South-East Regional Artist

“There is no shape of one’s career; there is only understanding one’s self, and forgiving.”

            -from Aphorisms II

“Every made thing is a metaphor for the having-been-madeness of itself.”

            -from South-East Regional Aphorisms I

            I must begin by expressing my relief at the opportunity to prepare a chapter-length version of this work; the dual gesture towards exhaustiveness and objectivity required in a longer format (the dual burden, honestly, and the dual ruse) has given me no end of soul-ache and trouble in a task that I already find difficult in a nearly metaphysical register. Approaching Arthur now is something like approaching Pound’s dynastic temple, and to be smiled upon with the utter equanimity of the master sends me spiraling back to more than fifteen years ago, when I was already grappling with the mantle that he left untenanted in the aftermath of his passing. Of course the editorializing that appears in my incidental remarks throughout allows for a bit of compression here, some revisionary adjustment there, and perhaps some rather grandiose critical salti mortale when necessary, but in truth it would be disingenuous to imagine that it could be otherwise. As evidence, I need only point you to my forthcoming South-East Regional Artist: Arthur White’s Art-/Life- World, of which disaster I felt I had washed my hands before it even finished its passage through publication. Here at least, though the whole thing is an ungodly generic hybrid, I can begin with the bones of a narrative art history, and then proceed with an altogether more adequate, more personal, and more polysemic rendition, one closer in genre to what nineteenth-century compilers referred to as Remains. If you don’t care for the farce, perhaps you’ll enjoy it as tragedy. I must only insist not to be read as hagiography in earnest: to the extent that Arthur is indeed great, may I be seen as noble; to the extent that he is monstrous, so may I be seen as unwhole.

            Those familiar with White's work tend to regard him foremost as a painter, although I would argue that much of the impetus powering the reception and recognition of his work comes from his charisma and from the intensely searching and reflective nature of his few published interviews and written works. The first and single most important show of both his curatorial and artistic career remains his exhibition "The South-East Regional Artist" at the 1982 Knoxville World's Fair, a venue so far outside even the most regional backwaters of the art-world circuit that very few can claim to have seen the show at all except via a few poor-quality catalogue reproductions and archival documents. This state of affairs has not hindered White's growing prominence in art-historical narratives and in a few very recent auctions, and in fact has probably helped establish something of a halo of myth or authenticity--that coarse X-factor of the modern information economy--around his career. White can be seen as one of a number of mid-century painters who transitioned from a large-scale, de rigueur Abstract Expressionism to a far more ambivalent and even strained engagement with figuration, although from the biographical dates it should be clear that this trajectory is complicated as well by the extreme lateness of his participation in that particular generational struggle. In White's case, the shift came not only as the stylistic rejection of Western post-academic painting or Greenbergian modernism, but a more deeply-lived turn away from some idea of centralization, or cosmopolitanism, or indeed larger-scale movements or discourses of any kind; though by no means reactionary, naive, or primitivist, his was an idiosyncratic strain of humanism, for lack of a better term, a localism and traditionalism that nevertheless derived a kind of clarity and dark energy from what it was not, a kind of missionary activism continuously brimming over its self-imposed limitations of scale and purview. In sum the oeuvre is eclectic and admittedly uneven, in part because of White's habitual insistence on working on the road and in other artists' studios, in short and provisional but intense bursts of activity, and because of his uncanny porousness and restlessness as both thinker and practitioner. While his life and work seem poised today--nearly two decades after his death--to profit a handful of insiders and speculators, the larger impact of his work and ideas in the cultural mainstream is destined to remain miniscule.

            Arthur White was born in Huntsville in September of 1958 and spent his early childhood in northern Alabama "among the dams," as he liked to say. Both his mother and father were engineers, or perhaps more accurately engineers-turned-suits, and were members of that orderly and progress-minded middle class of intellectuals who helped modernize the agrarian portions of mid-century interior America with a secularized Protestant zeal. Functionaries for a priestly class of Southern technocrats, they seem to have been influential members of the pan-regional shadow government that since the New Deal had been aggressively reshaping the greater South outside the purview of the public political sphere; from all accounts they were an open-minded, energetic, and mobile family, torch-bearers for a particular notion of the human spirit, with a framed group portrait in the kitchen of a small group of gray-suited figures (Arthur's mother the only one in a dress) arranged respectfully around a seated David Lillenthal. Arthur's youth seems to have been happy, typical of a relatively literal-minded and aspirational caste, and in his later life he would rank his first fifteen years quite low in his personal mythology. As a high-schooler at Clark Prep in Atlanta he took drawing classes with a teacher named George Eckhard, a one-time Black Mountain attendee from whom Arthur dated his exposure to a universe of ideas and narratives beyond the ones piped in by TV, magazines, and radio to his parents' study. From the beginning a seeker and theorizer rather than a technician, however, the young Arthur seems to have been more deeply transformed by afternoons among Eckhard's art books and personal library than by any blossoming experience of potential at the end of a charcoal stick.

            It was in his early twenties that White's life and career began to take the form for which he would subsequently be recognized. In the late 70s he made the easy leap to the university in Athens, where he pursued a vaguely pre-Law degree in History while mostly hanging around the photography labs and downtown bars, reinventing himself as a big-living southern Outlaw type and confrontationally resisting affiliation with any of the tiny college town's cliques or subcultures. He was already painting seriously in those years (some of the larger abstract canvasses that would be unearthed after his early death for some unilluminating retrospectives) but was mostly engaged with a messy and somewhat punk-inflected social photography that seems to have been motivated as much by the entrée it afforded into the divergent and well-insulated Athenian social worlds than by any kind of photographic rigor in its own right. It was this latter aspect of his persona/practice that would lead rapidly to the major early-career milestone of the 1982 World's Fair. With his parents’ connections at Oak Ridge and the TVA headquarters, the ambitious young White heard early on about the plans coalescing around “Jake’s Fair,” a downtown Knoxville real-estate scam á la Chinatown dressed up as an International Exposition on Nuclear Energy. Jake Butcher himself and the rest of the local overlords had more important details to pin down than the cultural program, and so when a well-dressed Arthur approached them with a Prospectus for an Arts Pavilion focusing on The South-East Regional Artist and a sheaf of well-selected references, he was allotted what at the time seemed to him a perversely large sum of money and carte blanche as to what, exactly, the 1982 World’s Fair Arts Pavilion—just north of the fission-inspired glare of the Sunsphere—would become.

