1 00:00:00,360 --> 00:00:11,100 All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the third of four lectures in the terror lecture series, our series for American Art. 2 00:00:11,100 --> 00:00:20,340 I'm Melissa Block. And today is modernism disfigured cult and illicit ritual in New Mexico. 3 00:00:20,340 --> 00:00:28,770 In the works of Georgia O'Keefe and Martha Graham or everything you could possibly ever want in a lecture title. 4 00:00:28,770 --> 00:00:48,000 So we'll see if the lecture measures help. I would like to dedicate this lecture to my first academic mentor, Wanda Corn. 5 00:00:48,000 --> 00:00:55,230 Georgia O'Keefe is one of the most celebrated American artists and other American artists who are women. 6 00:00:55,230 --> 00:01:04,470 Certainly the most famous she enjoyed outstanding success during her lifetime was the subject of the Museum of Modern Arts. 7 00:01:04,470 --> 00:01:09,870 Very first retrospective, dedicated to a woman in 1946, 8 00:01:09,870 --> 00:01:22,140 was beloved throughout the turbulent 1960s and achieved the pinnacle of her fame in the 1970s as a symbol for the growing women's movement. 9 00:01:22,140 --> 00:01:27,720 She is virtually synonymous with her lush, suggestive flower paintings. 10 00:01:27,720 --> 00:01:34,350 Conceived and articulated with such personality and force that it is impossible for any artist 11 00:01:34,350 --> 00:01:41,910 to have painted a flower in the last century without O'Keeffe's example present in mind. 12 00:01:41,910 --> 00:01:44,700 But not just flowers. 13 00:01:44,700 --> 00:01:54,420 As the only woman in the inner sanctum of a group of modern artists surroundings, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who was also her husband. 14 00:01:54,420 --> 00:01:59,520 She lived in Manhattan and took its dramatic skyline as her subject. 15 00:01:59,520 --> 00:02:12,450 In the 1920s, O'Keeffe's enduring success resides in the fact that she imparts to us ways of seeing that we didn't know were inside of us, 16 00:02:12,450 --> 00:02:24,810 not buildings, but the jagged spaces in between them, not electric streetlights, but there dappled incandescence as imprinted on our site. 17 00:02:24,810 --> 00:02:33,630 O'Keeffe's city stretches seeing into something akin to feeling not eyesight but eyeball. 18 00:02:33,630 --> 00:02:47,940 Not the lens, but the finger and the hand. Georgia O'Keeffe is also synonymous with New Mexico and potentially the entire American Southwest. 19 00:02:47,940 --> 00:02:56,880 She first journey there in 1929, aged 41, only to settle there permanently in the late 1940s. 20 00:02:56,880 --> 00:03:04,200 At first she painted Adobe churches and American Indian dolls. 21 00:03:04,200 --> 00:03:13,830 But over time, it was really the bleached bones that she collected from the high desert floor that captivated her cow, 22 00:03:13,830 --> 00:03:19,050 mule and deer skulls and pelvic bones. 23 00:03:19,050 --> 00:03:32,880 These objects were not culturally specific blank slates for her to add them, add to them whatever perspective she wished and that she did. 24 00:03:32,880 --> 00:03:41,430 The red, white and blue motif in Cowes skull may retrospectively seem to us to be effusively patriotic to the artist. 25 00:03:41,430 --> 00:03:49,200 However, the word patriotic might not have made as much sense as the word essence. 26 00:03:49,200 --> 00:03:57,600 The New York modernists believed that there was an authenticity of the American spirit worth pursuing and esprit de corps, 27 00:03:57,600 --> 00:04:08,180 which would separate it once and for all from Europe. O'Keefe gave the object of this pursuit a name, the great American thing, 28 00:04:08,180 --> 00:04:15,990 and it is very well possible that she had become the greatest American painter of her generation. 29 00:04:15,990 --> 00:04:24,360 If the title of this lecture series is the body of a nation, then the key word for this lecture is gender. 30 00:04:24,360 --> 00:04:30,920 It is very well-documented that O'Keeffe's gender was highlighted by critics right from the start. 31 00:04:30,920 --> 00:04:40,080 The women must, of course, paint flowers problem. But she continued, despite this misunderstanding of her work. 32 00:04:40,080 --> 00:04:44,190 Stieglitz is photographs of O'Keeffe's body, or I guess I should say, 33 00:04:44,190 --> 00:04:50,400 body parts are similarly well known and studied and produce an idea of an 34 00:04:50,400 --> 00:04:58,020 artist whose identification with her bodily femaleness is all but unquestioned. 35 00:04:58,020 --> 00:05:06,960 To take a tiny conceptual jump, we might ask, what did it mean for O'Keefe to relocate to make to New Mexico? 36 00:05:06,960 --> 00:05:10,680 What was its body like? Visa v Herve's? 37 00:05:10,680 --> 00:05:17,520 What were its genders? As we shall see, the question is complex. 38 00:05:17,520 --> 00:05:28,410 O'Keefe was not the only modern artist, male or female, to come from the East Coast to the American southwest looking for the great American thing. 39 00:05:28,410 --> 00:05:35,970 By the late nineteenth century, northern New Mexico was a must see on what we might call the domestic grand tour, 40 00:05:35,970 --> 00:05:40,890 made accessible by a vast and ever expanding railroad. 41 00:05:40,890 --> 00:05:46,320 The southern route did not afford travellers as much of the dramatic Vernick. 