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rockypoint Press and Shoot the Lobster are proud to present Mise En Scène, a series of artist/writer collaborative prints curated by the Mexico-born novelist Veronica Gonzalez Peña.
Begun in 2004 as a way to counterbalance the solitary nature of novel writing, rockypoint Press launched with Le Montrachet a silk-screened book by Liam Gillick and Heather McGowan.
Through the production of the book Gonzalez Peña began to formalize her ideas around collaboration, specifically foregrounding the British psychoanalyst DW Winnicott’s theories on the transitional object and creativity through play. Inspired by the cross-pollination of Modernist artists and writers – the many instances of their working together, but also the deep influence they had on each other’s work because of their close interactions – Gertrude Stein structuring her writing like painting or film, for instance, or Virginia Woolf’s psychological and painterly concerns; Gonzalez Peña enacts her play by bringing an artist and a writer together to create something completely new.
As in any endeavor primarily concerned with flow she often works with a repeating cast of like-minded friends and acquaintances; this feedback loop of the socially generative and generatively social is foundational to rockypoint’s other activities as well, which include a reading series (often held at such L.A. institutions as Hop Louie, the Mountain Bar and China Art Objects). All of these activities eventually led her to an art form that is at its center collaborative: filmmaking.
Gonzalez Peña’s first three films are fictional narratives, and are all deeply literary. She positions herself in relation to a group of friends and creates stories that fit within the themes present in their conversations, so that the films themselves are generated by the people in them. The actors in her films have included Pat Steir, Chris Kraus, Michel Auder, Sylvère Lotringer, Tala Madani, Michael Silverblatt, Douglas Gordon, and Servane Mary. Though the films are primarily a form of storytelling, Gonzalez Peña allows for a fair amount of improvisation, and works closely with the artists to mold her characters.
Her feature film, Cordelia, (2016) is a contemporary adaptation of King Lear, told from the banished daughter’s point of view. The film was made soon after Gonzalez Peña moved to NY where she met Servane Mary and decided to make a film with Mary at its center. Michel Auder stars as the Lear character, with Pat Steir as the missing Queen Lear. It was while working on Cordelia, that Gonzalez Peña and Pat Steir decided to make a film together. Pat Steir: Artist premiered at the New York Jewish Film Festival at Lincoln Center in January, 2019, and is available to stream online. Artnews named it one of the 10 best artist documentaries of 2020.
As in her previous projects, the films are a way for Gonzalez Peña to address her longstanding concerns with community, collaboration and an open, process-oriented practice, while also providing the space and opportunity for other artists to play. In Winnicott’s conception of it, play is always a state of doing, a state of being. And this is the area which process-oriented art inhabits: It is always in this in-between space, this transitional space, in this space of becoming and creating. There is no final Meaning. There is no final Thing, no absolute Beauty – only a coming together which is ever shifting and moving, like Gertrude Stein’s repetition which is never repeated or that glimmering of something which vanishes before we think we have it in Woolf’s terrifyingly beautiful work. The porous always allows us an entrance, denying a belief in an absolute. There is only us, and the work, and the world, and the possibilities are boundless when we open up and allow motion, process, to occur.
Gonzalez Peña is currently at work on a documentary about Lawrence Weiner.
