All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the third of four lectures in the terror lecture series, our series for American Art.
I'm Melissa Block. And today is modernism disfigured cult and illicit ritual in New Mexico.
In the works of Georgia O'Keefe and Martha Graham or everything you could possibly ever want in a lecture title.
So we'll see if the lecture measures help. I would like to dedicate this lecture to my first academic mentor, Wanda Corn.
Georgia O'Keefe is one of the most celebrated American artists and other American artists who are women.
Certainly the most famous she enjoyed outstanding success during her lifetime was the subject of the Museum of Modern Arts.
Very first retrospective, dedicated to a woman in 1946,
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.
She is virtually synonymous with her lush, suggestive flower paintings.
Conceived and articulated with such personality and force that it is impossible for any artist
to have painted a flower in the last century without O'Keeffe's example present in mind.
But not just flowers.
As the only woman in the inner sanctum of a group of modern artists surroundings, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who was also her husband.
She lived in Manhattan and took its dramatic skyline as her subject.
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,
not buildings, but the jagged spaces in between them, not electric streetlights, but there dappled incandescence as imprinted on our site.
O'Keeffe's city stretches seeing into something akin to feeling not eyesight but eyeball.
Not the lens, but the finger and the hand. Georgia O'Keeffe is also synonymous with New Mexico and potentially the entire American Southwest.
She first journey there in 1929, aged 41, only to settle there permanently in the late 1940s.
At first she painted Adobe churches and American Indian dolls.
But over time, it was really the bleached bones that she collected from the high desert floor that captivated her cow,
mule and deer skulls and pelvic bones.
These objects were not culturally specific blank slates for her to add them, add to them whatever perspective she wished and that she did.
The red, white and blue motif in Cowes skull may retrospectively seem to us to be effusively patriotic to the artist.
However, the word patriotic might not have made as much sense as the word essence.
The New York modernists believed that there was an authenticity of the American spirit worth pursuing and esprit de corps,
which would separate it once and for all from Europe. O'Keefe gave the object of this pursuit a name, the great American thing,
and it is very well possible that she had become the greatest American painter of her generation.
If the title of this lecture series is the body of a nation, then the key word for this lecture is gender.
It is very well-documented that O'Keeffe's gender was highlighted by critics right from the start.
The women must, of course, paint flowers problem. But she continued, despite this misunderstanding of her work.
Stieglitz is photographs of O'Keeffe's body, or I guess I should say,
body parts are similarly well known and studied and produce an idea of an
artist whose identification with her bodily femaleness is all but unquestioned.
To take a tiny conceptual jump, we might ask, what did it mean for O'Keefe to relocate to make to New Mexico?
What was its body like? Visa v Herve's?
What were its genders? As we shall see, the question is complex.
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.
By the late nineteenth century, northern New Mexico was a must see on what we might call the domestic grand tour,
made accessible by a vast and ever expanding railroad.
The southern route did not afford travellers as much of the dramatic Vernick.
Melody of the Rockies nor comforts of gold rush.
Cities like Denver en route to the San Francisco Bay.
Instead, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad darted through the flats of Kansas and eastern Colorado,
careening into the hilly terrain southwest through Santa Fe and Albuquerque,
past Erard Flattop Mountains called Macy's and sudden drop canyons and then down into
the blistering heavy desert as it lurched toward the growing port of Los Angeles.
No Hollywood, no Beverly Hills, just figs, lemons and beans.
In 1884, the journalist Charles Lummis popularised New Mexico in an adventurous series of articles called Tramp Across the Continent,
finding himself restless at his desk of a Small-Town newspaper in Ohio.
Lummus accepted an assignment at the recently established Lorsch at Los Angeles Times to walk the
3000 miles from Cincinnati to Los Angeles under the pretence of wanting to get back into shape.
After years of white collar work, he knew the publicity stunt would bring him a national reputation.
East Coast readers would have been sympathetic to the pseudoscientific cognitive impairment known as Brain Fagg,
known to afflict Middle-Class White Men, not women. And its remedy found in getting back into nature.
The American painter Thomas Eakins, for instance, was an avid proponent of rry masculinisation through homosocial contact in the great outdoors.
And already the West was known to be a rough and rugged place, ideal for toughening up the overworked professional.
To externalise and make plain the evidence of his cure.
Lomis narrated his transformation into a bonafide frontiersmen.
Over the months of his sojourn, he told readers that he traded his britches for the buckskin leggings of an Apache dude.
