An Artist Falls for Irresistible Trash
Wayne Andersen
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(...) About then, I saw a pair of lovers in the gutter, the woman lying across the man, the two on a cardboard mattress floating toward the corner catch basin. They were wet and cold, stiffly asleep. I rescued without disturbing them, carried them on their soggy bed to my apartment nearby and dried them under a lamp. I brought them to Boston on my return, looking still as they had fallen from the tree and then in love. By the authority invested in me as an artist, I declared them a work of art. Those leaves were two of billions that dropped in the autumn that year. Their conjugation, had they been other leaves, could have been in any gutter on any street in any city. They exist now as you see them, in a shift of discourse, a pictograph of the indeterminacy of life and art (...) The first exhibition of WAYNE ANDERSEN’s art was in 1958 in the San Francisco Museum of Art. The works shown were collages of loosely painted hand-wiping towels of the sort that machines dispense in public toilets. Anderson’s most recent exhibition featured collages he made of debris picked up in street gutters in Paris and Boston. So one might say that over the 45 years between those shows, he made hardly any progress. But he did manage to fill the space with an array of achievements. In the mid-60s, Andersen earned a Ph.D. in art history and archeology from Columbia University. After two years in Paris and Brussels, he taught on and off in the Department of Architecture at MIT while heading his design firm, Vesti Corporation. As owner of Vesti Arabians, he bred many show horses and took ribbons all across the country. He has published 11 books. The Los Angeles Times Book Review cited his book, “The Youth of Cézanne and Zola,” as “The Best of the Best” in non-fiction published in 2003. His most recent is “Manet: The Picnic and the Prostitute” (2005). His book in progress for 2006 is titled “German Artists and Hitler’s Mind.” |
