When ready to use again soak in buttermilk. A handwritten note, in ink, included in a package Adriane Little received one day, a few years ago, from her mother s cousin who had herself found it in her attic. It contained Adriane s christening dress and the note was in her great-aunt s handwriting. What do we do with objects and legacies from the past that come down to us in the present? When the line of family and group memory and transmission is broken by death, emigration or exile, such objects and such messages can carry disproportionate weight. They can provoke imaginative investigation, fabulation and creation. They can stand in for memory, serving as carriers of meaning. But whose memory do they carry, what indeed do they mean? And how might we best respond to their demands? The aunt s message is a call: to soak the dress in buttermilk, perhaps because it had been starched and would need to be softened before use. Using it again is to
repeat a ritual, to continue tradition, to have children and to have them christened in the same dress. But, it turns out that along with the dress and the note, Adriane Litltle received another message and another injunction. Her mother s cousin also told her that her family was actually Jewish, but that she was not to speak of this to anyone in the family itself. On the one hand, an invitation to perpetuate tradition, on the other, a ban on speech. Little did use the dress again, and she did soak it in buttermilk, as part of this beautiful multi-media art work. When Ready to Use Again Soak in Buttermilk is the third in a triptych of installations responding to maternal loss and haunting: the artist lost her mother at the age of seven and, with her, she lost the knowledge and practice of the Serbian Orthodox tradition in which she was raised. She also lost the possibility of inquiring about the family s history, of uncovering the family s secrets. I am neither Serbian, nor Jewish, nor daughter but exist as the remnant or residue in between, she has written. But her three almost contemporaneous
installations, Call Home Mothers Dead (2003), Phantom Pains of Amputation (2004), and When Ready to Use Again Soak in Buttermilk (2005) are more than mere inquires into identity and family history. They each use objects, messages or rituals from a familial and cultural past to reclaim aspects of that past in the attempt to hold and to repair a severed and seemingly irretrievable history. The gallery visitor walks down a narrow ramp into a darkened room, separated by a temporary wall. On each side of the wall, the room is filled with empty milk bottles, 5 on one side, 295 on the other. Each side of the wall exhibits only one word, the word mother: on one side, it is painted in Hebrew with a small hanging light above, and, in the exact same spot on the other side, it is painted in Serbian and illuminated by the same type of light. The walls directly across from those words become the screens for the projection of the same black and white video showing the artist standing in front of the a church through which she was christened (she was actually baptized at home). We see her from the
the back, standing in front of a basin, soaking the dress and shaking it out, in precise, ritualized, slow and repetitive gestures. Three LCD screens show another video braiding two separate films together: old home movie footage, transferred into black and white of Adriane Little s christening, in which we see the baby, her mother, her mother s cousin and the priest and, a video of the back of the artist s long hair, being arranged and rearranged in a beehive by someone else s hands. In her study of Jewish funeral rituals, Little read about the mourner s practice of refraining from cutting his hair during the entire year of mourning. Although this is a male practice, she began letting her own hair grow on an anniversary of her mother s death then subsequently cut it at the next anniversary. In the video, a friend of her mother s, now Adriane s friend, puts the hair into a beehive for her for the video of the dress soaking. This is what she used to do with Adriane s mother s hair. Again, the gestures are slow, ritualized, precise. Even as the hair is being braided, the two separate videos
are also braided together, yet multiplied on the three screens. One signals birth, the entrance into Christian community and practice. The other follows death and connects the daughter s body and hair to her mother s. The daughter s body is marked by the mother s death, even as it repeats the mother s appearance. By holding her daughter until she is christened, the mother insures her daughter s Orthodox identity; by growing her hair and connecting it, through the friend s hands and gestures, to her mother s, the daughter creates, or recreates, in material bodily form, the mother s Jewish identity. The mother becomes both majka and m/other. And thus the artist inscribes herself and her mother into a Jewish, as well as a Christian, line of transmission. But in order to watch the videos we walk through three hundred empty milk bottles arranged on the gallery floor. Arranged often in groups of five, they measure the amount of blood contained in the female human body, approximately five quarts. Buttermilk is both a nourishing drink and a substance in which to wash the dress, nour
