Emily Chertoff

I.



The writer arrives at the Venice Biennale at about 10:15am. This seems quite good by her recent personal standards—these are somewhat loose after three weeks of mojitos in Rome. But it is not good enough for a hard-hitting journalist. She imagines the Arsenale, one of two venues for the Biennale’s International Art Exhibition, swarming with reporters. Probably they have all been up since six. Probably they have fancy voice recorders and notebooks with expensive French paper. Probably they are being paid.



Everything about this undertaking seems very glamorous. But by the time an efficient Apparatchik at the press office has fixed the *Advocate* up with a press badge—she is now *The Harvard Advocate*’s official envoy to the Biennale, to Venice, to all of Europe!—a packet of promotional materials from the sponsors—Enel, Nivea, Illy—and the *Advocate*’s first tote bag of the day, it is 11am. This is horrifying. But even more horrifying is the crowd of journalists. There is none.



The *Advocate* begins to worry. Perhaps this is the wrong place. Perhaps they have squirreled the press office away next to some adjunct show or collateral event that nobody goes to. However, twenty minutes of aimless wandering through the galleries reveals that the giant warehouse is indeed the Arsenale. The Italian Pavilion, largest of the national shows, is here. So are the Chinese and Turkish and Chilean pavilions. So are individual installations by big-name artists like Pae White and William Forsythe. So is a good chunk of the main international show—Fare Mondi, “Making Worlds.”



Slowly, it dawns: nobody is here yet. Probably all the journalists are hobnobbing at elaborate breakfast meetings. Probably they are sleeping off hangovers so colossal and expensive that the Advocate’s morning troubles seem juvenile by comparison.



Finally, around 11:45am, the Beautiful People start to filter in. The *Advocate* recognizes art critics, academics, some curators. The center of press activity appears to be a temporary outdoor café wedged between the Arsenale and a canal. The *Advocate* stands in line for ten minutes to buy a four-euro can of Pepsi—official soda of the Biennale—finds a seat at one of the tasteful molded-polyurethane tables, and surveys the scene. As one might expect, she sees a lot of black. As one might not, she sees many tote bags of varying size, shape, color, strap length, and fabric quality. Glasses are common. So are blazers. So are the dropped-crotch 80s-style bottoms that the Spanish call pantalones cagados, or “shit-pants.”



The Apparatchiks, who at 11am were huddled in purposeless clumps around the building, have swung into action. They are answering questions, giving directions, requesting contact information. If the Beautiful People dress like upscale vacationers, the Apparatchiks make an effort to look like professionals. Many are wearing (black) suits. They are young. They are bright. They are well turned-out. They cannot afford to be otherwise. The Biennale pays them to be pleasant, and they need the work.



Months from now, in late September, the international art press will circulate a report that 110 Apparatchiks have gone on strike to protest poor working conditions at the Biennale. The strikers will claim that the Biennale manages them badly, offering them only three-day employment contracts and withholding overtime pay. Furthermore, they will allege, they have been laboring under these conditions since the show began.



But there is not a glimmer of conflict, present or future, on anyone’s bright face right now. These three preview days are more important than all the rest of the Biennale, because the visitors are the pillars of the art world. Curators, journalists, academics, dealers, and collectors have assembled, and the valiant Apparatchiks stand ready to shepherd them along. “Making Worlds” stretches before them all. It will dictate tastes and change reputations.



 



II.



 



This Biennale is the art world’s crown jewel, an event so spectacularly large, so tremendously expensive, so irrationally important that Venice employs a permanent squadron of bureaucrats whose sole job is to plan it; that participating nations bankrupt their arts endowments in order to stage their contributions; that a full-priced admission to the two main venues—forget the dozens of peripheral shows that dot the city—costs 18 euro per person; that the royalty of the art world brave the heights of the mosquito and tourist seasons just to pay it a visit.



What makes the show such a huge draw? Simply put, it’s very old and very well established. When the first Biennale opened in 1895, it was the only semiannual art show in Europe. Imagined as an event to honor the silver anniversary of Italy’s King Umberto and Queen Margherita of Savoy, it wound up attracting over 200,000 people to Venice’s public gardens for a mostly tame selection—barring one “scandalous” painting of female nudes—of mostly Italian art.



Other nations began building pavilions in the garden starting in 1907. In the 1930s came the first special exhibitions to promote Italian art abroad. And, of course, the Apparatus of the Biennale was differentiating, acquiring layers of bureaucracy—Boards, Secretaries, Presidents, Special Commissions and Groups—tasked with testing the waters and currents of the European art world, keeping the show inoffensive, middlebrow, and a good couple of decades behind the artistic vanguard. Most of the art came from the 19th century until well into the 20th.



Thus was the good name of the city was preserved until 1948, when a tiny revolution, a youthful rebellion, took place within the Apparatus. A new General Secretary, Roberto Pallucchini, was in charge. The dust from the Second World War was settling. Suddenly, the organization realized it had just about missed a crucial half-century of developments in Western art. Pallucchini spent the next five shows scrambling to compile the Greatest Hits of the modernist splinter groups whose influence the Apparatus had been battling. And, just like that, the work of Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Joan Miro, Salvador Dali, and Piet Mondrian went up.



By the start of the 60s, the Apparatus had caught its audience up to where the rest of the art world was. Somewhere around this time, things shifted. The Biennale didn’t just show art anymore, some prestigious, some not; it became itself a thing of prestige. It became a tastemaker. This development has made the show much sexier, and more social, and more fashionable. But it has also overshadowed the show’s original purpose, which was to give a platform to artists.



A number of unattractive intellectual tendencies have accompanied this shift in focus. The Biennale’s curators have gained power. Supplementary critical texts have become as important to the exhibition as the art. Show concepts are abstract but not illuminating, and depend more and more on art theory. A layperson may enjoy individual works of art at every Biennale, but he or she is unlikely to find the International Show as a whole an edifying experience.



1964: Robert Rauschenberg, a central figure in the development of Pop Art, wins the Foreign Artist prize, earning the Biennale a new reputation as a pioneering show. 1968: Demonstrators protest the commercialization of art; many Biennale artists join the protestors, upending or covering their works in solidarity. 1972: The era of overarching thematics begins with the “Work and Behavior” Biennale. 1980: An entire hall is dedicated to “Postmodernism: la via novissima.” 1982: The big theme is “Art as Art.” 1984: “Art and the Arts.” 1988: “The Place of the Artist.” 1990: The controversial “Aperto” section of the Biennale is closed temporarily after the formaldehyde suspension leaks from one of Damien Hirst’s Plexiglas-enclosed cow carcasses. 1995: “Identity and Alterity.” 1999: “dAPERTutto.” 2001: The critic Harald Szeemann builds an entire show around a single work by Joseph Beuys. 2003: The critic Francesco Bonami breaks up his exhibition into a bunch of little sub-exhibitions with titles like “Clandestine” and “The Zone.” Reviews are mostly negative. 2007: The critic and academic Robert Storr’s Biennale is overtly political, offering a critique of American foreign and domestic policy. Reviews are mostly negative. 2009: Critic and academic Daniel Birnbaum (more on him later) gives us “Making Worlds.” Reviews are mostly negative.



Theme. Thematics. Thematicization.



Art as Art. Art and the Artist. The Place of the Artist. Where is the Artist? Art without Artists.



Text, context, subtext, pretext.



The Zone. The Zone. The Zone.



 



III.



 



There is an apocryphal story that, when someone asked Rodin whether he worked from his heart or his head, the sculptor replied, “I work from my balls.” There is a type of curator who also works from his (her?) balls.



But this sort of curator seems to have fallen out of favor recently, at least at the Biennale. Here, the critic-academics have been in charge for quite a while. Biennale curators emeriti Szeeman and Bonami both neatly fit the mold. Daniel Birnbaum—who has a rectorship at the Staedelschule at Frankfurt-am-Main, plus a regular gig writing scholarly essays for Artforum—does, too.



