Epiphany

Fear. These first few days of the new year have been very introspective for me and, in the past two days, depressive. Whenever I begin to feel real depression this spirals into fear, which leads to more depression, and silence, and the need for escapism. My anxiety over whether Juan will be here on February 28^th or February 29^th (this is a perfect metaphor, since it does not exist) is so clearly a reflection of my own insecurities regarding myself professionally and my fears and my doubts … the invading doubt that anything will so passionately seize me with creative fury that my entire life will be catapulted into a new sphere and imbued with a surge of fresh energy. The fear that in fact my fear is not at all about professionalism but has much more to do with fear of depression itself, that in writing this I am admitting to the “fact”? that I don’t feel inspired as much as I did even two weeks ago, that colors don’t seem as rich as I’d like them to appear. Though even as I write I realize the errors of my positioning, and this scares me still more, because it appears that “it” takes me over, the fear itself, and this time I won’t be able to talk my way out of it. The fear that this would be what I would offer to Juan when he arrives and not the energy we both need, or that I would seek salvation from my own depression in the light of his energy, the fear I am not suited to any real commitment, the fear of the fear itself, that by articulating fear I reproduce it, manifest it, and make it larger. The fear that there is no place to escape to, that I have already learned the meaning of escape by coming to Berlin and there is no other place to go that will be different, in essence. The fear that coming to Berlin was essentially an act of escape and yet my demons of depression still follow me. The fear that I won’t be able to meet Juan physically with the energy I so badly want to give him or to people far away with whom I communicate and want to shine for, to accomplish something for, though you have glimpsed in me some of it I can’t seem to fully access it at this moment. I am an ocean of fear.

Hair. That is to say, change. I dyed my hair blue and black again and cut the pink almost entirely out so that it is not quite as prominent like a huge feather sticking out of my hair. Before Christmas I had three paid performances, the most exciting being the night I had to myself at Barbie Deinhoff’s, where I performed for about 25 minutes. I attempted the first three or four pieces of what I am beginning to conceive of as a one-woman show and Juan helped me immensely by organizing the music, DJ-ing, and working the door. I never realized until recently that constructing a one-woman show has been a subconscious wish of mine for a very long time, since seeing a young woman perform one at Colleen’s summer theatre camp when I was about 13 years old. She combined movement, song, character, and recorded voice (if I recall correctly, it was the voice of Anne Sexton) to express her experience in the world. The memory and inspiration of her performance flooded back to me as I began to think of how I could make my writing three dimensional. As I begin to delve into it, I realize that I am most interested in the problem of portraying those most intimate moments in our lives, like the moment of waking, what that feels like, to wake up, in the morning. I am interested in capturing the gray areas of experience, that cannot be necessarily described categorically or with descriptive words of emotion. In this first performance, I explored the extremes of dance—oscillating between the idea of stripping/sex and ballet/love; these two “extremes” of dance, if one chooses to think of dance as linear spectrum, serve as a type of metaphor for life’s paradoxes. They symbolize the oscillation between control and loss of control, the oscillation between private and public, the oscillation between socialite and hermit. The oscillation between sleeping and waking. The oscillation between all and nothing; the two essentially being the same. Taken together they are a kind of conversation with the divine. I re-watched Waking Life after my performance and was reminded of what the boy says at the end, that time is an illusion and rather we are living in an eternal moment. That moment is an eternal conversation with god. The illusion of time is that constant questioning where we are asked to live on eternally, that is, to die, yet we don’t, we say no, we say no, we continue to say no. This is time. And when we finally say yes this is the end of time.

Nihilism. Despite re-watching this movie, despite reminding myself of the infinite now in which all is possible, I find myself feeling as though I have not done enough and that the changes that have occurred within the past year have not been drastic enough. Though rationally I know that these first few steps in performance have been an incredible step for me personally. This negativity is nothing but illusion and mental positioning. Though perhaps this is what pushes me to keep going, because nothing seems enough. I know that I felt depression touch me again during this past year, when I had felt somewhat untouched by it for about two years. And then, I fight it, I am in constant battle with it, though I have learned so many mechanisms to cope with it, or to fight against it. I assume this is true for so many people, but I have no point of reference other than myself and the people I know who are vocal about their depression. We are not particularly unique in our sufferings and for this very reason perhaps we are not particularly interested in uniting in our commonalities, this would destroy our very sense of self which seems to be created out of this uniqueness. I am an obsessive recorder of myself, whether this be inside my head or on the page, and for this reason it is very easy for me to go back and look at how I recorded my past feelings. This is an interesting exercise because every time I feel that I have fallen into depression I look back and “discover” that in fact it were only two weeks ago and I felt the exact same way, and only two days previous I felt that the world were my oyster and imbued with the passion of life, that colors of my world were brilliant and that I were on the wings of freedom. But two weeks ago I considered, in my darkest writing, something like the axe in my hallway and the absolute inconsequence of life and death. I protested the war in Iraq because I believe we can’t kill each other and claim to love one another but then a tsunami wipes out such a large number of people that I wonder has it anything to do with the value of life or the numbers at all. I think perhaps it is this kind of thinking that could lead one to take part in suicide bombing, I mean, if one really could kill the evil of this world through suicide bombings why not do it, given that ultimately my life is so meaningless. I figured all of these thoughts are better to disclose than to keep hidden, these thoughts never seem to go away; I always hole up with these thoughts. Though I cannot remember the meaning of “always.” Paradoxically I am completely dynamic as a human and yet absolutely static at the very same time. Or the oscillations appear to be the same, or are they more severe, as I get older? I cannot remember. My memory has gotten worse. I mean, worse than it was before.

