquing his theory of modernist beauty. Hickey was an art critic, not an intellectual historian. And so, although his collection of graciously written essays discusses some old master art, it is best read, as obviously intended, as a polemical intervention in writing about contemporary art, and not an attempt to present a comprehensive theory of beauty. For our present purposes, however, a brief historical perspective on the visual aesthetics of beauty will be suggestive.

If we look at the origins of aesthetic theory within the German philosophy of Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790) and Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics (1820s), we find a close identification of visual art with beauty. (Kant) “Aesthetic art, as a beautiful art, has the reflecting power of judgment and not mere sensation as its standard,” (Hegel) “These lectures are devoted to Aesthetics. Their topic is the spacious realm of the beautiful; more precisely, their province is art, or rather, fine art.”

Traditional aesthetic theory was much devoted to identifying and analyzing beauty. Most successful visual artworks were often said to be beautiful. And so to define beauty promised to aid in also defining art. But then a great deal of post-modernist art rejected this tradition.

Nowadays no one thinks that a visual artwork must be beautiful. Indeed, the conceptual artists of Beckley’s generation aspired to banish beauty. And his photographic narratives were certainly not beautiful. But around 2000 he made beautiful photographic works. And so we need to understand that change. Beckley tells a great story about the origin of these beautiful

photographs. He saw a florist’s shop near his home and admired the flowers. And so he went to his studio and photographed similar flowers. I believe him. Maybe, however, that experience was only part of the story.

Within modernism, certainly from the early twentieth century onward, the continuing concern with beauty is accompanied by the insistent presentation of unbeautiful work. Hal Foster’s influential anthology The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (1983) presented and theorized a great deal of new art that was not beautiful. Around the 1920s one saw both Henri Matisse’s beautiful odalisques of the 1920s and the often aggressively ugly German expressionist paintings. And Pablo Picasso’s 1930s beautiful portraits can be contrasted to the anti-aesthetic art of Dada and Surrealism, and also to some of Picasso’s determinedly ugly pictures of women. In the 1950s Willem de Kooning’s abstractions were often beautiful, but Clyfford Still’s paintings were not. And so on up to the 1980s: Some American art was beautiful but much was not. The young artists from Beckley’s 1970 world of 112 Greene Street were not interested in beauty. Nor was it a concern of the fashionable Neo-Expressionist painters of the 1980s or most of the abstract painters I knew then. But other artists continued to make beautiful work.

As Hickey rightly surmised, however, beauty had become identified with escapism, with undemanding visual art, and also with conservative complacent politics. And there was considerable demand for politically critical art. That much old master work and even most modernist painting was concerned with beauty only underlined the problem, for there was a felt need that contemporary work break with this tradition. In the 1980s, the concept of post-modernism was very fashionable; Foster had astutely identified the Zeitgeist. And whatever else post-modernism was, certainly the art of Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, Martha Rosler, Gordon Matta-Clark, Cindy Sherman and the other artists identified with that label certainly was not beautiful.

In his shrewd description of this situation, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (2007) the philosopher Alexander Nehamas allows that after Pater and Ruskin, “beauty had long ago ceased to go hand in hand with wisdom and goodness; it had eventually come to be, as it is to most of the world today, largely irrelevant and often opposed to them.” However we judge this history, then, a revival of beauty in the late twentieth century could not plausibly involve a direct return to the era of Pater or Ruskin. Not when a whole century of innovative modernism and post-modernism has intervened. Ruskin and Pater were art writers very much of their own day. And so their Victorian aesthetic concerns are very distant from those of the late 1960s New York art world, which was Beckley’s entry point. Between Pater or Ruskin and Beckley came a great deal of art—Cubism, Dada, Futurism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and much more! And so an artist of Beckley’s generation really could not be productively inspired in an immediate way by Ruskin and Pater. How, then, could an ambitious artist like Beckley present contemporary beautiful works in 2000?

If beauty were to come back into art, it would have to be beauty appropriate to the late twentieth century. But what subjects would that involve? This question is not easy to answer. And so it’s unsurprising that it took a while for Beckley to find a satisfactory solution. And when he came up with one, his flower photographs met with real resistance. He tells a revealing story: “Once when a couple of German critics came in to see my work and saw a bunch of poppy photos on the wall

along with the wilting flowers in my studio, they said nothing and walked silently out of the door.” It’s hard to imagine a more traditional or clichéd subject than flowers. And it would be difficult, also, to identify a subject more alien to most contemporary art made in 2000. So, it’s not surprising that these critics failed to respond. Understanding radical originality can be very hard. Perhaps, however, if they had recognized the relationship of Beckley’s flowers to Duchamp’s readymades or Jeff Koons’s works, they would have stayed longer.

Because I wrote my doctoral thesis at Columbia University in part about Ernst Gombrich, I had a modest relationship with this renowned English art historian. And so toward the end of his life, shortly after I had interviewed him in New York for Artforum, my wife and I were invited to visit him at his London home. We brought some flowers, an obvious house gift. I picked an attractive bloom without even knowing what type of flowers they were. But of course the Gombrichs identified them when they thanked us. Giving flowers as a gift like this is a very traditional custom.

In older artworks, too, you often see flowers. In Manet’s Olympia (1865), for example, we see the flowers presented to her by the black servant woman. Art historians have identified these posh hothouse flowers. Indeed, flowers are a very traditional still life artistic motif. You find them often in the Dutch Golden Age paintings, in Impressionist art, and in Chinese painting. For the contemporary artist, however, the obvious problem is that they are a clichéd, sentimental subject. Anti-aesthetic artists, too, may bring flowers as a house gift, but they’re not likely to make artistic representations of them.

Beckley’s flowers are highly distinctive. He shows the stem, but not the roots. His flowers are enlarged, seen against a neutral background. As he has noted, his flowers resemble Barnett Newman’s “zips.” “He painted verticals because he didn’t want to reference horizons. He wanted to be totally non-objective. He said he did verticals because a horizontal signifies ‘landscape’ and a horizon. For Newman, a vertical was a vertical.” One precedent in Beckley’s own art for these flowers is Roses Are, Violets Are, Sugar Are (1974). But Beckley’s systematic development of this theme took place only around 2000.

Even if you are not aware of the cost of flowers in pre-modern cultures, when you study old master still life paintings, you quickly learn that oftentimes the flowers depicted were rare luxuries. The same is true of many of the foodstuffs depicted in this art. In the golden age of Holland, in the mid-seventeenth century very typically still life pictures show luxurious shells, precious utensils and rare flowers. And there was a flourishing speculative market in rare tulips, a prototype, it has been said, for our present-day art markets. In his important essay “Tradition and Expression in Western Still Life” Gombrich traces the origin of this artistic genre, which depended heavily upon social and economic history. “What was ‘bourgeois opulence’ in seventeenth-century Holland would have been beyond the dreams of a twelfth-century nobleman.” Nowadays, however, you can easily purchase even in mid-winter many affordable varieties of flowers, including types that once were rare.

Our next chapter will focus on Beckley’s relationship to Naples. And so, in preparation, it’s appropriate to consider a Neapolitan example, Giuseppe Recco’s Still Life: Fish, Cuttlefish, and Lobster (1655–60), a still life which is in the Capodimonte museum. The contents of this picture would make for a grand posh dinner. Still life painting was important in Naples. And the foodstuffs displayed by Recco, one of the most famous Neapolitan still life painters, are lavish. Abundance Last Judgment 10, 2002

Cibachrome print 62 × 48 inches (157 × 122 cm)

appealed not only to privileged art collectors, but also to the larger populace. And even as late as the 1770s, court celebrations still included the Cuccagna, an artificial mountain loaded with all kinds of foodstuffs built in front of the royal palace. Guards protected it until the moment when the mob was allowed to fight (and sometimes kill) one another over the spoils while the court watched the sport from windows and balconies. And, so an historian tells, while some commentators “would denounce” grand art displays “as evidence of abused economic and social privilege,” others “celebrated them as a spectacular gesture of magnificence that epitomized the cultural vibrancy and refinement of the city.” Like most old master still life paintings, these ceremonies were celebrations of plenitude, scenes of pleasurable luxury in a society where too often scarcity was the norm. Then more recently, some modernists have depicted humble objects. Henri Matisse collected inexpensive Islamic textiles with all-over designs. And, of course, Paul Cézanne often depicted apples, in pictures that were the subject of a justly famous commentary by Meyer Schapiro, “An Essay on the Meaning of Still-life” (1968). It’s easy to puzzle over Cézanne’s eccentrically depicted groupings of female nudes, but what can be said about his compositions of apples, then as now a commonplace fruit? A great deal, it turns out for Shapiro, both in terms of the social history of this art, “unthinkable outside of Western bourgeois society” and in terms of the desires Cézanne’s represented still-life objects “satisfy as well as from their analogies and relations to the human body.” How fascinating, then, is the process in which these depictions of ordinary apples have become precious commodities.

In the great Piet Mondrian retrospective of 1994, at the National Gallery, Washington and MoMA, many of his early paintings of trees were shown, but there were only two works on paper showing his flowers. In one of them, Amaryllis (1910), we see the red flower against a striking blue background. That work on paper was a gift for his friend Charmion von Wiegand. Rather than give her flowers, he presented this image. That Mondrian often painted flowers is surprising given his dislike of nature. Perhaps, as he once said, he painted them just for money. Some scholars refuse to take them seriously. But as David Shapiro observes, in his essay in Uncontrollable Beauty, it is possible to find in them one side of this complicated personality, a sensual dimension that was repressed or controlled in his abstractions. A famous photography by André Kertész, Mondrian’s studio, made in 1926 shows a single, artificial flower in a vase.

Why are Beckley’s flowers beautiful? Perhaps only a philosopher would ask that question! And yet, it’s worth asking. Kant says: “A flower… e.g., a tulip, is held to be beautiful because a certain purposiveness is encountered in our perception of it which, as we judge it, is not related to any end at all.” He suggests that this is why we take aesthetic pleasure in tulips. Indeed we do, even if we don’t accept his teleological reasoning. Thus far I have spoken of Beckley’s flowers as if they were so obvious a subject as to need no interpretation. It’s true that these flowers are obviously beautiful- they certainly aren’t Baudelaire’s fleurs du mal/flowers of evil. But they are oddly unusual flowers, deserving of interpretative scrutiny. Beckley’s flowers are very large, of the same scale as his earlier photographic narratives or ambitious gallery paintings. And he always shows the stems and, sometimes, the flowers themselves, but never the vases containing them. These tall slim flowers are the floral equivalent of statuesque fashion models. Or, if you will, there are like the enormous bouquets of flowers in vases near the entrance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Compared with any of the flowers I’ve taken as gifts to hosts, Beckley’s flowers are unusual and distinctive. And, certainly, their scale makes them obvious luxuries.

Beckley’s early conceptual art was part of a movement, as were his 1970s photographic narratives. And so, in both those cases it’s natural, as we have done in the first and second chapter, to relate his works to other art developed more or less simultaneously. By contrast, though his photographs of flowers were inspired in part by Hickey’s influential book, there was no significant contemporary artistic movement devoted to doing images of flowers. I hesitate, however, to present a personal interpretation emulating Meyer Schapiro’s account of Cézanne or David Shapiro’s discussion of Mondrian, for, whatever the dramas of his inner life, Beckley’s choice of this motif is governed by his larger artistic development. Later, however, I will partially modify that suggestion. Even if you’re a card-carrying post-modernist, allergic to artistic beauty, the beauty of flowers is self-evident. And you, too, may well give flowers as house gifts even if you don’t admire artworks depicting them. It’s easy to explain why gifting flowers is a social custom. Here, then, let’s ask a more limited, more difficult question: why photograph flowers for art shows? To say that circa 2000 Beckley became interested in presenting beautiful things in his artworks explains his development only in a very vague way. He chose to photograph a very special kind of beautiful things, long stemmed flowers. Beckley did not photograph beautiful men (like his friend Robert Mapplethorpe) or women; he did not present beautiful landscapes or famous beautiful buildings. We admire old master still life paintings for the skill manifested in the depiction of their subjects. But admiration for Beckley’s flowers is not centrally bound up with his skill as photographer, though it may be worth knowing that he pioneered the development of large-scale photographic printings. In chapters one and two, it was natural and necessary to interpret Beckley’s photographs in some detail. But his beautiful photographs of flowers are, by comparison, show stoppers. They are so obviously beautiful as to hardly need interpretation, and so self-sufficient so as to scarcely appear to require it. It’s always seemed remarkably strange to me that his art developed in this way.

Paul Cézanne’s still lifes show his apples, and Giorgio Morandi’s pictures depict his bottles. Just as these still life painters have characteristic subjects and ways of arranging them, so too does Beckley. He does very large color photographs of flowers and flower stems. But Beckley’s photographs of flowers look very unlike those in traditional still life painting. By virtue of their scale and composition, as we have noted, they have some resemblance to Barnett Newman’s Abstract Expressionist painted zips. In the earlier chapters, we found that it is relatively easy to describe Beckley’s early conceptual works and photographic narratives. There’s lots of interest to be said about his self-portrait as George Washington and his photograph of a piece of cake with commentary. By contrast, what can we say about his lilies or poppies? To answer that question, we will focus first on his titles.

Unlike ordinary pictures of flowers, Beckley’s come with titles, which are in need of interpretation. Often these titles seem highly meaningful. Rendezvous at Tiananmen Square – The Aftermath (2004) may be a political work. Last Judgment 10 (2002) might, by contrast, be a dramatic sacred scene. And the fifteen Stations (2001) allude to his interest in Newman, who did fourteen paintings that he titled Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachtani (1958–66). Beckley’s title of Three Graces 4 (2004), which is a triptych, seemingly alludes to the famous mythological scene, much pictured in old master art. Titling another triptych Heroin Trade in Afghanistan Saturday

Night (2005) appears to give its beautiful poppies a hidden, highly sinister significance. And one title, “Not that there’s anything wrong with it,” comes from a Seinfeld episode, in which Jerry Seinfeld repeated that phrase many times under different circumstances.

In his introduction to Imaginary Portraits, Beckley recalls Roland Barthes’ distinction between “readerly” devices that “direct the reader through the story” and “writerly” techniques “where the reader ‘writes’ the text through the discovery of different combinational possibilities each time the text is read…” The same distinction applies also to his titles. When, as with some of these Beckley photographs of flowers, we can’t plausibly connect the title to what we see, it’s natural to wonder what’s going on. Here I think we have an extension of his use of unreliable narrators, as discussed in the previous chapter. Just as realizing that the written narrative in Cake Story is hard to comprehend, once we read closely naturally generates interpretation; so some of the puzzling titles of his flowers also should inspire discussion.

Interpreting the titles of artworks can pose surprisingly varied challenges. Some of the clever titles Marcel Duchamp gave to his readymades are amusing but obvious: Fountain (1917) for a men’s room urinal or In Advance of a Broken Arm (1915) for a snow shovel. One important difference between the readymades and these visually identical artifacts is that as artworks they have titles with dates, unlike everyday urinals and snow shovels. In a slight but significant variation to the usual usage of the phrase, I call these works “assisted readymades” to identify the way that they include these titles. Usually that phrase describes readymades that are artifacts modified by the artist. My suggestion, then, is that by adding the title an artist can also modify the artifact without any physical manipulation.

Sometimes titles of artworks are mischievous, as when in 1897 Alphonse Allais presciently described two imaginary monochromatic works Première communion de jeunes filles chlorotiques par un temps de neige (First communion of anaemic young girls in the snow), all white and Récolte de la tomate par des cardinaux apoplectiques au bord de la Mer Rouge (Tomato harvesting by apoplectic cardinals on the shore of the Red Sea), pure red. You can look at a great deal of art without knowing the title. Often in gallery shows of contemporary art, you need the checklist to find the titles. Frequently, however, with modernist and contemporary artworks, the title is an integral part of the complete work, a way for the artist to indicate how it is to be seen. And when that work is abstract, generally visual inspection won’t tell you the title. In this way, Beckley’s flowers are like the drawings of Sol LeWitt, who wrote out the instructions and often left the execution to others. What then defines a genuine LeWitt is its relationship with his instructions. The physical drawing itself can be destroyed and remade, so long as those instructions are preserved.

This analysis of titles has important implications for our discussion of Beckley’s development. What initially motivated our account of his photographs of beautiful flowers was the belief that these subjects are self-sufficient. That’s part of their essential beauty: flowers are just flowers, in need of no explanation. Now, however, when we acknowledge that their titles matter, that self-sufficiency of his flower photographs is undercut. As much as his early conceptual pieces or the photographic narratives, his photographs of flowers rely upon textual supplements. Do such photographs need titles? Yes, they do, if they are to be artworks. Suppose that at some distant future date Beckley’s titles for the flower photographs are lost. Then part of the essence of these artworks would

Station 1, 2001 Cibachrome print 81 × 44 inches (205 × 110 cm)

have disappeared. Like his earliest conceptual works and his photographic narratives, the flower paintings consist of two parts, photographs and accompanying words, which are the title. And what matters, I am suggesting, is that Beckley’s flower photographs have titles, but not that they have these specific titles.

Certainly Beckley’s various flower photographs are varied. The colors, the flower arrangements and the scale vary. Sometimes we are very close, but in other pictures at a greater distance. But in fact, it’s not visually obvious that asking the meaning of these titles leads interpretation anywhere interesting. I don’t think that they reveal a secret code. Someone might see Chardin’s apples as alluding to the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and view his strawberries as allegories about human frailty. But, in truth, his foodstuffs mostly seem just foodstuffs. Analogously, I don’t believe that Three Graces 4 is about Paris or that Heroin Trade in Afghanistan Saturday Night is a critique of our ugly war in that country. Some of Beckley’s prior conceptual narratives are political, but his flowers are not. Whereas Schapiro’s Cézanne is engaged in working out “a continuing inner struggle” in his art, Beckley, it seems to me, was engaged with his subjects in a less personal way.

