Massaging the message of marriage.
Imagine, for a moment, that you are Irina Zerkin. You're a young, sophisticated woman from Brooklyn with aspirations to complete a law degree and work in advocacy and activist situations for the general betterment of the world.
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In the meantime, you scratch your creative itch by earning an undergraduate degree in art. You know yourself, understand your motivations and disdain societal conventions that have disempowered women and promoted ridiculous stereotypes. Therefore, as much as you love and adore all the Jewish relatives you are surrounded by on a vacation to Palm Beach, Fla., their incessant prodding about when you're going to marry a doctor and bang out a couple of puppies can be tiresome, if not testing.
Why then, do you find yourself weeping with desire for a bargain-basement, off-the-rack wedding dress when a commercial for David's Bridal interrupts the television show you idly flipped on for refuge?
Well, if you really were Irina Zerkin, you'd embrace, examine and exorcise your desire by turning the urge into a project for your experimental painting ***image1***class at the College of Santa Fe. Cozying up to the notion of experimental and dropping any pretense of painting, Zerkin bought a dress and held a ceremony on April 5, in which she married herself and committed to spending 30 days in her wedding dress.
I recently spent a couple of hours with Zerkin as she ran errands with 10 days left to go on her commitment clock. As we walked from the college campus to a nearby bus stop, she admitted that the dress had taken on an "earthy" smell. But aside from a few streaks of dirt and some gravel-aided entropy that surrounds the base, the dress was in surprisingly good shape (it turns out that she removes it for sleeping and exercising). People driving past too quickly to notice the dress' grubbiness or to fixate on the black hoodie adorned with the image of a switchblade that Zerkin has donned to fend off the afternoon's chill, have a tendency to honk or shout, "Congratulations!"
When given the opportunity for a closer look, a kind of discomfort seeps into the eyes of observers.
"Your dress is dirty," people say as we jaywalk on St. Michael's Drive. On the packed bus, people scramble to offer up a seat to Zerkin; she's either the belle of the ball, homeless and crazy or a new bride having a really challenging day. When asked if she was just married, Zerkin brightly responds, "Yes!…Twenty days ago."
This is not the expected answer and smiles slowly turn from genuine to strained. Often, at this point, Zerkin will hand over a wedding-invitation-style flyer that invites people to visit her project's blog (committedblog.blogspot
.com). This might be met with enthusiasm, confusion or, in a place like Santa Fe, mild exasperation at the endless intrusions made in the name of art.
In the Whole Foods Market, Zerkin casually wanders the aisles, occasionally reaching far enough over to reveal her sensible Converse kicks. Trailing her at a distance, I watch the varied expressions of passers-by: reverie, nostalgia, apprehension.
Zerkin's project is fine situationist work. Routine is unhinged, the ordinary falls away and wonder takes over a moment of people's lives. Sometimes the only sound is the swishing of her dress as she walks through a group of people who have no words. But Zerkin is after more, or believes she should be. Does a wedding dress symbolize the commoditized value of women? Does loving (and marrying) oneself challenge the kind of "heteronormative" culture that creates Defense of Marriage Acts and hypocritical, secretly same-sex-seeking senators?
There is no doubt that Zerkin has empirically proven the sensitivities tied to the idea of a wedding dress. It is a specific ritual object and to use the object outside of its prescription is to trigger reactions. I'm unconvinced that such reactions amount to discourse on the level Zerkin claims to desire. To be too certain of the political message and the value of one's artwork is to risk pandering to an audience that may, eventually, be comprised of friends and opportunist allies.
Experimentation with art, with symbol, with situation and response, is more effective at its most open end, so it is the insistence upon message, upon directed discourse, upon the desire to subsume desire, that causes Zerkin's performance to falter. Sometimes art is best as art and ideas about how to live are best expressed by living them.
On a purely performative, instigatory level, Zerkin's work is a resounding success. People's minds do flex, the more so when they are free to go with their own private prevailing winds. On the bus back to the college, a man shyly asks what she's doing. He doesn't get the bigger picture, but he understands that she's still wearing her dress and, after thinking on it, decides that's cool.
"It's who you are, it's your heart and you're wearing it," he says, before confiding that he sometimes dresses in drag himself.
Zerkin smiles and responds, "It's fun to dress up like a girl, isn't it?"
