The Blue House
I haven’t been able to check this with Heather. But an old mate who visited the Blue House and worked at the Women’s Gallery and at Spiral listened to my argument. ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘You’re mistaken about the Blue House’s influence on Heather’s work and ideas’.
‘I’ve based this on the available documents,’ I said. ‘And I’m not saying that only the Blue House was significant. But she mentioned it and published poems about it, in several places’.
After a longish chat, my mate absolutely wasn’t persuaded that the limited documents available provided a robust framework for my argument. I thought they did and I at least wanted to give it a go.
Because of that conversation, I welcome comments even more than usual, here or on the Spiral Collectives Facebook page. — Marian Evans
It’s not about knocking on closed doors. It’s about building our own house and having our own door. — filmmaker Ava DuVernay (Selma, Queen Sugar, 13th, A Wrinkle in Time on its way, filming partly in New Zealand; and founder of Array, which distributes and amplifies independent films by people of colour and by women, globally).
When I read documents women send me for this project and re-read what Spiral founder Heather McPherson herself has written, I’m struck by some similarities between Spiral’s beginnings and Ava DuVernay’s inspiring statement. Spiral, and later the Women’s Gallery, were also about ‘building our own house and having our own door’ and in the 1970s the Blue House in Christchurch — and its associated culture — was a precursor of that.
The Blue House was on the corner of Trafalgar Street and Devon Street. It was already a women’s house in 1974 and still a women’s house in 1976, before a fire. Its full story waits to be told and I haven’t yet seen a single photograph.
Heather describes the Blue House in the index to A Women’s Picture Book (AWPB, 1988)–
The Blue House was a women’s house in Christchurch where Saj [Gladys Gurney, 1934-, a contributor to A Season’s Diaries] and other writers/artists/lesbians lived. There was a dancing party there most Friday or Saturday nights; because of its central location and spacious living room it was also a women’s meeting place. No longer extant.
As a women’s meeting place the Blue House was central to various lesbian activities, so it’s not surprising that the first issue of the Spiral journal was put together there. According to Heather — in a conversation with Tilly Lloyd (AWPB, 40)–
The physical putting-together was done by a group of lesbians circling great stacks of pages in the centre of the Blue House sittingroom floor.
And the culture within that community, spread over multiple sites, affected how Spiral developed and later how the Women’s Gallery developed. Take selection, for instance. In selecting for that first Spiral, Heather —
…worked with the material received — that it didn’t reflect our own reality didn’t bother me too much, it was the idea of women working together for women’s voices to be heard, positively, that was the aim, and the amalgam of arts — photographers as well as poets, painters etc. Not so much the content as the fact of presence and capability, in my head at least (AWPB, 40).
That philosophy certainly carried over to the Women’s Gallery although we also made individual invitations to women whose work we believe would suit a particular theme or form.
Community participation — through assistance with putting together Spiral and with fundraising — also implies accountability to the wider community for something that represents them.
It seems to me artists are representative of groups of their culture, that they are in fact the spokeswomen or spokespeople of their culture, of their particular group, and to do this they must have the input, the feeding from the group too so that is a participatory process (Heather, AWPB, 41).
For Heather, this meant that when she became interested in Gertrude Stein’s language experiments, ‘so innovative, and containing what you might call a gut of amazing meaning’, and experimented with something similar, and found that she was ‘no longer accessible to the women around me’, she modified her approach. Nevertheless, two of her experimental stein songs for the blue house were included in A Figurehead: A Face (1982), the first monograph Spiral published (& pasted up) and New Zealand’s first collection of poems by an out lesbian.
Community participation and accountability was key at the Women’s Gallery too. And one of the things that made working there very challenging, because the diversity of participation meant there were also very diverse views on accountability. Everyone had her dream of what a women’s gallery could be and what we should be doing about it. Often we couldn’t meet expectations. On the other hand the support and ideas and artistic and political contributions offered were often sustaining and beautiful and illuminating, as when Heather co-ordinated Women & Violence.
And later, when Barb McDonald was co-ordinator, there were wonderful Blue House-type women’s parties, up at 323 Willis Street, the gallery’s second home (1982–84). They were more regular than the 26 Harris Street (1980–82) exhibition openings and events, for women only or for the public and performances or dances were held at other venues, like the Women & Violence performance and dance at Crossways, in Mount Victoria. Was the socialising different because the gallery was in a house in Willis Street and in an industrial building in Harris Street?