Birnbaum is not the type of curator who works from his balls. Birnbaum is the exact opposite of this type. He and the other critic-academic-curators seem to care very little about instincts, or about pleasure, whether aesthetic or otherwise. (Though Birnbaum does have an awfully cute smile, a smile the publicity people have plastered all over the Biennale’s promotional materials.) The critic-academics do appear to care about theory—a lot—and about curating an argument. Like past Biennale curators, Birnbaum has built “Making Worlds” around a theme that is both complex and vague. He has slotted into this theme some art by midcareer artists, and has padded out the show with abstruse critical statements.



The critical texts that accompany an exhibition like the Biennale lay everything out for the viewer (more or less) explicitly. And so they become the show’s default reading, the one critics use to judge its success or failure. As a consequence, the artist says less—or is forced to say less, or gets away with saying less—than he did in the days when curators had a lighter touch.



In the catalog essay, Birnbaum gives his personal vision for the show at length:





The innumerable translations of the phrase ‘making worlds’ is [sic] simply a conceptual starting point […] the impulse to move away from the understanding of this show [the Biennale] as a museum-like presentation of ready-made objects. This is hardly a revolutionary conceit for a biennale today, but we can still place particular emphasis on its character as a site for production and experimentation, and it is my hope that this exhibition will create new spaces for art to unfold beyond the expectations of the dominant institutions and the mechanisms of the art market.





This is all highly ironic. The Biennale is one of “the dominant institutions.” It drives and is driven by values and fluctuations in the art market. Nobody whose work is commercially undesirable shows at the Biennale, and nobody who shows at the Biennale is commercially undesirable.



To read the forgoing statement charitably, Birnbaum wants to show artwork that is in process, or self-constructing, or aware of its own construction. If this is the standard, then many of the works in the show meet it. If the viewer applies other, timeless standards, then only some works make the cut. In the long, thin Corderie that connects the two parts of the Arsenale, the first pieces are strong—and strongly beautiful. First, a Lygia Pape sculpture, a web of golden filaments, lit to a soft radiance; then a roomful of massive, baroque, gilt-frame mirrors, each smashed with a mallet by Michelangelo Pistoletto. Both works are striking; each echoes  Birnbaum’s theme. Pape’s work is constantly being realized by the shining light; Pistoletto’s very visibly bears the marks of its own creation.



But then comes a pile-up. There’s a trite, visually unimpressive lightbox show by Paul Chan; Aleksandra Mir’s “viewer-activated” postcards of Venice; free candy and amateurish anti-imperialist protest from Anawana Haloba; a silly, tree-sized projection of a Bonsai by Ceal Floyer.



“Such rich work! It just keeps on giving!” says a woman with an Adam’s apple.



Among other things, Birnbaum’s promises Biennale-goers “points of visual intensity” and “beautiful objects” in his catalog essay. But these are lacking in the show itself. Few of the works “pop.” And rarely does the viewer experience that vertigo one feels in the presence of truly gorgeous, or joyful, or thought-provoking art. The latter are Romantic standards, perhaps, and hopelessly time-bound; but does this make them any less desirable?



Pleasure-seekers must find what they’re looking for elsewhere at the Biennale.



 



IV.



 



If you’d like to understand the Biennale, you’d do well to read the social pages. A lot of major art glossies have them now.



The Biennale’s authority is at least as much social as it is cultural. If you are a prominent (or resourceful) critic or dealer or curator or hanger-on, you attend the Biennale’s preview. It’s like a high-end trade convention. You catch up with friends, spy on competitors, party, chat, fuck, drink.



Of course, if you really have pull, you show up before the preview, while the art is still going up. The editors of *Artforum*, the really wealthy collectors, and the major museum heads all pull this trick. Once you’ve reached the highest class-echelons of the art world, the real sign of status is the ability to skip the preview entirely while the lumpen-elite scrap for tote bags at the United Arab Emirates Pavilion.



You can’t take two steps in the Giardini without running into a bespectacled, be-shit-panted Beautiful Person holding a tote bag. After a couple of hours of careful observation, the *Advocate* develops a Theory of Swag to explain the bags’ appearance. Let’s say that, around 3:00, the Dutch pavilion has a lull. Not too many visitors are coming in. So some enterprising staffer decides to crack into the tote bags. He hauls a couple of cardboard boxes’ worth out of storage and begins to distribute them—maybe to press, along with copies of the promotional materials; maybe to all comers. Within half an hour, the bags—emblazoned with the name of the pavilion—start appearing on the shoulders of the first Beautifuls.



Suddenly, there is a rush on the pavilion. By 4:30, half the guests and a handful of Apparatchiks are clutching at Dutch swag, and the staff is getting ready to pack it in for the day, having drawn most of the preview attendees to their show.



As art has commoditized, anything associated with art has done the same. The reception at the Nordic pavilion is, unusually, selling the swag they have on offer. The most popular item—and the most intriguing, and repulsive—is a canvas bag emblazoned with quotes from Sarah Thornton’s recent, totally uncritical pop-sociological study *Seven Days in the Art World*. The bag’s designer has apparently culled from the book all references to sex acts—plus quotes that have the word “fuck” in them—and screen-printed them on the canvas.



The Nordic and Danish joint exhibition is a crowd favorite, at times so packed that it’s difficult to get into one or the other building. The artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have transformed the pavilions into the homes of two fictional collectors. The Nordic Pavilion “belongs” to the mysterious Mr. B, an ethusiast of (often homoerotic) contemporary art. Handsome young actors playing hustlers lounge around on couches and sip cocktails while the Beautifuls view Mr. B’s collection. The show is quite witty, if gimmicky. It pokes fun at collector culture: at mixed motives for buying art, at the eccentricities of personal taste, at the signification of social status in the art world. Elmgreen and Dragset clearly have mixed feelings towards their buyers, with whom they are locked in a symbiotic relationship.



You could look at how popular these two pavilions are and say that the Beautifuls, as a group, have a good sense of humor. And maybe this is true. But isn’t it funny, after all, that their favorite show at the Biennale is all about them?



 



V.



 



The *Advocate* is squeezed into line at the Biennale store with a shrink-wrapped copy of the show’s two-volume catalogue when she feels something brush the back of her neck. She ignores it. The something brushes her again. She turns around. Behind her is a toddler with corkscrew curls. The *Advocate* smiles at him as he thwacks her repeatedly and vigorously on the shoulder with his little fist.



“I’m sorry,” says the man holding the toddler. He is a portly Italian with a long, dark ponytail and crinkly eyes. He is not wearing a blazer, round glasses, or shit-pants. In the crook of his other arm, he too is holding a shrink-wrapped catalog.



The *Advocate* likes toddlers. “Don’t worry about it.” The toddler delivers a left hook to the side of her neck.



“Sorry, sorry.” The man smiles apologetically at the *Advocate* and then coos something at the toddler in Italian.



“Sorry!” says his wife, who is big and soft just like he is. All three of them are wearing bright clothes, felts and velvets, newsboy caps and colorful, rubberized tennis shoes. They look like characters from a children’s book.



“It’s okay!” chirps the *Advocate*. The toddler swings wildly at the air.



The sorries and the cooing and the apologetic smiles continue until the *Advocate* and her new friends make it to the front of the line. The Italian-speaking clerk finishes with her last customer and waves the family over.



They begin an involved conversation. The *Advocate*, who knows only rudimentary Italian, makes out the following:



   * **Is there any way to get one without paying?* asks the man.



