is a Paris/New York–based artist working across painting, sculpture, film, performance, and artist’s books. She studied European Studies at Amherst College, continued at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and trained at the New York Studio School. Her work has been exhibited internationally in New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, and Paris, and engages in dialogue with thinkers including Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. Her films have screened at festivals in Paris and her artist’s books circulate in notable European collections. She is also the founder of THE SALONISTAS, a Paris-based collective launched in 2015 supporting women artists, critics, and writers. She performs and lectures widely across philosophy, psychoanalysis, and contemporary art.
The sunny Sunday turned gray, yet Paris maintained its charm. It’s a confusing thing about the City of Light. Even in its dreary climate, something illuminates its space. Rebecca Dolinsky is a fitting portrait for just why: the city has long drawn artists, writers, and filmmakers and “Paris” radiates from those who arrive.
It’s fitting that we’re here. Americans in Paris are a pest that the French can’t shake. Rebecca is from a generation that arrived with some direct connection to France–an art obsession, a scholarship, or the understanding and appreciation that French was still the lingua franca in Paris. The recent arrivals, myself included, are perhaps new, vague additions to this city. We speak French poorly, but we know what the city offers even to the lazy among us.
Rebecca’s reason for being in Paris was not vague at all. She was writing her undergraduate thesis at Amherst College on American expatriation. When she was 20, she came to Paris to interview American artists, writers, and filmmakers. While finishing her thesis in the States, James Baldwin was visiting the five college area of Massachusetts. “He spoke the way he wrote. He was so erudite,” Dolinsky said about his lectures. Fittingly, the young scholar was remembered by Baldwin when they crossed paths in New York. Shortly thereafter, she would continue the American tradition of expatriating to France. She left the US to study at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, famously associated with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Her arrival to France was charged with literary and philosophical giants. The art would follow.
Just a few days before our meeting, professor and writer Lillian Davies was describing Art Paris to her students. Standing beneath the architectural immensity of the Grand Palais, among the serpentine flow of trend-wearing art-viewers, Lillian paused and remarked, “Ah, there’s Rebecca.” Rebecca Dolinsky enters a place, immense may it be, and she’s noticeable–not just for her springy curls or energetic polyglot articulation. She’s a sort of beacon or guide in the labyrinth of an artist’s life.
As she and I sat in the garden of the Bibliothèque Nationale a few days later, I interviewed her, in a way, seeking her guidance. She explained how Walter Benjamin would come to that very place to transcribe entire passages of books. Perhaps that’s why he later wrote, “Objects are to ideas as constellations are to stars.” While sitting in the Salle Ovale, you are surrounded by myriad ideas represented by words and images of objects all housed in books. Rebecca sees this way as well. Many of her works begin with reading. Many involve writing. The quest to pinpoint an idea through words is amplified as it’s pursued through other languages. Rebecca describes “language as the gateway.”
For this reason, her art and writing often intersect in the artist book. Sometimes miniature, oftentimes transportable, they are the well-suited embodiment of her ideas. Words have an extra power to articulate. Art that includes them is doubly challenged to use its material well. Sometimes, artists are not so conscious of why they are doing something and it takes time to parse it out. Although, the same happens with writers. James Joyce famously took seventeen years to write Finnegan’s Wake (which he is claimed to have said that readers should take just as long to read). Dolinsky finds inspiration in these thinkers, and so, she began creating works like her Circular Library.
She cited Joyce: “Finnegan begin again. Begin again, Finnegan.” For Dolinsky, the ideas come from seemingly everywhere, modern literature as well as ancient Greek culture. Her artist book The Iyunx functions like a yoyo with a ceramic center piece and text on a ribbon wrapped around it. It evokes an ancient Greek magic where women would use these objects with incantations to summon their lovers. Dolinsky combines literature, mythology, and magic. And in turn, she produces these objects that are a marriage of form and function. Her ability to condense decades of research, writing, and thinking into an object is stunning. To her, it’s evident. “Circularity is ever-present in literature,” she said. “So, I started making these circular books.”
Before she was making artist books, Rebecca Dolinsky painted a lot of portraits. However, the portraits weren’t a far reach from the complexity of the circular books. In fact, they sometimes become artist books themselves (as witnessed in her commentary on Walter Benjamin’s “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” where she painted a portrait of him that she reproduced and stacked dozens of copies). An early subject of her portrait painting was philosopher Jacques Derrida. Dolinsky’s words and writing had led her to Paris. And ultimately, they led her to Derrida. She had a fellowship at the Ecole Normale Supérieure while Derrida was teaching there. By that time, he was an established voice in continental philosophy and the father of deconstruction. Rebecca was writing critically and developing her practice through language. After completing her studies at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, she was 22 and had been working under Derrida. “I painted a large portrait [of Derrida],” she said. The painting “got smaller over time and ended up being a postage stamp on a postcard.” The stamp would become a part of her project ‘je possède LE LOUVRE.’ She collected postcards from the Louvre of classic paintings and collaged them. They were “deconstructions of important paintings,” as she described them. She then sent the postcards to friends and scholars, among them Jacques Derrida and Georges Didi-Huberman. These recipients added a text on the other side and sent it back. There’s an explicit textual and visual conversation, and in a sly, understated way, Rebecca describes them as deconstructions. Always true to the text, I suppose.
When asked about her inspiration, she doesn’t deflect, but she seems to be drawing on so much that it’s not a simple answer. In her casual affect, she opines: “Sometimes it’s a little political; sometimes it’s a little feminist; ultimately it’s about bringing people together.” In a Parisian anti-Trump manifestation, her work, Aux Grandes Femmes la Matrie Reconnaissante, is testament to this belief. By archiving black and white portraits of historical feminists, she made posters for the march: one side the portrait, the other side text. The faces of the women said enough, but perhaps for Dolinsky as with Benjamin, the image is a star that exists alongside the words in the constellations of feminist history. And despite the fact that Trump has led the US into a post-truth, post-fact era, he still wildly uses both to sway the masses. Maybe Dolinsky elects to fight fire with fire, albeit more refined.
Rebecca is learning Italian. It’s her latest gateway to more inspiration. She sometimes reads bilingual Italian/French works: “That is transporting also. It’s another optic.” Through language, she’s able to newly experience Italian theater and opera works. And thanks to Paris, she has access to things like these language classes. Perhaps, the city’s multicultural community and its network of artists is the light we’re seeing. “It’s one of the reasons I love my life here,” Dolinsky says. For those of us lucky enough to experience it in person, Paris puts us near these people, places, and ideas. Otherwise, we can still access them in books. Rebecca Dolinsky provides a model for the artist anywhere seeking inspiration: “I tend to go to the studio; I read and I find something.”
GRESHAM CASH is a transdisciplinary artist and filmmaker who investigates how mediated environments shape cognition and daily experience. As a producer, composer, and sound editor, he has won awards and screened films at festivals across the U.S. and Europe, and has toured nationally with various music groups. His fiction and essays have been published in the U.S. and UK. Holding bachelor’s and master’s degrees in wildlife biology from the University of Georgia, he integrates ecological research into his practice.