I Love Dick (23 page)

“Jews don't like images,” I said, explaining some of Sylvère's work to you that evening in the restaurant, “because images are charged. They rob people of their power. Believing in the transcendental power of the image and its Beauty is like wanting to be an Abstract Expressionist or a Cowboy.” And isn't undermining this the basis of Kitaj's most successful work? His best paintings subvert the power of their image by tossing them around in a critical, cerebral mix. It's through an act of will—collision, contradiction, that these paintings attain their power. Kitaj infiltrates the image in the same way certain Jews lived through World War 2 with phony passports. Kitaj the Sneaky Kike bluffs his way into the Host Culture, Painting, and turns it back upon itself. He paints to challenge iconography.

My father's favorite writer is William Burroughs.

This morning, after dreaming about dead turtles, I wrote this in my notebook:

My entire state of being's changed because I've become my sexuality: female, straight, wanting to love men, be fucked. Is there a way of living with this like a gay person, proudly?

One painting in this show maybe has the answer. There's a Peter Handke story where a youngish German couple drive around America through the desert looking for the famous Hollywood director John Ford. They've lost the drift of why they were together, have no idea how to continue with their lives. (In Idaho last summer, Sylvère and I felt this way too.) The German couple thought John Ford would have the answer. (Sylvère and I never looked to anybody, though, for answers, except maybe the idea of you.) John Ford figured they were crazy. He didn't want to be anybody's saint, though in this particularly sentimental story he turns out to be.

Peter Handke and Kitaj must've known the same John Ford, likeably garrulous and ugly, the kind of guy who thinks that to be alive is to be in charge.

In this painting,
John Ford on his Deathbed (1983/84)
, John Ford is sitting up presiding over his own deathbed, fully dressed, holding his rosary like a stopwatch and smoking a cigar.

It's a brilliant and theatrical painting, art-directed like a Mexican-shot Western with its deep blue walls and straw-planked floors, color so strong it reconfigures the painting's Euro-American script.

There're several separate scenes within this painting. These scenes are dissonant, but not strategically oppositional. The painting is a chronicle of a life's events, like the Medieval story paintings that prefigured comic books but these events are splayed like life, chaotic and abstracted. All the dissonance is drawn together in a frame that can contain them not through magic but through Ford's formidable self-invented will.

At the bottom of the painting we see a scene from John Ford's past: a man of boundless middle-age talking through a megaphone to actors costumed as poor immigrants in what must've been a Texas western—cobblers making cowboy boots. His legs are crossed, his broad face, oblivious to its own ugliness, is partly covered by dark glasses and a squat black hat. In the middle of the painting a matador, maitre'd or major domo holds an empty frame pierced by a salmon pink pole, the kind you'd see on a restaurant patio or in a dancehall. A dancing couple spread their arms around it, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers (sort of) painted by Chagall. And there're lights strung through the painting, extending out into the room, flesh-pink, like the lobster terrace restaurants in La Bufadora, Mexico. The painting frame above Ford's bed is partly Mexican too, its green-red-yellow frame hanging askew, though its subject is decidedly European: a solitary man in black carrying something through the gray-white snow. It's pogrom-land, it's an old television movie.

In this painting dissonance's disappeared and been reborn as elevated schtick. It's a grand finale, the production number, where all the show's motifs come back as jokes. And Kitaj-as-Ford delivers, like movies're supposed to do, a dazzling punchline: at the upframe center of Ford's blue wall there's an Ed Ruscha knock-off framed in black that reads

THE
END

and below it, a tiny painting, window opening out from deep blue walls to deep blue sky. There is no road to immortality but there's a porthole to it. In this painting objects, people, dance and move but still there's flesh and weight. Transcendence isn't only lightness; it's attained by will.

And why do we crave lightness so?

Lightness is a '60s lie, it's Pop Art, early Godard,
The Nice Man and the Pretty Girl (With Huskies)
. Lightness is the ecstacy of communication without the irony, it's the lie of disembodied cyberspace.

Through his medium John Ford, Kitaj is telling us that matter moves but you can't escape its weight. The dead come back to dance not as spirits but as skeletons.

DD,

On December 3, 1994 I started loving you.

