Sink Stopper Marcel Duchamp 1967 bronze cast of 1964 lead original, Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Cartoonist Lynda Barry talks about how, amidst her difficult (poor, immigrant, alcoholic dad) childhood, she found solace in The Family Circus, loved looking through that circle into the life of a fantastically normal American family, one that she might not believe existed except on the page. The circle around the circus was a portal into a world of possibilities. She started drawing, discovered her voice, style, became well respected as an artist, writer and educator. She won a MacArthur “Genius Grant.”
At a comic convention someone introduced her to Jeff Keane, Bil’s son, who took over the comic after his father died. She burst into tears. They became friends. Then in The Family Circus comic strip, Jeff, as cartoon boy “Jeffy,” brought cartoon Lynda home to meet his dad. Lynda had gone through the portal and into the art that had so profoundly altered her perception of the world.
Art’s power is in it’s utility as much as it’s uselessness. Spirituality is faith in unknown forces working beneath the surface. Any creative act is spiritual as it rejects mundane logic for an unknowable subterranean illogic.
On Saturday I sat in Cy Twombly’s Fifty Days at Iliam gallery at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This small room was one of my portals when I was young. I probably discovered it around the time I rejected Catholicism, yet I was attracted to the inherent reverence in the room’s chapel-esque dimensions. Another portal was a video I found playing on a CRT monitor outside that gallery, Folding Hat by John Baldessari. It’s not there now. Probably my earliest portal was a rock next to a small stream where I read books until it got dark. I revisited this place on Saturday, too. It was, like most things, smaller and more derelict than in my memory. The Twombly paintings were just as good, though.
I wonder if Lynda understood her fascination with The Family Circus when she first saw it? I didn’t know why I was drawn to the Twombly paintings or the Baldassari video. That was part of their confusing perfume – they beguiled me, like a scene viewed through a circle. Me, a somewhat known quantity, on one side, and an unknowable universe on the other, utterly alien, yet solidly trustworthy. I believed in what they represented: endless potential, playful decision making, freedom to not make sense, a record of a process rather than a product, and adherence only to the rules of one’s own determination.
Down the hall is Étant Donnés, Duchamp’s scene through a circle. Actually, two circles, peepholes for two eyeballs, which must look somewhat cartoony from the other side, the side nobody will ever see. Then there’s one of my favorite little Duchamps, his cast sink stopper, both a thing, a name faithful to what it depicts, and nothing at all, gesturing toward a void.