I came across an
article on Agnes Martin and Gertrude Stein. Since they are my heroes, I stopped
everything I was doing -- working on Emily Dickinson -- to read “The Meanings
of Acts: Agnes Martin and the Making of Americans,” by Brendan Prendeville (Oxford Art Journal, 31:1, 2008, pp.
53-73). Prendeville is questioning
the way the artist makes her work, and, in a kind of mirror image, how that
directs the way the audience perceives the work of art.
He begins by
showing us Agnes Martin’s “Little Sister,” from 1962, (not re-printable: http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artwork/5653)...
The painting is oil, ink and brass nails on canvas and wood. Martin’s paintings
do not reproduce well. They are horizontal ruled lines, in soft penciled greys and
whites, usually, and they are very subtle. Here is "Untitled," an 11" square, pencil, ink and watercolor on paper, from 1995:
If you have ever seen Martin’s work
for yourself, you know that one of Prendeville’s threaded arguments in this
article is true. He finds two views of any given painting: the one you see from
across the room, which will look like a regular 5-foot or 6-foot square, seeming
perfectly angular, with measured marks. Then there is the one you see when you
get close, close enough to touch the canvas; you see the hesitations, the
pencil marks, the times the pencil slid almost imperceptibly out of grip, the
ever-so-slight deviations, almost like little breaths. Prendeville calls these
“the trace of her actions” (54).
He uses Stein in
this essay as she relates to this mark-making of Martin’s: Stein was interested
in what she called “the continuous present,” which Prendeville describes as
“the present as we live it now, making it as we make it; the reader of a Stein
text participates in its making of the present” (and he cites Ulla Dydo, to whom
we are all indebted for a better understanding of Stein, 69). The “making” is something we see in
Stein, and we see it through her repetitions and her insistence on seeing the
object....
Voilà. When we get close to an Agnes Martin, when we read a Gertrude
Stein sentence or poem aloud, we are following the maker’s trail. And by the
way we respond, do we “make” the piece, too? This makes Prendeville
uncomfortable, as it should; doesn’t the artist have any more control than
that? And so he asks: “Under what conditions and by what means is a
non-arbitrary response to a work possible, when the maker of the work has not
aimed to prompt any response?” (56).
Exactly. The
audience. How to control them?
As I mentioned,
I have been reading Emily Dickinson... She
discussed her work in letters, sent a few to friends, and perhaps a dozen or so
poems were published in her lifetime.
There is strong evidence that she did not seek traditional publication:
“If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her – if she did not, the longest
day would pass me on the chase – My Barefoot-Rank is better—“ (letter to T.W.
Higginson, June 1862). When Dickinson died, her sister found 40 bound packets,
known to scholars now as “fascicles,” roughly 5” x 8,” consisting of folded
leaves of paper tied together with string, and several poems were hand-copied
and bound into each fascicle. In
the very first editing of Dickinson’s work, the fascicles were all disbound.
One of the transcribers ripped out passages in the poems and letters, and inked
over one full poem. Other editors
replaced words, changed the appearance on the page of poems, and created
“normal” punctuation, capitalization, and spelling. Even the most well-intentioned scholars and editors cannot
un-alter Emily Dickinson’s life and work.
And these, we are given to
believe, are the good guys, the people who brought you the poems. We cannot know how to find our way back.
There is no thesaurus, no key.
There isn’t for Agnes Martin,
either. Prendeville argues that Martin’s models were Pollock, Rothko and
Newman. He says, though, that in their paintings, these artists were not pursuing
“recognizable common reference.” Each painting, “in its abstractness...
withheld itself and, still more, enacted on the part of the viewer a committed
act of attention – a personal commitment .... meaning needed to be elicited”
(57). And so it is with Martin.
She demands that we stop and stand and commit. We have to see her hesitating
pencil lines.
And who else hesitates?
