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Grief can be unspeakably devastating, and is usually generously distributed.
Most of us have had unsparing access to it. I once read something like
this: if you knew beforehand the losses you’d suffer in your life,
you couldn’t bear to live your life. So we take each modest heartache
and each bone-crushing loss as it comes. Mostly we find a way to live
alongside grief and the absence it delineates, not inside of it. Robin
Bernat’s new work American Pastoral probes the humbling effects
of loss through the death of her one true love. If that sounds like a
romantic conceit, so be it, for Robin Bernat’s work is an earnest
disquisition on compassion and redemption. In the museum debut of American
Pastoral, Bernat couples landscape images of the South with indigenous
American folk and gospel music in her search for transcendence, faith,
and grace.
Robin Bernat created American Pastoral after the death of Daniel
Zalik, her lifetime love. Lost on a camping trip in Argentina, he died
by falling from a cliff into a river. For Bernat, his death is her most
life-altering event, outpacing even the murder of her father when she
was fourteen. Of the uncanny circumstances surrounding Zalik’s death
Bernat writes,
I gave him a compass, but his accident happened after having become
lost. I also had a very clear and disturbing vision about a month prior
to his death about falling off a cliff into a river—and being
in a dark pit which I interpreted as my own death. I sent an email to
Daniel but neither of us had any idea it was about him, or I would have
warned him which, in large measure, exacerbated my grief as I had this
idea that I should have figured out that the vision was about Daniel.
I had never had a “vision” before; only regular dreams so
this was pretty peculiar to me. Also, I had started to write a poem
… but the only words which I managed were “a swollen creek”
and I didn’t have an idea why I had written this and came across
this piece of paper the day that Daniel died.
Daniel Zalik’s body was found in a river, an image that Bernat
cannot suppress.
Despite or because of Zalik’s death and Bernat’s ongoing guilt
and bereavement, American Pastoral is an ingenuous and agile
expression of faith. She credits Anne Lamott’s Travelling Mercies:
Some Thoughts on Faith, and Mary Rose O’Reilley’s The
Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist
Shepherd as influential clarifications of faith. Bernat was surprised
at her own feelings of comfort within a Judeo-Christian idea of surrender.
She notes, “These things still sound strange to me, but that is
what got me through, a Jewish girl from Monroe, Louisiana … the
idea that Jesus or God would take on the burden of my suffering is what
saved my life because I had nothing but despair.”
American Pastoral is divided into five parts whose subtitles reflect Bernat’s
literary and musical influences: Tender Buttons is the title
of a text by Gertrude Stein which Bernat reads in whispers in two separate
recordings edited together and dubbed over images of fireworks. Just
a closer walk with thee is an anonymous hymn. Where water comes
together with other water is the title of a short story by Raymond
Carver, whose work Bernat loves. The old sheep done know the road;
the young lamb must find the way are lyrics from a Negro spiritual
recorded by Dorothy Love Coates, a Southern gospel singer. My barn
having burned down, now I can see the moon is a Buddhist quote, seemingly
metaphorical for acceptance.
Each part of American Pastoral comprises rural scenes that include
pasturing cattle, nocturnal fireworks, a country baptism, swollen brown
waterways (the Chattahoochee River), linens blowing on a clothes line,
and more. The individual scenes are bound together by their movement toward
redemption. Similar filmic techniques, music, spoken and written word,
and overall dedication to the pastoral circumscribe the work. Bernat’s
idealized and plainly romanticized vision of the American Southern landscape
(anyone who has stood on the high-summer banks of a rural Georgia river
is familiar with suffocating heat) suggests her desire for faith’s
consolation, just as idealized images of a peaceful landscape offer succor.
The scenes don’t suggest the humidity and the mosquitoes, but rather
an Arcadian utopia where the land produces solace. That Bernat has chosen
to elicit comfort from landscape, which in effect killed Daniel Zalik,
witnesses her faith in redemption.
In the baptism scene, Bernat, who appears in almost all her own works
in a search for emotional authenticity, is the supplicant who willingly
kneels on a country porch. An unseen man (we see only his forearm and
hand) cradles the back of her neck while water rushes over her head
and body. The scene is fragile yet has the physical weight of sensuality,
skin, water, movement, and light. Bernat’s toweling off after
the baptism and her talking to someone out of camera range (we don’t
hear her words) contribute to the self-reflexive nature of the filmic
moment; yet still the artifice seems to belie itself—it seems
uncontrived, or at least honest. The camera angle from which Bernat
is filmed (from above) and her physical reaction to the water convey
the inherent drama within this acutely physical, spiritual, and emotional
moment.
In one American Pastoral scene, linens blowing in the breeze
on a rural clothesline, grass burnt by the sun, light pulsating, all seem
to signify an ethereal presence or a vision. The flickering of the images
here and in the other sections of the work is effected by opening and
closing the camera’s iris while filming. In editing, the films are
slowed and strobed at a very high number to heighten the pulsing. Through
these effects Bernat presents the familiar as supernatural, understanding
that the spiritual is often grounded in the prosaic.
“The whole thing is not understood”—one of the only
discernable lines spoken in Tender Buttons, Bernat’s recitation
of the Gertrude Stein poem against a backdrop of fireworks—could
summarize Bernat’s faith and this work. Bernat recorded the prose
twice and then edited the two recitations together, creating a disquieting
veil of whispered and slightly spoken words. The text becomes something
other than itself, a body of sound upon which we are enchantingly held
aloft. Robin Bernat’s video works have explored longing, solitude,
and romantic notions of love and beauty. With American Pastoral she
produces an elegiac visual and aural paean to spiritual grace. As she
writes in Daniel’s Song, “a whole life of wounds accumulate,
I think, Oh Lord, surely I will break.” But of course, like most
of us, she doesn’t break. She draws upon and enhances the profoundly
embedded history of spirituals, hymns, and the prayers of those who have,
through a desire and longing for faith, achieved the grace to turn suffering
into a requiem of solace.
Dana Self
Curator
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