            With over a year of lead time, Childe White got to work spending the money; much of it would fund a frugal but extensive Grand Tour of the greater Southeast: New Orleans, Memphis, Louisville, the Everglades, to name only a few; Georgia's coastal islands, Southwest Virginia's chain of secluded Blue Ridge hamlets, the Alabama Gulf. He sought out artists of all persuasions, exhausted his contacts, drank up the lore at countless roadhouses, and followed up new leads; though perhaps willfully idiosyncratic, White was young and tireless and truly committed to his task, and in the end it is actually difficult to imagine someone fulfilling the commission any better. Method was at the heart of the project: when approaching a prospective artist, locally eminent weaver, or renegade sculptor, White would insist on commissioning a totally new work for the Fair, and then would himself work alongside the artist for the duration of the project, sometimes weeks, doggedly creating his own crude or sometimes surprisingly accomplished version to accompany the commissioned piece. The show therefore came to be half White's, and to contain its own outsider doubling within itself; the entire year and ultimately the show in its final form became White's apprenticeship, his journey of self-dissolution into the far corners of his adopted fiefdom and his final demiurgic reappearance in Knoxville as the South-East Regional Artist incarnate, grand representative to the Fair and metonym to the World. By the March installation date there were a staggering sixty-two pieces of art (thirty-one of them by White)—pottery, sculpture, paintings, prints, drawings, videos, and all manners of craft-, wood-, metal-, and fiber-work—all completed within the previous sixteen months. If the conceptual strangeness and richness of the whole enterprise was mostly unremarked by the participants and perhaps only intuitively, dimly appreciated by White himself, there was nevertheless a landmark, jubilee feeling to the proceedings of the whole Fair, if for no other reason than because White tended to gravitate towards those artists who were also otherwise characters, local heroes, or freaks in their own right, and because their rolling arrivals during the summer of 1982 turned the Pavilion into an ever-unfolding party and social experiment of epic proportions. The six months of the Fair was one long all-night session, a tome of social history, the beating heart of a tapestry of pilgrimages—and yet at the same time, as a kind of rite, invisible to uninitiated. There were scattered attempts at greater publicity, both earnest and tongue-in-cheek, like one night's drunken and obscene letter-writing campaigns to the Artforum offices, but in the end the regional artists were their own audience.

            By the end of its run, the exhibition was unanimously considered a success by local reporters and town folk who mostly would never give it a second thought, and on the first of November, the day after the Fair’s Halloween closing date, over 180 federal agents raided all twenty-nine branches of Jake Butcher’s banking empire. Going down for massive banking fraud and necessitating a historic FDIC payout of $382 million, Butcher was forced to satisfy his creditors by auctioning off all of his possessions—among them, according to the brazen and byzantine paper trail of the previous few years, the pieces comprising the Arts Pavilion—and amid all of the small-town scandal and back-room proceedings that engulfed Knoxville for the entire next year and more, White’s art was either destroyed or purchased by unknown buyers, almost all of whom are lost to the historical record and unlikely to resurface. White himself (and his inner circle of collaborators) made out handsomely enough with the original funding—he referred to the whole episode as his “knighting” by the liege-lord of empty speculation, “Sir Oudeis”—and until his death twenty years later he never worked regularly again, aside from a scattering of temporary gigs and short stints teaching middle school history.

            The rest of White’s career was marked by nearly constant artistic activity and an equally constant and willful self-seclusion, punctuated by occasional publications and shows that gradually garnered him an increasing national recognition. Throughout his life he traveled regularly and for long stretches at a time, attaching himself to whatever coterie, area, or landmark he found most salubrious to his work at any given moment; he habitually worked on his art either in the studios of other artists or in improvised workshops while on the road. Some of the more notable milestones include the publication of Aphorisms I and II in 1989 and 1992, the second made to coincide with the Down Town show in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Collaborative works—not only paintings, but mixed media, film, performance, and audio projects—turned up throughout the 90s in a staggering range of locations and venues; cataloguing these even somewhat exhaustively would involve a massive recovery project in its own right. A subset of those works and some otherwise unexhibited short films were shown as part of a 1998 group exhibition at Remey in Manhattan (the only non-Southern showing of White’s work during his lifetime; he visited New York but never attended the show); and the largest ever gathering of White's paintings and works on paper was shown after his death in 2003 at a generous-spirited but poorly organized exhibit called King Arthur at the Lamar Dodd Center in Athens. By the time of his death, whatever prominence he had begun to acquire had already faded, and the indissoluble “regional” tag on his name and work relegated him to the overlooked annals of local writers and academics during a time when national-level art publications were occupied with genuflections to big Theory.

