Booklet Bill Beckley_ENG by Studio Trisorio

BILL BECKLEY

STUDIO TRISORIO

BILL BECKLEY

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The Essay‘70s by David Carrier

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Neapolitan Holidays, 2019 The ‘70s

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Interview with Bill Beckley Neapolitan Holidays, 2019

Essay by David Carrier

STUDIO TRISORIO

Myself as Washington, 1969 Black and white photograph 60 x 40 cm

Brooklyn Bridge Swings, 1971

The â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;70s

An Avoidance of Ann, 1972 Black and white photograph and ink on paperboard 71 x 107 cm

Cake Story, 1973 Cibachrome photographs 62 x 46 cm

The Elevator, 1974 Cibachrome and black and white photographs 165 x 305 cm

Roses Are, Violets Are, Sugar Are, 1974 Cibachrome photographs 95 x 228 cm

Paris Bistro, 1975 Cibachrome photographs 198 x 103 cm

Drop and Bucket, 1975 Cibachrome photographs 307 x 94 cm

Hot and Cold Faucets with Drain , 1975-1994 Cibachrome photographs 102 x 229 cm 152 x 381 cm

Mao Dead, 1976 Cibachrome and black and white photographs 101 x 304 cm

The Bathroom, 1977 Cibachrome and black and white photographs 228 x 305 cm

Deirdreâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Lip, 1978 Cibachrome and black and white photographs 175 x 306 cm

Rising Sun, Failing Coconut , 1978 Cibachrome Photographs 305 x 101 cm

Shoulder Blade , 1978 Cibachrome photographs 305 x 101 cm

Neapolitan Holidays

2019

Neapolitan Holidays, 2019 C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 250 x 95.5 x 3 cm

9 April 1953, Catania To Mrs Lillina Semini Pantaleo Corso Vittorio Emanuele 166, Naples My dear Lillina, thank you for the replacement. During the week, I will send you the amount, and I apologize for being late. I send you and Costantino my best wishes for next Easter and many kisses. Vera

Land of Lemon Trees, 2019 C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 250 x 95.5 x 3 cm

8 September 1976, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin To Mrs Semini widow Pantaleo Corso Vittorio Emanuele 116, Naples Dear Lillina, many thanks for your very kind letter of 26 February which gave me great pleasure. I hope that your teeth are now perfectly ok. And that you are fine and also that you have always good news from Costantino and his lovely wife and their beautiful baby. As you can see, I’m on the beautiful Coast again. My dear Mari is fine as is her son who is already 16 and is growing wonderfully and I’m very proud of him and…

Cambridge Trampoline Society, 2019 C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 250 x 95.5 x 3 cm

4 January 1953, Milan Dear Costantino, how’s life? I’m really happy to have escaped the English test, I’m having fun here and I feel sorry for you. What did you do on Thursday? Was the weather bad? I envied you from 1:50 to 2:40, that’s it. Please call Mary on Sunday morning because they won’t be there in the evening. Did you manage to get out on Friday or Wednesday at the first hour? On the way over, I bought three detective stories and I hope to buy as many for the return trip. Greetings, Mario

PM Mysteriess, 2019 C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 95.5 x 250 x 3 cm

20 April 1933, Amalfi To Mrs Rita Pantaleo, Corso Vittorio Emanuele 166, Naples To you and the girls, thousands of memories. Alma Giavi Leone

Parmenides II, 2019 2019 Dinner with Parmanides C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 250 x 95.5 x 3 cm

8 September 1915, Motta S. Lucia (Catanzaro) To Mr. Arturo Pantaleo, Engineer Lieutenant 35th Artillerie, War Zone Dear Professor, I would have liked to write you before, but I have only recently been able to obtain your address from the director. Please accept my respectful regards and sincere wishes for good luck. Your devoted pupil, Colosimo Caterina

Darling Young Son 1, 2019 C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 95.5 x 250 x 3 cm

What about Virgil, 2019 C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 250 x 95.5 x 3 cm

14 September 1915, Cosenza To Mr. Prof. Arturo Pantaleo Lieutenant 35th Artillerie, War Zone Best wishes for the victory of a great Italy, Rosa Le Piane

War, Artillery and a Few Questions, 2019 C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 95.5 x 250 x 3 cm

20 November 1948, Santa Elisabetta (Como) To Lady Bettina Menzinger Consiglio Via Francesco Crispi 84, Naples Best wishes and kind regards, Virginia, Gianni, Maria Rosaria, Gaby

Horse Thieves, 2019 C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 95.5 x 250 x 3 cm

24 May 1952, Balerna, Switzerland To Student Costantino Semini Corso Vittorio Emanuele 167, Naples My dear grandson Costantino, today is the feast of Saint John, and your grandmother sends you best wishes from Switzerland and is close to you today with best wishes for the name day, and in memory of, your dear father who loved you so. Our pain keeps us united even if we continue in silence, the desire to see you again increases with the passage of time. All of your aunts and uncles and cousins send you, as well as your mother, heartfelt greetings. I send you a tender hug. Your grandmother, Lucietta

Bird Watching, 2019 C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 250 x 95.5 x 3 cm

30 July 1955, Courmayeur To Mrs Teresita Molea Gradoni S.M. Apparente, Palazzo Ciapparelli, Naples Dear Teresita, the search was easy and we arrived in two hours. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s beautiful here even if itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s raining, as you know. And you? Any projects? Write to me and let me know what you are going to do and have a warm hug. Renata, care of Alessandra Casale

Buzz, 2019 C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 250 x 95.5 x 3 cm

