‘Brigid Berlin: The Heaviest’ Vito Schnabel Gallery, 43 Clarkson Street, New York, New York Until August 18, 2023Who remembers Eldin the house painter? As portrayed by Robert Pastorelli on the original run of the television series “Murphy Brown,” Eldin was forever ensconced in the titular journalist’s home, working on one or another never-ending renovation project. The joke was that contractors are notorious for not meeting deadlines. But what if it’s the client, and not the job itself, who requires a house painter’s continued residency?At the risk of shattering anyone’s notion that the life of a film critic is a non-stop pageant of red carpets, bottomless glasses of champagne and a fawning starlet on each arm, I’ll note that I was a contractor for the better part of my working life. Creative types: we’ve got to eat, you know? Skim-coating, faux finishing and life spent on a ladder — the work is back-breaking but the pay is sustainable. And then there were those deadlines. Ugh.Somewhere around 1994, I began doing pick-up work for Brigid Berlin: a bit of touch-up here, some decoupage there, that kind of thing. Brigid — I can’t bring myself to call her “Berlin” — was a neighbor down the hall, the former Warhol doyenne who extolled the virtues of the Republican party, was an inveterate watcher of CNN (and later FOX News) and whose purebred pugs were fed a steady diet of Greenberg’s schneckens. No wonder the poor things kept keeling over from heart failure.What started out as a bit of extra money on the side soon turned into something resembling a full-time job. Brigid wanted to renovate her two-bedroom apartment at Murray Hill and insisted that I was the only one capable of doing so. As a young man without gainful employment, who was I to complain? The bedrooms, the bathrooms, the kitchen and those bookshelves that needed — no, not two coats of paint — but wall-paper of a rather ornate sort. Bless Brigid and her obsessive ways. She was there for me when I was in need, and I never forgot that.This isn’t the place to enumerate Brigid’s sundry (and sometimes cringe-inducing) peculiarities, from her unceasing run of commentary during the O.J. Simpson trial to her brief but intense foray into the marvels of labneh yogurt, a delicacy readily available at the groceries at nearby Little India. When I attended one of her performances at The Kitchen, Brigid stopped in the middle of a monologue to introduce “the best house painter ever.” She insisted I stand up. Therein lies my epitaph.At a certain point, I had renovated her apartment a couple of times over and my visits began to trail off as job opportunities presented themselves elsewhere. Which isn’t to say that we lost touch. Having become something akin to family, Brigid gave me keys to the apartment and had me come by to do minor work when she felt it necessary. When Brigid became bed-ridden in later years — she died in 2020 — I would let myself into the apartment and, on one memorable morning, encountered an intruder — who turned out to be a life-size cardboard cut-out of Donald J. Trump. A big fan of the 45th president, Brigid was.All of which was brought to mind upon receiving the announcement for “Brigid Berlin: The Heaviest,” an exhibition at Vito Schnabel Gallery that purports to be “the first exhibition ever to document all aspects of the artist’s life, shedding light on the full scope of her career beyond the shadow of her famous friend and mentor Andy Warhol.” My eyebrows perked up when I read that the show would replicate the “dense, totalizing environment inspired by the unique atmosphere of Berlin’s apartment.” Will that cabbage wallpaper be going up on the walls at Schnabel? It proved hair-rending on the original application. Pity the poor craftsman who has to deal with it.Schnabel Gallery is making all sorts of claims about Brigid, that she was a forerunner of “sexual agency and body positivity,” as well as “oppositional aesthetics.” She exhibited, we read, a “fearless embrace of queerness.” Her adventures into photography were, God help us, “a forerunner of the selfie.” Okay; maybe. Historical figures are invariably prone to the wiles of the current moment and, it’s true, a person’s creative efforts can create ripples that roam far-and-wide. Yet I can’t help but picture Brigid responding to such claims with her distinctive cackle and then start in complaining about the preponderance of mesothelioma ads interrupting constant companions like Bill O’Reilly and Shepard Smith. However much her preoccupations are in evidence at Schnabel, “The Heaviest” can’t help but be marked by Brigid’s absence. May she and the pugs rest in peace.