            Though of course White's career is often characterized, when described at all, in terms of those infuriating catch-all labels 'outsider' and 'visionary,' my own inclination is to see him in terms of an atavistic return of manifesto-driven modernism, inflected perhaps by the more widespread countercultural social utopianism of the of his slightly older generational peers. Arthur's greatest impact, as I try to make clear below, far exceeded his output of discrete art works; he was a lightning rod, a polarizer and organizer who forced those around him into polemic action of their own. At the same time, in his elaborate and almost theological philosophical schemes there was something of the anti-technological organicism of the New Agrarians, although ironized and hardened by his ambivalence regarding his parents' careers, and one might even say—in his films especially, with their emphasis on structure and anti-discursivity—a subtle Romanticism that he would vehemently have disavowed. In short, in his earthiness and earnestness—be it at the level of form, subject matter, dialect, market positioning, politics, or anything else—I find him one entirely convincing and consequential dialectical turn beyond ninety-nine percent of his more successful or remarked-upon contemporaries, and certainly beyond his detractors. Novelty! Context! The scourge of an artist unfortunate enough reach maturity in the 1990s, that most blind and blinding of decades. In the great history that will not be written, in the great romance of ideas which interpenetrates us all, Arthur will be found to have been holding more threads than any of us.

            Although I am partial to the Aphorisms in their self-contained and haiku-like ability to suggest whole worlds, if I make only one intervention it would be to insist—absolutely insist, in conclusion—upon the essential humanity on display in the figurative oils, of the eye, the composition, the lineaments of the figures. The posture, grace, bearing, and weight of the human forms is where, to me, Arthur reveals his genius most clearly, and when I encounter responses to White's "naïve" or "strong" hand, my instinct is not to rejoin or even to bristle; I can only wonder whether we can see the same canvas, only long to meet someone else from whom these to-me-incomprehensible scales have fallen.

            My frustration, and my premise here, is that no catalogue raisonné howsoever devoted or meticulous may represent that which fundamentally escapes the operations of history-writing—that is, history itself—and yet, the impetus to make the attempt falls heavily upon we whose attempts at identity revolve around the search for origins. And so it is that a combination of memoir, eulogy, archival estate management, and second-hand reportage—what I have come to think of as Arthur’s Remains—can come to approximate, I hope, the general and extra-literary sense of the man, the Charakteristik, that (it dawns on me continuously) must survive only in me.

            In my early thirties, after Arthur’s death, I lived in New York for a time; I had friends enough in the city by then to make things somewhat manageable. What I worked on is only partially recoverable to memory now, but I remember most of all being animated by an optimistic if perhaps dully high-minded sense of my own impending flowering: much serious talk, much laying away of notes and fragments against the future as an animal might down its nest. A good deal of conceptual photography in short series, unconsciously gravitating towards the minimum required volitional investment for the emergence of the auteur signature. Most of all, for me, a sense of business and duty progressively, incrementally mobilized towards a vaguely defined collective goal; someone would eventually point and say to the world, “Look.” At the time I was naturally quite haunted by Arthur’s recent death and the sense that without his galvanizing influence an entire communal way of being might evaporate; this sensation I experienced with the ultimately fatalistic urgency of the anthropologist watching the extinction of an oral tradition, and could find no way around it. Over the years I intermittently returned to considering written pieces on the man and his work, either modest or epic, pop or pseudo-academic, and even spit-balled with a few magazines and publishers—some of which meetings were truly in the service of realizing the project and some of which I merely used by way of introduction to a circle in which I had some interest—but ultimately I did nothing.

            Like all ambitious people I eventually discovered a path forward that was fundamentally cagey enough to serve my purposes and to insure myself against any eventuality. Through some extremely subtle and well-distributed but finally still shameful wheedling I was granted access to a nicer SoHo space than I had any reason to expect, in order to put on a solo show that I would call “The South-East Regional Artist.” Arthur was at the time almost entirely unknown outside of a one-degree separation from his willfully anti-metropolitan circle of friends, and my conflicted but ultimately self-serving plan was simply to repeat a selection of his work as my own; the line between homage, ventriloquism, adaptation, and rip-off would be ambiguous enough that the entire gesture could construed as signifying within a contemporary art register, within one problematic or another, whether the ruse remained undetected or conjured heady reportage or erupted into scandal. All the better, in fact, in the latter case; and so I would be Arthur reprised, the South-East Regional Artist by détournement.

            The crux of the recontextualization involved transposing some of what Arthur organized under the heading of “dipole forms” (basically just a group of people hanging out, albeit in heightened intensity) into the key of the New York City Happening. Of course I had no problem filling the space itself—no paintings, but wryly Arcadian photos taken either by Arthur himself or me during the Arthur-years; some of the more Raymond-Williams-lite aphorisms stenciled monolithically onto the gallery walls—but the core of the show would be the performances, the situations, the (I hoped) slow and dawning self-induction of the attendees into the very kind of community of ramshackle seekers that Arthur had forged about him. It was at the very first off-site performance, however, a rehash of one of Arthur’s outings with the FootPrints Local Travel Agency which, in my reiteration, involved a rather long trip to Red Hook and some poorly planned amphibious elements, that I realized that the whole calculation had been off from the start and that the outing and maybe even the entire show would be a failure. I wasn’t able to attract much of a group beyond my immediate circle of friends, and the situationism simply failed to take hold—and yet it wasn’t simply the make-up of the audience: the context was too overdetermined, and my persona too provisional, no matter how stridently in-character. My general embarrassment and the fact that the entire experience sunk without a ripple into the bustling and all-swallowing maw of the New York scene should go without saying; the revolution it produced in me, however, and the cheerless, Bloomian distortion of Arthur as he had existed in memory—fundamentally raffish, exacting but tolerant—into the terribly placid and Kung-like image of my own thwarted idea of myself, I unequivocally pinpoint as the rupture which would lead to my retreat from New York—as locale, community, concept—and the gradually drying-up of my own practice as an Arthurian.

