Last week I arrived in Santa Fe ready to look at some vaginas.
A brief plane ride deposited me in the land of huge sky and dark earth, cowboy lore and indigenous life, chiles both red and green. As I directed my rental car from Albuquerque to Santa Fe, belly full of bright red Carne Adovada, I was ready to compare these real vistas with some of the only images of New Mexico I had received as an outsider: the flora and bones of Georgia O’Keeffe.
The Georgia O’Keeffe museum, per their website, is a “jewel box” collection of works from every era of O’Keeffe’s career. It sits on a side street just off Santa Fe’s central plaza along which Indigenous vendors roll out their blankets to sell turquoise rings and guitar picks and bookmarks kitty corner to slick and shiny shops selling Navajo rugs for thousands. As I walked the perimeter of the plaza, someone unseen beat a drum from within the foliage of the square, stopping only when the sky opened up — rumbles of thunder like shoes banging in a dryer. “Stop the rain dance!” came the wisecrack of a white lady behind me as the road streaked wet and the rain romanced the desert dust coating everything around us into its own atmosphere of smells and color.
I took refuge from the downpour in the O’Keeffe museum and cued up my audio tour. To me, one of life’s great pleasures is wandering alone through a museum with an audio guide, pausing before each painting with a gossamer shroud of melancholy over myself — ‘hmm, yes, this painting reminds me of loss.’
There is something singularly sad about an audio tour, though. It’s the experience of walking, over the course of about sixty minutes, through an artist’s entire life, flattening their artistic journey to a digestible arc. They never knew where they were going; we see where they went then go grab lunch. It’s the exact fallacy that leads so many artists to feel like impostors. We don’t have retrospectives yet. Because why? Because we’re not yet finished.
Petunia No. 2 (1924) drew me into the flower dialogue. The audio tour features a short recording entitled “Learn More About O’Keeffe’s Large-Scale Flowers,” that succinctly describes the rules she broke to create the paintings that became synonymous with her name. With these flowers she discarded the vase, the human eye, even, opting to view the flowers as if through a camera. Close up. Capturing a feeling more than the thing itself.
Throughout the museum, O’Keeffe’s language jumped out at me just as much as her paintings did. Trees. Sky Above Clouds. My Front Yard. Colors: red, black. Door. An O’Keeffe quote emblazons the wall:
Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meanings of things.
As for those career-defining flowers, in her own words she focused on them because she was curious about them. On the plaque beside one of her Calla Lily paintings stood the assertion that she neither loved nor hated them, but painted them to understand what about them provoked such strong emotions in others. No conclusion was offered.
Her work was driven by curiosity, by questions. And at her early exhibitions, critics met her question about the flowers with an answer: these are vaginas.
O’Keeffe resisted this definition all her life. On the topic in 1939 she said:
Well, I made you take time to look at what I saw. And when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower. And you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower. And I don’t.
Maybe it’s due to my woeful undereducation around art history, but I had received a kind of watered down cultural image of O’Keeffe that informed my entry into the gallery. That image goes something like “Flowers = vaginas = girl power!” But biology does not equal gender. And a reading of flowers exclusively as biologically female is as scientifically-misinformed as it is a projection of O’Keeffe’s early critics’ narrow binary thinking. Flowers are both and neither.
So it was both a delight and a kind of deflation to come looking for Girl Boss Georgia and meet an artist that stood for something even more intriguing, slightly sticky, even: the question of whether it’s possible to see without objectifying that which you behold.
Standing in front of Petunia No. 2, it’s easy to see a flower. But in front of others, like Blue Flower (1918), it’s nearly impossible to not cohere those curves and the pronounced golden stamen into anything other than a simple blue flower. It’s a Blue. Flower. Georgia is trying to show you a flower, and the rest is your projection.
(If I may write myself a permission slip to continue to see vaginas in the flowers, I think a queer woman’s experience of seeing herself and the objects of her desire in nature is somewhat different than the misogynists of O’Keeffe’s time saying “Girl Artist = Vagina = Unserious.” But I guess that value judgement is in the eye of the beholder as well.)
O’Keeffe’s exercise in seeing and not seeing is the kind of work many of us are doing all the time, whether we know it or not. When we look at someone we love, or someone we desire, do we see what’s in front of us? Or are we looking at a hundred refracted memories of other lovers, compulsory heterosexuality, dreams and nightmares, received sexual scripts? When we think about chosen pain for the purpose of pleasure, are we feeling that pleasure or drilling through layer upon layer of sediment — capital p Pain, ideas about violence, ideas about abuse. When we reach out for that person we desire, are our hands moving under our own control, or are we acting out someone else’s idea of intimacy, someone else’s gaze? Can we lay our desire out in front of us on pastel white sheets and regard it objectively like a flower? This is desire. This is just desire. This. Is. Desire.
Whether that’s possible perhaps rests on the training of your eye. For that I turn to O’Keeffe’s series of paintings looking through the pelvic bones she found on her walks through the desert. She held the bones up to the sky, peered through their openings, and painted what she saw. In this case, peering through the opening of a pelvis is just peering through the opening of a pelvis. But with this narrowing of her vision, the constraint of sky, she calls our attention to the relative nature of negative space. She asks, “can you really see what you’re looking at?” Constraint providing a place to see exactly what is. Constraint a kind of bondage. Bondage a kind of art.
The last room I moved through at the gallery displayed a work O’Keeffe painted after a river rafting trip she took with friends while in her seventies. On The River I (1965), as the audio guide puts it:
…is a wonderful opportunity to consider the relationship between abstraction and nature. Here we are presented with a composition that looks at first glance like a collage of forms, overlapping areas of color, texture, [that] don’t really add up to anything. We can very easily associate it with a view of nature. However, as soon as we’re told the pink area in the center of the composition is in fact a view of the sky, suddenly the landscape snaps into focus.
To once again hang my own associations on the work, there’s something about submission in that. Everything suddenly resolves from below.
Kink is a practice of learning how to see and how to unsee. Of taking signs and symbols and viewing them through the found pelvic bones of our own experience. Is it possible to look at whips and chains for their form? Power exchange for its function? Maybe sexuality is a place where we can ask whether it’s possible to see what is in front of us for its colors, lines, shapes, and patches of sky.
On the other hand, maybe the flowers, pelvic bones, and all the associations therein, are both within us and without. Maybe we’ll never escape the association, projection, and objectification.
Or maybe curiosity is enough. Asking why the Calla Lily gets people so riled up, then spending so much time on its curves as to forget the question entirely and just feel.
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