Acknowledgments

There is no first and foremost to thank in the creation of this show and consequential book. It can be argued that its creation was initialized in a heated dinner conversation between Robert Rauchenberg, Frank Stella and myself. Although the chicken was dry, the conversation was juicy with an argument over ways of looking and seeing. A tanned Robert drunkenly insisted while perched precariously on the tip of the tallest chair in the restaurant that his paintings where an invitation to look somewhere else. Frank , who was credited for killing painting with his black paintings but now mysteriously hired a platoon of artist assistance to continue the tradition in his name, countered Robert's thoughts on viewing with a straightforward approach: what you see is what you see. Robert had lost his temper earlier that day and punched Robert Scull in the stomach at Sotheby's without even wrinkling his suede-cloth suit. In an attempt to smooth the conversation over with the two friends and prevent a further incident, I mediated the discrepancy and WYSIWYG was born. What you see is what you get.

WYSIWYG created a whole slew of investigations for me. It wasn't until I was playing pool with a few of the boys that I brought up the suggestion of how this should be tackled visually to the forefront. We where sitting around laughing at a brilliant joke that Hans Hoffman had made about a German artist, 13 hookers, a bag of cocaine and a hotel room. He usually liked to joke about the push and pull of flat squares, so this leap from character made his telling of the joke all the more funny. Finally, James Rosenquist had the idea to make an irritating painting. The idea was simply this: to put fragments of generic imagery into space so that they’d be identified at a rate of speed and the largest, closest one would be recognized last, even though it was closest to you. It was to create a sense of something invading your aura, something that you the viewer didn’t like. Philip took his turn at pool, along with a long drink of wine. He was out here hiding with William DeKooning. The studio was in the woods down a rarely traveled road -- a temporary respite from their reputations as womanizing booze hounds. For a moment, then, there was silence. After a while, Guston said, "people you know will complain that it's horrifying. As if it's a picnic for the artist who will have to go into his studio everyday and see those paintings first-thing. But what's the alternative? You've got to see how much you can stand." I wasn't surprised when Will, who was often heard claiming that painters didn't have especially smart ideas, found a very pragmatic and simple solution to the idea of subject matter. "Make things easy on yourself," he said. "Put something right in the center, like two eyes. When you add this photographic reference, it will give you something to hold onto. When you place an eye in it, it will put you in a state of shock, and then you will know where you have to go." Wayne Thiebault, who turned out to be a total pool shark, rounded out the initial conversation about WYSIWYG by saying, "whatever you do, Wendy, be intrigued by what you can do to get some kind of relationship that may not necessarily be seen too much. Try to steal every kind of idea and use everything, and do that with the kind of vision I talked about before with as many ways of seeing in the same picture -- clear forms, hazy, squinting, glancing, staring...and even a sort of inner seeing.”

I left the woods rather tipsy and a little richer having won a few games of eight ball with my pool partner, Susan Rothenberg. It was raining out and my Volkswagen, which I had bought second hand from a guy named Chris Burden, had two tiny holes on either side of the roof that leaked. I'm not sure if it was the wine or general glee of creaming DeKooning in the last round of pool, but Suzanne didn't notice the leak, instead she noticed that everything outside the car window seemed to have the same color as the rest of the scenery. We began to discuss how you can tell one thing from the other, how the space in and around things can suddenly shift. I dropped her off at her house to work on her puzzles and called my friend, Lucas Samaras, who lost interest in the project as soon as he found out that I was only going to use his eyes in the painting. I thanked him for being himself, and then called up Barnnett to discuss the scale the paintings should be. At the time, his painting, "Voice of Fire," was creating a huge controversy in Canada. The Canadian people acted like someone had put a large shark in a tank of formaldehyde in the National Gallery because of the painting's simplicity -- and its $1 million price tag. This was especially funny because Joyce Weiland had just filled the lobby of the National Gallery with ducks and very few people even seemed to notice that. Barnnett, distracted by the Canadian circus, said, "In the end the size doesn't count, it's the scale that counts -- human scale -- and the only way you can achieve that is through content." My answers to scale and form had been found, I was halfway there.

I had just met Guido Molinari at my latest gallery exhibit. My paintings somehow always inspired him to talk about his theories on aliens, claiming that they are already on earth. (Because a virus was the only thing on our planet that could ever change the actual biological cell structure of other organic beings, he believed that aliens had in fact developed so far beyond our species that that was what they were -- a simple, one-cell organism invading our bodies.) I was reconsidering minimalism on the walk home based on what Guido had said when I saw Mike Kelly and Paul McCarthy at the bakery across the street. Both were quietly talking over a china plate of crustless watercress sandwiches and sipping tea with their pinkies extended. I was surprised to see them there, for Jeff Koons was giving a lecture on the morality of what it means to be an artist at the very moment around the corner. As Jeff rambled on how his life is defined through his responsibility on being an artist, I wandered over for a quick hello, hoping not to interrupt the crossword they were doing. Just as I was approaching the table, however, I heard "Hey Momassita! Wiggle that ass for pimping Daddy D " coming from a limo driving by. It was Dali, of course. He was stopping by the bakery to send his chauffeur in to get a loaf of bread for his head. As I was sliding across the purple Corinthian leather of his back seat I could just hear the remnants of what Mike was saying to Paul: " All the terms for understanding my work come from a specific historical lineage. I did my recent paintings specifically in response to a very particular history of painting. They mimic the way I was trained to paint, they reiterate an institutionalization. My only control of this perhaps fatalistic world view is through the overt construction of it as fiction; that’s my only power." Wow, I thought, and they are doing a crossword on Broadway musicals! I asked Dali for his thoughts on constructs of fiction. Dali had pulled a sweater over his head in an attempt to get naked and it appeared to be stuck, trapping him in what for any one else may have been an awkward position. I think he said, "you have to systematically create confusion; it sets creativity free," and then something about contradiction creating life, but he was half naked in the back of a limo with bread on his head and a rather lost driver who was searching desperately for Big Bob's House of Lobster and Eggs on the lower east side. What else could he say? I threw Dali's Peruvian monkey some extra condoms and got out of the car. Who would have thought, that contradicting constructs of fiction based in my historical lineage as an artist, would be the finale key?

With that settled, I lastly want to thank Joseph Beuys for introducing me to both my beautiful cute rabbit and current boyfriend, Bas Jan Alder, whom I am planning to take an extended sailing trip with. The ship is small but our friend Piero Manzoni, gave us a lot of tiny cans of food to eat, so we won't be hungry. Armed with the Italian food and the ocean, it will be romantic and we have so much unfinished work to do. So don't worry -- if you don't hear from us soon, have no fear, remember the immortal words of Warhol: "Art is what you can get away with!" Indeed I will be back!