SALON DE FLEURUS Number One JUNE 2018 Brisbane, Australia SCRIBBLES FROM THE SALON Pablo Picasso, Girl, oil on canvas, 2015. Collection Salon de Fleurus. Image: Chloë Callistemon. At QUT Art Museum in Brisbane on the evening of Tuesday 19 June 2018, guests were invited Man Ray, Gertrude Stein in her salon, writing, black and white photograph, 1920. to step back in time to the re- construction of Gertrude Stein’s Modernism has receded into an obsolete ide- Parisian Salon de Fleurus, for Nuclear Fictions ology from a previous century. Ideas of progress an evening of poetry readings and uniqueness have been thoroughly discred- inspired by Stein, an influential ited, and postmodernism is no longer a burning American author, poet and issue but a nearly forgotten one. Yet this Salon de art collector. Credited as the Kim Levin Fleurus brought visitors close to the experience of ‘first museum of modern art’, being at the epicenter of the originating myth of the salon was one of the first modern Western art. If this wasn’t the real ground gathering places for burgeoning zero in the narrative of Gertrude Stein’s salon and the birth of Cubism, it certainly provided a con- artists and writers including On December 22, 1992, this mention of a now vincing simulacrum. And yet, it was a metaphor Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, legendary conceptual anomaly appeared in the and a memory, as elusive and imperfect—and Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott centerfold of the Village Voice: impossibly imprecise—as re-remembered recol- Fitzgerald and Stein herself, lections often are. But this was a double-edged along with her brother Leo Stein memory. It was not only a memory of November and her life partner Alice B. SALON DE FLEURUS 1992, when Salon de Fleurus first materialized in Toklas. When systems (or for that matter New York, which some of us happen to remember, eras) collapse, freak occurrences but also a metaphor that recreated the American begin rising through the cracks. This role in the belated formation of the modernist Poetry presented and written mutant, “authorless,” iconic and myth. Featuring the original modern collectors— by Ella Jeffery, Emily O’Grady, iconoclastic space/time warp has Laura Kenny, Zenobia Frost, opened just east of Soho, conflating Leo and Gertrude Stein, an American brother past and future. It is and isn’t art and sister who transplanted themselves to early Rebecca Cheers and Anna and only the aesthetically intrepid twentieth-century Left Bank Paris and started Jacobson, Creative Writing should consider a visit. Daily from collecting the newest art, and Alice B. Toklas of Higher Degree Research 5 to 9, 41 Spring Street. (Levin). the mind-altering brownies—it explained the students at QUT, and filmed formation of the art historical narrative of how by Chloe Mills and Dale Allen, modernism as we know it came to be perceived. third year QUT students, Two decades later, the New York Salon de Since the early 1990s, we have all time- Fleurus continued to exist at 41 Spring Street, traveled to the future, while New York’s Salon studying a Bachelor of Fine Arts still open from 5 to 9. At some point, its collec- de Fleurus has receded further into the past. In in Creative and Professional tion had acquired a title: From The Autobiography 1992, it was about the atomization of time but Writing. The event was of Alice B. Toklas. You still entered through the with the passage of time it has shifted further into organised in partnership with courtyard passage that transported you to Paris. the modern past. The paintings and the parlors QUT Art Museum by Dr Penny Old French café chansons were still playing on the seemed older than the dispersed originals. Holliday and Sarah Holland- antiquated radio. The dimly lit parlors still had the In other words, while the Salon itself may Batt, academics, QUT Creative amber glow of gaslight. The replicated paintings have stayed pretty much the same, the context Industries Faculty. produced first in 1992 had mostly been replaced had subtly but immeasurably changed. Besides, with similar ones: second-generation copies in a what’s relevant is not what is visible, but how (Continued on page 2) world without originals. you remember. The first parlor still offered up (Continued on page 4) 2 SALON DE FLEURUS SCRIBBLES FROM THE SALON ZENOBIA FROST REBECCA CHEERS ANNA JACOBSON Zenobia Frost is an editor with Stilts Journal Rebecca Cheers is a writer, poet and Anna Jacobson is a Brisbane-based poet, and a Queensland Writers Fellowship winner. playwright from Brisbane. She is a Masters writer, and artist. Her poetry chapbook The Her work can be found inCordite, Scum, candidate at QUT and is researching the Last Postman is part of deciBels series 3, Woolf