Five Stories For Philip Guston, Printed Matter, 2024
In 1966, after over a decade of making abstractions, Philip Guston abruptly abandoned painting. He started to make drawings of simple things: an iron, a shoe, a nail, an open book. When he started painting again after this brief hiatus, the first image he committed to canvas was this open book, brief brushstrokes standing for lines of text.
Guston was an avid reader of novels, short stories, and philosophy, so it is not surprising that he painted books. What is surprising is how the book paintings made him think anew about narrative, and specifically the potential to tell stories again with his art. There was another prompt: during this period, events in American public life were in turmoil. Having seen firsthand the violence of fascist forces in the 1930s, Guston resolved to commit his work to storytelling once again—but in a new manner.
In this short story collection, five writers working today have created fictions in conversation with Guston and his painting. So many years after his death in 1980, it is clear why his influence remains stronger than ever.
Edited by Emmie Francis & Mark Godfrey Paintings by Philip Guston
Including stories: “Maverick Road” by Christopher Alessandrini; “Looking” by Thessaly La Force; “Bloodymindedness” by Ben Okri; “A Verdict” by Lou Stoppard; “The Line” by Audrey Wollen
Design and production by Karma, New York
Extract
This man—the prosecutor points at you—has created man. This man calls himself a painter. The prosecutor points again. He believes he is God. He does what only God should do. He has lifted his hand, and he has conjured a living thing. See it, there. The prosecutor points at the living thing, right there in the courtroom—though you cannot recall how they brought it in, or who brought it—and you look, and it seems quite alien to you even though you supposedly, certainly, made it. It is gleaming in the light. It bristles, it sighs. You are not exactly afraid of it, but you wouldn’t place a bet on what it could do next.
This man created a living thing. The prosecutor is still speaking, and others have joined in, repeating the accusation. They point to it, enormous and fragile, blatant. It stalks the room but remains quite still. Some avert their eyes and breathe in, crisply, sucking, as if trying to freshen the air in and around them. Some make a point of not looking, of turning their heads away from the living thing to show that they cannot bear it, that it has no place in their world and that they will not even see it. They shake their heads when it is referenced—it is dangerous, their shakes imply, it could hurt others, it could disrupt order and peace. How can it be controlled? You think of the officer who brought you in when you were first arrested, who came the whole way to find you, from the city. Who told you that the charge against you was grave, that you had done what only a high god should do, that you had done something that couldn’t be understood, couldn’t be rationalised. The officer said that it was not his place to judge you, that some- one else would take care of that. You recall the way he had cast his eyes, fearfully, over your equipment; the tubes, the wooden frames, the pencils, hacked into sharp points. The way his foot had knocked the bucket as he left, the clatter of the handle, the slop of the water as it hit the floor, the echo of the brushes, vibrating on the thin hard edge.
And now you speak. You say that you do not know how you did it. That it was the end of a long period of time, and that you laid down your hands, put your brushes in the dark pool to soak, and suddenly what was before you was not yours anymore. It got up and it walked around the room and it looked at you and held its hand toward you but then lifted it away from you before you could shake it, like a taunting child. And when it sat in the corner under the light you were almost proud of it, but you knew that it wasn’t yours to feel proud of, and you knew that to be satisfied was to be self-important, deluded, even. You knew that you were not really its master; that it existed independent of intention or order. That you had done all you could; it would have its own life, its own story now. You couldn’t do anything else to shape or contain it. You shouldn’t even try.
You pause to survey the judge, the jury—all are looking back, thinking—and you rest your water glass down after a sip. The water is very, very cold, and I am glad for it. We continue.
You say that you knew it wasn’t yours any more. That what you had created was a living thing. And that you did not set out to commit a crime, that you simply lifted your hands from colors to canvas— streaking the eggy, stubborn white, the stable putty, the grand, hopeful pink—and tried to do some- thing, to push yourself, until you were almost in a trance. You worry here that you have started to sound eccentric, bohemian. The judge thinks that you are unorthodox, imagining wildness. Not a trance, you clarify, but a rhythm. You entered a rhythm, and from those beats and repetitions came the living thing. It came quite unexpectedly, you say, looking around the room. It came unexpectedly, you repeat. But once it was there it was there—what could you have done about it? You couldn’t unmake it. You couldn’t somehow put it back. Where would “back” even be?
