Snapshot of My Mother’s Bed

“I came to see the damage that was done / And the treasures that prevail” - Adrienne Rich (from “Diving into the Wreck”)

Mimi Weisbord. A Terrible Beauty. c. 2014. Oil on linen. 18 in. x 24 in. ©Estate of Mimi Weisbord

Two Houses is a newsletter of stories about art, feminism, grief, and Time excavated from the Soho loft where I grew up. Posts are free and illustrated with the work of my long-divorced parents, the painters Mimi Weisbord and Lennart Anderson.

After she went to memory care, it took us days to dig out my mother’s bed. My brother removed the initial layers (Underdog comics!) Then I continued with it—the Coldwater Creek colored pencils (purchased despite multiple professional sets in her studio), the Ziploc bag of all her expired passports, her pocketbook with hidden hundred-dollar bills, stained pillows, tangled sheets, letters from creditors, gallery show announcements, stuffed animals, adult diapers—a 21st-century flotsam, her bed an ocean shoreline. 

In 1999, the British artist Tracey Emin put her bed on display at the Tate Gallery in London. Preserved after a painful breakup, My Bed weeps unmade with used tissues, empty vodka bottles, lube, crushed cigarettes, soiled maxi pads, condoms; it exudes an anguished thirty-five-year-old woman’s misery. 

Learning of My Bed online, I recalled Mom’s futon and decided it was her final masterwork. It was, after all, as intentional as anything else she did that year. Try as I might to replace it, she’d always return to that cluttered bed, raging against me (and her limitations). That year, on the wall above her futon, she hung one of her chaotic industrial paintings—an “accidental still life” shown at Prince Street Gallery in 2014—a jumbled collection of metal pipes and lumber, the work that grieved her neighborhood’s ongoing life-choking transformations. Considered together, her bed seemed to interiorize Soho’s street-level disorder to suggest those canvases were prescient of her mind’s troubled end.

Jasper Johns is famous for painting targets and American flags (“Take an object,” he prescribed for making art. “Do something to it. Do something else to it.”) Reading about him and others, I’m struck by how success as an artist can also be this simple: you stake it. You take yourself very, very seriously, presume you’re in the right place at the right time, respond to and help create the moment’s cultural zeitgeist. In 1999, Emin was ridiculed for calling her bed “art.” In 2014, My Bed sold at auction for over $3.7 million. 

Surely, 2019 was the right moment for my mother’s futon: on the cusp of climate disaster with a global aging population’s tidal wave of dementia gathering to roll across a planet suffocating with stuff. To me, Mom’s bed was an elaborate paradoxical expression of excess, grief, and loss. It spoke of confinement and a life diminished, yet expansively evoked life’s passages, passions, frailty, finality. 

I imagine it titled Bed End. I imagine its fabulous critical reception. “Exploring the idea of hoarding in order to complicate conventional binary oppositions between living and dying.” We should never have dismantled it. We could have made it a pop-up exhibit—right where she’d lived for more than forty years—in City Studios, a Soho artists cooperative. “Conversing with Emin, Weisbord demands equal attention to despair at life’s end while acknowledging time’s lived compaction; objects evoke a vibrant midlife as well as more childlike sensibilities.”

Returning to that futon again and again, Mimi defied me, building off Emin’s confessional construction, perhaps, as critics say, “investigating how abjection can be a tool for subversion.” It’s only fair. Emin’s work extends feminist discourses begun decades earlier by women like my mother. Mimi would have recognized that. Likely, she knew all about Emin’s bed. 

Diving into her wreck, I’ve learned never to underestimate my mother.