All About My Mother: Archives, Art, and Memory

Abstract

All About My Mother:Archives, Art, and Memory Laura Engel (bio) One afternoon when we were in high school, my brother and I came home from school to find the living room full of coconuts. These were not your typical tropical fruit advertised in commercials for resort vacations, cracked open to reveal a creamy white rim, a vessel for drink with a paper parasol and straw. Instead, they were unseemly, large hairy brown misshapen bowling balls that covered the floor of my mother's studio (which was also, and always had been, our living room). These alien blobs made it impossible to enter into the space. They rolled against each other on the uneven wood, at times emanating noise, like a hiss or a sigh. In retrospect, although this seemed odd to us, it was not exactly unusual. Having an artist as a mother, or a mother who was an artist (not always clear which came first, as these roles were inextricably linked) often meant surprises. We grew up sitting on the floors of galleries and enormous raw loft spaces in SoHo when the neighborhood consisted of abandoned buildings and warehouses. We spent hours drifting through openings, performances, and happenings, surrounded by art made of unconventional materials: dirt, wood, clay, porcelain, wall paper, aluminum, trash, netting, yarn, fabric, and thread. In the 1970s when my mother began to formally exhibit her work, she re-imagined her classical training (she studied with Ad Reinhardt at Brooklyn College and later went on to Yale University) to incorporate non-traditional materials, particularly those associated with women and domestic practices. She made abstract paintings out of thread and gesso, sculptural fractals out of layered organdy; she juxtaposed photographs of famous buildings and ethnographic photographs with a visual map of their knitted silhouettes. Later on, she embroidered paintings. The coconuts were part of an installation about Western appropriation of the tropics in art, popular culture, and tourism. They accompanied large photo collage pieces (made to look like movie posters) that paired images designed to highlight fantasies, desires, and false assumptions surrounding the lure of "uncultivated" places. In an effort to include herself as the artist/producer of knowledge, who was also complicit in her own cultural production, my mother decided to embed a photograph of our family in one of the compositions (see figs. 1 and 2). We are at the famous restaurant Trader Vic's located in the Plaza Hotel in New York City. It is 1985, and I am a junior in high school. My [End Page 209] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Elaine Reichek, Gauguin at the Harmonium in His Underwear, 1987, oil on collaged gelatin silver prints, 66 x 47" (167.6 x 119.4 cm), Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School, New York. Photographed by Daniel Terna. [End Page 210] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. detail of Reichek, Gauguin at the Harmonium in His Underwear. Photographed by Daniel Terna. [End Page 211] brother is a freshman. I am wearing an oversized Betsy Johnson sweater emblazoned with a tropical fish over leggings, an outfit that I remember thinking was very chic. My mother insisted that my brother wear a Hawaiian short-sleeve shirt for the photo, black with pink flowers, a hand-me-down from a trip she and my father had taken to the Caribbean a few years before. He still has his braces, and he smiles awkwardly at the camera. My mother wears a silk shirt; her hair is very short and spiky (an Annie Lennox look), and her expression is strained. She looks as though someone asked her to smile, and she complied, just to save face for the picture. My father, who is forty-four in the photo, is also trying to smile, but weakly. He looks unwell. His hair is beginning to thin, his body showing signs of the cancer that he would die from the following year. I do not know this in the photograph. I only know that I am posing for the camera, something I like to do. I am the only one with a real smile on my face. Today...