The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman
Elmore Leonard calls it “a winner.” Read the prologue here.
This month: The Blue Tattoo is one of three finalists for the Carolyn Bancroft Prize (best 2009 book on the history of the trans-Mississippi west). The winner will be announced Oct. 1.
Proust suffered from it. Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Perkins Gilman took “rest cures” for it. And though it’s been retired from The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, we all surely have a touch of it: Americanitus (or “neurasthenia”), a nervous condition triggered by the stresses of modern life (which, said Freud, also caused flatulence).
San Francisco artist Alison Pebworth has launched a cross-country research project called “Beautiful Possibility” in which she explores contemporary manifestations of Americanitus by interviewing people about what ails them and why. Her historical research focuses on the intersection between European and Native American history and how it shapes American identity today. Pebworth’s wry, postmodern, and stunning circus-style tour banners combine folk, historical and political icons (including Olive Oatman, who, she says, elicits more questions than anyone in the series). One of my favorites, “Claim Your Demons,” shows Dick Cheney hunkered down in a basket next to the Sauk Indian chief Black Hawk (to her credit, Pebworth forces you to figure out why Black Hawk was once considered a demon of Cheneyesque proportions).
Pebworth’s multimedia road show is interactive on many levels: she’s out there taking the pulse of the nation now; you can browse around to see where the northern leg of her tour is taking her here, learn what happened at previous stops here, or take her Americanitus survey here. Better yet, track her down and tell her how you’re feeling. Next stop: Aberdeen, SD.
Makeup-free Mondays: interesting, provocative, and—when you think about it for three seconds—bonkers. Last I checked, women (Lady Gaga excepted) were already fully empowered to forgo makeup on Monday or any other day. Half the working women I know go without; the rest slather on CoverGirl Thick Lash like there’s no tomorrow, and nobody cares who does what.
This natural beauty initiative either has something to do with Debrahlee Lorenzana, a 21st century Joan Holloway who was (allegedly) fired by Citibank for being too sexy for her shirt, or it’s a fabulous prank: after all, the organizers are asking women to donate their unopened makeup to–no joke–women’s shelters (Let them eat L’Oreal!)
The people at The Beauty Bean, where MFM was launched, recommend a Charlotte York inspired Sex and the City hair style that requires a $58 “serum” followed by a $38 “Anti-Humidity” spray followed by a $49 “creme”—no servility to fashion or commerce here! But their MFM page exhorts, “Stop apologizing for not wearing makeup, no matter what day of the week it is.” It’s true that women apologize for a lot of random nonsense, but not, in my experience, their bare faces. Even Grace Coddington goes naked at Vogue.
What next–girdle-free Fridays? This is the latest (well-intentioned) initiative in a growing trend of low concept activism that ranges from the merely misguided (Remember Not One Damn Dime Day? No one else does either) to the downright embarrassing (Bras Without Borders). And like most misdirected advocacy, it’s having an unintended effect. I suddenly hear Dior’s Serum de Rouge Luminous Lip Color Treatment calling out to me. Sephora, all is forgiven–I’m coming for the Crimson 840.
Since she was ransomed back from Mohave Indians in 1856 wearing a tribal chin tattoo, Olive Oatman has inspired a sculpture by Erastus Dow Palmer, two biographies, two novels, a play starring John Wilkes Booth’s brother, a 1965 episode of “Death Valley Days” (featuring Ronald Reagan), four children’s books, a 1982 short story by Elmore Leonard, and an Oscar-nominated short film (2008), but never a song.
Until now. Last month the country grindcore band Phantom of the Black Hills released a fittingly Deadwoodesque tribute to America’s first tattooed white woman on “Ghosts,” tweaking some interesting themes, like whether or not Oatman, a Mormon, lost her religion as a white Mohave. If the facts in “Olive Oatman” are iffy (twisted as they’ve been for over a century), the mood is right: Here’s the Oatman clan heading west:
Her and her family prayin’ to the moon
Piled in a wagon, rolling to their doom
Bones of the past rattlin in the back
That’s when the mountain roared
Indeed, the Yavapai Indians who killed Oatman’s family in southern Arizona (then Mexico) were mountain dwellers. (Note to Governor Brewer: back then, the state was filled with nativists–none of whom were white). Phantom nails it in saying Oatman, who was taken captive, then traded to the Mohave, “had to bend but she never bowed.”