I still do.

Chris

SYLVÈRE AND CHRIS WRITE
IN THEIR DIARIES

EXHIBIT A:   SYLVÈRE LOTRINGER

Pasadena, California

March 15, 1995

“Gave Proust seminar and first lecture today at Dick's school. One more to go. Dick was direct and friendly, though in the car I suddenly had flashes of his hand going across Chris' cunt. Images. The whole situation is so weird. In any case, Chris once again has pulled a fast one. Even though Dick's rejected her, she's managed to cover all the bases: She doesn't need him to respond for her love to go on. She can maintain a relationship with me, draw inspiration from Dick for her work, and even put her film into a vault without pushing it any further.

Chris faxed me her piece about Kitaj, the “kike” painter she identifies with. It's very heady, spiralling around his idiosyncratic life, critical rejection, East Hampton in the '60s. I've never heard of him, but she manages to weave everything in, including her own present predicament.

I felt very moved by it, exhilarated. Chris now believes that the failure of
Gravity & Grace
was “destiny,” pushing her towards some further explication of all the emotion within her films. She's writing without any destination or authority, unlike Dick, who's off to give another talk in Amsterdam and never writes unless he's asked to; unlike me, about to give my
Evil
lecture, collect my check and go home.

And yet Chris was feeling very sad, cut off from Dick, and I was sad too after talking to her. The situation was hopeless: she loved him, needed him, couldn't stand the idea of not being close to him or communicating with him. I decided I will talk to Dick tomorrow night on our drive out to the airport. I don't know how he'll take it; after all, he's been quite clear about ending this ambiguous situation. And yet if I happened to be heard by him, that would kill me: the idea of a strong connection between the two of them that excludes me. I ended up sobbing until 2 a.m., unable to fall asleep, feeling pretty down and desperate.”

EXHIBIT B:     CHRIS KRAUS

Los Angeles, California

March 31, 1997

“I found Sylvère's diary entry last night when I was searching all the backfiles of this computer for some link between
Kike Art
which I wrote that March and the last two essays in the book. Because I'd decided, and everyone agrees, that the only way to make this writing be a novel was to make the throughline very clear. But when I read his diary entry last night I was just so overwhelmed and moved. How much he loves me. How much he's taken all my questions as his own.

On the phone this morning to Sylvère who's in East Hampton I was talking about reading. How I like to dip into other people's books, to catch the rhythm of their thinking, as I try to write my own. Writing around the edges of Philip K. Dick, Ann Rower, Marcel Proust, Eileen Myles and Alice Notley. It's better than sex. Reading delivers on the promise that sex raises but hardly ever can fulfill—getting larger 'cause you're entering another person's language, cadence, heart and mind.

On April 9, 1995 I saw Dick alone in Los Angeles for the last time. We took a walk behind Lake Avenue. On April 20, I phoned him from upstate New York. I was upset and wanted resolution. The conversation was long and messy. He asked me why I made myself so vulnerable. Was I a masochist? I told him No. “'Cause don't you see? Everything that's happened here to me has happened only cause I've willed it.” On April 23, I met John Hanhardt, then curator of the Whitney Museum, to talk about my films. I was expecting John to offer me a show; instead, he wanted to engage me in a dialogue about the “failure” of my films.

On June 6, 1995 I moved permanently to Los Angeles.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in his diary, “Understand or die.”

That summer I was hoping to understand the link between Dick's misapprehension of me as a “masochist” and John Hanhardt's judgement of my films. Both men admitted that though they found my work repugnant, it was “intelligent” and “courageous.” I believed that if I could understand this link I could extend it to the critical misreads of a certain kind of female art. “I have just realized that the stakes are myself,” Diane di Prima wrote in
Revolutionary Letters
in 1973. “Because we rejected a certain kind of critical language, people just assumed that we were dumb,” the genius Alice Notley said when I visited her in Paris. Why is female vulnerability still only acceptable when it's neuroticized and personal; when it feeds back on itself? Why do people still not get it when we handle vulnerability like philosophy, at some remove?

