Art Took Her Life: Emmalea Russo’s Vivienne – Danielle Chelosky
April 7, 2025
Before Emmalea Russo’s Vivienne came out in September, Lydia Sviatoslavsky from Vera PR sent me an advance copy. I opened the pretty pink novel, saw it began with tweets, and promptly closed it. I complained to my friend through text that if I wanted to read tweets I’d open Twitter.
A couple of months later, I did a reading alongside Russo at Gabriel Hart’s On High At Red Tide book launch. She went first—an unfavorable position—but the crowd laughed and loved her. It wasn’t until February that I gave Vivienne another try. I was struggling to get absorbed into anything. I was (am) working on a novel that incorporates Twitter. Who was I to judge her? Plus, I’d read and enjoyed Tony Tulathimutte’s extremely online short story collection Rejection. I figured I shouldn’t be so dismissive of art that integrates the internet. However, I do think writers who do so have to work twice as hard to make it work; the internet is already a parody of itself, to satirize it in writing can feel redundant and fruitless. But sometimes it can be pulled off.
Vivienne is touted as a novel about cancel culture. When you search “emmalea russo” on Google, one of the top suggestions is “emmalea russo cancelled,” which, in my opinion, is just as unfortunate as it is kind of cool. In 2023, her fourth poetry collection Magenta was pulled shortly after being listed for sale on the indie publisher’s website due to her association with “alt-right” and “fascist-adjacent” entities. She wrote about it for Compact, which I consider an “alt-right” and “fascist-adjacent” entity. The article is less a thinkpiece than it is a rant; it does not offer any interesting or new ideas, and it’s likely it was only published so the echo chamber could comfort her.
Sometimes an artist being “cancelled” can truly ruin their work. Often someone who’s endured intense backlash can do nothing else but fixate on it, burrowing themselves deeper and deeper into a sense of victimhood, feeling imminent failure no matter what they do. It’s an understandable compulsion, but also a deeply boring thing to witness. Luckily for Russo, this is not the case with Vivienne.
Vivienne, released on Arcade, the imprint of controversial publisher Skyhorse, is 238 pages spanning only one week, conveying the rapid rate at which the Web moves. Vivienne Volk is a respected, reclusive artist and the widow of iconoclastic German artist Hans Bellmer, whose wife Wilma Lang died from jumping out of a window. Vivienne begins with online users trying to get the NAT Museum to pull Vivienne’s work from an upcoming exhibition called Forgotten Surrealist Women—whose backhanded compliment of a title already cheekily raises questions about how women are treated in the art world—due to rumors that Vivienne encouraged Wilma to commit suicide.
Before we meet Vivienne, we watch the internet spiral. “y include an alleged murderess maker of torture porn when there is so much GOOD underrepresented work out there,” @fdah argues. “this wuz 50 yrs ago,” @nellyr reasons. The museum ultimately removes her from the exhibit and releases a statement.
The book ricochets between the ridiculous, fragmented internet realm, and the bleak world of Vivienne’s humble Pennsylvania existence with her daughter Velour and Velour’s daughter Vesta. The two settings contrast greatly, sometimes overlapping eerily: “There’s a cold silence in the kitchen and on the internet.” The chapters set in their bumblefuck town are seamless and mesmeric. The prose is satisfyingly succinct, every sentence ringing with intentionality, perhaps a result of Russo’s years as a poet. In such simple language, Russo finesses humor and profundity: “Vivienne’s begun, these past few months, to think of every pee as her final one.”
The days in Vivienne drift like ghosts, but small subplots keep the book grounded: A neighbor’s missing chihuahua Pepper, whose LOST DOG sign looms in the backyard; Vesta’s problem of grinding her teeth at night, while her mutt best friend Franz sleeps beside her; Hans’ doll sculptures haunting the basement. At the center of Vivienne, though, is the plot of Lars Arden, your typical art world vulture/pervert, looking to swoop in on Vivienne in the midst of the scandal and show her work at his gallery. Thanks to his inappropriately aged girlfriend Clorinda, who’s friends with Velour, he’s able to seal the deal. Russo doesn’t hold back in her portrayal of Lars, especially as he “unzips his black Rick Owens pants and touches his cock” while doing “research” on Velour.
Vivienne is a satire as well as a tragedy. While serving her time as the internet’s enemy of the week, Vivienne suffers an ill fate: A brick flying through the gallery window and dramatically hitting her in the head, the result of either the online mob or Lars’ request for a publicity stunt. The novel ends in the future, where brain-dead Vivienne is at the Center for Constant Creation, a “retreat center and arts collective” that “seek[s] to deliver productive and purposeful afterlives to those in persistent vegetative states so that their bodies may remain creative and useful long after they’ve stopped legally living.” The concept reminds me of the epidemic of young rappers dying tragically and their labels churning out an endless stream of posthumous music, still exploiting an artist even after they’ve been buried in the ground.
Artists don’t decide to be artists; if it were a choice, many of us would choose a more conventional and rational path. However, being an artist requires a kind of signing your life over to the public, almost contractually agreeing to be a spectacle. Your life is not a life; it is performance art. You could argue that it’s not just artists at this point, it’s anyone who leaves their house. In the age of surveillance, we’re all fodder for content creators, subjected to street interviews where commenters can decide if we’re an angel or an asshole based on a five-second video. But Vivienne focuses specifically on the impact that internet has on art, which is undeniably destructive. Everyone wants something from Vivienne—the internet mob wants answers about whether or not she is a good person (whatever that means), while the art world wants to exploit her while she’s still at the center of attention, even if it means exacerbating the witch-hunt. Despite being in her eighties, Vivienne is not granted a break. “But I knew she’d somehow given her life to art,” Vesta, who ends up dating Lars, contemplates when she’s older. “Or art took her life.” Is it a necessary sacrifice? Or is it cruel theft? Either way, she’s dead.