emma
bernstein
by Douglas Messerli
irresolvable
pulls of life
I knew the young writer,
photographer, interviewer, and simply beautiful Emma Bee Bernstein since she
was a baby. On my many visits to her parents, often staying at Charles and
Susan’s New York apartment, I watched her grow up from a often-crying baby, to
a young child who for a short period was almost fixated with cleanliness (“she
often took up a toy broom to clean away debris indoors and outdoors”), to a
good-looking teenager who had little time for her parent’s friends as she made
her way through high school and then through the University of Chicago, from
where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors in Visual Arts
and Art History, a period during which I rarely saw her except on occasional
visits home.
Her senior thesis concerned issues of feminism and fashion in
contemporary photography, the later interest in which I am sure was encouraged
through her close relationship with where grandmother, Sherry Bernstein who
remained a kind of elderly fashion figure until her death. As part of her
thesis, she exhibited a photographic series titled Masquerade, works of
which were later exhibited at A.I.R. Galley in New York City, at the Smart
Museum in Chicago, and at the University of Chicago.
At the University she was photo-editor of the Chicago Maroon and
was featured in The New York Times for her work in Vita Excolatur,
a University of Chicago erotica magazine.
Henry Hills made a film around her, Emma’s Dilemma, which began
with her interviewing significant figures in 1997 when she was only 12, and was
completed finally in 2002.
Hills writes of that film:
“She had just turned 12 in 1997 when
we began shooting. The project was to consist of her interviewing a range of
artists about their work. Poet Jackson Mac Low was the first subject, followed
after a few months by interviews with Ken Jacobs and Richard Foreman which
became separate films, Nervous Ken (2003) and King Richard
(2004). We continued working together on a more or less regular basis until she
was 16 and then did a final shoot the next year.
As we progressed I felt the main center of focus subtly shifting from my
artist subjects to my teen protagonist. I had all along intended to take an
experimental (rather than documentary) approach to the interview material, to
fragment and reassemble it in various ways, frequently riffing on the subjects'
own work, exploring qualities of this new medium of digital video. In this
final version these explorations strangely function as interstitial material.
When an exhibit of Emma's polaroids was announced at Microscope Gallery
in Brooklyn, my longtime dear friend, poet Charles Bernstein, Emma's father,
asked me to put together some unseen outtakes out of the 30 or so hours I had
shot with Emma. I took this opportunity to finally finish this project which
had lain dormant for so many years.”
Emma also worked as a curatorial
assistant in the Photography, Contemporary Art, and Prints & Drawings
departments at the Art Institute of Chicago, at the Renaissance Society, and
was a docent at the Smart Museum. She was a Teaching Artist at the Museum of Contemporary
Art in Chicago, and was a mentor for Step Up Women’s Network. In New York City,
she was a docent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum.
A.I.R. Gallery has named one of its yearly Emerging Artist’s Fellowship Program
Awards in her honor.
Belladonna #4, which features Bernstein’s writing and
photographs, was published by Belladonna Books in 2009. GirlDrive:
Criss-Crossing America, Mapping Feminism by Emma Bee Bernstein and Nona
Willis Aronowitz was published by Seal Press in October 2009.
And then, a tragic event which shall always remain inexplicable and
confusing, happened. In December 2008, while working as intern at the Peggy
Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy, Emma committed suicide.
The piece below was begun soon after I received a call from the
Bernstein’s friend Nick Piombino and talked with both Charles and Susan on
December 20th.
Los Angeles, November 4, 2022
*
The saddest event for me in a very distressing
year was a telephone call from my dear friends Charles Bernstein and Susan Bee
on the afternoon of Saturday, December 20th, reporting that their daughter Emma
had died in Venice at the age of 23.
She had gone to Venice to work as an intern at the Peggy Guggenheim
Collection, but despite that achievement and a recent contract with Seal Press
for the publication of GirlDrive, a
photographic and written tour of the country she made with her friend Nona
Willis Aronowitz, Emma had been recently depressed, a condition apparently
exacerbated by a car accident during the summer. Her father had flown to Venice
to see her, spending some days with her touring cathedrals and museums, where
she delighted in pointing out to her father the dazzling beauty of the art.
The family spoke with her every day, sometimes several times, but just
before her death they had not been able to reach her where she was staying,
finally deciding to call her at the museum. Emma had taken a break from work,
and the person they reached said she had left work early because she was not
feeling well. A few hours later, when they called back, they found out that
Emma had committed suicide in the museum.
I feel uneasy even describing these
events, because I would rather think that she was incapable of such acts,
particularly given her ebullient personality and the deep love she felt for her
family—and theirs for her. Emma seemingly had everything to live for: she was
beautiful, highly gifted intellectually and artistically, and a naturally
curious being who seemed destined to achieve acclaim in creative endeavors she
had already begun.
For several years, beginning when she
was only 12 years of age, film director Henry Hills had documented a series of
interviews she conducted with major creative figures, including Susan Howe,
Richard Foreman, Tony Oursler, Bruce Andrews, Fiona Templeton, Jackson Mac Low,
and others. That film, Emma’s Dilemma,
had recently premiered to laudatory reviews, particularly noting Emma’s ability
to ask probing and unusual questions that brought fascinating and revealing
responses from her interviewees.
Howard and I had been out that
afternoon of December 20th buying a Christmas tree, and were just
beginning the ritual of hanging ornaments upon it—one of my favorite activities
of each year—when the Bernstein’s close friend Nick Piombino called from their
apartment in New York where he had rushed to comfort them upon hearing the
news. I talked briefly to Charles, who wept at some length. Susan was unable to
speak.
When the conversation ended, I turned to Howard and also burst into
tears. It was a sad evening, and all night I stayed awake trying to understand
why Emma, who had seemed so indomitable for so much of her life, would have
brought it to such a tragic ending.
