The Frame and the Perforations

Abstract

The Frame and the Perforations Mairead Small Staid (bio) How things seem to seem is not enough. We must somehow discover how things really seem! —Bertrand Russell Well, in the first place, what things? ________ At the Minneapolis Institute of Art, I stand before Georgia O'Keeffe's Pedernal—From the Ranch #1. "Look up pedernal," I write, imagining the unknown word an adjective, though it turns out to be a noun, a name. Pedernal Peak is the New Mexican mesa centered in the painting, brushed in the same soft blue as the sky above. O'Keeffe frames the mountain within what I realize, later, is the near-circular opening of an animal's pelvic bone, the skeletal element pressed into the foreground and Pedernal in the distance. Though I know this is what O'Keeffe is famous for—bones, and [End Page 714] flowers, and the flesh viewers imagine those bones and flowers to represent—it isn't simply bone I think of, looking too long in a quiet gallery of the MIA. The gap through which the mountain rises glows red instead of white, and I write a cave or rounded window, but it strikes me as an eye socket. The shape of it, the color: I feel I could reach out, removing half the painting like a mask. This itch swells and settles. I stand before the painting as if inside O'Keeffe's eye, her pupil. English isn't the only language in which the word for this central aperture also refers to a person; according to my dictionary, the latter definition—a student, a child—gave rise to the former due to "the miniature reflection of oneself seen by looking closely at another's eye." The eye a tiny mirror. Our gazes, catching on each other, form a funhouse hall. I imagine O'Keeffe's brushstrokes as a socket I can stand behind and find, in her painting, an attempt to render subjectivity whole, from the inside out. Everything we see is framed, if we admit the full periphery. Pedernal shows both the mountain seen and the way she sees it: through an opening, full of light. Of course, my own eyes catch on the walls—the bone, the socket—and the mountain recedes; obsessed with how things seem, I neglect the things themselves. Perhaps O'Keeffe's genius was she didn't. "It is my private mountain," the artist said of the place. "God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it." Which is a great line, any way you cut it. What have I loved as singularly, as diurnally? My obsessions are not so neat, able to be pinpointed on a map. If I write enough about time or perception or this blinkered, fragile body, will I get to have it, any of it? Will I get to keep it? [End Page 715] ________ I watch Arrival. I watch Melancholia. I watch Palm Springs and Mank and The Forty-Year-Old Version. I watch movies new and not-so-new and occasionally old, those mostly comedies: The Philadelphia Story, Bringing Up Baby, Kate Hepburn's accent rattling in my head for a few weeks. Hello, Geooorge. I haven't been to a movie theater in more than a year (the pandemic), and perhaps this explains my amateur's determination to turn my couch into an approximation of that space, simultaneously grubby and lush, seedy and sumptuous. My fingers grow buttery from microwaved popcorn and leave prints all over my wineglass. I watch regularly, searchingly, as if somewhere in this sheer accumulation of movies I might find the movies: that prickling sense of possibility rising in my chest as the houselights go down. "Not the artwork itself—even when the artwork is great," Ben Lerner writes in The Hatred of Poetry, "but the little clearing the theater makes." I make my own clearing, my own theater: I lift the dusty DVD player from under a mass of cords, balance it on a stack of books next to the television, and plug it in. The machine is so old (or I so ignorant of its workings) that when I pause Beau Travail...