Broad Strokes, page 13
I was overcome with a sense of the past colliding with the present. “I miss this,” I said.
Martha laughed her throaty, ’40s-movie-star laugh. “You could still have it,” she said, as if that were obvious, then gesturing it was time to go. I followed her out, hoping she was right.
This book starts soon after Martha said those words. Having just finished a years-long project, I suddenly knew it was women artists I wanted to write about next.
Probably Bourgeois’s most famous—and most loved—late work is Maman, a towering 30-ft-/914-cm-high spider, originally in steel with six copies cast in bronze. Maman’s eight dark, rough-hewn legs and skittery stance are as far as can be imagined from the glinty architectonic severity of The Institute, though they were made within a few years of each other. Bourgeois’s imagination always contained multitudes.
Maman means “mother,” and beneath her abdomen hangs a clutch of twenty-six marble eggs. Far from horror-movie sinister, the giant spider radiates a strange benevolence. When displayed at venues across the world, children play beneath its legs and busy urbanites stop to take smiling photos.
Bourgeois easily explained Maman’s appeal: “The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. . . . Like spiders, my mother was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. We know that mosquitoes spread diseases and are therefore unwanted. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother.” Spiders are like mothers, at least Bourgeois’s mother. They are also like artists, weaving, creating, repairing. In that way, Bourgeois is a kind of Maman, too, a benevolent mother for us all.
CHAPTER 12:
RUTH ASAWA
Whenever there was a free moment, I would sit down and do some work. Sculpture is like farming. If you just keep at it, you can get quite a lot done.
—RUTH ASAWA
IN THE SPRING OF 1942, sixteen-year-old Ruth Aiko Asawa, born and raised in Norwalk, California, packed a single suitcase of belongings and together with her mother and five of her six siblings reported to the Santa Anita Racetrack for internment. The previous December, Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor. Her younger sister, Nancy (Kimiko), was then in Japan visiting extended family, and was forced to remain for the duration of the war. Asawa’s father, a truck farmer (independent, local, small), buried or burned anything in the family home too overtly Japanese, including kendo equipment, decorative books, and dolls. But as an older businessman in the local Japanese community, he was still suspect. In February 1942, Umakichi Asawa was arrested by FBI agents, then interned at an enemy detention camp in New Mexico. For the next six months, Asawa didn’t know whether her father was alive or dead. She would not see him again for six years.
At Santa Anita, the remainder of Asawa’s family inhabited the racetrack’s former horse stalls. “We were given two stalls,” Asawa said. “My brothers lived in one and we lived in the other. They gave us an army blanket, a pillow, and a cot. We made our own mattresses out of straw.”
Asawa, a young woman whose entire world had been ripped to pieces, later told an interviewer, “We had a really good time, actually. I enjoyed it.”
Heh?
Some eighteen thouseand people of Japanese heritage were interned at Santa Anita while Asawa was there, a lively concentration of culture and talent. Asawa went from being a girl attending a (surprisingly) diverse public school, to direct instruction from Japanese Americans who came from the highest ranks of professional fields. An ad-hoc school was set up in the racetrack’s bleachers and there Asawa had her first contact with career artists, including the former director of the Art Students League of Los Angeles, at least one WPA artist, and three animators from the Disney Studios.
“How lucky could a sixteen-year-old be?” Asawa said.
Ever optimistic, not given to grudges, Asawa was no Pollyanna, either. When made to say the Pledge of Allegiance at Rohwer Relocation Center in Arkansas, where her family was sent after six months at Santa Anita, she and her classmates added their own coda after with liberty and justice for all—adding, with a loud bravura flourish, Except us!
After graduating from the Arkansas relocation center high school, Asawa availed herself of a government-paid bus ticket to any Midwest college (no one of Japanese heritage was allowed on the coasts). Already, she wanted to study art, but the famed Art Institute of Chicago was too expensive. So with the assistance of a Quaker-funded scholarship, she nabbed the cheapest school available: Milwaukee State Teachers College.
At age seventeen Asawa arrived alone in Milwaukee, ready to begin her education as an art teacher. She did well for three years, but in her fourth she needed classroom experience to graduate and her advisors would not place her in Milwaukee’s public schools due to lingering ill-will against the Japanese. Asawa left college without a degree. (Decades later, the school tried giving her an honorary doctorate, but Asawa insisted on the BA she’d earned instead.)
Fortunately, the summer before her final year in Milwaukee, Asawa had taken a bus to Mexico with her eldest sister, Lois (Masako), who was studying Spanish. In Mexico City, Asawa saw José Orozco painting a public mural, and took an art class at the Universidad de Mexico with Clara Porset, a Cuban refugee and friend of German refugee artist Josef Albers, who was then teaching at an experimental school in North Carolina called Black Mountain College. She told Asawa about Albers and his school.
When she couldn’t complete the teaching program, Asawa thought of Albers. “Had Milwaukee State Teachers College not rejected me and forced me to the alternative of Black Mountain College, I would have retired as an art teacher with retirement benefits,” she said. Mexico and Black Mountain College meant everything to what Asawa would become.
The summer after she started at Black Mountain, Asawa returned to Mexico, where she taught drawing to children in Toluca. From villagers she learned how to weave baskets out of wire, a strategy of utilizing what was effective and at hand. The technique—no more complicated than crochet—beautifully met many criteria that Asawa had soaked up under Albers’s tutelage.
Before the war, Albers had studied and taught at the Bauhaus, an influential German school that fed European Modernism, from painting, sculpture, and architecture to craftwork and industrial design. Through Albers (among many others, including his wife, renowned textile designer, Anni), the rational ideals of the Bauhaus were transmitted to American artists: refined simplicity, elegance, truth to material.
When she returned to Black Mountain that fall, Asawa began creating her own works in wire. “You make the line, a two-dimensional line, then you go into space, and you have a three-dimensional piece. It’s like drawing in space,” she said. She’d discovered a humble method that utilized industrial materials to create forms as elegant as nature itself. Asawa’s hanging chain-mail baskets feel almost like they might have been birthed in a kind of mechanized petri dish. They are both insistently man-made and feel elemental, living parts of the natural world.
Ruth Asawa. Untitled. c. 1955.
Bourgeoning, breathing, they sway as they hang and cast complicated, ever-changing shadows.
Ruth Asawa. Andrea Fountain. 1968.
I knew about Ruth Asawa from the history of Black Mountain. Her fellow students included such influential artists as Ray Johnson and Robert Rauschenberg, while instructors spanned the gamut, from painter Jacob Lawrence to composer John Cage, from choreographer Merce Cunningham to architect Buckminster Fuller, her mentor and lifelong friend.
So I respected Asawa but knew little about her until moving to San Francisco, where she was famous as “the fountain lady.” Said fountains—mermaids, one on a sea turtle nursing a merbaby; a cylinder jam-packed horror vacui style with notable city landmarks molded by local children; and others—filled me, I confess, with some dismay. These were products of Black Mountain?
They’re not my thing, but so what? Many people adore them, including the throngs who rallied to defend the landmark-filled fountain when Apple started its demolition for its new building in a shared plaza on Union Square.
So I didn’t “get” Ruth Asawa. That is, until one Sunday when I visited the de Young Museum with my teenaged son. He needed to find a work of art he liked for a class and document—i.e., stand next to it and take a picture—his choice. I was thrilled he wanted me there, ready to instruct and advise.
Surprise! It didn’t go that way. I started by pointing out an awesome, painterly Richard Diebenkorn—noncommittal shrug—then moved onto Wayne Thiebaud’s groovy Pop art territory—nothing—and on and on through the Modern galleries. It wasn’t until one of the more retardataire sections of the nineteenth century that he found the one. He handed me his phone. I pointed it at him, my eyes wide. I took a second picture with my phone and texted my husband: Where did we go wrong?
