The Saga of Bird and Brick
Linda Woolford
Forty years ago, some of us said murder. Some said suicide. Still, we shared an image: long black hair flying upward as she flew down from the 34th floor window. Some added fire—hair smoldering, crackling, flames shooting from each spread finger. We were all artists, embellishing. Some thought she had freed herself, released like a caged bird in those last moments of flight. Some thought she was damned, and had hurtled to her destiny with the pavement. Really, he was the one falling, she rising, on this we agreed. To some of us, her work was the more significant, eclipsing his. In it she was often naked. Sometimes Welch’s grape juice dripped from her thighs, her breasts, her buttocks, simulating blood. Both artists were defined by a war and political upheaval. Both created their own myths. Let’s call them Brick and Bird.
Brick was slow and deliberately poetic. The materials used to create his work were pedestrian: interchangeable units of floor tile, brick, railroad ties. Serial systems. One laid down after the other, creating a flat sculptural space. A new use of space. Revolutionary. He was a renouncer, a de-decorator, but the barrage of words discussing his work was legend, and, some of us thought, worthy of the weight. His war was Vietnam, but he was deferred because of plantar fasciitis—provable. And a rather peculiar turn of mind—opinion. Yet he acted like he’d been there, seen and done terrible things, and so needed the calming repetition—one after the other after the other. Even into his sixties he wore army fatigues. His carefully constructed outer self seemed to contain vast empty space. He had a stripped-down way of seeing things as if they were in the act of forming. You never knew when he might strike; he was so still. Except when drunk. We’d see him at the bar where the Abstract Expressionists used to hang. The Cedar Tavern. When his cups were overflowing, he was a loose talker, inhabiting the spirits of those old drunks, words spewing, dripping, flinging like one of Pollock’s best. Often, one of us would have to take him home to his apartment on the 34th floor. Unless he was with a new lady.
Bird was his last new lady. He met her as his star began to slip. But he was iconic, his place in art history assured. He could still pull in the big bucks, still the Old Guard’s critical darling. She was thirteen years younger, hard bodied with a wide swoosh of hip and a mouth that didn’t need booze to flap. But she liked the booze as much as any of us. Her work hit us in the gut—the way she used her body as a canvas, as if it could risk all that beauty and pain, as if it were hers. Naked, mud-encrusted, dotted with feathers and necklace of animal teeth, spread-eagled on a pile of leaves: Documented. Photographed and performed live in Battery Park or the bogs and swamps of Long Island. Ballyhooed as the pinnacle of Feminist Art by Lucy Lippard and the rest of the feminist art critics (whose own moment had come). The images on Bird’s invitations bothered us and got us hustling from our Brooklyn walk-ups, our squats, our cold-water and basement flats to SoHo to witness her acts of provocation. The pageantry of a woman owning and displaying herself—destruction and resurrection. An act of coming right up to the edge, naked and faux-bloody, her terror and power undeniable. Her work, built of bone and blood. At her openings and after-performance parties, cleaned up and dressed in a tight tube of red spandex, her face full of dare, we embraced and applauded her. She was a crusader we would follow anywhere.
Three weeks after Bird’s death, a Rising Artist and his sculptor wife created a ruckus during his opening at an up-and-coming gallery on Broome Street. The Rising Artist ripped his wife’s blouse; she kicked his shins. He called Brick a murderer. She castigated Bird, defended Brick—her former mentor and past lover. The Rising Artist shoved her into the street, locking the door. The gallerist closed down the exhibit, exiled him from her stable, then took his wife on, and she became the Rising Artist. Her husband went to live with his mother in Schenectady. Found work as a pipe-fitter.
Some others of us thought Bird a con artist and a bitch. When we saw Brick look at her, his face suddenly red, engorged with desire, we feared she might put this renowned artist in his grave before the booze did him in. Sometimes, after performances, her skin would still be tinged with grape juice as if the history of her bravado acts were tattooed on the flesh. Our attention caught for a moment, we wondered if maybe there was something authentic. Coming to our senses, we denigrated her as just another talentless exhibitionist, albeit with a great body and decent face, and not too stupid, either.
