Several years later, back in Manhattan, we shared a studio for a time. As my shifting interests began taking me away from painting, Rhonda became more intensely focused on her work, discovering her own unique creative voice, and making serious waves in the embryonic art scene that was developing in the East Village. Within a couple of years she was at the forefront of what was, for a few years in the mid-eighties, the most vibrant and exciting movement on the international art scene. The East Village scene, composed of a multicultural collage of young artists from mostly working class families, boldly and outrageously challenged the "high art" establishment, which at the time consisted almost exclusively of white, male painters whose work was bought and traded as "blue chip" commodities in the exclusive galleries of SoHo and the upper east side. (This, sadly, is still the case--just leaf through a recent copy of ArtForum or Art in America.)
As did many of these artists who were challenging the concept of "high art," Rhonda deliberately chose materials from the "low art" of popular culture; in her case, old beads, sequins, costume jewelry, high heeled shoes, discarded furniture, and other objects generally associated with women. While her imagery, too, was drawn from popular culture, her work had nothing to do with the dispassionate and cynical masters of "pop art," such as Warhol and Lichtenstein. Quite the contrary; Rhonda's work had guts, passion, and genuine romance. It was intrusive, confrontive, and it was fun.
In the artistically dry but financially booming eighties, the boisterous East Village energy attracted the opportunistic attentions of a new crop of nouveau riche collectors looking for bargains, as well as the genuine admiration of the European art community, who were, in general, much more interested in artistic innovation and intellectual discourse than the Americans. Rhonda's work began receiving glowing international recognition. Curators and collectors throughout Europe and the US eagerly bought her work, she was featured in Life, People, Vogue, and numerous art journals, and a retrospective of her work toured Europe.
By the end of the European tour, Rhonda was at a point of re-evaluation. Between AIDS, which massacred New York's art community, the Black Monday crash, and intensive real estate speculation which forced out many of the artists and galleries, the short-lived East Village glory days were over.
It was an evening not long after that that she returned home to her Brooklyn condominium after a long day in her studio. While she was out, new carpeting had been installed throughout her home. Within 48 hours she was deathly ill, seriously and permanently injured by volatile chemicals released by the carpet. Her life as she knew it was over. From that time on, she suffered continual fatigue, pain and discomfort. Exposure to the slightest chemical--perfume, soap, solvents--knocked her on her back. She became moody and depressed, and at times suicidal. She was often hysterical and overwrought. Her family and friends backed away. In desperation she fled to the Arizona desert, a traditional refuge of asthma and tuberculosis sufferers, where she hoped to find a tolerable environment.
I had lost touch with Rhonda during those East Village years, my own life path having led me in very different directions. I was not aware of her injury. I only recently reconnected with her after I found some of her "Dispossessed" photographs in a catalog of an exhibit of eco-art that was part of this year's Environmental Law Conference at the University of Oregon. While it was painful to hear her story and to feel her suffering, it was great to talk with her again, to share each others' stories after so many years had passed, and to find that the circle had come around again, giving us another opportunity to be in each others' lives and create together.
For Rhonda, the whims and fashions of the art world are now irrelevant. Her life and her art have merged; there is no separation. She can no longer walk out of her studio at the end of the day and leave it behind her. She is a hostage to her condition and an exile from our chemically saturated society. The devastating reality of her injury is always with her. It is only her still eloquent artist's voice and the urgency of her message that have enabled her to press on.
- Larry Kaplowitz
The following is excerpted from the introduction to her book, The Dispossessed: Living with Multiple Chemical Sensitivities (©1998, available directly from the publisher: The Dispossessed Project, PO Box 402, Paulden, AZ 86334-0402, email [email protected]).
