Walk
a piece of an older piece about a finished one
I recently found this segment of a text I wrote following a year-long collaboration with Nova Benway as she was doing her Master’s in Curatorial Studies at Bard. To make a long story short, Nova asked me to create a film in conversation with her curatorial research, which focused on Eleanor Roosevelt’s home in Hyde Park, New York, called Val-Kill. The work was shown as Nova’s curatorial contribution to the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies’ 2011 exhibition.
Among other activist activities she engaged in, Eleanor Roosevelt helped write the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. The film I made, “The Object of Society Is” reflects excerpts of her notes and contributions to this text, among many other emblems that I derived by making personal and poetic associations with things I found in her writings, her archive, home, and biography.
The film was shown in a giant projection in a big space usually taken up by multiple works in these shows. It was so great to see this experimental, research-driven piece given a lot of room and resonance. I was very pregnant with my second child while making this film and remember walking around in the snow, carrying Bolex and tripod through the trails near Val-Kill. About a month after the exhibition opened, I gave birth.
Below is a fragment of something I think Nova and I wanted to use to start making a book about our process. I’m sharing this because I am in the middle of writing something that’s proving to be difficult, so I feel the need to reorient myself to other, older things I wrote. I am also fascinated lately by encountering things I wrote and made that keep pressing on similar themes over these many years. This is both good and dispiriting. Corresponding.
I’m grateful to Nova for this opportunity to learn and create.
Movement I Out and Back (the walk)
Designating a space that is not biography, not autobiography, and not fiction. That has been the project of the research and production of the film The Object of Society Is. The project has also been about exploring the complexities of a particular collaboration. Nova Benway asked me to consider making the film. During the same period, she wrote a master’s thesis about the process of commissioning the film and the ethics of the artist/curator relationship. The result of the year’s work was a film and a thesis. The process is what is most compelling; meetings and discussions and parallel research and notes taken, written, images filmed, edited, texts drafted, written, and revised.
This text will elaborate on the film and also unpack this process. Like Eleanor Roosevelt, who traveled the world and continued to come home to her favorite sanctuary, the humble Val-Kill, Nova and I set out on a path of research and debate that took us far afield and then home again, to a film and a text. But we were changed by our travels together, and that’s what this essay tries to express.
Out and Back.
There were problems from the outset. I did not want to make a film about Eleanor Roosevelt, really. Or rather, there was no way I was going to compete with the volumes of writings, endless films, recordings, and docu- ments connected with this extraordinary woman.
Space: Nova was interested in Val-Kill, Roosevelt’s home. Her home is only a few miles away from FDR’s mansion in Hyde Park, New York, but the abodes could not be more different. Val-Kill can only really be described using the untranslatable word “gemütlich,” a sort of cozy, cluttered, chinz-filled home pleasantly laden with trinkets contendedly lingering on shelves backed by wood-paneled walls. A happy home, a safe space in which Roosevelt could entertain unburdened by the painful trappings of First-Lady-dom. I didn’t know what to do with the place when I visited. I felt uncomfortable immediately with the idea of dealing with the home-as-museum, in much the same way as I felt about exploring biography.
Space: Nova and I had to figure out a collaborative space of working, which could be expressed as a space in which we felt comfortable discussing and not discussing. Long conversations in my studio wandering off into silences, then head-scratching and another burst of ideas. Digressions, free-associations, references to things I hadn’t yet read but meant to. Image-ideas that jumped to mind. An insistence on some kind of circular “feeling” that early on entered the idea of this film. A fascination with the sense that the intensity of Roosevelt’s life lived in public, and its daily practice of writing in public, masked another kind of pain or searching, one that was ever elusive. That’s the discrepancy between the public and private self. And a realization that no matter how far afield she traveled, she was compelled, by habit, propriety, or something far deeper and more personal, to come back home.
Val-Kill, Eleanor Roosevelt’s home. A home as an escape from an unhappy marriage, a heteronormative culture, and an escape where Roosevelt could take on political issues of the day with a voice so strong and yet so often couched in domestic, self-effacing language. Roosevelt wrote a syndicated newspaper column called “My Day,” six days a week, from 1936 to 1962. The columns are a combination of public diary and political commentary, and the sheer number of pages, issues, and ideas Roosevelt discussed is astounding. Additionally, Roosevelt wrote to a monthly column, often answering a page of questions from the American public, in magazines such as McCall’s and Ladies’ Home Journal. Many of the texts quoted in The Object of Society Is come from those sources.
Roosevelt was constantly moving out and back, away from the appropriate domestic home (with the husband, the President) to a new home not far away where she could have the relationships she desired. She logged 20,000 miles in the South Pacific during World War II, talking, lecturing, conversing, greeting, and always writing and always returning to the humble space of Val-Kill. And as often as she could, walking Eleanor’s Loop, the one-mile circular trail behind the house, where she would walk alone and with friends, with diplomats and statesmen, conversing, thinking, and observing. The strongest image for the film relating to aspects of this life was the trajectory of a homing pigeon: out and back.
A walk helps you think; a body’s movement out and back in space generates ideas. The loop trail confirmed the idea: out and back, a daily walk, a brief escape or respite. Perhaps each trip, farther and farther afield, represented a hope of not returning, of spinning out into the universe, never to be caught back in Earth’s gravitational pull. Yet return happened. Out and back, the pull of something.
So in the winter of 2011 I filmed the trail, walking out and back. Snowy ground; someone’s footsteps kindly marked the terrain in front. Flat to hill, small pond, conifers and oaks, evidence of deer, up to the top and back down again. It took longer than I thought.
Thanks for reading.
BUNKER news: The film will screen at the Trondheim Architecture Film Festival, Octoer 18-19, in Norway.
