I am drawn back to Molly Zuckerman-Hartung’s website all the time.
I first dug it up last spring, after a particularly jarring morning in her drawing class. She’d been slinking around the classroom, lecturing us on our charcoal drawings being too timid, too contained, and was getting more animated by the minute. She threw her sentences like punches, swinging her arms, fighting the shoulder-stiffness of her navy blue blazer: “The drawing is filthy, it’s the waste left over after the gesture of living. You hate it. It’s going to eat itself if you don’t—for the love of God—wrestle with it and save it from itself!”
I told her that sounded angsty. She swiveled and barked, “Ha, fuck you!”
I left the class disoriented and kind of entranced by the strangeness of this interaction. I googled her that night. Her website, mollyzuckermanhartung.com, opens up to a splash screen of the alphabet and navigating through it is an intellectual expedition into bizarre geography.
Click on the big “A” in the top left corner, and you’ll find “The 95 Theses on Painting,” printed in black, uncomplicated Arial. Theses twelve and thirteen leave stinging little pinpricks in my art-major heart:
“12. I believe in painting as a meaningful act.
13. I believe in painting as a desperate, stupid, time-wasting act involving huge, crippling ambition and necessary and near-constant failure. This too is meaningful.”
She has seemingly relentless torrents of work in her digital portfolio, but her paintings and papers aren’t organized by title or exhibition. Instead, they’re dispersed like spores across arbitrary categories, spliced together with other media fragments she’s stuffed in her digital pockets over the years.
Click on M to open a new page subtitled “I can hold My own foot.” Here, formatted in bulleted paragraphs and red hyperlinks, are PJ Harvey lyrics, musings by the writer Annie Dillard and academic Jane Gallop, and the notes of pediatrician D.W. Winnicott. There’s also a 2012 article from The Toronto Sun about a woman in Iceland—who, unaccounted for on a tour bus, unwittingly joined a missing persons search for herself.
Alongside these knickknacks, Molly has catalogued the way midday light filters through the shutters of her dingy Chicago studio, scans of annotations she’s made in the margins of Fanny Howe poetry books, and screenshots of herself holding her own bare feet on Skype. She wears stiff gray jeans and a ruddy red lip. Leather clogs lay discarded behind her, capsized like little ships.
“I” is subtitled “Indivisible.” Here, she’s written a sprawling essay about how the pornographer operates on a principle of animism—the belief that the world of objects is alive, and produces bodily responses. Between the paragraphs, she’s linked grainy footage of an entire Berlin commuter train breaking out in contagious laughter and of North Korean citizens of Pyongyang collapsing in grief over the death of Kim Jong Il.
Under “N” for “200Nine”—another infuriating refusal to operate within the basic index of the alphabet—there’s a brutally raw journal entry. “I was broke ass broke,” she writes. “Hunched over, shame spiraling on the train.” On the same page, embedded down a rabbit hole of hyperlinks, is an extensive transcript of a personal Facebook groupchat, in which she and her girlfriends discover how to type German characters, and also discover that Molly has Athlete’s foot:
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung: Dana DeGiulio did you see my Fuß?
Antonia Gurkovska: How did you get the ß ßo faßt? Took me weekß! ßmarty pantß!
and
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung: My feet itched something terrible.
Dana DeGiulio: You knew this one was coming.
Keep digging, and an entire ecology of images emerges, held together by webs of associative thought patterns. I wonder if Molly knows her way around in here, I think to myself, disoriented, clicking around in the depths of “K.” Does she remember where she’s stashed things? Poke around the website for long enough, and it starts to feel familiar, like the bedside table clutter of a friend. I know what’s buried under “B” the way I know there’s a paper clip by the left foot of my dresser under a pile of laundry.
And, after encountering enough indirections (like “O” for “Studi-O”) one finally resigns oneself to the fact that the alphabet graphic is ironic. There is no sensical way to categorize what’s left over after the gesture of drawing, of painting, or of living—processes the artist believes to be indivisible. There’s something human in the project of admitting it. We’re all absentmindedly stuffing our pockets with receipts, loosely promising ourselves we’ll sort through the scraps one day, to remember what it is we’ve been up to.
Under “I,” there’s an unedited longform essay. To her, apparently, it’s unreadable. In a brief, backwards-glancing disclaimer, she writes:
“I am trying to cut the cords to these thoughts. I want this website to serve as a record of the fragments I have chewed and swallowed, the work of thinking and critiquing I have done, and then tossed aside, as the argument is not the point, the end. The end will be poetry. And painting of course.”
Whenever I return to mollyzuckermanhartung.com—which jingles on my bookmark tab like a funky keychain—a different bit of her manifesto strikes me anew. This morning, it was these two, theses eighty-seven and eighty-eight, that made tears spring to my eyes:
“87. Painting is the language of form and space that reminds me that I am made of the same stuff as the world.
88. I am hard and soft, gentle and dense and dispersed, bright and sharp, contrasting and undulating, acidic and toxic and soothing. As is the world.”
As is the world.
The archive seems to end in 2014, when she packs up her studio and moves out of Chicago. Blurry photos of empty shelves and haphazardly stuffed duffel bags make me imagine her packing up her own body, so indistinguishable from her body of work: her legwarmers tucking into her own pockets, her form self-collapsing, becoming untraceable, and free.
Who called you away from your mission of cataloguing? Where are you keeping your things now, Molly Z.?
