Sister Arts: Gardens, Poems, Art, Community

Fifties Experimental Film: A Glimpse of the Garden

My friend Chad Bennett sent me a link to A Glimpse of the Garden,

a wild little movie by the mid-twentieth-century experimental filmmaker Marie Menken.

Born in 1909 in Brooklyn, Menken was associated with the fifties underground film scene in New York that also included Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, and Kenneth Anger (considered by many to be a forerunner of queer cinema).  She also appeared in several Warhol films herself.  Her famously rocky marriage to poet Willard Maas, said to be jealous of her greater success as an artist, was the inspiration for the toxic relationship between George and Martha in Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.  Yikes! 

I must say that in Mike Nichols' famous 1966 film version, Elizabeth Taylor does look a little like the picture above of Marie.  Maas has been identified as the off-camera presence providing fellatio to DeVeren Bookwaiter in Warhol's 1964 film Blow Job, and he also had an affair with botanist Rupert Barneby, whose lover Dwight Ripley is credited in Menken's film with giving her access to their garden. 

In this five-minute film, we see only plants and landscape and hear only birdsong; the sole indication of a human presence is the camera itself, proceeding at a walking pace along paths and across lawns, occasionally pausing to focus on a particular bloom or tree, and finally gazing at sunset over the garden.  Alternating between long, swooping shots, quick cuts between images, and steady-camera shots in which the only movement is the wind through the leaves and flowers, the film is formally ravishing.  Menken's work is noted for its respect for the objects filmed (as is also seen in her film Lights), her desire and ability to sense (or is it produce?) consciousness in inanimate objects.  This aesthetic is of a piece with the interest in materials and in abstraction of the New York School, Fluxus and Abstract Expressionist artists that formed part of Menken's circle.  Her painterly sense can also be seen in the title frame, above, which might, like her film Drips in Strips, be a humorous and loving tribute to Pollock-style drip painting. 

Sister artist, species fag-hag.

 

 

 

The Blush of Summer: Guest Blogger Richard Morrison

I'm delighted to welcome to Sister Arts my first guest blogger,  poet, photographer and editor Richard Morrison.  In this exquisite post, a prose poem with pictures, he introduces the floral and human delights of his Minneapolis garden.  Enjoy.

Forget the nearly naked boy next door as he stretches on the front lawn, preparing for his evening run around the lake.  He's an easy distraction from pulling up crabgrass. Suddenly it's summer in Minneapolis, ushered in by a week of thunderstorms and high humidity. Bare skin and endless endless peonies.

They've peaked, and demand harvesting, their heads heavy with rainwater, stems bowed over, snapped, hanging from the edge of their wire cages.  The twenty-somethings come and go, emerging fresh and eager in their running gear, returning in the twilight, torsos gleaming with sweat. Their appearances are fleeting.

 More enduring are the bearded irises, which have finally established themselves in the boulevard. They've lasted for weeks, having prevailed through the first heat wave as well as late-night revelers staggering back to their cars. The last sentinels of spring, but far more sensual than stoic. Their stalks rose from faux-tropical leaves, and reared up heads of yellow, white, and one variety endowed with every possible hue of purple.  Elaborate, frilled, furry, they are the epitome of perversity. Their upper petals erect and penetrable, while the lower ones hang down and display their "beards," attempting to lure in pollinators.

Garden flowers are masters of sublimation.

 We have a new neighbor in the apartments next door.  He's just moved in with his girlfriend, and they're an incredibly sexy pair.  Yet when he comes up the sidewalk and finds me fretting over the creeping thyme or wrestling with the garden hose, his eyes and smile are wide, genuine with possibility. 

What's different about this year's garden? We've ventured headlong into the cultivation of tomatoes, and now that all the beds are filled --  front and back, north and south -- I've learned the pleasures of digging things back up and rearranging them. But I look forward to nothing more than the return of the dahlias. Distinct and flamboyant is each and every bloom.  The first one to arrive goes by the name of "Boom Boom Red."

They’ll carry us all the way to first frost.

 

Queer Gardens: Vizcaya Gardens, Miami

My friend Richard alerted me to this fantastic location, where in 1916, he told me, "the `confirmed bachelor' son of the tractor magnate," James Deering,

created a garden where he entertained friends, including, according to Richard, "many questionable types including John Singer Sargent (whose portrait of Deering is in the Art Institute of Chicago),

and Lillian Gish."  Queer gossip!

