Selfish Ghosts – by Heather Taylor-Johnson
ISLAND | ISSUE 165
It’s 1978–79 and in an abandoned warehouse in New York City, at a diner slightly out-of-focus, on a crowded subway pistoling through Brooklyn, seen pissing in a toilet in a dilapidated cubicle is Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud’s in Coney Island and at the Hudson River sex piers. He’s shooting up heroin. He is masturbating. He is pointing at Jesus graffitied on a wall. He is holding a gun to his head. Says multi-form visual artist David Wojnarowicz of the more than 200 photographs he took of his friends – and possibly himself – wearing a cut-out photocopied Rimbaud mask, ‘I had Rimbaud come through a vague biographical outline of what my past had been – the places I had hung out in as a kid, the places I starved in or haunted on some level.’[1]
When he was a teenager hustling on the streets for survival, Wojnarowicz read Rimbaud’s poetry and connected with his passion for an anguished art, one that celebrates the outsider through drama. Born 100 years apart – Rimbaud in 1854, Wojnarowicz in 1954 – they both had fathers who’d deserted them and mothers they weren’t fond of. They shared hard upbringings (though Wojnarowicz’s was more pointedly violent) and ran away from home. Neither was straight, and though homosexuality and sodomy were illegal, neither hid it. They were known as drug users, alcohol abusers, and they’d both been shot. They each died at 37 years old – Rimbaud from cancer and Wojnarowicz from AIDS. They’re legends in their fields, and their art is still widely consumed.
One way to look at David Wojnarowicz’s Arthur Rimbaud in New York series is to see it as a kind of autobiography, where the ghost of Rimbaud infiltrates Wojnarowicz’s story. On a motorbike, outside a peepshow and under the body of a naked man, two histories meet, and they look like Rimbaud. Despite Brian Butterick, John Hall and Jean Pierre – Wojnarowicz’s friends and lovers – having been named as models for the series, the coinciding histories also look like Wojnarowicz. It’s a melding of identities. A lie to get at the truth.
“On a motorbike, outside a peepshow and under the body of a naked man, two histories meet, and they look like Rimbaud ... It’s a melding of identities. A lie to get at the truth.”
***
It’s the night before Christmas Eve in 1888, and in a yellow house in Arles, France, at a wooden table in a dark inn, on a bitterly cold and wild night, seen with a razor in his hand is Vincent van Gogh. Van Gogh’s at his easel and at the brothel. He’s drinking absinth. He is masturbating. He is pontificating the bounty of God. He is holding a razor to his ear.
I have been haunting Vincent van Gogh, or he has been haunting me. I imagined him as if he’d had a full-blown Ménière’s attack the night he mutilated his ear. I granted him deafening noise in his left ear. I gifted him urgent vomit and thoughts of death. Wait – let me haunt David Wojnarowicz for a minute: I had van Gogh come through a vague biographical outline of what my past had been – the illness I hung out with when I was a woman his age. I both filled him and starved him with it. I haunted his story.
***
A second way to look at the Arthur Rimbaud in New York series is this: if mask amounts to identification but a mask, in its truest form, never reveals the person beneath it, how can we ever identify with anyone? How can we ever be ourselves if we’re too busy wearing masks of other people? These questions become pivotal while viewing the final photograph of the series in which a disembodied Rimbaud mask lay discarded on the crumbling pavement. Without a person to don the mask, the mask is nothing but a mask, the artwork nothing but a photocopy of a famous dead poet. It’s as if Wojnarowicz is saying, ‘give up the ghost’, that the ghost, after all, is dead.
“How can we ever be ourselves if we’re too busy wearing masks of other people?”
***
My relationship with art is one-sided. I take and I take and I take. When I consider Emma Jones’s series of photos, Nightstand Collective, this is what goes through my head: You are in a depressive state. You are in bed with severe pain. You are weak. You haven’t slept properly for almost a month. You are exhausted. Your stomach is bloated. You are dizzy. On your bedside table – no matter which of these ‘you’ you are – you might find pills, books, essential oils and vitamins, water, crystals, lotion, pens and a journal. The photographer has captured your nightstand and I’m looking at it, at all of them. They’re so crowded and small. I see you, big in the narrative, and then I see me, huge because I’m haunting you so I am the size of two people. Your vitamins are my memory of D-3, which I bought because my acupuncturist said it might help so I took them religiously while holed up in bed then stopped taking them when I rose, as if I’d learned nothing. Your glass dropper of essential oil is the first time I tried CBD oil, that which has become my new life-companion. I revisit memory so often that I need new settings. This time I’ve landed on your nightstand.
‘I wanted a quiet space where the items could speak for themselves and show the life behind them,’ Jones explains, making invisible people with chronic illness subjects of the work. Bodily, they’re not in the photos. They’re found in the objects on their bedside tables, in the scattered traces of their days. They haunt the salt lamp and the pill boxes labelled with each day of the week, the remote control, the plaque of encouragement and tiny cactus. ‘My nightstand was my nest, and while it was small compared to my old life, it reflected my growing inner world. I would look at my nightstand and wonder about all the other people out there struggling with the “unnamed” disorders that had taken their life down, and I would think about their nightstands.’[2]
In order to understand a person we must begin with their stories, which Jones presents visually. I listen to their stories with my eyes but then I take it too far. I begin haunting each nightstand, too, which means I am in someone else’s earbuds and clock. I take their stories, their identities, and twist them to reflect my own, which makes me a selfish ghost.