He wore a skunk pelt, a six shooter strapped to his waist and a Mexican sombrero to which he affixed a dried rattlesnake
skin before arriving at the Laguna Pueblo on Christmas Day to witness a native dancing festival.
Lomis trapped and killed a coyote, skinned it and stuffed it with straw, which he wore as a shawl to impress the locals.
One can only imagine the sight of him outfitted to the hilt in his imaginary native
costume in the audience of what he described to the readers back home as a corn dance.
In fact, if it were a corn dance in December, then the audience may well have been mostly white and the performance mostly theatrical.
The ceremonial corn dance. An important holiday on the Southwest native calendar, occurs in August.
The fantastical and symbolic representation of indigenous beauty in American art goes back at least to the 18th century.
Since the Indian removal policy of 1830, though,
the visual motifs governing natives had largely been set forth in the figure of the noble savage by physically and mentally strong American type,
resigned to his fate in acquiescing to the encroachment of a more technologically capable white civilisation,
thus relegated to the historical past tense. The docile and contemplative Indian, both male and female, was a favourite subject for artists.
Arranged. Part portrait, part still life with pots and rugs.
Without any question, the spectacular Pueblo's and the availability of Native American culture lured white travellers to New Mexico.
But that was not the only cultural encounter at work.
Indeed, white American contact with Hispanics in the Southwest was broadly unfamiliar.
At the furthest remove from the tropes of recognisable Spanish is that they might have known Hispanic people were enigmas,
fitting somewhere between white European ally and alien enemy.
This is where Lomis steps in again because he was amongst the first to solidify a
gendered motif of Hispanic identity in New Mexico for the sake of his white readers.
In 1888, he was living in the village of San Mateo, New Mexico, in the songwriter Cristo Mountains.
When he first heard of the unorthodox rituals of the old models, enough.
Then he dug the other side wiser than the rest throw nuestro bother cases.
Now Sorento in English. The brothers of the pious fraternity of our father, Jesus of Nazareth.
These penny 10 days, as they were known, are secretive layth religious fraternal organisations that served the spiritual needs of
Hispanic Roman Catholics in the remote stretches of country where priests did not live.
Each lent the Penitentes came out of secrecy to perform The Passion of Christ.
After saying Good Friday prayers in their private, one room meetinghouse called them whatever.
The brothers proceeded along the path to a clearing called the Colorado or the Calvary site,
using horsehair whips to beat themselves into penance at this clearing.
Other penances were enacted, including beating cactus needles into their flesh with stones.
The climax of the ceremony was a crucifixion,
nailing the life body and the penitent to a wooden cross called the mother Eddo already by the time Lomis arrived.
The high stakes of death in these ceremonies were known to white settlers and widely discouraged, if not outlawed.
So to deter attention, PENITENTE days began to use ropes to fix the.
He took the cross instead of nails.
But no matter, the bloody Lenten ritual already crystallised the identity of Hispanic vernacular religion and thus characterise the severity.
Danger, mystery and, yes, masculinity of the American southwest to which it pertained.
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.
From that moment,
the penitent a rituals objects of worship in meeting houses became an intense focus for outsiders seeking an authentic experience of New Mexico.
Here's a larger view by World War One.
There were enough white artists living in northern New Mexico to warrant the establishment of several ateliers.
One was called the Sincock, endorsed by painters in Santa Fe, and the other was the 20th Society of Artists.
In the more rural mountainous area, just north Taos was an especially attractive place to paint.
Here's a map for you. So here's Santa Fe, N.M.
Here's here's the Colorado border. Yes.
Taos was an especially attractive place to paint owing to its proximity to Indian settlements and the local penitentiary,
meeting houses that made access to the two exotic cultures especially convenient.
These painters, all male, presented Penitentes subject matter in a literal way.
For instance, William Penhallow Henderson's Holy Week in New Mexico PENITENTE, a procession of 1919,
relies on a dynamic sense of line and a bright palette to convey the Good Friday exercises.
The mountain and wild hills in the background conspire with an obtrusive sagebrush plant in
the foreground to compress the central action into a tight and partially occluded strip.
The arduous path to the Calvera such compression gives the sense of density and chaos amongst the participating actors.
But the shallow zone at the bottom edge of the painting ultimately separates the viewer from the ceremony.
Henderson renders the brothers flesh in the same brown tones as the Earth,
solidifying a relationship between the penitent days and their land of origin.