There was our son, messy surfer hair, black San Franpsycho T-shirt hanging on his skinny body, grinning in front of Frederic Church’s romantic landscape, Rainy Season in the Tropics, complete with rose-colored mist and a rainbow.
“What do you like about it?” I asked.
He shrugged, as if I could no more understand the appeal of Frederic Church than I could that of World of Warcraft. (“They’re related,” my husband wisely pointed out later. “Think Middle Earth.”)
I gave up, suggesting we check out the view from Hamon Tower before we left. It was a rare clear day and, in a town of few tall buildings, a coveted chance to look out over our beautiful city.
We turned the blind corner to the atrium with the elevators and I caught my breath. Hanging above and around us were more than a dozen works in wire, some dangling baskets, some starbursts of spiky metal, some shimmering cascades of chain mail. Light played through the layers and shapes, causing shifting shadows to play over the walls, floor, and ceiling, as if we were underwater. I frickin’ loved it.
“What about these?” I said.
My son gave a noncommittal nod. “Pretty cool,” he said, pushing the Up button.
It was an almost perfect inversion of my first real museum experience, when I was barely a teen myself. We’d driven cross country in July, from Montana to D.C., in a van with no air-conditioning. So the Smithsonian was like heaven, cool and spare and vast. Almost immediately, I spotted a huge Cy Twombly (as I now know), grayish green and filled end to end in a looping white script that looked like handwriting, but couldn’t be read. It spoke some language I didn’t know, but I still loved it, like hearing French for the first time and understanding nothing beyond that it was wonderful, even if I had no idea what was really being said. I wanted to keep looking, but family friends hurried us along to see “a real painting” they couldn’t wait to show us.
It was also huge, a Bierstadt mountain landscape with a mirroring lake reflecting craggy peaks above, surrounded by dusk’s pink haze. At the water’s edge, a deer family shyly drank, innocent but alert. Basically, it looked a lot like Montana.
Imogen Cunningham. Ruth Asawa at work with children. 1957.
Why had I so much preferred the first painting, the one I hadn’t fully understood? To paraphrase Lee Krasner when speaking of her teacher, émigré Hans Hofmann: “His was the lesson of abstraction, and I got it.” I just got abstraction; I liked it straight off.
But for my son it was the reverse, sublime landscape trumping any abstract art, whether painting or sculpture. He held the elevator doors while I snapped a shot of the wall plaque. In the tower, while he took in the view, I looked at my phone. The works in the atrium were by Ruth Asawa. Now I got her.
Before we left I bought a catalog of Asawa’s work, humbled by my previous disregard. She was so much more than I’d realized.
At Black Mountain, Asawa met a young architecture student from the South named Albert Lanier and they hit it off. Lanier heard that you could get a full meal plus a bottle of wine in North Beach for less than a buck, so in late summer 1948 he headed west and set up shop in San Francisco. That fall, the California Supreme Court struck down laws prohibiting interracial marriage. The summer of 1949 Asawa married Lanier in San Francisco. They had six children in ten years.
The year before she was married, Asawa exhibited her first wire “basket” pieces at Black Mountain College. In 1950, the year after her marriage, she showed similar pieces at the Art Association Annual at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She had her first two children that same year. Point being, neither marriage nor children impeded her work.
This fabulous photograph by Asawa’s friend, celebrated photographer Imogen Cunningham, demonstrates how: She just did it. Kept making art, kept raising children, kept doing all kinds of things. I copied the picture from the catalog and carried it around in my notebook. If Asawa could have four kids arrayed around her like a procreative Leonardo Madonna (see his Virgin of the Rocks), one a diaperless baby helping himself to a bottle, but keep her head down concentrating on a new piece (while finished works float around her family like household gods), then I could write some during my daughter’s soccer practice at the to-hell-and-back fields across town.
