A Private Need
Copyright © 2001 by Dave Badtke
Last Saturday I attended docent training for Manuel Neri’s A Private Need (A Private Collection), at the Arts Benicia Gallery, 991 Tyler Street, open until Sunday, July 15. Manuel Neri was at the Gallery to walk us through the exhibit, masterfully organized by Gallery Director Kathryn Weller-Renfrow, of works from his private collection, selected because they touch him in profound ways, because, as he frequently said while walking us through the Gallery, “I just love them.” The works on display are beautiful and moving, whimsical and serious, created by world-famous artists, like Neri, though his works are not in the exhibit, by Neri’s daughter, Ruby Rose (Neri has seven children), by students and artists just beginning their careers, some of whom were taught by Neri, by artists Neri admired but never met, and by artists whose names have been lost or forgotten.
(The Gallery is open Friday through Sunday, noon to 4pm, or by appointment. More information can be found on the web at www.ArtsBenicia.org or by calling (707)747-0131.)
I will not try to summarize the exhibit. I’m neither capable of doing so nor think that such an attempt on my part would be worth your time. You will need to visit the Gallery to properly appreciate the exhibit, and docents will be there to help you should you have questions either about the works on display or about the art of Manuel Neri.
But even with this information, you may find yourself saying, as you look at one of the artworks, “I wonder why Manuel Neri likes this?” And it’s exactly this question that I’d like to discuss.
Looking at the world of collectors we are—for we all collect both tangible objects, things like art, houses, rooms of furniture, drawers of stuff and shelves of knickknacks, and the intangible, things like love and hate relationships, wondrous and sad memories, skills perfected during years of education and practice—we might simplistically divide our collections into two groups: those for which we seek approbation, on the one hand, and those which we cherish irrespective of the opinions of others. The former require approbation because we do not trust ourselves to evaluate their worth, their real value in our collections; the latter we collect because we know they are priceless, that to put a monetary value on such things—to even ask whether others like them or not—would be to defame them. We question the former’s reality; we know the latter are the most real things we have.
This concept of reality became clear to me during an interview that Benicia artist Gregg Renfrow and I had with Manuel Neri at his home in Benicia a few weeks ago, before his exhibit opened at Arts Benicia. As we talked in Manuel Neri’s living room about art’s place in our lives, Neri said that art and friends are essential, that art feeds him, that we need art, that art, for him, made life real. When I questioned him further, asking him whether things like ATM machines were real, he said that such things were conveniences, but they weren’t real. The real to Neri are those things that feed his soul, those things that he cannot do without. He doesn’t need an ATM machine any more than he needed a refrigerator when, as a boy growing up on a ranch, his father built a cold box from wood and wet rags.
Neri’s concept of reality, which is embodied in his Private Need, his private collection of art, helped me to understand a TV program that I had previously found incomprehensible: Antiques Roadshow.
I very much appreciate KQED radio, especially their broadcast of National news programs and Terry Gross’ interviews. But I hardly ever find anything of interest to watch on KQED TV and was especially perplexed by the frequent—daily?—airing of Antiques Roadshow. Rarely would I turn on KQED TV, but whenever I did, it seemed as though this was the program that was on. I would watch with mystery, matched only by the perplexity I felt when I happened on professional wrestling programs (see Roland Barthes’ 1954 essay “The World of Wrestling” in Mythologies), as one person after another would question an appraiser about family heirlooms, old books and maps, antique furniture and the like. Why, I asked myself, would people waste their time lining up to have their stuff appraised? Were they doing it because they were hoping to make a fortune off the mistake of someone who inadvertently sold a famous painting for $2 at a garage sale? In this respect, was it like the lottery, or was something more fundamental on display?
Joshua Wolf Shenk, writing in the latest Harper’s, describes a scene: “During A show filmed in San Francisco, an old man brought the beer mug in which his grandmother kept her string. He learned that the mug was a rare piece from 1880 worth up to $4,000. ‘Oh, go on,’ he said, and then tears broke from his eyes and his voice choked. ‘Oh, I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘Yes,’ the appraiser said, ‘you have a real, real treasure here.’ ‘Two to four thousand?’ the man asked, his voice cracking and hard to hear. Watching this, I felt that he had been afforded a small, precious vision of his grandmother’s hands tossing string into that mug, of her lasting value.”
There can be little doubt that this mug was very real to this old man: It embodied his memories of his grandmother. He was not participating in a lottery. He was trying to share a memento that fed him through his memories. He had a story to tell that he wanted others to hear. “This is an essentially American moment, as it has to do with the essential American faith: that the material world will provide, that hard work will produce wealth, and that wealth will correspond to happiness…that true value should be recognized and rewarded with dollars.”
Yet, each of us knows not to take this valuation too far. We know that a line must be drawn. Had the appraiser told the old man that he was holding a piece of junk worth less than his carfare to the show, he probably would have dismissed both the show and appraiser with a laugh. What do they know of my grandmother, he might have thought. Certainly, he would not have devalued his grandmother because her cup was cheap. That the mug was assigned value, considerable value, confirmed his memory of his grandmother, but it was the mug itself and its connection with his experiences that were real, that fed his need.
That we are chronically confused by the monetarization of our modern liberal-democratic world, in which man’s measure frequently derives from pocket depth, should come as no surprise to us, since the pernicious conflict between true value and willingness to pay is inherent in the concept of money. Art, especially, has been subject to ever-inflated valuations: The sale of minor works by artists who have become icons is frequently front-page news either because they were sold for millions, which is expected, or were sold for fewer millions than expected, which is unexpected. Neri made the point during our interview that if someone took the $500,000 he spent on a mediocre work by a major artist and spent it instead on 1,000 works by young, unknown artists, he would later be amazed at the wonderful artworks he had collected.
That we so frequently lose track of what truly matters, of what is truly real to each of us, however, is of greater concern and more perplexing. Because each of us collects a long list of priceless objects that have little monetary value—snapshots of our family, letters and gifts from relatives, mementos of past travels, memories too numerous to count—it’s surprising that we don’t laugh more frequently at the absurdity of the monetarization we observe. (Do we not laugh because we’re afraid we’re losing out?)
Joan Brown, Neri’s first wife and a major 20th-century artist, was at the beach, sketching the family, creating playful little drawings in which a shark is nipping at heals and trying to eat people and animals. Later, when she wanted to throw the drawings away, Neri rescued them and had them framed. The need these priceless sketches feed is obvious.
114 artworks populate Manuel Neri’s A Private Need, a window on the real world of a major artist living among us. Take advantage of this opportunity to look carefully through the pane he has offered, and think, as you do, of the glory of human creativity, of the glory that is art.
- Dave Badtke can be contacted at:
www.CarquinezReview.com; Dave@Badtke.com; PO Box 763, Benicia, CA 94510; or by calling 707-745-5540.