By focussing exclusively on the group. Good Friday. Crucifixion.
These uninvited onlookers missed the nuances of the ceremony and mischaracterise them as a spectacularly affirmative, masculine bloodsport.
A penitently object less frequently depicted,
but one that I argue is a key spectral presence lingering behind these artist's powerful fascination with the Southwest.
Is this the death card? Although the use of portable objects in religious plays or puzzles in Spanish has its roots in mediaeval Spain,
the death card dates to about 1860, is unique to this region and has a ritual rather than a didactic function.
During the performance, the elected PENITENTE, a brother,
attached the heavy chassis to his torso with a rope and dragged it from the meetinghouse to the Calvary site.
This cottonwood chassy, as you can see, supported and partially enclosed a wooden statue called Lumb,
where they're presented as either denuded or dressed in women's robes.
What if he is curiously the only female body presiding over this secret fraternal ritual?
And is alluringly a cult? The significance of Ludwig today is obscure in penitently communities.
She is referred to as NWA Commodities Sebastiano, which means our godmother, Sebastiano or Lavonia.
So us Diana, Lady Sebastiano, the title Commendatory,
separates her from La Madre or the mother to emphasise her difference from the Holy Mother, Virgin Mary, who avoided early death.
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.
The name Sebastiano is a female declension of the male Saint Sebastian, who is frequently depicted as murdered by arrows.
By contrast, Donya Sebastiano carries a wooden bow strung with sinew, suggesting her agency as the archer rather than as the victim.
Taken together with her Macall appearance, one may assume that her arrows represent the arbitrariness of the moment of death.
In Spanish and Latin American traditions, it is relatively common to see Good Friday pageants involving likenesses of venerated saints.
But what sets the death card apart is its mobilisation as a form of penance.
Indeed, the life body of the male worshipper became the physical target in the death card performance, forcing his body into submission.
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.
Her rope, which you see here in front, assuming the weight of the female statue in the penitent,
dragged it along the path, causing bleeding around the clavicle and shoulders.
Thus, the death cart literally entered the penitents body, intensifying the sense of his own human mortality,
which the grisly aesthetic of Lemonier today also comeback signifies.
Her presence also potently suggests the reversal of the usual penetrative agency.
That is, the penitents will to enact punishment against his own body is theatrical ised by his submission to a female agent.
Thus, we cannot definitively understand this entire spectacle of masochism as essentially masculine,
but rather as an example of the incoherence of our expectations of masculinity.
The brothers desire to obtain the usually feminised qualities of passivity and bottom meanness in the elusive quest for their spiritual transcendent.
I submit that these white artists inability to visualise the death cart was in turn of
a fantasy to identify themselves as participants in their own exclusive brotherhood.
Similar to the one they depicted, a fantasy that did not consciously imagine an assertive presence of the feminine.
The bonds established by these artists in a presumptively alien and yet fully colonised place reinforced a new sense of their masculinity,
one that traded on the predominantly physical model of manhood understood to be at the core of the Penitentes rituals.
And this new masculinity also perceived itself to be unstintingly modern.
These men entertained powerful, narcissistic dreams of originality that were at the root of their desires to paint in New Mexico.
What we as viewers see is a spectacle of masculine strength corroborate corroborated by the privileged
artist who simultaneously aspires to authenticity but remains unapologetically at an arm's length.
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.
Forty years after Loomis's original popularisation, by then, Native Americans had more readily opened their pueblos to tourists.
And the commercial clauses in the Spanish town squares, especially in Santa Fe, bustled with a vigorous trade in hand-woven blankets,
furnishings and woodcarver religious figures called samples to be used as home decor to some, like the artist Stuart Davis.
New Mexico held little in the way of its promised allure of rustic authenticity his electric bulb.
New Mexico, for instance, revels in disappointment.
Similarly, in 1928, the journalist Paul Rosenfeld, a friend of Alfred Stieglitz, was disparaged.
The poor audience of neurotic whites and half poets, his words congregated to watch the native dancing.
But to many more, of course, New Mexico remains a romantic utopia, including two Keith,
who described in no uncertain terms her feeling for the place, a feeling that lasted throughout her life.
I do think, though, that her experience of New Mexico and her desire to express it was of a different flavour.
Unlike Lummus, she already had a professional reputation and did not to need to respond to those pressures.
Unlike the old male artist colonies in Santa Fe and Taos, she arrived with more progressive notions of art,
particularly abstraction, emerging from a heady trans-Atlantic exchange in New York.
