I got free tickets to last night's Met performance of Paul D. Miller's Civil War Symphony. Known as DJ Spooky, he was the artist-in-residence for the last year during which time he produced an electronic work of music that included a live string quartet, a tin drummer and phenomenal singer. All inspired by the Met's archive of civil war photography, some of which images he used and distorted in the video backdrop during the performance.
It was fantastic.
And I was there because too many people did not want to attend and so there were so many empty seats?!
The Met is to be congratulated for venturing into new territory and inviting unexpected artists to collaborate with the collection. This is what art can enable so well. Young artists to explore the past to create something new.
You can watch it live streamed and decide for yourself (give it a few minutes to begin).
I will grant there were a couple moments when the DJ might have used more experience conducting a live group. And I might have wished that he had been given support in how to make more of the visual aspect. It starts off strong but then became a bit repetitive and I don't think that was successful in promoting any particular idea, if that had been the intention. I wish I might have spoken with him over these past few months, helping him discern depths in his own ideas that could then translate into more sophisticated approaches to the video work. The man is really clever but we all sometimes need to talk through our ideas in order to get at the crux of the concept. As for the music, I have nothing to say. I've been a fan for years and enjoyed hearing this mature work.
Had I known about this performance, been granted free tickets ahead of time, there are so many that I would have invited. As is, I feel lucky to be inviting many, many to the National Arts Club where he will be speaking and performing on Tuesday the 14th.
More then about this amazing artist.
Education for a New World
Salman Khan and Carlos Slim spoke at the NYPL to demonstrably mixed reactions about their collaborative expansion of Khan Academy’s Spanish language offerings. Mr. Slim’s 10 million dollar donation does much to enhance the learning platforms that reaches, as Mr. Khan put it during his talk, “More people each month then Harvard has in its entire history.”
With almost a million YouTube subscribers, and over 250 million videos watched, Khan Academy is certainly meeting its mission to change “education for the better by providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere.” Over 4100 videos provide information in brief 10-15 minute chunks on Algebra I, the History of Dates, the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration, or Health Care Costs in US vs Europe. Anyone can get an education anywhere that has a internet connection, with a few USB keys produced to offer the educational programs to small impoverished communities where many do not have such access.
Who could object to such efforts?
During the discussion, many audience members would laugh uproariously at Mr. Slim's comments. They seemed mostly focused in the back right of the auditorium. Confused by these disturbances, other attendees glanced around, whispering possible explanations to themselves. An ophtalmologist, couldn't see who was making the disruption but suggested that it was being simultaneously translated, but poorly so that those listeners were greatly amused. One PhD student suggested that they must be past students of Mr. Slim who were amused to hear him telling the audience things they had heard so many times before. When the laughter had become increasingly disruptive, a young woman towards the front of the audience stood up and asked loudly: "What's so funny?"
"Carlos Slim's charity pretensions are laughable!" Replied a young man, who blew on a kazoo thus prompting all the other members of this group to stand, blow on their plastic kazoos and throw paper monopoly money into the air that explained Slim's information technology monopoly in Mexico. The fifty or so young men and women, between 20 and 40, dressed nicely, who must have each spent anywehre from $25 to $40 to attend the talk, marched around the room, blowing on their kazoos, quite politely heading towards the exit where security was trying to usher them more quickly.
Carlos Slim is the richest man in the world. Valued at over 63 billion dollars, he mostly made his money by taking advantage of a government loophole in telephony, explains a recent article in the Economist. Mexico Federal Competition Commission is trying to wrench such sweeping control away from Slim's company Telmex. Charges against him range from the mild-mannered tsk-tsking of bad business practices to demonstration-provoking accusations of evil corruption.
No one who has succeeded is clean. Fact.
The NYPL conversation was not about that, however, but rather about Khan Academy and how Slim's $10 million dollar donation will help produce 7000 Spanish language videos, servicing an audience that needs it. Over 10 million people in the United States speak Spanish, and little or no English. These populations struggle to get an education since even though Spanish language books are the majority of most libraries' non-English books, many subjects remain unavailable. In Central and South American, impoverished rural areas make an education difficult to procure. But the challenge exists here, too. In NYC, nearly three quarters of Hispanics drop out of high school. Only 7% of them pursue a college degree. Later, they may realize the value of an education. Khan Academy provides an extensive list of topics that can help someone learn what they need to know, or are simply curious to discover–and soon in Spanish as well.
Salman Khan started the academy in 2009 hiding in his closet. It was the most doors between him and his recently born son. Back in 2004, wanting to help a cousin who was struggling with mathematics, he used Yahoo!Doodle to provide tutorials, but as more people got interested he put the videos on YouTube. A graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School, he'd been working as a hedge fun analyst, but by 2009, realizing the potential for success, he left his job to dedicate his time to building Khan Academy. The operation is non-profit and has benefited from significant donations from Google and the Gates Foundation. Other personal donations have also helped the collection of video lessons grow, so that barely four years later Khan Academy now employs forty-five tech and education specialists.
Khan spoke after the kazoo demonstration to explain how positive his own experience has been working with Slim. He was distressed that Slim's finances could intrude on the positive efforts of Khan Academy. Slim shrugged; as the wealthiest man in the world, he is presumably accustomed to being disliked.
There is much to observe in how Khan Academy will succeed, but Khan's comments indicate he is planning for long-term growth. His book One World Schoolhouse explains how much he believes the art of education must change to improve. Education can no longer be didactic. "We don't know what jobs will exist to train people for them," Khan stated at one point, advocating for an education that encourages creative problem solving. The Academy has much to offer, and the lessons are particularly well-designed for delivering information. In my perusal of their offerings, I saw nothing though that would induct people in critical thinking. So why is that missing? I teach it in my classroom when we are discussing 19th Century Women Writers or Composition. It is the hardest thing to teach but not impossible. Khan Academy could cause a revolution if they could show success teaching critical thinking, as they have been able to show success in other educational testing areas. I'm available, Salman, for further discussion!
With almost a million YouTube subscribers, and over 250 million videos watched, Khan Academy is certainly meeting its mission to change “education for the better by providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere.” Over 4100 videos provide information in brief 10-15 minute chunks on Algebra I, the History of Dates, the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration, or Health Care Costs in US vs Europe. Anyone can get an education anywhere that has a internet connection, with a few USB keys produced to offer the educational programs to small impoverished communities where many do not have such access.
Who could object to such efforts?
During the discussion, many audience members would laugh uproariously at Mr. Slim's comments. They seemed mostly focused in the back right of the auditorium. Confused by these disturbances, other attendees glanced around, whispering possible explanations to themselves. An ophtalmologist, couldn't see who was making the disruption but suggested that it was being simultaneously translated, but poorly so that those listeners were greatly amused. One PhD student suggested that they must be past students of Mr. Slim who were amused to hear him telling the audience things they had heard so many times before. When the laughter had become increasingly disruptive, a young woman towards the front of the audience stood up and asked loudly: "What's so funny?"
"Carlos Slim's charity pretensions are laughable!" Replied a young man, who blew on a kazoo thus prompting all the other members of this group to stand, blow on their plastic kazoos and throw paper monopoly money into the air that explained Slim's information technology monopoly in Mexico. The fifty or so young men and women, between 20 and 40, dressed nicely, who must have each spent anywehre from $25 to $40 to attend the talk, marched around the room, blowing on their kazoos, quite politely heading towards the exit where security was trying to usher them more quickly.
Carlos Slim is the richest man in the world. Valued at over 63 billion dollars, he mostly made his money by taking advantage of a government loophole in telephony, explains a recent article in the Economist. Mexico Federal Competition Commission is trying to wrench such sweeping control away from Slim's company Telmex. Charges against him range from the mild-mannered tsk-tsking of bad business practices to demonstration-provoking accusations of evil corruption.
No one who has succeeded is clean. Fact.
The NYPL conversation was not about that, however, but rather about Khan Academy and how Slim's $10 million dollar donation will help produce 7000 Spanish language videos, servicing an audience that needs it. Over 10 million people in the United States speak Spanish, and little or no English. These populations struggle to get an education since even though Spanish language books are the majority of most libraries' non-English books, many subjects remain unavailable. In Central and South American, impoverished rural areas make an education difficult to procure. But the challenge exists here, too. In NYC, nearly three quarters of Hispanics drop out of high school. Only 7% of them pursue a college degree. Later, they may realize the value of an education. Khan Academy provides an extensive list of topics that can help someone learn what they need to know, or are simply curious to discover–and soon in Spanish as well.
Salman Khan started the academy in 2009 hiding in his closet. It was the most doors between him and his recently born son. Back in 2004, wanting to help a cousin who was struggling with mathematics, he used Yahoo!Doodle to provide tutorials, but as more people got interested he put the videos on YouTube. A graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School, he'd been working as a hedge fun analyst, but by 2009, realizing the potential for success, he left his job to dedicate his time to building Khan Academy. The operation is non-profit and has benefited from significant donations from Google and the Gates Foundation. Other personal donations have also helped the collection of video lessons grow, so that barely four years later Khan Academy now employs forty-five tech and education specialists.
Khan spoke after the kazoo demonstration to explain how positive his own experience has been working with Slim. He was distressed that Slim's finances could intrude on the positive efforts of Khan Academy. Slim shrugged; as the wealthiest man in the world, he is presumably accustomed to being disliked.
There is much to observe in how Khan Academy will succeed, but Khan's comments indicate he is planning for long-term growth. His book One World Schoolhouse explains how much he believes the art of education must change to improve. Education can no longer be didactic. "We don't know what jobs will exist to train people for them," Khan stated at one point, advocating for an education that encourages creative problem solving. The Academy has much to offer, and the lessons are particularly well-designed for delivering information. In my perusal of their offerings, I saw nothing though that would induct people in critical thinking. So why is that missing? I teach it in my classroom when we are discussing 19th Century Women Writers or Composition. It is the hardest thing to teach but not impossible. Khan Academy could cause a revolution if they could show success teaching critical thinking, as they have been able to show success in other educational testing areas. I'm available, Salman, for further discussion!
Marketing Mozart and Warhol
At a birthday party yesterday evening, I found myself in a conversation with a man who wanted to know about what was going on in the art world today. Somewhat flummoxed by his belief that anyone could actually answer that questions, I asked him what galleries or museums he had last visited. He said he did not really know where to go. He wanted to see today's great artists, though. You know, the Mozart and the Warhol of today.
I think the record inside my brain came to a screeching halt. I blinked and with sincerity replied that if Warhol followed Mozart for him then I really had no idea what to suggest.
I really had no idea what he meant. Trying to explain, he launched into a story about how Warhol drew daisies in a field when he was six while other children played. And the daisies were really well drawn. He knew how to draw! So it wasn't just a soup can because he could draw. My confusion grew. But, I tried to suggest, Warhol isn't significant because he could draw well. It's his ideas, I proposed, that were catalysts. (I did not here go into any of the arguments about whether the ideas belonged to Warhol or whether he simply took other people's good ideas and ran with them, as he might have learned working in a marketing firm; nor whether there is any significance to Warhol's presence in the screen printing factory when the works were being produced, as my sense was that the conversation could better maintain its cocktail party parameters by evading these denser theoretical issues.) But he could draw, the man repeated. Yes, but nobody cares about that, I said perhaps a little too bluntly.
Nobody values Warhol's line or color or artistry. It's the symbols that he permitted to resonate across art. It's the ideas that others have found in his work that made him significant. Warhol was great for creating a cultural artifact out of the new industrial and mass consumerist lifestyle of the post World War II United States. From the new major global power came its first self-generated cultural production.That, as a nation, we have come to embrace that one cultural production about industry and consumption with a nationalistic fervor–one which still resounds in much seemingly cutting-edge, "ironic" contemporary art–is simply because the United States is so young, culturally speaking, and hasn't yet learned that to shift out of one cultural identity into another, must then be followed by shifts into others. Warhol was great, but he wasn't great like Mozart, I said finishing my rant. The two are totally different. If you had asked Mozart what makes the bars of this sonnetina any good, he could have told you. Warhol could not explain his own work except to embrace what others said about it.
He nodded. There's nothing wrong with that, I added. Great art doesn't require the artist to explain it (how boring!) but if the work is a response to an ideology or theoretical paradigm, maybe they should? I asked. He nodded.
Does anybody care about Warhol in Europe? He asked me. My brain spun like a top trying to get a fix on where we were. Here was a man whose work oversaw the development of assorted optical programs, who was married with a six year old daughter, and he really did want to learn more about art from this conversation. I could tell simply from his earnestness. But I could not continue in this vein without having my own head explode.
As much as anywhere else, I replied getting up to get another drink, but don't forget that he still doesn't have his own chocolate candy.
I believe he nodded at that.
I think the record inside my brain came to a screeching halt. I blinked and with sincerity replied that if Warhol followed Mozart for him then I really had no idea what to suggest.
I really had no idea what he meant. Trying to explain, he launched into a story about how Warhol drew daisies in a field when he was six while other children played. And the daisies were really well drawn. He knew how to draw! So it wasn't just a soup can because he could draw. My confusion grew. But, I tried to suggest, Warhol isn't significant because he could draw well. It's his ideas, I proposed, that were catalysts. (I did not here go into any of the arguments about whether the ideas belonged to Warhol or whether he simply took other people's good ideas and ran with them, as he might have learned working in a marketing firm; nor whether there is any significance to Warhol's presence in the screen printing factory when the works were being produced, as my sense was that the conversation could better maintain its cocktail party parameters by evading these denser theoretical issues.) But he could draw, the man repeated. Yes, but nobody cares about that, I said perhaps a little too bluntly.
Nobody values Warhol's line or color or artistry. It's the symbols that he permitted to resonate across art. It's the ideas that others have found in his work that made him significant. Warhol was great for creating a cultural artifact out of the new industrial and mass consumerist lifestyle of the post World War II United States. From the new major global power came its first self-generated cultural production.That, as a nation, we have come to embrace that one cultural production about industry and consumption with a nationalistic fervor–one which still resounds in much seemingly cutting-edge, "ironic" contemporary art–is simply because the United States is so young, culturally speaking, and hasn't yet learned that to shift out of one cultural identity into another, must then be followed by shifts into others. Warhol was great, but he wasn't great like Mozart, I said finishing my rant. The two are totally different. If you had asked Mozart what makes the bars of this sonnetina any good, he could have told you. Warhol could not explain his own work except to embrace what others said about it.
