ugly (if defiant is the right word for such relative unanimity), and intended as commentary on the state of the culture at large. These are lean years for young still-life and portrait painters. A frank love of the visible world and a determination to pay tribute to it won’t get you very far just now. But you can do fine in Provincetown.
What passes for a dowager on the Provincetown art scene is the Provincetown Art Association, a gracious, rambling old white building in the East End with a trove of work by the luminaries and semiluminaries of Provincetown past and present. The galleries of Provincetown are not averse to showing work that aspires unashamedly to the rendering of the visible world, but at the same time some of them also show the work of artists who might be a little too far out there for most galleries in New York. Provincetown is where Kathe Izzo can get permission to live for several days in a gallery and arrange herself as a living tableau. It is where Michelle Weinberg could make a gown in the shape of a giant pink While You Were Out slip for opera singer Debbie Karpel, who wore it and stood in the window of a gallery on Halloween night, singing arias. It is where Sal Randolph could, last October, curate a show of free art, in which dozens of artists from town participated and at which you could take anything you wanted, as much as you wanted, for free.
THE FAR EAST END
As you walk past the stores and galleries of the East End, your most dicey aesthetic interlude will occur as you pass a four-story hotel that spans both sides of Commercial Street, a minor monument to ordinariness, with its sad little swimming pool surrounded by a cyclone fence. This place is known, locally, as the green monster, though it is no longer green. Directions are often given in terms of whether the place in question stands before (east) or after (west) the green monster. When it went up over thirty years ago, the selectmen quickly passed legislation forbidding any further structures more than two stories tall.
East of the green monster you are on solid sightseeing ground. You will walk for about another half-mile past the houses that line the bay, the best of which are dreams. They are old and slightly precarious, as houses on water often are. In calamitous weather, they would be the first to go. They are not generally much ornamented; they are sensible New England houses, content with their salt-weathered shingles, their shutters and porches and dormers. They eschew fancy moldings and woodwork. There is not a cupola among them. Wooden houses (only one, Norman Mailer’s, is made of brick) subjected to this much weather are built like boats, with a bit of sway—the fact that they move slightly in strong winds is part of what keeps them standing. You can see through some of them; that is, you can look into a streetside window and see the bay through a rear window, like a living painting the owners have hung, one in which clouds shift and gulls glide by. The houses on the water in the East End, standing as they do on their sandy strip between asphalt and salt water, are not only dreams but are dreaming. With the exception of an occasional newcomer stuck in among them, they have been here long. Some of the children who played in summers on these porches eventually died of old age in one of the upstairs bedrooms. The houses here are not just unusually vulnerable to weather and tides. They are prone to an extra degree of ephemerality, as if one or two of them might, after all this time, forget that it was a house at all and simply dissolve into the bay.
HELLO HELLO HELLO
Several summers ago my friends Marie Howe and James Shannon lived in a cottage on the East End. At the end of their block, two weather-beaten houses faced each other across the street. A pair of elderly women lived in one of the houses. They were always inside, always watching television, wrapped in blankets. They ate their meals from trays in front of the TV
Two old men lived in the opposite house. We could see, through their windows, that their house was full of what I would call junk but what they, surely, considered their holdings. Their living room was full of old radios and television