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There is a painting on the wall of my studio, a work by a young American artist named Slater Bradley. I’ve learned a few things about Bradley over the past year, but I first encountered this painting in a state of perfect innocence, when I saw it hanging in a gallery in Lisbon, where I was teaching at a writers’ conference. I was accompanying another writer, who wanted to see the work of a photographer she liked, and we were both struck by an exhibition of Bradley’s canvases in the gallery’s main space. The paintings were large, some broken into geometrical shapes, gold and silver and black, some simple fields of a single color. They contained an elaborate symbolism, a mix of astrology and Eastern metaphysics, which immediately aroused my skepticism and still has yet to catch my interest. But the paintings were beautiful, and one of them, the smallest, grabbed hold of me in a way I’ve felt only a few times in my life. It’s a block of blue on a surface mounted on a white mat, the whole enclosed in a brass frame. From across the gallery, a warehouselike space with cement floors and white walls, lit through a strip of high windows by Lisbon’s extraordinary summer sun, it looked like undifferentiated color, a weirdly textured and captivating blue. Then the room darkened dramatically–a cloud passed in fron of the sun–and the painting transformed: it brightened and became luminous, an effect I have become familiar with but not accustomed to, and which I have no way of explaining. The painting communicated a sense of stillness infused with vibrancy–a quality I find in much of the art I love, something I’ve characterized elsewhere as being like “a flame submerged in glass.” It’s a stillness that reminds me that stasis was also the Greek word for sedition, for that decidedly unplacid political stalemate that can erupt in civil war. (continued)
Up close, the stillness dissolves, or is troubled: the painting consists of thousands of small hatch marks, short vertical stokes made in horizontal bands, applied in what the artist has described as a kind of meditative gesture. The experience I had viewing it was something like love, what the French call a coup de foudre, a thunderbolt, and I knew I wanted to feel its effect again and again; I knew that it was something that would be, in some way I didn’t fully understand, useful to me. And so, thanks to haggling, a drawn-out schedule of payments generously accepted by the gallery, and the forbearance of my partner, it now hangs behind my desk, where I can feel it almost buzzing as I work.
It would be difficult for me to say anything about the social and political relevance of Bradley’s work, though of course the work is embedded in social and political contexts, the arrangements of the world that made it possible for Bradley to create it and for me to hang it in my writing room. It would be difficult to make the work voluble in ways intelligible to the idea of relevance I find inadequate. And yet, when I think of the real relevance of art, I think of this painting, which reminds me of that oldest sense of relever, the shared parent of relevant and relieve, and of its physical, bodily meaning: to put back into an upright position. That was what I felt at the gallery in Lisbon, and it’s what I feel now, writing these words with the painting at my back: that I am being restored, set upright, reminded of a frequency I need to tune myself to catch. This is the real relevance of art, I think, this lifing up, this challenge to lift myself up. I helps me to do my work, this mystery hanging at my back; it helps me to live my life.
