by Terry Castle
The trip is also, of course, an Artistic Pilgrimage; we’re hoping to pick up on the celebrated arty-bohemian Santa Fe vibe: adobe houses with huge ceiling timbers, decorative cow skulls on pure white walls, chunky turquoise jewelry, high desert air and the famous Southwestern “light”—indeed, the whole Stieglitz–O’Keeffe–D. H. Lawrence–Mabel Dodge Luhan–Willa Cather–Pueblo Cliff Dwellers–Death Comes for the Archbishop thing. Maybe we’ll even see Julia Roberts (the sun-dried actress—a forty-something Roma tomato in disguise?—has a ranch near Taos). Our hotel is right on the plaza and has the requisite Navajo rugs; the rental car is good to go; and we’ve got big museum plans for our next three days.
The O’Keeffe collection is the must-see, of course, though I confess that the prospect of Mavis in tandem with Georgia is a bit worrying. Although unable to take up the art scholarship she won in England in 1941—the Blitz put an end to her formal education—my mother has always been alarmingly “artistic.” Through both of her ill-starred marriages—the first to my gloomy-guts father, with whom she emigrated to California, and the second to Turk, the salty old American submariner with five wild children whom she married in the early 1970s to stave off destitution—her hobby no doubt kept her sane. (Apart from a much-loathed teenage stint “in the gasworks” in St. Albans after the war ended, she never worked.) She was a member of the Clairemont Art Guild and did monoprints on weekends with her friend Frances, a wisecracking old dame in Capri pants and Simone de Beauvoir turban. Together they inked rollers, tore newsprint for collages and cut do-it-yourself mats while my mother declaimed on the subject of Turk’s husbandly misdeeds. Frances, puffing on mentholated cigarettes, was the raddled and raspy Suzuki; my mother, a much abused Cio-Cio San.
After my stepbrother Jeff killed himself in 1982, my mother made the little upstairs room that had once been his into her creative lair—nine feet square of dense, paint-flecked, Krazy Glue squalor. Francis Bacon’s famously naff South Kensington studio (now recreated in a Dublin museum) is a neatnik’s in comparison. Tracey Emin’s Bed? Pristine and fresh-smelling. The mess is still intact; my mother stopped using the room ages ago but never cleared it out. Now, living alone, she can’t get up the stairs. True: Ruskin says one should not indulge in the pathetic fallacy, but peeking into this dust-laden camera abbandonata during hurried visits to the maternal hearth, I can’t help feeling that the crumpled tubes of acrylic paint, pots of dried-up gesso, broken picture frames, old bits of bubble wrap, and rotting cardboard are moping. They yearn for the past, but the past is a dream. They miss their Prime Mover and her passionate ways. They lie about, higgledy-piggledy and disconsolate. They seem to reproach me silently when I slip in to purloin rubber stamps or the odd box of pastels. My mother once had a museum reproduction of a Calder mobile hanging above the work table. I love color more than anything else! she is still wont to exclaim. Turk, in a fit of subaltern rage, went in there one day and smashed it to bits.
The problem—grotesque daughter that I am—is that I could never bring myself to like my mother’s work as much as I should. Colorful it is; Matisse the big influence. The aesthetic is relentlessly sunny, cheerful, and pretty: the baleful milieu in which many of the pictures were created—the Mavis-Turk ménage—is never in evidence. My mother’s great subjects are flowers and women’s faces, with the occasional female nude thrown in. (I don’t want to paint men! Women’s bodies are much more beautiful!) Granted, in her prime she occasionally hit it—made a still life or watercolor portrait of such informal ravishing loveliness one felt one’s own complex sort of gratitude. (Jane Freilicher’s gorgeous gouaches come to mind.) Beauty is Truth. But she seemed not to realize when she had produced a winner. Her pictures hang on the walls indiscriminately, the stunning ones mixed in with a lot of mermaids, dreamy girls in kimonos, elfin-looking flappers in cloche hats, simpering angels, and the like.