26 March 1937, Castellamare di Stabia Distinguished Professor Arturo Pantaleo Via Scarlatti 111, Naples Please accept my warm wishes of admiration and gratitude. Engineer Fausto Cirillo

Parmenides, 2019 2019 Dinner with Parmanides, C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 250 x 95.5 x 3 cm

21 August 1954, Rovigo To Student Federico Golderer Colonie de vacances von Sprererhaus, Davos-Dorf, Switzerland Dear Federico, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been in Rovigo for a few days and we all send you dear greetings. We are so happy to have seen you in Davos. I suggest you put on the shirt with long sleeves. Do cover yourself. A dear hug from your Mom. Kisses, Dad, Aunt Pina

Sleeves Etc, 2019 C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 95.5 x 250 x 3 cm

7 March 1954, Locarno, Switzerland To Mrs Mirella Pantaleo-Capocasa Corso Vittorio Emanuele 166, Naples Dearest Mirella, we all send you many affectionate greetings for your birthday. Once again, it’s been a long time since we’ve had news of you and we are waiting for a long letter from you. Best wishes to you and kisses to all from all of us. Everything’s good here. Carlo

I Kissed a Clown, 2019 C-print, printed on Fujiflex mounted on Aludibond 250 x 95.5 x 3 cm

interview with Bill Beckley

BB Okay let’s start with George Washington! I went to graduate school at Temple University. There I was painting landscapes with a brush out in the fields, north of Philadelphia. I painted lines in the landscape that were 1 meter wide by one hour long. It was literally landscape painting. I also painted squares on the bushes that I dedicated to Sol LeWitt who came in 1969 to visit my professor, Italo Scanga. Sol and I stayed friends until his death in 2017. He was a real influence on my work. In March of 1969 I painted a line in the fields from sunrise to sunset. The painting went over the fields, down to a small valley and across a stream. As I dripped the paint in the water, it immediately floated away. So I dripped a line all in water, as I walked across the Delaware to the other side. I felt like Jesus Christ and Jackson Pollock rolled up into one, except that Christ walked on the water, while I walked in it. It so happens that there is a famous spot in the Delaware where George Washington crossed to win the Revolutionary War. His crossing was in a boat on the night of December 25th, 1776. Mine was without boat on March 20, 1969. I carried a camera with me and entered the water with four one-gallon cans of paint strapped to my waist. At some point I was swept under - I didn’t plan for it, the river was deep, actually over my head. So I had to loose the paint – four gallons of it, so I wouldn’t be pulled under. In the skirmish I lost my camera. But I continued crossing the river until I reached the other side. It was then I realized that I didn’t have any photographs (possible proof). All I had was the story. There was a time when there were only analogue photographs, often erroneously regarded as truth. Anyway, I thought: “Well maybe I should do something more with George Washington”. Later I took a picture Myself as Washington, 1969. I had long hair and I teased it and sprinkled baby powder on it to make it white. I reversed a black raincoat to make the collar look high – over a white shirt. It was an improvisation, not a costume. Shortly after, I did a few other things with Washington. I signed my name with letters imitating his handwriting. Of course, George Washington was the first president of our country, and that image of me as him, was almost the first photo of my career. I used photos as art throughout my life. I still do. They are not documentation, but ficti on. LT When you started to paint on the land were you thinking of being a land artist? BB Land Art was not in the plan. In early 1968 it wasn’t really a genre as yet. At the time - I knew Dennis Oppenheim, and my friend, Peter Hutchinson – we were all showing with John Gibson. It was a time when conceptual artists were doing things outdoors. I felt the problem, if there was one, that what was shown in the gallery was documentation, not the “real thing”. I could have been wrong. But hardly anyone saw the so-called real thing. The real thing was out in the fields, unless you considered “the real thing” the photo documentation. I really wanted to get away from documentation. Documentation depends on the fact that the artist is telling the truth. And much good are his lies. Documentation is supposed to be true, but somehow I was thinking with Washington (1969) - “This is not documentation, this is obviously a fiction. I am not George Washington”. That’s when I began my narrative work. With fictional narratives it didn’t matter if it was true or not. It just mattered if it was good. I thought of different ways to write stories and one of the early pieces was a story about Willem De Kooning De Kooning’s Stove, 1974.

