Fun While it Lasted

 

Rhapsodic language and sanctimony do seem to readily attach themselves to modernist abstraction. As do miraculous accounts attach to medieval reliquaries. 

 

Pure abstraction's long-standing aspiration to be untethered from the objective - to unyoke itself from pictorial servitude to humanist culture - did (for good or ill) fatefully position it to promote the possibility of here-and-now transcendence. Transcendence, reserved, of course, for the elect.

 

These idle thoughts summoned for me the memory of Ancien Régime Werner and Elaine Dannheisser making their way across Chelsea's broken cobbles. The two, tottering unsteadily from gallery to gallery ... as if in search of New Lourdes.

 

I can't say if those two lovely oldsters did ever experience, in their regular pilgrimages, a rebirth of wonder, or, the return of their animal, spiritual, or erotic vitality. But I did once witness the normally dour art dealer, Diane Browne, transfigure suddenly and magnificently arise (with a fluttering of hands) from the floor of her gallery, as the Dannheisers entered the sacristy. 

 

It was, indeed, fun while it lasted.

Photo:

 

Werner and Elaine Dannheisser

by Robert Mapplethorpe