Monday, July 16, 2018

A DREAM OF TWO ARTISTS

I had a dream in which I was engaged in a project with two artists, both now deceased: Charles White, who will be having a long-overdue tribute exhibition at MoMA this October, and whose life and work I studied on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship back in the early 1980s; and Patrick Nagatani, a wonderfully imaginative, deeply engaged photographer whose posthumously-published book I reviewed a while ago.

In the dream, I was still engaged in my study of Charles White and Patrick Nagatani was assisting in the documentation. His contribution consisted in creating a complete catalogue raisonné on a computer hard drive and hundreds of tiny squares of paper, all of which needed to be painstakingly cut out. I was working with him on the project in a small apartment in a strange city. When we were done I asked him if he was free for dinner but he declined. His wife (who was not his wife) arrived just as I was leaving and did not seem much interested in meeting me. I left, feeling rather sad and lonely...

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