   *   **I’m sorry*, says the clerk. *We can only offer a discount.*



  *    **But I have work in the show.*



* We’re selling the catalogs here, not giving them away.*



The *Advocate* loses the train of the conversation for several seconds. Then the Apparatchik trots off. The artist stands at the counter, waiting. He waits for two, three, four minutes. All around him, the dealers and journalists and curators and academics are shopping. They contemplate books, and pencils, and CDs, and t-shirts that say “Art Loves You,” and posters, and magnets, and tote bags—really nice ones—and toys for their kids, and pins, and housewares, and limited edition collectible trinkets—and they do it with the same look of half-glazed sobriety that they use when looking at the art in the 53rd International Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. It’s all the same.



The first Apparatchik returns with a second Apparatchik.



  *   **You might be able to get one through the national pavilion, but here we’re selling them.*



* You can contact the office directly and see if there’s any way to get one. Sorry.*



*T**hat’s all right*, says the artist, and pulls out his wallet. All parties smile apologetically. The artist pays for his catalog and then signals his wife that they ought to go.



 



VI.



 



There is something in the world that allows the Beautiful People to press out weaker but more honest voices. Often these voices are the voices of the artists.



She leaves the Biennale, has dinner, and goes to bed.



But, later that night, something causes her to put her day clothes back on, to slip back out of her hotel and into the quiet dark. She is tired, and her calves ache, but she takes a vaporetto to the main island of Venice. She has not done enough, or seen enough, to justify going to bed.



She gets off at the Arsenale—it’s the force of the day’s habits—and starts walking, after a moment’s hesitation, toward St. Mark’s Square. Bands of tourists pass her in both directions. They seem unusually light and graceful, as people on vacation sometimes do: all talking and laughing gracefully, all clutching each other’s arms lightly, all escorts and charges, all dignified.



Seawater washes onto the promenade at points, and the *Advocate* has to pick her way to St. Mark’s more and more carefully. Little puddles become great sloshing mouths of canal water. They get wider and wider until the *Advocate* can barely jump them.



And she comes to St. Mark’s—where the Beautiful People stay; where they drink their Bellinis, at Harry’s Bar and at the bar in the Cipriani Hotel; where, after-hours, they promenade their expensive linen suits and asymmetrical gowns and round horn-rimmed professor glasses and their shit-pants, and their attitude; where they sip espresso and settle deals and laugh clubbily at each other’s jokes—and the entire place is flooded knee-deep.



The water doesn’t seem to be flowing in or flowing out, but standing, standing deep enough to ruin silk Louboutin pumps and Lanvin suits and Wolford tights. Deep enough to strand all the Beautifuls in their expensive St. Mark’s hotel rooms, while the tourists—and the *Advocate*, and the artist from the shop, and his wife and kid, and all the less fortunate—wheel free in the night air.



The stars in the sky shine down on the water to create a second, inverted sky. The *Advocate* catches the next vaporetto back to her hotel and goes to sleep.



 

The Harvard Film Archive began this month with a three-day screening of the movies of Kenneth Anger. Anger, who grew up twenty minutes outside Hollywood in Santa Monica, California, is considered one of the fathers of American avant-garde film: David Lynch and Martin Scorsese count him as an antecedent. The first two days of screenings were devoted to Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle, a nine-film series of thematically linked works that film critics tend to group together. All of them in some way concern the production of myth and mystery in Hollywood and elsewhere—the “magic lantern,” of course, being both the film projector and an object of the sort that might be used in a cultic ritual, with more than a whiff of the esoteric about it. (To call it a “magick lantern” both reinforces a connection to the occult and adds a touch of Anger’s characteristic camp.)



In Anger’s films, this production of myth and mystery is intimately linked with the idea of glamour. In his early films, this means the glamour of Hollywood. Scorpio Rising plays off the glamour of 1950s counterculture; in one of the film’s longest scenes, a biker (in sunglasses) lounges in bed and reads comics while Marlon Brando in The Wild One plays on the television. Photographs of James Dean stare down at him from the walls, and a “James Dean Memorial Foundation” button lies among the rings scattered on the dresser. The film’s audience understands that the elements of glamour here point to a single, definite cultural source—the glamour of the rebel biker figure which both Dean and Brando played (and who Dean in particular seemed to embody, in a glamorous conflation of actor and role). Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, filmed ten years earlier in 1954, has a more esoteric set of cultural referents. It is based on Anger’s experience at the Hollywood party “Come as Your Madness” and his fascination with the magician and self-proclaimed prophet Aleister Crowley’s religion, Thelema. Still, the actors in the film are all faces on the Hollywood social scene—these include Anaïs Nin, the famously erotic French novelist, and Sampson De Brier, a former actor who held salons and occult gatherings in his home—in its totality the glamour of the film is recognizably the glamour of the Hollywood occult scene and the circuit of pleasures trod by Anger and his actors.



Over the course of the Cycle, however, Anger begins to drain the glamour of his films of recognizable cultural referents, leaving bare glamour—now legible only as a form or style—where any content has been emptied out. In Lucifer Rising this decontextualized, effectively a-referential glamour is most evident. While the film once again displays an identifiable interest in the occult—a framed picture of Crowley hovers in the background in one scene—the visual elements of the film cannot be interpreted in relation to a single coherent referent. A scene of a priest or acolyte at his toilette clearly points to the occult motif again, as well as to the idea that glamour is prepared and artificial; but whereas Thelema was an obvious occult referent in earlier films, nothing in Lucifer Rising but the picture of Crowley points to any specific religion or cult. The sight of the singer Marianne Faithfull—if you can recognize her in her gray face-paint or hooded cloak—momentarily evokes the British rock scene of the 1960s and 70s, but after three minutes of watching her walk up a stone staircase, the cultural context of her celebrity becomes almost meaningless. The film’s Egyptian imagery is recognizable, but its camp use is bewildering. All of these images have an element of glamour, but this is not a culture-specific glamour that the viewer can decode—though these images originally had cultural referents, now they are almost completely hermetic.



In their book The Glamour System, Stephen Gundle and Clino Castelli cite the New Fowler’s Modern English Usage in designating glamour as an alteration of the old Scottish gramarye: this meant “occult learning, magic, necromancy.” When the word glamour entered English usage in the 1830s, Gundle and Castelli continue, “it did so with the meaning of ‘a delusive or alluring charm.’” Their definition of the word’s contemporary meaning retains this etymological connection: glamour is “an enticing image, a staged and constructed version of reality that invites consumption[...] it is primarily visual, it consists of a retouched or perfected version of a real person or situation, and it is predicated upon the gaze of a desiring audience.” Buried in this idea of glamour is the old notion of casting a spell, of seduction—of seducing with the visual. But what does it mean to seduce with pure glamour, glamour as form and aura alone, rather than with the fantasy of life as a kept woman or movie star?



 



*



 



Anger’s films and the way they treat glamour are of particular interest today in light of what seems to be a change in the media that surround fashion and fashion culture. His recognition of the self-sustaining interaction between glamour and visual media is canny and prescient. The current wave of interest in fashion has developed a telling degree of sophistication, focused on the fashion industry itself as a source of glamour rather than merely what “looks” are in next season. The New York Times now aggressively covers fashion weeks in New York, London, Milan, and Paris both online and in print—positioning itself, perhaps, as the newspaper of record in this area. (Women’s Wear Daily is the newspaper of record for the fashion industry; the Times’s coverage is aimed at a more general readership.) Five years ago, almost no one outside of the fashion industry could have told you who Giovanna Battaglia (fashion editor of L’Uomo Vogue) or Carine Roitfeld (editor-in-chief of Vogue Paris) was; today if you ask a well-dressed young person in a major metropolitan center, you have a decent chance of getting an answer.