He nodded. There's nothing wrong with that, I added. Great art doesn't require the artist to explain it (how boring!) but if the work is a response to an ideology or theoretical paradigm, maybe they should? I asked. He nodded.
Does anybody care about Warhol in Europe? He asked me. My brain spun like a top trying to get a fix on where we were. Here was a man whose work oversaw the development of assorted optical programs, who was married with a six year old daughter, and he really did want to learn more about art from this conversation. I could tell simply from his earnestness. But I could not continue in this vein without having my own head explode.
As much as anywhere else, I replied getting up to get another drink, but don't forget that he still doesn't have his own chocolate candy.
I believe he nodded at that.
Bushwick Open Studios, pt 3- some history
Bushwick made national news in 1977 when the New York City Blackout
unleashed a riot that left the already impoverished neighborhood
destitute–134 stores looted, 44 of them burnt to the ground, fires
flickering for a week. In the late sixties, unscrupulous real estate
agents began “blockbusting,” leaving disturbing messages about the
influx of Southern Blacks and Puerto Ricans to encourage the
historically white homeowners to sell. Bought cheap, those homes were
sold at much higher prices under bad loans and abandoned by their new
owners within a few years. In 1972, the city had estimated at least 500 homes
in the neighborhood stood empty. Hoping to collect on insurance
policies, some desperate owners set their homes on fire.
Gang crime also proliferated, starting fires that would rip through tightly packed wooden frame buildings in order to collect wiring and copper once the fire department had tamped the flames. Some parents would put their children to sleep in street clothes in case their building was ignited during the night. When the city nearly went bankrupt, budget cuts drastically reduced the number of police officers and fire fighters, allowing the mayhem to grow in poor neighborhoods like Bushwick. One apartment building was raided by a crew who started pulling piping from the walls; residents phone calls to the police precinct went unanswered for three weeks. The Blackout simply released what little was still being controlled.
The Eighties crack epidemic naturally scoured Bushwick. One area was dubbed The Well for its ceaseless drug supply. Abandoned buildings made natural havens for the city’s poor and desperate. Gang violence escalated. The often berated “draconian” crime reduction policies that Giuliani instated, however, helped reduce Bushwick crime 66% between 1990 and 1998. As the neighborhood calmed down, across the first decade of this century, artists moved to the large loft spaces as other neighborhoods got too expensive.
Now, Bushwick thrives. Shared work spaces like Bat Haus (279 Starr Street, off the Jefferson stop) and 3rd Ward (195 Morgan Avenue) provide space for small business owners to operate outside of their home among other young, idea-driven entrepreneurs. These spaces offer classes in everything from how to write an “About You” page on a website, to woodworking, to mastering various computer programs. Of course, crime remains in Bushwick as it does in every neighborhood in New York, but the graffiti is renowned and respected, and street scenes are often being shot by aspiring directors and photographers.
At Bushwick Open Studios, the history of the neighborhood is washed out in the ardent art enthusiasm. In a few years, like SoHo, that too will be forgotten. Who knows what art does to you personally, but it certainly changes a neighborhood.
Gang crime also proliferated, starting fires that would rip through tightly packed wooden frame buildings in order to collect wiring and copper once the fire department had tamped the flames. Some parents would put their children to sleep in street clothes in case their building was ignited during the night. When the city nearly went bankrupt, budget cuts drastically reduced the number of police officers and fire fighters, allowing the mayhem to grow in poor neighborhoods like Bushwick. One apartment building was raided by a crew who started pulling piping from the walls; residents phone calls to the police precinct went unanswered for three weeks. The Blackout simply released what little was still being controlled.
The Eighties crack epidemic naturally scoured Bushwick. One area was dubbed The Well for its ceaseless drug supply. Abandoned buildings made natural havens for the city’s poor and desperate. Gang violence escalated. The often berated “draconian” crime reduction policies that Giuliani instated, however, helped reduce Bushwick crime 66% between 1990 and 1998. As the neighborhood calmed down, across the first decade of this century, artists moved to the large loft spaces as other neighborhoods got too expensive.
Now, Bushwick thrives. Shared work spaces like Bat Haus (279 Starr Street, off the Jefferson stop) and 3rd Ward (195 Morgan Avenue) provide space for small business owners to operate outside of their home among other young, idea-driven entrepreneurs. These spaces offer classes in everything from how to write an “About You” page on a website, to woodworking, to mastering various computer programs. Of course, crime remains in Bushwick as it does in every neighborhood in New York, but the graffiti is renowned and respected, and street scenes are often being shot by aspiring directors and photographers.
At Bushwick Open Studios, the history of the neighborhood is washed out in the ardent art enthusiasm. In a few years, like SoHo, that too will be forgotten. Who knows what art does to you personally, but it certainly changes a neighborhood.
Bushwick Open Studios, pt 2- food and fun
Just like the program, the app will include all the participating galleries, venues, studios with artists names and addresses. As BOS has grown, the galleries and venues have become major destinations because they are large and central. The BogArt collects over a dozen galleries within its industrial building who collaborate on openings and events to support each other’s efforts (56 Bogart, across the street from the back exit of the Morgan Ave L train). English Kills remains a local favorite (114 Forrest St). While Norte Maar has been called “the beating heart of the Bushwick art scene” (83 Wyckoff Avenue, #1B). These galleries are major sponsors of the festival because they are also important galleries for local artists and deeply rooted in the Bushwick scene of the last decade. These locations know who’s who and what’s what, so can answer many questions about what you are seeing. Curated galleries establish a certain standard in the quality of work, but don’t avoid the smaller ones. Paul D’Agostino runs Centotto Gallery out of his apartment, politely welcoming MoMA curators and other art world leviathans to his small but significant salon (250 Moore Street #108). Most recently Roberta Smith positively reviewed D’Agostino’s own collage works and drawings, but in keeping with the Bushwick ethos, Paul determined that this year’s BOS would still see Centotto Gallery displaying artists whose works he hopes will get more notice for his support. He plans to send his visitors onward to the artists’ studios whose work he is showing. It is after all “Bushwick Open Studios,” he emphasizes.
Studio visits can be off putting because it is such a mixed bag. Last year, one attendee complained that she walked into someone’s living room where they had push-pinned some drawings that had clearly been scrawled with little effort. The artist seemed indifferent to her presence, drinking a beer on his couch. Why did he bother, she asked upon arriving at the studio of a full-time professional painter, Tim Kent (250 Moore St #104). He declined to answer, but proceeded to tell her about his interest in perspective, the English tradition of interior design, his influences, why he continues to love oil painting, and then over a slice of watermelon, introduced her to another guest. Discovering that they shared acquaintances, the two visitors joined forces and information, happily setting off to see more work together. Studio tours may sometimes be dismal, but they also provide a setting for such serendipitous encounters.
Most people are familiar with the Bushwick area around the Morgan Avenue stop, where many of the galleries already mentioned are located. In 2012, the Bushwick art scene centered around Morgan in part because of the group gallery building at 56 Bogart but also because Luhring Augustine, the renowned Chelsea gallery, opened a space within walking distance (25 Knickerbocker Ave). The gallery has done little to become a part of the community; it will be open during BOS, but is not participating as a sponsor or a hub. Its presence however makes an important statement about Bushwick’s place in the ever shifting, always seeking, art scene of New York City.
