Sister Arts: Gardens, Poems, Art, Community

Wobbly Petals: Sarah Sarai's Princess Di

Today I want to showcase another group of poems published in the excellent online journal Fringe.  Sarah Sarai is a New York poet who recently published the collection The Future is Happy (BlazeVOX).  I love the surprising ways flowers appear in her poems: 

A Bullish Run into Chambers

When a stranger is killed and laid to rest
at an altar for Public Mass of Remembrance,
African violets torn from a window’s sun
buttery as a tea cookie or rose petal,
prim Queen Anne’s lace for Diana,
buttery herself and silky, a fallen sulky,
for a child we will never meet,
a teenager who standing is caught
in crosshairs of our blood extravaganza,
aren’t we allowed our impersonal grief?
We pay to be hollowed by cinematic gore,
are immunized against capitalism’s rule:
a business must grow. The word was gore,
a bullish run into chambers born bursting
and broke. Along chain-link fences,
at street corners and Buckingham Palace,
wobbly petals mark our bid to be human.

African violets "torn,"
rose petals "buttery,"
Queen Anne's lace, paradoxically, "for Diana."
This last reference speaks so powerfully to me of the streets of London after the death of Princess Diana (which I take to be the occasion for the poem).  Madge and I happened to be in London that week in 1997, staying in a B&B in the gay neighborhood of Earl's Court.  Even though (or perhaps because) I'm Canadian, I have no real interest in the royal family, so when I had heard about the accident the week before while travelling in Greece, I thought it was sad but it had no personal meaning for me.  Not so the gays of Earl's Court.  Walking to the tube station, we passed window after window and fence after fence that had been turned into an altar or memorial, strewn not just with flowers (their "wobbly petals," in Sarai's phrase, drifting into piles on the ground as days passed) and pictures of the princess but with personal testimonies.  "You visited me in the hospital when my family would not, because I had AIDS."  "You came to our fundraiser."  "You gave me hope with your kindness and love." 

This Diana, beloved AIDS activist and icon of the gay community, had not been quite so visible to me before.  I could not help but be moved.  So although we had not planned to, Madge and I went to Kensington Palace.  Sarah's poem talks about Buckingham Palace, and there were memorials there too, but Kensington was where Diana had lived and Buckingham was the residence of "the estranged queen, keeping mum," as Madge reminded me today.  We shared the tube with families dressed in their Sunday best and drag queens equally carefully attired, and paid our respects.

Justin Vivian Bond, Dendrophile

A dendrophile is a tree-hugger by any other (Latinate, euphemistic) name.  Justin Vivian Bond, formerly of the iconic queer cabaret act Kiki and Herb, has just released a new album by that name that puts a queer spin on eco-friendliness.

Kiki and Herb came out of San Francisco's edgy mix of queer art and activism in the 1990s.  The duo moved to New York and by the time they broke up in 2008 had played everywhere from downtown spaces like The Knitting Factory to London's Queen Elizabeth Hall, Carnegie Hall, and Broadway, where their show Kiki and Herb:  Alive on Broadway was nominated for a Tony Award.  Kiki was known for her nightclub covers/queer revisions of standards by iconic women rockers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVpIZ-Chta8

Although the character Kiki is a raucous, alcoholic chanteuse whom one cannot imagine outside a nightclub, Justin has always had a love of nature and is a well-known participant in the Radical Faeries, a movement dating from the 1970s that melds Marxism, indigenous spirituality, feminism, and drag in a potent and liberatory mix. 

From this rich soil comes Dendrophile, Justin's first solo album.  The dendrophile loves trees and the term can even mean someone who sexually copulates with trees.  In a recent interview Justin described enjoying maple syrup not only as a healthier alternative to processed sugar, but also as "tree cum.  Yum." 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X14a3G0SuLs

In this video from the new album, the singer is pictured among swaying grasses, or crowned with leaves, while lamenting "looting the land."  "Every time we kiss/ we confirm the new world coming," the song promises.  Justin's whiskey voice and the simple, haunting instrumental behind it are hard and sexy but full of emotion.  In the final image of this video, the singer's face dissolves into flowers.

Yum indeed.

