These Women

by Ivy Pochoda

  She unrolls the sleeping bag but instead of camping in the back, she brings it out front. She finds the remote that controls the projectors for Dead Body #3 and turns them on. It takes a moment for the images to emerge. She orchestrated them to rotate out of sync with one another, creating a sense of disorder but also allowing the eye to drift from one screen to the next without feeling rushed.

  Click.

  On the left—a close-up of a bruised and battered eyebrow. The eye beneath it makeup streaked, pupils wide.

  In the middle—five women vying for space in front of a mirror, backs to the camera, dressed in thongs, in miniskirts, boy shorts, and nothing at all. Their faces defiant in the reflection, challenging themselves with their beauty, arming themselves with kohl and gloss.

  On the right—a woman eating a sandwich at a bar. Behind her the pole of a strip club. A stolen moment between times.

  Click.

  In the middle—a woman with wild yellow curls just turning away from the camera, her hair flying, a tattoo of cat claws visible on her breast, her face relaxed, neither mugging nor posing.

  On the right—three women shot from behind, walking down Western wearing micro shorts, mini shirts, breakneck heels, arms looped together like the street is their yellow brick road.

  On the left—a dressing room, makeup dumped on the floor like an explosion of Halloween candy and a woman asleep clutching a pink tube of mascara, her face serene, her lashes caked black, her lips outlined in dark pencil.

  Click.

  On the right—a shot from over the shoulder of two women sitting together peering at a cell phone while another woman is leaning toward the camera, her breasts pressed into an M, her mouth puckered into an O.

  On the left—Katherine Sims standing on a street corner, cropped puffer jacket, jeans that are more rip than jeans, head tilted up, eyes closed, steaming cup of coffee hiding half her face, a donut in the other hand, ignoring the car that’s pulled up beside her.

  In the center—a coffee table and a tray with a couple of CD cases with lines of white powder, an ashtray with lipsticked butts, a hand tapping a cigarette, a hand replacing a drink, a hand removing a paperback: Breaking Dawn.

  Click.

  In the center—Katherine Sims again at a table at a fast-food Mexican place, head thrown back, mouth open wide, a laugh like an explosion. A man behind her, staring at her like she’s candy.

  On the left—two women on a couch, half dressed or barely dressed, turned away from each other, each staring at a phone in her palm.

  On the right—Julianna reflected in the window of an upscale coffeeshop, hair big and loose, jeans tight, halter top tighter. Inside at the counter a man in a flannel shirt, sleeves rolled, handlebar mustache, porkpie hat, making coffee.

  Click.

  On the left—the woman with the tattooed claws on her breast in bed, Breaking Dawn in one hand, a cigarette in the other, an alarm clock on the nightstand: 4:34 A.M.

  In the center—the beach, a sheet spread on the sand, bodies spread on the sheet, the women from the previous pictures wearing bikinis that somehow seem innocent and modest.

  On the right—Julianna crouched down on Western, fronting, throwing up some kind of sign with her fingers, above her a banner for the Larry Sultan show at LACMA, her expression like she owns the street, the city, like she owns Larry Sultan.

  6.

  THE GALLERY IS FULL. PEOPLE CAME. THE RIGHT PEOPLE. Marella is talking to everyone at once—one conversation spilling into another as she’s pulled this way and that. There are rainy footprints on the floor, umbrellas and puddles near the door. Everyone talking about the downpour—an end-times deluge.

  There are a few gallerists from the bigger outfits, a critic from the L.A. Times, and another from one of the big online sites. There are the usual cheese platters and crudités and a table with passable wine.

  She’s dressed in black jeans, a tight black tank top, and a black kimono jacket.

  Marella listens to herself overexplain her work. Because the work can’t stand on its own—that’s the problem. It needs a voice to give it resonance. And even then it sounds flat.

  She worried that the show would be upstaged by the news. First the serial killer who’s prowling these streets. Then the action on the Brooklyn Bridge.

  Now, that’s art. Real performance art. Marella can’t deny it.

  A band of protesters led by Morgan Tillett, a Los Angeles activist with Power Through Protest, climbed one of the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge last night. Her group made camp. Unfurled banners. Staged their protest against the killing of Jermaine Holloway. Jermaine’s mother, Idira, was with them. She had a bullhorn and made a speech that was projected into the night and echoed off the bridge, down the river, over to the city. They had speakers and amps. They had strobe lights and smoke machines. They staged an entire hip-hop concert on the blustery top of the bridge, their backs to the New York skyline. They blasted the city—the world—with their songs of outrage. They took over.

  Then Idira read a letter she’d received from a woman in California who told her never to stop fighting. The group on the bridge ended their performance with a song called “Violence All Around.” As they sang, the chant went up through the city: Violence All Around. It rang down avenues. From office buildings. From people they’d planted on ferries and tour boats. On the subways. They paid pedicabs to take the chant to the streets, riding it up and down the Bowery, Central Park, Times Square.

  They arrested the city, held it captive for thirty minutes.

  Violence All Around.

  The iPhone videos went viral. The news cameras legitimized it.

  You couldn’t look away.

