|
1
I dropped in at Ace Art before A Ferocious Longing opened, while Connie Cohen was still at work.
Part of me said it was a mistake to see the installation in
process (the part that knows art as a conjurer's trick, and
doesn't want to see its inner workings). In fact,
A Ferocious
Longing had a meaning for me then
that faded later.
What I saw was a representation of
women's lives (women as mothers). The space was still lit by
natural light, and the passage, the curtained tunnel that
led into the installation, was pink, vaginal. On the
hardwood floor on either side, domestic objects were
scattered: Lamp, baby-bath, tricycle, ironing board. They
were wrapped in strips of flannelette, but recognizable,
familiar, all drawn from the archive of memory. In their
details I saw the imposed delicacy of female culture: lace
in the curtains, cast-iron lace on the treadle of the sewing
machine, everything softened with fabric, hidden, no hard
lines anywhere (Later, when the installation is complete, I
will hear a woman's voice on the tape, describing how hard
it was for her mother to be direct: ". . . She'd say
something, but she'd really mean something else, and you
were supposed to figure it out.").
It was like going back to an abandoned
house, to find pieces of a family's life on the floor. The
children have grown up and left, but the invisible mother
hovers, abandoned among all the mummified objects: Purse,
hat, pumps, just dropped, the shoes wrapped so carefully
that you can see that they are open-toed. These are vamp
shoes; I think of red lipstick stains on cigarettes.
Strange that the vamping, the vaginal
tunnel, led to this, to ironing boards and stoves. There are
things that speak of play, of course, and of adventure:
bicycle, wagon, sled, rocking horse. More chores for the
mother, things to be stooped over, hauled around, cleaned,
put away. On the stage of female destiny, teddy bear and
ironing board are one, and all there was. What we need in
life is love and work, Freud said. He didn't try to describe
the impact of a life of love and work. At that point, seeing
this installation half-installed, the ferocious longing is a
woman's: when children and home have to meet
everything.
I try this out on Connie. Not what I
had in mind, she says. For me, A Ferocious Longing expresses the feelings of children, and what
they feel now, as adults, about their relationship with
their mothers, or, if it is about our mothers' feelings,
it's about what they feel as daughters.
On one level, the wrapping of the
objects in flannelette speaks of warmth and comfort,
bandaging and healing - on another, of being bound,
restricted. . . the way swaddling clothes both comfort and
restrict. Two sides of our experience with our mothers.
Mothering is not just one thing-- or is it? It is
interesting how pure the meaning becomes when you use it as
a verb, all ambivalence and complexity falling away. Connie
and I talk about the iconography of mothers and babies, how
mother love has come to be regarded as the quintessence of
love: pure, free of self-interest.
What magic turns the woman with the
open-toed shoes into a madonna?
And yet, if what happened between
ourselves and our mothers is not well represented by madonna
and infant paintings, how big it remains. How central to
everything that follows: to our sense of our selves and how
worthy we are, to how we connect with others. How
disproportionately long those early years are, and how large
her figure, for better or worse.
2 I stoop and enter the passage. I am
disoriented when I stand up inside. The first section of
curtain is patterned like a wire fence. It fragments the
images on either side. Objects hang in blackness, tipped at
different angles, not grounded, distanced from each other
and from me. They look like debris orbiting in space, lit
with the cold smudged light of stars. A sad light. By the
time it arrives it is millennia old, the star may be
dead.
In the darkness the passage
is the birth canal, like the muscular tunnel you see in
fibre optic photos, yet nothing is living here. Everything
is muffled, numb. Voices on the tape speak of sharply
opposed feelings: yearning and revulsion, comfort and
disappointment.
So much happened in the
narrow spaces on either side of this passage, where we
learned who we were from a mother who may have been
preoccupied with her own pain or resentment, who may have
needed to protect herself from this relationship and these
ferocious needs. On this stage, mother was everything, and
not enough.
Connie spoke of Harlow's
experiments, raising monkeys with various surrogate
machine-mothers. I remember pictures from psychology texts,
the terrible pathos of a little monkey's ancient face,
through its passion making a mother out of a parody of wire
and terry cloth, as we all try to make of our mother someone
who loves us as we want and need to be loved.
There is the sound of
humming. It could be a mother comforting a child. It could
be a mother drawn into herself, unavailable. A woman,
crooning her own old sorrows.
I take a friend to see the
installation. The fabric of the passage touching her face
frightens her. It's terribly claustrophobic, she says.
Another friend says, Look at the scissors dropped on the
floor, their jaws open. This is a dangerous place. Another,
whose mother has moved into the darkness of Alzheimer's, is
transfixed by the memory of her mother ironing. She writes
"I stood looking through the gauze, wishing I could touch
the ironing board, but knowing I was separated from it
forever. Such regret, such sadness. . .".¹
Clearly, A Ferocious Longing is a Rorschach test-- you write your own
story in the darkness.
Each time I visit the
installation my defences against the feelings it evokes are
less effective. The last time, I was taken back within
seconds to a world that seemed empty of possibility. So many
layers protect us from the intensity of these feelings, so
much time, ambivalence, nostalgia, the push-pull of fear and
longing. It's not easy to go back. It's not easy, but
probably vital.
notes:
1.
Sandra Stuart, from a letter to the artist.
Joan Thomas is a contributing book reviewer to
The Globe and
Mail. This response is her first
critical writing about visual art.
|