Affiches Unique
Installation View, Mise en Scène, Shoot The Lobster, New York, NY, 2021
Liam Gillick, After Cordelia, 2021, Silkscreen, Sharpie and acrylic on Stonehenge paper, 30 × 22 inches, Edition of 5 plus III AP
Alix Pearlstein, Collage Archive Print (Leishia and Lion), 2021, Silkscreen on Stonehenge paper, 30 × 22 inches, Edition of 5 plus II AP
Aura Rosenberg, Enter the Labyrinth, 2021, Silkscreen and Sharpie on Stonehenge paper, 30 × 22 inches (76.20 × 55.88 cm), Edition of 5 plus III AP
Suzanne McClelland, Blue Shirley (DCprotest1971), 2021, Silkscreen, graphite and Japanese watercolor on Stonehenge paper, 22 × 30 inches, Edition of 5 plus III AP
Michel Auder, Untitled #08, 2021, Silkscreen on Epson semi matte photo paper, 22 × 30 inches, Edition of 5 plus III AP
Leigh Ledare, Untitled (Vanished Splendor), 2021, Silkscreen and oil stick on Stonehenge paper, 30 × 22 inches, Edition of 5
Joanne Greenbaum, Untitled, 2021, Silkscreen and Sharpie on Stonehenge paper, 30 × 22 inches, Edition of 5 plus II AP
Screenings, Readings & Introductions
rockypoint also produced a series of readings during the run of the show, including:
Mark Handforth reading George Porcari on Pauline Boty
The groundbreaking artist Pat Steir, a leading light in the development of Conceptual Abstraction and a trailblazing feminist, has been on the forefront of American painting for half a century, and her professional and personal life have intersected with many of the most influential artists and poets of her generation—from Sol Lewitt to Agnes Martin to John Cage to Anne Waldman. This intimate, revelatory portrait by Steir’s friend, the novelist and filmmaker Veronica Gonzalez Peña, was shot over the course of three years primarily in Steir’s home and studio. Enlivened by a visually poetic style and the clear affection between filmmaker and subject, the film offers a profound look into the life of an artist.
Available to stream on Apple TV starting June 9 and available now for Pre-Order.
The year after I went to live with them, my godparents with their two sons and me in tow, began making yearly summer voyages from our home in Athens, Ohio to Jalapa, Veracruz, leaving one leafy college town for another. Jalapa is a univer- sity town that sits high in the mountains of Eastern Mexico, and for several years running my godfather, who was newly a literature professor, worked with his students in a summer program there, our red Plymouth,Valiant snaking down through the flatness of the Midwest, through Arkansas and Texas and down into the rapidly shifting landscape that is Mexico, a landscape largely colored by the mountains and highlands of the Sierra Madres, and peppered with volcanoes throughout. Once in Mexico we would drive through the chapparal and mesquite grasslands of Taumaulipas, where huge saline lagoons are separated from the ocean by sandbars, then into tropical deciduous forests so thick you couldn’t see into them, before reaching the rainforests in the coastal state of Veracruz. Jalapa sits high above the ancient port town of Veracruz and as you climb up into it you enter an ever- green lushness, the steep city itself made up, it seems, of thousands of terraced flower-filled gardens. And after five or six days of driving we would arrive in this tranquil college town, Jalapa, a beautiful place known as The City of Flowers, pulling up to the same pretty courtyard house we rented there each summer.
For me it was always strangely weighty driving across that border, knowing that this was where I was from, that this was the place that held my biological family; and my other life. The landscape, which seemed to go all wild as soon as we crossed the border, seemed overwhelming and uncontainable, in some way, an unknowable part of myself that had a lot to do with my mother; though at a more basic comprehensible level, the sense of being overwhelmed had also to do with the shift in all the small details that affect daily lives, the texture of the language, the way that bodies inhabit and move through space, the spice rich food, and with the practicalities of driving too, which was not at all like driving in the States. My godfather had made it clear that as soon as we crossed the border we would, with our American plates, become an easy target for the Mexican police, and thus risk being pulled over. Should this happen, we were instructed, we children must go silent while he mock negotiated before finally handing over the obligatory mordida (the playfully aggressive term, literally “bite,” does nothing to hide the tinge of violence we felt watching him surrender the requisite bribe). He did get pulled over, and more than once; and while he slowed the car and inched it to the side, a tense hush fell inside it, and then we watched my godfather become an actor in the socially enforced theater of negotiation over some invented infraction. Father and policeman, they both played their roles, the per- formance inevitably ending with my godfather digging into his pocket and relinquishing a couple hundred pesos. Though the mordida imposed on the invented infraction never amounted to much more than 20 dollars, at that time I learned, if I didn’t know it already, that things are not often what they seem in Mexico, that when power rules in shadowy, indeterminate and unreined ways, those who are supposed to be aiding and protecting can in fact be doing you grave injustice. In Mexico this meant it was best to stay far away from the police, even when in need of help. It has long been a well known fact in Mexico that you don’t ever ask a cop for help, for their ranks come from the very poor, and they are badly paid (currently under $300 a month on average). And in the vast sad system of extreme inequality that is Mexico, the police have always had ways to supplement their meager salaries. In fact, as we crossed the border, the ones who were supposed to be protecting us were our biggest fear.
