The other day I went digging around in one of my favorite art stores and found a collection of old zines. One of them, titled “I Dreamed I was Assertive” (vol. 11), interested me because the author xeroxed a picture of a medieval-looking Madonna and Child onto the cover. Snippets of handwritten musings on food, Gertrude Stein, Joseph Cornell and Hemingway interspersed with photographs, clip art and doodles was enough for me to decide that I “had” to have it. I bought it for 50 cents.
I felt an immediate kinship with the author, who by page 4, fully admitted her tendency to research obsessively any given topic she might be interested in. At the moment, it was Alice B. Toklas, life partner of Gertrude Stein, who collected cookbooks, and even wrote one. The author’s own fantastic collage of words and images made even more colorful the names of Toklas’s recipes such as “Custard Josephine Baker”, “Violet Soufflé”, and “Pink Pompadour Bass”.
By the end of the zine, the playful entries on food and daily life journeyed toward a deeper inspection of the author’s emotions she came in touch with while cleaning out her dad’s belongings after he died. Much to her surprise, some of the things she found (such as fake birth certificates, calling cards, and gun registrations) revealed a whole life unbeknownst to her and her family. Her dad collected and organized these things from his secret past as meticulously as he collected “more acceptable” things such as stamps and paper rings from cigars.
She wrote, “is it wrong to care about things? In the big picture, not necessarily wrong, but you shouldn’t love things more than people. But in the small picture of our lives, things are so often what define us and make our day-to-day existence bearable. Life should not be lived this way, but sometimes it is the only life we can, or know how to, live. “
The attachment to and self-definition through things is also one of the themes explored in the movie “Grey Gardens” (HBO 2007), which I became slightly obsessed with during the same week I stumbled upon the zine.
As the movie warns us, even beautiful things can turn into trash over time. For the Beales women, the rotting and decay of their things symbolized their own degradation from socialites to hoarders and trash people.
In the directors’ commentary, they mention that Little Edie loved to decoupage. She cut out pictures from old Christmas cards, magazines, newspapers, and wrapping paper, and gave them new life in her correspondence, and on her books and furniture.
This practice of cutting, pasting, and repurposing is what artist Joseph Cornell (1903-1972), mentioned early on in the zine, spent most of his reclusive life working on. Several of his famous “boxes” pay homage to portraits of children. He seemed especially obsessed with the 16th-century Italian princess Bia (the illegitimate child of Duke Cosimo de’ Medici), who died shortly after her portrait was painted. In Cornell’s “Medici Princess” (1952), images of little Bia are neatly cut up and rearranged to produce an unsettling meditation that surely garners viewer responses that are entirely different from the intent of the original painting.
I find it so interesting that the arrangement, disarrangement, and rearrangement of things define not only where we come from, but who we are, who we want to be, what we dream of, etc.
Even though the Beale women ended up in a ruinous state like their things, Little Edie adamantly claimed “my mother gave me a completely priceless life.” (Edie Bouvier Beale 1917-2002)
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- Jessica Lange/Drew Barrymore, "Grey Gardens" (2007)
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- "I Dreamed I was Assertive" (vol. 11)
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- Joseph Cornell, "Medici Princess" (1952)
