by Jon-Marc Seimon
IN THE DESERT
I SAW A CREATURE, NAKED, BESTIAL
WHO, SQUATTING UPON THE GROUND,
HELD HIS HEART IN HIS HANDS,
AND ATE OF IT.
I SAID, “IS IT GOOD, FRIEND?”
“IT IS BITTER—BITTER,” HE ANSWERED;
“BUT I LIKE IT
“BECAUSE IT IS BITTER,
“AND BECAUSE IT IS MY HEART.”
It’s a short poem, written by Stephen Crane, who preferred to call his poems “lines” rather than poems. “I was very properly enraged at the word ‘poet”,” he wrote, “which continually reminds me of long-hair and seems to be a most detestable form of insult.” He insisted that all the poems in the book The Black Riders and Other Lines be printed upper case in their entirety, the more to make them read like newspaper headlines. His subject was, ostensibly, the Civil War, despite the fact that he wrote most of the lines at the end of the 19th century, many years after the war had ended. With the passage of time, of course, the specific war becomes less important. War is war. Look no further than Goya, in the context of Abu Ghraib.
Sometimes, late at night, I’ll walk into my wife’s studio to spend time with whatever paintings she’s currently working on. Duston usually works in series. In her “Delivered” series, for example, she isolates figures drawn from photographs on the front page of the New York Times, all depicting the cynical misery and squalor of one of the innumerable wars in the Middle East, the decontextualization of the figures insisting that we view them as human beings, be they Israeli soldiers carrying a comrade, a Palestinian girl clutching a doll as she flees her bombed out apartment building, or an old woman—who cares what side she was from?—being rushed away on a stretcher by paramedics. Or—another series—this one of blasting syncopations that reference Isambard Kingdom Brunel by way of Oscar Peterson, splayed out on large canvases that we now jokingly refer to as “the sneezes,” so forceful and emphatic is the way she ejaculated them onto the canvas. Or appeared to, at any rate. Her method is always far more considered than that.
Here’s the thing: when a series is working, it’s immediately obvious during my late-night excursions, because when I open the studio door I feel like I’m interrupting something, a conversation. The paintings talk to each other. They constitute their own body politic. They’re friends and rivals, they whisper and conspire. They’d share a beer, or at least an espresso, if they could.
I met Duston Spear in 1995, at a party on a Bowery rooftop, in the spring. Our hostess was our mutual friend Mandy Jacobson, a South African expat (like me: we all fancied ourselves expats back then, or even—more exotically—“exiles.” As Dus sardonically described our cohort, we’d all “escaped apartheid” via the Overground Railroad). Dus and Mandy had recently returned from Serbia, where they had lent their considerable passion and energy to a fierce women’s collective that was drawing attention to the Serbs’ systematic use of rape as a weapon in their brutal war. The moment I first laid eyes on Duston is, undoubtedly, the single most important moment of my life. She “made an entrance” from the narrow stairs leading to the roof, the water-tower-and-heating-duct wasteland that New Yorkers mistake for paradise, her hair blazing a lethal, unnatural white (“legally blonde”, she told me). I made a beeline for her, and now I’m writing my own lines, twenty-six years later.
The painting I’m concentrating on here is drawn from a series Duston did in the early 2000s, based on the poems in Crane’s The Black Riders. In this, as in the other paintings in the series, she started by roughly, almost savagely, scrawling Crane’s lines on a large, raw canvas. The words were inscribed in roofing tar, a foul brown muck that declares its organic roots and its caustic toxicity in equal measure. Having drawn the lines, she then assiduously smothered them with layers of house paint, oil paint, beeswax, and resin. Inconsistently applied, generally horizontal but not always. Sometime obliterating the words, other times veiling them in the milky semi-opacity of the wax.
No matter: the words themselves refuse to behave. Whatever Duston might have done to suppress or mute them, they insist on roaring their way to the surface. In some of the paintings, this happened literally overnight: “All feeling God, hear in the war night…” Others meandered their way to the surface, taking months and even, sometimes, years. Seemingly random words… “dusty”… “flash”… “the two-faced eagle”… “suffer us”… “paradise”…
Some paintings in the series were left to ripen in their purely textual form. They now, twenty years on, look like the liniments binding a mummy, steeped in embalming fluids and pharaoh-juice, or scrolls unearthed from their urns in the caves of Qumran, a furious testament to the endurance of the language and the physicality of the words.
So to this painting, Bitter Heart, which starts out the same way as its contemporaries, but then takes a dangerous swerve with the introduction of two violently assertive orbs that hover menacingly above the words on the canvas. The lower of the two orbs is slightly more reticent. Paler, and not full constituted in the center (one can see the unobscured words peeking through), it seems to be rising, drifting into existence. Not so the upper orb. Smaller, it’s a fully present ovoid, like a misshapen egg. Deep encrusted reds, like a wound scabbing over, but also with a limpid translucence, like the lizardy skin of a ripe pomegranate.
We’re all grimly recognizing that this pandemic, our own war, might last for a very long time. As in all wars, some don’t make it. We ebb and flow back into our old existences, we advance, then retreat again. The old normal is over, and we have enough perspective now to realize that we might not go back to it even if we could. We’re tempered, and we know we can endure, at least on this mortal coil. Ultimately, perhaps, we’re all just creatures, naked, bestial, squatting on the ground holding our hearts in our hands.
“BUT I LIKE IT
“BECAUSE IT IS BITTER,
“AND BECAUSE IT IS MY HEART.”
Jon-Marc Seimon is a writer and photographer from South Africa.
After the Art 