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| from Panico! Lima, Peru by Alfredo Villar translation by Idelfonso Smith |
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| The Little Girl Everyone Wanted to Ask to the Dance (Or how the "Life" by Phoebe Gloeckner is also the life of all the little girls we love and never dare ask to the dance.) And you want to hear, you want to understand. And I tell you: Forget what you hear, read or write. What I write is not for you, nor for me, nor for the initiated. It is for the girl that nobody asks to dance. --Jorge Teillier "My VIOLENCE is a DREAM". --Sonic Youth Violence is a dream. All my life I've told you, my friend, that violence is a dream, that your violence is a dream, and that this violence, which at one time brought us closer together, is what now is keeping us apart. Listen while from memory I sketch out for you "Evol" by Sonic Youth, and since I don't want to see any more of your photos (you are growing more and more beautiful and empty in the photos), I look at the book by Phoebe Gloeckner: A Child's Life, and that girl that is looking up at the sky, opening her lips and sticking out her tongue so that the stars can rest on it, that girl who is the stars and who dreams that this night is the most beautiful place to be, that girl who dreams that the unreachable is the most beatiful, that girl who just wants the stars to ask her to the dance, that girl who will always be smaller than her dreams, that girl who is in love with her dreams, that girl is you Phoebe Gloeckner, that girl is you, my friend.... Phoebe's delicate pencil strokes and perfect shading recall the details in drawings by Durer. Durer is the first modern painter who DOES NOT FEAR SICKNESS AND UGLINESS, especially when that sickenss and that ugliness forms a part of what we love, of the autobiographical. Phoebe's drawings for some reason make me think of the one Durer did of his sick, aged mother, and the feeling both these drawings have in common is one of the rarest in contemporary art: COMPASSION. Durer/Phoebe/any autobiographical artist create an art of compassion, and they know that this compassion must begin as a REJECTION OF ART. Phoebe Gloeckner moves me more than any modern artist or painter (in fact, I know of no painter who has moved me as much as Phoebe Gloeckner, FUCK FRIDA KAHLO AND All the fucking whores of the ART/STAR STSTEM!!!) with her rejection of artistic format. Phoebe is not one of the posers that from time to time have been taken by their old Lima jews to MOMA and now wants to study art at the Catholic University and only paint Pegasuses and angels in extasy. No, Phoebe despises ACADEMIA. Or rather, she does not despise it, the ACADEMY and the UNIVERSITY are simply irrelevant to her. But make no mistake, Phoebe Glockner is not one of those sticky ANTIARTISTS of the fine arts. You will never see her EXPLOITING VIOLENCE, or filth, or engaging in self-hatred like your garden-variety underground artist. No, Phoebe won't do that. Phoebe has drunk alcohol/sucked her step-father's cock/injected heroin/fallen into unconsciousness with men who later raped her/gotten sick/cried/been abandoned and lots of other things which perhaps you, my friend, have not endured. But Phoebe is not that darkness, in spite of all the pain in Phoebe's black and white. In the black and white of your eyes, my friend, THERE IS LIGHT. And that beautiful light is in the ink and in every stroke of white and shade/it is by means of the shadows that we see the light/the light of the imagination/the LIGHT OF LIFE. And I say that this light is life, the only life which really matters, the life which we live every day and which the academics and professional artists consider "unworthy": the private life -- the only life which belongs to us.... Phoebe has extraordinary power.... She has what Crumb calls "exceptionally good genes." It is that power to live makes Phoebe such a moving artist. But Phoebe's rebellion is her humility, unlike so many other heroines for artsy types who exploit their mediocre talent to spew autobiographical tales of self-flagellation in our faces. THERE IS NOT THE SLIGHTEST INTENTION IN PHOEBE TO HURT THE READER. Phoebe's tenderness is also the source of her sincerity: TO TELL IT ALL. Only when we dare to tell it all, without idealizing ourselves, without turning ourselves into victims,...only when we stop the DENIAL and start to ACCEPT OURSLEVES AS WE REALLY ARE, only then can true autobiographical art take shape.... The beauty of Phoebe is that she views her pain with tenderness and acceptance. She draws herself small, unkempt, never beautified. And it is this REFUSAL TO BEAUTIFY herself that makes her STILL MORE BEAUTIFUL, and which turns her lines, at times unmkempt themselves, into something more subtle, personal, and AUTHENTIC than so much other art that costs a bundle.... POWER COMES FROM SOLITUDE, Phoebe seems to be telling us. Every abandonment, every wound, is rendered by Phoebe's pencil not as a LAMENT but as a LIBERATION. And that is what interests me in the most authentic of art: No lamenting, no moralizing, no attacks on society, no vengeful judgments, just LIBERATION. TO DREAM/DRAW VIOLENCE IS TO LIBERATE YOURSELF FROM IT. I see you afresh, Phoebe, my friend: THE PERFECTION OF YOUR SHADOWS IS ALSO THE PERFECTION OF YOUR BRILLIANCE. Violence is a dream, but what is extraordinary in Phoebe is that the hypnotic quality of her drawing is also of a realism in the rendering that I can only describe as "genius". It is said that genius consists in casting new rules for everything, in being able to transcend your own errors, converting them into your own style. This style of imperfection and technical mastery in drawing is reflected in "A Shoulder to Cry On." Drugs are not the problem, the problem is the PARENTS, who want to turn their LOVING CONTROL INTO THE MOST POWERFUL DRUG OF ALL: THE DRUG OF SOCIAL SUBMISSION. Because of this, Phoebe is a rebel, fleeing from the drug of obedience. Her manner of flight is THE DRUG OF THE IMAGINATION. Phoebe is one of the least moral artists I know: She never judges, insults, aims to please or offend, we never see her as victim, or as "an abused child." Hallucination is central in Glockner's work. It is central because it contradicts her own style of confessional realism... This hallucinatory realism (is such a thing possible?) is Gloeckner's great achievement. Alfredo Villar (translation by Idelfonso Echeverria de Hidalgo Ramos-Irizarry Smith) |
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