Spitting on hegel

January 24 - February 22, 2020
coolspace @ artspace

Novelist Carolyn Breedlove received the Critical Mass 7 Critic’s Choice award in the Literary Category for her excerpt from this featured novel, Spitting on Hegel. This exhibition pulls the viewer into the setting of the novel - 1970’s Los Angeles during the height of the punk movement - allowing the readers to truly feel immersed in the story.

STATEMENT FROM THE ARTIST

A naïve, sheltered young woman grows up in the 1950s and 60s in a small town in Louisiana’s Acadian prairie. On a scholarship, she becomes the first in her family to attend college. She does the expected thing: marries, and soon follows her husband across country to Los Angeles. She leaves behind her best friend, a more impudent, outspoken girl from the “wrong side of the tracks,” who has wound up trapped in an abusive marriage. She takes with her the memories of the beloved older brother who always encouraged her not only to learn, but to think and question, now officially MIA in Vietnam. 

The city at the edge of the continent offers a range of possibilities unimaginable in the quiet streets and fields of home. Before long the marriage, its very reason for being unclear, falls apart. Freed from its constraints, and increasingly, the other expectations of her upbringing, she joins the democratic socialist New American Movement. She falls into a relationship with a man she meets there. As always, her own sardonic commentary unspools in her head, sparing no one, least of all herself. Memories of her childhood—her brother, her overbearing mother, the mutual support of the friendship she seems to have lost—come to her in flashbacks. 

As she struggles to become a published writer, she works a variety of jobs. Finally, overcoming her innate shyness and insecurities, she lands the position of Whisky a Go Go cocktail waitress on the Sunset Strip, just as punk rock begins to flower in the spring of 1977. The new relationship founders on her lover’s infidelity, but she immerses herself in the raucous, no-holds-barred explosion of music against a backdrop of Star Wars, the neutron bomb, the Hillside Strangler, extreme political upheaval in Italy, West Germany, Argentina, South Africa, Chile. In some ways punk is a visceral, audible rejection of establishment mores and agendas, sans the political theory. 

With new friends from political radicals, to other women writers, to a kind, gay black artist who takes her under his wing, to cynical opportunists and dangerous sexual encounters, life’s experiences continue. She begins, gradually, a serious relationship with a guitarist who encourages her writing. She summons the courage to submit reviews, commentaries she has been writing about punk, to music magazines, which to her amazement are accepted. When friends back in Acadiana stage an intervention and put her childhood friend and her daughter on a bus to L.A., one of her closest bonds is restored. Once physically recovered, the friend astonishes her by plunging headlong into the punk scene herself.

EXHIBITING ARTIST:
Carolyn Breedlove

ARTIST BIO

A researcher, historian, and writer, CarolynBreedlove lives in Natchitoches, Louisiana. She edited and annotated the antebellum journal, A Glorious Day: The Journal of a Central Louisiana Governess, 1853-1854 (Red River X-press Historical Publications). Her poems have appeared in publications including Artemis, Comstock Review, Wisconsin Review, The Bastille, New Millennium Writings, and Maple Leaf Rag, and are included in anthologies such as Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse and Drought: The Absence of Something Specified. They were aired on former Louisiana Poet Laureate Darrell Bourque’s radio program “From the Poet’s Bookshelf,” and will be heard on the NPR network Red River Radio’s “Pause for Poetry.” Finishing Line Press published a chapbook of her poems, Just Following the River. In between growing up and living again in Louisiana, she lived for many years in southern California; she is currently seeking a publisher for her first novel, set in 1970s Los Angeles.