Dirt: What Joan Didion means

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Terry Nguyen, Dirt's senior staff writer, on the Joan Didion “retrospective” at the Hammer, and some weekend long-reads.

It rained in Los Angeles on the day that Joan Didion died, and it rained again, almost exactly one year later, when I went to see Joan Didion: What She Means at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. The exhibit, curated by New Yorker writer Hilton Als, will be at the Hammer until February 19 before migrating to the Pérez Art Museum in Miami in July.

Didion died in New York on December 23, 2021, but I like to imagine that, had her deathbed been in Southern California, she would’ve found the morning’s blustery rainfall peaceful and necessary. She wanted to be rain, so deep was her self-professed “reverence for water”: “I wanted to be the one, that day, who was shining the olives, filling the gardens, and flooding the daylong valleys like the Nile,” concluded Didion in her 1977 essay “Holy Water.”

What She Means is described as “an exhibition as portrait,” but functions more like a thematic retrospective divided into four sections. Each is titled after books and seminal essays that served as signposts throughout Didion’s career: Holy Water (her childhood and early career); Goodbye to All That (Didion and husband John Dunne’s departure from New York); The White Album (the decades spent in Los Angeles, starting with the 1960s’ social and political turmoil); and Sentimental Journeys (the familial grief that plagued the final decades of her career). It is a bricolage of more than 200 artworks and memorabilia with direct and peripheral ties to Didion’s life, but not quite a portrait.

A portrait implies intimacy. Personal artifacts like letters, diary entries, a potato masher, and old photographs provide necessary biographical context, but reveal little more about Didion for those familiar with her writing. The quotes imprinted on the walls from Didion’s essays were crucial in filling in these gaps, denoting the associations between her life and, for example, Diane Arbus’s photographs or the dark interior of a John Koch painting. This does not render the exhibit futile or a failure. It is a stunning visual approximation of Didion’s wide-ranging oeuvre, though the last two sections are not as thematically coherent.

Pat Steir’s July Waterfall, a large-scale image of a waterfall of dripped paint, was one of my favorite works, placed perpendicular to Wayne Thiebaud’s vibrant River Intersection, a perspective-shifting landscape. I kept returning to Hughie Lee-Smith's Pumping Station, a Hopperesque portrait of a woman atop a pumping station, gazing out to sea. Was she a symbolic stand-in for Didion, of the writer cherishing the loneliness of New York?

I was also pleasantly surprised to encounter artists like Liz Larner, Ana Mendieta, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. “Holy Water” is the most cohesive and visually striking section in its arrangement of sculpture, painting, video, and personal objects. Maren Hassinger’s steel chain sculpture River runs through the center of the first room, with Alan Saret’s Blazing Be, a brushfire of copper wires, in its backdrop. A projected video of John Wayne plays on slow motion loop.

There is an inherent challenge to curating a collage-like exhibit when the central figure is herself a collagist. Didion’s work, to quote Roland Barthes, might be “a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centers of cultures,” but her narrative voice is rarely diluted by the added references. She weaves together a common fiction from what society already knows. Like any narrator, she can be biased and unreliable, while her guiding presence remains constant throughout. I struggled to find this presence in parts of What She Means, through no fault of the engaging and poignant art on display.

Perhaps the exhibit’s intent was to replicate Didion’s investigative essence—for viewers to derive their own meaning from the presented materials. In her essay “Why I Write,” Didion wrote, somewhat ambiguously, that “the picture dictates the arrangement” of a sentence. If we follow this logic, then Als’ curatorial efforts have provided us with the pictures. It’s up to us to arrange the sentences. —Terry Nguyen

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse — and some weekend long-reads.

• “Why I Write,” a timeless Didion favorite of mine.

• New York Public Library acquires the joint archive of Didion and Dunne. (NYT)

• A 45-year-old ultra-wealthy software entrepreneur spends $2 million a year trying to de-age his body. (Bloomberg)

• Boutique grocers are peddling the same DTC brands. The piece also raises interesting questions about what qualifies as a “small business.” (NY Mag)

• Writer Mary Gaitskill on what she learned teaching undergraduate writing. (Liberties Journal)

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