Today at Barnes & Noble I bought a new book by Steve Erickson. The jacket blurbs, placing him within a new and all-male canon, offended me. “Erikson's a major player,” the
Washington Post
crowed, shades of Norman Mailer in the '50s, “up there with his contemporaries Richard Powers and William Vollman, the spokesmen of the chaos generation.”

“Dear Dick,” I wrote in one of many letters, “what happens between women now is the most interesting thing in the world because it's least described.”

MONSTERS

El Paso Drive

June 21, 1995

DD,

This letter comes to you from Eagle Rock, Los Angeles—it's 40 miles away from where you're living but it feels very far away. I got to LA two weeks ago, seems like forever. Constant loops from one mood to another, loneliness and optimism, fear, ambition… Do you know the meaning of those roller coaster billboards that you see driving round the city? A black & white slightly blurred photo of some people on a roller coaster, a red circle slash for “No” printed at the center? Don't know if it's some kind of public art. It's a poor attempt at menace if it is one. In New York on 7th Street between Avenues B and C there's a plywood hoarding nailed like a canopy to some scaffolding above the entrance of a crackhouse. Someone's wheat-pasted a poster of two men in loose black clothes leaning with their guns against a high-rise patio balustrade. It's very scary: war-time reality slammed up against the image of a new-wave '60s futuristic movie. This is no movie, the poster seems to say. It's Beirut, these guys are serious, and so is thug business. Walking east towards it your eyes perform a double flip—the image of the patio seems to be protruding from the building, very trompe l'oeil, but by the time you've finally unravelled it you're already walking past the armored door.

God what a hoot. I'm moved to talk to you about art because I think you'll understand and I think I understand art more than you—

—Because I'm moved in writing to be irrepressible. Writing to you seems like some holy cause, 'cause there's not enough female irrepressibility written down. I've fused my silence and repression with the entire female gender's silence and repression. I think the sheer fact of women talking, being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructive but above all else
public
is the most revolutionary thing in the world. I could be 20 years too late but epiphanies don't always synchronize with style.

But really Dick I'm moved to write you differently 'cause everything is different now. I think of you a lot now that crossing socially seems inevitable. Both of us are in the LA artworld and it's small.

The image that I have of you is frozen in a single snapshot: April 19, the opening of the Jeffrey Vallance/Eleanor Antin/Charles Gaines show at the Santa Monica Museum. You're standing in the largest Jeffrey Vallance room, talking, drink-in-hand, to a knot of younger people (students?). Tall, black shirt and Euro-cut black jacket, standard opening wear for artists. You're standing very straight, your face smushed back in against itself; smiling-talking-moving yet imploding somehow backwards towards the immobility of the frame. You're locked. You are a country. A separate state. Visible, unbridgeable. And I'm standing in a tiny cluster next to yours, a trio, Daniel Marlos and Mike Kelley and just like you I'm shaky—my body trembles slightly as it cuts through space. But also very present. The Conquering of Fear is like performance. You recognize your fear and then you move with it.

So far I've told “our” story twice, late at night, as fully as I could, to Fred Dewey and Sabina Ott. It's the story of 250 letters, my “debasement,” jumping headlong off a cliff. Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our own debasement? Why do women always have to come off clean? The magnificence of Genet's last great work,
The Prisoner of Love
, lies in his willingness to be wrong: a seedy old white guy jerking off on the rippling muscles of the Arabs and Black Panthers. Isn't the greatest freedom in the world the freedom to be wrong? What hooks me on our story is our different readings of it. You think it's personal and private; my neurosis. “The greatest secret in the world is,
THERE IS NO SECRET.
” Claire Parnet and Gilles Deleuze. I think our story is performative philosophy.

The artist Hannah Wilke was born Arlene Butter in 1940 and grew up in Manhattan and Long Island. She died of cancer at the age of 52. Wilke's output was prolific and consistent. Through constant effort she maintained a visible career. At a certain point, perhaps the early '70s, her work began addressing the following question:

If women have failed to make “universal” art because we're trapped within the “personal,” why not universalize the “personal” and make it the subject of our art?

To ask this question, to be willing to live it through, is still so bold.

