Holly Moe
One of my life-long pleasures has been
(generally) to interact and (specifically) to joke around with people I run
into behind counters and desks and cash registers and so forth. It’s easy. It’s
fun. It’s relatively painless. And in this way I made friends with a razor-thin
young woman taking money at one of the registers at the UTSA cafeteria when I
was going to teacher training there in 1983. Her name was Holly Samson and she
was a graduate student in the art department, working on an MFA.
She had a husband, Curtis, who was an
officer in the Air Force. He’d joined up because he’d wanted to be a top-gun
pilot, but as things turned out he was prone to air-sickness, and kept barfing
all over the inside of his cockpit. Pilot trainees have to clean up their own
yuck when this happens, so Curtis had washed out of pilot training. He still
owed the Air Force some time, though, and since he had a BA in psychology, they
assigned him to psychological testing, where he was supposed to be writing
multiple-choice items for psychological tests. His quota of items to be
produced was, well, small, so he read novels most of the time. I directed
novels to him through Holly — at the time I was really big on Harry Crews — and
Curtis sent me some strange books back.
And Holly and Curtis and their MFA
friends interlocked with the Chris-and-Florence circle. I started going to some
nifty art openings and similar social events. I remember in particular one
opening at a new gallery in a run-down formerly industrial area south of
downtown – by now I’m sure thoroughly gentrified – at which someone put a few
handfuls of magic mushrooms on a plate on the snack table along with the
traditional water crackers and brie. Whoopie!
Holly’s artistic medium was carpets. A
glance at the entries about her on the internet indicates that it remained so.
By carpets I mean cheap, short-pile carpets, such as a company mindful of costs
might install in the offices of its lower-paid clerical workers. She cut it
into shapes and used unfiltered ready-made cigarettes to burn lines into it, as
if a platoon of clumsy smokers had dropped their smokes onto them and been too
lazy to pick them up. She composed these burn-lines into drawings of ordinary
things. Fairly recent reviews of her exhibitions reveal that she has taken to
using gunpowder, in addition to cigarettes, as a way of burning art into the
cheap fibres. To this day I have a Holly Moe runner, into which she had burned
a picture of ceramic pots, needing vacuuming on my kitchen floor.
It was about the time that I started
hanging out with Holly and Curtis that I started making hanging sculptures out
of flotsam and concrete poured into moulds scooped out of wet sand. I remember
the first one I made, in a flat plywood box back by the shed behind Chris’s and
my duplex on Claremont
Chris and Holly and Curtis stood
around as I rummaged around in the sand to see if the concrete had set. It had.
Holly reached into the sand to feel how it was and said, “Oh, Richard! It’s
hard!”, as concrete is. Amidst general chuckling at the double meaning, Chris
offered Curtis a large, evil-looking garden hoe — his favourite weapon — to use
if he cared to deal to me. But that wasn’t Curtis’s way. He had a
mild-mannered, almost spaced-out, way about him, not what a person would expect
from someone who’d wanted to be a fighter pilot.
Holly and Curtis moved into an
apartment over a brake shop on the light-industrial northern fringe of central San Antonio Battle
Then, in late 1983, Holly, Curtis, and
some of their artist friends took a lease on a nightclub, which they re-did in
punk and called the Bone Club. A couple of my concrete sculptures had the
honour of gracing the place, one of them over the table where people had to
show their IDs and pay the cover to get in. The club had formerly been a gay
bar, and they joked about all the AIDS dust they raised when redecorating it. A
spaced-out artist lived and worked in the loft overhead. They had a problem,
however, in that there was yet another gay bar next door, and the punks and the
queers got along poorly, and in the end — after less than a year, I guess — the
gay bar bought out the Bone Club’s lease and evicted them. I was getting ready
to be a teacher at the time, and didn’t attend the club as often as I would
have like to do.
Apparently feeling on the
underprivileged side artistically, Lt. Curtis got stuck into making amateur,
artsy-fartsy videos. Chris told me that Curtis dug doing the camera work while
Holly frolicked in various bizarre and erotic ways with artist friends in the
altogether. One evening I was up there over the brake shop visiting, sharing a
toke or two, and a fellow MFA person named Margaret was there also. It was in
the summer of 1984 and I had just finished teachers’ college and was looking
for a teaching job. Curtis got out a camera and started shooting tape of
Margaret and me. Soon Margaret was naked on a chair and I was down to my Levis
Unfortunately, I decided that my
upcoming career as a teacher didn’t need any video evidence of my moral
turpitude, so I decided not to take the plot any further. I don’t want to think
about what would have happened if I hadn’t had such an attack of the straights.
Holly and Curtis were drifting apart.
They moved, along with a few of their art-world friends, into an old victorian
mansion on the southern edge of downtown that had formerly been the
headquarters of some Nationalist Chinese organisation. A semi-circular sign
over the front door read, “Chung-Kuo Kuo-Min-Tang”. They rented the place’s
ballroom to Sandy Dunne, a friend of ours who had a modern-dance company, for
rehearsals. Holly and Curtis took separate bedrooms, but remained friendly.
Then Holly got a girlfriend: a
somewhat hard-faced blonde woman named Judy Bankhead, a not-all-that-distant
relative of Tallulah. Judy was much more demonstrably affectionate than Curtis
had been, which, as my new wife pointed out to me after they’d been by to
visit, Holly seemed to appreciate. Holly and Judy then adopted an extreme
high-garlic diet and became detectable by even the weakest nose from several
metres. They, however, claimed not to notice the aroma themselves, at least not
in regard to each other. Meanwhile, art continued to be created, shows and
galleries continued to be opened, and fun continued to be had.
Curtis finally finished doing his time
and left the Air Force. I missed most of that party. He made an effigy dressed
in his uniform and burned it. I saw the remains later. The Corfam®
shoes had been almost totally unaffected by the bonfire. He showed me the
photos.
Just before we left San
Antonio there was an art opening out at the McNay followed by a bit
of a retreat at Chris and Florence
It was after I left San Antonio San Antonio