Others thought he the exhibitionist, but with a clever cover— the humble, inert choice of materials, the lauding by all the best critics—but, really, weren’t those lines of brick on the floor shooting from one side of the gallery to practically out the door onto the street like one gigantic lying-down boner? If we said as much, he’d reply curtly, just bricks. And if we were drunk enough and persisted, he would insist, no metaphor here, no innuendo. Seriously, folks, bricks.
At that point, some of us couldn’t help but glance at his crotch.
She was an exploding star. Closing our eyes, that’s how we all saw her, no matter whose side we were on. She came from one of those Caribbean islands, a not-so-rich, but imperious family fleeing a Dictator whose henchmen had murdered her father. Or so she said. Her mother was detained in Miami, while she, a child of eight, was shunted among a series of relatives, all living in Montana—Montana of all places! The state, oddly (or tellingly!), with the most suicides. It made her fierce. Independent. Made her make things that made us want to look away. Impossible. She cast herself as an orphan, a stepchild in a land of merciless and chilly space.
Was that why she was attracted to him? That he created works suggesting endless space? Patriarchal space she wanted to fill and warm and then destroy?
Or was it his position? What he could do for her.
Months after her death, artists and critics picketed MOMA, which was in the midst of planning Brick’s third retrospective. An up-and-coming Feminist Critic threw the contents of a can of jalapeño-laced tomatoes in the face of the Head Curator who’d stepped out to reason with the protestors. The juice stung, momentarily blinding him. He didn’t press charges, but the Critic fled the country, found her way to Italy, and was never heard from again. The Head Curator, unable to quell the crowd, to convince them, was demoted to assistant.
They met at the opening of another Renowned Old Artist whose humongous slabs of macho steel rested against each other as if they were tired old prizefighters. No bracing, no soldering, no scaffolding, just resting, holding each other up. We knew there wouldn’t be an accident, none of us would get flattened that night, the metal pieces were poised precisely. Still, tension wired the air. Bird added to our edginess by leaning—no, slumping—against one of the slabs, pushing against it. Eventually, the gallery guard stopped nagging. The Renowned Artist never even noticed. But Brick did. He sidled up to her and contributed all his weight onto the slab and we thought, “Uh oh.” They stayed there leaning and drinking and smiling for the longest time. Then he whispered in her ear and she punched his arm, laughing. With her little hands, the nails broken and chewed, dirt wedged beneath them, she slapped his chest. He lifted her hair, wrapped his fist around it, making a ponytail. His knuckles shone white through the wire of dark curls. He kissed the nape of her neck, smack on top of her pineapple tattoo, then pulled those tangled strands so tight her head snapped back.
Her sass mouth. Her “fuck you” postures. The way she put down her lovers in public, and the way she bragged she was the best currently living artist, ever. Anyone would eventually want to hurl her from a window, yes?
No. Her smolder and provocation couldn’t destroy him, so she destroyed herself. His careful, spare placement of elements led to the quiet thrill—and undeniability—of his artistic genius. As artists said of Picasso and painting, they said of Brick, “After him we can never make sculpture the same way.”
Years after her death, the Renowned Artist of the Metal Slabs tried to break his contract with his gallery. No longer able to bear the increasing stridency of the Influential Gallery Owner who used every opportunity to besmirch his old friend Brick and bemoan Bird’s death, the Artist used the key the Gallery Owner had given him when he and she were lovers to sneak into the gallery at midnight. He removed all traces of himself, leaving a scathing note, threatening to take half her artists with him. She successfully took him to court. He remained with her gallery, but she never gave him another show.
Bird moved into Brick’s apartment. Most afternoons they were spied as they weaved through the homeless on the Bowery, passing the rage of trash-can fires, trying to reach the bars, dodging junkies in the East Village and lower East Side. What were they looking for? How did they get any work done? But by then, Brick was mostly writing poetry on bar napkins and Bird was sorting through slides, putting together proposals for a Rome Prize, NEA and Guggenheim grants. They sat, often without talking, elbows propped on bar or table in the comforting gloom, as if frozen in a Hopper painting. Occasionally he’d reach to stroke her arm, cup her ear while she leaned heavily into his hand, her lids slowly closing as if finally, finally she was able to rest. She’d run fingers along his chin, down his throat to its hollow, lingering there as if to feel his pulse. With no one watching (or so they thought) they were like actors backstage, shed of roles. But if a buddy of his came in the bar, they quickly became the couple we knew, bickering, taunting. He’d often try to put her in her place, adept at art speak, adept in the art of trying to make her feel stupid. But she had no interest in art speak, often getting up to put money into the juke and dancing by herself in the candy-colored lights streaming from the music machine.