To put it as churlishly as possible, I’m a bit nervous about pushing my mother around the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum because I fear being swept back—annihilatingly—into the world of “my mother’s taste.” My whole life up to now—as even the slow-witted reader may have deduced—has from one angle been a fairly heartless repudiation of maternal sentimentality: all the bright, powerless, feminine things. Now especially, her world is largely one of kitty cats, splashy floral bedspreads and pillow shams, See’s peanut brittle, cheap coffee mugs with jokey inscriptions (Because I’m the MOM—That’s Why!), sympathetic female friends. It’s all very Calendar Girls: cute, full of kindness, irretrievably down-market, and—to me at least—weirdly depressing. At this point in her decline, her house has become a hellish Knick-Knack Central, the chaos of the upstairs studio having spread ineluctably downward since Turk’s death. The kitchen in particular is a veritable Mavis-midden, overflowing with feathers, beads, glue-sticks, bits of decorative ribbon, tweezers, little embossing guns, and myriad other implements she uses for her main artistic pursuit these days: making strange-looking necklaces out of polymer clay. Notwithstanding the huge magnifying glass she uses to see what she’s doing, most of these recent concoctions—alas for those who receive them as gifts—have a pendulous, lopsided, somewhat savage look: the perfect thing for a stylish Aztec to wear to a human sacrifice. But she spends hours creating them and enjoys herself enormously. Who but a monster—or an Yma Sumac–hater—would begrudge her? The surrounding disarray is all part of some sweet yet decisive revenge.
Rightly or wrongly, I can’t help associating O’Keeffe’s work—colorful, vegetal, Modernist yet compromised, endlessly reproduced on tatty note cards, posters, and datebooks—with my mother’s abstracto-feminine creations. Like the beetle-browed Frida—you know the one I mean—O’Keeffe has become a sentimental icon, the culture heroine of a generation of (now increasingly elderly) female amateur artists. After all, it’s said, she was a feminist of sorts: earthy and independent; muse to a host of eminent men (Stieglitz, Paul Strand, et al.); lived almost forever. Best of all, she is supposed to have celebrated—fairly unabashedly—something called “female sexuality.” Who can contemplate those swelling pink and purple flowers—or the roseate canyon-wombs opening up within them—without thinking of the plush, ding-donging joys of female genitalia? Georgia, by God, must have had orgasms to spare. Until the 1990s, when the Asian-minimalist spa aesthetic finally took over, there was hardly a hippy-dippy hot-tub establishment between Baja and Mendocino that didn’t have an O’Keeffe poster (or several) decorating the premises. The fact that the artist seems to have been a frightful old harridan who ended up leaving her entire $50 million estate to an unsavory boy-toy sixty years her junior is seldom allowed to tarnish the legend. Oh, and by the way—to judge by the famous Stieglitz snaps, she looked just like a man.
How to cope with it all? I’ve been imagining the Santa Fe trip as both a fulfillment of daughterly obligation—it’s costing me a bundle—and a sort of spiritual Trial of Taste. (It’s not just the O’Keeffe, of course; almost as soon as we arrive and begin exploring the town plaza, I realize I shall also have to guard myself against copper bangles, polyester tees adorned with Native American pictographs, pony hide rugs, postcards purporting to show a family of jackalopes squatting in the desert, pimply valet parking attendants in Stetsons and cowboy boots.) Still, I’m not entirely unprepared. I’ve secretly inoculated myself with what I consider the ultimate Connoisseur’s Good Taste Vaccine. Everywhere we go, I tell myself, what I’ll really be doing is looking for the Agnes Martins. Agnes, I’ve decided, will be my private talisman, my anti-O’Keeffe. Yea, though I walk through the Valley of Southwestern Style, I will fear no evil. My aesthetic invulnerability assured, I’ll be able to enjoy everything else ironically, starting with the jackalopes and the women who love them.
And who, precisely, is Agnes Martin? Her semiobscurity is exactly the point. True, her paintings now reside in all the fabled modern collections and sell for millions of dollars. True, like O’Keeffe she lived near Taos and Santa Fe for much of her life. But she remains a
cult figure—an artist’s artist—legendary among the cognoscenti for her reclusive style of life and the Zen-like austerity of her vision. I first read about her in the 1970s in a weird stream-of-consciousness piece in The Village Voice by the then-radical-lesbian writer Jill Johnston. Johnston—herself once a fixture in the New York art world—described making a kooky pilgrimage to New Mexico to find Martin: a sort of Sapphic Quest for Corvo. I don’t remember much about the article, except that Johnston quoted a gnomic comment by Martin on death: you go out either in terror or in ecstasy. I recently saw some photos of Martin in her studio just before she died and thought she looked a bit like Gertrude Stein: stocky, impassive, the same Julius Caesar haircut—only dreamier, blue-eyed, more aerated somehow. Her emotional remoteness seemed absolute.
