00:36.880 --> 00:42.189
Alice Austin plays a rather interesting role in
the history of photography.

00:42.479 --> 00:47.599
I think this is because she began to work during a
period when a great many women had begun to

00:47.599 --> 00:54.439
photograph, and when photography for women was a
passport to

00:54.439 --> 00:56.150
a more interesting life.

00:56.439 --> 00:58.319
Alice Austin had many people

00:58.765 --> 01:05.725
who was brought up in a fairly well off family and
seemed to be interested in photography from an

01:05.725 --> 01:10.005
early age.
Austin was not the first woman photographer by

01:10.005 --> 01:12.966
any means.
There were many, many women before her.

01:13.085 --> 01:16.456
There were women right from the beginning of
photography, uh,

01:16.466 --> 01:20.155
for Austin, I think it was especially necessary
to have something.

01:20.272 --> 01:25.851
She did not marry and had no family duties, uh,
so to speak.

01:26.052 --> 01:32.722
Of course, there never was a husband, so again,
uh, that was sort of outside of the norm

01:32.722 --> 01:37.162
for Alice Austin's social class during that
period.

01:37.772 --> 01:44.692
I, I don't think it was the usual circumstance
for a young Victorian woman.

01:45.760 --> 01:52.410
Uh, to be so involved in athletic pursuits, and
of course she took a camera

01:52.410 --> 01:56.199
with her.
She was young when she received the camera,

01:56.239 --> 02:02.870
but most of the photographs are from the 1890s,
and uh, by the 1890s there was already a group

02:02.870 --> 02:05.889
of women, a large group of American women
photographing.

02:05.959 --> 02:10.600
Austin's work was limited by what she wanted to
do.

02:11.048 --> 02:17.479
The sense that she's somewhat outside of the
norm could have given her the

02:17.479 --> 02:22.869
motivation to pursue photography when it wasn't
that customary.

02:23.119 --> 02:27.679
While she made very interesting pictures
because of the subject matter she took and the

02:27.679 --> 02:31.768
fact that she did frame them rather carefully,
to me they don't fly.

02:32.718 --> 02:36.958
They don't have any real emotional content as
far as I'm concerned.

02:36.998 --> 02:39.128
They don't have a further resonance.

02:40.048 --> 02:44.714
What I have to disagree.
What about the one where she's cross-dressed as

02:44.714 --> 02:48.475
a guy and she's smoking the cigarette with
Julia Brat and Julia Martin?

02:48.625 --> 02:53.255
I was talking about these images of the city.

02:53.854 --> 03:00.654
The best of her work is so clear and so crisp
and so focused to me it gives the appearance

03:00.654 --> 03:04.824
of spontaneity, even though we, we know that
she posed things.

03:05.304 --> 03:10.145
It's just such a wealth of information about
life and people.

03:10.649 --> 03:11.940
And houses.

03:12.649 --> 03:13.949
It's magnificent.

03:14.279 --> 03:19.910
What caught my eye about Alice's work
was the sort of spontaneity of it.

03:20.440 --> 03:24.910
It seemed as though the pictures were snapshots,
but knowing the era,

03:25.240 --> 03:27.610
it was clear that they couldn't be snapshots.

03:27.880 --> 03:33.919
Oh, I'm interested in Alice's private life too,
and one of the things that has been

03:33.919 --> 03:37.139
questionable has been her relationship with
Gertrude Tate.

03:37.279 --> 03:42.580
She lived
with her for 55 years, and do you have any idea

03:42.580 --> 03:48.169
at all about whether she would have seen
herself as being a lesbian at that time?

03:48.259 --> 03:50.690
You remember I said I wasn't going to discuss
any of that.

03:51.100 --> 03:55.250
Yes, I, I would consider her a lesbian.
I don't think that she,

03:55.979 --> 04:00.089
um, it's probably likely that she didn't self
identify as a lesbian,

04:00.179 --> 04:03.889
mainly because of the time of her birth and
the time she came of age.

04:04.619 --> 04:09.350
Um, the concept of lesbian was not defined the
way we think of it today.

04:09.600 --> 04:14.059
That really came, um, in the early part of the
20th century.

04:15.220 --> 04:20.049
Um, but I do think that she thought of herself
as a woman who loved women,

04:20.299 --> 04:23.149
um, a woman who wasn't attracted to men.

04:23.459 --> 04:29.609
It's staggering to me when I look at the
history of literature and art,

04:29.779 --> 04:32.890
uh, since the Enlightenment, how many.

04:33.730 --> 04:38.559
Well, homosexuals, both male and female, have
been

04:40.170 --> 04:46.160
dominant figures in the creative tradition, uh,
and so part of my goal was to illuminate,

04:46.290 --> 04:52.579
uh, in particular the lesbian contributions to
that cultural world that we all inhabit,

04:52.769 --> 04:55.799
uh, regardless of our, our sexuality.

04:56.450 --> 05:01.859
Lesbians have contributed to cultural life way
beyond, uh.

05:02.570 --> 05:08.480
Uh, the statistical proportion, uh, I think
this is a phenomenon of creativity.

05:08.609 --> 05:13.070
The very people who are marginalized by the
world they live in,

05:13.410 --> 05:18.609
who are, in some degree, outsiders have a
compulsion.

05:19.130 --> 05:24.529
Uh, a desire to make their presence known.
Alice did seem to have a circle of friends.

05:24.640 --> 05:29.880
She went to parties at their houses.
I guess her best friends were Julia Marsh and

05:29.880 --> 05:36.130
Julia Brett, Gertrude Eccleston, and Sue Ripley.
The four of them together formed a

05:36.130 --> 05:40.089
little club that they called the Darned Club,
so called apparently because the boys

05:40.225 --> 05:44.445
of the neighborhood were annoyed that the girls
would spend their time together and not with

05:44.445 --> 05:47.765
them, so they were the ones who thought it was
a darn club.

05:48.024 --> 05:53.484
Trude Eccleston was probably one of her very
best friends when they were growing up,

05:53.575 --> 05:54.614
when they were young.

05:54.894 --> 05:58.614
They visited in each other's homes.
They probably slept over.

05:58.904 --> 06:01.054
Julia Martin, Mrs.
Snively, and Allison.

06:01.799 --> 06:07.630
I think that you have to understand that Julia
Martin said in many letters that she had no

06:07.630 --> 06:11.739
intention of getting married, that she didn't
particularly care for men.

06:11.989 --> 06:16.149
The one way to look at the picture is, you know,
three girls in bed, and the other is three grown women

06:16.149 --> 06:21.589
with sexual desires in bed, and it's fairly complex
in terms of one woman sleeping

06:21.589 --> 06:24.220
and the other woman gazing lovingly.

06:24.470 --> 06:27.109
Alice describes her life as a larky life.

06:28.089 --> 06:32.630
Alice spent a good deal of her life pursuing
fun.

06:33.200 --> 06:35.440
She did not have any work obligations.

06:36.399 --> 06:38.630
Most of her life she was financially secure.

06:38.920 --> 06:45.239
Smoking was forbidden for ladies at that time,
and being seen in your underwear and

06:45.239 --> 06:46.390
with your hair down.

06:46.720 --> 06:53.359
This was very, very, very scandalous.
The performance work in Alice's

06:53.359 --> 06:55.239
photographs are the most interesting.

06:55.989 --> 07:01.369
In terms of diary and learning about Alice's
life and the life of her society,

07:01.820 --> 07:07.140
then there are other pictures where their
costumes are involved in many of those pictures.

07:07.140 --> 07:12.940
This is where she used the opportunity to blur
gender roles and to comment on society's

07:12.940 --> 07:17.609
regulations, for example, concerning marriage,
concerning heterosexuality.

07:18.489 --> 07:21.679
Costume is what you find here; they are

07:21.980 --> 07:23.600
I found them.
I found their number.

07:23.679 --> 07:29.730
It's a good thing you said costume, but the
funny thing is the index cards say women in

07:29.730 --> 07:35.290
costume, and we've been looking at them and
saying from the Xerox saying men in costume.

07:36.359 --> 07:39.649
So I'm not convinced whether it's two men or
two women.

