Leslie Dill: A Ten-Year Survey
by Jerome du Bois
Beware the withering hand of Leslie Dill. This bodiless bearer of blight drifts through the rooms of her ten-year survey at SMOCA, leaching the life from leaves, mummifying human forms, trailing skeins of skinny unreadable words, and parching every work of juice, blood, and above all, color. Let no sunrise’ yellow noise interrupt this ground. It’s mostly tea-stained cloth, grey wire, paper the shade of cicada shells, and I never saw black look sooo thin. When her hand comes to rest on the farthest wall (Divide Light#1, 2000), it even manages to drain the pain from its own meticulous dismemberment. Humans don’t bleed thread.
Dill shows other ways to create pain -- piercing, slicing, stitching, flaying -- with the flatness of affect one expects from a sociopath. No screams to swallow here. Emily Dickinson, the twisted sister of Amherst whom Dill uses as her muse, harbored malevolent passions under her tight white bodice. She used every one of those sadistic tropes: “I like a look of agony, because I know it’s True.” But Dill dessicates them all. A Thought Went Up My Mind Today (1996), for example, with a woman’s back peeling open, is merely an empty envelope, an elementary-school body-outline project without the stuffing.
Visionary (1995) is a tall cloth photo-piece showing a plain middle-aged woman in a white dress looking calmly out at the viewer. Thin blue lines run down from her mouth. The quotation under her capitalizes THRILL, and SUMPTUOUS, and RAPTURE, and AMAZED, and RAVISHED HOLINESS. But these feelings must be bursting out somewhere else. Absent emotions pervade these rooms like little black holes.
Even after ten years of reading her and, presumably, about her, Dill continues the Hallmark-hooey, hothouse-swoony image of Dickinson. But thirteen years ago Camille Paglia, in the final chapter of Sexual Personae, wrote the definitive take on this “greatest of woman poets” and original kitchen-drawer sadomasochist. Has Dill never read this revision? I doubt it; Paglia’s least sentence blows away Dill’s “emotions between the emotions.”
This self-described devourer of books, this word-lover, would rather tear up and tangle the poet’s powerful phrases than lay them out clearly. (The soul has bandaged mo.) Black thread letters stitched on black cloth do not make for legibility. When they’re ink-stamped in dribbling blotches along the bottom borders of some pieces, they become the visual equivalent of low-talking. Strung out on necklaces, they twist and turn but please do not touch. And deciphering the words in the wire works is like picking gnat shit out of pepper. Why does she want me to work so hard to simply read?
This degraded typography seems knowing, market-savvy, maybe a legacy of graphic guru David Carson. Her work is crawling with his kind of corrosive obscurantist deconstructions. This isn’t telling it slant, this is dangling your pomo credentials in my face. The wall works have a calculated, carefully-wrinkled commercial appeal. I can see especially the big pseudo-Duane Michals photos diminished to postcards and shrink-wrapped with dried flowers and a little hand milagro.
Poem Eyes (1995) is kitschy Klimt and again way oversized, as though Dill has seen too many of Beverly Semmes’s scale-is-all works. The long trailing drapery is unnecessary, cheap drama, as the catalog cover and inside photo implicitly admit: they both crop the piece two-thirds of the way down. Double Poem Ghost (1995) also hangs high up on the wall so you can’t read the words painted on the bodies, but you can revel in the pale, thin drapery which falls to the floor. The catalog crops this piece, too. (But wouldn’t they make precious money holders?)
There are other tells showing Dill’s enervated shallowness. For example, she seems inspired by the limpest thing William Blake ever wrote, something anyone would say: “All are capable of having dreams and seeing visions.” Waow. The aphorist of fire! and she chooses this inanity. Then, she makes yet another wire dress (not in show) as an homage to Frida Kahlo, who would set fire to it with her eyes and burn this disingenuous insult to her daily torture. And Punch (1998), a wimpy fist’s kiss on a kisser, was made by a woman who has never been hit.
Oh, Leslie Dill’s survey is trendy, thin, parched work, and it’s made me thirsty. You’ve been patient with this debut rant, so on the way to the pub -- it’s on you -- let’s close with Solomon Burke singing a verse of “Diamond in Your Mind,” by Waits & Brennan, which neatly combines poetry, dismemberment, and the juices of life:
Old Zerelda Samuels said she almost never prayed
Since she lost her right arm --
Blown off in a Pinkerton raid.
Then they lashed her to a windmill
With ol’ Three-Fingered Dave.
Now she’s 102, drinkin’ mint juleps in the shade,
With her good, strong hand. Here’s to living.
UPDATE: I was informed that I was misspelling Ms. Dill's first name. But if one Googles Leslie and Lesley, behold: very similar information. It's confusing, and if my catalog had not been stolen by someone down at Phoenix New Times, I would even now know how Dill herself prefers to spell her first name.