Yet Martin’s story has always enthralled me. Born in rural Saskatchewan in 1912, she moved to New York in the 1940s to study art at Columbia. After a spell as a graduate student at the University of New Mexico she moved to Taos, where she supported herself for a number of years—barely—by painting and teaching. In 1957 she was discovered by the Manhattan gallery owner Betty Parsons and moved back to New York. There, alongside Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Ellsworth Kelly—fellow Abstract Expressionists seeking a new way forward after the death of Jackson Pollock—Martin won acclaim for her delicate, somewhat cerebral experiments in geometric form. She was touted by the critics and attracted the attention of wealthy collectors. Success notwithstanding, however, Martin was repulsed by art-world gamesmanship and one day in 1967 simply loaded up a pick-up truck and drove back to New Mexico. There she built a small adobe house with her own hands at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo mountains and began a new life as a hermit. She stopped painting and for seven years wrote poetry and studied Eastern philosophy. (Hatje Cantz published a book of her writings in 1992.) When she began producing work again in the mid-1970s—her prices having escalated astronomically in the meantime—she refused, despite the pleas of dealers, to relinquish either her privacy or the ascetic mode of existence she had embraced.
The modern world left her cold; in the stark New Mexico landscape she found a spiritual clarity unmarred by material entanglements. Daily life was spartan. Though she liked classical music she never owned a stereo; nor did she have a television. She had no pets. One of her obituaries reported that when she died (in 2004 at ninety-two), she had not read a newspaper for fifty years. Two years before her death she allowed a persistent woman filmmaker to shoot a documentary about her: it was entitled With My Back to the World. Leaving no survivors, she directed that her estate be used to fund a foundation for artists but insisted that it not bear her name.
The paintings are reticent in turn—pale, spare, barely there. (Martin rejected the term Minimalist in favor of Abstract Expressionist, but if she wasn’t a Minimalist, it’s not clear who would be.) Her pictures seldom reproduce well, and at first one looks much like another. This similitude is due no doubt to the fact that Martin’s basic technique stayed the same for years. She began with a square canvas precisely six feet by six feet, and primed it with plain white gesso. On top of the gesso she then laid down faint horizontal lines in pencil, followed by exacting, ultra thin washes of oil paint or acrylic. Sometimes she added vertical pencil lines, creating delicate grids; at other times, she made simple horizontal stripes. The bands of pigment were usually matte white or off-white, sometimes tinted a pale gray or yellow. Later in her career she added a nearly invisible coral pink and a faint blue pastel to her palette. And that, kids, was that.
It is impossible to overstate their self-effacing beauty. Martin herself wrote that she believed the function of art to be “the renewal of memories of moments of perfection.” Making art seems to have been a kind of meditation for her: she meant her paintings as aids to contemplation—“floating abstractions” akin to the art of the ancient Chinese. And it’s true, though they are built up line by line, by almost imperceptible increments, that after a while her pictures begin vibrating on the retina with strange energy, flipping gently back and forth between metaphysical registers like one of Wittgenstein’s playful visual paradoxes. The sense of calm they evoke in the viewer is similar to the liturgical mood Rothko’s work can produce, but Martin is less morbid, theatrical, and self-consciously “profound.” Facing down the void, Rothko can at times be downright bombastic. Martin is more humane and in some way stronger: smaller in scale, indifferent to sublimity (though her paintings achieve it), uninterested in making statements. It’s the difference, perhaps, between Lowell and Bishop.
Yet there is no doubt that Martin’s work will always be caviar—the very palest of pale fish roe—to the general. Who better, then, to serve as my guardian angel? The artist would no doubt be appalled to hear it, but admiring her work aloud is now a fail-safe way for the upwardly mobile poseur to signal intellectual depth and all-round ahead-of-the-curveness—like subscribing to ArtForum and actually reading it. Martin is the sort of artist show-offs show off about, know-it-alls know about. I think I like her—the whole chaste package—because she was so obviously unlike me, so seemingly unencumbered by envy or the need to strategize. Thinking about her has a soothing effect, like imagining myself reincarnated as a smooth and shiny pebble glinting in sunlight at the bottom of a cold, clear mountain stream.