Emily Dickinson. Think of the way the words (when they are presented truly, or
when you look at a manuscript) scatter across the page like rising birds. Think
of her dashes, which appear in the ms. as dots, and her refusal to use
titles or numbers. Here is my transcription of one of her poems from her
handwriting. Note the hesitations, the way we are forced to take special care
with both words and spaces:
I saw no way – the
Heavens were stitched –
I felt the Columns close.
The earth reversed her
Hemispheres –
I touched the Universe.
And back it slid.
And I alone –
A speck upon a Ball
Went out upon Circum-
ference
Beyond the dip of Bell.
Emily Dickinson wrote to her
mentor T.W. Higginson (and later
editor and changer of words) that “My Business is Circumference” (July 1862). And
here she is in her poetry, defying the stitchery, riding out upon
“Circumference,” far away from mortal sight or sound (a strange thing for this
poet to wish for), she who, in life, went only as far as Boston.
Susan Howe, in her fabulous My Emily Dickinson, takes on the stereotype of the sheltered and strange “Miss
Dickinson”:
[She] took the scraps from the separate ‘higher’ female
education many bright women of her time were increasingly resenting, combined
them with voracious and ‘unladylike’ outside reading.... She built a new poetic
form from her fractured sense of being eternally on intellectual borders.... a
‘sheltered’ woman audaciously invented a new grammar grounded in humility and
hesitation. HESITATE from the Latin, meaning to stick. Stammer.... He might pause, She hesitated. Sexual, racial, and geographical separation are at
the heart of Definition.... if we concern ourselves with the deepest Reality,
is this world of the imagination the same for men and women? What voice when we
hesitate and are silent is moving to meet us? (21-22)
What voice, indeed? [Think
too of the hesitations and repetitions built into a David Mamet play – the
hesitations, in his hands, of men]. Who is this audience standing on
(what Prendeville calls) such “uncertain ground” (58)? And what are our
responsibilities?
Prendeville writes that, as
we stand close to an Agnes Martin, “our instinctive focusing of attention, to
discern something in the thing attended to, is in some way thwarted, or
deflected....” There is no “resolution,” only an “overall ‘dissonance’” (65). Yes, and this is the thing about our
readings of Emily Dickinson; we all work to “resolve,” but as we do, we cram
her poems into categories, as her first editors did (“flower” poems or “death”
poems). She wasn’t
categorize-able, didn’t want to be pushed into the sewing corner. She was
aiming at dissonance, too: I read “Beyond the dip of Bell” several times before
I heard it as the stilled buoy or clapper. This use of “dip” is the only time I can find it performing
this function, a physical way of calling to our attention an auditory anomaly.
There are easier ways to say what was said here. Her world was constricted. Her
language and her form are not.
We have to take care.
Prendeville ends by saying that “to be drawn close” to a Martin painting “is to
apprehend her care in making the painting, and to assume the posture of care
and affectionate concern oneself .... [her work] vindicates intimacy” (71).
A reader of Dickinson’s
poetry must wander into it on her terms. The poet’s brother, Austin Dickinson, the keeper of his
sister’s purse, influenced one of the first sets of transcriptions of her
poems. His mistress, Mabel Todd Lewis, copied out poems, making them available
soon after the poet’s death, but she also inked over at least one entire poem
and omitted or cut out phrases or stanzas or sentences in poems or letters, all
because Dickinson spoke too warmly of Austin Dickinson’s wife, Susan. Was she assuming a romantic love? Was
she just jealous of their friendship, she who had never met the poet? Or was
she asserting her power?
We must not do any of these things. We cannot project, reject, cross-out or compartmentalize Emily Dickinson. because that has all already happened. We must start again. We must place ourselves before her handwriting and find her mark-making... and try and listen "Beyond the dip of Bell."
We must not do any of these things. We cannot project, reject, cross-out or compartmentalize Emily Dickinson. because that has all already happened. We must start again. We must place ourselves before her handwriting and find her mark-making... and try and listen "Beyond the dip of Bell."
[Thanks to Brendan Prendeman, to Susan Howe, and to Amherst College. I have created a work on Dickinson, called "Missing Emily," for the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art's Altered Book and Book Arts Exhibition. Find your way there... and help Marin MOCA].