Page 30 - the NOISE June 2014

BeAdIng TIMe In sMAll ToWn ARIZonA
an east village starlet sparkles anew
sToRy by saRah GiaNelli
It’s standard procedure to prepare for an interview, but nev- my elimination of potential chemical triggers. textile buildings ... everything was turned into art; and soon
er had it entailed rinsing my clothes (and hair) in vinegar and water; and refraining from the use of any fragranced products (even of the natural variety), or cosmetics. Dutifully I did so — this was an artist of international repute with a big, brassy personality, and an obscure, isolating illness that had already caused the interview to be cancelled twice, the last time seemingly definitively, until I received a call that the art- ist was feeling up for a visitor.
Rhonda Zwillinger suffers from Multiple Chemical Sen- sitivity (MCs), which is why I was heading to Paulden, Ari- zona on a diminishingly populated stretch of highway rather than into the buzzing hive of her native new York. MCs is a chronic condition yet to garner full credibility from the medi- cal establishment (beyond psychosomatic diagnoses) that the afflicted attribute to exposure to chemical substances in the environment. Common culprits are scented prod- ucts, pesticides, plastics, synthetic fabrics, smoke, petroleum products, paint fumes and, for electromagnetically sensitive Ms. Zwillinger, computers.
Contact can lead to a dizzying set of symptoms including headaches, blurred vision, nausea, fatigue, depression, food allergies, inflammation — and in Ms. Zwillinger’s case, sei- zures, black outs, burning skin and lymph nodes, and vocab- ulary loss. For an artistically rendered portrait of the illness, see Todd Haynes’ relatively unknown 1995 film Safe, starring a MCs (and anxiety) riddled Julianne Moore, for which Ms. Zwillinger was a primary consultant.
In 1991, shortly after the conclusion of a two-year interna- tionally touring retrospective catapulting Ms. Zwillinger into the next stratosphere of her career, the artist experienced the first signs of MCs. she correlates the onset of her symptoms with the installation of a toxic carpet in her Brooklyn co-op.
within three years she would abandon her home, Manhat- tan studio and only son, and cast herself into a life unrecog- nizable to the one she had lived prior — with the exception of art-making, although her work would change dramatically as a result of her illness and radically different surroundings.
Ms. Zwillinger appears anything but sickly when she emerges from her studio, one of two small custom-built alu- minum structures on a scrubby lot. she greets me in a thick oy vey accent buoyed on a witty, irreverent sense of humor. she wears her frizzy gray hair under a colorful rakish hat and is ornamented with chunky pieces of ancient, exotic jewelry, a spike nose ring and hip, tinted glasses. But once inside, she keeps a wary distance in case I wasn’t thorough enough in
On the wall hangs Digging Deep, a series of rusty shovels that act as figurative armatures for densely crocheted py- thons of glass beads amplified with a ruffly finish. It takes her four days to make one ball of “yarn,” individually stringing the impossibly tiny seed beads and larger glass baubles before they are woven or crocheted into three-dimensional forms or two-dimensional tapestries. On the floor are a few of her Dada Toys, antlers and bone affixed to wheeled rusty steel upon which more beaded sculpture will drape. Hanging like clothes on a rack are Works on Paper, abstract watercolors framed in steel and chain, stamped with personal haikus into a grid, and strung with beads that, left loose, sag into an im- pression of bellies or breasts.
“The work is incredibly arduous and time consuming,” she says, “but the way they’re being hung, they look f*cking smashing. They have that feeling that I’ve always been able to attain — that feeling of being ritualistic and alive and something ... other. To me, they’re not decorative objects. They’re imbued with some kind of spirit. Like something you would find in a museum of natural history.”
Ms. Zwillinger comes from a long line of women artists — her grandmother was a master seamstress by the age of 13, talented enough to get herself and two sisters out of Russia before wwI, and her aunt, a portrait painter. Following suit, Ms. Zwillinger studied at Brooklyn College under modern realist figure painter Philip Pearlstein, and Jimmy ernst, son of surrealist Max ernst. On the weekends she studied color at The Art students League of new York under the tutelage of wPA artist Isaac soyer.
In the 70s, a self-proclaimed “feminist when it was still an “F” word,” Ms. Zwillinger was busting through glass ceilings with larger than life paintings of women breast-feeding and
giving birth, but she was beginning to feel confined by paint- ing and began experimenting with mixed media.
By the 1980s, Ms. Zwillinger was a forerunner of the East Village Art Movement, when she and a group of artists, fed up with the exclusive soho art scene, took up residence in the gritty, industrial and more affordable neighborhood on the other side of town.
“There was this whole big explosion of art activity in the east Village,” remembers Ms. Zwillinger. “And I was vibrating with the creative pulse at the time. There was a coming to- gether of artists and writers and performers. everyone was visiting each other’s studios, and the streets became studios too — graffiti artists, gorilla art shows in the windows of old
people were coming from all over the world to see what was happening.”
Ms. Zwillinger’s pivotal work was a series of Xeroxed imag- es of celebrities framed in sequins, cat’s eye marbles and men- acing shards of mirrors scavenged from dumpsters. Objects of Desire was only the beginning of increasingly elaborate ob- jects that evolved from small pieces of furniture to high heels and purses to entire room installations (one with a bedecked grand piano, and a bedroom scene that found a permanent home in the Groninger Museum in the netherlands.) Trying to scintillate as many senses as possible, she would hide mu- sic boxes in the furniture and transform every square inch in her signature crystal, pearl and glass-encrusted aesthetic, and dusky pink and purple color scheme that led critics to adhere words like “kitsch” and “camp” to her early work.
“The whole conversation about the work being pop or kitsch used to drive me crazy,” she says. “It undermined the seriousness of it. I like to challenge people to look at objects and not necessarily be able to identify them by something identifiable in their world. For their imagination, their sens- es, to be stimulated by the pure, tactile nature of the object itself. I’m always challenging people with my work to ask questions; I don’t think life is about answers. For me the func- tion of art is questioning authority, and keeping that muscle strong is how we empower each other and engender change.”
Ms. Zwillinger’s curriculum vitae is too extensive to dent within these paragraphs, so suffice it to say that Madonna bought quite a few of her pieces (whether they survived the fire that shortly thereafter consumed the Malibu home she shared with sean Penn is anybody’s guess); she created a series of intricately beaded “not collars” for a Chanel Fashion Meets Art exhibition; and was showcased in other haute cou- ture exhibitions for Cartier and nina Ricci. she has shown her work in The whitney Museum of American Art in new York, The smithsonian in washington, and her work has visited or taken up residence in countless galleries, museums, corpora- tions and private homes the world over.
A not-to-miss selection of Ms. Zwillinger’s work will be fea- tured this month at 527 Gallery, 527 Main street in Jerome, with an opening reception from 6PM-8PM saturday, June 6. 928/647-2277 RhondaZwillinger.com.
| sarah Gianelli is not disturbed by the open road.
sarahgianelli@thenoise.us
30 • JUNE 2015 • the NOISE arts & news • thenoise.us