            I first met Arthur at what had been described to me as a “snow party,” but which I would later find out was only one iteration in a loosely related series of events collectively known as the Polar 500. Arthur had a large dose of the old-time showman in him, and everything he did was wreathed in the vaguely commercialized tones of the serial, the multiple, or the long-running folk tradition. Gatherings that could only ever materialize a single time, events that would never even make it out of the planning phase of a late-night bull session were denominated the “first annual.” He wasn’t all that much older than me, and it surprises and galls me somewhat to recall that after my initial awe at his charisma subsided he always seemed more like an older brother than the archetype of the looming forebear that my current, wrackingly Oedipal perspective might so far have suggested. That particular day he was wearing heavy canvas pants and a shirt of nearly the same color, a beard, and some high-tech looking snow boots that looked like they derived from some era or culture of which I was unfamiliar—and he was brimming over with irritation. Thwarted logistics were a main component of any group activity thirty years ago, especially among people so enduringly rag-tag as those Arthur surrounded himself with, and the scene in that extremely cold January morning was not fundamentally different from any one of many others in an identical mold—the sweating rearranging of passengers in A/C-less cars for a two-load-in tubing trip, the completely avoidable but inevitable wait while one party retrieved a loaned and then re-loaned tent, the dusty van that won’t start until the very moment after a mutinous and hungover splinter group has left in frustration to get coffee, etc. That morning the shuttle-like pickup that had been dispatched to collect sledding gear from around town had been gone entirely too long, the day was lengthening while we sat breathing vapor and exchanging introductions in every possible permutation, and all our attempts to intercept the truck in actu at various landlines along its route had so far proved fruitless. Everyone kept one eye on Arthur, whose “party” it nominally was and whose affect was visibly rising.

            As I was faux-confidently mingling through the lineup leaning on car doors and sitting on the curb, Arthur suddenly made a beeline for me and plucked me rudely from a conversation.

            “When were you born?”

            “1972.”

            “No, what month?”

            “September?”

            “Yep, let’s go.” Even before the first question he was hustling me towards his old diesel saloon, and I’ve since wondered about the degrees of misdirection possible in the sequence; probably he just needed a batboy susceptible to the flattery of the spotlight.

            I confirmed that I could drive and he angled me towards the driver's side; once I was belted in and cranking on the ignition key to absolutely no effect, Arthur started leaning on the oddly chime-like horn, drawing everyone's attention to me in the driver's seat.

            "It's from the 600! Just wait for the salt-shaker," he commanded in an aside to me, and then screamed, "Ocheehowie!" into the closed windows to those milling outside. I stopped cranking, unsure what I was waiting for, and then Arthur is banging the horn, reaching through my arms, yelling at top volume, inches from my ear, "Ocheehowie! Let's go!" and finally rolling down the passenger window and squirming nimbly up into a seated position on the sill with his torso up over the roof, "Come on. If you're ready, come on. If not, meet us at Ocheehowie and follow the fucking footsteps." And sliding back down to me and already banging the horn, "Let's hit it," one blast per syllable.

            I'm starting to mumble, "It doesn't work," but he's already leaning into my lap and peering into some kind of interface behind the wheel.

            "You're not glowing! Wait, the gorilla's not open. I thought you could drive?" And he eases a knob back on the far side of the cockpit with his left hand and chimes the horn sonorously with his right and sings like a trio doing warm-up intervals, "Gorilla! Tubes! Ignite!" and then cranks the knob back and the engine rumbled unsteadily up to a fast idle. "Go! Come on," and he hits my gas knee and I start away from the curb, eager to please, almost crushing some stray legs.

            Without hesitation he spun the radio up to an unpleasant pitch, and a pulsing groove of distortion accompanied us as he pointed me successively out of town. "What is this?" I ventured, very loudly but casually.

            "It's a Becker!"

            "Who's that?"

            "Oh! No. Ghost Rider, Suicide!"

            I didn't attempt anything further at all and when we arrived after ten minutes or so he bounded out of the car and grabbed his wooden sled, having already exhausted interest in me, and started flagging followers into the lot. The only rule of the Polar 500, I learned, was that you had to be able to hike your sledding apparatus in, an easy two-mile climb. We tramped up in a loose file, some lugging large bladed rafts with difficulty, some shouldering pool floats or sheet pans, everybody smoking or drinking or both, no attempts to make way for descending hikers. In addition to his formidable vessel Arthur carried some kind of feathered spear at the head of the line, and I kept my eyes peeled for the course, expecting eventually to find a short steep grade where we could set up base camp, settle boozily into the warm snowmelt weather, and have some fun running the thing in heats.

            The footpath had emerged out onto a jeep trail at an unassuming wooded junction when Arthur drove his spear down with two hands into the snow pack and gave a hoot. He pulled out two battered driver's gloves and splayed himself down head-first onto his sled. The file still stretched another hundred yards back down the trail, but the more intent and sporting looking characters, mostly men, were buckling up and pocketing flasks. The parties waiting on the truck were perhaps a mile behind, maybe not even to the trailhead yet; it was impossible to say. I looked around for the slope and didn't see one.

            "Ocheehowie," Arthur said with relish as he scooted back and forth on the trail with his hands, as if warming up his triceps. 

            Suddenly a rangy guy in what looked like a one-piece motorcycle suit started stomping animatedly downhill on the fire road, whooping and missing his footing, slipping, and finally crashing down onto his sled and attempting to pick up speed.

