Barbara Bloom
Barbara Blooms
The idea of mounting a retrospective of Barbara Bloom’s work seemed reprehensible from the outset, especially to Barbara Bloom. She found all retrospective exhibitions to be events of dubious provenance and doubtful consequence. For Barbara Bloom, who had devoted her artistic life to the creation of site-specific, time-specific moments, it seemed an offense of some kind. More to the point, the project of mounting a retrospective exhibition of her work presented a number of unattractive eventualities. At best, it might create a fog of aromas and perfumes, like the ladies room at a senior prom. At worst it could turn out to be a dry, archaeological reconstruction of her career drained of the tremulous moment and the pleasures attendant upon it. This reconstruction might then be transmogrified into a theme park for “issues in conceptual art,” and nothing could have been further from the drifting fragrance Bloom aspires to, so she declined such opportunities until she came upon the auction catalog for the estate of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
Here, she thought, was an occasion with provenance and consequence—as old as history itself—an occasion on the ridge-line between celebration and dissolution, glory and oblivion. The specificity and limitations of the catalog were, if anything, more beguiling than its trenchancy. The auction catalog did not aspire to the “whole Jackie,” or even the “true Jackie”; it proclaimed to be the “residue of Jackie,” a resonant idea with a provenance. Jackie’s collection, as it was offered at auction, fulfilled David Hume’s definition of “culture” as that which survives its creator and patron. The auction itself evoked the moment that W. H. Auden delineates in his poem on the death of Yeats—the moment of dispersal when Yeats, in the act of dying, “became his admirers.” The posthumous aura was also appealing in its succinctness and its gravitation around a fatal moment the artist herself had only just avoided.
Barbara Bloom, Color Chart, 2007. Digital print. Cover illustration of the book The Collections of Barbara Bloom, with essays by Dave Hickey and Susan Tallman, 2008. Courtesy of the artist.
As an homage to their absent subject, the objects and the photographs in the Jackie auction catalog bore something of Jacqueline Kennedy’s aura with them in the elegance and solemnity of their presentation—enough, at least, to make them a “set.” The visible contiguity of treatment and design created a cloud of fugitive reference among a variety of disparate frills, French furniture, minor impressionists, and fugitive memorabilia. These proclaimed Jacqueline Kennedy’s absence, along with the inference of “Jackie” that held the objects together and set them free, like the slaves of a dead master. Selected by the same sensibility and photographed for the same solemn, commercial act of scattering the ashes, the objects were each invested with an aura of perceived nobility that evoked Jacqueline Kennedy, but only vaguely as a skein of rapidly fading, wellborn, feminine ectoplasm.
For Barbara Bloom, this was something more like it, something with a filigree. It was better than planning one’s own funeral. For an artist devoted to the light touch and the blush of the moment, it was a challenge she had no other choice but to accept. The idea of resurrecting the past was obscene. The idea of gathering the residue and reassembling what survived in memory (where art must survive) was radiantly attractive. It required no muddling in the purgatory of lost time, no contemplation of sepia-tone kisses, no fearful reassessments of missed exits or frantic efforts at resuscitation.
This funerary document would mark a new California day, and, like any true Californian, Bloom would pick through the rubble of the quake and save what she recognized. She would reassemble the residue, so it might once again be burned, drowned, broken, or blown away. That, in a personal and practical sense, would be the work of Barbara Bloom; its subjects would be her subject. For the critic addressing these occasions, then, there is a tacit prohibition of analysis, lest it kill what it touches. So in the dance of similitudes, the task of inferring just what the experience of Barbara Bloom’s art might be like resides in our ability to tease out similitudes from other sources—about its resonance with other acts than hers.