Despite the growing art community, many visitors to the Morgan area have never entered a gallery. They were lured there by Roberta’s pizza. Lauded by foodies internationally, Roberta’s helped make the immediate neighborhood a destination spot. Anytime after 7PM, diners can wait up to three hours to be seated–and do, so expect an even longer wait if you want to get a meal there during the festival (261 Moore Street). Momo’s, the communal-table sushi restaurant around the corner, has received commendations in New York and London newspapers, but before those reviews used to post on their street sign: “Roberta’s packed? Come on in!” Now, Momo’s diners too can have a long wait. Tutu’s just opened this Spring but already has a loyal following, with music playing in their three rooms on weekends (25 Bogart Street).
Besides such fine dining, Bogart street provides plenty of quick and easy food options: two delis with plenty of organic choices, a falafel joint and Swallow, the coffee bar that took over one of the neighborhood’s first establishments, The Archive. Stepping off Bogart even just a few paces will reveal Fine and Raw, a chocolate factory (288 Seigel Street); Shinobi, a small spot that serves homemade ramen soup (53 Morgan Avenue); L’Ange Noir, serving typical coffee shop fare (247 Varet Street); and 983 which took over the space when the much beloved East Village off-shoot, Life Café 983, closed its doors in 2011, and continues to serve satisfying American comfort food (983 Flushing Avenue). During BOS, boutique food trucks also offer an assortment of fancy foods.
Unlike Williamsburg’s long main stretch, Bushwick has many pockets, each vital with its own great restaurants, bars and shops. Different scenes grow around various stops along the L train with stretches of nothing in between. Four busy blocks in Manhattan can be four long, desolate, industrial wastelands in Bushwick. A short distance on the map can suddenly feel drawn out when walking past windowless buildings with loading docks filling large brandless Mac trucks. Crowds center during the festival within particular busy points, and going from one to the next usually includes other wanderers, but every once and a while you’ll have the same experience of every Bushwick resident when you wonder where am I, and should I be going in this direction? The barren emptiness is a reminder of Bushwick’s slow rise out of destitution.
Arts in Bushwick hopes to keep the neighborhood a space for artists in all media to live and work, so that they don’t get pushed out of yet another neighborhood. The Bushwick Open Studios festival encourages work across the arts to help cement a general arts community. After the noon to seven period when most studios and galleries are open, the BOS night offers a range of happenings. Galleries have dance parties, but there are many performance events as well. Artists who’ve been inside studios spill out of their buildings, and the streets overflow as groups head to a dance show or a theatrical, a poetry reading or a music concert. Sunday will launch the first CinemaSunday, screening the efforts of local filmmakers. Unlike the rest of BOS, CinemaSunday works will have gone through a selection process and has been scheduled as the closing event of the festival. The screening will be held at Bat Haus, followed by a barbecue and dance party.
Bushwick likes to party and Bushwick Open Studios revels in presenting the enthusiasm of today’s lesser known artists. Irony is prevalent in New York and the art world, except among those who can’t afford to be blasé about their passion. Producing art has never been easy but the rising costs of New York make it ever more difficult. Certainly the neighborhood has its share of pretenders–any art scene will. Those indifferent hipsters may be a crime against Fashion and Reason but they keep the restaurants and bars in business while the real artists work behind industrial walls that haven’t yet been zoned residential, that haven’t yet become yuppy havens. For now, Bushwick artists offer a refreshing breath of earnest pleasure in the real struggle that is making art. The 2013, 7th Annual Bushwick Open Studios is a weekend long opportunity to observe art so fresh the paint’s still wet, to be inspired by the effort these artists make to keep their work real, to participate in a community committed to art.
Studio visits can be off putting because it is such a mixed bag. Last year, one attendee complained that she walked into someone’s living room where they had push-pinned some drawings that had clearly been scrawled with little effort. The artist seemed indifferent to her presence, drinking a beer on his couch. Why did he bother, she asked upon arriving at the studio of a full-time professional painter, Tim Kent (250 Moore St #104). He declined to answer, but proceeded to tell her about his interest in perspective, the English tradition of interior design, his influences, why he continues to love oil painting, and then over a slice of watermelon, introduced her to another guest. Discovering that they shared acquaintances, the two visitors joined forces and information, happily setting off to see more work together. Studio tours may sometimes be dismal, but they also provide a setting for such serendipitous encounters.
Most people are familiar with the Bushwick area around the Morgan Avenue stop, where many of the galleries already mentioned are located. In 2012, the Bushwick art scene centered around Morgan in part because of the group gallery building at 56 Bogart but also because Luhring Augustine, the renowned Chelsea gallery, opened a space within walking distance (25 Knickerbocker Ave). The gallery has done little to become a part of the community; it will be open during BOS, but is not participating as a sponsor or a hub. Its presence however makes an important statement about Bushwick’s place in the ever shifting, always seeking, art scene of New York City.
Despite the growing art community, many visitors to the Morgan area have never entered a gallery. They were lured there by Roberta’s pizza. Lauded by foodies internationally, Roberta’s helped make the immediate neighborhood a destination spot. Anytime after 7PM, diners can wait up to three hours to be seated–and do, so expect an even longer wait if you want to get a meal there during the festival (261 Moore Street). Momo’s, the communal-table sushi restaurant around the corner, has received commendations in New York and London newspapers, but before those reviews used to post on their street sign: “Roberta’s packed? Come on in!” Now, Momo’s diners too can have a long wait. Tutu’s just opened this Spring but already has a loyal following, with music playing in their three rooms on weekends (25 Bogart Street).
Besides such fine dining, Bogart street provides plenty of quick and easy food options: two delis with plenty of organic choices, a falafel joint and Swallow, the coffee bar that took over one of the neighborhood’s first establishments, The Archive. Stepping off Bogart even just a few paces will reveal Fine and Raw, a chocolate factory (288 Seigel Street); Shinobi, a small spot that serves homemade ramen soup (53 Morgan Avenue); L’Ange Noir, serving typical coffee shop fare (247 Varet Street); and 983 which took over the space when the much beloved East Village off-shoot, Life Café 983, closed its doors in 2011, and continues to serve satisfying American comfort food (983 Flushing Avenue). During BOS, boutique food trucks also offer an assortment of fancy foods.
Unlike Williamsburg’s long main stretch, Bushwick has many pockets, each vital with its own great restaurants, bars and shops. Different scenes grow around various stops along the L train with stretches of nothing in between. Four busy blocks in Manhattan can be four long, desolate, industrial wastelands in Bushwick. A short distance on the map can suddenly feel drawn out when walking past windowless buildings with loading docks filling large brandless Mac trucks. Crowds center during the festival within particular busy points, and going from one to the next usually includes other wanderers, but every once and a while you’ll have the same experience of every Bushwick resident when you wonder where am I, and should I be going in this direction? The barren emptiness is a reminder of Bushwick’s slow rise out of destitution.