            "Hey! Fuck you!" screamed Arthur and began paddling and angling himself down the road with strenuous full-body convulsions. Already by this unofficial starting gun the whole group was starting to run, fall, and shove their way down, and I realized that there was no slope, just the mountain to get down, a few miles of rocky jeep trail. I saw Arthur viciously drag down a figure high-stepping past him, plastic saucer held over head, and shout "trust your vehicle, comrade!" as the victim's heels, tailbone, and elbows cracked simultaneously on the snow. Arthur was veering left off the fire road and down, probably banking on some advance knowledge of the terrain, striking out across steep and dangerous-looking powder. People were still pouring up onto the road from the footpath, eager not to be left behind, some cajoling or reassuring each other, or just strapping on kneepads and cursing quietly under their breath. Upon Arthur's exit from the road people began disappearing off the edges on all sides, taken by a kind of frenzy, most people half-sledding and half-scrambling, breaking or abandoning or dragging their sleds. So no slope, and no course either; I eased into my own saucer and started skidding watchfully down the fire road. I looked back up at the abandoned spear like a nonsensical peak-marker designating the end or the beginning of whatever it was we were doing, the scramble of traces and footsteps and blade-lines pouring down the snow from its organizing point. 

            Within five minutes I somehow found myself entirely alone, the icy rocks having multiply cut open my palms in no time, and a sort of panic had begun to set in, a fear that I would never make it down at all and a childish desire that I could go home, the stinging cold darting from my red fingertips down into my wrists. Long before I reached the bottom I had given up attempting to race and though I was on the main jeep trail I could only hear shouts and laughter intermittently around me in the pines. By the time I got down, the Mercedes was gone and I felt like I had failed somehow, somewhere along the way—but circles of people were chatting and laughing in the parking lot, some tattered from the descent and others evidently not having bothered to make the ascent, listening to music from the cars and making Campari snow cones. Unabashed billows of pot smoke, and the unaffiliated citizens with their leashed dogs making wide suspicious arcs around the formation of poorly parked vehicles. I fell in with a group of older couples who seemed easy going enough, who had a twelve-volt kettle going, and who were busily sorting the options for later that night.   

            The realization I had that day, or if not that day exactly then gradually as a part of my emerging relationship with Arthur, is that he truly did not believe in a center of gravity. Take this as a biographical or art historical thesis at your pleasure or risk. He burned brightly himself, to be sure, and yet I never saw him fail to fling off satellites impatiently, to spiral his way furiously from concentricity of any kind. In learning this by Arthur’s example throughout my young adulthood I perhaps only came to understand what any perceptive high-schooler knows about being cool: action may only be countered with action; charisma is matched not by adulation but charisma. If this is a law, call it the Law of Strength. For his part, Arthur was never happier than when eluding capture. To the graspers and the keepsakers who passed through his orbit he always encouraged the documentary impulse—yes, comrade, of course you must bring your camera, your audio gear, your plein air easel!—and yet in the heat of any solid caper he refused (never explicitly, but none the less emphatically) to pose, to accommodate, to gather his band into the arc of the viewfinder. The commitment to the partial, the embedded, the limit of the human-as-agent was total; if you want more, you will earn it, and you will know that you have earned it not by vanity or acquiescence but by results. Ply your craft, said the underside of his spiked boots rounding an icy corner and falling out of eyeshot nearly a quarter mile below, and I’ll ply mine.

            The flipside of this acentricity was that he only ever truly loved and rewarded those who returned from a fray with a story of their own. Those who paddled to keep up, the self-nominated bards of the group or even of Arthur himself, they would be tolerated but not loved. The same fierce embodiment that he cultivated in himself—the focus on the self as vector in the human field—he naturally appreciated in others. If I make him into the prototypical egoic solitary, the fault is my own; his was a staunch and unprejudiced democracy, the path of collective accomplishment through the amplitude of its member components, group-love by way of self-love, a sturdy kind of social utopian. Although snow sports provide their own range of metaphors, to be sure, the image that comes to me most clearly, ingrained over so many summers over ever-shifting social and geographical permutations, is the float. Embarking onto the river as the sun is gathering force, every floater in his or her proper tube, five or nine or fourteen of us, everyone forged already into subcultures by acquaintanceship and carload, floating as individuals or in small clusters, atomic, molecular, submitted to the totalizing but locally variable forces of current, eddy, effort, wind, and drag. The duo bravely going down with the supply boat in the rockiest and most extremely un-fun shallow whitewater trajectories, the sun-worshipping trio blithely spiraling into the dead-zone eddy as the rest of the pack accelerate through the sweet spot of the next bend, the flatterer abandoning peace, poise, and enjoyment to paddle a hectic twenty-five minutes and regain his chosen coterie. And at dinner, drunk on fatigue and other intoxicants, the question not the easy road of what you witnessed, but what you did that no one witnessed.

            There is a school of thought in fiction-writing that divides authors into the systematic and the organic, those who emplot their characters into a preordained structure and those who seed their characters with motivations and agency and then stand by as a world unfolds. In all the years of happenings, parties, secret meetings, blowouts, anniversaries, parades, ceremonies, exhibitions, and rendezvous, Arthur was in life an author of the latter kind; he may nominally have set you in motion, but you became a character according to your own lights. This particular quality of leadership is precisely what eludes the art historical narrative—which cannot accommodate distributed agency except clumsily, belatedly, as a precipitate that drops out of solution—and it was this quality as well that brought Arthur occasionally to the brink of the pied piper or cultist. Above I briefly mentioned the relatively well-known FootPrints Local Travel Agency, a series of quite physical outings in which Arthur's arbitrary wielding of power in quarries or caves or ice-fields sometimes legitimately risked putting people in harm’s way, but the social engineering that I found and still find most difficult—and of which, to my knowledge, no written accounts exist—was the short-lived SSS Workshop. The Sixties Short-Story Workshop was a group (active in the early 90s) whose ostensible purpose was to provide a forum for area fiction writers to workshop their manuscripts-in-progress but whose actual underwriting motivation was blatantly—and riskily—to foster real interpersonal psychodrama among the participants. Arthur had found some battered but institutional-seeming wooden tables that he dragged into a circle in the rough-finished living room in the house of friend whose renovation had been interrupted by money trouble, showed up the first day in some simulacrum of professorial tweeds, and proceeded to sit cross-legged on top of one of the table chain-smoking while pronouncing upon (and goading others to pronounce upon) the various pieces under review. Although never allowing what might well have been period-appropriate patriarchal or outright bigoted behavior, the whole thing took place under such a deeply real aegis of misanthropic arrogance that I still think with some remorse about the relationships that were wounded or rearticulated, the feelings hurt or enflamed, and the vocations inflected or derailed. This was the gallery as group therapy—which of us can say, really, whether it was finally harmful or salutary—that indeed permanently changed the lives of those involved.