Of course, more than thirty years on, they are only one amongst many interconnected things that people fear. For it is increasingly and unquestionably clear that in Mexico the crooked police are but a small though significant cog in a vast wheel of corruption and ill used authority. And recently the stakes in regard to this authority have gotten much higher, because for about a decade there has been a notably growing and progressively more brutal siege on Mexico, engendered by the increasingly powerful and violent drug cartels that thrive there, and those who purportedly fight them. But it is in the past seven years that the trouble in Mexico has grown to the present outsized proportions. This escalation began when, less than two weeks after taking office seven years ago, the then newly elected President, Felipe Calderon, launched his drug war by unleashing 6,500 military troops on his home state of Michoacan, ostensibly to control the growing drug violence there. In many minds, however, “Operation Michoacan” was his way of taking hold of a power he didn’t yet fully yield; Calderon had been declared the winner in the July 2nd election by less than 1% of the vote, and this narrow victory was strongly contested by his opponent, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. With clear indication of millions of missing or discounted ballots, charges of illegal funding, as well as countless other claims of fraud, Lopez Obrador refused to concede defeat, and in late July of 2005 upwards of 2 million people marched through one of the main thoroughfares in the city, Reforma Avenue, an avenue which Emperor Maximilian had built in order to link his Imperial castle in Chapultepec Park to the National Palace. The support march ran the length of Reforma and culmi- nated in a rally at the huge central plaza that is the heart of Mexico City, the Zocalo.1 This is the second largest central plaza in the world, after Tienamen Square; and this was the biggest demonstration ever recorded in Mexican history. For several months many thousands would not leave the Zocalo, which sits squarely in front of the National Palace.
The anti-Semitism of today … is no object in itself. It is nothing but a wrench to unscrew, bit by bit, the whole machinery of our civilization. Or, to use an up-to-date simile, Anti-Semitism is like a hand grenade tossed over the wall to work havoc and confusion in the camp of democracy. That is its real and main purpose.
-Thomas Mann, 1930
We’re taking people out of the country — you wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals
-D Trump, 2017
The sky is blue and the air is too when she sees them. The grass is green and her eyes go grey when she sees them. The girl sees that group of them there on her street and her heart speeds forward and she flies to her house, she flies there, her feet wings; she is inside now, her chest heaving.
She pushes the door shut behind herself, breathing in spasms, a fast and shallow breathing that makes her dizzy. She hears their knocks, their animal yells. She shuts her eyes hard; she has to think. Fast and violent they knock. They are knocking. It is not knocking; they bang. They bang and they bang. They are searching. She has to think. Her heart pounds. The closet is stupid. It is too simple. That is where they will look. Right away they will rush to look in a closet. They will tear open the door with loaded rifle in hand and they will stick it into her side as they scream in barks at her. If she hides in a closet. She must think. A cupboard! the cupboard, how brilliant! She scrambles into the kitchen. She makes herself into a ball. She is 19, but she scrunches up small and pulls the cabinet door toward herself from inside. She is a terrified ball scrunched hard and tight and she can hear them banging, still, at her door. They bash it in. She hears them bash the door in, and then down. The door on the ground now, they are tearing through her house and she holds her breath tight. She must hold it as long as she can, though she is shaking. She must shut her eyes and hold it and hold it and hold her breathing until there is nothing.
Five days ago they took her brother. They have already taken her brother. They took her father too then. They called them animals, criminals. They turned them into criminals just by calling them that. That is how language works the girl understands. She knows about language. They were here illegally, the angry men yelled, THAT MAKES YOU A CRIMINAL, the angry men yelled. PUT UP YOUR HANDS! ALIEN!!
Hands in the air, they shoved her old father into the ground. They kicked at her old father. She heard the thud.
But Daniela, she is a dreamer. She remembers she is a dreamer. They did not take her that day because of this fact. She closes her eyes and in her mind she sees all the things she wants and has wanted and she knows what she must do. She must go speak before people. There will be cameras and a crowd and she will tell all those people the story of her father. The story of her brother. She will tell how she hid in the cupboard. She stopped breathing. For what seemed like many many minutes she stopped breathing in that cupboard while the angry men searched for her. She heard their enraged grunts as they tore her house apart.