Arts in Bushwick hopes to keep the neighborhood a space for artists in all media to live and work, so that they don’t get pushed out of yet another neighborhood. The Bushwick Open Studios festival encourages work across the arts to help cement a general arts community. After the noon to seven period when most studios and galleries are open, the BOS night offers a range of happenings. Galleries have dance parties, but there are many performance events as well. Artists who’ve been inside studios spill out of their buildings, and the streets overflow as groups head to a dance show or a theatrical, a poetry reading or a music concert. Sunday will launch the first CinemaSunday, screening the efforts of local filmmakers. Unlike the rest of BOS, CinemaSunday works will have gone through a selection process and has been scheduled as the closing event of the festival. The screening will be held at Bat Haus, followed by a barbecue and dance party.
Bushwick likes to party and Bushwick Open Studios revels in presenting the enthusiasm of today’s lesser known artists. Irony is prevalent in New York and the art world, except among those who can’t afford to be blasé about their passion. Producing art has never been easy but the rising costs of New York make it ever more difficult. Certainly the neighborhood has its share of pretenders–any art scene will. Those indifferent hipsters may be a crime against Fashion and Reason but they keep the restaurants and bars in business while the real artists work behind industrial walls that haven’t yet been zoned residential, that haven’t yet become yuppy havens. For now, Bushwick artists offer a refreshing breath of earnest pleasure in the real struggle that is making art. The 2013, 7th Annual Bushwick Open Studios is a weekend long opportunity to observe art so fresh the paint’s still wet, to be inspired by the effort these artists make to keep their work real, to participate in a community committed to art.
Bushwick Open Studios, pt 1
Booming Bushwick: 7th Annual Bushwick Open Studios
Bushwick Open Studios launches its seventh annual arts festival on Friday, May 31st with over 500 artists’ studios and galleries participating in the weekend long event. In a three square mile area, in lofts, residential buildings, art spaces, up stairs, on rooftops, in basements and on the street, deciding what to see becomes in part a question of how to navigate the scene. Do not expect the pristine and polite gallery walks of other art neighborhoods. This is a homegrown extravaganza, a fascinating fun-house.
Unlike curated festivals, the offerings at Bushwick Open Studios range in style and skill. Anyone can register to participate by filling an online form and attending one of the mixer events. These gatherings are required, and instill a sense of community among the participants, who range from after-work, occasional scribblers to full-time, professional artists. There are sculptors, woodworkers, oil painters, landscape painters, collagers, watercolorists, graffiti artists, sketch artists, installation artists, portraitists, conceptualists, photographers, curators, gallerists, art professors, students, all of the above and none of the above, because there are also events with actors, dancers, musicians and more. It’s hodge podge of what is being created today, with all the terrible and the great inherent in such a wide array.
Arts in Bushwick, the oversight organization, was begun by fifteen grassroots organizers and local artists in 2007 to promote an integrated, sustainable community that could counter development-driven displacement. Artists have been pushed out of the West Village, SoHo, the East Village, Williamsburg, and Dumbo because of development plans to upscale and gentrify. Arts in Bushwick gathers artists through the annual festival to create a sense of commitment to the neighborhood as a vibrant and authentic arts quarter. The organization is completely volunteer driven and non-hierarchical, and much to everyone’s continued surprise runs an orderly, engaging, and exciting three day festival, every year on the first weekend in June.
This year the festival will officially open at Shea Stadium–not the sports arena, but the recording studio, all-ages showspace, and radio station that’s been hailed by NPR, The New York Times, The Village Voice and others (20 Meadow Street, halfway between the Montrose and Grand Street L train stops). Just as artists in New York wear many hats so do their spaces often include several business angles, so don’t be surprised when you stop by a gallery-boutique bookbinder-monthly dance space. Such collaborations are particularly common among Bushwick’s small business owners. Shea Stadium will provide music and celebration, enthusiasm and noise on Friday night starting at 7PM. Some programs will be available (as they usually are at every studio and gallery) but information on what and where will always be available at any one of the several dozen “hubs” the festival has established, precisely to help those unfamiliar with the neighborhood.
“Hubs” are major galleries, bars, cafés and venues that have committed to remain open throughout the weekend to answer questions, provide directions, offer a bathroom and hand you a program. Located near subway stations and bus stops, they will have information on events and activities, as well as maps to guide the perplexed. A full list of all the hubs is still being developed but will be provided online for newcomers. All participants are identifiable by signs with a large red dot on a white square that includes their identification number in the program. The signs are located on building entrances, apartment and gallery doors, and sometimes on the street to guide audiences to little known locations. Stopping by a hub can help orient a visitor who hasn’t been to the neighborhood before, especially on a weekend that is swarming with people. For those committed to digital platforms, an Android and Apple app is being produced by last year’s volunteer team and should be available for download by mid-May.
Note: As it turned out, Bushwick Open Studios is still scheduling events. Galleries are still selecting who will be in their group shows. Sponsors and Hubs are being determined. As such, much factual information is missing that would need to be included for this to be an actual presentation of the upcoming BOS 2013. Instead, I did an overview of the event, the neighborhood and area to help prepare visitors about the general scene. By the beginning of May, it will be possible to include a great deal more information (which food trucks will be there, what galleries will have on display, what evening events are scheduled, and so forth).
Bushwick Open Studios launches its seventh annual arts festival on Friday, May 31st with over 500 artists’ studios and galleries participating in the weekend long event. In a three square mile area, in lofts, residential buildings, art spaces, up stairs, on rooftops, in basements and on the street, deciding what to see becomes in part a question of how to navigate the scene. Do not expect the pristine and polite gallery walks of other art neighborhoods. This is a homegrown extravaganza, a fascinating fun-house.
Unlike curated festivals, the offerings at Bushwick Open Studios range in style and skill. Anyone can register to participate by filling an online form and attending one of the mixer events. These gatherings are required, and instill a sense of community among the participants, who range from after-work, occasional scribblers to full-time, professional artists. There are sculptors, woodworkers, oil painters, landscape painters, collagers, watercolorists, graffiti artists, sketch artists, installation artists, portraitists, conceptualists, photographers, curators, gallerists, art professors, students, all of the above and none of the above, because there are also events with actors, dancers, musicians and more. It’s hodge podge of what is being created today, with all the terrible and the great inherent in such a wide array.
Arts in Bushwick, the oversight organization, was begun by fifteen grassroots organizers and local artists in 2007 to promote an integrated, sustainable community that could counter development-driven displacement. Artists have been pushed out of the West Village, SoHo, the East Village, Williamsburg, and Dumbo because of development plans to upscale and gentrify. Arts in Bushwick gathers artists through the annual festival to create a sense of commitment to the neighborhood as a vibrant and authentic arts quarter. The organization is completely volunteer driven and non-hierarchical, and much to everyone’s continued surprise runs an orderly, engaging, and exciting three day festival, every year on the first weekend in June.
This year the festival will officially open at Shea Stadium–not the sports arena, but the recording studio, all-ages showspace, and radio station that’s been hailed by NPR, The New York Times, The Village Voice and others (20 Meadow Street, halfway between the Montrose and Grand Street L train stops). Just as artists in New York wear many hats so do their spaces often include several business angles, so don’t be surprised when you stop by a gallery-boutique bookbinder-monthly dance space. Such collaborations are particularly common among Bushwick’s small business owners. Shea Stadium will provide music and celebration, enthusiasm and noise on Friday night starting at 7PM. Some programs will be available (as they usually are at every studio and gallery) but information on what and where will always be available at any one of the several dozen “hubs” the festival has established, precisely to help those unfamiliar with the neighborhood.