Of course Asawa could only do her part. She couldn’t control the critical assessment of her, or her art. In reviewing her work in 1954, TIME magazine described the artist: “Rush Asawa, 28, is a San Francisco housewife and mother of three.” Though the article says she “studied under Abstract Painter Josef Albers at Black Mountain College,” it only compares her work to another Japanese American sculptor, Isamu Noguchi (who, the article points out, studied with Constantin Brancusi). Though both Americans who studied with Europeans, the reviewer insists: “Noguchi and Asawa share one quality of Oriental art that Western artists often lack: economy of means. Their Japanese ancestors devoted vast efforts to making a single brushstroke look easy.” So there you go, art by genetic transmission rather than by serious study with European artists whose work was utterly defined by economy and radical simplicity (see Brancusi’s Bird in Space or Albers’s Homage to the Square).
Ruth Asawa. Untitled. c. 1962.
Asawa explored the possibility of wire for decades, following line into space wherever it led, neither burdened by past success nor afraid to explore new styles.
In the 1960s, friends brought her a desert plant from Death Valley, thinking she’d enjoy its unusual, outer-space shape, and she did. But when she tried drawing the plant, its unusual structure proved difficult to capture in two dimensions, so she began sculpting. A new style of “tied” wire sculpture was born, anchored at the center while simultaneously reaching up and down into space.
These could almost be portraits of the artist.
Her career was, more or less from the start, one of national and even international scope. By the end of the 1950s, Asawa had already exhibited across the country, including New York shows at the Peridot Gallery and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and at the American Art Exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, where one of her pieces was the cover of the exhibition catalog. Just six years after leaving Black Mountain College, one of her hanging pieces was included in the 1955 São Paulo Biennial.
If her reach was wide, Asawa’s roots ran deep, not just in her family that came to include more than a dozen grandchildren and great-grandchildren, but also in the community. In addition to public fountains, murals, and mosaics, Asawa spearheaded the Alvarado Arts Workshop, a successful effort to keep art in financially strapped San Francisco public schools. And she was instrumental in starting a public arts high school in the city, the first on the West Coast, now called the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts.
Child of truck farmers, Asawa was profoundly gifted at growing things: art, children, a long marriage, deep and lasting changes in public education. She was herself a force of nature.
CHAPTER 13:
ANA MENDIETA
She was excited and optimistic. She told me she was going to give up drinking and smoking because women artists did not get recognition until they were old. She said that she wanted to live long enough to savor it.
—B. RUBY RICH
Perhaps she had become addicted to exile.
—JOHN PERREAULT
IN THE HOT EARLY MORNING of September 8, 1985, a doorman working the night shift in Greenwich Village heard a woman’s voice pierce the night, screaming, “No, No, No, No,” then moments later, the sound of a large object striking somewhere nearby.
Artist Ana Mendieta, thirty-six years old and married less than a year to renowned sculptor Carl Andre, fifty-two, had just plummeted from the bedroom window of their nearby apartment—thirty-four stories—and died on impact.
Because Mendieta is known for the ethereal self-portraits-cum-crime-scene-outlines she called Siluetas—and because the police took no photos—it’s tempting to imagine the scene. Rather than gruesome, I want to picture Mendieta as she was in her very first Silueta: a naked body covered in white flowers, all ripeness and purity, associating her own procreative forces with the power of the Great Goddess. Or perhaps, like Silueta Muerta here (see page 146), her arms raised overhead in an ancient gesture of prayer.
Ana Mendieta. Silueta Muerta. 1976.
But there is more than eerie symbolism lurking in this story. On the 911 tapes, after her fall, Andre informed the emergency operator that he and his wife were both artists and had been arguing about his being more “exposed to the public than she was” and that in the heated course of things “she went out the window.” A bizarrely passive construction, as if she were a little bird who’d suddenly taken flight. Mendieta was indeed little, under 5 ft/152 cm tall, weighing just 93 lb/42 kg. Their high bedroom window was barely within her reach.
