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.

 

 

 

Black Nature

I've been longing to read and write about (and write poems with) Camille T. Dungy's anthology, Black Nature:  Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry ever since Dungy came to Austin as the guest of the Pro Arts Collective this spring. I've finally run through my backlog of English garden photos from my summer travels, so today I was able to sit down with this luscious, thoughtful book.

the earth is a living thing

 

is a black shambling bear

ruffling its wild back and tossing

mountains into the sea

 

is a black hawk circling

the burying ground circling the bones

picked clean and discarded

 

is a fish black blind in the belly of water

is a diamond blind in the black belly of coal

 

is a black and living thing

is a favorite child

of the universe

feel her rolling her hand

in its kinky hair

feel her brushing it clean

                                -Lucille Clifton

In her introduction, Dungy points out that in ecopoetics, a new-millenium movement denoting writing with a strong ecological emphasis or message, African Americans "have been generally absent from tables of contents."  Indeed, at the recent Poets and Scholars symposium at The University of Texas, Lesley Wheeler said at a roundtable that for her, ecopoetics seems to be a way to create another white canon in the wake of the opening-up of American poetry more generally to non-white voices. 

And yet, as Ravi Howard points out in one of the ten brief critical essays included here, "Waves of paradise carried slave ships.  In southern woodlands grew both emancipation oaks and hanging trees.  (Could some have been both?  Can we ever know?)  Along with the rice, tobacco, and cotton, the enslaved grew okra and yams, pieces of home for many transpanted Africans.  The connections to nature, those that haunt and those that nurture, have been with us all along."

More soon as I continue to work through this amazing book.

 

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.

 

"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.

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.

A Lesbian-Feminist Storybook Garden

Yesterday I got the best present in the mail.  I received the page proofs of my book, Sister Arts:  The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes, and they are gorgeous.

 

I love what the designers at the University of Minnesota Press have done with the luscious botanical and garden images, including a wonderful mash-up of Mary Delany botanical illustrations for the chapter headings—a kind of collage of collages.  In celebration of this next-to-last stage, I thought I’d share a short excerpt from the book’s conclusion.  The conclusion is called “The Persistence of Lesbian Genres:  A Circuit Garden,” and it’s a rapid tour through some of the 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st century writers and artists working in the “sister arts” tradition of women’s landscape genres started by Mary Delany, the Duchess of Portland, Anna Seward and Sarah Pierce, the 18^th-century figures I discuss in the main chapters of the book.  Here’s part of my discussion of Toronto artist Allyson Mitchell, along with some yummy images of her iconic installation piece, The Ladies Sasquatch.  One of the things I love about this part of the book is that I get to quote my friend and colleague Ann Cvetkovich, who first introduced me to Mitchell’s work and is one of its most astute and loving critics.

Oh, and by the way, if you want to pre-order my book (and get the footnotes to the quotations below, which I deleted in this blog format), go to: www.upress.umn.edu

 

“Mitchell’s series “The Ladies Sasquatch,” which the artist has been making since 2005, consists of female sasquatch figures on a heroic scale installed in a wilderness landscape feminized and domesticated through materials: the figures are rendered in fun fur, and the hills, rocks and trees they ramble are created from “found fabrics, needlepoint, rug hookings and carpet samples, to make rocks and hills and logs.”

 

 Invoking the historical complexities of landscape politics in Canada, Mitchell acknowledges the provenance of this imagery in “Aboriginal tales about the Sasquatch, 'Wild Man of the Forest' or Big Foot (as he is referred to in the US)” which “have been appropriated by the white Canadian mainstream - arguably an expression of the racist fears around the "otherness" of native culture - and by default - nature in general.” The setting alludes both to a canonically pastoral “wild forest glen” and to “the bush,” that definitively Canadian location “outside what is formally understood as the city-state.” (Mitchell’s work also potentially puns on “the bush” as an affectionate term for women’s pubic hair.) As critic Ann Cvetkovich describes the work, Mitchell merges “Canadian wildlife myth with the tradition of feminist counterheroines,” taking “the stuffed animal of both natural history diorama and childhood toys” to a colossal scale. Averaging more than nine feet tall, the sculptures are fur-covered and feminine, with prominent vulvas and pubic hair, breasts and nipples, and underarm hair. “Lady Sasquatch is your dream girl,” reads the artist’s statement for a 2005 exhibition, “only bigger and hairier, and she may just eat you if you don’t watch out.” In a 2009 lecture, Mitchell said that she wants to engage viewers’ potential discomfort with women’s hairiness in these images of wild but somehow approachable female sexuality. The contrast in tone between the fun-fur fabric and long eyelashes of the figures, and their often menacing poses and great size, make them both alluring and repulsive, depending on the viewer’s relationship to female sexuality.

For the figure entitled “Oxana,” Mitchell draws especial attention to the figure’s buttocks and vulva--Cvetkovich calls the butt “especially important” in this work--by creating a highly-colored collage of fur reminiscent of a mandrill’s hind end. “You want nature? I'll give you nature!” One visual model Mitchell drew upon for creating Oxana’s butt is Georgia O’Keeffe. Mitchell alludes to O’Keeffe again in a mirrored red and pink rose in the hooked rug covering the base of the sculpture, just below the vulva. Mitchell says she is interested in how the figure’s haunches and vulva can be read as a flower, but also as anatomical--a key convention in the sister arts tradition.

Importantly, however, the figures are not exhibited alone. Rather, they are installed in relation to one another, “in a gathering, as though they’ve come together in some sort of clutch, or meeting, or who knows, maybe even a sacrifice.” In intentional contrast to the canonical Sasquatch myth, in which the creature is always pictured as male and alone, this is a community of powerful female figures gathering for their own mysterious purposes. The female bodies created here are specifically queer or lesbian bodies. For example, Maxie is “an homage” to Mitchell’s friend, the fat activist Max Airborne. The large back, small buttocks and short legs are meant to evoke a specific, recognizable type of woman’s body often seen among lesbians, which Mitchell calls “the refrigerator back.” In her evocation of female bodies rarely seen in canonical art history, Mitchell marries the myth of sasquatch wildness to “the mythology of lesbian culture…something like the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, five thousand lesbians running around naked in the woods and all of the mythology surrounding that kind of a space.” Cvetkovich notices in the work “a queer erotics…one that lends itself to new worlds that enable different kinds of feelings.” Referring explicitly to both previous practitioners in the sister arts tradition and contemporary queer and lesbian communities, Mitchell calls Ladies Sasquatch “a lesbian feminist storybook garden.””