A former student messages me on Facebook early this morning that she needs help. I assume she means it was the dark night of a terrible election and she doesn’t know how to go on, what to do or think.
This is a very difficult moment, one of the worst in American history and world history in my opinion.
This sounds extreme. I have been thinking of times which were so much worse: I would for example recommend watching the excellent 1974 British series, The World At War, to realize just how horrible things can get from which one can return to civilization. Yet this seems very bad, connecting to fascist returns in Europe and Asia that reset the clock to 1938. And at a time when climate change threatens our future on earth.
We are reeling and grieving and so so angry. The 53% of white women who voted for Trump……I am trying to figure out what to do myself, what to say to you and others: be as smart as you can be and learn to be the toughest, smartest, funniest, most *knowledgeable* fighter for justice you can in the sphere of life you occupy. Knowledge is so important, especially knowledge of history, and finding other smart people, women in particular, to have solidarity with and greater power together than any individual can have.
I just listened to Hillary Clinton’s concession speech. She was composed and gracious, but also her concession speech was a fierce clarion call for vigilance for the integrity of the Constitution. She proved in that moment that she should have been our President. The racists, misogynist, xenophobes, male and white supremacists whose victory this is are a shame on our nation and the world.
This is a painful moment for me personally because I am a first generation American, child of refugees from Hitler and the Shoa. My parents found a welcoming expansive place in America–though McCarthyism darkened their first years as full citizens. Still they like so many millions thrived. My biggest fear has always been that “it could happen again.” I don’t believe that I personally will be sent to a concentration camp for being Jewish though anti-semitism has reared its ugly head yet again, but I do believe that the “Golden Door” inscribed on the Statue of Liberty will be closed, in reality for some and symbolically for all, and I do believe my life will be shortened by the grief and anxiety of this time. And I don’t believe that the failsafes which have preserved our nation before will function. The killer is inside the house and the police is the killer.
Worse is my other fear, that comes from the knowledge that in the end in such moments you have to prepared to risk everything, you have to be prepared to be arrested. I find I am not prepared to do so. I can use words, what a pale force though also sometimes a powerful one, and I can use art, also a pale force but a powerful one. On that score I will have patience with joy in art but not superficial eye candy, I want to be fed real food now.
In the short term, I think people need to learn about the Suffrage movement, the Labor Union movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Feminist Movement, Gay Liberation, LGBTQ rights movement, the figures, the history, the actions. I also think it is very important to study the history of the Great Depression and the New Deal. What brought Trump to victory was white male fear, mainly, as well as economic troubles that he will not be able to solve. But what will govern is the final attack on the New Deal, because it is Paul Ryan who will be functional President of the United States or someone like him, and the goal has always been to destroy the support systems and regulations and freedoms that were put into place by F.D.R.: the goal is to privatize Medicare, and Social Security, first and foremost, and reduce taxes on the wealthy as well as so many other civil and gender related rights and further corporate power and voter suppression. But first Medicare, SS. healthy insurance, and taxes. That is it, that’s all they care about. That’s why Ryan would not effectively denounce his party’s nominee. So knowing the history of the New Deal is absolutely vital. Also knowing about the heroic figures of that time and of the civil rights movement and the feminist movement etc is absolutely essential. The voices and the texts and the films are there to be studied. Their eloquence fills my soul, always has done. Miss Fannie Lou Hamer: “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave?”
It is also important to understand that what has happened was part of a long term plan. Read the so-called Powell Manifesto, written in 1971. Everything was laid out in it, there was a plan to take back the country from “Others” and the left, step by step, and they adhered to the plan and it has worked. I have been disappointed in the left, the academic left, it alienates even its own, frankly hearing privileged white men long for revolution makes me sick, and I have not seen the plan, unlike for example the plan that led to the victories of the Civil Rights movement in the 50s and 60s which had been laid out carefully though with much debate and disagreement within. As Hillary Clinton said in one of her last campaign speeches, “anger is not a plan.” It is the instigation and drive for a plan.