What's especially cool about this garden is that it's located in the heart of downtown Miami.  At the time of its design, Miami was a city of only about 10,000, but in the ensuing years the metropolis grew up around it and now it is a green oasis on the bayshore.  James Deering "engaged the assistance of Paul Chalfin, a young New York painter, to supervise the entire project.  Deering and Chalfin traveled throughout Europe surveying residential architecture for ideas and obtaining components such as doors, wall panels, mantels and ceilings that would be incorporated into the proposed home."  Just like Edward James' Las Pozas, which I wrote about in February, Vizcaya had its origins in an intense personal and creative relationship between and older and a younger man.  Deering also engaged the services of a Colombian architect, Diego Suarez, giving the garden a distinctly south-facing orientation.

The property has been repeatedly battered by hurricanes but its Italianate style remains visible.  It includes a Maze Garden,

a Secret Garden,

and a world-famous orchidarium.

A monument to the Gilded Age, it's also a natural refuge in the heart of a world city.

 

Molly Peacock's The Paper Garden

It's not just me.  Those eighteenth-century botanical illustrations really do look, in Molly Peacock's words, as if the artist had "shined a flashlight on nine hundred and eighty-five flowers' cunts."

I just finished reading poet and memoirist Peacock's new book, The Paper Garden:  An Artist (Begins Her Life's Work) At 72, a biography of Mary Granville Pendarves Delany, the subject of a long central chapter in my book Sister Arts and really, the inspiration for that whole project.  Between Peacock's book and the sumptuous 2009 exhibition catalog Mrs. Delany and Her Circle,

my obscure, beloved Delany is having a moment of unprecedented visibility.  Peacock's approach is to use Delany's life and work as an opportunity to muse on her own second marriage and work as a mature artist:  "She had no children.  I had no children.  She had a deep connection to a second husband.  I had such a bond....She had a plethora of arty girlfriends.  So do I....Her husband had died.  I was afraid mine would."  Both life narratives, Delany's and Peacock's, are absorbing reads.  Peacock's writing is often thrilling, as in this chapter that begins like a prose poem:

Now let Mrs. Delany be blooded.

Let her eyesight fade.

Let her stop painting.

Let her sit in a stupor.

Let food be tasteless in her mouth...

Let bloodlines be formed.

Let the generations fly.

Most gratifying to me, though, is Peacock's unabashedly sexual reading of the images.  Peacock gives more attention than I do to Delany's heterosexual romances (though she does note in passing the "atmosphere of gay attachment" in Delany's life and very kindly cites me on this), but we agree that Delany's work expresses a forthright and active feminine sexuality.  Here's Peacock on the shell-lined garden grotto Delany constructed with Anne Donellan, the friend with whom she travelled to Ireland in the 1730s and whom she nicknamed "Phil:"  "The grotto was like a secret garden.  It was shadowy, moist, and close:  sexy." 

Peacock on Delany's Lilium Canadense:  "She built up the surface by pasting red pieces on top of red pieces.  The lily petals have a bumpy, labial look to them.  And the colors are of excited female sexual organs." 

Umm, yeah.  In my book, I come to similar conclusions about Delany's work and use these readings to make an argument about its place in a tradition of lesbian erotic expression.  Lesbian critics are often accused of "reading too much into" images like this, distorting the past in order to find ourselves there.  It's nice to meet straight sister artist Molly Peacock in the same place.

"Not Afraid of Ikea:" Jason and Mike's Home and Garden

It's especially fun to write about the home Jason Craft and Mike Craigue share on East Side Drive, because Jason is the whole reason I started this blog.  Jason and I met when he was a grad student in the English department in the 1990s.  He left academia and stayed in Austin, and we've kept in touch over the years.  About six months ago, I contacted Jason and asked him for some professional help.  He's been a blogger and website designer and other things I can't even name over the years (he's now a software developer) and he was the one person I could think of who could help me figure out:  with three books coming out in one year (which you, dear reader, can find here, here and, in January 2012, here), do I need my own website?  No, Jason said.  What you need is a blog, and you need to post to it EVERY TWO DAYS for SIX MONTHS.  So here we are.  Such is the power of Jason.

When Jason and Mike moved into the house in 1997, the area was, shall we say, affordable.  "Have you seen The Last Days of the San Jose?"  they asked me.  I haven't, but remember South Congress in the 1990s--no business going on after 5 p.m. except drugs and prostitution.  They said their house was "a shack" when they moved in; now it's a polished gem set in an inviting, well-used front and back garden.