“I take their stories, their identities, and twist them to reflect my own, which makes me a selfish ghost.”
***
I think I inhabit other people’s narratives because I’m afraid to really sit with myself, to just let myself be. I’m like the protagonist of a book I recently read by Spanish writer Sonia Hernández called Prosopagnosia, which is about art and lies and identity. My friend’s partner has prosopagnosia, otherwise known as facial blindness. He can’t recognise faces out of context. Say that my friend – his wife – is crossing the road in the city after a meeting with her PhD advisor and her partner just happens to be crossing the road on his lunch break from work, he might see a woman waving at him and won’t know it’s the woman he loves.
In Prosopagnosia, 15-year-old Berta stares at herself in the mirror until she no longer recognises herself because she wants to see things differently from the way we’re taught to see them. As if she’s divorced herself from her body. Her eyes are just eyes, not the eyes that help make up her face. Her nose is simply another object of geometrical lines and curves made up of flesh, nothing related to the total composition of her face. Because each component of her face is separate from the whole, she becomes unrecognisable. She does this with paintings, too, and one day faints while looking at a work of abstract art, trying to dissociate the parts from the whole, trying to locate the perspective she needs to make sense of it.
Berta’s mother is at a crossroads in her life: her partner has left and she worries she’s fat. She considers keeping a diary or blog: ‘That way, I could dissect my problems and look at them from a different perspective, stripping them of dread to the point where I could realise that I was capable of facing up to them. And, by the end, I would be a new woman with a different appearance and a different attitude.’[3] She fails to make the connection between her own game-playing and her daughter’s.
She does not write a diary or blog but begins interviewing an artist for an article (the artist who helped her daughter after she fainted looking at his painting). The interviews are more than interviews for her; they’re philosophical and moralistic, and soon she finds she needs this man to balance her, to fix her, confusing the notion of art with the artist, though in this case he’s not a real artist. The artist she believes is famous Mexican painter Vicente Rojo is only wearing a mask of Vicente Rojo. Beneath he’s anonymous, he is faceless, and it’s a fine way to demonstrate that identifying with an artist or their art to get what you want is at its core a fallacy.
“... it’s a fine way to demonstrate that identifying with an artist or their art to get what you want is at its core a fallacy.”
***
When I’m sick, I think about being sick with enormous regularity and intensity, and when I’m well I still think about being sick. The latter is mostly to do with fear. Post-traumatic stress. The former is part of the process. I’ve written about my relationship to Ménière’s disease for so many years I’ve come to realise I’m basically solipsistic, and I don’t want to be vain all the time. I want to write about Vincent van Gogh, too, but if I carry on about his illness and use it to talk over his art, I’m following a tired trend and not paying due respect to what legacy truly means. I’m trying to find a middle ground.
Like me, the artist was plagued with chronic illness, and though he may not have intended it to enter into his art, it’s entered into mine. I studied his paintings and swallowed his essence so I could regurgitate them anew: art feeding art. I’m reminded of the words Vincent wrote to Theo after a serious bout of illness: ‘People say – and I’m quite willing to believe it – that it’s difficult to know oneself – but it’s not easy to paint oneself either. Thus I’m working on two portraits of myself at the moment …’[4] I’m trying to write a self-portrait. I’m crawling on the horse-battered, rain-driven muddy ground in Arles while the world endlessly spins. I’m in the tissue box on the nightstand of the person with chronic migraines, and in the laptop on the nightstand of the person with fibromyalgia, and in the Ali Smith books on the nightstand of the person with lupus. I know where I belong, though I’m not so sure it’s the right place to be because, in fact, it isn’t me. But I’m trying not to be too hard on myself, drawing strength from Jeanette Winterson who, in a novel about Sappho and Handel and Picasso but not about them at all, writes, ‘There’s no such thing as autobiography, there’s only art and lies.’[5] In putting on van Gogh’s mask and imposing him to put on mine, I can’t see how anyone’s face will be discarded on the decaying street. As a sick woman writing, I welcome the ghost. As a sick woman writing, I am the ghost.
“As a sick woman writing, I welcome the ghost. As a sick woman writing, I am the ghost.”
