Did you ever misunderstand an assignment in school and go to class with the wrong project? Susan Webster and I had that dream-like experience back in 2003 when Bruce Brown, then curator at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, invited us to be in an exhibition of couples who were artists. Since I didn’t make visual work, we assumed that the focus was on couples collaborating. As it turned out, everyone else in the show had their individual work exhibited side by side, and we were the only ones who made work together. It was a happy accident. We may have never begun making work if not for misunderstanding our assignment. That’s the beauty of mistakes.
The art we made surprised us both. We had been a couple for many years, shared our poetry and art with each other, raised children, played music, renovated a house, shared chores, and drawn exquisite corpses, but we had never tried to combine text and image. Our process was straightforward. The pieces we made for that exhibit were all 15–by–15-inch gelatin plate monotypes. Susan made the images, and I wrote the words. We had some ground rules. Susan printed the image first, creating some grayscale spaces where text might go. Following that, I rubber stamped words using two different fonts. We worked alone and didn’t talk to each other about the art while we were making it.
We didn’t want the words to describe the images or the images to illustrate the words. We didn’t talk about the scope or emotion of the work, but realized, as the pieces emerged, that we were working from a similar impulse. My brother Howard had been killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center a few years earlier, and that grief was still raw and close to us. I don’t think we could have named it at the time, but it was and is always with us. The series we produced became a dialog about mourning and renewal.
Because of the space limitations, what I wrote was much shorter than most of my poems, usually fewer than twenty words. I needed to find a way to express something I felt was essential, but briefly. I would meditate on an image and hope to find a way into its inner life. I wanted to echo or complement what was there. A call and a response.
While I’m not the visual artist in the relationship, hand stamping the text gave me a tactile connection. Letter by letter, I could watch as the words took shape on the print. As I worked, the text itself became a visual object for me. Inking and stamping letters, I entered into the making process in a different way than I do with typing or even handwriting. Each word was being built one letter after the next. Each word contained the etymological life that accompanies all words on their journey through time, and at the same time the image and text could be in a relationship, could dance together, the way lyrics and music do.
Back then I had made a rule for myself that words in visual work should be legible and be presented within the piece in a linear way. As a writer I wanted my meaning to be clearly constructed. I didn’t want fragments, but whole thoughts. Since that time, Susan and I have continued to work together, and I find myself less doctrinaire. Maybe a fragment is enough, maybe some illegibility is OK, maybe phrases can rise up in the alphabet soup of my consciousness. Aren’t we always listening and waiting for what we need to say? After all, it’s not only we who are searching for the words. It’s also the words calling out to us.
Image at top: Stuart Kestenbaum and Susan Webster, Your Stillness, gelatin-plate monotype with letter-stamped text.