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Lawrence Weschler

Prestelm u n i c h · l o n d o n · n e w y o r k

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Were it left to me to decide whether we should have

a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a

government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

t h o m a s j e f f e r s o n

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Tending the Garden of His Times: Fred Tomaselli’s New York Times Pieces

l a w r e n c e w e s c h l e r

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The Times27

List of Illustrations150

AcknowledgmentsAbout the Author and Artist

159

contents

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9Tending the Garden of his Times:Fred tomaselli’s new york times pieces

fred tomaselli has been busy slaughtering mosquitoes this past summer, or so I am given to understand one afternoon when I go to visit with him in the spacious fourth-floor walk-up studio he occupies in a converted one-time small-industrial building in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. I have actually come with the intention of talking with him about an entirely different recent passion of his: the vivifying, that is, of dead newsprint.

But first back to the mosquitoes, because in fact he is killing, collecting, and cataloguing the insects in question. Every morning he inventories a fresh batch from the bowels of the high-tech German mosquito-catching machine he procured from an entomology mail-order outfit (“It’s called a Sentinel Mosquito Trap: it looks like a cross between a Noguchi lamp and an ikea hamper, and I highly recommend it”), methodically laying out the night’s harvest gridwise across a paper towel and photo-graphing the results. “You can toggle through them,” he exults, full of boyish nerd marvel, riffling through the resultant photos. “Look, see: these are the Culex species, and these are all the Asian tiger mosquitoes. Basically, I’ve already killed over five hundred mosquitoes this summer, and it can all get so fascinating. One day there are flies coming in and there are less mosquitoes, but then the mosquitoes start building up again to a crescendo. Wait, I want to show you my favorite day so far: yeah, this one here—July 18, just a few days ago—122 mosquitoes! I admit it, I’m

a complete autistic taxonomist when it comes to trying to figure out and understand the shape of the world. But in addition I just love gloating over the corpses each morning—I love being able to reverse the bloodfest. And who knows, maybe one day it will all lead to something artwise, you never can tell.”

What I love about the story is its dailiness (“Oh yeah,” Tomaselli agrees, fanning out the prints, “this is like my diary”) and its ritualized nature (“Ab- solutely. I am very much about rituals; it’s probably the lapsed Catholic in me”). Both are qualities that go all the way back to the mornings of his very first job as a newspaperboy, rubber-banding the papers and setting off on his bicycle to toss them across the tract front lawns of his hometown subdivision in Santa Ana, California, the rising sun casting its long shadows in the very lee of Disney-land. “No doubt about it,” Tomaselli avers, “I’m a news junkie to this day—I love watching the history of the world unfold on a daily basis. And come to think of it, it probably does go back to those early mornings in Santa Ana.”

Junkie, perhaps, being the operative word there, for the other thing Tomaselli famously was in those halcyon days of his Southern California youth was an avid enthusiast of variously mind-altering drugs and plant extracts. Nothing too over the top, but he was hardly a mere piker, either, and the

Lawrence Weschler

Fred Tomaselli’s mosquito catch of July 19, 2013

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experiments left their lasting, shall we say, per-ceptual residue: a way of seeing the world in the fullness of its swirling dips and whorls. Indeed, the suburban-bred Tomaselli suggests that the drugs are what first turned him on to nature. By the time he was building toward his bachelor’s degree in painting and drawing at nearby California State University, Fullerton, he was spending a good deal of the rest of his time tending a small-scale backyard marijuana operation. “In order to hide my crop,” he confesses, “I built up this border of tomato and other vine plants all around the edges, and gradually those borders became ever more interesting to me than the stuff they were intend-ed to hide.” He doesn’t know about other people, Tomaselli likes to say, but for him marijuana proved a gateway into gardening.

And that love of gardening, in turn, prefigured a love of birding.

