Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

In Atlanta, the gallery called Abraxas is an influential but underfunded alternative-arts center in a predominantly black section of the city. The buildings making up the complex—a print shop, a theater, the galleries, and the studio wing—used to belong to a school. With the exception of the print shop and the studio wing, they were built early in the century in a stolid red-brick architectural style giving them the grim look of a prison or an oversized Andrew Carnegie library. Coming toward Abraxas from the east, you swing back and forth along Ralph McGill Boulevard between modest clapboard and brick houses until you attain the crest of a hill that plunges precipitously toward the foot of yet another hill. Abraxas, though, sprawls along the weedy mound of the first hill, partially obscured by the fence of a factory parking lot.

I was cheerfully dive-bombing the Mercedes past the gallery when Adam tapped my knee and RuthClaire cried, “Stop, Paul, you’re missing it!”

My first good look at Abraxas left me chilled and skeptical. A one-person show at this abandoned school, I mused, could hardly have any more cachet or impact than a violin recital in a garage in Butte, Montana. Adam’s show was clearly small potatoes. The movers and shakers of the Atlanta art community had granted him this venue because his work had nothing but its novelty (“Prehistoric human relic actually puts paint to canvas!”) to recommend it. Maybe they had given him this show as a courteous bow to RuthClaire, in the hope that she would contribute to the center’s funding. This decaying three-story shell of chipped brick and sagging drainpipes was Abraxas?

RuthClaire seemed to be monitoring my thoughts. “It’s better inside. You have to park around back.” The lot had already begun to fill. We inched along behind earlier arrivals before finding a space under an elm tree at the end of the studio wing. Quite a crowd. “The third-floor gallery has three main rooms,” RuthClaire explained. “Adam’s paintings occupy only one of them. Some of these people have come for the Kander photographs or the Haitian show.”

We got out and crossed the lot to a plywood ramp leading into the old school’s first-floor corridor. A security guard saluted RuthClaire and Adam and directed us up the cold inner stairs to the third floor. Little inside the place contradicted my first impression of it as a candidate for the wrecking ball. At last, a formidable door, preventing entry to the gallery. Adam pressed a buzzer on the crumbling wall next to the door.

“I need a password,” said a muffled male voice beyond it.

“Chief Noc-a-homa,” RuthClaire said. This was the name—the stage name, so to speak—of the Indian who served as the official mascot of the Atlanta Braves. It was also the necessary password. The door opened.

“Welcome to the Deep South franchise of Cloud-Cuckoo-Land,” said a tall, disheveled man in a lime-colored sweater and a gray corduroy jacket with elbow patches of such bituminous blackness that it looked as if they would leave smudges on any surface they touched. The wearer held his elbows close to his sides as if to keep from leaving charcoal blots here and there about the gallery. This was David Blau. He was nearly my age, but he exuded a boyish enthusiasm that seemed a permanent attribute of his character. RuthClaire made the introductions, and we went around the corner into the director’s huge, drafty “office.” In the middle of the room, a set of unfinished stairs climbed to a jutting mezzanine that may have been a jerrybuilt studio loft. A lumpy sofa squatted with its back to the steps.

People milled about between the sofa and its coffee table, between Blau’s desk and a metal desk piled high with tabloid art publications. Other people, wine glasses in hand, sat on either the steps or the sofa, chatting, laughing, enjoying themselves. Blau said they had a perfect right. Most of them had worked hard for the past ten days to make this opening possible. A woman in designer jeans and high heels approached with a tray of wine glasses and decanters of burgundy and white. Each of us took a stem, and even Adam drank, sipping at his glass rim as suavely as any cocktail-party veteran.

“Hey, Paul,” RuthClaire whispered, “still think this is the Siberia of Atlanta’s art world?”

Blau overheard her. “It’s the High Museum that’s the real Siberia. Every time I look at it I see a heap of trash-compacted igloos.”

“I like it,” RuthClaire said. “It’s a lovely building.”

“It’s cold,” Blau retorted. “Cold and sterile.”

“You’re not responding to the architecture, David. You’re responding to the fact that its exhibition policies are different from your own.”

“Southern artists can get shown in Amsterdam or Mexico City more easily than at the High,” Blau told me. “The High’s safe. Colorful abstracts with no troubling political or social messages. Artists safely dead or with one foot in some collector’s anonymous Swiss bank account.”

“It’s supposed to be safe, at least in comparison to Abraxas. It’s Abraxas that’s supposed to be dangerous.”

“Is Abraxas dangerous?” I asked Blau.

The Journal-Constitution art reporter—a young man with the clean-shaven look of a stockbroker—interrupted this conversation to ask RuthClaire if he could interview Adam. RuthClaire made a be-my-guest gesture and hooked arms with Blau and me to escort us in prankish lockstep out of the curator’s office and into the first gallery room. I glanced over my shoulder to see the reporter and Adam eyeing each other with polite perplexity. Adam’s, however, was feigned.

“That wasn’t fair,” I said. “That guy didn’t strike me as another Barrington.”

“He’ll survive,” RuthClaire said. “Maybe he knows sign language.”

“What about Adam? Isn’t it awkward for him, too?”

“He appreciates the situation’s humor. The reporter will blink first, believe me.”

Blau swept an arm at the walls of the spacious new chamber—careful, though, to keep his elbow tight against his side. “Is Abraxas dangerous? Hell, yes, Mr. Loyd.”

The white plaster, or Sheetrock, walls rose to a height of ten feet or so. Above them, extending another ten or twelve feet, were the cold red bricks of the old school’s outer walls. Ceiling fans with wooden blades, motionless now, hung down from the shadows of the loft space. Then I dropped my gaze to the banners and paintings of the Haitian exhibit.

“Witch-doctor territory,” Blau said, laughing. “One of the best collections of primitive Caribbean art ever put on display in the South. We did back flips to get it.”

“Expensive?”

Blau shook his hand at the wrist. “Under this administration, military bands receive more government money than does the entire National Endowment for the Arts.”

Dazzling tropical colors and bustling marketplaces danced in their frames on the Sheetrock. I liked what I saw. This painting was recognizably a portrait, that a landscape, this one a street scene. The banners at intervals among the paintings were more puzzling. They featured beaded or sequined designs on long strips of silk or velvet. Even so, their cabalistic patterns seemed right at home in a gallery billing itself Abraxas.

“What’s dangerous about these items?” I asked.

“By themselves, I guess, not much—unless vaudun , the Haitian voodoo religion, intimidates you. The banners you see here are what Haitian priests and witches call vevés . On the island itself, they’re laid out on the ground in meal or corn flour. They’re ceremonial drawings that play a role in creating trance states among vaudun initiates. Ours were made by real Haitians, but they’re only replicas of the vevés you might see in one of the canopy-covered temples during a real ceremony.”