Among documents given to me this year is a letter from 1976 that provided another dimension to my reading of Heather’s stein songs and my knowledge of Blue House life. It was written by one A Season’s Diaries participant to another and there’s at least one more letter with similar content, written by another participant. This letter’s author has agreed to have it reproduced in full, with names replaced by initials.
Dear X
I was so glad to hear from you, have actually been contemplating writing myself. Y started smoking again, though less than before. I ripped some tablets off from the chemist which were supposed to help you give up but no way, so we’re all still smoking.
Sorry.
I’ve been busy writing an article for Circle [lesbian feminist magazine] on Wimmins Music. Been stoned just about every day.
Plenty around. Getting a $17 deal tonight.
Spent 2 days this week with Z getting speed thru her & swapping for dope.
Got several books on Dyslexia out of the library and started a program of teaching A to read. Very hard going.
It was B’s birthday last Sunday. Tues. night Y got C to mind D and shouted B to dinner for her present (Birthday). I dropped speed that night because I was feeling really pissed off so took off with [four friends] & we picked up some booze & went out to E’s. [Three more friends] were already out there so had ourselves a good time. Stayed the night, because I don’t like driving when I’m drinking, so five of us bunked down there.
I was absolutely frozen and never slept a wink.
So went to bed at 8.30pm last night, after getting stoned with Z during the day and going to the Ramada.
F’s into some good art now I really like it.
Went to see G the other night to pick up some hessian for boards to paint on. She cracked up over Y & I felt terrible. I didn’t tell Y & please don’t tell her either. G is a really nice person when her defensive exterior drops.
Hope you can come down again soon, I love it when you’re here. Don’t forget you’re always welcome to stay with me. Lots & Lots of Love, [letter writer]. xx
The Blue House occupants’ and visitors’ partying and their relationships of various kinds aren’t obviously represented in the work shown in A Season’s Diaries, the CSA women’s art environment of 1977, or published in Spiral, or exhibited at the Women’s Gallery. But I think that the Blue House’s influence persisted in other ways, thematically and theoretically.
For instance, a focus on mothers and children, in Women’s Gallery exhibitions like Mothers and Children & Childhood. A focus on ‘the (then) ‘unmentionables’. A focus on the ephemeral, as also in A Season’s Diaries, shaped by the ideas of its intitiator Joanna Paul–
I don’t wish to separate the significant and everyday actions but to bring them to close as possible together. It is natural for women to do this; their exercise and their training and their artistry is in daily living. Painting for me as a woman is an ordinary act — about the great meaning in ordinary things. Anonymity pattern utility quietness relatedness (full statement here).
According to Heather–
Some women…like Joanna Paul had been using/exploring their domestic interiors through their paintings. I’d initially stepped over that — the child-rearing bit, as being outside the artists’ scope…Anyway, Linda Nochlin’s article ‘Why are there no great women artists?’, we discussed in a lot in 19675. And we, or I, wanted to redefine greatness in terms of content and its relative place in our lives. The main thing was that we saw art as artist’s process, it has to arise from a specific focus, and the unmentionables, whether child-care or menstruation, being part of our lives should be part of our art. And the art was made among children and dishes, that sort of thing…(AWPB 40)
But the issues for mothers associated with the Blue House, where ‘even women who didn’t have children were often connected with women who did’ (Heather, AWPB 40) were different than for those who weren’t, like Joanna and me, who met when we were both married to artists and living in tiny Seacliff around 1971–72.
I re-found a paper bag of 1970s letters Joanna wrote me when I researched my PhD thesis, where I included excerpts from some of them. They refer to completely different environments than the Blue House’s was at the time. In one letter from January 1976, Joanna, pregnant, wrote–
I shall simply sit up on our green hill & enjoy having a baby. The yellow bassinette under the plum tree, knowing too that Maggie who was terribly strenuously bored will be much happier for a young one. & all will be well if I put painting & films & such nonsense out of my head more or less for a while. It’s only when I sit down at a painting & Maggie awake that the clash comes. When ones so terribly directed one way, the pull when mummy come & see Polly Dolly asleep in the [?possum] room–is frustrating to breaking pt. How does Bill cope? Jeffrey has more tolerance & feeds Maggie magazines while he paints, quite happily. Anyway, Im no more a natural child rearer than Jeffery [sic] is a ‘natural’ bread winner.