“Birding actually started for me a bit later,” he ex-plains, when I ask him about any possible parallels,

“when I was with my brother in Devil’s Punchbowl, California. We were camping right there in the middle of the San Andreas Fault, and we were going to be climbing out of the Punchbowl up into the desert where there were Joshua trees, and from there on up into the bigcone Douglas fir and in-cense cedar forests high above. My brother was a birder, and at one point he said, ‘We’re probably going to see some western tanagers, and possibly even a pileated woodpecker.’ And I said, ‘Well, what do those look like?’ So he showed me his book.”

One of those bird guidebooks?

“Yeah, one of those little field guides, like Peterson, and I spent a little time looking up those two. Now, I had never gone birding before, and up to that

Fred Tomaselli, Night Music for Raptors, 2010. Photocollage, acrylic, and resin on wood panel, 84 × 60 in. (213.4 × 152.4 cm). Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, New York / Shanghai

point, for me, birds were just like, what, dirt in the sky; I had never paid much attention to them. But I had the binoculars and all of a sudden I see this little thing and I focus in on it—it’s this brilliant little orange, yellow, and black creature clinging to a branch—and I look and go, ‘Western tanager!’ And I realized that I was understanding something about the environment that I had never under-stood before. It was really fascinating to me, this idea of a parallel reality that really only needed to be unlocked with a certain kind of knowledge, a certain kind of information, and a certain kind of enhanced optics—all of which seemed very inter-esting to me, specifically, from a painterly point of

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Fred Tomaselli, Gravity’s Rainbow (Large), 1999. Leaves, pills, flowers, photocollage, synthetic polymer, and resin on five wood panels, 96 × 240 in. (243.5 × 609.6 cm) overall. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, purchase with funds from the Jack E. Chachkes Endowed Purchase Fund, Saul Rosen Fund on behalf of Arthur G. Rosen, James Cohan, and Anthony d’Offay

view. All us artists really are just trying to wipe everyone’s eyes clean and clear, our own included; I think a lot of artists are basically saying to their viewers, ‘Pay attention to this, I find this in-teresting.’”

Attend. Only attend.

“Yeah, attend to this idea, attend to this thing, attend to this vision. But I think you’re right: gardening, too, is an apt metaphor for making art, insofar as you start with this sort of chaos of the vines and weeds and whatnot, and you take your sensibility and you cultivate this chaos into what you want it to be. You weed it and you add things and subtract things. And slowly you grow it out.”

So it’s not just “Only attend”; it’s also “Only tend.”

“There you go. You attend by tending. And so both of these hobbies of mine—these useless hobbies

that have nothing to do with art—actually had everything to do with informing my sensibility.”

Might the same be true of his love of fly-fishing?

“Well, fly-fishing I discovered a bit later in Colorado when I’d gone to do some prints up in the Rockies. Some guy gave me a quick lesson and I actually caught a fish and it was very exciting to me. The thing I love about fly-fishing is how you have to understand the entire stream ecology to catch fish. Not only do you have to understand what the fish are eating, you have to understand stream entomology so as to be able to mimic the insect—how it lands on the water, how it floats along the water. You basically have to become one with that whole entomological-predator interface. And it’s all very specific to where you are—the flows and eddies and microclimates and everything else—so it’s an interesting way of unlocking the totality of a particular ecosystem.”

Which again has a lot to do with his painting, doesn’t it?

“I think so, yeah: the focus on being there in the moment.”

And then, as well, there’s the whole beauty of the activity itself, the arcs and swells of the unfurling line. Does he think about that?

“Well, they do call us anglers, you know? Because we are creating angles in the air. Though of course it’s more than mere angles, because what’s really fascinating about fishing, and specifically fly-casting, is that you’re actually drawing a big, per-fect line in the air and your whole body has to become part of that line. You have to completely understand, as the line straightens out, how much power it has inside of itself and how to unleash that power for a forward thrust. Right? So it’s all

UNVERKÄUFLICHE LESEPROBE

Fred TomaselliThe Times

Gebundenes Buch, Pappband, 160 Seiten, 28,0 x 25,0 cm103 farbige AbbildungenISBN: 978-3-7913-4914-5

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Erscheinungstermin: April 2014