* * *
There is, to be sure, a fanaticism to being a fan. When thinking about Anne Collier’s collecting, I go not only to Warhol but also to Joseph Cornell. He also used publicity shots—such as for his Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall. His shadow boxes that he made in his mother’s basement in Flushing, Queens, are self-portraits in a way, the portrait of his obsessions, born of his collections. They work as well as devotional objects, shrines to his personal goddesses, actresses, ballerinas, his fellow poet-recluse Emily Dickinson.
* * *
Although Cornell was a hermit, he was also a walker of the city, where he would scavenge in used bookshops on Fourth Avenue, at five-and-dimes. Anne Collier searches in vintage stores, on eBay, for her record albums, books, photographs, from the ’60s to the ’70s.
* * *
The photographer and the collector are both obsessed with the past, says Sontag. She writes, “The collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage.”
* * *
Joseph Cornell too was infatuated with Sontag, with her silver-striped, silver-tongued persona. He made her a collage as fan letter. Sontag, meditator on photography, also a celebrity, an image, the subject of so many famous portraits: by Mapplethorpe, Warhol, Peter Hujar, Diane Arbus, and of course Annie Leibovitz, her later partner, the quintessential celebrity photographer.
* * *
I just got distracted reading online about Joseph Cornell’s infatuation with a teenaged runaway waitress, named Joyce Hunter, who gave him his first kiss at the age of fifty-nine, and was later murdered. This the result of a search in which I asked Google: “Was Joseph Cornell kind of a stalker?”
* * *
The answer is, I think: Yes, but he was a sophisticated one.
* * *
There isn’t, after all, a mutuality in obsession.
* * *
Collier’s 2011 photograph named Valerie—a stack of different used editions of Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto. The title and the repetition a nod to Warhol, again. By sheer force Valerie Solanas became a Warhol superstar, in her failed assassination attempt (terrible and macabre that the Garland song is still in my head, that crescendo—The man that got away!).
* * *
It was Valerie who was obsessed. The obsession was over a lost script, her play Up Your Ass, which she wanted Warhol to produce. She repeatedly returned to the Factory, demanding it back. Warhol paid her some money to act in two of his films. Lines she delivered with relish (“I gotta go beat my meat,” she says in one). She also became convinced that Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press now owned all of her work. He had given her $500, apparently to write a novel based on her manifesto, which she was selling mimeographed on the streets when she met him (or maybe the payment was just to write a pornographic novel—there are different tellings). She wanted to be taken seriously as a writer.
* * *
It was Girodias actually who fictionalized the acronym as the “Society for Cutting Up Men.” A cut-up. A collage.
* * *
That day she first went to the Chelsea Hotel to try to find Girodias. She showed up to the Factory dressed up in a black turtleneck sweater, raincoat, and, a rarity, makeup, as if she knew she might be photographed. (Warhol apparently said, “Doesn’t Valerie look good!” upon seeing her.) When she finished shooting Warhol as well as the art critic Mario Amaya, she turned herself in to a traffic officer in Times Square.
* * *
“Read my manifesto and it’ll tell you who I am,” she apparently told him.
* * *
The connections between Warhol and Solanas have been made—both from working-class, Catholic backgrounds. The beginning of the SCUM Manifesto: “Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore.” Warhol so attracted to boredom, to emptiness.
* * *
Collier’s recent Questions series, her photographs of file folders containing pastel photocopies of questionnaires, worn and torn handouts.
CONNECTION
~How are things, events, or people connected to each other?
Pauline Oliveros’s composition entitled To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of Their Desperation.
CONNECTION
Valerie felt the FBI was out to get her.
The FBI did watch Marilyn, recording her movements.
* * *
Valerie Solanas died broke and anonymous, at the age of fifty-two, in a welfare hotel in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. One story has her still turning tricks, “slim and elegant” in a silver lamé dress. Another, maybe a parallel one, has her writing still, banging away at her outmoded typewriter, the landlord remembering her surrounded by pages and pages.
