from the archives

Excerpt from OSMOS Issue 3

DUANE MICHALS: OPEN BOOK

The following conversation was conducted with Duane Michals in his home studio-library-cum-laundry room, in preparation for the subsequent exhibition entitled Duane Michals: OPEN BOOK at OSMOS Address in New York. The exhibition offered a rare behind-the-scenes view of Michals’ creative process by presenting dummy versions of The Nature of Desire and Upside Down Inside Out and Back Wards: Fairy Tunes for Children alongside an illustrated biography of Yves Saint Laurent published in 1983 for The Metropolitan Museum of Art; a paste-up of ALBUM: The Portraits of Duane Michals with handwritten poetry fragments he drafted on scraps and pasted into the printer’s draft; as well as a handmade artist book of colored craft paper cutouts, type, and transparencies about touring Europe. OPEN BOOK featured a rare series of photographs mounted onto small blocks entitled Sequences that the artist made in 1970 for his show at the Museum of Modern Art. Here, Michals speaks to OSMOS Magazine editors about his longstanding affair with bound volumes and his quixotic relationship to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

AUGUST 29, 2013, NEW YORK

OSMOS Tell us about how you got involved with books and why you seem to believe that your work is better displayed in books than in exhibitions.

DUANE MICHALS I was seventeen, and my mother was a clerk at Kaufmann’s department store in Pittsburgh. I went into the bookstore, which I always did, and saw this most beautiful copy of Leaves of Grass, illustrated by Rockwell Kent. It was absolutely stunning, and I began to read it. I was dazzled, not just by the way it looked, but by the content. It was the first time I read poetry where the genders were both men, and at first I thought there must be a misprint. Then suddenly I read more and realized that Whitman wrote about his love of a man and […] that even when he heard that his name had been honored by the president and thus he knew that he was accomplished and famous, Whitman wrote, “still I was not happy” but when he knew “my lover, was on his way coming, O then I was happy…For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night…his face was inclined towards me, And his arm lay lightly around my breast—and that night I was happy.” I was a virgin then, and I thought, “Wow! That’s fantastic!” The book cost five dollars, and I was making $2.50 a week from my job, so two weeks’ salary.

OM So the affair began?

DM I have always loved books. I spend more money on books than I would ever spend on clothes. That is my list of priorities. The most important book I ever bought was a first edition, mint condition Leaves of Grass. I forget when it was, but it began to spook me, and finally I sold it at auction again. I’m sorry I sold it, but it was very spooky. I was very precious about that book because it meant so much to me, and I waited for a long time. It cost a lot of money, and I was terrified that somehow I was going to damage it. I got fixated on the idea that this book was 150 years old or something, and I would be the one to fuck it up, and so I didn’t look at it for about eight years.

OM What happened when you then opened it after eight years?

DM So one day my friend Ray was over, and he was leaving to go on a trip, and I said, “Would you like to see my Leaves of Grass?” And he said, "Yeah!" So I took it off the shelf, and opened it up. I saw that when I had closed the book the last time, eight years ago, the barrier page had got crinkled, and there were marks. I thought, "Oh my god, I did it!" And I said to Ray, "You know, I’m the one who fucked up this book!” I was desolate. You can ask my partner Fred. Every night I would fall asleep and see the crinkled page. I called a conservator at the Morgan library, who gave me the name of a book restorer who was on vacation. I must have sounded desperate so the conservator said, “If you want to make yourself feel better, go get this special kind of paper,” to protect it. I got the special paper. I pulled the book down, opened it, and discovered nothing was wrong with it. I gasped. I just couldn’t believe nothing was wrong with it! So then I thought wait a minute: "What did I see?" I called up my brother, who is a shrink, and told him what happened. He said it was possible that you could hallucinate, you are so anxious that your worst fears appear. So when Ray came back a week later, and I said, “Would you like to see my Leaves of Grass?” he said, "Don’t you remember right before I went away, you showed me your copy and it was damaged and you said,’ I, Duane, fucked up the book?’” Then I became so afraid to open the book for fear that when I when I saw it was okay, that was the hallucination. So I sold it, which I really regret. I was nuts about that book. The guy who did the description at Sotheby’s was the same guy who did the original description of the book when I bought it, and according to his description it was absolutely in the same condition; there were no problems, no damage. I really don’t understand. If Ray hadn’t seen it then I could dismiss it entirely as an aberration of sorts. He corroborated my story; of course he was drinking a lot that day.

OM Well I suppose if he was intoxicated by booze, you seem to have been intoxicated by something in that book.

DM There are certain books that really affected me. When I was doing my Japanese thing, there was this wonderful book I bought it in Santa Fe in a little bookstore. Sometimes I can’t remember where they come from, like this wonderful one of Gauguin that became my bible. When I find a book that really enters my mind I just live with it, and not just for a couple days—I will go months just looking at it. I prefer my work to be seen in books, rather than the exhibitions. Exhibitions come and go; books are forever.