'WHY I WORE THE DRESS'
Daniel Vernola, February, 2017
"Concepts are
drawers in which knowledge may be classified; they are also ready made garments
which do away with the individuality of knowledge that has been
experienced. The concept soon becomes
lifeless thinking since, by definition, it is classified thinking."
~Gaston Bachelard, 1958
Fourteen years ago, late August, 2002, in Venice, Italy for
an N.Y.U. masters degree, I had my final thesis critique with Doctor Angiola
Churchill. The work expounded a theory
that plastic was 'plasma of the metaphysical'.
My idea being raised by baby boomers in and around plastic engendered casting
it aside for new knowledge her tutelage gave in the milieu of Italian culture. I'd taken to utilizing a blowtorch in order
to melt various army men toys into myriad, conglomerate forms. The culmination of eight weeks taking myself
very seriously using the buzzword, 'globalism', was a hollow sphere made from
armies of small men in plastic. A day
before the all important moment of her seeing this creation, a studio hand
accidentally knocked it down damaging the integrity of the piece. His shame and apologies belied my anger; life
at that time was in a state of high entropy and the action was in accordance
with a synchronicity that I found appealing.
There in the studio at review, knowing the woman as only an instructor,
hunched over, hand jabbed palm-up over her mouth, she listened silently to my
rhetoric. When I said nothing more,
Churchill reached out, held the sculpture aloft, and placed it on her head
snug. Sitting back, arms crossed up
behind her, lounging and kicking up her legs to be crossed, that twenty seconds
was one of the heart-stopping moments of my life and I thereafter fell
hopelessly in love.
By February, 2003, I was avidly searching for a way to
manifest ideas in art. I made effort to
actualize working studio space and pursued what was a limited career acting off
off (off) broadway. I stayed the course
as a third year art educator in East Harlem but chaffed under the yoke. Fellow N.Y.U. graduate, Stacy Gibboni, whom I
met studying abroad, was making a play at moving to New York City. Engaged in the art form of fashioning herself
for reinvention, as only she could, Gibboni was to me a placeless goddess and
aided my becoming less a regional entity, in exile on the upper east side. Our cosmopolitan exploits operated out from
the studio of Dr. Churchill, who put her up for the time she needed in order to
sort through the theatrical backdrop of life and times. Eventually, the city, so demandingly
beautiful, could never be a neutral setting, and Gibboni took to the shapes of
Italy which fit into her work. With
consistency and discipline it is to Gibboni that I owe great debt for bringing
me to Churchill's table before leaving.
She gave me inroads to winning the affinities of a working artist, and
the ethics involved with being an adult.
Before macular degeneration made her only world gentle
movements and whisperings in the studio space, Churchill was a deliberate,
dominant form in the lives of those who crossed her path. At once organic and geometric in all things,
she was for example as consistent and disciplined in food and its preparation
as she was to anecdotes that went with each dish. All this energy synthesized when she made
art. As well, her sartorial elegance had
the same intensity that lines in the work did and I became gourmand to it
all. With Churchill there was sufficient
intellectual stimulus, refuge from the disappointments of conventional life,
and entree into an association of like minds.
The even flow in and out her door of intellects and otherwise was
standard grammar.
Engaged with
'Churchy' on any level, from sublime to banal, with humor or severity, it
behooved one to know their history.
Walter, her husband, was in need of constant care and occupied the space
as a sort of laconic sidekick, counterpoint to her savoir faire with deadpan
accuracy. Gibboni and I were often
tasked with bringing in certain food he liked (crabcakes from Dean and DeLuca
or Hagen-Dass ice cream) and stayed with him at the table eating, hearing about
his favorite books and stories provoked by old photos Gibboni would dig up,
framed by the title, 'it feels like it happened in a different life'. There was a feeling not only that the two were
history, but that your presence was syntax in its analog trajectory.