  It was impossible to escape. It was in you and on top of you. It was everywhere.

  The show went on with Morgan Tillett and Idira Holloway at its center—rock stars, icons. Women who will be remembered.

  Marella takes a glass of wine. This one—her second—gives her courage. Maybe the work isn’t as bad as she thinks. Maybe it’s next level, the next thing. Maybe it’s going to launch her.

  Marella’s college friends are here. Friends from the art scene. Up-and-coming artists. Established ones. A huge turnout for a small space especially considering the rain battering the windows.

  The young, celebrated muralist from Skid Row is there—the one who painted Idira Holloway being reborn from her deceased son’s head. So is an acquaintance who is doing an installation in the courtyard of MOCA downtown—a woman who has by all accounts “made it.” Marella watches her watch Dead Body #3. Her eyes are expressionless as the images of Julianna’s life reflect on the lenses of her saucer-sized glasses. The photos bounce off her like she’s a force field. She turns away, laughs at something a man with asymmetrical hair has just said.

  How can she be laughing? Marella downs her wine.

  She’s pulled aside by a writer for a feminist blog and asked a dozen questions about the female body and its objectification.

  Does her work celebrate woman-as-object?

  Does it liberate?

  Does it simply address the harsh realities?

  Is she trying to subvert conventions of beauty?

  She braces herself for the tough question—where did the photos in Dead Body #3 come from? But no one asks.

  She has another glass of wine.

  There’s another critic, one she doesn’t recognize. A short woman with choppy blond bangs and a suit like a bank manager’s. Either Marella didn’t catch where she said she was from or the woman didn’t mention it. But she has her notebook out and unlike the other people in the gallery who are glancing at the work, this woman seems really into it. She clicks her pen.

  “Can I ask you a few questions about all this?” she says with a gesture at the projectors and monitors.

  “Of course,” Marella replies.

  Click, click. Then she taps the pen on her heavy notepad.

  “I’m wondering about your materials.”

 
“It’s mostly projectors, computers, monitors. I try to use ones that are more reflective of a time period or that create a discourse between medium and message. Ones that produce a gritty, more granular quality.”

  “And what time period is that?”

  Marella does the math. “Midnineties.”

  “Why those years?”

  Marella waits for the woman to look up, then holds her stare. “They were formative for me in terms of development—my own. I came into my awareness of myself as a woman.”

  “Oh yeah.” The woman’s scribbling again. She doesn’t sound the least bit interested in Marella’s response. “So these monitors and whatever, they are the found objects.”

  “Excuse me?”

  The woman glances over toward Dead Body #3. “It says that the final piece involves found objects.”

  Here it is, the question Marella’s dreading.

  “Oh,” Marella says. “Sure. I found one of the monitors on the street.” Not exactly a full-on lie. She’d found it in a storage unit behind a friend’s studio that opened onto an alley. “I like to make use of discarded technology. I think, more than simply summoning a link to the past, it conjures the past itself.”

  The woman doesn’t write this down. But she waits, pen poised on her pad. She taps the tip once, expecting more.

  “And some of the pictures—I found them.”

  The woman purses her lips, a small gesture of agreement.

  “Or rather I sourced them from the internet.”

  “Sourced?”

  Marella looks over her shoulder. She wants this interview to end. “It’s called bricolage,” she says. “Borrowing from other sources, compiling and collecting to tell your own story.”

  Now the woman gestures at Dead Body #3. “And this is your own story?”

  “It’s everybody’s story,” Marella says. “Don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know,” the woman replies. “One more question. What’s the inspiration behind your work?”

  Marella takes a deep breath. This is what she’s prepared for. The spiel slips out. “I have always been interested in the destruction of the female body. Or perhaps in how the world is out to destroy it. It is, I’d guess, more than anything else the target of more violence, physical, psychological, emotional, let’s say, than anything else in the world.”

  The woman cocks her head to the side. “But why?”

  Marella raises her eyebrows in what she hopes is a do-I-have-to-tell-you expression. The truth is she doesn’t exactly know why and her work isn’t bringing her any closer to understanding. “Why do men and other women want to punish women?” She takes a deep breath, trying to compose a response. “Well, first of all, there is the physical power dynamic, you know—a question of size.”

  The woman stops writing, but doesn’t look up. She holds out a hand to stop Marella. “I mean why does this interest you?”

  “Oh.”

  “How did you become interested in such extreme violence?”

  Extreme violence. Marella has to stifle a smile. Because that’s what this is and it’s finally been seen. It’s not art or performance art or the re-creation of an emotion or event. It’s violence itself.

  “It’s inevitable in the world we live in, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?”

  The woman is challenging her, making her uncomfortable. She’s barely met Marella’s eye.

  “I mean, look around, the images on TV and on the news,” Marella says.

  “So you got interested in all this because of something you saw on the news.” She clicks her pen, scribbles something.

  Marella’s hand lashes out, almost pulling pen from paper. “No,” she says. This is her work, her life. She didn’t crib it from one of those sensational newsmagazines or get inspired after watching too much Law & Order SVU. Her work doesn’t derive from hearsay or secondhand information. It’s not a story she’s invented. It’s real.

  The woman looks up, startled by the force of Marella’s gesture.

  “It’s more than that,” Marella says. “It happened.”

  The woman takes a deep breath, as if at last Marella’s said something interesting. Before Marella can elaborate, and she’s not sure exactly what she would say if she did, she finds that she and the woman are standing in the center of people. Someone is clapping for silence. The woman steps back, leaving Marella to her audience.

  Marella stands in the middle of the gallery with everyone surrounding her. She takes a gulp of the drink she’s holding. They are waiting.

  She had a speech planned about the intersectionality of bodies and objects, life and decay. About the line between subject and subjugation. But the conversation with the brusque woman drove it out of her mind.

  “When I was eight years old I saw a dead woman floating in the sea behind my house outside San Salvador. She was bloated and blue. She looked like a sea creature. She’d been murdered, then tossed in the water. Whoever killed her started the job and the sea finished it. The world is out to destroy our bodies and all we have is our bodies to protect us.”

  In the crowd she tracks the woman she’d just been speaking with. She sees her near the front, still jotting in her notepad.

  “It’s hard to sleep at night when you start thinking about all the things that can happen. About how easy it is to rip your flesh open. It’s crazy that we make it through any day intact. Life is measured in millimeters. A car just missing you. And what about time and timing? What about meeting a stranger on an empty street? What if he’s distracted? Doesn’t see you or doesn’t see what he wants to see in you? What if he lets you go because he isn’t quite in the mood yet? What if he grabs the next woman who passes instead? How many encounters have you had like that? Hundreds? Thousands?”

  The guests arrayed in front of her are shifting from foot to foot. She can see them fighting the urge to look away, to check their phones, chat among themselves. She can sense their need for her to wrap it up. She’s made them uncomfortable, which is more than her art did. Because how could they look at what she created and keep eating and drinking and laughing and talking? All that tells her is that the work still isn’t strong enough. It’s not Darren Almond’s bus stop to Auschwitz or the sculpture of the manacled semi-naked family outside the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery. It’s not the pope on his knees taking it doggy style. It’s not Hitler as a schoolboy. It doesn’t shock people into silence, summon terrors that they haven’t experienced. Make them feel something that they haven’t felt.

  Marella feels the black wave coming for her. If she isn’t careful, she’s going to snap the plastic cup she’s holding and spill her drink. She winces to fight back the black. The cut on her cheek smarts. She can feel the quick throb of the bruise. It grounds her. Steady.

  “And then the women who get murdered around here. You’ve seen the news, right?”

  She waits.

  “Or do you think it has nothing to do with you? Maybe you give yourself that luxury. That must be nice. For me it’s different. First of all, this girl who used to babysit next door. And my next-door neighbor too.”

  She’s running on too long but she can’t stop herself.

  “The places that you think are familiar aren’t. Your home isn’t your home. My art isn’t art. I’m trying but I’m not getting anywhere. It’s hard to convey the violence. Because the violence is too violent. To do it right would hurt. It would hurt you. I want it to hurt you.”

  Marella staggers a little. Then she lifts her glass like she’s making a toast. And everyone around her claps tentatively.

  “Anyway—” Marella says. But she doesn’t have to say any more. The party has closed around her.

  Someone leads her to the back of the gallery and sits her down. She’s given a bottle of water, which washes away the sour taste of the wine. She props her head on her hands and stares through the door of the small office at the party. The majority of the guests are gathered around the monitors showing Julia
nna’s photos. Some have their cell phones out, taking pictures or making videos. A few are even taking notes.

  There are a few women from Jefferson Park—middle-aged, black. Community minded. They stick out. But they are the ones who give the work the right kind of look. Their gazes don’t pass over it. They drink it in as if they know.

  7.

  THERE ARE A FEW HANGERS-ON AND A FEW LATE ARRIVALS, but the gallery has mostly emptied out. Cups litter the floor, the window ledge, even near Dead Body #1. Marella can feel the hangover she’s going to have tomorrow.

  Whenever the door to the gallery opens, she looks to see if her parents decided to support her. But it’s just people leaving.

  A few stragglers stop by to say goodbye. A local woman peppers her with questions about how she became an artist and whether she could perhaps talk to the woman’s daughter who wants to get into comic book illustration but needs some guidance. Marella gives the woman her email just to be rid of her.

  Tomorrow there’s a studio visit from two potential patrons, TV writers who are getting into collecting. And that’s it. The show will stay up for a month. But Marella’s part is done.

  The door opens. It’s the small woman with the choppy bangs. Before Marella can stand up, the woman has crossed the gallery and is in the small office.

  “Was there something else you wanted to know?” Marella asks.

  The woman is holding out a card. Esmerelda Perry, LAPD Detective.

  “Detective?”

  “Mind if I sit?” Detective Perry asks, pulling out the chair opposite the desk.

  “Be my guest,” Marella says.

  Detective Perry is chewing gum as if she wants to destroy it.

  “You’re into art, Detective?”

  The detective has her pad open. She snaps her gum. “You grew up in Los Angeles.”