“Hubs” are major galleries, bars, cafés and venues that have committed to remain open throughout the weekend to answer questions, provide directions, offer a bathroom and hand you a program. Located near subway stations and bus stops, they will have information on events and activities, as well as maps to guide the perplexed. A full list of all the hubs is still being developed but will be provided online for newcomers. All participants are identifiable by signs with a large red dot on a white square that includes their identification number in the program. The signs are located on building entrances, apartment and gallery doors, and sometimes on the street to guide audiences to little known locations. Stopping by a hub can help orient a visitor who hasn’t been to the neighborhood before, especially on a weekend that is swarming with people. For those committed to digital platforms, an Android and Apple app is being produced by last year’s volunteer team and should be available for download by mid-May.
Note: As it turned out, Bushwick Open Studios is still scheduling events. Galleries are still selecting who will be in their group shows. Sponsors and Hubs are being determined. As such, much factual information is missing that would need to be included for this to be an actual presentation of the upcoming BOS 2013. Instead, I did an overview of the event, the neighborhood and area to help prepare visitors about the general scene. By the beginning of May, it will be possible to include a great deal more information (which food trucks will be there, what galleries will have on display, what evening events are scheduled, and so forth).
Looking for a Heroine, Book Review: Heroines by Kate Zambreno
Heroines. Kate Zambreno. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e) Active Agents, 2012. 309 pages.
“Your job will be to suppress everything suppressible” said T.S. Eliot to John Hayward, his literary executor. Kate Zambreno's Heroines recounts the numerous acts of suppression experienced by modernist women, wives and mistresses of the Great Male Authors of that time. The account of how these women’s art and work were stifled, their emotional outcries condeming them as mad, their letters and journals becoming controlled by their husbands’ literary estate speaks for a great silencing. Zambreno became entranced by these shadow lives flitting behind, around, and in the major works of modernism and sought out their stories. Reading the literary works by these marginalized women revealed a community that shared her own feelings of anxiety, while reading the letters, diaries and histories of these women presented the manner by which women’s writing has been minimized and dismissed. Zambreno's text is therefore an appeal to reconsider the way the literary and culture establishment has censored the mistress-muses of modernism.
Her research is thorough and she shares endless fascinating and disturbing anecdotes from the lives of Zelda Fitzgerald, Vivien(ne) Eliot, Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary McCarthy, Virginia Woolf, Anais Nin, June Miller, Sylvia Plath and many others, about the silence demanded of them. Her task is to make them Heroines, to help her reader see them as potential heroines when the established narrative has most of them diagnosed as mad (schizophrenic or depressed), crazy emotional tyrants to their suffering artist husbands. Here the Woolfs are the exception, as Leonard “wifes” Virginia and tends to her needs, maintaining the regime of her various rest cures. Here too, though Virginia must depend on Leonard for permission to write since “stimulation was seen as bad for a woman’s moral character.”
Vivien(ne) Eliot, who changed the spelling of her name and took on pseudonyms in a desperate quest for identity, published “satirical and sometimes savage portraits of the popular kids in the Bloomsbury set” under the name Fanny Marlow. T.S. Eliot eventually confessed to the offended group that his wife was the mysterious columnist in Criterion and promised never to publish her again. A rejection from another journal destroyed Vivien(ne)’s tender confidence, who would thereafter only jot notes in her journals. Convinced she could not write, her lifelong physical ailments increased and so did her emotional intensity. Though she cared for him during his breakdowns, Tom would have her hospitalized to free himself of the burden, regarding which Virginia Woolf wrote, “this is the bag of ferrets around Tom’s neck,” while Bertrand Russell wrote his mistress Lady Ottoline Morrell, “She is a person who lives on a knife edge, & will end as a criminal or a saint–I don’t know which.” Perhaps curiosity led him to drop Lady Ottoline for an affair with Vivien(ne), making Vivien(ne) the only woman to have slept with two Nobel winners, as Zambreno notes. When Tom received an offer to go teach at Harvard, and wanted to leave without her, the Bloomsbury set “gleefully” helped Tom escape. Distressed Vivien(ne) tried to place an advertisement in The Times: “Will T.S. Eliot please return to his home, 68 Clarence Gate Gardens, which he abandoned September 17th, 1932.” When she was found six years later wandering the streets of London, her family had her permanently hospitalized.
Zelda Fitzgerald, on the other hand, asked to be hospitalized to escape Scott. When she chooses to dance rather than tidy after Scott, or tend to their baby, she is interned in Switzerland for “obsessional illness” and “incipient egomania” but it is there that she writes Save Me The Last Waltz. When she returns, Scott is trapped by writer’s block and needs her memories and witticisms to spark his own work as she had always previously provided. She resists in order to complete her own novel, which she submits for publication to his horror. He steals at least one of her journals. She locks her writing in a drawer. He is outraged that her story about her time in the asylum might get published before his Tender is the Night, which addresses the same subject. He campaigned to suppress her script, but instead managed to review and cut any parts he wanted. He insisted that any writing ideas she had “will have to be submitted to me.” One would like to read the 114 page account of their final conversation recorded by a stenographer with a psychiatrist present in which it is decided that if Zelda can not write masterpieces like her husband than she ought not bother. F. Scott says “I am the professional novelist, and I am supporting you. That is all my material. None of it is your material.” She asks to be hospitalized but he insists she is not insane, that she must tell him her stories of madness. His inconsistencies and demands are exhausting, and Zambreno’s quotations are some of the best parts of this book. Zelda eventually manages to be institutionalized, where she spends the rest of her life, dying in an asylum fire.
Elizabeth Hardwick described Zelda “as the paragon of the unhappy woman,” but had no sympathy for the less resilent. Married to the poet Robert Lowell, she saw her own writing success as a rejection of any difference between the sexes (as did Mary McCarthy about whom Zambreno also writes). In her essay on Sylvia Plath, Hardwick wrote “every artist is either a man or a woman and the struggle is pretty much the same for both” though she also admits that having children means relinquishing a focus on writing for the woman. People who are gifted find time she insists, as Sylvia Plath did by waking at 4am to write in the morning quiet. Jean Stafford, Lowell’s first wife, would return home from her job at The Southern Review to make him, and any other poets belatedly waking from their hangovers, lunch, despite which she still wrote. Hardwick likewise sacrificed for him, quitting teaching jobs when he needed to move, tending him through his depressions, even as she knew he had endless affairs. She moved to London for his work, where he left her after 23 years of marriage for Lady Caroline Blackwood. She dreaded how biographers would interpret “Lizzie” in Lowell’s award winning The Dolphin that shamelessly presented their intimacies, but Hardwick insisted that her marriage was the best thing that had ever happened to her. Their marriage over, as she left London, she slipped him the note: “If you’ll need me, I’ll always be there. If you don’t, I’ll not be there.”
The stories of the women Zambreno has engaged are scattered across the pages of Heroines. A woman’s story will be introduced in one section, woven and compared to others, dropped and addressed again later, possibly multiple times. Composed of fragments, paragraphs and sentences stand alone but are gathered to develop themes and concerns. The first part presents the challenge that Zambreno and these modernist women faced to discover their own voice–Jean Rhys staying up one night filling exercise books with the story of her life, laughing and crying to hear it in her own words. The second part examines the difficulty in rejecting matrimonial or social expectations to be a mirror or muse–Katherine Mansfield who struggled to write when in a relationship and so lived apart from her husband most of their married life. For those familiar with the relationships of these modernist couples, the details that Zambreno highlights make compelling reading. Other readers may find themselves confused by these figures’ biographies since the chronology is scattered.
