Stars Formed from Steel

by Rudolfo Carrillo

There is a collection of objects at the place where Girard, Monte Vista and Central intersect. Methinks it is called Triangle Park. It's not a park in the conventional sense, vasty green, filled with automatic sprinklers and all that.

At the edge of it, there's a neon-lit tower spanning Central Avenue. That comparatively rough concrete form is festooned with colors of all sorts. In its span across the wide street, this bridge of sorts announces the entrance to the Nob Hill District.

There are some benches made up to look inviting. There's a police substation on the east side of the triangular area, and a few forlorn trees, too.

Nearby, the bus stops frequently.

For a long time, now a long time ago, there was a Chevron station and an eponymous bar at the confluence. I only went into the booze joint one time, but I used to use the air hose at the gasoline dispensary, all the time, to fill up the tires on my ride. In case you want to know, the car I drove was a nineteen-hundred-and-seventy-four Peugeot station wagon.

It was a classic alright, but I let some crazy music student paint the whole damn thing with paisleys, so it really looked like hell, like a bunch of hippies were responsible for the decline of European automotive power.

But that is a different story altogether. The stuff with the Peugeot was happening around the same time as some of the events in this narrative, so I thought I’d throw it in for sauce. I’ll tell about that art-damaged junker some other time.

Anyway, on the west side of the park, there is a bronze sculpture. Richard Beckman made the sculpure. It is called Star. I am not going to post a picture of Beckman’s construction because I want you to go take a look as soon as you can.

Beckman studied and taught at the University of New Mexico Department of Art and Art History when I was an undergraduate.

In his plain-spoken manner, Beckman was the real deal, authentic in a complex world of artists, those who wanted to be artists, and the adroit charlatans who sometimes tagged along for fun.

While at UNM, Beckman made formidable metal structures that seemed almost to have been engineered, so precise were they in their handling of materials and construction: clean and angular, objects rendered with industrial formality.

The work on display at the entrance to Nob Hill comes from a period of immense production in Beckman's career, as he was concluding his studies at UNM.

At the small community of artists where Beckman worked and studied in the late 1980s, many of the other students, myself included, were totally freaked out by the quality of Beckman's work. Hell, the faculty felt rightly flummoxed by the dude. He was way more talented than the old masters that ran the show.

Beckman fascinated everyone. The undergraduates who listened to the Descendents while pounding away on pipes and plates of steel in the metal shop wanted to buy him a beer at a watering hole called the Fat Chance Bar and Grill. Some gal from the ceramics division left a joint on his locker, sealed with a kiss made from a slip. The full professors waiting to hear from the biennial committee at the Whitney would walk around and around his output, adjusting their spectacles and clearing their throats.

I worked and studied with Beckman off and on, took his welding tips and wilting criticism because he was a nice guy and did not want to bullshit about this or that theory of postmodernism; he did not come off as pretentious or lofty and had the spirit of a working man.

One time, I volunteered to be part of a performance piece of Beckman's that was centered on a collection of steel objects he had crafted. He was quiet, polite and focused, very measured throughout. On the other hand, I danced around the sculptures in a bizarre new wave fashion heavily influenced by hours of watching the movie “The Truth About De-evolution”. The next day one of the professors stopped me in the hall. She told me she was fascinated by the authenticity of my performance.

Incidentally, those performances took place at an art gallery called Raw Space. Raw Space was Downtown, in the place Anatolia Doner Kebab now occupies. At the time, Raw Space was a popular place for UNM art folk. I had a show of my shitty paintings there once and a band called the Ant Farmers played at the reception. One of the songs they played was called Shower Curtain.

Meanwhile, Richard Beckman graduated and went on to have a substantial career in the art world. He taught at the University of South Florida, exhibited widely, had public commissions and essays written about his work, which had taken a departure, had begun to explore organic and quasi-biological forms with the same honesty of spirit as his earlier forms.

I only know this because I did some research on Beckman for a magazine article I was writing. I also found out Richard Beckman died eight-and-a-half years ago.

Most of that '80s crap I wrote about at the beginning of this essay—the gas station, the bar, the Peugeot and the wacky clarinetist with spray paint and paisley stencils—have all but vanished. The sculpture lab is pretty much the same though, down to the perplexingly aloof faculty and buzz-saw swinging students, I reckon.

But Beckman’s work is scattered grandly, memorably across America; some of it is here in this town. Go down to the place I told about and take a look. In the rain, or anytime, forever, Beckman’s Star is wondrous.

