Art and Old Age
Author(s): Robert Berlind
Source: Art Journal , Spring, 1994, Vol. 53, No. 1, Art and Old Age (Spring, 1994), pp.
19-21
Published by: CAA
https://www.jstor.org/stable/777521
You would like to hear how it is in old age?
Certainly, not much is known about that country
Till we land there ourselves, with no right to return.
-Czeslaw Milosz
OId age. Old: opening with the round vowel, slowing and
channeling its “o” through “l,” it closes down, ends, dies
with “d.” To age is to grow old. Your age is a number; age
is finitude. Repeat it a few times: “old age” takes on a gloomy
redundancy.
In a society enthralled by the ideals of youth and productivity,
the aged, collectively, become the “other,” to borrow that term from
the common critique of Eurocentric consciousness. As a conse-
quence of this marginalization, each of us who lives long enough
must come eventually to the shocking realization that the “other” is
one’s own self. Little in mainstream American culture prepares us for
the physical, psychological, or spiritual perplexities that arise late in
life. We are not, on the whole, given preparation for the potential
role, so prominent in other cultures, of “eldering,” of passing along
the accumulated wisdom and lore of a lifetime or of facilitating the
affairs of the less experienced.
art is something new, young, an emblem of fresh and lively energies, of the latest challenges, while people, artists and audience alike, outlive the moment, grow old, fade, lose relevance.
(even key work of 1970s feminism seemed often to turn on the physical beauty of confrontational body artists: Hannah Wilke’s chewing-gum-adorned body or Lynda Benglis, bare and be dildoed in the infamous 1975 ad in Artforum, or Carolee Schneeman in her provocational performances. More recently Jeff Koons, Matthew Barney, and others have deployed their well-trained physiques as strategically as Madonna does hers.)
As the baby-boom generation moves into middle age, shift-
ing demographics inevitably turn attention toward gerontological
matters. A number of artists have already been active in this area,
radically revising our socially constructed images of old age, and it
comes as no surprise that feminist thought is crucial here. Eight of
these quite various artists are discussed in Joanna Frueh’s essay on
erotics and age, which appears here. Some others who have done
important work about and with old people are Suzanne Lacy, who
has created large-scale, participatory works involving older women;
Chicago artist Claire Prussian, the subject of whose paintings and
drawings has been aged women, intimately seen; Milwaukee-based
sculptor Adolph Rosenblatt, whose acutely and empathetically ren-
dered, painted clay figures often portray the very old; multimedia
artist Joyce Cutler Shaw, who has concentrated on the final days of
her subjects in photos, drawings, and narratives; performance artist
Judith Sloan, one of whose characters is Sophie, the formidable
Jewish grandma; and Don Sunseri, who founded the Grass Roots
Art and Community Effort (GRACE) in Vermont to involve un-
trained, elderly people in art and to collaborate with them. This
group, along with Chicago painter Vera Klement, participated in
what proved a moving and enlightening CAA session (which I had
the privilege of moderating) in 1992. Vera Klement’s contribution, a
rumination on our denial of death as part of life, on our consequent
rupture with the past and the impact of that virtual disinheritance on
our studio teaching, is included here.
Among the artists whose interviews follow are others who
have taken aging as a central theme in their work, notably John
Coplans, Elizabeth Layton, and Anne Noggle (who figures also in
Frueh’s piece). In the course of gathering materials for this issue and
having countless conversations and a great deal of correspondence
with many artists and scholars, I have become aware of the very
widespread interest in the topic of old age and its relation to art.