Perhaps most significantly, her first view of New Mexico was seen through the frame of the modernist community
assembled by the exciting and eccentric figure of Mabel Dodge Lou Horne,
the restless heiress to a banking fortune. Lou had travelled to Europe in the years before the war and socialised it Gertrude Stein's
famous salon with the likes of public Picasso and other early French obstructionists.
She lived in Paris, then Florence, the New York,
where she became a fixture in the Bohemian Greenwich Village and then the artist colony at Provincetown, Massachusetts.
She then went west to Santa Barbara, California, a charming city perched on the Pacific Coast and finally settled in Texas,
New Mexico in 1917, purchasing attractive land with an ample home, which she immediately set about to fashion into an artists retreat.
Over the years, Lou, Hun's Taos colony attracted scores of writers, poets, photographers and painters.
Now fixed in the American modernist pantheon, D.H. Lawrence, Willa Cather, Thornton Wilder, Marzin Hartley, Ansel Adams, just to name a few.
And, of course, Georgia O'Keeffe.
In her first summer at New Hun's retreat, O'Keeffe's saw the awesome sights that inspired others before her quiet mountain terrene.
The Taos Pueblo, with its colourful festivals and distinctively shaped Church of Sun anymore.
The 18th century Adobe Ranchos Church of San Francisco, the which seemed eminently suited to modernist abstract sensibilities.
And an endless array of Hispanic and native material culture objects.
She also knew about the presence of the PENITENTE dates since new ones backyard looked out over a vast terrain,
including penitently meadows and a small meetinghouse, O'Keefe later recalled,
One evening we walked to the back of the mall, rather, toward a cross in the hills.
I was told it was at PENITENTE.
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.
Black Cross with Stars and Blue is one of four paintings of crosses O'Keeffe painted during her first summer in Taos.
The authoritative Central Cross shatters the painting into four uneven quadrants to upper zones of Twilight Sky and
to lower one's admitting a view of Sky Mountains and the land beyond the boundaries between the cross and the sky.
Wave and bend an organic form elsewhere.
O'Keefe mentioned that this suite of paintings. And here you can see another.
The commanding black crossing Mexico, with their prominently placed crosses, evokes the pervasive Catholicism of the region,
linking it to her painting of the raunchiest church, which we've also seen.
But Black Cross is far more compelling than what the artist describes.
These paintings meditate deeply on the theme of fracture.
They allude to a broken but absent body through abstract zones permanently divided into Four Corners by the monolithic,
cruciform the artist's words large enough to crucify a man reveal the paintings key mission,
which is the male body that previously acted as the point of identification for other
artists willing to establish their own initiation into the world of the savage.
Thus, O'Keeffe's vision is that the experience of extremity encapsulated both by the ritual and the usual representation of it,
could be suggested simply through form her sensuous imagery of inexact rectangles and undulating hills,
legitimate a feeling of intense corpo reality without having to represent an anatomy to complete the picture.
By the way, you can stay here, it's about two hundred dollars.
I stayed in this room, which was the room of the writer, Mary Austin, and it is totally thrilling.
So you must do it. What Lou Hohns Colony signified to O'Keefe,
to O'Keeffe's introduction to New Mexico was a community within the Southwest held apart from the usual context of masculine authority.
Many of the visitors to Lou Hohns colony were women travelling alone or with other women.
Georgia O'Keefe, for instance, made her first trip with her friend,
the painter Rebecca Strand, whose letters reveal the developing romantic affair between them.
Louann, who as bisexual and a proponent of free love, made her home a welcoming place for such awakenings.
More to the point, she encouraged women to find an unburdened locale for their work and life to flourish.
Perhaps sensing this, the male author, Jean Touma, who was also a guest,
wrote tongue in cheek of what he called the female fascism he found in Toff's strong,
resourceful women who like the starkness and isolation of this country.
But O'Keefe, like New Mexico, enough to follow Lohan's example to buy land there, to make her studio there.
Apart from New York and, well, apart from Stieglitz,
despite falling in line with the privileges of whiteness and money that enabled such New Mexican enchantments to seem so real.
The Taos colony still operated in distinction to the ubiquity of masculine significance assumed of the American Southwest.
Must we know about the Penitentes to appreciate O'Keeffe's Black Cross paintings?
Perhaps not. But I think they are made more arresting and abundant when we see the complete picture of the commonly
held gendered determinations of New Mexico at a critical moment in the development of American modernism.
