SEA OF FERTILITY
The garden exhibition that opened at the T. C. Andrews galleries on Saturday arrives here from Los Angeles and Houston, and it is well worth waiting for. Occupying the South Patio and Mower Gardens of the ground-floor gallery, it is a delight to the eye. Glossy-black Orient dew, surrounded by a pale-golden halo of rare, Sacred dew, suggests the moon’s bosom, bared, all unashamedly, to avid blowing roses of variegated colors and lush, foreign-bred, purple flowers. Sweet leaves and green blossoms inform a grassy slope, brilliant under lights especially designed for this exhibition by Garden Glows of London and Manchester. It is as if the gallery has been given over to an eternal spring, one which enamels all its contiguous elements, one which, in effect, “enamels everything,” as someone, with a gesture toward elegant panache, once remarked. There are also in attendance, so to speak, bright oranges in at least a dozen varieties, gleaming like so many golden lamps in the subtle yet spectacular lighting, a magical illumination that, in this breathtaking corner of the garden, creates what seems an uncanny green night. Figs, real or made of the most exquisitely fragile Baccarat crystal, seem to be at our mouths everywhere, as we move through the gorgeous displays; and melons — golden, orange, mauve, cerise, azure, brilliant yellow — crowd together at our feet in profligate and splendid profusion. Apples, cedars, the huge pomegranates called “Chinese honeymoons,” each bursting with jewels, awaken a kind of vegetable love in the viewer, and cool fountains contrast their silvery sprays with deep green shadows. There is Venus, in her pearly boat, redolent of strange perfumes, beautiful and regal as the Marvel of Peru, the legendary tulip (one of which was valued at the cost of a thousand prize sheep and a famed actor); and dazzling daffodils, arranged in careless garlands of repose, charm and soothe the eye. And at the far wall is a lavish collage — the curious peach, by the hundreds, amid its delicate and delicious aroma, strewn amid the shadows of countless roses and indigo violets. Every element — form, color, arrangement, scent — of this marvelous exhibition takes its place in an equally marvelous prospect of fruits, of grasses, and of flowers.
SEA OF MOISTURE
1. We see Private First Class Earl Fruchter in the shower room of a Mexican whorehouse, the realms of gold, if you please, with Nora, Elvira, Isabel, and Margot. All are naked, all are wet, all are glowing in the steam, all are laughing.
2. Just down the hall in this establishment, Ofelia’s, in the large “salon,” that contains the bar and dance floor, Private First Class Sklar rests his elbows on a table, while the sixteen-year-old Purita, her skin a creamy tan, bends her sizzling glance, in wild surmise, upon him — and what enamored bride in the drowsy numbness of a honeymoon morning, ever looked so lovingly upon her exhausted groom?
3. Yet Sklar, along with Sergeant First Class Eddie Trainor, a medical-aid man late of the badly mauled 24th Infantry Division, faces all aflame, are being sexually fondled by the forever panting Lola, of El Paso and Piedras Negras, she of the pastel chiffon cocktail dresses, matching heels, and faint acne scars. Sklar and Trainor groan as Señorita Lola leaves off her expert manual attentions, since she, as Corporal Whitehouse once put it, “ceases upon the midnight.”
4. Color photographs, in a snappy collage, reveal a passel of exuberantly drunken soldiers, in khakis and the flowered garments known as “AWOL shirts,” madly dancing with their chosen whores, and the noise made by these revelers can easily be imagined; at a table in the crepuscular rear of the room depicted, and barely discernible
5. in these images that pretend to offer us the truth about the febrile disturbance of young libidos, is Paulina, who may be remembered by some as the Indian girl partial to ice blue underwear, which sets off her silken-gold thighs to perfection, and which makes her a local bright star, christened, by Sergeant Beldino, Señorita Lingerie.