            What kind of art, in the end, does this constant sound and fury amount to? In one sense it might be seen to isolate a lesson about process from his early Abstract Expressionism and to dematerialize it into the more diffuse and generalized register of a Life-/Art-World, to use my own unfortunate neologism. And yet there is a way in which the 'process art' label fails to capture the kind of output that I found and still find most intriguing—I think back, for example, on the “Frostbite Doubles” T-shirts that he had printed every January (for years!), for a tennis tournament that never took place and was never intended to. The trick was in decoupling process from product somehow, not necessarily in order to prioritize one but to complicate the relation. At the core of both the near-continuous minor capers and his more traditional art practice there lay a critique of value of some kind, or perhaps of appearance itself. For Arthur “art” never consisted of what was there, precisely, but rather in a kind of penumbra around the ostensible proceedings. Penumbras, halos: William James resorted to such metaphors at times to describe what he called the “fringes” of consciousness, metaphorical tools for reorienting the empiricist tradition away from the manipulation of mechanistic units (whether ideal or perceptual) available for mental shuffling like a deck of cards, and instead towards temporality, to consciousness as a stream, towards narrative as the frame of a life.

            But what force resides in this critique and what object does it take—of what, precisely, is it a disavowal? And in my own narrative, how to be apprentice to a disavowal—except perhaps to write "a disavowal" where there was only silence? Within Arthur’s force for life there lay a force for life-only, for death-in-history. So the knight falls by the sword, his escutcheon is hefted by peer and heir, and the title reigns continuous through the dissolution of the person. But what title, what tradition? Of the chivalric poets it is written that the paradoxical combination of a-centricity and cohesion that emerges around the Yvains and Orlandos of fable comes not from some archetypal bedrock or deeper folk logic but from the belated writer’s attempt to impose form upon recalicitrant content, to discover meaning (create it? in-form it?) within essentially discontinuous episodes. In this sense Arthur’s art was coextensive with a will-to-annihilation more directly descended from Nietzsche than any mid-century cad. Metaphysically the knight is the parent of the chronicler, then, as well as the child—and so what of the chronicler? If I am to live it is to narrate, at the cost of appearance; to make Arthur appear at the cost of life—the problem, with the horizontal, is the horizon.

            To stay within the horizon is the task at hand, however, and to give justice to Arthur is to dissolve him as cynosure, to distribute him back into the world and the people that were his milieu. The fringe of art, Arthur's Art, is the living network, the knowable community, the play of agents, the grand geographic interlace of friend and enemy, the winking, alternating dilation of bower and road and temporary studio. This is the truest reading of “The South-East Regional Artist”—that assemblage of works that existed literally in the shadow of the Sunsphere, figuratively upon a bursting bubble—and perhaps the truest reading of all art in our time, the sealed letter from the inner sanctum where art-historical propositions cease to signify: the exhibition is not the art but the trace. How just and how right, then, that no one really witnessed it, that empty center, and that in history it is returned to a mere trace; how rare this sparing of our confusion. If this were eulogy and not essay I would reëmplot Arthur, not in 1982 but 1981, among the fellow-travelers and the tales of them: who bumped into whom in New Orleans, the knotted trails of romance, petty vendetta, glorious weekend, diverted visit, and fateful glorious gathering. In the clarity of hindsight I think that Arthur’s truest and most emblematic genre was not painting but reported dialogue, the continuous ongoing codification of self to others and others to self, the dance of identity, difference, and development.

            While I shared Arthur’s home town and acquaintance for many years, I can in no way for these reasons boast of any privileged knowing; Arthur was only himself when absent, spoken of, and whenever he came back he was as new, having dipped himself into the generative waters of non-existence-for-others. He was away from us all for long stretches of time, many times a year, and upon each return the process of being through being-elsewhere began again, chapters of the self having been written while in motion. Among a cache of audio recordings I recently found a tape with one such session; though not intrinsically any more significant than dozens or scores of other such tales, and though delivered in my presence and so indicative of one particular of his many personae, it can perhaps stand in for others.  I am the one that presses record and the intermittently muffled interlocutor. From the tape we can surmise that he's recently come back from a trip, probably to southern Georgia to visit his old friend and collaborator Dominik Bardo:

            [Muffled movement of microphone] '…and looking well-fed, as usual. Seems to be in some kind of ruddy laborer phase, walking around with a six-pack hanging by an empty loop from his finger, you know. But the sum of the thing is he more or less told me to fuck off. Like a big one, existentially, the prick.'

            -[Muffled response, probably “When was this?]

            'No, Christ, this was just a few days ago, when I was down there. [Pause, muffled voice again]. Oh yes, God knows what library he’s subscribed to now, jawing on about the material and the immaterial, up at the bar at the 5-Star no less. Anyway, bullshit. I thought I’d gone down to get drunk and spend a few days at the barn, having fun and hatching schemes, but now apparently he’s been doing homework, preparing, getting an axe ready to grind, that asshole. You know when he and Aaron were doing their Miami Vice routine down there in that “villa-style” dungeon I didn’t come down there ready to gleefully drop a wrench in their shit. No I hit the Jamaican clubs for about forty-eight straight hours and got them that DJ for the opening, and if I'm going to shoot absolutely straight with you, that DJ was the best goddamn part of the whole trip.'

