The Nancy Rubins show at Gagosian is the real deal. Not one wasted wall nor expectation disappointed. Spread over four galleries on two floors this energetic show needs to seen. The huge newer gallery to the south of the original space has never been used so successfully. It is devoted to an ambitious, spectacular forest of kayaks that delight and inspire! Pewter colored boats strung together with high tensile wires exploding thirty feet into the air.
We were shown smaller bronze editions that somehow don’t lose their magnificence even though they seem like maquettes for the larger works.
The art was violent and beautiful just as one would expect. Huge, crumpled graphite on paper pieces bearing down like storm clouds. The whimsical collages..covetable. A most enjoyable experience.
Nancy Rubin lives in Topanga, Los Angeles.
My day began with breakfast at Cecconi’s with John. We talked about an art project for his store.
I called TW but he is in the midst of an obsession so cannot be relied upon to carry me away from mine. My obsession to get out of dodge, to leave these filthy streets.
There was a rat that had to be dealt with in Malibu.
Chatted with travelling companion. Listen, every day that passes until I get onto that plane to Paris is absolute torture. I CANNOT wait. He thought I sounded pensive. Not really pensive, just bored, uninspired. Bored of LA. I need an enriching, invigorating, salubrious experience.
I am glad that I am taking a friend. It is always so delightful to see things through new eyes. I think we both need to run away. What we don’t need is more drama, prying eyes or complicated love affairs.
Even my more evenhanded friends seem haunted at the moment. Haunted by the prospect of no prospect. The economy, the war, the oil spill..the groggy, ineffective Obama administration.
I remember moving here. I thought, back then, that anything was possible in LA. I was wrong.
I am tired of the interminable struggle of living. Every day is a monstrous challenge. Every fucking day. Driving, parking, dealing with half-wits. Driving, parking, dealing with half-wits.
Although I woke up this bright Sunday morning feeling a little less pessimistic I swerve from irritable and discontent to the inner peace of absolute acceptance..then it’s back to the dark side. Malcontent, that’s what I am. Even looking at art yesterday, as inspirational as it was, could not stop me yearning for Europe.
I wondered what steps I could take to not be on my own.
I thought about joining a dating site. I tapped in the name of the site. As soon as the site popped up I was reminded of a time when all I wanted was to hear the reassuring buzz of new messages. Looking at that site was incredibly depressing. Page after page of cock pics, ass pics and naked men. On either side of the multiple cock pics were ads for porn sites. Mountains of white, heaving flesh.
I have no currency on sites like that. I am invisible and rightly so, I have no reason to be there. No reason to be judged simply by my age, weight and the size of my penis.
I know that this plan works very well for many men. I have heard from friends how relationships form and prosper. Many things work for other people that have never worked for me. The ease with which I see my friend become a fully fledged and engaged gay man has shocked me into knowing just how stunted my own experience has been.
The prospect of never being touched or kissed again fills me with fear. Is it so unreasonable to want a man who loves me as much as I love him?
If I have learned anything these past few months it is this: my heart sings when I am in love. Not when I have sex that is disconnected from my feelings. I wish I could! I wish that I had been made that way. But, the truth is..if I had been made that way I would have been killed by AIDS years ago. Before we knew what AIDS was. My reticence saved me though ultimately kept me on my own.
I have never been so eager to meet someone yet so disconnected from the possibility. I am resigned to the fact that it is totally unlikely to happen.
Friends, I suppose, are just as good.
I will be travelling with a great friend. I am grateful for that. Grateful to have a friend with whom I can laugh and although I once wanted more it is with the same resignation that I understand that what I have is just as good.
Some people will always be there. Until the very end. I hope that by sharing this journey he remains my friend. Seldom have I experienced such ease with another and have, on occasions, confused that with being in love.
I spent almost the entire day with Dom. We saw the show at Gagosian, ate lunch in Beverly Hills then I came home had a nap and cooked dinner for the both of us. Carrot and ginger soup, pork chops and peas then cups of British tea. It’s a quarter after 12 and he just left. Shooting the shit, putting the world to rights.