Eschewing the pregiven of an everyday world, I found myself
spending more and more time in her studio romanticizing a leftover,
near-abandoned quality of 20th century life that the place exuded. Harmony between her plan for things and the
process in order to make them fit into the grid of her studio space… demands
were obstacles to overcome with democracy and justice. It suited me.
Before then, life as an artist was caricature… Churchill helped me find
a character in it instead.
Churchill's own artwork was at that time something less of
painting but more of art; tactile, to be sure, and of a body growing from what
had been installation toward non dictatorial, high abstraction. Her post feminist modular units required
manufacture and It was natural I participate in making them. Garnering a label of assistant was
appealing. I rather liked the idea of
'apprenticeship'. It counter balanced my
teaching and the agony of a slowly burnished truth: that there were problems
with the New York City Public School Education System. I was finding in that career enthusiasms were
fabricated, and the fabrication of them took more energy than I thought. She answered the question of this dilemma
with great concentration, determined for brevity, handing me a book she wrote
on the subject, saying, "I've cried bathtubs of tears over this".
After a long workweek teaching, on Friday the seventh of
February, Gibboni invited me to join her at an opening in Chelsea for
Churchill. Judy Collischan, her stalwart
ally, organized an event in tandem with fashion week, to take place on 24th
Street at 4 P.M. and invited Churchill to show a dress that she had made
entirely out of paper forms that were vernacular to her work. There had been a fresh snowfall that day and
the world was covered in perfect white which mirrored the sensibilities of
Churchill's emblems and iconography.
Other participating artists wore outfits they each made or had got
models to do so. Gibboni had on
Churchill's dress and when things were dying down, after a culminating
performance that involved singing, in an act that was sea change for my
relationship to Churchill, suggested I put it on. A hit, I sang 'Mona Lisa' to her in front of
everyone, and she called me 'the warrior'.
I certainly considered it inverse retribution for she who wore my art
first. As fate had it, under the celestial
vault of Gibboni's machination, I was thereafter to don the mantle of all
things 'Churchill'.
My father died later that year on August 4th and Walter
passed away on Saturday, September 20th, soon after she returned from the eight
week program. We became spiritual
siblings, bound by that loss and together fostered a dialectic relationship
between ourselves and the world. I had
taken a sublet apartment on the lower east side and when that fell out from
under me, very easily moved my garbage bags of clothes into her guest bedroom
to stay. I was 27, she was 81. We made an experiment in divesting domestic
bliss for a live/work pattern. I could
return to her from the causal, ordinary world of daily bread and butter routine
and she became bedrock for a life of ideas.
Churchill fostered and engendered my professional development as not
merely an 'art teacher', but in the long run, an artful one; to
understand the structure of the outfit of an artist-teacher. I manifested childhood tropes so fervently
rejected in my graduate work. She was
Puff the magic dragon, a Jedi master, and the villainous antagonist I had
always wanted. I turned the place into
an epicenter for the magical realm of my adventures… and they were real. I was the warrior-prince-trickster-door
warden. She let me make myself into a
sorceresses apprentice. It sustained me.
Ultimately, we were aristocrats in postulating the
male-female relationship but would generously share this marvelous, improbable
first stanza in the poem of ourselves and how we met. It was sensual and symbiotic. I lived with her for eight years. She wore the pants. On her arm, vestiges of culture we tried on
together were custom made; the entire planet earth was our haberdasher.
After all this time I still feel as though I only ever did
her a favor by it; that dress, her oeuvre… it was she who had merit in naming
me artist and suffering the consequences.
I am wiser for the ware. She remains
herself; bitter with experiential knowledge.
Although I loved her first and then came to her abstraction, now I know
that abstraction comes first. I love her
still and there is a thing in that concept that I am ever grateful has yet to
be classified. Angiola Churchill makes
my life and its art better… in turn, if asked I can proudly say, "I was
big in the eighties"… not the eighties, Churchill's.
Gibboni in the dress talking with me
Friday, February 7th, 2003~
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