Dorothea Tanning’s 1942 painting Birthday presents a self-portrait of the surrealist artist, standing in her New York apartment with one hand on the doorknob of an open door. Beyond the artist and beyond the threshold lie more doors and more thresholds, receding into the distance. Tanning writes in her much later memoir of her attention being caught by the array of doors in her home, of the ‘imminent openings and shuttings’ (Tanning, 1986: 14) suggesting infinite doorways. The artist’s positioning of herself on a threshold in her home suggests a way of viewing the relationship of the artist to the unconscious, and speaks to the liminal positioning of all artists in relation to existing and new knowledge.
Birthday, and the ghost voices created by surrealist artist Tanning’s own descriptions of her creative process around that painting, forms a pivot point for my own meanderings through the subway passages, streets, and art galleries of summertime New York in 2013. This hybrid work blends creative nonfiction with critical theory on creativity and the psychology of the self as stranger to explore the way encounters with art and the unfamiliar can change both an artist’s self and creative practice. It plays with ideas about intimacy and estrangement, and about the repositioning of self that takes place in unfamiliar territory, when writing about travel, when travelling as a writer, or in adventures with new knowledge.
