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Linda Mary Montano Is Reborn

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Linda Mary Montano Is Reborn Linda Mary Montano is Reborn Linda Weintraub inda Montano did not wait to die to be reborn. The story of her entry into grace coincided with her father’s physical decline, illness, infirmity, L and death. In 2004, I visited Linda, who had returned to the Hudson Valley, where I live, six years earlier. At the time, neither she nor I considered this a professional visit related to our respective art careers. We two Lindas were simply getting together as friends. But, in the subsequent years, our get-together was recatego- rized as a “studio visit,” our conversation was reclassified as an “interview,” and the interactions I observed on that day endure as a culminating artwork of her distinguished career. Six years before, Linda yielded to internal voices beckoning her to return home to Saugerties to care for her aging father, Henry Montano. The time had arrived for them both to prepare for the inevitability of his death. All I knew about her Dad can be summarized as follows: Italian ancestry, Americanized, musician, businessman, devout Catholic. I entered the house at midday. Outside it was hot, sunny, and noisy, but the curtained space inside was dark and unnaturally quiet. Mementos and stacks of papers were piled on every surface. The carpets were imprinted with the footsteps of former occupants, pillows were shaped by their bodies, and furniture was marked by their repeated gestures. I remember thinking that this must be how the past tense looks and feels. By the time I walked back out into the summer glare, my impression had not only been revised, it was reversed. Linda and her father had not renounced themselves to the past. Indeed, they were not merely anticipating a future event: they were training for it. For six years and six months they had been making preparations © 2016 Performing Arts Journal, Inc. PAJ 113 (2016), pp. 21–30. 21 doi:10.1162/PAJJ _a_00312 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00312 by guest on 26 September 2021 to sanctify Dad’s passage from life to death, which occurred six months after this visit. The first four years of this seven-year work of art might be described as a tender prelude. Linda drove her Dad to visit doctors, wrote his checks, played music with him, took photographs of him, and made videos with him, which is how an extensive and enchanting record of the mutuality of their daily activities came into being. They reveal an intimacy between daughter and Dad that transformed the common place into an inspired space. This prelude ended in 2001 when Dad suffered a stroke and Linda became his full-time caregiver. That is when her ministrations became eligible for inclusion in all future accountings of Linda Montano’s art career. During my visit, Dad awoke from a nap. Linda fetched him. He appeared in a wheelchair, neatly dressed, combed, and shaved. Linda maneuvered him into kitchen. I followed. She tied a bib around his neck, took a container of yogurt from the refrigerator, and spoon-fed him his midday snack. I imagined her per- forming such tedious tasks, day by day, month by month, year after year. But Linda was not dispirited, and Dad was not pitiable. The intimacy of their exchange transformed drudgery into delight. Each was a benefactor and each a beneficiary. Linda explained that the piles of papers heaped everywhere were charts, state- ments, and records documenting Dad’s diet, baths, sleeping patterns, and the condition of his teeth, bowels, and skin. Comments from nurses were notated alongside Linda’s observations of his miniscule actions. But it would be wrong to assume that this was a sorrowful record of unremitting degeneration at the waning of a life. These documents also offered evidence of unleashing of Dad’s creativity. The papers included the watercolors he had made, one each day, before and after he suffered a stroke. Although Dad had never before painted, he achieved the spare spontaneity of a Zen master’s calligraphy. The marks left by each journey of his brush across the page transcended representation and expression. They are tiny, eloquent epiphanies. After Dad finished his snack and his bib was removed, Linda wheeled him to a side table that was arrayed with brushes, paper, and paints. She dipped a brush in the paint, placed it in his trembling hand, and guided it to so that it was suspended over the bare sheet of 8½-by-11 paper she had laid before him. He did not move. Time came to a halt. She waited. We waited. Then, with intense concentration, his hand stirred and a single line of spare and stirring beauty gradually appeared on the page. He stopped. He was finished. No expression. No words. No