“It's an elephant flexing its muscle,” Sean says of the piece. “The words 'Vis Inertiae'—or, the power of inertia — are inscribed beneath.” He brandishes a brief, coy smile. “Nice little play on words, don't you think?”
While his apartment is well defined by its furniture and memorabilia, Sean does not seem too concerned with the maintenance of personal appearances. He embodies that faction of academia that has abandoned the tweed and the ivy. His face is adorned with about three days of stubble; his complexion is of that sallow tone that one finds in most career academics still trying to familiarize the world with the rather recondite subject of their obsession. His hair faintly remembers what scissors sound like.
As he settles into the chair beside me, his movements become slow and his words calculated, though his facial features never cease to be engaging and somehow mischievous. One could easily mistake him for an overzealous grad-student.
His thin fingers reach for a framed Polaroid sitting on the table. Unlike some of the other artifacts surrounding it, it is not coated in ash. It is labeled “Pariah Blues — J.J. Bubbles, June 1993.”
“This one is really interesting. While there are some discrepancies between it and his later work,” he says as he traces a finger a few millimeters above the tobacco stained walls featured in the picture, “There is no doubt in my mind that this is an authentic Coprolalia. I can see why some have denied this, but, to me, the rudiments of his style are clearly evident.” He turns to me. “And that's what's important. It's an early piece. No one is going to be fully matured as an artist at the onset of their career. I mean, who doesn't evolve?”
He continues to talk shop about Coprolalia, which soon brings “Pariah Blues” into a far more sentimental light. “This was the first piece of his I saw,” he says as reaches for a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket.
“Really?”
He nods as he lights up. “It was sometime in the spring of ninety-four. To be perfectly honest, I didn't think much of it at the time — the piece, that is. It wasn't until a few years later that I understood just what I had come across. I went back sometime in ninety-eight to see it again, and that's when I took this picture.”
The date that Sean has attributed to Pariah Blues, June 1993, is somewhat controversial. The putative belief, or at least the one espoused by Sean, is that Coprolalia's work began appearing in Brooklyn in either 1991 or 1992. Little attention was paid to him, however. Even today the nascent career of the artist is an interest to art historians more than critics. It wasn’t until he began exhibiting his work in Bay Ridge during the late spring of '93 that he amassed a following. And while it is clear that the artist truly matured during his time spent in the Italian neighborhood in the shadow of the Verrazano, the chronology of the Bay Ridge Collection, as it has come to be known, and of which Pariah Blues is a part, is largely based on speculation and less than reliable depositions.
Inertiae, however, predated the Bay Ridge Collection by at least a year. It appeared in a Park Slope dive, and, unlike the vast majority of Coprolalia's work, the artist inscribed a date: November Seventh. Sean has always been skeptical of its veracity, he tells me, but he has never dismissed it as a forgery. “I like to show it to people because — well…provided it's genuine, of course — it's interesting to see how much Coprolalia matured in that short time. It was rare to see him push political banalities then, but he certainly does still have the habit of doing it even today.
“Of course,” he continues as he takes down the last of his cigarette, “The argument could be made that the pieces from the Bay Ridge Collection represent a departure from the general message found not only in Inertiae, but in all of his work prior to ninety-three. In other words, it may have been more politically charged than his later corpus. The problem is that there are fifteen pieces — and fifteen, might I add, is a fairly liberal estimate; I usually put it closer to ten — that predate the Bay Ridge Collection, so, unfortunately, no one can really regard this as a viable argument. Too much has been lost due to renovations and, especially in the City, gentrification.
“But I've gone on long enough,” he concedes. He walks over to the table steeped in mail and other papers, and retrieves a few sheets of paper. They feature the names of over fifty bars, their addresses, and a title for each corresponding installation. “I wrote this up for you last night. These are the places that, as of a year ago, still featured his work. The ones that I'm not entirely sure about are in italics. These ones,” he begins as he points to a list of several names in bold font, “I've seen in the past few months. I am almost certain that they are still available for viewing.” He hands me the list. “It's a good thing that you stopped me,” which I don't recall doing, “I could have prattled on about Coprolalia for the rest of the day, and I have a meeting in about forty-five minutes.”
He escorts me to the door, places a hand on my shoulder, and then lights another cigarette. The door opens. “Godspeed, young scholar, Godspeed.”
I finagle the sheets into my bag as I wait for the elevator to take me to the lobby. For the first time since I made the decision to do this, I seriously reflect upon the necessary steps I will have to take in order to successfully pursue this evasive figure. I had been under the impression that no one had ever found Coprolalia because no one had bothered to actually go to all of the places he frequents. Sean's collection proved that this was a naïve assumption. What he presented to me was not a grab-bag of photographs taken on a whim or by accident; they were not cutouts from either the paper or those high-end art magazines that omit advertisements in order to pass production costs right on to the consumer; they were not taken by those photographers passing through the bowels of the city seeking commission by means of the grief caused by a murder, a fire, a suicide, a rape, an assault, nor their counterparts who assassinate characters with nothing more than a flash. They were taken by Sean and his friends: they were blurry, overexposed, underexposed, off-center. They were of myriad size. Some had cigarette burns in them. Most contained the faded faces of the men, sometimes women, who had discovered the prize — their thumbs up, their tongues out, their smiles neither feigned nor forced. In fact, the collection said more about Sean than it said about Coprolalia.
I think of the number of such places that I will have to visit simply to gain a rudimentary understanding of the artist as I wait for the elevator. This is not a complaint. I like the bar as much as the next person: The women, the music, the offerings of dope and cigarettes and store-bought booze stashed away either in flasks or — for the less illustrious denizens of the city — in the same plastic in which the alcohol was packaged. I have always been attracted to the cacophony, the thronging around the bar, the chaotic atmosphere after two in the morning, the tangential conversations that always somehow come back to a Wilco lyric, a Warhol reference, a Married…With Children episode. It's often a rush of imagery that the brain places into some form of coherent order, even if it cannot always clearly reconstruct a chronology, let alone create anything more than a poor dramatization of the menagerie. We acknowledge that we set out looking for a good time even if we deny the high expectations and the low levels of patience with which we enter the social arena. And yet once the social lubricants begin to reduce the potency of the friction that exists because of more sober defenses, we find ourselves engaged in earnest conversation — not always as a consequence of lust, sometimes it's just interest — that need not lead to any great epiphany or even a subsequent phone call. For most types (unless one is attempting to talk with those severely artistic people, those who shun even their mothers for not just loving Godard), one need only abandon pretense and belligerence to fit in; for the loners, one just need to engage in that drunken form of conversational funambulism, of being both confessor and confessee to a total stranger who has been driven to the barstool by a laundry list of concerns to which no bottle can provide much in terms of sympathy, only a quick reprieve in the form of a blackout and a further laundry list of concerns the subsequent morning — the items of which are often times amusing unless your name is no different than the one on the letterhead. There are other archetypes floating around in the mix — most of which are either pleasant or harmless, though there are those pernicious and predatory few. It's rare to find members of the latter group in dive bars; they tend to stick to places where physical contact is encouraged, where the majority of the patrons seem to be plagued by a myriad of engagements (“Until, like, next week, but I'll call you — honestly”).