I used to work with Natalie years ago at a company called Agribuys in Torrance, California. We’ve stayed friends and she came to visit last fall. While we were standing in the outdoor car of the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad train in Northern New Mexico, she said the Joan Didion exhibit, (“Joan Didion, What She Means“), had finally opened at the Hammer Museum in LA. What? I completely lost track of that. And I had only two months left to see it!
Which I did finally in January with Julie (Natalie lives in the San Francisco Bay area) and we went right after my plane landed (and after a quick breakfast at the old stalwart Dinah’s). That’s how excited I was to make it the first thing in an event-packed weekend. It was raining the whole weekend, which drove people to do things they normally didn’t, like see museum exhibits and the Didion crowd was so big they had to break us up into two tours, one to start at the beginning of the exhibit and one to start and the end (our group).
After the first ten minutes of our guide drawing out visitor insights from two Anne Truitt and Martin Puryear abstracts (with questions like what does this say to you? And you? And you?) and nary a mention of Didion herself or what Hilton Als might have been thinking when adding the abstracts here, Julie and I peeled off to make our own way through the show.
And to be honest we kind of flitted through the five or six rooms because by this time we were tired and exasperated with the rain and the excitement of me being back in LA after a few Covid years. We focused mainly on the personal items and pop culture subjects, which generally happens with Julie and I are together and thinking with the same brain. I knew I’d need the book to make sense of how the original art pieces selected by Hilton Als all fit together in the Joan Didion story.
The exhibit was the brainchild of writer Hilton Als. In his essay he said he tends to like writers who are mental frontiersmen, writers who equivocate sometimes and writers who aren’t afraid to have second thoughts. Me too and I think that’s why I also like Lester Bangs (although he works in a much messier, wild west way). To see somebody change their mind is a very impressive thing.
And this wasn’t simply an exhibit of Joan Didion’s life, or her ideas or all the writings. It was an exhibit of how her experiences can intersect with the images and sculptures of other artists, artists who are thinking about the same dilemas or covering eras she had also lived in and wrote about.
Als talks about her flat tone, her family myths of self-reliance and pragmatism, the whole mythology of her ancestry of California frontiersman. She tired to “carry that on” in the vein of “seeds got carried.” But she later found those ideals were “recklessly self-inventing.” So important in my connection to Joan Didion. How our family histories try (and sometimes fail) to propel us. Als talks about her emotional detachment, her family idea that the future was a space (the West), a territory, a freedom, and yet how frontiers are susceptible, Didion came to feel, to kinds of “crackpot theories.” This is a concrete example of Manifest Destiny as a crackpot theory.
Als talks about her efforts in turning over the wounds of losing her daughter and husband prematurely, how astute she was about loss but how her attempts were ultimately failures to “understand what could not be understood.” He talks about Didion’s idea of how writers “look for stories that describe the self to the self.” But also how Didion was different in that she could find herself in other peoples’ stories, people who were very different from her. I always found this impressive, too. As humans, we don’t tend to do that.
Didion didn’t believe all the things she had written “add[ed] up” and she distrusted narrative resolutions, conclusions, wrap-ups, morals or even structural outlines.
Als talks about the great Didion gaze, her way of noticing, (I think in a very removed but emotional way), how she used her whiteness and frailness to expose lies and “the fakery involved” in not just Hollywood, an underbelly of which she was intimately familiar with, but also the great showbiz of politics, which she spent that later part of her career exploring.
Her tentative feminism: “Woman still rarely allow themselves the right to look at and talk about anything, let alone themselves…nice ladies turn away. They do no look but are looked at.” Such an awesome observation right there.
The exhibit’s commemorative book includes sections that depict each separate room of the show (in chronological eras of her life), all the gathered art pieces interspersed with brief biographies and an indicative essay from that era.
The first room was called Holy Water (covering the years of 1934-56) and it dealt mainly with the holiness of our early places, in Didon’s case the Sacramento area where she grew up.
