MODERN LOVE
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MODERN LOVE
Constance DeJong is wary of the way time functions in relation to art. As a figure deeply ensconced in the arrival of the postmodern onto the New York art scene, and one reluctant to pigeonhole her work, this is entirely understandable.
In the few interviews available of the author and artist we see her consistently tackle the subject of time and how it interacts with the art consumer. Primarily referred to as a writer more than a performing artist, DeJong speaks of her writing in terms of visual art—referring to writers as “people of language,” when speaking of her admiration for those writers who “weren’t confined to a convention.”
DeJong herself, with her recently reprinted masterwork Modern Love (1974), has toyed with the concept of nonlinear narratives, something she seems doubtful is possible within the confines of the medium some forty years later. She describes that the relentless repetition of the form—literally page after page after page—prevents it from escaping linearity entirely, the way visual art might.
Despite that, DeJong tries her best in Modern Love to deliver a narrative that is wholly unconventional, traveling from New York of the ’70s and its art scene to warring naval fleets, to the time of the Spanish inquisition, to a sci-fi novella, and much more. Originally five separate parts, the novel was bound and published in whole from DeJong’s own press at the time. It was made into a radio-drama soon after, scored by DeJong’s close friend Philip Glass, with whom she later composed the libretto for the opera Satyagraha.
As an extension of her creative choices—such as her collaboration with Glass and her commitment to the postmodern themes of non-art—her innovative performance pieces at the art institution The Kitchen helped DeJong find herself once again reissued, brought back from a sort of collective narrative oblivion few writers come back from. Complimentary of her new admirers, DeJong comments, “A younger generation has become interested in me or kind of adopted me and they are people of language, and they have reattached these forms [speaking of “crossing disciplines and forms” and collaboration in art] in a way I haven’t seen in decades.”
DeJong’s overlapping historical narratives, seemingly randomly chosen, are a version of roulette that highlights our modern attachments to what has come before. Re-representing, improving, redoing. DeJong has a way of transporting her audience into impossibly alienating times and places, without alienating their sympathies—whether it be the tedious (if you can believe it) love lives of NYC art monsters in the ’70s or a medieval quest for vengeance, DeJong’s ultimate motive seems to be to hold a mirror to the remarkable alignment of values and concerns between people across time. Not universal values of love, honor, justice—DeJong would not be the first to do that—but the values of spending time, of worrying about time, and the consequences of one’s own time on the human psyche.
Throughout her rambling narratives, DeJong seems to emphasize the mundane, how she may have chosen any one person’s day as an artist in the heyday of New York City in the ’70s and represented it, talked about it. Similar to how someone in the future might choose to represent her, one day, just writing at her desk. By focusing on the seemingly unremarkable, DeJong posits that her readers reconsider the value and meaning of every throwaway moment, postmodern and without triteness. The goal remains romantic all the same.
Written by So Textual
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