Sean Everington
Joe Newman
The artist, Joe Newman, paced back and forth in his studio on the fourth floor of a Brooklyn warehouse. Like many warehouses, it had been converted into studio spaces for all the young artists flocking to Williamsburg and Greenpoint—like they did to Montparnasse and the Latin Quarter at the turn of the last century. Joe Newman had made the journey to Brooklyn from Dallas years ago and was an established artist with a thick beard and flannel shirts. He lit a cigarette in front of a large window that overlooked the Manhattan skyline. It was 3 a.m. and the lights of the city glowed up into the sky across the East River. He hated Manhattan. “Filthy animals,” he called them and spat on the floor, “look what they’ve done to me.”
Ah yes, Joe Newman was a true contemporary artist. He had, well, contempt for most everything concrete and loved ideas—especially his ideas, because they were his and original and existentianalized (his word). He smoked one cigarette after another followed by a swig of cheap Canadian whiskey. He was rich now, but still he drank the cheap whiskey. There was a pile of the plastic fifths in a corner. Joe would make some piece of art out of them. He could make art out of anything. Joe couldn’t paint or draw or sculpt in the traditional sense, but he didn’t have to; he was a contemporary artist.
Joe finished the bottle of whiskey and threw it into the corner with the other empty bottles. The ideas weren’t flowing. “God damnit. God damnit.” He wiped the whiskey off his beard with his sleeve and then threw his cigarette box across the room, under the hanging light bulb and over bicycles parts, bamboo, rotting wood stacked against a wall, piles of canvasses, oil paints, spray paint, dirty brushes, and rags crusted with dry paint. The pack flew over piles of knick-knacks that anyone else but Joe would call trash: soup and soda cans, beer and liquor bottles, dirty blankets, cardboard boxes, banana peels and orange peels, and browning apple cores. The pack landed by cereal boxes, hair dryers and straighteners, pieces of metal new and rusted, twisted in all sorts of shapes. One piece Joe had hammered flat and shined, but then lost the idea of what he was doing. There were 26 mason jars full of his cigarette butts on a crooked bookcase that Joe had built himself. He wanted five more jars full before he could make art out of them. Three easels lay on their sides, broken. On a desk there was his laptop, camera, tripod, paper, old photographs, and a stack of art magazines and newspapers with the best reviews for Joe Newman. He picked up The New Yorker, saw his work being praised, and tossed it. He tossed the rest of them. They made his ideas mean something, and he hated those filthy animals for it. Before, his ideas were nothing, and he did not have to think for an idea like he had to think for an idea now. He just acted from his subconscious and, bam, it was art. His last idea had given him too much notoriety. Now, there was an expectation to his work, and Joe felt it.
It all started with Joe’s move from material objects to the body, specifically objects produced by the body. His first exhibit, titled God Bless You, showed at the Peter Stiener Gallery in Chelsea, and was met with mixed reviews, though all of the work sold, and Joe made $250,000 off the pieces. The work took him almost five months to complete. The hardest part was maintaining a runny nose for long periods of time, and then finding ways to make himself sneeze. The best sneezes were the ones produced by fate, and Joe had to make sure he was around a piece of paper. He would sneeze with all his might right onto the piece of paper, and before the snot hardened he sealed the snot on the paper by running a strip of paint over it. At first he had used white paint, but then he started using other colors: yellow, blue, red, anything but green. Joe had made thirty for the show and the ones with a clear coating, and the largest amount of snot sold for the most.
God Bless You had gotten Joe Newman through the door of the contemporary art scene but wasn’t what brought him to pace around his studio at three in the morning smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey, searching for a concept. It was his last collection of pieces that brought him to new heights. One critic had even compared Joe to Andy Warhol. It was true: Joe did have him in mind when he created the works. He wanted something like Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, and when Joe showed his collection of pieces, A Number 2, at the Hopkins and Norridge-Smith in East Village on 123 East 3rd Street, he had the show set up similar to the soup cans, with a square room of white walls—three walls with pieces on shelves, but at knee height so you looked down at them.
They were photographs of Joe’s excrements on a gray canvas, and each one was different, and each one had its own title: “Corn Beef and Hash,” “Spicy Tacos,” “Alfredo Pasta,” “Beer Runs,” “Sunday Brunch,” “Empty Stomach,” “Only Green Salads,” “All Fruit,” “Fried Chicken and Mashed Potatoes,” and so on. The collection took Joe much longer than God Bless You. It took a lot of experimentation. What foods would produce the effect he was after? If he ate that and that what came out? What made solids, liquids, and in-between? Joe became quite familiar with his body at the end of it. Sometimes when he laid a log it didn’t fall right; it fell a little too far left on the canvas, or it broke when he wanted a whole piece. He never touched the art. He wanted it to fall as natural as could be. Eventually, Joe figured out how he could find the result he was looking for by moving this way or that way while producing the art. The ones he wanted in liquid form were the easiest. They came out in a beautiful splat on the canvas. Originally, Joe was going to frame the work as-is, but he just couldn’t get the smell to go away. So photographing the work was the solution, and really it was for the better. The art world was buzzing over his work. There were lines down East 3rd Street on the weekends, and the pieces were selling for upwards of $100,000. MOMA bought a piece for their collection. One called “Indian Food,” which had wonderful reds and greens and texture, sold for $220,000 to some art collector who lived up in Beacon.
That was almost seven months ago, and Joe’s number 2’s had left him clogged up. He couldn’t get anything. Not anything that was wanted or he felt would be good enough and beat his last piece. He pulled the string on the hanging bulb and went out of his studio. It was another day gone with nothing done.
On his way home, Joe stopped off at the convenient store on Franklin Street for a new pack and some Twizzlers.
“How is it going today, Joe?” asked the attendant.
“Not good.”
“Nothing?”
“Nada, amigo.”
“It is a slump. All the best artist have slumps. Surely, Michelangelo had slumps.”
“You said that last time.”
“Really?”
The attendant grabbed Joe’s pack of Marlboro 27’s.
“How much I owe you?”
“The usual.”
“Did you get the Twizzlers?”
“No worries.”
“Thanks, amigo.”
“Only a slump,” the attendant said as Joe walked out.
Under a streetlight, Joe posted up against the brick wall outside the store. A few cars passed by. He watched them and smoked a cigarette and ate the Twizzlers. He felt tired and sorry and tried to believe it was a slump. A homeless man meandered by pushing a cart. The man let one go as he passed Joe, wafting the air behind him with his hand.
“Holy Crap,” Joe said. He tossed out his cigarette and went back into the store.
“What’s wrong?” asked the attendant.
“I have it.”
“Have what?”
He grabbed Slim Jims and cheese sticks. “Do you have any cans of beans?” Joe asked from the back of the store.
“By the chips.”
The attendant rang Joe up. “I don’t understand.”
“I can’t explain it. I might lose it.”
Joe paid the man and ran back to his studio. He pulled the light on and ate the cheese and beans and Slim Jims. Then he waited. He moved the bicycle parts out of the way and the bamboo and pushed the piles of junk to the side so that he could have a clearing on the floor. Finally, Joe felt it coming. He put a canvas on the floor and grabbed a can of black paint and a large brush. He pulled down his pants and smeared a good layer of the paint along his crack, but not so it dripped. Then Joe let one rip and the paint sprayed onto the canvas. He stepped back to look at the tiny dots of black paint scattered on the canvas like the stars in the sky. He knew he had it. This was his masterpiece.