Introduction

Introductory Note to The Vase

"We cannot go on prostituting the idea of the theater, whose only value lies in its excruciating, magical connection with reality and with danger."

Antonin Artaud, The Theater of Cruelty (First Manifesto)

The novel you are about to read attempts to explore the artistic moment in New York City occurring and/or developing after World War II in which several forms of art simultaneously exploded with a freedom and vitality never before witnessed. Included in this explosion was the Abstract Expressionist movement in painting which featured at its height Jackson Pollock's "drip" paintings for which he would become famous/infamous by the early 50s. At the same time many jazz artists began working in small groups creating bebop, in some ways as abstract and revolutionary and free and powerful compared to the big band sounds from which most of the practitioners came from as the painters' from their more realistic training. Charlie Parker would become the star of that movement. Less well known and actually later as far as the theory was the "projective verse" of Charles Olson, which promoted the concept of poetry being placed on the page as a reflection of the heartbeat and the breath of its composer. As far as theater goes, Antonin Artaud, an actor, playwright, theorist and famous madman from France wrote a polemic called, "The Theater and Its Double," from which the above quote was taken in which he insisted theater had to be dangerously alive and of the moment instead of museum pieces.

The license I used most for this fiction is the narrator's chosen art medium: film. Though avant garde filmmaking had existed since at least the 1920s, the most abstract, gestural work waited until the mid fifties for Stan Brakhage to invent and explore.

This moment has interested me for many years. However, creating a fictional world from it became problematic. I worried about the trap of pretention which seems to capture any attempt to dwell in the world of the artist. Whether too intellectual, effete or aesthetic to avoid being annoying, I'm not sure, but most endeavors fail. Attempting to dodge the pitfalls, I placed the narrator on the edges of the movements instead of immersed within them. While witnessing and creating art is important to him and to the narrative, his other life as a mistress's bastard son and a gigolo became the central concern. His youth and rebelliousness I think helps power through the possible trap. As much as artists are marginal figures in our society, being a young gigolo and an artist makes the narrator even more marginal and I hope more interesting.

--maxicue