Normally, I try to focus this column on "current" art events and exhibitions—I use the scare-quotes here because the long lead time required in publishing a monthly magazine demands that, most of the time, I have to project a bit into the future, to exhibitions that haven't opened yet when I'm writing the column. I am going to break with this informal rule, however, to report this month on a recent (but finished) event that deserves much wider attention than it received at the time.
 Views of Eeo Stubblefield's Who Cares?, performed in Ellenville on August 20. Photos by Michael Montella. |
As part of this effort, Eeo Stubblefield designed an amazing, deeply poignant, and truly beautiful performance piece, titled Who Cares?, a work that deserves much broader (and deeper) consideration than it received during the "10x10x10" show's run.
As an artist, Stubblefield is truly a natural. She meets the world with an open, attentive receptiveness to beauty, and a quick, native intelligence that enables her to envision works that are not only visually striking, but that also sound out a uniquely honest, emotional resonance.
Her mentor was the modern dance legend Anna Halperin; unsurprisingly, Stubblefield's works revolve around thoughtful (or should I say "mindful"), almost ritualistic repetitive movements. I first encountered this work when Stubblefield was preparing a major piece (and one of her first really public manifestations) six years ago, her Women Walking with Chairs in Phoenicia. Groups of mysteriously shrouded women (in either all black or all red) wandered into the town, each carrying a chair of her own selection—everything from rocking chairs to folding lawn chairs to an inflatable plastic one—periodically stopping to sit and rest, or to perform one of several other simple acts as outlined in Stubblefield's "score" for the piece.
The result was visually exquisite, and a bit surrealist in its sheer surprise. It's not every sunny August day that such a silent, focused group of women descends upon the town.
Much has happened in the intervening years. First 9/11, and then, in 2003, our invasion of Iraq. Stubblefield, who up to that point had been making achingly beautiful but nonpolitical work, found herself drawn in the months after the invasion to photographs made available on the Internet, images that never made the American newspapers or television, images of killed or injured Iraqi civilians, many of them children.
These pictures ate away at her until finally she had to do something—which meant using the powerful emotional language she'd been using in her performance work to help make these awful images speak.
She began writing scores for street performances, in and around Woodstock, in which she began to appear wearing a full black burka, as a figure of mourning. To her surprise, the reaction on the street in the supposedly liberal hub of the hippie revolution was often far from welcoming. "After the first time I went out in the burka," she told me, "the reaction was so bad it made me want to stay in it for a month."
For the Ellenville show, she developed a score to take advantage of the vacant storefront space offered her, playing on some of the themes that she had been using in the Woodstock area street performances. Organizing the space behind the large shop windows as a sort of glass-walled stage, she filled the space with sand to recall the arid deserts of Iraq, littering the ground with a few desiccated bones for good measure. Ever since 2003, she's been collecting disturbingly graphic images (mostly from the Internet) of Iraqi civilian casualties, which she has had printed in color on squares of white fabric. A corner space by the wide entry door was reserved as the "laundry room," where dirtied examples of these images could be ritualistically washed in a five-gallon plastic bucket (just like the ones used to fetch water over there, now that the infrastructure's been destroyed), and hung to dry on folding laundry racks, or clothespinned to hanging lines.