In the late spring of 1995, I joined other environmental educators and students attending a three-day environmental symposium outdoors in the pristine pines of Northern Arizona to discuss the serious global ecological crisis. While participating in the healing circles and lectures, I positioned myself on the group's periphery for protection from fragrances, laundry smells and lathered-on sunblock. The lectures were informative, poetic and interlaced with song, yet I was becoming impatient. We were learning the "why's" and "where's" of our global crises, but when would we discuss the "how to" of getting our planet back on a healing track?! Suddenly, a white-haired man rose, introduced himself as an environmental educator and wilderness expert of thirty years and uttered the magic word "activism." Compelled to seek him out afterwards for a tete-a-tete, I found him "holding court" under a tree. I asked: "How do we get people to acknowledge the existence of Multiple Chemical Sensitivities (MCS) to prevent further injuries and suffering?" He replied: "NO HOPE until the suffering reaches critical mass!"
My book, The Dispossessed: Living with Multiple Chemical Sensitivities focuses on MCS and the life-altering problems facing the MCS population. In designing its format, I considered how to provide information about this illness and its global ramifications, appealing to a wide audience range (from lay person to expert) without overwhelming or turning off the reader. Accompanying each black and white photograph is a brief biographical anecdote, a useful tool depicting the life of each sufferer--personalizing their plights and engaging the reader. I intentionally present more problems than solutions. This is reality; there is much work to do!
Until 1991, I enjoyed a full professional, social and family life. Then, at the age of 41, I developed a crippling case of MCS which forced me to leave my life and home in New York City. I could not have predicted the profound, all-encompassing effect of further ecological and environmental insights on my life, nor imagined the path I would follow once injured with MCS. Moving to Tucson with the hope of finding a clean, "safe" environment in which to heal, I found instead a pesticided, petrochemically polluted ex-paradise. Within a few months, I bought five acres of land in an isolated spot in Northern Arizona and had a 450 square foot "safe" house built to my specifications.
In 1993, I was asked to exhibit two photographs and anecdotes of people with MCS at Arti et Amicitiae, a museum in Amsterdam. Printed by a "fine art" printer to my specifications, these photographs evoked a great deal of attention from the Dutch press. I realized I had a book to do.
Hundreds of people had come to the openings of my exhibitions; now my only link to the world is the telephone. I cannot enter normal places, but instead must stand outside, tapping on store windows for help. While I know that I would do this work even if not injured, being an "insider" gave me a unique advantage in imparting the flavor of this project; MCS sufferers directly feel the pain of our ailing Earth. Despite my own life of exile from the chemical world, constant pain, great physical limitations and isolation, through working on my book and meeting the injured people who heroically face great odds each day I have learned memorable lessons of compassion. My emotional evolution after becoming sick was similar to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's stages on death and dying. It took me three and a half years to not contemplate suicide every minute, not to mourn my lost life and the loss of twenty-year friendships for reasons never disclosed by those who deserted me.
MCS is a devastating, chronic illness. As a direct result of their affliction, many sufferers lose their jobs, homes, careers, marriages, families, and friends; some even commit suicide. Because of the vast amount of petrochemicals and pesticides available and used since W.W.II, many chemically sensitive people are unable to go into most buildings, including stores, banks, libraries, theaters, restaurants, motels and places of worship. Even outdoor gatherings are problematic due to the frequent use of petrochemical-based perfumes, vehicle exhaust, sunscreens, barbecue fluid and lawn chemicals.
The people I interviewed and photographed have had to make major lifestyle changes to cope with this illness. Some have become virtual prisoners in their own homes, unable to experience normal lives. I have determined that approximately 60 percent of those injured with MCS are financially devastated. As a result of their isolation and inability to interact with society, most sufferers are unable to earn a living. As "safe" housing or shelters are unavailable or unattainable, they become dispossessed, ousted from our chemical world--they are the new homeless, living nomadic existences. Many establish residences in stripped-down mobile homes, RV's, old cars, tents, trucks or sheds, often moving around the country looking for a "safe" spot to live. Only a lucky few have been able to build or renovate "safe" homes in which to live; others have adapted rooms in their homes from which to work.
