Personic Truth: An Interview with Jasmin Lim

A few months back, one of the display windows at San Francisco's Artists' Television Access (ATA) was packed with a mishmash of photocopied news snippets, photographs, collages, and quotes on the nature of truth. At the center of the display was a TV with the image of a burning book: Sarah by JT LeRoy.

Yes, that JT LeRoy. The teen hustler/literary prodigy who wrote four works of fiction, received accolades, and befriended celebrities before being exposed as a “fake.” LeRoy’s critically acclaimed books, it turned out, had been written by Laura Albert, a woman in her 30s, and his public appearances had been performed by a costumed accomplice.

The backlash that followed was nuts. That image of the burning book is appropriate; a witch hunt would work, too. LeRoy/Albert had simply pissed off too many powerful people. The thing was, what Albert did was something fiction writers do on a daily basis: she pretended to be someone she was not. Who she was and was not, however, remains up for debate. Albert describes LeRoy as a “veil” rather than a “hoax” and maintains that the persona was not simply a scam; rather, he was an avatar created to indirectly express past traumas. Albert, who lives in San Francisco, continues to write and recently explored issues of sexual abuse in an essay on Roman Polanski over at Fandor. Last year she spoke about her experience as JT LeRoy on The Moth.

The window at ATA, Untitled (Persona Case Study), explores some of the complex issues of identity raised by the case of JT LeRoy. It was created by Jasmin Lim, an artist who has developed a close bond with Albert. Lim is no stranger to questions of perception. Her photographic experiments have featured altered perspectives via slight manipulations such as folding and tilting. I love the tactile nature of Jasmin’s work and am fascinated by the layers of identity involved in the case of JT LeRoy, so I was excited to get to ask her some questions. She talked about her relationship with Albert as well as the ATA installation, which at some point she hopes to adapt into a zine. 

Laura has talked about JT LeRoy as being a coping mechanism, a kind of way of dealing with past sexual abuse, as well as an integral part of her creative process. In this way, JT seems to straddle several dichotomies, one of which is that of healing/destructive figure. Do you see destruction as being key to the creative process, either as initiator or result? What about healing?

I think for many of us, especially when you grow up around abuse, violence is normalized, and when we choose to redirect that energy, it is healing. Laura often quotes writer David Milch, "People say that my writing is dark. And for me it's quite the opposite. It sees light in darkness and it doesn't try to distort darkness. The essential thing is that the seeing itself is joyful."

Art can be a practice of deprogramming ourselves. Like the Indian deities Shiva and Kali, destroyers of illusion. They grant liberation by destroying illusions of the ego.

Do you have a relationship to JT LeRoy? Is he a presence for you in your interactions with Laura?

Yes. He is a manifestation of Laura’s inner world, and I feel the contradictions and complexities she embodies are important to explore.

One of the most interesting parts of the conversation you and Laura had in August [a panel discussion at ATA moderated by Chuck Mobley] was when she talked about the photo of her as a child wearing a T-shirt that reads “I Want to Be Me.” There’s something so haunting about this image and the way Laura discussed it in the context of identity. Can you talk a little about this?

She said that her mom had her wear that shirt, but at the time, “being me” was the last thing she wanted. At the same time, it was the thing she wanted most without realizing it. 

There is an excerpt I included in the window, by theorist Jose Esteban Munoz, about survival strategies the “minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere”. It describes the contradictions we negotiate in forming our identity, like identifying with something that you are simultaneously in conflict with; because we absorb ideologies around us, we become a site of conflict.

Of course at her core, Laura really did want to be herself, but the external pressures to conform were often louder.

There are several other quotes from theorists featured in the window. Can you talk about the significance of some of these?

There is a George Steiner quote that says, “It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past."