42 00:05:46,320 --> 00:05:51,190 Melody of the Rockies nor comforts of gold rush. 43 00:05:51,190 --> 00:05:56,890 Cities like Denver en route to the San Francisco Bay. 44 00:05:56,890 --> 00:06:04,450 Instead, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad darted through the flats of Kansas and eastern Colorado, 45 00:06:04,450 --> 00:06:09,970 careening into the hilly terrain southwest through Santa Fe and Albuquerque, 46 00:06:09,970 --> 00:06:16,630 past Erard Flattop Mountains called Macy's and sudden drop canyons and then down into 47 00:06:16,630 --> 00:06:22,810 the blistering heavy desert as it lurched toward the growing port of Los Angeles. 48 00:06:22,810 --> 00:06:29,620 No Hollywood, no Beverly Hills, just figs, lemons and beans. 49 00:06:29,620 --> 00:06:42,700 In 1884, the journalist Charles Lummis popularised New Mexico in an adventurous series of articles called Tramp Across the Continent, 50 00:06:42,700 --> 00:06:48,880 finding himself restless at his desk of a Small-Town newspaper in Ohio. 51 00:06:48,880 --> 00:06:56,050 Lummus accepted an assignment at the recently established Lorsch at Los Angeles Times to walk the 52 00:06:56,050 --> 00:07:04,420 3000 miles from Cincinnati to Los Angeles under the pretence of wanting to get back into shape. 53 00:07:04,420 --> 00:07:12,610 After years of white collar work, he knew the publicity stunt would bring him a national reputation. 54 00:07:12,610 --> 00:07:21,070 East Coast readers would have been sympathetic to the pseudoscientific cognitive impairment known as Brain Fagg, 55 00:07:21,070 --> 00:07:30,130 known to afflict Middle-Class White Men, not women. And its remedy found in getting back into nature. 56 00:07:30,130 --> 00:07:40,000 The American painter Thomas Eakins, for instance, was an avid proponent of rry masculinisation through homosocial contact in the great outdoors. 57 00:07:40,000 --> 00:07:51,460 And already the West was known to be a rough and rugged place, ideal for toughening up the overworked professional. 58 00:07:51,460 --> 00:07:55,600 To externalise and make plain the evidence of his cure. 59 00:07:55,600 --> 00:08:00,340 Lomis narrated his transformation into a bonafide frontiersmen. 60 00:08:00,340 --> 00:08:09,910 Over the months of his sojourn, he told readers that he traded his britches for the buckskin leggings of an Apache dude. 61 00:08:09,910 --> 00:08:18,070 He wore a skunk pelt, a six shooter strapped to his waist and a Mexican sombrero to which he affixed a dried rattlesnake 62 00:08:18,070 --> 00:08:27,310 skin before arriving at the Laguna Pueblo on Christmas Day to witness a native dancing festival. 63 00:08:27,310 --> 00:08:37,690 Lomis trapped and killed a coyote, skinned it and stuffed it with straw, which he wore as a shawl to impress the locals. 64 00:08:37,690 --> 00:08:43,540 One can only imagine the sight of him outfitted to the hilt in his imaginary native 65 00:08:43,540 --> 00:08:50,410 costume in the audience of what he described to the readers back home as a corn dance. 66 00:08:50,410 --> 00:09:01,510 In fact, if it were a corn dance in December, then the audience may well have been mostly white and the performance mostly theatrical. 67 00:09:01,510 --> 00:09:10,720 The ceremonial corn dance. An important holiday on the Southwest native calendar, occurs in August. 68 00:09:10,720 --> 00:09:19,480 The fantastical and symbolic representation of indigenous beauty in American art goes back at least to the 18th century. 69 00:09:19,480 --> 00:09:22,810 Since the Indian removal policy of 1830, though, 70 00:09:22,810 --> 00:09:35,020 the visual motifs governing natives had largely been set forth in the figure of the noble savage by physically and mentally strong American type, 71 00:09:35,020 --> 00:09:45,130 resigned to his fate in acquiescing to the encroachment of a more technologically capable white civilisation, 72 00:09:45,130 --> 00:09:56,080 thus relegated to the historical past tense. The docile and contemplative Indian, both male and female, was a favourite subject for artists. 73 00:09:56,080 --> 00:10:01,660 Arranged. Part portrait, part still life with pots and rugs. 74 00:10:01,660 --> 00:10:12,820 Without any question, the spectacular Pueblo's and the availability of Native American culture lured white travellers to New Mexico. 75 00:10:12,820 --> 00:10:17,740 But that was not the only cultural encounter at work. 76 00:10:17,740 --> 00:10:25,990 Indeed, white American contact with Hispanics in the Southwest was broadly unfamiliar. 77 00:10:25,990 --> 00:10:36,580 At the furthest remove from the tropes of recognisable Spanish is that they might have known Hispanic people were enigmas, 78 00:10:36,580 --> 00:10:44,770 fitting somewhere between white European ally and alien enemy. 79 00:10:44,770 --> 00:10:51,790 This is where Lomis steps in again because he was amongst the first to solidify a 80 00:10:51,790 --> 00:10:59,830 gendered motif of Hispanic identity in New Mexico for the sake of his white readers. 81 00:10:59,830 --> 00:11:06,460 In 1888, he was living in the village of San Mateo, New Mexico, in the songwriter Cristo Mountains. 82 00:11:06,460 --> 00:11:11,550 When he first heard of the unorthodox rituals of the old models, enough. 83 00:11:11,550 --> 00:11:15,730 Then he dug the other side wiser than the rest throw nuestro bother cases. 84 00:11:15,730 --> 00:11:23,440 Now Sorento in English. The brothers of the pious fraternity of our father, Jesus of Nazareth. 85 00:11:23,440 --> 00:11:33,880 These penny 10 days, as they were known, are secretive layth religious fraternal organisations that served the spiritual needs of 86 00:11:33,880 --> 00:11:43,150 Hispanic Roman Catholics in the remote stretches of country where priests did not live. 87 00:11:43,150 --> 00:11:50,920 Each lent the Penitentes came out of secrecy to perform The Passion of Christ. 