Dawn Cerny's new show at the Henry is about death and mourning in the West. Her works are pretty good, especially the hordes of paper doll-type figures caught in the throes of death, many of them with red yarn entrails pouring out. The inclusion of medieval warriors in this collection was particularly charming. There's also a series of watercolors of death-related T-shirts with a modern goth aesthetic (in a clever marketing stratagem, you can buy one of these in a limited edition from the gift shop), which I found impressive in their technique, as Cerny convincingly related the wrinkly, floppy texture of T-shirt material using paint and paper.
The conceit of the exhibit is the comparison of mourning rituals across centuries, highlighting continuity. In the room with the T-shirt paintings are cases of Victorian artifacts and seven taxidermed owls. 19th-century photographs of people in mourning garb and vast flower memorials also decorate the walls.
The most impressive things in this exhibit were intricately woven pieces fashioned from the hair of the deceased. Two were watch chains, one of which was probably three feet long when measured end-to-end and reminded me of the lanyard braids that children make in crafts classes. This, however, was almost excruciating to look at for the fineness of its craftsmanship, knowing that it was made from a material as delicate as human hair. I can't imagine that anyone ever actually used it as a watch chain (though the implication of its role as an anchor of time is appropriate to an artifact of mourning). The other watch chain was much thicker in diameter and was a weave between human hair and gold links. Again, the painstaking labor that went into it was obvious. Finally, and this piece was the most moving for me, there was a locket that appeared to be empty. However, on a closer look, it was in fact upholstered on the inside by finely woven black hair. By invoking the "missing" photograph in the locket, this piece evoked with incredible effectiveness the emptiness inherent in mourning, and the necessarily futile effort to retain the tangible.
Grieving and mourning are a process of coming to terms with the impossible, of accepting "never again". Commonly, the most painful part of death is the survivors' consequent inability to touch the deceased. The frank admission of this, evident in these hair pieces, struck me in contrast to our modern terror of corpses and any of their byproducts. Now, carrying a watch chain or wearing an adornment made of a dead person's hair would seem "creepy" or "morbid" - like the Victorian portraits-in-death of children posed to appear as though they were alive. As stirring as these portraits can be, the works in hair as a sort of Ariadne's thread for the beyond, doomed to fail, were ultimately the most moving pieces in this show, if only for their sheer difference from our rituals of mourning today.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Okay, I give in.
Today, Edward suggested that I start a blog.
I am resistant.
But: I sort of miss writing. And I have lots of faraway friends, who in theory can check up on me here, maybe. Or at least what I think about things. Because this is, I hope, the most I will ever write about myself in these virtual pages.
So Anne Frank and the diary. It's got me thinking about authenticity, and how much that ephemeral concept really matters in the face of universal identification.
Back up. Everyone knows, or can assume, that the version of Anne Frank's diary we get to read is a highly edited version, particularly for the lion's share of us, who aren't wasting our brainspace knowing Dutch and thus read it only in translation. Also commonly known is that many of the edits in the trade paperback version were done by Anne's father, Otto Frank, who wanted to keep at least the skeleton's knuckle bones in the closet. Then came the edits we know the publishing house must have done, anything that went lost in translation, etc. etc. Good.
What most readers with more than a passing interest in Anne Frank find out, is that many of the edits were actually done by the author herself. In 1944, the precocious child undertook the massive project of rewriting her two-year-old diary, with the goal of ultimately turning it into a publishable novel. Inspired by a radio broadcast in which the exiled Dutch government expressed an interest in retrieving "everyday" war documentation when the fiasco finally ended, Anne began at 14 to reframe her own diary, which she had begun two days after her 13th birthday. This revamped version was the "first draft" for much of what was ultimately printed. Okay.
You get to another layer of interesting meddlery when you start to really delve into it - and I mean by reading biographies and tomes like the "Revised Critical Edition," which is 800 pages and probably weighs 10 pounds. What I just recently learned, and what made me ponder this authenticity problem even more, is that the "real" original of Anne's diary for almost the entirety of 1943 no longer exists. What exists is the second version that she wrote out on copy paper in her novelization project following the aforementioned radio announcement. So not only is the entire year of 1943 - the chronological center of what we think of as the diary - an edited version of an edited version, the unedited version is unavailable for comparison.
So why does this matter? (Aside: As I see it, it probably doesn't.) However false and idolatrous our view may be, we see documents like diaries and journals as vehicles of original, untouched and untouchable, authentic truth. And we are moved by a document like Anne Frank's journal because we think it is the ultimate expression of a real person's inner and outer life, her original experiences. We feel like we can get inside her head, like we can identify with her. And knowing that we are actually removed from this real person by several layers of editing somehow disturbs the connection and falsifies our organic experience of truth. Right?
Wrong, for two reasons, the first of which is the more nihilistic. In essence, the sweet authenticity promised by the diary format is an illusion. Anne, who edited her diary with the intention of publishing it, and who hoped someday to become a "famous author," made serious stylistic choices, as conscious and artificial as those made by any author of fiction. Once my friend James suggested a neat project: look at Anne Frank's diary as a work of fiction produced by an adult trying to construct an accurate picture of a life in hiding. As it turns out, he wasn't too far off the mark. The authenticity that is apparently betrayed by the editing and translation of the diary was never there to be betrayed. It is a construct of our minds, hungry to feel like we really knew someone - it's the same general thing that makes us feel like we know Brad and Angelina, etc. For really, anyone who puts pen to paper, fingers to keys, or paintbrush to canvas is picking and choosing, constructing a work that is always self-edited (the possible exception to this is Finnegan's Wake, which is incidentally one of the most alienating works of literature extant). So our disappointment when we think about the diary's "fakeness" is false, because "fake" implies a "real" that doesn't exist.