This quote is like theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman’s concept of the "adjacent possible," that the “complex systems best able to adapt are those on the border between chaos and disorder.” The adjacent possible describes both the limits and the creative potential of change; that we can only work from the framework that currently exists; that innovation is a recombination of what we already know. And everything we do increases the possibility of what is possible next. So imagining that there are realities beyond what we are capable of perceiving right now gives us room to perceive something beyond literal truth.

The Jorge Macchi quote says, “I’m absolutely against categorizations. Their function is to tranquilize the spectator."

Both of the quotes describe how focusing on literal “truth” neglects a deeper meaning. If we allow for ambiguity, then more complex understandings can develop as previously separate ideas coalesce.

Another quote is from the Authors Guild, regarding the lawsuit brought against Laura and what it means for authors who want (or need) to write under a pseudonym or anonymously. There is a clear miscarriage of justice here that will have ramifications for the literary community, yet I rarely hear it discussed. Can you talk about this?

The production company, Antidote International Films, bought the rights to Laura's book Sarah. After her identity was revealed, they didn’t want to just adapt the book anymore—they wanted to make what they called a "meta-movie, like Being John Malkovich," incorporating Laura's life into her fictional book. Laura said no, and they sued her for fraud because she signed the contracts as JT LeRoy—even though the contract signature does not change the fictional book they purchased. 

They spent four times more on the case to supposedly recover the cost of optioning the book. Laura's case became a principled issue to demoralize her. During the court case, the plaintiff's lawyers said they wanted her to "behave." Somehow the ambiguity was threatening to the president of the production company, who made an example out of Laura to retain his sense of power. That they won sets a precedent. The Authors Guild amicus brief for Laura's case states, "the district court's decision which holds that Laura Albert's use of pseudonym breached the Option and Purchase Agreement, is one that will have a chilling effect upon authors wishing to exercise their right to write anonymously."

There is a photocopied collage in the window that features images of computers and softcore porn. Where did this collage come from and how does it fit in with the window?

It is about 15 years old. Laura made this collage before JT (Jeremiah Terminator) was JT. Maybe at the time JT was just Terminator—I'm not sure. She only faintly remembers it and doesn’t really know what she meant to make.

More than softcore porn, it is bondage imagery combined with images of communication technologies at the time: early computers, telephone land lines, floating CDs, and flying saucers that share the same scale, etc. It's about buying fantasies of people and what is being communicated during these exchanges.

There is so much visual information all arranged in a dense mound that takes up 90 percent of the paper. Each time I look at it, I see something I didn’t see before or draw new associations between things inside the collage. I also make connections between what I imagine the conditions were while it was made and what they tell us today, now that we have 15 or so years’ perspective.

It’s similar to how the information in the window operates. There is so much information that I continue to understand it differently as I change and the world changes.

Can you talk about some of these juxtapositions that happened as you were assembling the window? Did anything become clearer to you through pushing separate fragments of writing together?

When I immersed myself in the materials, it seemed like nothing made sense; each individual piece had many layers within it, and combined with other pieces, you could draw infinite associations. 

I couldn't make decisions about what to exclude. This response seemed appropriate. The framework that I normally position things in became more fluid and open, and there was less hierarchy because each article or excerpt took approximately equal real estate. In this way, the concept became about how we process information, how we restrict our perceptual potential, and how reframing shifts our interaction with information.

The window’s centerpiece features a copy of Sarah hollowed out with an unlit candle inside. A couple years ago, you engaged with the book/movie Looking for Mr. Goodbar in a similar way, creating an image of a hollowed out paperback copy of Mr. Goodbar with a candle inside. What led you to approach these two works in this way? Are there thematic similarities between Mr. Goodbar and Sarah? 

Both Sarah and Looking for Mr. Goodbar have protagonists who can't be themselves in their cultures/environments. Both of these books are also expressions of real events: Sarah is a figurative expression of Laura’s experience with trauma and abuse, and Mr. Goodbar is both a book and a film inspired by the brutal murder of Roseann Quinn.

How to Name a Bitch

Just finished reading Gavin Lambert’s The Slide Area, which is a collection of short stories (some call it a novel) about 1950s Hollywood. While it covers a lot of familiarly bizarre territory, there are plenty of moments all its own, such as this (titular) one:

On one section of the highway a crowd has gathered. An ambulance stands by, winking red lights. A sheriff directs operations. From a great pile of mud and stones and sandy earth, the legs of old ladies are sticking out. Men with shovels are working to free the rest of their bodies. Objects are rescued first, a soiled tablecloth and a thermos flask and what looks like a jumbo sandwich, long as a baby eel. Then an air cushion and more long sandwiches, and a picnic basket, and at last the three old ladies themselves. They are all right. They look shaken and angry, which is to be expected. A few minutes ago they had been sitting on the Palisades, in a pleasant little hollow free from the wind.

The prose is consistently this great and there are several unforgettable characters, including Julie Forbes, an unabashed bitch of an actress reportedly modeled after Joan Crawford.

Like Joan, Julie Forbes has undergone a variety of identity reinventions during the course of her career: from the “chorus girl with a jaunty grin and busily tapping feet” in 1927 to 1933’s wholesome and victimized country girl to the cigarette-smoking, frivolous sophisticate to the noble humanitarian, where “(s)he played a famous woman doctor who went blind, and a member of the Norwegian resistance.” After a slump and a false retirement announcement, she reappeared:

Mature but unravaged, she presented a ruthless schemer in For Pity’s Sake, a woman who didn’t care how many lives she destroyed in her quest for … what? She stole other women’s husbands, became rich and feared and famous, drove her enemies to drunkenness or suicide, yet she never seemed happy.

And this is the Joan I know, and the one who seems to remain today, her lifelong ambition rewarded: a Hollywood legend, albeit one recognized mostly as an archetype she embraced for only a fraction of her career. I have to admit, before reading “The Closed Set”—the story that focuses on Julie Forbes—I didn’t realize the extent of Joan’s shape shifting. While I knew she had a long and varied career, it’s always been those shoulders and that malevolent mouth that stuck.

 

As a child of the 1980s, it makes sense I came to know Joan through Mommie Dearest—as unfair to her as that may be. Faye Dunaway’s “Joan Crawford” fuses so melodramatically well with the roles Joan played during the Cutthroat Bitch phase of her film career; thus, Joan’s most iconic roles remain the ruthless ones.

Anyway, it’s always the villains who get remembered. Survival takes ruthlessness, no? Well, yes, but maybe more importantly, it takes adaptability.

Lucille LeSueur—who was born in Texas, raised in Oklahoma, and commonly went by “Billie”—had a birth name with an implied exoticism that defied her small-town roots. She used this name to appear in three films before an MGM publicist decided she should change it. Not only did the name sound fake, the justification went, it also sounded like “Le Sewer”. A contest was held to decide the starlet’s new name; the winning moniker was “Joan Arden”. Because another actress was already using this name, an alternate surname was employed: “Crawford”. So Joan, in a way, was christened by the public, which is funny, as the public is the only boss Joan ever had.

Joan, nee Lucille, initially preferred the first half of her stage name to be pronounced “Jo-anne”. She also turned her nose up at“Crawford”, saying it was too few letters away from “Crawfish”. Years later, after she had been well established, “Joan Crawford” began to take on an aura of security for the actress. Perhaps it was a reassuring constant behind the array of personalities she found herself circulating through.*

Which brings us back to Lambert and his decision to disguise Joan as “Julie Forbes”. For me, while “Crawford” and “Forbes” are pretty much interchangeable, “Julie” is a far cry from “Joan”. Once again, though, maybe this is generational. Earlier this year, I read the autobiography of character actress Mercedes McCambridge, who famously clashed with Joan both onscreen and off.** After dealing with some diva-like behavior, McCambridge insists that Joan was much more of a “Lucille LeSueur” than a “Joan Crawford”. I really had to think twice about this one. Until that point, “Joan Crawford” was so “Joan Crawford”, I had never once attempted to separate her from her name. “Joan”: something about it sounded like a woman who takes no prisoners. It was a name that was brutal in its simplicity.

