Jessica cochran

LIVEWORKJunE 7 –

262013

in contemporary art, the con-sideration of home through the lens of theory and practice is nothing new; topical buoys such as economic crises, identity poli-tics, motherhood, the environ-ment and globalization ensure concepts of home remain as ripe and as potent as ever. also un-changing, artists, perhaps more than any self-selecting group of people, purposefully and generatively blur the lines be-tween work and domestic life. The home (here in chicago this is often an apartment, loft or bun-galow) is often the studio too, and sometimes even a gallery or performance space: in a recent essay, curator shannon stratton wonders if “the domestic (has) been so thoroughly mined by ar-

Let’s face it, our homes are fraught. This fact has only been highlighted and exacerbated by the current economic climate. still recovering (or reeling) from what many are now calling “the Great recession,” it is worth noting that the whole thing was caused by a housing crisis. While the political motivations for the “home/work” of the artists se-lected for this exhibition may seem ambiguous, they are all clearly products of their time. homes, in all their tenuousness, have become sites of deeper self-reflection for many con-temporary artists as labor and domestic practices unite. For artists, the practicality of work-ing today means that there is, out of necessity, a marriage of career, art, and home-life that requires a certain spirit of impro-visation:: ordinary life results in extraordinary living.

Jessica Bardsley presents us with work ruminating on the life and home of poet emily Dick-inson. in a Past of Plank and nail, Bardsley offers viewers an atmosphere of absence. nega-tion is inescapable in the pres-ence of death, a conspicuous preoccupation of Dickinson’s visible in her poetry and in the pressed flowers she culled from her herbarium. Bardsley knows there’s only so much that can be gleaned from such a space, es-pecially when it was inhabited by someone so notoriously secretive and enigmatic. But the space seems to thrum with significance and spirit as viewers are left to project meaning into every cor-ner, every doorframe, every crack in the wall — even into the whisper of blowing leaves as seen from Dickinson’s bedroom win-dows. Bardsley’s photographic

tistic practice that the domes-tic space is the site of the new institution?”1

recent high profile ex-hibitions provide added context. artist-curator Joseph Mcel-heny’s if you lived here, you’d be home by now, (ccs Bard) featured the “device of mod-el rooms” within the gallery—a living room, dining room, etc., to display works from the hes-sell collection by artists such as Moyra Davey and cindy sherman alongside examples of modernist furniture. More recently, Bet-ter homes (sculpture center) featured artists who consider the “design and homemaking from critical perspectives” in relation to the past, when “the interior became integral to the

1. Graham, Martha.

“i am a Dancer.”

in The routledge

Dance stud-

ies reader, by

alexandra carter,

66-71. London:

routledge, 1998.

P. 66.

2. ibid. P. 68.

3. Wilson, Bee. The

hive: The story

of the honeybee

and Us. new York:

Thomas Dunne

Books/st. Martin’s

Press, 2006. P. 71.

4. ibid.

5. Lefebvre,

henri. critique of

everyday Life.

London: Verso,

1991. P. 51.

VicToria BraDForD

JessicaBarDsLeY

chicaGo arTisTs coaLiTion

reBeccahaMLin Green

1. shannon strat-

ton,

“at home with

institutional cri-

tique: can Private

space Become a

Public Practice?”

in service Media,

ed. stuart Keeler

(chicago: The

Green Lantern

Press, 2013), 86.

2. Gaston

Bachelard, “The

Poetics of space,”

in interiors, ed.

Johanna Burton,

Lynne cooke, and

Josiah Mcelheny

(Berlin: sternberg

Press, 2012), 301.

curating homeward

reBeccahaMLin GreenBugonia: The Progeny of oxen

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construction of the subject.” What these exhibitions share with Live/Work is, is that the artists in them assert a renego-tiation of what it means to be home; through subject and prac-tice, they make visible the myr-iad reasons why an artist works the way she lives.

if, as stratton asserts, we can consider the home an institution to be critically “mined” it is not surprising then, that curators of-ten explicitly consider concepts of home in direct opposition to homogenizing and market-oriented force for consump-tion such as magazines (Bet-ter homes) or in relation to the systems of value, circulation and display that give structure to the art world as we know it (if you lived here…)

While curators make explicit gestures, the “home” work of artists is often oblique in its poli-tics, organized by the aesthetics of the everyday, personal histo-ries and domestic labor. in The Poetics of space, Gaston Bach-elard asserts that in art, “the house, even more than a land-scape, reveals a psychic state.”2

so then, what are the psychic states of the exhibition Live/Work?

This publication serves as a conceptual supplement to the exhibition Live/Work. Buttress-ing this short introduction, you will find process-driven images, recipes, essays and sketches that provide myriad insights into each artist’s individual investigations of home. Points of departure range from the life and home of emily Dickinson (Jessica Bards-ley), the ancient myth of Bugo-nia, the origins of bees, (rebecca hamlin Green) and the dinner as a framework for participatory dance (Victoria Bradford).

home/Work

elements for the exhibition — solitary pressed flowers rendered on a simple black background — are as isolated, concise, and beautiful as any Dickinson poem.