07:39.899 --> 07:43.609
When I looked at them, I always interpreted it
as two men dressed up,

07:43.690 --> 07:47.130
and then when we were looking at them yesterday,
I wasn't absolutely sure.

07:48.190 --> 07:52.459
It could be a man and a woman, but it's
impossible to tell.

07:52.910 --> 07:58.700
It's obvious that Alice, if her intent was
to confuse or puzzle or intrigue people,

07:58.750 --> 08:02.019
it obviously works.
Lloyd Hyde and Arvid Knudsen,

08:02.269 --> 08:04.739
they're always mentioned together as if they
were a couple.

08:07.149 --> 08:14.100
It took another researcher who was in here
saying that's pretty blatant for me to look

08:14.100 --> 08:20.579
and say oh my goodness, maybe I made, I made a
point that costumes were important to

08:20.579 --> 08:23.130
Alice because clothing is a language.

08:23.859 --> 08:26.250
It was a way that she could transform herself.

08:26.600 --> 08:32.059
And she could recreate herself and her friends
in different ways so that you have a costume of

08:32.059 --> 08:37.859
her dressed as a man, you have her dressed as a
nun, you also have pictures of Alice dressed in

08:37.859 --> 08:39.409
very feminine clothes.

08:40.289 --> 08:45.150
And again, this is a costume she could create
herself as sort of severe,

08:45.260 --> 08:49.989
which she was in most of her pictures, or she
could make herself into a typical middle-class

08:49.989 --> 08:51.859
woman of the late 19th century.

08:52.260 --> 08:55.250
Dunn's photograph is a fairly complex performance
piece.

08:55.419 --> 08:58.770
So you have Alice and Trudy Eccleston dressed
as nuns,

08:58.940 --> 09:02.809
and they've created their costumes from pear
soap packaging,

09:02.820 --> 09:04.140
and it's a sort of commentary.

09:04.442 --> 09:11.293
On what's acceptable and what's not, and what
goes on in public that's, uh, can be seen and

09:11.293 --> 09:16.853
what goes on in public that's ignored. One
photograph in particular of, uh, Nellie Jamison

09:16.853 --> 09:21.442
with the Roosevelt sisters, it's just the way
Nellie Jamison has placed her hand on, uh, one of

09:21.442 --> 09:25.543
the Roosevelt sisters' laps and sort of a
proprietary or a loving gesture.

09:25.773 --> 09:32.046
There are a number of photographs
that can easily be interpreted with a

09:32.046 --> 09:36.685
lesbian content.
There are several photographs of Alice and

09:36.685 --> 09:39.476
friends dressed in men's costume.

09:39.765 --> 09:42.426
I think it's a very, very complex photograph.

09:42.685 --> 09:47.036
It addresses the issue of the dominance of men
in society.

09:47.366 --> 09:49.185
There's a joke in the photograph.

09:49.606 --> 09:52.085
One of the women is holding an umbrella between
her legs and

09:52.700 --> 09:55.849
it looks like a phallus, and to me that was sort
of surprising.

09:55.909 --> 09:59.190
It was one of the first photographs I saw that
they had, that these women had this kind of

09:59.190 --> 10:05.820
raunchy sense of humor, and it also addressed
how these three women felt about gender

10:05.820 --> 10:09.460
boundaries in general and their own gender
specifically.

10:09.830 --> 10:14.840
There were so many women involved in these
worlds, and the more one works kind of

10:14.840 --> 10:19.905
archaeologically to sift through the, the
biographical evidence,

10:19.945 --> 10:24.664
the more you discover these social networks
that existed between lesbians,

10:24.905 --> 10:28.335
between gay men and lesbians.
Alice used to, uh,

10:28.784 --> 10:33.854
have a routine: every summer she would go up to
a resort in the Catskills called Twilight Rest.

10:34.265 --> 10:38.385
Her friend Trudy Eccleston's family had a
cottage at Twilight Rest.

10:38.424 --> 10:40.755
Alice would join them every August.

10:41.270 --> 10:47.140
And 1 August, uh, Gertrude Tate was also there,
and that would be 1897 and they became friendly,

10:47.260 --> 10:52.739
um, the papers at the Alice Austin House.
There were two or three letters from Gertrude

10:52.739 --> 10:58.020
Tate in 1898, talking about how happy she was to
have met Alice and how she was looking forward

10:58.020 --> 10:59.049
to seeing her again.

11:00.270 --> 11:04.369
Gertrude at the time was living in Brooklyn
with her mother and her two sisters.

11:05.349 --> 11:07.820
Her mother, and especially her older sister,

11:08.849 --> 11:12.229
became very concerned about the
relationship.

11:12.369 --> 11:16.359
They felt that if Gertrude spent all this time
with Alice, she would never get married.

11:17.210 --> 11:23.539
At one point, according to one story, Gertrude was engaged to a man named Guy
Loomis.

11:23.539 --> 11:28.059
Guy Loomis started pressing her.

11:28.539 --> 11:30.510
"When can we get married?"
"When can we get married?"

11:30.659 --> 11:33.650
I'd like to set a date," and she turned to
him and said,

11:33.859 --> 11:36.929
"I'm not going to marry you. I'm going abroad
with Alice."

11:37.619 --> 11:42.250
The stereotype, again, the caricature of the
lesbian has,

11:42.419 --> 11:46.979
in some ways been very much a kind of
desexualized one.

11:47.710 --> 11:54.580
There is as much evidence to suggest that these kinds of relationships were
very self-consciously eroticized relationships.

11:54.580 --> 11:59.159
There's as much evidence to suggest that as to
suggest they weren't.

11:59.320 --> 12:03.349
There's a photograph taken before 1920 at a
costume party at Jessie

12:03.799 --> 12:10.599
Simmons' house.
In this photograph, Alice is over here at the

12:10.599 --> 12:13.960
left-hand edge, and in this particular copy of
the Staten Island Advance she is cut out of the

12:13.960 --> 12:19.239
picture.
Alice herself is in a beret with a goatee and a

12:19.239 --> 12:26.020
job purse, a goatee and, I believe, she's
wearing knickers.

12:26.020 --> 12:31.340
A large number of people attending the party,
all women,

12:31.659 --> 12:35.820
by the way, are dressed in men's clothing,
sailor costumes,

12:35.900 --> 12:40.530
and riding outfits.
This is Jessie McNamee Simmons who had a,

12:40.539 --> 12:45.989
long-term relationship with a woman after
her divorce.

12:46.000 --> 12:48.830
Simmons and Dallas Austin were very close
friends in later life.

12:49.710 --> 12:53.219
I don't quite know what that
headline means.

12:54.280 --> 12:57.140
I mean, you could have three million photographs of
women and not have a single lesbian in them,

12:57.219 --> 13:01.380
although actually 10% should be.

13:02.099 --> 13:03.650
I think lesbians are a very potent threat to

13:04.380 --> 13:10.619
life as it has traditionally or
conventionally been lived.

13:10.619 --> 13:16.940
I think particularly the lesbian represents a
powerfully destabilizing figure in the modern

13:16.940 --> 13:22.140
imagination.

13:23.440 --> 13:30.200
Because her rebellion is so deep and so
intimate, Alice Austin was

13:30.200 --> 13:31.309
rather butch.

13:32.000 --> 13:38.510
She had several automobiles which she drove
herself at a time when not very many

13:38.840 --> 13:41.080
Uh, women knew how to drive.

13:41.590 --> 13:46.500
She had a green Franklin, which I believe was a
handmade automobile.

13:46.789 --> 13:53.419
And we're talking about probably one of the
first automobiles on Staten Island.

13:53.849 --> 13:59.190
Somewhere around 1911 or 1912, and she carried
around a canvas bag.

14:00.010 --> 14:05.690
With tools in it, and she would make minor
repairs on the automobile herself.

14:06.119 --> 14:10.280
As much as I like Alice, I have to admit that
Alice was a woman of her times.

14:10.320 --> 14:12.989
That she was a racist and an anti-Semite.

14:13.280 --> 14:18.880
I'm certainly not going to make an excuse for
Alice because I don't think there is an excuse.