I realized then that maybe Joan had managed to alter the implications of her own name. If people weren’t going to pronounce it “Jo-anne”, well, then she was just going to have to make that name her own.  Before Joan (and this was so unbelievably fortuitous for the actress), perhaps "Joan" was simply some bland sort of comfort,*** upon which any sort of desire could be projected.  Something more like “Julie”, in fact.

This doesn’t explain, though, why Lambert decided on Julie Forbes’s birth name. He writes that the actress came to Hollywood as “Julia Katzander”, a name with a vulnerable awkwardness that’s far removed from“Lucille LeSueur”. Was this perhaps Lambert’s way of humanizing a character who acts so monstrously? In a story that often flirts with  misogyny, the enigmatic narrator of“The Closed Set” relents for a moment, offering a view of Julie that—while not quite sympathetic—is less condescension and more awe:

Regulated as time itself, she was a source of power, energy, habitual purpose. When she entered the brightly-lit set, it was as if somebody stepped up the current. From every side the light glared white-hot.

During “The Closed Set”, Julie Forbes is attempting to transition her public image from Cutthroat Bitch into something hearkening back to the roles that jumpstarted her career 20 years before. She even dons the original top hat, tails, and fish nets that first launched her career, items that—like her face and body, whose preservation portends the soon-to-come plastic-surgery age—she has literally kept behind glass.

It’s hard not to think of Madonna here, the logical heir to Joan’s career strategy: when the public gets sick of you, simply shift your image. In the past few years, rather than dramatically depart from what came before, Madonna has been employing the crucifixes and lingerie that first brought her to our attention. She’s even made her daughter over in her own early image. Like Joan, she’s also been upping the Bitch factor: witness her recent hydrangea moment, which, deliberate or not, she has used to harness the attention offered by the viral video. Madonna’s bitchiness has been intensified by the meticulous British accent she’s been using for years now.**** Is she perhaps taking a cue from Joan? Does she realize she must now present the full extent of her ruthlessness if she wishes to remain immortal?

But Madonna, contrastingly, is just one name (Is this contrast, though? Or distillation?).

Let’s pause for a minute and look at them all, that staggering number of names that exist just outside of the acting roles Joan took on:

Lucille LeSueur; “Billie”; Joan Arden; Joan Crawford; Joan “Crawfish”; Jo-anne Crawford; Christina Crawford; Julie Forbes; Julia Katzinger

Whether or not Joan was really the Bitch she has come to represent (and she is represented as such in The Slide Area), it’s hard not to give her some credit for reaching such a mythical state. Besides, how can you fault someone so tough, her dying words were Don’t you dare ask God to help me?

God, too, has been called by many names; but God, as vindictive as he may have been in his Old Testament phase, suffers from abstractness and undefined shoulders. When it comes down to it, at that moment between this world and the next, if we choose to call on someone to lead our way through, what else can we possibly call that someone besides “Joan”?

* Joan actually gave her adopted daughter (the one who would later write the tell-all that sealed Joan’s reputation as Cutthroat Bitch) the same name as her own adopted persona: Christina Crawford spent the first several months of her life as “Joan”. This gets really weird when you remember the events portrayed in Mommie Dearest: Christina, a regular actress on a soap opera, falls ill, and her famous retirement-age mother weasels her way into playing her 24-year-old daughter’s character on the show.

** It’s a book worth reading for a lot of reasons, one of which is an anecdote McCambridge tells about working with Joan, and the threatening way the actress insists on the dainty size of her feet.

*** Although, as harmless as the name may have seemed in the mid-twentieth century, when you think of Saint Joan, you realize there always must have been some balls involved.

**** Joan, throughout her career, devoted hours a day to purging her diction of its Okie accent.