Spinster Style

2012-. Polaroid SX-70 print made with PX70 Color Protection Film, mounted on Impossible Project White Leather SX-70 Polaroid Camera Case, white kid leather gloves (made in France, 1970s). Installation. Dimensions variable. Part of ongoing Four Sisters project.

Text printed in form of menu:

The scene: a table at the Russian Tea Room on East 57th Street in New York City. A warm haven on cold nights when you wish the concert at Carnegie Hall could last forever? An enclave opened in 1927 by former members of the Russian Imperial Ballet? A tourist trap? An over-ornate, gilded refuge for eastern European exiles? An old-school, old-world, overstuffed restaurant with deep red leather booths and a retro menu on which the Cotelette à la Kiev of my childhood, the chicken breast that disgorges butter when sliced is still the featured entrée? Whatever the truth (and it’s probably all true), this was home. Or, rather, my wished-for not-home. The gilded dream palace to which the woman I called my Auntie Mame would usher me at least once a visit. Like the Auntie Mame of fiction and film, my great aunt Lis may not only have promised but also actually delivered on those lines: “I’m going to open doors for you. Doors you never dreamed even existed.” But, unlike Auntie Mame, my great aunt Lis—the Holocaust survivor from Germany who trained to be a French professor but, unable to find employment, supported herself as an accountant instead—was a life-long spinster. And a gourmande. Who paid for her own elaborate dinners (and for mine) with a poor salary and meager savings. Such restaurants where she was led to a table of her own (maybe not a nice one--she was an old woman alone after all--but a table nonetheless) were a kind of home to Lis. And they became an anti-home of possibility for me. In his essay on the secret of Jane Austen’s style, D. A. Miller writes of Style with a capital “S” as a kind of place, “Like the Unheterosexual, the Spinster too resorts to Style, the utopia of those with almost no place to go.” What I learned from the deep pleasures of the table in the company of my great aunt with a gourmandizing palate and fastidious taste was that Style could also make a habitable place for a woman, an old woman, a queer woman alone. Style turned the tables on an unhomely world of places set relentlessly for men escorting their dates to dinner. Style opened a delicious aperture for an aging, queer woman who likes to do her own escorting, who was over-fond and remains inordinately and perversely attached to her great aunt, and who couldn’t breathe but also couldn’t get sweaty breathless without the doors she swung wide with her queer, old Spinster Style.

Exhibited in Our House!: Portraiture and the Queering of Home, curated by Lex Lancaster, Evolution Arts Collective, October 2012.