UNOCCUPIED ROOMS

	November 1, 1999
	Essayist Roger Rosenblatt examines the work of artist Jane Freeman.

ROGER ROSENBLATT: This is the working thesis of Jane Freeman, an artist of small worlds, who for the past 13 years has been creating a way to understand one's place in one's life. Freeman creates miniature rooms that contain everything but people. Yet they are not dollhouses minus the dolls. Rather, they are undersized structures that demand oversize imaginations. We are the people inside them. And at the same time, we are outside, too. We are in and out of the vacant lot in "Night Prowl"; in and out of Matisse's studio; players and audience in her scenes from "The Magic Flute;" lingerers and observers in "Van Gogh's Bedroom." We live and do not live in the "Lower East Side Tenement;" ride and do not ride the subway in "Below the City." In all her created universe, she creates a proposition: People are outside the world they live in. This paradox seems modernist, but it goes back and forward forever. There is a great deal more than cleverness in her work, but her work is exceptionally clever. She sees small, and has a near- magical ability to discover in the larger world objects that become other things in hers: Tea bags, napkin rings, toys, scraps of wire and wood, nails. In her small studio, which she does occupy in New York's Tribeca, I asked her to detail what went into her "Subway Platform." JANE FREEMAN: The girders are made out of shelf brackets. Heater filter backs are the fences. Bic lighters for the subway turnstiles. Orthodontia molds for the subway tunnel. There's a swatch watch up here that's the clock. There's a sink aerator here, which is perfect for the P.A. System-- looks just like it. ROGER ROSENBLATT: That eye of hers allows her to make visual jokes-- puns-- in her work. But more important is the cosmic joke she deals with: That we never really know where we are, even when we are responsible for where we are. In any room one occupies, one is aware of part of the room, but never the whole. The room is one's life. The room is the graveyard in "Don Giovanni," or a television studio, or Rousseau's dream. Or it is the room you are in right now. You know something of what it says about you-- the biography is implied. But it is also incomplete. You don't know where you fit in, exactly. You are not sure of your place in the world, in spite of the fact that you have made or chosen that place. In a sense, then, one creates all the evidence of a life, except oneself. One goes on a lifelong hunt to find small, substantial things, like one's soul. ROGER ROSENBLATT: Is there a spiritual element in your work? JANE FREEMAN: Well, I think so. It's like if you go into a vast, beautiful cathedral, you become overwhelmed. I think cathedrals were designed so that we could be experiencing the dazzlement of the whole cosmos, which is really too much for anybody to take. So you go into this great big, huge cathedral, and you find something small. You find a little altar; you find a sculpture, a statue; you find a candle. And you can center yourself on that, and in so doing, without losing any of the awe, but all of the overwhelmed feeling, you find yourself. And you discover that you are not so small after all. You're quite large. ROGER ROSENBLATT: What do you think when you get into a work of art? JANE FREEMAN: I think I have to get out of the way. It's very much like writing poetry. I think Dylan Thomas said that they way he writes poetry was that he throws all the letters of the alphabet up in the air, and they fall down on the page in perfect order. And it's really...that's the creative process for me, too. I don't have anything in mind. I don't make sketches, I don't have plans. I want to rediscover and discover, and search and research as I go along. It's all very spontaneous. ROGER ROSENBLATT: What Freeman does with this special form of art is to make one suddenly aware of the place of place in a life, of the effort to locate oneself on a number of levels, and we try to learn how to live. We all begin as unoccupied rooms. Freeman is openly driven by the fact that she finds the world beautiful, even when the world's rooms are spare, cold or menacing, and she discloses a beauty in every scrap she uses. Yet the unfathomable, imponderable beauty of the world lies in the people she does not create, who struggle to know where they are. Like Freeman, they too construct rooms out of everything they come upon, and then yearn to enter the lives they make. I'm Roger Rosenblatt.

REGIONS TOPICS RECENT PROGRAMS ABOUT US FEEDBACK SUBSCRIPTIONS / FEEDS:

Support the kind of journalism done by the NewsHour...Become a member of your local PBS station.
PBS Online Privacy Policy Copyright ©1996- MacNeil/Lehrer Productions. All Rights Reserved.