Friday, March 9, 2007
How a Solitary Poet of the Past Speaks to 10 Artists of Today
By MARTHA SCHWENDENER
Emily Dickinson (1830-86) fits, almost too perfectly, the model of the eccentric, romantic 19th-century artist. Apart from a homesick year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary and visits to relatives or the eye doctor in Boston, she rarely left her home in Amherst, Mass. She wrote death-obsessed, heartsick, nature-absorbed, achingly precise poems: nearly 1,800 of them, though only seven were published during her lifetime, and without her full consent.
Now she is recognized as one of America’s greatest poets and, along with Walt Whitman, a progenitor of modernism (although when asked if she had read “Leaves of Grass,” she replied, “I never read his book — but was told that he was disgraceful.”)
“Emily Dickinson Rendered,” an exhibition organized by Jennifer McGregor, visual arts curator at Wave Hill, explores the poet’s life, work and relationship with nature through the work of 10 contemporary artists. It is the first in a series of three such exhibitions in 2007; interpretations of Thoreau and Poe and Twain will follow.
Given Dickinson’s near-mythical status, you immediately fear that the exhibition will fall short of its subject. “Emily Dickinson Rendered” has its disappointments, but it also gets some things right.
One is the setting. Wave Hill, the public garden and cultural center in the Bronx (itself a haven for 19th-century writers, Poe and Twain among them), conjures Dickinson’s bucolic Amherst, although on a grander scale, with lawns and gardens that look out over the Hudson River and the Palisades.
Dickinson was also a gardener and kept an herbarium (a book with plants and flowers pressed and preserved between the pages) as a girl. The naturalist connection is the strongest element of this show, although the best work here avoids getting tangled in the details. Instead it follows the lead of Dickinson’s spare, vivid poetry.
Francis Cape, whose carpentry-based installations might be described as Yankee feng shui, has constructed a simple wood screen, enclosing a space that includes a fireplace and a window with a sweeping river view. A plain wooden desk and cabinet are built into the screen’s verso. Above the desk is a color photograph of an anonymous, barren winter landscape. Titled “The Angle of a Landscape,” the first line of a Dickinson poem, the work suggests the atmosphere of Dickinson’s writing room and her self-imposed solitude, as well as the fusion of landscape and larger religious questions in her poetry.
Eileen Neff’s photograph “Dickinson” features a framed landscape mounted on a dull, pinkish-beige wall, next to a sliver of window looking out onto a “real” vista. Ms. Neff takes landscape as a primary motif, but she does not romanticize it or the struggles of the artist trying to describe such scenes. (The work is part of a series focused on writers from Dickinson to Wallace Stevens to Samuel Beckett.) The staggered landscapes mimic the structure of Dickinson’s poetry, the way one image or idea shifts, collapses or opens into another.
Lesley Dill has drawn more consistent inspiration from Dickinson than any other artist in the show. Her work centers on the body and clothing; her two bronze sculptures — one a mask with the words “It is a Lonesome Glee” cut out of it, the other a perforated figure whose simultaneous absence and presence respond to Dickinson’s poem that starts “Dust is the only Secret/Death, the only One” — feel uncharacteristically restrained.
Peter Edlund’s slick landscape and still life paintings, inspired by the Hudson River School, also demonstrate a controlled if somewhat limited meditation on this poet and her relationship with nature.
Other artists present the poet as fussy and unrigorous or, worse, uncritically romanticizing. Meridith McNeal’s “Beside Your Shimmering Doorway” is well researched but drowning in details, a tableau that feels more like a reliquary or an exhibit destined for the poet’s home museum in Amherst. It includes furniture, curtains and upholstery embroidered with maps of Amherst during Dickinson’s day, a paper dress and gloves, period seed catalogs painted with selections from Dickinson’s herbarium and silhouettes of Dickinson’s personal effects made with velvet and vintage wallpaper.
Miranda Maher’s breathless installation, with lengths of cheesecloth cloaking a spiral staircase and her own Dickinson-inspired writings mounted on the stair risers, paints the poet as a kind of romance-novel heroine. Brece Honeycutt’s copper plates in the shape of envelopes, etched with snippets of Dickinson’s poetry and made to accompany flowers that bloom from March to May at Wave Hill, connect nature and poetry in a regional-seasonal-Greenmarket way, although the exercise feels slight.
Valerie Hammond’s works on paper incorporating swirling ink and pencil drawings of dead birds, vines and insects make you long for Kiki Smith, while her flat plexiglass figures with cut-out fragments of Dickinson poems recall Ms. Dill. Stacy Levy’s nylon threads attached to a window catch the western light, an illustration of “The largest fire ever known/Occurs each Afternoon.”
There might even be room for a psychedelic Dickinson, although Marina Zurkow’s “Adventures in Psychotropia pt1 (v1): Brugmansia,” with tiny cartoon videos of bees and flowers, housed in the undersides of stylized plastic, missile-shaped blossoms hanging from the ceiling, feels, of all the works here, the least connected to either the spirit or work of Dickinson.
If this exhibition comes up short, perhaps that in itself is Dickinsonian. Treated as an unschooled “lady poet” rather than an artist during her lifetime, she supplied her own defenses. “Publication — is the auction of the mind,” she wrote, convincing herself, as unsung artists often do, that success in the marketplace meant failure in the form of selling out. Sour grapes, perhaps. But under those circumstances you can’t blame her for not wanting to leave the house.
