Lena Dunham's essay "The Best Day of My Life" appears in Aura Rosenberg's What Is Psychedelic, a book occasioned by Rosenberg's current exhibitions at Pioneer Works and Mishkin Gallery surveying over five decades of the artist's work.

I must have been seven or eight when I realized that I could make myself look like a ventriloquist dummy. I was in the bathroom in our loft on Broadway, flossing in the mirror, when a slip of the hand revealed a trick that resembled a hinged jaw—floss pulled tight over either corner of my bottom lip and down my chin. I ran into my mother’s bedroom to show her and she seemed genuinely impressed.

There were lots of ventriloquist dummies who lived in our house, along with other dolls and props that my mother, Laurie Simmons, photographed. Her studio was two floors down and I loved bringing my friends down there almost as much as I loved helping her scour flea markets for the best deals on antiquated dollhouse furniture and puppets. I never really questioned her interest in these things—to me, she was just a big (albeit glamorous) kid and to her I was a tiny (albeit needy) adult and our hobbies and interests met somewhere in the middle.

People often ask if my mother took lots of pictures of me. I always laugh and say, “No, actually.” Because my mother took photos of inanimate objects—and did it for a living—she documented our childhood less than the non-artist parents I knew seemed to (although she did keep our family photos and negatives very organized in the same thick brown albums she used to preserve her own work). As a child with a penchant for dress up and a desire to perform, I often begged her to take pictures of me—and sometimes I resorted to taking them of myself, carefully making my face up like I had learned to from the Kevyn Aucoin how-to book she bought me.

Aura Rosenberg, "Mike Kelley/Carmen," 1996-98, inkjet print, 46 x 36 in.Courtesy of the artist.

A year or so after the floss discovery, my mother approached me with an idea—her friend Aura Rosenberg was doing a series of images of children (including her own daughter, Carmen, a younger girl I knew from around the neighborhood) as reimagined by artists. Some—like Louise Lawler or James Sienna or my mother—were to transform their own kids. Others chose children of friends as subjects. We all got the chance to be dressed fantastically (my mother bought me a little boy’s suit jacket and selected a clip-on bow tie) and made up (I had red lipstick and hair gel, strictly forbidden unless I was alone on the weekends) and we got to sit in front of the bright lights and Aura’s patient camera. It’s the first time I really understood the magic that could be created with a story and a camera, how I could place myself both within the narrative and use the lens to refract a very different image of myself—and in many ways that’s the process I’ve committed my life to, in no small part because of the buzz I felt on set that day.

Aura remembers me telling her it was “the best day of my life” and I wasn’t lying. Not only was it a fresh diversion with a lipstick reward, but it’s the first time I remember being a part of the work instead of party to the work. I felt proud and indispensable, smart and cool. I think that every artist’s child, no matter how adored they were—and I was adored—knows the ghostly feeling of watching your parents make work. No matter how much they love you, there is always a part of them you don’t have access to, the part reserved for the great mystery of their artistic life. Art is more than a profession, and it has the power to take your parent away, if not in body then in mind, and no child really likes that even if they admire it. And while my parents always let me spend hours in their studios, if they were working a kind of church-like hush fell over the scene and I felt them drift up and away. It was the part of my mother that was the most magical, and also the part I knew the least. But on that day, with her hands holding the dental floss like the strings on a puppet, I was both her child and her collaborator. We still collaborate—in a sense it opened a trap door that never closed.

Looking at the series now, almost thirty years later, I am struck by its genius—the way that Aura turns children, both so unaware and so hyper-attuned, into both props and creators, objects and fully formed creatures. The pictures respect the autonomy of children while also demanding that they submit to the whims of adults. There is something both haunting and hilarious about the photos—Carmen as a Tony Oursler, peeking out from a fleshy donut. Marilyn Minter’s Willa, freckled with a bagel. Amy Sillman turns Isaac into a demented cartoon, part child superhero and part abstraction. It’s also a very giving series—Aura making the space for other artists to express themselves within her work (not the norm) and for the children they love to claim a place in that too. I remember lots of these kids from the neighborhood, where we’d recognize each other in the throngs of chatty grown-ups, catching eyes through our parents’ sea of black-panted legs. It makes me emotional, thinking of a time and place that was so particular to grow up in—Soho in the ’80s and ’90s—that is technically there but will never exist again, converted as it has been from artists’ community to Mall of the Americas. Back then, your parents saw everyone you knew on the street on Saturday—and you saw their kids and whether they liked each other or not they had this grand mission in common.

In a review of Aura’s show in Time Out New York, Robert Mahoney said, “It seems that Laurie Simmons has become blinded by her own ego; she thought it would be funny to present Lena as one of her signature puppets. Finally, what mother would let Mike Kelley anywhere near her daughter?” It’s hilarious for me to read now, not only because it seems oddly conservative for a downtown art critic—Mike Kelley’s imagination would have been a gift to any child, and the reviewer talks about artists more like deviants who shouldn’t be allowed to parent—but because he misses out on the central thesis: Aura (and my mother) weren’t dressing us up like pageant girls (a much more harmful practice than having Mike Kelley smear your face with ghoulish paint). They were empowering us to be part of the process we saw every day—the same way they empowered us simply through the act of creating as women in that time in history. My mother showed me I could be an artist, but Aura showed me that I had a subject—it wasn’t me, exactly, but I was in there, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, figuring out how to look like someone or something else. ♦