As an artist, Neel gave so many people their name—the right to their name. So doing, she told us that no person is fixed; we have as many names as the lies we tell, the truths we live. In my dreams of a glittering gay world, as exemplified by Geldzahler, Warhol, and the like, it never occurred to me that the universe wasn’t about inclusion; my imagination already included me. But Neel’s paintings offered something definitive and real, something larger than “identity.” She seemed to be saying in canvas after canvas that there was no word or image that could equal those fleeting moments of joy—of connectedness—that bound her not only to her subjects, but to painting itself, that solitary act that she performed in front of other people.
Sometimes in the silence of the paintings you wonder what was said during a Neel session, what language Alice used as she and her subject talked about the old times, the new times, and probably everything inbetween—same-sex love and domestic harmony or discord mixed with bitchy jokes and empathy—given that Neel didn’t retreat to the corner conversation-wise. If the conversation was interesting, she didn’t do the nice lady from Pennsylvania thing and stand along the margins of thought while the guys got to have the language and the thoughts. Part of her brilliance was her ability to throw body and soul into the arguments of the day. Her apartment, while being filled with her work, was also filled with language, books by Lenin and Marx along with novels and plays, a galaxy of words hovering near her gallery of faces. She was never without politics, and it was the politics I saw and experienced in life that opened me up further to what Neel was doing in portraits like Henry Gelzaher: talking about class. And how Henry’s labor was about taste, and how being an arbiter of taste can be distracting and deforming, especially if it’s renovated from the real world of politics and blood. And it almost always is.
by Hilton Als