6. What wild ecstasy for Private Archie Griffith to pretend that Paula is his fiancée, his as-yet-unravished bride, his Judy or Barb, this tall, dark girl,
7. who will not remove her brassiere and thus grant Private Griffith the sight of his fair Joan’s ripening breast; and so, in leaden-eyed misery, he pays Paula an extra dollar if she will leave her stockings on, so as to assure himself of her profession; for what fair wife in Private Griffith’s native town of Belleville, Illinois, would go to amorous bed so flagrantly deshabille?
8. Rills of crimson wine and spiced cold mushrooms have no place amid the raucous, sweaty, fevered lusts and drunken laughter of Ofelia’s; nor of the 1-2-3 Club, the Palma de Oro, Señora Amor’s, and the Cadillac, but are substituted for by icy Carta Blanca cerveza and bowls of salty green olives.
9. This dark photograph — there is no light to speak of — shows Celia, Visitación, Teresa, and Clarita smiling in the darkness, their teeth gleaming whitely, their naked bodies in sweet repose, the dull opiate of a night’s sweated wages protecting them from starvation, illness, brutality, the clap, and even poisoned wine, for yet another day.
10. Some soldier, passed out on the floor of the Club Mosaic, the last oozings of his last bout of mescal nausea pooled by his all-American chin, dreams of
11. flies on summer eves, of downy owls, and of the face of the carelessly beautiful whore, Julia Emilia Suarez. He sighs. He will marry the fucking lovely bitch, for he loves her, and she be fair; more happy love (and she be fair!).
12. We come to understand these things, for Jenny Shuttle worth-Robson, an assistant professor of cultural studies at Johns Hopkins, has explained the gestures and signs and obscured metonymies of the photographs and cinematic “stills” in this “BORDERTOWN” exhibition, in her introductory essay to its sumptuous catalogue. Professor Shuttle worth-Robson is a recognized expert in the everyday lives of what she has termed “brothel-entertainment workers, “but what the whores themselves call schifuzza, or, more informally, schijuzz’ or schi’. Nobody has determined how the Italian word has come to be used the world over.
BORDERTOWN: Loves and Lives in Mexico: To December 31st.
SEA OF NECTAR
The Transgressive Act
Fourteen motherfucking beer bottles are fucking haphazardly arranged next to an off-white shitty wall on the left. Six fucking more are fucking lined up in front of the fucking off-white wall on the right, in the foreground, you got it, cuntface? Four more are over here, right fucking here, next to this, you cocksucker! There are also twenty-six bottles in the back, and, just behind those fuckers, thirteen more. Nearby, shithead, two bottles lie on their sides, and one fucking hangs from the fucking ceiling, just above them, or above that, shiteater. Twenty-one are behind the false wall that has been hinted at in the hip ads placed in those faggot shitrags, and God knows how many more are fucking hidden under those things to the left, prick. A few more fucking bottles are fucking crowded together and the cocksucking motherfucker prick bastard clutter right in fucking front of that cunt of a woman standing there grinning like a possum eating shit also seems to be a fucking part of it all, the asshole shit! Forty more of the motherfuckers are here and there, and even more, if one should take a fucking look! The fucking glare of the fairy-ass lights make all these useless shit-heel things fucking shine and fucking gleam and fucking glint and fucking God knows fucking what, like nobody’s business, understand, you bull-dyke cuntlapping bitch? “Nobody’s Business” is the putative title of this pile of putrid shit “installation,” designed to make the assholes of the fucking world think they’re in art fucking heaven, although “Shit for Brains” would fit the fucking mess better; the title, incidentally, you dumb fuck, following, in what prickheads call “a new tradition,” the nickname bestowed on the cutting-edge artist who “made” this stinking whorehouse of a layout, the cocksucker faggot fairy queer prick motherfucker! That’s what they call him, “Shit for Brains,” don’t kill the messenger, cunthead, everybody knows it. It is, let’s face it, a fucking bad, really bad piece of fucking bullshit art, right, ass-fucker? Fucking A!