Perhaps the most impressive cultural shift accompanying the increasing visibility of the fashion industry itself has been the rise of the fashion photo blog. Five years ago, it didn’t exist. Today, ger-photographer-writers like Scott Schuman of The Sartorialist, Tommy Ton of Jak and Jil, and fourteen-year old Tavi Gevison of Style Rookie receive tens of thousands of hits to their websites each day, merit front row seats at fashion shows, and attract major advertising and editorial commissions from top designers and magazines like Vogue. Fashion blogs generally fall into one of two categories. Street-style blogs like The Sartorialist and Jak and Jil feature snapshot (or snapshot-style) photos of attractive and interestingly dressed individuals caught “on the street.” (In fact, many of the most successful bloggers regularly photograph the same cadre of fashion editors and other industry insiders.) Personal style bloggers like Tavi, on the other hand, photograph their own outfits each day. Both types of blog can contain additional material like analysis of recent fashion shows, commentaries on favorite designers, and colorful outfit-inspiring collages called “mood boards.” Most importantly, all of these new fashion blogs are image-based. Even when a particular post does not feature images, some visual—a runway presentation, a trendy print or cut—is always referred to, because fashion is primarily a visual phenomenon.



Glamour in Europe had its roots in a bourgeois response to the splendor of a decaying aristocracy; in the United States, which never really had a hereditary aristocracy, it was associated from the beginning with images and products that an ordinary person could consume. But today, when collections are filled with contextless historical references and fashion coverage has become at least overtly democratic, glamour has become, even more than before, an a-referential aura, a form with no immediate content. Fashion once had a social logic; even the widely-commodified aura of glamour, which functioned primarily to market certain celebrities and products to the public, was pegged to certain celebrities and diffused among middle-class consumer-aspirants. The girl in the 1930s who bought a fur coat captured for herself a hazy emanation of Garbo’s glamour, not the aura at full strength. Today, the relation between media and glamour has become even more intimate than before. Capture in the right kind of media is the condition of glamour. The very environment of the fashion media has become a center of glamour.



This deepening of the connection between media and glamour created a new set of fantasies distinct from the old fantasies of glamour—the fantasy of becoming a Hollywood starlet, for instance, or of finding a wealthy man to support one’s tastes. First, of course, there is the fantasy of a job in fashion. Fashion world jobs seem glamorous not only because they have an aura of creativity, but because they are associated with a jet-setting lifestyle (attending fashion weeks or shooting ads in far-off locations), with physical allure, and with celebrities, socialites, and others whose wealth attends on high status.



Second, there is the fantasy of being “discovered.” But here the body or face is not (primarily) the thing being discovered, but rather one’s eye—the knack for analyzing high fashion or advertising or trends-in-the-making; the personal style and allure so compelling that it inspires others to fantasize. In an economy that lacks stability, where even college graduates are unlikely to find a stable and rewarding job, young people who have spent their lives looking at images in print, on television, online, and in the world around them want to be rewarded for their superlative visual skills. The internet is an open forum where anyone can work to get noticed, and where a handful—but only a handful—in fact have been.



The images that show up on fashion photo blogs feed a similar desire. Anyone can be captured by a street photographer if he has the “right look.” And anyone who posts photos of herself to her blog knows her eye too can be discovered if her blog becomes popular enough that the relevant people hear about it. Jane Aldrich, of the website Sea of Shoes, started posting photos of her daily outfit to her blog in April 2007. Two years later, at age seventeen, she had designed a collection of shoes for Urban Outfitters. In November 2009, she debuted at the Bal de Crillon in Paris alongside Princess Diana’s niece and the great-granddaughter of a maharajah despite being from a by-all-accounts-normal family in a planned community near Fort Worth.



 



*



 



An interesting facet of the fashion industry’s latest media moment is that among young people, a taste for fashion does not seem notably gender normative. It is more acceptable for heterosexual males to be interested in fashion now than seems to have been the case at almost any time since what Gundle and Castelli in The Glamour System call “the masculine renunciation of fashion and display” during the nineteenth century. The metrosexual, the male hipster, and various permutations thereof can be of any sexual orientation. Interest in appearance, or more specifically, in maintaining a particular aesthetic or personal style, is presumed by the mere fact of membership in one of these groups, prior to the fact of the individual’s sexuality.



Despite the reinscription of fashion as an acceptable interest for all sexes rather than a mere caprice, fashion and the spells it can cast still pose a particular danger for women. While men are featured on some style blogs—among them the all-men’s Urban Gentleman and the gender-balanced Sartorialist—the majority of the photos major bloggers take are of women. The women in these photos often (but not always) treat their dress in a different way from the men; while the men on these blogs are often held up as exemplifying the importance of fine tailoring, clever details, and investment in quality garments, the women are often more spectacular in their dress. For every woman whose sleeves hit at just the right place on the wrist, there are five in towering stilettos, leather pants, or blinding prints.



Producing these enchantments requires a considerable investment of energy and time: many of the women who are photographed clearly spend hours a day on “personal appearance” once exercise, hair, makeup, skin, clothing, and decisions about diet are factored in. (Not to mention the extra time it takes to walk places in heels over three inches.) One editor who is frequently photographed for fashion blogs is said to exercise for two hours and change outfits up to three times a day. While the efforts of these women can buy them a great deal of notice—and in the editor’s case, a form of internet celebrity—you have the feeling that they think there is an expressive dividend as well.



But is this tremendous investment of time in fashion as it relates to one’s own dress in fact a creative activity? The claim is often made in an off-hand way by fashion bloggers and other young people with an interest in the industry. However, change in a culture’s preexisting system of dress, which constitutes the only environment in which a woman’s clothing is legible as a set of choices with content, is determined by the need producers have to sell garments. The choices fashion-conscious women make about dress are almost never autonomous of the market, and are therefore creative in a sense so stunted as to be meaningless.



Here I am following Barthes, who (to radically simplify his argument) conceived of fashion in a culture as a complicated sign-system that evolves both synchronically and over time. Critically, the article of clothing or some detail of it only signifies in the context of this sign-system. Even when an instance of a gesture is initially unique to one woman or to a small group of them—say, the wearing of a jacket over the shoulders rather than with the arms through the sleeves—for outsiders, this gesture only signifies if it has had some identifiable historical association (the jacket over the shoulders signifying, perhaps, either casualness or fragility, depending on the execution). If this gesture is repeated by more women, it becomes legible to a broader audience, but it may also attract the attention of marketers and trend-spotters and in turn become a codified, marketed element of dress by the next season—with a fully fixed signification. (Street style blogs chronicle the eccentricities of dress that might become bottom-up cultural phenomena, thus accelerating the ability of corporate designers and marketers to invert them to top-down phenomena that will sell clothes.)



But if women have taken on the role of the ornamental sex, and if the signification of their dress is highly prescribed by cultural context—which, in turn, is highly if not primarily determined by the exigencies of market capitalism, which must drive periodic shifts in codes of dress in order to motivate consumption—then I at least would argue that dress for many fashionable women is not creative, despite being precisely the domain in which for the last 150 years the right to create has at least theoretically been ceded to women. Women—the reasoning goes—retain the ability to choose their dress, to style themselves, and the ultimate right to refuse a mode of dress for reasons of taste. But the dress of many fashionable women not only operates completely within a broader cultural code, but is also driven by the necessary cycling of the market to a far higher degree than even modern visual art. It is perhaps even worse for a woman who considers her elaborate everyday act of dressing creative to follow the styles in the magazines, than for an artist to painstakingly copy a certain style of painting the market has approved—at least the artist retains a degree of self-awareness. Glamour today is indeed a form without immediate cultural referent; the market can fill glamour with whatever content immediately suits its own needs. The style of Hollywood starlets was in some ways fixed, but in a world in which designers show five or six collections per year, style is completely mutable; to remain useful, the cultural content of glamour must be mutable as well.