The art pieces for this era were primarily about water, fluidity and movement. They included Wayne Thiebaud’s arial oil panting of farmlands, an Alma Ruth Lavenson photo of the northern CA landscape with a juniper, Chiura Obata’s woodblock print of a river mountain landscape and a Marven Hassinger sculpture which was basically a long chain and rope meant to symbolize a river. There was a video excerpt from John Wayne scene in Stagecoach (because Didion loved John Wayne), family memorabilia, handmade maps of Sacramento, embroidery art and quotations about female creativity.
The next room, Goodbye To All That (1956-1963), depicted Didion’s time after leaving Sacramento for an opportunity to write fashion copy for Vogue Magazine in New York City, winning the same Prix de Paris award Sylvia Plath did years earlier (as fictionalized in The Bell Jar). Didion always claimed her writing style was “fashioned” here writing copy for Vogue and the occasional movie reviews, personal essays. It was during this time she met and married writer John Dunne (1964).
This room showed the upper-middle-class and society paintings of John Koch (depicting her own upbringing), Edward Hoppers’ “Office in a Small City,” the Todd Webb photo of Georgia O’Keeffe standing in her garage in front of her “Above the Clouds” painting, some Diane Arbus movie-themed photographs, the Vogue covers which had Didion pieces in them and her Prix de Paris Vogue announcement itself. One of the best juxtapositions was a Diane Arbus photograph of black transvestites next to a Richard Avedon photo of the Daughters of the Revolution. Both subjects had deadpan stares for the camera.
This section in the book ends with a good Didion essay from 1969 from Life Magazine, “In Praise of Unhung Wreaths.”
The next room, The White Album (1964-1988), covers probably her peak period, when she wrote her most memorable and groundbreaking essay collections, novels and essays, and when she also started writing screenplays with John Dunne (A Panic in Needle Park, A Star is Born) because she said she didn’t want to teach. She also became a parent in this decade. She famously said during this time,
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live…We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
Didion was starting to think about how writer’s think.
The art pieces include a sketch of Didion by Don Bachardy, a video clip playing from the movie of her book, Play it As It Lays showing Tuesday Weld driving around LA freeways. There are documentary photos of the unrest at the time, personal photos with Sharon Tate by Jay Sebring, the abstract Anne Truitt acrylic and, Martin Puryear etching and charcoal that sent us running from the tour, Noah Purifoy’s sculpture about the Watts Riots, Ed Ruscha’s photos of Santa Monica Boulevard and his fold-out lithograph of every building on the Sunset Strip, Jack Pierson’s set up of a record player on a table, Didion and Dunne’s screenplay movie posters, Los Angeles neighborhood photos by Henry Wessel, Garry Winogrand and William Eggleston, Robert Bechtle’s reproduction painting of a yellow Pinto in a driveway and photos of the Blank Panthers and Hells Angels which Didion wrote about. There are also Vogue photos of the interior of Didion’s Malibu house.
Her 1975 essay “Planting a Tree is Not a Way of Life” ends the section and is an almost perfect essay on the self-deception of the writer. It was a commencement speech delivered for the University of California-Riverside. “We all struggle to see what’s going on…that’s the human condition.”
The final room was called Sentimental Journeys (1988-2021) and it included later-day Juergen Teller photos of Didion, Doninique Nabakov’s areal photo entitled “Jogger in the Park,“ Cuban artists Ana Mendieta’s areal photographs of blood in the surf, works of other Cuban artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Salvadorian artists Ronald Moran and Walterio Iraheta (interesting photographs of worn Salvadorian shoes).
The last essay was “The Year of Hoping for Stage Magic” about the creation of the Broadway stage production of The Year of Magical Thinking.
I actually get a lot out of these artist mash-up exhibits, making connections between different types of artists and thinkers, looking for conversations in art pieces. It reminds me of one of my favorite books produced for an exhibit at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. It was called Shared Intelligence, American Painting and the Photograph and it showed how the early modernist photographers and painters were conversing with each other through their work.
It looks like the next stop in my Joan Didion obsession is going to be the New York Public Library once they finally acquire and process all of Didion and Dunne’s personal papers. Can’t wait.