Editor's Note: The sculpture pictured above is by Richard Beckman and was featured in the performance piece written about above. The photo was taken by Richard Beckman at UNM.

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The Moth From Room 123

Rudolfo Carrillo—eminent master of nothingness, pollinator of datura blossoms, pretender to the vast and empty throne known by those in the business as the stiff seat of a firebrand, a conjurer of illusory flames of all sorts—drove around town in a decent old silvery sports car he had supposed for some time to be a spaceship of sorts.


He dismantled that illusion at the long-lasting red light on the corner of Central Avenue and Tingley Drive. Carrillo was then free to consider ideas he had been busy stuffing into crevices in the backseat of the automobile, or worse, using inappropriately as poetic derivatives that closely resembled the ionic anti-matter fuel tablets which powered his excursions into the real world.

That real world consisted of a planet and all its souls—his base of operations, a dilapidated shack perched invisibly amongst the comfortable environs favored by the leisure class. There were yards of wet grass and green trees with fallen raindrops still perched on every edge of every leaf in that place, and the surrounding desert seemed impossible when one was immersed in that watery land.

Here was the first thing Carrillo's mind lit upon as the old Saab rolled toward the rain, and though it was an odd thing his head fixed upon, it was not unlike him. He might as well have had visions of pizza-bearing angels, but instead he considered the current state of postmodernism in Western art-making practices and decided he had no goddamn idea whatsoever about what was new and amazing; hell, he drove a twenty-two-year-old car for fun.

In an effort to understand the refreshing complexity of processes available in the second decade of the twenty-first century, he parked the steel and glass and plastic transport mechanism, went out into the rain, walked across the city in a pair of creaking army boots and somehow ended up by the art school he had spirited himself away from approximately twenty years ago.

When he got there, it was already Friday afternoon. Clouds were climbing and churning east of the campus, but the rain had mostly stopped. The whole joint was practically deserted, but somewhere in one of the undergraduate studios, a patriotic Fourth of July song drifted through the air and made him jumpy. Someone on the radio was going on and on about how they were not a fortunate son; there was a lot of static in the signal and it echoed through the concrete hallways.

The art building was pretty much the same as on the day in May—hooray—when he first flew away. There was a display case in front of the photography department covered in oily stains, falling apart. Some of the classroom doors had been tagged with an atramentous, indelible and ultimately, ironic ink. University officials had replaced the old clocks with digital upgrades. The main floor of the art building reminded him of photos he had seen of deserted shopping malls. It was dark and shabby now.

He walked past the sculpture lab. A few students were milling about. He figured he must either be invisible or appear insect-like and spectral, because nobody looked up as he entered. He decided to say hello to the machinery in the shop, instead. Carrillo had been friends with many of the power tools years ago and wondered how many of them had survived the intervening years to become venerable versions of finger choppers, wood-splitters, metal joining or blade-kickback devices. Here was the so-called Rolls Royce of lathes, there, a band saw big enough to cut a crocodile in half.

And he was surprised to find most if them still there, humming mindlessly and formidably, as they had been before his birth. Rumor had it some of the machinery came from the atomic laboratories down the road. A story got passed around about how the tools had been brought from that glowing and omnipotent place by an engineer who became the shop manager when the building was new. Everybody called him Fitz, but he was dead now, of skin cancer for probably twenty years, Carrillo gravely mused as he glanced over his glasses at a sheet metal bender in the next room.

There were only two sculptures in the whole dang place. One of them was made from hunks of concrete with bits of color thrown in here and there and crudely fashioned wooden parts lurching up through the air; the other was a spinning kaleidoscope of photographs mounted on jagged mirrors. The photos were of random human body parts, legs and feet and butts and bellies, but no faces and nothing private, either. The whole piece moved around on account of the wind from the ventilation system and that was kind of spooky.

On his way out, Carrillo saw his name still stenciled but rightly faded, on an old metal locker on the far end of the lab. A young woman was standing in front of the lockers, opening the metal storage box two rows over. He asked that stranger, as he fluttered by, why she was there. For a moment she thought herself mid-dream as the talking moth floated in front of her. When she finally answered, she tossed her hair to one side; wood chips, sawdust, and small shards of steel cascaded to the ground.

She said to make art, smiled a wan smile and reached for her medication as Carrillo floated out the door, landed on the summery lawn outside, laced up his rough boots and began scribbling meaningful responses to his initial inquiry in a small red notebook as he walked back to his spaceship. Folks who had been there talked about the mysterious visitation for a few days and then went on with their business. At least a few agreed it was mighty unusual to see flying arthropods of that particular configuration so late in the year.

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