There is so much to do and the young have to do much of it, because it is your future, and because you have more of the physical energy, the unconscious strength in the body to do it. You don’t know it until you begin to lose it. You can think you are so so tired, but you are not, and youthful health gives an unconscious optimism that must be channeled and used. But historical awareness, knowledge, humor, and solidarity are vital. And each small gesture does make some kind of a difference although it doesn’t feel that way right now in the face of such infamy. For yesterday, November 8th, 2016, is “a date which will live in infamy” (FDR)
Three exhibitions currently on view in New York City–Stuart Davis: In Full Swing, Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight, and the Hilma af Klint exhibition that is secreted within The Keeper exhibition at the New Museum–provide object lessons on the necessity of seeing “in person” artworks that in reproduction appear flat and graphic in a way that stays fixed at the level of an image with no scale so that when looking at the images most people, particularly those brought up entirely within the regime of Instagram would not see why they should see the works and, further, might not be able to see the work when in front of it because many people now see exclusively through the lens of their smart phone.
The Stuart Davis show and the Hilma af Klint show close this weekend. Sunday September 25th is the last day of each show. I hope that my readers in New York City will make a point of seeing both shows. It would be a shame to miss them.
As usual and in the case of all three exhibitions I will leave it to museum wall text, Wikipedia, and other reviewers to go into the historical background of the artist, and will focus on my experience in front of some of the key works in the exhibitions, beginning with the shows at the Whitney.
Stuart Davis: In Full Swing is an exuberant and joyful survey of the work of an original American modernist artist whose work demonstrated how an artist can be of his time and yet be original and predictive, anticipatory of works that followed him. I was immediately struck by how different the works are in person than in reproduction, where they appear so flatly graphic. This flatness may diminish their interest for people who see them in pictures as representatives of a style, or for people (like me) who see the works as part of a family of artists from Fernand Leger to Raoul Dufy, Miro and Matisse to Lichtenstein and Warhol–these particular associations actually might not be a positive recommendation because of over-familiarity or dislike in some cases. A Google image search of his work may in fact appear noisy to the point of being nauseating, an impression erased when in the presence of the works and also by examining the works close up so that you can focus on details, each work offering paintings within paintings, and on the way they are painted.
When you see them “in person” their physicality and painterliness as well as their scale creates a different and vivid impression, often more intimate than you might imagine, in some of the early works, such as the Lucky Strike paintings from the early 1920s, which have a tremendous sense of delicacy and intimacy in the details of what seem like works about advertising and commercial signage.
If such early works have a precisionist care in how they are painted that recalls early Renaissance painters like Pietro Lorenzetti or Domenico Veneziano, as much as they do product advertisements and packaging design from the 1920s, later works offer a bolder more sculptural approach, and suggests a whole other range of range of artists who followed Davis, including Elizabeth Murray and Al Held.
Among these are Memoand Memo#2 from 1956 in which the color is pared down to red, green, white and black, each with a quadrant of the painting a diagrammatic drawing in black and white, in contrast to more brightly hued and often more representational or symbolic areas, with fragments of objects and language on the bottom left of the work. While responding to the boldness, simplicity, and clarity of the composition of these Memo paintings, I was struck by a relation that they suggested to black and white works by Myron Stout such as Number 3, 1954 from 1954 (in the collection of MoMA). Stout’s work is incomprehensible or, rather, radically misunderstood if you see it in reproduction only, since its intensity and action comes from the indecision betrayed in the pentimenti at the edges, the borderlines between black “ground” and white “figure,” a borderline that Stout in some cases may have spent a decade battling over.
Davis’ paintings betray no such hesitancy yet he did use masking tape to determine shape and placement before deciding on the final configuration and composition. This process is most poignantly evident in his final work, left “unfinished” the night he died. This painting would have made a perfect companion to the unfinished work by Mondrian included in the Met’s recent excellent exhibition Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible. It was exciting and incredibly contemporary to see the tape and the push pin marks left on and in the surface where Mondrian had perhaps temporarily placed bits of colored paper. To see traces of Mondrian’s process again emphasized the handmade quality of works whose familiarity as images is so ubiquitous that fashion accessories and regularly copied from them.
In Davis’ painting, Fin, dried out strips of tan masking tape create a grid pattern over one section of the work while lines of black tape are used to rehearse placement of black lines to be painted onto the composition. The painting surface is very dry and often sketchy. The medium is casein rather than oil, a dry surfaced medium which it is possible that Davis used for underpainting, to be covered by oil at a later stage of the work. The surface and the bright colors make this look like the first layer for a 1940s movie poster, yet it is completely finished, as Davis perhaps intuited when he wrote the word “fin,” end, which he had just seen on TV at the end of a French movie–he died later that same night. The work is vibrant both in color and in composition, a restless vivacity, and a tremendous sense of optimism.
