Lux x Justiss on Duval

by Tim Gilmore, 4/24/2024

See also “Alan Justiss”

Because a moment’s a crossroads. Because every city corner is infinite in byways and crosscurrents.

The year 2000. Jonathan Lux, a young artist, has backpacked through England and picked up art books before an opening at the Tate. Alan Justiss, the old poet, has hitchhiked coast to coast and landed back in this occulted alcove of his hometown.

Even a quarter century later, Justiss elicits the same responses: drunkard; bum. Almost nobody who knows him in the year 2000 knows how once he sang and danced on stage. In 1976. Yet he’s still here when the building’s gone. In 2024. No pertinent clause in Eminent Domain.

His poems do that, slip one grammar into another. Like how Faulkner slides from one character to another on the same pronoun. Words are sly. One sentence becomes another you didn’t know had begun. “I will go so far / as to rob / the stems from / branches / & / then make fallen / the leaves / turn into the / color of / my hair / there.”

Alan sits for Jonathan Lux three times, 2000 & 2001. They’ve only just met. First one, a small head-&-shoulders done in that dark elevator shaft of a room where Alan lives in the shadow of City Hall. Appropriate, that. Shadow powers. Nether lands. Courts in occluded corners.

Alan keeps the first painting. The artist gets copies of Alan’s chapbook. Freedom at Its Worst Angle. Strange mentions of light and dust: “I am waiting for the neon lights / on the tombstone in my skull.” + “I am waiting for the dust / to fall where walking stirs it up again.” Here’s where: Duval and Laura Streets. Just a breath from the exact center of the city.

Second painting executed against the blue floors and sunlight of Jonathan Lux’s studio a block away on Monroe. Larger painting, later lost.

Alan perches at the edge of the sallow couch: those brown workboots facing out, elbows on knees, hands crossed at wrists. A balance thrown off between Edward Hopper and Francis Bacon. Nasolabial folds, hawk’s nose, puckered eyes, pony tail snaked down shoulder.

For Jonathan Lux, it’s not much Francis Bacon, all those portraits of men poised as repositioned meat, but Lucian Freud, grandson of Sigmund, and Frank Auerbach. The “London School of painters,” empire in freefall uncanny and grotesque. Acknowledging the chaos, but figurativist. Similarly here: downtown fallen, prior to urban regentrification, a playground of rooms in derelict buildings where suburbanites fear to tread. Alan Justiss steps in.

It’s a two story building beside that 1908 YMCA designed by Henry John Klutho. Alan lives upstairs in the back. Somewhere among the skeletons of fire escapes climbing iron-fingered up limestone walls. Haverty’s Furniture once on the corner, then down Duval: a restaurant, Toyland, The Boys’ Shop.

Demo’d for yet another parking garage. (Perhaps one day the City of Jax will succeed in demolishing all the city of Jacksonville to build a parking garage in its place, then hold emergency meetings to ask why nobody drives in to park in blocks and blocks of garages sans city.)

Jonathan lives downstairs for six months in back of a gallery, then moves a block up to 38 West Monroe. Now points a giant index finger shadowed into the past across a negative. Look, it says. Here’s where it was. Is. And Alan even still, these years after his death.

Here’s a shot of his ghost, black-&-white but blue at night, 24 years ago, 11 years before he dies in that tower in Riverside. Random evening. Sharp nose, sharp chin, a still from a video camera angled from a hip nearby. “Something unpleasant” has happened outside and the building’s come out to discuss it. Marquee seems to point through Alan’s chest, impaling him from The Loft behind.

Four residents in The Loft upstairs, another enterprise of Stephen Dare’s, five if you count Alan’s space. Downstairs, Lux remembers, half a century later, “a Job Junction, the Czigan and Rummel Gallery, and we all lived in the back, behind the showroom.”

In back of the gallery, a staircase climbs to Dare’s loft. Another left turn lands in “this very unwelcoming space, all stone, no windows,” where Alan stays up all night and drinks beer upon beer and writes. Then, immediately to the right, you’re on the roof.

This is what a city does. This concatenation. Angles once unlikely cross to bleed-or-breed new lifeforms. Evolutionary. Cross-fertilizing. Where most urban, even in gothic decline, inherently creative. Life itself made itself thus.

Jonathan Lux x Alan Justiss. Jux-ta-positioning Lust-is: Light and Dust. “string tight light” / “exposed / everywhere / I look / dust waits / to cover.”

On the cover of Fishing in the Dark, Alan wears a Hawaiian-print shirt and hunches not over his beloved Royal Companion manual typewriter but a Brother word processer, in this room behind rooms by the roof down the street from City Hall, walls of big salmon-colored blocks, piles of paper, grifted paintings, a coffeepot, a can of Maxwell House atop a can of Folger’s.

Lux has just moved downtown. The ’90s are over. It’s what he calls “the derelict early aughts.” The heart of town is “eerie and abandoned and wide open and incredible” and Alan’s “part of the atmosphere.”

Another painting from the period, there’s a blue figure, eerily lacking detail, bleeds up from the shadows, rounded old car curves before him, a woman and child at slight distance beneath the awning at The Loft. Incidentally, the man’s a 1950s’ Marx toy Army figure, woman and child from a circus set. Lights and hues dart off of old buildings in declension to atmosphere and sky. A nocturne.

Evidence provided of transcendence and mythos at work on random corners / incidental nights out in this old working-class, lame-named, post-industrial, post-fundamentalist town burg ville. And Alan’s in the background.

You can’t see him from the street. He’s back behind the showroom. He’s up the stairs. He’s off-angle from the living room. He’s another step down. He’s a step away from the roof.

He wants to know: “How could / I ever strike you / or / make a match / into light / for you / to better see: my nights.”

By sitting for Jonathan Lux. That’s how. Chain-smoking. Telling stories. Lux has just had his first exhibit. The proper experience of the artist is to inhabit ill-smelling spaces and have strange people sit for you to paint. In dark Jax, Lux became that artist, while Alan Justiss still says, “Unable to die / I live here / one line / at a time.”