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Making, Mothering, Ruth Asawa
Margot Lystra - 3.26.26 - Art, Mothering, HistoriesAfter visiting the Ruth Asawa retrospective at MoMA...
Dear Ursula,
About ten minutes into exploring this exhibit, I felt an emotional jolt - strong feelings, tears in my eyes. What got me was this:
It was the subtle sags and warps. Traces of two hands working, working. Reaching at once towards, and away from, abstract form.
So clearly, this was the work of a woman. So clearly, this person knew equally the blazing lure of conceptualization and the groundedness of bodies. Knew that ideal form is nothing without the body’s striving. And that in striving, one might set an abstract goal, begin forming it, get closer and closer to achieving it, and then in the very fact of making, mutate the aim altogether into something else. The outcome something accrued, grown, lived; something far more lively than the idea on its own.
There are many things I’ll remember from this exhibit. Among them...
The Guggenheim Fellowships never received, despite multiple tries.
An exquisite animation of space, over and over again. Asawa’s virtuosity at enlivinging surrounds. This done through myriad means...
materiality
illustration
enclosing
enfolding
inverting
So clearly, this was the work of a woman. So clearly, this person knew equally the blazing lure of conceptualization and the groundedness of bodies. Knew that ideal form is nothing without the body’s striving. And that in striving, one might set an abstract goal, begin forming it, get closer and closer to achieving it, and then in the very fact of making, mutate the aim altogether into something else. The outcome something accrued, grown, lived; something far more lively than the idea on its own.
There are many things I’ll remember from this exhibit. Among them...
The Guggenheim Fellowships never received, despite multiple tries.
An exquisite animation of space, over and over again. Asawa’s virtuosity at enlivinging surrounds. This done through myriad means...
materiality
illustration
enclosing
enfolding
inverting
and through creating together with others. The practice of animating the in-between transmuted, later in Asawa’s career, from a play with material and form to a play with people and stories.
I could imagine her, after knitting endless spherical and radial shapes while mothering her many kids, eventually simply needing more than mere form. Following the draw of a new, more complex kind of work; one that emerged out of everyday life: making in the house, being with kids and community.
Asawa was familiar with nurture. She described art-making as parenting a growing work, helping it to come into its own being. She was perhaps less concerned with form than with the raw force of life itself, as it coursed through, around, and in-between...
In this, her aspirations were perhaps messier and richer, more ongoing and ubiquitous, than those set by the Guggenheim Fellowship committees of her day. There can be extraordinary power in an indirect path - one that, in meandering, touches more people and places along the way.
.......
All of this I can relate to, as I know you can as well. Elusive messy everyday richness is familiar, isn’t it. In my own mother-self, it manifests as a mix of aspiration, loss, resistance, and staking claim. What a bizarre bundle that is! But it is so:
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Aspiration: to express that which I feel to be true to my experience of living in this world.
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Capitulation: upon realizing some years ago, that my truth, in its femaleness, was one that had been decentered through much of my learning and life. So many of my intellectual models had lived, as men, in vastly different circumstances than I did, would, could, that a sense of being peripheral was so familiar as to simply be what intellectual life was for me much of the time.
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Resistance: in developing a practice of denial, learning to separate my sense of self from supposedly neutral but actually masculine ideals once it became clear that they did not support or celebrate my kind.
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Radical claiming: greadually, increasingly insisting that my work is the right work, powerless or no. That being a woman/mother shapes the work in small and large ways, and there is no going around that. No pretending. No other way.
Despite all of this understanding and identification and resonant appreciation, still some part of me finds itself wishing that Asawa had gotten that Guggenheim. What would her work have become if she’d had a bit more quiet time, a bit more solitude, a bit more support? Perhaps it would have morphed faster, differently - who knows where she could have led us?
But another part of me (at once patient/resigned) understands that these things - the work and the life circumstances of the one doing the work - these interrelate in an unfolding that cannot be made perfect, cannot be controlled. One can only keep stepping forth with generosity, readying oneself - bodily, situated, fallible and unfully free - to meet the spark in whatever shape that it arrives.
Thus Asawa’s exquisite bouquet sketches in her later years. Talk about life force! Such an intimate act, drawing flowers gifted by friends. The drawings shimmer with interconnection, they are saturated with it. They succeed in holding some much liveliness that it radiates outwards. The love in them leaps off the page.
What does this all have to do with Land Culture Workshop? Anything? So much! Too much? Let’s settle at saying, just enough (ok, plus a bit more).
The work we are developing, by my lights, is, at its core, life force work. The form is not the point. How much life force can one’s work nurture and grow? That is the question, the lure, the project. To be tried with others if we can, with lots of others, across places and situations. Ruth Asawa as one who went before, this is about seeing what we mothers can bring into being...