"You Are Never in Ouides" our neighbor said...

In the summer of 1997, we rented a small house in the Auvergne; the house was located in a village called Ouides. There were no shops, only a church with three bell towers,  and Ouides was a quiet place at the best of times; at last count, there were 26 houses lived in year-round, 46 second homes, and one vacant house.  Amy and Vince, American friends who came to visit us there, used to take what they called "cow walks" before bed at night, accompamied by the sounds of soft cowbells and the occasional low mooing from the cows in the nearby fields.  Our principal entertainment came from local marchés; there was a market each day of the week somewhere around us. We even found a town totally dedicated to mushrooms, and had our fill of morels, for the first and last time in our lives. We also explored the nearest city,  Le Puy-En-Velay, where there were restaurants and where we washed our clothes and attended a massive flea market (called a brocante); here is one of the flyers:

We also spent some time at the nearby Lac du Bouchet, a very pretty little round lake with an inn at one end that served lunches and dinners:

Here is our anniversary dinner bill (Amy and Vince bought it for us... the prices are in francs):

So, it's no wonder our neighbor said we were "never in Ouides."  I am writing about all this because I am placing my latest odalisque in Ouides ... she is having a hard time fitting into the setting I am painting for her, and the setting itself has been re-painted and scraped and sanded and is still a work in progress. Here are a couple of pieces of the 2 x 4' painting, so far:

Repetition is Redemptive... in praise of a series, because we must TRY

 I was reading about Gertrude Stein ... the article was "Desperate Seriousness and Avant-Garde (Mis)Recognition in Some of Stein's Sentences," published originally in Modern Philology, Vol. 97, No. 2, Nov. 1999, pp. 220-233.  As you might conclude from his title, the author, David Kaufmann, concludes that "the public that Stein invites to dance is by definition limited. Stein courts obscurity and derision precisely because her authority as an artist rests on both philistine rejection and delectation of the cognoscenti" (231).  Don't you just love those last pairings... "philistine rejection" and "delectation of the cognoscenti."

Wow! One is tempted by this well-articulated coolness and sophistication. But one would do well to re-think.

The article quotes an argument from a book by Hal Foster, The Return of the Real. Kaufmann says that Foster claims that repetitions, a favorite technique in avant-garde work (see, for example, virtually any Stein work, except the Autobiography), are redemptive. But not for the reasons we or the authors might have thought. Foster writes that "the future the avant-garde looks to is not the one it has saved, but the one that saves it by putting it on the course it charted but could not see" (p. 29 in Foster, quoted in Kaufmann).  This is a very interesting use of time; but it is the sort of imaginative turn one must take to read any really "new" work. I really like this Foster, but Kaufmann moves on...

Kaufmann says that there is a pressure, in the university, to "legitimate difficult practices of writing and reading" (233) and he's not a fan.  Yet when I taught Stein in both basic composition and interdisciplinary classes, the students, at first reluctant, warmed to her prose. This happened when she was read ... aloud.  Thinking about the sounds and import of what we read --as we read it -- is not really a "difficult" practice. The students had fun with her, wanted to see what it would be like to write like her, but they liked Hemingway and Emily Dickinson, too.  They were travelling a middle road, the one Kaufmann claims is not there.

Aren't we all on "a course" we "charted, but could not see"?  W.B. Yeats said that "all life ... seems to me a preparation for something that never happens" ("Reveries Over Childhood and Youth," the Autobiography); his may not be the most optimistic view, but ... aren't we always in process? Isn't that what Stein teaches us? That we are thinking and looking and writing and listening, all at once?

Of course we have to screen out some stimuli and concentrate in order to create anything. Stein's way of concentrating was to write after everyone else had gone to bed. She tried to finish, she once said, before the birds began singing, because if she didn't, she would never get to sleep. Stein comes at us in waves, but I believe that her work is in ordered waves ... it is an attempt to get past that idea of "preparation for something that never happens."

A series of waves. A series of paintings. A kind of order (as Wallace Stevens said, in "The Idea of Order at Key West": "Then we,/ as we beheld her striding there alone,/ Knew there never was a world for her/ Except the one she sang, and singing, made") that we need. I have been thinking about my series of nudes in just this way. Here is a painting, completed in the last two weeks, part of my "Odalisque" series:

artist, audience, performance

I taught an interdisciplinary class called "Artist, Audience, Performance," where we discussed the ways that one of these words might influence another. For example, an artist intent upon the performance, the work of art, could lose any potential audience by becoming too difficult, too inscrutable and enclosed.  Gertrude Stein's early works, such as Tender Buttons, need great care before they can be appreciated, because ... well, here is a sample:

A Red Stamp
If lilies are lily white and they exhaust noise and distance and even dust, if they dusty will dirt a surface that has no extreme grace, if they do this and it is not necessary it is not at all necessary if they do this they need a catalogue.

Now, I love this.  I think the poem makes it possible to say that the silence that we typically associate with lilies comes because they have worn out (or collected into themselves) all the ambient noise. And any cut flower, brought into the house and placed in a vase, will disintegrate into dust and remind us of our own deaths. And if they are going to do this to us, perhaps we need a written warning of all their properties and behaviors.

Of course, this is just one way of perhaps two hundred of talking about this stanza.

And when Stein did court an audience, with The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,  and found it, she nearly stopped writing altogether, so startling and upsetting was all the attention.

So today, when I was researching Italian pictures, dating from about 1910, showing peasant women,  I was looking for a very particular kind of picture.  And what I found were studies in pencil or watercolor of women or children in dresses posing ... these became, some of them, postcards for the tourists coming through Italy, or France, or Switzerland, to take or send home as souvenirs. The time of women, dressed this way, gathering in any kind of harvest, was rapidly disappearing, but tourists were searching for the "authentic" rural life, and artists and photographers found it for them.

So the audience there had been tourists. And the market was clear.  Van Gogh, he who never sold anything in his lifetime, even drew a moving, plain study: "Peasant Girl Raking" (1881).  BUT at very nearly this same time, other artists were creating a fully different kind of "performance." 

Ingres (1780-1867), Delacroix (1798-1863), John Frederick Lewis (1804-1876) and Lord Leighton (1830-1896) -- to name only the few I can think of -- all painted European women in the dress and formal settings of the Harem.  Some of these artists also painted peasant women; if they did, their peasants have none of the allure of their odalisques. And it struck me how different these two sets of portrayals were ... both were, in their way, lies.  The artists drawing the peasants (except for Van Gogh, who was telling the truth about this woman's twisted shoulders and leaning angles) are already selling nostalgia. But it isn't sexy nostalgia. The artists drawing the odalisques are part of a long, classical tradition of Venuses and Susannah and her Elders ... the nude for the sake of nakedness.

The performance is set in ... the (utterly accessible) hayfields, or the (inaccessible) private rooms of the Orient.  I think I understand the audience for the former ... who is the audience for the latter?  Hmmm...