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She
Was Dissatisfied Early--and Had Two Purposes
I
first learned of Beatrice Wood--who was born in San Francisco in 1893 to
a socially prominent family--when I read of a current Dada exhibition.
But it is her recent works--her ceramics with lustre glazes, that thrilled
me.
Eli
Siegel said in his lecture "Aesthetic Realism As Beauty: Sculpture":
there
is a feeling of resisting nature opposed by insistent man, and man saying..."I
can find form in you....I don't care what aspect of the mineral kingdom
you may show yourself as, I'll show you I can get beauty out of you....I
can so arrange clay, I can make terra-cotta, I can see to it that it gets
a polish!"
I believe
that in some of her finest pottery Beatrice Wood was dealing with her life
question: how could she make sense of her dissatisfaction. Because that
purpose--to find form, to get beauty out of "resisting nature" is the distinguishing
thing between a dissatisfaction, a rebellion that has good will and a rebellion
that is ugly, that has contempt in it, that hurts herself. Beatrice Wood
gave herself great pain--in fact she often writes she was in "despair"--because
the way she was dissatisfied, the way she was against was so mocking
and contemptuous. In
her autobiography I Shock Myself, of 1985, written when she was
92 Ms. Wood tells of an early contest with her mother:
[She]
dressed me in lace, taught me to curtsy and to remain silent unless spoken
to....My mother...attempted to turn me into a porcelain doll. But I was
no doll beneath my childhood lace. At 14, my secret accomplices [were]
Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, de Maupassant, Colette, Shakespeare...Oscar Wilde.
Aesthetic
Realism shows when we use a parent to be dissatisfied with everything,
we get a victory. Beatrice Wood, like many girls, enjoyed showing she was
against things, some of which did not deserve it. She writes: "I refused
to study subjects I didn't like--algebra, geometry, German, Latin--and...sat
through those courses, a smile on my face." And when her mother finally
prevailed on her to make her social "debut," Wood writes with scorn:
Mother
simply could not make me the popular debutante.... People invited me to
parties and I wouldn't talk....The only subjects that interested me were
art and literature. All the businessmen were pitiful sloths sunk in materialism
and I refused to hold conversations with them.
Though
she writes somewhat self-critically that her mother's friends "thought
me some kind of monster, which in a way I was," Ms. Wood doesn't see how
the glory of using her mother to despise everything hurt her, including
with men--something Selena Tyler began to learn about in Aesthetic Realism
consultations.
"Is
your mother real to you?" The Three Persons asked her. "Yes!" she
insisted: "I just wish she would stop trying to run my life!"
TTP.
Do you ever think she felt that about her mother? S.
Tyler. I don't know. I never thought of it.
TTP.
Who do you think has been dissatisfied more, you or your mother?
S.
Tyler. Oh, me.
TTP.
But if she's lived longer, then logically wouldn't she have had more of
a chance to be?
S.
Tyler. Oh yes that's true. I guess I haven't seen what she's been through
as real.
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