Chapter 2: Linda Montano, Performance Art Saint

From, Long Suffering: American Endurance Art as Prophetic Witness by Dr. Karen Gonzalez Rice

In an early action, Happiness Piece (1973), endurance artist Linda Montano photographed herself smiling every day. Describing the motivation for this performance action, she wrote, “I wanted the habit of happiness to be available to me so I disciplined myself to smile everyday.”¹ This simple piece called attention to Montano’s lifelong performance commitments: the discipline of a daily vow; the cultivation of an outward appearance that, in turn, fostered inner conditions; and her quiet dedication to endurance in the face of persistent suffering. In quotidian art actions like Happiness Piece and other endurance artworks continuing to the present, the artist has measured her existence against monastic standards. In her youth, Montano lived for two years as a pre–Vatican II novice in a Maryknoll Catholic convent, where she dwelled in collaboration with her fellow nuns and in isolation from everyone else. Her intense experiences in the convent—its daily rituals, strict disciplines, ascetic practices, and missionary zeal—have marked the visual strategies and ethical claims of her art to the present. Through the medium of endurance art, Montano has replicated the asceticism of monastic life, appropriating the visual language of the convent, practicing sainthood, and investing her art practice with prophetic meaning. Montano has written, “My primary concern in most events was to become a presence (Catholic saint) via self imposed disciplines.”² As a child, obsessed with sainthood and yearning for a spiritual calling, Montano noticed that achieving holiness seemed to demand violence: “[T]he only way to be good was to be crucified or have breasts cut off.”³ Female saints, in particular, achieved spiritual recognition through mutilation and assault. For Montano, the promise of a heavenly reward for enduring suffering resonated with the early traumatic experience of sexual assault. In her endurance artworks, she has performed prophetic witness to female victimhood and survival by inhabiting the gendered figure of the nun. As a theologically charged embodiment of sexual purity, the nun has become the most persistent, flexible, and multivalent sign in Montano’s visual vocabulary. Whether wearing a nun’s habit or referencing it abstractly in habitual actions (as in Happiness Piece), Montano has incorporated the iconography of female monasticism in her work to simultaneously embody transformation and oppression, encounter and dissociation, victimhood and justice. Preoccupied with monastic discipline as a means of attaining sainthood, Montano has worked to manifest her posttraumatic subjectivity—the passivity of victimhood—in the powerful agency of prophetic witness.

Montano’s attention to prophetic monasticism echoed deep traditions of Catholic activism rooted in centuries of multivalent dissent and advocacy. When Montano decided to enter convent life, she chose to join the Maryknoll order, which she has described as “probably the most forward thinking, liberal, human/activist yet Christo-centered and ecumenical religious order ever founded.”⁴ From its founding at the beginning of the Linda Montano, performance art saint twentieth century to the present day, the Maryknoll order’s progressive approach to missionary work has consistently aligned Maryknoll nuns with indigenous and marginalized peoples on issues of social justice. Catholic monasticism also played an important role in radical American prophetic traditions in the twentieth century.⁵ In the 1930s, Dorothy Day agitated for labor activism in her publication Catholic Worker, and her houses of hospitality built nondenominational intentional communities in the tradition of Jane Addams’s Hull House.⁶ Her inclusive approach to monasticism continues to inspire spiritual communities working for social justice, including the twenty-first-century New Monasticism movement.⁷ During the Depression, Chicago priests were early participants in Saul Alinsky’s model of community organizing, a relational, cross-cultural approach to progressive reform modeled in the present by Barack Obama’s early career and his grassroots 2008 presidential campaign. At midcentury, southern nuns were important and visible facilitators of civil rights activism.⁸ In the 1960s, Catholic priests (and brothers) Phillip and Daniel Berrigan staged antiwar demonstrations and engaged in well-publicized acts of civil disobedience while wearing their vestments; they later founded the Plowshares Movement to advocate nuclear disarmament.⁹ Montano’s endurance actions have contributed to this trajectory of Catholic prophetic witness and activism at the same time that her work has participated in other important cultural dialogues, including histories of feminism, feminist art, and feminist sexualities.

Montano has framed her art practice consistently in terms of monasticism, explicitly taking on nuns’ personas and enacting monastic rituals in her endurances. Rather than monasticism, Montano has preferred the term convent life, which highlights the gendered nature of her experience.¹⁰ While recognizing the centrality of gender in this context, I follow medievalist art historians and religious studies scholars in using the more flexible term monasticism, which can refer to either male or female religious communities. In this way, this chapter situates Montano’s experience within the long history of aesthetic activities of religious communities from late antiquity to the present. Further, Montano’s monastic background is not limited to Catholicism: between 1970 and 1998, she committed herself to the study and practice of eastern religious traditions, including Zen Buddhism and Hinduism.¹¹ Her enduring interest in eastern religious traditions began in the early 1970s with the diligent study of yoga at a San Francisco ashram. In 1981 she and then partner Pauline Oliveros moved to the Zen Mountain Monastery in Mt. Tremper, New York, where they lived for two years.¹² In the 1990s, she furthered her study of Hinduism to become a sanyasi, and she traveled to India in 1997. In 1998, when she returned to her hometown to care for her ailing father, Montano also returned to the religion of her youth. She has remained strictly devoted to Catholicism to the present day: “I practice Roman Catholicism now because I feel I’m imprinted. But now I have enough skill to divide, to take out of the meal the things I can’t eat and still be true to those incredible sacramental mysteries.”¹³ Since her rededication, her endurance artworks have included pilgrimages to Catholic holy sites in Europe, the United States, and Latin America (2006); prayer pieces such as A Silent Three-Hour Prayer Retreat inside St. Patrick’s Cathedral (2007); and reenactments of the lives of Catholic female saints and famous women religious, as in Teresa of Avila (2007) and Linda Mary Montano Celebrates Mother Teresa’s Birthday (2010).While Montano’s complex spiritual journey reflected the cross-cultural, individualistic character of American religious experience in the late twentieth century, this chapter focuses on the specifically Catholic resonances of Montano’s endurance art actions. Many religious traditions have impacted her art practice, but her Maryknoll convent experience was foundational. Montano has consistently verbalized her endurance art commitments in Catholic language, actions, and metaphors: “I literally took the smells of church, the sights of church, the sounds of church, and almost, as if speaking another language, translated those into my work.”¹⁴ Critical analyses of Montano’s work have mentioned her interest in and connection to Catholicism without exploring the specific origins and particular implications of this religious investment.¹⁵ This chapter attends to the formation of Montano’s prophetic, monastic vision of sainthood, tracing in her endurance art the lived experience of Catholicism as it coincided with the visual markers of dissociation as a posttraumatic response to sexual assault.¹⁶ Montano’s monastic disciplines instantiated the figure of the nun to perform a uniquely Catholic form of prophetic witness beyond convent walls.

Becoming Sister Rose Augustine

Montano directly connected her personal religious experiences to her endurance actions in a set of two vivid lists.

List 1: Catholic Memories

the smell of high quality incense the inflexibility of doctrine

Linda montano, performance art saint

the dedication of vow-taking nuns the talking saint statues

the patriarchal exclusivity

the Tiffany stained-glass windows

the fasting before Communion, Fridays, and Lent the stories of statues crying blood

the sounds of small bells at Communion the sounds of the large Angelus bells the fear of dropping the host

the poetry of the Latin Mass the ritually-tailored vestments the possibility of purgatory the daily examen of conscience

the mystery of Transubstantiation the ecstatic surrender to creed

the nun’s/priest’s unavailable celibacy the obedience

the stories of miracles, martyrdoms, missionaries, curing of leprosy the offering up (to God) anger, rage, trauma

the repetition of trance-inducing rosaries

the Stations of the Cross, the Stations of the Cross the relief and humiliation of weekly confession the prayer beads and holy cards

the May Day hymn singing and rosary at Lourdes shrine the belonging the belonging the belonging

the promise of heavenly reward

List 2: A Few of Those Memories As Art

wearing blindfolds for a week (penance)

creation of Chicken Whiteface Woman (trying to be statue) anorexia videos (holy anorexia)

three-hour acupuncture performances (crucifixion)

riding bikes on Brooklyn Bridge tied by a rope to Tehching Hsieh (miracle of walking on water)fourteen years of living art (imitation of priest’s vestments)¹⁷

These rich, provocative juxtapositions illustrated the lived realities of daily religious practice in both lay and monastic communities, and they revealed the depth of Montano’s intellectual, emotional, and sensorial debt to Catholicism. Born in 1942 in Saugerties, New York, to second-generation Italian immigrants, Montano was educated in Catholic schools in her childhood, attended church with her family, and from an early age, she has said, she “wanted to be a saint.”¹⁸ She has observed, “My total consuming passionate focus was religion. I was a saint. I prayed constantly, continuously. I looked at statues until they moved or talked. I visited nuns onoff-hours. I was a religiomaniac.”¹⁹ Like many Catholic women at the time, Montano chafed at the gendered barriers to full participation in the spiritual and institutional life of the Catholic Church. Despite these tensions— and motivated by a traumatic sexual experience in adolescence—in 1960 Montano entered the Maryknoll convent in Ossining, New York, as a postulate, taking the name Sister Rose Augustine. She described this experience, lovingly, as an “incredibly rich time,” but she became anorexic and was asked to leave the order in 1962.²⁰

At twenty I entered a convent, “enduring” two years as a Catholic nun, living in silence those two years except for one hour a day when we all talked together in recreation. I loved the community and dedication to a higher good and absolutely pure goal, but I left anorexic, having lost nearly 50 pounds in six months, high as a kite on endorphins.²¹

