Whatever Is Contained Must Be Released: My Jewish Orthodox Girlhood, My Life as a Feminist Artist

Formations

Formations Oval on Left Edge, 1977. Oil on paper. Helene_ebook.indd 66 4/11/12 3:38 PM Detail of transforming Oval on Left Edge, 1987. Helene_ebook.indd 67 4/11/12 3:38 PM In the summer of 1973 I met with the art dealer Betty Parsons in her Bridgehampton summer home to show her my work. I came with only the very first of my Paintings That Change in Time, one of the smallest. I wasn’t going to show up schlepping a big package in my usual bag lady persona. She looked at my tiny painting and without a moment’s hesitation, declared, “This is very large.” Betty traveled to my Berkeley studio to see more of my work, bringing her friend, the playwright Edward Albee, who ignored the paintings on the walls and went straight for my file drawers, without permission. “I want to see what you’re really about,” he had the nerve to say by way of explanation. But there were no clues to the meaning of my art in the drawer—just sanitary napkins, as Albee discovered. Betty showed Paintings That Change in Time in 1975. I could never discuss feminist theory with Betty. She thought my inspiration for the paintings came from the West Coast, but she didn’t see the feminism inherent in the work, the way in which Paintings That Change in Time played with role reversals. With these works, the collector was deriving the excitement of the work in progress instead of the artist. They were about process rather than completion, which I think of as feminist. Betty Parsons at 112 Workshop viewing Breaking with Jagged Edges, 1979. To Betty, action painting was energetic and masculine, inseparable from the American dream. She had an imperialist attitude about American art, seeing the link between the action painting of the 50s and American expansionism. There’s a strong correlation in her attraction to the “legendary ” aspects of the cowboyesque Jackson Pollock and her attraction to the American Frontier mystique. “Picasso could never have done what Jackson did,” she insisted. “Jackson threw down the walls!” “America is at the crossroads,” she wrote for one of her catalogs. “ American artists are at the spiritual center of the world because they have the background of the American Dream.” Betty gave me a second show, Formations, in 1979, in collaboration with the alternative gallery 112 Workshop. In the late 70s I was pouring gallons of oil over panels that lay on the floor, standing over them like an ancient priest anointing Helene_ebook.indd 68 4/11/12 3:38 PM a biblical king. The top layer of oil would form a dry “skin.” With the wet oil beneath, the panels lay prone for months until the outer skin was thick and set. Then I would lift the panels upright, to “midwife” the paintings with other women I invited to the studio. I called these Formations Breaking “The Breakings.” Each time a panel was ready to be lifted, I announced to the other midwives: “Whatever is contained must be released. You are to initiate the breaking, and I will accept it.” The women then raised the panel and leaned it against the wall. The wet oil would pool beneath the dry skin, forming a sac. And the sac, heavy with oil, would break before our eyes. Sometimes the liquid would gush out; sometimes it drizzled; sometimes it dripped. It’s possible that the prayer my Baba taught me in my childhood, the one I recited each time I left the bathroom influenced The Breakings, but I could not bring myself to say that to anyone in the art world. These works alluded to the visceral body that makes us live or die, as opposed to the idealized body of the dominant culture that encourages us to stare at parts of the body, never seeing the whole miracle. The strong pull of the Kabbalah was surely in The Breakings. The too-full sac caused the skin to rupture, spilling and emptying out, and a new formation arose. There cannot be a tikkun (repair) without a shvira (break). The evidence of the moment of birth was in the image of the torn skin. The crystallization forming around the break was akin to a scab that heals a wound. I see The Breakings in my mind’s eye lined up one next to the other on a...