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10/10/2005: "Jenga" by Walter King
I’m not sure the life of an artist ever achieves what most people call normal. Although that is the best way to describe my life at this moment. For me normal means I’m back home and overwhelmed by all the things that need doing that I neglected while on my sabbatical and other travels during the last year. I’m always deferring maintenance, stealing time from things I should do so I can have time to paint or prep a show or attend some conference or exhibition. Being an artist is a balancing act whether full-time or part-time. In 2005 I’ve really only slept in my own bed about 75 nights out of a possible 255 at this writing. When I left for NYC in January my studio was a chaotic mess of neglect both upstairs and down. I paint upstairs and keep a woodshop/workshop downstairs where I build frames, prepare board and canvases and do a lot of the maintenance on my house and car. Between my son who also uses my studio and myself nearly 8 years of putting off the big spring cleaning had piled up tools and bits and pieces of project leftovers and potential projects that never went anywhere and spilled over onto every flat surface available.
I have 5 giant painting crates left over from a show in Seattle that I can’t seem to part with hoping to use them again one day for that big show in the sky. There is almost enough plywood in those crates to build a small house. And the outside of the building has a farmers variety of wood and metal, bins full of old pvc pipe, pieces of scrap aluminum, wire mesh from the garden, an old tiller for my sail boat and lighting fixtures torn out and replaced upon failure leaning here and there…thank God I live in an area where there is no homeowners association to tell me to clean up my yard, paint my house and mow the grass. In between trips this summer I have managed to put up rafters for a long awaited studio ceiling, install vents in the attic crawlspace to alleviate moisture and get the ceiling panels up to keep the insulation from falling down around my ears this winter. Soon I can begin again to paint. -Haven’t made art seriously since May. 
All I am really trying to do is to clear away a reasonable amount of work so I can paint. Even bought a big 48 x 60 canvas a few days ago. I have a large painting idea based on some sketches that I’d begun while in New York. The idea needed a certain time to gestate and I just ran out of time before I had to come home. I’d like to get started on that so I can show it at the College in November. It is based on a scene that took place at the Mark Bar one night towards closing time. Several of the late night regulars were killing time playing Jenga. It was interesting how everyone interacted as they pulled and pushed the small pieces of wood from the ever critically balanced tower until it eventually came crashing down on the bar. The game began to suggest all sorts of theatrical and metaphorical relationships about taking risks, survival, economic success and failure, society, politics, friendships and betrayal…
Sitting down at the other end of the bar, watching, sketching and trying to see what I was doing in the low bistro light, I thought of several compositions of people playing table games of various sorts: great paintings by la Tour, Chardin, Cezanne and Balthus . Jenga is a kind of self aggrandizing roll reversal. We all play games (‘the Game’) in one way or another no matter how much we try to avoid it. We do our best to control our positions in life and the things around us when ever we can hoping to better, or at least maintain, our circumstances. Whether we realize it or not, and we usually do it from behind a thin curtain of civility, we are in competition with each other for our little bit of space on this planet. If you don’t know the game, Jenga is played using small bars or blocks of colored wood or plastic (most likely ivory and jade in the beginning--I think Jenga came from China) stacked criss-crossed three at a time in layers creating a kind of tower of loose blocks. As you remove one block you replace it on top of the tower. As the tower grows it also becomes less stable building the inevitable ‘fall’ of the house into the game. If Monopoly is about money then Jenga is about life. It is more abstract and allows larger references. I was fascinated of course by the tower image. The tower, one of my regular icons in the last few years since 9-11, has become kind of an obsession. I’ve done a long running series of towers called the “House Series” begun around the time of the tragedy in 2001 and have page upon page of variations on the theme in several different sketchbooks. I began to think about what those wooden pieces really represented, money? Property. The lives we build, castles in the sky, built part by part, brick by brick often teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, calamity and failure-- sometimes, if rarely, succeeding by taking the greater risk. The idea that life is fragile and what we build can be so easily knocked down by another man’s politics, or natural disasters (my brother in law was, at the moment of this writing, battening down his house in Houston as Rita comes to shore), or disease, or even our own incompetence and stupidity. I did a few detail sketches substituting the small wooden planks with figures. 