The song’s gritty vocals and driving rhythm–slow in the intro, then double time–evoke Oatman’s ride on a prairie schooner driven by a reckless and monomaniacal father of seven, bound for California (the place, wrote Didion, “where we run out of continent”). A banjo traces jittery lines of fingerpicked beauty across this well-worn gothic narrative. Though Phantom of the Black Hills’ website is damnably uninformative (perhaps a masked dude aiming his banjo at you like a loaded weapon is all you need to know), I’m glad an L.A. band with a pistols-at-dawn attitude was the first to claim this California dreamer.
What we have to work with: Seven women, dressed identically, pacing atop an eight-foot tall, ten-foot wide wooden cube in Bryant Park in two shifts for 10 hours a day all week. So, Kate Gilmore’s performance piece “Walk the Walk” is about working women. They’re trapped, or perpetually on display, or going quietly insane in their corporate cubicles, or something. The piece is intended to depict women collectively, and though Gilmore told the New York Times that diversity was a particular concern in “casting” them, age was evidently not a factor: They’re all under 35—reflecting about a third of working women.
When I saw them Tuesday, they wore canary yellow skirts, pink tops, and beige pumps–get-ups no New York working girl would likely be caught dead in. Their perplexing fashion semiotics are complicated by Gilmore’s observation that the yellow matches, er, taxicabs. More immediately, they looked like a bed of tulips come to life, an alluring sight that–to Gilmore’s credit–drew in viewers who might not otherwise approach a piece of performance art; they regarded the women thoughtfully, then walked in and out of the cube to hear footsteps thumping overhead and read about the piece. The horizontal flow of the onlookers moving through the structure made a nice duet with the circular motion of the women above.
But the problem with using people in art–especially art about labor–is that the temptation to fixate on their experience of the piece often overwhelms yours. (Case in point: I clearly recall the stony expression of a museum guard forced to wear Ryan Gander’s bloody tracksuit in the New Museum’s 2009 “Generational,” but not the tracksuit). What were these women–many SUNY Purchase grad students–thinking? I’m making art history? I’d rather be a Vanessa Beecroft girl? I left the iron on in the bedroom and there’s not a thing I can do about it? When I saw them at around 2:00 on Tuesday, at the beginning of the second shift, their movements were relaxed and fluid:
Later, coming up on 5:00, the women looked like cold, caged animals trying to avoid each other:
“Walk the Walk” follows a long tradition of performance artists or their emissaries doing repetitive and vaguely degrading things,for better or worse, from Linda Montano and Teching Hsieh to Chu Yun, who paid his sleeping beauties $10 an hour to drop a pill and play dead last year. As a working woman, I stared at the Gilmore Girls with a feeling of pity, not recognition. I wondered why they weren’t allowed to wear sweaters and worried that their pumps hurt. A few looked back at me, but not for long; they were on the move, going nowhere.
Though I reviewed only her second (newly published)
volume here, designer Ina Saltz’ books on typographic
tattoos make a great set.
What’s more astonishing? A) Seventeen Alabama students were paddled for violating their school dress code on prom night; B) Corporal punishment is still legal in 20 states; C) Over 200,000 public school students are paddle-whacked each year; or D) Mainstream media coverage of A doesn’t mention B or C. Thank you, Jezebel, for putting the story in perspective.
And kudos to fashion offender Erica DeRamus, below, who just said no to the paddle–and got suspended. “This is not the 1940s,” DeRamus told Fox News. “We don’t take corporal punishment now.”
Here’s the feminine hygiene ad you thought you’d never see. It’s as if Kotex handed its ad campaign over to Bust magazine.
Howard Stern’s Tourettish teardown of Gabourey Sidibe on Monday doesn’t merit the outrage it’s instigated, first because it’s partly true (her size is shocking, but it’s her acting that matters) and second because this is just more of Stern’s predictable shock-in-trade (listening to him and his echo, Robin Quivers, spin this out for an excruciatingly inarticulate four minutes reminded me that talk radio is the boomer equivalent of social texting: hours of nothing about nothing).
