Yesterday Eric Doeringer posted his discovery of his bootleg Damien Hirst spot painting among the works John Waters has promised to the Baltimore Museum of Art. It was on view at the museum in 2022-23 in a selection—curated by Catherine Opie and Jack Pierson—from nearly 400 works from Waters’ collection. It hung next to a Warhol Jackie-style grid of Jonbenet Ramsay portraits by Eric Luken. While being perfect objects on their own terms, these two works help situate Waters in the place, moment, and discourse of art. For the Doeringer, that was on the mean streets of early 2000s Chelsea. For the Luken, that was probably an emerging art fair. [His only show (so far?) was with Joel Mesler & Daniel Hug’s short-lived LA gallery that rode the 2000s art fair wave.]
Speaking of short-lived collabs you never hear about, Waters also has the best/only thing you can really collect from one of the greatest artworks of the 20th century: a flyer made by Jonas Mekas for the world premiere of EMPIRE (1964), by Andy Warhol and John Palmer.
If you think I’m leading with all this to head off criticism that I’ve become a one-topic fanblog, you’re only partially not wrong. Because this is all stuff I found along the way while trying to get a legible image of the work beneath Doeringer’s painting, which is a scrap of paper on which Cy Twombly wrote his address.
Just as the Erics’ paintings, this object has EXIF data embedded in it, hinting at how and where it came from. The way Italy tracks the edge of the paper, which was already torn, a literal scrap of something. It looks like there are puncture marks from the pen, as if it was written on something soft, a tablecloth, maybe even Nicola’s back.
If I were Columbo, I’d say John Waters was a celebrity guest at a Gagosian dinner—1994 was a big one—where he offered to send Twombly something. This was not a casual conversation, but the culmination of a years-long plan. Waters pursued Twombly’s note with the calculated fervor usually only reserved for revenge. If Waters’ entire collecting career was all a ploy to get this Twombly scrap, I would not be surprised.
At the entrance to the BMA exhibit hung two works of various recognizability: a portrait of the filmmaker by Opie, and a 1991 drawing by the artist’s father, John Waters, Sr.
In his audio tour for the show, Waters said when he showed him his new series of Twombly prints, V Greek Poets + a Philosopher (1978), his father exclaimed, “You bought that? They saw you coming, boy.”
When his dad wrote the C-R-A-Z-Y in mocking response, Waters said, “What he didn’t understand is he wrote it exactly like Cy Twombly, my favorite artist…Really hard to do. He did understand it. He just didn’t realize it.” It really is hard to do. Tacita Dean spent thirty years and a night at the museum trying to write like Twombly, and finally kind of gave up. And let’s be real, Waters, Sr. did not quite nail it. But that shouldn’t stop his son from dragging him into the museum anyway. I mean, it worked for Phung and Danh Vo.
What it ultimately does is lock in Waters’ appreciation for art that makes people uncomfortable, even if it’s just because of the bad [sic] handwriting. In 2009, Waters spoke at the Smithsonian American Art Museum on Twombly’s 38-drawing series, Letter of Resignation, an event which is only documented, it seems, in a blog post. Waters apparently gave hilarious interpretations of the letter writer’s drafts, while noting that his housekeeper Rosa doesn’t like Twombly either: “They have the nerve to put this in a book,” he said she said, about the Letter of Resignation catalogue Waters keeps by his bed. He said Twombly made “such confident work it makes people mad.” And in a shoutout to the haters, Waters said: “This kind of contemporary art hates you too, and you deserve it.”
I will, of course, be looking for a recording.