I thought of what I knew of the people playing the game there in my favorite Brooklyn bar. They were all friendly acquaintances, even sticking up for each other when things at the bar got a little edgy or dodgy especially if the crowd included more strangers than locals. All but one were certainly from Judeo-Christian beginnings whether, Jewish, Catholic or Protestant active or apostate. Only one seemed to have some Islamist leanings. Two were black, four white. Two were originally from the South, two were New Yorkers from Brooklyn and the Bronx. One was from Connecticut. One was an assistant chef; one a bartender with an art degree ; one was studying to be an engineer while working full-time for the city waterworks, one played guitar in a rock band, one a graphic artist from who knows where. And the last guy, well I didn’t know what he did, he was a kind of fuzzy figure at the bar. I saw him on the street at all times of the day and can’t image what kind of job he has or business he runs. He always seemed the most solvent and I imagined shady deals and guns. Yet he was courteous and kind in all the interactions I had with him. Five were playing the game while one, drunk and tired from a long day, slept half way down the bar between me and the players. They, all but the shady one, were always hurting for money, some worked two jobs or just scraped by on one, often drinking cheep $2 cans of domestic beer instead of the more expensive imports, those who smoked often rolled their own, rode bikes, one rode a skateboard and of course all depended primarily on the subway system to get around instead of driving cars--not one of them had owned a car in years, several had never owned a car and didn‘t even have licenses. These are the basic stuff of a generation just trying to get off the ground, maybe on hold in their late 20’s. The idea that this tower represented people added just the bite I felt while watching my young friends dangerously slipping one block from under half a dozen and finding the right place to balance it on the stack above. In this game they were the movers and shakers rather than the peons that they and most of the rest of us really are in this world.
I paid attention to how the friends formed alliances and reformed those alliances as the game matured, the balance becoming more delicate and critical as the tensions rose and progressed towards that inevitable and unavoidable moment. The fall having been predetermined by the fist block removed at the beginning of the game. I began to wonder how often we really recognize the result of our actions, how well we think through and plan our moves, how the other players and observers will be affected. At that moment the tower came crashing down again and everyone shouted “Jenga!” and counted and argued the score. Both frustration and tense laughter filled the smoky bar. Everyone paid their tab and staggered home. They would be back the next night to play again. Most of what happened that night would be forgotten but later in the week I was still hearing about who had cheated or betrayed the others. Small lingering animosities smoldered until the next time they played and had the chance to get even.
Me? I’m just now counting the real cost of my time in NY. Was it worth it? Of course it was. I got to observe a little bit of history as I always do on my trip. History is simply the life we lead. It is the river we swim in whether upstream or down. There is of course big and small history…those giant defining moments and the general milieu, the common life. It is as important to me to witness the common life as the big momentous. It is the common life that sets the context.
Tomorrow I’ll do a little tuck point on the masonry in a few key places so my bricks don‘t begin to come loose. Eventually, before the cold and wet Ohio fall sets in, I hope to rebuild the brickwork on the wall of my front porch that has been caving in for the last few years. My wife cut back the bushes out front while I was gone and now it is obvious I can’t defer it any longer. The studio is built of wood and bad drainage has rotted the base beams causing the walls to settle making it look like a sway back horse, I’ll have to jack up part of the framework and put in a brick foundation before more wood rots and the whole building comes crashing down. I was planning to get to all that this summer even though I wasn‘t really in the mood. Thankfully, other opportunities interfered. And now it must be done between teaching and painting and other duties. But today I have to crawl up on the roof of my house (I hate heights as I get older and my balance is a bit more, shall we say, compromised) to caulk some flashing around the plumbing vents that have been leaking before I teach this afternoon. And now that I mention it I still have a few bricks to lay in the basement. I like bricks. They remind me of the story of the 3 little pigs who built their houses of straw and wood while the hero built a house of brick…the brickwork will raise the floor level by 3” to keep any little leaks from becoming a smaller version of New Orleans. I’d never realized how I wrap myself in my art and make my art from the detritus of my life brick by brick. 