            -“What happened?”

            'Deric! Spelled like Eric with a ‘D,’ Christ. No, we went out to the patio to smoke and just gradually becalm ourselves, you know. Real meditative-like. After a while, “Fuck.,” I said, just like that. “Fuck.” As if musing. He’s quiet and then after about forty-five seconds of total silence Dom just screws up his face like a farmer puzzling over some kind of blight and just says, “Fuck.” As if the word had more holy fucking pathos than he knew what to do with. Really good. So we’re just screwing ourselves up like this for a while, not even laughing, for a long time, probably twenty minutes, spitting and pulling long ones and saying “Fuck” from time to time, the intervals getting longer and the whole thing just getting funnier, cycling through whole dumb worlds of expressiveness, both of us getting sort of method, toeing our boots into the gravel like a tornado just destroyed the old family home, when eventually we hear these brats on the other side of the patio getting too loud with their big ideas and at one point they’re actually talking about “Arthur White” and his “strategies” for this cock and bull or that. Dom suddenly gives me this simpleton look of wonder, like he sees a big old grapefruit dawning up over the horizon, just the juciest lemon you ever saw, and then he ambles on over to these two scabs with about his fiftieth cigarette of the night, suddenly dropping this total set-change of art-mob affect over his whole posture and speech and everything, and starts asking these guys if they’re fans of White’s, ready to drum up some appreciative camaraderie because he too, as it happens, is a fan of White’s.'

            'So these two kids perk up, practically smooth their eyebrows in the goddamn mirror like something big is going down, the spotter from the big city about to get wowed by the local talent. So we settle in for the moment at their table, buy everybody a round, get them going a little bit, and before long the brats are literally quoting us hard figures, to the dollar, of the rent at all the spaces where they’re thinking about opening a gallery, and their friend, really good buddy, who just moved up to New York and is fucking an honest-to-God gallery assistant, and at any rate after a few minutes of this I’m real bored and depressed by these guys, and tired of this level-one irony that Dom has running, and so I just suddenly, very suddenly, just slam my hand of the table. “Hey,” I say. Just like that. “Hey,” I yell it at them, and then doing my best portentous initiator I say, “Don’t you little twats know anything?” “Don’t you dummies even…,” etc., etc. “This,” I say with gusto, and I gesture dramatically at Dom, “is Arthur White, and you are boring his fucking balls off.”

            'The lads screech to a halt, moment of confusion, and then the lid comes off. Oh yes, a gay time now, lads. After some veiled consternation and puny embarrassment comes the too-quick turn to much yucking and clapping indeed, all a merry band, yes, because now, though ephebes, they are in on the rite. This, they think, this is a good story, a myth even, and with a role for ourselves truly. At first Dom plays his cards close, becomes the cipher, sage and sphinx-like Artist Arthur, while he processes the heightened stakes in play, his first instinct—which I totally love—to stiff the lads of their increasing sense that they’re in on something. “Art is the disavowal of talk,” he finally says, getting started—pretty fucking good—and the brats look caught between taking notes and trying to up the ante, to take up the mantle and insert themselves into The Story somehow by fomenting raillery, making a position for themselves. Suddenly though, before we get to see how they handle it, and in actually a quite sinister key, truly, Dom gives the kids a free pass and decides to side with them against me.'

            '"But now a question of great importance for you lads,” he begins, “regarding what is to be done with my disciple here.” Gesturing towards me. Oh yes, here we go Dom, okay. Now, I could obviously give a shit about the two brats but this is just exactly—give me a little pour of that—here—I don’t care about these kids, fuck that, but this is just it, this is the evil little fucking twisted root that I’m talking about with Dom. I really don’t know what he is transparent to himself about, but I truly believe he equates, he understands power in terms of the ability to hurt people. He truly wants it, at some level. There is just this . . . festering core of fear and trembling at the heart of his brother-love, and I tell you it fucks me up. “Deconstruction is also architecture,” he told me once, not in his folksy Marxist phase, certainly, and I actually believe that he believes it, that what’s out there is a zero-sum universe, a universe without angels, and so now in the ensuing gambit on the fateful evening in question this very weekend he puts me in a bad spot on the patio at the bar, which of course means baloney and its all laughs, but he puts “me” in a bad spot because he plays me with his own blinking black hole at the heart of it, and with that move, amigo—for all spiritual intents and purposes—its just me and him on the patio's quiet blackened dueling grounds and it’s not good at all. “This mandarin,” he says, and I’m paraphrasing, now, but with the clarity of God and fury behind me, I assure you, “this Boy of Art—he believes that art is a thing that matters, that can focalize ambition, that contains ideas and can have true value, and that can be rewarded. Blasphemy!” Smiles from the boys and from the next table over. Old Arthur in the flesh now, that asshole. “He believes in vocation, and a band of brothers and sisters whose decisions and whose lives have political import, and practical effects, that the eye of God or History or Tradition is watching, and is good. Nonsense!” Mock cheers from the good sports, I say. “Art is energy at odds with itself!” Whooping, now, huzzah, good show, Dom. “There is no art, only people! When the hangers-on approach, I allow them, of course, for they only act according to their low natures. The followers, the accessories, they mystify themselves! I am the crystal Vision that is at once its own Action, and so I ask you, again, lads,” and the sense of crescendo at our table, and even the other occupied tables on the patio around us, is quite thick by the point, caught uncertainly between menace and some saving possible punchline, “What should be done with my disciple?,” and while he glowers at me with true ferocity, one of the boys pipes in upon the very crest of the climax, “Off with his head!” because I am the imperious Arthur, King Arthur, and he knows enough to know that when the cup of the monarch overfloweth one does best to channel it’s pleasure. [Pause.] Well.'

