P.F.S. : The Disfiguring Gaze

Not to be a wag, but stands to reason it's an appropriate time to point out that Mary Evelyn Harju's 2006 portrait of me, done in her co-op studio space in Spring Garden, North Philadelphia, does the nifty trick of fusing my face, as painted by her, with Abby Heller-Burnham's. Is the personal situation behind this contretemps a soap-operatic one? It is. Without being unduly personal, it is enough to say that Mary did not appreciate what happened between Abby and I while she was stuck, outside the Center City scene, in East Falls, with a reprobate far shadier, and nastier, than John and I. The East Falls, mid-Aughts period was not a culturally rich one for Mary. When she rejoined the scene, it was with an eye towards looking at who had done what while she was gone and taking the piss. Rather than Davidean (Michelangelo, Renaissance, not Jacques-Louis David)  elegance, I'm comically warped and gauche looking here. No pin-up at all. Instead, from her, what might be called a disfiguring gaze. The disfiguring gaze amounts, from the painter's perspective, to a radical power trip, a revenge fantasy fulfilled. The Other's energy is tamed and muted, if not decimated. The resentment at having missed all the mid-Aughts fun nonetheless plagued Mary H for the rest of her life. But made, disfiguration-wise (not decimation-wise), for one of the more intriguing fuck you-s in American art history.

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Having ascertained what the pertinent cultural evidence is, the conclusion is inescapable— I was Mary Evelyn Harju’s muse. Or: she used me, my physical apparatus, as a site to start from in exploring the issues she found the most interesting. A muse-site. The sense of intimacy with me thusly implies a preference Mary had for warmth or nearness. A purgation of the objective in favor of a warped, sexually charged, polyglot subjectivity. The exploration of the subjective as a labyrinth would’ve been valued by Miss H as a way of building depth (self-contained, self-perpetuated depth) into her visions. Humanism, the Renaissance manifested again, against the arid frigidity of the post-modern art which dominated East Coast gallery spaces during the Aughts.

How I react to being a muse, or, to not belabor the intimacy involved in this instance, a Muse— no sense of drollery, but a sense of bemusement nonetheless, that I relate to my own physique, rather than my brain, as having accomplished something culturally meaningful in the world. Mary and I, indeed, were physical people together, physically involved. The recognition, which includes bemusement, is that Mary Evelyn Harju regarded me as a body first, a brain (a perhaps distant) second. As a nascent writer in the Aughts, with my own set of socio-aesthetic concerns (starting from Symbolism and English Romanticism, but encompassing philosophy, literary theory, including Deconstructionism, as foundational materials in a self-made matrix), it is amusing that Mary needed naught but my body to be delivered into an expressive realm where she had leave to say what she wanted to, to the world and the times she lived in, from 915 Spring Garden on out. 

The radical sense of physicality was vertical for Mary here. The Muse Mary Evelyn Harju was looking for, to exalt, mystify, or disfigure, was centered, as the Italians had been, on physical dimensionality. On another level, my emotions cannot not be engaged by the realization of my servitude as Mary’s Muse. It is with a combination of pleasure and pain that I begin to understand the sojourn in her towards flesh-spirit, soul-body unity, through art and sexual intercourse, back and forth. Pain, because staying grounded in physical reality cost Mary the better ride she could’ve had, had she been more attuned to intellect, dissevered from physical presence, and presiding over physical presence as well.

To be the enfranchised Muse as raw meat does put me in a false position— I myself am dissevered, as aesthetic Object, from the kinds of cognitions that see and manifest bright vistas on all sides beyond just Bodies, or my own body, and sexual intercourse. Becoming a major Muse based on raw physical presence is thus only semi-empowerment. Nonetheless, for what Mary Evelyn Harju’s particular sensibility was, which could only take the Bible and the Renaissance together and channel them into revelations of carnality (which could also be seen to ricochet back and reveal the feminine or Woman), I served, at a younger age, as fulsomely as anyone could. Even as the recognition of what was in my brain, my own cognitive capacities, had to be consigned to the shadows, or to the chiaroscuro of half-existence.