At the bottom of the paining is a green, red, black and white parallelogram that reads like the future of painting: ten years later the character and form of this detail would reappear freshly conceived in works by artist such as David Reed, Mary Heilmann, and Elizabeth Murray, and other artists from the movement that is the focus of the exhibition catalogue High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975. You see in its the beginning of Murray’s work, or Thomas Nozkowski‘s, and the abstractions–paintings and collages–of Richard Tuttle.
In my notebook at the exhibition I wrote of this last work, “one of the most inspiring paintings I have seen in some time.” While it may seem that I am fetishizing incidents of painterliness rather than focusing on a dryer analysis of the role in which Davis is fixed as a somewhat maverick American modernist addressing commodity culture and language, I am responding to the aliveness of these incidents within the painting and to the expanding family of painters that individually and together give me the sense of optimism about artmaking that is essential to its continued practice.
*
I have in recent months expressed exasperation at the recent phenomenon in the artworld of finally giving old, very old women artists–100 is the new 70–“their due,” with the current exhibition of Carmen Herrera’s work a prime example. I don’t think I am alone in not having heard of Herrera’s work until her work became an instance of this phenomenon and, seeing her work in reproduction with no previous experience of it, the flatness of the work combined with the formal reductiveness did not appeal to me. However “The Blanco Y Verde Series, 1959-1971, a group of nine white and green paintings, handsomely installed in the central room of the show, offers yet another proof of the necessity of seeing in person abstract work which may appear so flat and graphic in reproduction that it does not convey the need to see the actual work. This is one of the works from the series, as reproduced on the museums website. Here are two pictures of it I took, one close up.
Herrera’s work is indeed extremely flat and for the most part without surface incident that would betray the trace of a hand. Only if, out of professional curiosity, you look very closely you can see in rare instances some traces of how the paint was applied. Yet in some of the work, notably the Blanco Y Verde series, a group of nine large easel size canvases with flat white surfaces crossed by delicate green darts or shards meeting at sharp finally balanced points of tension, there is a weight that comes from the totality of the surface of each work as well as the group of paintings as a sculptural installation. Something happens at the sharp points where green and white intersect and abut that interacts with the viewer’s scale, and the surfaces’ very dryness creates a kind of blank haze that the thin green darts punctuate. As is so often the case with paintings that involve a flatly applied geometric design, reproduction leaves out the objectness of the canvas, something that Herrara has carefully considered: the paintings are not framed or edged with wood as was the convention in that time period, and one painting has one side or edge of the stretcher painted green (the other edges are white).
*
The question of objectness, presence, and facticity is also relevant to the rare and amazing installation of paintings by Swedish early 20th century artist Hilma af Klint now on view as part of The Keeper exhibition. Sunday September 25th is the last day. RUN to see it if you are in New York, otherwise plan a trip to the Moderna Museet in Sweden.
A friend, artist but not painter, warned me that I might be disappointed by Hilma af Klint’s paintings because they were not very well painted. Having seen her work before I wasn’t too concerned. But upon walking into the exhibition my friend’s response was intriguing and important: not well painted in relation to what? according to what standard?
Klint’s surfaces are generally very dry and mostly flat though each painting may have large or small areas that are brushy or have a clearly demarcated section of impasto. I recommend walking around and around the installation, trying to not look at the sculptures by Carol Bove and others that are for some unfathomable reason plopped in front of the continuous row of paintings that are hung on three walls of the fourth floor. Perfectly fine sculptures in a range of materials from steel to plastic, they nevertheless seem placed there to deliberately test the viewer’s ability to not look at them so that they can concentrate on the paintings they obscure. Luckily the paintings sing out and overpower any such artworld interference.
My first round began to the right of the elevators. I stopped at Swann#18, a series of uneven concentric circle of deep black, red, blue and yellow hover on a red earth ground, brushy and uneven. Three dart like shapes pierce through the ovum of the black circle, and while everything is very precise, the edges of the forms and lines are uneven, but the brushy patchy earth red ground and the slight imperfections of the lines don’t give an impression of weakness or failure or lack of interest on the part of the artist. Each surface, each transparency or opacity is considered and is part of the meaning of the work. This is not decorative or about painterliness or figure/ground, they are “about” a space and a theory which is real to her and it then operates effectively to create space. At the same time the contrast between the dense blackness and the light filled thin red ground serves to give the work a very contemporary feeling. In fact it blows out of the water similar works that came after in the conventional timeline of modernism. Look at Swann#18 and think about Kenneth Noland. No difference in surface or scale. [Trigger warning, his website has music, it is kind of hilarious and fun.]