That night Brick was tired, didn’t want to go out to the bars, didn’t want Bird to go by herself. Their first fight of the evening. He was becoming violent. She gave in; they rented some movies, picked up a couple bottles of wine. Some chicken wings and hot poppers. Later, on the phone in the bedroom, leaning against the closed door, she whispered to her friend Lily that she was afraid of him, was going to leave. His work sucked, she said, had totally gone downhill. The sex was pathetic. She wanted to know if she could stay with Lily for a while. He was right outside the door, ear pressed against it.
That night Bird was tired, didn’t want to go out to the bars, didn’t want Brick to go without her. Their first fight of the night. He gave in; rented some movies and picked up a couple bottles of wine. Some chicken wings with hot peppers. She took a bottle into the bedroom, kicked the door open. Called Lily from the phone on the nightstand, talking crazy. Told her Brick was going to leave her and that she was at the end of her rope, getting nowhere with her own work. Spoke hysterically, loudly enough for him to hear, even with the movie Cabaret blaring away in the living room.
They both hated the cold, often wearing sweaters or turtle-necks on warm summer days, yet Brick told the cops the bedroom window had been opened earlier, despite the raw, wet April night. The place was over-heating, he said, although the radiators were cool to the touch when the police arrived. This is what he told them: They’d been drinking, and then they fought over the importance of her work, of his. She was distraught; the NEA grant didn’t come through, the Rome Prize a fantasy. He admitted to being unkind about the quality of her work, its importance. He told her he might want to leave her. She threw an empty wine bottle at him (although no broken glass found), then ran into the bedroom, and before Brick could stop her, jumped out the window. Lily, the last person to speak to her, was in shock and didn’t remember whether Bird whispered or shouted. Couldn’t remember exactly what Bird had said. This is not opinion or speculation. It was in the newspapers.
He was questioned, the death scene investigated. He was never arrested. No trial, and soon we were divided. Split apart like an axe-rent rock.
We know that she never would’ve committed suicide, that she was scrappy, brilliant, and resilient, that she created work not seen before, work threatening the male-dominated status quo, that she was courageous and willing every day to put her life, her art on the line, that her work was about to explode and be recognized internationally for its revolutionary brilliance, that the window was four and a half feet off the floor and she would’ve needed a chair to boost herself up (none found beneath it), that she’d told people in addition to Lily she was planning to leave Brick, that no one was able to corroborate that Brick had confided he was going to leave her, that everything about her threatened him: she got under his skin like an infection; he could not bear her rising prominence. She was the New Guard. He was a mean and violent drunk.
We know that she was an opportunist willing to use her body to lure and exploit the power and position of a famous—albeit aging—artist, that she was a flash in the pan, damaged goods, probably bipolar, maybe schizoid—which we had sympathy for, knowing her back story and all, but still she was unstable—and when drunk, mean and violent. A narcissistic man-eater capable of using suicide to frame and ruin Brick’s life, destroy his reputation.
We wonder how long the fight went on before he grabbed her long hair, dragged her across the bedroom floor, and opened the window? Did she try to escape, run back towards the door only to be captured again and flung into the night? What did she feel in those long, last moments?
We wonder did he feel guilty for not stopping her from jumping? Would he now seriously drink himself to death? Become a shut in? Stop working? How would this affect his reputation? His future exhibitions, the sales of his work?
Forty years later, in California, there’s finally a retrospective of Bird’s work. On the East Coast, opening a few months later, Brick’s sixth. The streets of SoHo, Chelsea, continue to divide us like a river, and we avoid each other. But when we come face to face, some still accuse him, others shout his innocence, as if her death is fresh in our minds. Artists against gallerists, critics against artists, curators against art historians. But we need each other, depend on each other, create images together. We cannot see the work of one without seeing the work of the other: Her naked body, ghostly, avian, half-buried beneath his bricks, his tiles, his railroad ties. The blood is real this time.
