When Women Were Birds

“…perhaps my mother is a conceptual artist…”—Terry Tempest Williams

The night I planned to attend a fundraiser for feminist bookstores in Canada and the US at the now defunct Toronto Women’s Bookstore, I gave up, which is a shame because I wanted to blog about the event. Once I heard the performer—already half an hour late—would be at least another half hour late, I walked to a different independent bookstore in frustration. Cheekily, I found myself drawn to a book there whose theme is the absence of content.

Terry Tempest Williams’ memoir, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice (Sarah Crichton Books, 2012) is the author’s heartfelt attempt to extract meaning from three shelves’ worth of empty journals bequeathed to her by her mother. Even more curious is the fact that on her deathbed, Diane Dixon Tempest made her daughter promise not to read them while Diane was alive.

At first, I wondered if the empty journals were too simple a metaphor for the female experience. The day I started reading When Women Were Birds, I caught the holiday classic, The Sound of Music, on television. My ears perked up when Rolf—the dashing but dastardly suitor of 16-year-old Liesl—sang, “Your life, little girl, is an empty page that men will want to write on.” I stand corrected: the metaphor is indeed apropos.

The premise is introduced immediately, with Diane dying right away, so the reader doesn’t get a chance to become attached to Diane or to feel Terry’s loss. It works because on the surface, the book is a tribute to her mother, but ultimately it is an autobiography, not a biography. Williams portrays her mother not as a solitary character but as a partner. Their bond is touching but arguably idealized with memories like her mother drawing a rose petal bath for Terry at the onset of menstruation.

A feminist memoir, When Women Were Birds is about finding a voice—as a Morman woman, as a near victim of a male strangler, and as a former teacher who was almost fired for being an environmentalist.

Art provides a backdrop for her musings, from having a meaningful conversation while walking along Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty to contemplating the act of confession in an Italian church with Domenico Ghirlandaio paintings. Works like Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings and Kazimir Malevich’s White on White function as a more direct vehicle for interpretation too. She concludes, “…perhaps my mother is a conceptual artist…” (p. 60).

The central motif is not art, but birds. As much as the book is a tribute to Terry’s mother, it is a tribute to ornithology. The characters in ancient Nushu (translated from Chinese as ‘women’s writing’) she describes, in which a bird’s head and a woman’s head share the same symbol, make Terry’s contemporary symbolism seem somehow predestined. In the book, birds take on a mystical role: Terry meets her husband at a bookstore because of their shared love of field guides, and she sees a hummingbird—her African friend’s favourite bird—when she learns of her death. When she quotes Jenny Holzer’s truism, “Myths make reality more intelligible,” it’s fitting.

It is beautifully written: the prose morphs into poetry and stream of consciousness with confidence. Its design is also noteworthy. The front and back inside cover feature an image of overlaid feathers in greyscale, with a mock label at the front that beckons the reader with, “THIS JOURNAL BELONGS TO ____________________.” Additionally, 12 empty pages follow the author’s discovery of the enigmatic journals totaling 54, the age at which her mother died.

With the New Year upon us, I’d like to close by quoting a friend of the author. Stephen Trimble co-published Testimony: Writers of the West Speak on Behalf of Utah Wilderness, a chapbook designed for Congress, with Terry. Not knowing Bill Clinton would single it out for its significance, a member of the press told Trimble that the book was a waste of time. He responded, “Writing is always an act of faith” (p. 143).

Image: reproduced in 2019 via fair use/dealing. Source: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250024114

From Conceptualism to Feminism

 

“When Lippard returned to America, she had a sense of how art and politics could dovetail.”

Lucy R. Lippard may claim that being a library page at the MoMA is the only real job she’s ever had, but as a freelance writer, art critic, and curator, she has worked undeniably hard. It’s evident from her list of accomplishments, and in her comment that editing other people’s texts resembles being on vacation compared to writing herself. For anyone who thinks curators sit back and let other people do the heavy lifting, get this: for her so-called Numbers exhibitions—the subject of a new book—she did favours like source out and shoot 400 photographs of purposefully mundane Seattle horizons for artist Robert Smithson who couldn’t be there to do it himself. Curiously, each Numbers show was named for the host city’s population and Canada was lucky to have one. First came 557,087 (Seattle), then 955,000 (Vancouver), then an overlooked 2,972,453 (Buenos Aires), followed by a touring c. 7,500 (Valencia, California). The fact that the third show was so overlooked (Pip Day highlights the absence of press coverage and the shortage of archival material) demonstrates the importance of publishing books on the history of exhibitions.

From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows 1969-74 (Afterall Books, 2012) is the third title in the Exhibition Histories series published in association with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna; the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; and Van Abbemuseum. It looks not so much at her shift in focus from conceptualism to feminism as the blending of the two: her final Numbers show was still heavy on idea-based art but it included only women artists, some of whom made work with a feminist bent and others who didn’t.

Lippard’s activist impulse was rooted in time she spent in Argentina in 1968 before the Buenos Aires show to jury an art award. It’s hard to imagine being exposed to the type of art being produced there without being affected. For example, Tito Fernández confiscated gallery visitors’ belongings and banned conversation inside the venue to comment on the police state. Characterizing the ‘dematerialization’ of art was Graciela Carnevale’s Acción del encierro (Confinement Action), for which she invited people to a gallery and without forewarning them, locked them inside until someone on the street broke a window an hour later and they escaped. The artists worked in solidarity, at one point burning their works collectively to protest police censorship of a single artist’s (Roberto Plate’s) work and reading a manifesto-like statement at a conference after cutting the electricity. When Lippard returned to America, she had a sense of how art and politics could dovetail.

I almost didn’t review this book because Conceptual Art really isn’t my bag (so many ropes, so many mirrors!). Much of Conceptual Art is text-based (Nancy Wilson Kitchel said it best: “My work would be different if you couldn’t read”) and I find myself agreeing to a point with Peter Plagens’ scathing Artforum review of Conceptual Art’s writing quality. Ultimately, though, I was won over by coverage of the many thought-provoking pieces, like John Latham’s Still and Chew (1966/67). A part-time art instructor at St. Martin’s School of Art in London, Latham was frustrated by the scholarly high-fiving of critic Clement Greenberg, so he checked out the school library copy of Greenberg’s Art and Culture and proceeded to make a unique protest. He invited students, critics, and artists to chew a page from the book and spit it out in a flask. It was chemically treated, and when Latham received an urgent overdue book notice, he had the audacity to present the then liquid solution to the librarian, poker-faced. The next day he was fired.

From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows 1969-74 includes a main essay by Cornelia Butler, interviews with Lippard and several exhibiting artists, and reproductions of selected index cards that were used in place of traditional catalogues for the exhibitions.