To round out this discussion, I would like to bring an additional artist into the floor, Martha Graham,
the history of modernism and one might say the history of Western art has not been cosy with the history of dance.
Surely some motifs prevail.
One might think of the vibrant cabaret culture in the late 19th century or in Paris or Edgar [INAUDIBLE] obsession with ballet dancers.
But the scholarship there is less concerned with choreography and more concerned with the changing nature of the audience and spectatorship,
the gaze framing point of view. No history of art stuff in the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st.
The explosion of performance art grew out of a newfound embrace of everyday movements,
first appearing in the severe, pared down aesthetic of modern dance.
One wonders if this is because more men were visible on stage more frequently.
Men who also happened to make history of art, stuff like paintings and sculptures.
And to this, we must acknowledge that amongst the performing arts, dance is difficult to describe.
After you see it, unlike a play, there are usually no words.
Unlike music, no school sound is integral to dance.
But it is not the dance, not a body, a lighting and bending, turning, breathing.
However, dance, when and where we can see it can provide an important nuance and supply compelling examples to us for still images.
If one person transformed the history of Western dance, it was Martha Grande.
Her trailblazing technique issued pointe work, which you see here were ballerinas move on their tiptoes across the stage as well as potentia lifts.
Each dancer, male and female, was expected to muscle their own way across the stage.
Graham also tended not to favour vaudevillian costuming or elaborate sets, which separated her from popular entertainment.
Instead, Graham innovated and taught her company a method of stylised breathing, which she married to movements based on quotidien body postures.
The idea was to infuse each danced motion with intense emotion, while at the same time appearing relatedly.
Human and entire day in the Graham studio might be spent laughing or wailing or even spitting.
Connecting the body to the feelings. The breathing exercise originates in the abdomen, in the fusiform muscle that connects the pelvis to the spine.
And for that reason, grammes dancers practised breath while splayed out on the floor with the legs radiating out from an opened groyne.
Breath is the beginning of movement. So not like yoga in which you breathe in order to connect one still pose to another,
but a contraction that pushes movement energetically outward, thus to audiences accustomed to ballet and transitional ballroom dancing.
The resulting motion seems inelegant and sudden.
Graham plotted her convulsive movement style onto narrative structures to which she felt a particularly strong gravity,
in which especially B fit the psychology of agony and pain.
As an early dance in her repertoire,
OpenNet 10 Day of 1940 is an experiment in the movement vocabulary that later became her signature choreography like O'Keeffe.
Graham was also a friend of Mabel Dodge, the one and visited Tostes regularly between 1918 and 1937.
And like O'Keefe, too, Graham developed an intense feeling for New Mexico, attracted especially to what she called its ferocity.
She would have witnessed the same litany of tourist attractions the mountains,
the pueblos, the native dances, the market squares packed with pots and rugs.
But unlike O'Keefe, a painter, Graham, as a dancer, held one sight in his steam above the others.
The Penitentes within the Brotherhoods performance of The Passion of Christ,
Graham focussed her gaze on the one object that had elsewhere disappeared from representation.
The figure of female difference. The death card.
What is remarkable to me about grams of Penington Day is how specifically Graham aligned her method with
narrative in a way that reveals the choreographer's physical understanding of the Brotherhood's rituals.
For instance, in the first suite of the dance, the character of the penitent danced by Graham's lover,
Erik Hawkins, an act of physical blow to the body, emulating the movement of self flagellation.
This movement is accompanied by the dancers forceful exploration of breath.
And this is more than mere theatrical. The dancer's body convulses in anguish, contracting his breath as prescribed in the grand method.
And the same gesture is expressed in a leader's suite when the penitent has a delirious
vision of Christ danced by Merce Cunningham as Christ thrusts his left arm outward.
The penitent aspirates again falling to the stage floor.
Throughout the dance, Graham choreographed her dancers bodies into right angles and cross or x like formations
such as repeating jumping jack movements that extend the body to its Vitruvian proportions.
The movements are highly stylised, of course, but the emotion is evident.
As we have learnt, the masculine experience of the penitential rights had been explored pictorially by artists in Santa Fe and Taos.
Grand, however, was the very first to imagine the penitently day rituals via the exploration of female protagonists.
First, consider that while Hawkins and Cunningham remain stable in their characterisations of the penitent and the imaginary Christ respectively,
Graham begins the dance by identifying herself with the wooden nonwork day inside the death cart,
changing her role to Virgin Mary, Eve and Mary Magdalene.