***
Possibly I’ve completely missed the point of art. I don’t sit with it as if it were a mountain but as if it were a mirror. Last night I watched a documentary on Marina Abramović. If I were to define her art I’d say it’s endurance art, not performance art. She has scrubbed 1500 cow bones clean over four days. Imagine the stink of it. She’s teased and brushed her hair, obsessively, repeating ‘art must be beautiful, artist must be beautiful’ to her audience, her scalp bleeding. She’s leapt into the centre of a petroleum-drenched and burning communist five-pointed star and lost consciousness. She has kneeled, alone and naked, in front of a high-power industrial fan, forcing as much air as she could into her lungs. She lost consciousness again. She’s placed 72 objects on a table and encouraged her audience to interact with them, giving them complete permission to use her body as their canvas – a rose, scissors, a whip, a metal bar, grapes, honey, a scalpel, a feather, a gun, a bullet – and this time she remained conscious throughout, and impassive. After six hours had passed she walked away, tears in her eyes. The audience, shocked by what had occurred, literally ran.
Abramović invites pain into her world and sits with it, enduring. Those who can’t make sense of her art and belittle it as vulgar show and hedonistic play might say that anyone can do what she does – there’s no real talent involved – but why would anyone do such things? My wish would be for them to know this: there is talent in enduring. When trying to explain the difficulty of her art, Abramović said, ‘You have to be like a mountain.’[6]
I love mountains. I’m thinking of a particular one in California, Mount Shasta, which is the kind of mountain I drew when I was a young girl because it is a perfect mountain, triangular with snow on top. I’m thinking about the relationship I have with mountains, how if I’m with them I’m happy to simply sit and be. I remember camping with a view to Mount Shasta, summertime, my children unable to make it to sunset, so exhausted with the day at the lake, and I was exhausted too. I sat with the mountain. It asked nothing of me and I asked nothing of it.
I’m thinking about Jeanette Winterson’s plea in her book Art Objects to sit with art, really sit with it. Be done with the distraction of galleries and focus on the artwork, or don’t focus on it, but be with it. She asks for an hour of our time and acknowledges it won’t be easy. We will think of the art, question the art, and we will think about what we might cook for dinner. We will return to the art and we will think about colour, intention, what we might do with the bedroom that’s soon to become a spare room now that the firstborn is preparing to leave home. We will return to the art again and wonder about the artist, think about how long we have been staring at the art, think about how much longer we still have before our hour is up, think the guard might be wondering if we’re alright, if there’s a reason we’re not moving on to the next work of art, and the next, and the next. I think Winterson is asking us to sit with art as we would a mountain, which just is. Sit with our thoughts, give ourselves over to grandeur so that we might, for an hour, just be. Like mountains, art, too, asks nothing of us.
“I think Winterson is asking us to sit with art as we would a mountain, which just is. Sit with our thoughts, give ourselves over to grandeur so that we might, for an hour, just be. Like mountains, art, too, asks nothing of us.”
Marina Abramović is the art, which means she is the pain. When I watch her performances, I am in her pain. In The Artist is Present, for 75 days and more than 736 hours, Abramović sat with 1554 people at the Museum of Modern Art. In asking people to sit with her she was asking them to sit with the art, for as long as they could manage, looking into her eyes. Blood flow to her legs was dangerously reduced, her abdominal muscles and ribs collapsed, she was dehydrated – it is difficult being a mountain.
I want to be a mountain, but when I sit and be, vertigo moves me, so in looking at van Gogh’s Les Alpilles, Mountain Landscape near South-Reme, for instance, I can’t help but mould the art to fit with my struggle. Because I have vertigo, his frantically wild and full-of-motion mountain grooves become my illness. In this way his art, like Marina Abramović’s endurance art, has let me take whatever I need from it, and I didn’t have to ask. This is why if you watch the documentary The Artist is Present, you’ll notice some of the people who sat with Abramović were moved to tears or shared with the artist a private, connective smile. They are saying: look how I needed you; look how you’ve haunted me.
***
How much of fiction is nonfiction and how much nonfiction is fiction? ‘If we can fictionalise ourselves,’ Winterson writes, ‘and consciously, we are freed into a new kind of communication.’[7] More than words, I think she means new forms. One might be illusive, gauzy, shifting, like this essay. One might be shaped like the novella I wrote in which Vincent van Gogh looks in the mirror and ‘doesn’t look anything like the man he knows himself to be and wonders if this means he’s seeing himself truthfully for the very first time.’ In blurring the lines between fiction and nonfiction, there must be an innate haunting, and if it’s a proper haunting, it should be reciprocal. So: Can you hear me, Vincent? And you, jewellery on the nightstand, can you feel me? How about you, Mount Shasta? Have I created a minuscule quake within your folds? Histories collide: art feeding art feeding art. The ghost is a selfish one, and very hungry. ▼
[1] Cynthia Carr, ‘David Wojnarowicz’ Interview Magazine 31 May 2012
[2] ‘The Nightstand Collective: An Art Project by Emma Jones’ Blanket Sea 13 Feb 2019
[3] Sònia Hernández, Prosopagnosia (trans Samuel Rutter), Scribe, 2021, p 14
[4] http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let800/letter.html
[5] Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies, 1994
[6] Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present, Matthew Akers & Jeff Dupre, Show of Force Productions, 2012
[7] Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery, Jonathan Cape, 1995, p 60
Image: Stefano Pollio
This essay appeared in Island 165 in 2022. Order a print issue here.
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This essay won the Island Nonfiction Prize, which was supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.