An earlier one was, Short Stories for Popsicles, 1971, where the story is written on the wrapper, but in order to finish it you had to suck on the popsicle so that you could read the rest of the story printed on the stick. Another was Short Story for Hopscotch, 1971. I silkscreened this story with 10 sentences on a vinyl hopscotch court with 10 numbers. So you could either hop or read, or perhaps both at the same time. It was a way of making a story an art object, rather than making art as documentation. Thereafter, I wrote fictional stories with fictional photographs. The Origin of And, 1971; The Interrelation of In and On, 1971; Snake, 1974. Of course The Brooklyn Bridge Swings, 1970 preceeded that. The outdoor show on the bridge was organized by Alanna Heiss, a curator who was the founder and director of the Clocktower Space, very significant then and now. LT She became later director of the PS1? BB Yes! Before she was director, she curated this show on the Brooklyn Bridge where she invited artists to do different projects on the bridge. My project was to hang swings from the upper level of the bridge. On the top of the bridge I put dead fish in a bucket to attract the seagulls; so above there was the seagulls flapping their wings, and below there was the possibility of people swinging. It was a combination of two movements. LT Why did you choose the swings? BB Because of the possible movement, and because it is a children’s activity that’s fun. I was doing things that were fun, also with the popsicles, different things that children could appreciate. Much of conceptual art was too serious. Then in 1971-72 I started writing short stories. The stories began with their titles. I called one An Avoidance of Ann, 1972 and I had no idea what the story would be. I just avoided using nouns that began with vowels, so I wouldn’t have to use the article, “an”. In the story there was a fictional person named Ann who the (fictional) narrator also avoided. I wrote the title and then I figured out how to explain it with a text. I did seven of these stories, and this was my first show at a commercial gallery in New York in 1973 with John Gibson. I had already shown at 112 Greene Street, a non-commercial space from October 1970 to 1974, and also in galleries in Europe like Konrad Fischer, Nigel Greenwood, and Yvon Lambert. LT What is the story about in An Avoidance of Ann? BB An Avoidance of Ann is a story about avoiding a person named Ann. There are no nouns with vowels in the story. So, when I was writing the story and wanted to mention an “innertube” for instance, I wouldn’t say “an innertube,” because “innertube” needs the article “an” in front of it. I would say, “a circular shaped tube filled with... It was about avoiding the word “an” in the language, but also avoiding a filled with air. A fictional person named Ann as well. My mother’s name was Anna, but I didn’t avoid her, at least at birth. Avoidance of Ann was one of the seven stories that I did in my first gallery show in New York at John Gibson. Before that in 1970, I was frequently showing at “112 Greene Street”. “Greene” is spelled with an “e” on the end because all the north-south streets of SOHO, where I still live, were named after Revolutionary War generals.

Short Story for Hopscotch 1971

(Sullivan, Wooster, Mercer, Greene, Thompson, etc.) 112 Greene Street was the place where I, and Barry La Va, Alan Saret, Gordon Matta-Clark and Louise Bourgeois, to name but a few, showed work. We would make unintentionally unsaleable objects and leave them there for a couple of weeks. I constructed a long bed with a cage for a live rooster hanging above the mattress. The live rooster, a reference to Rauschenberg, was there to wake you up. I also showed four of my silent ping pong tables. Actually they were real objects, they could have sold. The ping pong ball bounced on the foam surfaces of the paddles and table without making a sound. Most conceptual art added language to visual art. I took the language (the ping and the pong) out of art. 112 Greene Street was informal. No openings. I showed there from October of 1970 to the summer of 1974. By then it was all over. The story works comprised my first show in 1972 at the John Gibson Gallery. So there was: An Avoidance of Ann, The Interrelation of In and On, and one called The Origin of And. I wrote the titles first and then figured out what the story should be. The Origin of And was a story about a monk who had gathered food from the gardens below the monastery. There were three levels: the gardens, the mid-level quarters on the cliff where the scribes resided silently writing, and the top level where the rest of the monks worked and lived. As the gardener was being pulled back up to the monastery with his sack full of vegetables when he reached the top of the cliff, he said to his friends, “Give me a hand”. But before the other monks could help him out of the basket, the rope broke, and he fell, followed by all the fruits and vegetables that were in his basket. But the scribes on the middle level heard only the last part of, “hand”, which is, of course, “and”, as they witnessed all these fruits and vegetables falling. Thereafter, the monks associated the word “And” with the concept of multiplicity. So this was the first fictional story I wrote, and then I wrote six more - this is 1971-72… the beginning of my so-called “Narrative Art. But I didn’t call it that. My art dealer John Gibson did. Actually we had a discussion in a car from Basel to Baden Baden. Should it be “Story Art” or “Narrative Art”. I guess “Narrative Art” won. LT What about Cake Story (1973), for example? BB This does come from an experience that I remember, but it’s basically fictional. There’s a saying in English: “You can’t have your cake and eat it too”, and the work was inspired by this meme, and raised the question, “Is it possible to have your cake and eat it too?” Why not? Just save a little for later. LT What about Roses Are, Violets Are, Sugar Are (1974)? BB Some of the pieces didn’t have language, but they were still narratives. This title comes from, “Roses are red, violets are blue sugar is sweet and so are you”, a poem of my childhood. So, here’s the rose stem with a red background, here’s a violet stem with a blue background, and then there is a line of sugar imitating the rose and the violet stems. Some people thought it was a line of cocaine. I did not intend that. But in retrospect, it does give the piece a bit of an edge. “Sugar is sweet” doesn’t name a color, so I made the background yellow to complete the three primaries.

Rooster Bed Lying 1971

The stems (without the flowers showing on top) intentionally refer to the verticals of Barnett Newman. Newman didn’t like horizontals, he was wary of horizontals as landscapes, because that might bring him back to figuration. Shortly before he died, Newman did a couple of paintings called, Who’s Afraid of Red Yellow and Blue - verticals with red, yellow and blue backgrounds. There was an idea that a painter shouldn’t use the primary colors all together. This color taboo was a thing at the time, maybe because Mondrian used it allot. Who knows? And though both Mondrian and Newman were non-objective painters, Newman didn’t want to be compared to Mondrian. So he used the primary colors anyway, and he called the series, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue. He made these paintings right before he died. But I assume primaries were not the thing that killed him. So of course photos of stems are figurative, not non-objective. Light has to bounce off something to make an impression, and that something is often an object. It is difficult, but not impossible to come up with a non-objective photograph. Paris Bistro, 1975, was a restaurant in the West Village and the idea was that the top picture is a rectangle and the bottom picture is shaped like a stop sign, so that this sign pictured in the upper photo is reflected in the lower octagonal photograph which is a photo of a stop sign, again calling attention to the photograph as an object. In all of these works I wanted the physical work of the photograph to be the art, not a documentation of the art. Like now, the early seventies was a time of political unrest. Nixon was president. Conceptual artists, rebelling against the establishment, were saying: “Well, I’m not making objects”. But we were making objects because photographs are thin objects. I am sure all the good conceptual photographs have or could have been sold. I mentioned this object dilemma to my friend Vito Acconci. He agreed that the non-object political stance was weak. I actually took some of his photographs - the ones of him biting himself. This is one of my favorites: Drop in Bucket, 1974. Here’s the square photo on top with an image of faucet, here’s a triangle with a photo of a drop, and here’s another square photo with the circle of a bucket seen from above. So what funnels the drop into the bucket is the shape of the triangular photograph. It had something to do with the photograph being an object. And then, see this one: it was obviously one of my best, Hot and Cold Faucets with Drain, 1975-1994. It’s in the Museum of Modern Art. This work referenced, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue by Newman. Here’s the faucet with hot, signified by red, here’s the cold, signified by blue. They’re flowing together into a drain that is not a combination of red and blue. It’s simply yellow. Anyway, the background is yellow. Which doesn’t really signify “warm”. It’s hard to explain. At the time (Bill refers to the work Mao Dead, 1976) many artists were Marxists and I understand why, and I am sympathetic to the ideas of Karl Marx, but many artists were obsessively Marxist, and often puritanical. Puritanism and Marxism seem to go together. But I’m sure Marx had fun occasionally. With Marxism the whole idea is/was that there is no commodity so you are not hooking up with capitalism. This is a romantic idea, and I am a romantic. Marxism doesn’t work in practice because although you don’t need to buy a Tesla, you still need money for an old Volkswagen. This may be a naive idea. So I took Mao. He was in on the front page of the New York Post in 1975, and I wrote a story mentioning a newspaper, I included a photo of a street light, and another of field planted in rows like the lines of a newspaper. But I used the Post with “Mao Dead” on the cover - I could have taken any newspaper - you know, it was just a story about a newspaper, not a story about Mao.

Later in life I am thinking about becoming a Marxist, but (un)fortunately I like fine wine more than ever. So do many of my marxist friends. Anyway, in the early 70s the conceptual artists were a bit too puritanical for me, just black and white photographs, little or no sex and no humor, so I wanted to take a bit of the Puritanism out of my work. So I did this lady (Bill refers to the work The Bathroom, 1977) and these are her legs and these are scratches on her shoulder. By the way I must say humbly, my friend Jeff Koons really liked this work because it questioned the puritanical aspect of conceptual work. Of course, with that libertine attitude, Jeff carried on very well. Then this is Deirdre’s Lip, 1978. I was married for a year or so to an English woman named Deirdre and this photo is her upper lip. The three photos of breath (taken on a cold evening) are visual manifestations of the words, “forget,” “Twilight”, “darling”, as spoken. You have the connecting line of vapor from the smokestack of a train. So there’s the vapor of the train, and the mouth, and then the three things that the visual breaths signify: 1. forget 2. Twilight 3. darling. I took this photo (referring to the work Rising Sun, Falling Coconut, 1978) in Tortola in the Caribbean when I was there with my friend Mac Adams, who also showed with Gibson. Here the sun is rising and the coconut is falling and it just has to do with the dialogue, the sun is rising, into the upper photo, as the coconut is falling, into the lower photo. But there is more to it than that. I can’t explain everything. So this was a typical and good text piece (referring to the work Shoulder Blade, 1978) now owned by Jeff Koons, where there was a triangle of a shoulder blade and then the circle of a nipple and then this barrier here in 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”. Basically I wrote a story and took photographs at the same time. Then, at some point, after about five or ten studies and rewrites, I arrived at the final work. The text evolved with the photos. Each piece took several months to complete. So those were some of my best pieces from the early seventies which really has influenced my current work. This is a really good piece (referring to the work Neapolitan Holidays, 2019) – These are the works that are in the show. So, this one is called, Neapolitan Holidays, which is definitely ironic because of this postcard which was sent during the First World War, (the Great War) and the interesting thing about this postcard was that the postcard was sent to one place and then the soldier was reassigned, and then it was sent to another place to catch up with him. And I am sure it was not a holiday for him. LT He was injured, he was in the hospital. BB Yes. It’s kind of ironic in a beautiful way, because the whole series including this piece is called Neapolitan Holidays. For this soldier, it was not a holiday. So each one of these had a postcard that inspired me from the group of postcards that Lucia sent me.

I mean, it was amazing. It’s like hundreds and hundreds of fantastic postcards from 1915 to 1976 - all from your family. So then I wrote a cheerful story about trying to catch the ferry to Naples from Capri. Those red heels must be difficult to run in. And that’s the wake of the boat looking down from the ferry as it sped from Naples to Capri and vice versa. And so the pieces began with the postcards and then I wrote the text, and I did my own photographs for the piece. By the way - there were hundreds and hundreds of postcards - I picked out the ones that looked good. Lucia translated them, and then I used the ones from the best translations. It does, of course, matter what the postcards say. This one is called Cambridge Trampoline Society. A trampoline that you can bounce up and down on, so it has to do with some kind of up and down movement and you travel across the bouncing waves on to Capri. Postcards were early text messages. Our text messages are contemporary postcards. So the old postcard is answered by the recent text message or email, often a hundred years later! So that’s the format that I used- an early postcard and my contemporary email or text response. (My responses won’t be “contemporary” forever.) I have a specific recorded time on them because texts have specific times on them, and they are often a hundred years after the time when the postcard was written. So that is the idea of the work. I particularly like the photograph of this sad little girl here (referring to the work Darling Young Son 1, 2019). What was poignant about the postcards was that several of them came right in the middle of World War One. They were sent in a time that must have been incredible. It was called “The Great War,” because they didn’t know there was going to be an even greater one soon after. This was sent in 1915 (referring to postcard in the work War, Artillery and a few Questions, 2019). So it’s a new text message responding to an old postcard. And I’m glad you chose this for the invitation card and for the front cover. I’ve fallen in love with her. And David Carrier really liked this (referring to the work Horse Thieves, 2019). LT It’s Caravaggio at the Pio Monte della Misericordia… BB Yes it is. So I chose the postcards, and then Lucia translated them, and I responded - not so directly with a text message so many years later. The people that wrote these postcards are not alive. But their cousins and grandchildren are, and at my opening they identified their relatives. LT And the pictures have been associated in some way? BB Yeah. Here I am talking about a grinding stone (Bill refers to the work Bird Watching, 2019). The stone is something that’s heavy and here’s a feather, something that is light - and the heavy thing is on the top and the feather is on the bottom. Of course, the photo of the stone and the photo of the feather are the same weight. Well, here it talks about Virgil’s bees (Bill is referring to the work Buzz, 2019) and there’s some bees, you know, so that is not a coincidence. LT And the sign? What is associated to the sign?

