Now It’s early June and the world is shredding. We’re on the phone talking about the latest murder by police, of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta, and all the Black Lives Matter marches and rallies around the country and the world. Julian sends me a layout for some work he’s putting together about crime, including a text about van Gogh, “The Man Suicided by Society” by Antonin Artaud, with an image of Julian’s first plate painting, The Patients and the Doctors. We ask each other: What can we do? It’s June 2020 and New York City is still closed because of the coronavirus pandemic. Many of the stores and restaurants in our neighborhood are boarded up. Lots of people are still masked and the future of the city veers almost daily from guardedly positive to dire. I’m finding it hard to write this short story about my friend. I keep getting overwhelmed by the emergencies that continue to unfurl. Is it the pandemic that makes me see life as if from a great distance, a panorama of lost places and long gone people? The phone rings and it’s Julian and he’s reading a section from his script “In the Hand of Dante.” The pandemic is going on but Julian is writing, revising scripts, painting. “I miss Shooter, I haven’t seen him for months,” he says and sends me a video of his six-year-old son Shooter slowly falling asleep as he reads to him on FaceTime. This summer a new blind big girl painting no longer has a purple streak over her eyes. This time around she has no eyes. There’s just a long scar across her face where her eyes would be. I saw the new blind girl painting a few days ago at his outdoor studio in Montauk that he built when he moved out there. It’s a painting not only about the blindness of white people but the lack of any eyes at all.
The old days I must have run into Julian around the time he was doing the Whitney Independent Study Program with Ron Clark and Yvonne Rainer. I remember the circles of folding chairs and people sitting on windowsills and intense discussions about politics, the meaning of pure ideas like “the edge.” Julian had just arrived from Texas and was the only painter in the program who didn’t seem bothered by the notion that painting was dead. He was just rediscovering New York and the rest of his education started at 1 a.m. every night at Mickey Ruskin’s bar Max’s Kansas City, an artists’ bar where through his first and best friend in New York, Bob Williamson, young Julian was introduced to a world of New York artists with a capital A. In those days there he met Robert Smithson, Richard Serra, Willem de Kooning, Blinky Palermo, Brice Marden, Neil Williams, Larry Poons, and John Chamberlain, to list a few. We were in different worlds, I was recovering from minimal sculpture at the time. We swirled around each other, in and out of scenes of mutual friends—Gordon Matta-Clark and Susan Ensley, Dickie Landry, at the Leo Castelli and Sonnabend galleries, at 420 West Broadway, Trisha Brown, Phil Glass, John Chamberlain, Vito Acconci, and Malcolm Morley. It was the late ’70s and New York, like now, was dark and mysterious. In SoHo we lived in abandoned buildings—the future was uncertain. Artists, however, were beginning
“I want my life to be in my work, crushed into my painting like a pressed car. If it’s not, my work is just some stuff.” Julian Schnabel
Untitled (The Sky of Illimitableness), 2015. 17
Number 1 (Van Gogh, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, Willem), 2018.