P.F.S.: Triad

There was a night in October 2002 I was recording in South Philadelphia with Radio Eris keyboardist/utility producer Matt Stevenson, who was also a photographer of note. What we were recording became the spoken word album Raw Rainy Fog. I have described in detail elsewhere precisely what Main Street West (aka Webster Street Studios) at 11th and Webster in South Philadelphia was like; to nut-shell the thing, a lovable hovel. I had picked up some Paisano red wine, because we were to have guests that night— Mary Harju and Abby Heller-Burnham. As of autumn '02, Mary and I were entrenched, and Abby was our constant companion. When they arrived, we smoked the requisite bowl (Matt's weed) from Matt's little marble-textured piece, and I poured the wine. This was, I laugh to remember, rather a mistake— Mary and Abby, together or separately, could hold their pot but not their booze. So, Matt was forced to watch, in semi-bemused fashion, as the two painters disintegrated into cacophonous incoherence and tantrum-like upset. They were a tumultuous pair; and, a few months after that (February '03), they moved into a two bedroom flat in a complex on 42nd Street off of Baltimore Avenue in West Philadelphia, where Mary had lived for a few years already at the pictured 4325 commune. I was Mary's hubs, and there constantly.

One nuance to remember about Mary and Abby, as a Dynamic Duo, or double manifestation of the Creatrix— Mary, through a rigorous and rigorously enforced regimen of scant, vegetarian eating, was always perfectly thin, if still rather more big-boned up close than one would think; Abby Heller-Burnham's weight was always fluctuating between extreme thinness and chunkiness. Her quandary was clear— the better she was painting, the more she liked to eat. Mary had a height advantage, as well— her Grace Kelly-like near 5'8 (later matched, precisely, by Hannah Miller, and by Jennifer Strawser before) to Abby's elfin five feet even. Jenny Kanzler, turns out, held down the mid-range at 5'5. The flat itself was nondescript— a large kitchen/living room space (the kitchen had an island), flanked by bedrooms on either side. No serious painting could be done there— Abby and Mary both had studios elsewhere. Because Mary had a hubs, she was given the larger, master bedroom, as we alternated apartments night by night as usual (I was still at 21st and Race). An important facet of Abby's personality which became visible at this time was her slow-burn Virgo temper— she was pissed at Mary's marriage to me, and harbored a secret grievance that she (the reason wasn't important) deserved the master bedroom. It's just that they both knew by then (without necessarily verbalizing it) what it would take me a number of years to realize for myself—Abby Heller-Burnham was a greater artist than Mary Harju. She was more inventive, imaginative, and formally rigorous, building on French Neo-Classicists Ingres and David from a firm base of solid contemporary engagement, including an immersion in confrontational, New York-style queer politics.  Mary tended to lean on fluency in and masterful applique of traditional forms; even as she did also have a substantial engagement, more tilted to the nouveau, with photography, as well. Simmering in them in '03 was a congeries of these issues, destined to influence and sometimes confound the Aughts years ahead. 

The Creatrix, as a definable character in art, has now developed out of Neo-Romanticism. The Creatrix is a female artist who embodies the self-determination, autonomy, and complex sense of individuality which tends to manifest in Neo-Ro, and Neo-Ro creations. I am taking for granted that the Creatrix, as a definable art-character, does begin with Abby Heller-Burnham, Mary Evelyn Harju, and Jenny Kanzler. What distinguishes the Creatrix from post-modern female, and feminist, archetypes, is a sense of Eros, or the erotic, developed itself to an extreme pitch of intensity. This, even in Kanzler, where this development is stunted or warped into mutant form. The sense of the erotic is grasped, felt, and registered with emotions consonant with an integration not found in post-modernity: straightforward passion, straightforward longing, straightforward physical need, conveyed in a fashion which does not need to abuse the viewer with the dull, dispossessed ironies which have now become a post-modern tradition. Why Eros in American art can be made new now, especially with Heller-Burnham’s immersion in queer life, is that Eros in American art has never had formal parameters imposed on it, by painters who are not merely servants, but masters, of formality, on a level with classicist Europe. This is not to say that the Creatrix has to be a painter. But, if we are to start with Heller-Burnham, Harju, and Kanzler as initial archetypes, these are some reference points which might be of service to us, in an effort not to be strained by an atmosphere in which narratives of form, and narratives of passion, are disavowed.