* * *
One of the voices of Sylvia Plath’s radio play set in a maternity ward, Three Women, speaks to being the “heroine of the peripheral.”
* * *
Anne Collier’s photographs of tapes and albums, such as her 2008 photograph Sylvia Plath, the album propped against the wall on her studio floor, the title one can make out: Sylvia Plath Reading Her Poetry. The album cover an image of water and cliffs, at odds with the furious Ariel persona. Her clipped and draggy BBC radio narration. Sylvia Plath the opposite of self-help. And yet: the rushing sea.
* * *
Anne Collier’s first photograph of her self-help tapes. These outmoded objects. Tapes framed inside their chalk-colored compartments, their casing operates as a sort of frame, photographed against a bone-white exterior. A sterility juxtaposed against the gentle irony of the sequence, its wordplay.
Introduction
Fear
Anger
Despair
Guilt
Hope
Joy
Love/Conclusion
That kills me, the last tape: Love/Conclusion. The promise of that. That by the time you get to the last tape, the listener will have rid herself of all bad feelings. Will have found Love—which will cancel out all negativity and destruction.
* * *
As if Love is ever a Conclusion.
* * *
But the way the casing has been warped, slightly cracked, suggests the use was not peaceful. The wear shows signs of vulnerability. And one thinks of the also yielding boundaries of the self. Its wear and tear. Its desire to heal from grief and loss, a desire so deep that it would cause someone to purchase these tapes. To use these tapes, perhaps. Then take an image of them.
* * *
I wonder looking at this heartbreaking yet subtle image—what is the monologue of Introduction? What is the monologue of Fear? What is the monologue of Anger (Valerie’s, Sylvia’s monologue)? And then I also wonder about the autobiography of those who used the tapes, their history. And yet it’s so anonymous, and there is vulnerability I think to that anonymity. That is the pathos of self-help.
* * *
Another photograph, of a tape Believe in Yourself, half listened to: circa early ’80s, probably. The purple capitalized type on the white tape, the illustrated purple stars.
* * *
The voice of these tapes—an interior voice we do not hear but can imagine—a repetition too, a mantra: to be okay, to be okay, to be okay.
* * *
When we are stuck, we look to other signs and systems to be okay in the world. To relieve the burdens of personhood.
* * *
For there is a sort of leveling off of the self in self-help. The first person is abstracted, universal. A litany of I’s. A way of looking at the agonies of the self that is at once relieving and impersonal.
* * *
Anne Collier’s First Person series. Nos. 1–4. Four large-scale photographs of pages of a book—a section called “Personality Profile Checklist.” The statements of personality impersonal, contradictory, and thus quite deadpan. (“1. I am capable of giving orders. 2. I can easily show appreciation. 3. I am apologetic. 4. I can take care of myself.”)
* * *
The lists Marilyn Monroe made
for herself, to improve herself, to try to be happy. The affective labor of trying to survive. Lists, tapes, therapy, worksheets. The onus is on the individual.
* * *
Anne Collier’s forms are not filled out. A photograph of a blank page entitled Guilt (presumably a journal entry to be filled out for a workbook?). Another photograph of a page entitled What Do You Wish For? (the magical repetition of “I WISH” then bracketed by an illustrated shooting star). My Goals for One Year.
* * *
Her unspooled tapes photographed against a white background, as if floating. The Anger tape unraveled first (the effect suggests dissipation, as does the memory of the gesture). It’s a funny image. And yet there’s some sort of quiet desperation or frustration to it. The unspooling too of Despair. Guilt. Problems. The feather-blue thread that comes out of the Hope tape.
* * *
A recognition of a suffering body. Or an annoyed body. (The tape is also a body.)
* * *
Another photograph entitled Anger actually refers to Kenneth Anger, of the lurid and gossipy Hollywood Babylon books (a fellow obsessive and collector), a photograph of two hands pressed into his handprints on the Walk of Fame.