Here, then, we face an interpretative paradox. Beckley’s flowers themselves are straightforwardly beautiful pictures. And so it’s not clear what can interestingly be said about them. But, on the other hand, their titles are enigmatic, for it isn’t obvious how they relate to these pictorial subjects. What matters, I think, is not the significance of these particular titles, but that these photographs have titles, for it’s the presence of the titles that lifts them out of the florist’s world and projects them into the art world. But this claim, which seems elliptical, needs to be explained in detail. I do that by way of telling a short fictional story, whose significance I then will unpack.

Suppose that some upscale Madison Avenue florist, ignorant of the art world, but inspired by rumors about Beckley’s photographs of flowers, hires him to make advertisements. “Do some photographs of the flowers that I sell, lilies and poppies,” he says: “And please make them big, for I want to use them on subway ads.” And Beckley, happy to respond, happens to be busy, and so he gives this businessman exact copies of Three Graces 4 and Heroin Trade in Afghanistan Saturday Night, which he re-labels on a separate sheet “lilies for $19.99” and “poppies, only $14.95.” The florist is very pleased indeed. Knowing nothing about art, still he knows, as they say, what he likes. And he positively loves these photographs, which when mounted in advertisements bring lots of customers to his shop.

As for Beckley, he’s happy to get the commission, but doesn’t tell his art dealer this story. When  Beckley shows his flower photographs in Chelsea, they are major artworks, and get the prices and critical recognition that they deserve. But when used as advertising displays, they are, as one says, only worth the paper they are printed on. Little does the florist know that when Beckley was an art student, he was inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s readymades in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Nor, since he’s not a subway rider himself, is this florist aware that one older Beckley photographic work was seen in the subway, in a MoMA advertisement. But “lilies for $19.99” and “poppies, only $14.95,” though these posters are visually identical with his works shown in Chelsea, are not art. They are just successful commercial posters. No doubt, still, this florist might be amused to learn that once a museum guard used Duchamp’s In Advance of a Broken Arm as a snow shovel.

The ways in which assisted readymades can move between the so-called real world, the world of banal everyday commerce, and the art world is fascinating. Readers of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), one of Beckley’s favorite books, will recognize the obvious parallel in the way that people and objects (including texts) can move from reality to the fictional world, and back again. Let’s consider it again. That novel consists of two parts: a short poem by John Shade, and a long commentary that Charles Kinbote added. The poem seems relatively straightforward. But as one

Three Graces 4, 2004 Cibachrome prints 77 × 92 inches (195 × 235 cm)

reads the commentary, it becomes by stages obvious that Kinbote is crazy; he claims to be an exile from a distant kingdom, Zembla, in hiding from his enemies. Kinbote’s interpretation of the poem “Pale Fire” seems obviously fantastical. He claims that it’s actually an allegory about Zembla. In particular, the poem’s title comes from Shakespeare, but Kinbote cannot recognize that because he is working from a Zemblan translation.

Nabokov is making an elaborate practical joke about the academic propensity to over-interpret. Pale Fire has, perhaps paradoxically, been much discussed by academic commentators. In fact it’s structurally akin to the chess puzzles that also fascinated Nabokov, a puzzle book with a solution. In a number of his late novels Nabokov developed ideas of alternative realities, similar to but distinct from this world. Here, however, I’m concerned only with the significant parallel between the novel and Beckley’s artworks. When those movements take place, people and things change their identity in ways that are recognizable by those in the know; as happens also when assisted readymades move from the practical world to the art galleries. In Pale Fire Kinbote changes his identity when he moves from Zembla to this world; as, I am suggesting, readymades change their identity when they move from the everyday world into the art world. Like the two worlds in Pale Fire, these places are distinct but interconnected.

While Three Graces 4 and Heroin Trade in Afghanistan Saturday Night are major artworks, “lilies for $19.99” and “poppies, only $14.95” are merely successful subway advertisements. As readers of Marcel Proust know, titles matter in high society, for anyone who can’t understand that the Baron Charlus is the brother of the Duc de Guermantes, a fascinating detail for those interested in French aristocratic genealogies, is thought a bumpkin in that snobbish world. And, analogously, anyone who can’t understand why Three Graces 4 and Heroin Trade in Afghanistan Saturday Night are artworks, unlike “lilies for $19.99” and “poppies, only $14.95” will never be an art critic. What makes Beckley’s flower photographs contemporary art, then, is that the title is part of the artwork. Without these titles, these would be merely images of beautiful flowers. All that separates the artworks from the physically identical commercial posters is the presence of the title.

Consider, now, a variation this story. Imagine some aesthete who, admiring Beckley’s flowers, but unable to afford one of those photographs, decides rather to go to this local florist and purchase lilies and poppies. “Too bad that the photographs are too rich for my pockets,” he reasons, “but I can do even better, I can own real lilies and poppies.” Of course these real flowers are smaller than those in Beckley’s photographs; and they will decay. But those differences don’t seem essential aesthetically. What has this person missed? Well, the problem is that these flowers don’t have titles.

Here we are back in the world of conceptual art. Arthur Danto, who greatly admired and whose aesthetic theorizing was much influenced by Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box (1964), once told me that he regretted not having purchased one of these sculptures at the opening, which he had attended. Then those artworks were neither particularly expensive. Now, of course, they are gold mines. Danto became friends, however, with Mike Bidlo, an artist famous for his replicas, who gifted him one of his boxes, Not Warhol (Brillo Boxes, 1964) (2005), which is visually indistinguishable from a Warhol. But the title is different to indicate that it’s not a Warhol-forgery. And so now, in turn, Bidlo’s copies also are valuable, though still much cheaper than genuine Warhols.

Here, then, we see why the titles of Beckley’s artworks are philosophically interesting. At the start of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace Danto presents a detailed example that nicely shows the importance of titles for artworks. Imagine, he says, a red monochrome painting. Were its title The Egyptians drowned after pursuing the Israelites across the Red Sea, it would be a different work than were it called Kierkegaard’s Mood or Red Square a Moscow landscape. Or a geometrical minimalist work with the same title, or an illustration of Buddhist doctrine, Nirvana. Or, finally, just a red surface, not an artwork at all. The title of each work projects an interpretation. And in the last case, the description identifies something red that is not art. To put Danto’s claim in a dramatic way: were the titles of such works to be changed, we would have in each case a different artwork, and in the last case a red surface that is not art at all.

Just as people have names, so artworks have titles. Sometimes we think of the title as an addition to an already completed artwork. But this discussion of Beckley’s flower photographs shows that this is not quite correct. Are titles integral elements of artworks or supplementary additions to visual art? There’s no satisfying general answer to that question. In the museum, titles of old master works are on wall labels next to the art. But usually in churches, there are no such titles on altarpieces. Often the artist paints some chosen subject, and then adds the title. Or, often, he leaves that to someone else since the creative activity is complete. Adding the title to older works is often pretty straightforward. A glance at the work tells you that it’s a birth of Venus, a crucifixion or a portrait. And so adding a title labeling the work may seem merely a practical matter. But some cases it’s more complicated. It was argued by the curator John Pope-Hennessy that the Piero della Francesca painting usually called The Flagellation of Christ actually has a completely different subject. If that’s really the case, then it’s been wrongly titled in a way that’s significant.

When deciding that he wanted to make beautiful art, Beckley could of course have simply abandoned photography and painted beautiful subjects without titles. But his goal was to preserve the continuity of his artistic development. Historians of old master art focus on the importance of stylistic continuity. Caravaggio started by doing genre scenes, and then graduated to painting commissioned altarpieces. And thirty years later, Nicolas Poussin, another Roman emigrant, developed from making Caravaggio-esque pictures to his highly personal style of classicism. According to many recent critics, “style” is a concept that should be abandoned. Contemporary art, they argue, breaks with its past. And an individual artist’s oeuvre may not visually reveal continuous development. It is true that Beckley’s flower photographs look very different from his earlier works. But it’s impossible to properly understand them without identifying the continuities in his body of art, which are located, perhaps seemingly paradoxically, below surface appearances. The same is true, of course, for Duchamp, whose very various early paintings, readymades and late installations all reveal his essential developing sensibility. Duchamp’s readymades were intended to be visually indifferent, neither beautiful nor unattractive. Beckley’s flower photographs were meant to be beautiful. For both of these artists, however, continuity matters.

Usually the titles of old master and modernist still life paintings simply identify their pictorial content. What you see is what they describe. What’s more complicated and challenging about Beckley’s titles is their indirectness. Any attempt to speculate about their significance is sure to be

inconclusive. In that way, they’re akin to the stories in his photographic narratives from the 1970s Just as it’s difficult to relate those written accounts to the accompanying photographs, so it’s hard to link these titles to the flowers they accompany. But when the title doesn’t match the work, then it’s natural to be puzzled.

The problem with Barnett Newman’s Stations, it’s been argued, is that there’s not enough figurative content in these paintings to justify their titles. After making some of them, he added the titles. Sean Scully, on the other hand, has carefully explained the titles of his abstractions that name places, people or artists with detailed commentary. Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles does contain blue lines, but Full Fathom Five and Autumn Rhythm are poetic titles whose relation to these paintings demands interpretation. And Frank Stella’s Polish synagogue series doesn’t depict architecture, and his Herman Melville Moby Dick’s series doesn’t show a whale. Some artists number paintings. That’s the procedure of Gerhard Richter and David Reed. When its meaning is not obvious, a title

prompts closer looking. Learning that Brice Marden’s Nebraska (1966), a monochrome, was made after his first visit to that state is an important clue.

Whereas the implicit text of Myself as Washington deserves spelling out at length and interpretation the explicit words included in Cake Story naturally inspire a loquacious response, what can you say about these wordless photographs? Still life subjects always raise this problem. What can be said about Giorgio Morandi’s much praised still lifes, depicts of ordinary bottles?

In a revealing way, Denis Diderot already dealt with this problem when discussing Jean-Baptiste Chardin’s still lives, which he admired greatly. Some of the only modestly attractive figurative works in the Parisian Salons, the bourgeois storytelling paintings of Greuze for example, are easy to describe at length. But what can you say about the humble objects so beautifully depicted by Chardin? There’s no confusion, no artificiality, no distracting flickering effects… One stops in front of a Chardin as if by instinct, just as a traveler exhausted by his trip tends to sit down, almost without noticing it, in a place that’s green, quiet, well-watered, shady, and cool. Diderot’s account is enchanting and laconic. In the bustling Salon of 1767 he’s almost stopped in his tracks.

At the time when he was reading about Ruskin and Pater, Beckley recognized that his own, very different childhood had also been puritanical. And, also, he saw that the contemporary art world he had joined was puritanical. It’s true that some of his narrative conceptual works from the 1970s told erotic stories. For example, Bus (1976) and Shoulder Blade (1978), employing the basic format we analyzed in the previous chapter. But, perhaps paradoxically, they presented them within a puritanical framework.

In some ways our intellectual interests converged at the time when Beckley and I became close friends. In 1994 I published a collection of my art criticism, The Aesthete in the City: The Philosophy and Practice of American Abstract Painting in the 1980s. And in 1997 I edited and introduced a short book, England and its Aesthetes: Biography and Taste, a selection of the autobiographies of Ruskin, Pater and the legendary English art writer Adrian Stokes. I was fascinated with the discussion of truthful depictions of nature in Ruskin’s Modern Painters Thanks to my friendship with Paul Barolsky, author of Walter Pater’s Renaissance (1987), I also studied and wrote about Pater. And so I, too, was very interested in understanding what it was to be an aesthete.

In Beckley’s 1970s art world, and also still in mine in the 1980s the most influential contemporary art critics embraced a tradition of leftist politically critical art. They were constantly concerned to critique the art market system, which made artworks expensive commodities. Coming into the art world from the economically purer world of analytic philosophy, I found that critics were easily caught in a trap. If you critiqued this left system of thinking, you were identified as a political conservative, a crypto-Republican who favored the status quo. The important critics associated with the journal October developed a positively Manichean division between the “good” politically critical art and the “bad” socially conformist work. The very title of that journal, which alludes to Sergei Eisenstein’s 1927 film about the Soviet revolution of 1917, expresses their politics; they admire that leftist masterpiece, but not what soon followed, Stalinist totalitarianism.

To me, however, it was always obvious that this way of dividing contemporary art was highly implausible, for the “good” and “bad” contemporary artists were presented in the same journals, often displayed in the same galleries and certainly purchased by the same collectors and museums.

Heroin Trade in Afghanistan, Saturday Night 2005 Cibachrome prints 95 × 134 inches (241 × 340 cm)

In particular October made a distinction between the “good” early works by Andy Warhol, which critique American culture, and the many “bad” later paintings that are merely conformist. In his introduction to Imaginary Portraits Beckley remarks: “Warhol does not criticize popular culture. He simply holds it up to light.” Refusing to divide Warhol’s oeuvre, he offers a more plausible and sympathetic interpretation of his art.

Just as one could in the late twentieth-century meet in Italy any number of prosperous intellectuals who were members of the Communist party, so at that time in Artforum leftist thinking was important. Perhaps unexpectedly, this seductive, but fantastical way of thinking made it impossible to develop a truly progressively political tradition. The very ideal of “political protest art,” expensive critical works sold in grand galleries, was for me always something of an oxymoron. I reviewed one Whitney Biennale in which a great deal of art devoted to a critique of consumerism. That was a strange ritual, I said in print, to be conducted at a museum located then on Madison Avenue at 75th street amidst the upscale East Side boutiques. The strength of our art world lies, I think, in its capacity to celebrate its critics, as when it offers retrospectives to Hans Haacke and Barbara Kruger, great critical artists.

Now, in any event, the concerns of the contemporary art world have changed decisively, and so this particular political worldview is of basically historical interest. The remaining question, still, for our purposes in this reconstruction of Beckley’s career is what it meant in our visual culture to be an aesthete, and respond to the concerns of Pater and Ruskin in a radically novel context. In the previous chapter we surveyed one relevant concern, Beckley’s development of the Pater’s “imaginary portraits,” his fictional accounts of real historical persons. For Beckley’s narrative works, we saw there, this concern with the blurring between fact and fiction was essential, particularly because it provided a way to link his visual materials, photographs, to the accompanying narratives. Thus the text in Cake Story is a very Pateresque imaginary portrait. But that doesn’t make the work a political commentary. In rather different ways, both Pater, implicitly, and Ruskin, very explicitly were political thinkers. Indeed Ruskin inspired the English socialists, Gandhi and a host of other late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century radicals. Here again, however, as with their general aesthetics, these concerns are some distance from the present. For some time, then, I puzzled over my clear hunch that Beckley was a late twentieth-century aesthete. It wasn’t easy to find a way to spell out the significance that claim and make it clear and plausible.

As Beckley has indicated, in the 1970s, he—like many New York-based artists- was reading Roland Barthes and the other French post-structuralists, materials that he has continued to employ in his teaching at the School for Visual Arts. Because most of these writers were not especially interested in contemporary visual art, artists were free to adapt their texts to suit their own purposes. Indeed, the October-writers played a major role in that process. If you did studio visits in art schools, as I occasionally did, you often found their books in the studios. Art students were expected to theorize about their own art, preferably in this, the dominant style of the day.

What, however, was highly distinctive about Beckley, and set him apart from most of the artists I came to know early on, was his interest and skill in writing himself. In this way, he deserves comparison with a very different figure, another friend, the abstract painter Sean Scully. And what in part defines Beckley-the-aesthete is his rare refined ear for prose, as anyone can see reading his introductions to the Pater and Ruskin books, or his anthologies about beauty and the sublime.

As I have said, the immediate concerns of aesthetic theory of Pater and Ruskin are dated, and so can only be uncovered with historical exegesis. The Neapolitan intellectual Benedetto Croce published a book with a marvelous title: What is Living and What is Dead in The Philosophy of Hegel (1907). Analogously, I am  asking: what in 2000 was living and what was dead in the writings of Pater and Ruskin?

When I was writing my doctoral thesis around 1970, I broke off work every day at noon to hear a renowned leftist Berkeley radio station, KSAN. These broadcasts had a deservedly well-known slogan: “If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.” Analogously, it might have been said to an artist: “If you don’t like the contemporary work in the art world, go out and make some of your own.” In his own artistic life, Beckley gave a remarkably interesting answer to this question, what is it to be an aesthete: the interest of Pater and Ruskin in (very different!) good writing remains of living interest. That, he discovered, was how he could be an aesthete at the start of the twentieth-first century. What’s most remarkable to me now, looking back, is what a dramatic leap forward was required to proceed. After achieving real artistic and practical success with his conceptual narrative photographs, Beckley wanted to make beautiful works, art providing aesthetic pleasure. But nothing in his personal background, or in the American art world suggested how to accomplish that.

Certainly beauty was not the obvious concern of the painters Beckley had admired early on, Frank Stella and Robert Ryman. Nor was it much of an interest of his fellow conceptual artists. And so it is unsurprising that it took him a long time to devise a satisfying solution to this concern. But here our reconstruction of this development, looking at the results after the fact can be relatively brief.

Connecting seemingly distant sides of your life can be immensely gratifying. That’s one reason why reading Marcel Proust is so satisfying. The young character Marcel discovers that Swann’s Way, the path leading to the lands of this privileged bourgeois Jew and the Guermantes Way, the walkway around the aristocrats’ estate, are in fact conjoined. Conjoined literally, because you can walk from one to the other; and of course conjoined historically, for Swann’s widow becomes by marriage a Guermantes, and Marcel himself enters that grand world of privilege, which earlier he had viewed as a distant outsider. Beckley’s life (and mine) are very unlike Marcel’s, needless to say. But we, along with many other Proust readers, share this pleasure when we become aesthetes and enter the art world. The lesson taught by Proust, as also by Pale Fire, is that the real world and the art world are distinct but related. Making and appreciation of art involves understanding that relationship. And knowing this is one key to understanding Beckley’s art.