These works were done between 1914-1915. Think of the abstractions being done around Europe at that time, many of them small and even clumsy and half-hearted or half-assed in their approach to pure abstraction–I’m talking about you Robert Delaunay–and I am bringing this up because when MoMA organized their 2012 survey exhibition, Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925, they included Delaunay, but not Klint, of which exclusion more later.
I went round and round the room, focusing on how the works were painted, looking at the whole work, at the room, slowing down my tour, and shifting from a clockwise to a counterclockwise direction so that as many small details and incidents of painting as possible would spring into focus. I looked closely at the surfaces, taking great joy out the myriad shifts of application and scale within the work while enjoying their size: scale plays a great role in the work, because the works themselves are large and they address the viewer’s body as an equal, they have a declarative confidence.
But within the larger field, marks and grounds are painted as needs be, thick and thin, delicate and contingent, abstract and narrative. This makes them so much fun, they are not dour at all, and they are not constrained by Greenbergian rules eliminating the incidental representational vignette or the diagram which flows with the flatness of the painting field while interrupting it and creating some illusion of depth. They do not suffer from dogmatism.
There is a relationship to radiance and to the impact of dry white impasto that af Klint shares with her contemporary Florrine Stettheimer who followed a similar path from traditional academic training and familiarity with a contemporary artistic milieu and an unconventional deeply personal path–Steittheimer is the queen of white and pale pink impasto, creating an uncanny sense of ethereal materiality–as well as with later abstract artists whose work was both of and beyond their time, such as Jay deFeo, whose The Rose is sister to Hilma af Klint’s radiant white orbs.
I ran into many friends while at the exhibition and we all seemed to be in a state of joyfulness. Finally I ran into a friend who had her two and half year old daughter in her stroller. Unaccountably instead of napping as planned, the child became electrified by the atmosphere in the room. We took a milk and snacks break downstairs and then returned for one more tour. The break, the false departure, and the temporary return to the presence of the works allowed me to feel more strongly than ever the relationship between the dry surfaces and the relation that the works establish between the ethereal and memory. I took many pictures with my poor little phone camera, but the works’ presence is a necessary ingredient to their further life in my mind.
I thought we would just walk around and around, as in a park, and so the mother might get a bit of a chance to spend some more time with the painting and the child might be soothed by the movement but she sang louder and louder, repeating a sentence that I could not decipher, which was just about the moment when I was able to concentrate on the detail of the origin of these works that most likely caused MoMA to not include her in Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925, namely that af Klint, although an academically trained and skilled artist in a more conventional representational mode, did these extraordinary works under the influence of spiritual visions–the tour guide at the New Museum said that she painted landscapes during the day, and these glorious abstract paintings at night when perhaps she could communicate with less interference with the otherwordly non-dimensional spirits who dictated her forms to her–that is that, precisely during this key historical period, she claimed to paint as a medium. Like Mondrian, she was interested in Theosophism, but apparently for MoMA and the art historical establishment there was a difference in how Mondrian could be absorbed into the grand narrative of modernist abstraction and how she did. The whiff of the outsider or crazy artist was too much to bear and my own inculcation into the values of high modernism are such that I had been trying to block that aspect of her inspiration until the child sang and I finally read the wall text which included the word “medium.” I decided that the otherwordly force or being directing her painting was a damn good artist that any other modern artist would have wanted on their side, and, anyway,who knows where greatness comes from.
At the center of the central silver sphere of Dove#12 there is a tiny globe within which two angels do battle, black sword and red sword clashing in an X mark at the center of the painting. There is a relationship between the symbolic and the celestial in keeping with a medieval world view, yes, perhaps that doesn’t fit into Alfred Barr Jr.‘s philosophy.
But the uncategorizable is not nevertheless less great, that someone with traditional training having arrived at something so sophisticated with such command of visual language, painterly articulation, and spacial authority is way beyond an outsider artist [casting no criticism on great outsider artists]. She was not by any accounts crazy, just non-conforming. And, wisely, she knew that the category of “101-year old woman artist getting her due,” was not for her should she live. She left instructions that her work should not be exhibited until twenty years after her death, which came in 1944. It has taken another four decades since then for her due to begin to dawn on people, though the doubt and suspicion of Otherness that kept her out of MoMA’s survey of 20th century vanguard abstraction may still linger. But, still, perhaps, according to my view that women artists are trapped between two paradigms, of “still too young” and “not dead enough,” perhaps she is finally dead enough.
Or is she? during the run of this show, which ends tomorrow, you could not find the presence of Hilma af Klint’s work on the Whitney Museum’s website if you ran a search for her name.
