Accretions of Things
General Conversation with Judith Brotman
This piece is written after a conversation with Judith Brotman conducted in her studio on a rainy day. This being our first introduction it was a joy to write and I hope it does her work justice. If this if your first time being introduced to Brotman, then I’m happy to continue along this chain of introducing.
I. And the Skies Opened Up
I was talking with a coworker of mine the other day about how to properly impart to our students the importance of networking in their artistic careers. For many students this feels like a besides-the-point element of what should otherwise be a (usually) studio based practice; even to say artistic careers feels wrong for me as well. Work should speak for itself, so why is it that opportunities come from something as seemingly business minded as the act of networking? I come down on the idea that more than a business practice networking in art stems from a concerted intention of kindness and caring, to truly believe in and be attentive to what others are doing. It’s a belief that art is necessarily social, and we are all a part of that orbit.
About a month and a half ago I received an email from a dear colleague and friend Amy Vogel introducing me to Judith Brotman, a Chicago based artist and former professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I was loosely familiar with Brotman, having heard her name around before, but I was mostly unfamiliar with her work. In the introduction Vogel noted that Brotman was currently looking for people new to her work who would be interested in doing a studio visit. I immediately jumped at the chance as it seemed to be right in line with what I’ve been trying to do here, engage in the exchange of ideas to produce something that grows out of the conversation. The visit itself got pushed off a few times, but eventually we made it work and I biked over to her studio on an overcast day, warm and sticky, and yet ominous, the way only clouds full to burst with rain seem to be able to impose.
I biked up to the studio with the rain less like a promise and more like a threat, but still at bay. I was immediately greeted by Brotman whose kind and generous demeanor and gratefulness at my coming poured out infectiously. We made our way to her studio and began our conversation surrounded by small yet intricate collages and organizations of indecipherable, seemingly ritualistic writing on Kleenex transformed and adorned with various accoutrements including feathers, threads and beads. As if walking into the mind of the very person I was to speak to I found myself circling around and around with my eyes caught up in the vortex of a mystical and personal language that yearned to reach out and speak with me. It was equal parts shouts and whispers, and I was immediately drawn in to the details embedded in what was clearly a series of fragments moving themselves into momentary positions which would dissipate and reassemble just as soon as I left the room.
From the jump Brotman made it clear the importance that various mystical and spiritual practices had on the way she approached this work. In particular she referenced the Zohar, a foundational work of Kabbalistic literature. While she herself came to these texts for the mystical and spiritual elements, and the work pulled from it, the interest was not itself necessarily religious by nature. It was in a certain incomprehensibility of the texts that drew Brotman in, the poetics of the text as it stood, poetics which Gregg Bordowitz has defined as “nothing less than how you put stuff together.” The work to me seemed to be a part of these and other various traditions from many sources, one amongst many, and we discussed the importance of text as mark and the kind of performative elements which helped to guide the practice. And it was with this introduction that outside the rain began to pour as if the heavens themselves wished to join the conversation.
II. Decreation and Prayer
Brotman did not set out at first to become an artist. Her’s was a life originally dedicated to the medical profession, yet, like many artists, she found her way from one field to another. The travel between is often never long enough to warrant separation, but that is another thought altogether.
Or perhaps. There is something to be found in these kinds of cross-displicinary musings, whether you wish to call it interstitial art, interdisciplinary art, multidisciplinary, so on and so on. Inadequate terms for a world already too promiscuous to be properly classified. Planting one’s feet firmly in this figure-ground, the point from which the disciplines bleed, feeling the land extend, seems to me the surest place to start in understanding what it is Brotman has begun to do in her recent and ongoing works post-retirement. While we will in time return again to this medical idea and its possible application in understanding this work, I want to take a detour towards another whose work thrives in that ground we’ve planted our feet: Anne Carson, a classicist whose breadth and scope of output is the definition of promiscuous.1 In particular I want to look at her essay Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete, and Simone Weil tell God which will bring us these three women with whom I believe there is an important link in understanding what Brotman is doing in her work, and what kinds of legacies she continues; for mysticism of her kind thrives in legacy.