88 00:11:50,920 --> 00:11:58,310 After saying Good Friday prayers in their private, one room meetinghouse called them whatever. 89 00:11:58,310 --> 00:12:05,170 The brothers proceeded along the path to a clearing called the Colorado or the Calvary site, 90 00:12:05,170 --> 00:12:12,190 using horsehair whips to beat themselves into penance at this clearing. 91 00:12:12,190 --> 00:12:20,560 Other penances were enacted, including beating cactus needles into their flesh with stones. 92 00:12:20,560 --> 00:12:25,780 The climax of the ceremony was a crucifixion, 93 00:12:25,780 --> 00:12:35,290 nailing the life body and the penitent to a wooden cross called the mother Eddo already by the time Lomis arrived. 94 00:12:35,290 --> 00:12:44,880 The high stakes of death in these ceremonies were known to white settlers and widely discouraged, if not outlawed. 95 00:12:44,880 --> 00:12:50,050 So to deter attention, PENITENTE days began to use ropes to fix the. 96 00:12:50,050 --> 00:12:52,690 He took the cross instead of nails. 97 00:12:52,690 --> 00:13:05,170 But no matter, the bloody Lenten ritual already crystallised the identity of Hispanic vernacular religion and thus characterise the severity. 98 00:13:05,170 --> 00:13:14,110 Danger, mystery and, yes, masculinity of the American southwest to which it pertained. 99 00:13:14,110 --> 00:13:27,040 Lummis wrote up his story, produced a portfolio of photographs which I've shown you, and published his account in Cosmopolitan magazine in May 1889. 100 00:13:27,040 --> 00:13:28,150 From that moment, 101 00:13:28,150 --> 00:13:44,110 the penitent a rituals objects of worship in meeting houses became an intense focus for outsiders seeking an authentic experience of New Mexico. 102 00:13:44,110 --> 00:13:50,860 Here's a larger view by World War One. 103 00:13:50,860 --> 00:13:58,300 There were enough white artists living in northern New Mexico to warrant the establishment of several ateliers. 104 00:13:58,300 --> 00:14:05,560 One was called the Sincock, endorsed by painters in Santa Fe, and the other was the 20th Society of Artists. 105 00:14:05,560 --> 00:14:13,480 In the more rural mountainous area, just north Taos was an especially attractive place to paint. 106 00:14:13,480 --> 00:14:17,840 Here's a map for you. So here's Santa Fe, N.M. 107 00:14:17,840 --> 00:14:23,690 Here's here's the Colorado border. Yes. 108 00:14:23,690 --> 00:14:30,610 Taos was an especially attractive place to paint owing to its proximity to Indian settlements and the local penitentiary, 109 00:14:30,610 --> 00:14:38,050 meeting houses that made access to the two exotic cultures especially convenient. 110 00:14:38,050 --> 00:14:45,370 These painters, all male, presented Penitentes subject matter in a literal way. 111 00:14:45,370 --> 00:14:55,330 For instance, William Penhallow Henderson's Holy Week in New Mexico PENITENTE, a procession of 1919, 112 00:14:55,330 --> 00:15:04,480 relies on a dynamic sense of line and a bright palette to convey the Good Friday exercises. 113 00:15:04,480 --> 00:15:11,050 The mountain and wild hills in the background conspire with an obtrusive sagebrush plant in 114 00:15:11,050 --> 00:15:19,240 the foreground to compress the central action into a tight and partially occluded strip. 115 00:15:19,240 --> 00:15:30,490 The arduous path to the Calvera such compression gives the sense of density and chaos amongst the participating actors. 116 00:15:30,490 --> 00:15:38,050 But the shallow zone at the bottom edge of the painting ultimately separates the viewer from the ceremony. 117 00:15:38,050 --> 00:15:43,990 Henderson renders the brothers flesh in the same brown tones as the Earth, 118 00:15:43,990 --> 00:15:52,540 solidifying a relationship between the penitent days and their land of origin. 119 00:15:52,540 --> 00:15:57,100 By focussing exclusively on the group. Good Friday. Crucifixion. 120 00:15:57,100 --> 00:16:09,200 These uninvited onlookers missed the nuances of the ceremony and mischaracterise them as a spectacularly affirmative, masculine bloodsport. 121 00:16:09,200 --> 00:16:13,240 A penitently object less frequently depicted, 122 00:16:13,240 --> 00:16:22,390 but one that I argue is a key spectral presence lingering behind these artist's powerful fascination with the Southwest. 123 00:16:22,390 --> 00:16:35,830 Is this the death card? Although the use of portable objects in religious plays or puzzles in Spanish has its roots in mediaeval Spain, 124 00:16:35,830 --> 00:16:47,320 the death card dates to about 1860, is unique to this region and has a ritual rather than a didactic function. 125 00:16:47,320 --> 00:16:51,280 During the performance, the elected PENITENTE, a brother, 126 00:16:51,280 --> 00:17:00,580 attached the heavy chassis to his torso with a rope and dragged it from the meetinghouse to the Calvary site. 127 00:17:00,580 --> 00:17:08,380 This cottonwood chassy, as you can see, supported and partially enclosed a wooden statue called Lumb, 128 00:17:08,380 --> 00:17:17,240 where they're presented as either denuded or dressed in women's robes. 129 00:17:17,240 --> 00:17:24,450 What if he is curiously the only female body presiding over this secret fraternal ritual? 130 00:17:24,450 --> 00:17:34,260 And is alluringly a cult? The significance of Ludwig today is obscure in penitently communities. 131 00:17:34,260 --> 00:17:41,970 She is referred to as NWA Commodities Sebastiano, which means our godmother, Sebastiano or Lavonia. 132 00:17:41,970 --> 00:17:46,560 So us Diana, Lady Sebastiano, the title Commendatory, 133 00:17:46,560 --> 00:17:55,710 separates her from La Madre or the mother to emphasise her difference from the Holy Mother, Virgin Mary, who avoided early death. 134 00:17:55,710 --> 00:18:07,680 According to Roman Catholic doctrine, Mary's whole body and soul entered heaven at the end of her life and thus cannot appear as skeletal remains. 135 00:18:07,680 --> 00:18:18,180 The name Sebastiano is a female declension of the male Saint Sebastian, who is frequently depicted as murdered by arrows. 136 00:18:18,180 --> 00:18:29,850 By contrast, Donya Sebastiano carries a wooden bow strung with sinew, suggesting her agency as the archer rather than as the victim. 137 00:18:29,850 --> 00:18:42,020 Taken together with her Macall appearance, one may assume that her arrows represent the arbitrariness of the moment of death. 138 00:18:42,020 --> 00:18:51,500 In Spanish and Latin American traditions, it is relatively common to see Good Friday pageants involving likenesses of venerated saints. 139 00:18:51,500 --> 00:18:57,410 But what sets the death card apart is its mobilisation as a form of penance. 140 00:18:57,410 --> 00:19:09,200 Indeed, the life body of the male worshipper became the physical target in the death card performance, forcing his body into submission. 141 00:19:09,200 --> 00:19:18,830 The penitent would have faced away from the erect, might be expecting a prone position and harnessed his torso to the chassis with a horse. 142 00:19:18,830 --> 00:19:25,610 Her rope, which you see here in front, assuming the weight of the female statue in the penitent, 143 00:19:25,610 --> 00:19:30,620 dragged it along the path, causing bleeding around the clavicle and shoulders. 144 00:19:30,620 --> 00:19:40,070 Thus, the death cart literally entered the penitents body, intensifying the sense of his own human mortality, 145 00:19:40,070 --> 00:19:46,370 which the grisly aesthetic of Lemonier today also comeback signifies. 146 00:19:46,370 --> 00:19:53,720 Her presence also potently suggests the reversal of the usual penetrative agency. 147 00:19:53,720 --> 00:20:04,340 That is, the penitents will to enact punishment against his own body is theatrical ised by his submission to a female agent. 148 00:20:04,340 --> 00:20:12,470 Thus, we cannot definitively understand this entire spectacle of masochism as essentially masculine, 149 00:20:12,470 --> 00:20:19,130 but rather as an example of the incoherence of our expectations of masculinity. 150 00:20:19,130 --> 00:20:33,580 The brothers desire to obtain the usually feminised qualities of passivity and bottom meanness in the elusive quest for their spiritual transcendent. 151 00:20:33,580 --> 00:20:39,640 I submit that these white artists inability to visualise the death cart was in turn of 152 00:20:39,640 --> 00:20:46,780 a fantasy to identify themselves as participants in their own exclusive brotherhood. 153 00:20:46,780 --> 00:20:56,590 Similar to the one they depicted, a fantasy that did not consciously imagine an assertive presence of the feminine. 154 00:20:56,590 --> 00:21:07,360 The bonds established by these artists in a presumptively alien and yet fully colonised place reinforced a new sense of their masculinity, 155 00:21:07,360 --> 00:21:17,050 one that traded on the predominantly physical model of manhood understood to be at the core of the Penitentes rituals. 156 00:21:17,050 --> 00:21:23,800 And this new masculinity also perceived itself to be unstintingly modern. 157 00:21:23,800 --> 00:21:34,150 These men entertained powerful, narcissistic dreams of originality that were at the root of their desires to paint in New Mexico. 158 00:21:34,150 --> 00:21:41,050 What we as viewers see is a spectacle of masculine strength corroborate corroborated by the privileged 159 00:21:41,050 --> 00:21:55,430 artist who simultaneously aspires to authenticity but remains unapologetically at an arm's length. 160 00:21:55,430 --> 00:22:07,640 O'Keefe arrived in New Mexico in 1929, undoubtedly enchanted by the mysticism of the region, still dancing in the imagination of East Coast artists. 161 00:22:07,640 --> 00:22:17,900 Forty years after Loomis's original popularisation, by then, Native Americans had more readily opened their pueblos to tourists. 162 00:22:17,900 --> 00:22:26,690 And the commercial clauses in the Spanish town squares, especially in Santa Fe, bustled with a vigorous trade in hand-woven blankets, 163 00:22:26,690 --> 00:22:38,600 furnishings and woodcarver religious figures called samples to be used as home decor to some, like the artist Stuart Davis. 164 00:22:38,600 --> 00:22:46,820 New Mexico held little in the way of its promised allure of rustic authenticity his electric bulb. 165 00:22:46,820 --> 00:22:51,800 New Mexico, for instance, revels in disappointment. 166 00:22:51,800 --> 00:22:59,150 Similarly, in 1928, the journalist Paul Rosenfeld, a friend of Alfred Stieglitz, was disparaged. 167 00:22:59,150 --> 00:23:09,440 The poor audience of neurotic whites and half poets, his words congregated to watch the native dancing. 168 00:23:09,440 --> 00:23:16,520 But to many more, of course, New Mexico remains a romantic utopia, including two Keith, 169 00:23:16,520 --> 00:23:25,460 who described in no uncertain terms her feeling for the place, a feeling that lasted throughout her life. 170 00:23:25,460 --> 00:23:33,620 I do think, though, that her experience of New Mexico and her desire to express it was of a different flavour. 171 00:23:33,620 --> 00:23:41,720 Unlike Lummus, she already had a professional reputation and did not to need to respond to those pressures. 