Commitment. My father said, “Do I dare to say that you sound happy?” when he found out that juan and I had committed to each other indefinitely and that we had used the word marry, though marriage is probably not something we will do as such … It was interesting to me because I think that what he meant was that he was happy and my mother were happy to be able to use that vocabulary, though I find myself shy from the vocabulary of marriage because this is in essence not what I want to take part in. And it appeared funny that he had not said that to me the entire time in the past three years that I have been more happy in my life than ever. That I would have to fit into a prescribed box in order to appear happy to him, and yet I desired this, to fit into the box to make him realize my happiness, not that my decision to be with Juan has anything to do with making my father happy, but it is true that as soon as Juan and I had decided to be together, I did tell my father, because I knew that I would be rewarded with his happiness for me and still … somehow I felt unhappy at his reaction. Does this make sense. Can this make sense.

Processes and goals. And so this leads me to the place where I get out into the world and do something despite all this and these bizarre thoughts that lead me nowhere. Precisely I will tell you what I have been doing. Besides the performances in December, which was very exciting, it looks as though Jessica and I may be writing a column together in New York. This is very exciting especially if we can get our foot in the door in the freelance world. I finished some of the first big steps for my photography project called juxtapositions and I continue to write about the theory behind it, thoughts on photography, objectification, pornography, sexual power. I continue to write essays and explore my thoughts about sexuality and sexual politics. My thought of the day is: sexual power is extremely addictive. The idea that one can get power through their sexuality is extremely addictive and can cause depression when it is no longer accessible. My future projects: to combine with juan writing and music in order to flesh out this one-woman show, and to make original music with him. My goal: to finish this book of essays. My goal: to pitch and to be published writing about sex and performance in Berlin. My goal: to volunteer with an NGO here in Berlin so that I can continue to be politically active in a direct sense. My goal: to find the right balance between producing work and sending it out, so that I can both produce and get published, so that I have time to make art and also have enough money to live. At present I am not making enough money to live realistically.

Blessings. I would have to say of this year that I should write what I feel blessed for. I do not want to write about this past year without writing about two people, one of whom is Juan, who is such a light in my life, not to mention an incredible support to me. I love him much more than I can express in words here. He and I have a committed partnership in a way that is new for us both. Though it would hardly seem that I would have to say we made a decision about it, it just seemed to happen, this sense of partnership between us and wanting to be with each other.

I also want to mention Jessica because I think she and I are the only ones who really know how incredible our correspondence has been since I left for Berlin, and it seemed, on looking back at this year, to be too vast of an omission not to mention it. I am not sure that I can do justice to say that it has been incredible for me to have correspondence with her of this type, this regularity, and this clarity and with this honesty, but to say that it has been one of the things I most look forward to each day. When I left for Berlin I took no pictures with me and the only ones I had were the new ones I took of Jessica in New York before leaving … so I put them all up on my wall and I have been staring at her for the past two months, though new photographs have since joined her. Perhaps this is one aspect of bringing me closer to her. Perhaps it seems so amazing because I have never had such a consistent conversation with anyone through writing as I have had with her, and perhaps this is a love affair that we’ve created together because I most certainly love her more and more each day if that is possible.

