Requiem for a master

Aaron Guadamuz

From what I heard, the worst part of the cold had past but having California blood in my veins, March in New York City was not something that I was accustomed to. It was 3 am and I was lying awake in my small room tucked away on the bottom floor of the Chelsea gallery that had hired me for a month long assignment. While I was working around the clock and there was always too much to do, I was really there because the gallery owner wanted to represent Bruce Bickford and knew that I may be one of the few that had his ear. Being the middle of the night in New York, I knew it was an ungodly hour to phone someone on the west coast, but I had to talk to Bruce. I was watching months, weeks, hours, minutes of groundwork going down the drain and could not grasp why.

Why…………..?

Bruce had participated in a show at this gallery the year before and the opening night was an odd courtship between the gallery owner and Bruce. In the months that followed, I spent hours either on the phone or in the New York office hearing about how Bruce was going to be the toast of the art world. The gallery’s flagship artist was Jeremy Blake, the video artist who was one of the pioneers of the new movement in video as fine art and had also recently worked with Paul Thomas Anderson. Much of Blake’s success came from his work with this gallery and the kind of money and notoriety being projected for Bruce was something I could not get my head around. This is something that any artist would jump at in a hot second. Well.....not any artist.

Anyone who has worked with Bruce Bickford knows that if a vision for his work is not in line with how he saw it, it probably wasn’t going to happen. The problem here is that Bruce’s vision was not something that the average person could fathom, especially in any kind of practical way. This is certainly not to say that he did not put his work in the world and work with people, but it is like turtles hatching on the beach and making their way towards the surf, for every one of them that made it into the water and swam into a world of possibility, at least a dozen were snatched by talons from the sky and mercilessly devoured.

Sitting here in a familiar hotel room about a mile from Bruce’s house trying to get a grasp on all these feelings that I am being bombarded with, I look back on that time that I left New York feeling like an empty handed failure who could only sit and watch a dream smolder into dust. I would be lying if I said that I was not tied that dream myself. Bruce’s success in the cesspool of ungodly artistic pretension that New York could be would certainly mean my own, but that is not what mattered. That was the moment that I decided that Bruce is my friend and that’s it. Everything else will lay to waste eventually anyway. Maybe he is right and this is not who we are. Learning to let go of my own hopes for his work early on was a blessing because had I held on too tightly, it would most certainly have meant years of heartbreak.

In the following years, any time I got Bruce to do something it made those tiny victories all that much sweeter. He would often ask me to accompany him on trips and I would know what he needed in his hotel room, find where the weird stuff and weapons were and sat through many pre and post screening Q and A’s laughing and cringing at his diatribe of an answer to a question that ignored what was even being asked. In places where there was a language barrier, these situations were particularly uncomfortable and almost volatile at times. Bruce would often introduce his film and then we would go somewhere and wait for it to be over. One time we were waiting in the lobby of a theater in Stuttgart, Germany while CAS’L showed inside and after about ten minutes the doors busted open and we were fast approached by a young couple who had been mildly following him around town for the past week. The man came up with a bewildered look in his eyes and had our full attention.

“I love it..........but I can’t take it.....” he said and lowered his head in shame.

Bruce shrugged and smiled. He looked up at him, smiled and said something like, “Hey....I get it….”

While Bruce’s work is undeniable in many ways it also skated the line of sensory overload and while a few people (who shall remain nameless here) knew how it could be used in small doses to great effect, Bruce only knew how to keep a cinder block on the gas pedal. In many ways all of his work, from the different handcrafted things, to the drawings to the films were paranoid ambition personified, creating scenes with as many moving chaotic parts as a feudal battlefield directed by Kurosawa, but doing it on 1/100,000,000 of the scale. He was at war with minimalism as much as he was with white flour and sugar

As far as the gigantic amount of clay work that Bruce produced in his lifetime, there is not only nothing like it artistically but also physically. Transporting it was always a risk and there was nothing out there to compare it to. I will be the first to admit that I made some major mistakes in this regard. To my family and friends who got word of it, I sugarcoated it at the time, but I will now admit that the stress from one of these mistakes made my immune system collapse and landed me in the hospital in Takamatsu, Japan. I will never forget going to Bruce’s hotel room at the time to accept full responsibility and as I sat by his bed lamenting and apologizing he suddenly cut me off.