For Montano, living in a disciplined community fulfilled a deep desire for collaborative work toward the incarnation of a progressive vision. Yet her reliance on an ecstatic, self-denying high in the midst of this work points to the complicated role of monasticism in Montano’s traumatic subjectivity. At the same time, her convent trajectory traced broader trends related to Catholic women religious at midcentury. Montano entered the Maryknoll convent in 1960 at a time when the population of women religious was approaching its height in the United States.²² Convents were successfully recruiting new nuns, but they were unable to retain them; increasingly, young women like Montano left their orders before taking their final vows.²³ While older nuns were content with traditional, private spiritual actions, many novices yearned for shared religious experiences.²⁴ Responding, in part, to the cultural shifts that generated these desires, in the early 1960s the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican (Vatican II) instituted revolutionary changes in Catholic practice, including lay participation and the use of the vernacular rather than Latin in conducting the Mass. Vatican II had a profound impact on the lives of women religious in terms of participation, democracy, and laity interactions. However, long before the 1960s, centuries-old convent traditions, rules, and attitudes were already changing. Vatican II addressed and codified the Church’s response to questions that had been contested for decades.²⁵ The activities of the Maryknoll sisters in particular helped to incite this shift. Founded in 1911 by Mary Josephine Rogers (Mother Mary Joseph), this American order was devoted to missionary work. Montano entered the convent in 1960 expecting to change the world, to “go to Africa and cure leprosy, or to China and do something similarly dramatic.”²⁶ In addition to this missionary focus, the Maryknoll order established a cloister in 1932 to support sisters interested in pursuing contemplative lives.²⁷ For Mother Mary Joseph, isolation and encounter were complementary activities within the order. She wrote that “a missioner must be a contemplative in action.”²⁸ She described Maryknoll nuns’ responsibilities as follows: “Sisters shall be encouraged to undertake direct catechetical and evangelical work and for that purpose will expect to go from station to station for visitations comparable to those of the priests.”²⁹ This concept of missionary action, known as the direct apostolate, represented a significant shift from conventional practice and marked the progressive character of the Maryknoll order from its inception. Maryknoll sisters in China were the first nuns to receive permission to evangelize rather than simply providing social services to indigenous peoples. With these new priorities, restrictions on nuns were relaxed: the sisters wore modified habits so they could ride bicycles, and rather than returning to the cloister each evening they could live with families in remote villages.³⁰ This flexible, highly successful approach drew large numbers of postulants in the United States and globally. By 1960—even before the changes instigated by Vatican II—the Maryknoll order was sending more missionary sisters overseas than any other Catholic organization.³¹ Montano was profoundly influenced by the activities and structures of daily life in the Maryknoll convent. Prior to Vatican II, Catholic convent communities, including liberal orders like Maryknoll, were distinguished from lay or secular communities by three key features: discipline, collaboration (as a commitment to living in community), and the integration of life and prayer.³² In particular, female monasticism was characterized by an almost complete lack of privacy. While outsiders generally perceive monasticism as an experience of isolation and seclusion, these women lived in constant community. Communal living in dormitories, uniform dress—for novices, a modified form of the habit—and a routinized daily schedule separated novices from their communities of origin in order to constantly reinforce a sense of religious identity and belonging to the convent community.³³ Obedience to superiors was crucial, a basic discipline highlighted in nuns’ vows. All aspects of life were open to the approval or disapproval of the convent leadership. For example, nuns and novices were allowed to leave the physical space of the convent only with permission, and then only in the company of another nun.³⁴ In this way, a scaffold of social support organized interactions with the outside world, representing and asserting the convent community’s beliefs and practices against any outside pressures. Thus the communities created within convents were socially as well as architecturally cloistered. In this experience of living in community, discipline emerges as a central challenge. In the form of the vow, discipline presents itself as a question of will: one must constantly choose to fulfill it. The novice must cultivate this discipline through an extreme willingness to collaborate—to stretch her self-perception by identifying wholly with the community. Discipline thus becomes intimately linked to collaboration and intersubjective encounter. At the same time, collaboration clashes with the notion of a contemplative life. Meditation and prayer isolate members of the convent community from the outside world but not from each other; the negotiations of living in community are central to the experience of convent life. In addition, missionary work, as an alternative collaborative project, challenges this insider dynamic by calling for sustained, active engagement with outsider others. Devotion to missionary work and commitment to the contemplative life require different, though equally extreme, forms of collaboration. Coming out of her convent experience, Montano internalized these two forms of encounter. Her artwork throughout her career has consistently encompassed both contemplative and missionary impulses, beginning with her earliest endurance actions, performed less than ten years after leaving the Maryknoll convent. In a series of performances titled Lying: Dead Chicken, Live Angel (1971, 1972) and Sitting: Dead Chicken, Live Angel (1971), she swathed her nude body in transparent, gauzy white robes. Wearing a wimple and a set of large wings made of plastic bags and chicken feathers, Montano laid on a table or sat in a chair for several hours in various public locations in Rochester, New York, and San Francisco, California. Through complete silence and stillness, Montano cultivated her own inner, contemplative space, but her public performance of monastic contemplation punctuated the urban landscape with a prophetic presence. She observed, “I was getting the kind of attention that I used to give to nuns, priests, saints, statues, crucifixes, etc. I had reversed religion for myself.”³⁵ In this way, beginning with her earliest performances, Montano has posited endurance art as a fundamentally ethical encounter, an exchange of attention charged with religious significance. Montano’s artworks from this period merged and replaced saints and nuns with chickens, as indicated in their titles, which include Lying: Dead Chicken, Live Angel (1971); Sitting: Dead Chicken, Live Angel (1971); Lying: Dead Chicken, Live Angel (1972); Chicken Dance: The Streets of San Francisco (1972); and Chicken Dance (1974). Chickens had entered Montano’s visual vocabulary during her graduate work in sculpture at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.³⁶ Embarrassed by the explicitly religious content of her work, including the large-scale, car-parts assemblage Crucifixion (1964), she began to exhibit chickens: “I found that live chickens best expressed my internal-external state.”³⁷ For Montano, the nervous, erratic behaviors of chickens manifested inner anxieties and outer restlessness; she also punned on the notion of “being a chicken,” pointing to deeply held fears and repressed desires. She soon recognized that these placeholders for religious subjects took on their own religious significance. “The chickens began to be Catholic saints,” she observed.³⁸ Finally, Montano herself took the place of the chickens, which in turn had stood in for religious subjects. These “chicken woman” performances, in addition to those listed above, included The Screaming Nun (1975) and others presented between 1971 and 1976. In these endurance actions—her first performance pieces—Montano set herself apart, disciplined herself from agitated chickenhood into stillness, and offered herself as an object of devotion. She was practicing sainthood.

The Tensions of Monasticism

Living in disciplined, intentional community is hard work, and in the monastic context multivalent pressures demand a series of ongoing, productive negotiations among its members, particularly new additions. These negotiations may be more or less contradictory, more or less conflictual, and more or less resolvable, but they always involve commitment, extension, and expansion of the self and the community. After she left convent life, Montano’s representations of monasticism revealed the transformative possibilities and prophetic potential of living in community even as she lived outside it. In her collaborative performance with endurance artist Tehching Hsieh, Art/Life One Year Performance 1983–1984 (1983–84), Montano struggled to come to terms with the fundamental tensions of monasticism: the vow and its visual marker, the habit; collaboration; and, finally, suffering. Art/Life One Year Performance 1983–1984 took place in Manhattan between 1983 and 1984. As a collaboration between two artists, the piece drew on themes from both Hsieh’s and Montano’s past work. Hsieh had been presenting ascetic, long-term performances in New York since 1978, including living in a cage for one year (1978–79), punching a time card every hour for one year (1980–81), and living outdoors for one year (1981– 82).³⁹ Montano was attracted by the rigor of Hsieh’s work. In order to collaborate with him, she left the Zen monastery where she had lived with Pauline Oliveros for two years: “I was living in a Zen Center in upstate New York and during a trip to the city I saw one of Tehching’s posters and literally heard a voice in my head that said, ‘Do a one-year piece with him.’”⁴⁰ In another account of her decision to collaborate with Hsieh, Montano described her decision as vocational, indicating, in the Weberian sense of Beruf, an occupational calling of divine origin.⁴¹ Montano has said, “Although I would have preferred to have stayed in the monastery, I knew that my calling was to be a fringe, outsider artist.”⁴² Montano’s desire for secluded contemplation in the intimate Mt. Tremper community—one form of monastic collaboration—conflicted with her desire for more unbounded, unpredictable processes of encounter, like those of missionary work. The title of the piece illustrated the influence of each artist’s investments; the lack of punctuation deliberately equalized their contributions.⁴³ One Year Performance repeated the title that Hsieh used for all of his endurance actions between 1978 and 1986.⁴⁴ Art/Life directly referred to Montano’s small business and long-running performance piece Art/Life Counseling. Begun in 1980, these therapeutic, interactive performances collaged aspects of her study of yoga, palm and tarot card reading, karate, visualization exercises, and other techniques.⁴⁵ In addition, Art/Life referenced previous collaborative pieces in which Montano had attempted to blur the boundary between art and life. These included Handcuff (1973), a three-day collaboration with Tom Marioni in which the artists remained handcuffed to one another for three days, and several works performed with Oliveros in 1975, including Living with Pauline Oliveros in the Desert for Ten Days. In these endurances, Oliveros and Montano declared that “everything we did would be considered art,” collapsing the distinction between art and everyday life.⁴⁶

Art/Life One Year Performance 1983–1984 established a set of promises or assertions that bound Montano and Hsieh. In the form of a signed contract, their vow stipulated that the artists would remain tied together with an eight-foot rope for one year, without touching. The full contract, dated July 4, 1983, and signed by both artists, read:

We, Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh, plan to do a one-year performance. We will stay together for one year and never be alone. We will be in the same room at the same time, when we are inside. We will be tied together at waist with an 8 foot rope. We will never touch each other during the year. The performance will begin on July 4, 1983 at 6 P.M. and continue until July 4, 1984 at 6 P.M.⁴⁷

When indoors, Hsieh and Montano would remain together in the same room. In effect, this vow created a monastic community of two. In literally tying the two artists together, the eight-foot rope connecting Hsieh and Montano functioned as a metonym of the vow itself, and it visually marked the vow. In this sense, the rope became both vow and habit. As the means by which the two artists were connected, the rope both enforced and materialized their vow to remain tied together. Echoing Buddhist and some Christian monastic practices, both Montano and Hsieh shaved their heads the day before the piece began and did not cut their hair throughout the year. (Hsieh has observed that “this gesture is not related to religious practice” but rather illustrated the passage of time.)⁴⁸ The use of the rope as abstracted habit in Art/Life One Year Performance 1983–1984 also recalled Montano’s practice of wearing a modified nun’s habit in her chicken woman pieces and in endurance artworks to the present. In addition, the rope mimicked the convent practice of leaving the cloister with at least one other nun: the rope materially enforced their discipline, constantly and mutually bringing them into the presence of one another. Further, the rope differentiated Montano and Hsieh from onlookers, confronting everyone in their presence with the physicality of the vow. In an interview conducted during this piece, Montano described the discipline of the vow as a kind of separation of the will from both the mind and the body: “Once you give the mind a command, then you watch the body carry out the process.”⁴⁹ Here Montano identified at least three aspects of the self—mind, body, and will—an observational attitude echoed in the extensive documentation of Art/Life One Year Performance 1983–1984. The artists photographed their daily activities and recorded all conversations. Any deviation from the rules (e.g., accidental touching) was rigorously documented. Montano came to believe that this extensive documentation failed to adequately capture the piece: “It seems that the primary document is the change inside the performer and the audience. The results are felt and cannot always be ph tographed or expressed.”⁵⁰ Instead, the “results”—the potentially transformative outcomes of the piece—were embodied in the artists’ radical encounters with one another and their audiences.

Art/Life One Year Performance 1983–1984 required an extreme degree of intimacy and trust. As in the convent (or a cage), the two were absolutely restricted from privacy. Each action, comment, and gesture could be observed by the other. In addition, any decision required extensive discussion. Each day, Montano and Hsieh spent approximately five hours at desks, back to back. They used this time to make decisions about their daily activities: “We think about what we want to do and then we talk until we come to a consensus. So it takes many hours of sitting before we can do one thing.”⁵¹ In this way, negotiation became a central activity of the performance. Montano became interested in documenting the inevitable conflicts that took place between them, many of which arose in relation to different gender expectations. In particular, Hsieh, a carpenter, refused to allow Montano to help him with his carpentry jobs, which angered her.⁵² For Montano this tension was an integral aspect of the piece, a working out of the problems of living in community. Hsieh, on the other hand, was concerned with more abstract formal and symbolic meanings and did not support personal, social, or political interpretations, as in his observation that shaved heads visualized the passage of time.Over time the artists began to vent their anger over their different theoretical points of view, as well as over daily trivialities. Conflicts arose over what and where to eat, how and when to contact friends and art critics, and how to manage the demands of their jobs (Hsieh’s carpentry work and Montano’s teaching). Montano explained, “If we fought, then we would look ahead to what the other might want, and then take away that privilege.”⁵³ Eventually, she said, “yanking [became] a chief mode of expressing anger.”⁵⁴ The artists recorded these conflicts in images of crumpled paper marked with the word fight and in photographs of themselves in the act of yanking. The artists documented yanking on November 25, 1983, and March 17, 1984; the word fight appears in photographs from January 28, 1984, January 29, 1984, and March 21, 1984. Hsieh refused my request to publish these particular photographs, indicating that these non-“neutral” images from the piece “can only be presented as part of the whole yearlong photo documents.”⁵⁵ His reluctance concerning these specific images underscores his more conceptual investment in the piece. The violence of yanking spoke to the difficulty of the vow and the difficulty of the commitment to living in community. As Hsieh said, “We become each other’s cage.”⁵⁶ Montano framed the experience in terms of cultivating humility through the painful and problematic discipline of collaboration: “By staying tied to Tehching Hsieh in his Art/Life One Year Performance 1983–1984, I died a little every day, learning humility and collaboration.”⁵⁷ For Montano the stakes of this endurance artwork went beyond suffering and self-inflicted hardship to survival itself. Completing the piece without losing herself became her priority. Conflict management thus equaled survival: “For survival we have to work things out.”⁵⁸ While the language of death and survival may seem hyperbolic in this context, the experience of this piece radically destabilized Montano’s identity. One day she encountered a policeman on the street and considered banging her head into a glass window to draw his attention so he would come to her aid.⁵⁹ This endurance piece tested the limits of Montano’s ability to withstand extreme vulnerability; but it was also an investment, a project related to the mitigation of long-term fears and anxieties. For Montano discipline through collaboration served as preparation for future hardship: “I do hard work in case life gets hard. Then I will be ready.”⁶⁰ In this way, Montano’s public asceticism communicated an apocalyptic, prophetic sensibility. While tied to Hsieh, Montano conceived a plan for her next performance, 7 Years of Living Art (1984–91): “It was to be an ‘art job’ imposed on me, for me, for seven years. An ‘art vow.’”⁶¹ In this long-term piece, Montano continued her experiments in combining art and life activities. She established a set of prescriptions that structured her life on an annual, monthly, and daily basis: each year of the piece corresponded to one of the seven Hindu chakras and was associated with one color and one of seven personas. Montano drew on seven personas that she had created in an early video work, Learning to Talk (1977). In this video performance, Montano had experimented with role-playing and developed a set of personas, including a sexy Frenchwoman, a country western singer, and the character of a nun with her Maryknoll name, Sister Rose Augustine.⁶² In 7 Years of Living Art, Montano explicitly engaged with Hindu symbolism, but she also referred to Catholic metaphors of the seven sacraments, the seven sorrows, and others. The structure of the piece itself echoed structures of monastic encounter: Montano designated three sets of commitments: inner, outer, and others. Daily vows, or inner commitments, included wearing only clothing of the year’s color, spending at least three hours in a room of that color, listening to one tone for seven hours each day, and speaking in an accent associated with the persona of the year.⁶³ Here, as in Art/Life One Year Performance 1983–1984, Montano created a set of multivalent habits. Mimicking the nun’s uniquely identifiable garb, she visually marked the vow with her colored clothing, and she assumed a set of repetitive daily practices—habits—that shaped her speech and mannerisms. In this way, Montano transformed contemplative convent behaviors into art actions. During 7 Years of Living Art, these physical, behavioral activities constituted Montano’s inner work. However, in her continuation of the piece, Another 7 Years of Living Art (1991–98), she redefined these rules: clothing colors and listening to a single sound became outer rather than inner commitments, and she defined her inner work as increasing her attention to spiritual matters. This echoed the graduation of postulate to novice, or novice to nun, when habits of speech, dress, and schedule are maintained but deemphasized in favor of more abstract, interior forms of spiritual commitment. As part of the outer commitments of 7 Years of Living Art, Montano held monthly, public, one-on-one art/life counseling sessions at the New Museum, where she met individually with strangers for discussion and tarot, palm, and psychic readings. In addition, each year she hosted one or more artist collaborators (“others”) in her home for sixteen days; for several years, these collaborators were Annie Sprinkle and Veronica Vera.⁶⁴ As such, the piece incorporated both seclusion—in the cloister of the one color room and the daily inner disciplines—and its outer and other complements, missionary work. In particular, Montano’s uniquely Maryknoll approach to collaboration in the confessional space of the New Museum consultations and her in-home workshops echoed the direct apostolate, the missionary practice of directly engaging with individuals around spiritual issues. Montano wrote that through these seven-year commitments, she learned to “die daily to prepare for final retirement.”⁶⁵ This symbolic language echoed the spiritual writings of nuns such as St. Marguerite Marie Alacoque, but her explicit preoccupation with the habit of death and dying also signaled Montano’s traumatic subjectivity.⁶⁶ For Montano monastic discipline, self-denial, and sainthood coincided with the suffering female body.

Erasing the Past

In 1977 performance artist Suzanne Lacy invited Montano to perform at the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles. Montano remembered, “I think they were having a circus. It was upstairs, and festive.”⁶⁷ Deliberately locat-ing her body on the margins of this lively social event, Montano performed Erasing the Past on the floor in the Woman’s Building basement. She covered her face and lower body with a sheet, echoing the gauzy habitlike garment of her chicken woman pieces, but left her belly and breasts bare: “I laid for three hours in an empty room, my torso exposed, seven acupuncture needles in my conception vessel. I intended to forget the past.”⁶⁸ Montano described her adolescent experience of sexual assault briefly in “Love Sex: The Ecstatic Writings of Linda M. Montano,” an unpublished manuscript of erotic texts: “At sixteen my world collapsed when I was betrayed sexually.”⁶⁹ Montano’s spare statement lacked specifics, and she has resisted further discussion of this event, but she has identified trauma as foundational for her endurance art practice: “Much of my work is about . . . mending the past.”⁷⁰ Psychologist Judith Lewis Herman has defined “any physical contact that had to be kept secret” as traumatic for children and adolescents, and psychiatrist Anna C. Salter has observed that adolescent sexual trauma is “always emotionally violent and marked by destruction of trust and betrayal of intimacy.”⁷¹ Rather than speculating about the details of this event, this chapter foregrounds the artist’s subjective experience of sexual trauma as visualized in her discourse of endurance art. In this way, attending to Herman’s charge that “the victim herself may be the most reliable judge of the long-term effects of her experience,” I seek to deliberately interrupt the biographical coherence of this text, disrupt my own narrative voice, signal the instability of traumatic experience, and preserve the ambiguity and contradiction of Montano’s presentations and representations of traumatic content.⁷² In Erasing the Past, Montano described herself as “isolated, silent, faceless and feeling somewhat foolish.”⁷³ Alone and distanced from the boisterous party, she marked the invisible but powerful presence of her traumatic past and visually manifested the dissociation central to her posttraumatic experience of sexual trauma. As a routine mental activity, dissociation allows the temporary fragmentation of the self; for example, when arriving at work, one may not remember the particulars of driving there.⁷⁴ This brain function, when it occurs in the midst of trauma, may help victims survive by distancing or detaching from overwhelming affect. Survivors may feel that they were floating above or beside their bodies, witnessing traumatic events that seemed to be happening to someone else. However, some can continue to experience bouts of dissociation that disrupt the continuity of the self. Well beyond the traumatic moment, they may feel the intrusion of numbness, distance, or detachment from their bodies, from strong emotions, or from upsetting memories. Dissociated behaviors are diverse and their impact far-reaching: dissociation can prevent the integration of trauma into survivors’ internal self-narratives, resulting in a tension between knowing and not knowing. As psychologist Nanette C. Auerhahn and psychiatrist Dori Laub have observed, this doubleness reflects a posttraumatic, “paradoxical yoking of the compulsions to remember and to know trauma with the equally urgent needs to forget and not to know it.”⁷⁵ Dissociation, as a mechanism of not knowing, separates survivors from their own life experiences and isolates them from others. Compounding this sense of difference from others, the experience of sexual assault may be surrounded by silence motivated by family pressures, feelings of shame, or fear of stigma.⁷⁶ According to psychologists Leslie Lebowitz and Susan Roth, this secrecy can result in “a discrepancy between one’s inner and outer experience of self, thereby promoting alienation,” generating a sense of difference between self and body, and exacerbating the survivor’s fragmented identity.⁷⁷ In Erasing the Past, Montano performed dissociation physically. Rather than participate in the circus of human activity at the Woman’s Building, she situated herself on the margins. She lay silent and alone, aurally and physically marking her sense of difference. Swathed in the gauzy habit of her chicken woman persona, she obscured her face but laid bare her breasts and belly. Sexualizing and depersonalizing her identity, Montano eradicated her facial features and unveiled her torso, echoing sculptures made as art therapy by survivors whose sexual trauma coincided with the development of eating disorders. One survivor depicted herself “as an 11-year-old lying on her back with enormous manacles over her arms and legs. Her genital region was exposed and vulnerable, and no features were imprinted on her face.”⁷⁸ Erasing the Past presented a female figure similarly evacuated of identity, covered in the white robes of a novice nun. Manifested in the draped robes and figure of the nun, the affect of sexual trauma pervaded the visual structures and content of Erasing the Past and other endurance artworks. Charged with religious and sexual meaning, the nun’s recurring presence, both explicit and implied, visualized the centrality of Catholicism to Montano’s traumatic subjectivity and her prophetic witness to female victimhood.

Montano’s posttraumatic response to sexual assault took on a uniquely religious character. Religion had served as her retreat since childhood: “I became an escape artist at a very early age. Religion was a way to transform, transcribe, and move beyond, on the sensual, visual, conceptual level, my predicament as a woman, as a child in Saugerties, New York.”⁷⁹ She has explicitly identified her sexual trauma and its psychic damage with Catholicism: “I was deflowered and depowered by the Church.”⁸⁰ This powerful indictment directly associated her assault with Catholic patriarchal structures that degraded female agency and participation.⁸¹ Yet, in her adolescence, immersion in Catholic life provided a radical opportunity to break with the past: after her sexual assault, Montano, always a devout child, decided to enter the convent.⁸² In “Love Sex,” Montano situated her decision to become a nun in the context of her sexual assault: “To escape further into ‘purity’ and away from shame, I entered a convent at nineteen and stayed there for two years, basking in celibacy.”⁸³ The passage continues, “The life was utopian: time was devoted to silence (we talked only one hour a day), a study of scriptures and singing in an echo-chambered chapel with 150 other nuns while wearing a costume right out of the middle ages.” Montano narrated her retreat into monasticism—the first of many attempts to erase the past—specifically in terms of sexual purity. She noted that sexuality, in the form of “a crush on another nun,” invaded this safe place near the end of her time there.⁸⁴ This understanding of the sexual purity of convent life derived not only from the traditional Benedictine vow of chastity but from popular midcentury Catholic children’s literature. Maryknoll publications such as Bernie Becomes a Nun (1956), which were avidly consumed by Montano and other Catholic young women preparing to take the veil, described convent discipline in terms of moral and physical cleanliness.⁸⁵ Montano remembered this book and the Maryknoll magazine (as well as the relative geographic proximity of the convent to her hometown) as major influences on her decision to join the Maryknoll order.⁸⁶ At the same time, Montano’s search for a space free of threatening sexuality echoed the actions of many survivors of rape and sexual assault, who may avoid sexual encounters and practice abstinence for many years.⁸⁷ As a Maryknoll novice, following standard novitiate procedure, she discarded the name Linda Montano and was rechristened Sister Rose Augustine. Though processed through institutional means, this gesture furthered her already dissociated subjectivity. It reinforced her fragmented identity by positing a pure, undamaged persona that she has since described as the “Holy Girl,” visualized in the nun personas adopted in endurance actions from her earliest chicken woman performances to her most recent art actions.⁸⁸ As the imagined, alternate self—the whole self as opposed to the fragmented, traumatized self—the Holy Girl existed outside of, before, or beyond her sexual assault. In particular, Montano consistently has identified her Holy Girl persona with childhood, reflecting her desire, common to survivors of early sexual trauma, for a purified, innocent youth. Monastic asceticism presented Montano with an opportunity to regain a sense of agency by asserting control over her body. The structure and bodily surveillance of convent life and the convent’s goal of creating an undifferentiated community of nuns appealed to her: “It was totally to my liking and extremely structured.”⁸⁹ Montano described the uniformity of her daily regimen as a novice.