Let her have the last word, her heart and her inspired vision of a double helix,
or,
I
Hilma
**
for more images of and information on Hilma af Klint’s work, here is a good video, from Hilma af Klint: Painting the Unseen, the much more comprehensive exhibition of her work, held at the Serpentine Galleries in London in Spring 2016 (please note that the video will not play in your email program, only on the blog itself viewed on a browser).
It took a while for the full implications of a small item I read in Robin Pogrebin’s “Inside Art” column in the Times earlier this month to sink in, “Judy Chicago Does TV.” The first sentence–“An artist isn’t typically rediscovered at 77”–fit into a category of historicization of women artists that I have commented on frequently, as recently as in a blog post here a few days ago. The article continued, “But that seems to be what’s happening to Judy Chicago of “The Dinner Party” fame, who is now going to be represented by Salon 94.” That Judy Chicago, whose work “The Dinner Party” occupies the most square footage of museum real estate devoted to a woman artist that I know of, at least in the United States, and who has been in the public eye and in feminist history for nearly 50 years, is one of these older women artists who are being “rediscovered” struck me as odd, but, OK, I had noticed recently that she has been showing in Europe, and so perhaps “rediscovery” translates here to that fact that a certain layer of the European art marketeriat is paying attention to her for perhaps the first time.
However the core of my dismay centered on the next paragraph, “Jill Soloway, creator of the acclaimed television series “Transparent,” is also making an Amazon series based on Womanhouse, the 1972 feminist art space that Ms. Chicago organized with Miriam Schapiro.”
Some younger women artists I know posted this news on Facebook saying how “AMAZING” it is. I appreciate their enthusiasm for this signal artwork of early seventies American feminist art, for Jill Soloway as someone focusing on pressing gender and trans issues in her popular series Transparent, and in general for anything feminist to get attention in popular culture.
But, I beg to differ: I was a participant of the project Womanhouse and I find the prospect of a dramatization of it something between violation and farce.
This blog post is to try to examine my own reaction and, though I speak for myself, I write with knowledge of the reaction of a number of the other women who worked on Womanhouse, some of whom I quote below, which boils down to WTF.
First the inference of the article is that Judy Chicago is the principal advisor of this project, and therefore that it is her version of Womanhouse and her views and memories of the other participants that will dominate the narrative. That is disturbing. Why? There is no question that Chicago was the co-director with Miriam Schapiro of the CalArts Feminist Art Program and Womanhouse from 1971-1972. Chicago had created/taught/directed the first Feminist Art Program the year before at Fresno State. I highly recommend the section of Gail Levin’s biography Becoming Judy Chicago: A Biography of the Artist that covers that year of Chicago’s most radical pedagogical experiment, it is inspiring and provocative, and having worked with her and Schapiro in the CalArts program I can vouch for the fact that although our program was pretty radical, the Fresno program was ten times more so. Thus the importance of that Judy Chicago is absolutely paramount. Nevertheless, the idea for Womanhouse came from art historian Paula Harper, and was driven as much by Miriam Schapiro’s ideas, goals, dreams, aesthetic views, and ability to proselitize and fundraise for the project as by Judy’s vision for it. Also, and of course paramount to my own sense of violation, Womanhouse was a collaborative project with 20 young women students from the Program and three or four other unaffiliated women artists from the LA community working on installations, paintings, and performances, emerging from consciousness raising sessions and discussions. In a short, difficult, and intense period of time everyone involved worked to bring the project Womanhouse to fruition for public viewing in the month of February 1972.
The students who participated in the CalArts Feminist Art Program and Womanhouse included some of the women who had worked with Chicago in Fresno, the rest were women who had self-selected to join the CalArts FAP in the fall of 1971. This was a major decision for a number of reasons. First, the program was exclusionary–only women students. The program was given a very large shared studio space with a locked door–that women held significant real estate within the school was so important institutionally. The fact that the program was exclusionary meant that one’s fellow students were only women, which not all young women would find attractive socially. It also at first meant that one was somewhat cut off from the rest of the student body and faculty. Second, it was a major decision because it was not just a class, it was a program, an experimental educational program within an experimental art school, so it represented a major commitment of time, energy, political identification, and personal allegiance as well as a challenge to established views far greater than any of the other ways of challenging art that were operative at the school at that time. Being in the program was a radical statement, it was a public declaration of identification with a political movement, Women’s Liberation or feminism, which at that particular moment was gaining importance across the country but which still was an identification with social risk.
Thus the women who chose to be in the program were unusual, every one of us, even the ones who were shy and quiet or the ones barely sane enough to function. And we were doing all this while mostly very young. Who were we, why had we chosen to do this, how did we handle the pressure? Which ones of us went on to lives in the arts? And which ones contributed further to writing the history of Womanhouse? Does Jill Soloway know anything about this? I am told that she does a lot of research for her projects but not one of the original participants or, in the case of Schapiro, the executor of her estate, has been consulted or indeed heard a word about this project until the notice in the Times. And if Judy Chicago is her only source she won’t learn much of who we were and are and what we know, because Chicago of course was understandably focused on herself and her own significant struggles in the situation. One of the Womanhouse participants’ said that she thought they would only need two actresses, “Judy and ‘the girl’,” another’s fantasy is that in the series “Judy is a character and everyone else is portrayed out of focus.”
On Chicago’s website, her bio page does not mention either the CalArts Feminist Art Program or Womanhouse and her gallery of images tucks pictures of her much referenced and reproduced piece at Womanhouse, “Menstruation Bathroom,” into the bottom page section “Installations and Performances,” so it takes some work to find it. Further, since that time, Judy Chicago has not been an active participant in the many challenging directions that feminist art and theory has taken in the following decades: in fact she–her ideas and her work–was a major subject of, even a cause of, but not an active agent in the very divisive battles over essentialism that dominated feminist art discourse in the 1980s and more subtly ever since.
The little squib in the Times was vague about whether this Womanhouse based series is already in production or just in development. But, again, not a single woman associated with Womanhouse–and, with the exception of Schapiro, all of us are living–has been approached for our recollections and views and our engagements with that shared history or, for that matter, for what we might feel about this dramatization, how each one of us might balance pride in our participation in an important historical work with a sense of possessiveness or privacy about our experiences of it.
Second, it is very common in such dramatizations of real events and docudramas about famous people to focus on only a few characters that represent specific people. Thus, for example, if this Womanhouse series is an actual dramatization of the actual project Womanhouse, Soloway couldn’t get away with creating a composite character to stand in for Miriam Schapiro because she is a well documented historical figure, although some people in the know feel that Judy has done her best to erase Schapiro from the history. The struggles between the two women were visible at the time including in video documentation of the time. But it is their collaboration that creates that particular event in history. However, once past Mimi, it is likely that many of the rest of us would be lumped into generic composite characters. You know, the kind who hang around the great artist’s studio wearing period appropriate clothing and have one line, like “Pablo, that’s really a masterpiece.” In Gail Levin’s biography of Chicago, I believe I am referred to as “a strange girl from New York.”
Well, as it happens, I don’t see myself as a composite character: for example although probably I fit the bill more than I would like, I don’t think I’m the generic Jewish girl from New York. Since I hope Jill Soloway will see this text eventually, I’d just like to say that I happen to think that I’m a pretty unique and complex figure. Also, of the students who were in the CalArts Feminist Art Program and who worked on Womanhouse, I’m one of the ones who has become, with Faith Wilding, a historian of that time period. But the point is that each one of us was a specific and unique person–our choosing to be in the Feminist Art Program alone being evidence enough of that. That was one of the most important gifts of being part of that program and project, getting to know a number of exceptional and unique people with very different backgrounds from my own, but each with a perhaps atypical relation to her own history for having chosen to participate in a revolutionary program. If one is able to see Lynne Littman‘s 1972 KCET document Womanhouse is Not a Home in particular as well as the better known and distributed film by Johanna Demetrakas, Womanhouse, you get to hear many of the young student participants speak about their intentions and desires for their installations but not every woman is interviewed and anyway even that doesn’t give you the full information about each person’s background and what drew them to the FAP. Looking back I’m not sure any of us knew all about why each of us had joined up for though we learned a lot about each other since close friendships were formed and self-revelation in consciousness raising sessions was encouraged in the search for feminist subject matter; nevertheless there were also centrifugal forces that spun us apart, in the tumult of a small group and of a revolutionary moment.
That this was a revolutionary project and moment is embodied in the reaction of yet another of the Womanhouse participants: “it makes me think about how there is nothing that cannot be capitalized, commodified, and HBO-ized.”