In 1974, after producing drawings, ceramics and sculptural wall pieces—many of which involved a “tough, ambiguous depiction of traditionally female imagery” (Douglas Crimp, 1972) for 11 years, Hannah started to insert her own image into her art. I don't know what experiences or conditions in her life precipitated this. Was she pushed towards it by critics such as Phyllis Derfner, who wrote responding to her show of cunts fashioned out of washing machine lint at Feldman in 1972:

“There is some wit in this but it is swamped by aggressive ideology… The ideology is that of women's liberation. Female bodies have been shown, but only in an oppressive, ‘sexist' manner. Wilke's forthright repetitious presentation of the most intimate image of female sexuality is intended to be a cure for all this. I don't see how it is supposed to work. It is boring and superficial.”

Unlike Judy Chicago and her bloated vaginal renditions of Great Cunts In History—a show that every mother in the world could take her daughters to—Hannah never was afraid to be undignified, to trash herself, to call a cunt a cunt. “I want to throw back to the audience everything the world throws at me” (Penny Arcade, 1982). Hannah later told the
Soho Weekly News
how she'd collected ‘material' for this work over several years by doing laundry for Claes Oldenburg, her companion at that time. Even then Hannah was a neo-Dadaist. Claes Oldenburg, Great Male Universal Artist, shanghai'd.

In 1974 Wilke made her first videotape,
Gestures
. Created one day after the death of her sister's husband,
Gestures
was, among other things, an expression of grief and dismay, a reaching for the body after death. The critic James Collins gave it two thumbs up in
Artforum
. “Every time I see her work I think of pussy,” he declared. An early champion of Wilke's work, Collins described
Gestures
thusly:

“Erotically Wilke's video was more successful—‘hornier'—than the sculpture. Why? Well she's actually in it for a start. The video is probably the best thing in the show because by being in the pieces, using just her head and hands, she gives the folding gestures, particularly, more meaning. Stroking, kneading, preening and slapping her face were interesting but the folding mouth gestures were the naughtiest. Because she's sensuously breaking a cultural rule and that's one definition of erotic. Pushing at her lips and then folding them back… Using her mouth as a surrogate vagina and her tongue as a surrogate clitoris, in the context of her face, with its whole psychological history, was strong stuff !…

“Wilke's position in the art world is a strange paradox between her own physical beauty and her very serious art. She longs to fulfill her sexuality; but her attempt to deal with this dilemma within the women's movement has a touching air of pathos about it.”

But don't you see, the paradoxes in Hannah Wilke's work are not pathetic, they're polemic. (It's like that night, Dick, when you called me “passive-aggressive” on the phone? Wrong!)
Gestures
throws the weirdnesses of male response to female sexuality wide open.

Meanwhile, Hannah-in-the-work was exploring much more personal and human ground.

“Ree Morton told me that when she saw the video she almost cried,” Wilke recalled several years later. “I exposed myself beyond posing and she saw past it. She saw the pathos beyond posing.”

From this point on, Hannah willingly became a self-created work of art.

In
SOS Starification Object Series (1974-1979)
she turns to face the camera in 3/4 profile, bare tits and jeans unzipped with one hand on her crotch. Her eyes are bare and heavy. Her long hair's set in housewife rollers, obviously a home job. Eight bits of chewed-up gum, shaped to simulate vaginas are stuck across her face like scars or pimples. “Gum has a shape before you chew it. But when it comes out, it comes out as real garbage,” she later said. “In this society we use people up the way we use up chewing gum.” In her presence, Hannah always was extremely beautiful.

In 1977 she made another videotape called
Intercourse with
…in which the answering-machine messages left by her boyfriends, friends and family play as she removes the names of the most troubling, spelled out in Pres-type, from her naked body. “Become your own myth,” she started saying.

Like every other work of art, Hannah became a piece of road-kill for the artpress jackals. Torn literally apart. Her naked body straddling interpretations of the hippie-men who saw her as an avatar of sexual liberation and hostile feminists like Lucy Lippard who saw any female self-display as patriarchal putty.