Up at 4:00 or 5:00 AM—thirty women slept in one room with little curtains for cubicles, sort of like hospital curtain cubicles separating us. Army barrack lockers were used for our clothes. Everyone wore the same undergarment, nightgowns I guess they were called. . . . We would all get up together, close our curtains together, put on our hats together . . . put our eyes down, go to the bathroom, never look. Then go down, meditate together, go to Mass, breakfast, change to work clothes, work for three hours, lunch, go to school for four hours (theology), supper, and then an hour of talking. So therewere rules based on daily living. Life was: letter writing (receiving mail once a week), one hour of talking a day, silence, prayer, a lot of coming into the main chapel, sitting, facing 700 nuns on one side and 700 nuns on the other.⁹⁰

Montano compared the similarity and simultaneity of novices’ appearances, gestures, and activities to the visual spectacle and choreography of Alice in Wonderland and The Sound of Music.⁹¹ Despite their aesthetic appeal, these practices minimized, alienated, and subsumed individual identity by insisting on novices’ uniformity. The strict regimes of convent organization focused novices’ attention on managing and hiding their bodies. They were expected, she said, to “put our eyes down, go to the bathroom, never look.”⁹² In this way, monastic asceticism replicated and furthered Montano’s dissociation. While not inherently pathological, convent values coincided with Montano’s trauma reaction. In response to the fragmenting experience of dissociation, many survivors of sexual trauma may implement regimes of self-denial and self-monitoring or become deeply concerned with perfection or cleanliness. As attempts to regain a sense of ownership and control over a violated body, these dissociative behaviors nevertheless block the integration of trauma and the restoration of agency by obscuring the relationship between past and present, mind and body, trauma and self.⁹³ Convent life facilitated Montano’s split sense of identity and feelings of estrangement. The organization of pre–Vatican II convent life deliberately suppressed individualism, isolated individuals from past experiences, and demanded the selfless surrender of individual identity.⁹⁴ By specifically positing a new, pure identity, enforcing a highly supervised, regulated daily life, and providing institutionally sanctioned access to self deprivation, the convent exacerbated Montano’s posttraumatic dissociation. By allowing her to take refuge in the illusory perfection of her Holy Girl persona, monastic routines repressed and postponed her confrontation with trauma. Many young women found convent life at midcentury to be dissatisfying and stressful, but for Montano the untenable contradictions of living with a suppressed, split identity led to the development of anorexia in the second year of her novitiate. Montano named her condition anorexia nervosa, although she was not diagnosed at the time of her illness: “I . . . left [the convent] with anorexia or a situation like anorexia. I’m not sure if it was full-fledged ‘Karen Carpenter anorexia.’”⁹⁵ Bodily discipline, and particularly fasting, has played a key role in Catholic religious practice for centuries. Teresa of Avila, a sixteenth-century saint Montano has long admired, wrote, “[T]he first thing that we have to do, and that at once, is to rid ourselves of love for this body of ours.”⁹⁶ Historian Caroline Walker Bynum has documented medieval women’s extensive uses of food, the symbolism surrounding eating, and the central role of fasting in their daily Catholic practices, as well as how food practices offered possibilities for the expression of gendered dissent.⁹⁷ In the mid-twentieth century, fasting remained a traditional form of asceticism for Catholics and was practiced regularly by both monastic and lay communities. References to food suffused Montano’s memories of Catholic practice: “the fasting before Communion, Fridays, and Lent . . . the mystery of Transubstantiation.”⁹⁸ These elements of lived religion directed her attention to rigorous, ascetic, food-related Catholic practices. Anthropologist and nun Patricia Curran has argued that in pre–Vatican II convents in the twentieth century, “the rituals of convent dining were cultural performances that attempted to reestablish the fundamental facts and values of religious congregations—the ascendance of grace over nature, of mind over body, of the common good over individual interest.”⁹⁹ At the same time, convent authorities struggled with the tension between bodily renunciation and the vigorous activity required for nuns’ participation in manual labor.¹⁰⁰ Food regimes in pre–Vatican II convent dining halls manifested this tension with a variety of strictures that promoted nuns’ discomfort. Curran noted, “To avoid making food into a God substitute, a number of controls were built into the ascetic system. One ate whatever one was served, in posturally uncomfortable positions, as quickly as possible.”¹⁰¹ Novices and committed nuns alike were expected to respond with indifference to the timing, content, and portion size of meals. Refectories’ spatial organization and seating arrangements barred intimacy and “recreation” (conversation). Prostrations and other physical penances often took place during meals.¹⁰² Montano remembered that gruesome stories of saints and martyrs were often read aloud while the novices ate.¹⁰³ She described the extreme self-consciousness that she felt at these times: “[My] attention was usually on myself or all of the above [penance, food, neighbor, reading] . . . because [I was so] ‘uncomfortable.’”¹⁰⁴ She and other novices were required to maintain “custody of the eyes,” meaning they were not allowed to make eye contact or observe one another in the act of eating.¹⁰⁵ Mealtimes were a time of distancing, isolation, and assisted dissociation. Montano has described the origin of her anorexia in various ways. In 2009 she said, “I gagged on powdered sugar on a cookie in the dining hall and this ‘started’ my anorexia.”¹⁰⁶ In her video Anorexia Nervosa (1981), in which she discusses her struggle with the illness, Montano described how she and another nun began dieting. Regardless of its origins, in the context of this convent culture, Montano’s self-imposed fasting soon drew the attention of her superiors. In a letter dated July 6, 1962, Sister Paul Miriam informed Montano’s parents that their daughter would leave the order.

Yesterday Sister could not promise to eat normally, not because of physical reasons, but because she could not make up her mind to do it. [I]t is the general consensus of opinion here that Sister Rose

Augustine is out of place in religious life. We also feel that thisnon-eating program is an expression of the resistance—even perhaps sub-conscious—“a square peg in a round hole.” At any rate she and we are aware that it could be unwise for her to continue any longer in the novitiate.¹⁰⁷

Sister Paul Miriam’s letter framed Montano’s illness in terms of agency: she refused to “make up her mind” to eat. Her body disciplines served as a form of dissent from convent authority. Montano said, “We had daily confession with one nun. I was not confessing that I wasn’t eating normal amounts of food. So I was playing this incredible control game with myself and with them.”¹⁰⁸ Marked by her silence during confession, Montano registered her opposition somatically rather than verbally. She elaborated on these nonverbal power issues: “The situation there was difficult for me to swallow, and so my body reacted. I’m referring to a situation of being nonverbal in an institution that had a lot of structure, demands, and pressure—things for me to respond to. I did not give my full consent, or did not know how to give my full consent, or how to question whether or not I was giving my full consent.”¹⁰⁹ Even twenty years after her experience, Montano insisted that she enjoyed assuming control over her body: “I liked controlling my food intake, I liked watching what I was eating and not eating, and hiding it. I liked the challenge of making myself do something, controlling my body.”¹¹⁰ Montano has acknowledged that she continues to struggle with ascetic attitudes toward food.¹¹¹

Montano’s concern with agency and control recalled the fundamental violation of sexual assault described by Lebowitz and Roth: “The defining characteristic of sexual trauma is the elimination of the victim’s choice and the obliteration of her agency.”¹¹² Psychiatrist Ann Kearney-Cooke has suggested that “abusive sexual experiences, as well as the feeling of powerlessness which result from them, can be important contributing factors in the development of an eating disorder.”¹¹³ Anorexia nervosa, bulimia, and other eating disorders are common responses to sexual trauma because they can physically manifest the dissociation, violation of bodily integrity, and disintegration of self induced by traumatic experience. Montano addressed the nature of this somatic communication in her video artwork Anorexia Nervosa (1981), in which five women, including Montano, discuss their eating disorders: “My basic problem was being nonverbal. I didn’t know what I was feeling. I had no way to verbalize what I was feeling. [M]y body started to talk for me because no words were coming out of my mouth.”¹¹⁴ In this way, Montano suggested, the dissociated memory of sexual trauma found its voice in the marginalization and diminishment of her body.

Montano’s association of disordered eating with somatic communication responded to foundational research on anorexia conducted by psychiatrist Hilde Bruch in the 1970s and 1980s. Bruch identified conflicts of identity, selfhood, and autonomy as the most important factors in the development of anorexia.¹¹⁵ Although she contributed this analysis to the definition of anorexia in the DSM-III (1980), neither the final publication nor its updated versions, the DSM-IV (2002) and the DSM-5 (2013), adopted this understanding of the nature of disordered eating. Some practitioners have suggested that the manual’s emphasis on body image obscures patients’ underlying motivations related to identity and agency. Psychologist R. A. Gordon, for example, has argued that the DSM’s focus on body image without regard to issues of autonomy was a product of the 1970s cultural setting and does not reflect the reality of women’s experiences.¹¹⁶ On the other hand, sociologist Paula Saukko has explored the underlying assumptions of Bruch’s analysis and suggested that Bruch’s focus on autonomy was predicated on post–World War II American values of personal freedom and masculinity.¹¹⁷ While Bruch did not directly study the role of sexual trauma and eating disorders, current research suggests the relevance of her views on agency for sexually traumatized populations.¹¹⁸ Montano herself knew and admired Bruch’s work, and in the 1980s she sent Bruch her video Anorexia Nervosa and her book Art and Everyday Life.¹¹⁹ Bruch argued that anorexics tend to hold certain beliefs about themselves. She observed that they consider themselves to be—and usually are seen by others as—high-achieving “good girls” who feel “eternally preoccupied with the image they create in the eyes of others, always questioning whether they are worthy of respect,” and have grandiose aspirations that are difficult if not impossible to dislodge.¹²⁰ For Montano these qualities coalesced in her preoccupation with sainthood. In Catholic theology, a saint is an individual recognized by the Catholic Church for exceptional devotion. Through extreme devotional acts, saints become subjects of devotion themselves. They usually achieve this elevated spiritual status by mimicking Christ’s virtues, including charity, care of the sick, asceticism, and especially physical suffering. Montano’s lifelong fervor to become a saint has persisted since childhood. Speaking in the third person of her childhood self—itself a linguistic act of dissociation—she wrote: Little Linda became interested in one thing—being a saint. She tried different ways of doing that. She attended every First Friday Mass, Stations of the Cross, and even entered the convent because the persona that most inspired her was that of a “Holy Girl.” Her constant question was how can I be one? How can I get close to God? How can I be just like Jesus?¹²¹ Montano’s impulse to assume the mantle of sainthood, to authenticate her Holy Girl persona, combined her trauma reaction with her emotional and intellectual investment in Catholicism. Her commitment to asceticism reflected her dual impulses to discipline herself to “be just like Jesus” and to discipline the frightening memories of trauma. As such Montano’s conception of sainthood centered on suffering: “When I was seven years old, I wanted to be a saint and I thought that I had to suffer like Jesus. That became the plot and story line for my entire life quest.”¹²² These aspirations, which she has pursued in strict regimes of suffering in her endurance art actions to the present, were profoundly shaped by Catholic perceptions of suffering in midcentury America.

Endurance and the Pursuit of Sainthood

St. Augustine framed suffering as “tests of virtue”; for centuries before and since, Catholic theologians have debated the role and meanings of suffering.¹²³ Religious studies scholars Robert A. Orsi and Paula M. Kane have identified a uniquely American, post–World War II attitude toward suffering. Influenced by the Catholic Church’s increased emphasis on the interiority of religious experience, American Catholics at midcentury equated the endurance of pain—physical pain—with saintliness. Devotional literature argued that only the spiritually accomplished could mimic Jesus by successfully enduring pain with cheerful acceptance, even indifference.¹²⁴ Orsi argued that this sanctification of pain emphasized difference and made ill people “into inhuman others whose inner lives were radically unlike everyone else’s, and ultimately unrecognizable. First it made them into others—and then devotional culture celebrated them for this otherness and difference, which was called holiness.”¹²⁵ Holiness was defined in direct relation to the experience of pain. This cultural focus on suffering, which Orsi called a “darkly erotic aesthetic of pain,” nurtured Montano’s desires to become a saint.¹²⁶ Orsi has suggested that ideas about suffering accompanied socioeconomic shifts in Catholic communities after World War II. As second-generation Catholic immigrants moved away from ethnic enclaves to pursue financial and social advancement, traditional values of self-denial and sacrifice came into conflict with middle-class materialist ambitions.¹²⁷ Montano’s childhood memories reflected this cultural situation. The grand-daughter of “stately silent and dignified Italian grandparents,” Montano has noted that she grew up in an “outsider family,” the only Italians in their small, upstate New York community.¹²⁸ Her father’s parents were “non-English speaking from Campobasso, both devout, silent, hardworking.”¹²⁹ Her father, Henry Montano, a successful shoe salesman, articulated his generation’s conflicting set of values in an interview with his daughter. In response to a question about his business acumen, he said, “Any time that I had after work, I was home with the family. I was never in bars, or dancing. I was always home. It was business and family, nothing in between.”¹³⁰ Here Mr. Montano deflected attention from his business success, instead highlighting the activities that his commitments excluded. For Orsi discourses of sacrifice and suffering mediated this type of discomfort with material success: “The children of immigrants, in transition from one way of life into another, constructed for themselves an ethos that proclaimed pain (not hard work, ambition, or a desire for success) as a road to the greatest achievement (which was sanctity, not a bigger apartment, a new car, or a good job).”¹³¹ The rhetoric of sacrifice could alleviate both men’s and women’s anxieties over postwar prosperity—as it did for Mr. Montano, for example. However, physical pain carried a particular gendered connotation. Kane has observed that the ethos of pain in twentieth-century Catholicism coincided with gender expectations. The passive acceptance of suffering was a female phenomenon: the “ideal of extreme suffering [was] the true expression of the feminine.”¹³² Discourses of suffering allowed women to talk about their pain and provided a framework of meaning for their experiences. However, Kane has cautioned against interpreting narratives of suffering from this era as empowering. Instead, she suggested, “Self-inflicted bodily suffering, even if interpreted as a rebellious act by women seeking salvation, is not a universally emancipating gesture, particularly inside a patriarchal system like the Catholic Church.”¹³³

