Review by DeMisty D. Bellinger
In her latest chapbook, Gala, Lynne Shapiro melds persona and ekphrasis in an extended look at David Salle’s work and woman as artistic subject, especially in the painting “The Black Bra.” The poems offer a commentary on the surrealist movement, the objectification or glorification of women—or parts of women— and how Salle’s work in particular and all art in general is in conversation with other art.
Shapiro is an award-winning poet and editor who lives in New Jersey and who has served as poet-in residence in England, Morocco and Spain. She worked in the Whitney Museum of Art in the 1980s, a period in which her book Gala is grounded.
David Salle is a contemporary surrealist painter, photographer, and printmaker whose work is a mixture of found images and his own paintings and photographs. He often works in collage, which is interesting in that Shapiro’s poems often bring in found text and imagery, creating poetic collages. Salle’s work features women in various stages of undress and hyper-sexualized. In the particular painting Shapiro references throughout the book, disembodied eyes are prominent, unlike his more provocative paintings, and a black bra hangs carelessly in the upper left hand corner. Also in this painting, there is a bowl of apples reminiscent of Cezanne’s work, but revealed to be American artist Walt Kuhn’s apples.
The first poem, “I don’t Recall My Garmenture,” is both serious and playful, and sets the tone for the rest of the book. The title implies a situation in the speaker’s past. Through the poem, the speaker alludes and nods to the obscure and the familiar. For instance, not many of us will be able to grasp the term garmenture without some digging, but many will know Daffy Duck. Maybe younger readers wouldn’t understand a reducing machine, and that the speaker can use a reducing machine as a metaphor contextualizes the era and speaker (7). The speaker herself is a “salaried working girl, museum employee,” which implies the power dynamic between Salle and the speaker (7).
The poem continues with an awkward conversation between the speaker and Salle. Most of it is internal dialogue, as seen here:
My invitation was a bone-thrown
op to chew on every curatorial
and directorial words, and now
those of the maker himself,
ao I could be a go-between,
mediate/translate/evangelize (8)
This paints the artist as a God-like, “the maker himself,” and the speaker his medium. The poem ends with an admission that she does not like talking to “famous men” then closes with a quote from Chuck Klosterman about strangers.
The poem, “Sallied Forth a Minuet,” presents the inquiry on which the entire book hinges on. The speaker asks of “The Black Bra” painting, “whose eyes/are those,/ in that painting—there? and Shapiro does not give us an answer in this poem; she suspends our curiosity, compelling us to read on (10). This question, and the repetition of the word eyes, invites the reader examine the concept of voyeurism from the perspective of the spectator and the woman depicted in the artwork. Eyes demand us to see, to look, and understand through looking.
The word Gala is malleable: It could refer to a celebration, or it could be an apple variety. In this book, gala means both of these and also Gala Éluard, who was first married to poet Paul Éluard, then later, to surrealist Salvador Dali. Gala served as a muse for many artists, including Max Ernst and Andre Breton. Salle’s piece “The Black Bra” is dominated by a pair of beautiful eyes which resembles the eyes in Max Ernst’s painting “Gala Éluard.”
So much of enjoying art is making sense of the work in front of us regardless of the logic we see. Shapiro’s speaker searches for the recognizable, the literal and although the surrealists may not always mean for art to be representational, it’s difficult to not look for meaning, or the familiar. If we had the artists in front of us, would we not ask whose eyes they are, especially if we recognize them?
When David Salle finally answers the question of whose eyes, he states:
I took them from—
some—
some—
some—
Surrealist tome. (18)
His answer is unsatisfying. And we move away from the eyes and the artwork to the apples that rest on the woman’s forehead—we are assuming woman, we are assuming Gala—and there is another question: whose apples in the bowl?
Smart, thoughtful, and full of rich language, Gala is worth reading and rereading. A welcome addition to ekphrasis and well-researched poetry.
Gala by Lynne Shapiro
Solitude Hill Press, 2022,
42pgs, $16 [paper]
9798985592702
DeMisty D. Bellinger is the author of the poetry book Peculiar Heritage, the novel New to Liberty, and the short story collection All Daughters Are Awesome Everywhere. demistybellinger.com.