#5: Florine Stettheimer's Subversive Rococo
And Marina Abramović Part II
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Hello and welcome to Part II on Marina Abramović! (You can find Part I, here). The feedback was you read Part I, were intrigued, and have gone on to do your Abramović research, so I’m not going to belabor this. I’m also in a rush. I’m writing this on Tuesday evening and am shortly expected at a convention of Spanish Magicians (don’t ask, I cannot say more). So! Let’s cover Abramović’s seminal work, House With the Ocean View, and spend a few minutes on an artist you should know: Florine Stettheimer (both are heavily influenced by New York City.) Then we can call it!
Season 6, Episode 12 of Sex And The City (which aired Summer 2003) starts with a scene where Carrie Bradshaw and Charlotte Goldblatt attend a downtown art show. It’s a hot, sultry day (judging by Carrie’s attire) and inside the cool, quiet gallery they witness an artist living, sleeping and not eating for 12 days, in the name of art. Although the TV show doesn’t explicitly state this, the work was House With The Ocean View, a performance piece by Abramović originally shown at Sean Kelly Gallery in NYC in November 2002.
In the performance, the artist lives for 12 days and nights inside a gallery where she eats nothing but is allowed to drink water. She is confined to three cubes—symbolizing a house—installed part-way up a wall. The cubes approximate a bedroom, bathroom, and living room and are furnished with a bed, a table and chair, a shower, and a toilet. The house is accessed via ladders whose rungs are made of lethally-sharp kitchen knives. A metronome ticks monotonously, demarcating the passing of time. The artist is not permitted to read or speak; rather she is encouraged to engage with the audience by staring at them.
In the SATC episode, when Carrie is asked what she thinks of the work, she quips:
“Oh please! There are depressed women all over New York doing the same thing as her and not calling it art. I mean, if you put a phone up on that platform it’s just a typical Friday night, waiting for some guy to call.”
Fair enough. But not eating for 12 days is no joke. During the performance, Abramović wore the same hiking shoes she wore while hiking the Great Wall of China in Lovers, 1988, to ensure stability as her body got gradually weaker. By deliberately not eating, wearing clothes in hues that corollated to Ayurvedic color symbolism, and essentially entering into a meditative state, Abramović hoped to commune with the audience, to feel and influence their energy, to engage in a non-verbal yet powerful energy exchange.
The initial performance occurred roughly a year after 9/11. Abramović noted that she felt the energy of the New York audience was particularly special: raw, emotionally open, and vulnerable—palpably different from the energy she’d experienced during pre-9/11 performances of other works. A common theme was for visitors to come for a few minutes and end up staying for multiple hours. Some, including close friends, returned day after day to sit on benches or cross-legged on the floor, a small supportive community holding a peaceful vigil with her.
On the final day of the performance, thoroughly weakened from fasting, Abramović stood up and spoke:
“Dear artists, dear friends, dear public. I am sorry to disappoint you by not using the knife-ladder. With your mind you can do anything. […] I want to dedicate this work to New York and the people of New York. In a city that has no time I wanted to create an island of time.”
As today’s letter is short, I figured I’d end with an Artist to Know. Last year I was walking through the Met and stumbled across four paintings, crammed full of Where’s-Waldo-esque New York references, that I’d never seen before. (Note: I lived on the Upper East for a long time and spent many a humid summer afternoon or frigid winter morning sheltering in those galleries, so this felt like a mini revelation.)
The works were the Cathedrals Series by Florine Stettheimer: four punchy, large-scale works summarizing the key secular altars at which New Yorkers pray. The cathedrals of Art, Broadway, Wall Street, and Fifth Avenue. They were painted between 1929 and 1942, yet remarkably, I’d argue, not much has changed.
Stettheimer (1871—1944) was a painter, set designer, and poet of German-Jewish descent, living and working in New York City at the turn of the last century. Part of a wealthy matriarchal family (she lived, even in her adulthood, with her mother and sisters in an Upper West Side apartment), Florine was famous for her salons which welcomed Marcel Duchamp, Alfred Stieglitz, and Georgia O’Keefe among others.
Unlike most other artists, Stettheimer was not pressured to sell her work during her lifetime given her independent wealth. She issued a mandate requiring any gallery or museum that wished to exhibit her work to decorate the gallery in which it was displayed in the manner of her private residence—an ask designed, I imagine, to push the art world away. Upon her death she requested her sister destroy all her work. Her sister didn’t, instead donating many pieces to museums.
Stettheimer’s art was feminist in its ardent desire to be feminine in a patriarchal art world. One of her poems reads, “My attitude is one of Love/ is all adoration/ for all the fringes/all the color/ all tinsel creation.” Her works brim with lace, gold, cocktail dresses, flowers, glitter, tulle, and gemstones. They focus on subjects her male contemporaries wouldn’t have dreamed of referencing: Tiffany’s, Bendel’s, the consumerism of Fifth Avenue, and social satire of everyday scenes of her particular 1920s/1930s New York City. The art historian, Linda Nochlin refers to Stettheimer’s style as “subversive rococo.” Adam Gopnik perfectly distills the radical nature of Stettheimer’s vision in a 2021 essay for The New Yorker:
“No other artist at the time, avant-garde or academic, would have regarded a department-store sale as an event worthy of being treated as the central Manhattan sacrament it has always been. On the ground floor of Bendel’s… Stettheimer’s women grab for bargain dresses with the frenzied grace of maenads on a Greek red-figure vase: they pose, strut, try on. One shopper, with a long, sword-shaped green plume on her hat, of the kind a Homeric warrior might have on his helmet, leaps into the air to seize a blue dress from a rival shopper.”
You get the picture. You can read Gopnik’s New Yorker essay—How Florine Stettheimer Captured the Luxury and Ecstasy of New York—should you wish to learn more. Alternatively, here is Linda Nochlin’s important reevaluation of Stettheimer’s legacy in an ArtNews piece from 1980.
Stumbling past new discoveries in the Met is the best! I devoured these snacks 🍿🥨🥠☺️