Montano’s endurance art practice has pivoted on this notion of suffering as both gendered and culturally powerful. She articulated the direct connections among femininity, pain, and prophetic witness in her cartoon Visualization #1 (1982). In this series of provocative self-portraits, Montano grappled with suffering in the context of gender and sexuality. She penned these images at a crucial moment in her biography, twenty years after her convent struggles with anorexia, one year into her two-year stay at the Zen Mountain Monastery, and just before her collaboration with Hsieh in Art/ Life One Year Performance 1983–1984. In the 1970s, before joining the Zen Mountain Monastery, Montano had lived for a decade in California, where she became a key figure in the rich West Coast performance art scene. She moved to San Francisco in 1972 with her husband, Mitchell Payne, a photographer and former Presbyterian seminarian whom she married in 1971. In California, Montano performed extensively. She collaborated with Tom Marioni, presented work at the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles, and participated in Close Radio, a performance art radio program hosted by Chris Burden and John Duncan.¹³⁴ As she became involved with California feminist art circles, Montano began to consider the fluidity of gender and sexuality; she has explained that “what distinguishes a lesbian from a non-lesbian was a big issue for me in San Francisco.”¹³⁵ These questions came to the fore in 1975, when she met composer Pauline Oliveros. Montano separated from her husband and joined Oliveros in San Diego, where she created her first video artworks, including Learning to Talk (1977), in which she experimented with seven different female personas, from sexy French woman to pious nun. In 1977 Payne died in an accidental shooting. Montano documented her grief in Mitchell’s Death (1979), one of her best-known works. Visualization #1 documents Montano’s response to this accumulation of weighty life transitions. While this and other artworks included or referred to sexually explicit content and explored the fluidity of gender identity and sexuality, the presence of this material complicates but does not contradict its Catholic forms and influences.

Montano’s series of drawings began with an upward-gazing nun, followed by a sketch of a powerful, androgynous practitioner of karate. The aggressive stance of this figure mirrored the poses that Montano and Oliveros assumed in their collaborative performance Learning to Pay Attention (1979), in which they slowly performed synchronized karate movements.¹³⁶ Next, Montano sketched herself naked from the waist up, with unshaven armpits and buzz-cut hair, characteristics that identified her with 1980s lesbian culture. In the second-to-last frame, this short-haired, breasted figure has been nailed to a cross, a large penis visible between her legs. Finally, in the last frame, the artist appeared as a mermaid, with a fishlike tail and winglike arms. Visualization #1 represented the internal negotiations among Montano’s Holy Girl urges; her transgender, lesbian identity; the demands of artistic productivity; and other competing impulses. She depicted herself as both Jesus and nun, male and female, human and otherworldly. Montano’s self-portrait as Christ reinforced her preoccupation with sainthood. It echoed the medieval devotional practice of imitatio Christi, in which believers imagine themselves suffering alongside or in place of Christ, and it reiterated the visions of many female saints (usually nuns) who imagined themselves on the cross.¹³⁷ Montano’s vision of herself as Christ incorporated breasts as well as a penis, visualizing the transgender dynamics of women’s experiences of imitatio Christi. She has described herself as “envious of the priests” and their access to ritual mysteries while also noting that she identified with Christ in the absence of female religious leaders: “The crucifix was so potent and so right there, and there were no women on the altar giving any other message.”¹³⁸ In addition, Montano’s conflation of gender in the figure of Christ registered her ambivalence about the relationship among femininity, sexuality, and holiness: “the only way to be good was to be crucified or have breasts cut off.”¹³⁹ Female suffering and female holiness were thus equated with the mutilation and assault of the female body. In this way, Montano’s transgendered image presented a sharp critique of Catholic patriarchy, its gender-exclusive policies, and its violent consequences. Further, Montano’s drawing of herself as Christ visualized her psychological pain—resulting from the conflicting demands of her desires, fears, and dreams—as physical pain. The devotional literature of Montano’s childhood admonished Catholics that the gruesome physical pain of Jesus’s crucifixion and the saints’ martyrdoms trumped any other form of suffering. Compared to these excruciating and very common Catholic images of the suffering of Christ and the saints, psychological suffering was particularly scorned.¹⁴⁰ Just as Montano’s identification with Christ in Visualization #1 legitimized her suffering, abstaining from eating in the convent refigured the psychic pain of sexual trauma into physical form, marking her suffering as morally valuable and worthy of attention from her community. In addition, by physically manifesting her psychological distress, Montano connected herself to the long tradition of women who achieved sainthood—and prophetic authority—by enduring physical suffering in imitation of Christ.

The medium of endurance art resonated with two aspects of Montano’s understanding of suffering and sainthood. First, she connected both suffering and performance art with the endurance of pain: “When I was introduced to art soon after [leaving the convent], I immediately found a way to transfer religious fervor and my predilection for penance and suffering into my work . . . as performance art.”¹⁴¹ In addition, Montano has crucially linked both suffering and performance to purity. Both responding to posttraumatic affect and drawing on convent imagery, she sought purity in the medium of endurance art: “I didn’t want to make more things . . . the invisible, sculpting the invisible, seemed less polluting.”¹⁴² Rather than producing objects, strategies of endurance allowed her to explore internal states, daily life, and the ethical negotiations of collaboration, interaction, and encounter as art. Montano has most frequently, and most powerfully, presented these concepts in her recurring iconography of the nun, a theologically charged embodiment of sexual purity and monastic discipline. Akin to her Holy Girl persona, her nun performances marked her concern with female suffering, expressed her posttraumatic feelings of difference from others, and presented her dual desires to display and hide the wound of trauma, both to transcend or escape the pain of trauma and to garner spiritual acclaim for her suffering and survival. In this way, Montano’s monastic approach to endurance action can be understood as both an artistic strategy and a moral imperative. Psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton observed that posttraumatic responses can challenge the meaning of the traumatic event for the survivor and initiate reflection on moral questions.¹⁴³ As such, Montano’s quest for sainthood signifies the posttraumatic longing for the restoration of bodily integrity, purity, and justice.

Performing Sister Rose Augustine

The recurring iconography of the nun in Montano’s endurance art clarified the moral value of her suffering and tracked changes in her attitude toward suffering over time. From her first performance works to her most recent actions, Montano has consistently presented herself as a nun. Just a few of the pieces in which she performed in nun’s garments, modified a habit, and/or included photographs of herself as a novice are Lying: Dead Chicken, Live Angel (1971), Sitting: Dead Chicken, Live Angel (1971), Lying: Dead Chicken, Live Angel (1972), Chicken Dance: The Streets of San Francisco (1972), Chicken Dance (1974), The Screaming Nun (1975), Learning to Talk/ Living in Mandeville, UCSD, for Five Days as Five Different People (1977), Learning to Talk (1978), Listening to the 80s: Inside/Outside (1980), The Nun’s Fairy Tale (1981), On Death and Dying (1982), Seven Spiritual Lives of Linda M. Montano (1996, in which a photograph of herself as a novice hovered over a famous photograph of Mother Mary Joseph, the founder of the Maryknoll order), Teresa of Avila (2007), and Linda Mary Montano: I Dreamed I Was Mother Teresa (2009). Whether explicitly wearing convent garments or more abstractly bearing the marks of her vows, Montano’s monasticism both embodied and challenged midcentury American Catholic notions of suffering and sainthood. In Montano’s first performance actions—her chicken woman pieces, created only a few years after she left the novitiate—Montano assumed her convent persona, Sister Rose Augustine. Dressed in gauzy white gowns that echoed traditional novices’ garments, she “present[ed herself] as a symbolic religious, a nun-chicken in disguise.”¹⁴⁴ Naked beneath the transparent fabric and weighed down by wings made of clear garbage bags stuffed with feathers, the artist remained as motionless as possible through out these performances: “I tried to imitate the statues by becoming a saint via art: dressed in white, sitting still, white on my face.”¹⁴⁵ In attempting to turn into a statue, Montano objectified herself. She has explicitly connected this distancing with death: “I felt somewhat vulnerable lying there, not talking, eyes closed, not really dead, object-like.”¹⁴⁶ Montano’s chicken woman actions pivoted on the presentation of her live body as if dead. Her white, waxy skin; closed eyes; silent, inert body; and the filmy curtains and otherworldly staging of the works recall a funeral or wake.¹⁴⁷ In this dramatic imagery, Montano’s use of the figure of the nun approximated death. Underscored by the eroticism of her nudity beneath her habit like garment, her actions enacted the psychic death of self that she experienced as a result of sexual trauma. She has referred to these performances as her “early lying in state images” and as a series of “death simulations.”¹⁴⁸ Her performance of Lying in 1972 was alternately titled Don’t Be a Chicken Last Rites While Lying in My Own Shell, merging fear, isolation, and death in the figure of the nun.¹⁴⁹ Subsequent works continued to layer the nun with images of death, as in the video On Death and Dying (1982), in which three nuns played poker accompanied by an audio track in which an elderly nurse described the physical deterioration of dying bodies.

Death also characterized the artist-audience relationship that Montano actively worked to create in her “lying in state” performances. She performed these works in public, anticipating a devotional form of audience encounter. Her attempt to become a statue resulted in a totally silent, impassive, and restrained relation to members of her audience. She hoped to cultivate the admiration and regard of strangers: “[I asked] audiences to watch me endure. Give me attention, witness my long-term commitment. Their presence was like a bath of recognition and approval.”¹⁵⁰ Montano’s language resonated with theories of witnessing developed by psychiatrist Dori Laub, who argued that “there is, in each survivor, an imperative need to tell and thus to come to know one’s story.”¹⁵¹ However, by its nature, he argued, traumatic experience “cannot be fully captured in thought, memory, and speech.”¹⁵² By performing as a statue in the garments of a nun, Montano’s early endurance actions sought empathetic witnesses to her suffering. However, as Auerhahn and Laub noted, “[T]estimonies are not monologues; they cannot take place in solitude.”¹⁵³ The attitude and demeanor of Montano’s nun/saint statue did garner attention, but presenting herself as an object of devotion also rendered her mute, limiting her body’s actions, stifling her voice, and curtailing encounters with audiences. The rigidity of Montano’s presentation of the nun began to crumble in The Screaming Nun (1975), a turning point in her presentation and representation of trauma in the figure of the nun.¹⁵⁴ As Montano describes the work, “I dressed as a nun, danced, screamed, and heard confession at Embarcadero Plaza. [A friend] said that I screamed uncontrollably and that the sound echoed throughout the entire space. I don’t remember doing this.”¹⁵⁵ Photographic documentation of the performance shows the artist wearing the white habit of a novice; rather than a gauzy interpretation of a habit, as in her earlier chicken woman pieces, these robes hewed more closely to a novice’s authentic garb. While earlier performances presented a still body and pristine garments, in The Screaming Nun suppressed energy imbued her pose. Her hands seemed to grasp her rosary convulsively; her lower lip seemed to tremble. Most strikingly, Montano appeared disheveled, her habit spotted with dirt and creased with wrinkles, marked by her movements in the world. Here the restrained, immobile statue of previous works was replaced with an angry, straining woman. In The Screaming Nun, Montano vocalized her psychic wounds in art for the first time. Rather than attempting to awaken strangers’ regard and empathy with the pre–Vatican II ideal of her beautiful, impassive endurance of pain, Montano screamed her rage and anger to passersby. This somatic expression marked the beginning of a series of endurance actions that literally gave voice to her psychological suffering.

Abstracting the Habit

After this performance, Montano’s work began to suggest a new understanding of suffering, marked by a looser, less literal appropriation of her nun persona. Instead of the garments and outward characteristics of the nun or the physical challenge of remaining as still as a statue, she subjected herself to intense psychological disciplines. Her concern with discipline was already present in her earliest work, as in the chicken woman performances and Happiness Piece. By the late 1970s, however, her work increasingly began to suggest the seeds of a new approach, as in one of her best known video works, Mitchell’s Death (1978). Montano created this piece in response to the sudden death of Mitchell Payne, her estranged husband, who was killed by his cousin in an accidental shooting. The death initially was considered a suicide, but in a therapy session a month later Payne’s cousin recovered the memory of the shooting.¹⁵⁶ Montano mourned Payne in a series of performance events: A Tribute to Mitchell Payne, March 31, 1944–August 19, 1977 (1977), Z A Dream, Just after Mitchell Died (1977), A Tribute to Mitchell Payne (1978), and Mitchell’s Death (1978). She produced a video, also titled Mitchell’s Death, as an accompaniment to the last of these performances. In this much-exhibited video, Montano documented her grief by inserting acupuncture needles into her face while chanting a detailed narrative of the events of the days immediately following Payne’s death. The monotone she used for this narrative recalled the recitation of Mass, novenas, and other aural aspects of Catholic daily life: “[C]hanting singsong was a device I used to make a churchlike experience out of horror.”¹⁵⁷ In this and later endurances, Montano drew on a more varied set of religious and visual traditions rather than relying on nun’s garb and direct convent imagery. She later joked, “As Shakespeare, Annie Sprinkle, and others have said, ‘Dresseth liketh undt nuneth, duth noteth undt sainteth maketh!’”¹⁵⁸ This process of abstraction continued in Art/Life One Year Performance 1983–1984, in which Montano developed a more flexible model for addressing the tensions of monasticism in her work. She established new ways of representing the key elements of monastic life—including the vow, the habit, collaboration, and suffering—in terms of a series of long-term commitments to specific behaviors and attitudes.Montano continued to develop and evolve these new monastic modes of endurance in her next work, 7 Years of Living Art (1984–91), which radically collapsed her art and her life. She structured her daily life according to a series of “inner,” “outer,” and “other” vows: she organized each year around one of the seven Hindu chakras, which she associated with a persona, a color, and a tone. These associations dictated her inner commitments: the color of her clothing, her hand gestures, her accent, her behavior with others. “Outer” disciplines were performed monthly at the New Museum, where she offered confessional art/life counseling sessions to passersby. Each year, to fulfill her “others” commitment, she invited an artist to collaborate in her home for sixteen days. In its combination of interiority and collaborative encounter, this work replicated the monastic environment’s dynamic between contemplation and missionary work. However, in the midst of the intense, daily demands of this piece, Montano’s attitude toward suffering changed. She learned some flexibility within the vow: “[I was] so disciplined, so difficult on myself that after the third year . . . all the disciplines fell away and it became a fashion statement.”¹⁵⁹ She no longer assumed accents in speaking, but she did continue to wear single-colored clothing, practice some interior commitments, and conduct her New Museum work and collaborative workshops. In Another 7 Years of Living Art (1991–98), she continued to fine-tune her attention to the long-term sustainability of her performance vows. She fulfilled her others commitment— annual visits to the United Nations’ Chagall Chapel in New York—by “sit[ting there] physically or astrally.”¹⁶⁰ With these releases, Montano marked her new, more flexible understanding of suffering. Rather than seeking and passively enduring pain, she presented suffering as a more neutral, experiential process. By dropping the less successful vows of 7 Years of Living Art and working to manage her commitments over the years, Montano allowed herself the authority to shape her own experiences. Unlike the dissociative stillness of her early actions, 7 Years of Living Art and Another 7 Years of Living Art implemented discipline and self-control in a gentler fashion. While this increased sense of agency seemed to mitigate some aspects of Montano’s dissociative traumatic subjectivity, 7 Years of Living Art also reinforced her continued investment in purity. As the work progressed, Montano declared, “[M]y priority now is to be attentive, natural and pure enough in heart to walk in the snow and enjoy it.”¹⁶¹

The continued evolution in her attitude toward suffering is registered in two letters that Montano wrote to Italian performance artist Franko B, an endurance artist who, like Ron Athey, has used bloodletting and other selfharming actions in his work. In 1982, she was captivated by the grandiosity and Catholic aesthetic of his painful performances.

Having returned from your Italy, I have a deeper understanding of you and your work: What more is left for an Italian artist to do, given that daily cultural diet of baroque, bizarre beauty that you saw growing up in Italy, day after day? A diet of saints and popes and majestic giants! What more could you do than to make yourself a bleeding, breathing breath-taking LIVING SCULPTURE—and more shocking—one as brilliant as the blood-drained mighty marbles that dwarf consciousness? Franko, you responded with reality, with real blood, with stillness, with luminous flesh, with pulsation. We applaud and gasp in silence in the “eternal” presence of your life/art.¹⁶²

By comparing his body to the still, “blood-drained mighty marbles” of Italian sculpture, Montano linked Franko B’s work to her early chicken woman performances, in which she objectified her own body in attempting to become a statue. Twenty-four years later, at age sixty-four, she wrote:

Franko, my friend, I must say I had to leave your performance I saw in Scotland. The medical imagery and references to illness and hospitals were just too much for me. Plus it made me worry for you. Now that I’m 64, I worry about infections and damage to the body, about misuse of this house for the soul. Please listen to me: I am disgusted by my own use of art props and actions that brought gasps and silence to my “audiences” and I don’t want you to reach my age and say “what was I doing?” So listen to Aunt Linda: do the opposite for a while. Feed hungry puppies or rock AIDS babies, but please, please love your body, temple of holy spirit.¹⁶³

In this letter, Montano repudiated the self-deprecating forms of suffering that she herself had endured in her early performance actions. By returning to Franko B’s work in this way, Montano enacted the paired actions of looking and looking away that I advocate for readers of Long Suffering: she allowed for changes in her perspective over time, opened herself to the painful, personal impact of traumatic representation, and responded to the artist as a subject with an invitation to empathic, ethical dialogue. At the same time, her concern for Franko B’s physical and psychological being revealed a fundamental re-conception of endurance and discipline in her work. Montano’s artistic praxis has depended on the dedicated implementation of self-discipline from its origins in her chicken woman pieces. In the early 1980s, she defined her art in terms of asceticism: “Discipline is my style.”¹⁶⁴ In 2002 she qualified this commitment: “Self-discipline can never become self-punishment or it will backfire.”¹⁶⁵ She elaborated on this sentiment in the video Teresa of Avila (2007). In the character of St. Teresa, she said, “Do not make the mistake that I did of mortifying yourself inappropriately with too many penances so that you can feel special. Do not make the mistakes I made of designing your own penances and mortifications.”¹⁶⁶ Since the turn of the century, Montano’s asceticism has become more mindful, though no less difficult; she has continued to pursue sainthood with her art/life disciplines. However, in her twenty-first-century endurance art Montano has assumed a position of spiritual authority. In taking on the personas of famous nun-saints, including St. Teresa of Avila and Mother Teresa, she has affirmed her own spiritual status: “Now, I feel I am a nun—the real nun, the kind of nun I would have been—because I integrated art and religion.”¹⁶⁷ In 2010 she performed a three-day event entitled Linda Mary Montano Celebrates Mother Teresa’s Birthday (2010) on the streets of New York City. Due to a painful medical condition that led to the deterioration of her posture, she noticed that her stooping walk resembled Mother Teresa’s gait, and she decided to impersonate her in a public space. Three hours a day for three days, wearing the blue-bordered habit of Mother Teresa’s order and surrounded by an entourage of female security guards in black suits and slicked-back hair, Montano prayed with onlookers in front of the Empire State Building, offering “a word, a blessing, a hug, a hope.”¹⁶⁸ In these and other works, Montano has actively incarnated sainthood for herself. Leading prayers, blessing her audiences, and offering care and compassion to strangers, her actions recall the direct apostolate of her Maryknoll missionary training. Her appropriation of actual saints’ personas may appear blasphemous, but few observers objected. Video documentation showed the respect with which most people, deeply touched, approached to request her favor. The image of Montano’s Mother Teresa, moving among the crowd and reaching out to her devoted supplicants, contrasted sharply with the still, silent passivity of her earliest chicken woman performances. Rather than supplicating, self-objectifying, or incoherently denouncing, as in past performances, endurance strategies here served to generate dialogue and facilitate meaningful spiritual encounter. At the same time, the presence of security guards complicated this performance. While lending authority and credibility to her impersonation, their subtly transgendered appearances also registered Montano’s dissent from institutional Catholic positions on gender and sexuality.¹⁶⁹ Further, these guard figures underscored Montano’s abiding concern with vulnerability. Their protective, watchful stances gestured to issues of safety: the potential for violence and the anticipation of suffering. In this way, Montano’s endurances continue to signal the weight of her traumatic subjectivity. Though now more authentically performing witness to her own suffering, and generously acting as a witness to the pain of others, Montano has not erased the past. Her late career endurance actions continue to prepare her and others for future hardship, marking her survivor status. Like southern nuns picketing for civil rights and the Berrigan brothers torching draft cards, Montano’s public actions enact a uniquely Catholic vision that is both progressive and prophetic, recognizing the reality of violence yet simultaneously honoring the possibility of just human relations by setting the conditions for meaningful encounter. Ethical relations also serve as a touchstone for the endurance art of Ron Athey, whose performances testify to both suffering and communal healing. Parallel to Montano’s pursuit of sainthood through Catholic prophetic witness, Athey has sought to heal and be healed in the tradition of Pentecostal healing evangelists. He has appropriated the techniques and spiritual responsibilities of charismatic itinerant revival preachers, just as Montano has performed the nun’s persona for herself and others.

Notes

1. Linda Montano, Art in Everyday Life (Los Angeles: Astro Artz, 1981), 25.
2. Ibid., 99.
3. Hilary Robinson, “God! I Love Time: An Interview with Linda Montano,” n.paradoxa 5 (January 2000): 64. Montano here referred to the martyrdom of Saint Agatha.
4. Linda M. Montano, “Roman Catholic Performance Artist Manifesto: An Email Sent to Pope Benedict,” Linda Mary Montano (blog), accessed January 2009, http://lindamarymontano.blogspot.com/2009/12/roman-catholic-performance-artist_08.html
5. For an introduction to the extensive and varied scholarship on this topic, see Robert H. Craig, Religion and Radical Politics: An Alternative Christian Tradition in the United States (Philadelphia Temple University Press, 1992); Gastón Espinosa, Virgilio P. Elizondo, and Jesse Miranda, Latino Religions and Civic Activism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Dan McKanan, Prophetic Encounters: Religion and the American Radical Tradition (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011); and Mel Piehl and Peter Maurin, Breaking Bread: The Catholic Worker and the Origin of Catholic Radicalism in America (Philadelphia Temple University Press, 1982).
6. For details of Day’s activities, see Dan McKanan, The Catholic Worker after Dorothy: Practicing the Works of Mercy in a New Generation (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2008); and Piehl and Maurin, Breaking Bread.
7. For descriptions of New Monasticism, see Piehl and Maurin, Breaking Bread; Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, School(s) for Conversion: 12 Marks of a New Monasticism (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2005); and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, New Monasticism: What It Has to Say to Today’s Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2008).
8. For more on American Catholicism and racial justice, see Amy L. Koehlinger, The New Nuns: Racial Justice and Religious Reform in the 1960s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).
9. For the 1980s activism of the Plowshares Movement, see Sharon Erickson Nepstad, Religion and War Resistance in the Plowshares Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
10. Montano and I have discussed our differing points of view on this term extensively in conversations that continue to the present.
11. For a brief discussion of Montano’s concern with these subjects, see Kristine Stiles, “Performance Art and the Experiential Present: Irregular Ways of Being,” in The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, ed. Alexandra Munroe (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2009), 337.
12. Montano regularly returned to the Zen Mountain Monastery to live part time or full time between 1984 and 1991.
13. Robinson, “God! I Love Time,” 70.
14. Linda M. Montano and Jennie Klein, eds., Letters from Linda M. Montano
15. (New York: Routledge, 2005), 60.
16. Eleanor Heartney’s important study of Catholicism in contemporary art includes a brief examination of the Catholic nature of Montano’s work. See her Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2004), 54–57. Jennie Klein’s compilation of Montano’s writings, Letters from Linda M. Montano, has facilitated the study of Catholicism in Montano’s work.
17. The authors of Practicing Catholic described Catholicism as “a religion whose core theology, individual believer’s inner spiritual experiences, and a great variety of parochial and other social entities such as social, communal identities come alive preeminently though participation in and a sense of ownership of rite.” Bruce T. Morrill, Joanna E. Ziegler, and Susan Rodgers, eds., Practicing Catholic: Ritual, Body, and Contestation in Catholic Faith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 3. I follow these authors, and other religious studies scholars, such as R. Marie Griffith, David Morgan, Robert Orsi, Stephen Prothero, and Thomas Tweed, in exploring lived religion.
18. Bonnie Marranca et al., “Art as Spiritual Practice,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 24, no. 3 (September 2002): 27. Montano and Klein, Letters from Linda M. Montano, 123. In addition to Letters from Linda M. Montano, this brief biographical sketch is drawn from Linda Montano, “Spirituality and Art,” Women Artists’ News 10, no. 3 (Spring 1985): 8; Lyn Blumenthal, “On Art and Artists: Linda Montano,” Profile 4, no. 6 (December 1984): 2; Linda Montano, interview with Karen Gonzalez Rice, June 25–29, 2007; Linda Montano, “Linda Montano,” Bob’s Art (website), accessed June 2007, http:// www.bobsart.org/montano/more/vita.html. My conversation with Montano took place at her home in Saugerties, New York, and at her studio, the Art/Life Institute, in Kingston, New York, where we worked to organize her personal archive. I recorded our discussions in extensive notes. In addition, Montano and I maintain an active correspondence through letters and e-mail.
19. Blumenthal, “On Art and Artists,” 2.
20. Montano and Klein, Letters from Linda M. Montano, 18.
21. Ibid., 123. These words are excerpted from a lecture on endurance art; the artist’s use of quotation marks highlighted the connection between her artistic and religious activities. There is a discrepancy of dates here: if Montano entered the convent in 1960, she would have been eighteen years of age, not twenty.
22. This population reached its peak in 1965; between 1950 and 1966, the number of women religious increased by 25 percent, from 147,000 to 181,421. Helen Rose Fuchs Ebaugh, Women in the Vanishing Cloister: Organizational Decline in Catholic Religious Orders in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 1.
23. In 1950, 381 novices did not take their final vows; in 1965, the number was 1,562 (ibid., 50). Like other religious organizations in the United States, the American Catholic Church grew dramatically in the 1950s and early 1960s, only to decline quickly in the late 1960s and 1970s.
24. Patricia Curran, Grace before Meals: Food Ritual and Body Discipline in Convent Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 136.
25. Lora Ann Quinonez and Mary Daniel Turner, The Transformation of American Catholic Sisters (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 3–4.
26. Montano, “Spirituality and Art,” 8.
27. Barbara Hendricks, “The Legacy of Mary Josephine Rogers,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 21, no. 2 (1997): 77.
28. Ibid., 76.
29. Ibid.
30. Angelyn Dries, “American Catholic ‘Woman’s Work for Woman’ in the Twentieth Century,” in Gospel Bearers, Gender Barriers: Missionary Women in the Twentieth Century, ed. Dana L. Robert (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002), 140. Maryknoll nuns’ participation in the direct apostolate took place due to the urging of Bishop Francis Ford in China’s Kaying province. The nuns adopted common practices of lay evangelization in China at the time (139).
31. According to the Catholic Mission Association, Maryknoll supported 555 separate institutes in countries across Asia, Latin America, and Africa, while the organization with the second-most missionary sisters supported only 168 institutes (ibid., 130). Due to its flexible, embedded, intersubjective missionary practices already in place, the Maryknoll order was less troubled than others by Vatican II. Many present-day Maryknoll sisters embrace social and political activism; for example, they have been highly involved in Latin American civil society and social movements. See Bernice Kita, “Maryknoll Sisters in Latin America, 1943–1993,” Missiology 26, no. 4 (October 1998): 419–30.
32. Some features of this distinction between religious and lay communities are suggested in Ebaugh, Women in the Vanishing Cloister, 89.
33. Ibid., 90.
34. Ibid., 24.
35. Montano, Art in Everyday Life, 7.
36. After leaving the convent, Montano attended the College of New Rochelle in New York, studied sculpture in Italy in 1965, and earned her MFA in sculpture from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1969.
37. Montano, Art in Everyday Life, 87.
38. Blumenthal, “On Art and Artists,” 8.
39. For documentation and discussion of these and other artworks, see Tehching Hsieh and Adrian Heathfield, Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009).
40. Alex Grey and Allyson Grey, “Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance: Alex and Allyson Grey Ask Questions about the Year of the Rope,” High Performance 7, no. 3 (1984): 25.
41. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism: and Other Writings (New York: Penguin Classics, 2002), 109.
42. Robinson, “God! I Love Time,” 67.
43. Maya Houng, email exchange with Karen Gonzalez Rice, July 10, 2009. Hsieh communicated with me through his assistant, Maya Houng.
44. Tehching Hsieh, Tehching Hsieh: One Year Performance Art Documents
45. 1978–1999, DVD. New York, 2000; distributed by Tehching Hsieh.
46. Linda Montano, “Art/Life Counseling,” High Performance 4, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 53. Montano, Art in Everyday Life, 55. I am grateful to David Morgan for indicating that this attitude echoed the sacrilization of everyday life observed by nuns such as the nineteenth-century Carmelite Thérèse of Lisieux, who wrote that dialogue with Christ infused daily life with divine presence. See St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, a New Translation from the Original Manuscripts, trans. John Clarke (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1996).
47. Montano and Hsieh, “Statement,” in Tehching Hsieh, Tehching Hsieh: One Year Performance Art Documents 1978–1999, DVD. New York, 2000; distributed by Tehching Hsieh.
48. Maya Houng, email exchange with Karen Gonzalez Rice, July 10, 2009.
49. Grey and Grey, “Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance,” 27.
50. Ibid., 29.
51. Ibid., 26.
52. Jill Johnston, “Hardship Art,” Art in America 72, no. 8 (September 1984), 179.
53. Blumenthal, “On Art and Artists,” 30.
54. Johnston, “Hardship Art,” 179.
55. Maya Houng, email exchange with Karen Gonzalez Rice, July 10, 2009. Photographic documentation is available in Hsieh and Heathfield, Out of Now; and Hsieh, Tehching Hsieh.
56. Grey and Grey, “Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance,” 25.
57. Montano and Klein, Letters from Linda M. Montano, 245. Despite their equal conception of and participation in the work, Montano recently has referred to the piece as Hsieh’s (58, 66, 164).
58. Ibid., 27.
59. Linda Montano, interview with Karen Gonzalez Rice, June 25–29, 2007.
60. Robinson, “God! I Love Time,” 67.
61. Montano and Klein, Letters from Linda M. Montano, 9.
62. Ibid., xii.
63. Robinson, “God! I Love Time,” 68.
64. See Linda Montano, Annie Sprinkle, and Veronica Vera, “Summer Saint Camp 1987: With Annie Sprinkle and Veronica Vera,” TDR/The Drama Review 33, no. 1 (1989): 94–103.
65. Montano and Klein, Letters from Linda M. Montano, 26.
66. See St. Marguerite Marie Alacoque, The Autobiography of St. Marguerite Marie Alacoque, trans. Sisters of the Visitation (Rockford, IL: Tan Books and Publishers, 1986). Thanks to David Morgan for this reference.
67. Montano, Art in Everyday Life, 63.
68. Ibid. Montano placed the acupuncture needles in her lower abdomen.
69. Linda M. Montano, “Love Sex: The Ecstatic Writings of Linda M. Montano,” (1995), n.p. Montano shared this unpublished manuscript with me during our interview in Saugerties, New York.
70. “1+1=1,” The Act 1, no. 3 (Winter–Spring 1988–99): 44–48; Linda Montano, interview with Karen Gonzalez Rice, June 25–29, 2007.
71. Judith Lewis Herman, Father-Daughter Incest (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 70; Anna C. Salter, Transforming Trauma: A Guide to Understanding and Treating Adult Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995), 182.
72. Herman, Father-Daughter Incest, 33.
73. Montano, Art in Everyday Life, 63.
74. From an overview of the history of and current research on dissociation, see James A. Chu, Rebuilding Shattered Lives: Treating Complex PTSD and Dissociative Disorders, 2nd ed. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2011), 41–64.
75. Nanette C. Auerhahn and Dori Laub, “Intergenerational Memory of the Holocaust,” in International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma, ed. Yael Danieli (New York: Plenum Press, 1998), 22.
76. Susan Roth and Leslie Lebowitz. “The Experience of Sexual Trauma,” Journal of Traumatic Stress 1, no. 1 (1988): 97.
77. Ibid.
78. Ann Kearney-Cooke, “Group Treatment of Sexual Abuse among Women with Eating Disorders,” Women and Therapy 7, no. 1 (1998): 11. The survivor who created this sculpture had been molested by a priest.
79. Blumenthal, “On Art and Artists,” 3.
80. Linda Montano, interview with Karen Gonzalez Rice, June 25–29, 2007.
81. Montano has challenged Catholic resistance to female leadership, its enervating narratives of female participation, and its rejection of nonnormative sexualities. Her criticism of the policies of the Catholic Church has appeared in interviews, writings, and performances throughout her career. She anthologized her critique in Montano, “Roman Catholic Performance Artist Manifesto.”
82. It is not uncommon for survivors of sexual trauma to initiate drastic changes in their life circumstances (moving, changing jobs, etc.) within a few years of the traumatic experience. Ann Wolbert Burgess and Lynda Lytle Holmstrom, “Adaptive Strategies and Recovery from Rape,” American Journal of Psychiatry 136, no. 10 (1979): 1280.