It was hard for her to speak on the day that she spoke before people. It was hard. She had thought she would cy as she said things. But she didn’t. She wants to be a teacher, she told everyone, their faces jutting eager up at her. She wants to teach young people math. Daniela finishes speaking. Was that her voice which was just speaking? She looks down, into the mic. Shy again. The shy girl she was before they kicked her father. She reaches out, her hand searching for something; her fingers touch the mic. People cheer and she is confused. She smiles a little and allows herself to feel happy for one moment.
She shouldn’t have done that she will think later. She should not have allowed herself to feel anything. She was walking with a friend, and she allowed herself to feel happy. And it was then that they fell upon her. They charged at her and they shoved her friend away, and Daniela’s face contorted in confusion. Her friend cried out her name, Daniela!, as the angry men grabbed her, Daniela!, as they thrust her hands behind her back so hard she thought her shoulder would snap. And with that pain she stopped hearing her name.
She is a straight A honor student, she wants to say. She has just told the eager faces this fact. She just wants to be a math teacher. Her father has worked hard all his life. She wants to tell them this too. Her father works and he works, cutting dead birds open, deboning the chicken that all of you eat, she wants to say. It is hard work, everyday work, Daniela wants to cry. He stinks of it. She cries when she thinks it. But she knows it will not matter what she says to these men. She is arrested.
This President sees every instance of resistance as a personal slight, and many understand Daniela’s arrest as retaliatory; for girls are not allowed to speak. If a girl who is a dreamer does not have the money to file her paperwork on time, she will be arrested. Especially if she dares to think that she can speak. No lapse will be forgiven.
And in jail Daniela sweeps the floors… as she thinks of the blue sky and the green grass that she knows still grows outside as she cleans the bathrooms and helps in the kitchen. She wonders after her father as she helps mend the fences and then before bedtime cuts the other prisoner’s hair. She is a prisoner and a slave both, for this prison makes a profit out of making criminals of people like her. This is the system that separates mothers from children so they can work harder. They take their babies from them so that the women can work. They tear their babies from their arms, mother and child both weeping, and then they call the mothers beasts and they make them work for a dollar a day. These prisons give so much money to the angry man who is a president now. Daniela knows that the prisons helped elect that man; and she knows they make a profit out of making criminals of people like her.
Daniela knows too that her story is not the hardest. Daniela knows this. It is only one story. The mothers with infants who have been torn from their arms make her feel ashamed. She has to turn her eyes away.
She has heard that the government has lost thousands of these torn away children. She has heard that many are forced to work on farms, for long twelve-hour days. There is no pay for these torn away children, only tears and pain and motherless nights. Daniela knows that her story is not the hardest. It is only one story.
Daniela was fourteen when her parents brought her here… they propped her up on stories of Mickey Mouse, and ice cream cones, and hot dogs and parades, and then, after they finished their vacation, they decided they could stay. Should they stay? Maybe they had always known that they would stay, her parents. They stayed and they got jobs deboning dead birds for 11 cents a pound. Be careful you do not cut your hands instead of their thighs, Daniela’s father told her brother when he too went to work there at fifteen … be cautious with those cutting slicing knives.
When her mother dies, Marie falls into a tailspin. A month later, her estranged father contacts her wanting to see her after 35 years of absence. Though Marie deeply wants to see the father who abandoned her as a girl, her husband doesn’t trust him and doesn’t want him around. Marie is already a mess, the kids are confused, and it is clear to Paul that Marie’s father is going to make things worse. Yet Marie invites Alain to come visit them at their house in the country. Alain is a successful artist, cocky and self-assured, but when he arrives he immediately feels attacked by Marie’s family and friends. And as a way to get out of there fast, he crosses a boundary that shouldn’t be crossed. It is then that Marie must confront the reality of her relationship to her father. Who is he? And is he really someone she wants to get to know?
Cordelia Trailer
Cordelia is Veronica Gonzales Peña’s contemporary re-telling of King Lear, starring Michel Auder & Servane Mary and featuring Pat Steir, Alice Zimmerman, Cecile Casablancas, Jose Martos, and Douglas Gordon.
rockypoint Press is a series of artist-writer collaborations - books, prints, readings, and films - curated by Veronica Gonzalez Peña with help from friends in NY, LA & abroad.
