I lost five pounds over my first semester at Mason Gross thanks to my commute and climbing the stairs in Civic Square Building. In the fall I spent three days in Birmingham, Alabama, at the annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association’s pleasant gerontocracy as I became president for the coming year. People complimented my appearance: I looked so good, they said, so lively, so much younger, that is, slenderer. This came as a gift from the art gods, for five fewer pounds is a very good thing for an artist.
I’ve never been fat, but there have been many times in my life when I could stand to lose five pounds. Or ten pounds. I inherited my mother’s tastes and imported her vigilance into my own never-ending, and I do mean never-ending, anti-fat campaign. Weight loss always pleased my mother, she, ever svelte, despite giant Hershey bars and peach ice cream. To our dismay, I inherited my father’s tendency toward embonpoint. Over the decades he managed to stay slightly on the winning side of the battle with his belly, but his battle never let up. Once, years ago, my father and I were walking down Route 5 in western Maine. My father never hesitated to speak to strangers, turning every encounter into nascent friendship. This time he chatted up a slender neighbor working in his garden beside the road. My father was looking for tips in his perpetual struggle with abdominal fat.
How do you keep your belly down? he asked.
The neighbor’s reply: Cancer.
MY MOTHER SURVEILLED my weight as part of her passive-aggressive relationship with personal beauty in the United States of America. Even though she never had to contend with fat like my father and me, she kept her eye on me—for my own good, of course—to protect me from the fat-black-woman stereotype. A good lefty, she would never criticize working-class women for their looks. At the same time, she could also never forget that American culture casts the fat black woman as a servant, a servant happy to serve. No one ever confused me for the help while I was at Mason Gross.
As an artist, you know, you have to look good, starting with the raw material of your body. You can’t be taken seriously in The Art World unless you’re slender, or at least not fat. No fat artists allowed. This goes for men as well as women, even though in the regular, non-art world, women’s appearances weigh more against them than men’s. Come to think of it, this is changing, as men, artists or not, self-fashion for the look of beauty, not just power. Male artists, in particular, govern their allure, in body, face, and costume.
Male or female, you have to dress like an artist. I noticed right away at Mason Gross that artist professors don’t dress like professor professors. Artists don’t get dressed; they costume themselves in artist-outfit, an undertaking judiciously arranged for sprezzatura, for apparently insouciant style. Artists never dress up in jackets or ties. Artists always dress down. Artists wear pajama bottoms and house shoes from Brooklyn to New Jersey. Artists wear paint-stained clothing, for surely they must just have run into the classroom after a long night of painting. I have known artists, really excellent artists, even excellent women artists, who curate their appearance in order to stand apart from collectors. Artists are shabbier than collectors. You can tell collectors by their expensive, billowy, Japanesy clothing and whimsical (and outrageously expensive) eyeglasses. Curators wear hard-to-find shoes from Germany. Artists wear cowboy boots. For several years, even after leaving art school, I disdained cowboy boots as artists’ affectation.
Teacher Hanneline would come in from Brooklyn—Brooklyn!—in her cowboy boots as from the great outdoors (Brooklyn). I loved her, but cowboy boots struck me as too posed in central Jersey. That was when professor-professor sartorial habits kept me from donning costume. With time I grasped the point of artist’s apparel as costume and began costuming myself. Now I curate my appearance. Now I wear cowboy boots. Now I will swear to you that they really are comfortable. Really, they are.
I came to admire my sister and brother art students’ self-presentation, whether in cute little dresses with boots or in Uggs with shorts or in much torn and worn items put together with élan. Art students buy their clothes at Goodwill, or they wear expensive designer things that look like they came from Goodwill, tight clothes in clashing colors—is “clashing colors” still a recognizable concept? The fashion for men looked to me as though everything had shrunk: tight and short.
Undergraduate women, like Tina, who asked my age that first day, wore outfits that I thought made them look like children. At first, stiff-necked second-wave feminist that I was, I inwardly scoffed at girlyness as retrograde, the very response that makes younger women see feminists my age as superannuated fuddy-duddies, stamping out fun, like pornography, which should be enjoyed as an edgy but harmless pastime.
In my own case, experience had already altered the way I dressed over the years. I had moved on from 1970s-Harvard-graduate-student jeans and blue work shirts to careful dresses and skirts as a professor, until a trip to China in the 1980s introduced me to Chinese women professors still in their little blue pantsuits, which they discarded as soon as the Cultural Revolution had safely receded. Plain but extremely comfortable little blue Chinese pantsuits moved me back into pants, where I stayed for years, into and after art school. I’m wearing pants right now. As a woman of a certain age, I placed limits on my accommodation to artist-fashion for a long time. No dresses. Never any shorts. No tattoos, ever. On dresses I have relented. Not on shorts or tattoos.
Another artist’s stricture: you have to be able to drink, because there’s alcohol everywhere. Legendary artists, like legendary writers, are famous as wets. I always expect wine at art openings, even though Chelsea openings in the summer can stick to bottled water. Wine and beer all the time works for young people, who can carouse all night, drinking, smoking, dancing, and drugging, and still look like the mandatory million bucks. That’s hard to pull off when you’re over forty, not to mention when you’re over sixty-four. I have to eat when I drink. Otherwise, after three glasses of champagne, I’m nauseous. I don’t throw up, at least not often, but I feel awful. If I carry on three nights in a row, I look like shit. And when I say “carry on,” I’m not carrying on all that much. Such a little old lady I’d become in my mid-sixties. How was I going to be an artist if I couldn’t drink, or, rather, couldn’t drink enough?