Bill Beckley Studio Trisorio 2019

BB It’s just a stop sign. You know, I can’t explain that at the moment. I really liked the image in it. Most every photograph that I took was from Naples. Even the tomato. (Bill is talking about the work Dinner with Parmenides, 2019) and this must have been taken in Naples too, it is written in Italian - and also (referring to the work Sleeves, etc., 2019) it does have to do with simply looking at the overall piece and hopefully finding pleasure in the relationship of everything, content wise and visually. I really like this photo from inside a church - the color of the light from the windows - It’s enough to make me believe. LT How did you come up with the idea of the postcards? BB In my early work, everything that I wrote was postcard length. What’s interesting about postcards is that almost always when you write a postcard, it has little or nothing to do with the picture on the other side. You might say: “ Wish you were here,” and on the other side is a picture of a fish. Lucia sent me five hundred, maybe a thousand postcards. All the postcards came from your family, and were addressed to and from Naples. LT Are you happy about the show? BB Yes! Very! It could be the best show I have done or really up there in the top two or three... LT Fantastic! BB It’s nice how it evolved. I mean, three years ago we spoke about doing something again. We also spoke about new texts and writing. So this started bubbling in my head, and now, here it is and here we are! LT It’s very moving for us. BB I am happy for that. I saw the people at the opening pointing out places, relatives, and friends that they found on the postcards. What the people of the future will have is perhaps not the memories, but hopefully, the art. That is often enough. LT Grazie Bill, thank you! BB I have been to Naples many times, beginning in 1976 when I drove from London to Naples in my 1962 Morgan, an auto that I still have. I am loyal to cities and my automobiles. I love Naples, and the artists I met there, like Louise Bourgeois, Lawrence Carrol, and Lucy Jones Carrol. Naples is a magnet for artists. I met some artists in Naples only later in spirit, like Goethe, Sartre, Dostoevskij, Stendhal, and my dear friend and mentor, Oscar Wilde. Naples is a world onto itself. Roaming the streets with my cameras, photographing sculls, lions, and churches, I was told to be careful. I am glad that I wasn’t. December 4, 2019

Washington Crossing The Delaware, 1969 Photo album, postcard, ink on lined paper 29 x 27 cm

Bill Beckley

by David Carrier

Twigs Painted White, 1969 Photograph (latex paint on branches) 41 x 60 cm

“Let us . . . look at these strange configurations (cartoons) with puzzled curiosity, not so much for what they can tell about historical events as for what they may reveal about our own minds”. E. H. Gombrich “Good ideas are necessary and sufficient for good art”. Adrian Piper Bill Beckley is a conceptual photographer and a distinguished writer. When, long ago I met him I was fascinated that he possessed both of these skills. Few distinguished artists are also skilled writers. Thanks to that rare combination of skills, Beckley has the intelligence necessary to become a philosopher-artist. This essay is devoted to explaining how that is possible. In order to understand his newest artworks you need to grasp the good ideas, which he has embodied in these strange configurations of Neapolitan Holidays. In the seventeenth-century Nicolas Poussin was legitimately called a philosopher painter, so the English scholar Anthony Blunt says, because he was primarily inspired by a desire to give visible expression to certain ideas which, while not deserving the name of philosophy in any technical sense, represent a carefully thought-out view of ethics, a consistent attitude to religion, and, toward the end of his life, a complex, almost mystical conception of the universe. The nature of both art and philosophy, and so also of the philosopher-artist has changed drastically since his time. Bill Beckley is a present day philosopher-artist because his work consistently develops highly original, deeply challenging questioning about the identity of artworks. And nowadays that has become the crucial philosophical concern facing an artist. What is a work of art? For the philosopher this is the most basic question about the nature of art. In order to interpret an artwork and understand its history, we need, first, to know what art is. In the visual arts, for a long time this concern with the nature of art revolved around analysis of art’s subjects. For the European old masters, a painting had to depict the grand stories from antiquity and the Bible. In China, where this history was very different, words and images co-existed in scroll paintings. Then, starting in the seventeenth-century it was recognized that the pure landscape, without any human figures, or the still life could also be legitimate subjects. In the early twentieth century it was discovered that it was possible for painting to be abstract, to not depict a recognizable subject. And, of course, then Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades also offered striking new challenges to these traditional definitions of art. In the early Renaissance, some painters employed words within the pictures to aid in telling their stories. Often, for example, in an Annunciation the words spoken by the angel were written out. But soon that use of words in visual artworks was discovered to be uneconomical, indeed unaesthetic. A painter should be able to tell his story, it was decided or discovered, without any recourse to words. Words, then, in general, appeared in paintings only as represented elements, as when they are found on buildings or letters depicted in the painting, and, of course, in the artist’s signature. And sometimes these depicted words are the key to interpreting a picture. Once when I entered the outskirts of Naples exiting the autostrada, near the tollbooth a ragged-looking man was begging. If you paid the toll in cash, it was natural, indeed perhaps almost inevitable that you gave him a tip, for he looked needy and was, after all, standing right by your open car window.