 



*



 



Whether dressing up can actually become a creative act will not be resolved here, because I don’t know whether there is a way for dressing to totally leave market-driven networks of signification behind—or whether it is even worth it to attempt to do so.  At the least, it doesn’t seem to me that the historical place of women, pre-liberation, as keepers of personal objects—as homemakers, producers of household goods, and visual clues to their husbands’ social status—should necessarily lead them to treat a “feminine preoccupation” like adornment as a frivolity. Take the ground that is ceded to you, despite the stigma that attaches to it as an unserious (feminine) activity, and use the space a lack of male interest gives you to develop a practice that is interesting and worthy of analysis.



Since many young women do seem to feel that dressing is a creative act, I would like to point them to Anger’s later films for some indication of how the reality of dressing might match their fantasy. Glamour here is a form, still easily recognizable as a particular type of visual enchantment, but without the legible visual references to any market-driven cultural significance of the sort that dogs most “creative” dressers’ attempts to “say something” with what they wear. While these films appropriate certain cultural references only to blend them, they are not pastiche; the result does not have the quality of a montage, but rather of a closed system, one in which visual elements are in fact full of significance but in which their signification is only fully understood by the initiated—a category, in this case, that the viewer does not belong to. The priestess in Lucifer Rising understands the rules, rites, and icons of her religion, and their origin. Because we cannot read this visual code, we do not.



If women want to turn dress itself into a form of art, they need to create not just the outfits or even the garments that they wear but the very codes within which their dress can be interpreted. This requires the creation not just of things to wear or even of ideas for their design, but of a little world that these garments fit into and by which they are legible. In other words, it requires an act of fantasy that is both hermetic and theatrical: hermetic because the broader culture cannot be allowed to fully learn this code (otherwise, it can become popular and can be appropriated by fashion), theatrical because it requires the creation and constant maintenance of a fantasy world around the dresser so that the possibility of finding significance in the dress always exists (otherwise, it falls apart as a language.) There is no way to know what form this little world built up around the person who dresses would take, but I imagine an elaborate mythology and a set of personal rituals as in Anger’s Lucifer Rising. In other obvious ways, “parafashion” would take after performance art. But could it ever stand alone as a separate category of creative endeavor?

          In Andrew Wyeth’s winter landscapes, Pennsylvania seems to groom itself with a cold gray tongue. Down it sweeps, over wide brown plains and farms, over towns and small cities. It gentles the cows that graze in fenced-in fields, the light-eyed farmers who bring them out to pasture, and the crows that guard them both. It smoothes the wheat that covers its body like a winter fur. The state is cleaning, making ready for the spring, when the sunlight will reveal all its dirty and dusty corners without mercy.



          Sometimes the wind loses interest in the middle of a stroke. Other times, it licks energetically to the bottom of the state, where it comes up against an old stone mill on a broad lot. For fifty years, this mill was Wyeth’s home. Here the painter died on January 16 of this year, tucked in bed, as stray gusts rattled at the windowpanes.



          Wyeth painted this landscape and the people and things that populate it for nearly his entire life. It was a gentle scene, and a seductive one. His America was calm and austere, his Americans vital and strong. So why did critics so vigorously attack them both?



          At the peak of his career, in the 1960s and 1970s, Wyeth’s images of Pennsylvania and Maine, where he spent summers, made him both one the most popular artists in America and one of the most disparaged. Art world insiders derided his sentimentalism and “anti-modernism” even as thousands of patrons flocked to surveys of his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery, and the Boston Museum of Fine Art. The artist’s work was paradoxically controversial given its aesthetic conservatism. Robert Storr, now the dean of Yale’s School of Art, named the painter “our greatest living ‘kitsch-meister.’” Dave Hickey called him pretentious and accused him of working in a palette of “mud and baby poop.” Intellectually, these critics were reacting to the artist’s uncritical populism. Wyeth catered to mainstream tastes, and he displayed none of the tongue-in-cheek self-awareness of the incoming postmodern artists. His art was humorless, retrograde, inferior—clearly meant for the masses.



          But the objections to Wyeth’s work were not just academic. Often they were visceral and emotional. This seems odd; after all, the artist was only painting sparse landscapes and meticulous portraits in a clear and expressive realist style. Yet however strange the debate over his art seems, it had been rehearsed (albeit at a lower intensity) a half-dozen times over the past fifty years. The same argument surfaced every time a “regionalist” artist achieved widespread success.



          To be called a regionalist is either to be slandered or to be praised, depending on whom you ask. Detractors take the genre’s name for what it is. They often argue that regionalists are close-minded and lack the creative vision of their more radical, cosmopolitan counterparts. Supporters claim that regionalists do the United States a service by providing it with images of itself. Either way, the regionalist label, which has been in use since the late 20s, generally applies to artists whose work depicts a rural part of the country in an accessible, place-conscious way. When written with a capital “r,” it refers more specifically to Midwestern artists working between the two world wars. As the vagueness of both terms suggests, “regionalism” is less a clearly defined category than a means of signifying that a certain sort of debate has taken place over an artist’s work. The conflict it refers to is, on its surface, nothing more than an art-world iteration of urban-rural tensions.



          But with Wyeth, it was more intense. He made the city critics howl. They were not just dismissive; they seemed to be uncomfortable. There was something about the paintings that made them anxious. The artist’s works possessed some hidden and powerful reactionary force—a force that was driving audiences crazy. Some commentators attributed their own unsettled feelings to the artist’s simple-minded sentimentalism. Others slammed him for producing representational art in an age of abstraction.



          Few critics talked about the people Wyeth painted—and here, they may have missed the source of their own unease. The artist’s most famous and most frequent models are not “native” New Englanders. They are not recent arrivals like Italians or Mexicans or Jews. They are not former slaves or Native Americans. They are Nordic and German immigrants and their descendents. Some of them were forced out of their native lands by demographic pressures; others fled a blasted Europe in the middle decades of the 20th century. They were hardly welcome here even by Wyeth’s time. In the United States, the World Wars had taken the form “not simply [of] a struggle against Germany, but also [of] a fight against things German,” as the historian Stephen Gross puts it. Decades later, many Americans still distrusted Teutonic and Teutonic-looking newcomers.



          Yet there they were, on canvas after canvas. Christina Olson, Siri Erickson, Helga Testorf, Karl and Anna Kuerner—a spread of pale, wide brows, golden hair, rosy cheeks, glittering light eyes. Their figures seem to fade into his bleak landscapes, into the wind, the brown earth, the clear gray sky. To the artist, these people were “truly wholesome” and “fresh, really American.” To city-dwellers, they were alien, and frightening—foreign, but better suited to the land than they were.



          Wyeth was confronting the beaux-monde with a hardier, more perfect race of American. The city folk just couldn’t look them in the face.



          Fifty years before the critic Peter Schjeldahl called Wyeth’s Helga pictures “as threatening to your sense of self as a quilted pot holder,” Grant Wood was painting the German woman’s distant cousins. The Iowan took up the brush at a young age, not long after his family moved from Anamosa to the suburbs of Cedar Rapids. Though he left it in 1901, at the age of 10, Wood would always claim that the tiny farming town formed him as an artist. Certainly his later paintings bear out this statement: from 1930 on, the artist almost exclusively depicted rural landscapes, small towns, farms—and, of course, the hardworking, upright people who populated all three.



          But Anamosa was the last thing in his mind during what he later termed his “bohemian” period. From about the time of his family’s move to the city to his 40th birthday, Wood began to gather strength as a painter. He also made what in retrospect seem like a series of half-hearted attempts to escape the physical and moral orbit of the rural Midwest. He moved to Chicago in 1913, and spent the next four years as a sometimes-student at the Art Institute. After his return to Cedar Rapids, he was able to save enough money from sporadic teaching and design jobs to embark on a series of trips to Paris. Inevitably, he returned from these excursions talking, acting, and dressing like a denizen of the Left Bank and painting like a minor Impressionist. Eventually, however, Wood settled back down in his Iowa town for good. He began more and more often to paint the people and places he had seen since childhood.