Beckley’s photographs of flowers certainly are very beautiful. And so it’s unsurprising that these artworks were popular and that he did a great many of these images. As he recognized, there was a felt desire for artistic beauty in contemporary art. And he had a deep personal desire to make beautiful works. Yet, here again in reconstructing his stylistic changes, I focus on his selfcritical concerns. What was missing in these flower photographs, looking backwards, was the link of his work with art history. Here we are back in the situation of his pioneering conceptual art. At that point, I observed, what was needed was some attached verbal description explaining why these were artworks. And now, somewhat analogously, Beckley needed a way to insert his personal development into art history. He needed, I am suggesting, to make the implications of reliance of his flower works on their written titles explicit. When he did that, his art changed again. But explaining that development is a task for our next chapter.

“My choice of flowers as subject matter developed out of my admiration for Barnett Newman, including his interest in the sublime. As a painter, Newman did a series of paintings he called ‘Zips.’ They were vertical lines because, as an abstractionist, he wanted to get away from horizontals which evoke landscape. So I thought, what linear object is vertical? Well, a stem is usually vertical. Lily stems became my ‘zips.’ Then poppies came to mind. So I photographed poppy stems. But somehow it seemed wrong to crop the flower off, so I left it on.”

Works Stems

Station 7, 2001

Cibachrome print 81 × 44 inches (205 × 110 cm)

Station 8, 2001

Cibachrome print 81 × 44 inches (205 × 110 cm)

Station 14, 2001

Cibachrome print 81 × 44 inches (205 × 110 cm)

Station 9, 2001

Cibachrome print 81 × 44 inches (205 × 110 cm)

Station 15 (Pink, I Think), 2002

Cibachrome prints

80.7 × 90.5 inches (205 × 230 cm)

Three Graces 2004 Cibachrome prints 75.6 × 90.5 inches (192 × 230 cm)

Patriotism Spelled Backwards 5, 2004

Cibachrome prints 76 × 90.5 inches (193 × 230 cm)

On Being Blue 7 2004

Cibachrome prints 77 × 75 inches (195.5 × 190.5 cm)

Rendez-vous in Tienanmen Square (The Aftermath), 2004 Cibachrome print 76 × 39 inches (194 × 99 cm)

Singles Bar - Red, 2004 Cibachrome print 75.2 × 14.2 inches (191 × 36 cm)

Singles Bar - Blue, 2004 Cibachrome print 75.2 × 14.2 inches (191 × 36 cm)

(Tattered

Cibachrome print

77 × 39 inches (196 × 99 cm)

(The Huddle), 2005

Cibachrome print

77 × 39 inches (196 × 99 cm)

Heroin Trade in Afghanistan 1

Flag), 2005

Heroin Trade in Afghanistan 4

Heroin Trade in Afghanistan: For Those Who Have Died and Are Forgotten, 2005 Cibachrome print 76 × 39.3 inches (193 × 100 cm)

A Drop of Water in the Breaking Gulf, 2005 Cibachrome prints 47.2 × 67.3 inches (120 × 171 cm)

Not that There’s Anything Wrong with It 3, 2005 Cibrachrome print

77 × 36.5 inches (195.6 × 92.7 cm)

Heroin Trade: The Intersection of 44/55 and 209, 2008 Cibrachrome prints 77 × 82 inches (195.6 × 208.3 cm)

Oh to Be Young Carefree and Gay Epilogue 1, 2005 Cibrachrome prints 58.2 × 52.4 inches (147.8 × 133.2 cm)

Capote White 4, 2014

Cibachrome print 76 × 47 inches (193 × 119.4 cm)

Dervish 4, Bayrami, 2007

Cibachrome print 77 × 48 inches (196 × 122 cm)

Charge of the Chicken Men, 2009

Cibachrome print 77 × 48 inches (196 × 122 cm)

Dervish 10, Sunbuli 2007

Cibachrome print 77 × 48 inches (196 × 122 cm)

Chapter Four Neapolitan Holidays

Bill Beckley’s photographs of flowers were beautiful, very popular deeply satisfying artworks. And so it’s not surprising that he made a great many of them. But here again, as with his early development of purely conceptual works, like his self-portrait as George Washington, or his photographic narratives of the 1970s, relatively soon enough again he was ready to move on. From our perspective the contradiction, to speak in our Hegelian-Marxist terms of stylistic analysis, was that while these seemed to be self-sufficient images of flowers, they too need titles in order to be works of art. And so, the radical self-sufficiency for beautiful art that he desired was not achieved.

There was, also, I think, a second consideration running through Beckley’s mind at this time. His close study of Ruskin and Pater had made him very aware of what might be called the concerns of historicism. In the century from 1870 to 1970, the form of visual beauty had changed dramatically. And so an artist who wanted to make beautiful art, as he did, had to rethink fundamentals. In particular, the question that preoccupied Beckley was: how could his art acknowledge the importance of historical change in standards of beauty, making explicit this awareness?

Here, then, these two different concerns were passing through Beckley’s mind. He was interested in renewing and developing further the word-image narratives. And also, he wanted to make works that were beautiful and expressed his art historical interests, as defined in his anthologies on beauty and the sublime. And also, I think, the Nabokovian model provided by Pale Fire was important, in ways that deserve spelling out. Let’s start, then, by saying something more about that novel.

What initially seems most eccentric about Nabokov’s book, as we said earlier, is that it consists of a poem plus commentary. We are familiar with literary works that are accompanied by scholarly notes, explanations by some scholarly editor of the puzzling elements of the text. Very often, especially when dealing with pre-modern writings, commentary is necessary for the presentday reader, who needs information about the persons, places and things described in the text. Normally these commentaries are not provided by the author, but there’s no reason that a writer might not provide such notes to his own book. And of course, sometimes such commentaries are

unintentionally funny. The English translator T. M. Knox translated Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics and provided some bizarre footnotes. Is it appropriate, I wonder, to note that Hegel misunderstood Kant? Or germane to inform us that illustrations for Hegel’s long account of painting would be desirable? The effect of bizarre commentary like this can be to undermine one’s faith in reliably of the translation. Perhaps that is a good thing.

What, however, seems highly eccentric about Pale Fire is that Nabokov wrote both the poem and the commentary. Not surprisingly, some early reviewers were puzzled. Why combine a splendid but frankly banal poem with a long novella, which seems patently unrelated to that poem? Nabokov, it was sometimes thought, was merely engaged in an odd, perhaps (according to some critics) tedious game with the reader. To put this question another way, more suitable for our purposes: Do we not have here two actually unconnected literary works, the poem and the novelistic commentary? Why they bound together in one book?

As we saw in Chapter Two, understanding the unity of Beckley’s conceptual photographs can pose some interesting challenges. In Cake Story, for example, we need to relate the narrative to the photograph. Traditionally visual artworks have unity, which is to say that no element is superfluous.

When, for example, we look at even a large old master history painting, the fresco in a Neapolitan church for instance, we observe how each and every depicted figure fits into the organic whole. At least that is the idea. Even when we look at comic strips, where there are both images and words, these visual and verbal elements combine together to tell the story. Because Beckley’s conceptual narratives involve text and photograph on separate panels, mounted together, it’s natural to wonder about their unity. These texts seem to have only a loose relationship with the picture. And if that’s a problem when Beckley’s individual works had only two separate elements, what would happen when he used four distinct components? Let’s see!

In 2017 Studio Trisorio, Beckley’s long time Neapolitan art dealer, sent him a large collection of old used Italian postcards. Each of them contained a photograph and, on the other side, a message, a mailing address and franked stamp. It’s interesting when artists make use of obsolete visual technologies. Some video artists like to do reel-to-reel films. Others use old-fashioned cameras. And Beckley chose a few of these postcards, photographed them, enlarged that photograph and added his own message and contemporary photograph for his Neapolitan Holidays (2018–19).

The postcard is one of those pieces of everyday equipment everyone used to know whose functioning may seem too obvious to need analysis. When on holiday at the beach, you picked a card showing the local seaside, purchased a stamp, added a message, “wish you were here” perhaps, and addressed it to a friend. I sent them when was a tourist in Italy. And I collected them for reminders of art in museums, which I found of interest. Nowadays, however, the Internet and the easy availability of photographic attachments on the smart phone have made the postcard almost obsolete. They are still useful for political correspondence, because the security people can see that there’s nothing hidden in the envelope. So far as I can see, there isn’t much of a literature on the postcard, apart from some samples of photographs and a thoroughly mysterious book by Jacques Derrida, The Post Card (1980).

Ray Johnson (1927–1995) developed what he called Mail Art, which used these cards. So too did the Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara (1932–2014). Perhaps you would need to be a philosopher to analyze the postcard, so seemingly banal a device. But actually, the way it functions is fascinating. Usually postcards presented clichéd images: beach scenes, happy travelers, and local monuments. There is a special category of politically subversive and risqué photographs, better not sent to your parish priest unless he has a sense of humor. Postcards can be modestly interesting historical records, showing what scenes fascinated our grandparents. Think of ordinary postcards, here building upon our account in the previous chapter, as assisted readymades. You take a readymade image and add your own message, address and stamp. Indeed, Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. or La Joconde (1919), which is an assisted readymade, uses a postcard, with a mustache and naughty title added to Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. The postcard, like the paperback novel, is a creation of modernism, from the era of mass tourism. I don’t believe that Goethe or Winckelmann sent postcards from Italy back to Germany. The necessary working assumption of these cards is that the mails are relatively reliable and inexpensive.

As we saw earlier, Beckley’s conceptual art and his use of word-image works develops in a striking novel fashion some concerns of the contemporary art world. And his interest in beauty was, also, a concern of other artists circa 2000, though they presented beauty very

Study for Horse Thieves 2019 Archival pigment ink and pencil on museum board 32 × 40 inches (81 × 102 cm)

differently. But so far as I know, Beckley’s use of postcards in Neapolitan Holidays is completely original. The large works in this show have four parts of equal size, some arranged vertically, others horizontally. There’s the enlarged photograph of the postcard image; the original message, stamp and address; some words by Beckley; and, finally a new photograph by him. He did a number of these works. I will focus my discussion on Horse Thieves (2019), for reasons that will become clear.

In the previous chapter, I said something about my relationship with Beckley. Like him, I take an interest in beauty and what it is to be an aesthete. And, also, like him, but for quite independent reasons, I have for some years been very interested in Naples. Like him, I have visited repeatedly; and, unlike him, I am writing a book about that city. Naples interests me because this difficult city has an almost unparalleled collection of baroque art in the very numerous churches of the historic center. In particular, my book starts with, and focuses discussion upon Caravaggio’s The Seven Acts of Mercy (1607), the greatest picture in Naples. This painting is difficult to understand, for it depicts the seven acts in a composition, which had no precedents and has had no real imitations.

Matthew (25:35–36) offers the brief. “For when I was hungry, you gave me food; when thirsty, you gave me drink; when I was a stranger you took me in to your home, when naked you clothed me; when I was ill you came to my help, when in prison you visited me.” The picture shows these six actions: feeding the hungry; giving drink to the thirsty; taking strangers in; clothing the naked; helping the ill; and visiting those in prison. And the medieval church added a seventh, also shown by Caravaggio: burying the dead. According to Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), who was a Neapolitan philosopher, mercy is heartfelt sympathy for another’s distress, impelling succor if possible. It is not the greatest virtue, “since for him that has anyone above him it is better to be united to that which is above than to supply the defect of that which is beneath.” Charity unites us to God and so is a greater virtue than mercy, which relates to the defects of our neighbors.

“But of all the virtues which relate to our neighbors, mercy is the greatest… since it belongs to one who is higher and better (able) to supply the defect of another, in so far as the latter is deficient.” God, who has no defects, doesn’t need mercy, but neighbors do. This moral vision presupposes a social hierarchy and also, as we see in Seven Acts a division between the earthly and heavenly realms.

I especially admire the account of this work by the legendary Italian art historian, Roberto Longhi. Le Sette Opere di Misericordia, he says, forgive my homespun gawky Wikipedia derived translation, is “un soggetto antico, comunitario, romanico che gli sarà venuto inevitabilmente, non appena giunto, in qualche crocicchio famoso, rimescolato tra ricchi e poveri, tra miseria e nobilità” (an ancient, communal, Romanesque subject that inevitably came to him, as soon as he arrived, in some famous crossroads, mixed up between rich and poor, between misery and nobility).

Caravaggio’s visual culture has become distant. And so it seems impossible that a contemporary artist might respond to the sacred scene in this work. Seven Acts was commissioned for a chapel, while nowadays almost all artists work for secular institutions.

Many art historians have interpreted Seven Acts, describing this composition, which is uncannily lucid. However long one looks, it retains its hallucinatory quality. In Malcolm Bull’s

fine recent description: “What we are shown is so clear and dramatic that it seems indubitable, yet we have no way of telling how it connects to anything else, or even what is represented.” Giambattista Vico, another Neapolitan philosopher, Bull observes, “compares the experience of seeing by lamplight to the experience of pain. Both are extremely distinct, but they tell us little about the world beyond.” What we see, Bull rightly notes, is a fragmented scene with “no complete bodies and… no continuous space.” Welcome to Naples.

It’s easy, I think, to understand why I found Caravaggio’s picture so striking. Normally Seven Acts doesn’t travel- you have to get to Naples to view it. And so, it’s natural to reflect upon its relationship to that city. Here, however, I am interested in how Beckley uses it in Horse Thieves and, also, in how that recent photographic narrative fits into the fifty years’ development we have traced. In the four panels, reading from right to left (later we will consider the significance of this reversal of normal English reading order) we see a postcard image of Seven Acts; that postcard dated 20 November 1948, with a brief unrevealing message; a text by Beckley; and a photograph also by him. That text is a short deadpan narrative about how to successfully steal a painting, in a style much like his narrative in Cake Story. And, finally, on the left his photograph shows an old-fashioned bike with a signage plate that reads “Vulcano Solfatara,” the name of a crater volcano in Pozzuoli, near Naples.

The relation of Beckley’s text to the picture by Caravaggio is elliptical. Here, then, are a few of my thoughts. Yours might be significantly different. All that matters, however, is that you too consider how Beckley’s text and photograph relate to Seven Acts. Stories about the theft of Caravaggios are commonplace; there are any number of novels about such thefts, for he’s one of the very few old masters who attracts vast public attention. His Palermo Nativity went missing in 1969 and its whereabouts are the subject of ongoing speculation. Maybe, it’s been often suggested, some Mafia kingpin enjoys solitary possession. And Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (1948), in which the hero’s bicycle is stolen, is one of the most famous Italian Neorealist films. In fact, its original title was Ladri di biciclette, Bicycle Thieves, which then in the translation, approved by De Sica, become singular, Thief. And Naples, as everyone knows, is famous for its crime. No doubt many bicycles are stolen there.

How can a present-day artist use Caravaggio’s Naples? Not as a picturesque subject, but in this more elusive way. Is Horse Thieves an interpretation of Caravaggio’s picture we see in the postcard? Not exactly! The painting doesn’t describe going to prison or mention bicycles. There is, however, a slippage of interpretation that opens up Seven Acts. Horse Thieves thus is akin to Pablo Picasso’s painted revisions of old master and modernist pictures. With his text and photograph, whose relationship is elliptical, like a typical inscription on a postcard, Beckley offers a poetic employment of Seven Acts. Like any verbal or visual work of art, it doesn’t claim to be literally truthful.

When we discussed Cake Story we had to relate photograph and text. Here interpretation is more complicated, for we have four elements, the address on the postcard, Beckley’s text, the Caravaggio and the photograph of a bicycle. It’s easy enough from what we’ve said to see that all four are related in suitably vague ways. The highly desirable painting, to spell out one obvious thought, is a work that thieves will try to steal. The critical question, then, is how do we understand this relationship. What does Horse Thieves add up to?

Beckley’s artwork falls into two historically distinct parts, the postcard and his newly created text plus image. What is their relationship? My answer to this question is Nabokovian. “The moon’s an arrant thief, And her pale fire she snatches from the sun.” As we have said, William Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens provides the title for John Shade’s poem, and so for Nabokov’s novel. But Kinbote cannot identify the phrase, for all that he possesses from Zembla is a translation of Timon of Athens. There thus are two worlds, the so-called real world in which Shade writes his poem, and the fictional kingdom of Zembla as vividly described by Kimbot. But these two worlds are not entirely disjoint, for people and things can move from one to the other. More exactly, of course, both these worlds are fictional, for they both exist only within Nabokov’s novel.

Analytic philosophers and, also, theoretical physicists have developed elaborate, controversial systems of alternate worlds. Kant argued, to quote the exposition of P. F. Strawson, a modern English philosopher, that “there is only one space … every spatially related object is spatially related to every other such object.” But perhaps Kant was mistaken. For our purposes, however, it doesn’t matter whether this Nabokovian fantasy is actually realized in the physical world, or is merely a literary conceit.

Our discussion in the previous chapter dealt with alternative worlds in a tentative way.

Arthur Danto argued that Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box, though (essentially) physically identical with a Brillo box, is an entirely different artifact. Art works are described in different ways from utilitarian containers for Brillo. It often seems initially puzzling that these two visually identical objects are so different. After all, ordinarily if two things have the very same appearance, they have identical properties, apart from their location. How, then, can Brillo Box and a Brillo box be described so differently? Philosophers of art, myself amongst them, have devoted serious attention to resolving this dilemma. Now my present suggestion is that this Nabokovian account of alternate worlds provides a way of staging that contrast. Brillo Box is in the art world, while a Brillo box is only in the physical world. But of course, just as in Pale Fire this world and Zembla are connected, so also Brillo Box exists in one special part of our real world, the art world.

In some of his other novels Nabokov also developed this idea of alternative histories. In Ada for example, we get an alternate history of what he calls Antiterra, a world recognizably like this one. Sometimes historians (and also creative writers) develop alternate histories, accounts of what could have happened had events proceeded differently at some decisive moment. Philip K. Dick’s short story “The Man in the High Castle” envisages an alternate history in which the Axis won the Second World War. The Eastern United States is occupied by Nazi Germany, and the West coast by Japan. And some alternate histories describe alternate art worlds. In Kingsley Amis’s novel The Alteration (1976), for example, there has been no Reformation and so England remains Catholic. In the Cathedral Basilica of St George at Coventry, which is the mother church of the English Empire, there is a ceiling by Turner, a window by Gainsborough, frescoes by Blake and a David Hockney mosaic.

