BOB WENT HOME

I salute my old friend Gary Lloyd on the occasion of his 77th birthday. I divulge no secrets; he already made his age public in an online post. He made, recently, the wise choice to leave the city with his family and find a new home in Taos, New Mexico, where the culture and the landscape speak to the call of his inner life.

It was Gary who helped change the course of my own life, some 50 years ago. An aspiring young poet, I was just beginning to find an interest in the work of artists of about my age and, not knowing what to expect, drove out to see an exhibition of his work at the Orlando Gallery in the San Fernando Valley. 

I was shocked, perhaps even a little appalled by what I found. My exposure to art until that time had been, well, Picasso and Matisse, the Cubists, the Surrealists. I loved Paul Klee. At Gary's show I found--and I may misremember here, but I think I'm generally accurate--an axe head embedded in the wall, jars smeared with vaseline and overflowing with unpleasant-looking contents arranged on shelves, words scrawled here and there on surfaces, scraps of material... 

A nightmare schoolroom, titled "Bob Went Home." My mind's initial reaction: this can't be art.

I drove away. I found myself obsessed with what I'd seen. It had reached through to some deep part of my consciousness, memories of boyhood struggle and confusion, spilled ink and messy fingers, some dark area of rage and fear and inexplicable loss. Over the next few days--as I do when something troubles me--I wrote. I wrote and wrote. I ended up with a long poem--30 pages. I took the title from Gary's scrawled message: Bob Went Home. Bob was the boy still in me, still potent, still unexplored. Still troubling. Bob, I suspected, was Gary's boyhood.

We met. He saw the poem. Suggested that we make a book of it. And we did. The result is a big, klutzy, frankly somewhat dangerous thing with a galvanized metal cover dented with the back of an axe head and a hatchet hand grip for a spine. The words of the poem are bound together, hand-printed in Yves Klein blue on a variety of materials--cork, felt, tar paper--and the pages obscured with tissue, small-mesh wire, smears of vaseline. It's an impossible "book", a weighty and ungainly tome, a sculpture... We never managed to put together all 100 copies we aspired to, but many were completed, and many are now in institutional collections. I hope they are sometimes shown.

I have followed Gary's work since then. It has always challenged convention, asking what art is and what it should be in an age of advanced technology, how its ancient roots in human consciousness are still a vital part of its necessary call to the human mind today, how archetypes--boat, branch, cutting tool, raw meat--reverberate in the psyche's memory and teach us something about who we are and what we need for our survival. It has asked us to be always conscious of our need to communicate with each other and take responsibility for the planet that we live on. And Bob--the small boy, smart, naughty, messy, infinitely curious, needing love and constant nurturing--is still at the heart of it. He still needs to go home.