Lindsey Schell's Lustre

Lindsey Schell is a professional librarian known at The University of Texas for her leadership in the fight for domestic partner benefits (see my 2/16/11 post), her tireless advocacy for books and journals in the face of draconian budget cuts, and her cute shoes.  Here are her treasured Kate Spades:

Off campus, though, many Austinites know Lindsey as the entrepreneur behind Lustre Landscapes (http://www.lustrelandscapes.com/), a client-centered business for homeowners "on a more modest budget."  (Thanks for thinking of us Lindsey!)  After hearing from friends and colleagues what a wonderful job she has done with their yards, I thought it would be fun to look at Lindsey's home landscape in the central Austin neighborhood of Windsor Park.

These spectacular irises, which bloomed last month in Lindsey's front flowerbed, are a good place to start.  Lindsey loves irises--"they were my grandmother's favorite, and they're easy to share with people."  Once an active member of the Austin Iris Society, Lindsey won Best in Show a few too many times to be able to go back (apparently it was all very Downton Abbey) and now prefers to enjoy her irises in her own backyard.

Linsdey describes herself as an "over-the-fence gardener," sharing clippings and company with neighbors on other side of the open chain-link border between backyards on her street.  She told me that after the recent death of the elderly gentleman living next door (a founding member of the Austin Men's Garden Club), his wife had had to move into assisted living.  "I'm sad," she said, "because she will miss her rosebush blooming."  Lindsey has been pruning that bush for a few years for her neighbors and will likely continue to do so until new gardeners move in.

Also intensely interested in "how the micro-environment of Austin plays a role in the migratory life of butterfiles and hummingbirds," Lindsey maintains giant calico vine for the swallowtail species that visit her yard on their way from Mexico to the north, and pearly milkweed vine for the gulf fritillaries.  Here are some tiger swallowtail caterpillars munching on Lindsey's Aristolochia gigantea:

and just for fun, the flower of the same plant:

Letting caterpillars munch through such a gorgeous plant while still getting it to flower must be quite a trick.

Ever the librarian, Lindsey has a fantastic collection of gardening books including many rare and out-of-print items.  She calls it "an interesting bibliographic endeavour to find the best field guides," and points proudly to her copy of the out-of-print Cacti of Texas and Neighboring States by Del Weniger as an example.  After some gentle prodding by Lindsey--"I did kind of give them hell about it"--The University of Texas Press has just re-issued this classic. 

Another lustrous contribution to Central Texas's vibrant garden community.

 

 

 

Fall in Love With Equality: Rally at UT

On Valentine's Day the Pride and Equity Faculty/Staff Association at The University of Texas held a rally to demand domestic partner benefits. 

After the rally we marched to the Human Resources Office and 23 of us submitted paperwork requesting coverage for our significant others.  Our requests will be rejected, of course....but then maybe we've created a class for a lawsuit!  UT is really leaving us with very few options after many, many years of trying everything.

I had the honor of addressing the rally.  Here's what I said:

(Photo by Tamir Kalifa)
"Happy Valentine’s Day.  So good to be here with everyone.

Y’all, I am so tired of telling my sad story. 

When I came to UT in 1991, I came from a university—Cornell—that had just begun offering domestic partner benefits to all employees.  When I asked whether UT had them, I was told, “Sooner later it will happen here too.”  I’ve been told the same thing so many times over the years.  Sooner or later.  Sooner or later.

Guess what?  It’s later.

In 2008 I had the privilege of working with a hard-working group of UT staff and one or two faculty members on a historic report on the issue of domestic partner benefits at UT.  Led by the brilliant Lynn Milburn, supported by many I see here today still working on this issue, like Ixchel Rosal, Karen Landolt, Sarah Sloan, Dana Cloud, and Lindsey Schell, we held a big rally something like this one when we released our 70-page documentation of the cost to UT of denying us benefits and the successful strategies UT could implement to grant them.  Our rally was a huge success—except that we still don’t have benefits.  Working with these activists, and the students of Stand Out and other organizations, and the supportive administrators such as Associate Dean of Liberal Arts Marc Musick, Dean of Liberal Arts Randy Diehl, and Associate Vice President Julien Carter, has been an inspiration.  So let’s talk about the good news.

In the wake of our 2008 rally, President Bill Powers appointed a committee to look into quality of life issues for LGBT people on campus.  The committee has been working through a checklist of issues and has accomplished a lot.  The student housing division, which has long allowed married housing directors to live with their spouses on campus, will begin welcoming the same-sex partners of LGBT employees this fall.  The university’s policies on parental leave, family and medical leave, and bereavement leave are now under review with the goal of making such “soft benefits” available to employees with same-sex partners.  These may sound small, and health benefits remain, to quote Marc Musick, “the holy grail and the most elusive” of our goals.