I was reminded that just the day before I had had lunch with Diane Ward,
who asked after Emma (she was soon to perform in the same series that Emma,
Susan, and Marjorie Perloff planned to celebrate for another of Emma’s books,
published by the feminist press Belladonna). I had known Emma from her birth,
and watched her all the years of her young girlhood, but had not seen her often
since she gone off to the University of Chicago, from which she graduated with
honors in 2007.
“I don’t know,” I told Diane. “I’ll have to ask Charles and Susan.”
Now I suddenly knew that she had been suffering, suffering from
something that, as her father expressed it in his eulogy at her funeral, “grabbed
hold of her hand and would not let go, no matter how fiercely she fought... We
know Emma was always fierce so let it not go unacknowledged that in her last
moments she struggled fiercely and with all her soul against something more
powerful than she had ever known. Emma showed the same courage in her last days
as she did throughout her life; the courage that made her seem to herself
invincible and to us indomitable – a blazing force of nature, a fiery comet
that lit up our lives, burning so bright it sometimes blinded, sometimes
scalded, burning until suddenly, catastrophically, the ball of fire that she was
expired.”
On the 21st, I again called the Bernsteins, this time talking to Charles’ mother Sherry, as well as Charles, Susan, and their son Felix. All were suffering awfully, but Susan was clearly having the most difficult time of it, repeating, as I had the night before, “why? why? why?” The family was now faced with the difficulty of retrieving Emma’s body from Italy. Fortunately, the head of the museum had had experience, in the instance of Peggy Guggenheim’s death.
All that night I kept wishing that what we all knew to be true, that she
had in fact died, was a lie, that
somehow it had been a terrible mistake, an error of reporting, that she would
somehow rise like Lazarus from the event and return to her parents and friends.
Strangely, when Emma was only two years of age, I wrote a poem for her
that was titled “Lazarus: A Parable,” a poem beginning with a created maxim of
my Maxims from My Mother’s Milk:
To write is to bring the lie of life upright.
____________________________
lazarus: a parable
for Emma Bee Bernstein
Now you are
To become E
Ventually who
‘ve only begun
To uncover, slip
The blanket back
Rise, walk
Before their eyes
Become adjusted
To your size, speak
Against the old wives’
Tales told you
About this place, there’s a
door
A street. Everyone’s hungry.
Meat the earth
With your feat!
It was not really about a death and
resurrection for me at the time, but about the wonder of a child growing up so
quickly before our eyes to become someone different from anyone in the past, a
person who could represent sustenance of the human race through their acts,
acts undefined by the past.
Emma was, in fact, such a person, a young woman who would “meat/meet”
the earth with her achievements. But now she would not rise, like Lazarus, no
matter how much we might wish. She had been taken down by some inner demon who
would not let her go. Her father described such a terrible situation in his
moving eulogy:
“I wish I could use some black
magic, fueled by all our grief, and bring Emma back. I wish, like, Orpheus, I
could go now to the underworld to call her back to life, as my trip to Venice
now seems like a journey to Hades, travelling alone by boat to a dream-like
world of water and labyrinthine streets in a vain effort to rescue her. And yet
every day I think there must be a way, that of all people, Emma, like the
Houdini she was, would find a way; only to have such idle waves of compulsive
thoughts smashed on the shores of reality.”
Emma, it is now clear, was being torn by the inner and outer self. On
one hand she could describe her book as being “about gutsy young women across
the American cityscape. It’s about the past and the present, and it glimmers on
the future. It’s about the promise of the open road.” And yet, as she
revealingly wrote in her essay “What I Learned in School Today: A Soliloquy of
Sorts,” Emma felt an irrefutable pull between that gutsy future and her inner
self: “All inner and outer life finds itself irresolvable,” she writes. “Attempts
at talking through the
images and through words are always rendered through a web of misunderstanding;
the requirement of a medium in all communication always necessarily dilutes and
warps the message. ...[there is a] fundamental disconnect between our inner
cognition and our image in the mirror.”
Her brother, 16-year-old Felix, was the wisest of all, even while
singing at the funeral the poignant Cole Porter ode to loss, “Everytime We Say
Goodbye,” advising his parents that they must not think of Emma’s death, but of
her life. The first two paragraphs of Felix’s own statements about Emma’s death
clearly testify to immense possibilities recognized in youth:
"I can’t help thinking of the line, 'When one door closes, another opens,' and what that has meant to me in the
past few weeks. One door has closed, just as all my doors were opening, all my
lights turning on. And now to go through those doors is going to mean something
entirely different. My path was disrupted yet has not changed. My destiny will
have a loss in its memory, to be the background of whatever my foreground
becomes. But I walk the path just the same, learning to embrace the shadows
that follow me. Emma’s writings suggested that one must be despite
polarities. One such polarity, life and death, is something that will be hard
to ignore. Yet I will persist in my loving of Emma. Our love was never
constrained to life and death, anyway, and it won’t start now.
How artists around me have understood
this demonstrates how coping requires you to find the process that means the
most to you. I sang at the funeral – “Everytime We Say Goodbye.” To the
audience it may have been a comfort to hear a musical expression of their
grief. To me it was a comfort to express my doors paradox: As I said goodbye,
it was time for me to say hello, to announce myself as an adult to the over 400
people present and to sing in front of them: expose my destiny to them."
As pained as we all are about the death
of this beautiful young woman, Felix, I suggest, is right. Despite those darker
pulls on our souls, we must all move through that new door. As I tried to tell
Emma in that long-ago poem: “About this place, there’s a door / A street”; we
each have no choice but to walk through the doors to our destinies.
Los Angeles,
January 3, 2003