He began to speak about a Lee Marvin movie where a soldier was under arrest and explaining why he shouldn’t be executed for disobeying orders. After hearing his reasons, Marvin ordered the prisoner released and made him a part of his team. The reason was because he “defended an indefensible position”. This was Bruce’s way of telling me, “Yeah, you fucked up but you’re on the team because you’re willing to accept and do things that many won’t”. Any close friend of Bruce’s can attest that you often found yourself defending the indefensible.

There are things about my friend that I know and I would never reveal, but I do believe there is something that I can say about the bigger picture of his life. Over the better part of two decades I grew close to Bruce and from my perspective it was because I knew that while it often wasn’t pretty, and could be downright infuriating, I will never again encounter a mind like this one. It made sense why he thought almost every movie sucked and almost every animator or band was subpar. He was looking at much more than any of us were and there were just too many things that he could not ignore. I can’t tell you how many popular bands assumed he would jump at the chance to make videos for them or artists who would tell me how much Bruce would love their stuff only to have me tell them nicely that it would likely not happen. Inside the real answer was something I could not actually say, and that is that he would fucking hate what you do.

I am also an “artist” on that list and I learned a long time ago that this is not something to take personally, it’s just how it is. I rarely, if ever, voluntarily showed Bruce my work. It’s not even that he doesn’t like it, its just that he’s not capable of liking it. He knows too much about things that you and I shouldn’t or at least should be thankful that we don’t. Bruce was born into a situation in which he would come to know and even embrace darkness in ways that children are not supposed to. It destroyed many of those around him and often brought wolves to the gate, but he made his way through and outlived them all in relentless pursuit of trying to explain what may not be explainable.

Many admirers of his work have written about how difficult it is to understand this work but it is fascinating in its scope and technique. The truth is that it is not that you don’t understand it, you just aren’t capable of understanding it. Bruce was in touch with forces that we will all leave this earth without knowing. I may have gotten a little peek behind this curtain but I have the feeling that I am decades away from having any idea.

When I heard he was rushed to the ER, I got a one way ticket and to his bedside as soon as I could. When I got to him, he was able to speak and I tried to talk to him as much as I could about those things that we always did…..old B movies, fun times, people and stories from the past….anything to keep us distracted from this reality that I had feared for so long.

While I often said that he may outlive us all, I also knew that this day would likely come. In Bruce there are a number of things that I have to face losing. I would never again look in fascination at one of his new drawings as he explained what was going on. I would not be able to sit there and talk in gory detail about home remedies for venereal diseases or actors you have never heard of. I would never again get to walk an unpaved path through a forest in search of a mystery or hunch about what may lie ahead. Most of all, I would lose that voice………that voice…………

……..that voice that has told me so many things. While subscribing to any ridiculous indoctrinated belief system was out of the question, Bruce had his own outlandish brand of faith. He believed in possibilities that would have never crossed my mind and now I can’t help but believe in them myself. I must now close the most complicated and complex window into the past that I have ever known and try and retain what I had the privilege of seeing while it was open.

On the second day with Bruce in the hospital, I picked up that familiar blue folder that he took everywhere along with a .003 mechanical pencil for fine detail. There were only two pages of drawings and one had a huge coffee splash across it. I looked them over, making sure he could see me as I did. He always loved people admiring his drawings. I put them back in the folder and went to his side. I leaned in and said.

“Ya know Bruce…half the world would kill to be able to draw like that…..”

He shrugged and said, “Oh…well….I don’t know”.

I gently put my hand on his arm and said, “Well… I know, Bruce………….I know…”

I do know, Bruce………I do know………

Maybe more than anything I have ever known.