But let me tell a story I told in 2008 that illustrates why bereavement leave, to give just one example, is so important. 

Pamela Buchanan told us:  “Carol Fenske fought cancer for the last six years of her life. Although UT offered that there was no discrimination based on sexual orientation, on numerous levels there was no true support to be found. If Carol had been in need of my UT insurance plan, she would have died within two years. The only hope of future support came in a handwritten letter from then UT President Berdahl. I had responded to a newspaper article that told of his wife's journey with breast cancer. I believe that he truly saw the parallels of desperation when your loved one is dying. He was also leaving for UC Berkeley. Carol died, July 5th, 1997, 4:20am. No departmental flowers. No email from colleagues to acknowledge my loss. I still frequently wake up at 4:20am. I still serve The University of Texas.” 

Horrifyingly, Pam was not even entitled to take time off to go to Carol’s funeral because Carol was not recognized as her spouse.

 As for me and my partner Madge, we have struggled with this issue for many years.  As a self-employed artist and the parent who works part-time so she can care for our young children and her elderly mother, Madge has had a hard time finding insurance on the private market.  For a long time she paid several hundred dollars a month for a policy with a very high deductible, so in effect, we could not often afford for her to go to the doctor.  Recently her small business has been able to get its employees on a group insurance plan, so she has better insurance at the moment.  But she was also recently diagnosed with a chronic illness, and I worry about what might happen if she is no longer able to work and loses access to that insurance.  I need and deserve the security that my straight colleague across the hall has—of knowing that my employment benefits include the ability to take care of my family’s health needs.

 Of course, this is a familiar story to many people in so many walks of life.  It’s part of the bigger picture of the broken health care system in this country.  Every enlightened democracy but this one has figured out that as a matter of public health and economic security, not to mention human decency, it makes sense to offer access to health care to the entire population, not just those who are employed in the right jobs or married to the right people.  Making health care available to everyone in the United States is a big problem, and not one we expect UT to solve.  The one we want UT to do something about is so much smaller.  With so many factors keeping people from access to good health care in this country—homophobia shouldn’t be one of them.

 Thank you."

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.””

 

Las Pozas: a Surrealist queer garden

Edward James was born in 1907 and was an Oxford contemporary of Evelyn Waugh and Harold Acton.  A patron of the arts, poet, and designer, he is known as an ardent Surrealist.  In collaboration with Salvador Dalí, James created iconic works like the Mae West Lips Sofa and the Lobster Telephone (also known as the Aphrodisiac Telephone).

One of four known copies of the Telephone can be viewed at James’ estate at West Dean, now a National Trust site.  The site is known for its nineteenth-century Gothic house designed by James Wyatt and a twentieth-century Arts and Crafts garden. 
René Magritte painted two portraits of James, both expressing a mysterious or unknowable quality about him.

James married Tilly Losch, an Austrian dancer, in the early 1930s, and produced Les Ballets 1933, which included Kurt Weill, Lotte Lenya, and George Balanchine, as a vehicle for her.  In 1934, in a divorce countersuit, Tilly accused him of homosexuality.  In 1940, James stayed for a period at the Taos, New Mexico ranch of bisexual Mabel Dodge Luhan, which housed a revolving guest lists of avant-garde artists.  Travels in Mexico convinced him that in order to design the “true Garden of Eden” he had in mind, “Mexico was far more romantic” a location than either Britain or the United States.  In 1945, guided by a young telegraph operator named Plutarco Gastelum whom he had hired in Cuernavaca, James found the location of the garden he was to name Las Pozas (“the pools”) at Xilitla.  This is the James garden I nominate “queer,” if only for its Surrealist vibe of sexual freakiness and its origins in a collaboration between men.

 Gustelem, his wife and children lived with James at Laz Pozas for the next forty years.  Gustelem and James collaborated on nearly forty concrete follies (garden buildings including temples, pagodas and summerhouses) with names like The House on Three Floors Which Will In Fact Have Five or Four or Six.  Plantings included an orchid collection that at one time numbered 29,000 specimens, and “casas” or animal houses housed wild birds and animals from all over the world.

