Wendy Brenner on framing (literal; metaphorical)
Monday reading #39
Monday Reading is my weekly recommendation of something I’ve found thought-provoking or fascinating. Sometimes it is about something I have read. Sometimes it is about television or food or music or projects I care about supporting. Sometimes I do not send it on Monday. Please share with anyone who might like the vibes!
This week, I’m sharing Wendy Brenner’s “Don’t Bleed on the Artwork: Notes from the Afterlife,” an essay about (“about”) her time working at a frame shop in Evanston, Illinois; it ran in the Spring 2024 issue of the Oxford American. She took the job, a kind of apprenticeship, when she moved home to take care of her aging mother.
I actually really wanted to work in a frame shop when I was in graduate school, and I loved her descriptions of the steps involved in framing. The clarity of the process, the physicality of it, the absorption it engenders, and the muscle memory it builds were all part of the appeal to me at a time when nothing seemed as orderly. As she writes,
I work six or seven hours without breaks. I can’t seem to explain this to my friends. Momentum, focus. While I’m cleaning glass, inspecting endlessly for specks of dust or lint, using a marker to cover a flea-sized chip on a frame, time falls away. Everything outside the moment falls away, like a blurred background in an Impressionist landscape. No, I don’t want lunch, no I don’t want to sit down.
The essay’s full of running lists (I love a running list) that mimic the rhythm and flow state of the work.
On the wood stored in the basement:
Ash, oak, pine, eucalyptus, ramin. Finger-jointed wood, wood made of milled scraps. Narrow, wide, flat, scooped, beveled, painted, stained.
Her boss’s biography:
He’s Wolfman Jack, WKRP’s Johnny Fever; he’s Oscar the Grouch with the worst smoker’s cough I’ve ever heard … He’s a rebel, an old hippie, or maybe a young one? A long-hair, not a suit … He loves vintage sci-fi comics and Robert Crumb and Lichtenstein and Dali and Hieronymus Bosch.
The stuff stashed around the work room:
Inside are multitudes of everything: the rainbow of four hundred frame samples on the walls, those upside-down V’s we all recognize; a long side counter covered with tape guns, staple guns, spray bottles, glass gloves, art gloves, rolls of brown kraft paper and plastic bags and hanging wire, labeled and unlabeled drawers of hardware, hangers, screws, tools—and everywhere, littered about the store like ballpoint pens on every surface: razor blades.
On an artist whose work her mother hung in her nursing home room:
In Rodo Boulanger’s work, children are often aloft: riding bicycles or animals, leaping after balloons, sitting on high ledges, their feet always dangling above the ground.
The art that she frames:
Landscapes and dreamscapes, towers, harbors, mountains, forests, icebergs, beloved anonymous houses, beloved anonymous pets, psychedelic visions and graffiti, diplomas, hockey jerseys, vintage bicycle parts, photographs of every possible object or being, doing every possible activity. A little pencil line drawing of Warhol’s famous Absolut vodka bottle, his signature scrawled at the bottom. A dentist’s certificate of appreciation for his work caring for “the oral health of Holocaust survivors.” An orange cartoon brontosaurus riding a tiny scooter through downtown Chicago. A pack of fierce-faced bicyclists racing along a cliff, in an advertisement for the 1953 Tour de France. Director John Waters grinning in his favorite pink Comme des Garçons jacket (“that looks like your aunt’s bedspread with the little balls on it,” he told GQ).
These lists become currents to carry you through the story, and I really admire this strategy. Let me know what you think.
SOME BUSINESS:
Chicagoans, save the date! On Saturday, August 17, I’ll be doing a reading at the Chicago Cultural Center with my friends Marc Fisher and Brett Bloom from Half-Letter Press. I’ll be talking about “Jail on Wheels,” my latest essay on a bizarre midcentury law enforcement experiment, & Marc will be reading from Prisoners’ Inventions, a newly reprinted & expanded “collaboration with our late friend Angelo about the many things he observed during the course of his long incarceration in California.” The event (free!) will be around 4 or 5 PM. More details to come.
PS: In response to the very reasonable question “what’s up with this newsletter,” I’m … working on it. If you are a paid subscriber, thank you. It makes a very big difference to me. I’d love to send you a copy of “Jail on Wheels.”
More filthy commerce: I designed a t-shirt to raise money for Watermelon Relief & another one because I wanted one for myself. (If you don’t want a donation on your behalf and just want the shirt(s), use the code ATCOST at checkout for 20% off.)
