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Teaser: The Calder Kiss
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On March 23, 1960, the poet Frank O'Hara kissed his boyfriend beneath the Calder mobile hanging in the international terminal of what is now JFK. "That's what it always needed," he wrote on the plane, thinking of the Calder and the kiss, "a little history!" This brief teaser jumps off from O'Hara's appreciation of kissing as a form of art appreciation in order to introduce the general theory of relatability that underwrites this show: namely, the idea that the way not to let an aesthetic experience go wasted is to share it with someone else.
Transcript
A Historic Kiss Beneath Calder's Mobile
00:00:11
Speaker
On March 23rd, 1960, the poet Frank O'Hara kissed his boyfriend. Maybe they kissed many times on that day. i hope they did. But the smooch I have in mind, the kiss that's on my list, is one that must have happened quickly at Idlewild Airport. Must have been stolen by ducking behind a panel, surrounded as they were by travelers coming to and fro.
00:00:31
Speaker
We know about this particular kiss because it happened beneath a monumental kinetic sculpture, an enormous mobile entitled Point 125 that Alexander Calder had designed and installed in the International Arrivals building in 1957. Once O'Hara got settled on his plane, he wrote his boyfriend, the dancer Vincent Warren, a letter, and included this note about the Calder and the kiss.
00:00:53
Speaker
That's what it always needed, a little history. The mobile is still there, which is to say that so is this little piece of history, if you want to check it out. Idlewild was renamed JFK in 1963. The calder is still aloft in Terminal 4.
Inspiration Behind 'Having a Coke With You'
00:01:06
Speaker
O'Hara was on his way to Spain, where he was doing legwork to put together an exhibition of modern Spanish painters for the Museum of Modern Art, where he worked as a curator in the international program. But the trip he was taking is important to me for poetic rather than curatorial reasons. The itinerary he would follow through San Sebastian, Irun, Andai, Biarritz, and Bayonne would become the inspiration for a poem O'Hara would write a few days after he came back.
00:01:31
Speaker
That poem was Having a Coke With You, which has come to be O'Hara's most famous poem. If you don't know it, you should stop listening to me and go read it, or you can watch O'Hara read it on YouTube. It's a swoon-worthy love poem, one of the great love poems of the 20th century, really one of the best love poems since Shakespeare's sonnets.
00:01:48
Speaker
It's also, crucially, a truly spectacular queer poem, maybe one of the best queer poems since Shakespeare's sonnets. I'm mentioning all this because the title of this podcast comes from the end of that poem, where O'Hara expresses a kind of pity for all of the great artists of history, whose work might be classed as the best that we have thought and done, but nevertheless they never had the opportunity to watch Vincent Warren walk across the room, let alone to kiss him beneath a calder.
Art and Personal History: O'Hara's Perspective
00:02:14
Speaker
The poem famously concludes, It seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience, which is not going to go wasted on me, which is why I'm telling you about it. I love this idea that what the work of art had always needed was a little history, the kind of history that comes from two lovers seeing it together at a crucial moment in and the history of their own relationship.
00:02:35
Speaker
In part, I love it because of a little bit the history of O'Hara's poem. even though on its surface that poem seems to be saying that art pales in importance to, say, the experience of having a crush. I think the fact that O'Hara writes the poem, that he ties his feelings for Warren up in his thinking about oil paintings and sculpture, artistic movements and museums, suggests that on the contrary, the point is that art might be important for many reasons, but one important one is that it provides a kind of space, a backdrop against which it's possible for us to have a crush and to share it.
00:03:05
Speaker
O'Hara had clearly been thinking about art this way, at least since the Calder kiss. And in general, I think it's a philosophy art that underwrites a great deal not only of his own poetry and criticism, but that of the friends and collaborators who gravitated around him.
The Role of Art in Togetherness
00:03:20
Speaker
At its heart, it's a commitment to the idea that the meaning of art, the meaning of aesthetic experience, is inextricably tied up within the social relations that make it possible. Art is meaningful sometimes because of the way it becomes part of our everyday lives, because it it is an opportunity to be with other people and to have the experience of feeling like you all share some kind of world, even if uneasily, even if only for a moment.
00:03:44
Speaker
Art is a way of being together that's powerful and meaningful because it's also a way of reflecting on what it means to be together. So for one thing, that means that the conversation you have with a friend as you walk out of a play, the argument that breaks out in your book club, or your kiss aren't secondary distractions from the work of art.
00:04:02
Speaker
All of that is genuinely what the work of art needs. Some paintings just don't make any sense until you see them with the right person.
Celebrating O'Hara's Influence on Art and Friendship
00:04:10
Speaker
In the interest of full disclosure, this kind of sharing, both its pleasures and its anxieties, is the subject of my new book, Relatability, Sharing, and Oversharing with the New York School Poets, which obviously I think you should read and share with your friends and loved ones.
00:04:23
Speaker
but there's something powerfully appealing about O'Hara's lessons, which, especially this year, which is the centenary of his birth, I want to talk about in other ways, and especially with other people. And so that's the motivation for this podcast, which will focus on conversations about friendship and art, and maybe about the art of friendship.
00:04:41
Speaker
Here's how it'll work. Every two weeks or so, I'll be posting a new episode. And for each installment, I will talk to a pair of friends who will come to tell us about some work of art, some aesthetic experience that they have shared together in some way.
00:04:53
Speaker
It could be an album they bonded over in high school, a painting that wowed them on a date, a movie or poem that they've argued over for years and years. The idea is that each conversation will show us a little something about the work of art and also something of the texture and history of that specific friendship.
00:05:09
Speaker
I think it's going to be a lot of fun. Marvelous, honestly. And I hope you like it.