Domus, in collaboration with H.C., 2003

Notes on H.C. — May 2010

How to describe the influence of Hélène Cixous?  On so many artists: Roni Horn, Simon Hantaï, Nancy Spero, Pierre Alechinsky.  The impact on this artist is enormous.  Cixous’ essay “The Last Painting or the Portrait of God” was a call to work along the seam of image/text.  Cixous wrote: “I would like to write like a painter. I would like to write like painting.” What does it look like to be a writer with a brush laden with words?

When I first met Michael Joyce in person, he said, “You are a Cixousian.”  It was Cixous’ words that challenged me to paint.  Reading as a source material for painting.  Cixous wrote the afterward to Joyce’s “Moral Tales and Meditations.”  Joyce too is a Cixousian, I recognized this is the first text of his I ever encountered, “Reach.”

Meeting H.C. for the first time in December, 2003 or 2004?  I had invited Dan Rothenberg to join me — he knew of her because of her work through the Le Théâtre du Soleil, as a dramaturg.  Unfortunately, Rothenberg was also allergic to cats, and H.C.’s world is one inhabited by feline companions.  Our first meeting we sketched out”Domus” — you can see H.C.’s handwriting, forwards, and mine, backwards, trying to parse and visualize the Latin root.

And so the Ladder Quartet became a look at the image of the ladder in texts as diverse as the Bible, James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” and Cixous’ “Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing.”  Michael Joyce wrote “conspire” as an homage to H.C.:

Conspire (for HC)

How curious that the less appealing word opens before the more congenial one, Hélène, (a true subjunctive, the last I believe, K. the visitor said). Memo to the big man: we breathe together and the sky clears after the rain and out at sea none of your Gloucestermen but war canoes or ocean kayaks (where did she go? the goddess more or less, no longer carved on their prows) the blue! let’s breathe together where the sky is soldered along the seam of the horizon, sans compare we are where we are these tales take on the rhythm of a jump rope rhyme at twilight, a child again, a whimpering as I think the paper breathes and the space itself conspires to corner us, let’s take a deep breath and see what is left of us after the last gasp and the sheets entwine us like grave cloths or the complicity of lovers rolling off each other breathing the damp sea mist, your face H. launched this, the gift without return–write or milk– another panel just en face, just around the corner just the two of us a certain poetic justice

(N. Spring Street, Los Angeles, October 2004)

And I translated it into Spanish (my mother tongue) and painted conspirar:

I have painted into a painting, and I have painted a conversation with H.C. which has become real.

I visit Cixous every year in Paris.  Last year (2009), she gave me the then-unprinted text of Philippines : prédelles.  I am reading and rereading it.  I am envisioning it and mistranslating it.  It will become the starting text for my next body of work.