            'Then there’s a pause long enough to be eerie as the impact of these vibrations is absorbed, found by even the dimmest interlocutor to be in excess of the role, and so finally I said, “I’ll tell you.”'

            'And I stand up at my chair, still at the table, as if in some kind of ritual trance, and with the rest of the bar crowd now fully fucking tuning in, boy, I slowly take out my old and cartoonish but—gasp—very real Bulldog and point it slowly, lifting, right at Dom’s head.'

            -“What the fuck, Arthur.”

            'Well. I know, I mean shit. I honestly didn’t know just exactly what was going to happen. Something bigger was taking over. I mean it was method, really, just another turn of the screw we’d been winding all night. “Maybe to thrive,” I start off, “the pupil has to destroy the master.” [Pause.] True nervousness on the patio, by that point, I tell you.'

            -“I should say so, you fucking maniac—you could have ended up in the tank.”

            'Oh it was really fucking something. Dom couldn’t have liked it, I’m sure. The gun part at least. Though I’m sure that no one but me saw the shiver that went through him.'

            -[Pause.] "So what happened? Jesus."

            'Well, Dom stands up suddenly, all brimming with the self-aware gravity of the hero, and reaches over to my arm—surely not a good move, that, if we hadn’t been acting—and takes the gun right out of my hand, and with no urgency whatsoever turned towards the bar sign overhead, maybe twenty yards off, takes aim, and fucking blasts out a section of the neon.'

            -“Holy shit. You’re fucking with me.”

            'Nope, knocked out the L and half the blue crescent from the Bud Light sign at the 4-Star. Loud as a motherfucker even above the cicadas.'

            -“You are definitely fucking with me.”

            'It’s true, I say! God, nothing has ever been so glorious! I could have kissed him.'

            -[Pause.] “Well shit, so what happened?”

            'Well Christ, naturally it was tense as hell, but somehow the whole thing seemed to unfold in some sort of stunned, extra-legal register. No big men or citizen-arresters materialized from the shadows, people just mostly averted themselves excitedly to their own clusters of whispering about did you see that shit, and the two kids sure as hell didn’t know what to do—we gave them eighty bucks, which certainly wasn’t enough money [whoops with laughter], and told them to just apologize on our behalf, and we fairly skipped out of there.'

            -“Jesus Arthur.”

            'Jesus is right. Here, pour me a little. Can you even believe it? Where does inspiration like that come from? Where? We practically linked arms and danced down the double yellow like we had the keys to the kingdom, nipping a little from my flask here and there, getting blurrier as we went. “Ecstasy of Avila!,” Dom kept roaring, getting drunk and stuck on some internal groove, “My spear and tantric lover!” Like two crusty old drunks not worth a penny, I’d say, lucky not to be arrested. But God, where does it come from?'

            -"Well I'll ask him, you bastard, because I just got that whole thing . . .

            There's some muffled movement on the tape as one of us picks up the recorder and the thing shuts off. There are of course other recordings, but for this document to surface now is like some uncannily opaque limit case or uncertain parable for me, a negative of a negative. And how many more were like it, even if not so alarming? Is one case really different from another? The recording of this certainly tall tale is unmarked, but must have been from around August of 1995; Arthur died in 2002, seven years later. And how many years came before? Twenty? Forty? Of what narrative could this ultimately meaningless episode be said to form the climax?

            “Those who speak of fiction as if it were a singular, a thing,” Arthur wrote, “do not know the delight of fiction.” I have no recollection of the night in the recording or the story, though other nights and other happenings from that same era loom large in memory—too many, indeed. Surely Dominik would remember, but in what further iteration of myth or paraphrase I couldn’t say. Truly it exists as such only because of the cassette recorder which was ready to hand, and though this fact is not new or difficult, still it gives me a shock these years later—the contingency, the real which becomes the supplement, the mere furniture! And so it is: art has only ever comprised the sentimental posing as the naïve—and I don't mean the general temporality of belatedness, but a starker, more metaphysical condition. This is History as a problem of appearance, and what is art if not appearance itself? And what are ghosts if not appearance shorn of essence? But no, it is the living speech that appeals to me. Arthur White. What is true or what is truth is beside the point, as is the relation between fragment and whole, symptom and emblem, and yet—I don't mean living speech only in that it can explain itself, or that it appeals in ultimate terms to the final unbroken tradition of humane and apprenticed judgment, but one that raises curtain after curtain, and then yet another, with delight, with true excess, with generosity.

            To conclude on a final and more personal note: among all Arthur's many tattoos—the legible, semi-legible, and frankly illegible traces of whims and mottos sometimes long forgotten—there was one image that Arthur cherished, that he would show off if asked, above his knee and slightly off-center, of an early dime anachronistically dated with his own birth year. “I almost had it put on my arm, but thought better of it, thank the gods.” I heard this routine more than once, a kind of private catechism that he stinted not to share with those people he felt were kindred spirits. “And Elsie Stevens was the model, of all people,” he’d point out to his interlocutor with real wonder, undiminished—as with all true rituals—by repetition, “Wallace’s wife!” His "Mercury Dime," he called it, an occultist to the last, but if he were pressed or in a sentimental or loquacious mood, satisfied by something especially “well done,” perhaps as the sun began to set sentimentally over some personal exterior or interior vista, he’d come clean, with false reluctance, about the whole story—the original commission, the ambiguity of the wingéd Liberty, the false folk etymology, the high magic of emergence, and in the end the unerring collective rightness of history. “The greatest design ever to circulate in America,” he’d say, “Liberty masquerading as Hermes.”