You have begun to worry that what you are saying does not adequately explain it. It sounds fantastical, but simple too. Like an infant’s story. A silly tale. You worry you could lose the room; lose us all. What’s to be believed here? You try to focus on the truth, but the truth doesn’t seem to fit within the court, it doesn’t hold itself within the space, it can- not find support within this clammy air, within the lime-washed walls. It circles, a swarm of gulls above, round and round, sometimes whole, sometimes fractured. Some dart away, lose themselves in private missions, others lead, pushing forward on new, unexpected tracks. You say that it is hard to get your point across. You say that the more you think about things, the less they appear as they are supposed to appear.
What you need to explain is this, the prosecutor says, frustrated with the vagaries. How do you do it? How did you do it? He points to the living thing. And as he does you watch your arm extend, too. You are sure that he is speaking, but his voice seems to be coming from within you.
Tell us how you did it, the room says, all together. Tell us, and then we can get somewhere. You just need to tell the whole story. The judge nods; his beard stays in a stiff, straight point even as his head moves. You think of your wife, with her soft hair. Yours is so dry. You think of the way she uses the back of her fore- arm to sweep it from one side of her head to another, the way it sometimes blows into your mouth when you walk together in the wind, and you feel so sorry. Sorry to be here at all. Though not sorry for what you have done, you think to yourself, repeating the sentence in your head—I am not sorry for what I have done—as if to ensure the denial is noted in the chronicles of your mind, lest the court read your thoughts again and see a sign of guilt or admission.
You take a different tack. You say, firmly, that you’ll level with everyone. That you will be completely honest, that you will admit everything you can. So, you say—more confidently this time, your voice almost jovial, convivial, to convey the collaboration, the understanding, the sense of us all working together—you did not mean to do it, did not know that you could do it or that you had it in you, but you also always intended to do it. You had intention, you say, but you didn’t know what that intention was at the time. You simply hoped, you say, to do something.
The judge nods, pleased to be getting somewhere. Go on.
It began when you were young, you explain. When you were a teenager. You saw a late self-portrait by Rembrandt. You had travelled a long way to see the Rembrandt, to stand before the frame and be moved and awed and show yourself to it. And it was so dense. So truly dense. You felt as though if you peeled off the forehead, or a part of the eye, you’d open up a window into a living world—a whole eternity of teeming stuff. All this stuff. It was disturbing. You felt truly disturbed, you say. But you looked at the paintings around it, and they were all so self-conscious. They seemed to be saying, “I am a painting.” But the Rembrandt, the Rembrandt was looking at you. It was looking at you and it was saying “I am not a painting, I am a real man.” Everything was gone: any barrier, any plane, anything between that painting and you, you say. That is what Rembrandt had done—he had made, and he had eliminated. But it wasn’t satisfying, or calming. In fact, it frustrated you: it couldn’t be a living thing surely, but it wasn’t a painting either, so what was it that you were looking at?
So, if you had any intention, if any intention could be blamed for you ending up here—you gesture around the court—it was simply an intention to answer that question. You wanted to try and do the same thing—not the same painting, of course. But you wanted to eliminate the plane. To make some- thing that could be a man. To make, and to eliminate. You’d thought about this all the time, you explain.
Ever since seeing the Rembrandt, really, and every day when you went to your studio—usually after breakfast but sometimes at unusual hours, the middle of the night, as your wife slept, her hair spread across the pillow like prepped weaver’s threads—you wondered if you could make marks that would rise of the surface, look back at you and tell you what to do, how to live. Marks that would be a door, would contain a whole realm, beyond the paint. Usually what drove you to the studio in those late-night sessions was the thought of that Rembrandt. A memory of the face would come to you, as you tried to sleep, and you’d recall the thought of peeling back that eye and finding the chaos, the movement. You felt a forceful sense of urgency—and here you looked the judge right in the eye—like it was the living thing that was beckoning you. Like he was the puppeteer, and you were simply his servant, an obedient dog coming to heel. And as you worked it was as if some furious energy flowed through you, connected through you. You were an accomplice, a translator, a vessel, rather than an author.
You look up to the bench, to the one presiding over you, to take in his reaction to what you have just said. But it is you who are sat up on the judge’s bench. You making the calls, deciding the limits. You drinking from the cold glass, the one leaving the ring on the wood. You have torn back his eye and entered the world behind. You have walked through the crowds, the smoggy streets, the midday heat, travelled up there, to his bench, worn his robes, thought his thoughts. And you look down on yourself and you listen, as you explain that you were an accomplice, a translator, a vessel, rather than an author.