In her essay Carson engages with these three historical figures, who’s work in regard to G*d and love has in turns come up as only fragments to us, gotten the author burned at the stake for heresy, and been a life’s work which contributed (arguably) to that life’s brevity. Sappho, Porete, and Weil are not simple figures to draw into our orbit, as Carson notes, and will necessarily be complicated links in this chain, but I find that the more complicated a chain, the more useful it can be (think here of Fleetwood Mac, and the witch-ness of Stevie Nicks in particular). Carson focuses in on the tripartite figure of jealousy that runs through each of these figures works, and places them in a three part essay with four parts. (The intensity of the 1997 performance of Silver Springs by Fleetwood Mac is maybe instructive here to understand the more complex ideas of jealousy at play.)2
It is a complicated and at times frustrating practice to engage with these three writers, and is typified in Carson’s note that at Porete’s trial, the men who put her on trial referred to her as a fake woman whose work was filled with errors and heresies. The three woman in this essay entered what Carson referred to as a “zone of absolute spiritual daring” and, using Weil’s concept of decreation—the decentering of the self to arrive at G*d, as, in her words, the “I” is the only true thing we own so it is that which we must give back unto G*d—notes that they worked to undo the creature, the self, in themselves, but in order to do so they had to move through the self, to the very inside of its definition. It’s work that is paradoxical in its written form, as Porete notes, it is those who talk of G*d who have “never felt the true kernel of divine Love,” and yet each of these writers insisted on this writing. Could they have done anything else? But this contradiction is important, and for Weil the beginning of a dialectics of joy:
“Contradiction alone is the proof that we are not everything. Contradiction is our badness and the sense of our badness is the sense of reality. For we do not invent our badness. It is true.”
To accept the true badness of being human is the beginning of a dialectic of joy for Simone Weil:
“If we find fullness of joy in the thought that God is, we must find the same fullness in the knowledge that we ourselves are not for it is the same thought.”3
This dialectics of joy is embedded in the dialectics of something and nothing, presence and absence. Ultimately any simplicity of depiction is of no use to us here, as Carson states, “Society is all too eager to pass judgements on the authenticity of woman’s ways of being…”4 And so this contradiction must stand, or as Ursula K. Le Guin would have it, that if to put something you want in a container is, in fact, another way to tell the story of being human besides the Story of the Ascent of Man the Hero then perhaps she is human,
Not, let it be said at once, an unaggressive or uncombative human being. I am an aging, angry woman laying mightily about me with my handbag, fighting hoodlums off. However I don’t, nor does anybody else, consider myself heroic for doing so. It’s just one of those damned things you have to do in order to be able to go on gathering wild oats and telling stories.5
Two things will return us now to Brotman’s work, place them in your handbag if you will. Carson’s comment on prayer, that Porete, a Christian, never did and Weil, never an official Christian, was invested in, as well as the kletic hymn, that Sappho used, and its relationship to Porete’s conception of G*d as the FarNear, will help us return. “Why should the truth not be impossible? Why should the impossible not be true? Questions like these are the links from which prayers are forged.”6
It is prayer which fully acknowledges the FarNearness of G*d, and it is a prayer fragment, a kletic hymn, of Sappho’s found “scratched on a shard of pottery by a careless hand”7 which requires the absence of Aphrodite to seek her presence, that gets us at the intensity of prayer as a practice; as performative utterance. That earlier dialectic obliterated in favor of relation. For in Brotman’s mysticism and spiritual understandings of her own practice, while they may not stray as deeply into belief in G*d as these other three women, is a practice that I’ve found opens up when understood through the performance, and in particular practices that align with what it is prayer attempts to do.
III. “…comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable…”
Towards the end of our conversation, Brotman brought up the perennially misquoted phrase about comforting the afflicted, and afflicting the comfortable. We talked a bit about its history of misquoting and what role it could possibly have in her practice—a practice she is sure to note has a darkness within it—which like the work of the three writers above, is more complicated than we would otherwise normally prefer. That complication is embedded in the very quote we’re to look at, which in all actuality, while it’s been utilized by many, can be attributed to a newspaper character Mr. Dooley created by Finley Peter Dunne, both of whom were from Chicago. Originally written in what would be referred to as an Irish brogue—a term originally used to denigrate the Irish accent—the original quote without the writerly affectations of Dunne reads, “The newspaper does everything for us. It runs the police force and the banks, commands the militia, controls the legislature, baptizes the young, marries the foolish, comforts the afflicted, afflicts the comfortable, buries the dead and roasts them afterward.”8 It was a condemnation of the dominant news media at the times insistence on focusing too heavily on minutae of the world, something all too familiar to those of us now.9 But much like the Jester’s Privilege, the words of Mr. Dooley hold the multitudes that allows this quote to come through the century in so many forms. How something is said is just as important as what is said.