Third, most people who find that something they lived through is the subject of a dramatization must feel quite bemused or perturbed by the strangeness of that experience, and by the knowledge that not even the greatest director can possibly recreate the truth of a particular moment in time. If, as a viewer, you yourself have not actually lived through the moment, you can enjoy it no matter how removed from historical veracity. Who hasn’t watched all kinds of preposterous actors play the Kennedys? Maybe even Jackie Kennedy secretly watched some of them. If you know anything about the time period of a dramatization of a historical moment, there is a sort of kick of watching both the characterizations and reconstructions as well as catching the inaccuracies, the compressions of narratives, and, yes the composite characters: Ed Harris’ Pollock, Selma Hayek’s Frida, and Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt are very creditable examples of the genre, but there are always those moments that seem inauthentic, if you know anything about the subject, especially if the character is a composite type and not the depiction of a real person, however reductive and distorted.
Fourth, so really, if it turns out that I will be or have already been written in as myself, the character Mira Schor, age 21, who can play me? I realize that I am not much up on young women actresses at this point. Over twenty years ago I had a pretty good idea: in an envelope (currently lost) that I painted, in which I cast myself and the artists associated with a gallery I was represented by, I cast Judy Davis as myself, not that I look like Judy Davis but her characterization of George Sand in James Lapine’s 1991 film Impromptu (pure fiction at least if you look at the photograph of tubercular Frederick Chopin and compare to gorgeous young Hugh Grant, or photographs of plump plain swarthy middle-aged George Sand and compare her to slim Waspy Judy Davis but it was the Bette Davis impulse in Davis’s characterization that I responded to, the drive of intelligence and independence I associated myself with). But now, I can’t imagine. I sat with a young friend who ran through current actresses including everyone from the stars of Broad City to Emma Stone and, her first choice to play me, Kristen Stewart! Frankly I don’t see any of it. The best I can do is think of my admiration for some of the great comedians of our time–Tina Fey, Samantha Bee, Kristen Schaal, Jessica Williams. Yeah, make a composite of them, and I’ll accept that person + a little Semitic New York strangeness. This will have practically nothing to do with me, but at least I will enjoy the character.
Fifth, and most important, probably I am misunderstanding the whole thing: most likely this is a series that will be “based“ on Womanhouse, allowing for total fiction based on whatever research Soloway does and thereby handily preventing law suits. So perhaps some Semitic-looking actress portraying a scowling Jewish girl from New York or a sexy smart ass Jewish girl from New York or whatever works best for the ensemble of the plot line may float through. Perhaps imagination can create a character more cinematically interesting than my own complex self. And a Miriam Schapiro-like oppositional figure to the transformational radical pedagogue Judy Chicago-based heroine may perhaps be inserted to provide some necessary conflict. I can’t help thinking of all the survivor series, the “reality” shows that identify likeable and villainous characters for the gullible audience and that are so carefully edited and scripted to highlight the most conflict in order to maintain ratings.
The young women artists whose enthusiasm for feminism, which is so welcome, makes them look forward to this series as “AMAZING” will accept this fictionalization as reality because what other options would they have.
And why not applaud the whole thing because so few artworks by women artists are the subject of a television series or film? And, further, as an artist, I should trust in Soloway’s artistic vision and her narrative skill in re-imagining a very significant moment in the history of feminism and the American Women’s Liberation Movement–though, heads up, it really wasn’t much like that “Wimmin’s” festival in Transparent‘s Series 2 episode “Idlewild” although perhaps from the outside we were indeed just the younger versions of the women sitting around the campfire critiquing patriarchy. The casting and acting in Transparent are exemplary so why doubt that she would do a more than creditable job in representing Womanhouse?
Certainly I should recall, as a cautionary note to self, my understanding, shared by many others, that Miriam Schapiro’s desire for control of the narrative when working with potential biographers and documentarians (followed, sadly, by her later struggles with dementia) cost her in terms of historicization–for instance, Schapiro does not appear in Demetrakas’ film Womanhouse–allowing Chicago the historical field and the ground to be the one to influence this planned series on Womanhouse.
And it’s always important to remember the rule so succinctly articulated by John Ford at the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, when a reporter is given the choice between revealing the truth of an important part of the history of the West or sticking with the story as long told, “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” However, in that film, the whole story is a flashback, so we, the audience, know the legendary outcome before we learn the truth, and there is a kind of logic to the story, each of the two main protagonists “who shot Liberty Valance” is in a way a hero, so then a related ending occurs to me, of another Ford movie about the West, his 1948 Fort Apache: here the audience has experienced the story of the massacre caused by an arrogant and racist commanding officer diegetically–read Custer’s Last Stand seen from the critical point of view of US soldiers more experienced with and more respectful of their Native American enemy–so when at the end a reporter refers to the martinet as a hero, as depicted in a totally inaccurate famous painting of the event as reimagined by the winning side of history, the hero dutifully but ironically chooses not to correct the “legend,” but the unfairness is stinging.