          Wood was just bohemian enough for the people of Cedar Rapids. The townsfolk didn’t quite approve of Braque, or Matisse, or that Picasso fellow—and certainly not those oddballs over in New York—but Wood seemed just about right for an artist, at least to them. He kept strange hours, couldn’t manage his own money, and was probably too creative for his own good—but wasn’t he harmless, really? He taught their middle-schoolers and designed the stained glass window for the Veteran’s Memorial building. His early paintings hung in hundreds of homes and businesses across the state. True, that moustache and goatee he wore after his first European trip were a little much, but he shaved them off pretty quick. All told, Wood was the kind of artist they could really like. He didn’t stir things up or challenge their values too much, but he brought a bit of color to the place. So as long as he continued to meet their expectations, his fellow citizens would support him with commissions and patronage. A little market sprang up in the area for original Grant Woods.



          The artist returned their favor in the 1930s with what would be called his Regionalist canvases. By the start of the decade, he had completely abandoned his earlier pseudo-modernism and dedicated himself to painting meticulous, gently caricatured visions of the Iowans and their landscape. These works were both stylistic and thematic breakthroughs. Not only had Wood engineered a new realism from American folk art and mural-painting traditions and Northern Renaissance portraiture; he was giving rural subject matter a substantial artistic treatment. His innovations were important enough to earn gallery space for his work in Chicago and in the East. Through his paintings, city-dwellers finally had a chance to meet their country neighbors.



          But what the urbanites saw may have been disconcerting. If they were expecting people who looked or lived like they did, they were wrong. Wood’s landscapes are cartoonish, rounded, sinuous. His buildings stand rigidly upright. But his Iowans fall somewhere between the two, somewhere oddly inhuman. Their noses and chins are rotund, their eyes dark and moist, their necks stiff, their lips tucked into little lines of rectitude. Their limbs are rounded, but their motions and gaits are jerky, angular, stylized. Although they should be of the town—most of them were the descendents of German and Nordic immigrants who had arrived in the area just decades earlier—visually, they bridge the town and the land. They are not fully of the built environment, although it is an environment of their own construction. Over time, they have grown into the American Midwest, until they are more than natives. They are natural features. Few people in the East felt so comfortable in their own cities.



          Unsurprisingly, Wood’s Regionalist works were criticized for the same retrograde qualities as Wyeth’s later ones. While some modernists praised the painter for *American Gothic*, which they saw as a critique of rural values, the rest of his work elicited their ire. Formalists ripped him apart for what *The New Republic*’s James Sweeney described as a lack of “sensibility to color,” a “feeble sense of modeling,” and “insensitively stylized forms”—in other words, for failing to meet the criteria of orthodox modernism. Those who judged him on his own terms as a vernacular realist were just as harsh. His Iowa was too curvaceous, too alluring, and too far removed from what critics assumed were the realities of the Depression. Lincoln Kirstein accused him of painting with a “simple-minded mannerism” that at times sent his figures into “fat toy territory.” Even Thomas Craven, a pro-Regionalist, accused him of a “frivolity” that damped his attempts at expression. Wood’s popular reception was enthusiastic, particularly in the Midwest, but the opinion of the urban art elite was consistently, aggresively negative.



          However, Wood’s real or imagined shortcomings as a creator didn’t warrant the vehement responses of his detractors. Boring, conservative, insufficiently innovative, or overly imaginative paintings might be expected to produce indifference or mild distaste, not outrage. There was something else about Wood’s work that was making critics downright antsy. Something lurking in the Iowa landscape. Over round hills and fields sewn with wheat, it comes—a relative the city folk can’t recognize, a countryman to whom they can’t relate. A new sort of American. Wholesome, strong, and completely comfortable in the land—far more comfortable than they were among the skyscrapers and subway cars.



          In Wyeth’s work, this figure finally drifted into view.



          The first time the painter saw the Prussian-born Helga Testorf walking down a snow-strewn Pennsylvania road, he was enchanted. Immediately he noticed “all her German qualities,” qualities Karl and Anna Kuerner also possessed: “her strong, determined stride, that Loden coat, the braided blond hair.” He asked her to pose; she agreed. She became his “most perfect model,” and his most frequent. From 1971 to 1985, Wyeth secretly painted and drew 246 images of Testorf. There was Helga in the forest, Helga at home, Helga walking, melting into the landscape as if she could become a part of it. And Helga naked—on a stool, in a sauna, on her knees or her back in bed. Betsy Wyeth later told reporters she was unaware that Testorf had modeled for her husband. Andrew Wyeth claimed their relationship had never been physical.



          The art world exploded at the news of the series upon its sale to a single collector in 1986. The paintings’ scandal threatened to completely erase the public memory of the rest of Wyeth’s work. *TIME *ran a story on the collection and suggested that the artist and his wife had craftily manipulated reports about the series to inflate the value of his other paintings. Insiders, at least, did not need to be convinced that the pictures were tawdry. The Metropolitan Museum of Art declined to show the paintings, even though it was offered access to the entire collection. *The New York Times*’ Roberta Smith called the eventual National Gallery exhibition “a theme show with all the sentimentality and sensationalism—and even the element of soft-core pornography—of an afternoon soap.” Most critics bore similar feelings, and expressed them just as strongly. The general art world opinion of Wyeth had fallen even further.



          But what did these viewers find particularly offensive about the Helga pictures? It couldn’t be the implied affair between the artist and his model, nor the scandal that surrounded its revelation—both are commonplace in art history. The paintings are just as technically competent as Wyeth’s other works. They are just as spooky, just as kitschy. What, then, was the matter?



          Helga herself was the source of the critics’ unease. She is the apex of Wyeth’s Teutonic fixation, its symbol and best representative. Her thick brow, flat face, blonde hair, blue eyes—that Loden coat, that straight and solid bearing! She is a pure Prussian, the product of good Germanic stock—and strangely military. This, Wyeth would tell us, is the face of America. A “wholesome” and “fresh” face. But it was already familiar to most viewers, and not so wholesome to some of them. How did the city-dwellers feel when they learned that the new American, their country neighbor, their superior, their potential replacement, was Aryan?



          Critics were uncomfortable with Grant Wood’s paintings, but they were far more troubled by Wyeth’s. They had reason to be. Both artists appealed with their paintings to Americans yearning for “a lost agrarian past,” as The Washington Post put it. They presented their audiences with a new sort of rural person—a hardy breed well-suited to the land.  In Wyeth, however, the “breed” takes on an overt racial character. The progressive American art scene may not have been ready to accept a painter who fetishized the same qualities that had preoccupied Nazi eugenicists. They were qualities that had haunted many of the art worlders, or their parents and families, in a time so different it could have been another life. They were qualities over which, in a sense, Americans once went to war.



          But strangely—perversely—Wyeth’s fame and popularity have grown over time. By now, Wood has been reduced to a single, indelible image: American Gothic, much parodied and much discussed. His fellow regionalist, however, is considered the greatest American artist of the twentieth century in some circles. His paintings are exhibited across the country. Even the notoriously Wyeth-averse Museum of Modern Art displays *Christina’s World*. And the news of his death has propelled another burst of interest in his paintings and legacy.



          This time, the critics have been more generous. Robert Storr has acknowledged Wyeth’s “great energy and conviction.” Others have claimed him as a closet innovator. The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Kathleen Foster has called him “a different voice of modernism.” She curated a posthumous exhibition of the painter’s work that went up in late January. Other shows have opened in Tennessee and Maine. With more time to plan, other, larger retrospectives will debut—public demand for the artist is high. Once again, Americans will come face to face with Helgas and Siris and Olsons and Kuerners. Urbanites and city critics will have another chance to look them in the eyes.