Although MCS knows no ethnic, gender, economic or cultural barriers, about 75 percent of the people interviewed for my book are women. With only a few exceptions, my subjects live within an hour and a half drive from my Arizona home. Even within this limited geographical area, there was no shortage of subjects! Some MCS victims, however, were reluctant to participate in the book, despite my sharing their affliction, due to their shame and fear of others' ridicule. I worked quite hard to gain the trust of those who did finally agree to participate.
I tried to include a full range of occupations to exemplify the risks of developing MCS as a result of petrochemical and pesticide exposures at home, school and the workplace. Also interviewed are people injured by mainstream medical practices like dental mercury amalgams, excess antibiotics and breast implants. There are, however, many professions with a high incidence of MCS (e.g., farm workers injured by pesticides, beauticians, pet groomers, auto mechanics, pest control personnel) which I was unable to include due either to their reluctance to go public with their stories or the project's time constraints.
Photographing the people presented some difficulty; shoots had to be completed quickly (10-15 minutes) because some of the subjects were too sick to tolerate an outsider entering their "safe" environment. Sometimes when conducting interviews, I had to stand at a distance so as not to make them sick. Occasionally, going into others' "safe" environments would make me sick, having such a bad reaction while taking the photographs that I would inadvertently open the camera, exposing the film (I work only in black/white). For me, even handling photographic materials is highly toxic.
MCS is one of the most challenging public health problems of our time and the incidence is thought to be on the rise. Throughout the country, MCS-based grassroots political and advocacy movements have been forming, often accompanied by newsletters with large mailing lists. A grassroots movement may begin, for example, when home-bound MCS people call each other to initiate letter writing campaigns to legislatures, agencies and corporate technical industries to raise issues concerning MCS. The final results of a 1995 California Department of Health Services study found, in a random survey, that about 3.5 percent or one million people in California have been diagnosed with MCS and are unusually chemically sensitive.[1] These numbers are staggering. What that study could not include are people who are misdiagnosed, as less than one percent of this country's physicians are trained to diagnose and treat MCS.
Though the medical establishment has been slow to recognize Multiple Chemical Sensitivities, MCS is recognized by numerous federal and state agencies such as the Social Security Administration, US Department of Housing, Environmental Protection Agency and the National Academy of Sciences. The Justice Department and the courts have, on a case by case basis, upheld chemically sensitive people's rights to "safe" housing, workplaces and schools. The Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) guarantees people with disabilities reasonable accommodations and access to public facilities, housing, education, employment and transportation. The ADA defines a disability as a substantial limitation on one or more of an individual's major life activities. MCS easily meets this criterion.
"We the people of this technological world are all experiencing a collective trauma. The trauma endured by technological people...is the systemic and systematic removal of our lives from the natural world."[2] Our contact with the earth is becoming abstracted as our direct experiences with her diminish. Our suffering due to the seduction by, promotion of, and addiction to the environmental pollutants such as petrochemicals and pesticides will surely reach critical mass. Even now, researchers seeking cures for illnesses such as asthma and cancer are looking to our negatively impacted environment as a causative factor. To bring this epidemic to the forefront of the American consciousness will require public figures to "come out of the closet" with their illness, like Rock Hudson, Magic Johnson and Elizabeth Glaser courageously did to help the AIDS cause. Where is our Liz Taylor? I am simply so tired of explaining why I can't go, see, use, and wear...!
Until that time, be assured that I will continue to take photographs of the chemically injured--documenting this holocaust in progress.
[1] Ann McCampbell, MD, via personal communication with Richard Kreutzer, MD, Acting Chief, Environmental Health Investigations Branch, California Department of Health Services, January 8, 1997.
[2] Chellis Glendinning, "Technology, Trauma and the World," Ecopsychology, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1995, p. 46.
The Dispossessed:
Living with Multiple Chemical Sensitivities
is available directly from the publisher:
The Dispossessed Project, PO Box 402, Paulden, AZ 86334-0402
email [email protected]
©1998 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 1998
Volume 8, Number 2
Art and Ecology