14:18.880 --> 14:23.799
For racism or anti-Semitism, but she clearly
was a woman who

14:24.400 --> 14:30.830
Was definitely ethnocentric and xenophobic.
Today she would definitely be in the upper

14:30.830 --> 14:37.510
middle class or the upper class, but in that
era, because her grandfather worked for a

14:37.510 --> 14:41.229
living, they were automatically put in the
middle class.

14:41.510 --> 14:43.510
I don't think she's a heroine.

14:44.460 --> 14:47.539
People that knew her knew her, particularly
towards the end of her life, that she was a

14:47.539 --> 14:52.700
pretty nasty, unpleasant woman.
She's an interesting bundle of contradictions.

14:52.700 --> 14:58.890
And, um,
it's wonderful that the work and the

14:58.890 --> 15:00.840
memory of her life has survived.

15:01.609 --> 15:05.330
What's interesting to me is the level of the
reaction.

15:06.609 --> 15:13.530
To the idea that Alice was a lesbian, if I say
based on my research that I believe that

15:13.530 --> 15:17.520
she was a lesbian, I'm not saying it to
criticize her.

15:18.049 --> 15:22.340
And I'm not saying it to make her a more
important person than she is.

15:22.409 --> 15:27.570
I'm saying it to contextualize her images if
members of the board of the Alice Austen House

15:27.570 --> 15:30.450
Museum choose to believe that she's not a
lesbian.

15:31.270 --> 15:33.599
That's their prerogative.
I think that they're wrong.

15:34.049 --> 15:38.559
They've gone beyond saying that we just don't
believe what you're saying.

15:38.570 --> 15:41.520
And they've distorted the image of Alice.

15:42.010 --> 15:48.340
Basically, it boils down to just simple and
ugly homophobia.

15:48.570 --> 15:54.090
They couldn't accept the idea that their
icon wasn't a heterosexual.

15:55.349 --> 16:00.700
I think that as a publicly financed institution,
the Alice Austen Museum has an obligation

16:00.700 --> 16:05.659
to allow scholarship to go where it will. For
privately held,

16:05.919 --> 16:08.340
that would be a different story, but as a
publicly held institution,

16:08.469 --> 16:12.669
I think they have an obligation.
Even if they were to acknowledge that she was a

16:12.669 --> 16:15.719
lesbian, they would think it's something to,
you know,

16:15.950 --> 16:17.549
hide in the closet.

16:18.469 --> 16:20.940
It could be that, um.

16:21.880 --> 16:28.330
some of them may have their own personal issues
involving the closet to protect.

16:29.820 --> 16:34.650
Well, the Lesbian Avengers are a lesbian direct
action group,

16:34.700 --> 16:39.289
basically interested in being on the streets
and being out as lesbians.

16:39.340 --> 16:43.280
We're about, you know, lesbian visibility and
survival.

16:43.500 --> 16:47.099
Amy came to the Avengers.
She told us that she was writing this book on

16:47.099 --> 16:51.580
Alice Austin, but the board of trustees
wouldn't give her access.

16:51.684 --> 16:56.525
To any of the material because she believed
Alice Austin was a lesbian.

16:56.784 --> 16:59.905
Oh ho, homosexual.

17:00.715 --> 17:04.484
Alice and G. T. O. were lesbians, and we are as
well.

17:04.805 --> 17:11.675
Oh ho, homosexual lesbians as we are.

17:22.269 --> 17:26.058
That today’s obvious that she was.

17:34.010 --> 17:40.780
Um, let's preserve the history.

17:41.609 --> 17:44.650
The history, preserve the history.

17:45.459 --> 17:50.979
I didn't know.
Her house that you're standing in.

17:52.660 --> 17:54.209
We know her from her pictures.

17:58.050 --> 18:05.020
Do you deny that? Why do you deny that this
woman who was an important

18:05.020 --> 18:06.439
artist? Would you get away from that?

18:07.939 --> 18:10.209
There's not a word in their literature.

18:10.510 --> 18:14.939
They're erasing the fact that she was a lesbian,
and she didn't have those negatives.

18:15.060 --> 18:17.859
She would have died in obscurity.
Who would have given a damn, and you know why?

18:18.160 --> 18:22.180
Because she was discerned and disenfranchised,
because she made a choice in her lifestyle

18:22.180 --> 18:23.329
which you didn't appreciate.

18:25.920 --> 18:28.589
She was a photographer.
She was not anything else.

18:30.430 --> 18:35.290
I think what Alice would have been concerned about
is how her life is being projected,

18:35.579 --> 18:41.729
especially by, um, gay and lesbian activists who
consider her a sister,

18:42.060 --> 18:48.979
um, a pioneering sister, and consider her art,
her photography to be a

18:48.979 --> 18:53.219
key early example of, um, of

18:53.939 --> 18:57.699
feminist or gay vision.
I think the board of directors at the Alice

18:57.699 --> 19:04.290
Austin House are so intent and so keen on
fighting us and fighting what we were saying

19:04.290 --> 19:10.290
and keeping Austin in the closet that even
though they don't say that she's a lesbian,

19:10.500 --> 19:12.569
they must believe that she was a lesbian.

19:13.020 --> 19:18.219
I have heard from various people.
I don't know how reliable these stories are

19:18.219 --> 19:19.619
that some of the materials.

19:20.229 --> 19:25.150
have been destroyed, and I do know that some of
the materials appear to be missing the bony.

19:25.150 --> 19:31.359
Tapes in particular, and on those tapes you
have the discussion of white people who say

19:31.359 --> 19:32.859
that Alice was a lesbian.

19:33.130 --> 19:36.750
Anne Devony is another one of those people, and
I'm so sorry she's gone,

19:36.790 --> 19:40.349
and I know she knew a lot of stuff that didn't
ever get into the book because it's a

19:40.349 --> 19:41.869
mainstream kind of a book.

19:42.430 --> 19:49.349
The book was written in 1976 and uh chose not
to actually state

19:49.349 --> 19:52.349
the word lesbian after the book was published.

19:52.680 --> 19:56.949
She did state that they, that Alice and
Gertrude were lovers.

19:57.719 --> 20:04.280
She did interview uh Gertrude Tate's sister and
Gertrude Tate's

20:04.280 --> 20:11.160
nephew and his wife, and uh they all made it
very clear that there

20:11.160 --> 20:16.630
was a lesbian relationship between Alice Austin
and Gertrude Tate,

20:26.920 --> 20:32.770
a loving and long lasting relationship.
There should be no

20:32.770 --> 20:34.020
mystery.

20:43.869 --> 20:50.010
I think the fact that she was lovers with a
woman for 55 years is, um,

20:50.780 --> 20:53.300
proof enough.
They actually lived in this house on Staten

20:53.300 --> 20:59.209
Island for 30 years and then Alice Austin ended
up in basically the Staten Island

20:59.579 --> 21:05.859
poorhouse, and Gertrude Tate, I think, lived
with a brother or sister in Queens and even

21:05.859 --> 21:08.280
when that happened, she would go and visit
Alice.

21:08.869 --> 21:15.150
I think that you have to look at Austin's
life and the body of her work as a context

21:15.469 --> 21:18.790
for concluding whether or not she was a lesbian
and, and.

21:20.689 --> 21:25.900
I felt looking at her life and looking at the,
at her work that, um, she,

21:26.530 --> 21:28.130
she, she was a lesbian.

21:40.540 --> 21:46.250
I did many things today.
I have just researched a lesbian relationship

21:46.579 --> 21:49.449
from 1927 and 1916.

21:50.609 --> 21:57.170
Very private photographs, this big intimate shot
in Holland on a

21:57.170 --> 22:02.410
porch between a very famous artist and her
lover and, of course, the family,

22:02.449 --> 22:05.229
the one living member of the family denies it.

22:05.489 --> 22:07.160
The family never cared about

22:08.890 --> 22:15.489
her art and when she became famous by all.

22:16.869 --> 22:18.599
Knocked at her door.

22:20.599 --> 22:22.310
And they wanted to participate.

22:23.810 --> 22:29.319
You could say that lesbians have been ghosted
by Western culture,

22:29.890 --> 22:33.390
meaning by that, their existence has been
denied.