Meanwhile my mother is emitting plaintive yips. Even as we propel her round Santa Fe, B. and I—wheelchair-pushing novices both—keep rolling her into unexpected cracks in the pavement. Each time she pitches forward melodramatically and gives a little squeal of fright. Is she faking it? Hard to judge—we are pretty inept. I make feeble jokes about getting up speed and running her off the top of a Pueblo cliff dwelling to her death. She huffily maintains she can walk a bit, but after one or two arthritic attempts, is happy to plop down in the chair again and gaze about expectantly. B. and I are both reminded of Andy in Little Britain (we just got the DVDs)—the dough-faced, lank-haired, supposedly paralyzed invalid who climbs trees, assaults people, swims in the sea at Brighton, and even bounces on a trampoline whenever Lou, his kindly yet moronic caretaker, has his back turned. We try to explain the joke to her and even act little bits out—B. doing Lou, me Andy—but Mavis isn’t really paying attention. We’re outside a Häagen-Dazs place and she wants one.
I get my first inkling that my daughterly snobisme (it sounds even worse in French) is about to be compromised when my mother spots the rubber-stamp store. We’ve been indecisive so far about what museum to do first; just then Stampa Fe floats into view. One of my mother’s polymer clay pals has said it’s great and she’s instantly psyched. Panting a bit, Blakey and I hoist her and chair up the stairs (it’s on an upper floor and there’s no elevator) and I wheel her in—unable to suppress my own rapidly growing excitement. For I, too, I’m chagrined to confess, am a rubber-stamp addict. As Bugs Bunny might say: a weal wubber-stamp fweak. I’ve got hundreds at home; they’re taking over all the drawers in the work table in the spare room. Blakey rolls her eyes, sits down, pulls Richard Rorty out of her bag, and prepares to wait for several hours.
I guess I left this part out earlier: that I’m as “arty” as my old mum. Can’t help it—it’s a mutant gene, like homosexuality. And though I can neither draw nor paint, I’m fairly good at working around my limitations. Like numerous five-and six-year-olds—or Max Ernst and Hannah Höch, as we “creatives” prefer to say—I do collage. Rubber stamps, along with scissors and glue and glossy pages ripped out from The World of Interiors, are an essential part of my praxis. (I have the art-world jargon down pat. Yeah, I work in mixed media. Gagosian’s doing my next show.) It has not escaped my notice that even in London at the very center of the intellectual cosmos—the London Review Bookshop on Bury Place—there’s a rubber-stamp shop right next door. Titillating to admit, but as local surveillance cameras would no doubt corroborate, I have sometimes been seen to nip into Blade Rubber (“the biggest range of stamps and accessories in London”) even before I go next door—game face on—to per
use the latest tomes on Stalinism or global economics.
What sorts of subject have I tackled? Blakey informs me that it is called “blog whoring” to publicize one’s blog in print, so I won’t even mention Fevered Brain Productions, my digital art Web site. Oops, it popped out. Let’s just say I’m a neo-Surrealist—a bit dark, a bit Goth, a bit grunge—a sort of lady Hans Bellmer. As a child I was enchanted by the Surrealists’ Exquisite Cadavers game—the one in which you make comic figures out of mismatched body parts. This love of the grotesque has never gone away; even today, I enjoy putting dog or cat heads on human bodies and vice versa. Always on the lookout for detached torsos, legs, feet, hands, eyeballs, lips, etc.—anything to dérégler the senses, if only a teeny bit.
In Stampa Fe my mother and I go on a mad bacchanalian spree. Piling stamp blocks into my basket, I am even less restrained, I’m sorry to say, than she is. (Given her eyesight problem and seated position, she has to struggle and claw a bit to drag things down to her level.) I try to pretend that the stamps I’m grabbing up are “cool,” that my choices express my highly evolved if not Firbankian sense of camp. Thus I eschew the ubiquitous Frida K; ditto anything with Day of the Dead skeletons on it. I avert my eyes from a stamp showing Georgia O’Keeffe in her jaunty gaucho hat. But somehow I end up with things just as bad: a Japanese carp; multiple images of the Virgin of Guadalupe; a slightly dazed-looking cormorant; a sumo wrestler kicking one of his fat legs in the air; a woodcut-style picture of little people with sombreros on putting loaves into a mud-baked Mexican oven. Despite a longstanding ban on rubber stamps (or coffee cups) with sayings on them—Cherish Life’s Moments, Happy Easter, You Make Me Smile—I succumb to A New Thrill For The Jaded. I’ll stamp the envelope with it when I send off my next property tax bill.