In Brotman’s work this quote is something of the aspirational and the specificity of the medical and the contradiction of the prayer both hold sway over the what is that the work attempts to get at. Health of both the body and the spirit are of concern here. As I noted earlier the fragmentary nature of the work, its ability to be reworked and rearranged and coalesce only in moments of installation lend itself to this kind of responsive nature.
The medical: when understanding approaches to the health of the body, it is the specific that must be accounted for, a deep accounting for the environmental as well as the internals of the body allow for diagnosis to get us near to what is needed. In the deep accounting for the materials which come into play in her work, Brotman draws from sources of all kinds in her own personal archive as well as the archive of the world as it exists around her.
The prayer: as a deeply meditative and attentive practice her utilization of repetitive written practices towards mark making, as well as the sewn elements as their own mark making, have us engage in the smallest acts of prayer. Prayer here is that which communes with that which is far and that which is near. Or as Porete puts it in reference to G*d, “His Farness is the more Near.”10
This straddling of the medical and the prayer, and the two distinct instillation practices that occupy Brotman’s studio, both have something of the dialectic method in them. It is a dialectic method complicated by the emergence of the third thing borne out by a holistic practice that she practices. The container of the installation, the relation which obliterates the dialectic. Much like the tripartite that comes from the works of Sappho, Porete, and Weil, we don’t arrive at something so simple and processable as our current contemporary condition would allow us to usually occupy ourselves. It is the impossibility of Weil’s dialectics of joy, which just as we approach it, disappears.
Installation as an artistic practice lends itself to the aesthetics of the overwhelm. Something which engulfs us as we experience it. It feels like the proper analog of a shock doctrine world which we live in that Brotman cannot help but look to as she engages in these personal practices dedicated to exhibition, to the welcoming in that it necessitates. Another quick detour: Louise Bourgeois in discussing her Personnages notes that of importance for her is what she called the trilogue (three people relating), “Three is a good number to create relationships, generally a more interesting dialogue than with just two.”11 And she goes on to note that in these works, there was a fragility, or for our purposes a vulnerability, which was the personality of the object, and makes a note of some of the danger inherent in the presentations of this personal work. This seems to be no less true of Brotman and her installations. To engage for a moment with a secret third series of works she had sent to me, there is another underlying vulnerability here. In a series of vertical videos tied together the work shows Brotman is various guises, in various masks, singing songs of her life. Acapella, they are processed through Brotman, engaging the importance of them in her life, while expressing them outward in a new light. It’s these small moments, that seem to operate a bit like memorial, a bit like theatre, a bit like prayer. Brotman’s engagement with the video as her own engagement with the FarNear.
It is in the end, this accretion of things, the performance of the practice, this gathering of elements into something of a full-of-holes holistic practice, that characterizes for me the deeply mystical aspects of her work. Brotman presents to us an unencumbered way of thinking with the work which demonstrates and then asks us if we’d like to join her. At one point in our conversation she noted that, for her, there was nothing more exciting in teaching than the moments that her students proved her wrong, did something exceptional, or pushed what anyone thought possible. Brotman’s work asks us to live in that. “Why should the truth not be impossible? Why should the impossible not be true? Questions like these are the links from which prayers are forged.”
Her collection of writings called Short Talks started as drawings, turned into short talks, lost the drawings, and have been at times referred to as lectures, talks, poems, and have been published in collections of short stories and essays. And this is only of her collections.
That this song came on in the cafe after I wrote this line this can only be seen as an important coincidence in our matrix of thinking. Nicks asserts herself.
Anne Carson, “Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete, and Simone Weil tell God” in Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera, (New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 2005), 172.
Ibid, 180.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, (Cosmogenesis, 2024), 31.
Carson, Decreation, 178
Ibid, 178.
Finley Peter Dunne, Observations by Mr. Dooley, (1902).
This is often what is referred to as pseudo-events, which are events created explicitly to be understood as events by the media to fill space. This began in earnest with the increase in newspaper frequency through the creation of the telegraph.
Marguerite Porete quoted in Carson, Decreation, 176.
Louise Bourgeois quoted in Michael Auping, “Louise Bourgeois: Personagges,” in 40 Years: Just Talking about Art, (Fort Worth: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 2018), 23.