My suggestion is that what I have identified as the two distinct parts of Horse Thieves stand in a similar relationship as these two worlds found in literature: the postcard Caravaggio reproduction is from one world, and Beckley’s narrative and bicycle photograph from another. Pale Fire with its two seemingly disconnected but actually interrelated texts is a model for this composition. In making this suggestion, I don’t mean of course, to claim that in a literal way

Beckley was thinking of Nabokov’s novel. Rather, I am interested in the structural parallel. Just as the reader of Pale Fire needs to understand how, in the ways we have examined, Kinbote’s commentary is about the Shade’s poem; so the viewer of Horse Thieves should see how Beckley’s text and photograph of the bicycle is about Caravaggio’s Seven Acts.

What, then, is the significance of this seemingly elaborate procedure? In the previous chapter I argued that one goal of Beckley’s beautiful photographs of flowers was to bring into the present art world his fascination with the aesthetic thinking of Pater and Ruskin. He wanted to show how to update their theorizing. And a closely related goal, I indicated, was to create art that compensated for his own aesthetically impoverished childhood, by making work that acknowledged the importance of beauty. Now I add a further concern to our discussion: Beckley wanted to make explicit the attachment of his own art to art history.

Like the work of almost every significant artist, Beckley’s work has always been closely linked to the history of contemporary artistic developments. His earliest conceptual works were part of that movement. His conceptual narratives built upon a concern of modernism and after with employing words in visual art. And, of course his beautiful photographs were an intervention in the contemporary art world guided by recent theorizing. In more elaborate ways, then, the Neapolitan Holidays extended this way of thinking, in ways that now I spell out.

As we indicated in chapter three, one very common claim of post-modernists was that contemporary art- at any rate, the best contemporary art, broke with tradition. In place, that is, of the dated formalist analysis in which the deep old master space evolves into the shallow modernist space of Abstract Expressionism, whilst preserving the essentials; anti-aesthetic contemporary art rejects tradition. The very phrase “post-modernism” was meant to underline this point; post-modernism is something entirely new. Now, it may seem as if Beckley embraced this tradition. After all, what was conceptual art and photographic narrative art if not a break with tradition? And how can we understand his development as a photographer if not in these terms? Of course we can find precedents for anything. Myself as Washington has some relationship to Gilbert Stuart’s painted portraits. And, as we’ve seen, Beckley’s flowers have some kinship with old master still life paintings. But to focus on continuity, so the distinguished Octoberist Rosalind Krauss influentially claimed, is to blind ourselves to the importance of the recent rupture with tradition.

Is Horse Thieves about Caravaggio’s picture? Not exactly but that old master painting is not entirely irrelevant to understanding this conceptual work. Beckley makes a poetic use of the painting, showing how an absolutely contemporary artist can use Naples. Just as Uncontrollable Beauty and Sticky Sublime offer accounts of beauty, without telling us how exactly to interpret Beckley’s beautiful photographs of flowers, so this photograph of Caravaggio’s Seven Acts in Horse Thieves signals interest in older art, without indicating precisely how we should understand its presence in Beckley’s work.

This, then, is the context in which I would interpret Horse Thieves. Beckley aspires to do something radically new. I can cite no obviously influential old master or modernist models for this four-part narrative. And, also (at the same time) he wants to attach his contemporary work to artistic tradition. You might say, he wants to have his cake and eat it too. And just as, to return

to that infinitely suggestive model, Nabokov set Shade’s traditional-seeming poem “Pale Fire” in contemporary literature by enclosing it in Kinbote’s commentary, in Pale Fire so Caravaggio’s Seven Acts is included, in reproduction, in Horse Thieves, which thus is about that work. The act of interpretation, as is called for by the inclusion of the postcard image, thus asks the reviewer to link present experience to the Caravaggio.

Thus far I’ve focused on literary models, for the discussion by Nabokov and some other creative writers about alternate worlds provides a natural way, I think, of understanding Beckley’s procedure. But it may be instructive also to consider some musical examples, which will enrich our analysis. Just as Horse Thieves conjoins an image of a seventeenth-century altarpiece with Beckley’s contemporary photograph of the bicycle, so a number of recent recording artists intersperse older works with more recent compositions. Thus the pianist David Greilsammer records Bach, Brahms, Schoenberg and other familiar composers along with works by Jonatha Keren, a young figure. And the violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, in collaboration with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, performs segments of Schubert’s Quarter in D minor, “Death and the Maiden” along with an anonymous Byzantine chant, a quintet by John Dowland, a Gesualdo madrigal and a recent work by György Kurtág. The very interesting effect in both cases is to cause us to rethink how we hear the familiar works, set as they are in this new context. That, I would argue, is also what Horse Thieves does for Seven Acts

“Some of my best works from the 1970s highly influenced my 2019 series Neapolitan Holidays. In my early works, everything I wrote was about the length of a postcard. Every work in the Neapolitan Holidays series was inspired by a card dated from 1915 to 1972, sent to or from Naples. What I found particularly touching was that many of them had been sent during the First World War. The format I used was to respond to the text on the postcard with an email or a text message. A specific time is recorded on each message because each one is time-stamped. So, an old postcard may receive a response even after a hundred years. But my responses won’t be contemporary forever.”

Works

Neapolitan Holidays, 2019

Neapolitan Holidays, 2019 C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 98.4 × 37.5 inches (250 × 95.5 cm)

War, Artillery and a Few Questions, 2019 C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 37.5 × 98.4 inches (95.5 × 250 cm)

Darling Young Son 1, 2019

C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 37.5 × 98.4 inches (95.5 × 250 cm)

Cambridge Trampoline Society, 2019 C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 98.4 × 37.5 inches (250 × 95.5 cm)

Bird Watching, 2019 C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 98.4 × 37.5 inches (250 × 95.5 cm)

Land of Lemon Trees, 2019

C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 98.4 × 37.5 inches (250 × 95.5 cm)

Buzz, 2019

C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 98.4 × 37.5 inches (250 × 95.5 cm)

The Gossip Girl, 2019 C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 37.5 × 98.4 inches (95.5 × 250 cm)

PM Mysteries, 2019

C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 37.5 × 98.4 inches (95.5 × 250 cm)

Dinner with Parmenides II 2019 C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 98.4 × 37.5 inches (250 × 95.5 cm)

Dinner with Parmenides, 2019 C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 98.4 × 37.5 inches (250 × 95.5 cm)

What about Virgil?, 2019 C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 98.4 × 37.5 inches (250 × 95.5 cm)

Kissed a Clown, 2019 C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 98.4 × 37.5 inches (250 × 95.5 cm)

Horse Thieves, 2019 C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 37.5 × 98.4 inches (95.5 × 250 cm)

Florilegium: A Story of Art, as Told to Us by Bill Beckley

Andrea Viliani

Bill Beckley is the creator of a form of artistic research that is both organic and unified and yet, at the same time, he is not.

Beckley reflects and works on the multiple, for no element in his study is autonomous or selfsufficient, and all the elements are intertwined with, and responsive to, all the others. On the potential, because the words and images he uses in his works do not just represent what they refer to, or what they correspond to. This is because they also suggest what they might be otherwise. On the ambiguous and, therefore, the doubtful, so nothing is as it appears but is always a matter for interpretation.

First of all, Beckley reflects and works contemporaneously on the text, in the form of the art work as well as on the context the work is in, which is represented by the art world and by art history. While this may be true of all artistic research—though it not always is—in Beckley’s case it can also be associated with the historical origins of his research, which he started up in the late 1960s in an environment that was dominated by the conceptual studies being carried out at the time.

In this sense the work, like its creator, is inseparable, in Beckley’s view, from the inexhaustible series of interpretations that can be given by the context, of which both the work and its creator are a part and of which we, as viewers, are also a part. It follows that Beckley is aware not only of the active role played by those who can observe and judge a work, but also of the co-creation of the work in the act of interpreting it in so many diverse ways. The work is therefore the means for ensuring a constant critical and narrative exercise, which is a germinal ganglion in all Beckley’s artistic research, as we shall see. In this exercise, creating the work coincides not only with conceiving it in the mind—with an analysis of its conceptual, formal and historical values—but also with the beginning of the story of its possible variables.

The work is therefore probable, but not certain. In itself, being always subject to interpretation, it is both real and fictitious, and not just an actual object but also a means for telling a story. The work would not exist if it did not have its institutional horizon, which is that of art history and the art world, viewed as the chain of interpretations brought about by those who observe and judge the work, thus completing it. However, it is equally true that this institutional horizon—art history and the art world—would not exist if it were not for the way the work itself interprets and opens it up.

Here we are talking about the work, but we should first of all talk about its creator, or always about both of them together.

One of Beckley’s first works was a photographic self-portrait of himself as George Washington, the first US President, and is titled Myself as Washington (1969). It appears symptomatic that Beckley should put himself in someone else’s shoes by role-playing as someone else, while playacting the part of a different person, even though in actual fact the person is composed and interpreted by himself. A “pretender” is someone who not only believes they have a particular role, but also someone who feigns belief: so the meaning is both one thing and its opposite.

And that is it: Beckley reflects and works “as if” a thing were what it is but also its opposite, or in any case something else.

His tempo is neither the indicative nor the subjunctive tense, but a blend of the two, in which a natural fact is used to create a condition of epistemic uncertainty. A “hypothetical period” is a syntactic structure consisting of the main clause in a conditional sentence (apodosis) together with the antecedent of a conditional clause (protasis), which requires the subjunctive. These are therefore conditional sentences and clauses. In any case, it is a reality that is given only as a hypothesis, which means it is neither true nor false but, in some respects, it is both: “Myself as George Washington” does not mean that I am or that I am not him, but it is “as though I were” him.

In Italian—the language I am using to judge and illustrate Beckley’s artistic research— interpretare means two things that are inherently very different. It means providing one’s own version—for example an explanation or a translation—but it also means to act or to play a part, or pretend. This is where criticism and narration can coexist, since both are an act of interpretation, which is a process involving similarities in order to bring different things together. It means providing different versions of the same fact, or acting out a story as someone else.

By using conditional sentences, and thus operating “as if,” Beckley creates works that bring together levels of experience that are far removed from each other, and sometimes quite incongruous: criticism and narration, the conceptual dimension and decorative beauty, semiotic analysis and pure entertainment, cultured and popular, simple and abstruse.

The aesthetic and intellectual aspect of his various works came as a reaction to the artistic environments they were conceived in—respectively the rigorous conceptual roots of the 1970s, the return to expressiveness in the 1980s and the coming back together of these two opposites in the 2000s with the genesis of a differentiated conceptualism upheld by an individual personality. At the same time, the fusion brought about by Beckley meant that, once again, it was “as if” he had decided to be part of that particular artistic setting, while at the same time disregarding it.

Beckley began his artistic research in the late 1960s, biographically alongside both the generation of pop artists and that of conceptual artists, but he appears to have been interested less in the autonomy of the pop icon and of the conceptual idea and in a division of the work, for which the artist designs but does not produce (a logical consequence and a diktat of the most prescriptive forms of both pop and conceptual art). Instead, his work is similar to something that precedes this scenario, which is the supremely ironic salvaging that is typical of the Duchampian readymade, which in itself is both a critical and a narrative operation. On the other hand, Beckley’s work is also similar to something that is yet to come—that rediscovery of a sensual pleasure and

spontaneous playfulness that can be used to interweave references and quotations typical of the Post-modern aesthetic,¹ of international Neo-expressionisms and of Trans-avanguardia in Italy a decade later. In the case of Beckley, it should be noted that of these definitions—Post-modern, Neoexpressionism, and Trans-avanguardia—perhaps the last one—coined in 1979 for some exhibitions and articles by the Italian critic Achille Bonito Oliva—is the most accurate even if it is certainly the one that is most alien to Beckley in biographical terms. The neologism Trans-avanguardia places the emphasis neither on the new (“Neo”) nor on the after (“Post”) but rather on the idea of going through (“Trans”) the very concept of avant-garde, thus making it a dynamic conjunction that has to do with the impermanence of a dialogue, and the unpredictability of a result.

What is more, at the time when Beckley was starting his artistic research, a critical attitude began to be adopted towards the formats and behaviors of art. This was the so-called “Institutional Critique,”² which took root in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a realization by conceptual artists that the institutional context of art was an integral part of the work of art itself. This is because it influences its exhibition and mediation and indeed, by interpreting it, it alters the way it is understood not only from an artistic and historical angle but also from an economic, political and social point of view. But here too, with his first works consisting of words and images, Beckley appears to have been too interested in the stories he was telling to reduce them to an exclusively critical position that would deconstruct and cancel the narrative, revealing its internal mechanisms or external conditioning. Just as he is too conscious of the critical origins of his narratives to believe that they are simply stories to be told.

Beckley’s photo-narrative technique in the 1970s was in fact based on the effects of duplicity (the most basic form of multiplicity), on the coexistence of truth and lies, on something that is objectively there to see and read, and also on the possible interpretations that can be drawn from it (the “pretending/claiming” and the “interpreting/acting” mentioned above). A framework that was also structurally supported by the formal composition of the works in diptychs, triptychs or polyptychs, combining both images and texts as their components. While the aim in these composite works is critical, its application and rendering are narrative: images and words are combined to create stories, and the story is a contaminated means, at once true and false, plausible enough to be believable, but implausible enough to be dubious. And this leaves room for judgment and the imagination to work side by side, a bit like what happens when we read a novel or go to the cinema and suspend our disbelief for a few hours so that we can immerse ourselves completely in the story we are reading or that we are watching and hearing.

Works like Cake Story (1973)—typically divided into two parts, a photograph of a slice of cake placed on a table and a phrase about eating it but still having it (a possibility that is in itself a contradiction)—or De Kooning’s Stove (1974) or Rising Sun, Falling Coconut (1978) are, to quote

1. Jean-François Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1979.

2. For an introduction to this matter, see Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetics of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October, Vol. 55, 1999, 105–143; Julia Bryan-Wilson, “A Curriculum of Institutional Critique,” in Jonas Ekeberg (ed.), New Institutionalism Oslo: OCA/verksted, 2003, 89–109; Alexander Alberro, Blake Stimson (eds.), Institutional Critique An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Cambridge, Massachusetts/London: The MIT Press, 2009.

Umberto Eco, all open works that leave room for multiple interpretations. These interpretations are brought about by the active role of their viewer or reader,³ who takes part in the storyteller’s critical and narrative strategies. Reading and looking at these text-works of Beckley’s has always reminded me of Eco’s romans à clef, which act on a number of levels.⁴ Even so, I am aware of Beckley’s passion for another novelist, Vladimir Nabokov, and for his invention of plausible alternative realities, in which the borderline between true and false becomes vague, on the one hand attracting critical attention and on the other satisfying the reader’s desire for adventure. Over the years I have learnt how the Neapolitan language (which Beckley also referred to in some of his works) contains surreal paradoxes that convey a sense of life based on the coexistence of enchantment and disenchantment, thus turning it into a language-text, a language that is just right for storytelling while also full of critical wisdom.

So, as I see it, in some strange way these works seem to translate almost untranslatable Neapolitan sayings, such as one of the most paradoxical, which is one of my favorites: “miettila ‘n terra e vide si cammina…”(“put it on the ground, and see if it walks,” meaning “try it, if you can”).

One book that you will certainly find on Beckley’s desk is Imaginary Portraits, written by Walter Pater in 1887: this is a collection of imaginary biographies of real people, a handbook for those who want to blend fact and fiction, and to use literary tricks to understand that truth exists only if told in all its complexity and in all its polyphonic meanderings.

And Beckley himself conceived and edited two texts, two anthologies to be precise—Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics in 1998 and Sticky Sublime in 2001—which, in Beckley’s choice of artists and works and in his explanation in the introductory texts, show us his ideas on art. It is possibly no coincidence that we are dealing in both cases with anthological texts, of florilegia, of which the etymology is as follows:

florilegium – noun – from New Latin flōrilegium, from Latin flōrilegus flower-culling (from flōri- + -legus from legĕre to gather) + -ium (as in spīcilegium act of gleaning ears of grain) […] [translation of Middle Greek anthología]: a volume or collection of brief extracts or writings.”⁵

To formulate an opinion or to tell a story, it is first necessary to select and connect the thesis, the antithesis and the synthesis of one’s own reasoning, just as one needs to select and connect the protagonists and the events of one’s own fabula. Beckley’s is indeed not just a critical-narrative approach, in which the two elements are no longer in opposition but rather in a full and satisfying epistemic partnership, but also one that, I would say, is anthological as a result.

Beckley’s anthologizing, however, should not be viewed as a form of citation or appropriation —two terms that were to define the dominant aesthetics that emerged in the 1980s both in Europe

3. See Umberto Eco, Opera aperta. Forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee, Milan: Bompiani, 1962, and “Il ruolo del lettore,” in Lector in fabula. La cooperazione interpretativa nei testi narrativi Milan: Bompiani, 1979. See also the distinction made by Roland Barthes between “readable” and “writable” texts in The Death of the Author 1967. See also the distinction made by Roland Barthes between “readerly” and “writerly” texts (Roland Barthes, S/Z An Essay New York, Hill & Wang, 1982, p. 5).

4. The Name of The Rose (1980), Foucault’s Pendulum (1988), The Island of the Day Before (1994), Baudolino (2000), The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2004), The Prague Cemetery (2010), and Numero Zero (2015), all originally published in Italian by Bompiani, Milan.

5. Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary Chicago: Merriam-Webster, 1961.

and in North America, which Beckley also appears to have joined and then abandoned, just as he had done a decade earlier with the coeval conceptual and Pop approaches. Instead, Beckley’s anthologizing is more of an action that, although conceptually prescriptive, is nevertheless designed to bring about cognitive, linguistic and aesthetic breaches: an anthology, a florilegium that confuses categories that generally are not, or cannot be, associated with each other. They thus produce an unexpected and unpredictable anthology of metaphorical knowledge, that can once again be defined only “as if.” To try to visualize this anthology—since a picture is of course worth a thousand words, though I’m not sure Beckley would agree—I would ask you to think of the frescoes in the domus in Pompeii in which ideal gardens are shown with flowers and fruits, and animals that, in reality, could never be found together, because they bloom and mature in different seasons, or thrive in different climates. By having them illusively coexist in one time and place, the frescoes in Pompeii are fantastical and compendious trompe l’oeil landscapes. Beckley referred to this Pompeian theme in his collages of the Gardens of Pompeii series, which he made in the mid-1980s. When I first met him, in 2017, at the exhibition Pompei@Madre. Materie archeologiche,⁶ I showed a copy (Gardens of Pompeii, 1986) on which some words stood out, at first sight without any connection between them: “Orec,” “Spalla,” “Ena,” “Mimosa,” “Jitters.”

From the beginning of the new millennium, Beckley devoted himself to the theme of the garden and, more specifically, to flowers—which for etymological reasons, as we have seen, refers to the anthology and the florilegium. This new work started with photographs of lilies, callas or poppies against neutral grounds of various colors. Leaving the roots or vases out of the picture, the camera focuses only on the stems or petals, which are the elements best able to form almost abstract images, consisting solely of surfaces, lines, and shapes. The shots are also mostly close-up and vertical, detaching the image as much as possible from the horizontal and descriptive plane of the setting, and thus from the flower’s roots in the ground from which it grows. As the whole tradition of floral still life painting has handed down to us, painting a flower is above all a matter of style, and the fact that Beckley refers to the process of abstraction that led Piet Mondrian to move from his initial paintings of trees to his paintings of geometric shapes and primary colors, or the fact that Beckley continues a tradition that goes from Paul Cézanne’s pre-Cubist applies to Giorgio Morandi’s bottles and through to Barnett Newman’s “zip,” all this is in itself an anthology, a florilegium in stylistic terms. His anthological selection appears at first sight to focus our attention not so much on the objects of its representation, which are simply flowers, as on the possibility of extracting from them images of pure conceptual value, and of absolute abstract and minimalist discipline. But here again Beckley is acting “as if.” Because in actual fact these flowers are vectors of different cognitive, linguistic and aesthetic movements, and they bring about a relationship between the various levels of meaning: primarily between the flower in nature and its representation in art, between the piece of reality and its interpretation in the history of art. And therefore, between the unnaturalness of the concept and the naturalness of its embodiment. And thus also on the scandal of being able to combine the ideal of an art that is still conceptual with the spurious and irregular nature of something that is quite

6. Pompei@Madre. Materie archeologiche, curated by Massimo Osanna and Andrea Viliani, Madre-Museo d’arte contemporanea Donnaregina, Naples, Nov 19, 2017 – Apr 30, 2018.

simply, mundanely, humbly and truly… beautiful. In other words, these flowers are a florilegium that reflects,—and invites us to reflect—on the fact that what we see is never just what we see, but rather a whole series of practical matters and theoretical ideas, that looking at something from the front rather than from the side is never the best way either to judge it or to tell it. Even if it is nothing but a simple, mundane, humble flower.

To quote the archaeologist Salvatore Settis and, with him, the twentieth-century historian and art critic Aby Warburg, Pathosformeln—the “pathos formulas” with which some images, some stylistic features, and some archetypal interpretations tend to resurface even in different contexts—have also been deposited in these flowers. They shape our historical and artistic knowledge as an expressive pathos, a desire that becomes stratified in recurring expressions, as though they were the sediments from which our contemporary knowledge is also generated. Every original creation condenses in them around the repetitiveness with which it reappears, and for which every work of art is itself a museum in which all the history of art comes together.⁷

In this sense, Beckley’s flowers are deceptions: however much they may seem to us to be the last possible flowers in the long twentieth-century tradition of abstraction, they are poisonous flowers precisely because, by acting on a critical and narrative level, they make our perception and knowledge both greater and more problematic. It is no coincidence that, as works of art, they also have a title—a textual element that in this case is not present in the work itself but associated with it as the result of a further codification of the system and of the history of art, which always requires a title for each work, even if it is only “Untitled.” Again, it is no coincidence that these titles make no reference at all to the flowers themselves, but to something that they potentially inspired in their creator, although this may not be immediately understandable by the viewer/reader. Once again, these works lead to a whole range of possible interpretations, which appear in the form of both critical reflections and as the stories told by a basically unreliable narrator—which has always been the case with Beckley, and his viewers/readers with him. Like saying: “the story continues.…” Rarely will you see flowers that are so beautiful, so clear, so detailed, and so innocuous as to become, in reality, so opaque, so indirect, so enigmatic, and so complex.

After all, these floral anthologies—these florilegia of Beckley’s—coincide with that current chapter in the history of contemporary art that is ever more characterised by practices that were increasingly based, as in the case of Beckley, on interaction between criticism and narration and between real and fictitious, as well as on the intersection between the space-based visual arts and the time-based performative arts, and on the increasing confusion between the role of the artist and that of its interpreter. Here, even the original antagonistic practices of Institutional Critique were gradually absorbed and even celebrated by the system and by the history of art, entering museums as an expression of the contemporary institutional pathosformel. While proving themselves to be critical operations, these practices found themselves telling stories, which were probable enough to be believed but improbable enough to make us doubt that we should believe them, bringing to bear our critical judgment in the very act of listening to the story. I should like to refer to these

practices no longer as “institutional critique,” even though they are its heirs, but more properly as “institutional narratives,” and I believe that Beckley is indeed one of the most probable and seminal forerunners of this “institutional narrative.”

I started working on Beckley’s artistic research in the early 2010s, but I met Beckley in person only a few years later, in 2017, when I invited him to the group exhibition entitled Pompei@Madre. Materie archeologiche. On the occasion of his solo exhibition at the Studio Trisorio in 2019, he presented his Neapolitan Holidays series consisting of quadriptychs in which the four elements were variously juxtaposed in each work of the series and the image of an old postcard that Beckley chose from a set that the Trisorio family salvaged and gave to him; the original message that appeared on the back of the postcard, together with the address of the recipient and the stamp the sender put on it so it could be posted; a new image and a new message from Beckley (almost as a reply—though rather late and unexpected, even though plausible at first glance—to the message that was written on the original postcard).

As he demonstrates in the spatial, temporal, authorial and semiotic polyphony of his Neapolitan Holidays, Beckley has always been a visual artist but, as I mentioned, he has used the working methods and imagery of a critic and storyteller: it is precisely because of this that the images and words with which he writes his stories are unreliable, for they are based on the productive duplicity between word and image, on the suspended spaces and times that open up between criticism and narration, and on the potential for interpretation that they (the words and images, criticism and narration) open up as creators of realities, which are by their very nature alternative, of possible worlds, and of yet more states of understanding. This is why Beckley’s works are liberating and inspire an exhilarating sense of optimism in us, because they welcome us into them, awakening our critical sense and, at the same time, fulfilling our need for adventure, surprise and play. The work— but also the exhibition, the essay, the catalogue, the museum, the gallery, the participation and reception of the viewer and the reader—together write not just a single story but countless stories of art. Beckley’s story is one of them—indeed, it is one but also another and another and yet another.

In any case, no story can exist without the other in his anthology, in his florilegium of stories, sometimes touching it, sometimes intertwining with it, sometimes contradicting itself, sometimes even ignoring itself and the others. Each of these stories needs to be interpreted, for it is a recreation of reality as we know it or, at least, as we thought we knew it.

These, and others, might be some of the premises for a possible anthology on “institutional narrative,” on its origins, and on its protagonists. We might even give this anthology the title “FLORILEGIUM,” in your honor, Bill. And I thank you for having muddled up my ideas over these past few years, thus paradoxically clarifying what I was to write in this florilegium of mine, which concerns me as much as it concerns you and our reader.⁸

8. I should like to thank Bill Beckley, as well as David Carrier for his in-depth essay that also accompanies this volume, together with Lucia, Laura, and Paola Trisorio, in memory of Pasquale Trisorio, and my friend Gianfranco D’Amato, for having been by my side not only in editing this essay but through all the years in which it has taken shape and been redefined, slowly and even unconsciously, together with our mutual relationships.

A Conversation Bill Beckley

My work arose from the Minimalist Art movement of the late 1960s. At that time, the medium of painting was experiencing a crisis: Frank Stella, Brice Marden and Robert Ryman had produced works in which the pictorial surfaces appeared completely flat without content. Artists such as Dennis Oppenheim and Vito Acconci pioneered conceptual works, painted directly on the landscape or their own bodies. While attracted by their work, I found it disturbing their work depended on documentation.

I graduated from Temple University in Philadelphia. My professor, Italo Scanga, introduced me to former students and friends, including Bruce Nauman, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, and Marcia Tucker.

During that period, I would use a brush to paint directly on the ground in fields north of the city. I painted lines in the landscape that were one meter wide by one hour long. It was literally “landscape painting.” I painted squares on bushes that I dedicated to Sol LeWitt, who I met when he came to visit Italo Scanga in 1969. Sol greatly influenced my work and we remained friends until his death in 2017.

In March 1969, I painted a line from sunrise to sunset. The line was painted through fields, down into a small valley and across a river. As soon as I applied the paint to the water, it immediately washed away. So, I “painted” a line immersed in the water as I crossed the Delaware River from one side to the other. On the banks of the Delaware, there is a famous spot where George Washington crossed the river during the American War of Independence. His boat crossing took place on the night of December 25, 1776. My crossing, minus the boat, took place on March 20, 1969. I had a camera with me and when I entered the water I had four cans of paint—almost four kilos—strapped around my waist. I hadn’t realized the river was so deep, the water was over my head. At that point, to avoid drowning, I had to get rid of the paint. In the struggle, I lost my camera, but I continued across the river until I reached the other side.

It was then that I realized that I didn’t have any photographs, not a scrap of proof. All I had was a story. There used to only be analog photographs, often misconstrued as truth. At any rate, I thought to myself: “Well maybe I should do something more with George Washington.” So, I took a photo of myself (Myself as Washington, 1969). My hair was long so I ruffled it and dusted it with

baby powder to make it white. I put on a black raincoat inside out to make a high collar over a white shirt. It was an improvisation, not a costume. I also signed my name imitating his handwriting.

From October 1970 to the summer 1974, I frequently exhibited at 112 Greene Street. “Greene” is written with a final “e” because all the streets running in a North-South direction in SoHo, where I still live, were named after Revolutionary War generals. 112 Greene Street was established in 1970 by the sculptor Jeffrey Lew, who transformed the ground floor and the basement of an old six-story cast-iron building, formerly a rag-salvaging factory, into a venue for exhibitions and experimentation. It was an anarchic, informal environment where Barry Le Va, Alan Saret, Gordon Matta-Clark, Louise Bourgeois and I, to name a few, would display our work. We would make practically unsellable objects and leave them there for a couple of weeks. I built a long bed between two supporting poles of the building, and put a live rooster in a cage hanging above the mattress. The idea was that the bed would be used for sleeping, and the rooster (a reference to Robert Rauschenberg) would be the alarm. I also showed four of my silent ping pong tables. The ping pong ball bounced off the sponge surfaces of the paddles and table without making a sound. Most conceptual art added a form of language to visual art, where in this case I took the language (the ping and the pong) out of the art.

Yet another interesting experience was the outdoor group show on the Brooklyn Bridge, known as “The Brooklyn Bridge Event” which was organized in 1971 by Alanna Heiss, founder and director of the Clocktower Space, then P.S.1. Contemporary Art Center, now MoMA PS1. More than 20 artists and performers participated in the event, including Carl Andre, Tina Girouard, Jeffrey Lew, Keith Sonnier, Gordon Matta-Clark, Jene Highstein, Sol Lewitt, Richard Nonas, and Dennis Oppenheim. My project, the Brooklyn Bridge Swings, featured a series of swings hanging from the upper deck of the bridge and a bucket of dead fish to attract the seagulls perched on the bridge. So, the seagulls were flapping their wings above and below people could swing. It was a combination of two movements, that of the wings and that of the swings.

I knew several artists at the time, including my friends Dennis Oppenheim and Peter Hutchinson, and we were all exhibiting with gallery owner John Gibson in New York. It was a time when conceptual artists were doing performances or actions outdoors. I began to sense the problem that what was being shown in the gallery was not the “real thing” but rather its documentation. Documentation rests on the assumption that the artist is telling the truth and instead, in a good way, there are many lies. In considering my work on Washington I thought, “This is not documentation, this is clearly invention. I am not George Washington.” That’s when I started my “narrative” work.

I thought of various ways to write stories. In my 1971 Short Stories for Popsicles, the story was written on the ice cream wrapper, but if you wanted to know how the story ended, you had to finish the entire popsicle because the ending was written on the stick.

In Short Story for Hopscotch, also written in 1971, a 10-sentence story was silkscreened onto a composition of floor tiles arranged next to each other, reproducing the 10 numbers of the game of Hopscotch. Therefore, you could skip or read or perhaps do both at the same time. It was a way to turn a story into an art object, rather than making art as documentation.

Subsequently, I began to write short, fictional stories illustrated with photographs that were not intended to prove any truth: The Origin of And, 1972, An Analogue of An, 1972, Cake Story, 1973, etc. I began with the titles. One story was entitled An Avoidance of Ann, 1972, and I had no idea what the story would be. I simply thought about avoiding words that began with a vowel because that would have required the use of the article “an.” For example, if I had wanted to mention an “innertube” I would not have used the word “innertube” as it would have required the use of “an,” instead I would have spoken of “a circular shaped tube filled with…” It was all about avoiding not only the word “an,” but also an imaginary person named Ann. First, I wrote the title and then I tried to understand how to explain it through the text.

The Origin of And was a story about a monk who had gathered produce in the gardens of a threelevel monastery which included: the gardens, a mid-level area over the rocks where the scribes lived and an upper-level where the other monks lived and worked. When the gardener monk was about to reach the top of the cliff with his sack filled with fruit and vegetables after the having been hoisted up by the other monks, he asked his friends to “Give me a hand.” But before the monks could help him to get out of the basket, the cord broke and he fell with all of the fruit and vegetables. The scribes who were at mid-level saw him fall and only heard him say the last part of “hand” which is “and.” Thus, the monks associated the word “and” with the falling of many things, with the concept of multiplicity.

Cake Story was inspired by a phrase in English: “You can’t have your cake and eat it too” which begs the question: “Is it possible to eat the cake and still have it as well?”

The Origin of And was the first fictional story I wrote. 1969 marked the beginning of my so-called “narrative art.” My works, along with those of other international artists who followed the same trend, such as David Askevold, John Baldessari, Peter Hutchinson, Jean Le Gac, Italo Scanga, David Tremlett, Ger van Elk and William Wegman, were exhibited in 1973 at the John Gibson Gallery in New York under the name “Narrative Art.” The name was selected by John

Rooster, Bed, Lying, 1971

112 Greene Street, New York

Story 1973 John Gibson Gallery, New York

Bill Beckley with Silent Ping Pong Tables, 1971

112 Greene Street, New York

Gibson, the gallery owner, who thought it was preferable as opposed to “Story Art.” I remember discussing it with him as we were driving from Basel to Baden-Baden.

Several group exhibitions in Europe and America followed, including Narrational Imagery: Beckley, Ruscha, Warhol organized by Sam Hunter at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and American Narrative / Story Art: 1967–1977 at the Houston Museum of Contemporary Art.

Some of the works didn’t have text, but they were still narratives. Roses Are, Violets Are, Sugar Are, 1974, came from “Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet and so are you”: a nursery rhyme from my childhood. So, there was the rose stem with a red background, the violet stem against a blue background and there was a line of sugar which imitated the rose and the violet stems. The phrase “sugar is sweet” doesn’t name a color, so I made the background yellow to complete the three primary colors. The flowerless stems, intentionally alluded to the vertical lines of Barnett Newman who was leery of horizontal lines like the ones used in landscapes because he felt they might lead him back to figuration.

Shortly before his death, Newman realized a pair of paintings named Who’s Afraid of Red Yellow and Blue featuring vertical lines with red, blue and yellow backgrounds. Hot and Cold Faucets with Drain 1975, one of my best-known works, was actually in reference to Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red Yellow and Blue. The hot-water faucet is red while the cold-water faucet is blue. Water from both faucets runs together into the same drain which is yellow, not a combination of red and blue.

Drop in Bucket, 1975, is one of my favorites. On top is a square photo bearing the image of a faucet, in the middle there is a triangular photo with the image of a drop and at the bottom, there is another square photo with the image of a bucket viewed from above. So what syphons the drop into the bucket is the shape of the triangular photograph.

In Paris Bistro (a restaurant in the West Village), 1975, the idea was that the photo on top be a rectangle and the one below be in the shape of a stop sign. So the sign depicted in the upper photograph is reflected in the bottom photo, once again calling attention to the photograph as an object.

What I wanted in these works was that the photograph be an object of art and not a documentation of art. Other artists, in protest against capitalism, were against creating objects. Actually, I think that they were creating objects because photographs are thin objects. Furthermore, I have no doubt that all good conceptual photographs have either been sold or could be sold. I have discussed this issue with my friend Vito Acconci and we agreed that their position was politically flimsy.

In those years of political unrest, many artists were Marxists or, frequently, even puritanical. They criticized me for having alluded, metaphorically or literally, to sex in my work. They were right, even an exhaust pipe can be a sexual metaphor. To all effects, conceptual artists are a bit too puritanical for me: only black and white photographs, little or no sex, and no sense of humor. I wanted to take a bit of “puritanism” out of my work.

Puritanism and Marxism seem to go hand-in-hand. The basic idea of Marxism is: I don’t own any commodities; therefore, I am not part of capitalism. This is a romantic idea and I am a romantic, but I believe that, in practice, Marxism does not work because, although one doesn’t need to buy a Tesla, you still need money to buy an old Volkswagen. Although I feel indebted to early conceptualism, I find it excessive, constraining and puritanical.

The work entitled Mao Dead, 1976, was originally a story about a newspaper, not about Mao. On 9 September 1976, I took an image of Mao from the cover of the New York Post and wrote a story about a newspaper. I included a photo of a street light and another of a field with rows of plants, similar to the lines of a newspaper. I used the Post with “Mao Dead” written across the cover, but I could have used any other newspaper.

In The Bathroom, 1977, I inserted the image of a woman’s legs and her scratched shoulders. My friend Jeff Koons really liked this work precisely because it challenged the puritanical aspect in a conceptual work.

In 1978, I was married to an Englishwoman named Deirdre. Deirdre’s Lip is a photograph of her upper lip, the vapor coming out of a train smokestack and three photographs of breath, taken on a cold evening, which visually represent the pronunciation of the words “forget, twilight, darling.” There is a connection between this vapor and the vapor from the train smokestack. Therefore, in this work we find the vapor from the train, from a mouth and the vapor of the three words that the breath represents: forget, twilight, darling.

In Shoulder Blade 1978, which now belongs to Jeff Koons, there is a triangle of a shoulder blade, the circle of a nipple and a barrier between. My text reads: “A bar of soap passed over the nipple of a breast a circular erogenous zone. Stimulated it stood erect. Later the bar of soap passed over another area, triangular, on her back. The bathtub was set in Berlin. The city had been zoned after the war. Roads leading from one area to another had been blocked by gates. Later, bathed she crossed.”

In Rising Sun, Falling Coconut from 1978 I took the photo in Tortola, in the Caribbean, where I went with my friend Mac Adams, who also exhibited at John Gibson Gallery. In the top photo the sun is rising, in the bottom photo the coconut is falling.

The Living Room 1977 – Deirdre’s Lip 1978 Whitney Biennial, 1979

Sunday Paper 1987 – French Fries, 1983 Albertz Benda Gallery, New York, 2018

I was basically writing a story and taking pictures at the same time. Then, at a certain point, after five or ten studies and rewrites, I would have the final work. The text evolved with the photos. Each piece required a few months to complete.

In the 1980s, I used various materials, and my work became more sculptural and pictorial. By the end of the decade, I had found a way to integrate these materials with photography. The integration of photography and pictorial surfaces is an important aspect of all my works. These works are reminiscent of the flat surfaces in minimalist paintings such as those of Brice Marden while, concurrently, through their photographic references, allude to the phenomenon of water flowing down the drain, creating a space which is both illusory and real.

My choice of flowers as subject matter developed out of my admiration for Barnett Newman. As a painter, Newman did a series of paintings he called “Zips.” They were vertical lines because, as an abstractionist, he wanted to get away from horizontals which evoke “landscape.”

Of course Newman was a painter and as a painter he could be totally non-objective. With photographs it is difficult to be non objective. And, why should one want to?

I was influenced by the context of painting more than the context of fine art photography. Of course by then some painters like Robert Ryman and Jackson Pollock were totally without reference to objects in the so-called real world. But as a photographer it was problematic to be totally non-objective because usually an object is needed in a photograph so that light can bounce off of something.

I admired Barnett Newman for a number of reasons including his interest in the sublime, an idea that mystifies me even today. But at the time (1969) I think it took courage for Newman to be totally nonobjective. Even with abstraction there is some reference to something in the world.

A photograph usually has to be a photograph of a something that already exists. To do a nonobjective painting you don’t need anything except paint and a brush, to do a photograph an object usually has to have some kind of presence in the so-called world.

So I thought, what linear object is vertical? Well, for one thing, a stem is usually vertical. After all, flowers compete for light, that is why stems exist. So for a couple of years I photographed lily stems because lily stems didn’t have branches to disturb the smooth clear verticality of their existence. Lily stems became my zips.

Lilies are redemptive. And coming from a strict Puritan background in Hamburg, Pennsylvania, I thought, if anyone needed redemption it was me. Over a period of years I photographed many lily stems. Then one day I thought, what about other stems that don’t have branches. Poppies

came to mind. So I photographed poppy stems. But somehow it seemed wrong to crop the flower off the poppy. So I left the flower on.

I thank Barnett Newman for the bouquet.

Some of my best works from the 1970s highly influenced my 2019 series Neapolitan Holidays This may have been my best show or, at least one of the three best shows.

In my early works, everything I wrote was about the length of a postcard. The interesting thing about postcards is that the message written on the back almost always has little or nothing to do with the image on the other side. Postcards were the text messages of the time. Modern-day text messages are contemporary postcards.

Every work in the Neapolitan Holidays series was inspired by a card, selected from a group of postcards from 1915–1972 that Lucia Trisorio sent me, all from her family and sent to or from Naples. I selected the postcards that I liked the most and then Lucia translated them into English. What I found particularly touching in these cards is that many of them had been sent during the First World War. The title is a bit ironic because the entire series is entitled Neapolitan Holidays.

The format I used was to respond to the text on the postcard with an email or a text message. A specific time is recorded on each message because each one is time-stamped. So, an old postcard may receive a response even after a hundred years. But my responses won’t be “contemporary” forever. Thus, it all began with the postcards and then I wrote the text and took the photos. Neapolitan Holidays, which was also the title of the entire exhibition, refers to a specific postcard sent during the First World War. The interesting thing is that it was sent to a soldier who, in the interim, had been reassigned elsewhere and so the card was re-addressed and forwarded to him in another place. I’m sure that, for him, it was certainly not a holiday because he had been injured and was in the hospital. In response to this postcard, I wrote a lighthearted story about trying to catch the ferry to Naples from Capri. There is a photo of a red, high-heeled shoe which would make running very difficult. There is also a photo of the boat’s wake during the trip from Naples to Capri and vice versa.

Cambridge Trampoline Society instead, is reminiscent of the bouncing waves when traveling to Capri.

In Bird Watching, I am talking about a grinding stone. The stone is something very heavy, and here is a feather, something very light. The heavy thing is on top and the feather is on the bottom. Naturally, the photograph of the stone and the photograph of the feather weigh the same.

Roses Are, Violets Are, Sugar Are, 1974 – Dervish 11, Nasuhi, 2007 – Station 9, 2001 Studio Trisorio, Rome, 2009

Barnett Newman, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue IV, 1969–70

Buzz is about Virgil’s bees and there is a photo of some bees, which is not a coincidence. The stop sign is just a stop sign. At the moment, I really can’t explain it. I just like the image. Even the tomato in Dinner with Parmenides or the interior of the church in Sleeves Etc should simply be considered in the overall context of the relationship between content, text and image.

I have been to Naples many times since 1976 when I drove from London to Naples in my 1962 Morgan, an auto which I still have. I adore Naples and the artists I have met there, including Lawrence Carroll and Lucy Jones Carroll. Naples is a magnet for artists.

Later, and only spiritually, I met other artists in Naples such as Goethe, Sartre, Dostoyevsky, Stendhal and my dear friend and mentor Oscar Wilde. Naples is a world onto itself.

Everyone told me to be careful as I wandered about the streets with my camera taking photos of skulls, lions and churches. I’m happy I wasn’t careful.

Postcard, 1915

Excerpts from a conversation with Laura Trisorio, October 2019.

Biography

Present

Instructor, School of Visual Arts

Editorial Director of Aesthetics Today

Tyler School of Art, Temple University, M.F.A.

Kutztown State University, Pennsylvania, B.F.A.

Born in Hamburg, Pennsylvania

Museum and Public Collections

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

The Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY

The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

Sammlung Hoffmann, Berlin, Germany

La Jolla Museum, San Diego (MCASD), CA

Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK

Musée d’art moderne, Céret, France

Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland

Mönchengladbach Museum, Germany

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Musée d’art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland

Daimler-Benz collection, Berlin, Germany

Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany

Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

Kröller-Müller Museum, Arnhem, The Netherlands

Works in Private Collections

Sol LeWitt

Jeff Koons

Gianfranco D’Amato, Naples, Italy

Studio Trisorio, Naples, Italy

Morton Neuman collection, Chicago

Ed Downe, New York, NY

Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf, Germany

Lise Toubon, Paris, France

David and Lindsey Shapiro, New York

Daimler Benz, Stuttgart, Germany

George Waterman, New York, NY

Isy Brachot, Brussels, Belgium

Klaus Wolf, Essen, Germany

Sabine and Bernard Duare, Perpignan, France

Dr. P. Rau, Berlin, Germany

Chase Manhattan, New York, NY

Yvon Lambert, Paris, France

Esther Gruthen, Basel, Switzerland

Richard Oudenhuysen, The Netherlands

Select Solo Exhibitions

2019 Bill Beckley, Neapolitan Holidays, Studio Trisorio, Naples, Italy

2018 Frieze New York, Bill Beckley: The Eighties, Randalls Island, NY

Elements of Romance, Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, University of the Arts, Philadelphia PA

The Name of the Rose, Recent Works, Studio G7, Bologna, Italy

After the Orgies: Bill Beckley Works 1980s–90s, Albertz Benda, New York, NY

2016 Bill Beckley: Elements of Romance – Works from the Seventies, Studio Trisorio, Naples, Italy

2015 Bill Beckley: The Accidental Poet (The Avoidance of Everything) Albertz Benda, New York, NY

2014 Bill Beckley, An Answer from the Silence, Silvan Faessler Fine Art GmbH, Zug, Switzerland

2013 Bill Beckley: Facts (Fuck) I Love You, Friedman Benda, New York, NY

Flag Attempts, Galerie Hans Mayer, Art Basel, Basel, Switzerland

Retrospective, Galerie Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf, Germany

2011 Alternative Histories, Exit Art, New York, NY

P420 Arte contemporanea e libri, Bologna, Italy

Galerie Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf, Germany

Sammlung Hoffmann, Berlin, Germany

2010 ArteFiera, Studio Trisorio, Naples/Rome, Italy

New Works: Haben Gegenstände ein Gedächtnis Galerie Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf, Germany

“Etcetera,” Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, NY

Rosenbaum Contemporary, Art Basel, Miami Beach, FL

2009 Galerie Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf, Germany

Studio Trisorio, Naples, Italy

Studio Trisorio, Rome, Italy

2008 Ping-Pong Dialogues, Chelsea Space, London, UK

Rosenbaum Contemporary Gallery, Boca Raton, FL

Galerie Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf, Germany

2007 Park Ryu Sook Gallery, Seoul, South Korea

Bruna Soletti Gallery, Milan, Italy

Dorfman Projects, New York, NY

Galerie Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf, Germany

2006 Rosenbaum Contemporary, Boca Raton, FL

2004 Robert McClain Gallery, Houston, TX

Studio Trisorio, Rome, Italy

Studio Trisorio, Naples, Italy

2003 Galerie Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf, Germany

Gallery Park Ryu-Sook, Seoul, South Korea

2001 Fourteen Stations, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, NY

New Works, Galerie Hans Mayer, Berlin, Germany

2000 Selected works 1970–1999, John Gibson Gallery, New York, NY

1998 Galerie Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf, Germany

Galleria Milano, Milan, Italy

Studio Trisorio, Naples, Italy

1997 John Gibson Gallery, New York, NY

1996 Five Easy Pieces, Ace Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

1995 Five Easy Pieces, Ace Gallery, New York, NY

1994 Galerie Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf, Germany

Foundation Chateau de Jau, Cases de Pènes, France

1993 Galeria Pedro Oliveira, Porto, Portugal

1992 On The Road To Ra, American Opera Projects, New York, NY

Studio Trisorio, Naples, Italy

1991 John Gibson Gallery, New York, NY

Drawings Ace Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA

1990 Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris, France

1989 Galleria Milano, Milan, Italy

Studio G7, Bologna, Italy

1987 Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, NY

Galerie Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf, Germany

1986 Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris, France

John Gibson Gallery, New York, NY

Studio Trisorio, Naples, Italy

1984 Freidus/Ordover Gallery, New York, NY

Retrospective, Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany

1983 John Gibson Gallery, New York, NY

Galerie Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf, Germany

1982 Studio Canaviello, Milan, Italy

Bonlow Gallery, New York, NY

1981 Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris, France

Marian Desson Gallery, Chicago, IL

International Center of Photography, New York, NY

Annina Nosei Gallery, New York, NY

1980 Nigel Greenwood Gallery, London, UK

Galerie Loyse Oppenheim, Geneva, Switzerland

1979 Galerie Vera Munro, Hamburg, Germany

Nigel Greenwood Gallery, London, UK

Galerie Denise René, Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf, Germany

1978 Studio G7, Bologna, Italy

Galerie Denise René, Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf, Germany

Art in Progress, Munich, Germany

1977 Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris, France

Galerie Denise René, Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf, Germany

Nigel Greenwood Gallery, London, UK

1976 Galleria D’Alessandro-Ferranti, Rome, Italy

John Gibson Gallery, New York, NY

Galleria Lucio Amelio, Naples, Italy

1975 Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris, France

Galerie Patrick Verelst – Marc Poitier dit Caulier, Antwerp, Belgium

Steinway Hall, New York, NY

Galleria FranÇoise Lambert, Milan, Italy

Gallery 20, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

1974 Gallery 20, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

FranÇoise Lambert, Milan, Italy

John Gibson Gallery, New York, NY

1973 John Gibson Gallery, New York, NY

Nigel Greenwood Gallery, London, UK

Galerie Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf, Germany

1972 98 Greene Street, Holly Solomon, New York, NY

112 Greene Street Gallery, New York, NY

Gallery 20, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Galerie Rudolf Zwirner, Cologne, Germany

Galleria FranÇoise Lambert, Milan, Italy

1971 93 Grand Street, New York, NY

1969 Wabash Transit Gallery, Chicago Art Institute, Chicago, IL

Select Group Exhibitions

2017–18 Narrative Art, Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Etienne, Saint-Priest-en-Jarez, France

2015 Art on Camera: Photographs by Shunk-Kender, 1960–1971 MoMA, New York, NY

2014–15 Bad Thoughts – Collection Martjiin and Jeannette Sanders, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

2013 Color Andrae Kaufmann Gallery, Berlin, Germany

Galerie Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf, Germany

And Those Who Were Seen Dancing Were Thought To Be Insane by Those Who Could Not Hear the Music, Friedman Benda, New York, NY

2011 112 Greene Street: A Nexus of Ideas in the Early 70s, Salomon Contemporary, New York, NY

Narration Works of 1970 by Bill Beckley, Peter Hutchinson and Franco Vaccari, P420 Arte contemporanea e libri, Bologna, Italy

Rosenbaum Contemporary, Boca Raton, FL

2010 Alternative Histories, Exit Art, New York, NY

2004 Behind the Facts, 1968–1974, curated by Gloria Maure, Miro Foundation, Barcelona, Spain

Behind the Facts, 1968–1974, curated by Gloria Maure, Serralves Museum, Porto, Portugal

Behind the Facts, 1968–1974, curated by Gloria Maure, Miro Foundation, Kassel, Germany

Four Artists, Dorfman Projects, New York, NY

2002 Made in USA: Keith Haring, Robert Longo, Kenny Scharf, Bill Beckley, Ludwig Galerie, Schloss Oberhausen, Germany

Art Downtown curated by Richard Marshal, New York, NY

1968–1977, L’art en cause, Capo Musée d’art Contemporain de Bordeaux, France

2000 Critic as Grist, curated by Michael Portnoy and Marianne Vitale, White Gallery, New York, NY

Narrative, Studio G7, Bologna, Italy

Sammlung Hoffman, Berlin, Germany

Daimler-Benz collection, Berlin, Germany

1999 Sammlung Falckenberg Museum der bildenden KÜnste, Leipzig, Germany

17 Contempory Artists from America, Italy, and Mexico The Menil Collection, Houston, TX

Heroines and Heros, Cynthia Broan Gallery, New York, NY

Americans in France, The Fish Market, Perpignan, France

1998 Fotoz, Siqueiros Koll Gallery, Los Angeles

Fotoz, Spiral Lounge, New York, NY

Project Plans John Gibson Gallery, New York, NY

Acts of Faith Abraham Lubelski Gallery, New York, NY

1997 L’Arte in Faccia, Associazione Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Milan, Italy

Twentieth Anniversary Exhibition Chateau de Jau, Cases de Pène, France

The @ Show, Satellite Gallery, Long Island City

1996 Artist’s Photographs, John Gibson Gallery, New York

Narrative Art, Palazzo Rasponi Murat, Ravenna, Italy

1995 Narrative Art, Studio G7 Bologna, Italy

1994 John Gibson, Conceptual Photographs Venticinquesimo Studio d’Arte Cannaviello, Milan, Italy

1993 Collection of Vicky Remy, Musee d’Art Modern, St. Etienne, France

1992 The Seventies John Gibson Gallery, New York, NY

1991 Buchstäblich, Von der Heydet Museum, Wuppertal, Germany

Home Show, sponsored by Pat Hern Gallery, New York, NY

Group Show Elysium Art Source, New York, NY

1990 American Express John Gibson Gallery, New York, NY

Aquarian Artists Fine Arts Center, Kingston, RI

1989 Image World: Art and Media Culture, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY Annual 7, Mandeville Gallery, University of California, San Diego, CA

Words, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, NY

Text and Photograph, John Gibson Gallery Micro-Sculpture Show, University of Rhode Island, RI

1988 This is Not a Photograph, Akron Art Museum, Akron, OH This is Not a Photograph, The Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA

Large Scale Photography Los Angeles County Museum, L.A., CA

Ten Years of Collecting, 1976–86, Edward Downe Collection, Davis Museum, Wellesley, MA

1987 This is Not a Photograph, The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, FL

1986 New Painting and Sculpture, Indianapolis Museum, Indianapolis, IN

1985 A New Beginning Hudson River Museum, New York, NY

1984 Collage Expanded, School of Visual Arts Museum, New York, NY

Sex Show, Cable Gallery, New York, NY

Plastic, Miriam Perle Gallery, New York, NY

1983 Rupture, pas Rupture? Creation Art Press, Centre Culturel de Paris, Paris, France

Kunst mit Photographe, National Gallery, Berlin, Germany

Kunst mit Photographe, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany

Kunst mit Photographe, MÜnchner Stadt Museum, Munich, Germany

Kunst mit Photographe, Kunsthalle Zu Keil, Germany

1981 A Seventies Selection, Miami Art Museum, Oxford, OH

Alternatives in Retrospect, The New Museum, New York, NY

1980 Pier and Ocean, Hayward Gallery, London, UK

Pier and Ocean, Rijksmuseum Kroller-Muller, Otterlo, The Netherlands

Photographic Art, Museum of Modern Art, Paris, France

1979 Whitney Biennial Exhibition, New York, NY

Story Art, Heidelberger Kunstverein, Bonner Kunstverein, Drefelder Kunstverein, Germany

