Crone Tableaux
On hags as a target demo, gourdcore & Art Aunt energy
I’m doing a deep reading of Mary Sabo’s Bug’s Life for a longer writing project, contextualizing the artwork within the Mojave Desert’s Paiute legacy, its petroglyphs and atomic history, its postmodern temporalities.
I’m investigating shifting subjectivity in the piece, ranging from insect to archaeologist to displaced desert party animal gaze— but my reflections are full of crone asides. From Lucy Lippard’s Overlay to Libby Lumpkin’s tirade on Georgia O’Keeffe’s de-sexed desert Surrealism to Jill Johnston’s transmission from Agnes Martin’s sequestered adobe. My bibliography is populated with hags, from the founders of the Sekhmet Temple to archetypal art crones in the desert, musing on horizontal lines.
As a resourceful writer I want to use the fluff and gristle amassed along the trek, inhabit the empty ribcage of the writing, an eviscerated coyote in a Pasadena ditch.
Gourdcore
Lisa Berlin’s “Crone Smut” has been fueling my reveries. We were best friends and collaborators in our twenties, but I’m bowled over by how cool she is now. She’s been braiding a fence from discarded tree limbs and drying gourds, creating bulbous, arid tiaras for her garden walls under the shadow of Indiana water towers, against rolling hills stinking of tall grass. Her knuckles are tattooed with colored stripes, an act of post-divorce defiance, and she sends me videos framing her hands caressing, scratching and rattling the gourds, peppered with the occasional back porch tableuax:
My fantasy is that she finds kinship with the Indiana Gourd Society, who I encountered years ago at the State Fair, and possibly offer them a design intervention.
Hags to the Front
We’ve conceptualized a crone general store. Consider a dark sided Cracker Barrel without the ambient nationalism, stocked with bulk bins full of spiderwebs and dry brown leaves. Of course it would have a bar.
Imagine if hags were centered not sidelined, a target demographic; these beers and the neon signs that advertised them would be glorious.
But hags don’t have to advertise, they let their candy houses do the talking, enticing the kids, making slow food a threat again.
Esther Pearl Open Studio
Esther Pearl Watson is not a crone but she has big art Aunt energy. She gets a million points for having her comic “Unlovable” serialized on the back page of Bust Magazine in its fedgling years. Her studio is walking distance from my house, so that also gets a million points. I visited her during a Sunday open studio, the same day as Comics Art LA, shortly after a Matt Groening sighting. My friend courteously mentioned that Groening had been on Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Express, and was therefore no hero—but I couldn’t hear him. The cartoon luminary portal was open, the veils between that worlds and ours gossamer thin.
Esther Pearl’s cronedom comes in the form of art historical alliances. Her paintings pick up threads laid by Grandma Moses, Sister Gertrude Morgan and Howard Finster—inflected with hints of Lynda Barry and Marc Bell, piped with glitter for added pizazz.
She’s a storyteller, obsesively sketching and depicting the life of her family in a naive and blocky style, including a father who built flying saucers. Being the spawn of a crackpot inventor ups the crone ante, like being an heiress to a vaccuum company or a distant Kennedy. Her crone status is also enhanced by being a parttime desert dweller who trades LA traffic for isolation in the Mojave at critical moments of production.
She showed me her scrapbooks of source material and played it cool as I flipped through issues of the Paris Review containing her comix and gasped at her astonishing library.
Before I left I purchased a Womanhouse zine, an intricately folded booklet depicting the Feminist Art Program’s iconic project, to give to my mentor Wendy. I had to bounce to attend the Gentle Thrills studio sale a few miles away and trade Isa a zine for a block print of a rat. My final purchase for the day came from Flowers Finest in Eagle Rock—a magnet of a miniature domestic scene that said “I hate housework.” I situated a small plastic alien in the tableu and stuck it to my studio wall. This all seemed in aesthetic alignment.
wow, that scrolling headline on the gourd site -- Geocities vibes. And why did they suspend the roll of honor? I have so many questions.
It is also worth reiterating that the Indiana Gourd Society is located in Indiana but that the American Gourd Society is also in Indiana.