Across these stories and more, Zambreno makes the point quite clearly that “what is seen as signs of great Artistry in a man can be seen as alarm in a woman’s behavior.” Where the men are allowed eccentricities, breakdowns, passions for their art, the women are restrained from the same by requirements to be dutiful, loving, supportive wives to the great masters. The men are writing great works of literature. The women are scribbling away at the autobiographical. One of Zambreno’s main concerns is how a woman’s self-revealing writing has often been derided as a “girlish, self-involved act” because “memoir is a woman writer’s forbidden and often avoided continent,” though a review of women’s writings from the last forty years–from Maya Angelou to Brooke Shields to Joan Didion–argues this is no longer really true. Nevertheless, Zambreno hopes to liberate these women from their marginalized status as wives, by reclaiming their autobiographical writings as important and meaningful, not merely as surplus to inform the histories of their husbands but as works of literature in their own right. She weaves her experience into the narrative to perform the value of life writing that she is presenting.
It is not the personal stories she shares of reading or shopping, nor her particular brand of “girl” feminism, nor her strange argument against second wave feminism’s empowerment agenda, nor the lack of citation or clear referencing that undermined Zambreno’s presentation of these women’s lives. She strains the reliability of her narrative when she writes, “it is not lost on me the similarities in my current situation to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ which I teach. The husband named John. The gothic surroundings. The sense of being isolated, haunted. And I am: Unnamed Narrator. It’s really so Victorian I can’t stand it.” In the 21st century, in the United States there are few left who can argue their resemblance to the nameless narrator of Gilman’s classic text. Marrying your boyfriend to travel with him to his post-doc in London, working in a bookstore or as a freelance writer to contribute to the household income, considering graduate school but dismissing it in favor of your own free reading, no pressure to have children or tend home, rejecting doctor and therapist recommended medications are only some of the obvious dissimilarities. Kate’s husband encourages her to write, offering her a sunroom in which to write in peace while he pursues his full-time academic career. He supports her stance against psychotropics and psychological labeling. Though she is isolated in Akron, OH, she “escapes to Chicago” regularly, and is free to leave her writing room, and her house whenever she wishes. That her husband’s name is John and that she lives in a Victorian house are similarities too superficial to be convincing.
This passage, and others like it, make some of her distress at the lives suffered by the modernist women appear unnecessarily excessive. There are moments in these women’s lives that seem potentially manipulated or altered by the fragmentary telling composed within her intense reactions. Tying much of her contemporary feminist argument to modernist situations feels false when simple sympathy to these stories becomes radicalized empathy. Excessive emotions are not in themselves a problem for a reader, unless their disproportion makes them no longer believable, and puts the rest of the text in question. Such occurences in Heroines are unfortunate since they defeat an important argument for Zambreno that the excess of emotion women feel, then or now, is not only necessary, but valid because real and true. In many of her own examples, however, such excess seems peculiar and contrived.
In her own way, Zambreno has also used these women, as a catalyst to get more women writing. The book concludes with the message that “[i]f I have communicated anything to you I hope it is the absolute urgency to write yourself, your body, your own experience. The absolute necessity for you to write yourself in order to understand yourself, in order to become yourself. I ask you to fight against your own disappearance.” A poet that Zambreno admires, Audre Lorde, said something similar in “Silence Transformed into Language and Action,” first presented in 1977. Lorde saw then, as Zambreno sees now, that many women struggle to tell their own story. Heroines is full of interesting anecdotes about modernist wives and muses, but the question of why women remain silent today will not be answered in looking at those women whose lives were curtailed as women rarely face in the Western world today. Instead the issue remains a deeper one, requiring the arduous work of introspection that Lorde suggested thirty-five years ago when she asked her audience:
Zambreno is a talented writer clearly capable of offering her silent readers more than simply an encouragement to write. When she uses her emotional depths to consider why women (and men, since in my classroom I see as many men struggling to state their original truth as women) remain silent when the visible tyrannies are gone, she will have offered her readers a new, much needed, and gloriously outspoken Heroine.
“Your job will be to suppress everything suppressible” said T.S. Eliot to John Hayward, his literary executor. Kate Zambreno's Heroines recounts the numerous acts of suppression experienced by modernist women, wives and mistresses of the Great Male Authors of that time. The account of how these women’s art and work were stifled, their emotional outcries condeming them as mad, their letters and journals becoming controlled by their husbands’ literary estate speaks for a great silencing. Zambreno became entranced by these shadow lives flitting behind, around, and in the major works of modernism and sought out their stories. Reading the literary works by these marginalized women revealed a community that shared her own feelings of anxiety, while reading the letters, diaries and histories of these women presented the manner by which women’s writing has been minimized and dismissed. Zambreno's text is therefore an appeal to reconsider the way the literary and culture establishment has censored the mistress-muses of modernism.
Her research is thorough and she shares endless fascinating and disturbing anecdotes from the lives of Zelda Fitzgerald, Vivien(ne) Eliot, Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary McCarthy, Virginia Woolf, Anais Nin, June Miller, Sylvia Plath and many others, about the silence demanded of them. Her task is to make them Heroines, to help her reader see them as potential heroines when the established narrative has most of them diagnosed as mad (schizophrenic or depressed), crazy emotional tyrants to their suffering artist husbands. Here the Woolfs are the exception, as Leonard “wifes” Virginia and tends to her needs, maintaining the regime of her various rest cures. Here too, though Virginia must depend on Leonard for permission to write since “stimulation was seen as bad for a woman’s moral character.”
Vivien(ne) Eliot, who changed the spelling of her name and took on pseudonyms in a desperate quest for identity, published “satirical and sometimes savage portraits of the popular kids in the Bloomsbury set” under the name Fanny Marlow. T.S. Eliot eventually confessed to the offended group that his wife was the mysterious columnist in Criterion and promised never to publish her again. A rejection from another journal destroyed Vivien(ne)’s tender confidence, who would thereafter only jot notes in her journals. Convinced she could not write, her lifelong physical ailments increased and so did her emotional intensity. Though she cared for him during his breakdowns, Tom would have her hospitalized to free himself of the burden, regarding which Virginia Woolf wrote, “this is the bag of ferrets around Tom’s neck,” while Bertrand Russell wrote his mistress Lady Ottoline Morrell, “She is a person who lives on a knife edge, & will end as a criminal or a saint–I don’t know which.” Perhaps curiosity led him to drop Lady Ottoline for an affair with Vivien(ne), making Vivien(ne) the only woman to have slept with two Nobel winners, as Zambreno notes. When Tom received an offer to go teach at Harvard, and wanted to leave without her, the Bloomsbury set “gleefully” helped Tom escape. Distressed Vivien(ne) tried to place an advertisement in The Times: “Will T.S. Eliot please return to his home, 68 Clarence Gate Gardens, which he abandoned September 17th, 1932.” When she was found six years later wandering the streets of London, her family had her permanently hospitalized.
