Mars

I ran into her a few years after moving to New York, in the stairwell of PS1. She was a performance artist now, she told me, which made some sense. We knew each other from doing youth theater, in our youth. Later I found a video online. In it, she held a pane of glass, dropped it to the floor where it shattered, then undressed, writhed among the shards, and smeared the walls with blood from her cut-up breasts. I resolved to follow her career, and created a Google alert, but after that, there were never any relevant hits, which I would later realize was because she had begun performing under an assumed name.

We had done youth theater in Alaska, and I was disappointed to find no mention of Alaska in her professional bio. She had, I hadn’t known, been born in California, and this was the art-world standard, to give only the year and location of your birth. But surely Alaska had informed her practice, her later interest in colonization and climate catastrophe.

She was a few years older than I was and, as a teenager, had been generous with me. She once beat me out for the role of Anne Frank. The role was double-cast: one girl was Anne-the-girl, the other was the diary. (It was more successful than it sounds.) All of us auditioned in pairs, roughly matched in appearance, so that my audition partner—also older than me, but diminutive—was the girl whom I was otherwise most often up against for roles, and who most often prevailed, possessed of undeniable charisma. If we had, in this case, prevailed together, she would no doubt have been girl-Anne, and I the diary. My early success in the theater was based mostly on excellence within my age group at cold reading. But I was, at the time, closest to Anne’s real age and felt spiritually close to her, beyond just being Jewish. The performance artist and her tall partner won out. My double and I ended up as Anne’s schoolmates, disappearing from the play once the Frank family entered the secret annex, and returning as extras in the camp. The artist carried the show. It was, for her, in fact, a return. In an earlier production—the company tended to repeat its successes—she had played the role of Anne’s sister, Margot. My older sister played Anne Frank.

My double would die young, in a motorcycle accident. I attended the memorial, held in the same auditorium where we had all performed together, on the campus of the local university. The university had its own fairly robust theater arts program, and I was thinking about it this past summer, walking through the campus near my dad’s house. The air smelled like smoke from fires to the north and south. The sitting governor had recently proposed outrageous cuts to the university—aimed, people said, at defunding climate science, but usually the arts go first. The cuts would also necessitate the closure of rural community campuses, which allowed students to pursue education while living with their families, in their villages, and offered courses in nursing, social work, construction management, snow machine repair, plant identification, traditional basket weaving, net mending, whale biology, and understanding the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.

The performance artist, when I found her again online, had become quite successful, with a solo exhibition at the Whitney, grounded in inquiry into the potential colonization of Mars, so often hopefully discussed as an option for the continuation of the species after the depletion of resources on Earth and the mining of the asteroid belt. The exhibition’s centerpiece was a durational performance, ten days long, during which the artist and two others lived and slept in the museum, in a three-foot-wide space between two panes of window-glass—a simulation of life in a closed ecological system, like a spacecraft, or a biodome on Mars. The three women had ten days’ supply of food, a treadmill and a composting toilet. They collected their urine and recycled greywater. They grew edible sprouts. They banged the dishes and danced under red light.

The artist called this “real theater.” If you live on a set, it’s not really a set. I had left theater after high school and possessed now no real theory of performance, which I would broadly define as stuff you do with your body. But I’d say that “theater” is distinguished by imagination—when acting, the actions of your body are dependent on imagined external realities. In our youth, for her performance as Anne Frank in the “secret annex,” the artist imagined life and first love in a confined space while Jews were being rounded up outside. In the “biodome,” she cooked ramen. She watered the plants. She arranged crystals on a shelf, took sponge baths, adjusted the surveillance cameras. She cleaned and swept the floors. She colored her shoes red. She had a few items she’d brought—a special copper spoon. She looked out the windows and stretched.

At the end of the ten days, the women carried out their waste. The scheduled culminating event was a panel discussion, moderated by the exhibition’s curator, and the women answered questions from the audience about collective living and isolation. But the artist’s behavior was growing increasingly erratic. She spasmed and stumbled. For a while, she quietly humped the wall, and then she was beating herself against it. There was grunting and screaming, sounds of climax and labor—all three women participants now in a violent sexual frenzy. Then they left the room.

Los Angeles

The work would be about America. We’ll move around with open eyes, open ears, and our feelings, Pina said. But the dancers were dismayed—the lack of street life, everybody trapped in cars. Two vans would pick them up at their hotel and take them to rehearsal, pick them up. But they did go bowling. They sat in at a boxing gym and a UCLA basketball practice. They went to nightclubs and drag shows. They heard a gospel choir. They watched the gray whales heading south from Alaska.

In Bausch’s Tanztheater works, the dancers will often make use of common props, break into song, and speak (in English), addressing the audience. These theatrics one might deem intended as populist, promoting legibility, but the actual effect can be unsettling. The bodies onstage are no longer attractive forms creating forms. They’re people behaving strangely.

Movies!, a woman cries. I want to go to the movies! A woman gets balloons stuffed down her shirt. A man wears a fox pelt as a loincloth and walks down a line of women in gowns. He’s combing their hair. As far as you can see, all this is mine! A man drops a candy wrapper on the stage.

It’s a common thing, how people feel invisible in cars. In high school, in Alaska, driving my dad’s Mercury, I often sang expressively and drummed the wheel. And when, home from college, I learned that Dan had slept with my best friend, I drove and parked and howled and beat the dashboard with real strength. It was what women do onscreen. It was instinctual. There, in the seat next to me, I’d taken his virginity the year before.

We did feel separate up there. America was my grandparents’ houses, commercials during Star Trek for distant Olive Gardens, New Yorker reviews of museum shows I’d never see, and the J. Crew catalog—models in lightweight coats for winter, tailored and non-technical. I, too, visited Los Angeles and sat in back while others drove and didn’t feel I knew it. Anyway, it held little glamor for me, the Hollywood stuff. I’d always accepted movies too easily as “real”—they overwhelmed me with emotion. I couldn’t critically assess the artistic decisions made, had no interest in their making.

In Wuppertal, the stage was set with a stand of seven giant redwood trunks, shipped back through the Panama Canal.

Several paper houses get knocked down and rebuilt. A woman wears, strapped to her chest, two Big Gulp-sized plastic cups. A man wears, in similar fashion, a plastic clamshell takeout container, filled with live white mice.

Light cue. The redwoods look as though they’re underwater. A fiberglass whale descends from the fly space. Hangs there like a train car.

Was it American? the Times critic asked two young German men after the show. They couldn’t decide.

At the subsequent U.S. premiere in Berkeley, some picketers outside protested the current state of funding for the arts. Will Dance for Food, one sign read. Can’t Afford to See Pina.

Cayuga Lake

We’d both moved east for college. At his school, they called him Alaska Dan. At mine, two hours north, I was largely unknown. I had, up till then, thought myself naturally outgoing, but it became apparent that had been environmental.

In college, we agreed that it was size. Any piece of art, made big enough, was cool. It was good to have a concept, but size could be a concept, or substitute for one. We loved Robert Smithson, art so big you could walk on it—a rock jetty spiraling 1,500 feet into the Great Salt Lake. Or maybe not size—scale. Size determines an object, Smithson wrote, but scale determines art. The scale of Spiral Jetty fluctuates, depending on where you are.

Dan was, anyway, a better Alaskan. Camping, for his family, meant hiking in somewhere to pitch a tent; my family drove to campsites. When my new peers asked what Alaska was like, I couldn’t say, having not yet figured out the norm to which I should compare it. Discussion of the varying hours of daylight, the duration of seasons, only got me so far. There was a Walmart. There were movie theaters. I don’t know. It’s like anywhere. “Alaska Dan,” meanwhile, was possessed of an exotic knowledge which, when I was with him, in the company of others, was—gratifyingly—shared. In a winter storm, we walked around pushing cars out of snowbanks.

I’d seen at Dia: Beacon (Dan eventually had a car) smaller Smithson works, ones you couldn’t touch. Map of Broken Glass (Atlantis)—a pile of broken glass. Leaning Mirror—actually two mirrors, back to back, angled into a pile of sand. Closed Mirror Square (Cayuga Salt Mine Project)—once, gazing into the trick of the mirror, I got too close, heard the crunch of rock salt underfoot, got warned away.

In Smithson’s formulation of “site” and “nonsite,” the site was the actual salt mine under Cayuga Lake, outside Ithaca; his Closed Mirror Square was one of several nonsites, incorporating the mined salt. The interior of the museum, he wrote, somehow mirrors the site.

Dan was a physics major turned art major. I took several art classes, but was an English major—more practical. In his studio, Dan made large paintings of Bible stories with robot figures in all the roles. Robots in Eden, robot fathers prepared to sacrifice robot sons. I was making giant urns out of corrugated cardboard I painstakingly distressed. I had nowhere to store them.

For his “mirror displacements,” Smithson positioned mirrors in the landscape. These pieces he documented, then dismantled. Mirrors in the dirt can create a tunnel of sky. Gravel heaped against a mirror creates a heap of double size. I don’t think mirrors affect scale. Most of Smithson’s work was designed to change or disappear entirely over time. (At Dia, they sweep up and maintain the edges of those piles of salt and sand.) Spiral Jetty was, for several years, submerged under the Great Salt Lake. Then it reappeared.

In high school, I had dated one of Dan’s best friends, and then I briefly dated Dan, and then he dated my best friend, and then we drove across the country. After that, I lose track. But there were times when we slept together and times when he let me stay at his apartment while he slept with someone else, times when we swam in the ocean or rode his two bikes down the concrete steps of a municipal plaza. I moved to Brooklyn. Dan moved back west.

With his wife, Nancy Holt, Smithson made a film called Swamp in 1971, shot in a swamp in New Jersey, dense with yellow reeds. Holt advances through the swamp. Smithson tells her where to go.