When Can I See You Again? BY W.S. Di Piero (Pressed Wafer, 2010) From the Publisher: “When Can I See You Again is a collection of the poet and essayist’s recent short art writings on subjects ranging from Morandi to Rembrandt to Pre-Colombian marine animal amulets. Di Piero has great zest for looking and a prose style equal to what he sees.”

Writing in 1959, artist Jack Tworkov addressed his social responsibilities as an abstract painter: “I am against the extremes, those that appeal to elite attitudes, and I am for the extreme of the middle, the creative middle.” Tworkov’s “creative middle” is situated between art as a social expression, fettered to the needs of other people, and art as an individual indulgence answerable to no one but the artist’s conscience. The “extreme of the middle” is about finding an uneasy space where art sits within an individual, formed by social forces, responsive to social needs, but not beholden to predetermined ideas or political ends. The ‘extreme of the middle’ is about finding an uneasy space where art sits within an individual, formed by social forces… but not beholden to predetermined ideas or political ends. I thought of Tworkov’s finessed occupation of the middle while reading W.S. Di Piero’s When Can I See You Again?, a recently published collection of fifty-four of Di Piero’s art reviews written since 1999, most of them first published in the San Diego Reader. At the time of Tworkov’s writing, W.S. Di Piero was fourteen years old and discovering poetry in a library in blue collar south Philadelphia. Like the painter, Di Piero is an elusive thinker whose greatest respect is for the specificity of experience — what Di Piero describes as “what’s irreducible in art.” Tworkov, witnessing the ebb of abstract expressionism’s international triumph, was a stylistic shape-shifter whose work had an evolving relationship to the dominant art movements of his time. He said “bourgeois society as we know it in America today gives me the freedom to join nothing, no organization and protects me from its vengeance.” This is turtle shell art, responsive to its environment but protective of its maker, a natural extension that adorns the inside and defies the outside. It is an art about between-ness that takes a Mesozoic view of culture, disregarding short-lived artistic trends, and focusing on the long view of human creativity. Tworkov once said he wanted “to paint no Tworkovs,” which is a way of saying he refused the predetermined quality of personal history and aesthetic habits. For Di Piero — a Guggenheim Fellow, twice included in the Best American Essays, award-winning poet and translator, professor at Stanford University — his employment as an arts journalist for an alternative weekly might seem like a way to write no Di Pieros. “Everything is about moving on,” he once told Publisher’s Weekly.

Di Piero’s art writing shares a lot of similarities with his poetry and personal essays. His reviews can be economical, skittish dashes across a subject. Sometimes they are more circuituous, such as in his longer, excellent essays on Giorgio Morandi and Jackson Pollock. He has a way of staking a specific, evocative place and building links from other observations, as when he encapsulates Lucien Freud’s work as “a frank, tight-wired confrontation with the body’s presence in space” and then uses descriptions of the work and personal anecdotes to unlock specific meaning. “The portraits of [Leigh] Bowery, and of another enormous person named ‘Big Sue,’” Di Piero writes, “remind me of something I once heard on a streetcar: ‘The meat will inherit the earth.’”

Di Piero does not build systems, and he avoids theory or structural analysis. Like every good writer, he stakes out specific places in the work he’s looking at and lets the topography fall into place.

Di Piero does not build systems, and he avoids theory or structural analysis. Like every good writer, he stakes out specific places in the work he’s looking at and lets the topography fall into place. Di Piero is a kind of humanist. When he talks about Pollock, for instance, Jackson Pollock the man is always present. When he describes Pollock’s much-argued-over late paintings as a place “where desperation dances with a fearless grace,” it conjures up Pollock’s body moving over his canvases, tracing the hand and following his footsteps.

This approach opposes those of Pollock’s greatest champion, Clement Greenberg, and latter-day apologist Hubert Damisch. Greenberg argues that the late paintings, in which Pollock returned to figuration while using his drip technique, are a relapse into nostalgic subject matter. Damisch argues that the later paintings are misunderstood because the technique is still about the formal relationships on the canvas and are actually more complicated because of Pollock’s articulation of recognizable forms. Greenberg and Damisch are in agreement about one thing, though: Pollock’s life doesn’t matter. The work’s the thing.

For W.S. Di Piero, art forms dissolve into life forms; what is in art relates to the artist and also to the viewer, and these relationships evolve beyond the difference articulated by separate forms. His thinking integrates a kind of negative space that forms a whole beyond objects. Talking about Morandi, he says “The modern sublime isn’t about magnitude or clarion ambition: it rubs perception so close to ordinary facts of physical reality that we feel pressed against a membrane that obscurely separates us from whatever lies on the other side, if there is another side.”

For W.S. Di Piero, art forms dissolve into life forms; what is in art relates to the artist and relates to the viewer, and these relationships can take you beyond the world of forms.

His writing can be idiosyncratic because he embraces the associations and surprises that happen while looking — and these happen within particular bodies in particular places. In one essay, he says that a man in a photograph by Horace Bristol is “a ringer for a homeless guy in my neighborhood.” Most writers (and editors) would scratch the aside as irrelevant, but these personal asides recur throughout Di Piero’s criticism as a way of constantly reinforcing the subjectivity driving our relationships to art. I am looking at this work, it says, and I have my own way of looking.

In Di Piero’s writing, there is always an “I” in art. In an essay on photographs about American identity, he says “The act of looking, to be fully humanized, has to be an act of unruly, bristly, subversive criticism.” Even though he is dedicated to looking, he is not dedicated to conventionally “subversive” criticism. He is not lobbing Molotov cocktails but setting controlled fires.

The most negative review in the book takes on a show of contemporary art, “Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect,” where artists take museums as their inspiration and subject matter. “To somebody like me,” he writes, “who thinks easel painting is still a juicy, pliant medium for form and feeling, the only thing missing from the exhibition is everything.” This strike isn’t about defending a medium or broadly attacking more contemporary themes but defending spaces for individual conscience and perception over the institutions that command authority over our attention.

Yet, while he stakes a claim for contemporary easel painting’s viability, almost none of the essays in When Can I See You Again? addresses new painting that hasn’t been canonized or written about at length. There are two ways to read Di Piero: either he is playing it safe with what he looks at and writes about, or he is simply in orbit around work that has long had a personal gravitational pull. Both could also be true.

Di Piero’s “subversive criticism” of looking isn’t necessarily directed at a system, or the other, or at one’s self, but is directed at habits of thinking that too easily follow predetermined paths en route to self-satisfied outcomes. At his best, Di Piero is not writing about the shows he is seeing but rather exploring what it is like to think through looking. In this way, his subjects always remain interior. When he gets inside Giorgio Morandi’s quiet, interior still lifes, for instance, there are interiors to the interiors. Morandi’s arrangements of bottles become other things, like “characters in a Beckett play” or “like buildings in a medieval hilltop town.”

Art always leads elsewhere. Di Piero, who namechecks more than Santa Claus, lives in a place called elsewhere. In an interview with John Rodden entitled “The Thinking Poet,” Di Piero explains that he began writing about art while feeling stuck and tired of writing about literature. Then, for five years, he wrote about art in a book, Out of Eden. This idea of being stuck and getting out of it pervades Di Piero’s sense of writing, life and art. Getting stuck happens on the margins. Tworkov’s “extreme of the middle” is a way of pushing and pulling. Getting elsewhere is a way of getting there.