 
James was also a poet.  Here are some verses about his garden: 

 

I have seen such beauty as one man has seldom seen;

therefore will I be grateful to die in this little room,

surrounded by the forests, the great green gloom

of trees my only gloom - and the sound, the sound of green.

Here amid the warmth of the rain, what might have been

is resolved into the tenderness of a tall doom

who says: 'You did your best, rest' - and after you the bloom

of what you loved and planted still will whisper what you mean.

And the ghosts of the birds I loved, will attend me each a friend;

like them shall I have flown beyond the realm of words.

You, through the trees, shall hear them, long after the end

calling me beyond the river. For the cries of birds

continue, as - defended by the cortege of their wings -

my soul among strange silences yet sings.

 

Here's James at Las Pozas in the 1980s:

 

Thanks to Roberto Tejada for introducing me to Las Pozas.  Now run by a foundation, the garden is open to visitors.  I’m adding it to my list of lifetime garden tourism/research destinations.  I’ll be able to visit West Dean this summer when I’m in England and will be sure to report any features that set off my garden-writer gaydar.

 

 

Gardens are sexy

Everyone knows gardens are sexy.  Ever since Eden, the garden has been associated with nudity and breaking the rules.  I just finished writing a book about the great age of English garden design, the eighteenth century, and I gave the bawdy garden of the period some attention. 

 The most famous example is Sir Francis Dashwood’s West Wycombe in Buckinghamshire.  In addition to being a politician and art collector, Dashwood was a notorious rake who led a secret society called the Hell Fire Club, which met in a network of prehistoric chalk caves that surfaced on his West Wycombe estate. (They became know as—what else?—the Hell Fire Caves, and you can still go visit them.)  Sir Francis and his associates were either “happy disciples of Venus and Bacchus” or “subversive of all decency,” depending on your point of view. 

Here’s one of many period portraits of Sir Francis.  It's called Sir Francis Dashwood Worshipping Venus, and it shows our loose-living subject kneeling blasphemously in front of an erotic novel instead of the Bible, with his equally notorious friend Lord Sandwich peering from the halo instead of an angel:

 

To facilitate his Venus-worshipping tendencies, Sir Francis carried out a series of ambitious renovations to his West Wycombe estate in the 1760s and 1770s.  Like a lot of eighteenth-century gardens, the updated West Wycombe included a temple to Venus.  But Dashwood’s Venus Temple is special.  The temple is built into a hillside with the arch-shaped door opening into a dark interior space.  Another Hell Fire Club participant, John Wilkes, said this archway was meant to represent “the Door of Life, through which we all enter”—in other words, the vagina.  The small rotunda on top of the hill, which looked like a belly button, emphasized the bawdy meaning of this part of the garden:

 

Get it?

 Yeah, the belly button is a little oversized.  The symbolic effect was probably strengthened at the time by the fact that there were apparently two swelling mounds with their own, smaller rounded porticos on top visible behind and to each side of the vagina-and-belly construction above—i.e., the breasts complete with nipples.  

 In the eighteenth century people were either scandalized or titillated—or both--by Dashwood’s Venus Temple.  As a feminist I was intrigued to find a similar design by an eighteenth-century woman garden designer named Mary Delany  Delany knew about West Wycombe and Sir Francis’ highjinks both through family connections and because he was a neighbor of her longtime girlfriend (more on eighteenth-century lesbian relationships later) the Duchess of Portland, whose estate at Bulstrode was just a few miles away.  Delany collaborated with the Duchess on the Bulstrode renovations (everybody was doing it; that’s why it’s the great age of English garden design!), but here’s the Beggar’s Hut she designed for her own garden outside Dublin:

See the similarity?  In the middle of the drawing you can see the arched doorway of the "hut," which is actually an underground cave, drawn just below the belly-like mound of the hillside.  This image was a starting point for me in realizing that women participated in the tradition of the bawdy garden.  I’m sure some of them made gardens that looked like penises (actually Dashwood made a church steeple with a golden ball on top of it that was even more scandalous than the Venus Temple) but since I’m a lesbian, I was less interested in that possibility.  I liked the idea that women in the eighteenth century made gardens that looked like the sexy bodies of other women.  And my book, Sister Arts:  The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes, was born.

Next time:  the erotic gardens of the 21^st century.