12 Questions for Emma Stern
The award winning painter on narrativizing exhibitions, Damien Hirst, her troubled teen years, the libidinal nature of making art, whether or not she's an edgelord, and more.
Walking Alfie through the West Village, a man canvassing for human rights commented on my dog’s supposed smile, his appearance. ‘That’s an effortlessly happy dog,’ the man, with long blonde hair like Brigitte Bardot, said. ‘Happy dog means green flag.’ He continued. I ignored him and walked away. I’ve never liked anything about the whole flag discourse, labeling everything green flag, red flag, blue flag, magenta. I think the term is an excuse for people to evade having to describe things for themselves, in their own words. It doesn’t just make someone’s vocabulary look limited, but also their sense of expression, their awareness of where and how they meet the world, and, by corollary, the way they perceive the outside from within. Prepackaged cliches and turns of phrase are nauseating, but when it’s a coarse summary evoking a piece of cloth, one generally used to let beachgoers know whether its safe or not to swim, it also portrays a willingness to summarize and package the entire sensibility of others with no nuance or distinction; it’s laziness that can end up, on the collective social level, becoming harmful; it already has.
‘This is so based,’ Stern responds, when I share the paragraph above. Based, of course, another online word that basically means nothing.
‘Just kidding!’ She adds, trying to reassure me. ‘I mean it’s good and it rings true.’
Emma Stern doesn’t like labels either, but, in her art, she often plays with our culture’s tendency to prepackage and commodify everything and anything, utilizing tropes of media marketed turns of phrase, ways of life. ‘I’ve been really interested in propaganda recently, as a concept and a practice,’ she tells me. ‘I’ve come to the conclusion that if it’s for the government it’s called propaganda, but if it’s for a corporation then it’s graphic design. My whole idea is to show people something familiar, something they already conceive of themselves as being fond of or at least comfortable with, or unthreatened by, and then sneak something else in, imbuing familiar tropes and archetypes with secret messages.’
‘What are those messages?’ I ask Stern on the phone.
‘Well it’s a secret.’ She says, taking a sip of peppermint tea. I can hear her ninety-four year old grandmother talking in the background.
‘Don’t tell him how old I am!’ The grandmother says. Unfortunately, though, Stern already betrayed her.
***
I spent a whole morning into afternoon, around four to five hours, reading about politics, stuff of ideology and tribalism, the murder, corruption, decay around the world, every day, every minute, happening it seems at an ever increasing pace, or at least now more than usual; an awareness of these matters from the second I wake up, five and a half hours go by in a flash. I need an escape, but not one driven by the tech-influenced sphere of content and entertainment. The needed escape is called art, of course, but no one really knows what that means or entails — other than the tired aphorism that the only difference between art and porn is knowing it when you see it.
Emma Stern thinks trying to define art is moot, if not stupid and sinister. ‘Art is a label that can be ascribed to anything by anyone, art is what one says it is, and you’re an artist if you say you are,’ Emma tells me. ‘Besides, I call myself a painter, not an artist.’ So there you have it, Emma Stern the painter. ‘When someone asks me what I do,’ Emma continues, ‘I tell them I’m a painter to avoid a broader conversation. I want those conversations to be over as fast as possible. I get bashful. I tell my mom’s friends I’m a graphic designer. I don’t want to have to show them the big-titty centaur girl in the bikini that I’ve drawn up and then have them ask me why it does or doesn’t qualify as art. Wait, hold on a sec,’ Stern says. I hear her open her door, a man asks her a question in a foreign language, and she answers yes, in English. I pause to think for a few moments: our collective conscious has been dulled, for ages now, by shopping and screen-time and autotune music from dullards like Sabrina Carpenter. Who in God’s name knows what they even know, anymore? We’re all lost in a haze. When I ask artists I interview how they’d define art, they usually scoff at the pretension of the question. But I’m asking them with innocent sincerity, using their power of expression and sensibility, where and how they’d best define art, because I want to know, for myself, how to better survive in a fucked-up ecosystem, an unnatural world. There’s a violence in me that can be described as desire; I aspire to utilize art, in all its undefinable mystery, as a spiritual panacea; it’s one of, if not the, defining questions of this series, whether or not my aspiration is futile.
