Art I'm Seeing #47

The real reason for my visit to the National Gallery of Art on Monday was to tour the photo exhibition of Allen Ginsburg: Beat Memories.

I think of Ginsberg less as a poet than a witness. A voyeur of a movement, a fly on the wall as history surrounded him. And these photographs completely affirm that view of his significance. Allen lived a fairly long life and produced 2 or three noteworthy poems, ironic that his penchant with a little camera should so suddenly and complete trump his presence as a poet, but it does.

The images show us some of the major players of the beatnik movement. Iconoclastic figures in their full glory. Players like Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Neal Cassidy, Gregory Corzo, and Peter Orlovsky. Young bucks in the prime of their youth and virility.

There is another and more powerful aspect to the photos: They don't stop there. Ginsberg continued to snap away at his friends long after their "15 minutes" were over. Glory becomes what it will: grace, pathos, tragedy...those realities are all, also, here in these photos. And with each imagine there are Ginsberg's candid and interesting hand written notes, talk about poetry.

Like this one of a seemingly winded Jack Kerouac from 1964, a scant decade after his glory days, and only 5 years before his death in 1969. The caption reads: "Jack Kerouac the last time he visited my apartment 704 East 5th Street, N. Y. C., he looked by then like his late father, red-faced corpulent W. C. Fields shuddering with mortal horror, grimacing on G. M. T. I'd brought back from visiting Timothy Leary at Millbrook Psychedelic Community, Fall 1964."

Other pictures are even more intimate. Images of family members and familiar abodes, like this one.

The caption reads: "I sat for decades at morning breakfast tea looking out my kitchen window; one day recognized my own world the familiar backyard, a giant wet brick-walled under-sea Atlantis garden, waving oilanthus ("stinkweed") "Trees of Heaven," with chimney pots along avenue A topped by Stuyvesant Town apartments' upper floors two blocks distant on 14th street, I focus'd on the raindrops along the clothesline. "Things are symbols of themselves," said Chögyom Trungps, Rinpoche. New York City August 18, 1984"

Entering into this exhibition is no less entering into a shrine or cathedral. The ground feels holy. The images are of the saints that look down upon the living to offer us their blessings as we seek to make sense of life, too. The one difference? We walk in the shadows of their grace.