gesture. He had poured all the capacities he had lost into this painted line. 22 PAJ 113 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00312 by guest on 26 September 2021 Dad’s spirit was flourishing even as his body faltered. The watercolors are evi- dence of the extraordinary convergence of creative vitality at the brink of death. Linda believes they unleash the soulfulness he had cultivated during his lifelong spiritual practice in the Catholic Church. “My father is Italian and Catholic, yet strangely his quality is Zen-like. He is half way between life and death. The payoff for his surrender is pure beauty. Beauty is a vibrational frequency, a brain wave.”1 Dad finished. Linda glowed, not like a proud mother, but in the manner of someone who had just observed a miracle. “Bliss” and “ecstasy” are the words she chooses to describe this period in her life, and they were written on her face. She and her father were experiencing synchronous spiritual awakenings. Neither had waited to die to be reborn. Linda didn’t apply the word “art” to her care-giving devotions until after Dad died. Now they comprise another formidable artwork in which her father is the subject, muse, inspiration, and collaborator. As such, my observations on that day are ripe for art analysis. Dad Art takes three forms. First, there are the watercolors that mark the creative finale of Dad and daughter’s life together. Dad Art is also a film that combines pre and post-stroke footage, and serves as an enduring memorial of familial devotion. For the four years that preceded Dad’s stroke, he and Linda videotaped each other having breakfast, watching TV, and making music. Linda explains that the camera enabled Dad to communicate as he declined. After his stroke, Linda retained her position behind the camera because, she said, it helped her manage her emotions. She couldn’t watch him suffer. Thus, over the course of two hours, viewers are invited to witness Dad being fed, bathed, driven to the hospital, and dying. The film then presents him dead and in the morgue. It ends with his burial. The shots are grainy, over- or under-exposed, uncomposed. She explains, “The film is really a memorial, not art cinema.” Dad Art is also a three-hour, participatory staged event in which the film is pro- jected while Linda sits at a piano and sings, in a sweet soprano voice, her father’s favorite love songs from the 1930s and 1940s. When I saw this work performed at the University of New Mexico in 2009, Montano led seven student volunteers, who were referred to as “secretaries,” to chairs scattered across the stage. Audience members were invited to take a seat across from them to dictate letters to the dead and receive grief counseling. Their exchanges were inaudible to observers, but gestures and postures sufficed to convey their sorrow. However, communal grieving was not the finale of this work. As the film proceeded to Dad’s death and burial, audience members and their secretaries danced together. Then they WEINTRAUB / Linda Mary Montano is Reborn 23 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00312 by guest on 26 September 2021 Top: Linda and Dad. Dad Art, 2007. Two hour video/performance. Produced, directed, and camera: Linda Mary Montano. Video editing: Tobe Carey. © Linda Mary Montano. Bottom: Linda feeding Dad in kitchen. Dad Art, 2007. Two hour video/performance. Produced, directed, and camera: Linda Mary Montano. Video editing: Tobe Carey. © Linda Mary Montano. 24 PAJ 113 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00312 by guest on 26 September 2021 Top: Painting by Henry Montano. © Linda Mary Montano. Bottom: Painting by Henry Montano. © Linda Mary Montano. WEINTRAUB / Linda Mary Montano is Reborn 25 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00312 by guest on 26 September 2021 formed a procession outdoors where the papers on which their sorrows were inscribed were placed in a metal bowl and burned. An orange and red flag was waved. The healing was complete. Montano comments, “I felt that all my art had led up to the piece with my Dad. Everything I had ever done, everything I learned, everything I ever studied, was a prelude to being with my father in his last seven years. And now I’m undoing and re-seeing and fixing and healing.” In order to establish Dad Art’s culminat- ing role in the trajectory of her long career, Montano differentiates it from her earlier Art/Life series because it does not invest life with aesthetic and symbolic significance. It certainly is not Art/Art because it is not an aesthetic object pre- sented to the public as a commodity. Instead, she refers to Dad Art as Life/Art which “only happens within an atmosphere of prayer.” Life/Art is sanctified by ritual.
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