In his travel book Etruscan Places, D. H. Lawrence speculates on the practice of divination that was native to Etruscan culture and later adopted by the Romans. The prophetic practice required an adept to attend very carefully to the entrails of a goat, to the flight of birds, to the weather, or to any number of physical phenomena. The idea was to focus with intensity up to and beyond the point of hallucination and vision in search of insight. As such, divination differs from sorcery. Sorcery creates something, and divination discovers what is covertly there. Through the diviner’s act of concentration the truth or the future or that which is hidden is revealed. As a mode of prophecy, divination derives from the antique assumption that the world presents us with a tapestry of resonant rhymes and similitudes, each pregnant with harmonic deviations and absences, so that any one thing, carefully attended, might reveal everything. In his defense of this practice, Lawrence argues that the object of attention matters little in the search for wisdom; the guts of a duck, the flight of an eagle, or a summer storm—one will serve as well as the other. Wisdom’s font, according to Lawrence, resides in the “quality of the attention” we pay to the world. This payment is our tithe.
This “quality of attention,” when it is made visible, presents itself as a frisson of indeterminate origin, an atmosphere of brio, panache, or solemnity that attaches itself to the act of seeing or knowing. It is variously attributed to the object’s power, to its subject’s charisma, to its creator’s sensibility or its beholder’s sensitivity. Andy Warhol, the sorcerer, conjured his own specific “quality of attention.” He painted gestures and silk-screened fields of color over stock photographs of Marilyn Monroe to make her charisma manifest in the room where the painting hangs. Barbara Bloom, the diviner, is more interested in locating this fugitive ambience than in creating it. She teases specific and often unnamable “qualities of attention” into visibility out of tiny eccentricities and rhymes in found photographs and texts.
As a result, Lawrence’s emphasis on the “quality of attention” always springs to mind when I am tussling playfully with Barbara Bloom’s art—and one must tussle playfully with it (as wary children might tussle in Emily Dickinson’s sitting room) lest one break a plate and shatter the atmosphere. Brute force and hard analysis are blunt instruments in this regime, so, in the presence of Bloom’s work, one’s sensibility must gradually recalibrate, as a diviner’s must, to identify evanescent qualities that manifest themselves like fugitive colors at the intersection of devotion and adoration, of humility and desire, of loathing and admiration, recognition and romance. This elaborate dance of seeing, picturing, imagining, and comparing evokes a condition of reverie that conjures up, quicker than thought, nothing more substantial than some specific “quality” of the atmosphere it creates. In this sense, Bloom’s art is a pure high modern art; it requires an engaged beholder who is something more than a sightseer. Bloom’s work resists being experienced as Bridget Riley’s paintings resist being seen. Even so, they both require a certain level of attention and inquiry for their resistance to become manifest, for the game to begin.
In the realm of modern art, this “resistance” was once presumed to be an indispensable attribute, a signifier of the work’s difficulty. In a blatant and baroque moment like the present, any assumption of the beholder’s curiosity seems quaint, but, when exercised, such curiosity has its benefits, because, at the end of the game, the power of Bloom’s art is best measured by the extent to which our experience of its difficulty pays off in the world beyond her art. Having looked at Barbara Bloom’s work, one is invited to look through it at the world beyond, to recapture in reverie one’s own “Barbara-Bloom-Moments” in the world—as anyone who loves the art of Ed Ruscha must find their own Ruscha trouvé in the world beyond his work. (My own favorite is a sign beside a church near the Las Vegas Strip that reads “Cathedral Parking in Rear,” with its naughty inference.)
Moreover, citing evidence of Bloom’s work from beyond the realm of Bloom’s work seems more in line with her sensibility and more demonstrative of the work’s efficacy. Finally, it smacks less of “analysis,” so here goes: A few weeks ago, in the New York Times, David Brooks’s column cited a perfect “Bloom-Moment.” Professor Brett Pelham of SUNY, it seems, has, by some statistical sleight of hand, ascertained that “people named Dennis and Denise are disproportionately likely to become dentists. People named Lawrence and Laurie are disproportionately likely to become lawyers. People named Louis are disproportionately likely to live in Saint Louis and people named Georgia are disproportionately likely to reside in the “Peach State.” This haunted batch of statistics, at least to me, seems designed to evoke and appeal to a sensibility like Bloom’s—a woman who never signs her name “Barbara Bloom” without smelling the flowers and thinking of Molly in Joyce’s Ulysses.