To take a more optimistic view, the diary is a richer and more authentic historical document, precisely because of the edits. Instead of an ejaculation of adolescent experience onto paper, we are presented with the considered work of a conscious young writer. In addition, we get to see what her father found appropriate to present to the world, and what the publishing houses felt inappropriate. Passages about her beginning menstruation, for example, were left in by Otto Frank but cut out by the first publisher, a moralistic Dutch company. The Germans and Americans, on the other hand, printed them. In the constructed, edited diary, we see Anne as she wanted to be seen; we get clued into the (grieving) father-(dead) daughter dynamic; and we can compare cultural differences between eras and nations, as the Germans and Americans saw fit to include the menstruation passages in the 40s, while the Dutch didn't until later (the 80s? really?). With a more holistic view of what authenticity can mean, Anne's diary actually gains "realness" through every edit, instead of losing. In the meantime, it also becomes a more graceful and readable piece of writing. Now isn't that a nice resolution?
I am resistant.
But: I sort of miss writing. And I have lots of faraway friends, who in theory can check up on me here, maybe. Or at least what I think about things. Because this is, I hope, the most I will ever write about myself in these virtual pages.
So Anne Frank and the diary. It's got me thinking about authenticity, and how much that ephemeral concept really matters in the face of universal identification.
Back up. Everyone knows, or can assume, that the version of Anne Frank's diary we get to read is a highly edited version, particularly for the lion's share of us, who aren't wasting our brainspace knowing Dutch and thus read it only in translation. Also commonly known is that many of the edits in the trade paperback version were done by Anne's father, Otto Frank, who wanted to keep at least the skeleton's knuckle bones in the closet. Then came the edits we know the publishing house must have done, anything that went lost in translation, etc. etc. Good.
What most readers with more than a passing interest in Anne Frank find out, is that many of the edits were actually done by the author herself. In 1944, the precocious child undertook the massive project of rewriting her two-year-old diary, with the goal of ultimately turning it into a publishable novel. Inspired by a radio broadcast in which the exiled Dutch government expressed an interest in retrieving "everyday" war documentation when the fiasco finally ended, Anne began at 14 to reframe her own diary, which she had begun two days after her 13th birthday. This revamped version was the "first draft" for much of what was ultimately printed. Okay.
You get to another layer of interesting meddlery when you start to really delve into it - and I mean by reading biographies and tomes like the "Revised Critical Edition," which is 800 pages and probably weighs 10 pounds. What I just recently learned, and what made me ponder this authenticity problem even more, is that the "real" original of Anne's diary for almost the entirety of 1943 no longer exists. What exists is the second version that she wrote out on copy paper in her novelization project following the aforementioned radio announcement. So not only is the entire year of 1943 - the chronological center of what we think of as the diary - an edited version of an edited version, the unedited version is unavailable for comparison.
So why does this matter? (Aside: As I see it, it probably doesn't.) However false and idolatrous our view may be, we see documents like diaries and journals as vehicles of original, untouched and untouchable, authentic truth. And we are moved by a document like Anne Frank's journal because we think it is the ultimate expression of a real person's inner and outer life, her original experiences. We feel like we can get inside her head, like we can identify with her. And knowing that we are actually removed from this real person by several layers of editing somehow disturbs the connection and falsifies our organic experience of truth. Right?
Wrong, for two reasons, the first of which is the more nihilistic. In essence, the sweet authenticity promised by the diary format is an illusion. Anne, who edited her diary with the intention of publishing it, and who hoped someday to become a "famous author," made serious stylistic choices, as conscious and artificial as those made by any author of fiction. Once my friend James suggested a neat project: look at Anne Frank's diary as a work of fiction produced by an adult trying to construct an accurate picture of a life in hiding. As it turns out, he wasn't too far off the mark. The authenticity that is apparently betrayed by the editing and translation of the diary was never there to be betrayed. It is a construct of our minds, hungry to feel like we really knew someone - it's the same general thing that makes us feel like we know Brad and Angelina, etc. For really, anyone who puts pen to paper, fingers to keys, or paintbrush to canvas is picking and choosing, constructing a work that is always self-edited (the possible exception to this is Finnegan's Wake, which is incidentally one of the most alienating works of literature extant). So our disappointment when we think about the diary's "fakeness" is false, because "fake" implies a "real" that doesn't exist.
To take a more optimistic view, the diary is a richer and more authentic historical document, precisely because of the edits. Instead of an ejaculation of adolescent experience onto paper, we are presented with the considered work of a conscious young writer. In addition, we get to see what her father found appropriate to present to the world, and what the publishing houses felt inappropriate. Passages about her beginning menstruation, for example, were left in by Otto Frank but cut out by the first publisher, a moralistic Dutch company. The Germans and Americans, on the other hand, printed them. In the constructed, edited diary, we see Anne as she wanted to be seen; we get clued into the (grieving) father-(dead) daughter dynamic; and we can compare cultural differences between eras and nations, as the Germans and Americans saw fit to include the menstruation passages in the 40s, while the Dutch didn't until later (the 80s? really?). With a more holistic view of what authenticity can mean, Anne's diary actually gains "realness" through every edit, instead of losing. In the meantime, it also becomes a more graceful and readable piece of writing. Now isn't that a nice resolution?
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