Is art the transcendent, the outer-realm of reality that brings us closer to actualization? Beats me. Emma Stern is an artist, in my opinion; a visual one, a painter. She may call herself a painter, not an artist, but everyone in her presence would certainly ascribe her with the crowning title. The question I have is why visual artists, as opposed to, say, filmmakers, writers, or comedians, get to be the ones who are labeled with the broad stroke of the term? Why is it that, as a writer, if I walk around and say ‘hello I’m an artist,’ people would think I’m a constipated douchebag? How come Emma Stern, and people like Jon Rafman or Anna Weyant, have a license to do that? In my opinion Ross Barkan is an artist, but all he writes about is government affairs, something of a faux-pax for any would-be artist. I’ve still got the illustrious Emma Stern on speaker as I write this out. She’s sitting in a hotel in Istanbul, Turkey, paid for, she says, by the same people who bribed Eric Adams. Out of nowhere, I hear a loud moan. ‘Sorry,’ Stern begins, ‘I’m sitting on a Sybian while watching John Wick.’ I don’t know if she’s kidding or not, and the artist laughs with malice.
I joke to Emma that the intro I’m writing about her consists of me devising one thousand different ways to call someone a cunt and she tells me she doesn’t like that word. I ask why, and she says it’s because it’s ugly. ‘What about it is ugly?’ I ask. ‘The sound of it,’ she replies, before continuing. ‘It’s one of these words that sounds exactly like what it is. I don’t like the word gash for the same reason. Have you ever heard someone be called a gash? It’s so gross.’
‘What does the word artist sound like to you?’ I ask.
‘An empty bucket, I don’t know. I can’t write this whole intro for you,’ she says, before adding: ‘I did my homework already.’
Emma Stern, still sitting on the Sybian, erupts into climax as I write down my notes. She begins crying and puts me on hold, but doesn’t get back on the phone for another two hours. ‘Sorry I fell asleep,’ she says, calling me back a little later. ‘Fuck, what time is it? I’m supposed to be doing this other interview that’s more boring than yours is, they asked me, How do you choose your colors? It’s for this dutch magazine I’ve never heard of. They want to know how I choose my colors, and it makes me appreciate your questions a little more.’ She puts on the TV, then flips the camera to show me what’s on. The show is something that appears similar to Friends, but Turkish. A hairy man walks around in a bathrobe while two women who look vaguely like Jennifer Anniston mock him with a pointed finger. Stern changes the channel, and we see Erdogan giving a speech. She’s now watching politics as well, just as I was this morning. She gets up and then shows me the view outside her hotel room, practically the entire skyline of Istanbul, flaunting her success, rightfully so.
‘What area are you in?’
‘I don’t know.’ She says. ‘I like just got here.’
‘Should we edit this?’ I ask her. ‘Like is this something you want to show your father?’ (He’s a world-renowned Jewish scholar)
‘He’s seen worse.’
She changes the channel a few more times, the camera again facing a small television that sits atop a marble stand. A talk show, a soccer highlight program, and images of dolphins in a large violet pool flash across the screen.
‘Oh my god, Gordon.’ She says abruptly. ‘I saw a UFO last night.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘I was out star gazing with a new friend I made in Bodrum, then we saw something that was neither a star or an airplane, it was really bright and it wasn’t going in a straight line, I thought maybe it was a drone? I don’t know. Turkey shares a border with Russia. It really freaked me out. Then I saw a bunch of shooting stars. It was a spooky night, last night.’
She shows me the TV again, and now it’s an earnest looking Turkish man sitting beside a large marina filled with yachts. He sings a ditty about love, and then about devotion, it seems, about devotion toward God. Emma giggles again, this time with delight, and decides to change the channel once more.
‘Where do you get your inspiration from?’ I ask her.