83. Montano, “Love Sex,” n.p.
84. Ibid.
85. Sister Maria del Rey, Bernie Becomes a Nun (New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1956), n.p.
86. Linda Montano, interview with Karen Gonzalez Rice, June 25–29, 2007.
87. Michael W. Wiederman, “ Women, Sex, and Food: A Review of Research on Eating Disorders and Sexuality,” Journal of Sex Research 33, no. 4 (1996): 306; Burgess and Holmstrom, “Adaptive Strategies and Recovery from Rape,” 1282. See also John N. Briere and Diana M. Elliott, “Immediate and Long-Term Impacts of Child Sexual Abuse,” The Future of Children 4, no. 2 (Summer–Autumn 1994): 54–69; and Susan Roth and Elana Newman, “The Process of Coping with Sexual Trauma,” Journal of Traumatic Stress 4, no. 2 (1991): 279–97.
88. Montano and Klein, Letters from Linda M. Montano, 18.
89. Blumenthal, “On Art and Artists,” 3.
90. Ibid.
91. Ibid.
92. Ibid.
93. Kearney-Cooke, “Group Treatment of Sexual Abuse,” 7. For a reading of dissociation in the work of performance artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, see “1.1.78–2.2.78: Lynn Hershman’s Roberta Breitmore,” in Kristine Stiles, Concerning Consequences: Studies in Art, Destruction, and Trauma (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 109–20.
94. Curran, Grace before Meals, 120.
95. Blumenthal, “On Art and Artists,” 3.
96. Quoted by Montano in Marranca et al., “Art as Spiritual Practice,” 25.
97. See Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Bynum has suggested that medieval notions of the embodied self have resurfaced in the contemporary era due to a condition of threat to the body. See her “Death and Resurrection in the Middle Ages: Some Modern Implications,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 142, no. 4 (1998): 595.
98. Marranca et al., “Art as Spiritual Practice,” 72.
99. Curran, Grace before Meals, 141.
100. Ibid., 131.
101. Ibid.
102. Ibid., 120.
103. Linda Montano, Anorexia Nervosa, artist’s film, 1981. Distributed by Video Data Bank, Chicago.
104. Linda Montano to Karen Gonzalez Rice, February 17, 2009 (Montano’s emphasis).
105. Ibid.
106. Ibid. (Montano’s quotations).
107. The full paragraph reads, “During the year you have seen Sister several times, and I think you know either from having seen her, or by letter, that Sister has lost a great deal of weight. We have observed this with great concern, especially after learning that it was due to deliberate undereating. Since Sister was working out-of-doors for one period each day, which would normally help to create a hearty appetite, we have been waiting for this to happen and to see her regain the round cheeks that were hers last Fall. This has not happened. Yesterday Sister could not promise to eat normally, not because of physical reasons, but because she could not make up her mind to do it. It is difficult for me to write this to you, because I feel that it will be a disappointment to you, but it is the general consensus of opinion here that Sister Rose Augustine is out of place in religious life. Sister herself is among those who are of this opinion, and has never felt, even as a postulant ‘this is it.’ We also feel that this non-eating program is an expression of the resistance—even perhaps sub-conscious—‘a square peg in a round hole.’ At any rate she and we are aware that it could be unwise for her to continue any longer in the novitiate.” Sister Paul Miriam to Henry and Mildred Montano, July 6, 1962.
108. Blumenthal, “On Art and Artists,” 4.
109. Ibid., 2.
110. Montano, Anorexia Nervosa.
111. Linda Montano, interview with Karen Gonzalez Rice, June 25–29, 2007.
112. Roth and Lebowitz, “The Experience of Sexual Trauma,” 100.
113. Kearney-Cooke, “Group Treatment of Sexual Abuse,” 7. See also Joanne T. Everill and Glenn Waller, “Reported Sexual Abuse and Eating Psychopathology: A Review of the Evidence for a Causal Link,” International Journal of Eating Disorders 18, no. 1 (1995): 1–11. Practitioners continue to debate the relationship between eating disorders and sexual trauma. Psychologists Rachel Calam and Peter Slade have noted the difficulty of identifying an incontrovertible link between sexual trauma and eating disorders because “eating difficulties and unwanted sexual experiences . . . both occur with such high rates in the female population as a whole and so there is a high probability that many women have experienced both.” Rachel Calam and Peter Slade, “Eating Patterns and Unwanted Sexual Experiences,” in Why Women? Gender Issues and Eating Disorders, ed. Bridget Dolan and Inez Gizinger (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Athlone Press, 1994), 102. Current research suggests that, while not all anorexics have experienced sexual trauma, many sexually traumatized women are anorexic and that a history of sexual trauma is “likely to be relevant to the development and maintenance of an eating disorder.” Everill and Waller, “Reported Sexual Abuse and Eating Psychopathology,” 7.
114. Montano, Anorexia Nervosa.
115. See Hilde Bruch, The Golden Cage: The Enigma of Anorexia Nervosa (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); and Bruch, “Anorexia Nervosa: Therapy and Theory,” American Journal of Psychiatry 139, no. 12 (December 1982): 1531–38.
116. R. A. Gordon, “Concepts of Eating Disorders: A Historical Reflection,” in Neurobiology in the Treatment of Eating Disorders, ed. Hans Wijbrand Hoek, Janet L. Treasure, and Melanie A. Katzman (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998), 9.
117. Paula Saukko, The Anorexic Self: A Personal, Political Analysis of a Diagnostic Discourse (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 39.
118. Drawing on Bruch’s concern with identity, some scholars argue for the recognition of the role of religious self-understandings in the development and treatment of anorexia. See Caroline Giles Banks, “The Imaginative Use of Religious Symbols in Subjective Experiences of Anorexia Nervosa,” Psychoanalytic Review 84, no. 2 (April 1997): 227–36; Caroline Giles Banks, “‘There is No Fat in Heaven’: Religious Asceticism and the Meaning of Anorexia Nervosa,” Ethos 24, no. 1 (March 1996): 107–35; David Rampling, “Ascetic Ideals and Anorexia Nervosa,” Journal of Psychiatric Research 19, nos. 2–3 (1985): 89– 94; S. Huline-Dickens, “Anorexia Nervosa: Some Connections with the Religious Attitude,” British Journal of Medical Psychology 73, no. 1 (March 2000): 67–76; P. Marsden, E. Karagianni, and J. F. Morgan, “Spirituality and Clinical Care in Eating Disorders: A Qualitative Study,” International Journal of Eating Disorders 40, no. 1 (January 2007): 7–12; and J. F. Morgan, P. Marsden, and J. H. Lacey, “‘Spiritual Starvation?’: A Case Series Concerning Christianity and Eating Disorders,” International Journal of Eating Disorders 28, no. 4 (December 2000): 476–80.
119. While Bruch did not respond to the artist, Montano’s letter, video, and book have been archived in the University of Houston’s collection of Bruch’s papers. Papers of Hilde Bruch, Manuscript Collection no. 7, John P. McGovern Historical Collections and Research Center, University of Houston.
120. Bruch, “Anorexia Nervosa: Therapy and Theory,” 1536–37.
121. Montano and Klein, Letters from Linda M. Montano, 18. The use of the third person was common among the anorexics studied by Bruch, who called this style of communicating a “confusion of pronouns.” Bruch, The Golden Cage, 35.
122. Montano and Klein, Letters from Linda M. Montano, 123.
123. St. Augustine, Concerning the City of God, against the Pagans (New York: Penguin Putnam, 2003), 139. For more on Catholic notions of pain before the twentieth century, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992); and Manuele Gragnolati, “From Decay to Splendor: Body and Pain in Bonvesin de la Riva’s Book of the Three Scriptures,” in Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. Caroline Walker Bynum (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).
124. Robert A. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 21.
125. Ibid., 43.
126. Ibid., 23.
127. Ibid., 34.
128. Linda Montano, interview with Karen Gonzalez Rice, June 25–29, 2007.
129. Marranca et al., “Art as Spiritual Practice,” 25.
130. Montano, Art in Everyday Life, 96.
131. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, 42.
132. Paula M. Kane, “‘She Offered Herself Up’: The Victim Soul and Victim Spirituality in Catholicism,” Church History 71, no. 1 (2002): 118.
133. Ibid., 117.
134. A recording of Montano’s 1977 broadcast for Close Radio can be found at the J. Paul Getty Museum http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/evidence_ movement/close_radio.html (accessed July 16, 2009).
135. Blumenthal, “On Art and Artists,” 11.
136. John Duncan, discussed later in this book, was present at this performance; it moved him to tears. John Duncan, interview with Karen Gonzalez Rice, August 2–7, 2009.
137. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 181–238. These medieval women’s visions often reveal a fluidity of gender mimicked in Montano’s transgendered self-portrait as Christ.
138. Robinson, “God! I Love Time,” 69.
139. Ibid., 64. Here Montano was referring to the martyr St. Agatha, who was tortured in this fashion.
140. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, 27.
141. Montano and Klein, Letters from Linda M. Montano, 124.
142. Robinson, “God! I Love Time,” 67.
143. Robert J. Lifton, “From Hiroshima to the Nazi Doctors: The Evolution of Psychoformative Approaches to Understanding Traumatic Stress Syndromes,” in International Handbook of Traumatic Stress Syndromes, ed. John P. Wilson and Beverly Raphael (New York: Plenum, 1993), 17.
144. Montano, “Spirituality and Art,” 8. For a brief discussion of the traumatic implications of the gauze-wrapped body in performance art, see Kristine Stiles, amaLIA perjovschi (Bucharest: Soros Center of Contemporary Art, 1996), 49, 56; and “Notes on Rudolf Schwartzkogler’s Images of Healing,” Whitewalls 25 (Spring 1990): 10–26. For more on the white nun’s habit, see Elizabeth Kuhns, The Habit: A History of the Clothing of Catholic Nuns (New York: Doubleday, 2003).
145. Montano and Klein, Letters from Linda M. Montano, 59.
146. Montano, Art in Everyday Life, 102. This language recalls her description of Erasing the Past.
147. Similar to Montano’s chicken woman performances, Barbara T. Smith, in Piercing the Corporate Veil (1980), lay in a coffin for twenty hours wearing a pink dress. Kristine Stiles analyzed Smith’s piece in terms of traumatic dissociation in “Barbara Turner Smith’s Haunting,” in The 21st Century Odyssey, Part II: The Performances of Barbara T. Smith, ed. Rebecca McGrew and Jennie Klein (Claremont, CA: Pomona College Museum of Art, 2005), 437–40.
148. Moira Roth, “Matters of Life and Death: Linda Montano Interviewed by Moira Roth,” High Performance 1, no. 4 (1978): 7; Montano and Klein, Letters from Linda M. Montano, 238.
149. Suzanne Foley, Space/Time/Sound-1970s: A Decade in the Bay Area (Seattle: University of Seattle Press, 1979), 87.
150. Montano and Klein, Letters from Linda M. Montano, 124.
151. Dori Laub, “An Event without a Witness: Truth, Testimony, and Sur vival,” in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (New York: Routledge, 1992), 78 (Laub’s emphasis).
152. Ibid. (Laub’s emphasis).
153. Ibid., 70.
154. Montano, Art in Everyday Life, 41.
155. Ibid.
156. “Mission Woods Death Becomes Murder Case,” Kansas City Star, September 20, 1977, 1.
157. Montano and Klein, Letters from Linda M. Montano, 6.
158. Marranca et al., “Art as Spiritual Practice,” 25.
159. Robinson, “God! I Love Time,” 68.
160. Montano and Klein, Letters from Linda M. Montano, 166.
161. Montano, “Spirituality and Art,” 8. Montano’s phrasing echoes the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matt. 5:8).
162. Linda Montano, “Letter Number One,” in Franko B: Blinded by Love, ed. Dominic Johnson (Bologna: Damiani, 2006), 177 (Montano’s emphasis).
163. Linda Montano, “Letter Number Two,” in Franko B: Blinded by Love, ed. Dominic Johnson (Bologna: Damiani, 2006), 177.
164. Blumenthal, “On Art and Artists,” 30.
165. Montano and Klein, Letters from Linda M. Montano, 25.
166. Ibid., 97, 104.
167. Linda Montano, interview with Karen Gonzalez Rice, June 25–29, 2007.
168. Montano’s description of this event can be found at Linda Mary Montano (blog), http://lindamarymontano.blogspot.com/2013/01/linda-mary-montano-as-mother-teresa-of.html. See also Karen Gonzalez Rice, “Linda Montano, Student of Real Presence,” In Media Res: A Media Commons Project (April 10, 2010), http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2010/04/15/linda-montano-student-real-presence
169. Although her art/life observance of Catholic ritual is strict, Montano’s actions have retained the marks of her encounters with other religious traditions. At a public reading of “Roman Catholic Performance Artist Manifesto: An Email Sent to Pope Benedict” (2008), Montano appeared with her head wrapped in an orange scarf. This abstracted habit recalled both her convent experience and her spiritual travels in India, where her guru advised her to wear orange as a mark of her spiritual achievement. Linda Montano, interview with Karen Gonzalez Rice, June 25–29, 2007