ish it back to life. The empty bottles signal the absence of maternal nurturing, the physical absence of the mother s body and being. They signal thirst, hunger, longing. Buttermilk is milk that has turned sour. In the old world, in Serbia, it was creamy and thus must have worked well to soften the starched dress. In its diasporic instantiation in the U.S., buttermilk can most commonly be found in lowfat form; Little had trouble finding it at all in her Buffalo neighborhood. The absence of the mother is the absence of nourishment and the irretrievability of authentic tradition. But could not the empty bottles also be seen as an invitation to fill them with new content in this new and uncharted world of loss, secrecy and possibility? How, as we walk through the installation, can we imagine filling the empty milk bottles? Is the motherless daughter doomed to perpetual melancholic loss or can she, in her art, create new structures of meaning and feeling? When Ready to Use Again Soak in Buttermilk goes a long way toward productive mourning. Significantly this is the third installation in this
triptych, one that may be ready to lay the maternal ghost to rest. In braiding different traditions together -- Christian and Jewish, Serbian and American, masculine and feminine -- and in combining different media -- installation, video, ritual -- Little creates and claims a tradition even as, in the absence of knowledge, she is unable to remember, reclaim or to recreate it. And what she creates is plural and open- ended, full of questions and reflections. It is the space where identity may be practiced in the plural, rather than asserted in the singular. Perhaps now, in the aftermath of monolithic identity and its politics, being neither Serbian, nor Jewish, nor daughter, but performing all of them through ritual and art may not be a negative at all. In the wake of mourning, it may offer a sense of promise and possibility. Marianne Hirsch Professor of English and Comparative Literature Institute for Research on Women and Gender Columbia University
Adriane Little s work investigates trauma and ritual through an interrogation of a presence and absence of the maternal body. The translation of this space is both literal and metaphor or the architecture of an ephemeral maternal space that is embedded within what she calls the matrilineal ghost. Her work has been displayed in solo exhibitions, at Big Orbit Gallery in Buffalo New York, the Carnegie Art Center in N Tonawanda New York and 621 Gallery in Tallahassee Florida. Her first solo exhibition at PEAK Gallery in Toronto is forthcoming in February 2008. Her work has also recently been included or is forthcoming in several group exhibitions & film festivals, including the 21st Leeds International Film Festival, Death Bizarre at The Center for Photography at Woodstock, Insatiable Streams: 10 years of the Institute for Electronic Arts at the Beijing B.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Beijing China, Video Art in the Age of the Internet at the Chelsea Art Museum in NYC, Particulate at LumpWest Gallery is Eugene Oregon that also traveled to Vox Populi Gallery in Philadelphia Pennsylvania and Vertical Hold at Galery One in conjunction with the Ellensburg Film Festival. Vertical Hold also traveled to Punch Gallery in Seattle Washington. Adriane Little received an M.F.A. from the University at Buffalo. She is Assistant Professor of Photography and Intermedia in the Gwen Frostic School of Art at Western Michigan University. Adriane Little is represented by PEAK Gallery in Toronto Canada. This catalogue been printed to accompany the Exhibition When Ready to Use Again Soak in Buttermilk on view from April 16 - July 15, 2005 as a solo exhibition at CEPA Gallery in participation with the Albright Knox Beyond/In Western New York 2005 Exhibition. Essay: Marianne Hirsch. Catalogue Design: Adriane Little, Documentation: Soyeon Jung and Adriane Little, Installation Assistance: Jason Sokolowski and Jill Berthot. Printed by DPI Communications, Inc., Buffalo NY. CEPA Gallery, 2007. DVD When Ready to Use Again Soak in Buttermilk Initial Preview (labeled start here) Extended Viewing / sound Gallery Walkthrough When Ready to Use Again Soak in Buttermilk - excerpt M/Other - excerpt all original running times: 7-minute loop CEPA Gallery, 617 additional Main Street, information Buffalo, and NY artwork 14203 can be found at www.adrianelittle.com www.peakgallery.com
www.adrianelittle.com www.peakgallery.com