22:33.670 --> 22:36.319
Uh, people say, oh, they don't really exist.

22:36.569 --> 22:43.430
I think what's so useful about the ghost as a
metaphor is the paradoxical way that

22:43.430 --> 22:47.930
It suggests absence and presence simultaneously.

22:50.949 --> 22:56.069
It's a kind of entity that can return.

22:56.459 --> 23:01.520
At the same time, there's always been a creeping sense that
maybe she's there after all.

23:01.760 --> 23:08.160
A lot of very important women in the 20th
century have had parts of their lives written

23:08.160 --> 23:09.479
out of their biographies.

23:09.680 --> 23:16.239
I believe lesbians have been ghosted through
the sanitizing of women's

23:16.239 --> 23:17.430
biographies.

23:18.439 --> 23:22.719
This is something that has gone on for a long
time.

23:23.209 --> 23:30.130
Uh, the erasure of intimate relationships in
women's lives.

23:32.569 --> 23:38.579
Hanahus was an artist who's best known for her
photo montages of the twenties.

23:38.849 --> 23:42.829
She came onto the art scene as part of
Berlindata, the only woman in Berlindata.

23:43.849 --> 23:46.560
That's when she was in her early twenties.

23:46.910 --> 23:49.459
She was very
prolific throughout her life; she did photo

23:49.459 --> 23:54.619
montages, paintings, watercolors, prints,
pattern designs.

23:54.920 --> 24:01.900
She did not show during the Nazi years, but up
until then and afterwards, she was very

24:01.900 --> 24:05.979
persistent
in her career and her survival as an artist and

24:05.979 --> 24:11.060
in fact, enjoyed the beginning of her revival
in the 70s when she was still alive with a

24:11.060 --> 24:17.579
big show at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in
Paris, so she was able to enjoy part of that

24:17.579 --> 24:22.140
attention and at this point she's really
something of a cult figure in Germany and to

24:22.140 --> 24:28.280
some degree here.
Had three major relationships, and then she was also

24:28.280 --> 24:33.319
on her own for decades.
The first is the one that's most well known,

24:33.400 --> 24:36.589
and that was with her fellow Dadaist Ray
Hausmann.

24:36.800 --> 24:40.390
It was very stormy, very stormy, very
problematic.

24:40.680 --> 24:44.160
She had a nine-year relationship with the writer
Till Brugman.

24:44.849 --> 24:51.160
Um, Dutch writer, then she married a younger
man, Kurt Maths.

24:51.410 --> 24:55.410
We would consider her bisexual.
The way she tended to talk about the three

24:55.410 --> 24:58.920
relationships was not so much in terms of
defining her sexuality,

24:59.209 --> 25:01.729
but three intense relationships.

25:02.079 --> 25:06.689
Hirsch for a long time was known as Ralph
Hausman's girlfriend from Berlindata.

25:07.300 --> 25:12.900
Here would be this supposedly new man and new
woman living together trying to forge a new

25:12.900 --> 25:17.660
kind of relationship, and he would be saying
things to her like, 'I hit you because I'm really

25:17.660 --> 25:22.780
hitting your father inside you and your
obedience to your father and the old values

25:22.780 --> 25:26.689
garbled, you know, bullshit kind of
psychoanalytic theory,

25:26.780 --> 25:29.569
but it's very important to realize that Huosh
was not at all a.

25:29.744 --> 25:35.665
A victim, she really argued back very strongly,
and she would leave periodically.

25:35.714 --> 25:42.125
At one point, she even hiked across the Alps with
her sister Greta and the poet Regina Ullman,

25:42.234 --> 25:44.974
and then continued on foot all the way to Rome.

25:45.295 --> 25:51.005
The Dada group was a real male avant-garde art
group.

25:51.295 --> 25:56.050
John Heartfield.
It wasn't interesting that Hannah Höch comes

25:56.050 --> 26:00.770
in the first Dada exposition with her work.

26:01.270 --> 26:06.170
I think the work of Hannah Höch was, for him, to

26:07.589 --> 26:12.890
playful to smart, her houseman.

26:13.469 --> 26:20.459
explains that she can participate in this
exposition in

26:20.459 --> 26:21.650
the first exposition.

26:22.689 --> 26:26.979
Hannah and Til met in the summer of 1926 in
Holland in The Hague,

26:27.420 --> 26:33.699
where Hannah came to visit Kurt Schwitters
and his family who were there for a vacation.

26:33.780 --> 26:38.109
Till Burgmann was driven.
She was enthusiastic,

26:38.219 --> 26:40.449
exuberant, perhaps she was.

26:40.920 --> 26:45.160
A present, woman dominant, uh, also you could
say, um,

26:45.380 --> 26:46.969
she was fearless.

26:47.180 --> 26:51.300
She wasn't afraid of people; she was assertive.
Well, she was concerned,

26:51.339 --> 26:54.010
but at the same time a little pushy.

26:54.219 --> 26:58.719
It's a very moving letter, um, Hannah Hir wrote to
her sister Greta.

26:59.449 --> 27:02.160
I am and will be very happy with Till.

27:03.030 --> 27:08.770
We will be a model of how two women can form a
single rich and balanced life.

27:09.540 --> 27:16.020
Each day I find out wonderful new things about
Till that enrich me and allow me to see life in

27:16.020 --> 27:17.050
a new light.

27:17.540 --> 27:18.859
My dear Grete.

27:19.349 --> 27:25.359
You are probably the only one who realized how
thoroughly the chapter, man, is finished for me.

27:25.810 --> 27:28.920
Now.
All the gates have been thrown open again,

27:29.089 --> 27:34.199
and I stroll happily out for myself to be
closely connected with another woman,

27:34.489 --> 27:40.319
for me is something totally new, since it means
being taken by the spirit of my own spirit,

27:40.609 --> 27:43.479
confronted by a very close relative.

27:45.229 --> 27:51.339
Burgmann's letters to Höch are more physical,
but they're, uh, they're on this sort of very

27:51.910 --> 27:58.579
romantic level, but also erotic, like "I wanna
kiss you on your neck" and, um,

27:58.829 --> 28:00.550
but not more detailed than that.

28:01.829 --> 28:07.500
The vocabulary that they used to describe
themselves tends to be more about their

28:07.500 --> 28:08.890
spiritual closeness.

28:09.290 --> 28:15.689
Certainly after World War One in many European
countries, you had female couples,

28:15.900 --> 28:20.020
some of whom were considered by themselves and
others to be romantic couples,

28:20.219 --> 28:21.489
some of whom weren't.

28:21.900 --> 28:25.920
In Holland, in The Hague nor elsewhere there was not much
of a lesbian subculture.

28:25.920 --> 28:28.239
Of a lesbian subculture.

28:28.489 --> 28:32.989
Lesbian was not a public figure, so to speak,
in the 20s,

28:33.290 --> 28:39.839
I could say that in a way made it easier for
two women to live together and be together.

28:40.130 --> 28:43.500
I have no idea whether they were in the closet
or not in Amsterdam.

28:44.130 --> 28:47.489
They were; they lived together.
They were certainly known as a couple.

28:47.890 --> 28:51.219
No, I don't think, um, uh, till Bergmann nor Hanna.

28:52.310 --> 28:55.910
Uh, was in the closet.
I don't think you can speak of being in the

28:55.910 --> 28:59.819
closet and coming out or not coming out in
those years.

29:00.300 --> 29:03.989
These, these are words that are used in the 70s
and 80s.

29:04.189 --> 29:11.150
They were two women artists who took each other
seriously and, um, who

29:11.150 --> 29:17.430
worked together and inspired each other in the
circle of friends in the avant-garde, um.

29:18.239 --> 29:25.069
I'm sure everyone knew they were together; they
were open about it when they moved to Berlin, of

29:25.069 --> 29:31.510
course, was a completely different situation there.
There were, um, there was this famous lesbian

29:31.510 --> 29:35.189
subculture with all those bars and journals and
magazines.

29:35.479 --> 29:40.510
For lesbians, there was a strong homosexual
emancipation movement.

29:40.760 --> 29:44.760
The new woman was everywhere, um, whereas in
Holland, well,

29:44.880 --> 29:46.349
she was hardly to be seen.

29:46.760 --> 29:52.319
Hanna Höch made a change of address card when
they changed in '29.

29:52.829 --> 29:58.060
From The Hague to Berlin, she depicted herself
as a Dada puppet,

29:58.250 --> 30:03.160
all feminine, with bare breasts; till Bergmann
was this tank,

30:03.369 --> 30:07.449
this masculine square woman.
It's a little bit of a joke about a

30:07.449 --> 30:10.849
relationship, but then everyone could see what,
what she meant.

30:11.250 --> 30:14.079
No, I wouldn't think that Till Bergmann or
Hanna Höch, um,

30:14.329 --> 30:17.239
were in the closet as far as their work is
concerned.

30:17.400 --> 30:21.329
Um, Höch made a lot of portraits of Till
Bergmann.

30:21.739 --> 30:26.810
Um, she portrayed her lover as a masculine,
self-contained woman.

30:26.900 --> 30:33.380
There are a lot of, um, signs that she was
playing with lesbian identity,

30:33.579 --> 30:38.069
so to speak.
There's one photomontage called Rosi Tenserin.

30:38.510 --> 30:44.569
And I like to see that as a self-portrait.
It's also called Medulla.

30:44.819 --> 30:49.469
You see a dancer with woman's legs with a
monocular in the eye,

30:49.760 --> 30:54.739
and of course the monocular is a well-known
lesbian attribute.

30:54.959 --> 30:58.880
There was in Berlin a lesbian bar called the
Monocular.

30:59.630 --> 31:03.859
Um, there is this famous portrait of Una
Trubridge, uh,

31:04.030 --> 31:08.459
the friend of, um, Ratcliffe Hall made by
Romaine Brooks,

31:08.589 --> 31:13.859
who also wears a monocular when she is in full
attire, a book,

31:14.119 --> 31:20.469
uh, that came out in the, in the same year in
28 called Berlin's Bishop Fraun.

31:21.150 --> 31:26.380
She played with lesbianism, she played with
lesbian fetishes,

31:26.589 --> 31:32.109
I wouldn't call it all being in the closet just
outside and making fun of it.

31:32.469 --> 31:39.290
Yeah, this work to me seems erotic.
The hovering figure has these diaphanous wings

31:39.579 --> 31:45.699
and that kind of sensation of one figure
hovering over another with whirring wings,

31:46.050 --> 31:48.969
um, to me is connotative of oral sex.

31:49.650 --> 31:56.410
He made a lot of photo montage and that you can
read as what we now would call gender

31:56.410 --> 31:59.959
bending montages, and I would say that.

32:00.339 --> 32:06.290
At least partly, is a playful recreation of
their relationship.

32:06.500 --> 32:11.459
One of the things that I keep arguing with in
terms of interpreting Fischer's work is

32:11.459 --> 32:17.380
preserving the ambiguity of it, especially when
you have images that are about androgyny,

32:17.449 --> 32:23.849
and this main figure in Damusa or tamer is
very

32:23.849 --> 32:28.130
carefully balanced between male and female, you,
you're not supposed to be able to say,

32:28.219 --> 32:29.959
oh, that's a man or that's a woman.

32:30.250 --> 32:36.890
Till B went home to her family and showed some
pictures of Hanna

32:36.890 --> 32:43.489
her to her mother, and her mother saw a woman
that uh indeed was

32:43.489 --> 32:49.660
very neatly clothed, high necked but had a
lecherous

32:49.660 --> 32:50.839
pose.

32:51.089 --> 32:56.479
Her mother, uh, commented, uh, though perhaps
the two women were unaware of it,

32:56.689 --> 32:58.800
the devil traveled with them.

32:59.640 --> 33:02.770
When Hanna and Till went visiting to different
family members,

33:02.790 --> 33:08.079
and they stayed in the same bedroom and um my
general impression was that there was a lot of

33:08.079 --> 33:09.910
acceptance and that Till was liked.

33:10.599 --> 33:17.459
I have to say that the family was very open,
more open than in fact

33:17.459 --> 33:19.349
they may have wanted to be.

33:19.589 --> 33:26.150
There were aspects of Hu's life, the lesbian
years, and also the fact that she'd had two

33:26.150 --> 33:29.630
abortions that the family was uncomfortable
with.

33:29.949 --> 33:32.300
Certainly the closet as it has existed.

33:32.574 --> 33:38.084
Over the century is in many ways a very
impoverished one.

33:38.535 --> 33:43.574
It's not always, it's not invariably a matter
of self-protection.

33:43.734 --> 33:47.224
I think the deepest closets have to do with
family members.

33:47.415 --> 33:53.604
But I know it from the family.
I know it from the politics of the art market.

33:55.344 --> 33:56.974
The point that

33:58.510 --> 34:05.069
Hanna Hirsch is more political, more feminist,
more lesbian than the art

34:05.069 --> 34:06.579
market likes it.

34:07.189 --> 34:11.489
The first Hanna Hirsch retrospective is going to
open tonight.

34:11.739 --> 34:18.500
The museum has told me that I cannot tape
inside, so I've decided that I

34:18.500 --> 34:24.979
would come and try to meet a few people outside
the museum to ask them if they

34:24.979 --> 34:31.820
know that Hanna Hirsch was a bisexual woman and
if that relates to the way

34:31.820 --> 34:33.090
one reads her work.

34:33.500 --> 34:36.850
So I, I don't think it influences the way that
you look at the art.

34:37.600 --> 34:40.899
But in knowing this about them, I can
appreciate their openness.

34:41.479 --> 34:44.169
Are you going to the Hanna Hirsch exhibit?
It's opening tonight?

34:48.540 --> 34:49.020
No, why?
Why do you ask?

34:49.239 --> 34:52.389
Did you know that she was a bisexual woman?
I knew that.

34:52.800 --> 34:54.719
I was proud that it was in the brochure that's
not in.

34:56.014 --> 34:57.614
It does say that she had a relationship with.

35:00.304 --> 35:04.584
I'm glad that they actually said that instead
of sort of glossing.

35:04.594 --> 35:08.824
Yeah, that's in the brochure but not, and why,
why do you think it wasn't in the wall

35:09.054 --> 35:12.905
the wall text? Possibly because there's less
space.

35:14.909 --> 35:16.889
Was the museum a closet?

35:18.439 --> 35:24.770
Till Burman tried and succeeded in organizing
exhibitions in Holland.

35:25.120 --> 35:30.560
And in fact the first one-woman exhibition was
in The Hague in

35:30.560 --> 35:32.209
1929.

35:32.520 --> 35:39.320
The theme that both were very attracted to in
those years was criticizing and

35:39.320 --> 35:42.360
joking about women's role in society.

35:42.659 --> 35:48.889
The difference between men and women, the codes
men and women were obliged to follow.

35:48.979 --> 35:51.889
Till Burman wasn't very successful in
publishing her work.

35:51.979 --> 35:58.939
Till Burman wrote a lot of sound poems, but
there are only five of them that

35:58.939 --> 36:00.129
are published.

36:00.659 --> 36:06.590
We know about her work that was not published
but written in the 20s and 30s by Hanna Hirsch's

36:06.590 --> 36:12.419
archive.
The scrapbook is this great scrapbook that Hirsch

36:12.419 --> 36:17.169
made for herself in the early 30s, probably out
of media images.

36:17.419 --> 36:18.489
She was part of the.

36:19.219 --> 36:25.899
general excitement in the 20s and 30s about the
mass media boom into daily culture, and she

36:25.899 --> 36:31.459
loved the weekly illustrated newspapers and the
magazines and would clip all kinds of images.

36:31.459 --> 36:34.060
From them. There's just this kind of voyeuristic
fascination that I don't think even can be

36:34.060 --> 36:39.090
quickly called racist. It's voyeuristic.
It's a kind of nostalgic and naive

36:39.100 --> 36:43.889
feeling. It's nostalgic and naive.
It's a kind of feeling.

36:47.949 --> 36:49.699
Of Hanna Hirsch from her garden.

36:49.909 --> 36:55.120
I found it.
There are descriptions that Hanna Hirsch tells

36:55.120 --> 37:00.780
Till Pukman's words, and Till Pukman's
temperament was so heavy for her.

37:01.110 --> 37:05.975
She had ideas that were her own.
That were lost.

37:06.264 --> 37:13.034
I also know it from her sister, who was a
wonderful person but very strong.

37:13.034 --> 37:19.465
She was strong with her temperament and strong with her ideas.
The whole day she had new

37:19.465 --> 37:20.534
interventions.

37:21.270 --> 37:26.419
She more and more lost her own form.

37:26.870 --> 37:31.479
Her sister gave me a letter from Hanna Hirsch
to her.

37:31.790 --> 37:36.820
This letter tells about love from one woman to
the other.

37:37.110 --> 37:42.949
The time is not right now for women like me.

37:44.739 --> 37:47.129
It's written in his letters.

37:48.949 --> 37:55.570
I want to quote from a letter Till Briman wrote
in 1936 when they were separated,

37:55.939 --> 38:01.969
and in this letter she reminds her of the
beautiful time they had together.

38:02.379 --> 38:06.370
Don't we have that rare bond of perfect
spiritual union?

38:06.540 --> 38:10.729
Isn't our work a unity?
Don't our feelings wind on the same spoon?

38:11.500 --> 38:16.159
You often were grumpy looking through my
manuscripts, but other people

38:16.169 --> 38:19.719
and I have tried, don't understand a word of it.

38:20.169 --> 38:26.570
And apart from the correcting, my little Hannah,
we did give each other something deeper — mutual

38:26.570 --> 38:31.020
inspiration, excitement of mind, soul, and body,
didn't we?

38:32.510 --> 38:36.459
At the beginning of the Nazi years, she was
living in a lesbian relationship.

38:36.790 --> 38:43.030
She was known to have been part of the twenties
avant-garde, and for both those reasons she

38:43.030 --> 38:45.979
needed to get away from the prying eyes of her
neighbors.

38:46.429 --> 38:51.379
So later on, when she was married,
she moved out to this cottage.

38:51.550 --> 38:54.419
She stayed there for decades, for the rest of
her life.

38:54.850 --> 38:58.939
She had a very, very elaborate and
fanciful garden.

38:59.189 --> 39:02.949
It was kind of wild.
It had traditional German plants

39:02.949 --> 39:09.310
and also cacti. She really had some fun
there, and I think it was part of what kept

39:09.310 --> 39:14.419
her going, and she talked about it a lot in all
the interviews with her in later years.

39:14.840 --> 39:20.699
But the biggest threat to Husch's history in
terms of talking about her sexuality right now

39:20.989 --> 39:26.790
is that it's seen in very categorical terms to
keep a sense of somebody who had these very

39:26.790 --> 39:32.419
intense relationships with men and women and
trying to find them.

39:32.510 --> 39:35.149
I think, as she went, is delicate.

39:35.969 --> 39:38.379
A historical challenge.

39:50.159 --> 39:56.699
I think there was a point where the closet
appeared in my work.

39:56.909 --> 40:03.699
There was a lot of veiling, a lot of sex, but
also a lot of my sexuality

40:04.129 --> 40:09.820
was veiled, unbeknownst even to myself.
I didn't even realize it.

40:09.870 --> 40:13.229
But I look at a lot of my work that I did in
college and

40:14.090 --> 40:17.560
it's all figurative work, and there's a lot of
fantasy.

40:17.600 --> 40:23.840
I used to paint wrestlers and lifeguards saving
drowning victims, usually men or

40:23.840 --> 40:29.060
men saving women.
It wasn't until more recently in my life that I

40:29.060 --> 40:32.280
started painting women together, which was

40:34.209 --> 40:35.459
somewhat of a revelation.

40:37.290 --> 40:39.649
Sounds very simple.
It was a big step for me.

40:39.899 --> 40:46.899
In 1991, I opened a project space in my loft
here called Trial Balloon that was dedicated to

40:46.899 --> 40:51.100
showing
the work of women artists only, and with a

40:51.100 --> 40:56.739
special emphasis on lesbian art.
Nicola Tyson invited me into a show she was

40:56.739 --> 41:00.550
curating called Part Fantasy, which was about
lesbian fantasy.

41:00.820 --> 41:07.540
Here, she did a great big mural down one wall,
split into two; one half

41:07.540 --> 41:12.860
featured Penelope Pitstop, and the other was some
Amazons.

41:12.860 --> 41:14.459
Fighting Minotaurs, that was a theme she was

41:14.929 --> 41:19.540
working with at the time.

41:19.729 --> 41:22.090
There was this work that was totally not about
the closet.

41:22.169 --> 41:24.320
I mean, it was just right out there in your
face.

41:24.350 --> 41:26.120
I mean, no shame, nothing.

41:26.330 --> 41:30.459
It wasn't dealing with that.
It was just expressing this kind of

41:31.409 --> 41:37.929
confidence about being lesbian and just
having the right to

41:37.929 --> 41:41.530
just express that with, you know, whatever,
I mean.

41:42.860 --> 41:47.439
Either work about sexuality or work
about lifestyle stuff in a kind of fun way, and

41:48.639 --> 41:52.919
just lifestyle stuff in a kind of fun way, and
this was the catalog.

41:53.979 --> 41:59.820
With one of Nicola's pieces on the cover.
This is Betty Gets It; it kind of sums up

41:59.820 --> 42:03.729
what Nicola was doing, you know, taking sort of
popular culture,

42:03.739 --> 42:08.500
the cartoons that she loved so much; she adores
Hanna-Barbera, and she

42:08.580 --> 42:12.290
took these cartoons and
then turned it into this,

42:12.300 --> 42:14.300
this, um, sexual.

42:14.719 --> 42:19.429
You know, being out about my sexual orientation, it's been really easy
for me to be out of the closet and actually be

42:19.429 --> 42:22.350
out of the closet has helped; it's gotten me
where, you know,

42:22.429 --> 42:24.540
it's gotten my foot in the door in the art
world.

42:25.169 --> 42:30.080
I mean, I came and started showing when lesbian
chic was, that's like,

42:30.129 --> 42:33.300
you know, that’s what was happening in the
early 90s,

42:33.330 --> 42:40.090
so I had a really big fear that when the lesbian chic thing, when
that wave sort of splashed and died down,

42:40.090 --> 42:45.050
I would be left without a gallery who was
interested in showing me, but I have faith

42:45.050 --> 42:51.459
in the art world now because I'm still being
shown, and I don't think

42:51.459 --> 42:53.010
I'm being shown just because I'm a lesbian like I

42:53.610 --> 42:57.820
was maybe when I first started.

42:58.979 --> 43:02.810
She is not only a great satirist, you know,

43:02.929 --> 43:09.570
she's a great draftsman, and so the two
together make the message very

43:09.570 --> 43:13.530
powerful.
Trash’s Dance is the first drawing I saw by

43:13.530 --> 43:18.129
Nicole.
It's a lesbian bar scene, and I think that at

43:18.129 --> 43:20.810
the time it was 90 or 91.

43:21.270 --> 43:25.780
There was such a strong and very exciting bar
scene in New York.

43:26.149 --> 43:30.790
Trash is dancing and she was a bar dancer,
and there were these great go-go dancers.

43:30.830 --> 43:33.739
It was just a great scene.
It was a time of liberation,

43:33.830 --> 43:37.870
I think in a way that the 70s were for gay
men.

43:37.989 --> 43:44.790
I made drawings of big castration scenes,
big figurative, full-blown

43:45.229 --> 43:47.629
scenes of women castrating men and

43:48.110 --> 43:54.939
Amazons capturing pirates — captured pirates
on the Isle of Lesbos, where pirates have

43:54.939 --> 44:00.620
been captured by an island of women;
everybody’s naked, the women are cutting the

44:00.620 --> 44:05.699
penises off, they’re tying the men up.
There’s all kinds of castration and blood, and a lot of

44:05.699 --> 44:06.919
violence towards men.

44:07.219 --> 44:09.340
She had a lot of images where Amazonian kind of

44:09.649 --> 44:13.600
women were cutting men’s dicks off and all
sorts of things, but with a certain humor.

44:13.889 --> 44:18.159
This was just so liberating and so fun to see,
and so

44:18.179 --> 44:21.320
so over the top.
I think in Nicole’s work as well,

44:21.570 --> 44:27.969
the actual practice to me is as much lesbian
practice as any of the subjects that she

44:27.969 --> 44:30.610
depicts; the way I work with collages.

44:31.699 --> 44:33.850
There’s no end to it.
You don’t know where the hell you’re going with it.

44:33.850 --> 44:36.939
It could go anywhere and it keeps building and

44:36.939 --> 44:41.409
you can often sort of, and you could
re-piece it together,

44:41.540 --> 44:45.340
Um, trying to put this more simply, basically I
don't know what the hell I'm doing.

44:45.340 --> 44:46.780
Don't know what the hell I'm doing.

44:48.179 --> 44:49.739
I think that sort of sums it up.

44:51.070 --> 44:54.310
There's no plan, you know, if there's only a
plan.

44:54.429 --> 44:58.949
I mean, I do have a plan.
I plan to find a really cool girl that's

44:58.949 --> 45:04.679
gonna love me and have my children, and my
family is gonna love us, that's my plan.

45:04.889 --> 45:10.899
This idea of not knowing what is
gonna happen next,

45:11.189 --> 45:15.510
I mean,
you know, and I've been seeing this really

45:15.510 --> 45:18.699
clearly in the last month or so.

45:19.709 --> 45:25.110
Um, my brother has recently gotten married, and
my other brother seems like he's right on the

45:25.110 --> 45:31.669
verge of it, and there's this definite path that
they're taking, and it sort of just really

45:31.669 --> 45:38.639
hit home just how free floating this sort
of lesbian thing is. Nicky moved to New

45:38.639 --> 45:41.629
York in the late 80s.

45:42.310 --> 45:48.669
There's already, um, there's already a
community of lesbians in the East Village

45:48.669 --> 45:53.469
who are culturally active by the late 80s and
early 90s.

45:53.629 --> 45:57.020
There's also heroin in the East Village lesbian
community.

45:57.379 --> 46:04.100
Which was not here before, was not here when I
came to New York in the early 80s, and

46:04.100 --> 46:09.439
Nicky was part of the East Village heroin community too.
 

46:09.800 --> 46:15.929
Which at the time, and still is, is very much in
our community.

46:16.100 --> 46:21.219
Yeah, last year and a half I've spent
sort of recovering, like recovering.

46:22.260 --> 46:27.659
At that time, it was very fashionable to
do a lot of drugs.

46:27.739 --> 46:31.570
People, everybody was doing a certain amount of
drugs, and um,

46:33.020 --> 46:38.129
but just some people did it more than others,
and Nicole did an awful lot.

46:39.100 --> 46:41.550
And it really did start to get in the way of
things, yeah.

46:41.669 --> 46:46.790
I mean, it fueled her on the one hand, I
think, to go into some crazy free association,

46:46.830 --> 46:51.000
which I think sometimes perhaps would have been
more difficult if she'd been completely sober.

46:53.770 --> 46:58.330
There was a lot of atmosphere around, you
know, an artist's

46:58.399 --> 47:00.399
heroin addict's loft.

47:01.550 --> 47:06.709
Can look pretty out of control, so it was
really exciting for art people

47:06.709 --> 47:08.310
to come over and visit.

47:09.050 --> 47:12.979
You know, this is really pretty dull
comparatively speaking.

47:13.070 --> 47:18.709
I don't know, the art world's like a circus, and
I think I was like a freaking

47:18.709 --> 47:24.110
some sort of freak show, and I was painting
murals and working all night.

47:24.149 --> 47:28.830
The exotic,
the freak, the token if it is used.

47:28.830 --> 47:34.989
Descriptively, the word lesbian still ends up
being like some kind of freak word because

47:34.989 --> 47:38.840
people don't really know what a lesbian is and
they don't want to talk about what a lesbian is

47:38.840 --> 47:42.750
they don't want to talk about why a lesbian is
they don't want to talk about the implications of

47:42.750 --> 47:48.030
lesbianism to the larger culture. One review
after the after Nicole.

47:48.304 --> 47:54.205
Uh, Peter Sheldon’s review where I felt that
there was almost a kind of prurient pleasure

47:54.205 --> 47:59.885
being taken in who she was sexually. There was
a certain kind of paternalistic, condescending

47:59.885 --> 48:04.514
quality to the way he wrote about Nicole in an
article called Our Nicole.

48:04.885 --> 48:10.125
Um, whose Nicole is he talking about?
Who has the right to appropriate her

48:10.125 --> 48:12.645
in that way?
It was, it was creepy.

48:13.340 --> 48:18.209
A critique of the show by Grace Glook in the
New York Times,

48:18.379 --> 48:23.199
um, she seemed especially upset by the drawing
Jesus fucking Christ.

48:23.409 --> 48:27.199
It just seemed to her to be a totally
gratuitous, outrageous act.

48:27.489 --> 48:33.290
Nicole’s class position is, um, certainly
intrinsic to her survival.

48:33.385 --> 48:38.014
Out of the lesbian heroin network, without a class
position, I don't think she would have been

48:38.014 --> 48:42.534
able to go to the Betty Ford Clinic, but when
it came to me fucking up and getting addicted

48:42.534 --> 48:45.774
to drugs, it was only me who could bail myself
out of that.

48:45.935 --> 48:52.014
So I took myself to Betty Ford.
I came from an upper middle-class family from

48:52.014 --> 48:55.254
Scarsdale, and it enabled me to.

48:56.449 --> 49:01.399
Um, attend the art school of my choice, Rhode
Island School of Design.

49:01.719 --> 49:04.969
My art education didn't include any women.
I mean,

49:05.090 --> 49:09.129
hardly any.
It's more—that's what they teach you in art

49:09.129 --> 49:12.090
school: that painting is like a battle and you're
like

49:13.000 --> 49:19.060
in war against, like, you, against the canvas—all
this really great romantic stuff about painting.

49:19.229 --> 49:22.989
Who told you that?
Well, it's like just this stuff, like these old

49:22.989 --> 49:29.300
dogs in art school used to like, you like it's
a battle you gotta fight it out.

49:31.070 --> 49:33.510
You're bad.
You know, I read this kind of stuff.

49:34.780 --> 49:37.060
It's you against the canvas.

49:37.260 --> 49:38.500
It's gonna try to kick you out.

49:39.219 --> 49:42.760
And you got to wrangle it in like a wild
stallion.

49:43.379 --> 49:47.570
There are artists who are deceased whose
museums own their work,

49:47.790 --> 49:50.760
right?
OK, so they are denying museums.

49:50.969 --> 49:55.320
If you don't claim that in your lifetime, it
could happen after your death,

49:55.409 --> 49:58.479
and then that museum keeps saying, oh, she
wasn't gay,

49:58.689 --> 50:00.120
she wasn't a lesbian.

50:02.379 --> 50:07.810
Yeah, huh, wow, really?

50:08.939 --> 50:12.979
Wow, you would think it'd be good for the
museum to say they were gay, kind of stir

50:13.139 --> 50:15.770
stir things up, stir a little interest up.
I mean,

50:15.899 --> 50:18.260
I don't really know any artists who are in the
closet.

50:19.000 --> 50:23.020
I mean it seems kind of, it's it seems kind of
hard to be in the closet and be an artist

50:23.020 --> 50:26.270
because you're making this work and the work
comes from yourself and you put it out there.

50:26.350 --> 50:29.030
How could you be in the closet?
I mean you don't have much of a choice if

50:29.030 --> 50:33.699
you're just showing it, you know, I mean who's
an artist who's in the closet?

50:33.899 --> 50:37.780
I mean, that's not something I've come up with
in my career that I'm like,

50:38.120 --> 50:40.830
you know, getting lower prices because I'm a
gay woman.

50:40.929 --> 50:43.489
I mean, nobody's gonna ever try to say I was
straight.

50:44.110 --> 50:47.949
The 70s really paved the way for an artist like
Nicole Eisenman.

50:48.629 --> 50:55.030
Yeah, I'm discovering now that lesbians were
out there, doing like some, you know, like some of

50:55.030 --> 51:00.790
the smartest, funniest work that I've seen ever.
Um.

