Heide Hatry with friend.
The asparagus season traditionally begins on 23rd April and concludes about a month later, but this year it’s early, and the markets are filled with both the slim green variety and the fat white kind. I prefer the violet/white, even though one has to shave them with a vegetable peeler to remove the fibrous outer skin. ( I only just discovered that they’re the same plant, but the white is cultivated underground, to keep it from producing chlorophyll.)
I grew up with melted butter as the only suitable accompaniment to steamed asparagus, and while Marie Dominique introduced me to serving them with vinaigrette, I still prefer that sumptuous emulsion of egg yolks and melted butter, Sauce Hollandaise.
Which brings me to Heide Hatry….
Some years ago, during the Paris Book Fair. we rashly invited a dozen book dealers to our apartment for dinner. Even less intelligently, I decided to serve as an entrée some white asparagus, and, in the final example of folie de grandeur, to make the Hollandaise by hand.
I was too busy in the kitchen to do more than greet our guests but did notice the arrival of John Wronoski of Cambridge Mass.'s Lame Duck Books. John demonstrated his taste for the good things of life by bringing two bottles of an obscure but obviously exceptional champagne and a striking female companion, but I had no time to appreciate either before returning to hand-whisking melted butter into eggs over a high flame.
It was only when, ten minutes later, I smelled a powerful perfume that I realized John's friend had entered the kitchen. Champagne flute in hand, she eased herself onto a high kitchen stool and crossed her legs. Her tight black skirt and shocking-pink blouse complemented a personal style that had more of her native Berlin than either Paris or Cambridge. Her skin, beige with a faint slaty undertone, as well as the way she piled her black hair on top of her head, recalled Leni Riefenstahl and Marlene Dietrich, as did her low, murmuring voice.
Still whisking, I apologized for neglecting my duties as a host.
"Are you a book dealer also?" I asked.
"No," she said. "I am artist."
"Oh? What is your medium?"
She sipped her champagne. "You would say, I think, flesh."
I briefly stopped whisking. Flesh? “I don't understand…."
Picking her way through its events like someone strolling in a garden of poisonous plants, she described her interesting life, beginning with childhood on a pig farm. "I am exposed to death and dead bodies as far as I can think back. It was my 'job' from ten or fifteen to cut dead pigs into pieces for the family freezer."
She married a book dealer. "We had a shop. But then I learn that my husband has other woman…." Her familiarity with meat suggested an appropriate revenge. Selecting his best suit, she stuffed it with raw pork, took it into the woods with two hungry Dobermans and watched them tear clothing, meat and, metaphorically, her husband, to shreds.
By now, I’d stopped whisking. Then I smelt something burning. In turning away from the stove in fascination, I'd backed into the gas flame and set fire to my shirt.
After that, our paths crossed periodically, in Paris, or in her Greenwich Village studio. Her preoccupation with raw flesh continued. I contributed a text to Not a Rose, her 2012 collection of flowers created from different kinds of raw meat, and watched in fascination as, in Heads and Tales, she created imaginary human portraits using the same grisly medium.
Later, in Icons in Ash, she found new inspiration in another aspect of human corporeality. “Trying to quell my own persistent grief over my father’s early death," she explained, "I began making portraits from the ashes of the subject. It involves building up the portrait in a beeswax surface by embedding particle by particle of the cremated remains. The portraits look like very grainy photographs. "
Heide and the portrait of her father she created from his cremated ashes.
Then there was her 2006 performance piece Skin Room. I saw it in the German Cultural Center in New York - not an experience one forgets in a hurry.
As a soprano sang the setting of a text by Leonardo da Vinci, Heide appeared at the top of the stairs leading down into the main gallery. She wore of long white gown, splattered with blood, and carried the carcass of a pig, which she proceeded to butcher. Totally enclosed in the act, she was as remote as any priestess. One could only watch and admire as she created a room, about the size of a small elevator, and lined its walls, floor, and ceiling with slabs of raw pork skin. Visitors were then invited to enter. Two young women, each wearing a skirt and bodice cut from the same skin and secured with wire, ensured that we removed shoes and socks before doing so. The feeling of the spongy, moist floor under one’s bare feet was both disturbing and erotic, and the overall impression of the piece somehow devotional even sacred. Here is a film of her recreating the piece at the Neidelberger Kunstverein.
These days, I make Hollandaise using a blender. But I never do so without remembering that night, and the scent of burning and perfume.
This is a post I will never forget!
Fascinating. I have read the Hollandaise story which is ver funny. Not too sure about the flesh… I’m a bit squeamish.