Provincetown Report
by Eileen Myles
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It's been a lousy summer. I hear that not since 1868 has there been such a
wet season on Cape Cod, and the other news is that it's raining money here in Provincetown
on the tip of the Cape. Gay money. I just read in the "New York Times"
how much our new neighbors paid for their house. They paid a lot and called the
price "reasonable." Apparently 60% of the houses in this town are now owned
by "non-traditional families," read: gay us. Housing prices have doubled
here over the past five years. So everyone feels great, looks good, it's
really too bad the weather stinks.
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People, gay people in particular, have swarmed to Provincetown since the
beginning of the twentieth century when it was first established as an arts
colony. I asked my neighbor, Jay Critchley, a "local" artist, performer and
activist for his perspective on "the pec parade"--those muscled beauties,
mostly male, who stream down Commercial Street, P-town's main drag, all
summer. "Gay people come here because it's safe. You can walk down the
street holding hands, you can dance, you can show your chest, women
especially like the fact they won't get bashed for displaying affection."
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And because of this sense of tradition, Critchley explained, this feeling
of small-town public safety, "many gay people think of Provincetown as
their spiritual home." Cleve Jones, founder of the NAMES Project Quilt
came here in June stumping for his new book, "Stitching A Revolution," and
remarked that the idea for the Quilt originated in memory of Marvin
Feldman, Jones's best friend who'd first brought him to Provincetown.
P-town was a natural haven for PWAs in the eighties and lots of them simply
came here to die. Lots of kids who'd been thrown out by their families came
here, too. And they did die, but with the advent of protease inhibitors,
others not only survived but regained their lives. Oddly that history is
visually eradicated by the radiantly healthy look on the street and on the
beaches.
"We're in the eye of the storm," says Bill Furman, a handsome dark haired
man who for ten years has been a caseworker at PASG (Provincetown AIDS
Support Group) the hub of Provincetown's superb AIDS services organization.
"It looks really good now," he says. "And that's the problem." Mark Baker, a
health advocate who has been living with HIV for 15 years echoes Furman's
belief. "The infection rate is up, STDs are up, all the conditions are in
place that preceded the original AIDS crisis. People don't look sick, but
they're getting heart attacks, they're getting diabetes, they wear Depends,
they have diahrrea constantly. Yet young people in their teens or twenties
will risk unsafe sex because they see ads in magazines that show men
climbing mountains, triumphing over the disease. I take 39 pills a day,"
says Baker. "And that doesn't show. We have to make it new, find a fresh way
to make it understandable that the crisis is not over--taking chemo in pill
form is not an easy life. I go to bed at 8 o'clock. You see me on the
street and you wouldn't know. It's very hard for this information to
persist in the face of the exuberance of youth."
"There's something I think of as 'a haunting edge' this summer," says Irene
Rabinowitz, a long time AIDS worker, who now heads H.O.W. (Helping Our
Women) a support group for a variety of women's health issues including
AIDS. "Maybe it's the sheer numbers of tourists who come here, but we're
all seeing ghosts, people who have died you spot someone walking down the
beach." "A younger version," I add. "Yes," she says. "Not how they would
look now."
There are not many women in Provincetown living with HIV, Rabinowitz
tells me, but we both agree that we're seeing the same kind of memorials and
community outpourings that accompanied early AIDS awareness in the women's
community. Now the focus of concern is cancer and hepatitis C.
The night I arrived in Provincetown in June I attended a service on the
beach for Kristyna Morton-Meraz, a 28 year-old writer who died of
leukemia. The wind blew our voices away as we read reminiscences and poems,
kneeling around a fire. Later we gathered upstairs at the The Vixen, a
lesbian night spot, to pore over dirty and funny photographs of Kristyna, a
punky and charismatic girl standing in her kitchen, goofing on the couch
with her friends. Or Kristyna wearing a tight and magnificent boustier as
she lounged with her lover Lisa Bonenfant maybe a year ago in an erotic
photo spread. Their half-posed, half-sincere S/M exudes a timeless and
pleasurable glow. Seeing the pictures was wrenching; it was exactly the
display we all needed to allow our tears to flow.
There's a women's health crisis "scene" happening, and I mention it here
both because I must and because it sheds light on the turbulent history of
cultural representations of AIDS. In the art-culture of women's health
issues, excess reigns, just as it did in the first decade of AIDS art. The
Tristan Gallery has mounted several shows on the unambiguous theme of
"survival" and is now exhibiting a group of oil paintings by Dianna
Mattingly. Mattingly's kind of a brut Frank Moore. Her paintings
mythologize the recent losses of friends to cancer and AIDS as well as
depicting her own sometimes surreal experience of living with illness. In
"Oh My the Walls Are Spinning," the room depicted in her painting is
upended, the darkness looms while the painter and her dog are safely on the
rotating bed, which marks her survival.
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"Leaves"
by Eric Rhein
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Schoolhouse Art Center is the preeminent exhibition space in town. I talk
to Schoolhouse's director, Michael Carroll, a painter himself and a man who
spent much of the last ten years of his life living with a partner who had
AIDS. Carroll shows me a glass case full of elegant metal renderings of
leaves by Eric Rhein, a young, New York artist living with HIV. Two years
earlier he believed he was at the end of his life, began "the cocktail" and
headed for a stay at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire where he
interpreted an abrupt physical turnaround as a spiritual experience:
"Enveloped in autumn, I sensed the presence of those I loved who had died
of complications from AIDS; it was if their spirits were supporting me
while I learned to walk again. I began picking up fallen leaves that
recalled unique qualities of those who had left their physical forms."
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Rhein's frankness about the spiritual underpinnings of his work is rare
among men in his art culture, almost "lesbian" in its unabashed
emotionality. On the other hand, ten years ago this spin on "Leaves" would
have been embodied on the artwork on the wall, rather than in an artist's
statement available at the front desk. There are also several pieces on view
here that were more HIV-specific: Small clusters with jewels that represent
Rhein's blood count and belong to a larger body of work, which
logs--daily--his own survival. That work plays a smaller part in this show.
Carroll told me that for himself, having lived with HIV (through a partner)
he felt the immediate story of AIDS and dying was "literally exhausted." I
was a little shocked by his words, but I also preferred the more abstract
approaches to the experience of AIDS--art that engages the "pattern of
mourning rather than the thread," as Carroll put it. Eric Rhein's leaves
are truly alive.
Also at Schoolhouse, Morgan Norwood, a female sculptor, is showing laminated
photos of her favorite gym bunnies, female and male, embedded into pieces of
found stone: old black and white tile, gravestones, asphalt. Norwood's
intention is to have these pieces of stone installed in various casual
public settings, the sidewalk etc. It's a nose wrinkle at the town's rabid
development. But more likely her pieces will wind up in private gardens and
walkways, being quickly sold out of the gallery as I write. I didn't ask her
if she identified this work with AIDS. She told she admired these men's
bodies and thought that they shared much with her own ambitions
and her sculptor's love of consciously chiseled beauty.
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by David Carrino
Critcheley and the Swim for Life
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Around the corner in the same gallery, David Carrino's 15 paintings mime
marble. Carrino is a photographer who has a huge collection of anonymous
photos that he manipulates in his work. His move away from his usual
practice of tinting, cutting and arranging photos of other people's
existences into the free fall of these stunning baroque abstractions
probably has some emotional component, I reasoned. I thought of Michael
Carroll mentioning that a lot of the work he was attracted to now was in
some way about "recovering from grief." I liked thinking about that while
gazing at the giddy miracle of Carrino's work. A very clinical series of
pictures of marble variations from a stone mason's catalogue are
transformed into a hallucinogenic surge of stains and angelic gestures
pushing beyond the frame into a rollicking permanence. In my slightly
hippie way, I pressed for significance. AIDS, "That's a stretch, though
they're definitely elegaic," he muses.
Jay Critchley bought the house we're sitting in years before the boom and he
is comfortable in this town because he's watched it ravel and unravel for
more than 25 years. He's ridden the crest of the town's politics, creating a
flood of small and grandly impertinent objects: the Old Glory condoms;
educational displays touting the features of his invention,
P-Town, Inc.,
which is a theme park devised out of his increasingly unnatural
natural surroundings. Critchley is that utopian thing, an authentically
civic artist. He's converted his own abandoned septic tank into a
performance space and he's the founder and organizer of Provincetown's
preeminent AIDS fundraising event, the annual Swim for Life, now in its
fourteenth incarnation. When I asked him about the annual post-Labor Day
swim from Long Point to the town beach at the Boat Slip he answers
modestly, "we've levelled out. We raised
$75,000 last year." His eyes widen. "What I really want to create here is
an AIDS memorial. Not like the Vietnam memorial in town, which is a big
block of granite with everyone's names on it, and it just sits there." "It
stops things," I say. "No, I want to create a living space. To plant about
30 trees somewhere in town, to create a meditative space. Something quiet
and open. That would be my kind of AIDS memorial." Critchely smiles and
makes this nice idea feel conspiratorial.
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I walk home, even beginning to step away from my little town as the summer
that never was, begins to end. It occurs to me that the place itself, this
town with its beautiful men, its forthright women, its mind boggling gay
gentrification program is an AIDS memorial in toto. Pat Hearn, the New York
gallerist and one of the most original enthusiasts and taste-makers of her
generation, came here this summer to end her struggle with cancer [ed. note:
Hearn died on August 18]. Her friends surround her--people from the same New York, Boston, and
Provincetown arts community who survived the most devastating moments of the
AIDS crisis. Perhaps it prepared them to watch another friend die. I kept
hearing reports of Pat's occasional movements under the sheets of her bed,
that the smooth and erratic texture of her movement seemed like language.
Language is like blindness, a loss of visuality, an act of replacement that
occurs before we can see. The increasingly prettified village perched on the
site of so much brine and loss is a sometimes silent, but nonetheless
vibrant human utterance.
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