The Mutual Muse: Playing Is The Thing [by Molly Peacock]

D.W. Winnicott’s marvelous book, Playing and Reality, published in the mid-20^th century,  describes the intermediate area between external and internal experience where we play. As children play, they define this arena, beginning their relationships with the world.  Play is the source of creativity, and Winnicott doesn’t mean artistic product, but instead  the creativity of everyday life, the shared playing that creates culture.

  Though the talk about play is complex, actual playing feels simple and natural, provided you weren’t a child whose capacity for play was damaged.  It is a very big job to teach someone how to play.  Or to re-teach someone.  But on all the downward slopes in my life—which I think of as many mountains, not just one mountain—I know that I felt rescued, pulled upward, through play.  It’s the basis of art for me—and perhaps for you, too, reader, if you’ve stuck with this series of five blogs.

  When the estimable photographer Claire Holt (check out her dreamy portraits of Emma Thompson, Paul Auster, Mark Norris, Suzan-Lori Parks, Quentin Tarantino and more) suggested that we just play around taking some photographs, I quickly said yes. Holt not only has the famous and the corporate as her clientele. She also does the darkly internal series, We Chase The Things We Flee, a remarkable group of photographic images with words superimposed:  young girls turning their backs and fleeing situation after situation. Girls with the courage to run.

 Really playing, after a certain age, takes courage, too.  Holt’s new project is a series of portraits of women writers.  Here’s how she describes it:

I am working on a series of portraits of women writers for an exhibition and a book. I am doing a non-traditional, more collaborative portrait process where both the photographer and subject are fully engaged in the creation of the image. The resulting portraits are as much about the play and interaction of the creative process as they are about the writers. 

 So far Holt has engaged some marvelous (and beautiful) writers in the portrait play:  Kimiko Hahn, Marie Howe, Honor Moore, Sigrid Nunez, Dawn Raffel, Victoria Redel, Roxana Robinson, Christine Schutt, Kate Walbert, Diane Williams, and more. 

  When Holt and I sat down to play in front of a splendid painting by Morton Kaish, we were inspired by Mary Delany.  Delany is the 18^th-century collage artist who pasted spectacular cut paper flowers on dramatic black backgrounds.  I wrote about her in The Paper Garden:  An Artist Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 and Delany's Damask Rose, an image from the book, courtesy of the British Museum, is at the left.

Holt brought the black velvet drop cloth;  I arranged the flowers.  Holt dropped the roses on the black background; I bent the roses into the painting. Both of us are yoga and Alexander Technique practicers, so she got me a pillow to cushion my sacrum and lift me upright while sitting for a lonnnnng time on the floor.  The end result photograph won’t look like this one with the fun red arrows pointing to all our props. This is a working photo that the superb Holt kindly prepared for this blog. The final photo will probably have no sense of this context. But product isn’t crucial here.  What’s important is Winnicottian intermediate space, the method of the creative life that leads to free exchange.

 Now in my seventh decade, what I desire most is the internal time to play. I, too, want the ground that Delany claimed when she invented a brand new art form in her eighth decade.  Thinking of her roses brings me back to the rose-colored chair at the end of the mind—the image by Kara Kosaka in the first blog of this series. Time to turn my back, then run and curl up in that chair.

P.S.

Thank you David and Stacey for indulging  the Mutual Muse!

 

 

Comments

[Jim C]

Thank you, Molly, for a wonderful blog week.

[Margo Berdeshevsky]

Thank you, Molly for this fine series and for the reminders to play. I get too damn serious about making art, even in multiplicity with the self, and too often think," The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

Sometimes I need to go back to my own earlier works and remember that I got there, yes, often, by playing. And that yes, we'll each be "Beautiful, Soon Enough."

One earlier example, a "look inside" in this book:

http://tinyurl.com/ka3sf8g

Again, many thanks for the reminders in this series you've so playfully done,

warmly,
Margo

[Molly Peacock]

I am awed to have a comment from Black Belt Sestina Maestro James Cummins! Thank you for reading these posts--you are the only man who has dared to respond to these girly collaborations. Bravo, bravo, JC....

[Rosemary Royston]

Defining "play" is so important. I was too serious as a child, and as an adult I've had to teach myself to be more playful. I thought if I couldn't do something perfectly, then I shouldn't attempt. Ha. Now I have tried my hand at making journals. I often take found art (magazine ads, poems from books that are falling apart) and combine them with my handmade journals. What I've stumbled upon is this -- that collaborating with someone else's art when creating mine is advantageous just for the process. If something lovely evolves, that's great. If not, I've still played; I've still interacted in a way that helps me see my world in a different way, and it's always worth the time and energy put in.

[Molly Peacock]

From Helen Tzagoloff,

Poet and memoirist Helen Tzagoloff emailed me with these comments, and I'm posting them for her.

"I have found class exercise collaborations, where each participant writes a sentence below the sentence of the previous poet, fun and inspiring. After obtaining a copy of the exercise and contemplating it, I have on several occasions, gone on to write a poem of my own, the subject of which would not have occurred to me without this exercise.
I have also collaborated with an artist from Brazil who had expressed a wish to illustrate some of my poems."

Tzagoloff's journey from Russia to New York City and life as an American poet is utterly fascinating--a collaboration between two selves, the girl and the woman, the Russian-born and the American bred, the sensualist and the intellectual. I hope that memoir gets published soon!

Molly Peacock (for Helen Tzagoloff)