Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,51

My artists weren’t very well documented beyond those oral history interviews, and they weren’t very visible, though most of them—particularly DeFeo and Conner—got a lot more attention afterward.

The artists’ own works were often a kind of collage, literally: of the six artists central to the book, Jess, Berman, George Herms, and Bruce Conner were known primarily for their collages and three-dimensional assemblages. Jay DeFeo was, like Wally Hedrick, primarily a painter, and one whose work often featured a powerful solitary form, but she too ventured into collage on many occasions, mixing painting and photography and found material. Collage makes something new without hiding the traces of the old, makes a new whole out of scraps without erasing the scrappiness, emerges from an idea of creation not as making something out of nothing, like God on the first day or painters and novelists, but as making something else out of a world already exploding with images, ideas, wreckage and ruin, artifacts, shards, and remnants.

Collage is literally a border art, an art of what happens when two things confront each other or spill onto each other, what conversations arise from the conjunction of difference, and how differences can feed a new whole. For these artists it was also a poverty art, one of scrounged materials from the Victorian houses being knocked down in the black neighborhood around them, the detritus of thrift stores, scraps from magazines. Conner even made his first films out of found footage because he couldn’t afford a camera, and then settled into this recontextualizing as his chosen genre, or mixed found and new footage to make films influential for their inventive editing and pacing.

Putting together this picture of my part of the world as it existed not long before I arrived in it was a paradise of ideas and pattern recognition, perhaps more so because it was the first time I had done so on such a scale. That I was getting to know the past of my own city and region meant that places I had passed through were acquiring new layers of meaning. I was writing about the world up to the point when I had been born into it, and it was foundational work for moving forward in that world. I was writing a cultural history that gave my own part of the world significance and possibility I had not seen before. I was becoming an expert on a subject, and that too had its rewards.

Diving Into the Wreck

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When I wrote that book, I conducted a number of interviews with straight male subjects who thought I might be a groupie of sorts, and demonstrating a deep knowledge of their milieu was one way to dispel some of that: I’m not excited to meet you, I’m excited to reconstruct how it all came together in 1957, and I have most of the pieces but would like to ask you a few things. I remember one of them inviting me to sit on the sofa with him, and putting my tape recorder between us as a tiny barrier; another who seemed frisky with anticipation of some sort of frolic we might engage in; and years of sexual harassment from Bruce Conner, who I tried to keep at bay in part by addressing him as Uncle Bruce and his wife as Aunt Jean, a reminder of, among other things, our age gap. The conduct of the frisky artist seemed to come from something very familiar to me, a sense that since young women are nobody, nothing you do with them is on the record, which was disconcerting to run into while I was making the record of his life and achievements.

As part of my research, I paid to have several short films screened for me at the Pacific Film Archive and Canyon Cinema, but there was one I didn’t see at the time but had read about often in the literature. Works of art you have only read or heard about take on their own dimensions, and often such a work takes on a life in your imagination before you see the real thing. My imaginary film of joyous liberation withered when I finally saw Pull My Daisy. Codirected by the painter Alfred Leslie and the photographer Robert Frank, it had a voice-over by Jack Kerouac.

The film begins with a woman opening the drapes and picking up after her husband: