“This is great,” I whispered to Simon, though I couldn’t say what it was that I found so great: only that Helen, play acting the fearless leader, made a good case for paying attention to her and her cottony crowd. He gave me a look of really? “It’s funny. I don’t know about great, though,” he said. As he’d made clear in the car ride over, he had misgivings about the project, but after years of visiting the mountain for dinner parties, concerts, performances, and bonfires, he thought of Helen as a friend, as his neighbor, and as an important part of his stretch of the state, even if she remained to him, this boy who spent most of his time in the city, a rural curiosity.
Tiny field of legumes after tiny field of corn, “But it is hard to imagine the appeal of this to artists, really,” I admitted to him.
“Sort of. ‘Relational aesthetics,’ is what they call it.”
“So crazy that she just … That that’s it.” The term and its aesthetic prerogatives—art composed out of (and into) public social relations rather than the privacy of the white cube—had long since fallen out of fashion, at least in New York. And, in any case, I didn’t think anyone had ever used that term with much seriousness, except for the critic who coined it.
“I know.”
He nodded to Helen, who was coming over to us to give Simon a hug, hi, sweetie. He introduced me again: “You know Nick’s a writer,” he said. “He writes about art.”
She smiled. “Do I know your work?”
“I don’t think so.” I was too obscure, responsible for only a few reviews here and there, and nothing substantial.
“Who do you write for?” she asked, with a stiff smile.
“Oh, just some art magazines. Frieze. Artforum.”
“Well, now,” she said. “Tell me about it.” In fact, I had been trying to write an essay about the sculptor Greer Lankton, who, based on some cursory research into Helen that I’d done on the ride over, I suspected she had known in the eighties since they showed at the same gallery, Civilian Warfare. Lankton, who died in 1996, was best known for her strange doll-like sculptures of celebrities and downtown personalities. They were arresting in photographs but I had yet to see any in person since they had fallen into relative obscurity.
I jumped in: “You showed at Civilian Warfare … Did you know Greer Lankton?” I asked. “I’m actually writing about her work. Or at least trying to.”
“I did, I did. That’s so wonderful! Greer was a great artist,” she said, walking us down the field toward what would be the last part of the tour, a visit to a large compost heap surrounded by chicken-wire fence. “One of the best artists I ever met, someone who really focused, loved what she did.” She ticked off a few biographical lines about Lankton: that she had lived with the photographer Nan Goldin, had struggled to sell her work (and relied on David Wojnarowicz to do so early on in her career), her long-term relationship with her partner Paul, who now manages her estate. I’d read about most of this before, but Helen added new, personal weight to Lankton’s story. They were facts, facts that didn’t just come from the few books or essays I’d tracked down that mention her, but were spoken by a person who had known her, who had been her friend and who had had dinner with her, gone to her openings. But she offered little else: “Did you know her in the nineties?” I asked.
“I didn’t, no.”
The pink light, waning into the steady, dark blue of night, consumed us. Simon grinned as I got hooked on Helen’s line. “You going to move here?” he asked as we arrived at the Big Compost. I elbowed him. With her back to the heap, Helen told us that the humid pile behind her was the most essential part of the entire project, though she didn’t clarify quite how so, except that it provided both a literal site of recycling and a kind of metaphor for life on the mountain. I watched Simon as he listened intently, this pretty, half-French (through his mother), EU passport-carrying, though thoroughly Americanized boy with black curly hair, someone I didn’t really know all that well in the end, someone whom I’d met at a party, though now we were sleeping together fairly regularly and so we did sort of know one another, at least in the sense that we knew one another’s desires, but was that enough to be up here, visiting him—for the first time—at his parents’ upstate house? It felt serious. Was serious. I ran my eyes up and down him while Helen went on about rotten vegetables decomposing in un-fracked earth. Life eats itself up. The lumpy mound was flecked with bits of food, plants, much of it smeared among the piles of dirt shot through with grass and weeds, like streaked sprinkles baked into a cupcake. I turned away from Simon to stare at it. “Without this we’re nothing,” she said. She got animated as she gestured toward it, Mickey conducting the mops. Sure we got it.
That weekend, Simon and I had gone up to his parents’ place in Phoenicia with two of his closest friends, Zachary and Julia. In the car, we rarely strayed from the surface of our lives, and our conversation dwelled on the easy politics of pop and film. Julia liked Taylor Swift. Zachary did not. Julia felt Taylor’s celebrity was premised on the emptiness of white feminism, which was funny to her. Zachary didn’t understand. I nodded along in nervous agreement with both, unsure what position to stake among them (Simon, who was driving with strained focus on the road, had no opinion); I still didn’t know the three of them very well. Or they didn’t know me. To break the ice over lunch, Simon suggested we go to Helen’s place. “What is that?” Zachary said.
“It’s an artist’s residency.” Seeing Zachary’s drawn face, “But different. They’re having a dinner tonight that we’re invited to. It’s run by this woman, Helen Hunley Wright. She started it with her husband, George. He’s an artist.” He turned to me: “Do you know his work?”
“Sort of,” I said, though I didn’t know much at all, only that he was famous, and that his practice consisted mostly of complex installations: a series of tar-coated pinwheel-like structures on which he hung also-tarred objects so mangled in their production as to be unrecognizable, though occasionally they took the form of animals (cats, crows, a pig split in half); elegant arrangements of reproductions of furniture from the colonial period; excavated trees he deposited in the gallery; cabinets of organic detritus he’d collected on a beach in the South of France—all of it intelligently defended in press releases and in articles written by critic friends. Nineties stuff. He was an artist whose subject was “the environment.” I’d never heard of Helen.
“Anyway, they have these lecture nights over the summer. It’s like $30 and it comes with a meal and a party afterward. You can even stay over, if there’s room, so it might be fun. Cute boys, Zachary.” It wasn’t that Simon was interested in art—in the city, he had nothing to do with it except at those moments, usually in nightlife, when it intersected with parties and his own vaguely defined career as a stylist—but, up here, there was seldom anything to do. Helen’s was the closest to fun in the area, and the only place that attracted anyone in their mid- to late twenties.
Zachary rolled his eyes. “We’d rather go swimming,”