Curious Beautiful
One of the nine rooms in Rachel Claff and Connor Kalista’s Vermeer-inspired environmental piece Curious Beautiful is devoted to this painting. The room is appropriately cramped–there’s hardly enough room for three people to stand in it. Slumped behind a small table draped with an elaborately patterned cloth is a smartly dressed woman who sighs heavily. Her dreams–some serene, some disturbed–are scrawled in chalk across every inch of wall space, as though silent, relentless, psychotic voices were pressing upon her. But where Vermeer gives the viewer a safe sense of distance from the private moment he paints, Claff and Kalista offer no such refuge. To experience this woman’s ordeal you must intrude upon it, standing inches from a person who clearly wants nothing more than to be left alone. Here it’s the viewer, not the composition, that holds her captive.
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Despite the superficial tranquility of each room and the women’s silent, dignified manner, Curious Beautiful is deeply disquieting. Like many of the women in Vermeer’s paintings–crouched over their writing desks, held hostage in chairs by imposing men–these performers seem ready to burst: it seems the boredom of captivity has driven them to the brink of madness. Occasionally they look a passing spectator in the eye, as if “in appeal to be released from the oppressive charade,” to use Gowing’s words. Sometimes they’ll even slip viewers handwritten notes. I received two: “To me, it seems as if I’m asking too much. What about what we wanted?” and “Tonight is cancelled. I can’t go through with this.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Tim Carlson.