I feel blessed to have so much time on my hands, though time slips so quickly. I feel blessed to have such a community of people I love back at home, especially in California. I feel blessed by the inspirational women that fill my life, the women at la med, the women from college, and the women from high school that always inspire me as they grow, the women living in my community wherever I am. I feel blessed for my chosen and given families. I feel blessed by my brother and the way that he is growing older and the way that we are becoming friends in a new way. I feel blessed for the changing relationships that are happening with my mother and my father, I feel blessed for the houses that I know would receive me if I ever needed to come back, Hrair and Melanie remind me of this whenever I speak with them. And thanks to Melanie for reminding me that the reason I need to stay here is because it is hard. I feel blessed for the isolation and time I received this year for myself, the months of intensity, between Iowa aloneness and Berlin aloneness, to the intense community of SF and living intensely with Juan there in a house that also so warmly received me, combined with the intensity of the theatre workshop and the imminence of departure during August and September. I feel blessed for the intensity of the spring, how emotionally difficult it was, how blindly I lived at times, how roughly I lived at times, how recklessly I pursued my explorations, and I feel thankful to Dustin for how much I learned from him and new lives I glimpsed with him. I feel blessed for the support from all of the incredible writers I met at new college as we finished our degree. And for the women I learned from was inspired by that I met inside the SF jail. I realize at the end of this letter that this writing has taken me from a space of selfishness and self-loathing to an entirely new sense of the coming year and I feel thankful for that in itself.

Feminist myth-making

Certain contemporary thinkers consider, as it is well known, that modernity is characterized as the first epoch in human history in which human beings attempt to live without religion. In its present form, is not feminism in the process of becoming one?
- Julia Kristeva

This quote from Julia Kristeva’s 1979 article “Women’s Time” brings up an issue that I thought might be an interesting first topic for our board. Is feminism, or some part of the feminist movement, or some feminist art and writing engaged in myth-making? If so, is this a good thing? Do we need myths to help us negotiate the world, or do we need to reject all myth and ruthlessly face the world as is (if such a thing is possible)? Can we reject patriarchal myths and invent or recover feminist myths of our own, or is the mythologizing process inherently tied to patriarchal ideas?

These questions have vaguely come up off and on before, but I started thinking about it more intensely during my paper writing last quarter. The most humorous of the strands that started weaving themselves together began when I was staring out my apartment window and observed, to my dismay, two men who were clearly Mormon missionaries in my neighborhood. In my writing-induced semi-hallucinatory state, I tried to come up with something I could say to them that would scare them away immediately. This is the note I wrote down:
If I believe in a God at all, it is a God who created Adam and Lilith together, of the same substance, at the same time, with the same capacity, and for the same equal purposes in the world. I believe in a God who gave Lilith her freedom to pursue her way in the world, unfettered by unhappy Adam, who wanted only another animal he could control. And I believe in a God who punished Adam by creating Eve from Adam’s very flesh, giving him the illusion of control, until Eve proved that, made of the same human substance as he, she would pursue her own course to freedom and knowledge.

Sadly, they did not come knocking on my door, and thus I had no opportunity to discover whether I would have actually handed this to two unsuspecting disturbers of my peace. Feminist myth-making may have been in my mind because I had recently read the Kristeva quote as an epigram for a paper in which a favorite art historian was grappling with the question of whether the meanings and myths tied up in the term artist make it possible for there to be such a thing as a woman artist (she says not, by the way). Myth may have also been in my mind because I will be working this summer with one of the greatest feminist myth making projects, Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party. (For anybody who hasn’t seen it click here for some images.) Elaine Pagels lectured on campus this quarter, and among the stories from one of the Gnostic gospels (I will try to find the reference) is that of a woman who heard Paul preach, was converted, and started traveling with him. After being harassed on the road one day, she decided that it would be better to travel as a man. Paul was outraged, and refused to baptize her until she was properly dressed. Turning to a ditch at the side of the road, she reached down for a handful of water and, pouring it over her own head, baptized herself. I love this myth, and I loved having a very well respected historian tell it to a standing room only crowd in a large auditorium. I find these stories very powerful and very heartening, and they war with the critical, deconstructionist side of me that feels that anything taken to heart emotionally and unquestioningly is ultimately a dangerous route back into reliance on dominant modes of social control.

In terms of my own work, feminist mythmaking is rampant at least throughout the art and art history of the 1970s, and has come under question in the 90s as art historians have begun to argue that the whole idea of a great artist is inherently patriarchal. I tend to agree, in that it glorifies the subject-genius at the expense of considering the web of social contexts in which the artist exists and which shape his or her work and success, and yet I also have to admit that there is something in me that thrills when I see a really great work, something that wants to stand in dumb admiration rather than analyzing its content, form, and context. The bit below is a reading response I wrote for my Feminist and Queer Art History, 1971-present class, a historical survey of art historical work with feminist and queer perspectives. It addresses, in a slightly tighter and less meandering way than the above, the positive side of the issue I’m interested in – do we need a sense of a feminist past to be able to proceed with our future, although I wonder, is this a desire we had at an early less confident point and should we, as Kristeva suggests, steer clear of the dangers of too much emotional reliance on a quasi-religious belief in that history. I have, purposely, left the definition of myth very vague, (I have been using it loosely as history interpreted with desire) because I think that’s an interesting question in and of itself. Another favorite art historian argues that it is impossible to read/see with anything but desire/personal context, and from that perspective perhaps all our histories are myths.