172 00:23:41,720 --> 00:23:49,000 Unlike the old male artist colonies in Santa Fe and Taos, she arrived with more progressive notions of art, 173 00:23:49,000 --> 00:23:57,440 particularly abstraction, emerging from a heady trans-Atlantic exchange in New York. 174 00:23:57,440 --> 00:24:06,290 Perhaps most significantly, her first view of New Mexico was seen through the frame of the modernist community 175 00:24:06,290 --> 00:24:13,820 assembled by the exciting and eccentric figure of Mabel Dodge Lou Horne, 176 00:24:13,820 --> 00:24:22,400 the restless heiress to a banking fortune. Lou had travelled to Europe in the years before the war and socialised it Gertrude Stein's 177 00:24:22,400 --> 00:24:29,510 famous salon with the likes of public Picasso and other early French obstructionists. 178 00:24:29,510 --> 00:24:32,900 She lived in Paris, then Florence, the New York, 179 00:24:32,900 --> 00:24:40,880 where she became a fixture in the Bohemian Greenwich Village and then the artist colony at Provincetown, Massachusetts. 180 00:24:40,880 --> 00:24:49,430 She then went west to Santa Barbara, California, a charming city perched on the Pacific Coast and finally settled in Texas, 181 00:24:49,430 --> 00:25:03,590 New Mexico in 1917, purchasing attractive land with an ample home, which she immediately set about to fashion into an artists retreat. 182 00:25:03,590 --> 00:25:11,510 Over the years, Lou, Hun's Taos colony attracted scores of writers, poets, photographers and painters. 183 00:25:11,510 --> 00:25:23,780 Now fixed in the American modernist pantheon, D.H. Lawrence, Willa Cather, Thornton Wilder, Marzin Hartley, Ansel Adams, just to name a few. 184 00:25:23,780 --> 00:25:27,800 And, of course, Georgia O'Keeffe. 185 00:25:27,800 --> 00:25:39,440 In her first summer at New Hun's retreat, O'Keeffe's saw the awesome sights that inspired others before her quiet mountain terrene. 186 00:25:39,440 --> 00:25:47,660 The Taos Pueblo, with its colourful festivals and distinctively shaped Church of Sun anymore. 187 00:25:47,660 --> 00:26:00,780 The 18th century Adobe Ranchos Church of San Francisco, the which seemed eminently suited to modernist abstract sensibilities. 188 00:26:00,780 --> 00:26:07,740 And an endless array of Hispanic and native material culture objects. 189 00:26:07,740 --> 00:26:16,800 She also knew about the presence of the PENITENTE dates since new ones backyard looked out over a vast terrain, 190 00:26:16,800 --> 00:26:25,110 including penitently meadows and a small meetinghouse, O'Keefe later recalled, 191 00:26:25,110 --> 00:26:30,870 One evening we walked to the back of the mall, rather, toward a cross in the hills. 192 00:26:30,870 --> 00:26:32,080 I was told it was at PENITENTE. 193 00:26:32,080 --> 00:26:46,860 They cross the cross was large enough to crucify a man who was in the late night and the cross stood out dark against the evening sky. 194 00:26:46,860 --> 00:26:56,310 Black Cross with Stars and Blue is one of four paintings of crosses O'Keeffe painted during her first summer in Taos. 195 00:26:56,310 --> 00:27:05,940 The authoritative Central Cross shatters the painting into four uneven quadrants to upper zones of Twilight Sky and 196 00:27:05,940 --> 00:27:14,730 to lower one's admitting a view of Sky Mountains and the land beyond the boundaries between the cross and the sky. 197 00:27:14,730 --> 00:27:19,100 Wave and bend an organic form elsewhere. 198 00:27:19,100 --> 00:27:23,200 O'Keefe mentioned that this suite of paintings. And here you can see another. 199 00:27:23,200 --> 00:27:32,910 The commanding black crossing Mexico, with their prominently placed crosses, evokes the pervasive Catholicism of the region, 200 00:27:32,910 --> 00:27:38,950 linking it to her painting of the raunchiest church, which we've also seen. 201 00:27:38,950 --> 00:27:45,120 But Black Cross is far more compelling than what the artist describes. 202 00:27:45,120 --> 00:27:50,370 These paintings meditate deeply on the theme of fracture. 203 00:27:50,370 --> 00:27:58,830 They allude to a broken but absent body through abstract zones permanently divided into Four Corners by the monolithic, 204 00:27:58,830 --> 00:28:08,790 cruciform the artist's words large enough to crucify a man reveal the paintings key mission, 205 00:28:08,790 --> 00:28:14,580 which is the male body that previously acted as the point of identification for other 206 00:28:14,580 --> 00:28:21,780 artists willing to establish their own initiation into the world of the savage. 207 00:28:21,780 --> 00:28:31,650 Thus, O'Keeffe's vision is that the experience of extremity encapsulated both by the ritual and the usual representation of it, 208 00:28:31,650 --> 00:28:42,450 could be suggested simply through form her sensuous imagery of inexact rectangles and undulating hills, 209 00:28:42,450 --> 00:28:54,910 legitimate a feeling of intense corpo reality without having to represent an anatomy to complete the picture. 210 00:28:54,910 --> 00:28:57,430 By the way, you can stay here, it's about two hundred dollars. 211 00:28:57,430 --> 00:29:04,870 I stayed in this room, which was the room of the writer, Mary Austin, and it is totally thrilling. 212 00:29:04,870 --> 00:29:12,190 So you must do it. What Lou Hohns Colony signified to O'Keefe, 213 00:29:12,190 --> 00:29:25,660 to O'Keeffe's introduction to New Mexico was a community within the Southwest held apart from the usual context of masculine authority. 214 00:29:25,660 --> 00:29:33,490 Many of the visitors to Lou Hohns colony were women travelling alone or with other women. 