Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,39

knew then, just inclinations and excitement from the work of writers like Pauline Kael, George Orwell, Susan Sontag, Jorge Luis Borges.

What I learned there was immeasurably valuable. I was trained in resourcefulness in how to find out things, in ruggedness about meeting deadlines, in how to organize a story and verify facts. I was instilled with a commitment to precision with language and accuracy with data and a sense of responsibility toward readers, subjects, and the historical record that still matters to me.

Just before my first year began, the hotel in the Castro was sold, and the new owners laid me off after promising not to. Desperate, I talked my way into a waitress job at an Italian restaurant just opening, but my inability to remove corks without a graceless struggle was one of the reasons that didn’t work out. Had I been better at sales and service my fate would probably have been worse. I trudged over to UC Berkeley’s work-study office, disclosed my plight, and got my chance to apply for one of the jobs they orchestrated and partially financed. I pursued one at the Sierra Club and one at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, both of which were offered to me. I went with the museum, for reasons I no longer remember; I still work with both institutions from time to time.

That the gracious women in pearls and pumps who made up the research/collections department hired me still surprises me. I had gone for my interview wearing a baggy men’s suit from a thrift store, pants held up with a cowboy belt, and my new rockabilly haircut, short on the sides and frothing into a pompadour on top. (I had thought I’d look tough and androgynous when I chopped off my long hair, but instead it curled when it was relieved of its own weight; toughness was an ideal I aspired to without success, at least as an aesthetic.)

Those women must have seen something in me, because they soon promoted me from rote filing work and set me to do serious research. I was there every Tuesday and Thursday for the next two years, and full time in the summer between my first and second years of graduate school. It was the best job I ever had. The museum, which had been the second modern art museum in the country, was preparing for its fiftieth anniversary in 1985, and I was helping with the catalogue of the permanent collection’s highlights that would be published on the occasion, the first time I produced content for a book. I was researching major works of art, and it was the beginning of an education in modern and contemporary art.

I was handling Matisses, Duchamps, Miros, Derains, and Tamayos (I don’t think I worked on anything by a non-male artist, though I was excited by San Francisco art historian Whitney Chadwick’s recuperation of the reputations of the women surrealists and the emergence of Frida Kahlo as a cultural icon in those years). I was putting together a dossier on each piece—sales and ownership history, exhibition history, a bit of information on the life and work of the artist at the time of its creation, contextual material on related works, and more. For two years I wandered in and out of storage spaces, file rooms, library stacks, typing up data on a big electric typewriter, corresponding by letter with scholars, solidifying the biographies of a few dozen works of art and broadening and deepening my own sense of art history.

I worked directly with paintings in the course of documenting the labels and inscriptions on their back sides. I went into the basement to catalogue Marcel Duchamp’s Boite-en-Valise, a little suitcase with miniatures of his major works of art, and the brief covetous moment I had—my boyfriend at the time loved his work—faded when I realized that every work of art lives in its context, and a stolen work of art has to exist outside of it, silenced, unable to circulate in the conversation from which it emerged. That storage basement had other lessons to impart: it contained some art that would probably never be shown again—paintings and other items that had seemed significant in their time but been written out of history or never written into it, odd trends and faded heroes, movements that had lost their sheen, detours from the official road