As for sex addiction? What of that? Well, I have been really well-behaved. Not acting out, not objectifying, intriguing, not making inappropriate comments, not looking at porn, not…well, not doing anything that might compromise my sobriety.
I think my friends here worry about me. Think that I might be depressed. They might have a point. It has been a very, very hard six months. Not with people, but with banks and aspirations and an inability to make art.
The trouble with LA is the lengths one has to go to make sense of every day. I have been here for five years now.
Five long years in purgatory.
On Friday night I had dinner at Soho House with a new friend. It was like dining with a ghost. A beautiful man with no soul. A beautiful man who referred to me as an uncle. Again. That fucking word. Asexual uncle. I didn’t pay for dinner. Uncles pay for dinner.
6 replies on “Nancy Rubins”
Another great post.
Might I make a suggestion? As someone who totally shares your sentiments about LA…
I definitely understand you being excited for your trip to France. I remember as my school semesters were coming to a close in LA, counting the minutes until I hopped on a plane out of there. My trips out of LA were what allowed me to deal with that place. No way could I stay there for a full calender year.
I also feel you on your artistic block. As much as I think your trip to France will help you feel better in general, it might not do the trick for the art.
My suggestion? Get out of your comfort zone.
I know you take trips to Japan to study Raiki, but even that won’t do much for you right now, I don’t think.
You should come here to Bangkok.
Not only do you have a tour guide here, but Bangkok, I am quite sure, would rip you right out of your slump and get you back where you need to be artistically. This place is just so alive… full of great characters, interesting, eclectic scenes. You just never really know what the next day is going to bring here. You may even want to make a movie here.
Just a suggestion.
-L
I want to be in love with someone who loves me too, but you have prospects. People would flock to you and love you even if you weren’t famous. It’ll happen for you. Hope it happens for me too!
Maybe the love of your life will be found in Paris, it being the city of love and all that.
Duncan,
The pictures of Nancy Rubins’ art were amazing. I’m trying to imagine the vastness of the space. Walking through the sculptures. Feeling “… a weblike structure of compression and tension that recalls Buckminster Fuller’s notion of ‘tensegrity,’ where the whole is stronger than the parts.” to quote from a review. For some reason I was reminded of lines from Carl Sandburg’s “Smoke and Steel” (I guess because of the way the found objects are morphed into something unexpected and surprising by the fire of an artist’s inspiration.):
“A bar of steel—it is only
Smoke at the heart of it, smoke and the blood of a man.
A runner of fire ran in it, ran out, ran somewhere else,
And left—smoke and the blood of a man
And the finished steel, chilled and blue.
So fire runs in, runs out, runs somewhere else again,
And the bar of steel is a gun, a wheel, a nail, a shovel,
A rudder under the sea, a steering-gear in the sky;
And always dark in the heart and through it,
Smoke and the blood of a man.
Pittsburg, Youngstown, Gary—they make their steel with men.
In the blood of men and the ink of chimneys
The smoke nights write their oaths:
Smoke into steel and blood into steel;
Homestead, Braddock, Birmingham, they make their steel with men.
Smoke and blood is the mix of steel.”
I first heard the lines spoken at the eulogy of a character in a movie called “Heart of Steel” about a small town, it’s steel mill and it’s workers. I had to know the source of the words. Beautiful words.
As for your angst and your depression and your detestation of being termed an “uncle”…. I keep thinking of how some qlever people a while back rebranded another word “gay”. (A hint so broad it should be singing in an opera wearing a metal hat with horns on top.) So let’s see, women have declared themselves yummy mummys, embraced being labeled cougars with Cheshire cat smiles… what can we do with “uncle”. I keep seeing a lusty salt and pepper haired brigand saying “Stand and deliver. I am a thief of hearts. I’ve come for booty” (Hint, hint. Wink, wink.), waving a brace of pistols, wearing a velvet jacket lace at his shirt cuffs and thigh high leather boots — nah, maybe a bit too romance novel. Hmmmm… well, I’ll have to work on that one. Maybe your gentle readers can offer suggestions.
Mainly, I have to ask… what’s the rush about being in a relationship? Unless you’re voodooing yourself into believing that your doom is imminent, I would repeat a phrase that a therapist of mine told me is used in family therapy a lot, “Don’t just do something, sit there.” Get it? Sometimes the worst thing that you can do is to flee the uncertainty, discomfort and yes, pain by jumping 24/7 into work or love or any other distraction. There’s a reason why one is told in therapy or for the first year of sobriety to NOT make any major decisions unless it’s unavoidable and NOT to jump into a relationship. I keep saying… you’ve been sexually sober for just over 1 year, 12 months, 365 days. What is the fucking rush?
You ARE depressed, Duncan. How could you not be? Four, possibly, five of the top 5 on the scale of major stressors: death of loved ones, financial difficulties, moving one’s home, loss of a relationship (2). Damn. It’s called situational depression. You’ve been effected by all the crap going on in your life and you’ve just kept soldiering on. Oh, and how could I forget, you’ve got a major milestone of a birthday coming up… and you’re lonely. It’s palpable. You have this lovely desire to nest and you have no mate to cuddle with. But pushing the flow will get you nowhere except more exasperated and sad. It doesn’t mean that it will never happen, it just means that it’s not happening NOW.
Since you use your psychic and creative energy to cocoon yourself and your significant other away from the world when you are in a relationship, maybe you’re meant to use your creative energy to, gee, I don’t know, CREATE SOMETHING. A screenplay, your autobiography, short stories, theater, film… acting? Something that will draw you out of yourself. Hell, fall in spiritual love with yourself, dammit. Why can’t your heart sing when you look at that man in the mirror? Do you ever say “I love you” to HIM? The one who has survived so much and still has an open heart. Who CAN still create. Who hasn’t been drawn to wreck on the rocks of self-destruction by the siren song of addiction. By the GRACE of God. I know it sounds dumb but if it’s so hard to do it — and it goes for us all — why is it such an affirmation from the lips of another? And we can say it to THEM, affirm THEM but not OURSELVES? AFFIRM YOURSELF!
“… eager to meet someone yet so disconnected from the possibility.” Maybe that’s the place where you need to just let yourself be and let go and let God. I’m so glad that you’re going to the Continent with a good friend. Do you really, really realize how LUCKY you are to have friends like that? I sometimes wonder. Despite everything, you really are so incredibly lucky. With everything you HAVE, you weigh that in the balance scales against what you WANT and don’t have — a relationship — and consider yourself poor. How fucking sad. How fucking BLIND. I hope that a change of scenery and psychic energy will free up what’s frozen in you. And open your soul to the abundance of your life. Stop telling yourself lies. Stop obsessing. Look outward for a while.
Blessings,
Amanda
If you’re depressed and lonely then WRITE about it: poetry (A haiku, dude. 17 syllables. 5, 7, 5. Surely, you can do that. Just to get the wheels going.), a short story, whatever. Write a short story about a lonely guy, going about his drudgery of a life, hoping for love. Write a sonnet to your soulmate. Write about how angry that you are that you can’t find love. Make the pages catch on fire with your anger. Get it OUT and stop stewing in your own juices.
And if you feel that the parade’s passing you by and you don’t like the clowns in it anyway… put on some John Phillip Sousa and start your own parade. I read once that baby boomers were the way showers in the 60’s, 70’s & 80’s as young people and are again as they enter their fifties and hit Social Security age. You have a whole cohort of LGBT people who are waiting for a new leader, so strike up the band. 🙂
Hi Nancy, I have followed your work off and on since 1995. Congratulations on such wonderful ideas and scuptures….I don’t know if you got the first message, as I may have accicently deleted it…however..would love to see you and or hear from you some time. We can catch up on old times…Love and best wishes, Randa