51:01.979 --> 51:05.370
And I just didn't know about it.
I didn't know they paved the way for me, and in

51:05.370 --> 51:10.639
fact, it's really funny to like do a project and
see that some chick did it,

51:10.729 --> 51:15.020
you know, 15 years ago.
It's 20 years ago or whatever, it's like, wow,

51:15.020 --> 51:18.489
God.
I'm not that original, am I?

51:18.610 --> 51:21.080
Or, you know, I don't know, very funny.

51:21.330 --> 51:22.600
Has all the time.

51:23.989 --> 51:26.939
Lesbian feminists during the 1970s.

51:28.459 --> 51:34.560
Created the space so that those of us who come
after have somewhere to walk around.

51:35.459 --> 51:39.060
We have somewhere to move politically, somewhere
to move socially,

51:39.209 --> 51:41.100
and somewhere to move artistically.

51:41.810 --> 51:48.090
She talks much more about great male
artists of the past, and she talks about, um,

51:48.090 --> 51:52.800
underground comics, and she'll talk about all
that sort of thing, but not so much, um, what was

51:52.800 --> 51:55.189
going on, uh, in.

51:56.760 --> 51:58.709
Art by women in the 70s.

51:59.239 --> 52:03.669
Sometimes I think I'm not in the closet and
then I catch myself being in it.

52:03.919 --> 52:09.000
I tend to, like, like to make my life sound a lot
easier, and be in denial of

52:10.070 --> 52:12.860
like the tough stuff.
I don't know if it's all, like,

52:13.070 --> 52:15.300
I don't know, maybe about homophobia.

52:16.050 --> 52:22.840
I don't come across it as much, but I think
it's, I tend to sort of like try to ignore the

52:22.840 --> 52:27.000
little tiny things that you experience daily.
Yeah.

52:28.699 --> 52:32.060
There was the destruction of the Whitney, and
then there was a big farcical thing about the

52:32.060 --> 52:37.209
biennial, and the biennial was like reaching
some sort of goal,

52:37.419 --> 52:42.290
like a major goal, and then you go on and we set
goals biennial.

52:42.419 --> 52:45.409
It was very tame, the work she put in there, and
there was hardly any lesbian,

52:45.580 --> 52:47.409
and there's an opportunity to really go for it.

52:47.780 --> 52:51.489
Yeah, there's not a huge amount of lesbian work
in that show.

52:51.580 --> 52:53.340
I may have been.

52:54.479 --> 53:00.750
Scared to really do that.
I made a decision to put the self-portraits in

53:00.959 --> 53:05.709
and that, you know, again, this is when I was
maybe slightly in the closet.

53:05.800 --> 53:10.879
I don't think Nicole Eisenman has ever
disguised one tiny bit her sexuality.

53:10.919 --> 53:13.989
I don't know how she would respond to that
in her work.

53:14.040 --> 53:19.030
I don't think she has ever disguised her
lesbian sexuality.

53:19.760 --> 53:22.439
She's not really that sexy, this one, is she?

53:24.540 --> 53:27.179
That's
who is she to you?

53:28.709 --> 53:33.459
Who is she?
Yeah, she's the, uh, reverend sex slave.

53:34.909 --> 53:39.989
Who bows down at your feet, drawing is the kind
of thing.

53:40.550 --> 53:42.909
It's like your handwriting.
It's like, yeah, they're

53:44.169 --> 53:46.469
I mean, you should learn how to do it better,
but.

53:47.379 --> 53:50.600
I hate to say this, but I think you either have
it or you don't.

53:52.090 --> 53:59.020
So yeah, uh, a big asshole, that's right, and
this giant lady with the big ass, my sex

53:59.020 --> 54:01.810
life.
Alright, I don't know that the word lesbian

54:01.810 --> 54:08.570
pigeonholes an artist necessarily, but I for
one don't want to see on the totality of an

54:08.570 --> 54:12.459
artist's work.
Focused on one particular issue,

54:12.500 --> 54:15.270
Pigeonholing of any sort is a bit tricky
because you know, you don't

54:15.379 --> 54:19.350
know, as an artist you want to feel that
you've got as much room as you want to

54:19.350 --> 54:23.429
maneuver; you don't want to feel
trapped into any particular kind of category.

54:42.560 --> 54:49.219
She is very out there; she's brave in all kinds
of ways in her work that I think in many ways

54:49.219 --> 54:51.050
stemmed back to her sexuality.

54:51.939 --> 54:53.290
You don't hide anything.

54:54.689 --> 54:57.510
Yeah, I definitely don't hide anything.

54:59.610 --> 55:05.120
There's like a big daisy chain of women like
having oral sex upstairs.

55:05.199 --> 55:06.790
I'm definitely not hiding anything.

55:37.939 --> 55:39.810
You're making work for lesbians.

55:40.689 --> 55:43.580
Well, this isn't actually a lesbian.
This is a straight,

55:43.840 --> 55:48.590
This is a married woman who wants, like, a
lesbian scene on her ceiling.

55:48.760 --> 55:53.850
I mean, this stuff is erotic and sexy for anyone.
I mean, everybody fantasizes about

55:54.080 --> 55:58.530
you know, lesbian sex: straight women, gay
straight men,

55:58.639 --> 56:01.959
you know, maybe all excluding gay men.

56:02.840 --> 56:07.090
Don't you think? Is that just my idea as a
lesbian that everybody fantasizes about us?

56:07.399 --> 56:10.159
I think that's true. It's true.
It's erotic.

56:10.239 --> 56:14.389
I mean, you can't. I mean, even if you're not, I
mean it looks good,

56:15.000 --> 56:19.120
maybe even if you're not having the fantasies,
it's still, it makes for gorgeous subject matter.

56:19.360 --> 56:21.840
It always has.
I as well.

56:22.649 --> 56:25.290
And that was always so weird, you know, these
people, these collectors,

56:25.370 --> 56:28.320
you know, these heterosexual collectors would
buy this stuff up.

56:28.850 --> 56:33.399
And, uh, yeah, you have to wonder what their
relationship to these images is.

56:33.570 --> 56:37.320
There was, I remember one image that was called
lesbian recruitment center, and it was these big

56:37.320 --> 56:41.189
dykes picking up these girls over their
shoulders and taking them into this house, and

56:41.189 --> 56:45.300
then through the windows you could see, you
know, some kind of like lesbian initiation kind

56:45.300 --> 56:46.370
of sex thing going on.

56:47.129 --> 56:50.409
There was loads of stuff like that, um, but
like I said,

56:50.530 --> 56:53.080
you know, it's just not where, you know, you
can't see it now.

56:53.129 --> 56:55.520
I mean, it's hanging in people's homes somewhere.

56:56.610 --> 56:59.689
The market still hates women, you know, it
really does.

56:59.889 --> 57:03.199
That's the bottom line.
I mean, there are very few women who can somehow

57:03.199 --> 57:05.850
who have managed to transcend that.

57:06.459 --> 57:10.719
Um, the kinds of restrictions that are
placed on big ambition,

57:10.729 --> 57:12.719
men do it all the time, but women don't.

57:13.290 --> 57:18.919
I'm always disappointed by a lot of powerful
women in the art world who are misogynist.

57:19.370 --> 57:24.050
It's incredible but true, and so, you know,
they're misogynists about straight

57:24.050 --> 57:28.209
women, let alone gay.
And that's a problem, you know,

57:28.310 --> 57:31.879
the kind of powerful fag hacks of the art world,
so.

57:33.919 --> 57:39.800
So there is a glass ceiling, yeah. The closet
is for women. Women are just all shut up and not

57:39.810 --> 57:44.280
not out there.
For sure, yeah, it's terribly unfair.

57:45.590 --> 57:52.399
If by closet you mean rendered secret, made
hidden, forced into isolation and

57:52.399 --> 57:59.209
seclusion and denied expression, absolutely,
absolutely right. Here this is my favorite

57:59.209 --> 58:04.030
part.
You get that kiss, the kiss to end all kisses.

58:05.469 --> 58:08.500
Oh, that's a very sexy kiss.