Painted Bushes for Sol LeWitt, 1968 C-print of dead bushes and acrylic paint 41 x 51 cm

De Kooningâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Stove, 1974 Cibachrome and black and white photographs 55 x 100 cm

In the 1970s, a number of visual artists who later became well known were experimenting developments of the word-image relationship within the visual arts. They included Adrian Piper, Richard Prince and Ed Ruscha. Beckley also took part in this important development. Consider, for example, his de Kooning’s Stove (1974). On the left is a true story about de Kooning’s working procedures, and a suggestion, probably fictional, about how that procedure influenced Beckley. And on the right you see the photograph of a stove. What then is the relationship between left and right, between story and image? Should we imagine that this is Beckley’s own stove? I’m not convinced that assuming this aids us in understanding this artwork. And so one is left puzzled, probably happily confused. Or look at Beckley’s Deirdre’s Lip (1978), a work that is somewhat harder, I think, to interpret (does it help to know that Deirdre was the name of Beckley’s first wife? I am not sure). On the right is a somewhat disconnected narrative about a phone call. And there are five distinct images, including a white vapor trail from a steam train. Although it is visible all at once, this work thus is something like a comic strip, with a succession of scenes laid out. This texts, it seems, comes from an incompletely heard phone call made on a cold night, interrupted it appears, by a passing train. But maybe there is more to it than that. For one thing, it’s not obvious in what order to read the images. For another, the relation of the text to the image is puzzling. In my catalogue essay for the Frankfurt Museum show Pioneers of Comics: Another Avant-garde (2016), I included a reproduction of this artwork in my essay; I was interested in the way that Beckley builds upon the comics’ tradition of the word-image relationship. What makes Beckley’s images works of art, and distinguishes them from cartoons is that in these photographs the relationship between word and image is indeterminate, in challenging ways. Normally a successful cartoon must communicate immediately and unambiguously. Larson’s cartoons work quickly. But the meaning of an artwork is harder to pin down, and so it can inspire happy, ideally prolonged reflection. Old master painting inspires such attention because we decipher and marvel at the brushwork and composition used to present the image. Beckley’s word-image art demands such contemplation, also, because the elliptical relationship between the words and images readily inspires prolonged thought. In that way, his works, as much as traditional paintings, hold our eye and thus inspire what can legitimately be called aesthetic attention. Looking at large photograph-and-word images is very different, obviously, from focusing on an old master painting. Here let’s consider in some detail a Neapolitan example, a work that I think the greatest picture in the city, Caravaggio’s The Seven Acts of Mercy (1606). It is permanently displayed in Pio Monte della Misericordia, and, also, reproduced on the postcard in Beckley’s Horse Thieves (2018). What’s subtle and demands prolonged attention in order to understand this Caravaggio is unpacking this scene. As long as I have been coming to Naples, I have been studying this painting. But only in the past few years have I even begun to understand it. Every time I return to Pio Monte della Misericordia, it takes me a surprisingly long time to identify the various actions in Seven Acts. Sometimes I still need help from the newly installed audiovisual presentation, which unpacks the narrative. However long one looks, this composition retains its hallucinatory quality. Inspired by a recent presentation of tableau vivants, in which twenty-three of Caravaggio’s paintings were performed by eight actors on a nearby stage, just North of the Duomo, at the Diocesan Museum, here I describe the image as if it were a real scene. In the eighteenth-century Parisian Salons, performers brought Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s storytelling genre paintings to life on the stage. Let’s treat Seven Acts as an image in such a theatrical performance.

Silent Ping Pong and Short Stories for Popsicles, 1971 Installation view John Gibson Gallery

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 must show 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 action, also shown by Caravaggio: burying the dead. This complicated picture takes time to understand. So too does Horse Thieves, for there you need consider not only the reproduction of this Caravaggio but also the words and image added by Beckley, which perhaps comment on that picture. When you are driving and see a road sign, you need to respond quickly without undue reflection. The sign tells the speed limit and so you immediately slow down. But when you encounter The Seven Acts of Mercy or Horse Thieves, there is no way that you can quickly decipher them, for you need to take time to sort out the complex details. That’s why an art gallery is no place to be in a rush. When, recently, Beckley told me that his Hot and Cold Faucets with Drain (1975) had been juxtaposed with Claude Monet’s Water Lilies (1916) in a New York subway poster for MoMA, I was overjoyed that his art had this potentially enormous public audience. I do hope that some commuters slowed down to look. Since we are in a Neapolitan gallery, let’s look a little further at this Caravaggio, for one relatively prominent detail in plain sight that has been missed by all but one recent commentator (we owe its publication to Terence Ward, who attributes this interesting discovery to the guard he met at Pio de Monte in the 1990s). Just above the wing of the angel on the left you see a large, bright circle, which is the moon. And just below it, you see also the slope of Mount Vesuvius and a reflection of the moon in the water of the bay. When I first saw Neapolitan Holidays, I was puzzled. Why, I wondered, was Beckley using photographs of postcards in his art? What, I asked myself, had this humble art form to do with his larger artistic concerns? And how, I wondered, did these new works relate to his classic 1970s art? There now is a large literature on the uses of words in contemporary visual art. But as yet, there is not much discussion of the postcard. In two recent books Joachim Pissarro and I discuss what we call ‘wild art’, art that is found outside of the galleries and museums of the art world. Wild art stands to art world art as wild to domestic animals or weeds to cultivated plants. Graffiti and tattoos are examples of wild art. Comic strips are another example. Our basic claim is that because there is no intrinsic essential difference between wild art and art world art, any form of art can make its way into the art world. But we didn’t discuss the postcard. How does Beckley turn these humble cards into works of art? The invention of a novel subject is rare in the visual arts. Think how much time and critical discussion it took for the still life or the landscape genres to become established in European painting. And recall how late was the development of abstraction. These novel subjects were the product of a changing sensibility. When that happened, then representations of foodstuffs and attractive landscapes, or pictures with no subjects at all, became acceptable as artworks. The invention of other novel subjects depended upon new technologies.

Song for a Chin-up, 1971 Performed by student at Juilliard

Pop art was possible only because its subjects are the products of modern mass production. And comic stripes were created when newspapers demanded visual supplements to their written news reporting, materials for people whose reading skills were weak. In all of these cases, new kinds of subjects were introduced into visual art. Nowadays, then, a photograph of almost anything can be an artwork. In Neapolitan Holidays Beckley does something different, he introduces the structure of the postcard into his photographic art. The postcard, a modernist invention, was a mid-nineteenth-century creation. Once mail service became inexpensive, when there were many middle class tourists and literacy became relatively common, many of these traveling people wanted to post cards home. You went on vacation and send a card back home, writing ‘wish you were here’, or some other suitable inscription to send to your geographically distant friends or family. And just as texting on our smart phones encourages brevity, so the same is true with communicating via postcards, where the space available for the written message is strictly limited. Now thanks to the internet, such post cards have almost disappeared. You take a selfie of yourself in Naples, and Email it back home. Just as a postcard contains an image and a personal message, and identification of the sending; so too does Email, which is cheaper and faster, and easier to use. No longer do tourists have to look for stamps and mailboxes in order to send their messages home. Postcards are still used, however, it’s true, to advertise political campaigns or sales of consumer goods; and sometimes art galleries use them to announce openings. A traditional picture postcard contains five elements: the picture; the stamp, which you may need to purchase separately; and any printed comments by the sender; the postmark, indicating the time and place where it was mailed; and the address and note written by that sender. What thus distinguishes a postcard from a letter is that its contents are open to immediate visual inspection. Recently where there were concerns about anthrax being mailed to American politicians, postcards became the preferred mode of communication. The postmark provided by the postal office allows the recipient to determine when and from where the card was sent. But of course this surveillance is not always entirely reliable. In The Captive, the fifth volume of In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust describes his hero Marcel’s ultimately vain attempt to keep track of his lover, Albertine. Leaving her to travel alone with just his chauffeur, he trusts that driver to mark her movements by sending him postcards. But in fact, as she later explains, “I’d bought them in advance and given them to the driver . . . and then the fathead put them in his pocket and forgot about them instead of sending them on . . .”. In the 1970s, as noted, a number of American artists were experimenting with word-image art. Beckley has a distinguished place amidst their company. His newest works develop an extraordinarily original format not developed, to my knowledge, by any other artist. They are a novel form of visual allegories. Allegory is a familiar, highly traditional art form. Literary scholars and art historians often discussed it. But in the 1980s, thanks to the literary critic Paul de Man and some other literary theorists, and the belated translation Walter Benjamin’s early book, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, allegory became a highly fashionable topic. And the American critic Craig Owens published an influential essay identifying postmodernism as an allegorical model of art making. More recently, this interest in visual allegory has waned. Here, however, I revive that topic, for it helps explain Beckley’s new artworks.

Study for Short Stories for Popsicles, 1971 Wrapper, silkscreened popsicle stick, and strawberry flavored popsicle 30 x 41 cm