Pack, Australian Poetry Journal and writing of feminist biography through lyric published by Vagabond Press (2018). Anna Contemporary Feminist Poetry. Her book, poetry. She founded and has edited Woolf was shortlisted in the 2017 Queensland Salt and Bone,is available from Walleah Press. Pack, a zine publishing femme and non- Literary Awards for the Emerging www.zenobiafrost.com / @zenfrost binary writers and artists, since 2014. Her Queensland Writer Manuscript Award and work has appeared in Voiceworks, The was shortlisted for the 2016 and 2017 Conspirator, Anywhere Theatre Festival and Queensland Premier’s Young Writers and Nailed it Yarn Storytelling. Publishers Award. She was shortlisted for After Gertrude Stein the 2015 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. In 2017, Anna was one of The Red Room Plum caught up in a truffle. Butter burns I must tell a little about Helene Company’s commissioned poets for ‘Poetry uvula. Sage crisps in a pan. The bruise of Object’. Anna is currently completing a poached quince resurrects a collar. I can She knows to tilt the bowl and lift her Master of Philosophy, specialising in make my own pikelets. I can live off you her wrists in frantic circles, the rest poetry at QUT. Her love of poetry and art for weeks. Have we transcended turmeric? of her body held still. To make the continually interweaves and in 2009 she won A caramel slice forgotten in your fist. You peaks, the gloss and fall and ribbon the Queensland Poetry Festival Film Award, can do just about anything on granite, even of the egg she knows that all she needs screened at the Judith Wright Centre. real hot stuff. Put the entire roast beetroot is a little air. www.annajacobson.com.au and its rose honey right there. Layers of potato sunbathe in the oven. Fingers take Gathers the dark curtains, with a dip in figs. A creamy void wakes in the forearms thick and dark-furred, How to grow nightshades with teapots blink of a bagel. I’m not a morning person. and lifts the dust that settles on the After Gertrude Stein A brain mornay. Roll your forehead into the tops of picture frames. Gertrude knows shortcrust. Melting moments split the timer. to hang them till the plaster starts Pour arctic fire into open ground and furrow A recipe is a letter to your body. And your to crack, to seat each painter dirt. The wagon will heavy the tea and body is just a reply. underneath their work so the world portend readings. ESP will reign. Think takes on the wash of their own brush. about a person and they will appear or ring But Helene knows to tend to or write or pull up in their car as you walk the spaces in between them. sideways. Silver teapots show the future. Clay teapots are not for breaking. The red glaze is We don’t need more, she says, the rarest. My mother has a red teapot fired Weighing our coins in the marketplace, like dragon. Hide-and-seek throughout the plucking the fruit from Gertrude’s hands, house counting twenty-three teapots on three squeezing it for ripeness til her square nails sets of hands. Teapots loiter on washstands, break the skin: non, pour une pomme? in cupboards, in bedrooms, waiting for playtime. My mother opens side-tables Make room for less. and dressers where more gather like dense More room. More air, pressed necessity. The house brews with forty teapots. between the heavy salon chairs Now there are fifty. Remember: the red glaze by her round hips passing. is also the most poisonous. Nightshades under the house can never be collected. SALON DE FLEURUS 3 LAURA KENNY EMILY O’GRADY ELLA JEFFERY Laura Kenny is a PhD candidate and Emily O’Grady’s fiction, poetry, and essays Ella Jeffery’s poetry, essays and reviews sessional academic at QUT. She writes poetry have appeared in Meanjin, Southerly, Kill have appeared in Meanjin, Island, Westerly, and prose which blurs the line between Your Darlings, Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite, Best Australian Poems and autobiography and fiction. Her creative The Big Issue Fiction Edition, and Award elsewhere. Her poetry has won or been work has been published in the Review of Winning Australian Writing. She is a PhD highly commended in a number of national Australian Fiction, TEXT, Hecate, Social Candidate at QUT, and co-editor of Stilts prizes and awards. She is currently a PhD Alternatives, Pressure Gauge Journal, Poetry Journal. Her first novel, The Yellow candidate at QUT, where she teaches in the eTropic, Underground, Right Now, and House, won the 2018 Vogel Literary Award. faculty of creative writing and literary studies, Limina. Laura was shortlisted for the and researches the intersections between Josphine Ulrick Literature Prize in 2016, Ode to Basket contemporary poetics and home improvement and was awarded a 2017 Varuna Residential culture.