215 00:29:33,490 --> 00:29:37,990 Georgia O'Keefe, for instance, made her first trip with her friend, 216 00:29:37,990 --> 00:29:45,980 the painter Rebecca Strand, whose letters reveal the developing romantic affair between them. 217 00:29:45,980 --> 00:29:55,630 Louann, who as bisexual and a proponent of free love, made her home a welcoming place for such awakenings. 218 00:29:55,630 --> 00:30:06,050 More to the point, she encouraged women to find an unburdened locale for their work and life to flourish. 219 00:30:06,050 --> 00:30:12,190 Perhaps sensing this, the male author, Jean Touma, who was also a guest, 220 00:30:12,190 --> 00:30:19,750 wrote tongue in cheek of what he called the female fascism he found in Toff's strong, 221 00:30:19,750 --> 00:30:27,100 resourceful women who like the starkness and isolation of this country. 222 00:30:27,100 --> 00:30:35,260 But O'Keefe, like New Mexico, enough to follow Lohan's example to buy land there, to make her studio there. 223 00:30:35,260 --> 00:30:39,190 Apart from New York and, well, apart from Stieglitz, 224 00:30:39,190 --> 00:30:47,680 despite falling in line with the privileges of whiteness and money that enabled such New Mexican enchantments to seem so real. 225 00:30:47,680 --> 00:30:57,970 The Taos colony still operated in distinction to the ubiquity of masculine significance assumed of the American Southwest. 226 00:30:57,970 --> 00:31:03,730 Must we know about the Penitentes to appreciate O'Keeffe's Black Cross paintings? 227 00:31:03,730 --> 00:31:11,260 Perhaps not. But I think they are made more arresting and abundant when we see the complete picture of the commonly 228 00:31:11,260 --> 00:31:22,940 held gendered determinations of New Mexico at a critical moment in the development of American modernism. 229 00:31:22,940 --> 00:31:30,760 To round out this discussion, I would like to bring an additional artist into the floor, Martha Graham, 230 00:31:30,760 --> 00:31:39,200 the history of modernism and one might say the history of Western art has not been cosy with the history of dance. 231 00:31:39,200 --> 00:31:41,120 Surely some motifs prevail. 232 00:31:41,120 --> 00:31:52,490 One might think of the vibrant cabaret culture in the late 19th century or in Paris or Edgar [INAUDIBLE] obsession with ballet dancers. 233 00:31:52,490 --> 00:32:02,010 But the scholarship there is less concerned with choreography and more concerned with the changing nature of the audience and spectatorship, 234 00:32:02,010 --> 00:32:13,640 the gaze framing point of view. No history of art stuff in the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st. 235 00:32:13,640 --> 00:32:20,060 The explosion of performance art grew out of a newfound embrace of everyday movements, 236 00:32:20,060 --> 00:32:26,990 first appearing in the severe, pared down aesthetic of modern dance. 237 00:32:26,990 --> 00:32:34,430 One wonders if this is because more men were visible on stage more frequently. 238 00:32:34,430 --> 00:32:43,410 Men who also happened to make history of art, stuff like paintings and sculptures. 239 00:32:43,410 --> 00:32:51,260 And to this, we must acknowledge that amongst the performing arts, dance is difficult to describe. 240 00:32:51,260 --> 00:32:56,660 After you see it, unlike a play, there are usually no words. 241 00:32:56,660 --> 00:33:03,740 Unlike music, no school sound is integral to dance. 242 00:33:03,740 --> 00:33:11,750 But it is not the dance, not a body, a lighting and bending, turning, breathing. 243 00:33:11,750 --> 00:33:24,110 However, dance, when and where we can see it can provide an important nuance and supply compelling examples to us for still images. 244 00:33:24,110 --> 00:33:31,130 If one person transformed the history of Western dance, it was Martha Grande. 245 00:33:31,130 --> 00:33:44,780 Her trailblazing technique issued pointe work, which you see here were ballerinas move on their tiptoes across the stage as well as potentia lifts. 246 00:33:44,780 --> 00:33:52,490 Each dancer, male and female, was expected to muscle their own way across the stage. 247 00:33:52,490 --> 00:34:03,290 Graham also tended not to favour vaudevillian costuming or elaborate sets, which separated her from popular entertainment. 248 00:34:03,290 --> 00:34:15,800 Instead, Graham innovated and taught her company a method of stylised breathing, which she married to movements based on quotidien body postures. 249 00:34:15,800 --> 00:34:26,060 The idea was to infuse each danced motion with intense emotion, while at the same time appearing relatedly. 250 00:34:26,060 --> 00:34:35,810 Human and entire day in the Graham studio might be spent laughing or wailing or even spitting. 251 00:34:35,810 --> 00:34:54,590 Connecting the body to the feelings. The breathing exercise originates in the abdomen, in the fusiform muscle that connects the pelvis to the spine. 252 00:34:54,590 --> 00:35:05,960 And for that reason, grammes dancers practised breath while splayed out on the floor with the legs radiating out from an opened groyne. 253 00:35:05,960 --> 00:35:15,050 Breath is the beginning of movement. So not like yoga in which you breathe in order to connect one still pose to another, 254 00:35:15,050 --> 00:35:28,130 but a contraction that pushes movement energetically outward, thus to audiences accustomed to ballet and transitional ballroom dancing. 255 00:35:28,130 --> 00:35:33,020 The resulting motion seems inelegant and sudden. 256 00:35:33,020 --> 00:35:42,170 Graham plotted her convulsive movement style onto narrative structures to which she felt a particularly strong gravity, 257 00:35:42,170 --> 00:35:48,440 in which especially B fit the psychology of agony and pain. 258 00:35:48,440 --> 00:35:52,430 As an early dance in her repertoire, 259 00:35:52,430 --> 00:36:04,250 OpenNet 10 Day of 1940 is an experiment in the movement vocabulary that later became her signature choreography like O'Keeffe. 