“One good thing about being a woman is we haven’t too many examples yet of what a genius looks like. It could be me.” Sheila Heti wrote this line in her 2010 book How Should a Person Be? and a thousand well-behaved girls who treat their art like it’s going to affect their grade point average underlined it, posted it to their Tumblr, and fervently whispered into the pages, “Me.”
The last fifteen years or so have been ardently dedicated to figuring out what a woman genius looks like. Much of this has focused on digging through the past, trying to trace matrilineal pathways in and around the artistic canon. Publishing, art museums, historians, and film scholars have sought out “rediscovered voices” to exploit and establish. While much of this work has been invigorating, the backward glance toward the overlooked, the forgotten, and the inappropriately maligned has given our culture a nostalgic feel, one lacking in vigor and direction.
It’s also unfortunate that this time coincided with the rise of the schoolmarm and the nebulous force known as “cancel culture” — which somehow encompasses both prison time for violent acts and people being mean about celebrities on Reddit. So every time someone did find a woman genius in the back catalog, someone else was there to say “well, actually” and let us know every bad thing they ever did. So the Virginia Woolf monument in Tavistock Square has a QR code that will take you to a site that will tell you in which ways she’s problematic. Doris Lessing got two books explaining what a bad mother she was, with more surely to come.
This combination has led mediocre and middlebrow women artists to be crowned as “geniuses.” If Woolf and Lessing are unavailable due to antisemitism and lack of maternal instinct, we’re going to have to look through the bargain bin for replacements. The only thing that explains the cultural celebration of, say, Greta Gerwig or Sofia Coppola as “auteurs” is that neither one is complicated or interesting enough to do anything that could make them a target of cancel culture.
Emmalea Russo is interested in this tension between the demands for both geniuses and good girls, and she presents us with Vivienne, the story of a forgotten artist whose work is being rediscovered both through artistic reappreciation and through cancellation. She is a target because of an incident from her past, involving the death of another female artist, and the event is shrouded in enough ambiguity to linger in the collective consciousness. The backlash around this possible murder, possible assisted suicide, possible unlucky happenstance gets Vivienne Volker’s work removed from a group show at a national museum, but the backlash to the backlash gets her a solo show at another gallery.
Russo’s women are fake, but the male artist their lives and reputations revolve around is real. Russo conjures heirs — biological and artistic — for Surrealist sculptor and fucked-up dollmaker Hans Bellmer. Vivienne is written as Bellmer’s last love, and her daughter Velour is the result of their problematic age-gap union. It’s a strange choice of Russo’s to center the story around Bellmer and his very real works of art, one that suggests that the masculine part of the canon is so immovable it resists even imaginary intervention.
Russo needs to do some work to establish her fake artist Vivienne as a real genius and not one of these nice ladies with an MFA. She does this mostly by associating her with the already established geniuses: men. Vivienne is Bellmer’s counterpart — he makes mutant dolls, she makes clothes for mutant dolls. Her book of poetry is titled The Machine-Gunneress in a State of Grace, after one of his sculptures. Russo describes Vivienne’s work as “clothes for the misshapen and deformed. Wool and silk coverings for nubs, a set of trousers with four leg holes, and a bra with one cup, a skinny boa made from pubic hair.” There’s a sense that with more “feminine” media like textile, fashion, fiber, and quilting the whole institution of art had to change to see forms once dismissed as mere ladylike “craft.” The art world’s reappraisal of Vivienne marks not only a triumph of identity politics and DEI efforts but also a shift toward redefining what art and genius is and can be.
But Vivienne has been missing from the public eye for decades, and rather than stockpiling unseen work she seems to have been domesticated. The novel’s opening finds her living with her daughter and granddaughter (also the offspring of a genius, dead male artist) in rural Pennsylvania. Velour is tasked with managing the family legacy, holding onto the works of both her parents, and doing her best to manage her mother’s cancellation. Her own daughter Vesta is your typical precocious child character, a preternaturally wise 7-year-old who says quirky things.
But Vivienne never coalesces into a character; she never emerges from this genius façade to become a person. Russo seems uncomfortable with Vivienne, as if she’s not sure, in the words of Heti, “what a genius looks like” if she’s a woman. Russo is much more adept at rendering the secondary characters, from Lars, a gallery owner with disordered eating and a habit of reading profound theological texts as if they were business motivation self-help books, to Velour, who is anxious about carrying the genetic burden of two genius parents and has retreated into caretaking their oeuvre to avoid confronting her own limitations.