1978 American Story Art, Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, TX

American Story Art, Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans, LA

American Story Art, Art Gallery, Winnipeg, Canada

American Story Art, University of California, Santa Barbara and Berkley, CA

1977 The Surrealist Heritage Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA

Documenta 6, Paul Dierichs Verlag, Kassel, Germany

1976 Narrational Imagery: Beckley, Rusch, Warhol, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA

Sequenced Photographs, Venice Biennale, Venice

Sequenced Photographs, University Art Museum, Austin, TX

Sequenced Photographs, Broxtan Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

1975 Camera Art, Lund Kunsthalle, Berlin, Germany

Sequenced Photographs, University of Maryland Gallery, College Park, MD

Toys, the Clocktower, New York, NY

Report From SoHo, Grey Art Gallery, New York, NY

Word, Image, Number, Sarah Lawrence Gallery, New York, NY

Paris Biennale, Paris, France

1974 Narrative 2, John Gibson Gallery, New York, NY

Photographic Art, Flash Art, Milan, Italy

Verbal Visual 3, John Gibson Gallery, New York, NY

Narrative Art, Studio d’arte Canaviello, Rome, Italy

Art and Architecture, Royal College of Art, London

1973 7, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

Story, John Gibson Gallery, New York, NY

Xerox Show, Rochester, NY

Richard Fonke Gallery, Gent, Belgium

Contemporanea, Rome, Italy

Three Game Installations, 112 Greene St., New York, NY

1972 Projects Pier 18, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

Spaces School of Visual Arts, New York, NY

112 Greene St., New York, NY

1970 112 Greene Street, New York, NY

1969 Untitled, Cheltenham, PA

Art in the Mind, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, OH

Awards

Pollock-Krasner Grant, 1997

New York Council of the Arts, 1986

National Endowment of the Arts, 1979

New York Council of the Arts, 1976

New York Council of the Arts, 1973

Lectures and Symposiums

Uncontrollable Beauty (Symposium) with Arthur Danto, Peter Schjeldahl, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, and Bill Beckley at the School of Visual Arts, New York, May 1998

Keynote Speaker, Discussion on Art and Design Theory affiliated with the 1998 International Association of Art and Design Schools, General Assembly New York, October 1998

Uncontrollable Beauty (Symposium) with Wendy Steiner, Lillie Wei, and Bill Beckley, Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, November 1998

On recent work (Lecture), University of the Arts, Naples, Italy, May 1998

On Art and Language (Symposium) with Benjamin Buchloh, Martha Rossler, David Shapiro, and Bill Beckley, School of Visual Arts, New York, 1984

On recent work (Lecture), Princeton University, New Jersey, 1982

On Narrative Art (Symposium), with Mac Adamsand Jim Collins, University of Calgary, Canada, 1979

On Narrative Art (Lecture). Royal College of Art, London, 1973

Published works

Beckley, Katherine Aguilar and Roberto Portillo, eds. The Death of Photography and Other Modern Fables on the Visual Arts New York: Delano Greenidge Editions and The School of Visual Arts, 2004

Beckley, Bill, ed. Sticky Sublime. New York: Allworth, 2001

Beckley, Bill. “Introduction.” Out of the Box by Carter Ratcliff. New York: Allworth Press, 2000

Beckley, Bill. “Introduction.” Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe. New York: Allworth Press, 1999

Beckley, Bill. “Introduction: Doubting Thomas.” Sculpture in the Age of Doubt by Thomas McEvilley. New York: Allworth co-published with the School of Visual Arts, 1999

Beckley, Bill. “Introduction: Generosity and the Black Swan.” Uncontrollable Beauty, Toward a New Aesthetics, ed. Bill Beckley and David Shapiro. New York: Allworth Press, 1998

Beckley, Bill. “Introduction.” The End of the Art World by Robert C. Morgan. New York: Allworth Co-published with the School of Visual Arts, 1998

Beckley, Bill. “Introduction: Rocket Man.” Imaginary Portraits ed. John Ruskin. New York: Allworth, 1997

Beckley, Bill. “Introduction.” Lectures on Art. ed. John Ruskin. New York: Allworth, 1996

Select Literature

10 Jahre Sammlung Sal. Oppenheim 10 Years Collection Luxemburg, Belgium: Sal. Oppenheim jr. & Cie. S.C.A., 2007

Beckley, Connie. Connie Beckley: performances & installatie - Bill Beckley: partituren / tekeningen de Vleeshal Middelburg mei-juli 84. Middelburg: Gemeente Middelburg, Bureau Culturele Zaken, 1984

Brentano, Robyn. 112 Workshop, 112 Greene Street: history, artists & artworks. New York: New York University Press, 1981

Godfrey, Tony. Conceptual Art, London: Phaidon, 1998

Grundberg, Andy and Kathleen McCarthy-Gauss. Photography And Art Interaction Since 1946

New York Abbeville Press, 1987

Hoy, Anne H. Fabrications: Staged, Altered, and Appropriated Photographs. New York: Abbeville Press, 1988

Hunter, Sam. American Art of the 20th Century. New York: Abrams, 1979

Krauss, Rolf H., Manfred Schmalriede and Michael Schwarz. Kunst Mit Photographie Berlin: Frolich and Kaufmann, 1983

Naylor, Colin and Genesis P-Orridge, eds. Contemporary Artists. London, United Kingdom: St. James Press, 1977

Bonito Oliva, Achille. Europe/America: The Different Avant Gardes. Milan, Italy: Deco Press, 1976

Papadakis, Andreas, Clare Farrow and Nicola Hodges, eds. New Art: An International Survey

New York: Rizzoli, 1991

Ruf, Beatrix. Kunst bei Ringier 1995–1998 Zurich, Switzerland: Ringier AG, 1998

Sabau, Luminita. Index: Fotografie. DZ BANK Sammlung im Städel Museum. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2008

Sabau, Luminita, ed. The Promise of Photography Munich: Prestel Press, 1998

Shapiro, David. Bill Beckley: The Art of Liberty 1969–1994. Düsseldorf and Perpignan: Galerie Hans Mayer and Chateau de Jau, 1994

Tannenbaum, Judith. New York Art Yearbook, vol. 1, 1975–76. New York: Noyes Art Books, 1976

Select Press

Herriman, Kat. “For the Birds.” W Magazine September 16th, 2015

Jordan, Eliza. “Bill Beckley,” Whitewall Summer 2015

“North America’s Must-See Exhibitions This Fall,” ArtSlant September 7, 2015

Wisniewski, Katherine. “In a SoHo Loft, New York City’s 1970s Art Scene Lives On,” Curbed.

August 3, 2015

Small, Rachel. “Bill Beckley, Beyond the Rooster,” Interview. November 22, 2013

Haden-Guest, Anthony. “Anthony Haden-Guest’s New York,” The Art Newspaper: International Edition. November 2013

“Studio Visit: Bill Beckley,” The Avant/Garde Diaries. October 29, 2013

Wayne. “And Those Who Were Seen Dancing Were Thought To Be Insane by Those Who Could Not Hear The Music,” The Imagist July 15, 2013

Hernandez, Jennifer. “AND THOSE WHO WERE SEEN DANCING…,” Cultured Magazine. July 24, 2013

Omojola, Ope. “Raunch & Revelry: Nightlife at Friedman Benda Gallery,” Opening Ceremony New News July 23, 2013

Colucci, Emily. “Art Attack at Friedman Benda’s Glamorous Nightclubbing Exhibition,” Societe Perrier. July 23, 2013

Baumgardner, Julie. “About Last Night | A Chelsea Gallery, Made Over as a Decadent Nightclub,” The New York Times Style Magazine. July 18, 2013

Small, Rachel. “Art’s Wild Night Out,” Interview. July 17, 2013

Cooper, Ashton. “Friedman Benda Curator on Turning Excessive Partying Into an Art Show,” ARTINFO. July 16, 2013

Zhong, Fan. “Nights to Remember,” W Magazine. July 16, 2013

Lescaze, Zoë, Andrew Russeth, Michael H. Miller and Dan Duray, “11 Things to Do in New York’s Art World Before July 21,” Gallerist NY. July 15, 2013

Maida, Stephanie. “Everything You Need to Know This Week On New York’s Art Scene,” Guest of a Guest July 14, 2013

“Addenda: Five More Great Summer Group Show Titles at New York City Galleries,” ARTINFO July 13, 2013

Carrier, David. “Silently Among Us: The Beauty of Bill Beckley,” Art Critical. July 4, 2010

Carrier, David. “Tony Shafrazi Gallery Presents Three Decade Survey of Bill Beckley’s Art,” rt Daily. July 13, 2010

Maul, Tim. “Bill Beckley,” Art in America. September 11, 2010

Leffingwell, Edward. “Review of Dorfman Projects show,” Art in America January issue, New York, 2008

Martin, Courtney J. “Bill Beckley: Ping-Pong Dialogues,” Artforum. June 6, 2008

McEvilley, Thomas. “Review,” Art in America. March issue, New York, 2002

“Two Stations Volume 2, #1,” Smock Magazine Winter issue, New York, 2002

Interview on The Connection. WBUR Boston. March 27, 2002

Shapiro, David. “14 Stations/Fourteen Questions,” New York Arts. October 2001

Morgan, Robert. “Review of Gibson show,” Review Magazine. March 15, 2000

“The American Sublime: Conversation with Bill Beckley and Louise Bourgeois,” Harpers Magazine.

September, 1998

Cahill, Tim. “A Dialogue with Beauty Reappears in Contemporary Art,” Christian Science Monitor

August 21, 1998

Tabor, Mary. “Think Tank: Rescuing Beauty, Then Bowing to Her Power,” The New York Times

April 11, 1998

Newhall, Edith. “The Beauty Part,” New York Magazine March 23, 1998

Caroli, Ela, “Arte. I segni quotidiani dell’americano Beckley,” Corriere del Mezzogiorno. May 22, 1998

“Il Sole,” In Galleria. May 24, 1998

Von Michael George-Muller, Zeitgenössische Kunst in DÜsseldorf, Wirtschaft, March 1, 1998

Goodman, Jonathan. “Review of Gibson Exhibition,” Art in America. September, 1997

Newhall, Edith. “Review of Gibson exhibition,” New York Magazine. March 17, 1997

Gauville, Herve. “Les acides mésalliances de Beckley,” Liberation Paris. August 20, 1994

Vezin, Luc. “Les codes de Bill Beckley,” Info Matin. September 7, 1994

Malepeyre, Luc. “L’épouse du ministre de la Culture au vernissage de l’expo de Bill Beckley,” Midi Libre. June 26, 1994

Jocks, Heinz-Norbert. “Subtile Poesie des Banalen (review of exhibition at Galerie Hans Mayer),”

Westdeutsche Zeitung. June 1994

Reinke, Klaus U. “FrÜchte gemeinsamer Strategie (review of exhibition at Galerie Hans Mayer),” Handelsblatt. June 2, 1994

Klause, Sebastian. “EisgekÜhlte Poesie (review of exhibition at Galerie Hans Mayer),”

Düsseldorfer Feuilleton. May 27, 1994

Pinto, Antonio Cerveria. “Not Photography,” Independente. June 12, 1993

Faria, Óscar. “Arte de Frabricar Histórias,” Publico. June 3, 1993

Faria, Óscar. “Fabrica de textos,” Publico. May 17, 1993

J.S.M., “Text Factory,” Artes & Leibnões June/July 1993

Roberts, C.S. “Riguer et la Rupture,” Kanal Europe. January 1993

Notte, Riccardo. “Affidiamoci alla forza d’urto delle immagini assolute,” Roma. January 9, 1992

RTM T.V., Naples, Rome, Evening News January 12, 1992

Rubenstein, Raphael. “Review,” Arts Magazine May 1991

Jones, Alan. “Books in Artist’s Lives,” Arts Magazine, January 1991

Uridsany, Michel. “Marathon Autor de Beauborg,” Le Figaro. September 11, 1990

“Bill Beckley,” La Republique. June 8, 1989

Christensen, Judith. “Slices of Art and Life,” Artweek. May 6, 1989

Shapiro, David. “Review,” Art Scribe November / December 1988

Bell, Jane. “Bill Beckley,” Art News. January 1988

Dagbert, Anne. “Bill Beckley, L’Archeologie du Tableau,” Art Press no.93. June 1985

Brenson, Michael. “Review,” The New York Times. Friday, April 6, 1984

De Chairo, Tommaso. “Lo Spazio-Tempo della Narrative Art,” Terzoocchio March, 1984

Shapiro, David. The Text Factory: An Interview with Bill Beckley, Arts, vol. 59, no. 2, October 1984

Kuspit, Donald B. “Exhibition review,” Art in America, vol.72, no.9, October 1984

Handy, Ellen. “Exhibition Review,” Arts vol.58, no. 10, Summer 1984

Millet, Catherine. “Rupture, pas Rupture?,” Art Press 70, 1983

Bell, Jane. “Exhibition Review,” Artnews, Vol. 82, no.8, October 1983

Davis, Douglas. After Photography, Village Voice. April 1–7, 1981

Levin, Les. “Camera Art,” Artes Visuales, no. 25, August, 1980

Lette-Darcy, Chantal. “Interview with Bill Beckley,” Parachute no.19, Summer, 1980

Stevens, Mark. “The Dizzy Decade,” Newsweek. March 26, 1979

Alinovi, Francesca. “Humor and Thrills in Bill Beckley’s Stories,” Sommario vol. 3, no.6, June 1978

Frank, Peter. “Auto Art, Self-Indulgent? And How!” Art News. September 1976

Stevens, Mark. “The Dizzy Decade,” Newsweek. March 26, 1976

Krugman, Michael. “Exhibition Review,” Art in America, Vol. 64, no. 4, July/August, 1976

Radice, Barbara. “Bill Beckley: La struttura della causale,” Data Arte. May/June, 1976

Jochimsem, Margareth. “Story Art,” Magazin Kunst no. 2, 1974

Collins, James. “Narrative (exhibition review),” Artforum September, 1974

Stoullig, Claire. “Bill Beckley, Le Narrative Art,” Art Press, no. 6, September / October, 1973

“A la 8 Biennale de Paris,” Elle September 17, 1973

Boice, Bruce. “Exhibition Review: Bill Beckley,” Artforum. June 1973

Collins, James. “Exhibition Review: Story,” Artforum September 1973

Lew, Jeffery and Alan Saret. “112 Green Street,” Avalanche Winter 1971

Rohm, Robert. “Outdoor Sculpture – Sculpture Outdoors,” Pukka Magazine September 1970

Studio Trisorio, Naples, 2016

Studio Trisorio, Rome, 2006

Studio Trisorio, Naples, 2019

Bill Beckley, Studio Trisorio, Naples, 2019

Chapter One – Entry Points

Myself as Washington, 1969

Black and white print

20 × 16 inches (51 × 41 cm)

Private collection, Bari, Italy

p. 8

Works – From the 1960s to the 1970s

Painting with Blue Squares, 1968 (wall)

Painted Bushes for Sol LeWitt, 1968 (floor)p. 22

Painted Shrubs for Sol LeWitt 1969

Painted shrubs

C-print

16 × 20 inches (41 × 51 cm)

p. 23

Twigs Painted White, 1969

Painted branches

C-print

13 × 19 inches (33 × 48 cm)

p. 24

Vertical Horizon 1969

Painted branches

C-print

13 × 19 inches (33 × 48 cm)

p. 25

From Sunrise to Sunset, Looking West at Midday 1969

36 inches wide × ½ mile (0.91 × 805 m) line

painted on fields from sunrise to sunset

C-print

13 × 19 inches (33 × 48 cm)

p. 26

From Sunrise to Sunset (sunrise) 1969

36 inches wide × ½ mile (0.91 × 805 m) line

painted on fields from sunrise to sunset

C-print

19 × 13 inches (48 × 33 cm)

p. 27

Washington’s Crossing 1969

Photo album, post card, ink on lined paper

13 × 12 inches (33 × 30.5 cm)

p. 29

Six Minute Paper Punch Lines April 21 1969

Ink and graph paper

4 × 22 inches (10.2 × 56 cm) each sheet p. 31

Song for a Chin-Up, 1972

Photocollage and pen on cardboard

20 × 29.7 inches (51 × 75.5 cm)

P420 Art Gallery collection, Bologna

p. 32

Song for a Chin-Up, 1971

Performed by a student from The Juilliard School, NYC

p. 33

Song for a Sliding Board 1971

Performed by a student from The Juilliard School, NYC

p. 35

Turtle Trumpet, 1971

Performed by Bill Beckley

p. 37

Brooklyn Bridge Swings, 1971

Installation view at the Brooklyn Bridge, NYC

Photograph by Shunk-Kender

p. 39

Silent Ping Pong Tables, 1971

24.4 × 48 × 33.8 inches (62 × 122 × 86 cm)

Installation view at John Gibson Gallery, NYC

Photograph by Shunk-Kender

Private collection, Düsseldorf

p. 40

Short Story for Hopscotch, 1971

104.7 × 108 inches (266 × 275 cm)

p. 40

Study for Short Stories for Popsicles, 1971

Wrapper, silkscreened popsicle stick and strawberry flavored popsicle

12 × 16 inches (30 × 41 cm)

p. 41

The Origin of And 1972 Black and white prints with written text

30 × 80 inches (76 × 203 cm)

Gianfranco D’Amato collection, Naples, Italy

pp. 42–43

An Avoidance of Ann, 1972 Black and white prints with written text

28 × 42 inches (71 × 106.7 cm)