Linda Nochlin’s article “Why Have There Been No Great Woman Artists?” accurately predicts on the second page the direction in which feminist art history has been most influential when she says “A feminist critique of the discipline of art history is needed which can pierce cultural-ideological limitations, to reveal biases and inadequacies not merely in regard to the question of women artists, but in the formation of the crucial questions of the discipline as a whole.” (2) Such a demand may, however, have been ahead of its time. When I look at the feminist art and writing of the 1970s, including Nochlin’s own, the women involved could more accurately be described as creating a framework of positive images and history than as deconstructing the basic assumptions of art and art history. I do not want to trivialize these projects, but rather to acknowledge them as absolutely essential for the radical way they changed how women artists and art historians thought of themselves, which laid the groundwork for the later more intense critiques Nochlin calls for.

Nochlin herself acknowledges this in “Memoirs of an Ad-Hoc Art Historian” when she writes of what women have said to her about the Women Artists show, “That show changed my life. I never knew before that I, as a woman artist or art-worker, had a history. After that show, I knew I was part of a long tradition and it gave me the courage to go on.” (33) In other words, women were finally getting to have a share in the kind of history that Nochlin calls “the whole myth of the Great Artist,” (7) and discovering how empowering it was. Knowing that there were others who had struggled as they had struggled, had made the same sacrifices for their art, had fought the same doubts and continued on seems to have made all the difference for these women artists and art historians of the 1970s. I think this recovery of women artists may be a necessary step for the larger project of destroying these myths that Nochlin wanted to engage in, and to some extent I question how possible it is for us to truly let go of all our heroic artistic mythology, even as I whole heartedly believe she is right. I saw Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum of Art last year, a feminist mythologizing project if there ever was one, and found the experience deeply moving. From a 2003 perspective it was moving in part because I have not had to struggle in the same way that those women, those of the history portrayed or those of the 1970s who made it, did, mostly due to their efforts. But along with the swelling forms struggling to rise off the plates as women’s liberation increased through the centuries, I felt a corresponding rise of my own resolve to continue the struggle in the myriad areas that remain to be changed. Julia Kristeva accused feminism of becoming a religion in her 1979 essay “Women’s Time,” and I have to admit that seeing the Dinner Party is probably as close as I have ever come to a religious experience.

In “Vaginal Iconography” Barbara Rose addresses something of the mental effect of this experience when she compares feminist art to the “Black is Beautiful” art of the Black Power movement, which she sees as “essential in creating not only an ideology of equality, but a psychology built on the confidence that black is as good as white.” (576) Before women could proceed with a project of tearing down and rebuilding an entire way of thinking about a discipline, women needed the confidence that they were worthy, beautiful to themselves beyond the codified and frequently represented signs of their sexual availability to men, strong, and not monstrous in their desires, as their desire and actual sexual organs had so frequently been termed. As Rose writes,
“For much of the feminist art that has been labeled ‘erotic’ because it depicts or alludes to genital images is nothing of the sort. It is designed to arouse women, but not sexually… What is interesting about them is the manner in which they worshipfully allude to female genitalia as icons – as strong, clean, well made, and whole as the masculine totems to which we are accustomed.” (576)
Both the vaginal imagery of many feminist artists in the 1970s as well as the feminist art history recover projects were in a sense engaged in creating the psychological supports for women that the myth of the Great Artist has provided for centuries to white male artists. Crucial among these supports were the feelings of having a history, a community, a vocabulary, and an audience.

In this context, Nochlin’s article reads more as an examination of the norms and institutions by which the white male Great Artist was constructed so that women might be able to finally become Great Artists than a true attack on the bedrock assumptions of the discipline. She closes the section on Rosa Bonheur with a summary of what she sees as the reason she could not achieve greatness, “the voice of the feminine mystique with its potpourri of ambivalent narcissism and internalized guilt subtly dilutes and subverts that total inner confidence, that absolute certitude and self-determination (moral and esthetic), demanded by the highest and most innovative work in art.” (36) Despite Nochlin’s astute assessments of the role of the broader social context in creating the Great Artist, she is not yet ready to give up that ideal goal, and in that sense is very much part of what I see as the 1970s project to create the psychological, historical, mythical, and iconographical framework for women to create great art and become great art historians.