A Looking of Another

Bard College Bard Digital Commons Senior Projects Spring 2016 Bard Undergraduate Senior Projects Spring 2016 A Looking of Another Grace Anne Caiazza Bard College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2016 Part of the Fiction Commons, Painting Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Caiazza, Grace Anne, "A Looking of Another" (2016). Senior Projects Spring 2016. 222. https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2016/222 This Open Access work is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been provided to you by Bard College's Stevenson Library with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this work in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights- holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A Looking of Another Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College by Grace Caiazza Annandale-on-Hudson, New York May 2016 Acknowledgements To Mary, my friend, my mentor, for bringing me home (in every way) To Weardseld, my fellow birds—I will always knock on your door N. & N., for Rilke in the rain and Tolstoy at the hospital To C., for being always and everywhere To the swoon, who holds To my family, who have circled it all and have encircled me I love you all, would not have made it if For FX 1 When I was so much younger, I would take off my shoes when I went to the museum. I was secretive and I was fearless. I did it because I like to feel cold marble, or, I guess, at our local museum, cold imitation, on my feet. After walking for a while I would find a painting that seemed like it was important. Not really a judgment on my part because I’ve never, especially then, had the knowledge to judge such things properly. But maybe from the painting’s location (if it were apart from the rest) or from the lights that were pointed at it, or if I saw it on posters or banners on my way into the building, I might know. I would stand in front of it and try to figure out why it was important. I would stand with my head tilted, nodding in the way that meant something was being understood and appreciated. If all of this failed and I could not understand why a painting was important I would look around me to check and see if anyone was watching and unlace my sneakers. The museums of my childhood homeland are largely unguarded, but onlookers hung around. I would lay my socks flat in front of my feet for easy access to slide back in if noticed, but seeing as I was still a child most people left my strange behavior to be managed by my mother. I would then stand rigid and feel the floor. I would drum on it with my toes as I adjusted to the cold. Staring at my skin for a little I would recognize what exactly I was made of and what exactly I was feeling, being made of. The portrait of this particular memory, but perhaps instead just the first portrait I can recall, is that of a very fat woman. She was a patroness of the museum, the engorged wife of a country doctor. She had a pale, puckered face and a large spillover chest. I remember that her lips and dress were red. 2 The dress, barely containing her, had a gold rope twisted around the sleeves and stomach, scarcely visible from underneath her heave, the fat. Because of this there were black creases all over her body, places where she vanished. The artist had certainly attempted to depict the woman as youthful and elastic, but it was clear to me that he could not resist including a few shadows under her eyes—indicating for me the inability of artistic vision to supersede the power of what is given. On the flattened canvas, they appeared as dark pools. Her face then, seemed to be the surface of a poisonous and barren planet, glowing with an ill health that so strangely countered the plentitude of her body, collecting its dark bile in craters around the hillock curve of her chin. But the bile was not what I was looking for. The bile was for the realm of the painter, a detail in the subject that is so unflattering or miniscule that a painter must first exaggerate it, and then turn it into a symbol so that the detail might be seen by the ordinary eye. I did not let it distract me from her. I instead tried to find the woman inside her pose, where she evaded the artist, where she ran away to. I found her in the splay of her thick fingers, their white casings being the perfect surface for the emergence of blood, pinkish blood, where it collected around her rings. Her fingers did not rest at her side, but pressed into it. Here she was, in the confinement of her body, with blood swelling in her hands, so alive, unlike the resting pools of black. As her palm pressed into her flesh she comforted herself by feeling the depth, the heat, the softness of her weight, her greatest pride and pressure. When I looked up, the painting was important. I felt as though together we were pulling a very taut net. If anything, this felt like a pact. I understood her infinity and she understood my mortality, which made me seem like the stiff one, the inflexible. It was an 3 easy and mutual possession. We were equally incapable of holding own our histories transparently, though this was more embarrassing for me. In this way I felt I truly traded something, I felt that she and I, in the preciousness of the moment, were accessible to one another. This, in a way that other people had never been accessible to me, especially as a child. Her effect was disastrous. In our exchange she gave me not only the knowledge, but also the sensation of my body—I had never before known weight or color to be inside myself. She set in slowly, an illness. In the following days I would look in the mirror and lift up my eyelids, ball up the flesh from my thighs that was growing thick as I left childhood, finding a black cove or swelling pink patch in every place. Eventually, as I learned the operation of these phenomena I began to use them in my life for my own gain and pleasure. I learned to tilt my head down to make the darkness slide off my cheeks and onto my chin, to curl my toes as I stood, to create an organic feeling of tension and discomfort when I needed it. I learned through her not only the ways of forcing feeling, but also the ways of recognizing it. I was constantly new, either an invention or discovery. A lifelong of obsession with myself began. I had the feeling of knowing with absolute certainty who I was and what I could achieve. I would say I lived the first years of my true life under her reign, wonderful years wherein I prospered, excelled, became beautiful, tried to drown myself, lectured others on life, lost my virginity, forgot names, ate well. This is how I have come to love art, and much else. I have lost this type of looking. 4 I am undertaking this walk to attempt some kind of clarity. I will walk back and forth between the two portraits of Adele Bloch-Bauer. I had known the first Adele and had seen the second on accident. I asked a bystander if it was the same woman in each portrait and they replied that it was. I then imagined a white room, soothingly infinite, where they hung across from one another. In both versions of the portrait Adele is inseparable from her environment. She is a being born of symbols (golden eyes, small flowers) that seem to be both outside of her and from within her. They are within their own nature. The portraits are each within their own nature but share a body between them; they are divided by the straight back, the thin lips, the curved waist that together form a keystone. The portraits asked if I might move between them as a conduit so that they might communicate. I agreed. 5 I came to her vanished. But in the aftermath of her, I see that I have built another woman entirely, one who stands with me, made in the image and likeness of myself. I would like to know who this woman is. I feel her whole life as though it is my own, her thoughts and her fears, yet we are separated like these portraits. I must travel to her and come back again. The speed of her formation and the state of completeness in which she arrived to me require me to be skeptical of her. However, I believe her as if I have formed her myself, as if I had spent years forming her. Perhaps I have, and the paintings’ power lay not in that they created belief in me, but in that they allowed me to recognize belief, which had been waiting, disguised as temperament and as circumstance, until the moment when belief became necessary for me to live.

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