An allegory is a text or visual work with a double-layered meaning. A written story tells the life of a person, but its real subject is the history of a nation; a picture shows a female nude, but its true subject is ‘the naked truth’. Allegories are fascinating because they use their literal subjects in this richly suggestive way. Neapolitan Holidays create an interesting, allegorical doubling. In Beckley’s sources, the original photograph and its caption are mirrored by his photograph and caption. The result is an artwork whose meaning is highly elusive. Some years ago I surprised and pleased Beckley when I identified him as an aesthete. I did not intend to surprise him. After all, not only did he publish early on books by the greatest Victorian aesthetes, Walter Pater and John Ruskin, but also he was involved in both his Soho urban loft and his country house upstate in New York with creating aesthetically perfect environments. And, indeed, he has a 1962 Morgan, a very aesthetic antique car. But I do understand why he was puzzled. An aesthete, as that description is understood by many, perhaps most people is a privileged person, probably politically as well as aesthetically conservative, with a connoisseur’s interest in old master art. But that is not at all what concerns me: I, rather, am interested in close looking with reference to visual-and-moral concerns. This is how Pater and Ruskin understood being an aesthete, and it is how I, following them, understand it. To be an aesthete, as I understand that term, is to be politically radical. Beckley’s series of postcard artworks based upon photographs, his Neapolitan Holidays was begun in 2017. The name and themes reflects his longtime interest in Naples, a city that has fascinated him since his first visit, in 1978, thanks to his ongoing representation by Studio Trisorio in that city. The gallery supplied him with a large selection of postcards, and he chose the small selection used in these works. Beckley’s large artworks in this show were all made in 2018 or 2019. Each of them has five parts, sometimes arranged vertically, but in other cases organized horizontally. They are enlargements of an actual Italian postcards send between 1915 and 1965, with an English translation of the message; a photo from that postcard; one of Beckley’s recent photos of Naples made between 2016 and 2019; and his text responding to the postcard. Some artists find a working style and them repeat themselves. Other, more ambitious artists know that nowadays only continual development attracts or deserves attention. After the 1970s, when Beckley achieved recognition and success with his word-picture image, he knew that he had to go further. Neapolitan Holidays extend the concerns of these earlier works (and, also, his other more recent art) in a surprising way. Look at these postcards. Who is writing? And who is the recipient? Apart from the names given, we don’t know anything about these people. Here scale matters. Just as Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol turned comic strip images into paintings by enlarging them, so Beckley uses photographs to make large-scale artworks from these photographs. We all are accustomed to send and receive postcards. At least, this is true for people of a certain age. But so far as I am aware, before Beckley no major contemporary artist has used the postcard in an artistically significant way. It’s instructive to compare Tom Phillips’s book The Postcard Century: 2000 Cards and Their Messages (2000). He presents cards he collected which were sent between 1900 and 1999 to tell a social history. We see how postcards showed great public events, including the two world wars, looking both at the printed messages and also at the written comments, some somber, others frivolous or even very silly, which frequently have little to do with the pictures. You could write a history of modern England using the messages on these cards. Beckley’s concerns are very different. He is an artist, not a social historian.

Snake, 1974 Cibachrome Photographs 62 x 48 cm

In traditional and modernist visual art the artist creates an artifact, and a spectator responds. What then makes the postcard distinctive is that the need for an inscription is built into the artwork, for without some message added by the sender, the artwork remains incomplete. Some modernist artworks solicit a spectator’s response; without the viewer’s presence, it has been argued, a minimalist work remains incomplete. Postcards make some written response mandatory. And Beckley in effect extends (or doubles) that essential structure by adding his own words and an image to these images postcards. How, then, do we interpret Neapolitan Holidays? Here Beckley’s previous word-image compositions supply only an incomplete guide. When his chosen photographic image and words were juxtaposed, then we almost inevitably seek connections between them. In his 1970s photographic art his words, we expect, are in some sense ‘about’ the photograph. The postcards are different, for there need be no connection between the image and original message, and the words added by Beckley. Let us imagine that Beckley merely made large scale photographs of these postcards. They would be interesting sociological documents, but there’s no reason to believe that they would be artworks. What he has done, however, is much more complicated. He has offered verbal and visual interpretations of the words and images on these cards, thus supplementing or, as I say, doubling, the originals. And so it’s unsurprising that initially I was puzzled. Upon reflection, I realized that in fact these photographs extended his prior concerns, in a marvelous, very formally intelligent fashion. But just as Nicolas Poussin’s paintings are enticing artworks even if you don’t care about his philosophical concerns, so even if you know nothing about the philosophical concerns I have presented, yet still you will find these photographic artworks visually compelling.

Note: This essay draws upon many discussions with Bill Beckley. I wish to acknowledge what I have recently learnt from the exalted commentaries of Adrian Piper, published in her Out of Order, Out of Sight (1996).

Biography Bill Beckley was born in Hamburg, Pennsylvania in 1946 and lives and works in New York. He has shown at the MoMA, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art (1979), Documenta in Kassel, Germany (1976), the Paris Biennale (1973) and the Venice Biennale (1975). Beckley has been represented by Studio Trisorio since 1986. Museum and Public Collections Basel Kunst Museum, Switzerland Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Daimler-Benz Collection, Berlin Kröller-Müller Museum, Arnhem, Netherlands La Jolla Museum, San Diego (MCASD), CA Monchengladbach Museum, Germany Musée Ceret, France Musée d’art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland Museum of Modern Art, New York National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Sammlung Hoffmann, Berlin Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. Stadtisches Museum, Monchengladbach, Germany The Guggenheim Museum, New York The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Victoria and Albert Museum, London Works in Private Collections Chase Manhattan, New York Daimler Benz, Stuttgart, Germany David and Lindsey Shapiro, New York Dr. P. Rau, Berlin, Germany Ed Downe, New York Esther Gruthen, Basel, Switzerland George Waterman, New York Gianfranco D’Amato, Naples Hans Mayer, Dusseldorf, Germany Isy Brachot, Brussels, Belgium Jeff Koons, New York Klaus Wolf, Essen, Germany Lise Toubon, Paris, France Morton Neuman collection, Chicago Richard Oudenhuysen, The Netherlands Sabine and Bernard Duare, Perpignan, France Sol LeWitt Collection Yvon Lambert, Paris, France Awards 1997 Pollock-Krasner Grant 1986 New York Council of the Arts 1979 National Endowment of the Arts 1976 New York Council of the Arts 1973 New York Council of the Arts

This catalogue has been published on the occasion of the exhibition: Bill Beckley, Neapolitan Holidays Studio Trisorio, Naples 30 October 2019 - 31 January 2020 ÂŠ Bill Beckley Translations by: Angela Federico Gabriella Rammairone Graphic design project: Tristan Beckley Paola Cagnetta

Printed 2019 - Naples Printed in in October January 2020

STUDIO TRISORIO Napoli Â· Riviera di Chiaia, 215 +39 081 414306 www.studiotrisorio.com info@studiotrisorio.com