Angela Woodward
While visiting Chicago last weekend, I stepped into a museum to get out of the rain. An artist had several galleries to himself or herself, someone with a name with a strange doubling of vowels, like Saar or Adaams or Hooff. I can't remember except that it was like Voorhees, but not Voorhees. Anyway this artist created a limited vocabulary of shapes—something like a comb; a rectangle with a wedge cut out of it; two triangles oddly fused; a blocky hourglass—and made paintings, sculptures and other objects out of them. Maybe eleven or twenty-one shapes that she laid on top and next to each other in a palette of dark brown, dark green and pink, these colors like a 1930s hotel lobby's palm tree wallpaper, tropical and harmonious.
Everywhere I looked, these shapes looked back. One piece of carved wood sat in a high niche, ten feet above me, as if watching the gallery visitors from a safe remove. The sculpture's same shape, now flat, figured in the large painting on the wall below it. There the shape floated atop the other shapes, severed from the attentiveness of its sculptural iteration. On another wall, two smaller paintings also held a combination of the shapes, aligned differently. Each symbol in Voorhees's vocabulary could mysteriously change place, and go from heavy to light, anchoring to escaping.
In the center of the room stood a desk, very much like my mother's desk, the one she gave to me. I'm writing on it at this moment. I loved it as a child because it had cubbyholes and two tiny drawers, now stuffed with my own receipts and letters, the warranty for my broken wrist watch, and passwords unwisely scribbled onto half index cards. The artist's collection of shapes had cooperated in forming a smooth writing surface. They found their fullest expression in the desk legs and chair back. On the desk lay two books, or sculptures of books, closed, of the same size, bound in gray linen. One of Voorhees's symbols was stamped across the front cover of the top book. The symbol also presumably marked the identical book below it.
The second gallery held a a mock bookshelf—a bookshelf created by the artist to look like a bookshelf, which she may have altered from a commercial bookshelf, or from one she had found on the street in Buenos Aires. Slim volumes of gray linen showed their spines, each printed with one of the symbols in pink. I took it as a threat almost—out of these few repeated shapes a whole library arises. Over there is the woman writing at the desk, and around the corner, the woman reading. Or able to write. Able to read. Voorhees dealt in possibility, I thought, making her fairly contained world wild with ungovernable prospects: where there were no human representations in her artwork, no faces, hands, butts or throats, there still lingered the impression of busy masterminds churning out their meaningful tchotchkes.
All the time I actually lived in Chicago, thirty years ago, my friends and I only went to museums on the occasional free Tuesdays. Sometimes in extreme heat, we paid to experience the air conditioning. Where a huge park now celebrates the edge of the lake, we used to go for picnics in wasteland. As we walked out to a promising spot, we scared up pheasants nesting in brambles between the rails of abandoned train tracks. From our blanket we watched the light change across the profiles of the glass buildings of the Loop. Only a hundred yards away, men and women in business clothes hustled between sightseers stepping off tour buses. This stretch of land seemed utterly forgotten, hemmed between the restless lake and the grandeur of Michigan Avenue.
Another place we liked to go for fun was Tire Island. On a small spit of land in the middle of the Chicago River, someone or many people had piled thousands of used tires. The water swirled around the island, thick with foam from industrial effluents. While the water made its rapid, messy passage around the island, the tires waited indifferently in their piles. Created for rolling down highways, they now lay on their sides, immobile, like ancient horses out to pasture. Nothing bothered them. Even as the tallest piles listed, sloppily composed, they never altered. My friends and I hiked to this desolate spot not too far from the neighborhood where we'd settled, honing our keen observational powers and our sense of apartness from striving. We didn't enjoy working towards goals, but liked to mosey around.
In those days my friends and I were very poor. We entertained ourselves by wandering and noticing. One afternoon, I went to a sliding scale health clinic with my daughter, and wrote down my income on the intake sheet. This number came through on my patient chart. The doctor looked at me with horrified concern, as if this annual before-tax figure was an ominous medical test result for a condition he couldn't cure. I myself wasn't troubled by the number until I saw his expression. I thought sliding scale clinics existed exactly for people like me and my baby. I should be treated, without judgment, for my ailment. The doctor seemed to think the fault for whatever illness I had was mine. He would do his best, but it wouldn't be much.