Writing 2015
Friends Among Us: Reflections on the Value and Risk of Nepotism in Art
Catherine G. Wagley, December 8, 2015
Corazon del Sol had just arrived in Lisbon, to an apartment she left in the early 2010s, not long after losing someone close. She spent her first night there dreaming about intimacy, she told me over Skype. She woke up tired. “Understandable,” I said. I hadn’t spoken with Del Sol for two months, not since she left L.A. in September 2015. I wanted to know about the time she’d spent in residence at Skogen, in Gothenberg, Sweden. The topic of the residency had been “The Personal is Political,” not a new notion but an especially relevant one, given the artworld’s ongoing obsession with professionalism. “Can’t we release ourselves from the formality that’s become so important to us,” Del Sol asked, “and accept that our personal experiences aren’t separate from our professional ones?” Then we were off again on one of our frequent conversations about how vulnerability and authority can – and should be permitted to – coexist.
Helen Molesworth Upends the Permanent Hang at MOCA LA
Catherine G. Wagley, October 26, 2015
Ruth Asawa spent the summer of 1948 making buttermilk for her teachers, Josef and Anni Albers, in Asheville, North Carolina. She was enrolled at Black Mountain College, where Josef Albers headed the school’s painting program. She didn’t like the buttermilk, but the Europeans who visited the college relished it, which is why the Albers assigned her this job. That same summer, she went running down a hill, carrying a torch – to the strains of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring – with the young artist Robert Rauschenberg, also a student. Asawa, who arrived at Black Mountain not long after leaving a World War II internment camp, could not recall much else about this performance, when prodded in a 2002 interview, except that nothing caught fire. She more clearly, and wryly, recalled acting as an “alarm clock” for Josef Albers so he could wake at 6 a.m., before the fog came up, to photograph the landscape and then return to bed. And she remembered how mean Buckminster Fuller, the architect on faculty, could be. School was not perfect or free from messy egotism, but Asawa stayed three years. She could do what she wanted there. “If it didn’t fit,” she said in 2002, “they’d make a category for you.”
The Conversation: The Young Female Artist as Historian
Catherine Wagley, Spring 2015
“Why Do I Not Know About This,” Margaret Haines writes in an essay about artist Marjorie Cameron, omitting the question mark. “I feel left out of something important, while no one is there to tell me what I have so completely missed.” Haines first came across Cameron in 2009, when she was one year deep in graduate school at the California Institute of the Arts and saw a survey of work by occult-involved filmmaker Kenneth Anger. She remembers being compelled by a figure who appears in Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954). The figure, whom Haines initially perceived as a man in drag, was called Cameron by those who knew her. She lived in greater Los Angeles from the late 1940s until her death in the 1990s. As Haines recalls in the essay, she had “strict red hair, a beak nose, a loose robe.” She struck “deeper and stronger than the white-woman-does-bitch-witch girlyness so connected to women of my generation.” Onscreen, Cameron mimicked and reimagined glamour, subverting the Hollywood divahood practiced by Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, or Marilyn Monroe. But when she began digging for information on Cameron, Haines found the sources limited and at times conflicting. She realized that if she wanted to read about the woman who compelled her, she would have to do the writing herself.