But it does open the door to a more compelling conversation about size, black women, and celebrity.
Can we just acknowledge that the black actresses at the ceremony, spanning a range of body types, allowed for a diversity seemingly forbidden to all the half-starved white women on display? From the typically svelte Paula Patton (seven months pregnant at the ceremony) to the curvy Mo’Nique to the stunningly zaftig Queen Latifah—and yes, Sidibe at the far extreme—these women represent a refreshingly real demographic, and an exhilarating resistance to Hollywood conformity.
Though Stern would be happy to see Sidibe (“the most enormous fat black chick I’ve ever seen”) wear a hair shirt instead of a ball gown for committing the crime of offending his delicate sensibilities, her red carpet swagger was a peak Oscar moment. Stern seems to have missed history in the making:the point isn’t how her weight will affect her ability to land more roles; it’s that she ended up with a nomination in the first place. Career over? Fat chance.
Because of some harrowing ‘80s experiences, I thought I was through with video art, and most of the pieces I saw today at the press preview for the Whitney Biennial didn’t help: enough process and repetition videos to put anyone off the stuff for a lifetime. Our culture has never been more wedded to screens, yet visual artists, overwhelmingly, seem constitutionally incapable of either embracing their seductions or harnessing their potential.
Not so Marianne Vitale, whose “Patron” (2009) renewed my faith in video art, if not the Biennial itself. Like a cross between Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in “Full Metal Jacket” and Barbara Stanwyck in “Double Indemnity,” Vitale delivers the kind of ad hominem beat down Americans so enjoy, whether directed at the poor schmuck kicked to the curb on “American Idol” or the tearful penitent who dared to be dowdy on “What Not to Wear.” Only this one’s parodic.
Vitale’s video harangue is a mashup of aspirational homilies and absurdist directives. “Patrons! The final drill of the night: it’s a five-step run. This’ll take you to the next plateau. Sure it will! Don’t forget to say no. But you can’t. So don’t even try. But don’t forget, either. Number one:close your eyes. Call yourself a number.” A string of nonsense images follows (“copper bonnet timpani,” she says with venom) and Vitale’s manic rant—a vicious scold here, a command to stand in gopher pee there—is impossible to pull into perspective, just like the parade of public humiliations and apologies, small and large, we witness on a weekly basis. Bombed innocent Afghans? Lied about your faulty gas pedal? Wore a blazer with bike shorts? You’re going down.
Unlike the other videos in the biennial, this one actually attracted an audience—that laughed. And while the others played to benches stationed across the room, Vitale’s featured a subtle touch: just one folding chair positioned mere feet from the screen. I dared to sit in it. I was embarrassed. Then I was redeemed. But mostly I was happy to leave the Biennial contemplating a witty, theatrical, well-edited video that resonated with so much media culture.
Second Set
The Mexican artist Acamonchi uses stencils, silkscreen, tape and spray paint on wood, slaps titles like “Terrible Sexo Sexo” on his creations, and loves to appropriate sexist and racist ads depicting Mexicans, which may explain why the spray cans that have crept into his paintings (carrying the milk of his artistic expression?) inevitably look like breasts. A lifelong Fluxus fan (who wears the Fluxus logo inked on his arm) he emerged from the skate punk and fanzine scene of the 80s in Tijuana/Ensenada and southern California, and moved from San Diego to New York last year. The face of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio,who was assassinated in Tijuana during a campaign rally in 1994, often appears in his work as a symbol of Mexico’s entrenched political corruption (Acamonchi has outfitted him as Colonel Sanders and as a cosmonaut).
When I visited Acamonchi and his six-toed cat in Washington Heights recently, he showed me these paintings, among others:
Terrible Sexo Sexo
Doors Open
Super Limpio
Acamonchi, who studied graphic design, has worked with MTV, Reebok,Vans,Tribal Gear and Obey (and his Osiris shoes are pretty adorable.) But his focus, now, is art. He likes to paint fast, and his improvised stencil and silkscreen imagery adds depth to his chaotic graffiti work. You can see him in action here. Better yet, go to his show at Eyelevel BQE in Williamsburg, in May.