‘Oh now you’re asking me one of those retard questions the Dutch magazine asked. You’re better than that. Ugh. What was the question?’
‘Where do you get your inspiration from?’
‘I mean, I don’t know, dude. I can give you a really boring answer about renaissance and post-renaissance paintings, about how I really admire human anatomy, how you can tell when someone understands what’s underneath the skin, how you can look at all these old Italian masterpieces, the way they dissect bodies, understand the musculature, the truly fascinating translucence of skin.’
Again, I pause for a moment. Emma Stern is one of those people who are far more intelligent than they like to give off. She has real self-confidence, doesn’t feel like there’s much to prove, at least not when it comes to her work; her personal life is another story. She prefers, as many smart people do, to deflect seriousness (possible boring or sentimental interludes) with humor and play. She probably wasn’t really riding a Sybian, but I’ll never know for sure.
Even though much of Stern’s talent exists within her work—glossy oil paintings on canvas that give a three-dimensional appearance, portraying mischievous females whom she calls Lava Babies—her personality is something of an art, in and of itself. When interacting with Stern I often think of what Dean Kissick says about how the people surrounding art, at openings and events, have become more fascinating to observe than the art itself. But knowing Emma decently well, I’ve found that her art and her persona are one and the same, complimentary if not indistinguishable. She does, as an artist, exist in a cultivated, heightened reality; it bleeds from her energy, gushes all around her. It’s in this reality that her paintings come to fruition, and the distance Stern maintains from the work she creates remains slim, minimal, hardly there at all.
She’s an artist, that’s right. Can she give me what I’m looking for?
***
‘I like thinking of paintings as the original virtual reality,’ Stern writes in the middle of our interview. ‘When they’re sufficiently advanced enough, paintings are also portals to other times and places that no longer exist, or never did exist in the first place. Art can suspend time, but it can also liquify it.’
A synonym for liquify is to condense, and to dissolve, I think to myself as I read her answers over, sitting with legs crossed and a hand on my chin like an old academic pervert, like a character the derivative artist Noah Baumbach would make a movie about. I’m threatened by Stern’s answers. ‘Fuck.’ I say to my dog, who’s lying by my side, licking his feet with intent. These answers are better than anything I can write myself: the perfect mix of clarity, wit, and ambiguity. She’s making me look bad. I begin to conspire that she’s done this on purpose, just to destroy me. ‘Hmm, time.’ I think again, adjusting my crotch. Time disappears and, in regard to Stern’s paintings, its subjectivity presents itself, making time look a bit silly, something of a neurosis. Yet the practical definition of the verb liquify, to make or become liquid, can also be applied to the physical sensation Stern’s work provides. I’m beginning to become nervous about how much of my life these interviews have come to take up, sometimes every waking moment. If they’re not the subject of my thoughts, or discussion, they exist in the background. ‘These people I’m profiling are going to be the end of me.’ I say to myself out loud; my dog tilts his head with curiosity. ‘Emma Stern and her minions, her made up minions… these fucked up Lava Babies are trying to destroy me.’
Stern’s various female cyphers, the subjects of her paintings, are clearly up to no good, malevolent, sure, yet charming and seductive. Lava Babies. They evoke the concept of e-girls, tech-enhanced hybrid women, existing simultaneously in fantasy and reality, with all the forms of hysteria both offer and provide; they dwell upon infinite shades of purple and always appear to be in control, making a fool of those around them. Existing in my unconscious, rent-free, no way out; it hasn’t just been Emma Stern, but, also, her devilish little creatures, frolicking and causing havoc in all directions of my mind, throughout the day, through the night. I respect Emma as an artist just as much as possible, but I also, at this point in the process, have had enough. I’ve been having bad dreams about Stern’s aforementioned Babies every night of the week. Among other things, the Lava Babies have burned me alive while holding up a cross and a star of David, they’ve castrated me with a blunt chainsaw, and have trapped me in a small room with every woman I’ve ever slept with, giggling on the outside while threatening to blow the whole thing up with dynamite. ‘This is your problem, not mine,’ Stern told me in a recent conversation. While she’s not wrong, I still can’t help but blame her. She created these cyphers; I was sleeping fine before. In a recent dream, I sat alone at the bar of a diner in Midtown. One of Stern’s Lava Babies comes to my table and provides me with a QR code. ‘The menu?’ I ask. ‘I don’t know,’ the girl says, in a virtual high pitched voice. I open the QR code’s link to find videos of ISIS, on top of a mountain above the clouds, beheading a variety of different journalists, only it’s my head super-imposed onto all the journalists being decapitated. When I try to exit the link, my phone freezes on the video. ‘You stupid little bitch,’ Stern’s Lava Baby says, laughing with vigor. I try to get up but find my self glued to the seat, my phone stuck to my hand. I begin screaming as loud as I can and wake up in a dark room. I have no idea where I am. I’m covered in sweat, and erect, I must admit.
‘It seems like you have a lot of castration fantasies,’ Stern says when I recount this story.
‘I think every man does.’
‘Oh gosh.’ She says. ‘It must be so hard to be a man.’
***
Several hours later, Stern gives me a call.
‘I was really nervous before my first ever show, which was in London. I was up all night in my hotel room and had to take some pill to fall asleep. I had a dream that one of the Lava Babies came to my show, an hour late, then approached me all pissed off. She was really fucking upset.’
‘What was she upset about?’
‘She pointed to each and every painting and said, Emma, you gash, that doesn’t look like me. She just stood there for a while, hands on her hips, waiting for a reply. Redo it! She demanded. I was petrified at what she’d do to punish me for this mistake.’
‘They’re like your children.’ I reply.
‘Like my children!’ Emma says.
***
‘Say hi to Brooke!’ Stern implores during one of my visits to her studio in NoHo.
‘Who?’ I reply, confused, thinking we’re the only two people there.
‘To Brooke!’ She says again, pointing in the direction behind me, toward the floor.
I turn around, look, and let out a shriek, on the top of my lungs, before breathing heavily, beginning to calm down. ‘Oh, Jesus Christ.’
Stern starts laughing, and then calls me a ‘she-male Jew.’ Brooke is lying on all fours, her feet webbed, her tongue sticking out. She’s painted all white and is staring right in my direction, looking me in the eyes with a subtle grin, trying, it seems, to gauge a reaction; an antagonizing figure. Brooke, I should also mention, is inanimate. Well, practically speaking, inanimate. I look back at Emma, then back at Brooke, and then Emma once more.
‘Why Brooke?’
‘Because she lives in a brook! Idiot. Frog girl, my little princess.’ It begins to seem as if Brooke’s tongue is changing shape. Brooke was definitely taking pleasure in the situation, listening to everything, and you won’t believe me when I say that her provocative smile even began to widen. ‘Brooke’s my best friend.’ Emma continues. ‘I’ll never sell her. She’s been with me since the beginning. I can’t believe you got so scared! Go sit over there.’ Emma points to a nook in the corner of her studio. A dirty white chair has a piece of paper stapled to the backrest with the word CUCK written in capital letters. ‘Go sit in the cuck chair!’
In some sense an artist exists between fantasy and reality, effortlessly embodying the energies that surround them. Now, in the era of phono-sapiens, the inescapable ubiquity of screens, of the internet, of micro and macro computational systems unconsciously influencing our every move, thought, and fear, it’s true our environment has become synthetic, or at least influenced by a world which isn’t grounded in reality. Should an artist, a figure who veers toward expression with the intended power of transcendence, ignore this truth and choose to become a luddite? Or, perhaps, should they lean in, and, in a way, become one with the machine? To an extent, Emma Stern is an e-girl.
But these new terms that’ve sprung from online life, like e-girl, don’t really have concrete definitions, and they’re often abused. It is, I suppose, all open to interpretation. And then again, I think, Stern’s not really an e-girl, whatever that even means. She’s a Lava Baby, through and through. A figure of her own creation. And it’s not necessarily technology that she’s so effortlessly morphed with, but all our most elaborate fantasies and fears.
***
‘I like it,’ Stern says to me on the phone. I’ve just read her the passage above. ‘Do you want to say morph or merge, though?’ I think of that famous line from the beginning of Less Than Zero, about cars and freeways, about how people are afraid to merge.
Part of me doesn’t want to publish this interview because it would mean letting Emma Stern go. I mean, she’s a friend of mine, and I assume that for the foreseeable future she’ll be part of my life, somehow, in some manner. But publishing this interview, this intro, would also mean (a much relieving) cathartic release from the long process of considering her work, her character, the way she interacts with the world, and how she’s regrettably seeped into all aspects of my perception. I become far too close with everyone I interview, this is very true, to say the least. Recently someone I hold dear sent me a critical letter, one of constructive admonishment. He critiqued the way I tend to befriend everyone in the downtown art scene somewhat indiscriminately, but then, in my work, find outlets for my repressed critical instincts. And this is, of course, even more true with the subjects I interview; and in other words he’s saying—and he’s not wrong—that these people aren’t really my friends. A writer/critic should be public objective; a friend can be private subjective. It’s asking for validation from people while also writing about them. Other than the prescriptive use of the word ‘should’, it’s hard to disagree with what his letter says. At the same time, this manic inclination of mine, this lack of distance from my subjects, is what, I suspect, makes this series interesting, what distinguishes it from other interviews, other profiles; and, even more, it happens naturally; in other words, to maintain that discipline of distance would be somewhat of a contrivance. I naturally move forward, I go ahead and merge. The result is inescapable. I destroy myself and am reckless with my emotional state. I then unpack it into a form, try my best to make it legible. The public perceives this unraveling. But I don’t do it masochistically, it gives me purpose, makes me feel real, part of something larger and very much greater than myself.
A critic trusts their internal tastes; a writer trusts that they have an identity. But if you aren’t sure about those things, you can only reflect other peoples’ projections and social propaganda, knowingly or unknowingly. Another harsh truth, another misstep, another aspect of dissonance that I think makes this series stronger, and then makes my life more painful; Emma Stern the angelic devil, the hypnotizing influence I can’t see; or perhaps I can, and choose to look away. Perhaps I can see it in everyone, their performative aspects, the parts of themselves they’re describing but not truly portraying; the lies, the delusions, the subtle and not so subtle variety of manipulations. And I must add that, if it’s done well, with beauty, with aesthetic sensibility that makes me feel alive, well, then, I’ll let it all breathe, I’m happy to be influenced by… their propaganda. I can’t help but capitulate. And the truth is, I’m not really in control.
Or is that the truth? I really don’t have a grasp of what’s going on here? Hm. Think again. Perhaps, I guess, that’s all part of the bit, a bit I’m creating that I don’t fully understand. There are definitely parts of me who understand it, my own little Lava Babies, but the unfortunate thing is that I’ll never understand them.
Understanding. I don’t think Stern understands her whole bit either. It’s what makes it interesting. It’s what makes it unpredictable. We can’t help but wonder what she’s going to do next, going to say next, think next. There’s only so much of ourselves we can really perceive, at least on an intellectual level. It’s then that the aesthetic starts to slowly take over, becoming something monstrous, greater than us. That acceptance is vital for the work to really thrive.
***
I’m with Stern, the painter, the artist, whatever you want to call her, at the Half Gallery in the East Village. It’s a few days after her most recent opening, Welcome to The Rabbit Hole which is based on a fictional Las Vegas casino, and follows an aging Lava Baby magician named Pandora, her assistant Viola, and their sidekick Bonnie the Bunny. One of the exhibit’s strongest paintings is titled Everyone Loves Slots. Another one is titled, Pandora’s Perfect Pink Box Destroyed by Massive Tool.
‘Can you sign my guest book!?’ Emma says, holding up a large white notebook, smiling, showing her teeth. She puts it back down on a tray that sits below a large kitchen knife permanently stabbed into the wall; when you bend down to sign the book, the knife hangs over your neck.
‘Did you do that?’ I ask.
