Lately I've been romanticizing the bohemian lifestyle. Checking out places to live in Jerome and Bisbee (bohemian centers both), daydreaming about escaping the killing routine of office life. It usually works like this - I join the bohemians, and in a year am daydreaming about working in an office where they hand you lots of money just for putting up with really inane stuff. ("It'll be ok, I'll just do my stuff on the side.")
I've been through this before. I had my first go at bohemia in the early 90s. It's a lifestyle with a ton of perks, but is really hard to maintain in an obsessively capitalist society. I lived in an old cowboy shack on a ranch, never wore uncomfortable clothes, got to live and work on the navajo reservation for a month at a time (making and selling jewelry with my navajo buds), worked my own hours, went to artist 'salons' every Friday (read, happy hour for artsy types), had a bunch of artists for friends, went to AMAZING parties, and made a meager living at "art". We basically started First Fridays, had a gallery on Art Walk, and I did everything I set out to do except, well, to keep doing it. Everything you hear about artists - that they're flaky, unreliable, and self-centered? Mostly true. It was a hard life. Especially being involved with another one.
At that time I discovered all these great women artists that somehow got left out of the art history classes I had at college. People who made me want to stick with it, maybe even become a real artist. Like Frida Kahlo.
Everyone knows Frida's story - her horrible accident, her lifetime of pain, her pain in the ass husband, Diego Rivera. But she was also a great surrealist artist and a political revolutionary. She housed Trotsky when he was being hunted by Stalin, and supposedly had an affair with him. You know how any type of rebellion now is really just eclipsed by glamour? She didn't give a rip about her unibrow or clothing style - she never caved to critical New Yorkers when she landed there. She was relentlessly, unapologetically, Frida.
Or Remedios Varo - never heard of her, right? She lived in Mexico City and Paris in the 30s and 40s - her work was completely overshadowed by male contemporaries like Andre Breton and Max Ernst. She too was an amazing surrealist painter, arguably better than any of her contemporaries, but she never became famous. She was a revolutionary as well, participating in the dada debates that informed so much of the surrealists' work at that time and later.
And Niki deSaint Phalle. She, her partner Jean Tinguely, and a group of friends built this enormous "Cyclops" sculpture in the middle of a forest outside Paris - it took 20 years to make this incredible piece of work. They never even kept track of their expenses - they just devoted 20 years to developing a sculpture.
Where are these women now? Where are revolutionary women artists? They have to be out there. Now it seems that the only 'revolutionary' women are performance artists whose shtick is a whole entertainment package, or couched in feminism, rather than in just living an authentically revolutionary life and having their art reflect it. Even in music, people who may have started out as somewhat revolutionary, like Chrissie Hynde, they cowtow to mainstream canonization like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Niki deSaint Phalle, she would spit on zis hall of fame craziness... The only woman I can think of that could rise to that level is Bjork. She is not gonna be upstaged by Matthew Barney and seems impervious to criticism. (Yet what do people focus on? Her swan dress. Sigh.)
But anyway. Are women so afraid of being labeled unfeminine, or even, unfemale, that they no longer have the capacity for free thinking? Has art become a commodity that is only valued when it is sold at Sotheby's for upwards of a million? Where are all the bohemians?
Maybe it's just too hard.
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