Collections: Hoffman, Berlin; Holly Solomon, New York; Gianfranco D’Amato, Naples, Italy

p. 45

Chapter Two – The Word-Image Riddle

Cake Story 1973

Black and white and Cibachrome prints

32 × 20.5 inches (83 × 52 cm)

Collections: Private collection, Cologne; Falckenberg, Hamburg; Galerie Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf; Studio Trisorio, Naples, Italy

p. 48

Joke about Elephants, 1973 Black and white prints

25 × 18 inches (63.5 × 46 cm)

p. 55

Works – From the 1970s to the 1990s

De Kooning’s Stove, 1974 Black and white and Cibachrome prints

41 × 61.8 inches (104 × 157 cm)

Collections: Private collection, Cologne; Fioravanti-Meoni, Siena, Italy pp. 60–61

Roses Are, Violets Are, Sugar Are, 1974 Cibachrome prints

37.4 × 89.8 inches (95 × 228 cm)

Private collection, Bologna pp. 62–63

Paris Bistro, 1974

Cibachrome prints

73 × 40 inches (185 × 102 cm)

Collections: Sylvio Perlstein, Antwerp; Private collection, Germany; Andrea and Paola Abbamonte, Naples, Italy

p. 65

Circle Line, 1974

Cibachrome and black and white prints

40 × 120 inches (102 × 305 cm)

Princeton University Art Museum collection

pp. 66–67

The Elevator, 1974

Cibachrome and black and white prints

65 × 120 inches (165 × 305 cm)

pp. 68–69

Snake Story 1974

Cibachrome and black and white prints

30.5 × 20 inches (77.5 × 50.8 cm)

p. 71

Rabbit Turtle, 1974

Black and white prints

38 × 205 inches (96.5 × 520.7 cm)

pp. 72–73

Sad Ending, 1975

Cibachrome and black and white prints

23.6 × 78.7 inches (60 × 200 cm)

Di Bennardo collection, Naples, Italy

pp. 74–75

Drop and Bucket, 1975

Cibachrome prints

187 × 60 inches (475 × 152.4 cm)

Collections: Kunst Museum, Basel; Campiani, Brescia, Italy; FioravantiMeoni, Siena, Italy; Perlstein, Antwerp

p. 77

Hot and Cold Faucets with Drain 1975 and 1994

Cibachrome prints

40 × 90 inches (102 × 229 cm)

60 × 150 inches (152 × 381 cm)

Collections: Museum of Modern Art, New York; Fioravanti-Meoni, Siena, Italy; P420 Art Gallery, Bologna pp. 78–79

Mao Dead 1976

Cibachrome and black and white prints

40 × 120 inches (101 × 304 cm)

Collections: Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hoffman, Berlin; Gianfranco

D’Amato, Naples, Italy

pp. 80–81

Boat, 1976

Cibachrome and black and white prints

40 × 120 inches (102 × 305 cm)

Falckenberg collection, Hamburg pp. 82–83

Bus, 1976

Cibachrome and black and white prints

80 × 90 inches (203 × 229 cm)

Collections: Gerhard and Lydia Hanske, Essen; Galerie Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf p. 85

Elements of Romance, 1977

Cibachrome prints

40 × 120 inches (101.6 × 304.8 cm)

Collections: Château Vignelaure, Rians, France; Daimler Art Collection, Stuttgart; Estate of Sol LeWitt pp. 86–87

The Bathroom 1977

Cibachrome and black and white prints

51 × 120 inches (130 × 305 cm)

Collections: Hoffmann, Berlin; Lize Tourbon, Paris pp. 88–89

The Living Room 1977

Cibachrome and black and white prints 50 × 120 inches (127 × 304.8 cm)

Collections: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (study and preparatory notes); Rolf Krauss, Stuttgart; Galerie Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf pp. 90–91

The Kitchen, 1977 Cibachrome and black and white prints 110 × 80 inches (279.4 × 203.2 cm) Miriam Solomon collection, Paris p. 93

Roses Are, Violets Are, Sugar Are, 1978 Cibachrome prints 96 × 135 inches (243 × 343 cm)

Collections: DZ Bank; Städel Museum, Frankfurt; Hoffmann collection, Berlin pp. 94–95

Rising Sun, Falling Coconut 1978 Cibachrome prints 120 × 40 inches (305 × 101 cm)

Collections: Douglas Chrismas, Los Angeles; Dr. Praue, Berlin p. 97

Shoulder Blade 1978

Cibachrome and black and white prints

120 × 40 inches (305 × 101 cm)

Collections: Jeff Koons, New York; Gianfranco D’Amato, Naples, Italy

p. 99

Deirdre’s Lip 1978

Cibachrome and black and white prints

70 × 120 inches (177.8 × 304.8 cm)

Collections: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Pizzuti, Columbus; Gianfranco D’Amato, Naples, Italy

pp. 100–101

Cah Beneath the Grass, 1980

Cibachrome prints and aluminum pipes

105 × 92 inches (267 × 234 cm)

Peter Bren collection, New York

p. 102

Pipes and Hics 1980

Cibachrome prints and aluminum pipes

107 × 87 inches (272 × 221 cm)

Tate Modern collection, London

p. 103

Cherubs V.S. Saucers, 1985

Mixed media on Arches paper

41.3 × 29.5 inches (105 × 75 cm)

Studio Trisorio collection, Naples, Italy

p. 104

History of Handles and Spinning

Wheel of Fortune, 1985

Mixed media on Arches paper

41.3 × 29.5 inches (105 × 75 cm)

Studio Trisorio collection, Naples, Italy

p. 105

Peaches 1985

Mixed media on Arches paper

41.3 × 29.5 inches (105 × 75 cm)

Private collection, Bari, Italy

p. 107

Gardens of Pompeii 1986

Mixed media on canvas

73.6 × 32 inches (187 × 81.5 cm)

Private collection, Bari, Italy

p. 108

Gardens of Pompeii, 1986

Mixed media on canvas

73.6 × 32 inches (187 × 81.5 cm)

p. 109

House of Pompeii, 1986

Mixed media on canvas

73.6 × 32 inches (187 × 81.5 cm)

Studio Trisorio collection, Naples, Italy

p. 111

House of the Red Capitals 1986

Acrylic on canvas

60 × 40 inches (152.5 × 102 cm)

p. 112

Villa of the Mysteries 1986

Mixed media on canvas

60 × 40 inches (152.5 × 102 cm)

p. 113

BiPlane or How to Tie a Bowtie in Four Easy Lessons, 1987

Plywood, rubber, black and white prints

120 inches (304.8 cm) wingspan

pp. 114–115

Sunday Paper 1987

Black and white prints, plywood, cloth and wood

51 × 60 inches (130 × 152 cm)

p. 116

Bess Truman Having Tea with Her Friends, 1987

Black and white prints, plywood, cloth and rag dolls

51 × 60 inches (130 × 152 cm)

p. 117

Front Porch 1987

Photographs, ferns, and screen

60 × 192 inches (152 × 488 cm)

Installation at Ace Gallery, Los Angeles

p. 118

Frank (Homage to Frank O’Hara), 1987

Black and white prints, wallpaper, piano leg and “The New York Times” (all from the same day)

80 × 120 inches (203 × 305 cm)

Galerie Hans Mayer collection, Düsseldorf

p. 119

The Juggler, 1990

Cibachrome prints, plaster, lead and snake skin

96 × 96 inches (244 × 244 cm)

p. 121

Study for # 5 of Seven Sins, 1991

Mixed media on museum board

39.7 × 32.2 inches (101 × 82 cm)

Maria Letizia Pelosi collection, Naples, Italy

p. 122

Study for # Seven of Seven Sins 1991

Mixed media on museum board

39.7 × 32.2 inches (101 × 82 cm)

Studio Trisorio collection, Naples, Italy

p. 123

Study for # 3 of Seven Sins, 1991

Mixed media on museum board

39.7 × 32.2 inches (101 × 82 cm)

Studio Trisorio collection, Naples, Italy

p. 124

Study for Apple Pie, 1991

Mixed media on museum board

39.7 × 32.2 inches (101 × 82 cm)

Private collection, Rome, Italy

p. 125

Study for Fish Fry # 3, 1991

Mixed media on museum board

39.7 × 32.2 inches (101 × 82 cm)

Studio Trisorio collection, Naples, Italy

p. 126

Study for Chopsticks 1991

Mixed media on museum board

60 × 40 inches (152.5 × 102 cm)

Studio Trisorio collection, Naples, Italy

p. 127

Bloody Mary, 1994

Cibachrome prints, felt and bronze with patina

29 × 60 inches (73 × 152 cm)

Esther Grether collection, Basel

pp. 128–129

Mixed Drinks: Margarita (Gabon, Mexico, United States), 1994

Cibachrome prints, cloth and bronze with patina

29 × 60 inches (73 × 152 cm)

Hoffman collection, Berlin

pp. 130–131

Niçoise at Sunrise, 1997

Cibachrome prints

54 × 109 inches (138 × 278 cm)

Siegfried Weishaupt collection, Ulm pp. 132–133

Down the Drain “Weeping Woman,” 1997 Wood construction and Cibachrome print

Ø 90 inches (229 cm)

p. 134

Down the Drain, Black 1997 Wood construction and Cibachrome print

Ø 90 inches (229 cm)

p. 135

Chapter Three – The Aesthetics of Beauty

Heroin Trade in Afghanistan (Lineup)

2008

Cibachrome print

77 × 48 inches (196 × 122 cm)

p. 138

Last Judgment 10, 2002

Cibachrome print

62 × 48 inches (157 × 122 cm)

Collections: Sal. Oppenheim, Cologne; Private collection, Palm Beach Gardens, Florida

p. 143

Station 1, 2001

Cibachrome print

81 × 44 inches (205 × 110 cm)

Collections: Hoffmann, Berlin; Private collection, Düsseldorf

p. 146

Three Graces 4 2004

Cibachrome prints

In two different dimensions:

77 × 92 inches (195 × 235 cm)

95 × 115 inches (241 × 293 cm)

p. 149

Heroin Trade in Afghanistan, Saturday Night 2005

Cibachrome prints

95 × 134 inches (241 × 340 cm)

Collections: Private collection, Allschwil, Switzerland; Private collection, Marseille

p. 152

Works – Stems

Station 7, 2001

Cibachrome print

81 × 44 inches (205 × 110 cm)

p. 158

Station 8, 2001

Cibachrome print

81 × 44 inches (205 × 110 cm)

Collections: Private collection, Düsseldorf; Private collection, Sardinia, Italy

p. 159

Station 14, 2001

Cibachrome print

81 × 44 inches (205 × 110 cm)

Collections: Private collection, Düsseldorf; Private collection, Sardinia, Italy p. 161

Station 9 2001

Cibachrome print

81 × 44 inches (205 × 110 cm)

Fioravanti-Meoni collection, Siena, Italy p. 163

Station 15 (Pink, I Think), 2002

Cibachrome print

80.7 × 90.5 inches (205 × 230 cm)

Private collection, Aspen, Colorado pp. 164–165

Last Judgment 9 2002

Cibachrome print

62 × 48 inches (157 × 122 cm)

Collections: Park Ryu Sook Gallery, Seoul; Agathe and Maximillian Weishaupt, Munich; Private collections, Germany p. 167

Three Graces 2004 Cibachrome prints

75.6 × 90.5 inches (192 × 230 cm)

Private collection, Zurich, Switzerland p. 169

Patriotism Spelled Backwards 5, 2004 Cibachrome prints

76 × 90.5 inches (193 × 230 cm)

Collections: Essl, Klosterneuburg, Austria; Private collection, Liebefeld, Switzerland p. 171

American Gothic 2004 Cibachrome prints

48 × 80.7 inches (122 × 205 cm)

Private collection, Zurich, Switzerland pp. 172–173

On Being Blue 7 2004 Cibachrome prints

77 × 75 inches (195.5 × 190.5 cm)

Studio Trisorio collection, Naples, Italy p. 175

Rendez-vous in Tienanmen Square (The Aftermath), 2004

Cibachrome print

76 × 39 inches (194 × 99 cm)

Studio Trisorio collection, Naples, Italy p. 177

Singles Bar – Blue, 2004

Cibachrome print

75.2 × 14.2 inches (191 × 36 cm)

Private collection, New York

p. 178

Singles Bar – Red, 2004

Cibachrome print

75.2 × 14.2 inches (191 × 36 cm)

Private collection, Naples, Italy

p. 179

Heroin Trade in Afghanistan 1 (Tattered Flag) 2005

Cibachrome print

77 × 39 inches (196 × 99 cm)

Collections: Galerie Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf; Private collections, Munich, Basel, Zurich

p. 180

Heroin Trade in Afghanistan 4 (The Huddle), 2005

Cibachrome print

77 × 39 inches (196 × 99 cm)

p. 181

Heroin Trade in Afghanistan: For Those Who Have Died and Are Forgotten 2005 Cibachrome print

76 × 39.3 inches (193 × 100 cm)

Private collection, Switzerland

p. 183

A Drop of Water in the Breaking Gulf, 2005 Cibachrome prints

In three different dimensions:

88.2 × 129.1 inches (224 × 328 cm)

77.2 × 113 inches (196 × 287 cm)

47.2 × 67.3 inches (120 × 171 cm)

Collections: Studio Trisorio, Naples, Italy; Maurizio Petta, Bologna, Italy; Private collections, Brussels, Cologne; Private collection, Germany

pp. 184–185

Not that There’s Anything Wrong with It 3, 2005 Cibrachrome print

77 × 36.5 inches (195.6 × 92.7 cm)

p. 186

Heroin Trade: The Intersection of 44/55 and 209, 2008

Cibrachrome prints

77 × 82 inches (195.6 × 208.3 cm)

Zappa collection, Lecco, Italy

p. 187

Oh to Be Young Carefree and Gay Epilogue 1, 2005

Cibrachrome prints

58.2 × 52.4 inches (147.8 × 133.2 cm)

p. 189

Capote White 4, 2014

Cibachrome print

76 × 47 inches (193 × 119.4 cm)

p. 191

Charge of the Chicken Men 2009

Cibachrome print

77 × 48 inches (196 × 122 cm)

p. 192

Dervish 4, Bayrami 2007

Cibachrome print

77 × 48 inches (196 × 122 cm)

Collections: Park Ryu Sook Gallery, Seoul; Rosenbaum Contemporary, Boca Raton, Florida

p. 193

Dervish 10, Sunbuli, 2007

Cibachrome print

77 × 48 inches (196 × 122 cm)

Collections: Fred Dorfman, New York; Siegfried Weishaupt, Ulm; Private collections, Germany and Switzerland

p. 195

Chapter Four – Neapolitan Holidays

Study for Horse Thieves, 2019

Archival pigment ink and pencil on museum board

32 × 40 inches (81 × 102 cm)

p. 198

Works – Neapolitan Holidays, 2019

Neapolitan Holidays 2019

C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond

98.4 × 37.5 inches (250 × 95.5 cm)

Gianfranco D’Amato collection, Naples, Italy

p. 209

War, Artillery and a Few Questions 2019

C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond

37.5 × 98.4 inches (95.5 × 250 cm)

pp. 210–211

Darling Young Son 1, 2019

C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond

37.5 × 98.4 inches (95.5 × 250 cm)

Gianfranco D’Amato collection, Naples, Italy

pp. 212–213

Cambridge Trampoline Society 2019

C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond

98.4 × 37.5 inches (250 × 95.5 cm)

Luca Cordero di Montezemolo collection, Rome, Italy

p. 214

Bird Watching, 2019

C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond

98.4 × 37.5 inches (250 × 95.5 cm)

p. 215

Buzz 2019

C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond

98.4 × 37.5 inches (250 × 95.5 cm)

p. 216

Land of Lemon Trees, 2019

C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond

98.4 × 37.5 inches (250 × 95.5 cm)

p. 217

The Gossip Girl 2019 C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 37.5 × 98.4 inches (95.5 × 250 cm)

pp. 218–219

PM Mysteries, 2019 C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 37.5 × 98.4 inches (95.5 × 250 cm)

pp. 220–221

Dinner with Parmenides 2019 C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 98.4 × 37.5 inches (250 × 95.5 cm)

p. 222

Dinner with Parmenides II, 2019 C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 98.4 × 37.5 inches (250 × 95.5 cm)

p. 223

I Kissed a Clown 2019 C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 98.4 × 37.5 inches (250 × 95.5 cm)

p. 224

What about Virgil?, 2019 C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 98.4 × 37.5 inches (250 × 95.5 cm)

p. 225

Horse Thieves, 2019 C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 37.5 × 98.4 inches (95.5 × 250 cm)

Gianfranco D’Amato collection, Naples, Italy

pp. 226–227

Bill Beckley and Narrative Art

The Word-Image Riddle and the Aesthetics of Beauty

Bill Beckley wishes to thank Gianfranco D’Amato

David Carrier

Andrea Viliani

Pasquale Trisorio

Lucia Trisorio

Laura Trisorio

Paola Trisorio

Valeria Cacciapuoti

Laurie Johenning

Tristan Beckley

Liam Beckley

Cover

Hot and Cold Faucets with Drain 1975, detail

Editorial coordination

Studio Trisorio, Naples

Graphic design and layout

Paola Trisorio

Translation of the text by Andrea Viliani

Simon Turner

Editing Angela Federico

Photo credits

Nicola Amato, p. 107, 108

Amedeo Benestante, p. 109

Giuseppe Schiavinotto, pp. 125, 243

Francesco Squeglia, pp. 104, 105, 111, 112, 113, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127, 256–257, 260–261, 262–263

Head of publications

Marco Vianello

Editorial coordination

Federica Boragina

Graphic Design

Angelo Galiotto

Editing

Laura Guidetti

© Barnett Newman by SIAE 2022

© Bill Beckley, New York

© The authors for their texts

© Studio Trisorio, Naples

© 2022 Electa Spa, Milan

All rights reserved

www.electa.it

This book was printed for Electa spa at O.G.M. Spa, via 1a Strada 87, Padova in 2022