Inside, the 1700-square-foot house is colorful and inviting.  Almost everything Jason and Mike showed me they credited to a friend or family member.  The beautiful curved glass-brick entry piece was suggested by their friend Mark, whom they call "Markitecht," apparently because he is an architect.  His name came up a lot.

Markitecht is also responsible for the beautiful built-ins

that make the relatively small space so functional.  Jason admits to getting "nervous" when things get messy and says that built-in storage areas calm him down.  The couple credit their friends Jonathan and Billie Jo with the color scheme, a different value of the same teal/turquoise color on every wall:

Here Jason shows me another important influence, Mike's cousin Hazel Kight-Witham, a California artist and writer who has given them several of her prints. 

Jason's mother Donna also loves to buy them art.  The pieces they display range pleasingly from treasured family heirlooms like this needlework motto made by Jason's grandmother Dot, which Jason remembers from visits to her Kentucky home as a little boy,

to the whimsical

and even downright creepy,

a combination I find irresistibly queer.

In the yard, these two big guys are trying to grow some food, mainly tomatoes.

Like all of us, they have to fight the birds and squirrels for them.  They've hung red Christmas balls on the tomato plants and planted a bed of catnip to attract the neighborhood's feral cats into the yard,

but they admit the tomatoes they get to eat are mostly green.  Winter vegetables include lettuce and greens in one of two seasonal beds. 

They enjoy cooking outdoors on one of those cool ceramic eggs,

a gift from Jason's dad and the source of Mike's much-beloved slow-cooked brisket.

There's a nice outdoor dining area on the back porch and they also cook for friends at their "New York-style" Ikea pull-out dining table, which they keep pushed up next to the kitchen island so guests and hosts can visit while the food is being prepared.  The Ikea bar stools they bought "for, like, twelve dollars" years ago as a stop-gap have not been bettered over the years, and indeed, they look great in the beautiful cook's kitchen.  And that, my friends, is why Jason and Mike are not afraid of Ikea.

 

 

Drawing in the Landscape: Rachael Shannon's Lesbian Land

Last summer, I gave a gallery talk at Women and Their Work called "A Brief History of Queer Space," in conjunction with Leah DeVun's exhibition about the Lesbian Land movement of the 1970s and 1980s, "Our Hands on Each Other."  At the time, Leah and I argued in a friendly way about whether or not the practice of lesbians creating communes was dying.  Leah told me that the women in the wilderness and backwoods communities she had visited were concerned about their legacy; either they did not have children, or their children were not interested in going "back to the land."  My point was that while those particular groups of people might be struggling, the concept of lesbian land lived on, both on a large scale, such as the fabled Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, and in smaller-scale experiments in living like Rachael Shannon's small East Side lot, which she refers to as her "land."  I finally got a chance to visit Rachael's land this week, just as she gets ready to leave it to spend two years in Baltimore getting an M.F.A. in Community Arts at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

This mirror leans against the fence near Rachael's outdoor shower.  First at Darcee Douglass's iconic lesbian compound on East Riverside and later as an attender and worker (or "festie") at Michigan, Rachael grew to love showering outdoors and built her own version on East 16th St.

She showers here every morning and says she has never been bothered by or bothered her nieghbors (with whom she is very close)--although she does avoid showering on Friday mornings when the rather high-sitting trash truck rolls by her fence.  (Well, one time she did have a problem with a neighbor, or maybe just a passer-by, who stole the first crop of green pears from her front-yard pear tree.

Her painted response earned her the local nickname The Pear Lady.)

In general, though, Rachael doesn't like hard-and-fast boundaries like fences.  She says she was first attracted to this neighborhood when she bought the house--then "a shack"--in 2002

in part because the unfenced yards flowing from one household to the next reminded her of the small Texas town of Wharton, where her dad grew up.  Rachael's parents and grandparents are all designers, makers, builders, not professionally but as a way of life.  Rachael recently visited her 91-year-old grandfather on the land he visits every day to watch the sunrise and sunset.  He knows the birds, animals and plants on the property and keeps track of them all.  This kind of "piddling and tweaking" is also how Rachael describes her ongoing projects around her land--including planting this sago given to her by her grandfather:

Surrounding Rachael's small, always-in-renovation cottage is a series of other buildings.  Her studio is in the house, and that's where her roommate also lives; Rachel herself sleeps in a trailer,

decorated with flats from this year's Gay by GayGay festival in Austin.  There's also a silo,

currently used for storage but which Rachael ultimately envisions as studio and living space as well.  And here's the bike shed she just built with her dad:

Rachael's love for adding these outbuildings reminds me of a series by iconic lesbian-feminist photographer Tee Corinne that commemmorated the storage tanks and yurts of her Oregon back-to-the-land community.  I wrote a little bit about those photographs in the conclusion to my book.

