Lee Bontecou's retrospective has been in LA and will be in NY this summer, and then in Boston this fall. I walked out of the library with the catalog for this show last week, and have been thinking about Bontecou quite a bit since. She is a sculptor, now about 72 or 73, who was famous with the abstract expressionist men in the 1960s and dropped out of sight for thirty years. She was working and teaching, raising a daughter, but not showing. The catalog spans her years of work, about forty-five of them. The book is standing open to a piece she worked on between 1988 and 1998. It hangs from the ceiling, is 7x8x6', made of welded steel, porcelain, wire, wire mesh, and some kind of semi-transparent fabric. The bits of fabric are pale silver greys, browns, beige, russet. There are a lot of wires strung like rigging. Seen in a photo these have a quality of lines in a drawing, and the color in the fabric has a quality of watercolor wash. I'm sitting in my room staring at the page that has two views of this object. Phoenecian galley, Renaissance galleon, solar lightship, butterfly, exploding galaxy, hurricane, eye with lashes, a jellyfish, a fish, a school of fishes, something photographed through stages of a motion. A diagram. An antenna. The strength of a piece of art often depends on whether opposites are brought against each other within it. This sculpture is a transcendently beautiful thing. The word that has been coming to me is Elizabethan. I realized it's because of the fullness of being, the synthesis of opposites, there is in it. As in Shakespeare. Abstract and representational, organical and mechanical. Drawing and sculpture, science and art, male and female, history and futurity. Surrealist and naturalist. They are all there in "implacable unitary presence" (someone said), and it's because she made herself all of them. She wasn't always all of them at once, and some of the work isn't good, but she is all of them at once in this piece. Bontecou says, "as much of life as possible ­ no barriers ­ no boundaries ­ all freedom in every sense." She writes that when she was working on the early pieces that made her famous she used to be listening to short wave radio and she'd be in a rage. Last night I was revising pieces about my dad dying slowly of dehydration in kidney failure, my first love hanging himself at sixty after thirty years of depression, my beautiful best friend in high school thrashed into the ground a couple of years back by stroke and cancer simultaneously. There are times when I want nothing to do with people and want just to trance out with nature, but then if I let myself feel what nature has done to people I love, what I want from people and what I want to give people is splendour. Things so hard to make that it takes for instance Bontecou's entire life to be able to make them.