But you never know, perhaps I will in the end find myself grinning at the contact glow of secondary fame of being in any way associated with a television series by an Emmy Award winning producer-director. Maybe the dramatization will eventually replace my own fading memories of what actually happened and what it was actually like and what I thought of it at the time. And given the simulacral aspects of contemporary life, where entertainment trumps all, that aphasic self will be a totally representative, contemporary, composite character.
***
I originally had planned to put a bibliography and filmography on Womanhouse here at the end of this text, but why be a goody goody? Thus I have not included any such references or pictures despite being sorely tempted to do so, except for a picture of the original catalogue.
Writing online allows you the ability, offers the temptation, and even imposes the necessity of writing fast and clicking on the “publish” button to meet the news cycle. (I’ve written about this previously on A Year of Positive Thinking–cf. “The Imperium of Analytics”). So what once might have taken a few months of thought and research now may go out in a day. I had not written anything here for the past 6 months because the demands of studio and job were too great and now I seem to be bursting out again and eager to communicate but even twenty-four hours allows useful time for further reflection so I’ve made some corrections and added some material for context to my review of the Eva Hesse documentary that I posted yesterday.
The art documentary obligatory scene of museum or gallery viewers milling around a show of works by the subject of the documentary is one of the most boring tropes of the genre. People holding their coats while looking at art are just not that interesting as film subjects. The Eva Hesse documentary that is finally being screened in New York and around the world is so good that when those scenes come, towards the end of the film, you are glad and moved to see old friends (the art works) and in one case you feel triumphant, as the work returns to the city where she was born and from which her family had to flee for their lives.
The genre of documentary film about artists has acquired a number of tropes or requisite scenes: the studio visit if the artist is living or was filmed previously, the archival pictures, the talking heads, the letters and diaries read out loud, and those scenes of viewers milling around the museum retrospective. Emile de Antonio’s 1973 Painters Painting both consolidated, established, and transgressed the rules and in the past twenty years series such as PBS’s American Masters and, in general, the Ken Burns effect have increasingly homogenized the genre, creating dominant stylistic guidelines for how such films should be if they want to be funded and distributed: it is a circulatory aesthetic system that is efficient and informative but also most likely quite constricting to the creators. Despite these strictures and against difficult financial odds to which documentary filmmakers are particularly prey, important documentaries are made and this year it has been a particular privilege to have been able to see a number of fascinating and moving films about artists who I greatly admire including Beth B.‘s Call Her Applebroog about her mother Ida Applebroog and Kristi Zea’s Everybody knows…Elizabeth Murray.Eva Hesse is an excellent new documentary that adds to this important filmography.
Director Marcie Begleiter–Academy Award please–has created a deeply moving film. Given our familiarity with the forms of this type of film it is interesting to think about how she accomplishes her task. Often documentary music choice is unfortunate, but here it is the music of the time. The director avoids the temptation of using new animation tricks and established commercial formats and video style to get the contemporary viewer’s attention but rather sticks to a graphic style that feels more period specific. The story is particularly and tragically compelling. The passage of time may have served to distill the information. And the script is largely the words of Eva Hesse herself, an exceptionally articulate, intelligent, and present woman.
Begleiter did everything right to bring us into Eva Hesse’s head and her studio, bringing along also the feeling of the times she lived in, New York in the sixties, both the uptown glitz of pop art and the experimentation of downtown, including my old neighborhood on Canal Street, which I realized I moved to only 8 years after she died, same stores I remember, same lost New York.
At the viewing yesterday, as soon as the film began the need to concentrate on every image and word was so intense that I nearly knocked the giant bag of popcorn out of the hands of the two women next to me because their crunching seemed audible across the tiny theater. I would say that you could have heard a pin drop for most of the movie people were so intent on every word and image, except for the sniffling and eye dabbing with Kleenex that started midway through. What Eva Hesse accomplished in a decade of art making is astounding, humbling, inspiring–if one can find within oneself an ounce of the talent, inventiveness, courage, and energy she had.
The movie is playing in New York at the Village East Cinema starting today and the website below indicates screenings around the world, all short, it’s like sightings of a rare bird, so run to see it! It should run and run and be required viewing for all art students, particularly those who have lost interest or faith in drawing and making things with their hands.