P.F.S. : On being painted as David

 

The solvency of Mary Evelyn Harju's The Fall, from 2008, is about form and formal rigor. It would be easy, just from this piece, to call her a formalist. In Philly, this is a dread categorization— Manhattan has always accused Philadelphia of bland, tepid formalism— but if the Harju piece is charged into being more, placement within proximity to other Aughts Philadelphia products, writing and photographs (a benevolent matrix structure here), transcendentalizes the piece into being something more. The similarity of how I am painted here to Michelangelo's David, the ideal male nude in art, highlights both Mary's twin obsessions, the body and the Renaissance, and the sense of a relationship narrative laid down, also similar to what I do in Equations. The phenomenology, for me, of being painted as David, is about an era in which raw physicality, the primordial physical, was both valued and fetishized. I participated, as has been established— threw myself into the Aughts matrix, with all the freshness and naivete of a young adult, not yet seasoned by continual intercourse with the material or cultural world. My version of David is thus one of original innocence. Adam, if you will, before the Fall. The narrative of the painting is specifically about innocence transformed into experience. Eden, or the Edenic. The piece freezes before I make my choice— to bite from the apple or not— and thus destabilizes that the outcome must be a predictable one. On another level, this is my ascendent moment as a pin-up— full frontal nudity establishes that— and, as a classicized version of a pin-up, the painting is meant to be as seductive and provocative as representations of raw flesh can be. The image here is not chaste. 

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A few more things to say about The Fall. Axiomatic things. Like, for instance, that Mary Evelyn Harju’s representation of me as David is just that, and precisely that. The similarity is there, and unmistakable. Mary’s fascination with the Renaissance is already well-documented. As is her sense of erotic fascination with ideal male nudes. Also notable that who I am in The Fall, as someone being represented, is someone true to life. I really am 5’9, slightly over 5’9, actually, with a pronounced tendency to lankiness. I’m not secretly 5’6, and chunky. Or 5’8 and a half. Those who might see me will not be surprised. These tokens of complete aesthetic legitimacy have to be established, in a country where carnival-rules have made show biz standards the norm. The Fall has a number of ways of being for real that are striking ones. No show biz.

The other thing I wanted to discuss is more interesting. The Fall was modeled for and painted in a co-op studio in the Spring Garden section of North Philadelphia (915 Spring Garden) in 2007-2008. On a narrative level, the painting suggests Mary and I in the garden of Eden, and locates a portion of its narrative in the Bible. Mary coming out of a Christian Right family is significant, as is the outre Aughts-Philly peccadillo of her Renaissance obsession and eroticism. The sense of Philadelphia as an Eden, or as Edenic, is an intriguing one. If there is one facet of Philadelphia as a city which establishes that it can manifest as an Eden, or as Edenic, it is the sublime nature of Philadelphia’s architecture. What a city is, primordially, is a collection of buildings. Because Philadelphia, from City Hall on out, was constructed, at its best, of buildings meant to endure over decades and centuries, and to fulfill rigorous aesthetic criteria, it creates a physiology, in Philadelphia, of levitation, transcendentalism over the mundane, and of an atmosphere in which history moves forward, lives and breathes. Because Philadelphia is built, at its best, of living, breathing history, it offers a sense of shelter and amnesty to those who wish to pursue living, breathing history itself. Thus, it could be an Eden, or Edenic, for those of us in the Aughts, who wished to create to do something other than degrade, or reenact show biz. Philadelphia, in short, is built past swinishness. It’s a real city, by world standards. The Fall could not have been painted, I would tend to say, anywhere else, nor could David manifest as David, or Mary and I as Mary and I. Even the inbuilt sense of doubleness in The Fall falls into place with the idea of history which subsists as history, but also lives and breathes. Is, thus, double. And tolerates the phenomenology of doubleness.

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Acutely worked into both the surface and the depths of The Fall is a semi-obvious contradiction— to the eye of the painter, I can be both Adam Fieled and Michelangelo’s David. The work of art is a conduit to a color-form reality in which a frozen moment allows this apotheosis into doubleness. Yet hewn into The Fall is the troubled and troubling narrative of a relationship gone wrong. This narrative itself is skewered and doubled by Biblical intimations. Mary Evelyn Harju was, in fact, raised on the Bible. So I, as a figure in the painting, split into a triumvirate: Biblical Adam, Adam Fieled, and David. If you look closely into the depths of The Fall as a work of art, the emotional heart and soul of the painting is not the Biblical or Renaissance resonances. The felt core of what is being expressed is about the vicissitudes of my relationship with Mary. The creation of levels in the painting is important— as high art is supposed to do, it classicizes and historicizes what in itself is unimaginative, overly familiar material. Yet beyond the sense of levels to be engaged, the most central and centralized level is a genuine human relationship— a marriage—gone asunder. Mary and I were never legally married. We didn’t need to be. We were married in blood and in art. The terrible conflict in Mary— what is forcing her to stumble in the painting— is a complex congeries of material and psychological realities which made it that, in the Aughts, Mary could paint only intermittently. Ferocity and delicacy were oddly mixed in her.

Remember: Mary and Abby were plugged into the mid-range at PAFA. As usual, an academic context was not prepared to handle to emergence of something profoundly new. But the criss-cross of influences built into The Fall— Bible-Renaissance-Aughts Philadelphia— are a soul’s potential journey into a world never felt or experienced before. Inappropriate, I feel, to speak too much of what I went through with Mary then. I’ve done that abundantly elsewhere. Back to the main, where David fits in is its own criss-cross, for Mary, into the issue of perpetual temptation, and potential damnation. David tangibly manifests for her, as a male ideal, her own potential sense of physical, consummated deliverance. David, for her, is about lust. Mary was not a delicate woman about fulfilling her lust. She was libido-empowered by a Manifest Destiny attitude attendant on the realization of Renaissance ideals, and notions of the body. The Humanistic, at its extreme of expressiveness. Courageous, also, given her background. The Fall, is, in fact, a courageous work of art. Classicizing and historicizing the personal, and indeed, as boldly personal as any feminist could wish or hope for. The David level, about lust, melds back into being Adam Fieled, and us being co-joined as partners. Returns, in a loop, to the beginning, and to the singular. Other eyes will see how it moves in other ways. But the points of origin, I prophesy, will remain roughly the same, where The Fall is concerned. They are, or will be seen to have been, sturdy ones.

© Adam Fieled 2026

Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): from Something Solid, Aughts Philly, "4325 Baltimore Avenue"

Jason cooking flounder on a filthy range, picked
up at 40th & Walnut where Penn students mingled
with artists, Chomsky-ites, bums, mothers, where
French bread for two bucks we’d carry around for
walks home down rustic mansion’d streets, fish-waft
filling lovably threadbare kitchen laden with mustard
& crumbs. Mary’s Acme-purchased pesto pasta, Olive-oil
Goddess, she’d make a pot on pot in a pot & we’d
have a bowl from the pot watching hot French-flicks
in the lived-in living room. Paintings, Mary’s evocations
Dionysus & Apollo, Jason post-Dali post-structuralist
Dada & Derrida derived violences, submitted to smitten
PAFA judges, originals all flecked with little chips from
the falling ceiling leaned. Parties on the green-awning’d

porch, weed midnights—butt-smoke, frost-breath, gun-
stocked West Philly cops stop to shock us with looks as
we loiter, amused— moments later I’d drag Mary into
her wood-floored bedroom & frivolously fuck her, hoping
Josh & Kevin might spy us. One time on whiskey Mary’s
diaphragm got stuck inside her, I felt it, fucking her, we
laughed, Mary’s hair then was long down to her ass, raucous,
randy. Diana remained unrevealed as she revealed herself
in the next room, ready to lead me, always, to my doom.
Golden apogee— everyone hot— everyone fucking,
painting, making music, boozing, drugging, sucking, humping,
leaning on nothing but the night’s promise, our nexus the nexus,
our moment the moment, all now reduced to ash, nothing but
a shut window, a fiery memory of an open one—

© Adam Fieled 2005-2025

The 2005, draft version of 4325 was published in Many Mountains Moving in 2005

More from 42 Opus

WHEN I FIRST SEE THE DEAD DEER

When I first see the dead deer, I think
Hope and Remembrance.
It's not the cluster of pinks I'd wanted,
not the first sight of the first crocus,
but a bouquet nonetheless.

Touching the furred foreleg where it juts
from the broken ribcage, it's
how perfectly still the leg lies, and
what a strange arrangement— how like a stem
it is for the whorl of bones and hair,
just uncovered by the melting snow.

Later, when I smell it on my hands,
I touched a man in love, and
what strange confessions the dead make.
Look how the blooms lie frozen still,
in the not-quite spring, in the shapes
of tubers, rhizomes, bones.

© Mary Walker Graham 2007

From Caffeine Destiny

ENTROPY

The night, the windows all crash
in their frames. I'm not the shambled

aftermath or the boy-girl order.
Spaces between us are not spaces

at all but a thousand blue flowered
nightgowns. You haven't yet learned

to discern the shape of things according
to your tongue. Heavy cumulous hang

the sky like sheets from a line
and entire alphabets go missing.

In the dark, a woman's teeth
flicker on and off. We'll decide

who's leaving by a scientific method
and the rule of light bulbs and iceboxes.

My skin exudes enough lumen for boxwoods to glow.

© Kristy Bowen 2006

From 42 Opus

DAILY MADONNA

Don't forget to do your daily Madonna.
Wake up and pat your womb before the light
gets in your window; you don't know what
the day will have in store.

You could be sweeping the stairwell, unaware
all this time that discipline was discipline.
You didn't know that using turnips
would win you favor, that saving rainwater
in the barrel would make anyone happy.

Someone likes it when you take the wilted stems to the heap
and churn them in. Someone likes it when you're patient
with bumblebee-weed, when you know that purslane is purslane,
and good to eat, and even when you let the grass
grow longer than it should.

Someone saw you carry the feathers of the jay the cat killed
and lay them on the fencepost, in hopes
another bird would use them for a nest, saw you smile
before you threw the gathered walnut hulls
into the woods, instead of weeping.

© Mary Walker Graham 2007

From Eoagh 3

SORRY

I can’t remember the 2nd
time I hurt you—

it was dark & someplace
in that darkness
was the thing I did.

You weren’t the target, I
know that, though
you might’ve been the bow
& the tension
I really think is love.
Nothing ever sends me away.
I’ve got your pain
in my pocket &
it glows in the dark

and in the light
it’s the softest kind
of singing woman’s voice.
That’s who you are. To me, I mean.
Let me hold your shoulders
back so you look
arrogant & beautiful
welcoming me into the warm
sad party. Let this
be the unfortunate hat
I hang outside the door
if only you will
allow me to come in.

© Eileen Myles 1979

More from moria poetry

PRECISION ENTRANCES
             (For H.D.)

Ethereal jellyfish
knotted garden
pearl vision of a
waking bridge
quiet transitory gully
screaming and sunlit
tides of dream
seeds in the ground
oyster abounding
the delphic charioteer
flies right into the mulberry symphony
trance skeleton drunk in the vineyard.

© Carrie Hunter 2004

From Dusie 5

WE’RE LOVING IT

Night arcs add to a continuous sense
of April, of this year. Please welcome.

To the pink pages, thank you;
thank you parasol, thank you fuzzy voiced
at the mike. Thank you, ice in a glass.

The road is a method, or a line joining
one possible former with a likely latter,
like a ladder.

And yes, the sky is blue,
& it can be photographed.

Our official position is class piñata.
Our innermost breaks.

© Shanna Compton 2006

From Melancholia's Tremulous Dreadlocks

METROPOLITAN AVENUE DANCE NO. 1

I will myself into a bird. I might be a sparrow
or a robin or a broken plate. I might

not be any of these things. I might hide
in the shed or sing a wicked song.

I might sing e-i-e-i-o. I will myself
an audience— everyone claps or sings or

does nothing. I will myself into a frame,
tuck in my arms, my legs. Perhaps I begin

again, this time with a partner. Partner says
you sing a wicked song.

Partner says sparrow, dish-plate, birdsong.
Partner says, no, no, you’re doing it wrong.

© Gina Myers 2006

From moria poetry

obedience: 136

there is only infinity of jealous passion
tireless devotion walled in blindness
multiple poverty of substance
a poverty of property
a discourse of laughter
an action cutting across the self
stripped of
nothing but its fiction
of a fiction
of an absolute
timeless external organ
thing least compromised

a thought between a thought
the sun
between gladly becoming
words with an always message
touching a passing touching
a moment of touching
a passing moment
touching
the moment
never missing the missing

© Kari Edwards 2005