Remembering Joan Didion, beyond her words

— “Pacific Distances” (1979-1991)

LOS ANGELES — In her 1970 novel “Play It as It Lays,” Joan Didion’s troubled protagonist Maria obsessively practices a daring drive throughout 4 lanes of Los Angeles freeway site visitors with out touching her brakes. Now, just a few miles from that notorious merge spot, reminiscences and connections to Didion, a fifth-generation Californian and iconic author, fill a sprawling present of visible artwork and literature.

In “Joan Didion: What She Means” at UCLA’s Hammer Museum, the primary exhibition about Didion since her December 2021 loss of life, her presence and world come to mind in some ways. Quotes from her writing about driving and far more cowl the partitions, and archival gadgets about her and her household abound. The gallery house is full of work, sculptures, images and movies from all kinds of artists, constructing a portrait of Didion as in a collage.

“I needed to point out the trajectory of and improvement of somebody’s consciousness,” says the present’s curator, Hilton Als, a employees author on the New Yorker who teaches about writing at Columbia College and the College of California at Berkeley. Als, who developed a friendship with Didion after he met her within the mid-Nineties, prompt the thought of an exhibition to Didion in 2019. He had beforehand curated exhibits on writers James Baldwin and Toni Morrison and needed to deliver Didion’s work and life to a museum in California. Als says Didion replied, “Will probably be lovely.”

Als, who began studying Didion within the Seventies, remembers being jolted by the primary line of her 1977 novel, “A Book of Common Prayer”: “I will likely be her witness.” “It actually modified my sense, that you would bear witness by means of writing,” Als says.

The multilayered exhibition goals to commemorate Didion and prolong her work. What units it aside, says the Hammer’s chief curator, Connie Butler, is that “the literary voice has equal footing to the visible artwork. … The massive concept is the thought of narrating a life by means of visible artwork, by means of the author’s journey, led by the author’s voice.”

Planning for the present was delayed and adjusted first by covid after which by Didion’s loss of life at 87. Als says Didion’s “unbelievable validation” of the exhibition buoyed him and all others as they ready it.

“That is what I wish to let you know about: what it’s to return from a spot like Sacramento. If I might make you perceive that, I might make you perceive California … for Sacramento is California, and California is a spot by which a growth mentality and a way of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.”

— “Notes From a Native Daughter” (1965)

By giant rooms of white partitions and blond flooring, 4 chapters unfold representing Didion’s life: Holy Water, Sacramento-Berkeley, 1934-56; Goodbye to All That, 1956-63; The White Album, California, 1964-88; and Sentimental Journeys: New York-Miami-Honolulu-San Salvador, 1988-2021.

In every is a mix of objects whose references to Didion are apparent, in addition to ones which can be extra symbolic. “One of many issues that I’ve been attempting to do is to re-instill just a bit thriller,” Als says. “You need to sit together with her work due to the density of her prose, and likewise she’s an important crystallizer of knowledge.”

Within the introductory Sacramento-Berkeley part, there are a lot of private gadgets, corresponding to furnishings from Didion’s household dwelling in Sacramento, the signal for her father’s insurance coverage enterprise and the potato masher introduced throughout the plains by Didion’s great-great-great-grandmother in 1846 (written about by Didion in “Where I Was From”). Many images of Didion are included.

On the identical time, there are gadgets whose connections to Didion are extra summary. Winding round on the ground of a room is “River,” a mixed-media set up with metal chains and twine by Maren Hassinger. Close by is Alan Saret’s copper wire sculpture “Blazing Be,” which resembles a tumbleweed.

“I imply possibly I used to be holding all of the aces, however what was the sport?”

— “Play It as It Lays” (1970)

Violence is a key theme within the exhibition, because it was in Didion’s work, particularly within the Sixties and Seventies. “The middle was not holding,” Didion wrote in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” bending a line of William Butler Yeats poetry. Her writing at the moment helped set up her and contained a lot about gritty, violent conditions, and the exhibition represents that.

A portray by Vija Celmins of a hand holding a pistol factors to a room that features objects corresponding to images of a pregnant Sharon Tate, quickly to be murdered in 1969 by members of the Manson Household, and violence on the Altamont music competition that 12 months. Facet by aspect are movies of Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Military robbing a San Francisco financial institution in 1974 and “Invocation of My Demon Brother,” Kenneth Anger’s 1969 fictional movie, a sinister, jarring quick with a coloration palette strikingly much like the financial institution theft footage.

Didion’s writing, identified for its staccato, exact model, is highlighted all through. She and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, turned amongst Hollywood’s most dependable screenwriters. Their credit embrace variations of “Play It as It Lays” and James Mills’s “The Panic in Needle Park,” and the 1976 reboot of “A Star Is Born.” Typescripts are integrated within the exhibit, together with film posters and movies.

Amongst greater than 60 artists represented within the present are well-known painters (Wayne Thiebaud, Richard Diebenkorn, Pat Steir), photographers (Diane Arbus, Brigitte Lacombe, Jeffrey Henson Scales, Irving Penn) and sculptors (Amanda Williams, a present MacArthur fellow; Liz Larner), in addition to many much less acquainted names.

The exhibition’s catalogue, with greater than 100 illustrations from the present, additionally consists of reprints of three lesser-known Didion essays, “In Reward of Unhung Wreaths and Love,” “Planting a Tree Is Not a Approach of Life,” and “The 12 months of Hoping for Stage Magic.”

Within the last room, about her final New York years when she did extra political writing and books concerning the deaths of her husband and daughter, Quintana Roo, who died of pancreatitis and septic shock at 39, Didion is a literal presence by means of the audio of her 2006 Paris Assessment interview with Als. The room fills together with her voice, and she or he talks about all kinds of topics — like by no means writing a novel with out first rereading Joseph Conrad’s “Victory,” lacking California sunsets when in New York, and her struggles to jot down.

Als asks her whether or not the opportunity of changing into a author began when she went to Berkeley. “No, it started to really feel not possible,” she says of her school expertise. “Every part had already been carried out by individuals who knew find out how to do it.”

Solely after time did her confidence enhance sufficient for her to become the author she turned.

“Joan Didion: What She Means” is on the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles by means of Feb. 19. Will probably be on the Pérez Artwork Museum Miami from July 13, 2023, till Jan. 7, 2024.