Throughout the course of the dance, while male identity is fixed in penitently,
female identity shifts Punisher Intercessor Temptress S. indicating a more complex and
independent state of being in effect as a result of her interaction with the deaf card.
Graham identified her own body as the disruptive agent at the centre of a highly self-conscious the gendered performance.
Now, on the one hand, her fantastical imagining where today, as incarnations of other biblical figures, diverges from the penitently belief.
But on the other, it restores the importance of feminine presence to the crisis of masculine embodiment implied by the original right.
The death card appears as the object of difference in Graham's work,
signifying special otherness within a ritual appropriated precisely for its exotic appeal.
As we know by now, these issues must be passed delicately because the representations of the penitent,
a brotherhood are deeply entwined with colonialist expectations to find imagined bounty belonging to the primitive other,
as we have seen in certain other artist quarters in modernist New Mexico.
Despite her sincerest affinities for the material culture of the Penitentes, Graham is not un susceptible to bias.
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,
heterosexual white woman and troublingly elides a fuller picture of the original religious culture of the Hispanic Southwest.
And yet there is something also appealingly brazen about grammes excessive presence in OpenNet 20,
something plentiful in the way her body moves to the very boundary of anatomical
possibility that unbalances the patriarchal subject as the paradigm of control.
Like Georgia O'Keeffe,
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.
She found a community of nonconformist women in Mabel Dodge Lou Hun's artist colony.
The American dance world, including ballet for that matter, was already a predominantly female homosocial space in which women were encouraged,
encouraged to explore their sexuality, including intimately with other women.
It was also a place where sexual equality took on political expression and socialism, which is a topic vastly underexploited in the literature.
Graham was neither a lesbian nor a socialist,
but she prioritised the cultivation of a community within her studio that disrupted the sexual norms of the world outside.
For our purposes today, PENITENTE Day describes a fascinating reintroduction of the duff cart into a
modern cultural discourse that had repressed it by visualising the Brotherhood.
White artists in the Southwest established their practise at the edge of the periphery,
emulating their occult mysticism as a metaphor for the avant garde rejection of normal civilisation.
By working to her own aesthetic, O'Keefe resisted collapsing into the purely primitive,
although Black Cross depends to some extent on the viewer's connexion to an existing Christian iconography.
In order to surprise its regular meanings.
Similarly, Graham diploid penitentiary rituals and objects to establish a movement vocabulary based on her own body.
To all of these artists under discussion today, the deaf card.
And indeed, the entire rich folkloric tradition of the PENITENTE days represented a special contingency at the threshold of identity.
The allure of the subversive and the dangerous and enduring appeal of the body as a pathway to self-knowledge.
One final consideration. In the 1930s, both O'Keefe and Graham used their sojourns in the Southwest as a springboard for further identification.
As an American, their great American thing to use.
O'Keeffe's enduring Frayn's O'Keefe, as you will remember, laid to the side.
Her original fascinations with Native American dolls and Hispanic churches, preferring instead to work with sun bleached bones.
In doing so, she could investigate the formal connexions of geometry in space that were at the crux of her modernism.
Without the typical primitivist and as I think we can see here now, masculinisation fascinations when looking at Cowes skull of 1931,
the colour scheme of red, white and blue might seem embarrassingly nationalistic,
maybe too overt or too anxious to appear at the centre of American culture.
Similarly, Martha Graham's relentlessly affirmative American document of 1938,
a dance proceeding of Penitentes, was an early collage of stage suites set to the spoken.
Of the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation, Walt Whitman's poetry and the Bible.
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.
Let us think about this a different way, a way that comprehends these artists posterity.
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.
Graham, too, looked back to her original dances and reworked American document for a new premier in 1989.
The intervening years saw traumatic world wars, the upheaval and still incomplete promise of civil rights.
The assassination of Martin Luther King and the women's movement.
Going forward into the 1990s, we find a retrenchment into conservatism,
militarisation and the consolidation of corporate global power under the guise of neo liberalism.
Thus, throughout the 20th century, the question of who, which genders,
which ethnicities belong within the American body only intensified and emboldened, but stands unresolved.
The question of belonging to a place within that democracy, the land of the free and home of the brave,
a nation that withholds as much as it promises, was the same one confronted by Georgia O'Keeffe and Martha Graham 80 years ago.