* * *
The unspooled tapes almost form a shape of the emotion, something sculptural and figurative, this emotion that is supposed to be destructive, that the tape is serving to protect against. They are dancing and light when freed from their packaging.
* * *
And then her photographs of pirouettes of spools freed of their plastic bodies, their tangled figure eights. The kinetic sculptures of Surviving Depression or Spiritual Warfare or The Unique and Mysterious Role of Hope, almost Calder-like.
* * *
The dance posed between Conflict, Criticism, and Anger, one interprets something meaningful in this statement, how they are so bound up in each other.
* * *
Yet there’s something to this. As opposed to focusing on the fiction of the integrated, instead to celebrate the beauty of the failures. The fragments of lost objects.
New York City, Summer 2013
On Kathy Acker
Ever since I moved here a few months ago I have been walking around looking for ghosts. Is it possible to mourn a city and time that I never knew? I walk around Alphabet City—how literary that sounds. Wild women like Cookie Mueller in the East Village. Nan Goldin’s girls with their tears and pubic hair. Lydia Lunch ranting at the Pyramid Club. A young Kathy Acker walking around like a punk Edie Sedgwick bankrolled by Sol LeWitt. All the brilliant free spirits and so many of them are dead.
The week I got here I was asked to be on a panel on “literary bohemianism” with Katie Roiphe at McNally Jackson Bookstore. I said no.
The relationship of art to the market here feels psychotic. The conversations about writing here are conversations about publishing.
This city makes me feel psychotic.
I think of Kathy Acker’s letters to Susan Sontag in Great Expectations, struggling over publicity, how to survive as an artist in this city. I want to hold a séance with Kathy Acker.
* * *
DEAR KATHY—
Who wants to be famous? Not me. But that is what is expected here. Visibility, brand, platform (gross gross gross). How can one artist survive here? And stay feral? How can art be political in society? (Rimbaud.)
DEAR KATHY—
I am experiencing career suicide ideation.
DEAR KATHY—
What defines the middlebrow to me is that it is absent of any anger, and by that I mean devoid of any politics. Why worry about the mainstream? Why can’t we live and write in the margins? I know you write that the margin is a way to be marginalized—that’s why you hate “experimental.” But I love that you hate. I love that you hate and that your works derive from such hate. I hate too.
DEAR KATHY—
But how to avoid feeling sold? Because I want to be successful, I want to be a success. What I would do sometimes for success, to not feel like a failure all the time, but success, I think, comes at a price, perhaps one’s integrity. Did you feel too that American publishing is interested in success, not failure? When failure, I find, is so much more interesting.
DEAR KATHY—
Why can’t I just be a boy genius?
DEAR KATHY—
I don’t think New York City will ever love me. I don’t think I’ll ever love New York City.
* * *
All summer I kept on thinking of one of Jenny Holzer’s texts: “IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY.”
Kathy Acker lived in the same building as Holzer.
“Who can think about art in this miserable city?” In The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec Kathy made the painter a horny, ugly, alienated girl. New York City is Montmartre.
Still early on such an alive quality to the work. But this feels like a shift from the early plagiarism experiments. The “I” is and is not Kathy Acker. Raw and abject diary entries—yet filtered through art history and persona—destabilizing everything and giving it this A-effect.
“To survive in New York is to be a little like those hamsters on a wheel, the wheel turns faster and faster.”
* * *
New York is exhausting and weird. I walk around Soho and look at all the rich bitches who are glacial in the extreme heat, wearing long sleeves. Either they are aliens or I am. What is it like to be so good-looking and gentrified?
Notes from a book proposal I try to write: “I want to write about feeling dirty and gross in public, as a woman and a writer, like a witch.”
“I’m a total hideous monster. I’m too ugly to go out in the world . . . I’m extremely paranoid. I don’t want to see anyone. I’m another Paris art failure. I’m not even anonymous. All I want is to constantly fuck someone I love who loves me.”
The mannequin in the window at Catherine Malandrino wears a long red gown. Little specks of red paint splatter her white face. Like Carrie at the prom.
