The Lyrical View
Janet Sternburg’s Poetographic Impressions
- Joern Jacob Roewer, catalogue essay commissioned by the American Embassy, Germany, written on the occasion of Sternburg’s one person show at the Galerie im Einstein, Berlin, Germany, 2005
I got to Boston in time to see her eyes, which had slipped to one side, focus on me as I held her head in my palm. To this day, I carry the weight of her head in my palm, her silky grey hair, her eyes trying to find me. I said a word I didn’t know I had in me, a word she called me when I was growing up, in Yiddish, which she herself didn’t speak. ‘Fagelah,’ I said. ‘My little bird.’[i]
These are the words the American artist Janet Sternburg uses to describe parting from her dying mother. The text passage is as touching as it is characteristic of Sternburg’s work as an author and photographer. In plain morphology and with the use of metaphors of memory, Sternburg manages to condense complex descriptions into a lively synthesis of past and present.
Since the 1980s, readers’ attention has been drawn to Sternburg’s oeuvre, which contains essays and poems, a collection of essays on women’s literature[ii], as well as a book of memories titled “Phantom Limb”. Since the nineties, Sternburg has also been working as a photographer, achieving extremely refined artistic results, equipped with nothing but a disposable camera.
Sternburg’s view is characteristic of her work, as it determines the direction and development of her thoughts in ways that are lyrical, analytical, and empathetic at the same time. Her vision captivates audiences with intellectual and emotional depth, precision of observation, and an unmistakable sense of the moment. This rare combination is refined by Sternburg’s ability to trust in coincidences and meet life with composure. From that angle, both her writing and her photography are always autobiographical. They proclaim the beauty of fleeting glimpses that Sternburg has encountered over the years.
The artist remains concealed by her art. Early in her childhood, it was a symbolic act for Sternburg to close doors behind her so that she could be alone. This was her only way to find access to her “own world, (…) beginning to speak, through writing”[iii], as she remembers. In her book “Phantom Limb”, Sternburg grants insight into her early years in Boston and New York City where she was raised as the offspring of a family descended from Russian Jews. Surrounded by ambitious neighbors, melancholic aunts, and a mentally challenged uncle, she lived with her parents in bourgeois confinement, under the spell of the McCarthy era and far removed from the American Dream.
Fragile and ailing, she stayed in bed for a whole year, guarded by her mother and educated by a visiting teacher. She was a talented child, transient and bright at the same time, who would later recall everything adults sought to hide from her. “As in bodies, the wounds of history have layers, extending through generational strata,”[iv] Sternburg wrote later in one of her essays. Many years passed before she reached this insight. Until then, she studied philosophy, wrote articles and poems and tried to establish herself socially as well as professionally. When her first marriage broke apart and she was diagnosed with cancer, her life changed. “No one survives intact” says Janet Sternburg. “No one is exempt. In that democracy of sorrow lies our consolation.”[v]
Sternburg’s descriptions are free from tearful sentimentality, penetrated with hope and filled with a need to comfort others, which is the function of her art as she sees it. At the same time, to her, the overcoming of anxieties and the symbolic healing and reconciliation in using aesthetic means can be seen as an element linking the works of those artists who, in the second or third generation, stem from families that were refugees or victims of persecution. Although Sternburg herself is hesitant to express it as clearly as that, one can make it out in her work like in that of other prominent artists whose image and text installations have similar symbolic effects, among them Christian Boltanski from France, Oz Almog from Israel, Jenny Holzer or Shimon Attie from the USA. Art which has its source in a cultural memory and in the notion of reconciliation, Janet Sternburg says, “also appears in challenging relationship to the present cultural moment when the distinctiveness of specific histories has been explored as a means to understand the powerful idea of difference.”[vi]
The motif of memory which dominates Sternburg’s work also appears in her photographs – those optical puzzles consisting of arrangements in multiple layers and interiors which seem coincidental and yet are consciously set in scene, always referring back to the artist and her lyrical view. Sternburg looks at the world with her own eyes; objects which seem worthless when standing alone receive meaning, because people once owned them or own them now and thus relate to them. Sternburg gives magic to everyday life by making the inconspicuous visible, wrapping the dreary into colors and giving new life to things long forgotten. Janet Sternburg’s images can be understood as a school of seeing and an iconography of memory all at once.
With her vigilant, highly sensitive outlook, Sternburg, like so many US artists and intellectuals, embodies the other America: a continent of multiplicity and richness of those voices, colors, and thoughts shaping a universal memory, not to say consciousness, and standing in opposition to the dominant “culture” of denial, which Arthur Miller has described as typically American. “Americans,” says Miller, refuse to “deal with the country’s unhealing wounds and injuries. Until they are forced to do so. This is a country insisting on good news, it keeps grasping the future. Glamorous it should be, that future, fulfilling itself through our thoughts, our labor. So that we will not get stuck in the present day, or even worse, in our sorrows. That would be a pure waste of time.”[vii]
Sternburg makes a similarly critical comment when she, very sharply and uncompromisingly, conveys American presence in the dialog of two women: “‘Do you know what I do’” one woman asks the other, “‘when I leave my parents’ apartment? You must never say another word about this, but I get into my car, roll up all the windows, and I scream.’ All over America, adults are screaming. I hear them in small towns in Maine, in front of doormen buildings on Park Avenue, and along the Wilshire Corridor of Los Angeles, screaming in sealed cars in border towns in Texas, in the driveways of two-family homes in Wisconsin, in Boston and La Crescenta. I hear America screaming, its grown children trying not to be heard.”[viii]
As in the passage quoted at the beginning of this essay, here too, the artist demonstrates her distinctive ability to symbolize complex contexts with few words and thus make them known more powerfully and also more sustaining. Janet Sternburg knows exactly what reality is like, even if she manages to make us perceive it in different ways through the words of her poetry and through changing lights in her photography. She does not require effects, montages or tricks; nothing would be further from her than to deceive with her art. What she sees is true and present. How she sees it, however, is lyrical, performative, extremely specific and in a rare, completed way, free.
“Fagelah” – the little bird – is the symbol of a creature we love and care for, but also of life which needs to detach and unfold. Janet Sternburg’s work stands for the secret of memory which—if we regard it as a picture, read it, and understand it—can redeem and liberate us.
Jörn Jacob Rohwer
Berlin, November 2005
Translated from German by Elisabeth Mecking
[i] Janet Sternburg: Phantom Limb, University of Nebraska Press (2003), Page 120.
[ii] Janet Sternburg: The Writer on her Work, W.W.Norton&Company (London, 2000).
[iii] Janet Sternburg: The Writer on her Work, Pages XX-Xxi.
[iv] Janet Sternburg: Long Exposure, Pages 184-185. In: Common Knowledge, Volume 3, Issue 1, Spring 1994.
[v] Janet Sternburg: Phantom Limb, Page 127.
[vi] Janet Sternburg: Long Exposure, Pages 184-185.
[vii] From: Jörn Jacob Rohwer: Hinter dem Ruhm, Steidl Verlag (Göttingen, 2005), Page 91. Transl. Elisabeth Mecking
[viii] Janet Sternburg: Phantom Limb, Pages 89-90.
© All rights are with the author. This text may not be printed, reproduced, or translated without the prior written permission of the author. The essay is being released for publication in the catalog The Behaviour of Light, which is published on the occasion of the November 2005 Berlin exhibition of the same title.