My world was different then, too. A few years later, perhaps around the time that the Women’s Gallery started, in another undated letter, Joanna wrote–
Your note unnerves me, the pain in it. I can feel you jangled tired strained by all you do. Other — that mystery of domestic misery which is always so private. However I have my other vision of you, stepping thru the fence holding daffodils, silver spring sea light everywhere. , & coming from the shower with wet hair and the little leather skirt. How those luxurys told didn’t they in that raw place & the struggles with money & babies — the flowers cake camembert & brief meetings[.]
We never had the same issues, especially around our male children, as mothers who were associated with the Blue House. Heather again–
I’d leapt from liberal academic to lesbian separatism, but then the younger lesbians without children said ‘Hey, how come you’re a lesbian separatist but you’re bringing up male children?’ And this forced a rethink, those of us who continued to bring up male children had to modify our positions (AWPB, 40).
But I think we did share Heather’s belief, in ‘building our own house and having our own door’. Joanna did so collectively only briefly, I believe, although she certainly continued to do so as an individual artist and writer in many mediums, possibly more successfully than any New Zealand artist of her generation. But during those few years from about 1974, when she joined Heather’s women artists group, until about 1980, she was intermittently a highly effective activist in the women’s art movement, as I was reminded this year when I read the relevant documents in the Alexander Turnbull Library: her initiatives even included approaching the local film society to suggest that it show slides of women’s work before its screenings.
For Heather, beyond welcoming community participation and accountability from diverse women (‘that it didn’t reflect our own reality didn’t bother me too much‘), there seems to have been two elements to ‘building our own house’. The first was eliminating the distinction between ‘artists’ and ‘others’ (as also happened in the CSA Women’s Environment in 1977, originally proposed by Joanna, and in her A Season’s Diaries in the same year)–
I feel that we are all artists in some way, and at the time we were all much more idealistic in saying look there is no barrier between galleries and women, that in fact, women belong in galleries, that is, women as artists, and you are all women as artists essentially anyway. We were trying to democratise and radicalise the whole art scene as being not something removed and precious and part of an establishment patriarchy, hierarchy, we were trying to say, look, this is our space and look, you are us. We are not ‘here we are and there are you’ as consumers; taking away the whole product and consumer meaning from it.
The other element, which I certainly didn’t share at the beginning of my involvement with the Women’s Gallery, was the bringing together of ‘the connections of a women’s heritage, of a spirituality, of women’s relationships in this enormously long context, you know, that in fact, whatever lesbianism was, it was also a culmination of a very long herstory’ (Heather, AWPB p40).
Because of this framework, when Heather exhibited at the Women’s Gallery Opening Show in early 1980, ‘the opportunity for me as a writer to work in a visual medium [for the second time] was really exciting’. And she was–
…trying to say — this is where you start. And if you’re trying to make a new concept it is going to look raw and home-made. As Gertrude Stein said about Picasso, you start to make something new and it’s ugly. Those that come afterwards can make it beautiful but when it is new it is raw.
For the Women’s Gallery Opening Show, in ‘our’ house with its own door, Heather made a symbolic goddess figure.
This is how she explained this work–
[It] incorporated a lot of the ideas we’d been working on [at the Blue House, at the CSA exhibition and elsewhere], for example she had a hairdresser’s head that was facelessand on the table beside her were cut out face shapes for women to fill in themselves, to put their own face on them. And they did. So when I actually came to write the poem about doing that [the 11-part (Having seen past the gods, their power, we make a goddess, ours…)], it seemed to me a beautiful culmination — that I did the thing and then wrote about it, and that was my most important poem for bringing in so many ideas…We were working on a supposition — discovery, certainty — that our spirituality was in ourselves, that it was not outside ourselves, that its manifestation was political. As were the myths, so was the manifestation of any kind of deity, as the rulers were political so the deities took the face of the rulers. The man-made god, or, as we were trying to say, the woman-made goddess. This was the whole point of having women put their own faces on her. There were some very angry ones. There were some quite beatific ones. There were some very querying (or querying?) ones. It was lovely. Then too, as in the early constructions it was made out of the scraps of the patriarchy, using an extension of pop art, ready-mades, it was a bit like that, partly because we had so little resources that once again we were using scraps, and trying to vest them with new meaning, so others could vest them with new meaning.
(Having seen past the gods, their power, we make a goddess, ours…) has complicated line endings that can’t be reproduced here on Medium and its 11 pages don’t work here as images either. But there’s just two pages of Chant from the Goddess stand, with its final ‘I Am I Am I Am’, which Heather’s always read in a way that makes my hair stand on end. So here it is, the last poem from A Figurehead: A Face, to end this tiny Blue House party, complete with its queerly placed page numbers.