‘Yeah, the day before the exhibit. The gallery was freaking out because they thought it was gonna fall, they were concerned it was a “hazard,” but Matt the art handler came to the rescue and secured it, or whatever, I don’t know how he did it.’ Stern smiles again and hands me the pen. ‘Here! Sign it.’
Hesitantly, I do so, bending over and glancing up at the knife above my throat while Stern looks on delighted with content.
Several days later, I read her this part above. ‘You like to embellish, don’t you. You like to make me sound meaner than I think I am. Which is fine.’
‘Why is that fine?’
‘Well I don’t know, if that’s how you see me, then that’s how you see me. If you think I’m a huge bitch just say it.’
‘You are not a huge bitch.’
***
After a recent hot yoga class, starving (in the way that’s insulting to people in Africa), I sat down at the first restaurant I passed. I didn’t even realize it was ramen until I was sitting by the bar and looking at the menu. I ordered right away, then looked to my left and noticed another man who was in class with me. He looked in my direction and made eye contact, before nodding in recognition. Motherfucker, I remarked, very loud in my head.
‘Not the healthiest food after yoga, but man, it’s delicious!’ He said.
‘Hah, for sure!’ I responded, then looked away. And then a few minutes later he started talking to me again; I’d failed to convincingly pretend to read something on my phone. He talked and talked throughout the meal, about his day job at CNN, a recent trip he took with his mother to Spain, and then for ages about his childhood in Brazil. He got his food before me and had already finished eating by the time mine arrived, so the majority of the conversation took place while I was trying to eat the ramen. Instead of ignoring him while slurping I just kept asking follow up questions; a soup with so many solid elements, and long wavy noodles, is hard enough to eat as it is, so this was a particularly irritating, troubling situation; it was an arduous day, with too much work, family issues, social discontent. I wanted, if not needed, to be left alone. But he kept speaking, and I kept repeating the last word of whatever he said with a question mark attached, and then he answered and spoke more. He got his 12 Questions, that’s for sure. Though in fairness I should say: he was, as far as one can tell, a pretty nice guy, I just wasn’t in the mood.
I spoke with Stern later in the evening and told her the story of being annoyingly talked at while eating ramen after a long day. ‘You’ve just described the female experience,’ Stern replied. And then I realized, so far into this intro, that I’ve hardly talked about the dynamic between us, the whole business of masculine/feminine; is there a tension? Something I’m missing?
***
‘What would you say is the dynamic between my masculinity and your femininity?’ I ask Stern a few days later.
‘Well, I’ve written about this in the past, but part of what I’m constantly grappling with is that if there’s such a thing as a male gaze it means all acts of femininity are in reaction to some hypothetical male audience. I start to question the way in which I define myself, and everything I do. I try to play with that, to work through it.’
I wished I asked a follow up, but I didn’t, I think we were interrupted, and the conversation moved somewhere else entirely. (Not until the formal Q and A did I get to ask her again, exactly how she defines femininity, and she gave an incredible answer.)
There’s a Balzac quote I find funny, if not ridiculous, from his short story Madame Firmiani, where he earnestly describes his ‘ideal woman.’ Apparently it’s based on Balzac’s real-life perspective of Laure de Berne, an aristocratic mistress and confidante that was twenty-five years his senior. Balzac writes:
Have you ever had the good fortune to meet a woman whose melodious voice lends her words an enchantment which equally invests her whole being? A woman who knows when to speak and when to be silent, who claims one’s attention with a perfect sense of delicacy, who chooses her words with felicity and speaks a language that is remarkable for its purity.? Her teasings are like caresses, her criticism does not wound; she does not handle things in a quarrelsome spirit, but is content to guide a conversation and to bring it to a close at the right moment. She behaves with smiling charm, her courtesy is not forced, and she can make an effort without becoming overanxious. The respect one renders her is never more than merely a sweet shadow; she never tires you, but when you leave her you are satisfied both with her and with yourself. And you find all the things with which she surrounds herself stamped with the same pleasing grace. Everything in her house flatters the eye, and the air you breathe is like the air of home. This woman is natural. All she does is effortless, she does not show off, she expresses her feelings simply because she feels sincerely… she is both tender and cheerful, and her sympathy is displayed in a way that is particularly agreeable. You will love this angel so ardently that even if she were to make a mistake you would be ready to admit she was right.
I wonder, of course, what the Lava Babies would think of this. They’d light a match, that’s for sure. But they’d also conclude that there’s use in taking advantage of all these masculine projections. Only to subvert, though; only to use them to their benefit in the most cunning of ways. The Lava Babies are, at least in my head, in my own masculine projection, one step ahead—frighteningly so. Women are so scary!
I send Stern the Balzac quote, and she replies: ‘OMG! <3. You don’t find me quarrelsome??’
***
A wedding this past weekend in Mexico City; a close friend of mine I’ve known for half my life. The bride’s sister, one of six sisters, is a painter from Tijuana, and I’ll call her V.
I first met V at a karaoke bar two nights before the wedding. I noticed her right away, it was a pull that couldn’t be avoided. Well, we noticed each other. She had this long, curly black hair that went down past her waist. We talked for a little while. Though the conversation was brief, there was an immediate connection. I thought about her the whole next day and looked forward to seeing her that evening, at the Shabbat, which, at Jewish weddings, is often the equivalent to a rehearsal dinner.
And it finally came along. I was looking for V everywhere, trying my best to not be obvious. There’s no emotion stronger, not one in the entire world, than romantic pull; in terms of sensational impact, it’s art’s greatest rival. But I hardly know any forms of art that are stronger than romantic pull, true romantic pull. I was lost in these very thoughts when a woman came up to me and said, ‘Hello, Gordon.’ I turned around and paused. It was V, of course, the same large brown eyes, disarming cheek bones, an altogether welcoming face; a kind, delicate gaze that punctures one’s defenses. But, something was different; her hair was up in a bun and I didn’t notice her right away. It took a second or two. And, for whatever reason, something in me decided to embellish it. I paused for around ten seconds, deciding to make a joke out of the whole situation. V decided to take it a step further. She pretended to be a woman named Laura from Guadalajara, a childhood friend of the bride. V played the role so convincingly that after a minute or two I started to question whether or not I was hallucinating, if I were indeed talking to a woman named Laura from Guadalajara. Disoriented, I didn’t know exactly who was who. The question appeared in my head; did V even exist? It was only later in the evening when friends, and family, came up and addressed her as V that I was taken out of the illusion, the ostensible role-play, for lack of a better word. Still, V kept up the whole Laura bit for the rest of the evening. It reminded me of a section from Gary Indiana’s Horse Crazy, where the protagonist describes the different names and characters that he and his boyfriend ascribe to each other’s moods and mindsets, all to illustrate whether or not someone is acting themselves, or if they’ve been possessed by a force they can’t tame or control. Yet with Laura, or V, it wasn’t so simple. Laura was neither a ghost nor an aspect of V’s persona, she was someone else entirely, a fully embodied character. In a letter received this morning, V wrote: ‘It was foolish of you “not to recognize me” at Friday’s Shabbat. I could feel your stares and glances. The same foolish ones you so confidently threw at me at the karaoke bar.’ I didn’t realize I was being so obvious. ‘But,’ V continued. ‘What if I chose to believe you? What if you actually didn’t recognize me? It wasn’t hard to unravel your attraction to Laura. To men who enjoy entertaining their eyes with desires, I wish them all the fun and pleasure. You can look all you want. I am having fun too.’
Though nothing remotely sexual occurred, not physically, at least, V, Laura, and I, (and Connor, she began to call me Connor) were somewhat inseparable throughout the rest of the weekend, which was far too short. V flew home to Tijuana, and I went back to my apartment in New York. At the wedding, we danced and spoke all throughout the night. We got as drunk as you can imagine. Toward the end, they handed out gray sweatshirts with the newlyweds’ last names printed on the front. V secured the sweatshirt around the waist of her red dress, an almost identical red dress to all of her sisters in attendance (except the bride, of course). We separated for a little while; I went out for a smoke, V, or Laura, went to take a sip of alcohol from a large silver cup that was being passed around. A good song came on, something in Spanish that I recognized from an Alejandro González Iñárritu movie. I noticed V moving at the corner of the dance floor, back turned toward me, gray sweatshirt tied tightly just above her hips, hips I came over and took into my arms. There were flashing lights all around. Together we jumped up and down with intimacy. I took my phone out and took a selfie of us, our cheeks rubbing against one another’s, her body pressed against mine. Did we kiss each other on the cheek, at that very moment? I don’t fully remember. And not remembering tortures me, because it wasn’t V, but one of her sisters. I realized a second later, when I saw V standing beside us.
It wasn’t too crazy or out of the ordinary, everyone was drunk, dancing in close quarters, all touching, on top of one another. V and her sister don’t know me very well, so I could’ve just been one of those people who are very enthusiastic, affectionate with strangers. Neither of them said anything about it, but I can’t help but think they thought it was a little weird. Well, V did say: I see you’ve met my oldest sister, a polite, perhaps Laura-esque way of saying: What the fuck was that? I, for the matter, thought it was indeed more than weird; the next day, hungover on an early flight home, I was absolutely mortified. There was V, and of course Laura, who is and at the same time isn’t an extension of V, and then there was the oldest sister, the very odd few seconds where she merged, and morphed, into my perception of V and all the elements she could inhabit. Unable to stop thinking about this very embarrassing moment, I asked the stewardess for a whiskey, then another, and fell asleep. I dreamt, yes I dreamt, of the moment once more. I grabbed the woman with the red dress and gray sweatshirt by the waist. I pressed up toward her, put my cheek against hers, and gave her a kiss with as much affection as I could possibly muster. We danced for almost an hour, slow songs, fast songs, melodic ones too; all the different genres racing by, with haste. I went up close to V’s ear to tell her that I loved her, and finally after all that time, V craned her neck, like an owl, to look me in the eyes. And of course it wasn’t her, but one of Stern’s Lava Babies. I became frightened and jumped back. I looked all around me to find everyone dancing all the same, yet slowly transforming to become a character in one of Stern’s paintings. I started shaking, scared, and frantically searched the whole room to see if I could find V, somewhere, anywhere, all so I could have the opportunity to see her face again, even if it was the last time I’d ever have the chance. All the Lava Babies pointed their finger at me and started laughing, before quickly becoming disinterested and deciding to light a cigarette, one after another, walking away, exiting the space. ‘Pussy!’ One of them yelled. I saw a translucent hologram of someone who appeared to be V at the other end of the room and started walking toward it, but I couldn’t. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t move my body. The flight attendant pressed her index finger into my shoulder and I screamed. She was letting me know that we were landing; it was time to put my seat forward.
‘Okay!’ I said aloud, covered in sweat. ‘Yes.’ I put my seatbelt on and then rubbed my eyes. ‘Fine.’ I said. ‘Emma Stern is a fucking bitch.’
She is, it’s true. Unavoidable as well. She elicits strong emotions, excavates hidden biases, reveals unconscious fears. Her strength is her persona; the multiple elements she so aptly personifies in her life, and through her work. It has an incredible staying power. Yes, I suppose, this is definitely art. And though it places aspects of my life into perspective in a way that’s difficult to identify, hard to articulate, this art is certainly not the panacea I had initially hoped for. Elusive, it’s something far stronger; more mysterious than imagined.
But finishing this intro. That’s a panacea. A full month later, more life lived, another 12 Questions. Making art, or whatever you’d like to call this, is better, if not stronger, than existing as part of the audience. At least in my opinion. But afterward, alas, an emptiness settles in. That’s the difference between the two, of creating and receiving.
Everything in the end—art, love, ghosts, and dreams—becomes far greater, more powerful than us.
GG: How do you come to name your paintings? I like your recent one, ‘everyone loves slots.’
ES:
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