Hannah started using the impossibility of her life, her artwork, and career as material. If art's a seismographic project, when that project's met with miscomprehension, failure must become its subject too. In 1976 she produced a poster modelled after the famous School for Visual Arts subway ads that read:

“Having a talent isn't worth much unless you know what to do with it.” Hannah reproduced it with a photo of her fucked-up self. Portrait of the Artist as an Object: she's wearing a crocheted apron that doesn't hide her naked tits at all and clutching a Mickey Mouse doll. The now famous chewing gum vaginas are arranged like tiny scabs across her body. In a later poster called
Marxism And Art
, Hannah's wearing a man's shirt flung wide open to reveal bare breasts, chewed up cunts and a wide man's tie. “Beware of Fascist Feminism,” the poster reads.

From the very start, art critics saw Hannah's willingness to use her body in her work as an act of “narcissism” (“A harmless air of narcissism pervades this show…”
New York Times
, 9/20/75). This strange descriptor still follows her beyond the grave, despite the passionate efforts of writers like Amanda Jones and Laura Cottingham to refute it. In his review of
Intra-Venus
, Hannah's posthumous show, Ralph Rugoff describes the artist's startling photos of her naked cancer-ridden body as “a deeply thrilling venture into narcissism.” As if the only possible reason for a woman to publically reveal herself could be self-therapeutic. As if the point was not to reveal the circumstances of one's own objectification. As if Hannah Wilke was not brilliantly feeding back her audience's prejudice and fear, inviting them to join her for a naked lunch.

A few smart men like Peter Frank and Gerrit Lansing recognized the strategy and wit of Hannah's work, though not, perhaps, the boldness and the cost. The fact she was a genius. At any rate, the controversy around her work never agglomerated into major stardom. By 1980 Guy Trebay was sniffing in the
Village Voice
that Hannah's vagina “is now as familiar to us as an old shoe.” Has anybody ever said this about Chris Burden's penis?

No one apart from Hannah's closest friends and family recognized the sweetness and idealism at the bottom of her work. Her warmth. The human-ness of her female person.

In an amazing text written in 1976, Hannah proved to be her own best critic:

“Rearranging the touch of sensuality with a residual magic made from laundry lint or latex loosely laid out like love vulnerably exposed…continually exposing myself to whatever situation occurs… Gambling as well as gamboling… To exist instead of being an existentialist, to make objects instead of being one. The way my smile just gleams, the way I sip my tea. To be a sugar giver instead of a salt cellar, to not sell out…”

Hannah Wilke Wittgenstein was pure female intellect, her entire gorgeous being stretched out in paradoxical proposition.

In 1979, Claes Oldenburg, Hannah's partner since the late 1960s, changed their door-locks while she was out one day and married someone else. She recreated the collection of 50 rayguns she'd collected for his work and posed naked with them in a series of ‘performalist self portraits' called
So Help Me Hannah
in which she “demonstrates” and overturns her favorite classic citations of male philosophy and art.

Hannah Wilke on Ad Reinhardt: sitting naked in a corner, feeling hopeless, head in hands, high-heeled legs apart. She's surrounded by toy pistols and bazookas. “
WHAT DOES THIS REPRESENT
/
WHAT DO YOU REPRESENT
” the title reads.

Hannah Wilke on Karl Marx: Posed shakily on the pistons of a combustion engine in her strappy high-heeled sandals, naked body part of the machine, Hannah lunges forward in profile, toy guns in hand.
EXCHANGE VALUES
. (Exchange
values
? Whose?)

The insertion of Hannah Wilke's complex human presence throws all slogans into question. Her beauty is compelling, but as in
Gestures
, her presence circumvents the pose.

“I have long since resolved to be a Jew… I regard that as more important than my art,” R.B. Kitaj and Arnold Schoenberg declared. Hannah Wilke said: “Feminism in a larger sense is intrinsically more important to me than art.” No one ever called these men bad Jews.

The bitterest irony of Hannah Wilke's career is that her imitators who risked much less became art stars of the early '80s. “Wilke's projection of herself contrasts markedly with the more impersonal impersonations of…the recent work of Cindy Sherman, whose ‘dress up' masquerades are
au fond
no less narcissistic, but somehow easier to accept or digest as art because they disguise the self and parody the suffering, pain and pleasure we sense as real in Wilke's art,” Lowery Sims argued in a New Museum catalog in 1984. But by then art history had already labelled Wilke dumb, her imitators smart: