August 2024, part 2
Red Grooms and Wim Wenders
I grew up in an outer ring suburb of Nashville in the 80s and early 90s. It was big enough to keep you busy but removed enough to make it so that you did not know what you did not know. Could life get any better? Maybe. We were not sure. I would read about movies in magazines and think they sounded interesting, knowing I would have no chance of seeing them unless Captain Video got a copy for rental. They usually did not. Neither did the video store inside Kroger. Yes, Kroger rented videos.
I thought about this time after rewatching Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World. You can finally buy it or rent it digitally. I have the Criterion DVD because that is the only way you could see this movie for the past decade unless you caught a random screening in a theater. It is an important movie to me, but not because I have lived with it for 33 years. My longest association with the movie is the soundtrack. There is a chance that the soundtrack outgrossed the film in the United States.
The movie was poorly received upon its release, justifiably so. But there is a reason why the movie was not good. The original cut of Until the End of the World was 12 hours long. It was recut to 4.5 hours. Wenders was told to whittle it down to under three hours. What was left at that point? Not much. The only way to archive the 4.5-hour version was for Wenders to pay to have that version duplicated for himself on the side and then make a separate theatrical cut.
I could not rent the original cut in Hendersonville. I had to wait until I moved to Knoxville for college to see it. It was not that good. That was still the era of pan-and-scan videotapes, so it did not even look good on my television. I retained little memory of it for the next couple of decades. I knew nothing about the abbreviated final version or Wenders' struggles with producers. It was a sub-par movie to me, and I moved on.
The proper cut is among my favorite movies. It is an anomaly on that list of films because it is epic. Most of my favorite movies are deliberately limited in scale. Until the End of the World does everything. Everything. Road movie. Detective mystery. Western. Sci-fi. Love story. Slapstick moments. Musical numbers. Technology creep. Human existential crisis. There are at least four languages spoken. It is shot on four continents. It should not work, but it does.
This is not my first post to mention Until the End of the World; it will not be the last. That said, the movie is not what this month’s letter is about. I am thinking more about access to information these days. Until the End of the World was a movie I wanted to see in 1991. The Belcourt in Nashville may have shown it, but I would not have known about it. Other movies were “events” to see, meaning they required driving to Nashville (which sounds like a tiny hurdle now, but in 1991, it was a little more difficult), or I had to cross my fingers and hope Kroger or Captain Video would come through for me. These were not obscure movies either. Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V. Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King. Alan Parker’s The Commitments. Not even a foreign language film. But it required effort. Fast forward ten years, and I could walk to see this stuff in Philadelphia.
My cultural landscape was stitched together through magazine articles and MTV. What good movies were out? I would not have a clue if Peter Travers had not written about them in Rolling Stone or Siskel and Ebert had not mentioned them. What art was “important” at the time? I did not know Artforum existed. If I did, I would not know where to buy one. Kroger did not sell Artforum. I probably would have hated it anyway.
I knew so little about art as a teenager but probably did not know much more after getting my bachelor’s degree. I slept through a lot of art history in college. It was entrapment: a dark room and the hum of a slide projector fan. Our access to art history in high school was a series of old magazines that acted as textbooks. The highlights of the timeline were there, but it still made no sense to me. I knew one example of many artists, but little more than that. The Nashville art scene was a mystery. There was no Frist Museum. I knew of one gallery- Cumberland Gallery. We went there on field trips en route to Cheekwood. That was it. That is all I knew. I did not know who Robert Ryman was, and I had no idea he grew up here. I did not know who Aaron Douglas was, and I had no idea he taught at Fisk for as long as he did. The only thing I knew about Nashville's art history was that Red Grooms grew up here. How did I know this? I have no idea. But I clung to that tidbit. That factoid was attached to one image of Grooms’s Ruckus Manhattan sculptural installation I had seen. That was enough to think, “If this guy did it, I guess I can give it a run.” But knowing that about Red Grooms also meant if I was going to do it, I could not do it here.
Time brought both Grooms and me back to Tennessee. He has a show of watercolors at the David Lusk Gallery through the end of August. Some are pandemic-era watercolors; others precede it. Riding out Covid in his cabin in Beersheba Springs, TN, Grooms passed the time painting flowers on his porch. For an artist most associated with large, loud sculptures capturing the manic energy of city life, these still lifes look like the visual equivalent of the sound of a screen door closing. They are not urban. They are an embrace of something he left years ago, maybe not even sure at the time that he would ever return. Home is a good place to ride out a pandemic. I was grateful to be where I was during that time. Grooms was probably grateful for his escape pod from New York. These watercolors have a love of light, nature, and domesticity. What else did we have in 2020 and 2021, if not light, nature, and domesticity? Nature simultaneously handed us a bad hand and became our only place of rest.
Grooms participated in a panel discussion at the gallery with a curator and an art historian. The questions were geared toward getting him to talk about his still lifes in the Dutch tradition or related to the post-Impressionists and Cubists. If they wanted that discussion, I was right here ten years ago. But I digress. Grooms was gracious about those ideas: still life as a reflection of human life as well as formal exploration. But it was much more straightforward to him than that. It was about light and the moment when he worked. It was simple, but not in a dismissive way. Grooms is 87 years old. When an artist is 87, they are comfortable enough to make their art, be themselves, and not feel compelled to justify their art by explaining its place in the canon. He is Red Grooms. He was born in 1937. He knows who Cezanne and Picasso were. He does not need to pass that test. At some point, we all get to say that we are influenced by what preceded us, but now we have our own thing. Those questions led to more interesting answers, such as reflections on Alex Katz and studying under Hans Hofmann.
My favorite statement was his most obvious one: you will never get more light on the page than when it is a blank piece of white paper. It is so evident, but that sounds like a statement you would hear more from Robert Ryman than from Grooms. That is the point, right? Someone at the talk described Grooms's work as “populist,” which might have been the first time I have ever heard someone say that at an art talk and not mean it in a pejorative way. Grooms is an artist with mass appeal. He wants it that way. But he speaks the same language as Ryman or Hofmann.
Is Red Grooms the reason I am an artist? No. Is Red Grooms a reason I am an artist? Yes. I have not considered Grooms’s influence on my work since I made a paper mache sculpture of my high school history teacher dressed in a rabbit costume. That was the end of my exploration of art with mass appeal. But Grooms has always been in the back of my brain. Another person from around here did it. You can do it, too. It was good to listen to this artist, who probably inspired hundreds of other Nashville artists. How many 87-year-old artists would still attract an audience? Will I want people to listen to me when I am that age? Will anyone care? Will I? Who knows? I am glad that people still care about Grooms, though. It was a solid show and a nice gallery talk. That kid from 35 years ago, flipping through art magazines and Rolling Stone, could finally connect some dots.