On the subject of blooming flowers, I have my own Barbara-Bloom-Moment, from my youth, because my grandmother owned a flower shop in south Fort Worth where my mother routinely parked my brother and sister and me while she ran her errands. There’s not much for kids to do in the scuffle of a chaotic small business, so we would go into the large refrigerator, stand amidst the chilly gladiolas, irises, chrysanthemums, carnations, and roses, and play the “flower game.” We would close our eyes and say the word “flower” about fifty times until the sound lost all its meanings and connections. We moved from “flower” to “flow-er,” to “flaow were,” etc. Then we would open our eyes and let the category of “flower” reconstruct itself before our eyes in fits and starts.
I have always regarded the “flower game” as a kind of preadolescent acid trip and it is important to me. It also evokes Bloom’s obsession with the fluidity and slipperiness of the relationship between names and the things they represent, between mediums and messages, between the body and the mind, and the world at large. So what do we make of a color named Richter? Why do we blush at the thought of that? Why do we smile at Bloom’s idea of the Bible in shorthand or Playboy in braille? How do we detect the presence of what’s implied? How do we distinguish the picture from the frame? How do we parse the endless vocabulary of similitude: the proliferation of twins, pairs, doubles, rhymes, harmonies, symmetries, inversions, substitutions, and palindromes? In other words, how do we think and feel about the apparatus of our seeing, thinking, feeling, and knowing? Most critically, wherein does the pleasure and beauty of our seeing and knowing reside?
Bloom plays in this special territory, even though not many artists may be said to play and even fewer play amidst the recognitions that precede cognition, Bloom does. Like a child running through a hedge maze, she flits through the spaces that divide the five roses in Gertrude Stein’s famous lyric “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. / Civilization is a rose.” Bloom tweaks the soft boundaries between the sensibility that notices the rose, the cognitive act that recognizes it, the word that stands in for it, and the empty phonemes, “eh roze,” that we attach to the word and ultimately to the blossom. The fifth rose is a rose whose subject is “civilization.” The abstraction of this subject reinvests the empty phonemes “eh roze” with a new word of comparable generalization: “eros.” This, in turn, activates to the fog of Western metaphors connecting roses with sex and romance. This, ultimately, defines the act of looking at arose.
This is the territory in which Barbara blooms and the critical inference we may draw from her work is that, if there is pleasure there, if this territory actually exists, then Michel Foucault is right. Levi Strauss is right. “harmony is all.” Our engagement with the dense tapestry of superficial resemblance that unfolds before our eyes each day—our happy embrace of moments when we find ourselves “rhyming” with the world, and things “rhyming” with one another—still drive the deep tides of our personal existences in special harmonies. We have inherited these proclivities (abjured by advanced thinkers) from the premodern world, and, since the primary task of high modernist art has always been to restore to us those aspects of living that modern science and technology have suppressed, the high modernity of Bloom’s work (and of Stein’s, Joyce’s, Nabokov’s, and Eliot’s as well) is defined by its ability to self-consciously rediscover and reinvent the tapestry of experience bereft of absence, to ignite the murmur of fugitive harmonies amidst the residue of knowledge.
More specifically, without this murmur, one could not “marry the glove.” The link between names and their consequences would remain opaque. The predisposition of Dennis to become a dentist, of Laurie to become a lawyer, of Georgian parents to name their daughter Georgia, would not haunt us with enjoyment as it does. The entire beaux-arts appetite for pleasant surprises, patterns, recognitions, and moments of self-recognition can be dismissed as delusional. Bloom’s task has always been to make this murmur audible and visible to us in its intricacy, so let me conclude with the author Colin Thubron’s Bloom-Moment. In his book Shadow of the Silk Road, Thubron recounts his visit to the end of the Great Wall of China outside the city of Yongchang. There, he discovers what he felt sure was there, a scattering of tall, redheaded Roman-Chinamen right where history left them, poised between glory and oblivion. In the late days of the Roman Republic, their ancestors were captured after the defeat of Crassus’s army and Crassus’s death. These Roman invaders were, appropriately enough, assigned to work on the Great Wall designed to keep invaders out, and there they remain, half a world from Italy and their German homelands, like a distant genetic echo, visible evidence of the way things blur, and flow and swarm. They blossom forth in reverie to amaze our imaginations in the manner of Barbara Bloom. That’s what it’s like.