“Who’s Chris Kraus?” she screamed. “She’s no one! She’s Sylvère Lotringer’s wife! She’s his ‘Plus-One’!” No matter how many films she made or books she edited, she’d always keep being seen as no one by anyone who mattered so long as she was living with Sylvère. “It’s not my fault!” Sylvère yelled back.
But she remembered all the times they’d worked together when her name had been omitted, how equivocal Sylvère’d been, how reluctant to offend anyone who paid them. She remembered the abortions, all the holidays she’d been told to leave the house so Sylvère could be alone with his daughter. In ten years, she’d erased herself. No matter how affectionate Sylvère’d been, he’d never been in love with her.
(The first night they ever stayed together in Sylvère’s loft, Chris asked him if he ever thought about history. At that time Chris saw history like the New York Public Library, a place to meet dead friends. “All the time,” Sylvère replied, thinking about the Holocaust. It was then she fell in love with him.)
“Nothing is irrevocable,” Sylvère said. “No,” she screamed, “you’re wrong!” By this time she was crying. “History isn’t dialectical, it’s essential! Some things will never go away!”
And the next day, Monday, January 30, she left him.
PART 2: EVERY LETTER IS A LOVE LETTER
Love has led me to a point
where I now live badly
’cause I’m dying of desire
I therefore can’t feel sorry for myself
and —
Thurman, New York
Wednesday, February 1, 1995
Dear Dick,
I’m writing to you from the country, the Town of Thurman in upstate New York. Yesterday I drove up here without stopping except for gas in Catskill at the Stewart’s store. Tad’s moved back to Pam’s in Warrensburg. The house is empty and it’s the first time I’ve been up here alone. It’s funny how I don’t feel lonely, though. Maybe it’s the ghost of Mrs. Gideon. Or maybe ’cause I know the whole Thurman cast of characters from buying wood and fixing up the house and working at the school. The Adirondack Times reports on local happenings like Evie Cox’s visit to the podiatrist in Glens Falls. Somehow this redneck town allows the possibility of a middle-aged New York City woman bouncing round a house alone more generously than Woodstock or East Hampton. It’s a community of exiles anyway. No one asks me any questions ’cause there’s no frame of reference to put the answers in.
For several days now I’ve been wanting to tell you about an installation I saw last week in New York. It was called Minetta Lane —A Ghost Story, by Eleanor Antin, an artist/filmmaker who I don’t know very much about. The installation was pure magic. I sat in it for about an hour and felt I could have stayed all day. It was at Ronald Feldman Gallery on Mercer Street. You entered it through a sharply cornered narrow corridor—the white sheet rock of the gallery abruptly changed to crumbling plaster, rotting slats and boards, rolls of chicken-wire and other prewar tenement debris. You stumbled over this stuff the way you stumbled up the stairs, maybe, if you were lucky enough to’ve lived in NYC in the ’50s when people still lived this way, on your way to a party or to visit friends. And as you rounded the last corner you came to a kind of foyer, a semi-circular wall with two large windows mounted on one side and a single window mounted, slightly higher, on the other.
There was a single wooden chair in front of the two windows and you sat down in it uneasily, not wanting to get your feet covered in plaster dust (I can’t remember if the dust beside the chair was real or not). Three films played simultaneously in each of the three windows, rear-projected against the window panes. The corridor’d led you to this point so you could attend a kind of seance, becoming a voyeur.
Through the far-left window a middle-aged woman was painting on a large canvas. We saw her from behind, rumpled shirt and rumpled body, curly rumpled hair, painting, looking, thinking, drawing on a cigarette, reaching down onto the floor to take a few drinks from a bottle of Jim Beam here and there. It was an ordinary scene (though it’s very ordinariness made it subversively utopian: how many pictures from the ’50s do we have of nameless women painting late into the night and living lives?). And this ordinariness unleashed a flood of historical nostalgia, a warmth and closeness to a past I’ve never known—the same nostalgia that I felt from seeing a photo exhibition at St. Mark’s Church a few years ago. There were maybe a hundred photos gathered by the Photographic/Oral History Project of the Lower East Side of artists living, drinking, working, in their habitat between the years 1948 and 1972. The photos were meticulously captioned with the artists’ names and disciplines, but 98% of them were names I didn’t know. The photos tapped into that same unwritten moment as Antin’s show—it was the first time in American art history, thanks to allowances provided by the GI Bill, that lower-middle class Americans had a chance to live as artists, given time to kill. Antin recalls: “There was enough money around from the GI Bill to live and work in a low-rent district… Studios were cheap, so were paints and canvases, booze and cigarettes. All over the Village young people were writing, painting, getting psychoanalyzed and fucking the bourgeoisie.” Where are they now? The Photographic/Oral History Project show transformed the streets of the East Village into tribal ground. I felt a rush of empathetic curiosity about the lives of the unfamous, the unrecorded desires and ambitions of artists who had been here too. What’s the ratio of working artists to the sum total of art stars? A hundred or a thousand? The first window did the job of shamanistic art, drawing together hundreds of disparate thoughts, associations (photos in the exhibition; lives; the fact that some of them were female too) into a single image. A rumpled woman paints and smokes a cigarette. And don’t you think a “sacred space” is sacred only because of the collectivity it distills?
And then there was strange magic in this window too: a magic that would connect this window with the very different states depicted in the other two. After several minutes a little girl wearing a velvet dress and a large bow walks into the frame, the painter’s “room.” Is this girl the woman’s daughter? Is she the daughter of a friend? It’s certain right away that the little girl lives in an entirely different metabolic and perceptual universe than her mother/caretaker/older friend. The canvas holds no particular appeal, though she’s not pointedly disinterested in it either. She looks at it, then drifts away to look at something (us?) outside the window. Then this gets boring too, (She’s got so much energy!) So she starts jumping up and down. Up ’til now the painter has been just peripherally aware of the little girl. But now she puts her brush down, lets herself glide into the game. The woman and the little girl jump up and down together. Then that moment passes too and the woman’s drawn back into her work again.
(This installation grounds the structuralist fascination with the minutiae of varied states of concentration, passing moments, in the only thing that gives these moments any meaning: history and time passing through other people’s lives…)
Through the second window on the right-side of the painter, a young couple cavort in a tenement kitchen bathtub. The girl’s pale blonde, maybe 16, laughing, splashing water on her partner, a tall Black man in his 20s. They slip and slide, arm wrestling in and out of soggy embraces. It’s not clear which one of them lives here (perhaps they both do, or maybe it’s an apartment that they borrow?). At one point the little girl wanders out of the painter’s window in this apartment chomping on a sandwich. She sits and eats, watching them from a ledge above the tub.