 

Something is floating in the pool, the Missus realizes on Tuesday, as she sips the coffee Concepción always brews for her when she starts work. (Fresh coffee is not worth the shame of having to ask for it brewed around noon.) She can’t make out the shape from the kitchen window, but a quick inspection reveals it to be a dead fawn, lying on its side, its front hooves idly playing in the jet of a water filter. “It would be good if they could pick it up before my husband comes home,” she tells Concepción. But when Concepción calls Animal Control, the rude voice that answers, put off by an accent she can’t identify, tells her to call back in the afternoon when a Spanish-speaking operator will be on duty, and so Concepción decides to wash every single one of his shirts instead and leaves the deer in the capable hands of God.



She winds her way through the big house, kneeling periodically to gather clothes strewn in the hallways and across the floors of rooms. Seen from above, her little figure could be that of a penitent monk as he winds his way through a cloister, stopping periodically to touch the ground and mumble a few words of self-abnegation. It’s difficult to keep track of what she has and hasn’t done, in this house. There are so many rooms, and when the husband isn’t home—which is most weekdays and even some weekends at this point—the Missus somehow manages to spread her waking and sleeping hours, her dressing, eating, and undressing, evenly throughout the rooms, so that no room is ever unused. Concepción doubts she’d get a reprimand if she missed one. But her conscience won’t permit her to be like her friend Gloria, who sometimes runs the same load of laundry three times to look busy, and spends most of her workday standing in the kitchen watching soap operas and adding hot water to the cubes of instant mocha that she brings from home.



Each room is very, very elaborately decorated, but Concepción, with her girlhood spent in QuezÓn, can’t see a meaningful difference between the Baroque Revival moldings in the third guest bedroom and the rococo panelling in the ground-floor study. She does have a special fondness for the delicate curves in the gleaming wallpaper of the Art Nouveau room, although she couldn’t tell you why. Today there is a mess in what she doesn’t know is the Victorian room. The sheets on the wrought-iron Murphy bed are in disarray, and a bottle of Pastek that had been sitting open on the floor has been overturned. The whitish, viscous substance oozes across the floor in a two-foot-long slick.



 Only a professional-grade solvent, or paint thinner, will remove the Pastek from the floor, but Concepción can’t drive and doesn’t want to walk to the hardware store in the midday heat. Still, feeling compelled to do something, she fills a bucket with wood soap and water and scrubs meditatively at the stain for the next hour. She knows her efforts will not be rewarded; this is not the first time she’s had to clean up a spilled bottle of this paste. The new wallpaper—an ugly paper, she thinks, imported from a heritage manufacturer in Britain, printed with big fat cabbage roses spilling across a pink and green background—still smells like the store-room and the packages it was shipped in. The shadows of branches and the early afternoon light play across it, and out the window Concepción can see the Missus sitting by the pool, staring out across the lawn and drinking something out of her coffee mug with a straw, while the deer bobs gently in the pool next to her.



Although Concepción is paid a good bit more than Gloria, and probably much more than the other women in her carpool, she sometimes daydreams about leaving this job because the house is so lonely during the day. Other women have houses with children, sometimes little children who don’t go to school yet and need to be fed and bathed. She has a green card, is young and pretty, and could probably find other work. She might even be able to marry an American. The reason she stays is something obscure relating to the Missus. There is something about her mania for decorating that makes Concepción uneasy, and she wonders if the poor woman can’t have children.



If Concepción had the consciousness to ask the right questions, she might also ask why her employer isn’t working, despite a prestigious Ph.D. that hangs on the wall of the third-floor study next to an equally prestigious B.A. When the Missus is in a black mood, she likes to berate herself by telling herself she’s lazy. (She esteems herself too highly to call herself stupid.) The half-written manuscript of her first and last monograph has been locked in her 19th-century Shaker writing desk since she bought it online six months ago. When she isn’t torturing herself by thinking up possible extensions of the book’s argument—which are always of ambiguous value and which she therefore never makes—she puts her art history background to use. She has planned the interior décor of her house, sourced materials from American and European antique dealers, rearranged and altered furniture, and generally wasted time. She realizes sometimes, with a laugh, that she is worse than one of the future wives she used to make fun of in college.



One came to her senior tutorial and announced, “My boyfriend and I are engaged. We leave for Paris on Friday.” Another, who used to wear her right ring finger the largest emerald the Missus has ever seen on, never spoke but always spent the whole two hours braiding and rebraiding her long golden hair. On warm days these long-legged beauties spilled across the portico and steps of the department’s Italianate building, swapping sticks of gum, painting their nails, and sunning themselves. The professors were grumpy old men with hair coming out of their ears. She wrote a thesis subtly insinuating that one of the most prominent of them was sexist and racist and was awarded *summa cum laude*. When she went to New York for her Ph.D., she fell in love with a very tall and broad-shouldered young associate who swore and talked very loudly and had a habit in conversation of slapping nearby surfaces for emphasis. They saw each other on weekends and went for walks in Prospect Park and then to the bar next to her building to get drunk. In her second year, after each was deeply in the other’s confidence, he told her that he had been seeing a dancer—a man—behind his wife’s back, and that, in celebration of their first anniversary, they were going to look at summer shares in Montauk together. When, six months later, she told him she was suspending her studies to marry and move to the suburbs of Washington, D.C., he asked her to explain herself. When she wouldn’t, he got angry and called her a mercenary. You think you’re so fucking clever, he told her, but if you leave one day you’ll find yourself knee-deep in shitty diapers and you’ll be so deeply fucked that you’ll wish you were dead. She called him a coward, a fag, and a misogynist loud enough for the people in the adjacent offices to hear her.



Their friendship—probably the deepest she has ever had—was an unfortunate mistake and she doesn’t like to think about it. Most days, while she sits by the pool drinking her coffee, she remembers all of the tricks (intellectual and social) that she learned in her six years in higher education. She thinks about the apartment she shared with three other female grad students, all of whom were starved for sexual attention and coped with it by dieting perpetually, denying themselves food so they could forget they were being denied the other thing. She used to pick up men sometimes at the bar next to her building and take them to her room. When they came to the next day they would see the shelves full of books with names like *Representation and Suppression *and* WHO SPEAKS?* and the nude photographs of local women—found at her neighborhood flea market—that she had pasted above her bed. More than one of them pulled up his pants and snuck out of the room as quietly as he could. She would have a good laugh later recounting her night to the roommates, who were always nonplussed by the vulgarity she employed but secretly fiercely jealous and also a little cranky from hunger.



Concepción is more or less the only woman she has had regular contact with in her two years since moving to Potomac. The Missus likes to tease her by asking her about her men, and Concepción evades her by blushing and acting as if she doesn’t completely understand the question, even though the Missus knows she didn’t use an interpreter when she was interviewing for her green card and has been picked up several times in the afternoon by a boy in a pickup truck.



 



Later that summer, when Concepción visits her family in the Philippines, she will be kidnapped along with an aunt when they are walking in the street in Lucena City. The kidnappers are three day laborers, one of whom has a pregnant wife and one of whom wants to replace his Geo van (where they will be held until nightfall) with a flashy yellow sports car. As the kidnappers hustle them down to the humid basement where they will pass the final 36 hours of their captivity, Concepción slips on the stairs and loses the baby she has been carrying for the past ten weeks. She won’t have known she is pregnant, and as a small trickle of blood collects at the hem of her skirt, she will only fret for herself and for the green silk dress she has borrowed from the Missus without asking. After her extended family has scraped together the money for the ransom and the kidnappers have delivered her back to the two-story cinderblock building where they live, she will tear the rich garment to shreds in a fit of anger, supposing it the reason that the kidnappers plucked her and her aunt off the street.



Was it the pills she is using? They’re an herbal fertility aid that you can find in drugstores in the Philippines. The married women in her family have taken them for decades. Before that, they would make a tea from the same plants. Concepción isn’t married, at least not yet, but she would like to have a baby. Some mornings, when she’s the only one awake in the house, and she looks out the kitchen window to see the lawn with its pool so empty, and there isn’t a sound to be heard and no one who could possibly observe her, she crushes up one of these pills to slip into the Missus’s morning coffee, where it dissolves over the hours, its peculiar herbal bitterness dissolving into the bitterness of the coffee, and by the time the Missus finally rouses herself and comes down to the kitchen, she could not possibly suspect that the mug she holds contains a sweet loam, a sprinkling of tropical soil.



 



On Tuesday night, Concepción dreams that she is sitting cross-legged in a field as the fawn decomposes in her lap. When she comes to work the next morning, it is gone. The Missus has brewed her own coffee. There’s a mess of grounds scattered across the countertop, but Concepción feels obscurely proud of her anyway. She puts some pretzels on a plate, and cuts up some nice cheese to go with it, and brings it down to the pool, where the Missus reclines in a deck chair in her pink robe and sunglasses reading *Architectural Digest*.



“Good morning, mam. Did the town come and pick it up?”



“I called Animal Control first thing in the morning,” says the Missus.



“I’m sorry, mam. I called them yesterday when it happened!”



“Oh, they had a record of your call,” says the Missus. “You have nothing to apologize for—they were rude to you. Someone will be calling for you around 11, go ahead and pick up the phone yourself.”



“Thank you, mam! I brought you some food, mam. It’s early. You never eat breakfast because you always wake up at lunch time!” In Concepción’s warm throat there is a rising feeling of devotion to this funny woman-child who treats the work of making her home like a game but always looks so horribly sad.



While she is waiting, she sees the Missus take off her sunglasses and then stand up and slide off her bathrobe. She is wearing a floppy pink bikini that can barely cover the jiggling of her firm little breasts. A deep voice calls her name. She squints up at the third floor of the house and waves slowly, broadly, as if she’s waving at a passenger on the deck of a departing ship.



Later that night, when the Missus searches frantically in the chest of drawers in her bathroom for the diaphragm that her husband doesn’t know she wears, it will be rattling around the floor of Gloria’s car in its pink plastic case. They are coming back from a dance in Virgina along MacArthur Boulevard in Gloria’s RAV4. Concepción reclines against the floral neoprene seat cover and watches the passing day laborers fish in the polluted waters of the Potomac. They do it at night with flashlights so the police won’t see them.



The diaphragm is wet and floppy like a rubber jellyfish, and this makes her think of an old fertility ritual that her grandmother once explained to her. When they get to the Chain Bridge she tells Gloria to pull over. They get out of the car and walk partway across the bridge. “What’s that?” Gloria asks. Concepción opens the pink case to show her the glistening dome. “It’s a giant condom!”



“It’s for women, you put it into your vagina and it seals it up so the sperm can’t get in.”



Gloria makes a vulgar joke and they laugh. “Where did you get it?”



A secret smile spreads across Concepción’s face and she doesn’t answer Gloria’s question. Instead she hurls the diaphragm, case and all, into the river. It bobs on the surface for a moment, propelled by the surf hitting its concavity, and is swept downstream onto the waiting hooks of the fishermen.

 



When I am sitting at home in my bedroom after my 10 p.m. curfew has passed, I like to think about my grandmother when she was my age. She grew up in a village in Poland full of cows, horses, and pink, milk-fattened children, and life went on more or less as you would expect it to until she was 17 and her father came into the family’s stable to find her screwing the stable boy on top of a trough of oats. From that time on they began locking her in the house, and she was only allowed to go to church and to the market when accompanied by her mother. It was winter, the pond in the middle of town had frozen over as usual, the other kids were allowed to skate on it, and I bet it was cold as shit in that house because her parents were too cheap to invest in a wood stove or whatever the fuck they used back then. The village children used to throw chestnut shells at the window of her bedroom and yell, “witch, witch!” and she would open the window and scream obscenities at them until they ran away crying.



When she was 20 her parents decided the thing to do was to marry her off to a man with a taste for crazy women—the sort of man who gets his rocks off dominating or domesticating them. Her first husband was about 35, an ethnic Russian, with a handlebar mustache. He looked like a Cossack rapist and that was more or less the scene in their bedroom on their wedding night. Ewa threw a vase at his head and then shook a wooden chair at him like a lion tamer; he grabbed the chair by one leg, threw it aside, and dragged her to the bed by her hair. When her mother came to visit the next morning and saw she had been crying she assumed her virginity had been restored miraculously in the conjugal bed. She made the whole family go to church every day for a month, Ewa consoling herself by passing dirty notes back and forth with the usher in the lining of a psalter.



Ewa’s bastard of a new husband locked her up in the house, too, but being alone all day she was able to devise new ways of entertaining herself, like standing at the window and lifting up her blouse every time she saw a peasant on the road with his cart; or taking logs out of the wood stove and watching them glow orange-red with the heat, and then using them to scorch patterns on the floor. Her husband beat her every time he saw evidence of the latter hobby, and so one night when he came in late from drinking with the whores in the village tavern she was waiting for him in the kitchen brandishing one of those glowing logs. When her father opened the stable door in the morning he found her brushing the horse and applying a piece of ice from the frozen pond to the black eyes her now-ex-bastard-husband had given her.



Her parents thought about sending her off to starve in a remote village where she would know no one, although probably she would have liked that a lot better than being stuck in a house in the back-fucking-woods with her own family. Unfortunately, she was so beautiful and her small dowry so coveted in her shitty little village that even though the full story of her marriage to the Cossack rapist was common knowledge, there was another idiot waiting in line to marry her once the swelling had gone down. He had been one of the children who had called her a witch and thrown chestnut shells at her window, and he had a condition that made his eyes run with pus no matter the season. Her family was pleased: it would be a better way of punishing her than sending her to one of those licentious convents you read about in books.



Her new husband was full of drippy talk about loving her from afar and the backward attitudes of their time towards women and her blue eyes and her long, dark hair. Do you think my grandmother gave two shits about this, when the bastard had talked to her parents and locked her in the house all the same? She would stand in front of the dirty, scummy, cracked mirror that was one of about five pieces of furniture in their house and say, I’m going to grow old here, in this piss-poor little village where the men are ugly, the livestock freeze to death every winter, and the shitty little pond will never become a lake.



She did what she had to do which was to continue her occupation of lifting up her shirt for passers- by on the road from Krakow to Lodz. Over the years she had collected a handful of regular admirers who would come and whisper dirty things to her through the window while she pressed her breasts to the glass above their heads. One of these, who came back and forth down the road on his horse about three times a year, had a well-trimmed mustache and no holes in his coat. He was the most perverse of her admirers and would sometimes whisper words she didn’t even know when talking about what he would like to do to her. (And she had developed quite a vocabulary through her correspondence with the church usher.) This winter, when he approached her window, she told him that if he let her travel with him, he could indeed do whatever he liked to her.



As they tore through the sad, shitty village on his horse, she sat backwards in the saddle and lifted her blouse up high, in full view of everyone, on her way through the town square, past her parents’ house, past her husband working in the fields. (His buckshot missed them both, thanks to his clouded, runny eyes). She cackled and screamed vulgarities and conjured Satan, asking him to make every woman in the town barren and every man syphilitic. Her eighth night on the road with the pervert, who was indeed a pervert, she absconded with a stranger she met at an inn—and again a few weeks later, with another stranger. In this and similar ways she made her way through the countryside, over the course of a year or so, towards Western Europe and then America.



Her only regret in life, she told me on her deathbed, was that she had not been born thirty years later and in California, which to her was a golden land where all the roads are freeways, and where the favorite pastime of the young women is to go screaming down them in their convertibles at ninety miles an hour, waving their tits at the oncoming traffic.