I made one enormous concession toward art-school self-fashioning. I straightened my hair for the first time since going natural in Ghana in the 1960s. My mother and I had stopped straightening our hair there out of resignation in a humid climate and pride in a nascent sense of the beauty of natural blackness. For decades, even after Black Power subsided, my black pride kept my hair natural, whether longer or shorter—until I went to art school, with its unspoken decrees on winsome appearance. No one told me my natural hair looked wrong or dated, but I got a message about how to look better. Wordlessly, my natural hair seemed twentieth-century.
So I straightened my hair. I straightened my hair, but I didn’t cover my gray. For this I have a very good reason best illustrated by my mother’s experience with a cane, which she preferred to call a walking stick, as in the deportment my father adopted in Ghana. Bear with me here.
In her eighties my mother began having trouble keeping her balance, a fact she confided to me hesitantly, as though this were some shameful secret (like, at the other end of womanhood, having your menstrual period) that was her own individual failing. I recognized balance as an older woman’s issue. Ever since joining an older women’s group at sixty, I had been reading up on what happens to you when you get old. I learned that losing your balance is one of the worst of the many impairments of age. First balance goes, and then it’s falls. From falling, straight to death.
I advised my mother, Mom, we don’t want you to fall. You’ve got to start using a walking stick. I knew she’d never go for a “cane.”
Dona saw through my euphemism.
She could never heed my caution, she said.
Why not?
Then they’d know I was old, she said, utterly without irony.
Being seen as old at eighty-five was an unacceptable trade-off for stability.
This story ended well. In the online Smithsonian store, my father and I found a handsome cloisonné cane that won Dona over as a fashion accessory. Even better, there came her renewed confidence in walking, for, fearing loss of balance, she had stopped venturing out. With the support of a cane—sorry, walking stick—she walked outside again. In the Adirondacks she walked down- and uphill to the post office. In Oakland she revisited old haunts like Marcus Books. She posted the story on her blog as “My Walking Stick Freed Me.” And it surely did free her at eighty-five.
And this is how I get back to straightening my hair in art school, but not covering my gray. As a young comedienne would say, I’ve passed my “fuck-by date,” and a good thing that is, too, even in The Art World. My gray hair frees me to be an older woman with an older woman’s release from the ceaseless, expensive, time-consuming, and anxiety-inducing demands of sex appeal. Vanity I have with me still, but I would not try to camouflage or to deny my age, even for art school. Aging is a very big deal; it changes your life, not usually for the better, but there is some better. The better part is emotional; old people are happier and more trusting than the youth. You learn that all that upheaval that used to distress you really isn’t such a big deal after all. Just let it go.
The concrete meanings of old age can surprise you. Some of them surprised me, even though they’re well known and talked about in the New York Times. Up to now for the most part, at least, I’ve escaped the worst of it in my heart, lungs, and circulatory system. So far the hardest part for me about being old emanated from other people’s automatic assumption, back before I started becoming known for my art, that my work, because made by an old woman, isn’t interesting, even before being seen.
It’s not only women who resent aging, for men, also, despise getting old. Even really smart French men who I would have thought to know better. Jacques Derrida, the prince of twentieth-century post-structuralism, the king of the complexities of this world, dreaded aging. Years ago, Derrida had influenced my writing of history, and French history was a long-standing interest of mine. His biography gave me a glimpse into his experience. Derrida, even Derrida, hated like hell turning seventy. He had never liked birthdays, but seventy irritated him in the extreme. Derrida confessed to a friend,
More than ever I’m obsessed by age and the desire to un-age.
Seventy, you see, is hell.
Derrida didn’t make it even to seventy-five. My mother outlived him by a couple of decades, but that didn’t make being old easier to face.
Now that I watch women artists my age, I note what seems to be new attention to women artists past seventy, even going up to nearly one hundred. These are artists who’ve been working for fifty or more years, who, like Faith Ringgold, live by a philosophy of: If you live long enough and you persist, you are going to get recognition; you must stay in the game.
Several of them have stayed in the game to reap the rewards of sustained production.
Women artists continue their youthful practice of costuming, dressing to face down without acknowledgment the passing of time. Lynda Benglis, speaking at the Rhode Island School of Design, wore tight leggings as though she were still thirty-two, in Artforum magazine posing naked but for a pair of cat-eye sunglasses and a two-foot-long dildo. Chakaia Booker fashions an original robe flowing from a gigantic turban of African fabrics. Vija Celmins remains comfortable working in my kind of clothes. Echoing T. S. Eliot, eighty-two-year-old Michelle Stuart sums up a conviction I strive toward—with modest success:
I wear my trousers rolled, Stuart says.
It’s the philosophy of an older person . . . There’s a wonderful freedom in not having to prove anything.
Audrey Flack is still sculpting, with ideas flowing continually, ideas flowing into busts of women from European history. For painters and sculptors like Flack, one’s life’s work ultimately presents one of the severest tests of age. Unless an artist belongs to the 1 percent who sell out regularly, old age means a lifetime of artistic production piled up around you. What to do with all those paintings, all those pieces?
Inventory, then, not appearance, is aging’s burden on old artists—and their heirs. But first, there’s making the work that goes into the inventory.