Rachael's design sense is organic, sensual, curved.  She says there was not much she could do about the squareness of the house--"you just had to work with the box"--but her plantings and outdoor architecture have a rolling, sinuous quality, like Hogarth's "line of beauty".

Rachael calls her design practice "drawing in the landscape,"

and says she is seeking a homey, inviting, yet crafted and intentional feel.  Her garden is a wonderful place to visit.  Rachael will be leaving it in other hands for the next couple of years but she says she's like "a kite on a string"--she'll keep coming back to her Austin land and with the help of her community, it will continue to evolve and provide a home for many.

 

 

Editing the Garden

Growing herbs in the window box outside the kitchen window was a lovely idea, and while they lasted it was great to slide open the window and snip whatever you needed for your recipe.  But that spot gets full sun through the afternoon and ended up being way too hot for such tender plants.  They got burned to a crisp, so I dug them up and relocated them to the front bed where we have a few straggling herbs from last year.

Who knows, they might make it.

I made the requisite Memorial Day trip to Home Depot and bought some moss roses, which look lovely in hanging baskets and are supposed to tolerate full sun.  We'll see if they can stand up to the heat reflected from the window.

I guess heat is not the only thing the window reflects.  I swear, I have been photographed (or as in this case, photographed myself) more often in that red T-shirt I got at SteinMart in Midland than in any other garment I own.

Meanwhile, the potted herbs were doing splendidly so I planted chives and virtually invisible cilantro (it had spent too long unplanted) in a new container.

Looking forward to sprinkling these on grilled fish and vegetables.

In front-bed news, the Starry Eyes flowers we planted in our newly-ameliorated soil just withered up, so Madge put some balloon flowers there:

Hope they last; they are gorgeous.

Did you all see the wonderful article by historian David Blight in today's NYT?  Turns out Memorial Day was first celebrated in 1865 in Charleston, S.C. by thousands of African-Americans who buried the Union dead left behind when whites fled the city.  Very much worth remembering.

"desire exceeds the bounds of any garden": Ed Madden's Prodigal: Variations

Last weekend when I interviewed my friend Neville about his garden for this blog, he asked, "What makes a queer garden different from a straight garden?"  I rambled a bit about how it could be a matter of who uses the garden and how, or a matter of how the garden is made (I mentioned that Neville's own garden includes sisterly-sissy elements such as his grandmothers' favorite plants and some canna lilies he dug up from the yard of my old house when we moved), or the use of certain well-known erotic shapes, like the arched grotto entrance.  But ultimately, I made my away around to saying something about how a garden is always riding the line between nature and culture, between order and chaos, between art and life.  It's art in a living medium that simply obeys its own unruly, asocial sexual laws (of reproduction and growth).  So in that way, every garden is a queer garden.

What a pleasure, then, to read Ed Madden's new book and find a similar idea encapsulated so beautifully in the quotation in my title.  Ed, who was one of a beloved band of queer UT graduate students who befriended me when I first arrived in Austin in 1991, is now an English professor at the University of South Carolina.  He's the author of a critical study of modernism, Tiresian Poetics, and a previous book of poems, Signals, which won the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize.  His new book, Prodigal: Variations, explores the very queer territory of intra-family erotics and does so through memories and experiences of plant, garden and farm.

Ed was raised by conservative Christians on a farm in Arkansas, and he beautifully evokes the fear of his father's wrath that shaped his gay childhood in the opening poem, "Sacrifice:"

When my father bound me, I submitted,

 

closed my eyes to the lifted knife in his fist.

Even now, the cords still hold my wrists,

 

rough ropes of love.  My chest is bare,

my heart lies open.  He loves his god more

 

than me.  I open my eyes, watch my father

raise his fist against a bright and bitter

 

sky, no angel there to stay his hand.

The speaker's childhood farm, like all farms, is a place of both lush growth and violent death, as in these lines from "Osage orange:"

This is eating tomatoes from the vine.  This is the cutworm,

this viscous smear of green.  This is killing worms.

This is breaking windows in the pig house.