Victoria Bradford’s Din-ner Dance presents a “choreo-graphed meal” in which the din-ner manifests the framework for participatory dance. Bradford invites guests (her ever chang-ing “company”) to embrace their “most playful, willing-to-fail” selves to partake in the experiment/performance/dance. here, Martha Graham, John cage, Merce cunningham, alan Kaprow, and the Futurists — namely Marinetti — come to mind, comingling with a sense of post-modern alienation and iso-lation. This is(a reality the art-ist hopes to break—or at least challenge—through her personal desire to activate spaces and re-lationships that create commu-nities in opposition to loneliness

Martha Graham said, “i be-lieve that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practic-ing living, the principals are the same.“1 she continued musing, “The word ‘theater’ was a verb before it was a noun — an act, then a place. That means you must make the gesture, the ef-fort, the real effort to commu-nicate with another being. and you must have a tree to shelter under in case of storm or sun. There is always that tree, that creative force, and there is al-ways a house, a theater.”2 such is the enterprise of Dinner Dance.

rebecca hamlin Green will present, among other works, art that feels as much like an-thropology and archaeology as anything else, offering sculp-

tural objects based upon an-cient lore about bees born from an ox; the Bugonia legend. Bu-gonia, meaning literally “birth from an ox”3 suggests that bees can be generated from a dead ox (in the case of this myth, one purposely killed) and left to rot in an enclosed space (specifi-cally erected for such a purpose.) noted food author and colum-nist Bee Wilson elaborates in her book, The hive; The story of the honeybee and Us, “as the Latin poet ovid put it, ‘swarms rush from the rotten ox; and one ex-tinguished life produces a thou-sand.’”4

The organization of the beehive, a location of work and shelter for the insects, provides foundational allegory for this exhibition; a home of industry, productivity, creativity, and community. The hive provides a home for the individual at the same time that it produces an architecture for their entire soci-ety. The partnership, the collab-oration, the aggregated effort of the bees can be seen, in all its hierarchy and systemic logic, as a kind of political metaphor. in our current condition, we might take note.

henri Lefebvre wrote in 1958, “Men and women everywhere are aspiring to build their ev-eryday lives on a solid basis, to escape from insecurity and pov-erty. These are mass problems, problems of social aspirations and social needs. The face of the world is changing; everywhere the everyday nature of life as-serts itself, conscious now of its own weakness and its own value. Life is appearing in all its naked-ness.”5 nowhere, still to this day, are these notions so nakedly vis-ible as when life and work are anchored and structured around the home.

aaron oTT

Lesson 0. overview

six guests, six stages—that is, between each of the six courses of our meals, you the dinner guests (or company) will take to a designated site within or around the studio. at this site, you will create a stage, a script or score for a 2 min performance, and a space for an audience. in order to accom-plish this task, you will each be given a role, ro-tating roles with each course, as well as a toolbox of items to facilitate your work and prompt your creation. Throughout the meal, the dinner table will play host to rehearsals and other conversation. Following the sixth course (dessert!), we will take a tour around the building to view each production.

six guests, the company:a hosta sous chefa choreographera designera documentariana deviant

six stages, the sites:the kitchenthe entryway/landingthe hallwaythe back stairwellthe main spacethe auxiliary rooms

in the lessons to come, we will provide more de-tailed descriptions about each role listed above. Don’t worry about the logistics of how it all works! We promise that we’ve got that all figured out... and of course, remember it’s all in the spirit of fun and experimentation, so bring your most playful, willing-to-fail self—and plan on spending your en-tire evening with us!

VicToria BraDForD

“Biography first convinces us of the fleeing of the Biographied—.” emily Dickinson preemptively pinned the impossibility inherent to mimesis that would later plague her biographers: there are many ways to know someone, but none complete. a portrait is a contrivance, an imprint of its mak-er’s desires met with historical knowledge, and its gaps. how does one capture something as ephem-eral as countenance? how does one know some-thing as elusive as demeanor? The writing of emily Dickinson and her archive have together gener-ated more writing, as well as endowed heightened importance to her possessions, her home. each withholds as much as it presents, and her absence calls desire to duty. But it is not that emily Dickinson eludes biography in a way that anyone might. she ac-tively resisted: she was exclusive about who she chose to meet in person, often hiding when a stranger—or even longtime neighbors—entered her home; she refused to publish but a handful of po-ems; she instructed her sister to burn all of her pa-pers after her death (including her poems); and she avoided photographic documentation. she wrote that her resistance to being photographed “often alarms father. he says death might occur, and he has moulds of all the rest, but has no mould of me.” While her father was afraid that she would leave behind no image if she died, emily flouted his con-cern. she was not a nostalgic, though she has made obsessive nostalgics out of those her writing has transfixed. according to sean ross Meehan, photog-raphy became a means of formulating authorial identity for 19th century writers like ralph Waldo emerson, henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Frederick Douglass. But Dickinson is notable in her expressed refusal to articulate identity visual-ly. she preferred to identify with the refusal itself. emily Dickinson once wrote to Thomas Wentworth higginson that, “i had no portrait, now, but am small, like the Wren, and my hair is bold, like the chestnut Bur—and my eyes like the sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves.” her words are her document. Despite her claim, there has existed to our knowledge for one hundred and twenty five years a single daguerreotype of emily Dickinson. she is seventeen. she smiles, and yet she does not. her eyes appear both vacant and alluring. her pos-ture is both upright and relaxed. her hair is parted down the middle, and gathered out of sight. she holds flowers in her hand, but they are out of focus. her dress is plain and dark. as a viewer, i am ea-ger to find a clue, some revealing quality: a punc-tum. i seek to be pierced, but the image conceals as much as it appears to offer. she herself disliked the image, and her family found little likeness to the embodied emily they knew. it is photographic evidence at its crudest: simple proof of her being. Perhaps she sat for a very long time. Little in her archive reveals itself entire-

ly. her poems are enigmatic. The emptiness of her house, the light that blanches the hallway to her room lead us not to evidence, but to a lyrical neth-erworld. her herbarium exhibits an aesthetic, rath-er than scientific, appreciation of the shapes and colors of the flowers she pressed. Flowers become alien eyes on a tear-shaped head, or the rough fluff of another is like the unbrushed, matted hair of a child. Many are mislabeled, some partly dis-integrated, but the flowers themselves are like squashed ghosts that remember her touch, which we cannot. But because one photograph is not enough for the archivistic drive, there have surfaced nu-merous frauds, improperly attributed. The first image that gained notoriety as a possible sec-ond likeness is a print made from a glass negative, purchased from a man renowned for forgery. The woman in the image has harsh, thick eyebrows that chart her broad face. she wears earrings, her hair begins high on her forehead, and she almost smiles. at first glance, she looks nothing like the teenager in the daguerreotype we have come to know. she lacks the awkward, bird-like qualities of emily’s stature—her gooseneck, her egg-shaped head. at second glance, her lips and nose bear a resemblance, but as noted by Joe nickell, “a mere resemblance between two people does not consti-tute proof of identity.” on the back of the print, written in pencil, is the name “emily Dickenson.” aside from the misspelling of her last name, the im-age lacked provenance and the forensic anthro-pologist that nickell hired concluded that “…all of the features cannot be simultaneously superim-posed; therefore the evidence does noT corrobo-rate the hypothesis that the photographs are of the same individual.” The subsequent image that gained trac-tion, known as the Gura photograph, shows a doe-eyed, round-faced woman with a petite frame. her expression is serious and dull. Looking at the image, i feel both certain that it cannot be her as well as desperate to have this confirmed. This woman has laid all of her cards on the table. in re-sponse to a forensic anthropologist’s lazy assertion that “The fit is quite good . . . actually pretty im-pressive and perhaps makes the case well enough,” refutations of the image pointed out obvious dif-ferences in the chin, mouth, nose, eyes, and hair of the two women. Features such as these are he-reditary, and because the authenticated image we have of Dickinson was taken of her as a late teen-ager, her bone structure would not have altered greatly as she aged. The cleft of her chin would not flatten, the broadness of her nose would not shrink. and, too, i believe the aliveness that ani-mated her eyes, the intelligent refusal that propa-gates our curiosity would not have dissipated. Just recently, another possible likeness has been discovered, still contentious, but perhaps at least with evidence. in this second image, “Dick-inson” sits with her arm around a woman decided to be Kate scott Turner, a woman whom biogra-pher rebecca Patterson had argued in 1951 was emily Dickinson’s lover. “Dickinson” sits patiently. her nose is broad, her eyes large, imploring, and her hair parted at the middle. her lips are sepa-rated slightly, their corners upturned quietly, and with cunning. an ophthalmologist concluded, “i believe strongly that these are the same people.” This statement strikes me primarily for the use of the word “believe.” Whether this image is ever authenticated, i like to believe that this is emily Dickinson—finally an adult, with a commanding, yet gentle, stature. here, she has strength and confidence. she is no longer a hesitant child. Despite the affirmation that the other woman is Kate Turner, a known friend of Dickinson’s, and despite possible corroboration of

“Dickinson’s” dress pattern with swatches of fabric associated with the Dickinson estate, despite the similarity of the style of dress worn by “Dickinson” in this photograph with Dickinson as a teenager, i cannot help but wonder, What is it that we hope to find? What would it mean for it to be authentically her? it is not simply a matter of whether the image can be linked indexically to emily Dickinson, but it is also a matter of her intimacies, and whether, as rebecca Patterson once affirmed, emily Dickinson loved women as well as men. What excites me about Dickinson and her archive is that it all fundamentally evades and ex-udes: she offers so much, and yet so little. her ar-chive teases. her writing, her image, her home all open onto an imaginative play-space. and i like to believe that this is emily Dickinson because the image captures the one thing we might be certain of: her resistance toward being captured, a quiet defiance of the basic property of the photograph-ic apparatus. it is her, but it is not. The other two images, simply, were not.

Your primer for the evening.

JessicaBarDsLeYDesiring Dickinson

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