Rooms of One’s Own
Marjorie Schlossman’s Fargo Chaplets
with personal history and annotations
by Collier White
1985, outside Palo Alto, California: I am eight years old. Outside my bedroom door, in the brightly lit hallway visible from my bed, is one of Marjorie Schlossman’s large, abstract expressionist paintings. Partially obscured by the doorframe, the cool blue background and the green and red splashes, blobs and swirls are – to my childish imagination – sometimes a mournful and supplicant geisha, sometimes a flop-eared hound. Both face away from me, toward the living room. They coalesce and retreat as childhood dramas run by my darkened door.
These dramas run from the mundane to the bizarre. More than once, my sister’s rat escapes, and in a house patrolled by cats, transforms from beloved pet into a monster, part vermin and part terrified prey. I watch from bed with safe ankles as the family criss-crosses, stooped and grasping, in front of the canvas. Full of dread from an overheard marital argument, I stare into the mysterious and colorful shapes of Schlossman’s canvas. For years, my older sister has vivid nightmares. She wakes screaming about a man standing at the foot of her bed. My parents murmur by; dad says the visitor is a friendly ghost; and the painting persists, gesturing toward the horrors and comforts of the supernatural.
At the edge of my adolescence, we moved from that northern California rambler. Skyrocketing proProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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rty values assured its demolition, and Schlossman lost her proximity in my mother’s life, as by coincidence her painting lost its prominent placement in our home.
More than twenty years later, my mother asks if I remember her friend Marjorie. It seems that my first abstract expressionist has mounted a rather ambitious project. And as we discuss patronage, placement and the somewhat arbitrary paths that visual art may take on its way to our eyes, it occurs to me that Schlossman’s work has taken two unauthorized paths to my attention. First: by the matriarchal alliance of two Northern California doctor’s wives, her painting hung before my young eyes. And now, Schlossman has found the means to present her work without patronage, in settings both permanent and temporary, in her chosen home of Fargo, with the contradictory ambition of exporting the experience of site-specific installations.
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At the end of the aughts, and at a cost in the low six figures, Schlossman commissioned the design and build of six mobile “chaplets” in which she painted site-specific works. The work was conceived, pitched and completed with Schlossman’s own money, unfettered by the grant proposals and foundations that usually guide artist statements. In its scope, the project seems designed to place Schlossman on the map, even while skipping over the search for public or private patronage that governs most artists.
Thus, Schlossman’s work elides fashionable political or aesthetic justification. Her references to art as “pure emotion” and her commitment to the unconscious are anachronistic throwbacks to the surrealist movement, almost quaint at first glance. And yet her commitment to her own muse, to an out-of-style mode has already spanned more than three decades. There is, without a doubt, a timelessness to her work, that transcendent quality toward which fine art was once rumored to aspire.
Curious about the mother of such a prodigious project – also the mother of seven children, and the friend of my mother – I arranged to meet Schlossman in Fargo. It’s just over 200 miles from my door to hers, but as if to confirm the remoteness of her chosen city – frequently the butt of jokes – I am delayed for three consecutive weekends by winter storms. In such weather, the schools in Fargo frequently close, as do the highways leading to the city.
When I finally arrive, there is a distinct air of scotomization in the way Schlossman presents her ancestral city without visiting the dismantled parts of her most ambitious installation, a project that until recently must have dominated her day-to-day life. We instead visit the Roberts Street Chapel, an old restaurant space in downtown Fargo that Schlossman has transformed into a public space for showing her work. It’s not a typical gallery, as the work is site-specific and not for sale. The blood red canvases of the chapel’s online iteration have been replaced with a new series. The dominant hue is yellow, and with light streaking in from all four directions, the viewer feels suspended in a womb of color and light. In a corner, a single red velvet upholstered chair sits in front of a music stand that holds the handwritten sheet music of her uncle, composer Gunther Schuller. It looks as though the violinist has just stepped out for a minute.
“We debuted his Piano Trio No. 2 here in November. Can you imagine? Probably the most important piece of music being debuted that day, and we were doing it here in Fargo, in this little room.” Marjorie played the violin. Her manner drips with pride and resentment, tempered with world-weary self-deprecation. She adds, lovingly, “Uncle Gunther called me a ‘high-end dilettante’.”
He was referring to her performance of his composition, but it’s the kind of complement that Schlossman has had to brush aside from all sides. It lurks around the edges of the canvases of an artist who has never submitted herself to the testing of the art world’s meritocracies.
I see the monsters on the canvases, and though Schlossman insists that they are the residue of past relationships, I see real and imagined critics, the paranoia and self-recriminations of a lonely career. She has subdued them. Increasingly, Schlossman’s work, despite its abstraction, approaches this autobiographical metatextuality. The eyes and teeth roam along the ground, below counter-height. Above is a kind of psychic medicine cabinet, the organized imaginative toolbox of a well practiced parent. I am aware of Schlossman’s art as the work of a mother, and for once this is no liability but a strength. I reel at my own essentialism. What is this feminine voice of which I speak? Spectral professors mark up my margins with red pens. But I hear the echoes in the voice. It is the voice of a doctor’s wife. My own mother, for a time, and Marjorie who has seven children of her own. Does that authorize or discredit her painting, and should it have any bearing at all? The expectation that feminine work – as manifest here in the artifacts of motherhood – would be a liability for the work stuns me a little bit. How is it possible that the horrors of child rearing are not appropriate domain for a painter’s abstracted angst.
In Schlossman’s defiant approach to self-patronage and in the latent second-wave feminism that embodies that defiance and animates the curves of her paintings, I recall Virginia Woolf. Her book, A Room of One’s Own, transcribed from two college lectures, was unwelcome to the literary scene of 1929. The suffragettes had achieved western feminism’s first goal. Importantly, Woolf’s room was paid for on fixed income that came from the colonies. That is, the oppression of the developing world underpins the creation of one of second wave feminism’s most beloved texts. And so, as Woolf so carefully maps out in her text, the cultivation of a female voice in a male-dominated society may yet require independence from its structural forces. It is possible that the art world is still male-dominated, that it requires women to perform in men’s clothing, that it is still tied up with men’s concerns and only allows those feminine utterances to which it is already accustomed. Thus, Schlossman’s independence may still qualify as radical.
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A documentary featurette, Plain Art, traces the development of Schlossman’s project, from conception to birth, and the gaffes along the way. The chaplets came in late, overbudget, and required more labor than intended for mobility and assembly. After three exhibitions – at her son’s farm, on the grounds of the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, and on the campus of her family’s shopping mall – the tiny buildings were dismantled and stored along with their respective paintings in the darkness of a warehouse, where they wait.
On our tour of Fargo, Schlossman never shows me the disassembled works or the building in which they are stored. Instead, she points out the geography of her own family’s history in Fargo: the warehouse building where her grandfather, a capitalist and philanthropist, housed his business. Nearby is the shopping mall where her father made his own fortune. In the sheltered spaces of this city, Schlossman has dedicated her effort and her privilege to pursuing the abstraction of her emotional and psychological truths. She makes no attempt to conceal the privilege that has helped her create these spaces, but she may wish we wouldn’t go on and on about it.
OK, Margie, I’ll stop.
Thank you for pursuing such uncommon investigations. The work is lovely.
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