Zelda Fitzgerald, on the other hand, asked to be hospitalized to escape Scott. When she chooses to dance rather than tidy after Scott, or tend to their baby, she is interned in Switzerland for “obsessional illness” and “incipient egomania” but it is there that she writes Save Me The Last Waltz. When she returns, Scott is trapped by writer’s block and needs her memories and witticisms to spark his own work as she had always previously provided. She resists in order to complete her own novel, which she submits for publication to his horror. He steals at least one of her journals. She locks her writing in a drawer. He is outraged that her story about her time in the asylum might get published before his Tender is the Night, which addresses the same subject. He campaigned to suppress her script, but instead managed to review and cut any parts he wanted. He insisted that any writing ideas she had “will have to be submitted to me.” One would like to read the 114 page account of their final conversation recorded by a stenographer with a psychiatrist present in which it is decided that if Zelda can not write masterpieces like her husband than she ought not bother. F. Scott says “I am the professional novelist, and I am supporting you. That is all my material. None of it is your material.” She asks to be hospitalized but he insists she is not insane, that she must tell him her stories of madness. His inconsistencies and demands are exhausting, and Zambreno’s quotations are some of the best parts of this book. Zelda eventually manages to be institutionalized, where she spends the rest of her life, dying in an asylum fire.
Elizabeth Hardwick described Zelda “as the paragon of the unhappy woman,” but had no sympathy for the less resilent. Married to the poet Robert Lowell, she saw her own writing success as a rejection of any difference between the sexes (as did Mary McCarthy about whom Zambreno also writes). In her essay on Sylvia Plath, Hardwick wrote “every artist is either a man or a woman and the struggle is pretty much the same for both” though she also admits that having children means relinquishing a focus on writing for the woman. People who are gifted find time she insists, as Sylvia Plath did by waking at 4am to write in the morning quiet. Jean Stafford, Lowell’s first wife, would return home from her job at The Southern Review to make him, and any other poets belatedly waking from their hangovers, lunch, despite which she still wrote. Hardwick likewise sacrificed for him, quitting teaching jobs when he needed to move, tending him through his depressions, even as she knew he had endless affairs. She moved to London for his work, where he left her after 23 years of marriage for Lady Caroline Blackwood. She dreaded how biographers would interpret “Lizzie” in Lowell’s award winning The Dolphin that shamelessly presented their intimacies, but Hardwick insisted that her marriage was the best thing that had ever happened to her. Their marriage over, as she left London, she slipped him the note: “If you’ll need me, I’ll always be there. If you don’t, I’ll not be there.”
The stories of the women Zambreno has engaged are scattered across the pages of Heroines. A woman’s story will be introduced in one section, woven and compared to others, dropped and addressed again later, possibly multiple times. Composed of fragments, paragraphs and sentences stand alone but are gathered to develop themes and concerns. The first part presents the challenge that Zambreno and these modernist women faced to discover their own voice–Jean Rhys staying up one night filling exercise books with the story of her life, laughing and crying to hear it in her own words. The second part examines the difficulty in rejecting matrimonial or social expectations to be a mirror or muse–Katherine Mansfield who struggled to write when in a relationship and so lived apart from her husband most of their married life. For those familiar with the relationships of these modernist couples, the details that Zambreno highlights make compelling reading. Other readers may find themselves confused by these figures’ biographies since the chronology is scattered.
Across these stories and more, Zambreno makes the point quite clearly that “what is seen as signs of great Artistry in a man can be seen as alarm in a woman’s behavior.” Where the men are allowed eccentricities, breakdowns, passions for their art, the women are restrained from the same by requirements to be dutiful, loving, supportive wives to the great masters. The men are writing great works of literature. The women are scribbling away at the autobiographical. One of Zambreno’s main concerns is how a woman’s self-revealing writing has often been derided as a “girlish, self-involved act” because “memoir is a woman writer’s forbidden and often avoided continent,” though a review of women’s writings from the last forty years–from Maya Angelou to Brooke Shields to Joan Didion–argues this is no longer really true. Nevertheless, Zambreno hopes to liberate these women from their marginalized status as wives, by reclaiming their autobiographical writings as important and meaningful, not merely as surplus to inform the histories of their husbands but as works of literature in their own right. She weaves her experience into the narrative to perform the value of life writing that she is presenting.
It is not the personal stories she shares of reading or shopping, nor her particular brand of “girl” feminism, nor her strange argument against second wave feminism’s empowerment agenda, nor the lack of citation or clear referencing that undermined Zambreno’s presentation of these women’s lives. She strains the reliability of her narrative when she writes, “it is not lost on me the similarities in my current situation to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ which I teach. The husband named John. The gothic surroundings. The sense of being isolated, haunted. And I am: Unnamed Narrator. It’s really so Victorian I can’t stand it.” In the 21st century, in the United States there are few left who can argue their resemblance to the nameless narrator of Gilman’s classic text. Marrying your boyfriend to travel with him to his post-doc in London, working in a bookstore or as a freelance writer to contribute to the household income, considering graduate school but dismissing it in favor of your own free reading, no pressure to have children or tend home, rejecting doctor and therapist recommended medications are only some of the obvious dissimilarities. Kate’s husband encourages her to write, offering her a sunroom in which to write in peace while he pursues his full-time academic career. He supports her stance against psychotropics and psychological labeling. Though she is isolated in Akron, OH, she “escapes to Chicago” regularly, and is free to leave her writing room, and her house whenever she wishes. That her husband’s name is John and that she lives in a Victorian house are similarities too superficial to be convincing.
This passage, and others like it, make some of her distress at the lives suffered by the modernist women appear unnecessarily excessive. There are moments in these women’s lives that seem potentially manipulated or altered by the fragmentary telling composed within her intense reactions. Tying much of her contemporary feminist argument to modernist situations feels false when simple sympathy to these stories becomes radicalized empathy. Excessive emotions are not in themselves a problem for a reader, unless their disproportion makes them no longer believable, and puts the rest of the text in question. Such occurences in Heroines are unfortunate since they defeat an important argument for Zambreno that the excess of emotion women feel, then or now, is not only necessary, but valid because real and true. In many of her own examples, however, such excess seems peculiar and contrived.
In her own way, Zambreno has also used these women, as a catalyst to get more women writing. The book concludes with the message that “[i]f I have communicated anything to you I hope it is the absolute urgency to write yourself, your body, your own experience. The absolute necessity for you to write yourself in order to understand yourself, in order to become yourself. I ask you to fight against your own disappearance.” A poet that Zambreno admires, Audre Lorde, said something similar in “Silence Transformed into Language and Action,” first presented in 1977. Lorde saw then, as Zambreno sees now, that many women struggle to tell their own story. Heroines is full of interesting anecdotes about modernist wives and muses, but the question of why women remain silent today will not be answered in looking at those women whose lives were curtailed as women rarely face in the Western world today. Instead the issue remains a deeper one, requiring the arduous work of introspection that Lorde suggested thirty-five years ago when she asked her audience:
What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?
Zambreno is a talented writer clearly capable of offering her silent readers more than simply an encouragement to write. When she uses her emotional depths to consider why women (and men, since in my classroom I see as many men struggling to state their original truth as women) remain silent when the visible tyrannies are gone, she will have offered her readers a new, much needed, and gloriously outspoken Heroine.
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