260 00:36:04,250 --> 00:36:13,700 Graham was also a friend of Mabel Dodge, the one and visited Tostes regularly between 1918 and 1937. 261 00:36:13,700 --> 00:36:25,670 And like O'Keefe, too, Graham developed an intense feeling for New Mexico, attracted especially to what she called its ferocity. 262 00:36:25,670 --> 00:36:31,880 She would have witnessed the same litany of tourist attractions the mountains, 263 00:36:31,880 --> 00:36:39,080 the pueblos, the native dances, the market squares packed with pots and rugs. 264 00:36:39,080 --> 00:36:49,030 But unlike O'Keefe, a painter, Graham, as a dancer, held one sight in his steam above the others. 265 00:36:49,030 --> 00:36:55,610 The Penitentes within the Brotherhoods performance of The Passion of Christ, 266 00:36:55,610 --> 00:37:03,140 Graham focussed her gaze on the one object that had elsewhere disappeared from representation. 267 00:37:03,140 --> 00:37:09,840 The figure of female difference. The death card. 268 00:37:09,840 --> 00:37:16,800 What is remarkable to me about grams of Penington Day is how specifically Graham aligned her method with 269 00:37:16,800 --> 00:37:24,540 narrative in a way that reveals the choreographer's physical understanding of the Brotherhood's rituals. 270 00:37:24,540 --> 00:37:32,960 For instance, in the first suite of the dance, the character of the penitent danced by Graham's lover, 271 00:37:32,960 --> 00:37:41,790 Erik Hawkins, an act of physical blow to the body, emulating the movement of self flagellation. 272 00:37:41,790 --> 00:37:47,550 This movement is accompanied by the dancers forceful exploration of breath. 273 00:37:47,550 --> 00:37:57,280 And this is more than mere theatrical. The dancer's body convulses in anguish, contracting his breath as prescribed in the grand method. 274 00:37:57,280 --> 00:38:02,610 And the same gesture is expressed in a leader's suite when the penitent has a delirious 275 00:38:02,610 --> 00:38:09,960 vision of Christ danced by Merce Cunningham as Christ thrusts his left arm outward. 276 00:38:09,960 --> 00:38:15,570 The penitent aspirates again falling to the stage floor. 277 00:38:15,570 --> 00:38:24,240 Throughout the dance, Graham choreographed her dancers bodies into right angles and cross or x like formations 278 00:38:24,240 --> 00:38:31,230 such as repeating jumping jack movements that extend the body to its Vitruvian proportions. 279 00:38:31,230 --> 00:38:38,400 The movements are highly stylised, of course, but the emotion is evident. 280 00:38:38,400 --> 00:38:48,420 As we have learnt, the masculine experience of the penitential rights had been explored pictorially by artists in Santa Fe and Taos. 281 00:38:48,420 --> 00:38:59,040 Grand, however, was the very first to imagine the penitently day rituals via the exploration of female protagonists. 282 00:38:59,040 --> 00:39:10,710 First, consider that while Hawkins and Cunningham remain stable in their characterisations of the penitent and the imaginary Christ respectively, 283 00:39:10,710 --> 00:39:18,060 Graham begins the dance by identifying herself with the wooden nonwork day inside the death cart, 284 00:39:18,060 --> 00:39:26,370 changing her role to Virgin Mary, Eve and Mary Magdalene. 285 00:39:26,370 --> 00:39:34,080 Throughout the course of the dance, while male identity is fixed in penitently, 286 00:39:34,080 --> 00:39:44,100 female identity shifts Punisher Intercessor Temptress S. indicating a more complex and 287 00:39:44,100 --> 00:39:50,820 independent state of being in effect as a result of her interaction with the deaf card. 288 00:39:50,820 --> 00:40:00,570 Graham identified her own body as the disruptive agent at the centre of a highly self-conscious the gendered performance. 289 00:40:00,570 --> 00:40:10,320 Now, on the one hand, her fantastical imagining where today, as incarnations of other biblical figures, diverges from the penitently belief. 290 00:40:10,320 --> 00:40:24,920 But on the other, it restores the importance of feminine presence to the crisis of masculine embodiment implied by the original right. 291 00:40:24,920 --> 00:40:30,110 The death card appears as the object of difference in Graham's work, 292 00:40:30,110 --> 00:40:38,230 signifying special otherness within a ritual appropriated precisely for its exotic appeal. 293 00:40:38,230 --> 00:40:44,970 As we know by now, these issues must be passed delicately because the representations of the penitent, 294 00:40:44,970 --> 00:40:53,420 a brotherhood are deeply entwined with colonialist expectations to find imagined bounty belonging to the primitive other, 295 00:40:53,420 --> 00:40:59,480 as we have seen in certain other artist quarters in modernist New Mexico. 296 00:40:59,480 --> 00:41:08,510 Despite her sincerest affinities for the material culture of the Penitentes, Graham is not un susceptible to bias. 297 00:41:08,510 --> 00:41:19,130 It should rightly seem that her borrowing of to today as one of her many mask's points out, her privileged position as a bourgeois, 298 00:41:19,130 --> 00:41:28,640 heterosexual white woman and troublingly elides a fuller picture of the original religious culture of the Hispanic Southwest. 299 00:41:28,640 --> 00:41:37,910 And yet there is something also appealingly brazen about grammes excessive presence in OpenNet 20, 300 00:41:37,910 --> 00:41:42,800 something plentiful in the way her body moves to the very boundary of anatomical 301 00:41:42,800 --> 00:41:52,150 possibility that unbalances the patriarchal subject as the paradigm of control. 302 00:41:52,150 --> 00:41:53,360 Like Georgia O'Keeffe, 303 00:41:53,360 --> 00:42:03,470 Graham found New Mexico to be a vital place away from New York in which she could extend her practise and purrfect her technique like O'Keefe. 304 00:42:03,470 --> 00:42:09,720 She found a community of nonconformist women in Mabel Dodge Lou Hun's artist colony. 305 00:42:09,720 --> 00:42:19,760 The American dance world, including ballet for that matter, was already a predominantly female homosocial space in which women were encouraged, 306 00:42:19,760 --> 00:42:25,730 encouraged to explore their sexuality, including intimately with other women. 307 00:42:25,730 --> 00:42:35,810 It was also a place where sexual equality took on political expression and socialism, which is a topic vastly underexploited in the literature. 308 00:42:35,810 --> 00:42:39,080 Graham was neither a lesbian nor a socialist, 309 00:42:39,080 --> 00:42:50,240 but she prioritised the cultivation of a community within her studio that disrupted the sexual norms of the world outside. 310 00:42:50,240 --> 00:42:57,320 For our purposes today, PENITENTE Day describes a fascinating reintroduction of the duff cart into a 311 00:42:57,320 --> 00:43:04,310 modern cultural discourse that had repressed it by visualising the Brotherhood. 312 00:43:04,310 --> 00:43:10,580 White artists in the Southwest established their practise at the edge of the periphery, 313 00:43:10,580 --> 00:43:18,380 emulating their occult mysticism as a metaphor for the avant garde rejection of normal civilisation. 314 00:43:18,380 --> 00:43:24,800 By working to her own aesthetic, O'Keefe resisted collapsing into the purely primitive, 315 00:43:24,800 --> 00:43:31,490 although Black Cross depends to some extent on the viewer's connexion to an existing Christian iconography. 316 00:43:31,490 --> 00:43:35,540 In order to surprise its regular meanings. 317 00:43:35,540 --> 00:43:44,600 Similarly, Graham diploid penitentiary rituals and objects to establish a movement vocabulary based on her own body. 318 00:43:44,600 --> 00:43:48,470 To all of these artists under discussion today, the deaf card. 319 00:43:48,470 --> 00:43:57,740 And indeed, the entire rich folkloric tradition of the PENITENTE days represented a special contingency at the threshold of identity. 320 00:43:57,740 --> 00:44:06,620 The allure of the subversive and the dangerous and enduring appeal of the body as a pathway to self-knowledge. 321 00:44:06,620 --> 00:44:19,220 One final consideration. In the 1930s, both O'Keefe and Graham used their sojourns in the Southwest as a springboard for further identification. 322 00:44:19,220 --> 00:44:23,360 As an American, their great American thing to use. 323 00:44:23,360 --> 00:44:29,480 O'Keeffe's enduring Frayn's O'Keefe, as you will remember, laid to the side. 324 00:44:29,480 --> 00:44:38,420 Her original fascinations with Native American dolls and Hispanic churches, preferring instead to work with sun bleached bones. 325 00:44:38,420 --> 00:44:46,790 In doing so, she could investigate the formal connexions of geometry in space that were at the crux of her modernism. 326 00:44:46,790 --> 00:44:58,010 Without the typical primitivist and as I think we can see here now, masculinisation fascinations when looking at Cowes skull of 1931, 327 00:44:58,010 --> 00:45:03,380 the colour scheme of red, white and blue might seem embarrassingly nationalistic, 328 00:45:03,380 --> 00:45:10,580 maybe too overt or too anxious to appear at the centre of American culture. 329 00:45:10,580 --> 00:45:16,250 Similarly, Martha Graham's relentlessly affirmative American document of 1938, 330 00:45:16,250 --> 00:45:23,880 a dance proceeding of Penitentes, was an early collage of stage suites set to the spoken. 331 00:45:23,880 --> 00:45:31,330 Of the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation, Walt Whitman's poetry and the Bible. 332 00:45:31,330 --> 00:45:43,840 Graham apparently was aiming her dance at the urgent political need to galvanise the American people's resolve on the brink of a war in Europe. 333 00:45:43,840 --> 00:45:50,590 Let us think about this a different way, a way that comprehends these artists posterity. 334 00:45:50,590 --> 00:46:04,510 O'Keefe Gifted Cows Skull to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1976, where it is to this day on view enshrined as a jewel of American modernism. 335 00:46:04,510 --> 00:46:14,890 Graham, too, looked back to her original dances and reworked American document for a new premier in 1989. 336 00:46:14,890 --> 00:46:22,570 The intervening years saw traumatic world wars, the upheaval and still incomplete promise of civil rights. 337 00:46:22,570 --> 00:46:26,920 The assassination of Martin Luther King and the women's movement. 338 00:46:26,920 --> 00:46:32,440 Going forward into the 1990s, we find a retrenchment into conservatism, 339 00:46:32,440 --> 00:46:39,580 militarisation and the consolidation of corporate global power under the guise of neo liberalism. 340 00:46:39,580 --> 00:46:45,820 Thus, throughout the 20th century, the question of who, which genders, 341 00:46:45,820 --> 00:46:57,280 which ethnicities belong within the American body only intensified and emboldened, but stands unresolved. 342 00:46:57,280 --> 00:47:03,850 The question of belonging to a place within that democracy, the land of the free and home of the brave, 343 00:47:03,850 --> 00:47:22,517 a nation that withholds as much as it promises, was the same one confronted by Georgia O'Keeffe and Martha Graham 80 years ago.