Vivienne’s backstory is barely sketched in: as a character she just swings from being an inappropriate granny figure with a much younger lover to a towering genius the uneducated masses can’t possibly understand. We don’t see her at work, as she seems to have given it up. And other than a reference to an inappropriate Bergman film she showed her granddaughter, there’s no engagement with other people’s work either. How she feels about her cancellation, about her reacceptance, about her work at all, is a blank. We do, instead, get detailed descriptions of her clothing. Russo does not seem to have access to her character’s consciousness, so she distracts with external details.
The controversy surrounding Vivienne has to do with her involvement with a fellow artist and fellow lover of Bellmer, Wilma Lang, who fell/was pushed/jumped out a window. But there’s also in Vivienne an artist named Paulina Paz who was allegedly pushed by her husband “from her studio window onto the sidewalk.” But she survived. She’s better now. The real-life parallel seems not to be the obvious out-the-window-artist Ana Mendieta and more the love triangle between Robert and Nancy Graves and their shared mistress poet Laura Riding. Riding one night went out the window and survived, an event retold by Robert Graves in the play But It Still Goes On. In the story of Riding and the Graves’ there is something similar about the tension and love between a wife and a mistress, the once-shocking-now-banal bohemian experimentation of the artistic household, and the fight over who is the central and who is the peripheral, who is the artist and who is the muse.
Women are always going out the window; someone should do something. The history of art is filled with these airborne ladies, and their recurring appearance throughout the novel suggests an urgency around the problem of these women. How to constitute a canon of woman genius when so many of them were obliterated by men, either murdered or discouraged or turned into mothers and wives? And how to talk about this violence without turning complicated people into just another true crime victim, with how she died overshadowing everything she did while alive, as has happened with Mendieta? These are interesting questions raised but not resolved — or even taken very seriously — by Russo.
Same with the “mystery” that opens the novel — did Vivienne Volker kill Wilma Lang? Russo holds it up to the light and then lets it crash to the floor, not out of an interest in complexity or ambiguity but simply from distractibility. There’s no revelation, the mystery is solved with an offhand comment and then things move on.
It’s almost paradoxical, Russo’s intense but only occasional attention to detail combined with a sloppiness that starts to make the book a chore. She clearly cares enough about Vivienne to layer it with meaning. The women artists are all Vs, all sharp edges and piercing presences: Vivienne, Velour, Vesta. All their hangers-on are Ls, squares and dullards, Lisa and Lars and Lou. Sometimes the prose is polished to a shine. “The silvery alchemical vigor of needles — mend, kill, cure, poison, rip.” But often it’s listless and banal, repeating itself for no narrative or stylistic reason. As the novel switches perspectives from one character to another, conversations of no real importance get retold with only negligible differences, as if there isn’t enough to distinguish one character from another to justify the experimental narration.
Russo also gives voice to the mob by inserting the comments made on social media by Vivienne’s cancellers. This could be innovative, as the collection of posts acts as a kind of chorus of the societal superego. The comments of fans, normies, and the outraged deliver a running assessment of the acceptable and unacceptable in the case of Vivienne’s return to the public eye but also of art, morality, and women’s lives in general. There is page after page of these messages of imagined indignation, and one hopes that they add up to something in the end. They don’t.
But, also, the comments in Vivienne are very tame. “DO BETTER! she. Is. A. PREDATOR” etc. It is a censored version of what these online conversations are really like. The cancellation process is a strange one. Transvestigators will reliably show up to insist that no matter what the gender of the cancelled, they can tell, from bone structure and close examination of the victim’s throat, they were originally the opposite sex as what they are claiming now. There are hours-long videos on YouTube about how Marina Abramović gets together with Jay-Z and Hillary Clinton to drink the blood of trafficked children. Poor dead Basquiat gets routinely accused of Satanism, along with Balenciaga execs, fashion models, and pop stars. Even the cancellation of painter Dana Schutz for racial insensitivity in her painting of Emmett Till culminated in an open letter where famous writers and artists demanded the Whitney not just remove her painting but destroy it. Several pages of text of anonymous accounts at-ing a museum’s account “WHAT THE FUCK” doesn’t compare, nor does it manage insight, into what these demands for ethical and moral purity are really about.
But this is a problem with Vivienne as a whole, its refusal to get weird or dark for very long. For a novel about artists who are supposedly deviants and weirdos, it is remarkably housetrained. There are flashes in the work to suggest Emmalea Russo might have a bit of brilliance to her. But for whatever she writes next, let’s hope her genius kills her inner good girl.
Jessa Crispin is the author of My Three Dads and The Dead Ladies Project, The Creative Tarot, and Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto. She has written for many publications, some of which are still in existence. She is the editor-in-chief of the publication The Culture We Deserve.