Many of these poems were written while Ed was the poet-in-residence at the Riverbanks Botanical Garden in Columbia, South Carolina,

and here the poet, still struggling with the legacy of love and anger bequeathed him by his father, sees clearly how this laid the groundwork for a satisfying intimacy with another man as an adult.  In the garden, and with his lover, he is able to "learn the vocabulary of sweetness."  He asks,

How do I know I will miss you?

 

And why does it come to me

in a garden, of all places?

These lovely, grave, formal poems belong in the Sister Arts tradition in which garden art is poetic, philosophical, even theological, offering an occasion for us to meditate on our deepest and hardest truths, and to experience the out-of-bounds wildness of being alive.

How Ruby Saved the Neighborhood and Other Stories from Vic and Neville's Garden

Neville Hoad and Victor McWherter assured me that their garden was "where Queer Gardens meets Grey Gardens."  The large corner lot on Lullwood Road in the Wilshire Woods neighborhood does seem to have two different personalities.  The front yard is an impressive display of lawn that would have made a 1950s dad proud:

In the large, shady back yard, the aesthetic is lush, overgrown, and sensual, with a riot of plants, colors, textures, animals and uses.  "Nature in Central Texas is messy," Neville said.

As you can see, Neville (left) and Vic (right) are among the gardens most attractive features.  And that's Ruby, their Jack Russell/basset hound cross, who along with her sister Harley keeps the yard nicely pocked with holes.  But more about Ruby in a moment.

Neville grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa.  He describes himself as a "vernacular gardener" who "started off trying to plant all the things my colonial grandmothers planted:  camellias, azaleas, roses." He remembers a "huge bouganvillea outside my bedroom window" and says, "the thing that I really miss is a jacaranda tree."

And really, who wouldn't?

When I asked him about the trend toward native plants gardens, he said, "I respect its practicality but I don't like its ideology.  I think gardens should be cosmopolitan, and native gardens are a bit xenophobic."  But along with the English garden flowers he loves, Neville has also planted and come to enjoy colorful natives like Turk's cap, butterfly weed, salvia in many colors, and flowering trees including crepe myrtle and a small but thriving Texas mountain laurel:

Other personal touches in the garden include Geraldine the Giraffe,

a lovely pair of flamingos,

and what Neville calls "the ashtray of shame:"

One reason Neville loves the garden, he says, is because "I smoke."  He doesn't smoke in the house, though, which means a lot of time enjoying one of their two outdoor seating areas.  Does Victor smoke?  "Not officially, and you can put that on the blog." 

But I promised a Ruby story, and here it is.  When the new Mueller development was being planned just across Airport Boulevard from Wilshire Woods, the planners decided that there was not enough room to put the new water pipes down Airport.  They proposed to run them down Ardenwood instead, right past Ruby's house, which Ruby and her neighbors did not appreciate.  One neighbor, an ecologist, did some research and discovered that Wilshire Woods was the last extant strand of post oak savannah in Austin.  Post oak savannah is the only habitat of the endangered Texas red garter snake.

If the neighbors could find a specimen of a red garter snake to prove that it was still living in the area, the plans for digging up Ardenwood would have to be scrapped.  One day Neville was in the yard and saw Ruby looking like she was wearing "a Fu Manchu moustache."  He looked more closely and saw that she was carrying in her mouth a tiny snake with a red stripe.  He took a picture, sent it to the proper authorities, and the pipes now go down Airport.  And that, my friends, is How Ruby Saved the Neighborhood.

 

Sister Arts the book is OUT!

I always dreamed of writing a book that looked like this.

Academic books are usually much more about content than form. In terms of design and format, they are at best serviceable, at worst plain and hard to use. But from the moment I first sent my query letter to editor Richard Morrison, asking, “Would you like to read a lush, sexy book about lesbian gardens?” University of Minnesota Press has been making my dreams come true. Richard’s own interest in gardens and poetry (did you know he has an MFA and is an accomplished garden photographer?) as well as Minnesota’s distinguished queer studies and landscape architecture lines appealed to me when I was choosing a publisher. Now, holding the finished book in my hands, everything from the texture of the paper to the eye-popping design to the typeface does justice to that first description, and to the stories I tell in the book of bold women artists expressing desire and creating relationships with one another through landscape art.

You can purchase Sister Arts:  The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes on Amazon or from The University of Minnesota Press, and it will be in bookstores in the next couple of weeks.  I hope you enjoy it.