* * *
Wojnarowicz said to a reporter that he decided to make his Rimbaud in New York series because “I felt, at that time, that I wanted it to be the last thing I did before I ended up back on the streets or died or disappeared.” The photographs too feel like grainy ghosts. Mocking apparitions. As if Rimbaud were sighted at a diner. As if David Wojnarowicz were still somehow alive.
* * *
To go out with anger—to trace one’s own disintegration, or disappearance, as he does in Close to the Knives, his gorgeous elegy to his dead friend Peter Hujar that also mourns his own dying and fragile body. That has decided not on peace, but on rage. His “blood-filled egg” he carried around with him, an inscribed body. His “memoir of disintegration.”
* * *
That haunting Peter Hujar photograph of Candy Darling on her deathbed. She has the beauty of a consumptive—tranquil and yet feverish. Her makeup perfectly on. The David Wojnarowicz photograph of a shrunken Peter Hujar on his deathbed, Hujar like a medieval saint. In her life Candy Darling transformed herself into a blonde Hollywood starlet—the performance perfect, intact. My favorite part of her documentary, which I recently watched, is the scene in which Candy mimes a Janet Leigh monologue, knowing all of the words.
* * *
Peter Hujar, who felt an artist should be able to make up their own biography.
* * *
Je est une autre. “I am another.” Rimbaud’s famous declaration. When one writes, one is already somebody else. The fiction of the self. Like Elizabeth Hardwick tweaking how many siblings she has in Sleepless Nights. Don’t pretend to know. But also, the idea that to write, to make art, can allow for transformation.
* * *
In a recent interview, I was asked to name a book I thought should be remembered, and I chose the Québécois writer Catherine Mavrikakis’s A Cannibal and Melancholy Mourning. The narrator hotly mourns all of these friends who have died of AIDS, all named Hervé. The narrator says she loves works that are tender and cruel, and that is what this is for me, a jeremiad, a beautiful complaint. The book is inspired by Hervé Guibert’s autoportrait, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, fictionalizing his friend Michel Foucault’s death from AIDS, which also documents Guibert’s own diagnosis, like a French companion to Close to the Knives.
The interviewer asked me to talk about New Narrative, and I told him that it was an avant-garde queer mostly American literary scene circling around community, and especially memorializing friends and lovers who died of AIDS, refusing their disappearance. That in New Narrative, gossip is a political act, naming is a political act, a revolt against disappearance. I rattled off names of New Narrative writers: Bruce Boone, Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, Kathy Acker, Gail Scott. The interviewer asked me if I thought there would ever be another movement where writers could be angry in force again, if there would be another crisis that would allow for a political literature.
I have thought about this question for a while now, and I think it connects to more than just writing—it’s about art making; it’s about a way of life that is opposed to a mainstream, homogenized success.
And I said to him that there is always something to be angry about, always something to rage against.
* * *
Can literature be a suicide note, a love letter, a manifesto, a complaint, can it be all of these things?
Can art be a way to trace not only disappearance, but our survival?
Fragments of a Lost Object
Meditations on the Photographs of Anne Collier
I am wondering what it means to collect.
* * *
I meditate upon the tender and witty memento mori of the photographer Anne Collier, who photographs her collections of books of photography, self-help tapes, other lost and melancholy objects.
* * *
“To collect photographs is to collect the world,” Sontag writes in On Photography. A photograph in a book too, she notes, is an object to be collected.
* * *
Can you collect, I wonder, people too?
* * *
Anne Collier’s image of Marilyn Monroe from Bert Stern’s book The Last Sitting, from her Woman with a Camera series (the title teasing in its anonymity). Marilyn, in a moment of playfulness, poses with her black evening gloves and a Nikon camera suspended over her mouth, yet looks away, her eyes crinkling in a smile. The camera obscures but does not mask what we are really looking at—the face always so iconic, always a fact, so the camera performs a peekaboo, like the fan dance with the striped diaphanous scarf in those other Stern images. The camera isn’t active, posed like it’s actually looking back, taking pictures at the photographer capturing her. As if to show the joke: she is the beautiful image here; this is not her point of view.
* * *
So who is the woman with a camera? The woman with a camera is Anne Collier. Her gaze that is obsessive, sad, sensitive, witty. She’s not just looking; she’s looking at how others have looked (men, fellow photographers, all of us)—an affectionate and ironic distance, yet also with the intimacy of a collector, even, perhaps, a fan.
* * *
To look at this image of Marilyn Monroe is to mentally page through the rest of the book, with its morbid name—the fragility and pathos of those images—and then to linger on the biography, of Marilyn’s deep unhappiness and struggle, which she would not survive. How this photo shoot, commissioned by Vogue in 1962, was part of a major publicity effort after she was fired from 20th Century Fox, a year after being institutionalized at Payne Whitney. How she would be dead of an overdose of barbiturates six weeks after she posed for these photographs over three boozy days in the Hotel Bel-Air. The heaviness of all of this, the tragedy behind closed doors, seeps into these photographs, giving them the weight of a historical memory. Memento mori, from the Latin for “Remember you will die.”
* * *
And yet she performed such vitality. “You’re beautiful!” Bert Stern remembers saying to Marilyn, upon meeting her. “What a nice thing to say,” she replied, always rehearsed for her public. Upon seeing only accessories laid out on the bed, she quickly grasped his idea for the shoot, a series of nudes (not very high-concept). She was worried, initially, about revealing a surgical scar, but after consulting with her companion/hairdresser, she went for it. Champagne. Flirting. She became Marilyn (a movement she could do, how she could disappear into a crowd when not playing the persona, be a woman alone on a park bench). She transformed for the camera into the sex symbol. “Not bad for thirty-six,” she said, once she came out of the bathroom in one of the sheer scarves.
* * *
There is no real intimacy to the nude, yet something was captured in these Bert Stern photographs, something, perhaps naked, unable to be replicated. He tried to replicate them, exactly, a few years ago, with Lindsay Lohan, but she possessed the tortured life but not enough of Marilyn’s talent for vulnerability, her expressive and haunting face. Performances cannot be repeated, not exactly.
* * *
The red Xs of the contact sheets that Bert Stern published in the book, where Marilyn crossed out the images she disliked. The gesture that performs her disappearance. The cover of The Last Sitting is exactly this—Marilyn crossed out, Marilyn already a ghost, Marilyn’s mouth open as if trying to say something.
* * *
Sontag speaks again: “Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading towards their own destruction, and this link between photograph and death haunts all photographs of people.”
* * *
The camera is objective. And yet one desires to be inside, to enter a subjectivity hinted at in fragments. What does it mean to imagine another’s life, the impossibility of accessing their first person? What does it mean to never escape one’s image or mythic status, while still struggling with personhood?
* * *
A photograph to Sontag was also a fragment. This essay is composed of fragments. And by that I mean photographs.
* * *
Fragment: Marilyn reading James Joyce’s Ulysses outdoors in the striped bathing suit. She often insisted on being photographed with a book (a desire to direct her publicity, perhaps, away from the image of the dumb blonde). This reminds me of the press photo of a young Louise Brooks, shiny in black-and-white, reading Kierkegaard on set.
* * *
Some English professor once called a method of skipping around reading Ulysses “the Marilyn Monroe method,” as she confessed to not finishing it, and mostly enjoying Molly Bloom. The Marilyn Monroe method: I employ it too. I skip around. I flip. I drift.
* * *
I once wrote a series of failed monologues about screen sirens, imagining them as writers, as “difficult” women. Sirens—voices, ghosts, echoes. I imagined Marilyn as Molly Bloom, her fervent and ecstatic “I.” Also: Veronica Lake, Vivien Leigh, Louise Brooks, Clara Bow, Judy Garland, really all the tragic ones. The ones who died young (tragic). The ones who died old (also tragic). The public selves constructed by the studio system, how this infected their private lives. A madness. To be alienated from oneself. Jean Harlow spoke of herself in the third person. “Jean Harlow was a figment of MGM’s imagination.”
* * *
Louise Brooks on Clara Bow, the It girl, an abstraction: “Off the screen she disappeared like an overexposed negative. The only thing she was was this image they had made for her.”
* * *
What does it mean to share myths? Is it that these celebrities, these tortured women we have appropriated, tell us something about ourselves? A sort of projection. An overidentification. They met sad ends. They met lonely ends. They were alone in a room at the end.
* * *
I’m interested in difficult women, especially women who wanted to be artists, in their failures and fragilities, their uneasy communities with each other and refusals of kinship.
* * *
(This doesn’t matter. This is not my self-portrait.)
* * *
The private “I” can search, tormented, as to one’s contradictions. Marilyn’s poetic fragments, written on hotel stationery, in unfinished diaries. In a letter to her therapist while at Payne Whitney: “Sometimes I wonder what the night time is for. It almost doesn’t exist for me—.” She was reading Freud’s letters. She cried at his photograph, taken toward the end of his life. She thought he looked so sad.
* * *
I collect this fragment, this anecdote, and add it to my archives. My archives of loneliness and longing.
* * *
The isolation and identification between these figures. The stars were seen as repeats of each other. Gene Tierney on the ledge, recounting looking at Marilyn and Arthur Miller’s apartment across the way. “It’s Jean Harlow all over again,” an exec at 20th Century said of Marilyn’s screen test. Marilyn wanted to play Jean Harlow in a biopic. Her fascination with stars while growing up, in and out of foster homes. This is the narrative of the star system, of Hollywood. The desire to inhabit, to embody, someone else. That Life magazine photo spread of Marilyn dressed as Theda Bara, Clara Bow, Jean Harlow.
* * *
Can one’s obsession be a form of autobiography?
* * *
Or one’s gentle appropriation?
* * *
Louise Brooks: “Autobiography and biography are the greatest fictions.”
* * *
To escape the self, in a portrait of another. That’s acting. That’s photography. That’s perhaps writing too.
* * *
(What does it mean, then, to disappear?)
* * *
I count twenty-three neon Post-it notes marking the Bert Stern book in Anne Collier’s photograph. I use the same type of Post-its, as a form of remembering—the moment of reading/looking, marking a return. The Post-its show the artist’s touch and obsession—the hand, the eyes, two motifs reoccurring in her images.
* * *
The Post-its are lavender, lime, yellow, light pink, blue, hot pink. The coloring an affectionate nod to Warhol, as are her other Marilyn images, such as her side-by-side albums with Marilyn on the cover, and her witty single, diptych, and triptych of Marilyn heads against her gray studio floor, slightly fanned-out copies of Norman Mailer’s book on Marilyn (another male auteur’s appropriation of an actress).
* * *
An appropriation of Andy Warhol. A nod to his own act of appropriation—a meditation on media, celebrity. He created the Marilyn diptych weeks after her death, from a publicity photo from the 1953 film Niagara—a glamour shot, Marilyn in a sort of drag, in the lavish Marilyn mask. Set to Technicolor. Her publicity (not her private life).
* * *
Are there layers and levels of appropriation? Does it matter whether the feeling is of homage, or an inquiry, or that of ownership? Whether there’s warmth and feeling, or detachment? I don’t know. I think it matters.
* * *
Cindy Sherman dressing up, playing the anonymous starlet in her Untitled Film Stills. Anne Collier’s photo of Cindy Sherman dressed in drag on the cover of a fashion magazine. Madonna dressing up as Marilyn in her most iconic stage, at the height of her stardom. Collier photographs a folded Steven Meisel poster of a nude and insouciant Madonna, cigarette in mouth, cupping her breast—the folds mimicking the grid of a Warhol. Gillian Wearing dressing up in drag as Warhol himself.
* * *
Kathy Acker wanted her punk texts that appropriated classic novels like Don Quixote and Great Expectations to be like a Sherrie Levine—like Levine’s photographs of Walker Evans photographs. The litany of I’s in Acker that are not her own. A way to inhabit, to wear a classic text from the inside. Unlike Anne Collier’s appropriations, obviously inspired by the so-called Picture Generation, but kept at more of a witty gentle distance. Framed on a wall, in her own space, touched and manipulated by her hands.
* * *
So many eyes in Anne Collier’s photographs. The witty take on Un Chien Andalou. The series of eyes in trays that reveal different photographic processes.
* * *
The left of Warhol’s Marilyn diptych is colored, the right black-and-white, which Collier mimics in reverse in her Woman with a Camera diptych, of two framed press photographs of Faye Dunaway from a film Collier returns to, Eyes of Laura Mars (the title perhaps part of the obsession), a rather lurid film about a fashion photographer, played by Dunaway.
* * *
In the diptych, we are looking at two framed press photos hung on a wall, of Faye Dunaway posed with a Nikon camera, two different yet mirroring action shots. But she doesn’t look like she is really using the camera, or at least the fingers posed on the camera are manicured impeccably, the hands staged almost awkwardly (the red nails of Cheryl Tiegs in another Woman with a Camera image, that same late-’70s glamour period Collier returns to, in this one it’s even more evident that the camera is a prop). It is a playful image, but one that underscores the woman-as-image. But then in Anne Collier’s layered doubling treatment of it, the subjectivity is given back, in some way. We can sense the heat of Collier’s lens (her eyes, her camera) on the image, presumably shot by a male photographer, framed to show the ad copy, a series of male names. Collier’s lens sensitive, aware, cognizant of technique as well as clichés, but also trained on the woman looking back. It is the traces of this—of the embodiment of the photographer, of what she is looking at—that gives these works such complexity.
* * *
And now I’m thinking of Warhol’s later self-portraits, after Valerie Solanas shot him, after repeat surgeries, when he was paranoid that she would try again and obsessive about his own mortality. The self-portrait with his fright wig. The image, saturated in different pop colors but also the protection of camouflage, that looks more like a death mask (and he was to die nine months later from complications following gallbladder surgery).
* * *
What is the relationship of the death mask to self-portraiture? One cannot, literally, photogr
aph one’s own death mask. Marlene Dumas’s painting of Marilyn pre-autopsy, Dead Marilyn.
* * *
Anne Collier appropriates another Warhol subject, Judy Garland, in her photograph of the book of consummate celebrity photographer Douglas Kirkland. The image that we see, marked off with a pink Post-it, is the 1961 still of an older Judy Garland crying—that intense, beautiful mask. Kirkland asked Garland to think of how sad her life had been, and she, the tortured ex-child-star and consummate performer, was able to cry on cue (although, like the self-conscious girl out of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, she has said she couldn’t cry at her father’s funeral). This is the Judy Garland who had survived collapses of her career and body and psyche, who had just the year before given that performance at Carnegie Hall, the glorious spectacle of her sobbing. She was to die eight years later at the age of forty-seven from an overdose of barbiturates.
* * *
The winds grow colder / Suddenly you’re older, Judy belts out in “The Man That Got Away” from A Star Is Born, her Lady Lazarus performance after being fired by MGM, that little pleased hiccupy laugh at the end of the song.
* * *
I too am somewhat of a fan, of a collector.
* * *
Measure the emotion, perhaps sentimentality, of not only Kirkland’s photo but also Collier’s appropriation (the intensity of the neon Post-it notes) with Warhol’s diary entry about Judy Garland’s funeral. More of a detached conceptualism, less of the adoration of a fan: “At the end of July I took Ondine and Candy up to the round-the-block line for Judy Garland at Frank Campbell’s Funeral Home on 82nd and Madison. I wanted to tape-record them as they were waiting to go past the casket . . . I had it in my head that this would make a great play.”
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