Magazine Article	Articles Archive

"I am not pure anything," says Ted Titolo, who at age 73 has under his belt more than a half-century of drawing, painting, photography, and collage, with some sculpture and video tossed in for measure. Variably droll, haunting, and mordant, Titolo's creations are stylistically diverse-- his works over the years seem like they could be those not just of different artists, but different eras and cultures. In the Titoloean oeuvre, realist portrayals that could be declarative sentences stand side-by-side works abstract and encrypted enough to be utterances of Herr Rorschach or the Delphic oracle.

View our poll archive

But there's usually a few drops of lubricating playfulness in the mix. A drawing headlined "God" presents the Judeo-Christian desert deity as Bitch Queen from Hell, dishing out the Ten Commandments afresh. Commandment Six: "Fuck only to make copies of you (man on top), otherwise, no sucking, lapping, tonguing, rimming, poop fucking, sleep loads. Don't even think of touching it down there. And no tit pinching." In "American Kouros," a chapbook of text and naively-rendered color drawings, Titolo casts a quietly outraged eye on American sexual puritanism, like the gaze William Blake cast over England's early industrial wastes. Elsewhere, Titolo's work is just sheerly, exuberantly Out There-- as with a series of colorfully line-drawn fairies dancing superimposed over photos of grazing cows. Underlying it all-- if any one thing is-- there's a distinctive queer sensibility.

Titolo studied art and psychology at Bucknell in the late 1940s, and then-- deemed too mad and too homo-- was booted from the army in time to miss the Korean war. He travelled around the country acting in a children's theater production and driving the scenery truck before settling in New York. Titolo spent much of the 50s pushing paper in an office on Wall Street. Though he'd sneak off to museums at lunch hour, life as Organization Man was not Titolo's cup of tea. He'd already been hovering around New York's art scene-- then in one of its most electric periods-- so he dropped out, tuned in, and turned on. He found inspiration in the work of Jack Smith, filmmaker and performance artist whom Titolo dubs "the father of the anarchistic homo-art 60s." A role model for Andy Warhol, Smith was a meticulous craftsman and flamboyant provocateur who declared that the most crucial part of a painting was its title.

A touch of Smith's influence can be seen in a 1981 photograph of Titolo painting his own shit with primary colors-- a photo that redeems itself for more than shock-value with the title "The Birth of Art." (The squeamish will be relieved to know that the "shit" is really Crisco and crushed Oreos-- "No one could manage that kind of control," he contends.)

Titolo came into his artistic own in the late 60s when he says he gave up the hope and desire for career success. Galleries pressured artists to find some catchy schtick-- dribbling oils on canvas, painting celebrities or dogs-- and to stick with it, the better to insure predictable, salable product. He and his lover Ben Gillespie lived the Bohmenian life hand-to-mouth in a Soho loft-- at a time when that was not a contradiction in terms.

But more than just creating to please only himself, Titolo has dallied with Buddhist and Taoist notions of the "death of the artist": of not even working for oneself, but-- as in meditation-- shutting down the apparatus of self-identity, and engaging experience without questions. Maybe the meaning of the work that results is obvious, he says, maybe it becomes clear later, or maybe-- like those sprites and cows-- it stays obscure.

Titolo quotes Henry Miller: "Art is a healing process, as Nietzsche pointed out. But mainly for those who practice it. A man... [makes images]... in order to know himself, and thus get rid of self eventually. That is the divine purpose of art."

Some Buddhists aspire to Nirvanic nonexistence over life and the body. Even Buddhism, however, does not counsel thoughtlessly throwing the body away, but rather makes it a zone of spiritual practice, testing, and discipline-- the wall against which you push off onto a higher plane. Though Titolo hasn't signed on to the Buddhist program, this idea for using the body motivates some of his work. For a self-portrait "Myself as Chairman of the Board," he deliberately fatted himself up, luxuriating in obesity. As his waistline grew, Titolo says he was grateful for his lover Ben's understanding. One of Titolo's recurring motifs is the contrast between the fat man and the boy-- the former the icon of selfish, voluptuous indulgence, with its onion-layers of ego; and the latter signaling spare, clear, direct awareness.

Ben died of AIDS in 1988 and gentrification chased Titolo from New York. He lives now as close to Manhattan as he can afford-- in a housing project striped with catwalks that seem inspired by Attica or San Quentin. Hometown is a Connecticut city that-- with its six-lane roads and glass-box corporate headquarters-- mixes the worst of New England snobbishness with freeway-ridden Los Angeles. Walking a few blocks from his apartment one day last winter, Titolo was struck by a car and tossed flat onto the pavement, his shoulder smashed. An insurance settlement from his injuries may give him the wherewithal to buy a computer and explore a new world of graphic manipulation. But maybe there's no pressing need-- with just Polaroid shots of his TV screen, Titolo has created haunted, dusky, Vermeer-like stills from 70s porn loops.

Especially today, getting old often means losing the matrix of colleagues, friends, and lovers that nurtured one's life and work. But getting old-- if you can catch this particular wave-- can also dampen inhibitions and free one to follow one's fancy. As with soldiers at war, when death looms just around the bend, what's to lose? The roots of beauty lie in eros, Titolo cites Plato approvingly. Carried along by the fascination he finds in his subject, Titolo keeps working, like a medieval monk in his cell illuminating manuscripts. Drawings, paintings, and photos are still flowing, and he's 400 pages into writing a novel of sex and ideas loosely inspired by pulp romance.

Titolo's work has caught the eye of the New York's Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation, which has put the whole of "American Kouros" on its web site (www.leslie-lohman.org). But Titolo prickles at the category "gay art"-- "The gayest painting around is Michaelangelo's 'Last Judgment'-- no straight man could summon that passion," he insists. In a drawing Titolo made of a packed Manhattan parking lot, the cars seem aggressively nose-to-butt, like hound dogs in heat. Titolo's "Gay Art"-- in which a pink, campy, hyper-hung he-man hovers over a bucolic mountain glen-- is Titolo's tongue-in-cheek reply to those who want art to be chained, branded, and trademarked to a sexual identity.

Titolo is happy not to expatiate about his work, letting it speak for itself. But he offers a few interpretive epigrams. "There's an ancient tradition of those who see beyond the material. Blake was such a giant, and Walt Whitman, a more recent prophet, said: 'No one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as literary performance, or attempt at such performance, or at aiming mainly toward art or aestheticism.'"

"If you substitute 'images' for 'verses,' and 'graphic' for 'literary,'" Titolo goes on, "you will pretty much understand how I view things. By no means am I attempting to place myself in their company; but it is vision which instructs that gives me the greatest pleasure. Creating images is the practice of meditative magic, and it's in the making that true religion occurs, spiritual-material conjunction. What's left on the paper is just the residue. Later, outside the church, it's all about comparing fashions."

Author Profile:  Bill Andriette
Bill Andriette is features editor of The Guide
Email:	theguide@guidemag.com