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The author, Ann Rower, was the instructor for the Journal Class I took at The School of Visual Arts during my time there. She and that class greatly influenced my writing. Unfortunately, her presence on the web is negligible. I was able to unearth only two sites that featured her works (and only one actually had excerpts of her writing).

Fresh Dirt

Hannah Wilke was -- why am I using the past tense, she'll be there forever, what tense is that? -- the youngest woman in Green River Cemetery when I first went there, in both grave and body. Looking down into a frame of grass, winter yellow dead, but with life in the color, the soil looked just turned up--down? -- disturbed, or like food, like it does around earthworm holes and the freshness got to me. It was brownish wettish live red like someone had rouged the mound, newly dug and put back, plumped, like a blanket she was under. It was the also the flowers. Someone must have left them on the shoveled earth the day before, two at the most. They were still living--still dying on her and I was totally unprepared for the way she moved me. I mean I loved her but she was impossible, a narcissist 100%. At her funeral, her dealer Ronald Feldman actually made everyone laugh and feel relieved when he mentioned right up front, standing up front of the small Riverside downtown chapel, how oboxious and self involved Hannah was. When we'd bump into each other on Greene Street where we both lived, it would be an hour before I could extricate myself. Smart talk, interesting for a while but always all about Hannah. You couldn't interrupt, even to say goodbye. But there at the grave, that day, big tears popped into my eyes by surprise --is that the motion part of emotion? Was it the fresh dirt?

Hannah was how I came to find the celebrity cemetery, which is the next right after Deep Six Road, just past Pussy Pond. At the time I was staying at the intersection of Babe's Lane and Squaw Road. I knew that famous artists were buried there, Frank O'Hara, Jackson Pollock, his wife Lee Krasner, de Kooning, (oops no he's not really dead) -- his wife, Elaine's been there since `89. Hannah had a lot in common with the other women in the cemetery. She, too, was involved with a big power artist of her generation, Claes Oldenburg, only she didn't stay with him. Not that she had a choice. She supposedly adored him and happily came home one late afternoon with dinner fixins to find her key no longer worked, the locks had been changed. She learned that Oldenburg had married someone else earlier that day. For months she put her signature bubblegum vaginas on his mailbox.

They were so clean and sweet looking, even after she made them out of latex and ceramic. But all her early performance pieces consisted of her unwrapping and chewing bubblegum and shaping it into cunts and sticking them all over her body. Would that she had never changed media; maybe she wouldn't be dead now, at 52: lymphoma, something that has killed a number of other women artists who worked with stuff like latex and ceramic, with its killer dust. Eva Hesse? Maybe she chewed all that sweet Bazooka because she was so bitter: she felt that being a woman artist kept her from getting the attention she felt she deserved, even from other women artists, especially ones who used vaginal iconography like Judy Chicago, who somehow ended up being more famous. They were less confrontational, less obnoxious, less involved with presenting the personal female. But now that she's dead, Hannah's getting more attention.

But Oldenberg never even returned Hannah's calls, not even in her last months (She kept calling). She was having herself photographed, in the nude, as always, posing, as always, but this time with bandages and bloody tubes coming out of all of her, making drawings out of the hair she lost in chemo, the soiled bandages, her shunts, her holes, hundreds of slides, of her puffed up hips, her balding twat. We imagined that the next show would include these, be even more shocking than her last show which was of her mother who was dying of cancer, mugging vainly for Hannah's camera. Get more press and Hannah would be at the opening. The show was going to be called "Cured." But just after going to Texas for some new experimental therapy, she took a plunge and died fast. The show was later called "Intra Venus."

Back in Great Neck High School where we both went, her name wasn't Hannah Wilke. It was Arlene Butter. All I knew about her was that she was a cheerleader and really sexually experienced. I never thought of her as arty. She was too pretty. Other people called called Hannah a slut, not us, of course because we were artistes, so we put experience in general and sexual -- as well as chemical -- liberation high above all other traits. I know I did. But I also knew about it from having taken a "purity test" with her when we were fourteen. Of course it was clear then that it was ambiguous. You wanted to score high and low at the same time. You were asked all kinds of broken-down questions having to do with doing what with kissing telling under over inside, outside, waist, neck, clothes, lips, legs, head, tail, tongue, tasting, touching, sucking, swallowing, up, down, ending with "going all the way." All I remember was you started with a 100 and got points taken off for every yes. Then everyone had to read their scores. Hannah got the lowest, a perfect 0. I felt ashamed to have scored so high.

Of course my score would have been much better if I had counted my experience with girls but I realize now that I didn't. The wording of the questions, the pronoun placement plus my own repressions kept me from saying yes out loud and though I'd had many more and mutual and even simultaneous orgasms with Grace than I bet a lot of the girls who checked off that question, that was not what seemed meant by "going all the way." Fucked up.

More dirt. I overheard a bunch of boys, now men, I went to high school with say, drinking and laughing: "Remember when Francie (Ford) Copolla wanted to lose his virginity in the eleventh grade, and we got him drunk and got Hannah to fuck him?"

Ann Rower writes songs, theater and dance texts but mostly prose.
Her collection, If You're A Girl, was published by Native Agents (Semiotext(e)).
Her second book, is called Armed Response, (Serpent's Tail: High Risk) and is due out this fall.
She also teaches at Manhattan's School of Visual Arts.

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