Dear Reader,
This month I’m sending you a text that grapples with those acts of reclamation we might feel compelled to perform when we’re thinking about female artists, collections and archives.
It came out of a larger piece I was commissioned to write around a group of female artists who were being entered into a prestigious collection. Three things occupied me while writing it: one is that becoming part of a collection or archive can be a kind of death for a work, and the other is that the act of retrieval itself—while it can be powerful—is not a straightforward undertaking with a guaranteed restorative outcome. The third, was how we might illume our encounter with artists in their reclaimed or retrieved state: how the fact of retrieval bears down on an artist, and might in some circumstances function as another barrier or filter. These coalesced into a sort of peripheral essay that's concerned with how we—as practitioners of the literary and visual arts—can ethically address bodies that have been wilfully neglected if not violently excluded.
For my ever generous paid subscribers, I’ll be sending through a kind of companion piece: an ekphrastic response to one of Ana Mendieta’s Siluetas. This second text attempts to drape some meat on the bones of the first (there’ll also be links to some potent supplementary material).
When I decided this would be the text I’d share with you this month, I of course had no idea this would be the week Ireland lost our supreme force in Sinéad O’Connor.
In the words of poet Annemarie Ní Churreáin,
What we did not learn from Sinéad about voice is not worth knowing.
She hacked a path through a dark forest and in doing so, she has gifted that path to every poet, singer and artist to come.
Suaimhneas síoraí dá hanam.
…Ireland mourns.
And in the words of author Sarah Maria Griffin
i hope her soul rests but her memory haunts this island for what it does to women who speak truth to power
Many have said it better, but I’ll say it again: she was a titan, a glorious and shimmering force. What she did for women in this country that routinely butchers us remains untold. We did not deserve her, and we lost her too soon.
‘Til August,
Sue
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WHAT SHAPE IS A CROCODILE?
on female bodies, occlusion & death in the archive
In her memoir In The Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado writes:
As we consider the forms intimate violence takes today, each new concept—the male victim, the female perpetrator, queer abusers and the queer abused—reveals itself as another ghost that has always been here, haunting the ruler’s house. Modern academics, writers, and thinkers have new tools to delve back into the archives in the same way that historians and scholars have made their understanding of contemporary queer sexuality reverberate through the past. Consider: What is the topography of these holes? Where do these lacunae live? How do we move toward wholeness?
Machado is speaking of intimate violence, of abuse within queer relationships, but her logic holds true for archives in general (what is stored or unstored, saved or unsaved) and discursive spaces (what goes said or unsaid).
I’ve become somewhat fixated on the terms she employs, and have been reciting their definitions to focus my writing—or the intention of my writing.
lacuna: an unfilled space
topography: an arrangement of features on a landscape
wholeness: the state of being unbroken or undamaged
And then, when the long day is almost done and I’ve few words left, I begin to redefine them:
lacuna: the outline of a woman
topography: a woman’s face, a woman’s voice, a womb, a pair of lungs, a heart
wholeness: that which we only glimpse in flashes and slivers, that which exists, paradoxically, as a series of fragments. That which, the longer I spend considering archives that are broken by way of un- or mis-representation, feels less like an act of inclusion, and more like answering a backlog of engagement.
What does that mean? ‘Backlog of engagement’? I think it means the levels of response—emotional, aesthetic or intellectual—that an artist or artwork, writer or text was prevented from receiving because of where they fell on the spectrum of occlusion.
And what do I mean by this daedal term: ‘spectrum of occlusion’? I mean a map of overlapping marginalisations, trajectories of oppression that intersect and form crossroads, perilous places at which a female body is likely to lose her visibility or voice.
Possible points of overlap include:
Bodies that are female and illiterate, bodies that are female and black and brown, bodies that are female and immigrant, bodies that are female and pregnant, bodies that female and trans, bodies that are female and queer, bodies that are female and sick.
Each of these cross sections is indelibly nuanced and highly specific, is a crevice in the archive of a particular shape and texture. Each, in calling to be filled, calls for soil with a particular mix of mineral and microbe, calls for earth clotted together by a particular root.
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In her memoir Mother Winter, Sophia Shalmiyev writes
Sappho’s poems were once shredded and used as stuffing in mummified royal crocodile carcasses.
I wonder, what shape was the hand that reached into the crocodile, and saw these scraps of paper for what they were?
Did the hand, realising there was more poetry inside, then go through the crocodile’s mouth, or through an opening hastily torn in its petrified gut?
But of course, not all crocodiles have guts and mouths.
If there’s anything the female body has come to know, it’s that, across space and time, a crocodile comes in many shapes and sizes.
1612: Artemisia Gentileschi has been raped and then shamed in a trial that finds her rapist innocent. Her paintings will later be misdated by art historians so that it appears she painted scenes like Susana & the Elders and Judith & Holofernes—scenes that pertain to sexual trauma—in immediate relation to her own assault.
The intent of this misdating is to suggest she was not a realist painter of skill that rivalled Caravaggio’s, but a victim of sexual violence with special knowledge of female trauma. In turning her into a pre-feminist feminist heroine, art history strips her of her artistic power.
1944: Anna Banti loses a manuscript it has taken her three years to write. The manuscript is a historical novel about Artemisia Gentileschi, and Banti loses it because the Nazis destroyed her home when they detonated bombs along the river Arno.
This stratified rupture in which one loss compounds another—the loss of a city compounds the loss of a home compounds the loss of a manuscript—sees Banti begin her book again. Arguably from a perspective of desperation, arguably from throes of traumatized hallucination, Banti now foregoes the historical novel form and writes instead a text which is a psychological investigation of Gentileschi.
What she writes, now, is a muscular portrait. A text composed of densely wrought images and overlapping subjectivities, a novel which counterposes art history’s placing the assault at the axis of her life and career, and hinges instead on her solitude, a solitude which was a direct result of her unflinching commitment to her art.
A textual space.
The 1970s: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha is using her ritualistic performances to create ethereal, haunted states.
1974: the artist performs Barren Cave Mute, transcribing each word from the title in white wax on a piece of paper 10 feet long by 4 feet wide, words which become briefly legible with the aid of a candle before bursting into flame and becoming a pile of ash on the floor.
1975: the artist is performing Aveugle Voix (Blind Voice), blindfolding herself with a headband inscribed with the word voix (voice) and covering her mouth with another headband inscribed with the word aveugle (blind).
Writing in Frieze, Martin Patrick tells us
The quasi-mystical procedures of Cha's performances recall certain aspects of traditional Korean Shamanism, which features women priests conducting rituals incorporating trance possession.
1982: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha is raped and murdered in New York City. She is 31, and has just received copies of her first book, Dictée. This book is a collage of poetry, found text, and images and deals with a central theme of her work: displacement.
It will take three trials and five years to convict her murderer-rapist, who raped other women before and after 1982.
2015: on the first page of her book Ban en Banlieue, Bhanu Kapil holds a ceremony with Cha.
I lean over to the bookshelf and brush [touch] Dictée, a book I have not read for many years. I close my eyes then open them, my finger on page 4. A volt of violet [orange] fire goes through my body when I read these words: “Now the weight from the uppermost back of her head, tightly all sides the front of her head. She gasps from its pressure, its contracting motion.” In this way, Cha’s “Dead tongue” licks the work. No. I feel her licking me. The inside of my arm, the inside of my ear. My error. I wake up.
In this book of ‘disruptive and disrupted rituals’, Kapil memorializes, emulates.
A textual space, a performative space.
1973: Ana Mendieta is lying down on stretches of soil, plant-life and sand in the U.S. and Mexico. Between now and 1980 she will lie down over 100 times, and each time she will leave behind an impression of her body. She will work with pigment, fire and blood to suffuse these outlines with archetypal power. This is her Silueta Series: volatile transcriptions that are at once sensuous and elegiac, spiritual and somatic, residue and meat.
1985: Ana Mendieta allegedly falls from the window of her apartment, which is on the 34th floor. She is 36. Her husband, also an artist, is arrested for her murder, but he is found innocent.
2017: Emma Haugh performs Poverty of Vision at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Commissioned to respond to ROSC, Haugh focused on Mendieta’s absence from the 1984 iteration of the exhibition, one which included works by Anselm Kiefer, Robert Morris, Donald Judd, and Mendieta’s husband.
For the duration of the performance, Haugh sits between a projector and a screen and speaks into a microphone on a stand. The script, which she sometimes reads from a notebook, is a blend of diaristic prose, song lyrics, cultural theory and art discourse:
Looking into archives is like looking into dry cracks, aggravating holes, frustrated orifices, volatile perforations, omissions and splits all knocking about in the void, it’s comparable to watching the intermission as the central narration. Looking into archives is all about looking at what isn’t there.
Looking into the ROSC archives from 1984 I think over and over that 1984 was the last year of Ana Mendieta’s life. I write Ana Mendieta ...on top of everything I read. What I find most compelling about Mendieta’s work is that she renders herself invisible, disappeared, dead, and in doing so powerfully marks herself and her body in time and space, but in a space time that acts on you through afterimages, symbols and storytelling. Her work is to do with not seeing, with following traces. Asking the question Where is Ana Mendieta? opens up wormholes... dislocates and disorients... does the work of learning to value what is lost, seeing what is not there.
Afterimages.
Traces.
Wormholes.
The value of what is lost.
Of experiencing the performance, Lily Cahill tells us
You felt what the voice felt and it felt like loss. Greater than loss, as it seemed to tell of an experience it never got to have in the first place – articulating a void. This account was a retelling, an act of reclamation; both bitter for a past that wasn’t permitted and sweet for a retrospective formulation of an alternate space of possibility.
Poverty of Vision, in short, managed to cleave open a paradoxical space inside of which Mendieta had not been forgotten, had not been erased. The audience encountered, for the length of the performance, a Mendieta who did not have to return, because she was never gone.
A textual space, a performative space, an alternate space.
*
I wonder about the questions women might ask one another.
Not only; where are you?
But: how will I know you’re gone?
What happens if no one hears you calling out from the carcass you’re trapped inside?
What happens if your female body, because of where it falls on the spectrum of occlusion, is one no one thinks to look for?
Having glimpsed tools that are immersive and subjective, what tools might we yet graft that will exceed our initial objective and reverberate beyond us? Carry on looking, hearing, touching when we put down our pens and lie down to sleep?
This is the next state of urgency, I think, when we talk about this labour of retrieval: how to forge methods that are both specific and expansive, reactive and sustainable, independent and porous. If the question ‘Where is Ana Mendieta?’ opens wormholes in western history books, archives and judiciary systems’, what questions can we ask that will bring into view bodies that haven’t yet been counted among the missing?
What texts, artworks, installations and gestures will open up alternate spaces in which alternate histories can be excavated and alternate futures can unfold? How will they invert the spectrum of occlusion so that its crossroads, once treacherous, become points of differential power?
Kate Zambreno writes ‘I align myself with a genealogy of erased women.’
Carmen Maria Machado writes ‘I toss the stone of my story into a vast crevice; measure the emptiness by its small sound.’
Anne Boyer writes ‘Are you going to be the snake or are you going to the snake’s cast-off skin?’
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A textual space, a performative space, an alternate space.
These are spaces that feel potent to me, albeit temporary, albeit imagined.
These are spaces that seem restorative to me, albeit sometimes wounded, sometimes ragged.
These are spaces that seem whole to me, albeit fragmentary, incomplete, imperfect and ongoing.
These are spaces I dream of and more and more and try to carry into my wakeful hours. They are spaces that, more and more, feel real to me, even though I know they took seed in dreams. They are spaces I must dream because their length and breadth I am, as yet, only brave enough to measure while I’m sleeping.
They are spaces that, more and more, awake or asleep, I do my best to live and write inside.
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WRITING PROMPT
Write down the thing that has made you silent, and then set the piece of paper on fire.
Really loved this piece. I don’t know nearly enough about Theresa Hak Kyung Cha but so inspired to find out more from what you’ve written in a couple of pieces here. (Trying to clear my unread substack backlog before the end of the year (!) and a joy to be catching up on your writing) x