Dear Lee,
I texted you earlier today about how Ava went missing during the fires. I’m going up the coast to look for her in a yacht I’ve stolen that belongs to friends of my parents who are away in the Austrian Alps until Christmas. Did you know that the term “yacht” comes from the Dutch word jacht, which means to “hunt”? I didn’t either. It describes a quick and light sailing vessel used by the Dutch navy to pursue pirates around the shallow waters of the Low Countries. I won’t be using this yacht to pursue pirates. For now, I am the pirate.
It’s been so long since we talked. I’ve been cleaning yachts moored in Marina Del Rey all summer and have felt mostly annoyance and disgust at the filth of the wealthy; shower drains filled with pubic hair or traces of semen, and toilets coated with the residue of expensive champagne-induced vomit. But now, I’m realizing it may have been a means to an end.
Going out to search for Ava reminds me that lately I’ve been dreaming about that footage we all shot together on the roll of Super 8 that lay at the bottom of my ‘97 Honda Civic for two years, because I never cleaned out my car and I was too broke to get the film processed. Then it got lost when that truck driver collided with me, and the car was junked. Do you remember what was on the roll? I think that it was mostly scenes we shot at Paramount Ranch, throwing fruit and vegetables at each other and rolling around in the grass. Paramount Ranch is on fire now.
Last week I was at a gathering near Paramount Ranch, in Topanga Canyon. It was a lavish dinner in a cabin owned by some musician. I forget his name but his wife is a famous fashion designer and I was missing you.
On the way back home, I remembered, “formal structure, subversive thought.” That’s what a professor once wrote on the blackboard in a literature course I took on Transcendentalism. She left it there the whole semester and on the last day of classes she erased it and the traces still remained even after she wiped it a second time with a wet cloth. I had a lot of time to look at that phrase and yet, I can’t help but disagree. Formal is a word that makes me yawn. If I were ever a professor I imagine I would write in giant letters, “subversive structure, radical thought,” and then I would erase it immediately.
Then, I got to thinking of cinema as a form of conjuring. In a seance, a ritual, or a holy service, one must set the space, create the right conditions and atmosphere for the spirit world or the divine to enter. It can never be predetermined. The only power one has is the ability to create space for the possibility that someone else will come. That something else will come. What will come for us now that everything is on fire?
Speaking of the occult, what really takes me off guard though, Lee, is how Imani Perry points to many feminist artists who “invoke the character of the trope and magic of the witch, who unlike (Virginia)Woolf do not seek to make the woman artist a patriarch, instead claiming a different designation for the witch/saint and that is simply ‘artist’ “1. Perry brings this up while discussing how Virginia Woolf, in asking for “a room of one’s own,” was essentially succumbing to the patriarchy’s logic of property and sovereignty.
Do you remember the summer when we first encountered the work of Ana Mendieta and spent months trying to find all her films? It was nearly impossible, despite the fact that she made over ONE HUNDRED works that were deeply connected to the natural world, our bodies, rituals, and the thread of universal energy that runs through everything. Finally experiencing her work caused me to realize how much I had been longing for art that is about the body. I desperately needed it…
Maybe it was at the end of that same year we began working so hard for Geoff at his company after he swept in and tried to control our film project. That whole period is fuzzy to me – too many late nights of work bleeding into socializing, or ‘networking’ rather. There was a kind of brainwashed atmosphere around him and how he ran the place, as if stopping work or going home was to court oblivion.
He really managed to warp my sense of desire – it still causes me anxiety when I think about it. I’ll never forget what he told folks one night out at dinner. He said you walked around like you owned the place. Even he couldn’t deny that. It is one of the things I love most about you.
As I’m sure you’ll remember at the young age of thirty six, Mendieta was most likely murdered by her husband, Carl Andre, a white artist who was adored and protected by the art world2. Her vanishing, after so many of her sculptures, performances, photographs, and films referenced the impermanent traces, the forgotten, the washed away, and the disintegrating, is unfathomable–beyond painful, yet endlessly evocative. They used that, you know. They used her past work to say that when she fell out her window in New York City from thirty four floors up it was a suicide, and Andre was acquitted of killing her. But it was well known that she was afraid of heights. I think you understand, Lee, why I’m mentioning this now.
I’m on my way to find Ava and all I can think about is her dancing in Tem’s garage in Mount Washington, in front of all his old motorcycles and greasy tools. She was wearing that long, see-through orange chiffon dress, with pearl beads on it in the shape of the Big Dipper, and her hair was shaved off. In that moment, she could have been a cult leader in the late 1960s, swaying her hips and letting herself fall down dancing.
Silvia Federici wrote an intro to Jesse Jones’s witchy work, Tremble Tremble, called “In Praise of the Dancing Body.” I recently ordered a copy of it from the gallery because unless the exhibition comes to Los Angeles, I know I won’t be able to see it. Federici writes about the body as a site of resistance, and dance as a liberating counterforce to capital. Dance connects us to the intelligent material of the earth, our “inorganic body” that we have been separated from and to which are seeking to reconnect. When we move in dance, we are awakening not only our own thriving potential, but the rhythms and language of all that we have lost. She writes, “Our struggle then must begin with the re-appropriation of our body, the revaluation and rediscovery of its capacity for resistance and expansion and celebration of its powers, individual and collective. Dance is central to this re-appropriation.”3
I caught the aforementioned moment on camera: Ava dancing in the garage, oil stains on the concrete, and the cats meandering in and out of the frame. But I think that was also lost among those rolls of film in the bottom of my old car. Fitting, wouldn’t you agree? Only the memory of such a cinematic scene remains. Hail Mary. I pray I find her.
Love you,
Iona