I’ve been making lists of how disgusting my body is. How chipped my black toenail polish. How filthy underneath my fingernails. The little toilet paper sculptures I pull out of my pubic hair.
Being groomed all the time feels impossible. I wonder if grooming is a desire to look simple and easy, to be easily read. I want a beautiful and perfect text like I want a beautiful and perfect body. I want to be seen as an intellectual, serious writer—but here I also want to be slim, young, fashionable. I walk around and suck in my stomach and worry over my yellow teeth. I buy expensive Acne white T-shirts like the models off duty wear, which on me just look like baggy white T-shirts. The day my book receives a (lukewarm) review in the London Review of Books I am obsessing over that, but also obsessing over pictures someone put on Facebook from the night before, at a friend’s reading in Bushwick. My arms look so white and gross in a tank top, expensively shredded and newly procured. (My mother and her slim muscular arms, pointing out how flabby I am.) Ugh.
I go to a salon that all the other feminist writers on the Internet in NYC go to as well, run by a former Riot Grrrl who is also a feminist writer on the Internet. My models for haircuts are often writers I want to emulate—like Ann Quin’s proud brunette head, or Gertrude Stein in Balmain, or elegant hollowed David Wojnarowicz, or austere rooster Samuel Beckett. These are often links I send to the photographer who needs to take my new author photo. I also send Robert Mapplethorpe photos of a young leonine Patti Smith, and then photos of an older warrior Patti Smith, and then the Peter Hujar of Susan Sontag reclining on the bed. I feel that’s the image I want to project—fierce and striking, maybe scary. Intelligent and severe and masculine but also light pretty witty (cute). I am not sure which self I am anymore. I think probably I’m neither. I want to be ugly and bold, and then I want to be pretty and young.
I wanted to look like an alien, I told the person cutting my hair. Because that’s how I’ve been feeling. The salon does not take my picture against the wall and put it up
on their blog, like they do for another feminist on the Internet, who is something of a celebrity, a slim pretty blonde woman who knows how to pose for pictures. I have weird feelings about this other woman. She seems to encapsulate the New York literary scene for me—witty, bitchy, a popularity contest.
* * *
I have been sending little emails to myself thinking about this essay and this summer.
In the subject head: Identity Crisis.
In the body: “What does that mean?”
* * *
The summer before, I flew here to have my picture taken by a ladyblog. They said that I was One to Watch, and I wanted to be watched. I wore my black jersey Rick Owens. I got my hair newly shorn so I looked severe enough. The picture they chose to publish was me with my eyes closed. Otherwise you looked too intense, they said. At the party to celebrate the pictures I didn’t know what to wear. So I bought a pink dress. Like a cotton pink day dress. Like the pink dress Villette buys.
Kathy Acker stares at us from those metallic pastel Grove Press covers, crimson-lipped and peroxide-butched.
I didn’t want to smile in my author photo. Because for a while I always smiled, and this was something I wanted to resist.
Why isn’t she smiling? My students asked me of Frida Kahlo. Kathy Acker was reading Frida Kahlo’s biography on her deathbed.
I think of Kathy Acker like a gender-fucking Claude Cahun heroine. Muscled, tattooed, spiky-haired. Claude Cahun with a shaved head dyed green who freaks the fuck out of André Breton.
Her project one of hijacking literature, antagonizing memoir. As if there is a unified, coherent self. Kathy Acker manipulated this fiction. The author dies—le petit mort. Her personas the literary equivalent of Cindy Sherman’s iconography. Can we contain all of these selves? Who is “I”? I can be the sum part of literature and history. I can insert myself inside.
The confessional as commodity, that is unleashed upon a coliseum. Kathy Acker torched this whole concept. She wrote the self, but she cast herself into the canon. She is writing the Young Girl far before Tiqqun. Except hers might be banal and entranced with her own image, she might have love stories, she might know her photo, but she is not a model citizen.
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