A Pandemic-Appropriate Show Ends Its Run in a Newport Cemetery

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/24/t-magazine/piotr-uklanski-cemetery.html

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In Newport, R.I., just off a street with the fitting name of Farewell, sits one of America’s oldest cemeteries, the Common Burying Ground, and adjoining it is a slightly newer plot, the Island Cemetery, stocked with some of America’s most illustrious blue-blooded departed: Commodore Matthew C. Perry, the architect Richard Morris Hunt, assorted Auchinclosses, the banker August Belmont.

One evening this month, I walked alone past Belmont’s imposing marble sarcophagus to the little neo-Gothic chapel he had built in 1886 to honor his daughter Jane Pauline “Jennie” Belmont, who died, possibly after a short illness, at the age of 19. Being by oneself in a very old graveyard during a deadly global pandemic is somehow almost comforting; it brought back a cruel sentiment by Lucretius, recalled dimly from a college literature course: “It is pleasant, when the sea is high and the winds are dashing the waves about, to watch from the shores the struggles of another.”

But as I parted the wooden chapel doors, covered with decades-old graffiti (“ding dong daddy”), my shores felt suddenly less secure. Inside, flickering cemetery lanterns and incense dishes covered the floor, and in the chancel loomed a solitary figure covered head to toe in a black-hooded cloak, its face concealed by a white Venetian mask that couldn’t help but conjure the orgy scene from “Eyes Wide Shut.”

A disembodied voice echoed through the chapel, addressing me. “Take a seat in the wicker chair,” it said. “Let us close our eyes and close our mouths, breathing only through our nose … Let each inhalation of this incense bring with it the spirit of your ancestors. Think of the ancestors you know and imagine the ones you don’t.”

I sat in the chair and did as I was asked, knowing at least a couple of things that led me to believe I was probably not going to end up unspeakably Kubricked that night. I’d been invited to this eldritch spot by Dodie Kazanjian, the writer and curator, who was born and raised in Newport and has been organizing shows by contemporary artists like Paul Chan, George Condo and Shara Hughes in unorthodox places in the city for the last three years.

Kazanjian’s family plot lies within the Island Cemetery, and she grew up with a childhood dread of the gargoyle-studded Belmont chapel, which was abandoned by the 1950s and slowly swallowed by ivy and wisteria like a Piranesi ruin-porn etching. Six years ago, a foundation formed to rescue the structure, and Kazanjian began dreaming of the chapel as a place to stage an exhibition, ideally while it was in some alluring borderline condition between restoration and ruin.

The idea eventually dovetailed with thoughts about a show that might obliquely mark this year’s 100th anniversary of the adoption of the 19th amendment and the history of the suffragist movement. The result of all this musing — a visit-by-reservation, cloistered show that opened July 3, in the teeth of the pandemic — was “Suicide Stunners’ Séance,” an exhibition that consisted of seven new paintings by the Polish artist Piotr Uklanski, who, using photography, film, sculpture and, lately, figurative painting, has made a career of sometimes dark conceptual twists on sex, death, power, celebrity and art history.

Uklanski, who lives and works in New York, had been rummaging around in the history of the 19th-century English boys’ club known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which sought to turn back painting’s clock to what its members saw as the purities — critics saw them as pieties — of the late medieval world. The group, which included Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, also had a predilection for depictions of wan flowerlike women whose pallor suggested they were not long for this world, a necrophilic bent admired later by Ezra Pound, who alluded to the vibe in his 1912 poem “The Picture”: “The eyes of this dead lady speak to me.”

The brotherhood recruited its models primarily from the working class — milliner’s shops, servants’ quarters, alehouses — and these “stunners,” as they were called, subsumed their existences almost completely to the painters’ work. Even those with ambitions beyond modeling — like Elizabeth Siddal, probably the most famous Pre-Raphaelite muse, a talented painter and poet in her own right — could never quite escape the gravitational pull of the brotherhood’s fame. (Siddal died of a laudanum overdose at the age of 32, in 1862.)

With paintings destined to be displayed in a chapel constructed to memorialize a dead teen, Uklanski said he wanted to try to restore a sense of individuality and personhood to the women, whom he depicted vividly and glowingly as subjects seeming to embody only themselves, not Dante’s dying Beatrice or Shakespeare’s dying Ophelia. If the paintings serve partly as meditations on death, surrounded by hundreds of stone reminders of death’s ambit, they are exceedingly life-affirming cenotaphs. “There was the brotherhood, but there was also a sisterhood, in a sense, of these women, and I thought of it in connection with the sisterhood of the suffragists,” Kazanjian told me. “I thought of this as a way of giving the sisterhood its say.”

Uklanski agreed and added, cheerfully: “It turned out that a cemetery really is the perfect place to hang an art exhibition if you’re in a pandemic. There’s no one there.” When it was time for the show to come down — more than 600 people visited during its run — Uklanski and Kazanjian wanted to find a means of marking the moment without drawing a crowd. They considered an actual séance, in a nod to the show’s title, but were told it was bad afterworld etiquette to conduct a séance in a graveyard, like yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater. And so Kazanjian, who is the founding director of the Gallery Met, the art gallery of the Metropolitan Opera, began talking about the possibility of some type of concert with a friend, Anthony Roth Costanzo, one of the world’s premiere countertenors and a highly unorthodox performer who is as comfortable singing in cabarets and on the beds of pickup trucks as on the opera stage.

It’s at approximately this juncture that I entered the scene: as The Audience.

Uklanski wanted to film the concert-ceremony, and he and Kazanjian both felt there should be a witness, a parishioner of sorts, in the chapel’s nave as something akin to a liturgy unfolded to commemorate the women and the spirit of the show. I was kept completely in the dark — at first metaphorically and, later, literally — as to what would happen. And yet I found myself seated in the wicker chair, on the eve of the autumnal equinox, squinting above my surgical mask into the twilight, engulfed in Costanzo’s powerful rendering of a dirge by the English Renaissance composer John Dowland (“Thus, wedded to my woes/and bedded in my tomb/O let me dying live”) and thinking, amid lingering fears of being terrifyingly pranked: “Hey, this is my kind of performance art!”

At one point, appropriately, a spoken recording of Siddal’s own verse rang out from a hidden speaker:

Through the gaps in the broken stained-glass windows, I could see that the sun had just set. After the recitation of a passage of Henry Purcell and a requisite sprinkling of Goethe, I was instructed to take one of the candles and locate Jennie Belmont’s grave, just outside. As I knelt before it, noting the sadly proximate dates carved onto its cross, Costanzo’s haunting voice rose a final time, now issuing from somewhere in the shrubbery, singing verses I recognized instantly, composed in 1962 by Roy Orbison, a native of West Texas, where I grew up — as bracingly mournful (and graveyard-friendly) a song as was ever written, pop or otherwise: