A companion to feminist art 9781118929179, 1118929179, 9781118929186, 1118929187, 9781118929193, 1118929195, 9781118929155

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A Companion to Feminist Art

WILEY BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO ART HISTORY These invigorating reference volumes chart the influence of key ideas, discourses, and theories on art, and the way that it is taught, thought of, and talked about throughout the English‐speaking world. Each volume brings together a team of respected international scholars to debate the state of research within traditional subfields of art history as well as in more innovative, thematic configurations. Representing the best of the scholarship governing the field and pointing toward future trends and across disciplines, the Wiley Blackwell Companions to Art History series provides a magisterial, state‐of‐the‐art synthesis of art history. 1 A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945 edited by Amelia Jones 2 A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture edited by Rebecca M. Brown and Deborah S. Hutton 3 A Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Art edited by Babette Bohn and James M. Saslow 4 A Companion to British Art: 1600 to the Present edited by Dana Arnold and David Peters Corbett 5 A Companion to Modern African Art edited by Gitti Salami and Monica Blackmun Visonà 6 A Companion to American Art edited by John Davis, Jennifer A. Greenhill and Jason D. LaFountain 7 A Companion to Chinese Art edited by Martin J. Powers and Katherine R. Tsiang 8 A Companion to Digital Art edited by Christiane Paul 9 A Companion to Dada and Surrealism edited by David Hopkins 10 A Companion to Public Art edited by Cher Krause Knight and Harriet F. Senie 11 A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture, 2 Volume Set edited by Finbarr Flood and Gulru Necipoglu 12 A Companion to Modern Art edited by Pam Meecham 13 A Companion to Nineteenth‐Century Art edited by Michelle Facos 14 A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, 2nd Edition edited by Conrad Rudolph 15 A Companion to Contemporary Design since 1945 edited by Anne Massey 16 A Companion to Illustration edited by Alan Male 17 A Companion to Feminist Art edited by Hilary Robinson, Maria Elena Buszek Forthcoming 1 A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latina/o Art edited by Alejandro Anreus, Robin Greeley and Megan Sullivan 2 A Companion to Museum Curation edited by Brad Buckley and John Conomos

A Companion to Feminist Art Edited by

Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek

This edition first published 2019 © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions. The right of Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with law. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA Editorial Office The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print‐on‐demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data Names: Robinson, Hilary, 1956– editor. | Buszek, Maria Elena, 1971– editor. Title: A companion to feminist art / editors, Hilary Robinson, Maria Elena Buszek. Description: Chichester, West Sussex ; Hoboken, NJ : Wiley, [2019] | Includes bibliographical   references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018061403 (print) | LCCN 2019000212 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118929186   (Adobe Pdf ) | ISBN 9781118929193 (ePub) | ISBN 9781118929155 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Feminism in art. | Feminism–Political aspects. | Feminist art criticism. Classification: LCC N72.F45 (ebook) | LCC N72.F45 C67 2019 (print) | DDC 700.1/03–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018061403 Cover Design: Wiley Cover Images: Reproduced by permission of Mira Schor Set in 10/12pt Warnock by SPi Global, Pondicherry, India 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For our companionista Alanna Lockward (1961–2019)

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Contents Series Editor Preface  xi About the Editors  xiii Notes on Contributors  xv Introduction  1 Part I 

Geographies  15

1 Recurring Questions, Cyclical Energies: A History of Feminist Art Practices in Australia  17 Julie Ewington 2 Debunking the Patriarchy: Feminist Collectives in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and Peru  37 María Laura Rosa (Translated by Maria Elena Buszek) 3 Women Artists: Making a Subject Space in India  53 Gayatri Sinha 4 Feminism as Activism in Contemporary South African Art  69 Karen von Veh 5 Moving Towards Paratactical Curating: A Critical Overview of Feminist Curating in Istanbul in the Twenty‐First Century  91 Ebru Yetişkin 6 From Within, From Without: Configurations of Feminism, Gender and  Art in Post‐Wall Europe  111 Martina Pachmanová 7 Crossing Borders and Other Dividers in Western Europe and the British Isles  127 Alexandra Kokoli 8 Wheels and Waves in the USA  141 Mira Schor

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Part II  9

Being  155

Essentialism, Feminism, and Art: Spaces Where Woman “Oozes Away”  157 Amelia Jones

10 Feminist Ageing: Representations of Age in Feminist Art  181 Michelle Meagher 11 Letters to Susan  199 Lubaina Himid 12 Feminist Art Re‐Covered  215 Richard Meyer 13 Collecting Creative Transcestors: Trans* Portraiture Hirstory, from  Snapshots to Sculpture  225 Eliza Steinbock Part III 

Doing  243

14 Witness It: Activism, Art, and the Feminist Performative Subject  245 Hilary Robinson 15 Feminism and Language  261 Griselda Pollock 16 Busy Hands, Light Work: Toward a Feminist Historiography of Hand‐Made Photography in the Era of the ‘New Materiality’  283 Harriet Riches 17 Reading Posthumanism in Feminist New Media Art  299 Maria Fernandez 18 Finding Ourselves Feminists: Curating and Exhibitions  315 Lucy Day and Eliza Gluckman 19 Erasure, Transformation and the Politics of Pedagogy as Feminist Artistic/Curatorial Practice  331 Felicity Allen Part IV 

Thinking  351

20 Art Matters: Feminist Corporeal‐Materialist Aesthetics  353 Marsha Meskimmon

Contents

21 The Hidden Abode Beneath/Behind/Beyond the Factory Floor, Gendered Labor, and the Human Strike: Claire Fontaine’s Italian Marxist Feminism  369 Jaleh Mansoor 22 Dear World: Arts and Theories of Queer Feminism  389 Tirza Latimer 23 From Representation to Affect: Beyond Postmodern Identity Politics in  Feminist Art  405 Susan Best 24 Call and Response: Conversations with Three Women Artists on  Afropean Decoloniality  419 Alanna Lockward Part V 

Relating  437

25 On Feminism, Art and Collaboration  439 Amy Tobin 26 Opening the Patriarchive: Photography, Feminism, and State Violence  459 Siona Wilson 27 Maternal Mattering: The Performance and Politics of the Maternal in  Contemporary Art  475 Natalie Loveless 28 Ars Eroticas of Their Own Making: Explicit Sexual Imagery in American Feminist Art  493 Tanya Augsburg 29 Masculinity, Art, and Value Extraction: An Intersectional Reading in the  Advance of Capital as Post‐Democracy  513 Angela Dimitrakaki 30 New Subjects and Subjectivities  533 Jill Bennett Index  545

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Series Editor Preface Blackwell Companions to Art History is a series of edited collections designed to cover the discipline of art history in all its complexities. Each volume is edited by specialists who lead a team of essayists, representing the best of leading scholarship, in mapping the state of research within the sub‐field under review, as well as pointing toward future trends in research. This Companion to Feminist Art focuses on the recent history of and current discussions within feminist art history, theory and practice. The wide‐ranging chapters include contributions that address questions such as configurations of feminism and gender in post‐Cold War Europe, to more focused conversations with women artists on Afropean decoloniality. This volume is divided into five sections that signal the variety of voices that articulate feminist thought and art. Together the sections and essays challenge and expand our understanding of feminist art beyond the canonical definitions that are rooted in the 1960s. Through the chapters we encounter feminist art as dynamic and fluid, sitting at the intersection between culture, politics and practice. As series editor, I was delighted to receive the proposal for this volume, which was both timely and thought provoking. As the editors note, the book’s evolution over a number of years has in part been a product of the differences of thought and experience of the editorial team. The volume has benefitted from this creative friction as the thematic sections and the essays they contain recognise and celebrate the diversity of feminist thinkers and practitioners. This collection of essays will be essential reading for students, researchers and teachers working on the histories, theories and practices of feminism and art, and in related fields. I have no doubt that A Companion to Feminist Art will make a very welcome addition to the series. Dana Arnold, 2019

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About the Editors Hilary Robinson is Professor of Feminism, Art, and Theory at Loughborough University. Her publications include Visibly Female: Women and Art Today (1987), Reading Art, Reading Irigaray: The Politics of Art by Women (2006), Feminism–Art– Theory 1968–2014 (2015). Initially she trained as a painter, at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne; she also has an MA in Cultural History from the Royal College of Art, London and a PhD in Art Theory from the University of Leeds. Hilary’s academic career has been in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, and London, England. At the University of Ulster (1992–2005) she taught the history and theory of contemporary art to studio Fine and Applied Art students, at BA, MFA, and PhD levels. In 2005, she was appointed Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. While in Pittsburgh her board memberships included The Andy Warhol Museum; Silver Eye Centre for Photography and The Mattress Factory Museum. She headed the Creative Entrepreneurs project, to retain artists in post‐industrial Pittsburgh. She moved back to the UK in 2012 to take up the position of Professor and Dean of the School of Art and Design at Middlesex University for a four‐year term before taking up her present research professorship. Her current book project is ReSisters: Art, Activism and Feminist Resistance. Maria Elena Buszek is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Colorado Denver. Her publications include the books Pin‐Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture (2006) and Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art (2011). She has also contributed writing to numerous, international exhibition catalogues: most recently, essays in Dorothy Iannone: Censorship and the Irrepressible Drive Toward Divinity (2014), Andrea Bowers (2014), Mark Mothersbaugh: Myopia (2014), and In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States (2012). Her scholarship and art criticism have appeared in such publications as Art Journal, TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies, and Art in America, and (with Kirsty Robertson) she edited a special issue of Utopian Studies on the subject of “craftivism.” Dr. Buszek is also a prolific independent curator, whose most recent exhibitions include the 2016 exhibition Danger Came Smiling: Feminist Art and Popular Music and the traveling exhibition Raised in Craftivity. Before coming to CU‐Denver, she was Assistant Professor of Art History at the Kansas City Art Institute and served as a curatorial assistant at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Her current book project, Art of Noise, explores the ties between contemporary activist art and popular music.

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­Notes on Contributors Felicity Allen is an artist, writer, and educator. Her career’s work is a model of The Disoeuvre, the neologism she coined to describe the contingent and adaptable practices that she has developed (like many other artists), in contrast to a conventional ‘oeuvre’. In the last decade she has made five series of Dialogic Portraits projects, producing paintings, films, and artists books (included in Tate’s and Getty’s artists’ books collections). She has written numerous articles on gallery education, published poetry, and sustained a long‐term project with a Syrian artist based in Damascus. Tanya Augsburg is a humanities‐trained, interdisciplinary feminist performance scholar, critic, and curator who can be occasionally persuaded to perform. She teaches at San Francisco State University, where she is Professor of Humanities. Her current projects include completing a book‐length manuscript on the interdisciplinary arts and a book‐length manuscript on what she is calling “feminist ars erotica.” Jill Bennett is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and Professor of Experimental Arts at the University of New South Wales. She leads a transdisciplinary research team investigating the experience of ageing and neurological/mental health, and producing 3D immersive visualization of subjective experience. She is Founding Director of The Big Anxiety: Festival of Arts + Science + People. Her books include Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art and Practical Aesthetics, as well as monographs on media arts and curating. Susan Best is Professor of Art History and Theory and Deputy Director (research and postgraduate) at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. She is the author of Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant‐Garde (2011) and Reparative Aesthetics: Witnessing in Contemporary Art Photography (2016). Lucy Day is a lecturer, writer, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Alongside her 30‐year curating career, Day has supported artists and arts organizers through mentoring, workshops, and organizational change. For over 10 years as part of the independent curatorial partnership Day + Gluckman, she has collaborated with a variety of organizations, and in 2015 founded A Woman’s Place Project CIC, which takes equality as its starting point, exploring it creatively through contemporary‐art exhibitions, projects, and events.

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Angela Dimitrakaki is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art History and Theory, University of Edinburgh. She has co‐edited Economy: Art, Production and the Subject in the 21st Century (2015, with Kirsten Lloyd) and Politics in a Glass Case: Feminism, Exhibition Cultures, and Curatorial Transgressions (2013, with Lara Perry), and special issues on social reproduction for the journals Historical Materialism (2016) and Third Text (2017), and on antifascist art theory for Third Text (2019). She has authored Gender, ArtWork and the Global Imperative (2013), and Art and Globalisation: From the Postmodern Sign to the Biopolitical Arena (2013, in Greek). Her forthcoming book is Feminism, Art, Capitalism. She has received an Academy of Athens award for fiction writing (2017). Julie Ewington is a writer and curator based in Sydney, Australia. Between 2001 and 2014 she was Head of Australian Art at Queensland Art Gallery|Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. She has written numerous catalogue essays and reviews for journals, including The Monthly, Art Monthly Australasia, and Artforum. Major publications include monographs on Fiona Hall (2005) and Del Kathryn Barton (2014). In 2016 Ewington curated The Sculpture of Bronwyn Oliver for TarraWarra Museum of Art, and in 2017 was a curatorium member for Unfinished Business: Perspectives on Art and Feminism, at ACCA, Melbourne. Maria Fernandez teaches at Cornell University. She works on the history and theory of digital art, postcolonial and gender studies, Latin American art and architecture, and the intersections of these fields. She is the author of Cosmopolitanism in Mexican Visual Culture (2014) for which she was awarded the Arvey Prize by the Association for Latin American Art in 2015. She edited Latin American Modernisms and Technology (2018) and with Faith Wilding and Michelle Wright coedited Domain Errors: Cyberfeminist Practices (2002). Eliza Gluckman was Curator of the New Hall Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, the largest collection of works by women in Europe, from 2015 to 2018, and is currently Senior Curator and Deputy Director of the Government Art Collection (UK). For over 10 years as part of the independent curatorial partnership Day + Gluckman, she has collaborated with a variety of organizations, and in 2015 founded A Woman’s Place Project CIC, which takes equality as its starting point, exploring it creatively through contemporary‐art exhibitions, projects, and events. Lubaina Himid is an artist, curator, and Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancaster. She was awarded the Turner Prize (2017), and an MBE for services to Black women’s art (2010). Recent exhibitions include Invisible Strategies, Modern Art Oxford, 2017, and Navigation Charts, Spike Island, 2017. Other exhibitions include the Studio Museum, New York, 1997, Tate Britain, 2011, and the Badischer Kunstverein, 2017. She represented Britain at the Gwangju Biennial, 2014 and the Berlin Biennial, 2018. She curated Five Black Women, Africa Centre, London 1983, The Thin Black Line, ICA London, 1985, and Thin Black Line(s), Tate Britain 2011. Amelia Jones is Robert A. Day Professor, Roski School of Art & Design, USC, and is a curator and scholar of contemporary art, performance, and feminist/sexuality studies.

­Notes on Contributor

Recent publications include Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (2012), co‐edited with Erin Silver, Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories (2016), and the edited special issue “On Trans/Performance” of Performance Research (2016). Jones is currently working on a retrospective of the work of Ron Athey and a book tentatively entitled In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance. Alexandra Kokoli is Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture, Middlesex University, London, and Research Associate at VIAD, University of Johannesburg. A writer and curator, she has published widely on feminism, art, and visual culture in journals including Art Journal, Women and Performance, n.paradoxa, Performance Research, Oxford Art Journal, and Hypatia. Her books include The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice (2016, paperback 2017), and (as editor) Feminism Reframed: Reflections on Art and Difference (2008), and The Provisional Texture of Reality: Selected Talks and Texts by Susan Hiller, 1977–2007 (2008). Tirza Latimer earned her PhD in Art History at Stanford University. Professor in Visual Studies at California College of the Arts, Oakland/San Francisco, her teaching, publications, and curatorial projects reflect on visual culture and visual politics from queer feminist perspectives. Her latest book, Eccentric Modernisms: Making Differences in the History of American Art, was released by University of California Press in 2016. Alanna Lockward was a Dominican-German writer, journalist, filmmaker and founding director of Art Labour Archives. Lockward conceptualized and curated the groundbreaking transdisciplinary meeting BE.BOP. BLACK EUROPE BODY POLITICS (2012–2018). She was the author of several books, including Apremio: apuntes sobre el pensamiento y la creación contemporánea desde el Caribe (2006) and Un Haití Dominicano: Tatuajes fantasmas y narrativas bilaterales (2014), and editor of BE.BOP 2012–2014. El cuerpo en el continente de la conciencia Negra (2016). She was research professor at the Center of Caribbean Studies, Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra. Dr Lockward passed away in January 2019. Natalie Loveless is an associate professor in the Department of Art and Design (History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture) at the University of Alberta, Canada, where she also directs the Research‐Creation and Social Justice CoLABoratory. Recent projects include New Maternalisms and Immune Nations. Current work includes a forthcoming book, Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research‐Creation, and a collaborative project on art and ecology called Speculative Energy Futures. Jaleh Mansoor is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of British Columbia. She coedited the anthology Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics (2010), and her monograph Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia was published in September 2016. She has contributed to October, Texte Zur Kunst, and Artforum. Mansoor’s current project traces the historical and structural entwinement of aesthetic and real (or concrete) abstraction, the latter understood as the extraction of surplus labor valorized on and by the market.

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Michelle Meagher is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, where she teaches courses in the area of popular culture, feminist body studies, and art and activism. Her current research project, titled Art, Feminism, and the Periodical Press, considers the ways that feminist art was produced, defined, and circulated by periodical communities of the late 1970s and through the 1980s in the US context. Marsha Meskimmon is Professor of Art History and Theory at Loughborough University (UK). Her publications include: The Art of Reflection: Women Artists’ Self‐ Portraiture in the Twentieth Century (1996), Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics (2003), Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (2010), Women, the Arts and Globalization: Eccentric Experience (coedited, Dorothy Rowe, 2013), Drawing Difference: Connections between Gender and Drawing (coauthored, Phil Sawdon, 2016), and Home/Land: Women, Citizenship, Photographies (coedited, Marion Arnold, 2016). She is currently writing a trilogy, Transnational Feminism and the Arts for Routledge. Richard Meyer is Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor of Art History at Stanford University, where he teaches courses on twentieth‐century American art, censorship, feminism, and queer studies. He is the author of What Was Contemporary Art? (2013) and, with Catherine Lord, Art and Queer Culture (2013). A new edition of Meyer’s first book, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth‐Century American Art, has just been published with a preface by the author that considers the book’s relevance to the cultural and political landscape of Trump’s America. Martina Pachmanová is an Associate Professor at the Department of Theory and History of Art at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. As a researcher, writer, and curator she specializes in gender, sexual politics, and feminism in modern, post‐war and contemporary art and visual culture. She is an author, editor, and coeditor of numerous books and exhibition catalogues, including monographs of f­orgotten Czech female modernists related to their retrospective exhibitions. Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director, Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CentreCATH) at the University of Leeds, UK. Committed to an international, postcolonial, queer feminist analysis of the visual arts, visual culture, and cultural theory, one major publication is Charlotte Salomon in the Theatre of Memory (2018). Forthcoming publications included Is Feminism a Bad Memory? (2019) and Monroe’s Mov(i)es: Class, Gender and Nation in the Work, Image‐Making and Agency of “Marilyn Monroe” (2020). Harriet Riches is an art historian whose current research focuses on issues of gender and the language of femininity in the historiography of photography. She has published widely on this subject in journals such as Oxford Art Journal, and writes regularly on contemporary photography for several international magazines including Afterimage: Journal of Media Arts & Cultural Criticism and Source Photographic Review. She is ­currently Director of postgraduate programs at Cambridge School of Visual & Performing Arts.

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María Laura Rosa is a researcher at CONICET (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas, Argentina) and the Interdisciplinary Institute for Gender Studies at the University of Buenos Aires, Professor of Aesthetics, Department of Arts, Philosophy and Literature Faculty University of Buenos Aires, and Lecturer of Latin‐American Arts at ESEADE University, Buenos Aires. Dr. Rosa is the editor (with Soledad Novoa Donoso) of Share the World: The Experience of Women and Art (2017) and the author of Legacies of Freedom: Feminist Art in Democratic Effervescence (2014). Mira Schor is a New York‐based painter and writer. Schor has been the recipient of awards in painting from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Pollock‐Krasner Foundations, as well as the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism, a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and an AICA‐USA award for her blog A Year of Positive Thinking. She is the author of two books of collected essays, Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture and A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life and coeditor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism and M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online. Gayatri Sinha is an art critic and curator whose primary areas of interest are gender and iconography, media, economics, and social history. She has curated and lectured extensively in India, Europe, and the United States. Sinha is the founder and director of Critical Collective, an initiative to build knowledge in the visual arts in India. Sinha’s publications include Voices of Change: 20 Indian Artists (2010), Art and Visual Culture in India 1857–2007 (2009), and Indian Art: An Overview (2003), among others. She was the recipient of the Tate Asia Research fellowship in 2017. Eliza Steinbock is Assistant Professor of Film and Literary Studies at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, and former “Veni” Talent Scheme postdoctoral researcher awarded for “Vital Art: Transgender Portraiture as Visual Activism” (NWO 2014–2018). In addition to coediting four special journal issues, their articles have been published in the Photography and Culture, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Spectator, Feminist Media Studies, and in over fifteen edited volumes. Their forthcoming first book, Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment and the Aesthetics of Change, is with Duke University Press (Spring 2019). Amy Tobin is a lecturer in the History of Art Department at the University of Cambridge and Curator of Events, Exhibitions and Research at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. She completed her PhD at the University of York in 2017 with a thesis on feminism, art, and collaboration in the 1970s. Her research on art, film, and feminism has been published in the journals Tate Papers and MIRAJ, as well as in Sue Clayton and Laura Mulvey’s edited collection Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s (2017). She is also coeditor of London Art Worlds: Mobile, Contingent and Ephemeral Networks 1960–1980 (2018) with Jo Applin and Catherine Spencer, and the author of 14 Radnor Terrace: A Woman’s Place (2017). Karen von Veh is Associate Professor of Art History and Head of Department in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Her research interests include contemporary South African Art, the transgressive use of Christian

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iconography, postcolonial studies, and gender studies. She has written several articles in academic journals and chapters in books on these subjects, as well as two monographs on South African artist Diane Victor. Karen is a past president and long‐term membership secretary of the South African Visual Arts Historians Association, has served on the board of directors of Arts Council of the African Studies Association, and currently serves on the international board of AICA (International Association of Art Critics). Siona Wilson is Associate Professor of Art History at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center, the City University of New York. She is the author of Art Labor, Sex Politics: Feminist Effects in 1970s British Art and Performance (2015) and has published on topics including feminist politics of war imaging, documentary photography and film and video art, and the gendering of sound. She is currently working on a book addressing episodes in the history of documentary from the 1930s to the present and the figure of the female insurgent. Ebru Yetişkin is an independent curator and media theorist. She works on the interaction of science, technology, politics, and art. She works as a full‐time researcher at Istanbul Technical University. She has curated media art related exhibitions entitled Cacophony (2013), Code Unknown (2014), Waves (2015), Contagious Bodies (2015), X‐CHANGE (2015), Illusionoscope (2016), and Interfaces (2017). In 2016, she edited a book of poetry, Like The Others written by a robot named Deniz Yılmaz, and curated an autograph session at the Istanbul Art and Book Fair.

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Introduction The term “feminist art” has been misused as often as not. Understood as a codification within the academic discipline of art history and within the related curatorial and archival categories of museological practices, it has frequently come to represent a classification: feminist art. Used as such, the classification implies consideration under definitions familiar in other art historical and museological classifications, definitions of geography, chronology, style, materials, and influence (fifteenth‐century Florentine, Golden Age Dutch, Pre‐Raphaelite, and so forth). It therefore restricts consideration of feminist art to a particular overt content, style, use of materials, or chronological geographical influence since “women’s liberation” or the “second wave” of the feminist movement emerged in full force in the West in the late 1960s. This book, however, comes to the term “feminist art” from a different direction. As editors, we have approached “art” as a dynamic set of material and theoretical practices in the realm of culture, and “feminism” as an equally dynamic set of activist and ­theoretical practices in the realm of politics. Given that culture and politics constantly intersect and work upon each other, “feminist art” for us is the space and place – the site – where feminist politics and the domain of art‐making intersect. Not surprisingly, it is also the place where both feminist politics and art‐making sometimes diverge and divide, in order to reconnect with greater strength resulting from this kind of critique and debate. It is not always a comfortable, safe, or secure place for those who work at that intersection: the art world in the twenty‐first century retains a hierarchy of thinking and of practice that is still overwhelmingly dominated by masculinist, Euro/USA‐ centric values. (A quick look at the 100 most expensive modern and contemporary artworks sold at auction can verify the value assigned to non‐male, non‐Euro/USA ­artists.) To us, and to a determined, angry, joyous, powerfully creative, and increasing number of artists, critics, scholars, and curators, working at this intersection is an urgent activity. The structure of the book is grounded in this approach to feminist art. Not a history, rather it is intended to give an overview of what is happening at the time of its writing, why, and how; and in different locations, ways of making, and ways of thinking. We have invited the writers to respond to the brief in the way that suits them best, rather than asking all to give an overview of the subjects in which they are specialists: sometimes the sharp focus can illuminate the tacit questions and challenges of a large sector of artists; sometimes an overview has been a more appropriate way to introduce or provoke further, focused questions for the reader. Either way, we hope that readers will, along with us, be cognizant that what is here is an indicator of how much more there is A Companion to Feminist Art, First Edition. Edited by Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Introduction

out there to discover. There is a recognition that we have tried to build into the structure of the book this diversity of feminist thinkers and practitioners. Indeed, the choice to coedit this volume emerged from a desire to include at the editorial level d ­ ifferences of thought and experience, and a challenge to each editor’s own, distinct ways of thinking and working. And, concomitantly, we’d like to recognize our editorial frustration at the inevitably partial nature of any such undertaking within the covers of one book and the reach of one language: for various reasons, we were not able to secure all the writers we wished for, or therefore all the voices and topics we wanted to share. In many ways, this book is both a complement and a contrast to the archival anthologies compiled by one of us, Hilary Robinson’s Feminism–Art–Theory 1968–2000 and Feminism–Art–Theory 1968–2014. It is a contrast in that here you will find newly ­commissioned essays that focus upon the now and upon recent history, while the other anthologies are of pre-existing texts, charting discussions and developments historically. It is a complement in starting from such values and pursuing such diversity, in its approach to feminist art and to feminist thinkers and practitioners, and in the words of these thinkers and practitioners themselves.

­Geographies In her 1984 book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, the African‐American feminist scholar bell hooks influentially, and inclusively, defines feminism as “a movement to end sexist oppression.” And yet, she reminds us, feminism also “directs our attention to systems of domination and the interrelatedness of sex, race, and class oppression.”1 This definition has guided our work as feminist‐art scholars, and also our choices as editors of this anthology – beginning with the knowledge that, while the limitations of an English‐ language publication prevented us from working with and translating the work of as many feminists as we’d have liked, this anthology needed to incorporate as many voices from around the globe as possible. We often spoke of the need for “on‐the‐ground” ­perspectives on global feminisms, and all the contributors to our “geographies” of feminist art live and work in the regions about which they write. We have not pursued an “area studies” approach to this section; rather, we have ­compiled it from the belief that feminist politics and practices rest upon local conditions, and interact with local histories, and cultural and political practices. Nor did we address the section by thinking we needed a “compare and contrast” approach, which may have led to false competitions about which feminism was more urgent or more effective, or to a sense that differing locations were in themselves objects of study. Instead, we invited writers to identify the current issues for and of feminist art in their locations, along with the most appropriate way of exploring them. In the opening chapter, Julie Ewington presents us with a survey of the Australian feminist movement in art, starting by situating it in a moment of historical reflexivity, internationalism, and a 2015 artwork by Kelly Doley and Diana Smith (working as the collective Sunday School), titled The Lucy R. Lippard Lecture. This piece itself reflected upon the visit to Australia 40 years earlier by American critic Lucy Lippard. Ewington goes on to trace the engagement of Australian feminist artists not only with the US but with current European (‘continental’) philosophy, and of course the UK (where Germaine Greer and a number of other Australians, later to become prominent in the arts and

­Geographie ­Geographie 3

media, had emigrated in the 1960s). Against this backdrop, Ewington demonstrates the struggle of Australian feminists to produce methods and practices appropriate to their own condition, including that of the differing realities of Indigenous Australian lives and white post‐coloniality. She concludes with an examination of recent curatorial and art practices, including major exhibitions and the debates they embodied and provoked. A different approach is taken by María Laura Rosa. Her chapter covers four countries – Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and Peru – but she maintains a focus on particular types of practice: feminist collectives and their art activism. A strong theme through this chapter is that of access to public space, and how to make effective aesthetic interventions in it. Charting projects by four groups  –  Mujeres Públicas, Mujeres Creando, Malignas Influencias, and Laperrera  –  Rosa opens up the tactical thinking of these groups to reach the audiences that they wish to, in order to build solidarity and further action. In contrast to the occupation of public space in Latin America, Gayatri Sinha’s essay traces the creation of subject space of women artists and feminism in India. Woven against a background of subaltern studies, Indian Marxism, class, and caste, she demonstrates how these artists realized their subjectivities and their publics in movements “compelled by the politics of a region of fraught cartographies.” Influences of goddesses and the lived politics affecting individual women are shown to effect both the growth and nature of feminism in India from the 1970s onwards, but are also necessary to understanding the work of the artists she discusses, such as Arpita Singh, Sheba Chhachhi, Nalini Malani, and a newer generation such as Sheela Gowda, Anita Dube, and Navjot Altaf. In all this work the artists question the “divine feminine, or the ­motherland.” Opening with “an initiative so silent that it was virtually unspoken,” Sinha argues that these artists have moved towards representing diverse subjectivities through re‐representing the gendered and “unquiet processes of nationhood.” Karen von Veh’s chapter also focuses on the unquiet processes of nationhood, in this instance, in the formation of post‐apartheid South Africa, and in particular on how sexualities and sexual identities intersect with constructions of national identity and analysis of how contemporary South Africa is formed through its sexual politics. The work of two women, one black and one white, is brought to the fore. Zanele Muholi’s activist practices of photography focus on representations of queer black identities, particularly in her portraits of black lesbian women and trans men. Diane Victor’s mixed media works explore men’s violence against women in the new South Africa, across all communities. Both women, therefore, are exposing that which has been hidden in silence, and attempt instead to give visibility and voice. Muholi gives dignity, respect and self‐realization to communities that have been abused, denied, and subjected to crimes of “cure” by rape. They are portraits of those who have endured, survived, and who have found security in their individual subjecthoods and collective communities. Victor exposes (often shockingly and painfully) the crimes to which those communities, and other women, have been subjected. Not all the victims of corrective rape survived; elsewhere in black communities and in all sections of the white community, the levels of rape and woman-murder are horrendous, bringing the female homicide rate to six times the average. Victor’s work focusses on particular crimes, bringing them out of the realm of anonymous statistics to present their narratives in a visceral manner. Von Veh completes her essay by outlining how both artists avoid the designation “feminist,” and how the term has a complex and problematic history in its rise in white communities before the end of apartheid.

4

Introduction

The art world in one city, Istanbul, is the context for Ebru Yetişkin’s chapter, “Moving Towards Paratactical Curating.” She describes the algorithmic control exercised by state and corporations as producing systemic and functional stupidity, and analyses how this has been at work in Turkey and more specifically in the art world of Istanbul, and how feminist critiques through curatorial practices have attempted to develop effective techniques. Given some background in the political and economic programs of the Turkish state, including in the arts, she then moves to the development of curatorial practices, and thence to feminist practices of curation, particularly of new media art. In the increasingly autocratic and repressive state that is Turkey, paratactics are needed. Maria Pachmanová addresses the region she calls in her title “post‐Wall Europe.” Through the essay, her terminology shifts as appropriate – “former Eastern bloc” (political); “eastern Europe” (geographical); the “former East” (chronological); even “ex‐East” which could remind us of the ex‐parrot in Monty Python – one description in a long list of ways to say the bird was dead. The resonance is not drawn flippantly: how to describe the complexity of this part of the world, not post‐colonialist but post‐communist though not all post‐Soviet, overwhelmingly white but subject to racial and ethnic abuse in the rest of Europe, and where wars between their newly formed states have been fought often on ethnic and sectarian grounds, and internal minorities including the Roma bear the collective brunt of such thinking. Pachmanová explores the status of “feminism” as a political concept in this environment, and the difficulty and significance of attention to the politics of gender and race in the art world here. While the “former East” is and has been clearly problematized as a concept on many fronts, its counterpart, the “former West” is not often treated in a similar fashion. Its values are taken as having triumphed (if only because it has outlasted the Communist regimes of the former Eastern bloc), even while they have shifted. Further, its identity crises are happening internally within pre‐existing states, who are attempting to redefine themselves in distinction from each other or, more frequently, in distinction from people who have arrived from elsewhere and who are seen as a threat to that identity. In these new narratives of Western identity, old narratives are brushed off and re‐drafted, as if national identity were static. Alexandra Kokoli addresses these crises in “Crossing Borders and Other Dividers in Western Europe and the British Isles.” Her focus first is on transhistorical feminism; then on the shifting uses of “gender” as a category; and finally on transnationalism, exile, and diaspora, emphasizing how national identity is always contingent, even in times of retrenchment, and how feminist politics and art is ­constantly in negotiation with these changes. To end this section, we move to the other end of the scale: one event in New York. Mira Schor’s “Wheels and Waves in the USA” starts with the concept of amnesiac returns – apparent successes leading to forgetfulness and the return of the need for and actuality of feminist acts which have, however, also forgotten their history. Schor’s account of the event, in turns acerbic and funny, pulls together her tweets from the event, her notes written at the time, her later reflections upon being there, and her political analysis. It spins off into reflections upon her own feminist history: throughout, the jamming together of the personal and the political across a generational gulf is to the fore. What is the reader to draw (for example) from her quotes of the speaker’s wish to escape from capitalism, and her observations of the financial realities of the event? Or the veteran and much‐respected feminist who hands over her speaking time to a white male? At the end, as a Jewish woman, she recounts the story of the Jews being

­Bein ­Bein 5

made to wander in the desert until a generation has died and a new way of thinking can emerge: a story about the necessity of forgetting and the imperative of remembering. It is left to resonate with what we have read before, and with feminist politics in the USA.

­Being Feminist politics frequently spring from the experience of inhabiting a body that is accultured in particular ways (trained to designated behaviors, appearances, and ­activities; assumed to be adept at certain functions; and understood as deviant or disruptive if it transgresses these sanctions). So, too, feminist art often grapples with the representation of these bodily acculturations, and the relationship between them and “femininity.” In this section, contributors confront some of the myriad, even contradictory, ways in which the experience of living in and perceiving aged, raced, and gendered bodies relates to feminist politics in the art world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering their growing visibility and impact upon feminist politics in the past decade, trans* persons, art, and theory emerge frequently in this section’s writing on representing ­contemporary feminist embodiment. Amelia Jones opens this group of essays with a nuanced history and critique of “essentialism” in feminist art and theory (an issue raised by Schor at the end of the last ­section), and how queer and trans* bodies are productively problematizing the notion in the twenty‐first century. On the one hand, Jones recognizes the ways in which the “felt and visible” category of “woman” is necessary to recognize when confronting the fact of sexist oppression in heteronormative patriarchy. On the other, this categorization of “woman” as the opposite of a gender binary with “man” – as readily assumed in social‐ constructionist feminist theory as essentialist – tends to limit the very freedoms and variety of gendered identities that feminism embraces. Analyzing the representations of gender in emergent trans* cultures as they have evolved out of queer theory, Jones proposes that the simultaneously social and individual, and always relational definitions of gender in the work of trans* artists like Vaginal Davis, Zachary Drucker, and Rhys Ernst offer feminism tantalizingly open, new ways of battling sexism without reverting to the binaries sexism upholds. In the subsequent chapter, Michelle Meagher also applies the potential of “trans‐,” but in the context of feminist ageing. Utilizing Helene Moglen’s concept of “transageing” to disrupt narratives of age as linear and deteriorating, Meagher asks her readers to rather reconsider ageing as accumulation – of experience, knowledge, work, and self‐awareness. Conjuring tropes of ageing womanhood from the ancient crone to the contemporary cougar in the work of feminist artists from Louise Bourgeois to Cindy Sherman, Meagher compellingly argues for “the capacity for a feminist aesthetics of ageing” in both a women’s movement and an art world historically centered around the image and concerns of youth. Artist Lubaina Himid’s chapter takes the form of letters to artist and collaborator Susan Walsh, in which Himid’s responses to a series of (here unseen) queries from her correspondent unfold into a narrative about the nitty‐gritty of everyday battles of Black women artists in the United Kingdom. The chapter ostensibly begins with Himid looking back at her experiences in organizing three groundbreaking exhibitions in London galleries: 5 Black Women (1983), Black Woman Time Now (1983/4), and The Thin Black

6

Introduction

Line (1985). Today, these are enshrined in art history for the spotlight they shone on the work of contemporary women artists of color in the UK. However, as the fine‐grain detail of Himid’s recollections grow with each subsequent letter, the reader becomes aware of the participants’ struggles to launch not just these shows but their very careers as artists, curators, critics, and scholars. Himid’s “Letters to Susan” attempts to demystify the opaque systems by which artists are educated, discovered, organized, and funded – to which too many women artists and artists of color are denied access. She also lauds the often unglamorous or seemingly trivial contributions to marginalized artists’ work that results in real, if frustratingly incremental, progress toward their visibility. Richard Meyer similarly addresses the power of exhibitions to reveal hidden histories and fault lines in feminist ways of being; in this case the “blockbuster” traveling exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007–2009). Here, Meyer focuses his attention on the exhibition catalog’s cover, whose use of a Martha Rosler collage comprising vintage pin‐ups reignited decades‐old debates around the blurry line ­ between feminist expressions of sexuality and desire and cultural representations that often objectify and demean women. Meyer both contextualizes Rosler’s work in the “erotic ambivalence” of the second wave feminist era from which it came, and argues that the more recent debates over its meanings – in the art press, between artists in the exhibition, and even on the Internet and social media – demonstrate the sophistication and ongoing relevance of these expressions in feminist art today. In Eliza Steinbock’s chapter, she too returns to the resilience of second wave feminist thought, as well as returning this section full circle to the potential of transfeminism by rephrasing Linda Nochin’s famous 1971 question about women artists: “Why are there no great trans* artists?” While Steinbock is eager to trace the hirstory of “trancestors” in art, like Nochlin she is more interested in critiquing the conservative traditions by which art‐historical “greatness” is determined, represented here by portraiture. Steinbock sees in the importance of self‐portraiture among trans‐identified artists a concerted effort toward the documenting and humanizing of radical new subjectivities that simultaneously reference and extend feminist theories and practices of embodiment in art.

­Doing Too often, “feminism” is approached as a “methodology” of art‐making and scholarship, rather than as an activist practice. Needless to say, as art historians dedicated to both practicing and writing about feminism as activism – in the streets as on the page – we sought out contributors who would articulate a range of practices in the realm of “doing feminism” in different realms: activism, use of language, and practices of education, as well as in different ways of making art. To crib from Eliza Gluckman’s contribution (with her curating partner Lucy Day) in this section, throughout this book, we hope “to remind people as they are learning about feminist art […] that it comes from this – a place where there is a fight to be had.” Hilary Robinson begins this section with a crucial, tragic moment from the fight for women’s suffrage in Great Britain: the death of Emily Wilding Davison during an action at the Epsom Derby in 1913, when she stepped onto the track with a suffrage banner

­Doin ­Doin 7

and collided with the racehorse Anmer, owned by King George V. Her death would rally support for women’s enfranchisement, largely due to the spectacular, performative nature of her martyrdom, captured by the relatively new phenomenon of the moving‐ picture camera that allowed unprecedented numbers to witness her feminist protest via Pathé newsreel. Applying the writings Hannah Arendt, Chantal Mouffe, and Lucy Lippard on the nature and power of political art, Robinson addresses contemporary feminist work over which Davison’s ghost fairly hovers: work that not just performatively but also publicly intervenes in the very spaces, systems, and communities where women’s subjugation occurs, requiring viewers to “bear witness” to these artists’ (literal) acts of resistance. In her rich survey of the subject, Griselda Pollock takes up language as a significant form of “doing” feminism. Words, she reminds us, are “potent ways in which dominant social and political systems sustain their hegemony,” and in this chapter Pollock analyses how Western languages have established and reinforce hierarchies of gender, class, and race. However, Pollock also documents the myriad ways in which feminist artists and scholars have revealed and interrupted, and continue to interrogate and transform these hierarchies in ways that transcend the limits of existing representation – allowing us to not just imagine and articulate but also create and live new realities as gendered subjects. The act of art‐making is the focus of Harriet Riches’ chapter on photographic processes, handcraft, and their implications in feminist art. Riches is interested in women’s presence in photo history from its very origins, beginning with Elizabeth Fulhame’s experiments with “fabric photographs” in the eighteenth century, as well as the consistency with which these women’s contributions have been minimized by criticism that downgrades the alleged “feminization” of their work. As such, Riches turns to the work of contemporary photographers such as Julie Cockburn, Inge Jacobsen, and Sabrina Gschwandtner, which uses needlework to pierce and embellish found photography as a feminist reclamation of the “soft processes” of photo history that are often dismissed as nostalgic or folksy at a moment when digital photography is coded as masculine and, predictably, dominant in the discourse as a result. New‐media scholar Maria Fernandez’s contribution to this section asserts the relevance of posthuman and new materialist philosophy to ways of “doing” feminist art. She builds on influential thought by scholars such as Katherine Hayles and Rosa Braidotti, which necessarily addresses the limits of classical humanism in the digital age, and analyzes the work of artists from Lynn Hershman‐Leeson to Gaetano Adi as exemplary of “ways in which the processes of matter contribute to support, consolidate, or disrupt power relations.” Fernandez stresses that, despite the seemingly dystopian cast of the term “posthuman”, that the crisis it suggests is, in fact, an opportunity to recognize and create new subjectivities that integrate cutting‐edge knowledge from the sciences, and even historical innovations of marginalized peoples into appropriately complex, nuanced notions of what feminist agency might look like in the twenty‐first century. Lucy Day and Eliza Gluckman contribute a chapter that is part conversation, part curatorial statement, which simultaneously explains and reflects their embrace of “curation as a collective act, working alongside its co‐conspirator curation as an activist proposition.” While each woman has her own, individual curatorial practice, the pair additionally work together organizing feminist exhibitions and events as Day + Gluckman, the genesis of which they articulate here in a warm, informal interview with one another.

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Introduction

They subsequently, and more formally, follow this with a statement of their goals for Day + Gluckman as a model of feminist curatorial activism in not just the subjects of their exhibitions but also how they seek to consider and empathize with the personal, work/life realities of artists, arts professionals, and audiences in their practice. In the subsequent essay, Felicity Allen expands on Day + Gluckman’s insistence on the feminist collaboration inherent to, but often overlooked by, contemporary curatorial practices with a look at gallery educators and the myriad communities they engage with. Noting that, for decades, the role of women in art institutions was limited to that of “teacher,” Allen tracks ways in which the activism of (often working‐class) feminists and people of color quietly entered, then arguably came to define, practices in gallery education in the 1970s to the present day. And yet, even as concepts of relational ­aesthetics have allegedly grown more common and popular in contemporary art and its exhibition, Allen argues that the labor of educators and staff in these “relations” have gone unrecognized  –  indeed, is generally obscured  –  by the institutions they serve. Historicizing and celebrating the feminist history of gallery education, Allen’s essay reveals how the field has built our understanding of and demand for art spaces’ connection to their communities.

­Thinking After “Being” (feminism addressing the sexual politics of ontology and embodiedness) and “Doing” (where we asked writers to reflect upon different ways in which feminism is enacted in the art world and how its processes have developed), we wanted to address the intersection between feminist thinking and major theories that have influenced art theory. Aesthetics, Marxism, queer theory, psychoanalytic theory, and decolonialism have all been hugely beneficial and enriching to feminism in the art world – but equally have benefitted from feminist input and critique. Again, we invited writers to use their knowledge and expertise to determine how to address the topics and the currency of feminist thinking in these fields, and again diverse approaches to the challenge and to writing essays have emerged. Marsha Meskimmon takes this as her starting point in her move towards identifying her focus. Her aim is to discuss the possibilities for creating and understanding aesthetic practices through understanding the ways in which corporeal feminisms are entangled with new materialisms. Such a feminist corporeal‐materialist aesthetics will demonstrate that art matters, and therefore is “asking us to think, make and write ­otherwise.” Developing layers of thinking through the essay, drawing upon work by such as Judith Butler, Karen Barad, and Rosi Braidotti, Meskimmon constantly returns us to the practices of artists, producing increased legibility and resonance for their work. Works by Joanna Frueh and Frances Murray, Phil Sayers working with Esther Sayers and with Monica Grohmann, and Elizabeth King are analyzed for their processes of making and as objects that have people that interact with them. Meskimmon traces how processes of intra‐action and mutual productions of evolving identities are formed in and through these works, together confirming that “art matters, and matters differently.” The dependency of feminism upon Marx’s Capital is asserted in the opening sentence of Jaleh Mansoor’s chapter. In one passage Marx evokes the “hidden abode” of capitalism – the private office spaces in the factory, bourgeois spaces that if examined

­Thinkin ­Thinkin 9

can show the workings of capital more readily than focus upon the working conditions of laborers themselves. Here, Marx says, we shall find the structures that not only ensure that workers produce surplus but that they are paid enough to replicate their own lives and to partake of the market themselves, purchasing the products of their (and others’) labor. The Italian feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s took this a step further, holding that there is labor that is further hidden from view. It ensured that the laborer turned up physically and emotionally able to undertake the work required – and within this capitalist system this unseen labor is gendered female and normalized within a heteronormative family structure. Mansoor takes us through this strand of feminist analysis, situating within it the art and theory work of feminist collective Claire Fontaine. The strike of such women’s work would be a formidable weapon to overthrow patriarchal capitalism, and the strike is a theme to which Claire Fontaine returns again and again within the hyper‐capitalized contexts of contemporary art fairs and biennales. The feminist queer art world of North America echoes the feminist Marxist analysis of Italy at the end of Tirza Latimer’s chapter “Dear World: Arts and Theories of Queer Feminism,” though the strategies required are frequently as different as are the starting points. Here, the starting points are the nurturing of individualism in North America alongside suppression of the existence of queer women, rather than dependency of the economy upon unpaid labor and its key role in a heteronormative culture. Rather than the strike to expose the dependency of the invisible labor of women, “at sites of queer feminist critical mass […] we can image how what is ordinarily missing might perform if it were not.” Latimer starts by calling attention to the importance of collective actions both within feminist and within lesbian and queer communities. Such actions can unravel both feminist and queer politics, and are read here as “worldmaking” in preference to community building as communities can remain isolated: new worlds need to be imagined. Latimer takes us through work by groups such as LTTR, DAM!, Finger in the Dyke Productions, and FAG to explore how this happens in practice, and to demonstrate how queer theory informs, emerges from, and is shifted by such practices. That there is a relationship between feminism and both the practice and theory of psychoanalysis has been evident from the 1970s onwards, if not before Juliet Mitchell’s book Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis was published in 1974 and the germinal text for feminist thinking about psychoanalysis and visual culture was written the year before, but not published until 1975: Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” This century has seen much work upon affect in particular, and Susan Best’s chapter focuses upon this. She outlines how affect and feminist art history have usually been kept apart, with feminist art history more interested in meaning than feeling, and usually with an “account of gender i­ dentity as contingent and subject to change [and] that femininity is a mere ideological construction.” To challenge this, Best draws upon the work on affect by, primarily, Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick and gives a close reading of two series of work by Cindy Sherman, the “Film Stills” of 1977–1980 and the “Society Portraits” of the 2000s. By reading the artworks against the theory, Best indicates how the works are generative or exemplars of the theory, rather than responsive to, or illustrative of, it, as well as how differing readings of the same works can in themselves provoke deeper consideration of the affect they produce. Finally in this section, Alanna Lockward addresses the issue of decolonization. She starts the essay with an account of BE.BOP. BLACK EUROPE BODY POLITICS, the

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Introduction

series of events presenting artworks and discussions and other events with artists. In an act of radical generosity, Lockward turns most of this chapter over to the words of three European‐based artists of the Caribbean diaspora, with a set of written interviews where the artists responded in writing to the same set of questions from Lockward. The artists are Teresa María Díaz Nerio, who moved from the Dominican Republic to Amsterdam in 2002; Jeanette Ehlers, who is Trinidadian Danish; and Patricia Kaersenhout, who is Surinamese Dutch. What emerges are distinct voices, diverse analyses of the intersections of politics and identity and of the histories of Black thought in the Caribbean and in Europe, and the links, back and forth, between their own vitally engaged aesthetic practices today and these legacies.

­Relating There is, of course, no such thing as “feminism for one.” Just as being a feminist means recognition that the broad, diverse, complex category of people known as “women” are placed in a detrimental power relationship to men within patriarchal structures, and working to undo that with and on behalf of all women, so too, to be dedicated to feminist art, scholarship, and activism is to dedicate oneself to critiquing and battling sexism writ large. And so this volume ends with essays regarding the ways in which feminism is about relating: to our contradictions, one another, our environments. We invited the writers in this section to think about how feminist art intersects with considerations of collectivity, war, maternal relationships, desire, men, and relational aesthetics. Within the women’s liberation movements, from the dress reform and suffrage movements of late‐nineteenth and early‐twentieth‐century feminism, through the consciousness‐raising groups and collectives of the 1970s, to the pussy hat marches and the intersectional politics of #BlackLivesMatter in the late 2010s, forms of collaboration and collectivity have been a fundamental way of working. Often trying to work out new, non‐oppressive, ways of working together even as they were trying to work on other projects, these groups took on myriad forms, and experiences, of being part of one ranged from fractious or painful to the establishment of solid bonds. Amy Tobin explores the diversity of such working, then focuses upon three very different works, each named as being by an individual American artist: Judy Chicago, Suzanne Lacy, and Emily Roysdon. She examines how each work was made by a collaborative effort between many women, the different ways in which collaborative effort was manifested, and the results, which she concludes “capture moments of political movement [in the] redistribution of relationships between women.” Siona Wilson’s chapter focuses upon war, but as she explores works and collections she exposes also how the relation of women to the state is reflected with the official state sanctioning of archives. Her starting point is the small number of photographs that were made public by the American state out of about 1800 images taken of the atrocities carried out at Abu Ghraib. Many of these photographs feature women ­soldiers carrying out the abuse of captives. From there, she moves to Three Guineas, the exploration by Virginia Woolf of how women have still not become full citizens in the decade following universal suffrage. The book also analyzes patriarchal systems of hierarchy as inevitable prefigurations of war, and representations through photographs as potentially exposing such structures. Wilson’s reading of Woolf as a theorist of photography

­Relatin ­Relatin 11

takes us through analyses of the documentary archive collated by photographer Susan Meiselas of the stateless people of Kurdistan – a project that exposes the “patriarchive” through its omissions; and a three‐channel video by Zineb Sedira of an interview with Safia Kouaci. Kouaci is the widow of photographer Mohammed Kouaci, and the keeper of his archive of work documenting the Algerian war of independence. The archive exposes the role that women played in achieving independence, but the present Algerian state refuses to acknowledge its significance. Sedira helps us see how Kouaci is ­struggling to retain this archive – and hence this narrative of war, women, and nation‐building – in Algeria. Whatever other relationships we have, we all have some relationship to a mother and to being mothered, whether blissful, absent, or simply good enough. Natalie Loveless starts her chapter quoting both Tracey Emin saying she could not have been an artist and a mother, and Donna Haraway exhorting us to “Make kin, not babies!” The chapter explores feminist works that have explored how the maternal is produced culturally through practices of mothering, with particular focus on artists in or from the USA who make work in or with the maternal. While Mary Kelly’s Post Partum Document in many ways can be seen as taking the maternal relationship as its subject, it is crucial that it puts into the foreground both the labor and the effect of mothering. A younger generation of artists have returned to mothering and working with the maternal in their work, and examples are discussed that provoke questions about the nature of feminist care, of maternal labor, and of the making of kin. The invention of the birth control pill, the (partial) legalization of abortion in many Western countries, the sexual revolution, and the rise of the erotic art movement (along with the first international exhibition of erotic art) all happened in the 1960s. Tanya Augsburg gives this as the context for the debates that emerged within feminism in relation to explicit sexual imagery, from those who saw erotic art as benefitting only a heteronormative male sexuality and as such oppressive of women’s desires, through to those who called for a sex‐positive attitude and the exploration of women’s sexual desires through visual imagery. Ironically, both groups saw erotic art on a continuum with pornography. Augsburg takes Michel Foucault’s definition of the term ars erotica to describe secret societies of men, and explores what a specifically feminist ars erotica might be. She focuses on debates within feminism over the representation of women’s bodies, and how they were given form within artwork by artists from the 1960s to this century. Lesbian sexuality, queer sexuality, race‐positive sexuality, and feminist porn and other positions within the discourse are identified. Feminism is a political movement, not an identity, and therefore does not require that its adherents  –  feminists  –  identify as women. Yet there is a clear tension between ­feminism and the structures of masculinity that benefit those who identify as men in patriarchal cultures. Paradoxically, however, Angela Dimitrakaki identifies the ­structures creating the social categories of men and masculinity as a virtually “absent narrative” within curating that focuses on gender, but is more likely to be found where the focus is upon class or labor. She gives us an intersectional reading between gender and class, to open up representations of men and masculinity within capitalism to a more acute feminist lens. The moves within art theory to consider what art does, more than what art is, have been influenced by feminist thinking and practices – as can be extrapolated from much of the work in this book. Yet the theorizing of the effects of social or relational art

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Introduction

practices has also elided specifically feminist practices and sources. Jill Bennett, in the final chapter, argues that feminist processes can be found in the requirements of “radical interdisciplinarity” for the “reflexive criticality” found in feminism. Feminism has more recently turned to consider “unconscious discrimination [and] emergent experience.” Thus a shift in focus since the 1990s has been towards subjectivity, along with a shift to thinking about feminist practices as a technique, in institutions and in art. Bennett focuses upon one project between artist Shona Illingworth, neuropsychologist Catherine Loveday, and Claire, who has severe amnesia. She teases out the processes involved in this work to demonstrate deeply feminist attributes: the nature of the care between the participants, the nature of subjectivity in inter‐subjectivity, and the affective relation between the body as it is experienced by the subject and the body as it is experienced by the world. How this is then manifest as a feminist aesthetic work through its curating brings us back to questions of embodied – and engendered – subjectivity.

­Conclusion/Collaboration/Companionistas According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “companion” has three meanings – two as a noun and one as a verb: “A person or animal with whom one spends a lot of time or with whom one travels”, “Each of a pair of things intended to complement or match each other”, or “to accompany.” The nouns suit our experience as editors, and the verb is what we hope this book will do for you, our readers. We have, indeed, spent a long time with this creature, and together we have traveled a long way with it. Maria Elena Buszek: I first met Hilary as a “fan” – of both her scholarship and what I perceived as her own role as a “fan” of others’ work, apparent in the lovingly crafted and updated anthologies of writing on feminist art that she has published since the 1980s. I had recently finished my doctorate, just published my first book and, in ­anticipation of a long layover during a speaking engagement in her then‐hometown, more or less insinuated myself into her life after (what I’m sure to her seemed) an out‐of‐the‐blue email of introduction. Never would I have guessed then that a decade later I’d be an equal partner in this volume of new essays on the field we share. I am delighted and truly honored that in the years since our first meeting we have become good friends as well as collaborators, even though (perhaps precisely because?) our respective generational, scholarly, and activist histories have occasionally found us sparring. But, Hilary was clear, to both the publisher and me, that in inviting a collaborator she wanted for the final table of contents to reflect the productive frisson of our current moment in feminist history. We couldn’t have imagined just how much “this moment” would shift and change – from the microlevel of feminist art‐making to the macrolevel of global politics – since we first began the 2012 “wish list” that evolved into the book you are reading. Hilary Robinson: And yet, a project with 30 authors and two editors travels at the speed of the slowest element, and that element may be a part of the process or different people at various times. New jobs, house moves, children, the beginnings and endings of relationships, exhibition and teaching and writing commitments, overflowing email in‐boxes, have all intervened.

Notes Notes 13

MEB: It took a very long time to match up our abstract, preliminary sketches for what an anthology like this should include with professionals actively working on or thinking about those subjects. In some cases, the authors we invited argued to tweak or change outright the themes we thought important, and we bent or broke our preconceived frameworks – both because we trusted them and in the spirit of our own collaboration’s goal to accommodate friction and critique. In others, we felt the subjects at hand were too significant to be left out, and stubbornly sought out and cycled through contributors for little‐studied or difficult subjects for, literally, years. HR: All of this reminded us of the political, institutional, intellectual, and personal importance of slowing down.2 So, thank you to all of the writers, for your patience and continued commitment to the project. The conversations took place, between us, and between us and the writers, online, by video calls, occasionally in person at conferences or even in museums, looking at art by feminists. Editing this book as a pair, as a companionship, across time as well as time zones, oceans, and a generation gap, has been a wonderfully unfolding experience of how we complemented each other in expertise and matched each other in feminist commitment. This is at face value an overtly personal statement – but it is also an assertion that feminist intent can be realized in and despite the academy. MEB: As all our work on the anthology wore on, Hilary and I created a word for one another – Companionista – by which we eventually began warmly addressing all the contributors to this volume. Besides its shorthand reference to this Companion itself, it additionally speaks to the journey we shared, all of us working together toward its final state. HR: And, it is in this sense that we send this book out into the world: to accompany all who read it in their explorations of the intersection of feminism and art, to accompany your developments of, differences within, and discussions around this particular site in sexual politics. We hope that it will accompany new investigations of what can be thought, and how; what can be said, and how; and what can be done, and how. Above all, we hope that it accompanies vital imaginations and realizations of arts and feminisms that are presently unknown.

Notes 1 bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, 2nd edition (Cambridge, MA: South

Press Classics, 2000), 33.

2 And, indeed, the Slow Professor movement. See: Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber. The

Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016).

Part I

Geographies

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1

Recurring Questions, Cyclical Energies: A History of Feminist Art Practices in Australia Julie Ewington On 26 July 2015, I went to Sunday School. This was not a religious event, but a quasi‐ pedagogical project by artists, staged at Artspace, Sydney’s long‐established ‘alternative’ gallery. Two young women  –  Kelly Doley and Diana Smith  –  presented The Lucy R. Lippard Lecture, an interpretation of the American critic’s presentations on contemporary feminist art during a tour of Australia during International Women’s Year, 1975 (Figure 1.1).1 Lippard’s tour was a signal event: as Sunday School suggested, the lecture tour ‘is said to have kick started the Women’s Art Movement and other important ­feminist activities in Australia’.2 Like most mythologies, this is only partly true: by 1975, feminist visual arts collectives and projects had already been established in Sydney and Melbourne. What is undeniable today, however, is that young artists are claiming the feminist past: as Smith and Doley say, ‘Forty years on, [The Lucy R. Lippard Lecture] considers the legacy of feminism in Australia and how it ghosts and overlaps with the contemporary context.’3 What interests me, then, is how women artists in Australia have explored, navigated, ­colonised and re‐invented feminist arts over 40 years, and the contemporary effects of these ­persistent, intermittently flourishing, ideas and practices. Geography may not be destiny, but location is a powerful factor in cultural life – not always detrimentally. Australia is thousands of kilometres from the cultural centres of the northern hemisphere, with which its Anglophone society is still principally aligned in cultural matters; but what was in 1966 dubbed ‘the tyranny of distance’ by historian Geoffrey Blainey has brought unexpectedly rich opportunities to Australian artists who explore feminist ideas.4 I will argue that women artists in Australia have thrived – at different times, in various ways – during the resurgence and redevelopment of feminist intellectual and creative life in recent decades. Not without difficulties, delays or deferrals, to be sure, but the cultural, social and political landscape inhabited by Australian women artists today is unrecognisable from the extremely bleak prospect they faced in the early 1970s. Looking back over 40 years of involvement in these practices, I see rich cyclical energies for feminist arts practices and discourses in Australia, with successive generations taking up issues that sustain a number of feminist positions. I want to sketch my sense of the apparently discontinuous (but strongly recurring) gestures, practices and campaigns that have marked feminist visual arts in Australia. These have taken many forms, but are sustained by ongoing disquiet, even dismay, about women’s access to opportunity as artists, and by socially and culturally ingrained resistances to A Companion to Feminist Art, First Edition. Edited by Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Recurring Questions, Cyclical Energies: A History of Feminist Art Practices in Australia

Figure 1.1  Lucy R. Lippard Lecture performance with Kelly Doley and Diana Smith at Sunday School, Artspace, Sydney 2015. Photo: Kate Blackmore.

women’s expressions in art, which arise from their perspectives as women, however defined. I am arguing that Australian feminist artists, while enjoying the recent enhanced success by women artists in this country, remain energetically opposed to the continuing diminution of their potential as artists. Sunday School’s The Lucy R. Lippard Lecture in Sydney, in its reconsideration of an event 40 years ago, is one marker of this recurring feminism. So, differently, was the selection of senior artist Fiona Hall for the official Australian pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, entirely without comment about her gender, marking to an extent the ­normalisation of women’s achievement in Australian cultural life. As Abigail Solomon‐ Godeau observed, writing about Australian photographic artist Rosemary Laing: ‘woman artist’ is a ‘marked term’ that means the ‘woman artist operates in a more or less alien territory, which is, after all, the symbolic order of patriarchy itself ’.5 At the same time, in July 2015 Sydney’s venerable broadsheet newspaper published a news story on continuing male domination of the prestigious and nearly century‐old Archibald Prize for portraiture. This annual exhibition has become an occasion for mainstream advocacy for women artists, part of the current broad interest in women’s participation in society more generally.6 Why is this happening now? It is set against a general recent upsurge of discussion across Australian society about gender equality in politics and the workplace, but there are two primary reasons for the recurring cyclical energy, and considerable success, of feminist arguments in the arts in Australia over four decades. The first goes to women’s participation as artists, one of two persistent issues addressed by feminists from the early 1970s. A strong Australian emphasis on equal opportunity discourses stems from the egalitarian traditions of Australian settler society: from the late nineteenth century Australia, together with its neighbour New Zealand, was one of the ‘social laboratories of the world’, noted for its progressive policies in women’s suffrage, education and social

Recurring Questions, Cyclical Energies: A History of Feminist Art Practices in Australia

rights: New Zealand and Australia (in the then colony of South Australia) were the first in the world to grant the vote to women, in 1893 and 1895 respectively. This egalitarianism, however, did not extend to Australian Aboriginal peoples, the original inhabitants of the land, who were not able to vote until 1967. This history of social rights is certainly why ‘equal rights feminism’ from the 1970s onwards was so powerful in Australia and, eventually, so successful in the arts: the long‐ established egalitarian ethos suggested extending access to creative opportunity to women. Clearly, this is not yet entirely achieved, as statistics on women’s participation in the arts show; and feminists point, with justice, to the qualified delights of achieving an equality already compromised by convention. Yet a strong social and political consensus, and legislative foundation, exists in Australia for supporting achievement by women and, from the early 1970s onwards, the key role of the newly established Australia Council, the national arts and funding and advocacy body, was of critical importance in responding to growing claims for affirmative action for women in the arts.7 The second perennial question concerns the nature of women’s artistic expression. A crucial factor in the sophisticated flowering of feminist arts discourses in Australia was access to influential strands in late twentieth century feminist thinking globally, through the English language and its educational and cultural apparatuses. Though historically aligned to British art, by the 1970s Australia had also begun to develop strong links with American and European artists, critical discourses and institutions, through formal links (touring exhibitions, artists’ visits, educational links and lecture tours such as Lippard’s), but also through individual contacts initiated by Australians, such as the visit of writer Barbara Hall and artist Peter Kennedy to see Judy Chicago and Arlene Raven in Los Angeles in 1973, to discuss the 1972 Womanhouse project made with their students at CalArts, while filming experimental artists in the northern hemisphere.8 This knitting of Australian feminist practices into international discourses was amplified, and made more complex, by the energetic participation from the late 1970s of a distinguished group of Australian philosophers in contemporary European theoretical work. This effected a kind of triangulation with the sharply different tenors of Anglophone feminist cultural discourses in the United Kingdom and the United States. The Australian context and contribution was, in fact, decisive: many important French texts of the 1970s and 1980s, including feminist texts, were first translated and interpreted in Australian universities, by scholars such as Meaghan Morris, Paul Patton, Moira Gatens and especially Elizabeth Grosz at the University of Sydney.9 The speculative and imaginative character of texts by, for instance, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray carried women artists, as well as philosophy and literature students, into stimulating possibilities in creative assertion that leavened existing feminist ­discourses based on equality and social justice. All these developments had an incalculable impact on Australian women artists, especially in Sydney and Melbourne, through the universities and art schools. It was a heady mix, and ran through the Sydney art schools, particularly the newly established Sydney College of the Arts (1977), like wildfire, influencing artists who came to maturity in the 1980s, such as Janet Burchill, Merilyn Fairskye, Anne Ferran, Narelle Jubelin, Lindy Lee, Jennifer McCamley, Margaret Morgan, Susan Norrie and Julie Rrap. These artists became, in their turn, teachers and mentors of the next generations: Helen Grace

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Recurring Questions, Cyclical Energies: A History of Feminist Art Practices in Australia

taught Anne Ferran at Sydney College of the Arts in the 1980s, for example, and in her turn Ferran taught there from the 1990s to the 2000s; in Melbourne, senior artist Elizabeth Gower and art historian Anne Marsh taught for many years at the Victorian College of the Arts (now part of the University of Melbourne) and at Monash University, respectively: Gower cites Kate Just as an example of one younger feminist artist with whom she has an ongoing relationship over several decades.10 Australian women brought their particular issues, and critical responses, to international feminist discourses. Most importantly, the place of Indigenous women, from Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, was acknowledged. The gradual emergence from the 1980s of Indigenous women artists such as Fiona Foley, Judy Watson, and Tracey Moffatt, some in dialogue with First Nations artists ­elsewhere, eventually profoundly altered the cultural landscape in this country. In Australia, Aboriginal women artists have played a crucial role in the history of ­contemporary painting since the 1990s, and, through presentation of their contemporary fibre works in museum settings, have complicated distinctions between fine art and craft.11 Importantly, perhaps ironically, the strength of Australia’s equal rights ethos, together with multiple sources of developed feminist theoretical positions, has ensured that a certain agnosticism has prevailed about the character of women’s work as artists in Australia. To put it simply, despite ongoing urgent questions about forms of expression that can be seen as specifically female, no single feminist meta‐theory of ‘women’s’ art, such as the American thesis of ‘central core’ imagery or British psychoanalytically derived theories of representation as applied to feminist art, has dominated Australian feminist histories and debates. Australian feminists tended to glean widely, opportunistically and serendipitously from texts, exhibitions and, importantly, from extensive travel, for whatever suited their practices. This factor is crucial: Australians are, because of geography, hypersensitive to metropolitan art; energetic artist‐travellers have also had access over the period to international fellowships and residency studios, especially in Europe and Asia, that are maintained by universities and funding agencies, and have kept in constant communication with their peers, and with curators.12 It is almost impossible to overemphasise, decades later, how episodic and discontinuous these illuminations were. Often what Australians accessed from international debates, events and publications was scant, fragmentary and precious. Of necessity, the development of feminist ideas in this country was independent and socially grounded, while internationally connected through language. This was a boon, however: it ensured a richness and flexibility in feminist practice, and from the 1980s onwards a characteristic strategic sense and tactical nimbleness. This was highly prized: in Australia’s rigidly gendered social environment, strategy and subtlety were seen as essential, and in ­cultural matters, Australian feminists were alive to the necessity of constant revision. In 1985 I wrote: ‘The women’s movement is still the most remarkable contemporary site (as well as the product) of a persistent determination to understand and alter social life by making and using theory. Reassessment and refinement are part of this process, and intellectual and creative work is an essential part of it.’13 Thirty years later, while feminists have been joined by queer and many other interrogative social theories, this engagement is still alive. All these questions are still being played out today: let me point to several key recurring issues in Australian feminist art.

­Collectivity and collective actio

­Collectivity and collective action This longstanding principle has taken different turns in different Australian cities over the decades. In Melbourne, initial feminist arts discussions coalesced around the magazine Lip, published between 1976 and 1984 by a loose collective.14 Lip remains impressive today, available once more in an anthology edited by the younger Australian curator Vivian Ziherl, based in Amsterdam; it was driven by artists, such as Elizabeth Gower, and the late Isobel Davies and Erica McGilchrist, with writers, curators and art historians such as Janine Burke, Suzanne Davies and Ann Stephen. The focus of feminist ­cultural thinking in Melbourne, it was read widely across the country. Also in Melbourne in 1975, the Women’s Art Register was initiated by artists including Lesley Dumbrell and Erica McGilchrist and curators Kiffy Rubbo and Meredith Rogers, at the University of Melbourne’s Ewing and George Paton Gallery. Formed to research and document work by women artists for educational use, it is now one of only two such surviving projects in the world.15 The Women’s Art Register moved in 1978 to an inner‐suburban municipal library and is now available online.16 The formation of the Women’s Art Movement (WAM) in Adelaide in August 1976 was a direct response to Lippard’s accounts of American feminist groups. Margaret Dodd, educated in ceramics in southern California, initiated WAM; I was her first recruit. In August 1977 WAM Adelaide presented The Women’s Show, a national ‘women only’ unselected exhibition, with over 400 works, including by Adelaide’s political printmakers Ann Newmarch and Mandy Martin and a collaborative work by Sydney’s Women’s Art Group, and with programs ranging from theatre to poetry readings. This was a ground‐clearing exercise, to seek out women practitioners.17 The assumption was women had been discouraged from practising. However, while the standard public markers – solo exhibitions, museum surveys, monographs – overlooked women, the reality was that many women continued to practise, albeit often part‐time, making a living in teaching or support capacities (during planning for The Women’s Show, senior artist Dora Chapman (1911–1995) cautioned that WAM was mistaken in believing women had abandoned working as artists, and correctly predicted the hundreds who would participate.) The Women’s Show was among many collective exploratory projects in Australia at that time. Significantly, in August 1978 WAM Adelaide co‐hosted what was probably the first Aboriginal feminist event in the country: two women Elders from the Indulkana people from northern South Australia held a joint women’s song/dance workshop with CASM (Centre for Aboriginal Studies in Music, now based at the University of Adelaide).18 Crucially, these discussion groups, exhibition and journals stimulated debate and public awareness, encouraging ­artists, art college lecturers and students in succeeding decades. Many artists who participated, such as Adelaide‐trained Jackie Redgate and Anne Marsh, went on to become major artists and scholars; their influence on succeeding generations has been profound. At the same time, Australia’s vibrant political print and poster‐making collectives from the early 1970s to the late 1980s included important feminists, such as Toni Robertson (radicalised through the University of Sydney’s General Philosophy strike to secure feminist courses) and Marie McMahon, Frances Budden and Jan McKay, from the first Sydney group. In poster collectives in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Canberra, limited‐edition prints as well as large editions for street use were produced on women’s issues and for campaigns. One of the largest editions, over 1000, was produced in a single night in 1980 by Toni Robertson and Jan McKay to contribute to a

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Recurring Questions, Cyclical Energies: A History of Feminist Art Practices in Australia

long and eventually successful campaign about legal defences available to victims of domestic violence in homicide cases, and to free those already imprisoned.19 Eventually, with the advent of digital imagery in the 1990s, screen printing became untenable, but these collective artists’ groups and workshops provided a model of activist image‐­ making in the community, which persists in studios such as Canberra’s Megalo, originally established in 1980. While women‐driven community projects were widespread and influential, close attention was also paid to ‘official’ art. In both 1979 and 1982, protest actions advocating women artists’ participation were staged at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Biennale of Sydney’s principal venue, and in 1983 demands for equal representation of women in major exhibitions were still being made at that year’s Australian Perspecta (the biennial national contemporary art survey staged in Sydney, 1981–1999). These appeals to equal rights focused on redressing systemic discrimination in the arts, such as in awarding of major trophies like the Archibald Prize or in the paucity of major solo exhibitions of work by women.20 Throughout the late 1970s and into the 1980s, this appeal to equality bore fruit. In 1984, the Australia Council’s The Women and Arts Report, a project originally developed by the 1982 NSW Women and Arts Festival, ­presented the first ­comprehensive research about women artists’ incomes, participation rates in exhibitions and success with applications to funding agencies.21 After that time, data on women was collected by the Australia Council in its regular surveys of artists’ incomes and conditions, and these findings also influenced the state arts m ­ inistries in Australia’s federal system. Eventually, the significant participation of feminists in Australian government agencies led to proactive programs for women in the arts. These interventionist women, the best known of whom is historian, activist and journalist Anne Summers, were affectionately dubbed ‘femocrats’ in the Women’s Movement. The endorsement by the Australia Council in 1984 of affirmative action policies was incalculable in its effects, not only on women practitioners who benefited directly but on other entities, especially the Council’s organisational clients. To a certain extent, these campaigns were successful, and in higher education institutions, where many feminist artists studied and later taught, their impact has been felt both in course content and pedagogy, and in concern for the success of educational programs: put simply, what are the implications of ­educating a large number of students for failure? Of graduating women artists who are disenfranchised from professional success? Thirty years later, the principle that women should have equal access to education and employment in Australia is, ironically, as firmly enshrined in policy as it is consistently betrayed by social and industrial practice.22 This is exposed in the visual arts through the website CoUNTesses (2008 to present), a project of feminist artists and scholars led by artist Elvis Richardson that addresses museums, exhibitions and prizes for female participation rates, and continues to critique egregious failures in gender equity.23 Equal rights feminism has proved a powerful negotiating tool in the arts, as in other fields, and continues to be so.

­Multiple sources, local resources From the 1970s onwards, increased participation in the global Anglophone sphere introduced Australian feminists to rich resources. Very early, in the first half of the 1970s, the Australian feminist movement – then called Women’s Liberation – found

­Multiple sources, local resource

resonant images, texts and ideas in art, cinema, literature and pedagogy from both the UK and the USA, and these multiple sources filtered into established Australian feminist culture. Local energies were complemented by comparing notes with women from other countries – artists, critics, scholars. This was not a new phenomenon: Australian cultural life, sometimes stigmatised as ‘provincial’, was always part of the English‐ speaking world; what was different at the precise moment when feminism re‐emerged in the 1960s and 1970s was the faster pace of transmission of ideas, texts and people, as noted earlier. The UK was an early source of inspiration and comparison, because of long‐­established colonial relationships. Lively interchanges took place between the UK and Australia in the 1980s, with the availability of texts by art historians such as Griselda Pollock and Roszika Parker. These fed into recuperative historical projects about Australian women artists, whether surveys (such as the nationally touring Australian Women Artists 1840–1940, staged in International Women’s Year in 1975) or monographic exhibitions (for example for Margaret Preston in 1980 and Joy Hester in 1981).24 Moreover, Sydney‐ based artists, in particular, including Helen Grace (a member of London’s photography group, Hackney Flashers, in the mid‐1970s), Sandy Edwards, Jude Adams and Merilyn Fairskye, saw parallels between their work and the politically interrogative work of British artists.25 Australians investigated the powerful strand of post‐conceptual ­practice of some artists based in the UK, exemplified by Mary Kelly: her influential Post‐Partum Document was shown in the 1982 Biennale of Sydney in its entirety and one section acquired by the National Gallery of Australia in 1983. (Arguably, British practice and writing, through Screen and other journals, was equally, if not more, influential on experimental and feminist cinema in Australia.) Photography proved crucial for a new feminist criticality, now enriched by postmodernist theories; it can be seen as the quintessential postmodernist medium in this country, with notable works by feminists such as the late Sue Ford and Destiny Deacon in Melbourne; Anne Ferran, Rosemary Laing, Tracey Moffatt and Julie Rrap in Sydney; and Pat Brassington and Anne McDonald in Hobart. Intense interest in the interrogative capacities of photography saw a convergence of multiple strands of feminist investigations into photographic depictions of women, not only in art but also in the mass media, together with renewed and theoretically informed scrutiny of the ways that photographic imagery signifies to, and works with, audiences. Most importantly, in the feminist context, the new theorisation of photography enabled feminists to problematise photography’s positivity, and to develop sophisticated ways to apply photographic techniques to the interrogation of issues as various as women’s corporeality, history, domestic labour and family structures.26 The implications of this complex address to imagery and image making had profound effects on understandings of the operations of power, not only in the image regime but in social life, including in the art world. From this time, Australian feminist artists were alive to the instability of imagery, to its dependence on context; ‘positive’ imagery, in the more venerable feminist sense, was seen as vulnerable to challenge, or irrelevance, and the notion of interventionist imagery became increasingly important. This was the mid‐1980s moment when the academic dissemination of postmodernist theories, from Barthes to Foucault to Derrida, including the French feminist theorists I cited earlier, was at its height in Australian universities and art colleges. With considerable suspicion attaching to painting as the canonical (gendered) art form, photography became central to feminist arts practice.

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Recurring Questions, Cyclical Energies: A History of Feminist Art Practices in Australia

This investigation of photography’s possibilities has proved a rich and enduring aspect of contemporary feminists’ arts practice, with important effects on gay representational strategies and, later, connections with queer theory: Anna‐Marie Jagose’s internationally influential Queer Theory was published by Melbourne University Press in 1996. What was clearly at stake in these photographic discourses – a key issue from the very beginning of the Women’s Movement  –  was reframing women’s corporeality. Photographic work from this period onwards had an incalculable effect on succeeding generations.27 These positions came to inform the works of Australians working not only in photography but also across both performance and video, in works by artists as diverse as the Kingpins (a girl drag group, active from the early 2000s), soda_jerk, Salote Tawale, (all from Sydney), Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano, and Cate Consandine (the last two from Melbourne). Broadly speaking, Australian feminism was suspicious of the evangelical strands of American feminist essentialism, and by the mid‐1980s many Australian artists were keenly aware that theirs comprised a number of practices – the use of the plural was typical of the period, and remains important  –  situated in complex historical and ­geographical contexts. The intricacy of these positions was registered by two important projects: Frames of Reference: Aspects of Feminism and Art in 1991, a major group exhibition in Sydney staged by Artspace, followed by Dissonance, an anthology edited by Catriona Moore and published in 1994.28 Around this time, however, feminist scholars began to devote considerable energies to researching women’s historical achievements in Australia, often implicitly comparing them with the situation in the present day, as an attempt to come to terms with the complexity of Australia’s post‐colonised society.

­Heritage and discontinuity: two perspectives In the years around the Bicentennial of British colonisation in 1788, the particularity of being Australian, members of a ‘settler’ society, began to be explored more critically. This bore on understanding women’s, and feminist, art practices. During the 1980s, interest in historical Australian women artists continued to develop, building on the revelations of the previous decade. Art historians such as the late Joan Kerr in Sydney, specialist gallerists such as Jim Alexander in Melbourne and Stephen Scheding in Sydney and the important Crothers Collection of Women’s Art in Perth, now located at the University of Western Australia, consolidated scattered research. The 1990s saw the institutionalisation of these histories: the sheer weight of teaching, research and writing about women artists began to familiarise audiences with the appearance of women artists in the public domain. And with that familiarity, audiences were brought into contact with feminist interests. In the mid‐1990s, after two decades of feminist debate, and a legacy of teaching women’s art and feminism in university courses, there was a cyclical upsurge in feminist activity in the visual arts. The provocatively titled Mad and Bad Women, curated by Candice Bruce at Queensland Art Gallery in 1994, was the first of a succession of themed exhibitions examining art by women, from a variety of perspectives, admittedly not all explicitly feminist. Since that time, group exhibitions of historical and heritage works by women have become a staple of exhibition programs, particularly in university art museums and regional galleries; these are often retributive projects, spurred by the established Australian commitment to equal opportunity.29

­Heritage and discontinuity: two perspective

Key research projects creatively mobilised this commitment to equality: in Sydney, Joan Kerr spearheaded cooperative research in the early 1990s, developing earlier biographical research into a new project focused on Australian women that was collected in the 1995 book Heritage; this was accompanied by the National Women’s Art Exhibition in Sydney and other cities, marking two decades since International Women’s Year in 1975. This broad collaborative approach proved enormously successful in attracting new audiences to work by women. If the 1980s marked the apogee of formal agitation, research and assertion for women’s access to exhibition and employment opportunities in Australia, into the 1990s and 2000s a certain settled pattern of acceptance was achieved. Yet the highest accolades in Australian cultural life were reserved for men. Two incidents during the 1990s betrayed persistent cultural anxiety when women became bearers of national aspirations, especially in international art‐world contexts. Of all these, the Venice Biennale is the most prestigious, and the critical response that greeted Jenny Watson’s exhibition in Venice in 1993 as the first woman to represent Australia in its official pavilion was classically conservative. Her sketchy fabric‐collaged paintings of female subjects were derided by newspaper art critics in gendered terms, informed by opposition to her diaristic style,30 and in 1997, when the decision was taken to present works by Aboriginal women artists at Venice, there was a chorus of dissent, both ­published and throughout art‐world circles.31 In Watson’s case, her style was seen to correlate with femininity: the informality of her paintings seemed to suggest girlishness; with the three distinguished Aboriginal artists – painters Emily Kngwarreye and Judy Watson and weaver Yvonne Koolmatrie  –  the affirmative action taken by Australian officials was decried. The convergence of gender and style proves particularly combustible on official international occasions. By 1997, however, amongst the most important artists in the country were a number of Indigenous women, hence the decision to feature their work at Venice. The 1980s and the 1990s saw an extraordinary flowering of Aboriginal artists, both from remote communities and in the cities, especially in Sydney’s Boomalli collective, with a number of the most significant artists being women. This immediately, and with brilliance, complicated discussions about women working in the arts in Australia.32 Many Aboriginal women in remote communities were, and are, amongst the poorest and least privileged people in this wealthy country, but with the development of art centres as cultural and economic agencies, and with art making on remote communities from the early 1970s, many Aboriginal women seized the opportunity to make art, with considerable success. In many cases they were painters, but in remote communities in the Arnhem Land region of the Northern Territory, women’s longstanding skill as weavers and basket‐ makers working with native vegetation and dyestuffs was recognised from the ­mid‐1980s onwards, with curators and scholars such as Jennifer Isaacs, Diane Moon, Louise Hamby and Diana Young introducing this work into urban cultural fora and collections.33 This was, in effect, a special case of recognising women’s customary and domestic practices as culturally significant, and owed some part of its success to previous f­eminist revisions of the artistic canon. One extraordinary phenomenon in Aboriginal art has been the emergence of senior women in remote communities who transfer their cultural authority and social leadership into singular achievement as artists. Two notable figures are Emily Kngwarreye (1910–1996), from the Anmatyerre people of the central desert region, and Sally Gabori

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(c.1924–2015), from the Kaiadilt people of the Gulf of Carpentaria in tropical north Queensland. Their brilliance, and her community leadership in Kngwarreye’s case, offered instances of female talent and drive that served as models for many communities in wider Australian society. For Kngwarreye, this extended to significant international exposure, as her gestural paintings based on customary body painting, or on the curvilinear rhizomatic root forms of the indigenous yams with which she identified, challenged established Western histories of abstract painting, and even provided new sources for it. Of all recent Australian cultural developments, the emergence of senior Aboriginal women painting in a gestural mode is perhaps the most celebrated inside Australia, and the most misunderstood outside it.34 At the same time, from the generation that came to maturity in the 1980s emerged a number of exceptional urban artists, whose fierce sense of their Aboriginality was married to feminist perspectives. Destiny Deacon, a Melbourne‐based artist of Torres Strait Island heritage, who often collaborates with non‐Indigenous artist Virginia Fraser, is inspired by her heritage; her pungent and often hilarious photographs and videos, based on family and close friends, both celebrate and problematise the life experiences of an urban diasporic community, living thousands of miles from its island homes. Other works, however, have addressed archival collections, both family photographs and early film taken by colonial officials in 1899 on Erub, her mother’s natal island in the Torres Strait, in biting indictments of government policies towards Australia’s Indigenous peoples.35 Similarly, Judy Watson’s family history in Waanyi country in far north‐western Queensland, and her affiliation with her maternal line, has driven her work over more than three decades. Working in printmaking, painting and installations, she researches the hardships experienced by Aboriginal women in colonial Australia, and their resilience: both her great‐grandmother and her grandmother were from the ‘Stolen Generations’ mixed‐race children forcibly removed from Aboriginal mothers because of the federal government’s assimilationist policies of the period, for which then‐Prime Minister Kevin Rudd publicly apologised in 2008 in the Australian Parliament. At the same time, Watson feels a deep connection with the land these women sprang from, and reasserts Aboriginal claims to land rights in exquisite paintings that draw on the beauty of her Country, as well as the pain of being forced to leave it.36 Fiona Foley, from the Badtjala people of southeast Queensland, has mined museum collections for images and artefacts that link her contemporary Aboriginality with her ancestors and their land. Like others amongst the brilliant contemporary cohort of Australian Indigenous artists, she insists on the continued presence of her people on this continent, making sculptures and installations and, more recently, public artworks, that testify to a greater public acceptance of the issues she articulates.37 In Black Velvet (1996), titled for the sexualising nickname given to Aboriginal women, she applied the form on a set of cotton dilly bags, to devastating effect (Figure 1.2). Foley links gender with labour: the reiterated bags allude to the many Aboriginal women historically enslaved in white households, very often in sexual service. The work turns on the use (and abuse) of textiles, stuffs associated with domestic life, which in Foley’s hands is shown to be a sad instrument of colonisation. The work of Tracey Moffatt, perhaps Australia’s best‐known contemporary artist internationally, also with Aboriginal heritage from Queensland, reveals the complexity marking the practices of post‐colonised Aboriginal artists. Refusing the category of

­Renewal and dissen

Figure 1.2  Fiona Foley (Badtjala people, Wondunna clan, Fraser Island). Black velvet 1996. Linen fabric with cotton appliqué. 9 bags: 99 × 20 cm (with handle, each); 180 × 200 cm (installed, variable). Collection: Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. © Fiona Foley. Image courtesy: QAGOMA.

‘Aboriginal artist’, and regularly eschewing exclusively Indigenous art exhibitions, she nevertheless draws on experiences as an Aboriginal child placed with a white family: her 1999 film Night Cries poignantly evoked the emotional difficulties and divided loyalties of that situation. After many years living in the US, Moffatt returned to working with images of the land, the enduring subject and emotional heart of Aboriginal Australia. Her Spirit Landscapes of 2012, a number of suites of photographic works, are haunted by the twinned legacies of black and white Australia. More recently, the Western Australian painter Julie Dowling has brought to portraiture an unflinching view of both historical and contemporary Aboriginal women; her black womanly bodies interrupt complex uncertainties in Australia, both more conservative as well as feminist, about depicting Aboriginal bodies in their personal and sexual powers. What is abundantly clear with Deacon, Watson, Foley, Moffatt and Dowling is that a broadly feminist position infuses their work. Their confidence in exploring their own histories attests to fluid and flexible interpretations of feminist principles across contemporary Australian culture. At the same time, younger Indigenous feminists are now drawing on the work of Aboriginal scholars, particularly the influential Aileen Moreton‐Robinson, to challenge Australian feminists in our ­attitudes to race.38

­Renewal and dissent In the new century, the cyclical energy that seems to characterise Australian feminist practice has resurfaced. A rash of feminist exhibitions and projects has for the most part been achieved through the agency of women, sustained by the example of large exhibitions mounted in the northern hemisphere, such as Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum (2007), which, unusually, included several Australians, and elles@pompidou in Paris (2009–2011). Importantly, artists working today are nourished by a wealth of information about women artists, both historical and contemporary. One instance: in

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2012 a group exhibition at Melbourne’s Heide Museum of Art, which accompanied a solo exhibition by the late Louise Bourgeois, featured works by, for example, Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley, and Del Kathryn Barton, that spoke (variously) to Bourgeois’s imagery and interests. Where Australian artists borrow from Bourgeois, they do so knowingly.39 There is widespread commitment by younger women to supporting feminist projects, research and curatorial theses. One notable manifestation of this new energy was ‘Feminism Never Happened’, a discussion in 2007 at Gertrude Contemporary in Melbourne, a provocative title that was again used by Robert Leonard for a 2010 group exhibition at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art.40 In subsequent years, Melbourne’s thriving art community has hosted excellent projects that canvass current issues: notable examples include The View From Here: 19 Perspectives on Feminism, a group exhibition in 2010 at West Space, a long‐established artist‐run organisation; BACKFLIP: Feminism and Humour in Contemporary Art, at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2013, curated by Laura Castagnini; in 2012, the same college and curator invited the perennially popular and, it seems, still relevant Guerrilla Girls to lecture and conduct a workshop, both enthusiastically received (their previous visit had been in 1999); and, a 2014 group exhibition in Melbourne, Benglis 73/74, revisited American artist Lynda Benglis’s notorious 1974 Artforum advertisement.41 This (re)turn to feminism was seen in numerous other groups in other cities, such as LEVEL, the Brisbane artist‐run group originally established in 2010, whose name neatly incorporates both equal rights feminism and archetypal female authority.42 This recent upsurge of activity has not been without its tensions. This is not surprising – much is at stake, and while women in art colleges, according to anecdotal and exhibition evidence, are asking questions about women’s status and achievements with continued energy, there is by no means unanimity about the answers. In this period a resurgence of certain ‘postfeminist’ positions might be seen, ironically, as both positive and negative symptoms of public feminist success: some young women expect access to serious consideration as artists as their birth right; others no longer wish to be associated with feminist agitation (in both its senses). More recently, a fashionable commitment to feminism has been criticised by other women: where is the action  –  they ask – where are the results?43 I saw something of these polarised attitudes in reactions to Contemporary Australia: Women, a major group exhibition I curated for the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art in early 2012. Some responses were hostile to a women‐only exhibition as ‘unnecessary’, others ferociously critical that its naming, and framing, was not more explicitly feminist. My reading at the time was that such a prominent large‐scale exercise was particularly provocative to remaining prejudices against women as artists: this lavish high‐profile exhibition was conspicuously ignored by mainstream critics, but at the same time women observers often wished to distance themselves from what was seen as special pleading. These positions are familiar, recurring and still relevant today. It was challenging to realise that arguments resisting exhibiting work exclusively by women were still current, alongside strong evidence of commitment to feminism among younger artists, critics and curators. One telling response was from Melbourne artist Emily Floyd: initially she thought this all‐woman show redundant, but changed her opinion when she saw the exhibition, and what could be achieved with opportunity and support.44

­Renewal and dissen

It is instructive to consider two recent exhibitions in Melbourne. At opposite ends of the institutional spectrum, they had feminism in common. Emily Floyd’s The Dawn, a survey of nearly 20 years of work, was presented in late 2014 at the National Gallery of Victoria, the country’s oldest and largest art museum (Figure  1.3). Floyd celebrates feminist history as an archival source, problematising memory, personal investments in events and how histories are recorded. Her most recent project started with inheriting in 2012 her mother’s archives of material related to 1970s community collectives, which she mined to reconsider feminist practices. This work, in large sculptural works made with aluminium components that often draw on texts or educational toys, including books, was driven by personal connection, especially her mother’s work as a community activist in developing childcare and learning in feminist collectives. Floyd not only charted connections between art, play, education and personal development; importantly, she prized these categories open, keeping them mobile: interactive works encouraging children’s play continue her mother’s commitment to childhood development, this time in the art museum setting. This major project by a feminist, presented by the country’s most prestigious art museum, was accompanied by a substantial commission. As art historian Helen Hughes noted, ‘The Dawn is an intervention…’45 One might add, Floyd’s topics are now mainstream: the audiences interested in these topics are enormous. At the same time, 2014, Re‐Raising Consciousness, a modest group exhibition, was presented at an artist‐run space TBC Art Inc., Melbourne. Curated by artists Katherine Hattam, her daughter Harriet Morgan, and artist/writer Fayen d’Evie, this reconsidered feminist practices, specifically the widespread use in the 1970s of consciousness‐raising.

Figure 1.3  Emily Floyd, The Dawn, 2014, detail. Collection National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Photo: Courtesy the artist and the National Gallery of Victoria.

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Including around 70 artists, the exhibition was notable for its cross‐generational mix and interest in collectivity. The lively installation in a dense salon hang mimicked the conversational process of conscious‐raising, as did the collective ethos of the exhibition: ego was left at the door. Many works reflected on the feminist past, such as Abbra Kotlarczyck’s Sweeping Exchanges (Lucy) 2014, which borrowed Sue Ford’s 1975 photograph of Lucy Lippard meeting women in Melbourne. Other sculptural works, by Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley, and by Rose Nolan, explicitly reflected on the ironies of this recapitulatory exercise in text‐based works that implied the qualified success of decades of feminist action, while Elvis Richardson and Virginia Fraser’s Femmo 2014, a series of covers for a spoof publication, satirised both canonical feminism and its detractors. Re‐Raising Consciousness was an instance of the current widespread feminist dialogue across Australia, and a number of projects revisiting the history of feminism. In Sydney, this curiosity led to the development of a feminist archive, launched in 2013 by a group of university‐based scholars as Contemporary Art and Feminism (CAF), an ‘independent platform for art, scholarship and activism’, with activities scheduled for 2015, 40 years after International Women’s Day and 20 years after the National Women’s Art Exhibition.46 Here the model pioneered by Joan Kerr, of dispersed cooperative action allied with historical research, is put at the service of the future, including through regional workshops: how might the feminist archives of the future be sustained, in physical or digital form? Similarly, a special feminist issue of Art Monthly Australia, published over the 2015/16 southern hemisphere summer, featured an illustrated timeline by younger scholar Louise Mayhew, essays testifying to contemporary feminist arts discourses in the northern city of Brisbane and evidence of collective activity by women artists.47 Like the Heritage and National Women’s Art Exhibition projects, the CAF Archive project and the work of Art Monthly’s emerging artists and writers comes directly from the feminist equal rights agenda, but also commitment to histories of art in Australia. Indeed, what connects the work of younger artists as diverse as Sydney’s four‐person performance group Barbara Cleveland, Melbourne’s Emily Floyd and the Brisbane collective LEVEL is attentiveness to the past, in a challenging but ultimately splendid degree of intergenerational contention. The crucial circumstance for artists, audiences, scholars, critics and curators interested in feminism in Australian art in the 2000s is that there is now a substantial body of evidence to consult. A body of work put together, in the main, by women. Forty‐five years ago, Linda Nochlin’s plaintive question ‘Why are there no great women artists?’ was interpreted variously, not always positively. Now, this is understood as a subtle interrogation of past history, and an indictment of its prejudices.

­At the minute: 2017 This returns me to artists working now, such as Sunday School in Sydney, with whom I began. Today, Australian feminists have a wealth of information about women’s historical artistic practices: they have a plethora of exemplars and, most importantly, teachers, mentors and collaborators amongst preceding generations of feminist artists. The ­question is: what are they doing with these inheritances? In all this, a number of issues continue to fuel women’s work in Australia. Artists as various as Del Kathryn Barton, Patricia Piccinini and Nell explore women’s sensuality or

Notes

the experience of motherhood; Aboriginal artists from remote Australia have addressed the social dislocation of their communities  –  the Ken family from the APY lands in northern South Australia, in paintings invoking customary knowledge but also the Jirrawun Girls from Wyndham, in northern Western Australia, whose 2006 works ­mimicked local graffiti; Mikala Dwyer works with the possibility of women’s occult knowledge; Helen Grace attends to the photographic registration of daily events around her; Justene Williams whirls like a female dervish set loose in complex video installations that deconstruct the modernist canon. These artists are accorded serious critical attention: their subjects derived from female lives, and feminist perspectives, are now part of the broader picture of Australian cultural life. Here, even as the cultural landscape is changing rapidly with the continual growth of LGBTI perspectives in social and cultural life, we see the beginning, perhaps, of a consolidation of images and tropes that, being shared, may come to be signifiers for female presence in Australian art, or as Australian art historian Susan Best suggested in a different context, make contributions to refashioning contemporary art practice.48 Yet the feminist blog CoUNTesses is still correct: recognition of work by women ­artists is slow and sporadic, even as major Australian museums, despite continuing resistance, now more frequently exhibit their art. And for one excellent reason: museum visitors are curious about what women have been doing all these years and are doing now. Women are an enormous force, as audiences. In this fluid and yet still unsatisfactory situation, how may one calibrate the optimism necessary for political and social change with the disappointing reality of contemporary experience? The pattern in Australia of recurring feminist interrogation of the status quo derives precisely from unfulfilled expectations, as women accustomed to the rhetoric of equal opportunity find it wanting in practical application. In 1985 I wrote about deep ‘disappointment’ after a decade of feminist action in the arts, which is today multiplied and widely diffused among young women.49 Clearly, despite all the advances of the last 40 years, today this is business that has hardly been begun. Yet begun it has: Australian audiences for art may have finally started to catch up with the desires of feminist artists: to be seen, and to be heard, and on their own terms.

Notes 1 Lucy Lippard delivered the Power Lecture, sponsored by the Power Institute at the

University of Sydney, in 1975, touring to major Australian cities. For Sunday School, see kellydoley.com/Lucy‐Lippard‐Lecture‐1, accessed 8 August 2015. 2 See kellydoley.com/Lucy‐Lippard‐Lecture‐1. For a contemporary account, see Helen Saniga, ‘Lippard in Australia’, Lip, 1984, pp. 79–80. 3 See kellydoley.com/Lucy‐Lippard‐Lecture‐1. 4 Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History, Melbourne: Sun Books, 1966. 5 Abigail Solomon‐Godeau, Rosemary Laing, London and Sydney: Prestel Verlag and Piper Press, 2012, p. 15. 6 Nick Galvin, ‘Archibald Prize 2015: It takes balls to be a winner’, 15 July 2015, at http:// www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art‐and‐design/archibald‐prize‐2015‐it‐takes‐balls‐to‐ be‐a‐winner‐20150715‐gickzs.html#ixzz3iU1JYBT1, accessed 16 November 2018.

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7 See Australia Council for the Arts statistics on women’s employment as artists, which

have been maintained through research for three decades: http://artfacts. australiacouncil.gov.au/search/?s=women, accessed 16 November 2018. In 2009, it was estimated that 63% of professional visual artists and 79% of craft practitioners were women. See David Throsby and Anita Zednik, Do You Really Expect to Get Paid? An Economic Study of Professional Artists in Australia, Sydney: Australia Council, 2010. Women’s earning as artists are far lower than men’s, however: see http://artfacts. australiacouncil.gov.au/tags/demographics, accessed 29 August 2015. See also the feminist blog CoUNTesses: Women count in the Artworld, at http://countesses. blogspot.hr, and for a recent assessment, Melissa Miles, ‘Whose Art Counts?’ Art Monthly Australia, no. 224, October 2009, pp. 5–8. 8 Peter Kennedy, Other than Art’s Sake, interviews with Steve Willetts, Hans Haacke, Judy Chicago, Arlene Raven, Adrian Piper, David Medalla, Charles Simonds, Ian Breakwell, 1973. See http://www.milanigallery.com.au/artist/peter‐kennedy, accessed 16 November 2018. Also, the impact of increased access to international travel for Australian artists since the 1970s, through the introduction of long‐haul wide‐bodied aircraft, cannot be overestimated; the institution of the Biennale of Sydney in 1973 also had an incalculable effect on the international activity of Australian artists. 9 Influential Australian interpreters of French theorists included Moira Gatens, Meaghan Morris, Paul Patton and especially Elizabeth Grosz, all initially teaching at the University of Sydney. 10 See Helen Grace, ‘From the margins: A feminist essay on women’s art’, Lip, (1981/82), p. 13, for a contemporary text; for Kate Just, see http://www.katejust.com, accessed 16 November 2018. 11 See Christiane Keller’s 2010 assessment of this development in ‘From baskets to bodies: Innovation within Aboriginal fibre practice’ for the craft + design enquiry – www. craftaustralia.org.au/cde, accessed 29 August 2015. In 1992, the senior Aboriginal weaver Elizabeth Djuttara won the prestigious Vic Health Craft Award at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, signalling the arrival of indigenous fibre works in the national arena. 12 For example, since the 1970s the Australia Council has established studios in Barcelona, New York, Paris, Tokyo and Los Angeles; since the 1990s Asialink has enabled artists and curators to undertake residencies and projects in Asia: see http://asialink.unimelb. edu.au/arts, accessed 18 November 2018. Since 1992, Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarships, at the University of South Australia, Adelaide, have supported overseas study for Australian artists. 13 Julie Ewington, ‘Past the post: Postmodernism and postfeminism’, originally published in 1985, in Catriona Moore (ed.), Dissonance: Feminism and the Arts 1970–90, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994, pp. 109–121, p. 119. 14 Vivian Ziherl (ed.), The LIP Anthology: An Australian Feminist Arts Journal, 1976–1984, Melbourne: Macmillan Arts Publishing/Amsterdam: Kunstverein Publishing, 2013. 15 The other, the previously independent Women’s Art Library, is now in the library of Goldsmiths, University of London 16 See http://www.womensartregister.org/about‐the‐register.php, accessed 20 August 2015 17 Julie, Ewington, ‘Women’s show’, The Women’s Show, Adelaide 1977. Women’s Art Movement (SA), St Peters, SA: Experimental Art Foundation, 1978.

Notes

18 See Anne Marsh, Body and Self: Performance Art in Australia 1969–92, Melbourne:

Oxford University Press, 1993, and Jane Kent, ‘Performance art and W.A.M: A report’, in Jane Kent and Anne Marsh (eds), Live Art: Australia and America, Adelaide: Anne Marsh and Jane Kent, 1984. My thanks to Jude Adams for her scrutiny of WAM Adelaide records for information about Aboriginal workshops. 19 See Therese Kenyon, Under a Hot Tin Roof: Arts, Passion and Politics at the Tin Sheds, Sydney: State Library of NSW/Power Publication, 1995, and Anna Zagala, Redback Graphix, Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2008. 20 For women artists selected for the Archibald Prize, see http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov. au/prizes/archibald, accessed 8 August 2015; for the latest Australia Council report, see http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/workspace/uploads/files/arts‐nation‐final‐27‐ feb‐54f5f492882da.pdf, accessed 29 August 2015. 21 The Women and Arts Report was initiated by the 1982 NSW Women and Arts Festival. See Gil Appleton (ed.), Women in the Arts: A Study by the Research Advisory Group of the Women and Arts Project, Sydney, 1982. See also Gillian Hanscombe, But is it Workable? A Report on the Evaluating and Monitoring of the Australia Council’s Policy, Sydney NSW, prepared for the Women in Arts Unit, Arts Council of England, 1994, pp. 1–2, for a British study evaluating the Australian programs. For the visual arts program in the 1982 Women and Arts Festival, see Anna Waldmann, Women’s Imprint, (exhibition brochure), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1982. 22 See http://artfacts.australiacouncil.gov.au/search/?s=women, accessed 8 August 2015. 23 See countesses.blogspot.com. 24 See Janine Burke, Australian Women Artists 1840–1940, Collingwood, Vic.: Greenhouse Publications, 1980, and Ian North (ed.), The Art of Margaret Preston, Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 1980, the first of many retrospective exhibitions to be devoted to Australian women artists. See also Sandy Kirby, Sight lines: Women’s Art and Feminist Perspectives in Australia, Tortola, BVI: Craftsman House in association with Gordon and Breach, 1992, for a summary of the period. 25 For a first‐hand account, see Jude Adams, ‘Looking from with/in: feminist art projects of the 70s’, at http://www.outskirts.arts.uwa.edu.au/volumes/volume‐29/adams‐jude‐ looking‐with‐in, vol. 29, November 2013, accessed 8 August 2015. 26 Catriona Moore, Indecent Exposures, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, in association with Power Publications, 1994. 27 Anne Marsh, Body and Self: Performance Art in Australia 1969–92, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1993. 28 Sally Couacaud (ed.), Frames of Reference: Aspects of Art and Feminism, Sydney: Artspace, 1991. 29 Joan Kerr (ed.), Heritage: The National Women’s Art Book, 500 Works by 500 Australian Women Artists from Colonial Times to 1955, Sydney: Craftsman House, 1995; Joan Kerr and Jo Holder (eds.), Past present: the national women’s art anthology, Sydney: Craftsman House, 1999 and Candice Bruce, Dinah Dysart and Jo Holder (eds), Joan Kerr: A Singular Voice: Essays on Australian Art and Architecture, Sydney: Power Publications, 2009. 30 Julie Ewington, ‘Number magic: The trouble with women, art and representation’, in: Barbara Caine and Rosemary Pringle (eds), Transitions: New Australian Feminisms, St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1995, pp. 102–119.

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31 See Gwen Horsfeld, in 2008, for a useful summary of responses to this exhibition, at

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http://www.nma.gov.au/audio/transcripts/emily/NMA_New_directions_20080823. html, accessed 16 November 2018. On artists from remote Aboriginal communities, see Hetti Perkins and Hannah Fink (eds), Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius, Sydney: Art Gallery of NSW, in association with Papunya Tula Artists, 2000; for an obituary of Sally Gabori, see Jeremy Eccles, ‘Sally Gabori: Artist whose boldness of colour and design was unique in Aboriginal art’, Sydney Morning Herald, 9 April 2015, http://www.smh.com.au/comment/obituaries/ sally‐gabori‐artist‐whose‐boldness‐of‐colour‐and‐design‐was‐unique‐in‐aboriginal‐ art‐20150408‐1mh6ea.html#ixzz3jPF3FNDl, accessed 21 August 2015. Jennifer Isaacs, Desert Crafts: Anangu Maruku punu, Sydney: Doubleday, 1992; Diana Young and Louise Hamby, Art on a String: Threaded Objects from the Western Desert and Arnhem Land, Sydney: Object Gallery, Australian Centre for Craft and Design, and Centre for Cross Cultural Research, ANU, 2001; Louise Hamby (ed.), Twined Together, Gunbalanya, NT: Injalak Arts and Crafts, 2005; Diane Moon, Floating Life: Contemporary Aboriginal Fibre Art, Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2009; Diana Young, Nyukana Baker: A Retrospective, Adelaide: Jamfactory, 2009. Margo Neale, Emily Kame Kngwarreye – Alhalkere – Paintings from Utopia, Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1998. Destiny Deacon, et al., Destiny Deacon, Walk and Don’t Look Blak, Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004. Louise Martin‐Chew and Judy Watson, Blood Language, Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2009. For a personal account, see Doris Pilkington, Follow the Rabbit‐Proof Fence, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1996; see also Peter Read, The Stolen Generations: The Removal of Aboriginal Children in New South Wales 1883 to 1969 (first published 1982), Surry Hills, NSW: New South Wales Department of Aboriginal Affairs, 2006. Michele Helmrich et al., Fiona Foley: Forbidden, Brisbane: Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and The University of Queensland Art Museum, 2009 and Diane Losche, ‘Reinventing the nude: Fiona Foley’s museology’, in: Hilary Robinson (ed.), Feminism– Art–Theory 1968–2014, New Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2015, pp. 455–461. See Kathryn Weir, Tracey Moffatt: Spirit Landscapes, South Brisbane: QAG|GOMA, 2014; Amy Jackett, ‘Julie Dowling’s celebration of Aboriginal women through portraiture’, Woman’s Art Journal, Spring/Summer 2015, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 3–9. See also Aileen Moreton‐Robinson, Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Aboriginal Women and Feminism, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2000. Julie Ewington, ‘Big Maman: The strange case of Louise Bourgeois in Australia’, originally published in Art and Australia, vol. 48, no. 2, Summer 2010, pp. 326–333, and reprinted in Jason Smith and Linda Michael, Louise Bourgeois in Australia, Melbourne: Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2012. See Feminism Never Happened, panel discussion at Gertrude Contemporary, November 2007, with artists Lily Hibberd, Alex Martinis Roe, Julie Rrap and Lyndal Walker, academics Felicity Colman and Anne Marsh, chaired by Alexie Glass and Emily Cormack. See also Alexie Glass, ‘Extimacy: A new generation of feminism’, Art and Australia, vol. 47, no. 1, 2009, pp. 136–139, and Robert Leonard, Feminism Never Happened, Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 2010, unpaginated leaflet.

Notes

41 See (Laura Castagnini, curator), BACKFLIP: Feminism and Humour in Contemporary

42 43

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45 46

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Art, Melbourne, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Victorian College of the Arts, 2013. For the 2014 Benglis 73/74 exhibition project, showing at Melbourne galleries Neon Parc, TCB and Sutton Projects, see http://www.suttongallery.com.au/projectspace/index. php?year=2014 and Dan Rule’s assessment at http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/ art‐and‐design/lynda‐benglis‐provocative‐art‐inspires‐trioof‐exhibitions‐20141003, accessed 28 August 2015. Benglis was included in the project. Benglis’s naked self‐ portrait, sporting only sunglasses and an enormous dildo, a spoof of macho advertisements by male artists including Robert Morris, was published in Artforum in November 1974. For Level, see levelari.wordpress.com. Among a plethora of voices and positions, see Eva Cox, ‘Feminism has failed and needs a radical rethink’, published by the respected online site The Conversation, for a lively polemic by a sociologist active in Australian feminism since the 1970s. See www. theconversation.com, dated 7 March 2016. Emily Floyd to author, Brisbane, May 2012. For a negative account by a younger scholar, see Amelia Groom, ‘Some of my best friends are women’, Overland, 21 March 2013, at https://overland.org.au/author/amelia‐groom/, accessed 21 August 2015. Helen Hughes, in Emily Floyd: The Dawn, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2014, p. 39. Contemporary Art and Feminism (CAF) was instigated by Sydney‐based academics Catriona Moore and Jacqueline Millner, and curator Jo Holder. See http:// contemporaryartandfeminism.com. See Louise R. Mayhew, ‘Forty years and counting.’ In: Susan Best and Louise R. Mayhew (eds), Art Monthly Australia, vol. 26, 2015/16, pp. 33–40, for an illustrated timeline of Australian feminist arts activity. Susan Best, Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant‐garde, London/New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011, pp. 2–4. Julie Ewington, ‘Past the post: Postmodernism and postfeminism’, pp. 109–121.

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Debunking the Patriarchy: Feminist Collectives in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and Peru María Laura Rosa (Translated by Maria Elena Buszek) To speak of feminism in Latin America is complex. The diversity of the historical, social, and ethnic particularities that characterize feminism’s development in the Latin‐ American world requires nuances that resist classification and summary scholarship on the subject.1 As such, this essay will address works by South American feminist groups in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and Perú that use the streets as well as art institutions as site and medium, in order to present some activist work that applies the languages and tools of the artistic field, but without implying that they reflect all feminist artistic or activist issues in a continent rich in pluralities. Historically, public space has been forbidden to women because women’s dignity was determined by patriarchy from its performance in the private sphere. Those who left the protection of their domesticity did so out of economic necessity. The public sphere  –  and in many places, this is still the case  –  is rife with notions of class and gender to which must be added, in Latin America, the issue of ethnicity. The poverty and marginalization of indigenous and Afro‐Latin peoples in Latin America today are rooted in longstanding historical socio‐cultural and economic factors. Ethnic and racial discrimination plays a central role, with gender serving as a thread running through all these issues. Many indigenous and Afro‐Latin women were plunged into a situation in which, just as Latin American women were obtaining the right to vote during the first half of the twentieth century, they discovered it would be granted only to those who were literate. Examples of this were found in countries like Bolivia, Peru, and Guatemala, where the largely illiterate, indigenous population exceeded 50% during the first half of the twentieth century, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (or CEPAL).2 The resulting entry of Latin American women into the public sphere was thus marked by ethnic and class status, since it was the white, literate bourgeois women in these countries who initiated the struggle for enfranchisement and citizenship in the early twentieth century, and continued to claim the rights over their bodies in the 1970s. This is why the origins of the Latin American women’s movement are in the street; public space became the territory of the convergence and distribution of diverse women’s claims, complaints, and marches. It was there where women first asserted that the political is not solely that which affects the state and public welfare, but is woven into the fabric of our private lives, which have consequences in the public sphere. Thus, the private is political, in ways that the personal is political. A Companion to Feminist Art, First Edition. Edited by Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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But, in addressing the resulting artistic and political practices (or political art practices) that emerged from this scene, it is important that one not forget the words of the Mexican feminist artist Monica Mayer, referring to her time as a student at the Feminist Studio Workshop in the Los Angeles Woman’s Building in 1978: “Something we confirmed at the time is that if one is to make revolutionary art in political terms, one must first do so in artistic terms.”3 With this in mind, this essay will address four feminist art collectives with origins in Latin America: Mujeres Públicas (Buenos Aires, Argentina 2003–), Mujeres Creando (La Paz, Bolivia 1992–), Malignas Influencias (Santiago de Chile, Chile 2004–2009), and Laperrera (Lima, Peru 1999–2004). These groups have taken to the streets as well as to art spaces in order to launch critiques of patriarchy, while raising feminist consciousness throughout their respective societies. Gender violence, the question of abortion (illegal in many Latin American countries), and unpaid domestic work have all been problems addressed by feminists since the 1970s that continue to affect women, and for which we do not seem to have reached solutions. These art collectives take to the streets as a laboratory for artistic experiences, but they also bring these issues to galleries, museums, and biennials around the world in order to raise awareness in such institutions about these everyday situations that affect 50% of the population. The shared quality of all the collectives selected for this article is their explicitly ­activist practice. By this I mean the articulation of artistic and aesthetic practices  – ­performance, drawings, posters, videos, installations – whose purpose is social action, and where the street is the ideal space to talk with the inhabitants of a certain place. However, as mentioned above, they do not reject art institutions. Rather, they are challenged by these groups as they seek to dissolve the boundaries between institutional spaces and street art, involving them directly with the problems with which women live and suffer every day.

­Argentina: Mujeres Públicas The artistic activism of feminist group Mujeres Públicas debuted in the city of Buenos Aires on 8 March 2003, the date of its first action. Its works were fueled by the Argentine political art of the 1960s, the legacy of the Argentine women’s movement that has developed since the 1970s, as well as avant‐garde graphic arts (such as the ‘zine, feminist protest art, and countercultural aesthetics) of the 1980s and 1990s, and the activist practices of foreign collectives like The Guerrilla Girls. Since its inception, Mujeres Públicas has combined the agenda and demands of women’s movements with an enormous knowledge of art practice that has allowed them to communicate without a loss of aesthetic or conceptual quality. They put their creative tools toward politics. This was reflected in the poster that the group created for their first action in March 2003, entitled All with the same needle (Todo con la misma aguja), which appeared on the streets unsigned, seeking complete anonymity for its authors. The title and image spoke directly to the problem of clandestine abortion in Argentina. The phrase is strong and related to the drawing: a ball of wool pierced with a needle. The objects – soft, womb‐like ball and sharp needle – relate to a woman’s body violated by the illegal, and thus hidden, surgical process. References to the “thread” of life endlessly employed in the arts to speak of motherhood appeared subverted. Rather,

­Argentina: Mujeres Pública

thread and needle relate here to Argentina’s lack of protection for women. All with the same needle introduced a number of elements that later would form the characteristic visual language of Mujeres Públicas – the forceful use of negative space, artistic graphic design, and an efficient, powerful image accompanied by a direct statement, as well as an overtly feminist subject – that has since characterized all the group’s work. The choice of topic that each of their posters addresses is determined by issues of concern to the group’s members, which often relate to the broader agenda of the global women’s movement. The posters are pasted in different places in Buenos Aires, but the group does not consider them urban interventions, because, in their words, “Mujeres Públicas do not transform public space but use it as a stage to display a message. In that sense, the posters made by us over the years as activist objects may be taken from the street and into a domestic space, a school or wherever, but do not lose either their ­activist burden or their consciousness‐raising function. This is distinct from urban interventions that are closely linked to their context and the situation they provoke.”4 Through their posters and objects Mujeres Públicas have applied irony and pungent humor in their lines of questioning, and seek out spaces that tend to be traversed by women: “Our work begins with an interest in certain problems and our own reflection; things that have happened to us – our friends, our family, close friends are not alien to us – and that is how we begin to see how to tackle, problematize, stage, distort them. So we started to see what types of speech, what types of language [to choose:] we chose irony, humor, imagery that is attractive, drawings, [producing a] certain synthesis.”5 Matchbox (Cajita de fósforos) was an activist object in which Mujeres Públicas developed a dual strategy: appropriation and hyperbole (Figure 2.1). This involved taking an existing object and giving it another meaning. Onto a matchbox the group printed a

Figure 2.1  Mujeres Públicas, Cajita de fósforos, 2005.

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drawing of a church in flames on one side, and on the other a phrase itself appropriated by the Spanish anarchist Buenaventura Durruti during the Spanish Civil War (1936– 1939) from Pyotr Kropotkin, one of the founding theorists of the anarchist movement: “The only church that illuminates is a burning church.” To this, Mujeres Públicas added a (literally, incendiary) suggestion to the audience: “Contribute.” Thus, Mujeres Públicas appropriated this anarchist expression to move it into the context of feminism, in clear reference to the historical weight that the Catholic Church has had and continues to have in preventing the legalization of abortion in many Latin American countries. The influence of the Church over state policies is complex, longstanding, and particularly egregious in the battle for legal abortion. The work draws attention to the historical weight that the Catholic Church has had and continues to have in preventing the legalization of abortion in many Latin American countries. Matchbox (Cajita de fósforos), distributed in several places, was also exhibited at the exhibition Un saber realmente útil (Useful Knowledge), held at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid between October 2014 and February 2015, during which time the piece’s reception generated controversy in the Spanish‐language press.6 The irony and dark humor that the group uses in its work is particularly notable in this piece. Until 2008 Mujeres Públicas’ work was mostly limited to street posters and activist objects, but from that date the group began investigating other strategies in which to work without compromising its visual activism. With the group’s participation in the 11th Havana Biennial (2012), Mujeres Públicas began to think about the capacity of the video installation to bring visual activism to the white‐cube system of art display, ­without undermining the critical focus of the work. In the resulting piece, “In the square, In the house, In the bed:” Test for a feminist cartography (“En la plaza – En la casa – En la cama:” Ensayo para una cartograf ía feminista, 2013) the group reflected on the history of feminism in Buenos Aires through a map marked by affect and a desire to change women’s lives. But this piece did not appear in large demonstrations, fill squares, or instigate power politics – on the contrary. In this map, which I will describe below, Mujeres Públicas spoke of little things that mean a lot in the history of Argentine women. They presented a map without centers and peripheries, whose markers visualized those who were always there, but were made invisible: “We want to draw the city of Buenos Aires as an imaginary and undefined map, lacking a center and a periphery, where the street layout is replaced by subjective spatial constructions that exalt the discontinuous experience of collective struggle women for their freedom, reaffirming the uniqueness of experience and action, as defined from below, from its blurred and minimal signs.”7 This work consisted of an action in which a group of participants – including members of Mujeres Públicas – walked zones that traced the footprints of feminist women in Argentine history.8 The action was filmed and was part of the video installation Test for a feminist cartography alongside works by Spanish artist Ana Navarrete at the Buenos Aires Spanish Cultural Center (CCEBA) in 2013. “In the Square…” is accompanied by a tourist map measuring 1.2 × 1.2 m, through which the city’s citizens discover an urban cartography not related to the actual geography of Buenos Aires, but one that is condensed or expanded according to the memory of feminist action. The city takes on the appearance of tissue and arteries made by routes traveled from memory. The map becomes an organic body through the representation of its protagonists’ movements, through legends expressed in a poetic and creative way, seeking to remember their

­Argentina: Mujeres Pública

deeds. The artists did not want to develop a historical document of feminism in the city, or instruct the spectators, but rather, “with this mapping of affection and memory, try to understand the unknowns of our city, detect the political meaning of our situations and charged activities, and look for hidden, unrepresented signs of the lives of those who have made history, as they are genealogy – our genealogy.”9 This work led Mujeres Públicas to reflect on display strategies suitable for urban movement: how does one exhibit work made for the streets within an institution? How does one not lose the experience of the body in the streets? Then came the question of coexistence between visual activism and street activism. The first device that responded to this question was, as noted, Mujeres Públicas’ call to join a city tour reliving its mapped areas. This action took place on 4 May 2013, and involved a large group of people willing to travel around the city. But unlike those free paths formulated by the Surrealists (who saw the city of Paris from an ethnological model) or the Situationists (who sought psycho‐geographical surveys to analyze how the urban environment influenced the psychic experience of people and from there build a criticism of the system), Mujeres Públicas distributed their maps establishing a precise, patterned path. Over nearly three hours, the caravan moved through chants and cheers, lectures and reunions. The walk was conceived as a political act: return to those footprints of Argentine pioneers in the struggle for women’s rights. But this journey also served as a poetic act, since it involved a way to remember, a memory exercise. And in this encounter between the political and the poetic, walking as an artistic fact emerged: the urban tour was part of a map created from the genealogical concept of women’s experiences. Another device that the Mujeres used for this project was video installation through which they created a feminist trial for its mapping. It was formed by two wall pieces that reflected the documentary survey conducted by the artists for the realization of the map. In this installation the photographs of their protagonists converged with the reformulated, graphic language of the artists’ drawings made from descriptions of or imagined places, markers relevant to the times in which the map’s stories were written and, finally, artifacts from the two years it took for the project to come to fruition. A brief look at the works of Mujeres Públicas might be aptly concluded with a video piece from a performance that was part of the installation presented in Useful Knowledge, entitled Legal Abortion (Aborto Legal, 2014). The piece focused on the illegality of abortion, an issue that Argentine feminist activists continue to fight tirelessly. Mujeres Públicas began by drawing a geometric structure with graphite on a wall, establishing the basic lines that would form the letters in the phrase (in Spanish) “legal abortion.” The place where the performance took place is the former Argentine School of Naval Mechanics – a site of illegal detention, torture, the killing of militants, and the “appropriation” of children during Argentina’s military dictatorship (1976–1983); a tragic place where many women were tortured and gave birth while imprisoned. On the walls of an old building – a few days before being demolished to build the headquarters of the activist group HIJOS, dedicated to the children of the desaparecidos (the disappeared) from the last military dictatorship10 – Mujeres Públicas began to rub graphite against the walls. Again and again passed the graphite bars, seeking to fill the typography they had laid out against this building. Again and again its actions resembled the insistence of the fight for the legalization of abortion, which for decades the women’s movement has been fighting. And every pass of the bar against the wall showed

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that the struggle is not just one woman’s, but many women’s, though their actions may be silent. Though the video’s sound at times dropped away from the work of the artists on the wall, viewers could see their utter concentration on the task. In this way, they symbolized a collective struggle, quietly but firmly, made invisible or removed by the political powers‐that‐be. And a struggle – shown when Las Públicas took an eraser and began to smudge the lines made by their rubbings – that is constant. This document is what persists of the Mujeres Públicas’ action and Argentine feminists’ claims. Mujeres Públicas have taken into account that criticism and subversion of patriarchal systems necessarily imply a language that subverts what is expected of art, even as they expect something artful from that activism. Creating other artistic devices to their practice that relate simultaneously to the street and art institutions presents a challenge that is always present, because it is never quite reconciled. This is how the group conducts its political advocacy in diverse spaces  –  without ignoring that they carry their own ethnic and class identities – seeking a real transformation in the lives of women.

­Bolivia: Mujeres Creando Bolivia’s complex history – riddled with racism, sexism, poverty, and violence – brought a collective of women together in the city of La Paz in 1992.11 Maria Galindo12, Julieta Paredes, Monica Mendoza, Florentina Alegre, Julieta Ojeda, and Adrian Rosario were the co‐founders of Mujeres Creando (Women Creating),13 an anarcho‐feminist movement that continues to produce actions and street interventions that aim to combat institutionalized sexism and patriarchy. To this end they have sought out spaces for women’s visibility in the media, on the street, and in the contemporary art world. The group, since its inception, has been autonomous and heterogeneous, consisting of poets, journalists, domestic workers, prostitutes, market vendors, artists, seamstresses, and teachers. Mujeres Creando has demystified leftist populism, movements of indigenous peoples, progressive demagoguery, and intellectuals, among other institutions, persons, and social groups. They have claimed a genealogy inhabited by Bolivian anarchist grandmothers and grandfathers, autodidacts who acted in their own contexts, and Bolivian women rebels, following through on their desires and freedoms, such as the chola Pepa Infante, whose concept of free love and claiming one’s own space was pathbreaking in the Bolivia of the 1930s. This did not mean they were unaware of the issues raised by the European and American feminists but, on the contrary, developed their own theories and practices defined by two facts in common with them: the reality we live14 and the alliances that sustain us15 must be based on pleasure, respect, and solidarity among women. Mujeres Creando has questioned the concept of struggle within patriarchy, one that assumes a sense of militarism. For them “struggle is conjoined with love, struggle is conjoined with feeling and creation”16 which is why graffiti is “a method, a form or a strategy of battle, as they prefer to call it.”17 By using graffiti as a medium that makes visible the creative search for social change, Mujeres Creando merges ethics and aesthetics, politics and art, the private with the public. However, they have not claimed to be street artists or activists, but they assume the position of impostors,18 coexisting between the world of street art and art institutions. Their disruptive activist practices

­Bolivia: Mujeres Creand

led to a questioning of legitimacy that involves all artistic institutions: Is visibility a way to subvert, to raise awareness, to change? Or, by entering the system, do allies spread out and diffuse issues that are already buried, undercover, or disguised? In a 2014 interview, Julieta Ojeda pointed out how the group employs the artistic: One aspect, I think, that drew members to Mujeres Creando was the creativity which manifested itself politically. And that somehow increasingly converted into a collective language, required of all of us who exercise collective creativity in everything we are doing, from the most simple to the most complex, from our publications, use of language, graffiti, street actions. We obviously include partners who manage these languages, but there are others who develop skills in other areas, for example the development of the graffiti, which is a language that we are appropriating little by little. Each job, each proposal, has an impact, but the street actions have special impact in the media, which has further amplified our protests, our denunciations, our languages, our way of doing politics, which questions how subjectively we watch or live through the media. It is noteworthy that a partner who contributed significantly to the use of these new languages within the movement is María Galindo.19 Feminist, lesbian, anarchist militant Maria Galindo (1964–) is one of the founding members of Mujeres Creando. The collective is dedicated to the denunciation of sexism experienced by women in public, and the prevailing Bolivian lesbophobia at home, using the media toward these ends. As such, any reflection on the work of Mujeres Creando reflects a journey that takes the group from the street to the institution.20 In 2003, during a tense political time in which citizens demanded a referendum to decide the fate of the Bolivian gas industry and possible export through Chile and Peru, roadblocks and protests began. In the rural town of Warisata the roadblocks prevented the return of a group of English and American tourists who were climbing the snowy mountains of Illampu. Sánchez Berzaín, then defense minister, sent in the army to ­confront the village’s protesters using the tourists – as they were not hostages and their lives were at risk – as an excuse. The people resisted, whereupon he instigated a brutal crackdown in which three people died, including an 8‐year‐old Aymara girl, Marlene Rojas, who had looked out the window to see what was happening. A week before the event, Mujeres Creando had gone with two banners bearing the messages “The bitches who love life declare that neither Sánchez de Lozada nor Sánchez Berzaín are our ­children” and “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” To honor the deaths they peacefully declared a hunger strike  –  on 13 October 2003  –  within the Ombuds office of the city of La Paz. They were dispersed, but resumed their declaration at the Cultural Office the next day. There, officials for the mayor asked them to wait another day. The next day they publicly began the first hunger strike – initiated by the former Ombudsperson Ana Maria Campero – along with intellectuals and middle‐class supporters, which deflated Mujeres Creando’s grass‐roots initiative and grievances. Nonetheless, Mujeres Creando joined journalists, workers, and invisible women within social movements to continue the strike. Maria Galindo wrote a text entitled “Approaching the Window of Life to Meet Death.”21 In July 2003, in the city of La Paz, the first Bolivian seminar organized by women in prostitution was conducted, which was named “No Woman is Born to Whore.” There,

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concrete proposals were raised in order to not prosecute women’s sex work, but to advance human rights – healthcare for themselves and their families – and reveal the corrupt network of which they are victims. This phrase subsequently was used in Mujeres Creando’s actions, by way of graffiti, posters, and proclamations that were turned into an art exhibition and a book.22 Their exhibition opened in La Paz on 20  January 2006 as part of the celebrations for the inauguration of (leftist, and first indigenous Aymara president) Evo Morales, as a critical and reflective declaration about the impossibility of a social change without sexual change, as the Mujeres’ graffiti declared: “no political freedom without sexual freedom.”23 In both the form of its workshops and the exhibition, the seminar traveled to Buenos Aires in 2007, to study and reflect on prostitution in Argentina. The exhibition was held at the Centro Cultural Borges in the heart of Buenos Aires, and exhibited graffiti, pictures, posters, and activities in that city, as well as those in Bolivia. In this project, Mujeres Creando not only established ties with Argentine feminists, increasing awareness of the issue of trafficking linked to prostitution, but also linked the issue to an institutional space. Under the theme “How to Live Together,”24 the Brazilian curator Lisette Lagnado invited Mujeres Creando to serve as an official selection for the 27th São Paulo Biennial in 2006, where they presented a paper that sought to reread the history of Bolivian society at the moment when Bolivia had elected its first president of indigenous origins. They illustrated their writings with work from the photographic archive of autodidact Julio Cordero – one of the country’s most important photographers of the early twentieth century – whose images were part of police records of women prostitutes, thieves, indigenous rebels, and the Acre workers’ campaign from about 1900 to 1920. This group of photos was accompanied by graffiti and three letters written to Evo Morales but signed by characters of Cordero’s era: an anonymous jailed woman; an anonymous soldier; and indigenous rebel Pablo Zárate, known as the fearsome Willka, from Bolivia’s Federal Revolution (1898–1899), who helped the liberals to victory, to be later betrayed and murdered. Willka’s letter displayed concern for Morales’ lust for power, and ­pondered whether radical change would be possible during his presidency. Cordero’s photographs, the most extreme examples of racist and sexist injustice, showing working girls who had been raped by employers, indigenous front‐guard soldiers heading to an early death, and, finally, exponents of enduring genocide. This project sought to reflect on the changes that were occurring at a political level in Bolivia: could real social change be possible without contemplating sex? The 31st Biennial of São Paulo opened in 2014 with the theme, “Ways to […] that do not exist,” where the parentheses invited completion by actions such as “discuss,” “live,” “fight,” “understand,” and “use” – simple issues often difficult to recognize or denaturalize. Curated by Charles Esche, Nuria Enguita Mayo, Pablo Lafuente, Galit Eilat, and Oren Sagiv, Mujeres Creando were again invited to participate. This time they were inspired to reflect on the question of the illegality of abortion in various Latin American countries, including Brazil. To this end they made an installation through which visitors entered the Biennial building. The work’s name, Space to Abort (Espacio para Abortar), appeared in the center a huge iron uterus with small curtains, into which women who had been through this clandestine experience were invited to enter and share their experiences. María Galindo said of this project: “It is a grievance against the Latin American left, Cristina Kirchner, Dilma Rousseff, Evo Morales, prohibiting the right to abortion and forcing thousands of women to risk their lives to simply have control over their bodies.”25

­Chile: Malignas Influencia

Along with the installation’s evocation of a womb, it consisted of two giant television screens on which was continuously projected María Galindo’s short film Illegal Wombs, where the issue of women’s decisions to be a mother or not is analyzed, emphasizing the perspectives of women who chose to abort in countries where such a decision is punishable by law. Alongside this film, however, the installation incorporated smaller environments that allowed people to express their opinions and offer their testimonies on abortion. Prior to the opening of the Biennial, Mujeres Creando had developed a series of actions in São Paulo, painting graffiti on the streets and broadcasting interviews on the radio in order to explain the daily life of the Bolivian community living in São Paulo. They also publicly presented the book There is no Decolonization Without Depatriarchalization26 – María Galindo’s latest publication – and organizing a march against the penalization of abortion in Brazil. This project – very simple formally, but intensely direct in its involvement of women and their realities – caused much controversy, to the point that there were efforts to censor the work because of objections from religious groups. This led the feminist art community to reflect on the issue of freedom of expression in contemporary art and to consider what tools can conjure memories, instigate discourse, give voice to those hitherto mute – the voices of women – that are uncomfortable, slippery, fed up with the circulated speeches of authority, that contemplate the places from which we speak and the importance of seeking connections through which to exchange and disseminate our experiences.

­Chile: Malignas Influencias The Chilean feminist art collective Malignas Influencias (Evil Influences) was formed in 2004 around a research project by the historian and performer Julia Antivilo Peña. It dealt with a series of repressive objects used on the bodies of women, many of whose effects are still present – and manifested in women’s minds – even though their original uses have fallen away from everyday life. Antivilo Peña focused on the chastity belt, but then extended her research, incorporating other objects and repressive systems. In the process, the historian connected with photographer Zaida González and sculptor Jessica Torres, which in turn resulted in the group’s formation, addressing these issues through performance, photography, and the creation of different objects. In 2006 the choreographer and dancer Paula Moraga joined the group. Malignas Influencias remained together until 2009, when its members decided to focus on their individual careers, although still within the field of feminist art. Antivilo Peña said in relation to the group’s interests, “our theoretical, visual and ­aesthetic proposal consists of resignifying the metonymy that speaks to us of torture and public embarrassment, encouraging mental prostheses of censorship and self‐­ censorship, and transforming it into devices that serve women’s pleasure and self‐ defense in the face of the symbolic and direct violence we receive every day both outside and inside of our homes.”27 Thus making use of humor and irony, Malignas Influencias created a series of objects that, depending on usage, went from being repressive to pleasurable, such as swings that artists made for female masturbation. In their performances, the drama had a wry and scathing sensibility that served as a catalyst for their strong critique of patriarchy.

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The body is at the center of their work – whether through performance, photography, or objects of pleasure or repression – which is conceived as a territory to rediscover political and aesthetic speech. Or, as the group put it, “The discovery of the body as uncharted territory for women is a political and aesthetic act.”28 The artists made use of surveys to collect information on the subjects of violence and pleasure for Chilean women, summarizing their experiences and creating a body of research when creating their artworks. Malignas Influencias’ 2007 exhibition at the National History Museum in Santiago de Chile showed the kind of interdisciplinary work that the group developed. The building in which the exhibition took place was constructed on a lot that in colonial times belonged to the Royal Court, the highest court of justice. Moreover, it is located in the Plaza de Armas, where the main institutions of the colonial period were installed and, in turn, where public executions and other punishments took place. Therefore, the exhibition took place in a highly symbolic site of the city. There they exhibited a large installation that included works such as Pleasure Swings (Columpios de los Placeres), with seats that adapt to the sitter’s vulva and incorporate a built‐in vibrator; Gossip Violins (Los Violines de las Comadres), which were stock‐like instruments that existed in colonial times for the purpose of publicly humiliating women branded as gossips; and a sexual‐abuse preventing Anti‐groping Bodice (Corpiño Antigarrones), which emits an electrical shock to those who attempt to touch the torso of its wearer. These installations were all utilized in daily performances by Julia Antivilo Peña. The exhibition concluded with five photographic series, in the style of graphic novels, recounting various stories derived from those shared by the collective’s m ­ embers. These photographs were shot in black‐and‐white, then hand‐colored with watercolor pencils and brilliantines, reflective of the style of hand‐tinted photographs of the early twentieth century. The series comprises images of beautiful nymphs who were condemned to carry the “gossip violin.” Alone and in pairs, the women moved through fields with their bare breasts exposed, displaying atop their nakedness the object of their punishment. At times a faun is attracted and excited by their beauty, and wants to abuse one, but facing resistance decides to accompany her to the Pleasure Swing instead. These stories that integrate the objects and performances of Malignas Influencias reveal the scorn and violence against the female body but with humor and irony, expressing the artists’ message in a kinder manner than they wanted to convey. Audiences also encountered six figures in projected slide format, taken from the ­photographic series. These included a naked woman, leaning on the Gossip Violins in uncomfortable, tortured positions. Finally, the performances by Antivilo Peña showed the use of Malignas Influencias’ objects for the public to try: Gossip Violins, Pleasure Swings, and Anti‐groping Bodice all conveyed women’s experiences of repression, enjoyment, and self‐defense.

­Santiago–Buenos Aires Visual Log (Bitácora visual) was a work made for the Sixth Meeting of Corpolíticas (Body Politics) organized by the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics at New York University, which took place in June 2007. The work was a travelogue from Santiago to Buenos Aires by two hitchhiking members of Malignas Influencias.

­Santiago–Buenos Aire

The  artists took the Anti‐groping Bodice as self‐defense system, and a hidden video camera documenting the tour. The idea was to use hitchhiking to further the group’s ongoing investigations around gender violence and the problems that women face in the world. Once in Buenos Aires, the artists spoke at a performance conference at the Recoleta Cultural Center. Here, audiences were encouraged to break free from the forms of censorship and self‐censorship with which women are educated, freeing themselves from their own Chastity Belts and Gossip Violins. In connection with Malignas Influencias’ research on the repressive body objects, it’s interesting that the chastity belt was one of the most researched by the group (Figure 2.2). However, as they themselves stated: “this work is not intended only to exist in writing, but to step further, running between the text and performativity. And so we build a chastity belt to name, from conceptual art, the thought or idea itself, but also for aesthetic validity.”29 Ultimately, the means by which Malignas Influencias reflected on the physical and mental systems of women’s repression were multidisciplinary. This allowed them to bring awareness to institutions and cultural spaces not often taken into account by Latina feminists as places where they might be heard. The irreverence of these feminist

Figure 2.2  Malignas Influencias, Cinturón de castidad, 2007.

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artists allowed them to break beyond the polite coteries of women’s movements by expanding into various, unexpected public spaces, updating the slogan “the personal is political” in the process.

­Perú: Laperrera The Peruvian group Laperrera (Thedogpound, or Thebitchpound) emerged in the city of Lima in 1999, out of research on graphics that artist Natalia Iguiñiz and sociologist Sandro Venturo had been conducting. The group combined the recovery and re‐appropriation of “Chicha” advertising – a type of regional, urban vernacular design employing fluorescent inks and colors, reflecting a popular aesthetic inspired by cultural events originating in the clubs and marginal areas of Lima – with messages highly critical of gender issues relating to the Peruvian government. The city was the place they chose to spread their messages, but from the start they were aware that there was an enormous amount of visual pollution in Lima. As Iguiñiz put it: The street is a place of transit/movement, and to a lesser extent a meeting place, because the big cities have increasingly become passageways for moving from a certain place to another, not for political articulation. And in Lima, this is even more marked. We almost did not integrate public spaces that produce connections between people. All political demonstration ends in rupture, in dissociation, in slippage. And in Peru, given the anomie and almost no sense of belonging to a community, there emerges a situation that Sandro Venturo synthesized with the paradoxical phrase: “In our country the street isn’t for everyone: it is for no one.” And in that sense, we could extend the concept of non‐places to it.30 Thus, the choice of Chicha aesthetics – extremely popular, but derided by elites as vulgar – determined the audience to which they were directing their posters, as Iguiñiz notes: “Appropriating an aesthetic, a materiality, a form of production and distribution network of the ‘Chicha’ posters, Laperrera was inserted into a [pre‐existing] circuit. We did not just make posters. We slipped into a circuit to exploit its potential with a political project that sought to question, for example, patterns of [that culture’s] sexual ­violence that we repudiate.”31 The first piece that they unveiled was an intervention by Laperrera denouncing Peruvian sexism and machismo, called Perrahabl@ (Bitchspe@k) and consisted of 3000 posters distributed around the city of Lima with the image of a dog and phrases naturalized in slang in which women, sexuality, and animality are matched pejoratively.32 By placing an email address in the poster, the group enabled the viewers to express themselves with the Web, which was relatively new in those years. The received mails were part of an exhibition where Laperrera reproduced them as computer graphics and then, after the opening, a series of roundtables and debates were organized on different citizens’ reactions to the posters. Participants included Peruvian feminist groups who felt attacked by the posters, since they were interpreted as a mockery of the work already carried out against gender violence. However, Perrahabl@ was an extremely important action to Lima, according to Teresa Garzón: “it not only proposes a change in how we invent our

Notes

identities and representations, it also opens the spectrum of possibilities for political action, one’s relationship to visual art, and the use of new communication and information technologies.”33 The Perrahabl@ action was followed by others that drew attention to discrimination against women. In some, Laperrera collaborated with NGOs and trade unions. The poster No is No (2001) was commissioned by the Office for the Defense of the Rights of Women (DEMUS) in preparation for a campaign against gender violence. They once again added an email address and a phone number (which directed them to DEMUS assistance lines). The direct phrase, simple graphics, and bright colors – characteristic of publicity usually used to advertise working‐class entertainments in the city – attracted the attention of a cross‐section of women who journeyed daily to and through Lima, whom the posters primarily addressed. Laperrera’s Excluded (Excluidas) reflected on inequality in labor rights, particularly on the issue of domestic workers. Since the 1970s, many feminists have claimed that domestic work is not “real” work and therefore must be hired out. This situation became problematic for women who are domestic workers, as it naturalized the exclusion of labor rights in the field, something very common in numerous countries across South America. Laperrera denounced this and caught the attention of unions to address the problem. While this Peruvian group was only active until 2004, the collective has exhibited its works in several art exhibitions in the decade since. Significantly, Laperrera set a precedent in the use of the poster in Peru, combining street‐level circuits, a certain popular audience, and a visual language with graphics that awoke Lima from its sexist somnambulism that Laperrera had detected and criticized.

­Conclusion All these Latin American feminist groups are examples of collectives that use art to denounce patriarchal systems and their control over of women’s lives and bodies. With domesticity as their cultures’ only possible horizon for the feminine, the sexual division of labor and naturalization of verbal and physical violence against women are foremost among the issues they denounce. These artists take the city as a laboratory for their activist practices, for conducting performances, or for urban interventions. They also seek the complicity of art institutions as a legitimate space of denunciation and awareness for the whole society. These groups realize the force of feminism in Latin American countries that still have many fundamental problems to solve. Illegal abortion and gender violence cause the constant deaths of women. These artists use their work to invade and subvert the patriarchal system, and seek to bring about real change in the lives of women.

Notes 1 Maxime Molyneaux, Movimientos de mujeres en América Latina, Estudio teórico

comparado (Valencia, Spain: Cátedra, 2003); y Maxime Molyneaux, “Género y ­ciudadanía en América Latina: cuestiones históricas y contemporáneas,” Debate feminista, no. 12, vol. 23 (April 2001): 18.

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2 Álvaro Bello and Marta Rangel, Etnicidad, “raza” y equidad en América Latina y el

Caribe (Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe, CEPAL, 2000).

3 Karen Cordero Reiman and Inda Sáenz (eds), Crítica feminista en la teoría e historia

del arte (México D.F.: Universidad Iberoamericana, 2007), 404.

4 Interview of the Mujeres Públicas by María Laura Rosa, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales,

Universidad de Buenos Aires (27 November 2014).

5 María Laura Rosa, “Mujeres Públicas en la Bienal de La Habana.” In: Jorge Zuzulich

(ed.), Curaduría y Arte (Buenos Aires, CIC: Perspectivas actuales, 2014), 43.

6 On the controversy that Mujeres Públicas instigated as part of the Un saber realmente

útil exhibition, see http://www.elconfidencial.com/cultura/2014‐10‐29/unas‐cerillas‐ incendian‐el‐reina‐sofia_421699/ and http://www.ramona.org.ar/node/54202, accessed 16 November 2018. 7 Mujeres Públicas, Este mapa/proyecto/recorrido es…, unedited artists’ statement (2011), unpaginated. 8 See María Laura Rosa, “La sonoridad de los caminos recorridos.” In: DUODA. Estudis de la Difèrencia Sexua, no. 46 (2014): 32–51. 9 Mujeres Públicas, Este mapa/proyecto/recorrido es… 10 HIJOS. (Hijos e Hijas por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio) was founded in 1995. 11 Particularly on issues related to sex education in Bolivia, homophobia, and the critical position of Mujeres Creando, see: Maria Galindo and Julieta Paredes, Machos, varones y maricones: Manual para conocer tu sexualidad por ti mismo (La Paz: Mujeres Creando, s/f ). 12 She has written No se puede Descolonizar sin Despatriarcalizar. Teoría y propuesta de la despatriarcalización (2013); María Galindo y Sonia Sánchez: Ninguna mujer nace para puta (2007); Archivo Cordero (2004), amongst others. 13 Although, over the years several of them, like Julieta Paredes, left the group and other women joined in turn. 14 Writes María Galindo: “So we made these paintings [referring to graffiti] from us and our daily lives, it is political, it is concrete, it is the quotidian life that we share with our loved ones, along with their torments” [“Así vamos construyendo esas pintadas [se refiere a los graffiti] desde nosotras y nuestra cotidianidad, que es política, que es concreta, que es la cotidianidad que compartimos con nuestros seres queridos y también con sus tormentos”], Mujeres Creando, La virgen de los deseos (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2005), 203. 15 Helen Álvarez Virreira, “Mujeres Creando, feminismo de propuestas concretas.” In: VVAA: Mujeres Grafiteando… más (La Paz: M.C., 2009), 4. 16 Mujeres Creando, La virgen de los deseos, 202. 17 Mujeres Creando, La virgen de los deseos, 202. 18 Maria Galindo is defined as impostor trying to visualize Mujeres Creando through a world that does not consider her companions as participants but who appreciate possibility of survival and protection, without changing the direct, unfiltered language used on the street. So she says: “To us we are interested in the space of art in the same way that live television is the street, as it crosses the private area and is also street.” Mujeres Creando, La virgen de los deseos, 232. 19 See “¿Quiénes son Mujeres Creando? Entrevista a Julieta Ojeda” at http://www. mujerescreando.org/2014, accessed 10 January 2015.

Notes

20 These actions and graffiti are addressed in a lot of Mujeres Creando’s work, so I invite

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32

33

the reader to peruse their website: http://www.mujerescreando.org/ to learn more about this group and consult the material they publish. See Galindo’s text http://www.rebelion.org/hemeroteca/mujer/031016galindo.htm, accessed 16 November 2018. María Galindo and Sonia Sánchez, Ninguna mujer nace para puta (Buenos Aires: Lavaca, 2007). Grafitti documented in VVAA: Mujeres Grafiteando… más, 157–158. Lisette Lagnado and Adriano Pedrosa, 27 Bienal de São Paulo: como viver junto (São Paulo: Fundaçao Bienal, 2006), 158. Alberto Armendáriz, “Bienal de San Pablo: el convulsionado mundo de hoy se mira en el espejo del arte contemporáneo,” La Nación (6 September 2014), 31. See María Galindo, No se puede descolonizar sin despatriarcalizar. Teoría y propuesta de la despatriarcalización (La Paz: Mujeres Creando, 2014). Julia Antivilo Peña: “Malignas Influencias en la ciudad de la furia,” http://www. malignasinfluencias.com/textos/malignas.htm, accessed 16 November 2018. Julia Antivilo Peña: “Malignas Influencias en la ciudad de la furia,” http://www. malignasinfluencias.com/textos/malignas.htm, accessed 16 November 2018. Julia Antivilo Peña: “Cinturón de castidad. Prótesis en las mentalidades de las mujeres latinoamericanas,” http://www.malignasinfluencias.com/textos/cinturon.htm, accessed 16 November 2018. Natalia Iguiñiz, “Afichismo callejero y publicidad popular: la experiencia de Laperrera” (Lima: 1999, mimeograph), 2. Ibid., 2. Iguiñiz says in an interview with Maria Teresa Garzón: “In Peru (but not just Peru), bitch is one of the ways of referring to women who use their bodies freely. If we assume that we are a culturally Catholic society, we find that at one end the virgin and the whore on the other; obviously this bitch‐woman is at one end of the spectrum. In addition, there is a kind of logic by which the body of the woman tempts one to crime. Therefore, not only can a woman become pregnant to provoke, but she is guilty of everything that happens, which seems to contradict the reification that is done in advertising.” María Tereza Garzón: “Si te dicen perra tienen razón. Representación, identidad política y ciberfeminismo en Perrahabl@,” Revista Nómadas, 23 (October 2005, Universidad Central de Colombia): 197. Ibid., 198.

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3

Women Artists: Making a Subject Space in India Gayatri Sinha It was an initiative so silent that it has gone virtually unspoken. In 1986, Nalani Malani wrote to Arpita Singh, complaining of male domination on Indian art exhibition circuits, suggesting a women’s exhibition. In an era bereft of curators or the recognition of gender practices or institutional support, the unspoken ­suggestion was that women artists would come together to exhibit their own work. Singh’s cryptic reply to Malani was a postcard bearing the message ‘4’.1 Malani read the message to indicate that Singh would accept a group of four women. Within months, Arpita Singh, Nilima Sheikh, Nalini Malani and Madhvi Parekh had come together. From the city of Bhopal, J. Swaminathan stepped in, and agreed to give them a show. The exhibition  –  Watercolours by Four Artists  –  was sponsored by Bharat Bhavan, a multi‐arts complex and museum in Bhopal, in 1987. The moment of efflorescence for a contemporary woman’s practice in India thus would trace to the mid‐1980s. Arpita Singh, Madhvi Parekh, Nilima Sheikh and Nalini Malani set in motion one of India’s most cogent artist formations, one that had no name, no stated ideology. Between 1987 and 1989 they organized five showings of their work in Bhopal, Mumbai2 and Delhi, invited catalogue texts, organized their own shows and served as each other’s interlocuters. That they assumed no group ideology allowed them to fly under the radar, yet each individual practice assumes importance for its aesthetic and political positions, its challenge to gender stereotypes and its intimate reading of women’s histories. Reflecting on developments since 2000, it is women’s practices in India that have been the most radical and politically acute. The knotty unyielding arguments around indigenism, the stuff of seminars through the 1970s, suddenly seemed to unravel under the more relaxed contours of the postmodern. The classical and popular could rest and embed, under a more welcoming regime. Yet not everything was hospitable to women as artists: much of what had never been addressed now sought a language. In the scramble of documentary film making, publishing and writing that erupted among women in the 1980s, there were bruised and abrasive patches. The 1987 outing at Bhopal was panned rather than welcomed: for the next few shows, they hired their own spaces.3

A Companion to Feminist Art, First Edition. Edited by Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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­The double gaze: Women as subject The political and social context for women’s collective action had a long precedent of issues and contexts but also irresolution and a festering delay. Several of the narratives of image making in the present are rooted in what came to be known as ‘the women’s question’ of the 19th century. In the 1820s, when the social reformer Raja Ram Mohan Roy made a plea for social reform, he spoke against ‘sati’, the immolation of women on the funeral pyres of their husbands. Subsequently, reformers like Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar made efforts to legalize widow remarriage and abolish polygamy. By the turn of the century, however, the pace of the reform movement had slackened as the national movement gathered momentum and all aspects of traditional India were espoused as the ‘truth’ of Indian culture. At the core of this espousal was the ‘pure’ Indian woman, seen by the nationalists as a continuous link to an undefiled ancient age, the bearer of all the virtues of ideal mother and wife. Partha Chatterjee in his essay ‘The Nation and Its Women’ describes the dominant nineteenth century distinction between the material, masculine and Europeanized outer world and the spiritual, pure, feminized inner world of India under colonial rule. Writing of the inner, partially veiled female spaces, he says: ‘No encroachments by the colonizer must be allowed in that inner sanctum. In the world, imitation and adaptation to Western norms was a necessity; at home they were tantamount to annihilation of one’s very identity.’4 As the occupant of the inner courtyard, the woman was freed from the material pressures of the outside world but bound to what Partha Chatterjee calls ‘a new and yet entirely legitimate subordination’. As the nation became interchangeable with Mother India or a trope of a pure national femininity, women became imbued with a kind of immutability, one that conditioned her sexual freedom. ‘In fact the image of woman as goddess, or mother served to erase her sexuality in the world outside her home.’5 In Gandhi, the dominant figure of the first half of the century, women were accorded the rights of protest, of political participation – especially in the wake of powerful male relatives – and accorded areas of authority, such as cultural revival in the areas of the performing arts and crafts. However, Gandhi had an oddly idealized notion about women: his epitome of female perfection was Sita, the beleaguered wife of Rama, a popular Indian deity and eponymous hero of the Ramayana (first century ce) Gandhi’s own widely publicized and controversial experiments with sex placed the women of his life in highly publicized images of passivity.6 In the 1980s, when Indian women appear in substantial numbers in the matrix of art, it is with small and large narratives of the present and past, a cornucopia of social and conceptual concerns. In the excavation of the archaic the re‐appropriation of the grand narrative in terms of opposition to colonial readings was a critical trajectory of modern Indian history.7 Among artists and thinkers in the subcontinent in the early 1980s was the formation of the subaltern studies group, and the growth of their influence opened up shuttered histories, minor narratives and vernacular myths of the past. If the re‐­ envisioning of Indian history project was affected by Marxist readings, subaltern studies opened new perspectives on caste, and its long shadow: on how readings on religious practices change unalterably when seen through the prism of caste. Implicit in the explorations of subaltern studies was the class/caste paradigm, and within it the l­ ocation of gender. Interestingly, it was in exploring the reception of faith and rituals at different caste levels that some writers explored many of the fine nuances of religious practice over the last few centuries.8

­The uses of text: Painting as citatio

Looking back at the late 1980s and 1990s, women’s practices compel us to believe that just as nations on the periphery are now accepted as representing other modernisms, women artists of the south or the Third World may represent ‘other feminisms’. In so saying I would suggest that the extent of their artistic embrace was wider, compelled by the politics of a region of fraught cartographies. Beneath the fabric of civility spread and laid out by the ‘modernity’ of the new nation, incipient movements had started to stir. Other than issues of gender and colour, issues of religious and class conflict filter through and colour their work. In seeking a language, then, there are multiple excavations, across time and, like women’s writing within the subcontinent, there were also the smaller, vernacular, traditions of art making in which they found kinship, and a sense of location.9

­The uses of text: Painting as citation In his essay ‘What is the Contemporary?’ Georgio Agamben makes the argument for the irresistible links of the present with the past. He writes: ‘Historians of literature and of art know that there is a secret affinity between the archaic and the modern, not so much because the archaic forms seem to exercise a particular charm on the present, but rather because the key to the modern is hidden in the immemorial and the archaic.’10 In 1979, the formation of the subaltern studies programme, the upsurge in post‐­ colonial writing and the uncovering of histories, poetry and narratives somewhat apart from the great voices and grand narratives of the Indian subcontinent, was to profoundly influence several crossing streams. What this period encouraged was a distillation of experience that linked the archaic and the modern unselfconsciously  –  enabling the space for a woman’s perspective. In a perverse way, the nationalist argument of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries about the unchanging and ‘pure’ Indian woman was to become a provocation that artists unpacked and redressed, tossing the gaze back across the centuries, addressing texts, codes and the idea of the idealized feminine. Speaking on the subaltern and the seamless manner in which Ranajit Guha linked ancient texts with present‐day cultural practices, Dipesh Chakravarty argues that ‘certain cultural practices could continue to exist, long after their historical origins by becoming codified’ and in the process we realize ‘how the archaic can lie at the heart of the modern’.11 The emphasis on women and text in the 1980s challenged the widely prevalent views of Manu, lawgiver of the pre‐Christian period who had condemned women and shudras, or women and untouchables, as beyond the pale of education.12 A deeper inquiry reveals that in the early period, when properties or attributes were being apportioned between the major Indian sects – Shaivism and Vaishnavism – text, writing, the alphabet, metre –  and by extension scripture emerge as attributes of Devi, the great goddess, or the divine feminine. In the Lalitasahasranam, a twelfth century text from the Brahmanda Purana, the thousand names of the goddess are used to elucidate her attributes. Foremost among them is identification of her body with text. In leading texts dedicated to the goddess, such as the Devi Mahatmayam in the fifth century, Markandeya Purana, the goddess, is praised: ‘You are the embodiment of the threefold matra, the Om sound’ (verse 74). She is praised as the supreme knowledge.13 In the Devi Bhagavat Purana, the text attributes to the Goddess: ‘Out of my Omniscient and Omnipotent Nature the Vedas are born.’14 The early identification of the body of the goddess with the ground/

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Women Artists: Making a Subject Space in India

earth, set up a triangular image and dialectic between the goddess; the earth, with its attributes of fertility and sustenance; and textual authority. In conversation, Urvashi Butalia speaks of the making of the women’s movement through the 1970s and 1980s; co‐founder of the feminist publishing house Kali for Women in 1984, she traces several of these formations to both public protest and an increase in the translation of texts. In the latter part of the 1970s, violence against women peaked with the Mathura (1978), Rameezabee (1979) and Maya Tyagi (1980) rape cases, which led to women’s demonstrations outside Parliament House and a rapid change in the rape laws. In addition the Roop Kanwar sati death (1987), where a young woman immolated herself on her husband’s funeral pyre, provoked a strong reaction from India’s middle class, film makers, writers and students. But let us for a moment return to the 1980s as a period of realization of explicit communitarian violence and class politics, and their reflections in art.15 Not unusually the beginnings were modest, and unheralded by any radical stands, manifestoes or formations. Nilima Sheikh committed very early to the theme of sexual violence, but through ‘the idea of tradition’, one to which early‐twentieth‐century intellectuals were committed. Sheikh’s chosen style was to link the inheritance of Mughal painting with its early‐twentieth‐century revival in India at the hands of Abanindranath Tagore and the links sought in a Pan‐Asian cultural vision. With her prescient work When Champa Grew Up (1984–1985), Nilima Sheikh’s beginnings would appear modest, unheralded by any radical stand. Like many of her famous friends and peers, like Bhupen Khakhar or Vivan Sundaram, Nilima Sheikh had trained at Baroda’s Maharaja Sayajirao University, was aware of dominant international trends and had witnessed the rise and then the dissipation of the modern art movement in India. Yet, Sheikh brushed aside the new inclination of the 1970s and 1980s, an engagement with pop and bazaar images  –  and the irony that their inclusion in the ‘fine’ arts implied  –  and reverted instead to an early‐twentieth‐century ideal, articulated by Rabindranath Tagore, Okakura Tenshin and Sun Yat‐sen.16 Sheikh used these ideas, drawing on Chinese landscape imagery, Japanese Ukiyo‐e and Persian paintings – thus creating a syncretic Asian style to posit her delicate figures, lucid flowing landscapes and iridescent colours of conflict in the subcontinent. However, the contrast between the lyrical beauty and aesthetic inclination of her work, and the violence of conflict and mourning that she depicted, was profoundly affective, and marked a rupture in both the aesthetic field as inheritance, and in the contemporary as located in the present. The feminist position on text was based on the unearthing of women’s neglected archive of writing. When it appeared in 1994, the anthology Women Writing in India assumed the position of historical redress.17 As a sweeping archival collection the two‐ volume study anthologizes women’s writing in India, from the Theravada or the earliest Pali canon to the present. Among Indian artists Nilima Sheikh acknowledges the influence of this double volume. In devising her own painterly style, through the use of tents and scrolls – which also are reminiscent of screens for open or veiled areas – Sheikh creates a ground of enactment, one that seems to stretch from central and western Asia to the Indian peninsula. The movement on this ground is that of the poet and exile, the wanderer and the mystic. From the mid‐1990s to the present, Sheikh has located her figures within the climatic events of the subcontinent’s history, the Partition of India (1947) and the civil disturbances in the valley of Kashmir. In such instances, her entry

­The uses of text: Painting as citatio

into their bloody histories is through poetry, text or oral histories. The Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali or the myths of Punjab which speak of love and separation as much as the document of the survivors of Partition become Sheikh’s painted enactments. Agha Shahid Ali’s sweeping, poignant poetry which Sheikh inscribes through stencilled texts on the verso of long, painted screens becomes an inscription to Kashmir’s troubled history, the contrast with the gently painted images creating a profound dissonance. Sheikh’s engagements find a corollary in the shared if different trajectory of Nalini Malani. Writing in the catalogue Through the Looking Glass in 1989, in the series of four‐woman exhibitions, Malani compared her practice across media with the freedom that intertextuality affords. ‘I do believe that it is possible for a visual artist to observe, cogitate, and ponder over numerous ideas and themes in his or her work, using different means, just as a writer’s oeuvre may span poetry, play‐writing, novel‐writing and even criticism.’18 In Nalini Malani the references to text devolve around an imagining of the woman under duress and her acts of resistance. Early in her practice Malani sought work at the leading newspaper The Times of India, where editors of two Hindi magazines commissioned her to illustrate stories: ‘it was still a very young country so there was a lot of new writing pouring in the editorial offices. From this I began to make storyboards which in a way was connected to cinema.’19 At this time in the mid‐1960s Malani used to subscribe to the British journal Encounter, edited by Stephen Spender. ‘There were essays in it on psychoanalysis connected to literature, which has been a fascination for me.’ In Paris in 1968/69, Malani attended lectures by Noam Chomsky, Claude Lévi‐ Strauss and Louis Althusser. Through the 1990s her main engagements were with script, meaning and gesture arrived at through theatre. Malani’s Medea, a play by Heiner Muller that emphasizes extreme violence at the level of the state and within the family, was also interpreted on other registers of the colonizer and the colonized, the articulation of the ‘success’ of globalism and the inarticulation of those that live beyond its illuminated highways. Rooted even as she is in a cosmopolitan space, Malani draws on the love poetry of Radha and Krishna, layered with articulations of modern Western writers. In defying patriarchy or defining desire, she finds easy kinship in the passions of Radha or Mirabai.20 Her study of Brecht and the twelfth‐century Bhagavat Purana have a strange cohabitation; the protagonist of The Job, a play for which she created an installation, uses a reversal of gender role; not unlike Radha and Krishna, who engage in gender role play as depicted in Kangra painting. Through her literary engagements such as they are, Malani creates a feminine space in which pressure and affect far exceed form. Luce Irigaray suggests that the feminine space is one of ‘materiality infinity and plurality beyond the category of “woman”’.21 Irigaray proposes a woman’s language based on female morphology, an alternative poetics for the body and mind, a condition that Malani in fact revels in. Malani also has the facility to compress and reconstitute two or three kinds of references to women in art and mythology. In the process she may assume the space of the ungendered middle, one that looks at women’s bodies from the outside. It is a space of power, but also of interrogation of the cumulative desiring gaze of the male, as possessor. Compared to the figure of the male, Malani confers on women a location in our time and all time: women in Malani’s work carry the mantle of a mythologized past and the fraught conditions of the present, with ease. Malani is possibly the first artist who articulated and names desire, compounds it with a complex slew of ideas, of the taming

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of a wild almost primeval female power, through social systems – desire then becomes mediated by the political.

­The reproductive body and its denial The shared camaraderie of the four artists, the bonhomie of a girl group that exhibited without a name, sidestepped the naming and a potential critical dialectic with the Delhi Bombay art scene.22 What the group did address, individually and together, was to use elements like revivalism of Indian and Asian genres, and to suggest complicity and deviance in the gaze, and to do this even as the artist’s approach to the body became more deeper, more ironic and self‐reflexive. Writing on Nalani Malani in ‘The Medeaprojekt and Beyond’, Chaitanya Sambrani discusses states of violence, on different registers, including the gaze. He describes how the performance of Medea comes ‘into a critical interface with the history of European art’ referring particularly to the way in which male “masters” have represented the female body from behind. This manner of representation constitutes the most voyeuristic gaze, for the viewer is invited to share the artist’s vantage point, looking at a woman who is either unaware of being watched or complies to thus being objectified. Sambrani here invokes paintings such as Ingres’ Turkish Bath (1862) or Velasquez’s Rokeby Venus, suggesting that the role of Medea invokes ‘the power relations implied in the act of looking.’23 It is a moot point whether the artists working on the female body are more informed only by the politics of the male gaze, or beyond, to the fulsome and frequently eroticized depiction of women in Indian classical art as well as the politics of protest of the 1980s. Malani is also possibly the first artist to name desire, even as she ungenders it: at the end of her play, Medea says, ‘I am no man, no woman, I am the empty middle.’ The arrival of the woman as artist immediately marked a subversion of the gaze. The 1980s were the decade of emphasis on the girl‐child, India’s high rates of female mortality and foeticide. As a mother and an artist, Arpita Singh built a complex series of image relations between the girl and an increasingly hostile social environment. On this register there is her own mother (My Mother, 1993), caught in the chaos of street violence, that was Singh’s response to the riots in Mumbai; and the girl‐child, as sexually vulnerable (Child Bride with Swan, 1985, watercolour). In this work, ageing mothers form a half ring around her, their shaven heads and white widow’s sarees recalling the painting Dance by Matisse (1910), here the colour depleted, and the contours flattened by age. In Singh, in an asymmetrical progression, the girl‐child elides with the middle‐aged female body as a natural inheritor of rights – sidestepping all tropes of youth and beauty. Desire, such as it is, belongs to the mature body with its caesarean section and receding hairline; the youthful reproductive body seems strangely absent, like a missed generation. Desire is, in Singh’s work, also a refuge from the violence that seems to close in from all sides of the painted frame. ‘It is the girl who inherits the traditions with all its wisdom.’24 Women are carefully individuated, usually occupying the centre of the frame, iconic as they cradle a girl‐child, or appear like solid, earthy figures of resistance. (In Malani the invitation to the viewing of the female body is mocked and confounded by her refusal to commit to a form. The fact that the figures lie unrooted on her painted mylar surfaces problematizes and in fact deflects desire.) The space that Singh evacuates, of the sexual or reproductive body, is claimed by a later generation – Bharti Kher, Sonia Khurana and Sheba Chhachhi –but then further problematized through mutilation, spoilage or distortion and rejection. Among them, Bharti Kher, an artist and a mother, includes her children in posed photographs in domestic

­The reproductive body and its denia

environs (Figure  3.1). They appear as hybrids in an eponymous photo series, a partial bestiality overlaying their bodies. Bearing the marks of animalism, the mother and children are bound by an exceptional energy, one that violates the expectation of childlike innocence. In Kher’s work, the breaking of the body and then accretion with animal parts, such as hooves or pelts of fur, debases, even as it gains in the scale of energy or potential. In the last decade Kher’s body-cast sculptures such as Mrs. Hera Moon (2006), Arione (2004), or Lady with Ermine (2012) confer on her figures both human and animal properties, lending her female subjects a mythic aspect. In her recent project Six Women (201315) she cast six sex workers from Kolkata, seted in the attitude of nude, passive stillness, allowing the passage of time and the memory of other bodies to be read into the work. A series of events and a shift in sensibility, global exposure and the permeability of feminism through the 1990s heralded a new period, as did shifts and preferences in medium for found objects, to tech imaging, video and photography. The changes in women’s practices are sharp and mark a shift on many registers. The 1990s were a time that was ripe for an Indian postmodern: the politics of caste reservation elided with globalization with unpredictable consequences.25

Figure 3.1  Bharti Kher (b. 1969). Family Portrait (Digital print on archival Hahnemuhle Photo Rag paper, 76.2 × 114.3 cm / 46 × 31 inches) 2004. © Bharti Kher. Courtesy: the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

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Two or three parallel streams emerge as a response to this vast shift. The first is an engagement with tradition, its interrogation and subversion. The second is an evacuation of the past, an excluding of what Nalini Malani used as a title of a work: ‘Old Arguments about Indigenism’. The third was the appearance of the international curator and a broad exposure to theoretical positions that wove links, however tenuous, to those on the ground in India. Globalism appeared to provide a tabula rasa for a rewriting of gender concerns, even as it, paradoxically, created a flat, ungendered space for art. In the nascent new generation of women of the 1990s, many of the social tensions and concerns appear to coalesce and lead to a radical shift in imagery. The artists also scale different time periods as artistic locations, bringing them together seamlessly. In Sheba Chhachhi’s work the margin becomes the centre; through much of her career she has used the figure of the women ascetic, or yogini, as a lightning rod to articulate her ­concerns around gender. Frequently, the least considered in social power hierarchies, the yogini is a cognate, of the mystic, the vagabond and rebel, the poet and the androgyne. Drawn as a highly romanticized and remote figure in traditional Indian painting, a master of the esoteric arts, Chhachhi renders her as a witness and commentator, one who engages the complexities of time through an image of timelessness. In her work, such as Winged Pilgrim (2009), the idealized woman (of the nationalist period, one embedded in the Indian gender stereotype) is freed from the bonds of patriarchy. As witness, the yogini makes a case for a reformed notion of the pure, one that is located in a spiritual rather than a physical plane. In Sonia Khurana’s work, the artist’s performing body becomes a site for a repudiation of the expectant gaze and an invitation to discourse. The singularity of her own body draws attention to a slew of issues about space, temporality and artistic identity – issues that come to the fore precisely because beauty and desire have been evacuated. With Mithu Sen, the reproductive female body is evoked only through reference as she occludes it to make space for the male. As a sexualized being on the scale from gay to heteronormative, Sen paints the male as body and form, turning the tables to enable the female gaze as a determinant of power. From the mid‐1990s, issues of labour become important to women’s practices, in a way that breaks with the centrality of the iconic/heroic figure of resistance. In Nilima Sheikh’s work, she celebrates the labouring bodies that dig wells, or pitch tents and bear loads. In a recent series she draws from a document of artisans of Kashmir – works that bear a spirit of kinship and nostalgia for their dying skills. In the medieval and Mughal eras, the artist belonged to the ‘tarkhan’ or carpenter class, a generic term for the artisan, and Sheikh represents these labouring figures with empathy and a spirit of kinship. In Malani, the painted hieroglyph‐like figures of Lohar Chawl represent the constant movement of labour in a crowded and poor part of Mumbai. Just as Malani has resisted the influences of classicism, the flowing lines and the heroic cast of women of lineage and beauty, she allows her figures from myth and history to challenge centuries of accumulated belief with the terror of the present.

­An aesthetic of toxicity While Malani, Sheikh and Singh expanded the scope of their practices, a newer generation of artists assumed a conceptual mode of response. In 1984, about when the four women artists were banding together, Sheela Gowda entered the RCA on a scholarship.

­An aesthetic of toxicit

Very soon, her semi‐figurative painted works of women as objects of violence had changed, and were replaced by a spare, even cryptic, language, largely of found objects. In 1992, following the demolition of the Babri Masjid, there were riots in Mumbai. Ten years later these were followed by the Godhra riots. As the bookends of a decade that cast deep striations of distrust and the long shadow of fear, this decade fostered its own lexicon of ideas, and an aesthetic of toxicity. In 1998, Gowda displayed powerful gender concern with And Tell Him of My Pain, a mass of red threads that ended in a cluster of needles. This was preceded by Gallant Hearts (1996), in which pieces of cow dung tied with the holy thread (kalava) were suspended in a cluster from the wall to the floor. Gowda had shifted into a visceral use of everyday objects that marked ritual, female labour and violent transition. Draupadi’s Vow (1997) in which a mass of hair is tipped at the edge with KumKum26 – associated with marriage, faithfulness and menstrual blood – recalls one of the bloodiest episodes in the Indian epic, the Mahabharata – of the attempted disrobing and rape of Draupadi, and its consequence in the great war. The collision of poverty, another older way of life and urbanism are embedded in works like Darkroom (2006) and Stopover (2012). In the latter, 170 grinding stones, symbol of the southern Indian kitchen for centuries, now abandoned on the streets of Bangalore and displaced by the electric mixie‐grinder, were presented at the Kochi biennale. Gowda so arranged them that they spilled out of the exhibition space, a nineteenth‐century colonial hub, onto the Kochi pier, like a post‐ colonial gesture towards global trading on the waters of the Kerala coastline. In her pared‐down monochromatic approach, Gowda invokes Arte Povera as syntax and ironic comment on the impoverishment of global markets. Sharing Gowda’s conceptual idiom, Anita Dube, with a background in Marxist critical thought, also devised a language based on the potential of found objects. In 1997, Dube created a remarkable cogent work that employed a human skeleton, covered with red velvet and the bling of sequins, carefully stitched by her own hand to position gender in the realm of the phobic and the erotic. The piece is titled ‘Silence’ Blood Wedding (1997) after Lorca; the invitation to touch and the evocation of red velvet are belied by the knowledge of the bones within these oddly surreal forms (Figure 3.2). Much of her practice is encased in this clash of registers: the small secluded domestic acts of cleaning, stitching, embellishing locked in with the heavy, brooding erotic violence of works like this and Sade (1998–1999). Coincidentally, both Gowda and Dube use ritual/mythological associations and tropes to dislodge and destabilize the construct of the traditional woman. Dube uses ceramic eyes, otherwise used only for temple deities to create highly evocative sculptural installations. Through this displacement of context her works also gain an indefinable sexual charge. The taboo began to acquire an aesthetic language even as the work embraces and engages the discourse of the time: gender and labour, gender and violence, absent or evacuated bodies and their residue. Even as sexuality and globalization would allow references to expand and become more universal, the particular conditions of subgroups within was yet to be uncovered. Within the growing discourse on the status of women, Muslim womanhood and the gaze directed towards them acquired a sharp edge. In 2006, Ritu Menon and Zoya Hasan’s study of 10,000 women in Unequal Citizens: Muslim Women in India was path‐ breaking. In the same year, they wrote: ‘Muslim society … is presented as having a monolithic and undifferentiated character, and Muslim personal law is seen as the defining feature of the lives of Muslims in India. Such typecasting is especially prevalent

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Figure 3.2  Anita Dube (b. 1958). Silence (Blood Wedding) (human bones, velour, tulle and pearls). 1997. © Anita Dube. Reproduced with permission.

with respect to Muslim women, who are usually presented as forming a homogenous, undifferentiated group that is so oppressed by the combined effect of polygamy, purdah and triple talaq that it is rendered almost invisible.’27 From the all‐women, gendered perspective of Sheela Gowda’s work, which examines class and the economies of labour, and the displacement of sexual taboos in that of Anita Dube, a third artist of the time, Rummana Hussain, created a subcategory: the subcontinental Muslim woman. Like Gowda, it is the tipping of the balance, and the violent dislocation of settled continuities that pushed Hussain from allegorical painting into installation, and the examination of a social and personal history. A violent and tragic coincidence between the demolition of the Babri Masjid and Hussain’s experience of surgery for breast cancer brought about some of her most poignant work. In the performative video Is it what you think? (1998) Hussain appears at first bearing all the tropes of conventional South Asian Muslim women – the decorative braids in her long hair, the kohl ringed eyes, the traditional garments, all inviting the voyeuristic gaze, until she reveals the radical mastectomy on her chest. Hussain was able to counterbalance this personal narrative with historic and contemporary aspects. In her work Begum Hazrat Mahal (photographs, mixed media installation, 1997) she recalls and marks a Muslim woman’s resistance at the heart of the uprising against British imperial rule in nineteenth‐century India. Hussain’s work that follows Home/Nation (photographs, mixed media installation) seems to draw an analogy between the body, the devastation of the mosque and the ruinous effect on the body politic. Within this decade the outpouring of work sought to contain and lend a shape to violence, and its corollary: protest. Navjot Altaf, with a background in Marxist activism, was among the first to react to the violation of her city, Bombay, and the riots of 1992. Pylons, the chords that snake underground, marking the density of construction in India’s financial capital, were used as coiled and severed forms in the work Links

­An aesthetic of toxicit

Destroyed and Rediscovered (1994). In photographs, and across the gallery floor, these spilled and lay like tangled, severed arteries. Navjot’s deeply poignant Lacuna in Testimony (3 channel video installation, 2003), made in the aftermath of the Godhra incidents, marks the absence of justice to those who have no recourse to the law. Like many of her peers, Navjot responded to social cataclysms through a conceptual frame, arriving at a language expressive of the acts of erosion, and an abrasive upheaval. In the artists that follow this generation, the narrative of the performing body continues. At the heart of women’s practice of the 1990s and the 2000s is a shift in gender subjectivity. The heroic and the iconic make way for bodies that seize the space, both to assert profanation and a personal right. That the body could be performed, through acts of mimicry, and cause rupture and displacement came to be used through video and photography. In the artists of the 1990s and beyond who break the bounds between photography and art – Dayanita Singh, Pushpamala N, Sonia Khurana, Shilpa Gupta, Tejal Shah, Gauri Gill – there is a play with history, mythology as well as the conflicted states of the present. Tropes of femininity and beauty are treated as subject areas by Pushpamala, who casts her gaze across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, theatre and cinema tradition and modernity to perform the heroine, the tribal, the goddess, the star, and to appropriate images from art history. Her subjects carry the imprint of the mythologized past and the roughness of the present, on the same body rendering the female subject same and yet different, both trope and performer. Dayanita Singh, critically acclaimed for the formality and depth of her portraits, and the residue of India’s mid‐twentieth century, Nehruvian era has also developed the physical body of the mobile, personalized museum. As a structure she denudes from it the reading of museum as institution to celebrate instead whimsy and chance. In Tejal Shah’s work the desiring gaze, so long deflected by women, returns upon herself to enact and then engage the transgendered or queer body. Thus the artwork becomes a site for acting out fantasy and wish fulfilment. In performing the ungainly body, Sonia Khurana’s works such as Bird (1999) or Closet (2002) and the more recent videos in the work Oneiric House (2014) further push for a more universal reading of selfhoods that project or seize space beyond the body (Figure 3.3). In her videos Khurana is both auteur and performer. The reflections on her own body and, crucially, how it occupies space then allows for readings on loss, on domination and Khurana’s highly affective means of engaging the spectator. Sheba Chhachhi’s embrace of the figure on the margins, the sadhvi or the renunciate, has also translated into her work on the ascetic as witness to ecological degradation, in a world overtaken by the pursuit of gain. In her practice there is also the making or the vivification of the archival image, as in her elaborately staged work on the late Indian film actress Meena Kumari. In her 2017 work Twist, a 22 foot (6.7 metres) high column made of exposed film induces ideas on the opacity of vision, and reflections on temporality. The accumulation of women’s practices as a narrative has had to reflect on the ­fissures across India’s polity, which shift with each decade. From the pockets of small experience there is a response, to the poetic, and to cycles of trauma. It has taken women artists several decades of interrogating the premises of the state to question the imaging of India as the divine feminine, or the motherland, and instead view the unquiet processes of nationhood. Against this background, the newer regimes of globalization have not gone unchallenged. Shilpa Gupta addresses India’s troubled borders in Kashmir and Bangladesh, emphasizing the fragility of neighbourhood accords in South Asia. Gupta

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Figure 3.3  Sonia Khurana, Logic of Birds (video still), single channel video, 2 min (looped), 2006. © Sonia Khurana. Reproduced with permission.

has addressed border issues and the long shadow of Partition with reference to Kashmir and Bangladesh. In 100 Hand Drawn Maps of India (begun 2007/8), she invited one hundred children to draw the map of India, the wobbly shifting lines marking the uncertain bounds of the nation state. In Nothing is on Record (2015), she created a thoroughly researched, text‐heavy work on the chitmahals, the narrow finger‐like strips of land between India and Bangladesh, where movement across the waters of the Hooghly River renders the border porous and unstable. Gupta and Sharmila Samant were both founder members of the artist collective Open Circle in Mumbai; individually, Samant has gone on to address areas of vulnerability – scarce water exhausted by multinationals like Coca Cola, farming practices and GM seeds, the politics around land use and waste disposal. Samant’s work is staged at First World exhibition sites, rendering the dialogue between global geographies a transnational debate. Even as a loose, unstructured presence, these artists reflect a ‘moulding’ of the female body through an expansion into literature, film and the media. In the three decades since the mid‐1980s a furious output has completely changed expectation of what ­constitutes the subjectivity of women. With a younger generation of women like Hemali Bhuta, Pallavi Paul or Parul Gupta, gender may or may not be a primary projection; rather it may submerge into a deeper understanding of gesture, matter, process or affect. There is also a desire to work outside of gender, to ‘talk back’, and build initiatives outside of the gallery or institutional systems. The environment and the phenomenology that it presents as subject becomes an engagement and a process of negotiation. In this sweep individual and social histories serve to meld onto the same template, reverting to art and art making as subject.

Notes

Notes 1 From recorded interview with the artist on criticalcollective.in & MoMA Post, dated 19

June 2015.

2 ‘Bombay’ is the period before the city was named ‘Mumbai’. It also refers to a more

cosmopolitan past. Hence the Bombay/Mumbai usage through the essay.

3 In many ways the 1980s was a politically decisive decade. The assassination of Indira

Gandhi and the Sikh riots that followed, and the devastation of the Bhopal Gas leak, took place in 1984. Towards the end of the decade, the Mandal Commission report on minorities and the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 changed the course of Indian politics. 4 ‘The Nation and Its Women.’ In: Partha Chatterjee, The Partha Chatterjee Omnibus (New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 121. 5 Ibid. 6 ‘Gandhi’s contribution lay in encouraging a frank and honest discussion of moral issues, including sexuality,’ writes Bhikhu Parekh (Colonialism, Tradition and Reform, An Analysis of Gandhi’s Political Discourse, Sage Publications, 1999, p. 291.) One of his experiments included that of Brahmacharya or chastity, which included sleeping naked with young women, as a demonstration of sexual control. 7 The reading of the history of the Indian subcontinent with the broad brush of the colonial/imperial gaze by writers such as John Stuart Mill into the Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic and British periods has been challenged by Indian, notably Marxist, historians. 8 Prof. Dipesh Chakrabarty, in a lecture entitled ‘In Retrospect: Subaltern Studies and Future Pasts’, speaks of David Hardiman’s study of folk forms of healing in South Asia and Gautam Bhadra’s study on Battala prints in colonial Calcutta and other forms of specific local academic inquiry, at the heart of the Subaltern Studies project (1984–2008). 9 Among the writers of the period the twin publications Women Writing in India 600 BC to the Present (vol. 1 and 2), Susie Tharu and K. Lalitha translated into English women’s poetry from the sixth century bce to the present, mining for the first time the rich seam of writing that acknowledges their role as poets, lovers and spiritual figures. Artist Nilima Sheikh acknowledges the influences of these two volumes on her practice. 10 ‘What is the contemporary?’ in What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays by Georgio Agamben, translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford University Press, 2009). 11 In Retrospect: Subaltern Studies and Futures Past, keynote address by Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty (University of Chicago and ANU) at the conference on Subaltern Studies: Historical World Making Thirty Years On. The conference was held at the Australian National University, 3–5 August 2011. 12 The Manusmriti or laws of Manu, first translated by Sir William Jones, in 1794, dated between 200 bce and 200 ce is an ancient and primary source on law. In contemporary times the Manusmriti has been denounced by thinkers like BR Ambedkar, and feminist writers and activists. 13 Knowledge ‘You are the Bhagavati embodying the three Vedas’ (verse 10). ‘You are the intellect by which the essence of all scriptures is comprehended’ (verse 11). This identification becomes even more strongly elaborated in the Devi Bhagavat Purana and

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14 15

16 17

18

19

20

21 22

23 24 25

the Brahmanda Purana (350–950 ce). Wendy Doniger, Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996). Shrimad Devi Bhagavatam, Book 7, Chapter 39, p. 735. Partha Chatterjee’s study of caste appropriations of ‘authentic’ rituals among Bengal Vaishnav sects in the essay ‘Caste and Subaltern Consciousness.’ In: Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies IV Writings on South Asian History and Society, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989). Together those thinkers proposed a Pan‐Asian cultural skein that ran back in time to the greatest spiritual traditions of the East as a counter to the materialism of the West. Susie Tharu and K. Lalita (eds), Women Writing in India: 600 BC to the Present. Volume 1: 600 BC to the Early Twentieth Century. New York: Feminist Press, 1991. Volume 2: The Twentieth Century (New York: Feminist Press, 1993). The 1980s signalled an efflorescence of women’s engagement with text. From the late 1970s, the visualization around initiatives like SEWA and Chipko, Indira Gandhi’s premiership and her brutal assassination in 1984 had created an area of investigation into the literary and mythological status of women. In 1978, Madhu Kishwar and Ruth Vanita launched Manushi, a journal that commented actively on the status of women in South Asia. Alternating between Hindi and English monthly publications for the first ten years, Manushi investigated ancient Indian texts such as the Manusmriti from the perspective of the contemporary feminist, and located the significant if poorly recognized role of Women bhakti saints. Another path‐breaking initiative came from two Hyderabad based academics, Susie Tharu and K. Lalitha, who published Women Writing in India in two volumes, covering the period from 600 BC to the present. In 1984, Kali for Women, a publishing venture by Urvashi Butalia and Ritu Menon, was launched. Shanay Jhaveri, ‘Building on prehistory: Artists’ FILM AND NEW MEdia in India’ from the blog, LUX: Artists’ Moving, Image. London, 24 June 2014. Featured in the book Nalini Malani 1969, published in conjunction with the exhibition Nalini Malani: You Can’t Keep Acid in a Paper Bag, 28 January to 21 December 2015 (New Delhi: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, 2015), p. 88. Radha and Mirabai are both leading figures within Vaishnavism, a sect devoted to the worship of the ten avatars of the deity Vishnu. As Krishna, the central figure of the epic the Mahabharata, he is worshipped with his beloved Radha. Mira, a sixteenth‐century poet saint, dedicated a lifetime of worship to Krishna. Welsey Nan Baker, ‘Sexual Ethics Beyond Sexual Difference: Luce Irigaray and the Ethics of “Women’s” Writing’, PhD thesis, Emory University, 2012. During the 1980s and 1990s, despite the efflorescence and grand standing of the Festivals of India, art activity was limited to a smattering of galleries in Delhi and Bombay, and from 1995 to 2000, a somewhat more vigorous programme of exhibitions at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi led by director Anjali Sen. Chaitanya Sambrani, ‘The Medeaprojekt and Beyond.’ In: Nalini Malani 1969. New Delhi: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, 2015, p. 158. Yashodhara Dalmia ‘Arpita Singh.’ In: Gayatri Sinha (ed.), Expressions and Evocations Contemporary Women Artists of India (Marg, 1996). Even in the early 1990s, when economic reforms were underway, the average Indian lived on less than a dollar a day. The economist Sanjeev Sanyal in the Indian Renaissance: India’s Rise After A Thousand Years Of Decline (Viking, 2008) speaks of

Notes

the ripple effect of liberalization in the period 1991 to 1993: ‘For the first time in a millennium, India had the courage to face the real world – to compete in a global export markets. Even more importantly it opened itself intellectually and culturally to the outside world … The year 1991 saw the unwinding of a mindset that was irrationally suspicious of the outside world and of innovation, that abhorred entrepreneurship and risk taking, and above all, that was paralyzed by an ancient fear of failure’ (p. 57–58). 26 The red pigment used on women’s foreheads, identified as a mark of marriage. 27 Paper presented at the educational conference at Ambur, Tamil Nadu, on 6 September 2006.

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Feminism as Activism in Contemporary South African Art Karen von Veh ­Introduction During the 1970s and 1980s, while feminism was gaining strength and momentum in most Western countries, South African politics ensured that the majority of the population, both men and women, were economically, socially and politically dispossessed and oppressed based purely on their race. In response, artistic and cultural activities were biased towards activism, where, unsurprisingly, the imbalance of white power over black people appeared to be the driving force in any cultural manifestation of social consciousness. One of the consequences of anti‐apartheid resistance was that the feminist movement was largely overlooked or considered irrelevant in the light of more urgent social inequalities and identified as a white Western middle class (largely academic) phenomenon.1 Furthermore, both the Afrikaner Nationalist government and the movement for national liberation were patriarchal and hierarchically organised (to the detriment of women), so there was an inherent distrust for feminists’ calls for ­alternative power relations. Nelson Mandela’s release from jail on 11 February 1990, signalling the end of apartheid, was the catalyst for a shift of emphasis in the oeuvre of many South African artists. Content in art shifted from liberation politics, activism and resistance art to the constraints that society imposes on individuals, ­moving from the political to the personal and embracing issues such as gender, sexual orientation and the construction of identity as legitimate subjects for interrogation in the post‐apartheid era. The new constitution of South Africa, drawn up and passed into law in 1996, includes a clause on the equality of all its peoples: The state may not unfairly discriminate directly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth.2 This clause is one of the reasons that the South African constitution is, arguably, considered one of the best in the world as it is the first to ban discrimination against sexual orientation.3 It also might be understood to usher in a new ‘postfeminist’ era in A Companion to Feminist Art, First Edition. Edited by Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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South Africa as women’s equality has now been legally ratified. In addition, for the LGBTI4 community, further legal judgments have ensured equality with respect to access to medical aid, insurance, immigration, inheritance and the adoption and ­custody of children.5 In November 2006 the Civil Union Act was signed, making South Africa the first country in Africa to legalise gay marriage, and the fifth to do so internationally.6 The reality is, however, that paper proclamations do not always manifest in lived experience, and whereas the ‘state’ is clearly constrained in the way it may act, this does not necessarily apply to the behaviour of individuals. Despite the constitutional guarantee of freedom for all, women (particularly rural women7), children, migrants and the gay community face ongoing, unjust infringements of their rights and freedoms, including violence and intolerance, often due to a history of entrenched patriarchy and exacerbated by the scourge of continued financial inequality. In the cultural production of twenty‐first‐century South Africa, these lived realities have resulted in a pendulum swing back to what might be identified as ‘activist art’ or ‘consciousness raising’ in response to the upsurge of violence and turmoil in society. Feminism, however, has always espoused an activist approach to art making in that it is inherently a response to injustice and unequal balances of power (with a gendered bias). In this chapter I consider the work of two contemporary women artists, Zanele Muholi8 and Diane Victor9, whose work might be said to employ a feminist approach that demonstrates activist intentions. Muholi is a world‐renowned photographer, a lesbian and an avowed activist whose photographs and portraits of the LGBTI community in South Africa have made visible those who many people would prefer to ignore. Her aim is to respond to the violence and discrimination that is meted out to homosexuals in South Africa by giving her subjects a face, a voice, a story and a presence in society that cannot be dismissed. Diane Victor has a long history of washing society’s dirty laundry in public. Her work is often difficult to look at as she graphically represents the depths of moral depravity to which all‐too‐many South Africans have sunk. Her response to the violence towards women and children is comprehensively covered in one particular work on which I focus, entitled No Country for Old Women (2015). To understand why Victor and Muholi are taking a militantly activist approach to their artmaking one needs to consider the historic reasons for the levels of violence and the effect this has on South African society and on women in particular.

­A context for gendered violence in South Africa South Africa’s continued social problems are largely a result of historic imbalances of power that were written into law under the system of ‘separate development’, or apartheid. From 1948 until the early 1990s, the Nationalist government, run by a white (mostly Afrikaans) minority, were in power and the black majority were denied basic human rights, including quality education, good healthcare, decent housing, equality and the right to vote. During the apartheid era, violent protests and criminal acts were understood by the black community to be a form of resistance that would render the townships ungovernable and thereby promote political change. The struggle for e­ quality thus legitimised crime and violence as a liberation strategy. Instead of the new democratic ANC government ameliorating this situation, however, it has rather enabled the enrichment of a small elite, through corruption and maladministration, leaving the

­A context for gendered violence in South Afric

masses (who voted them into power) disenfranchised and increasingly angry. There is, therefore, an ongoing struggle for equality now identified in economic terms, with ­blatant displays of unequal distribution of wealth in the ‘new’ South Africa.10 The Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) has found that ‘South Africa’s high rate of violent crime is just as related to economic and social marginalisation as it was during the 1980s’.11 The permeation of violence in South African society includes distressingly high levels of violence against women and children, including both rape and murder. The Medical Research Council reports that ‘South Africa has a female homicide rate six times the global average, with half the murdered women killed by an intimate partner’.12 The year after the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as the first democratically elected president of the ‘new’ South Africa in 1994, Human Rights Watch released a report indicating that South Africa’s rape figures are among the highest reported for any country not at war.13 Rape is identified in existing studies as an act of power and an assertion of male dominance over women, and is particularly prevalent in South African society because, as mentioned above, substantial gender inequalities persist despite constitutional decrees.14 It has been suggested that the state of transition from one political dispensation to another might exacerbate uncertainty and violence leading to sexual and gender‐based violence as a result of a wholesale suspension of the rule of law.15 Kylie Thomas, Masheti Masinjila and Euniuce Bere, however, disagree with this interpretation, and in their comparative study of political transitions in Southern African countries they suggest that, actually, the sexual and gender‐based violence should not be recognised as ‘an aberration, but rather as systemic and structural, with a clear purpose in demonstrating male dominance over women … As feminists have shown its root cause is not turbulence but patriarchy.’16 When violence in general increases, as it has in South Africa for so many reasons, then so too do attacks against those most vulnerable. As Thomas et al. explain: ‘transition has not altered the fact that [South Africa] is patriarchal in nature: thus, violence against women within the domestic sphere is so widespread as to be regarded as normative, and sexual violence, and in particular rape, has been used a means to punish and control women.’17 In addition, social studies also point to the widespread abuse of alcohol exacerbating these high statistics of domestic violence. The 2012 Human Rights Watch report indicates a lack of political will as a contributing factor to the alarming rise in statistics of gender‐based violence,18 and several studies indicate the failure of the criminal justice system to investigate and punish sexual violence has created a culture of impunity for rape. Furthermore, the rulings of magistrates and judges sometimes trivialise the gravity of rape, yet they are still supported in their careers by the patriarchal status quo. For example, in September 2011 President Jacob Zuma controversially selected Judge Mogoeng to serve as chief justice. The announcement was met with severe criticism from civil society and opposition parties as his appointment was considered to have eroded the gains that had been made in addressing violence against women. Many civil society groups accused Mogoeng of undermining the rights of women and girls, not only by issuing lenient sentences in cases of rape and domestic violence but also because he regularly invoked in his rulings myths about rape that often blamed the victims and excused perpetrators.19 It is clear from these examples that the combination of violence and patriarchal entitlement is an ongoing problem in South Africa, but more insidious attempts at social

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control have arisen recently with a populist revival of African ‘traditional’ values. The call to embrace traditionalism has come as part of ongoing attempts to decolonise current social and educational practices in the country. Embracing traditional values, however, might include outdated notions of a woman’s role, including subservience to her husband or father and accepting that her primary role is to bear and raise children. In addition traditional practices such as patriarchal polygamy and lobola (a bride price) encourage men to believe that they ‘own’ the woman to whom they are married.20 One of the more troubling aspects of African traditionalism is the notion that homosexuality is characterised as ‘un‐African’, an attitude that was revealed in a survey, ‘Pride and Prejudice: Public attitudes toward homosexuality’, conducted in 2008 by Benjamin Roberts and Vasu Reddy. Their finding reveals ‘a moral and cultural view that African societies are somehow unique and therefore immune to what is perceived to be a western and European import’.21 This very brief overview of current social norms indicates that women artists in South Africa cannot afford to be complacent, despite the advances written into legislation for the equality of all people. The state of South African society is so far from ‘postfeminism’ that I would argue there is a real need for a form of gender activism to expose ongoing patriarchal controls in response to local conditions, as seen in the work of Muholi and Victor.

­Zanele Muholi In August 2009, Muholi and nine other South African women artists took part in an art exhibition, Innovative Women, supported by the Department of Arts and Culture. It took place at Constitution Hill22 in Johannesburg and the minister of Arts and Culture, Lulu Xingwana, was due to open the exhibition. Instead she walked out before her opening speech, reportedly calling the exhibition ‘immoral’ because she deemed Zanele Muholi’s images of black women holding each other in bed offensive and sexually explicit.23 Danielle de Kock explains that Muholi and other artists on the exhibition understood this response as blatant homophobia in the light of the ubiquitous display of nudity and heterosexual sexuality that abounds in the media.24 It is sadly ironic that such prejudice was expressed in the very site where the constitutional freedoms and equality of all South Africans are upheld and defended in the Constitutional Court. Xingwana subsequently denied homophobic claims, but her response points to an insidious permeation of the perception, identified in Roberts and Reddy’s survey, that homosexuality is not normal in African society.25 A black lesbian is therefore identified as ‘abnormal’ both because she rejects men and because she is identified as ‘un‐African’. The debate that arose in the media around this exhibition raises the very issues that Muholi is aiming to address. She calls herself ‘a visual activist’ and her ‘cause’ is the invisibility of black South African lesbians, particularly those who come from poverty‐ stricken areas in the black townships and who are therefore doubly marginalised.26 Muholi states that she wants to ensure that these women, who have been overlooked in both art and popular culture, ‘are included in the women’s “canon”’.27 The images in Innovative Women were taken from a series of photographs entitled Being (2007). Muholi says of this series:

­Zanele Muhol

Being is an exploration of both our existence and our resistance as lesbians/women loving women, as black women living our intersecting identities in a country that claims equality for all within the LGBTI community, and beyond. The work is aimed at erasing the very stigmatisation of our sexualities as ‘unAfrican’, even as our very existence disrupts dominant (hetero)sexualities, patriarchies and oppressions that were not of our own making.28 The works consist of photographs of couples, either in bed or just standing together with their arms around each other in an affectionate way. They are statements of lived experience rather than demonstrations of explicit sexual activity, so Xingwana’s call in response to this exhibition for ‘a long overdue debate on what is art and where do we draw the line between art and pornography’ is particularly incongruous.29 The triptych Being (2007) is the only work showing the women actually in bed (Figure 4.1). These three photographs are, ironically, the most aestheticised of all the images on display, visually reminiscent of idealised reclining nudes by ‘old masters’ found in countless ­galleries and collections, by artists such as Rubens, Titian or Boucher, for example. Muholi has carefully composed the figures so their softly curved bodies are framed within the crumpled black sheet on which they lie, almost creating a vignette effect. The lighting is even and the figures appear languid and peaceful. The careful composition and approach to these representations of women is so far from being pornographic that Xingwana’s statement is laughable. Similarly, the other couples in the Being series, who have been photographed in Muholi’s more typical forthright, almost documentary, style are merely women who are presenting themselves as couples in their township setting, in much the same way as heterosexual couples might appear in domestic situations. Another irony with reference to Xingwana’s debate between pornography and art arises from the historical precedent for such images. For example in the modernity of nineteenth‐century Europe, genre scenes of everyday life were de rigueur for avant‐garde artists and would include scenes of ordinary interiors and typical domestic tasks. Muholi’s images of women arranging their hair or washing themselves in a basin remind one of Berthe Morisot’s and Edgar Degas’ Impressionist paintings of women at their toilette, or bathing (see both 1886 versions of The Tub by Degas, for example).30 Muholi is merely presenting lesbian ­couples engaged in daily activities, asserting that for many this is: our ‘modernity’, our reality. In doing so she normalises the presence of black lesbians in a society that has steadfastly refused to acknowledge their existence. The series Faces and Phases (2007–) is, in Muholi’s words: ‘dedicated to all the black lesbian survivors and victims of hate crimes’.31 In her essay ‘Mapping our histories: A visual history of black lesbians in post‐apartheid South Africa’, Muholi lists some of the harrowing experiences that these women have suffered merely because of who they are.32 Many of these crimes are not reported to the police; certainly, many of them are not prosecuted adequately. The International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) website has a report on the trial of three men who gang‐raped and stabbed a South African lesbian, Eudy Simelane, in April of 2008.33 Only one of the three was convicted of the murder, and the report states that he showed no remorse. Moreover, Monica Mbaru, IGLHRC’s African Program Coordinator, notes that she was appalled at the level of homophobia in the courtroom when she attended a hearing on the matter in July, to the extent that the Judge, Ratha Mokgoathleng, objected to the use of the word ‘lesbian’

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Figure 4.1  Zanele Muholi, Being, 2007, Triptych, Silver gelatin prints and a C‐ print. Each print: 30 × 22.5 cm © Zanele Muholi. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York.

­Zanele Muhol

Figure 4.1  (Continued)

in court. The report goes on to explain that Simelane is one of several examples of lesbian victims who were murdered execution style or by stoning, in both Johannesburg and Cape Town between 2007 and 2009, indicating a deep‐rooted intolerance for homosexuality despite South Africa’s constitutionally entrenched freedoms and rights.34 In a more recent incident in June 2013, lesbian Duduzile Zozo (26) was found half naked, with a toilet brush jammed into her vagina in Thokoza, in the Gauteng East Rand. She died from the internal injuries suffered in this horrific version of ‘corrective rape’.35 In the same newspaper article that reported on Zozo’s attack Khuthala Nadipha states: ‘At least 31 lesbian women have been brutally murdered in the last 10 years and it is reported that at least 10 lesbians are raped or gang‐raped per week in Cape Town alone.’ The Faces and Phases portraits by Muholi do not indicate any of the atrocities suffered by these women. In an effort to avoid re‐victimising them she has presented instead positive images that affirm the existence and individuality of black lesbians (Figure 4.2). They are mostly ‘head‐and‐shoulders’ shots, typical of formal portraiture. Each image is titled with the sitter’s full name and place of residence, a brave act on behalf of the subjects as they are being publicly identified as lesbians in a less‐than‐ accepting milieu and could run the risk of reprisal from the community. Each woman gazes confidently at the viewer, expressing her personality and asserting her individuality. There is no attempt to make them conform in terms of clothing, angle, lighting or background. In Faces and Phases Muholi is asking us to consider:

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Figure 4.2  Zanele Muholi. Boitumelo Mimie Sepotokele, White City, Soweto Johannesburg, 2013. Silver gelatin print. Image size: 76.5 × 50.5 cm. Paper size: 86.5 × 60.5 cm. © Zanele Muholi. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York.

What does a lesbian look like? Is there a lesbian aesthetic or do we express our gendered, racialised and classed selves in rich and diverse ways? Is this lesbian more ‘authentic’ than that lesbian because she wears a tie and the other does not? Is this a man or a woman? Is this a transman? Can you identify a rape survivor by the clothes she wears?36 This ongoing project is an attempt by Muholi to validate these women and to provide an archive of the existence of black lesbians in their communities in response to their previous invisibility. Archives are mostly understood as records constructed by the dominant hegemony; they are indices of power as the content of archives depends on who decides what is worth keeping or recording. Muholi’s archive is an alternative to the value‐laden rigidity of official record keeping, where images of indigenous people became anonymous specimens of racial otherness. The recording of the ‘black body’ has a particular historic racial and gendered power bias in South Africa, related to the hierarchies of colonial domination and the male gaze. Images of women in particular

­Zanele Muhol

Figure 4.3  Diane Victor, No Country for Old Women, 2013. Smoke drawings on glass. Size: + 4 × 4 m. Reproduced courtesy of Diane Victor.

have been used to construct stereotypes about racialised sexuality, where the black female body becomes a receptacle for male fantasies of the exotic other.37 Muholi’s ­photographs specifically deconstruct this history of difference and her images of black lesbians fall instead into a category of remembrance and recognition that is more inclusive and therefore more representative. One might call it an ‘ordinary’ archive or an ‘everyday’ archive because it is a non‐sensational record of personal encounters. It is also a continuously growing ‘living’ archive and thus provides ‘the foundation of the production of knowledge in the present, the basis for the identities of the present and for the possible imaginings of community in the future’.38 In this way Faces and Phases is an attempt to redress the inequity in South African memory, which is inherently patriarchal and steeped in colonialism. The series does so in a positive way as the hate crimes against these women are acknowledged, but not listed or detailed, as they

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would be in official record keeping. By creating her visual archive Muholi is both affirming for the present and memorialising for the future those whom society would prefer to forget.

­Diane Victor Diane Victor also responds to the violent hate crimes against black lesbians using the photographs taken by Muholi in Faces and Phases as source material for one of her panels in her large Gothic window triptych entitled No Country for Old Women (2015) (Figure  4.3). In a panel directly left of the central image is a woman with a bruised, beaten face and her lower half clothed in a coyote skin, referring to the motto – ‘give a dog a bad name and hang it’.39 This is not a single victim, but her face is a composite made up from several of Muholi’s portraits of lesbian survivors.40 She thus represents the collective anonymity and blanket approbation that black lesbian women suffer in South Africa because, as Victor explains, ‘she’s disposable, or she needs corrective rape or needs to be beaten’ to pull her back into line, as if she can be ‘cured’ by such treatment (Figure 4.4).41

Figure 4.4  Diane Victor, No Country for Old Women, 2013. (Detail) Smoke drawings on glass. Size: + 4 × 4 m. Reproduced courtesy of Diane Victor.

­Diane Victo

Pervasive violence, particularly towards women and children, has been the subject of several works by Diane Victor.42 In No Country for Old Women, Victor documents some recent infamous examples of the rape, murder and mutilation of women that have made news headlines, and others, like the beaten anonymous lesbian, that form part of the voiceless and nameless statistics that indict South African society. Each ‘window pane’ is shaped like a coffin and contains one of the victims of violence. Above and below them are disturbing fragments of imagery such as faces that appear to be watching the atrocities unfold, and a lamb’s head in the centre referring to the martyrdom of Christ in religious terms, but also to the slaughter of animals for food, perhaps equating the vulnerability of edible livestock with the crimes against the women she has documented here. In the central panel, instead of a dove of peace at the apex there is a dead crow hanging upside down above a Madonna figure, signifying the lack of salvation depicted in these panels. In the lower register a horizontal corpse lies, reminiscent of The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb by Holbein (1522), except that this figure is a dead woman, not a saviour who will triumphantly rise again. Each image is drawn in smoke onto glass, using the smoke from a candle while the glass is suspended above the artist. The details are then carefully brushed or scratched out of the carbon stains on the substrate, lightening the soot marks and leaving an extremely fragile, easily damaged surface that evokes the vulnerability of her subjects.43 The effect created is reminiscent of transparent spirits gently fading into obscurity as details of the violence inflicted on them are somewhat softened because they are hard to see; it is as if we are already forgetting their torment by looking through instead of at them, and we are left with a sense of sadness and pathos at the plight of these ghostly victims. The inspiration for this work was the senseless murder of Victor’s elderly aunt, 82‐year‐old Angela Reardon, who was buried in her vegetable garden by robbers so they could come back and finish clearing out her house without interruption. Angela Reardon’s portrait appears on the far left of the panels, where she stands, a little old lady clutching the spade that was used to dig her grave and with her spirit apparently floating away above her head. Victor states that she was angered by the callousness of the robbers who thought Reardon was so insignificant that no one would miss her, and the dismissiveness of the police who had ‘more important’ cases to deal with than the death of an elderly spinster, with no children to mourn her and no impact on the economy because of her age.44 The title45 arose from Victor’s perception that these responses indicated Reardon’s apparent low social worth; but as she notes, it is all women who seem to be disposable in South Africa, and reported statistics confirm this.46 One example of these statistics is situated on the right‐hand side of the centre panel, and is the only other named victim illustrated in Victor’s triptych. The rape and murder of teenager Anene Booysen in February 2013 made newspaper headlines for many months thereafter because of the sheer brutality of the attack. After being badly beaten and raped she was disembowelled with a blunt object and left to die.47 Victor has worked from a small ID photograph of her face, taken from newspaper reports, to commemorate the waste of this life that her rapist considered so worthless. She is placed in her glass ‘coffin’ dressed in a baroque manifestation of her own intestines and reminiscent of the wax anatomical models with removable stomachs that were used to train doctors in the eighteenth century. Her helplessness is manifest in this comparison as, in death, she echoes the passivity of a medical mannequin, something to be used, disembowelled and abandoned without further thought.

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In the central position between all these ‘worthless women’ we see a Madonna figure, identified by her exposed burning heart. She holds her unappealing child out awkwardly towards the viewer, as if indicating the plight of so many women who are quite literally ‘left holding the baby’. This image is, in fact, inspired by an unfinished painting by ­Pre‐Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown called Take Your Son, Sir! (1851).48 The implications are similar in this image, as the woman is presenting the child to the father, presumably in the hope that he will accept paternity and support both mother and child.49 Research by the Institute of Race Relations found that ‘single parent households, are the norm in South Africa’ and usually it is the mother who supports the children.50 The legal right to child support is inferred by what looks like a gavel at the Madonna’s feet, similar to those used in court to pronounce judgment. However, this gavel is ­rubber‐tipped and not wooden, so the enactment of law is diminished, perhaps even rendered worthless and ineffectual by implication.51 The child grant provided by the South African government is as little as 350 rand per child, per month, which translates to approximately $25 at the exchange rate at the time of writing. This is barely enough to pay for food and, while there are no clear figures nationally, it is estimated that defaults on maintenance payments by absent fathers run into millions of rand.52 The lack of resources for child‐rearing is a double‐edged sword for women in South Africa, who are often unable to be present and involved in caring for their children if they also have to support the family financially. The resultant parental absence can have long‐lasting consequences, and this is perhaps one of the factors referred to in the pregnant woman in the left‐hand side of the triptych. This woman appears to be carrying a fully grown man inside her and Victor explains that she was trying to express the latent potential for male children to become perpetrators of violence against women, once they are adults.53 This woman is thus unknowingly carrying the potential for her own demise, illustrating the perpetuation of criminality and neglect that drives the cycles of violence in South African society. The small child on the right represents literally hundreds of cases of the abuse and murder of children. The UNICEF report on Violence against Children in South Africa states that ‘statistics from the South African Police Service record a total of over 50,000 crimes against children for 2010/11’.54 The child in this panel totters along innocently while behind her a shadowy insubstantial figure leans forward as if to take  hold of her, or perhaps just to hold her hand. This figure is deliberately ­ambiguous – we do not know if it is a protector or a perpetrator – and this ambiguity reflects the statistics of child molestation and murder, where many of the perpetrators are friends or community members known to the family, or might even be family members. The sperm‐like objects floating in the background and obscuring the adult figure perhaps indicate the sexual nature of most of these abuses, where the statistics that 52% of the ­violence against children is sexual in nature, whereas it is only 16% for  adults.55 UNICEF further states, with reference to the South African situation: ‘The belief that sex with a virgin can cure HIV and AIDS is also a possible factor in the rape of babies and children.’56 This belief initiated a series of baby rapes in South Africa that shocked the country in the years leading up to the end of the 1990s and into the early twenty‐first century.57 Victor responded by producing a particularly harrowing etching on this topic entitled Made to Measure (2005), which is part of an ongoing series of intaglio prints

­Diane Victo

named Disasters of Peace (inspired by Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War [1810–1820]). Like Goya’s graphic depictions of dismemberment and torment in the aftermath of armed conflict, Victor forces us to confront awful truths reported in local newspapers as a strategy to overcome the desensitisation that arises from relentless media coverage. In Made to Measure a female baby is depicted twice, once as a wrinkled helpless newborn and below her is an outline of the same child showing the skeleton and internal organs, simulating an X‐ray view. Superimposed over the lower child’s body is a realistic tonal rendering of an erect adult penis, graphically indicating the horrible physical trauma that must ensue in the rape of a baby. This is a very difficult image to look at as it demonstrates in visual terms the numerous reported events that most people prefer not to think about. Once seen, however, one can never forget it. The Disasters of Peace series, and this image in particular, thus functions in a similar manner to Victor’s altarpiece, by disturbing viewer complacency through the exploration of distressing subject matter. In the panel next to the child we see a woman holding desperately flapping chickens and trying vainly to protect herself under a hail of stones. This image responds to the ongoing stoning to death of women who have been accused of witchcraft, mainly in the rural areas of Mpumalanga and Limpopo. Victor notes that this type of violence against women does not get much news coverage, but in her research for this image she found up to 20 or 30 reports of ‘witches’ being stoned to death each year.58 Throughout history witches are usually identified as older women who are no longer dependent on men. They are often outspoken and difficult to control, so they make the perfect scapegoat for any misfortune in the village. They are also often without protection, having o ­ utlived their spouse, or with their children having moved to the cities for work, so they are easy to ‘punish’. This woman is holding the frightened chickens to reference the potential for some kind of ritual sacrifice which she is perhaps going to perform. However, they could also metaphorically refer to the helpless nature of the ‘witch woman’ herself, who is being sacrificed because her life is no longer worth anything in the social hierarchy. In this way we return to the worthless nature of the old woman, Victor’s aunt, who inspired this altarpiece. Victor has quite literally turned these victims into contemporary martyrs. They refer directly to contemporary events in South Africa, so they perhaps lack subtlety in their attempt to illustrate the worst aspects of certain documented atrocities. The overall effect of smoke on glass memorialises their suffering rather than glorifying their lives, and, unlike the brightly coloured stained glass saints shown victorious in Gothic church windows, these victims appear insubstantial and helpless. The fragility of their smoky dissolving forms is also contrasted by the rigidity of the Gothic framework in which they stand. According to Robert Furneaux Jordan, the Gothic style represents hundreds of years of remarkably consistent ecclesiastical and political rule.59 During the Middle Ages in Europe, state funding of cathedrals resulted in ongoing work for the guilds, ensuring that society was economically viable during the building process. Religious worship and diocesan regulations maintained a controlled and docile ­populace benefiting both church and state. Gothic cathedrals are the manifestations, therefore, of spiritual power wielded by a male God as well as earthly patriarchal power wielded by kings and abbots, priests and bishops. It is ironic that this Gothic style is now employed by Victor to reveal the misuse of patriarchal power in contemporary South Africa.

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­Conclusion Victor prefers not to be identified as a feminist artist, because she is uncomfortable with labels of any description, despite the emphasis in many of her works on injustice towards women. Muholi prefers to be identified as an ‘activist’ artist. This disinclination to be associated with feminism is, as mentioned in the introduction, partly due to its historic associations in South Africa with white, middle‐class academics, evoking a form of ­elitism that both Victor and Muholi would certainly eschew. In addition there are still many social problems due to historically entrenched financial and educational inequalities which perpetuate racial divisions instituted by apartheid. This may further alienate young black women from the implied ‘sisterhood’ of feminism as they see no congruence between their experience of life in South Africa and that of previously advantaged white women. These facts problematise the historic identity of feminism in South Africa to the degree that both black and white women are wary of associating with a movement that some identify as having a troubled association with race. Furthermore, in the post‐apartheid era, constitutional guarantees of equality suggest that young women today do not need to continue fighting as they should be able to access all the things feminists stood for, including education and equal employment. This leads to a reluctance to espouse feminism as it is seen as unnecessary. It is clear, however, as noted in this chapter, that there are so many insidious examples of the erosion of women’s safety and their freedom of expression, across all racial and social categories, that women cannot afford to become complacent, nor can they accept ‘postfeminism’ as an accurate identification for contemporary South Africa. As explained at the beginning of this essay, the aim of feminist art is to redress ­inequality and injustice, and it could, therefore, be said to function as activism by creating awareness of social problems faced by women. It is clear that Muholi and Victor work within the framework of ‘feminism as activism’, and with good reason. South Africa today appears schizophrenic if one balances the good intentions outlined in the constitution with the experience of living as a woman in a permanent state of insecurity, irrespective of race, class or sexual preference. This dichotomy between intention and reality provides inspiration for the work of both artists. As demonstrated in the examples discussed above they each aim to raise awareness of ongoing injustices and provide a voice for the women of South Africa who still need to actively claim their right to the constitutional guarantee of equality. Muholi and Victor may not identify themselves as feminist artists, but in promoting the fight for women’s freedom and equality they are certainly supporting the core purpose of feminism today.

Notes 1 For readings on the introduction of feminist ideologies in South Africa and the difficul-

ties encountered by feminist artists under the apartheid regime see: Marion Arnold, Women and Art in South Africa (Claremont: David Philip, 1996); Marion Arnold and Brenda Schmahmann, Between Union and Liberation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Brenda Schmahmann, ‘Shades of discrimination: The emergence of feminist art in apartheid South Africa’, Woman’s Art Journal, Spring/Summer 2015, pp. 27–36; Karen von Veh, ‘Is there a place for feminism in contemporary South African art?’, De Arte, no. 73, 2006,

Notes

pp. 28–42.; and African Arts, vol. 45 Number 4 (Winter 2012) which is dedicated to South African feminism. 2 Constitution of the Republic of South Africa Act, N0108 of 1996. ss. 9.3. 3 Brenna M. Munro, South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come: Queers Sexuality and the Struggle for Freedom (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), p. vii. 4 LGBTI is the commonly used acronym for the lesbian, gay bisexual, transsexual and intersex community. 5 Benjamin Roberts and Vasu Reddy, ‘Pride and Prejudice: Public attitudes towards homosexuality.’ HSRC Review, vol. 6, no. 4. November 2008. Available: http://www.hsrc. ac.za/uploads/pageContent/1607/Pride%20and%20Prejudice.pdf, accessed 16 November 2018. 6 Ibid. 7 For a discussion on the plight of rural women in poverty‐stricken areas of South Africa, who often suffer domestic abuse and a denial of their rights, see Brenda Schmahmann, ‘Needled women: Representations of male conduct in Mapula embroideries.’ Textile: Cloth and Culture, vol 5, 2007, pp. 10–33. 8 Zanele Muholi was born in 1972 in Umlazi, Durban, and lives in Johannesburg. She is an artist, a photographer and a visual activist. She co‐founded the Forum for Empowerment of Women (FEW) in 2002, and in 2009 founded Inkanyiso (www.inkanyiso.org), a forum for queer and visual (activist) media. Muholi studied Advanced Photography at the Market Photo Workshop in Newtown, Johannesburg, and in 2009 completed an MFA: Documentary Media at Ryerson University, Toronto. She is an Honorary Professor at the University of the Arts/Hochschule für Künste Bremen. Muholi has won numerous awards, including the ICP Infinity Award for Documentary and Photojournalism (2016); Africa’Sout! Courage and Creativity Award (2016); the Outstanding International Alumni Award from Ryerson University (2016); the Fine Prize for an emerging artist at the 2013 Carnegie International; a Prince Claus Award (2013); the Index on Censorship – Freedom of Expression art award (2013); and the Casa Africa award for best female photographer and a Fondation Blachère award at Les Rencontres de Bamako biennial of African photography (2009). Muholi is listed in the 2016 ArtReview Power 100. Her Faces and Phases series has shown at Documenta 13; the South African Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale and the 29th São Paulo Biennial. She has had many other solo exhibitions and taken part in group exhibitions internationally and in South Africa. Stevenson Gallery, 2017. Zanele Muholi Biography. Available: http://www. stevenson.info/artist/zanele‐muholi/biography, accessed: 16 November 2018. 9 Diane Victor was born in 1964. She received her BA Fine Arts Degree from the University of the Witwatersrand. She won the SASOL New Signatures Award in 1987 and became the youngest recipient of the prestigious Volkskas Atelier Award in 1988, which granted her a ten‐month stay at the Cité International des Artes in Paris. Since 1990, Victor has been a part‐time lecturer, teaching drawing and printmaking, at various South African institutions, including the University of Pretoria, Tshwane University of Technology, Open Window Academy, the University of the Witwatersrand, Rhodes University and the University of Johannesburg. She has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in South Africa and internationally and has taken part in several residencies, including those in Poland, Vienna, the United States and China. Victor is represented in many public and private collections in South Africa and abroad, including The Victoria and Albert Museum, London and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She has been

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the festival artist at ABSA KKNK, Innibos and Aardklop festivals. Victor is represented by Goodman Gallery and is associated with David Krut printmaking in South Africa ART.co.za. Diane Victor. Artist’s CV. Available: http://www.art.co.za/dianevictor, accessed 16 November 2018. Steven Hunt points to the examples of unequal distribution of wealth which are illustrated in the minority who can enjoy the constantly upgraded shopping centres or live in leafy suburbs with good schools nearby for their children, while many stay in shanty towns without adequate sanitation or legal electricity and still have to travel long distances to work. The reasons for these economic divisions include: massive unemployment, poor quality education, a huge rise in teenage pregnancies and growing drop‐out rates in high schools, the influx of migrants from all over Africa (exacerbating the unemployment problems) and overcrowding in the cities due to local and immigrant people desperately looking for work. HIV and AIDS is an added social problem leading to poverty‐stricken child‐headed households due to the death of one or both parents, or economically active adults becoming too ill to earn a living. Steven Hunt. Turning the ‘Tide of Violence in South Africa.’ In: The International Development Research Centre (2003). Available: https://www.idrc.ca/en/article/turning‐tide‐ violence‐south‐africa, accessed 16 November 2018. Hunt, ibid. Achille Mbembe explains that economic inequality is a factor affecting most African countries, leading to riots and protests, and the effects are exacerbated by high levels of corruption. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (California: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 46, 68. His description of unrest in African post‐colonies is certainly borne out in the realities of the South African post‐apartheid milieux. Vuyo Mkize, ‘Shocking Female Murder Statistics.’ IOL News (4 October 2011). Available: http://www.iol.co.za/news/crime‐courts/shocking‐female‐murder‐ statistics‐1.1150205, accessed: 16 November 2018. Isak Niehaus notes that despite rape being one of the most under‐reported crimes in South Africa, 49,280 cases of rape and attempted rape were reported to the South African police in 1998. Niehaus further states that 41% of these victims were younger than seventeen. Niehaus, ‘Masculine domination in sexual violence: Interpreting accounts of three cases of rape in the South African Lowveld’. In: G. Reid and L. Walker (eds), Men Behaving Differently: South African Men Since 1994. (Cape Town: Double Storey Books, 2005), pp. 65–87. Such studies as were carried out, for example by Rachel Jewkes and Naeema Abrahams, ‘The epidemiology of rape and sexual coercion in South Africa: An overview.’ Social Science and Medicine, no. 55 (2002), pp. 1231–1244; Lloyd Vogelman, The Sexual Face of Violence: Rapists on Rape (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1990); Diana Russell, Behind Closed Doors in White South Africa: Incest Survivors Tell their Stories (London: MacMillan Press, 1997); Diana Russell, ‘Rape and child sexual abuse in Soweto: An interview with community leader Mary Mabaso.’ South African Sociological Review, vol. 3, no. 2 (1991), pp. 62–83; Christine. A. Varga, ‘Sexual decision‐making and negotiations in the midst of AIDS: Youth in KwaZulu‐Natal, South Africa.’ Health Transition Review, vol. 7, no. 3 (1997), pp. 45–67. Kylie Thomas, Masheti Masinjila and Eunice Bere, ‘Political transition and sexual and gender based violence in South Africa, Kenya, and Zimbabwe: a comparative analysis.’ Gender and Development, vol. 21, no. 3 (2013), pp. 519–532. Ibid., p. 520.

Notes

17 Ibid., p. 523. 18 Human Rights Watch 2012: World Report. Available: https://www.hrw.org/world‐

report/2012, accessed: 16 November 2018.

19 Some of the questionable rulings that Mogoeng made in the Bophuthatswana

Provincial Division (now the North West High Court, Mafikeng) indicating his gender insensitivity include the following: ‘In the 2001 case of S v Mathebe, the accused was convicted of assault with the intention to do grievous bodily harm. He had tied his girlfriend onto his car and dragged her on a gravel road at a high speed for 50 meters then later on denied her access to medical treatment till the following day. Here, Justice Mogoeng reduced the accused’s sentence from 2 years imprisonment to a fine of R 4000 or 2 years imprisonment suspended for 5 years. One of the reasons he raised for his decision was that the victim “provoked” the accused and that she did not suffer serious injuries. Hence there was no need for a harsher sentence. The 2005 case of S v Moipolai involved the rape of an 8 months pregnant woman by her long‐term boyfriend and father of her two other children. Justice Mogoeng reduced a sentence of 10 years imprisonment to 5 years and he stated here that the rape was not as “serious” as it would have been had a stranger committed it. Finally, the 2006 case of E. Modise v State, dealt with attempted rape (marital rape). The couple were said to have been separated for a year when the accused committed the crime. Justice Mogoeng gave a concurring judgment where the 5 years imprisonment sentence was reduced. He stated that some of the reasons for this were that the rape was not as “serious” as it would have been had a stranger raped her and that no injury had been caused to the victim. The Southern Africa Litigation Center also released a research report in which it criticised justice Mogoeng’s judgments in cases involving child rape where in some cases he implied that the non‐violent nature of the rapes negated the seriousness of the offence.’ Emily Kinama, ‘Is the Appointment of Justice Mogoeng as Chief Justice in the Interest of the People?’ ISS: Institute for Security Studies. (2nd September 2011) [Available: https://issafrica.org/iss‐today/is‐the‐appointment‐of‐justice‐mogoeng‐mogoeng‐as‐ chief‐justice‐in‐the‐interest‐of‐the‐people, accessed: 16 November 2018. In response to the appointment of Mogoeng, Ilham Rawoot reported on child rape cases that caused controversy including: ‘State vs Serekwane … in 2005, Mogoeng reduced from five years’ to three years’ imprisonment the sentence of a man who had attempted to rape a seven‐year‐old girl. Among the factors he considered in reducing the sentence were that the accused was 30 years old and a first‐time offender, married with two children and a soldier who earned R1,800 a month. He did not explain the relevance of these factors.’ Also, ‘In a 2004 case, State vs Mathule … Mogoeng reduced the sentence of a man convicted of raping a seven‐year‐old girl from life imprisonment to 18 years, the minimum.’ Again there was no compelling evidence to support the lenient sentence. (Ilham Rawoot, ‘Mogoeng’s Shocking Child Rape Rulings.’ Mail & Guardian (2 September 2011). Available: https://mg.co.za/article/2011‐09‐02‐mogoengs‐shocking‐ child‐rape‐rulings, accessed: 16 November 2018.) 20 A combination of the mis‐use of patriarchal power and traditionalism is illustrated in Jacob Zuma’s rape trial. Zuma was accused of rape by a young woman and family friend, known as ‘Kwezi’, in November 2005. During the trial, he invoked traditional culture and used arguments about Zulu sexuality and sexual behaviour to suggest that the intercourse was consensual. According to Nolwazi Mhkwanazi, he also spoke only in isiZulu during the trial, using local idioms which ‘marked him as a “real” Zulu man’,

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allowing him to ‘effectively make the case that his everyday actions were influenced by his Zuluness’. Nolwazi Mhkwanazi, ‘Miniskirts and Kangas: The use of culture in constituting postcolonial sexuality.’ Darkmatter in the ruins of Imperial Culture (2 May 2008). http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2008/05/02/miniskirts‐and‐kangas‐the‐use‐ of‐culture‐in‐constituting‐postcolonial‐sexuality, accessed: 16 November 2018. Zuma’s main excuse was that ‘Kwezi’ had initiated the event (which she vehemently denied) and ‘in Zulu tradition nothing could be worse than refusing her gratification’. Richard W. Johnson, South Africa’s Brave New World: The Beloved Country since the End of Apartheid (London: Allen Lane, 2009), p. 547. The trial in 2006 acquitted Zuma of all charges, but although he was not found technically guilty of rape his attitude was an indictment on a narrow (and expedient) interpretation of the so‐called revival of ‘traditional values’, particularly in relation to the rights of women. For further information on patriarchy, traditionalism and Jacob Zuma, see Von Veh, K., ‘Textual textiles: Gender and political parodies in the work of Lawrence Lemaoana.’ Textile: Cloth and Culture, vol. 15, no. 4 (2017), pp. 442–460. Available: http://www. tandfonline.com/eprint/CqMDnhYQ8kDRuZ9JhNF2/full, accessed: 16 November 2018. 21 Roberts and Reddy, op. cit. A direct example of institutionally sanctioned prejudice is recorded by Xavier Livermon, who explains that South Africa’s council for traditional leaders, in a debate on same sex marriages in South Africa, officially declared homosexuality ‘unAfrican’ and argued that same‐sex practices remained incompatible with ‘African culture’. Xavier Livermon, ‘Queer(y)ing Freedom: Black Queer Visibilities in Postapartheid South Africa.’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Stuies, vol. 18, no. 2–3 (2012), pp. 297–324. 22 Constitution Hill Precinct in Braamfontein Johannesburg has a very complex history going back to 1892, when the Old Fort was built under the Zuid Afrikaanse Republiek. The prison complex of the fort has impacted deeply on hundreds of thousands of ordinary South Africans lives as it was essentially a transitory prison where prisoners were held until they were sentenced before being transferred to serve their prison terms elsewhere. It is also notorious for its harsh treatment of prisoners. Along with common criminals there were many political activists including Mahatma Ghandi, Robert Sobukwe and Nelson Mandela. Winnie Madikizela‐Mandela, Albertina Sisulu and Fatima Meer among others were held in the women’s jail. The entire site was injected with a new meaning and energy when it was chosen in the mid‐1990s as the site for the new Constitutional Court, which is the highest court in the country on constitutional matters and is the major representative institution of South Africa’s new democracy. The court building itself was built using bricks from the demolished awaiting‐trial wing of the former prison. The court building is open to the public who want to attend hearings or view the art gallery in the court atrium. The court houses a collection of more than 200 contemporary artworks chosen by Constitutional Court judge Albie Sachs, including works by Gerard Sekoto, William Kentridge and Cecil Skotnes. The areas consisting of the old prison now host many exhibitions, both educational and informative, as well as ongoing contemporary art exhibitions with themes that showcase South Africa’s rich heritage and advocate human rights. Furthermore, Constitution Hill is an imperative platform for heritage, education, and tourism related programmes, enabling visitors to experience the unique way that South African transition has built hope for the future out of the pain of the past.

Notes

23 Lisa Van Wyk, ‘Xingwana: Homophobic claims “baseless, insulting”’, Mail & Guardian.

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27 28

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Arts and Culture (5 March 2010). Available: https://mg.co.za/article/2010‐03‐05‐ xingwana‐homophobic‐claims‐baseless‐insulting, accessed: 16 November 2018. Brenna Munro explains that although the scandal was focused on Muholi’s works there were other examples of black semi‐naked bodies, by photographer and sculptor Nandipha Mntambo, which also aroused Xingwana’s ire. Brenna M. Munro, op. cit., p. 299. Danielle De Kock, ‘Faces and phases: Zanele Muholi at FRED London Ltd.’ ArtThrob. (24 June to 4 August 2009). Available: http://artthrob.co.za/Reviews/2009/07/Danielle‐ de‐Kock‐reviews‐Faces‐and‐Phases‐by‐Zanele‐Muholi‐at‐Brodie/Stevenson.asp, accessed 16 November 2018. The debacle around Xingwana’s remarks continues a trend of homophobia that has been identified in other parts of Africa as well as South Africa. For example in 2010 Uganda proposed a bill in parliament to impose the death penalty for homosexual acts. Instead of condemning this suggestion President Jacob Zuma proposed sending an ‘acknowledged homophobe’ (Jones, 2010), Jon Qwelane, to Uganda as South Africa’s ambassador. This decision suggests to onlookers ‘a tacit endorsement of the repressive stance Uganda is taking on homosexuality’. Both quotes from Michael A. Jones. ‘How South Africa might endorse Uganda’s anti‐homosexuality bill.’ Gay Rights (19 January 2010). Available: http://gayrights.change.org/blog/view/how_south_africa_might_ endorse_ugandas_anti‐homosexuality_bill, accessed: 20 January 2010. Zuma’s own stance on homosexuality was demonstrated by statements made before he became president in 2006. At a Heritage day meeting in KwaZulu‐Natal, Zuma stated that same‐sex marriages were ‘a disgrace to the nation and to God’ and that: ‘When I was growing up unqingili [homosexuals in the Zulu language] could not stand in front of me. I would knock him out’. IRIN, ‘South Africa: Zuma slammed for views on homosexuality, same‐sex marriage.’ IRIN Humanitarian News and Analysis. Johannesburg (27 September 2006). Available: http://www.irinnews.org/ news/2006/09/27/zuma‐slammed‐views‐homosexuality‐same‐sex‐marriage, accessed: 16 November 2018. He later apologised for the remark but as noted in the Ugandan affair his views have apparently not changed. In addition to other references on Muholi cited in this article, information on her views and her work can be found in the following publications: Jeanne Fouchet‐Nahas, ‘Zanele Muholi ‐ Bayobona: So, they have eyes to see, they will see’. Interview. In: Transition. Catalogue. (Les Rencontres de la photographie, Arles/ Market Photo Workshop, Johannesburg: Editions Xavier Barral. 2012), pp. 132–133; Tamar Garb, ‘Interview with Zanele Muholi’. In: Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography. (Gottingen: Steidl, London: V&A Publishing, 2011), pp. 286–289; Zanele Muholi, Faces and Phases: Our queer black aesthetics in South Africa (Munich, Berlin, London, New York: Prestel, 2010); Kylie Thomas, ‘Zanele Muholi’s intimate archive: Photography and post‐apartheid lesbian lives’, Safund: The Journal of South African and American Studies, vol. 11, no. 4 (2010), pp. 421–436. Available: http://www.tandfonline. com/doi/abs/10.1080/17533171.2010.511792, accessed: 16 November 2018. Van Wyk, op. cit. Stevenson Gallery, 2007. Zanele Muholi: Being. Original credit: http://www.stevenson. info/exhibitions/muholi/being.htm now available on: http://b1ackness.wordpress. com/2012/08/02/zanele‐muholi‐difficult‐love, accessed: 16 November 2018. Van Wyk, op. cit.

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30 There is an interesting correlation in the controversy that arose over Degas’ bathers

31 32

33

34 35

36 37

38 39 40 41 42

which bears comparison with Xingwana’s rejection of Muholi’s images. According to Eunice Lipton, there was a problem with the reception of Degas’ images by men in the nineteenth century because they were unable to categorise his bathers within their frame of reference. Firstly, they were not idealised or aesthetically beautiful (as expected in images of nudes at the time), nor were they easily identified in terms of their social status. This left the male viewers at the time unable to find an adequate response to the images, and their uncertainty led to much approbation and some scathing attacks in the media on the ugliness and possibly pornographic nature of Degas’ bathers (for a full discussion see Eunice Lipton, ‘Degas’ Bathers: The Case for Realism.’ Arts Magazine, vol. 54, 1980, pp. 94–97). Similarly, Xingwana’s remarks can be understood as an uninformed response born from a lack of understanding of how these women might fit into contemporary society. Stevenson Gallery, 2010. Zanele Muholi: Faces and Phases. Available: http://archive. stevenson.info/exhibitions/muholi/facesphases.htm, accessed: 16 November 2018. Zanele Muholi, Mapping Our Histories: A Visual History of Black Lesbians in Post‐ Apartheid South Africa (PDF of essay published online, 2013), pp. 19–22. Available: http://www.socialresilience.ch/fileadmin/afrikakomp/redaktion/Dokumente/ Veranstaltungen_2013/ZM_moh_final_230609.pdf, accessed: 16 November 2018. IGLHRC. ‘Scant justice in South African murder case; courts must value lesbian lives!’ International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (23 September 2009). Available: http://www.iglhrc.org/cgi‐bin/iowa/article/pressroom/press release/976. html, accessed: 16 November 2018. Ibid. Khuthala Nandipha, ‘“Corrective rape”: Lesbians at the mercy of powerless men’. Mail & Guardian (15 July 2013). Available: https://mg.co.za/article/2013‐07‐15‐00‐violence‐ against‐black‐lesbians‐is‐a‐struggle‐for‐power, accessed: 16 November 2018. Muhole (2013), op. cit., pp. 27–28. The story of Sarah Baartman, known as the Hottentot Venus, is an infamous example of racial and gender related exploitation. Baartman was a Khoikhoi woman with the national characteristic steatopygia, or distended buttocks. European explorers took her to England in 1810, and then to France, and displayed her in fairs and freak shows as a curiosity, until she died in Paris in 1815. Her remains were then dissected by the French anatomist Georges Cuvier and plaster moulds made of her body as part of his studies on exotic sexuality (Arnold 1996, op. cit., pp. 25–26). Her skeleton remained at the Musee de l’Homme in Paris until, after much lobbying by Nelson Mandela and others, her remains were repatriated for burial in 2002. Caroline Hamilton, Verne Harris and Graham Reid (eds). Refiguring the Archive (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), p. 8. This is an English idiom signifying that a person’s plight is hopeless once their reputation has been tarnished, even if it is unjustified. Diane Victor, interview between the author and Diane Victor in Johannesburg (2 May 2013). Diane Victor, ibid., 2013. Examples of Victor’s works on violence towards women and children include: Wise and Foolish Virgins (2008) (for a discussion on this work see Karen von Veh, Diane Victor: Burning the Candle at Both Ends (Johannesburg: David Krut, 2012), pp. 58–62); Nastagio Degli Onasti and the Difficult Decision (1992); and from the Disasters of Peace

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55 56 57

series (2001–), She was killed like a goat; Give a Woman Enough Ribbon and She Will Hang Herself; In Sheep’s Clothing; Made to Measure; All for the Right Price; Witch Hunt; Why Defy, among others. See also Victor’s series of smoke drawings of lost children in the installation Stained Gods (2006) and the AIDS victims in her installation for the Sasol Wax Exhibition The Recently Dead (2006). A discussion of these works can be found in Elizabeth Rankin and Karen von Veh, Taxi 013: Diane Victor (Johannesburg: David Krut, 2008), p. 89. Victor has previously drawn with smoke on a paper substrate which, ironically, is even more fragile than the images on glass as it is impossible to use fixative without damaging the image. The works on glass are protected by placing another glass layer over the original using spacing blocks to ensure a small gap of air is left between the layers. It is therefore impossible to touch (and thereby damage) the drawing once this protective layer is in place. Victor, op. cit. This references the 2007 Coen brothers’ film, No Country for Old Men, based upon the 2005 Cormac McCarthy novel of the same title, which in turn quotes the opening line of Yeats’ 1933 poem Sailing to Byzantium. Victor (2013, op. cit.) notes that this occurred at the same time as Oscar Pistorius’s shooting of Reeva Steenkamp, which made international headlines, unlike the murder of Angela Reardon. She points out that this was not only because of Pistorius’s fame but because Steenkamp was young, beautiful and had a correspondingly high value in society (despite the fact that her career was only starting and she had not yet had any children). Hannah Osborne, ‘South Africa Rape Victim Anene Booysen Was Disembowelled By Hand.’ International Business Times (17 October 2013). Available: http://www.ibtimes. co.uk/anene‐booysen‐rape‐murder‐trial‐johannes‐kana‐514685, accessed: 16 November 2018. Victor 2013, op. cit. For an extended feminist reading of this painting, see Marcia Pointon, ‘Interior Portraits: Women, Physiology and the Male Artist.’ Feminist Review, no. 22 (Spring, 1986), pp. 5–22. Heartlines, 2014. ‘The trouble with child maintenance’, Heartlines: The Centre for Value Promotion (27 January 2014). Available: http://www.heartlines.org.za/the‐trouble‐with‐ child‐maintenance/#sthash.2CMmIclw.dpuf, accessed: 16 November 2018. Victor (2013, op. cit.) explains that this is also the tool she used to insert the metal frames into the larger wooden surround. It was also used for tapping the glass in and for Victor it became a symbol almost, for the entire process, of making this work and the meaning it carries so it is in a way a self‐reflexive symbol. Heartlines, op. cit. Victor 2013, op. cit. UNICEF report on Violence against Children in South Africa (2012) p. 9. Available: http://www.cjcp.org.za/uploads/2/7/8/4/27845461/vac_final_summary_low_res.pdf, accessed: 16 November 2018. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 12. One of the reasons contributing to the scourge of extreme responses to HIV and AIDS at this time was the denial by the then president, Thabo Mbeki, and his minister of health, Manto Msimang, that HIV led to AIDS. Their collective denialism effectively

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killed thousands of AIDS sufferers by restricting access to antiretrovirals (because they were too expensive), and by promoting traditional healers, a ‘healthy diet’ and the advantages of garlic, beetroot and lemons as a viable alternative. Johnson op. cit., pp. 186, 187, 213. This policy was continually ridiculed by the media and by the international community, to no avail, and Johnson states: ‘By 2008 2.5 million South Africans had already died of AIDS, often in misery and ostracism, many deliberately deprived of medicines which could have saved them’ (ibid., p. 215). Johnson also notes that AIDS was more effective in depleting the youngest and strongest of Africa’s population than the slave trade (ibid., p. 216). For a fuller discussion on the political and personal complexities behind this mistaken policy, see ibid., pp. 182–195 in Johnson. Also see Andrew Feinstein, Chapter 12, ‘Dying of politics’ in After the Party: A Personal and Political Journey Inside the ANC (Johannesburg and Cape Town: Johnathan Ball, 2007), pp. 123–153 for a detailed analysis of both the effects on the country and the motivations of the people involved. 58 Victor op. cit. 59 Robert Furneaux Jordan, Western Architecture: A Concise History. Toledo: Thames and Hudson, 1988, p. 127.

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Moving Towards Paratactical Curating: A Critical Overview of Feminist Curating in Istanbul in the Twenty‐First Century Ebru Yetişkin Today we live in what Bernard Stiegler has dubbed a ‘systemic stupidity, which can also be called functional stupidity’ at a planetary scale.1 We are incapable of exploring the complexity of multi‐layered problems because they are produced outside the cognitive capacity of human agencies. The contaminated outcomes of such exploitative stupidity, which evolved through the use of algorithmic settings and ‘enigmatic technologies’, deprive its users of their knowledge/power of the world, and of their capacity to orient themselves to it.2 Algorithms, as processes, instructions or sets of rules to be followed in problem‐solving operations, are not only based in software. Today, there is a growing interest in understanding how algorithmic technologies change the ways in which various social worlds of humans and nonhumans are organized, governed, and controlled. However, the workings of algorithms are hidden and malleable, ‘likely so dynamic that a snapshot of them would give us little chance of assessing their biases’.3 Today we cannot know how big corporations and states use algorithmic technologies to control and govern tactically. Therefore it becomes critical to explore the hidden operations of these platforms, which adopted algorithmic governmentality tactically. In this way users can respond by subverting various figurations of such systemic stupidity because, as a result of the decline in capacity to question the world and to reflect on the information, users are expected to mediate quasi‐automatically. That is, the system promotes and determines the structure of thought and behaviour in which critical thinking is programmed. For this reason, contemporary feminist ­reflections become critical for revealing and extracting how such mechanized acts are processed and tactically circumvented. Focusing on algorithmic control in Turkey, this chapter offers a paratictical overview of the knowledge/power production of feminist curating in Istanbul, where the majority of the contemporary art scene is based. With the aim of discussing how feminist curating has developed through quasi‐automatic responses, first, I will introduce the politico‐economic programmes of the government, with a special emphasis on  ­gender politics and contemporary art. In the second part, the impact of the politico‐economic programmes will be discussed by emphasizing the shifting paradigms in curating. Finally, in the last part, a critical overview of feminist curatorial practices will be presented to reflect on the production of knowledge and power in relation to how f­ eminist curating, feminist art and feminism are widely understood in Turkey today. A Companion to Feminist Art, First Edition. Edited by Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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­ he politico‐economic programmes in Turkey in the early T twenty‐first century In the early twenty‐first century in Turkey, feminist thought has remained predominantly heteronormative, ­women’s‐issues oriented and human centred. To understand how contemporary feminist curating mediated a quasi‐automatic mode of knowledge/ power, first one should explore the operational logic of the politico‐economic programmes of the government, because in Turkey, the contemporary art scene is strongly attached to leading cultural institutions which are funded by big corporations and foundations that collaborate with the government. In 2002, the Turkish government introduced a politico‐economic programme with a special emphasis on development and democratization. One of the aims was to attract foreign investment especially from European countries, which are the major business partners of Turkey. As a result of the integration process to EU regulations, this ­programme supported the active participation of women in public life, development of and collaboration with women’s rights organizations, passing legislation against violence against women (including sexual and economic exploitation), the development of preventative measures against all kinds of discrimination, preventing the suicides of women and honour killings, and raising awareness in rural areas about the education and schooling of girls.4 In 2012, this programme was revised and the called Vision 2023.5 Between 2002 and 2012, the government took strong measures to address women’s rights in Turkey in a positive way. Collaborating with non‐governmental agencies, local authorities and media, government programmes incorporated legislation and campaigns, aimed at creating transformations in the schooling of girls, violence against women in the family, liberation of women through entrepreneurial grants and the ­integration of headscarved women to education and employment opportunities in state institutions. Today, while the democratization process allowing the admission of headscarved women to education and employment opportunities in state institutions has been achieved, other barriers to women’s equality still remain unresolved.6 The prevalence of physical violence throughout Turkey has remained virtually unchanged over the course of twenty years.7 These acts of violence include torture, murder, physical and psychological violence and forced marriage.8 Despite their inclusive and exclusive approaches, both programmes considered women as a natural resource for the reproduction of a national workforce. Since the beginning of the 2000s, the ageing population of Turkey has been at risk, no longer easily used as cheap labour to attract foreign investment. Taken as a national force, women were asked to use their fertility power to fight back the enemy and create a labour pool. In 2008, then again in 2013 on International Women’s Day, repeating his concern about those who want to eradicate the Turkish nation, the then prime minister, now president, Erdoğan urged women to have at least three children. In 2016, adopting algorithmic control, such a well‐defined work description was reiterated again, this time giving the emphasis on the centrality of humans and humanity in the fight for national survival in the global n ­ etwar: ‘Rejecting motherhood means giving up on humanity’ and ‘A women who rejects motherhood, who refrains from being around the house, however successful her working life is, is deficient, is incomplete.’9 Besides attempts at banning abortion in 2012, another proposed law in 2016 suggested that men who have been convicted on charges of rape and sexual abuse of women

­The contemporary art scene in Istanbul during the 2000

(including under‐age girls) have their s­ entences indefinitely postponed if they agree to marry the victim.10 Although these law proposals were withdrawn after widespread protests by feminists in various cities in Turkey, the operational logic of the government programmes remained the same: the more women are used as a reproductive workforce, the better to fulfil its goals. For this reason, ­feminist criticism in Turkey has been predominantly focused on ­heteronormative women’s issues. Both versions of the programme also considered an extremely restricted notion of gender by maintaining a heteronormative framework, ignoring the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals. In rapidly increasing numbers, especially after 2013  –  when moral values were strongly attached to and dominated by heteronormative gender roles and patriarchal codes – there have been custodies and detentions used against those who struggle for gender equality, freedom of expression, ecological diversity and democratic participation along with bans and closures of women’s organizations, and against economic and cultural exploitation.11 Further, a report of Transgender Europe (2016) revealed that between January 2008 and September 2016, 44 trans and gender‐diverse individuals were murdered in Turkey.12 This intervention was another control operation of the government to monitor the users’ action to fulfil its goals. The control of (feminist) criticism within contemporary curating is important for the implementation of the government programmes because politico‐economic imaginaries constitute the fabric of world making and they acquire the power to form and transform (and control) user actions and behaviours. But today it is extremely difficult for most people living in Turkey to think about the possibilities of imagining alternative futures and having more, or even basic, rights, beyond constantly opposing the violation of basic rights, protesting against ignorance and manipulation of facts, adapting to the dominant circumstances or migrating to other cities. Hence, those subject to ­algorithmic governmentality, both human and non‐human, are expected to mediate quasi‐automatically. Then, contemporary feminist curating becomes even more critical because it can create alternative politico‐economic imaginaries, which can subvert the control of user actions and behaviours.

­The contemporary art scene in Istanbul during the 2000s A comparative analysis of the 2002 and 2012 versions of the government programme reveals drastic changes in the conception and realization of cultural activities in Turkey. Acknowledging the fact that the impact of neoliberal politico‐economic programmes is not the only factor for the shifting dynamics in the contemporary art scene, it is important to bridge the gap from a critical perspective. With the aim of increasing national reputation and competitive assets for attracting foreign investment, the 2002 version of the government programme had clear statements about the development of cultural institutions, projects and all kinds of artistic activities, with a special emphasis on ­plastic arts and Turkish Islamic arts. On the other hand, the 2012 version presented numerous vague statements with no specifications about the development of cultural institutions, projects or any genre of artistic activities. Attributing female agency to Turkey and reproducing the normative dualistic distinction between ‘us v. them’ (i.e. Muslim Turk v. the West), the 2012 programme emerged as a hegemonic production line of neo‐orientalist discourse.

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The 2002 version of the politico‐economic programme of the government, which both competes and collaborates with big corporations in global markets, aimed at fulfilling its profit‐oriented goals. As a tactical operation for raising its reputation and credibility for foreign direct investment, the government supported the cultural activities of foundations and scientific research institutions through tax exemptions, which resulted in the establishment of art museums and art centres through sponsorship.13 As a result of the 2005 tax exemption, most of the leading art institutions in Istanbul, including Elgiz Museum (2001), Sakıp Sabancı Museum (2002), Proje4L (2002–2004), Istanbul Modern Museum (2004), Contemporary Istanbul (2005), Pera Museum (2005), Santral Istanbul Museum (2007–2013), Arter (2010), SALT (2011), ArtInternational (2013–2016) and Borusan Contemporary (2011) were established.14 In other words, the emergence and the struggle of the leading cultural institutions in Turkey are determined and strongly linked with the government’s politico‐economic programmes. In the twenty‐first century, the politico‐economic priorities of art institutions had a great impact on the quasi‐automatic knowledge and power production of contemporary curating in Turkey. These leading institutions have been mostly directed by a male‐ dominated older generation of tycoons. Despite their devoted younger followers, and although criticisms of ‘alternative’ curatorial approaches were presented in their ­programmes, these were not incorporated in the organizational operations of these leading cultural institutions. They did not fully engage with or develop hybrid associations of artists, scientists, engineers, architects, designers and other disciplines or with maker, do‐it‐yourself (DIY), hacker and activist communities; nor did they invest in subversive transdisciplinary research through financial and infrastructural support. Contemporary research, also in curating, has been widely understood within a quasi‐ automatic mode and maintained in an interdisciplinary context by adopting a ‘transition between social sciences and art in the context of postmodern discussions’.15 Curating as mediation During the 2000s, the contemporary art market in Istanbul emerged and simultaneously globalized. Curating, one of the most debated issues throughout the 1990s, had become institutionalized and as a result the collectivist mood of the 1990s was replaced by an individual approach.16 The late 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s were ­dedicated to the charismatic star curators, who were collaborating with powerful institutions of contemporary art both internationally and in Turkey. At the same time, ­curating as a profession was also situated within the so‐called creative industries. In the second decade of the 2000s, some leading curators quit working with museums and private art institutions, criticizing their neoliberal market‐oriented operations, elitism, unskillfulness and discouragement. Some started working only with galleries, artist initiatives and international institutions abroad, or created alternative curatorial spaces, or even stopped calling themselves curators. For example, a few years before his retirement, Vasif Kortun clarified his position in his detachment from the market‐oriented curating: Because making exhibitions is asking questions. [A curator] interrogates, opens up a subject, a field of thought. I am particularly searching for associations, passings from one to another, antagonisms, or rather, different responses to the same question that are free from visuality.17

­The contemporary art scene in Istanbul during the 2000

Simultaneously, the number of commercial art galleries, which had been opened by wealthy benefactors, corporate entities and private collectors had grown from a dozen to over 200. Works and signature names offering little or no consideration or subversive critique of the state’s politico‐economic programme became the widely acknowledged norm. Although independent art initiatives played an important role in pushing the limits of the mainstream cultural institutions, they lost their critical power in recent years: Attempts at rapid institutionalization during the 2000s resulted in the establishment of independent artist initiatives formed by artists who were excluded or preferred to remain excluded from such practices. Although these initiatives, which have roughly a 10‐year history, aspired to demonstrate the possibility of sustaining contemporary art without grand financial support and aimed to ­provide a platform for non‐institutional artists, these initiatives weakened and began to fall apart after 2010, eventually losing the power they had at the beginning of the 2000s.18 Hence the growing institutional settings and market conditions required critical validation and recognition from experts to stabilize the financial value of contemporary artworks and the careers of artists in the market. Even academics, supposedly independent from market concerns, contributed to this economic knowledge/power production and reputation‐building and value exchange. Within a post‐Fordist neoliberal economy, the intellectual labour of the scholar‐as‐curator became an instrument for increasing the symbolic value of the a­ rtworks, the art events and the art institutions as commodities. These second‐generation curators were basically expected to meet the demands of art institutions and take care of the politico‐economic interests of their employers, owners and sponsors. As a result, becoming event organizers with competitive entrepreneurial skills, in these years ‘curators have been described as middlemen or mediators’.19 The inclusion of contemporary feminist curatorial critique within institutional art events also helped and empowered the sustainability of these leading cultural institutions. Despite Helena Reckitt’s praise for the ‘feminist spirit of self‐reflexivity’, the curators’ production of knowledge and power was mostly mediated to sustain the central authority of leading cultural institutions.20 For example, the ‘self‐reflexivity’ that highlights the terms of its operations played out powerfully in the 11th Istanbul Biennale curated by the Zagreb Collective, What, How & for Whom (WHW), in 2009. Taking seriously Fraser’s admonition that ‘the institution is us’, curators Ivet Curlin, Ana Dević, Nataša Ilić and Sabina Sabolović made visible the economic and labour conditions within which they acted. The 11th Istanbul Biennial had an overt didactic agenda, which was manifest in the statistics and figures which appeared on the walls under the roof of the Tobacco Warehouse and were repeated in the exhibition guidebook and the collection of texts. Hence, rather than a subversive knowledge/power production, feminist curatorial criticism remained a tactical side effect in established art institutions in Turkey. It was also used and mediated to conserve the status quo in the name of critical thought in institutional settings. But today feminism is not considered as concerning merely ‘women’s issues’ any more. As articulated in the works of posthuman feminist materialist scholars, such as Donna

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Haraway, Karen Barad, Jane Bennett and Rosi Braidotti, humans are positioned as entangled in broader ecologies of other living creatures and non‐living objects and spaces.21 Therefore, contemporary feminist curating was immersed in transdisciplinary ways in which we work together with other non‐human species and non‐living objects as well as spaces to activate vital forces, agencies and capacities for feeling, learning or acting. However, such a line in feminist theory could only be echoed in an extremely restricted manner for the sustainability of the leading cultural institutions within the global contemporary art scene.22 Although transdisciplinary feminist perspectives were adopted as conceptual tools for curating in leading art institutions, they were extremely weak at revealing and subverting the hidden operations of these leading institutions that are linked with the politico‐economic programme via their sponsors, owners and supporters. Thus the correlation of the use of knowledge/power with the increasingly centralized authority of the government and dominant cultural inhibitors in established critical outlets resulted in the celebration and promotion of what we might call ‘risk‐free’ works. Because the executives of these leading institutions (including the curators) were strongly attached to the power of the elite, as a result of the increasing threats to their supporters, this also facilitated the quasi‐automatic repetition, reproduction and conservation of ready‐made knowledge/power (e.g. about how contemporary feminism, feminist art and curating is understood and practised). The development of transdisciplinary feminist political knowledge/power production in curatorial practice was mostly ignored. The power of feminist curating (especially at the institutional level) predominantly coincided with and was subordinated to the government’s politico‐economic p ­rogrammes. Contemporary feminist curating in Turkey remained remarkably reactionary in the second decade of the 21st century. I­ t became weaker at creating ways of collaborating among diverse disciplines, fields, and heterogeneous groups. Various practices of unlearning and the maintenance of conventional ways of learning became epidemic in closed‐ circuit, self‐styled circles of contemporary art in Turkey. Algorithmic politics of curating A politico‐economic programme can be considered an algorithmic technology of control. If one can explore how a politico-economic programme is coded by processes, instructions and sets of rules to be followed in problem-solving operations, it should also be possible to reveal the subsumption of those that are run and controlled by such a programme. Contemporary feminist curating in Turkey seems to be captured in an enclosed, commercialized and managed ‘platform’, which is a third kind of organizational principle – the other two being the market and the state.23 By way of interfaces (such as the 2005 tax exemption) both human and non‐human ‘users’ (including curators, museums, artists, galleries, exhibitions) are included within useful operations in such a way that platforms begin to p ­ roduce and structure governance tactically. This is also where systemic stupidity seems to emerge, as we do not have enough information about the workings of such control within a platform. In the twenty‐first century, the contemporary art scene in Turkey was developed by the users’ value and the platform’s surplus value. That is, simply, if the values produced by a curator or a leading art institution supported the goals of the government programme, they would be facilitated either financially or by socio‐cultural reputation. Users make use of the platform to link existing systems of knowledge and power. In this way, the platform becomes an organizational principle to preserve the authority of the

­The contemporary art scene in Istanbul during the 2000

existing knowledge/power. In doing so, the platform incentivizes the users to incorporate more of their own interests within its operational layers. If a curator is not constantly connected to the programme, rejects being a user of the platform, and acts independently, the curator and the curatorial work are widely devalued, or worse, ignored because they simply would not produce or exchange any value for the platform. Within algorithmic control of curating, curatorial works are expected to establish patterns of relating among users in the platform. This clarifies how the dominant cultural inhibitors in established outlets celebrated and promoted the ready‐made knowledge/power and risk‐free works mentioned above. There is an incentive for subsequent users to link their existing systems to benefit from the hybrid associations established by earlier users, who in turn enjoy the benefits of increased hybrid associations as more users’ systems are incorporated to the platform over time. In the first decade of the century, the emergence of leading art institutions was perfectly well suited to the goals of the politico-economic programme (i.e. Istanbul’s gentrification and promotion to foreign investors, particularly from Europe). The instructions of the 2002 government programme were customized to incorporate more of the users’ interests, commoditized within the operational layers of the platform. The productions of the art market, including curatorial works, did not fully support and empower the goals of the government programme­. The algorithmic control of curating was somewhat soft. Despite Turkey ranked as the tenth country with highest contemporary art auction sales turnover in the world in 2010, several reports also revealed that most artworks were sold to the collectors from the Middle East; that is, the expected foreign capital from the European countries was still pending.24 For the platform, the conception of art shifted, especially after the ‘Istanbul Art Boom Bubble’ in 2012.25 Contemporary art as a business was not profitable enough to be considered by Vision 2023, but drew the state’s attention post boom. The art world’s critical interrogation of, and opposition and resistance to, the sanctions of the programme were either increasingly considered as grave instances of disobedience or simply disregarded and trivialized. If artists, curators, directors and board members of art institutions would not agree with the goals and actions of the platform, they were ignored, censored, detained, devalued, attacked, exiled and even destroyed. They were coerced to become the user and the surplus value of the platform. Control by algorithmic governmentality became stronger. As a critical feminist intervention, The Black Band initiative, founded in 2011 by Pelin Başaran, began to research and document the cases of censorship in art since 2000. Their work indicates the increasingly oppressive and transgressive measures of the government programmes in Turkey.26 Platforms control their core interactions (the creation, curating and consumption of values) by scaling and repeating such interactions to suit their goals. In Turkey, with the aim of achieving the goals of Vision 2023, the controlling power of the platform (the state along with its networked collaborators such as corporations, foundations, organizations and individual entrepreneurs) has increased through a scaling operation in contemporary arts. Especially since 2013, due to the increase of this forceful scaling operation, contemporary art workers were silenced and coerced to fine‐tune their cultural activities to create and curate surplus platform value for Vision 2023. The strong associations between the sponsors of the leading cultural institutions and the state helped facilitate the application of such a scaling operation. The investments and corporate operations of the sponsors (especially in the finance, energy, pharmaceutical and construction

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s­ ectors) became a threatening risk factor in maintaining institutional contemporary art practices, simply because their financial resources could be withdrawn. If these leading cultural institutions were to be consumed, the sponsors and owner companies would not benefit from the tax exemption. As a result of this scaling operation, an increasing number of galleries and independent artist initiatives were closed.27 Sponsorship became an aggressive instrument for corporate priorities and promotion of artworks, artists and art events as commodities. In 2016, Turkey withdrew from EU cultural funding, which was one of the most important incentives for art institutions that wanted to become more independent from their sponsorship organizations’ concerns and local restrictions. Curators were constantly asked to tune down their demands. Some of them found employment opportunities abroad. Curatorial proposals sat in computer folders and awaited an alternative future. Curating as transdisciplinary research could not develop in Turkey. Within the scaling operation of the programme, the definition and tasks of art have also been demarcated. It was clearly stated at so many levels of the state that art is expected to reflect the traditional values, opinions and tastes of Turkish society as a whole. Despite the lack of any kind of specifications about the content of these traditional values, opinions and tastes of Turkish society as a whole, the users of the ­programme were expected to act and mediate quasi‐automatically to reproduce the neo‐orientalist discourse of the 2012 government programme: ‘us v them’ or ‘Muslim Turk v the West’.

­Feminist curating in Istanbul during the 2000s Feminist curating in Istanbul since 2000 was developed in a threefold manner, as I shall detail below: curating as historiography, curating from above and tactical curating. One common aspect in all of these major lines of feminist curating is the boost in exhibiting women artists, who tackle numerous issues of gender politics and modernity in Turkey. Until today, these major lines of feminist curating have been practised concurrently and they adopted a heteronormative human‐centred approach. That is, they gave a priority to ‘women’s gaze’ and ‘women’s issues,’ however flawed. In the 2000s, visibility of feminist artists, some of whom have been practising since the 1970s, was increased with the curated solo exhibitions in leading cultural institutions.28 There were also a great number of solo shows that did not have a named curator.29 In these cases, the curating is mostly undertaken by the artists themselves, collaborating with others in the art establishments. Hence the early 2000s witnessed the establishment of art museums and the inclusion of women in institutional frameworks. In the following years, there was disengagement with mainstream institutional curatorial practices by developing collaborative initiatives, using emerging techniques and creating alternative spaces. Overall, during the 2000s, many women began to work also as curators in galleries, museums and biennales, despite problems of gender equality, socio‐economic exploitation, censorship, mobbing and sexual harassment. Curating as historiography As an extension of a transition between social sciences and art in the context of postmodern discussions, the first line of curating – increasing the numbers of women artists

­Feminist curating in Istanbul during the 2000

exhibited – played an effective role in rewriting the national history within curatorial practices in leading art institutions. Curating involves both working with archives and constructing histories; it involves looking at works of art and making choices about which to include; it is driven by ­concepts of what is important, how and what to see and what ends up being encountered in the space of the museum.30 Curating as historiography was realized through the inclusion of hitherto neglected women artists, considering women or women’s perspective as a subject matter, to the exhibition programmes and collections, mostly emerged as an extension of postmodern critique of Turkish modernization processes. During the 2000s, all‐women’s exhibitions in leading museums curated by art historians reflected this critical feminist intervention to the national historiography. For instance, the Women, Painting, Stories (2006) exhibition (organized by the Pera Museum and curated by Zeynep Yasa Yaman), reinterpreted the transformation of the image of ‘women’, but mostly by male artists in Turkish modern art: The exhibition reflected a biased perspective that celebrated republican modernization through the liberated image of women without critically investigating the changing roles of women as agents of social change or, as part of such agency, their ability to pursue careers in the arts. Such instrumentalization of women as signs of modernity in The Republic of Turkey has, one could argue, often served to obfuscate issues of female agency in the public sphere, a disparity reflected by the gap between the image of women presented by the exhibition and their absence as artists.31 A similar line of curating was adopted by another art historian, Ahu Antmen, the curator of Bare, Naked, Nude: A Story of Modernization in Turkish Painting (2015; also at the Pera Museum), which included nearly 150 works with academic studies by 44  artists. Referring to the fact that the concept of ‘the nude’ predominantly evokes the female body, Antmen pointed out that this perception – or to put it better, knowledge –that ‘Western art history almost legitimized still finds its reflection in the Turkish paintings’ (my emphasis) is a problematic issue in Turkey: Bare, Naked, Nude further explores: the evolution of the ‘artist’ from being a ‘subject’ to the Sultan to becoming an ‘individual,’ the pains of transitioning from one mindset to another; the struggle of identity between the artist and the ‘Muslim‐Turk’ [my emphasis].32 The curatorial perspective of the exhibition sought to call viewers to rethink art not merely as an object of aesthetic admiration but also as a critical knowledge production instrument, which questions the power of dominant social and politico‐economic ­settings. But it is important to note that the way of rewriting national history can also be taken as symptomatic of the epistemological problem in which contemporary ­feminist curating is trapped. In their exhibition review, both Antmen as well as Akkoyunlu and Bahar destroyed their own affective and subversive potential by quasi‐automatically reproducing the dominant neo‐orientalist nationalist discourse as they could not escape using the East– West dichotomy, the constructed association between the artist and the Muslim Turk identity, as well as the nation‐based approach towards artists and artworks. Without

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any subversive interrogation, they used a similar discourse with the government’s ­politico‐economic programme. Hence, their knowledge production augmented the politico‐economic programme without intervening in its basic protocols, so that curating remained merely a platform surplus value. Similar problems were also observed in other curatorial practices as well. In Dream and Reality  –  Modern and Contemporary Women Artists from Turkey (2011–2012), curated by Fatmagül Berktay, Levent Çalıkoğlu, Zeynep İnankur and Burcu Pelvanoğlu in Istanbul Modern Art Museum, the curators aimed at exhibiting Turkey’s social and cultural transformation from the mid‐19th century as seen through the eyes of 74 female artists from Turkey. They claimed to ‘[offer] a new, alternative perspective on the sociocultural history of Turkey.33 The exclusion of women artists from [the] modern art canon continued for some time, and as late as 2011, when art historians attempted to write a modern art narrative exclusively about women artists, they followed the pattern of Modern Art History, in which progress is demonstrated through a sequence of stories, that moves forward according to stylistic changes and heroes  –  in this case, heroines – emerge one after another.34 However, as another example of rewriting the national history as well as an interdisciplinary knowledge production, the exhibition received numerous criticisms regarding its curatorial incompetence about feminist art history discourses, lack of information about the artworks and the artists, racial stereotyping and lack of any rigorous art‐­ historical scholarship or social contextualization. Some institutions, that adopted a sociological and historiographical approach, did not even use the term ’curator’. SALT was established to be a curatorial intervention in the production of dominant knowledge/power, aiming to collect archives of recent art, architecture, design, urbanism, and social and economic histories and make them available for research and public use. These resources have been presented in exhibition format also. SALT adopted a project-based approach, integrating researchers in the organization of exhibitions as research outcomes. How Did We Get Here (2015), organized by Merve Elveren and Erman Ata Uncu, was funded by the programme ’The Uses of Art – The Legacy of 1848 and 1989’ (2013–2017; organised by L’Internationale with the support of the European Union). Elveren and Uncu created a comparative analysis of the repressive and seminal periods after the coups in 1980 and 2015. According to their research statement, the exhibition presented the severe impact of neoliberalism, in which liberal social values have been absorbed by conservative and nationalistic discourses. The exhibition also aimed at exploring the struggle for political representation by feminists, as well as environmentalists, anti‐militarists, gay rights activists, human rights defenders and many others since the 1980s, when a free market economy was introduced under military rule. The display of 270 then‐established magazines covering a wide range of topics during the 1980s revealed the scope of subsequent media censorship in Turkey by comparing the critical power of media in the formation of alternative movements in these periods. But it appears that the exhibition traced the causes of the weakness of the incomplete resistance without any reference to the creation of more radical possibilities (e.g. that emerging technologies can offer). While curating was developed as a rewriting of the national history as memory‐making research from the grass roots and although the researchers presented ‘the archive as a site of decolonial resistance’, it had no particular

­Feminist curating in Istanbul during the 2000

interest in concentrating on the ways of exploring, revealing, reusing and subverting the hidden operations of the neoliberal politico‐economic programmes in Turkey. Indeed, the exhibition didn’t emerge as a surplus platform value but it obfuscated SALT’s user value because it didn’t reveal any self‐critical knowledge about the strong links among the government and SALT, Garanti Bank, Doğuş Group, Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria and its partners, including media, which applied censorship during the 2015 coup as well. For this reason, these exhibitions have been considered risk‐free in their knowledge and power production. But it should also be noted that after a historiographic line of curating in Turkey, Merve Elveren received the 2018 Gerrit Lansing Independent Vision Curatorial Award, and established a collective of women art professionals to curate exhibitions and public events for the Istanbul Women’s Library and Information Centre Foundation (the first and only library dedicated to women’s histories in Turkey, with archival holdings of local and regional feminist movements since 1869), thus enhancing its visibility and resources. Curating from above Since the beginning of the century, established curators and museum directors have been at work cultivating collectors and other benefactors who might lend artworks for their shows, donate oeuvres to their collections or financially endow their institutions. Hence, star status was attributed to some feminist artists as a consequence of the integration of art institutions in making reputations in the global art market. As an extension of the first line, the second line of curating focused on the commoditization of ‘feminist artists’, ‘feminist art’ and ‘feminist curating’ for creating and promoting an  exclusive product, whether it an artwork or an artist’s name, in a developing art market. Hosting touring exhibitions became an integral part of curatorial practice in leading art institutions. By using this institutional authority at an international level, the second line of curating produced knowledge/power around how contemporary feminism, feminist curating and feminist art should be understood in the twenty‐first ­century in Turkey. Held Together With Water (2008), curated by Gabriele Schor (founding director of Verbund Collection, Austria) and Levent Çalıkoğlu (chief curator of Istanbul Modern Art Museum), focused on the artworks of renowned women artists who have been ­recognized as ‘the feminist artists’ in global contemporary art scene, such as Cindy Sherman, Valie Export, Sarah Lucas, Kate Gilmore and Laura Ribeiro. Established in 2004 as a corporate art collection, Sammlung Verbund Collection has been showing how women artists in the 1970s first began to collectively redefine their own conception of ‘woman’. The collection director, Gabriele Schor, coined the term ‘the feminist avant‐ garde’ and introduced it into art‐historical discourse with the aim of highlighting these artists’ pioneering work. Schor thus extended the avant‐garde canon hitherto dominated by men. In this exhibition, the curators described Nil Yalter as one of the pioneers of feminist avant‐gardes after one of her works presented in Musée Rodin, Paris in 2007, and in WACK! Art and The Feminist Revolution held in National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2007 and in MOMA PS1 in 2008. During the exhibition, one of Yalter’s works, La femme sans tête ou la danse du ventre was included both in the collections of Istanbul Modern and Sammlung Verbund. The press release of the exhibition revealed that Nil Yalter, not her work but her name, was used and promoted as an exclusive ‘product’ that recently

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joined the museum’s collection.35 In this press release, the co‐curator, Çalıkoğlu, mentioned international histories as ‘great’ when compared to local (Turkish) histories.36 This statement cannot be taken as a feminist curatorial intervention but as a covert recognition of dominant art historiography, affirming the greatness of the Western canon. Moreover, reproducing the distinction of ‘us v them’ which is repeated within the 2012 politico‐economic programme, this curatorial act becomes another surplus platform value. The curating also obfuscates the user’s value. Besides emphasizing the power of the institution, Oya Eczacıbaşı, CEO of Istanbul Modern, asserted that “art is able to establish a vision for society”. By 2017, it was clear that such a vision was synched with the Vision 2023 because in 2016, the Doğuş Group (which has strong corporate relations with the state) announced that, as part of the Galataport Project (another mega‐construction investment associated with Istanbul Development Plan in Vision 2023), ‘the developer and manager of the Galataport project, and the Istanbul Modern Art Foundation have signed a collaboration agreement for the construction of a new building for Istanbul Modern’.37 This agreement is an extension of the regentrification of Karaköy and Taksim, neighbourhoods of Istanbul where the majority of cultural activities were based at the time. Historically anticipating such activities, in 1997 Şükran Moral had created a performance, Bordello, to insert feminist critique in the 5th International Istanbul Biennial in Karaköy. Moral transformed herself into a prostitute, displaying her body by holding a sign stating, ‘Artist For Sale’, and putting another sign in the entrance of the brothel stating, ‘Contemporary Art Museum’. In this way, the artist revealed the gentrification process by the commoditization of artists, artworks and contemporary art institutions, in which the Biennial was playing an institutional role. Curating from above standardized and merged diverse conceptions of ’feminisms’ and ‘feminist art’ in Turkey by introducing ‘the feminist artists’ and ‘the feminist artworks’. For example, Akbank Art Centre launched a solo exhibition of a leading woman artist, Louise Bourgeois: Larger Than Life (2015), curated by Hasan Bülent Kahraman. He stated in an interview that ‘Although Bourgeois did not particularly identify herself as a feminist artist, as a result, she is one of the most important founders of feminist art. There is no doubt about this.’38 Such a tautological curatorial statement demonstrated that the exhibition became a means of knowledge production about what feminist art is and how it must be understood today. As another example of international division of labour and consciousness‐raising effort from above, the exhibition also confirmed that the knowledge/power production about feminism in various contexts in Turkey was synched with the feminist knowledge/power production canon of global cultural institutions (e.g. Tate Modern in London, Guggenheim internationally, MoMA in New York). Curating from above was also seen in a horizontal organizational structure. Collaborating with 35 leading scholars, activists and artists from Turkey, the United States, Chile and other contexts, in Mobilizing Memory: Witnessing Women (2014), Işın Önol and Ayşe Gül Altınay developed an exhibition of women artists (an initiative of not-for-profit organisation Anadolu Kültür) analyse the practice of memory in activist work in a transnational setting.39 Despite its emphasis on violence against women and other disempowered social groups, and provision of alternative histories and political imaginaries, this type of feminist curating also operated as a production line of hegemonic knowledge/power as it implicitly reads local diversity through the lens of globally celebrated ‘feminism’, ‘feminist art’ and ‘feminist curating’.

­Feminist curating in Istanbul during the 2000

Tactical curating The third line of curating emerged as a tactical response to institutional framings in contemporary art scenes during the 2000s. Against the increasing limitations of the ‘white cube’, several feminist artists and curators embraced public art. Artists, mostly within independent collective initiatives, took the role of curators, created alternative spaces and used a non‐hierarchical model for interaction in tactical interventions. For instance, Fulya Erdemci organized Istanbul Pedestrian Exhibitions in 2002 and 2005. Özge Açıkkol, Güneş Savaş and Seçil Yersel founded and organized the Oda Project to experiment with alternative ways to use and produce space in a city. İpek Duben organized a travelling exhibition, Re‐Duschamp (2001), in which artworks were exhibited on the streets and in buildings around the Galata area of Istanbul. In her performance entitled Seyir‐name (2005), Gülçin Aksoy transformed a private vehicle into a mode of public transportation and gave free rides in her car to anyone wanting to travel from Galata to Karaköy. During this short trip the passengers watched her work on small televisions. Övül Durmuşoğlu organized Radikal Art: Ardından Değil Karşısına (2007) that showed work on Istanbul billboards.40 Beral Madra criticized the second line of curating and opposed the dominant representation of ‘feminist art’ and mainstream ‘feminist art’ practices that acted in fear of scaring the burgeoning Turkish art market. Emphasizing the heterogeneity of women’s movements in Turkey despite class differences, in Under My Feet, I Want The World, Not Heaven (2009), Madra worked with 17 women artists and art groups in Akademie der Künste, Berlin. In 2004, Madra also curated Sphinx Will Devour You in Karşı Sanat, an independent artist‐run space against the emerging commercial gallery system and dominant culture industry in Istanbul. Although the curatorial statement reproduced normative, dualistic oppositions between the ‘West’ and ‘Islam’ quasi‐automatically, the works in Sphinx Will Devour You, which is a riddle, reminded the viewers of ‘the knowledge and intelligence inherent in women’.41 Today we can associate this riddle with enigmatic technologies that women, along with other non‐human species, are also becoming inherent within the hegemonic knowledge and intelligence production, the systemic stupidity. Suggesting a political stance by considering the exhibition as activism, Unfair Provocation (2009), curated by artist CANAN in Hafriyat Karaköy (an independent ­artist initiative that has been organizing its own exhibitions since 1996), did not take feminism as a subject matter; rather, it was considered ‘an act on behalf of feminism’.42 That is, the curating in this line emerged as a tactical intervention to the dominant conceptions of ‘feminism’, ‘feminist art’ and ‘feminist artist’ produced by the first two lines of curating. The title of the exhibition was based on the mitigation of punishment due to unjust provocation applied in trials on violence against women and it intersected with the protests against the Article 5237 of the Turkish Criminal Code under the heading, ‘Reasons for removing or reducing responsibility for criminality’. Aiming to be an inclusive alternative platform besides the exhibition, the catalogue, which was published by the Amargi Women’s Collective and edited by the art critic and journalist Aysegül Sönmez (who also created an online art journal, Sanatatak, in 2012 as a tactic against the rising control power of corporate media), included diverse aspects of feminist art theories by asking whether there is an absolute relationship between women’s art and gender issues: “Do feminist artists make feminist art by definition?” This line of curating was also developed as a practice that committed itself to counter‐hegemonic initiatives that have been giving voice to some of those who have been historically silenced and, as

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such, focused largely on works produced by not only women but also feminist artist collectives, such as Atıl Kunst, and queer artists, such as Esmeray. Instead of an authoritative individual curatorship, in the third line of curating, feminist artists have created tactical performances by supporting the diversity of ideas and creating what Hakim Bey identified as ‘temporary autonomous zones’ for critical intervention.43 During Unjust Provocation (2009), Adnan Çoker, one of the most recognized representatives of modern painting in Turkey, invited women to participate in the opening of his exhibition by wearing a hat, which had become a symbol of secularism as opposed to the religious headscarf at the time. Neriman Polat, Canan Şenol and İnci Furni responded to the call with a tactical performance, Without Hat (2009), to subvert the power of such epistemological distinction between ‘us v them’. By asserting his preference of women with hats in a period when the secular and conservative groups were having extensive arguments about the headscarf issue, the artist determined his attitude in the republican ideology over the woman’s body and used a discriminative language. As a reflex towards this attitude, three artists who are against all kinds of discrimination, Neriman Polat, Canan Şenol and İnci Furni visited the artist’s exhibition wearing turbans and took pictures … in front of the paintings.44 Tactical curating also integrated other disciplines such as architecture and design by including independent and private spaces for feminist activist art. Among many, in the Hidden in Loss (2016) exhibition in Karşı Sanat, an artist‐run space, a collective of six women artists – Arzu Yayıntaş, CANAN, Evrim Kavcar, Fulya Çetin, Nalan Yırtmaç and Neriman Polat – focused on the ways in which we, that is merely humans, can stay alive in the current politico‐economic and socio‐cultural states in Turkey. They have come together under the burden of the banned mourning of people whom no law protects and with the urgency of talking, remembering, telling, sharing and connecting. Another collaboration with the activists of Purple Roof Women’s Shelter Foundation was developed in the exhibition Solidarity Within Two Breaths (2017), organized in a restaurant and bakery, Zapata Moda, in which 30 women artists donated their artworks to be exhibited and sold to support the struggle with violence against women. The opening of the exhibition also had a screening of a short film, Sulukule, Mon Amour (2015), directed by Azra Deniz Okyay, a documentary about two young women dancers from one of the gentrified neighbourhoods of Istanbul, Sulukule. The tactical use of online platforms was also effective in creating action about the issues of gender politics from the grass roots. Arzu Yayıntaş, together with Güneş Terkol and Sevil Tunaboylu, developed A Room of Our Own (2017), a women‐only blogging platform exhibition in Ark Kültür, a non‐profit art organization, as an extension of a questionnaire and workshops on motherhood and fertility. They also included an open‐call to integrate a diversity of women artists. In 2006 another women’s initiative, Atıl Kunst, began to use the Internet as an exhibition space to ironically criticize political and social events in Turkey. In 2012, the media announced that the Ministry of Health proposed a draft law that, among other restrictions, aimed to introduce the right for doctors to refuse to perform abortions on the grounds of their conscience, and a mandatory consideration time for women requesting a termination. As a tactical opposition, two Istanbul‐based artists, Saadet Sorgunlu and Kardelen Financı, curated a call for horizontal artistic action via

­Moving towards paratactical curatin

Facebook: 7–8 July Art Action: The Abortion Ban is Legal Rape. Over two days, artists participated in the event in various studios to exhibit their artworks and defend women rights and freedoms against the use of the female body for the sake of the government’s politico‐economic programme. Over a short period of two months, this participation included around 250 artists from various cities in Turkey including Istanbul, Ankara, Diyarbakır, İzmir, Antalya and Bartın, and tens of studios and alternative art spaces that provided their spaces and technical equipment.45 As a result of public opposition, the bill was dropped, and the details of the proposal were not revealed (even for academic uses) but the attitude of some doctors and other health professionals changed, nevertheless. Finally, the exhibition Learned Helplessness: On Authority, Obedience and Control (2014), curated by Işın Önol in the collective space Muse Istanbul, presented how a conceptual intervention was realized by remediating a social psychology term which is widely used in work on violence against women. The exhibition, which was curated tactically to reflect on how systemic stupidity is operated as a control mechanism, was an outcome of collective thinking with the participating artists. Thus, the curating of this exhibition emerged as a critical intervention for exploring and subverting the ways in which quasi‐automatic responses are collectively learned and challenged. It is a sign of intelligence to do so; we have learned that something is impossible. The insight of impossibility gets encoded in an emotion, especially if punishment or pain is associated with a failed attempt. This internalized experience of incapability is often so traumatic that we never ever take another attempt, even if the conditions may have changed … We have learned helplessness … Moreover, the future can only be made from what is considered possible: We can only choose among the options for behaviour that we are aware of.46

­Moving towards paratactical curating This century, contemporary feminist curating in Turkey remained in the historical‐ normative accounts of feminist thought. It prioritized the issues of women‐oriented gender politics. Curating as historiography, curating from above, and tactical curating made an extensive impact on the contemporary art scene in Turkey, such as the inclusion of the artworks of women in the exhibitions as well as in the collections of art institutions and private collectors; rewriting the national history through the scrutiny of  women from an art historical perspective, introducing archival resources for public use to produce an alternative national history, presenting feminist art in leading art institutions and beyond. However, they also emerged and developed as an extension of algorithmic control. Having been influenced mostly by the first and second waves of feminism, phrases such as ‘the personal is political’ and ‘identity politics’ were frequently used in an effort to demonstrate that race, class and gender oppression and discrimination are all related. At the same time, due to the growing issues of gender politics, feminist curating in Turkey also had to take the risk of becoming counter‐productive by conserving and

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prioritizing the essentialist use of human‐centred and identity‐oriented approaches. Despite recent curatorial interventions  –  such as Future Queer (2016), an exhibition curated by Övül Durmuşoğlu together with Aylime Aslı Demir – inserting women artists and advocating women‐only exhibitions generated and reinforced another line of hegemonic knowledge and power production about how gender itself, along with feminist criticism and feminist curating, is understood and practised quasi‐automatically in Turkey. In 2016, CANAN, one of the feminist artists and curators in Turkey, made a critical call by adopting a normative‐descriptive account of feminist thought: ‘Artworks of female artists are priced at cheaper prices, and female artists are less likely to enter private or corporate collections. There are still not enough female art historians, and they are struggling with the same issues. The history of female artists needs to be rewritten.’47 Today we need a deeper conception of contemporary feminist curating in relation to a wider range of communities that collaborate in dealing with political, economic, social and ecological problems. Vision 2023 has been negatively targeting not only human (and in particular women’s and queer) agencies, but also other non‐human species and cultural heritage. As articulated in the works of posthuman feminist materialist scholars Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Jane Bennett and Rosi Braidotti, humans are positioned as entangled in broader ecologies of other living creatures and non‐living objects and spaces. Working together, they create vital forces and agential capacities for feeling, learning or action. These scholars suggest alternative ways of thinking about various forms of action, belief and practice. Their work draws attention to the implications, boundaries and limitations of feminist curatorial practices, and proposes new modes of action for effective politico‐economic change. Contemporary feminist curating in Turkey needs to explore, compare and link the exploitative, subordinating and aggressive use of repetitions and differences among various versions of such hegemonic politico‐economic programmes applied across diverse cultural geographies. In this way, perhaps, it can create emerging ways for exploring, learning, revealing, interacting, sharing, reusing and subverting the often obfuscated, tactical operations and manoeuvres of control, the systemic stupidity. For this reason, developing minor practices of feminist curating is critical to deal with systemic stupidity. Thus, contemporary feminist curating also moves on to the activation of potentialities, transdisciplinary approaches, possible futures, unexplored imaginaries and actions beside, alongside and beyond tactical feminist interventions: ‘paratactical curating’.48

Acknowledgements This research was  partially supported by The  Institute of  Social Sciences in  Istanbul Technical University. I am grateful to Ekmel Ertan, Fatih Aydoğdu, Zeynep Gündüzand all contributors of Amber Festival 12 as each one of them provided insight and expertise that greatly assisted the development of the concept, paratactic, although they may not agree with all of the arguments and conclusions of this chapter.

Notes 1 Bernard Stiegler, States of Shock: Stupidity and Knowledge in The Twenty‐First Century,

trans. Daniel Ross (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015).

Notes

2 Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms that Control Money and

Information (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 1.

3 Frank Pasquale, ‘Assessing algorithmic authority’, Madisonian.net, 18 November

2009, http://madisonian.net/2009/11/18/assessing‐algorithmic‐authority, accessed 16 November 2018. 4 Justice and Development Party (2002), Development and Democratization Program, Ankara: The Grand National Assembly of Turkey Library, https://www.tbmm.gov.tr/ develop/owa/e_yayin.eser_bilgi_q?ptip=SIYASI%20PARTI%20YAYINLARI& pdemirbas=200205071, accessed 16 November 2018. 5 Justice and Development Party (2012), Political Vision of Ak Parti (Justice and Development Party) 2023, 30 September 2012, https://www.akparti.org.tr/english/ akparti/2023‐political‐vision, accessed 16 November 2018. 6 The previous, secular, governments forbad the wearing of overt Islamic emblems such as headscarves in places of education and state employment. The government lifted a ban on the wearing of the headscarf on university campuses in 2010, in state institutions from 2013 (except police force members, judges, prosecutors and military personnel) and in high schools in 2014. The scope of 2013 regulations was also extended for judges and prosecutors in 2015, for police force members in 2016 and for military personnel in 2017. 7 Ayşe Ustaoğlu, Türkiye’de Kadına Yönelik Aile İçi Şiddet Araştırması Raporu (Ankara: Hacettepe University, 2015), p. 326. 8 M. Keskin, ‘Crisis of Women’s Rights in Turkey during the AKP regime’, ‘Teaching the Crisis: Geographies, Methodologies, Perspectives’, Summer School, 2–14 September, 2013. Institute for European Ethnology, Humboldt‐Universität Berlin, http://teaching thecrisis.net/wp‐content/uploads/2014/03/Keskin_Crisis.pdf, acessed 16 November 2018. 9 Hürriyet Daily News (2013), ‘Turkish PM Erdoğan Reiterates His Call for Three Children’, 3 January 2013, http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkish‐pm‐erdogan‐ reiterates‐his‐call‐for‐three‐children.aspx? pageID = 238&nid = 38235; The Guardian ‘Turkish president says childless women are “deficient, incomplete”’, 5 June 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/06/turkish‐president‐erdogan‐childless‐ women‐deficient‐incomplete, accessed 16 November 2018. 10 Başbakanlık Mevzuatı Geliştirme ve Yayın Genel Müdürlüğü (2016) ‘Cinsel Dokunulmazlığa Karşı Suçlardan Hükümlü Olanlara Uygulanacak Tedavi ve Diğer Yükümlülükler Hakkında Yönetmelik,’ Official Gazette (26 July 2016), No. 29782, http:// www.resmigazete.gov.tr/eskiler/2016/07/20160726.pdf, accessed 16 November 2018. 11 After the closure of independent women’s organizations by governmental decrees, such as Van Women’s Association, government‐organized women’s organizations were established and reinforced, such as Women and Democracy Association (KADEM), Women Health Workers Association for Solidarity (KASAD‐D) and The Association for Women’s Rights Against Discrimination (AKDER). 12 See ‘TDoR 2016 Press Release’ (9 November 2016), https://tgeu.org/tdor‐2016‐press‐ release/, accessed 16 November 2018. 13 Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı Teftiş Kurulu Başkanlığı (2005), Kültürel alandaki destek (sponsor) faaliyetlerinin teşvik edilmesi hakkında genelge (Genelge 2005/13), http://teftis.kulturturizm.gov.tr/TR, 14821/kulturel‐alandaki‐ destek‐sponsor‐faaliyetlerinin‐tesvik‐.html, accessed 16 November 2018. 14 Although Akbank Art Centre was established in 1993, it re‐established its structure and focus more on contemporary art after 2003.

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15 Burcu Pelvanoğlu, ‘The Contemporary Art Scene in Turkey’, The Brooklyn Rail, 16 May

16 17 18

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2014, http://brooklynrail.org/special/ART_CRIT_EUROPE/reports‐and‐interviews‐ from/the‐contemporary‐art‐scene‐in‐turkey, accessed 16 November 2018. Pelvanoğlu, ibid. SALT Araştırma, ‘O Zamanlar Konuşuyorduk,’ Sezin Romi (ed.) (Istanbul: SALT, 2014), http://saltonline.org/media/files/10_scrd.pdf, accessed 16 November 2018. Pelvanoğlu, op. cit. For a partial account of art initiatives in Istanbul, see Elif Ayşe Bursalı, Sanatçı İnisiyatifleri ve Sanatçılar Tarafından Yürütülen Mekânların İstanbul Güncel Sanat Alanındaki Rolü, unpublished Master of Arts thesis (Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi University, 2013), https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/51099746.pdf, accessed 16 November 2018. Andreasen, Soren and Lars Bang Larsen, ‘The Middleman: Beginning to Talk about Mediation’. In: Paul O’Neill (ed.), Curating Subjects (Amsterdam: Open Editions, 2007), pp. 20–30. Contemporary Istanbul, a non‐curatorial art fair, can be an example here: in non‐curatorial art fairs ‘the curatorial role is assigned to specific curated sections of the fair such as special commissions, talks and events’, making the curator as a mediator, a middleman, or rather a ‘middlewomen’. (Pauline Brien, A consideration of art fairs as a curatorial platform, unpublished thesis (Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University, 2016), p. 5, https://e‐space.mmu.ac.uk/615914/, accessed 16 November 2018.) Helena Reckitt, ‘Forgotten Relations: Feminist Artists and Relational Aesthetics’. In: Angela Dimitrakaki and Lara Perry (eds), Politics in a Glass: Case Feminism, Exhibition Cultures and Curatorial Transgressions (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), p. 148. Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter.’ Signs 28(3) (2003), pp. 801–831. Jane Bennett, 2010. ‘A vitalist stopover on the way to a new materialism’. In: Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (eds), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010) pp. 47–69. Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002); The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2008); ‘Anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene, chthulucene: Making kin’, Environmental Humanities 6(1) (2015): pp. 159–165; Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2016). Such feminist critique was also adopted by the 14th Istanbul Biennale (2015) curated by Carolyn Christov‐Bakargiev and The Istanbul Biennial (2016), curated by Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley. Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). Rachel Spence, ‘Sex and Death by the Sea’, Financial Times, 26 November 2011, https:// www.ft.com/content/2661abc0‐1451‐11e1‐b07b‐00144feabdc0, accessed 16 November 2018. Suzy Hansen, ‘The Istanbul Art Boom Bubble’, New York Times, 10 February 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/magazine/istanbul‐art‐boom‐bubble. html?pagewanted=all, accessed 16 November 2018. Black Band is an initiative run by the International Performance Arts Research and Production Association (PARC) and supported by the Embassy of the Netherlands and the Open Society Foundation. PARC is an Istanbul‐based non‐profit arts organization that provides support and consultancy services focused on research and production in the field of performance arts. PARC also aims at contributing to artistic development.

Notes

27 Some of which are closed: Rampa Istanbul in 2017, The Empire Project in 2017, Maçka

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Art Gallery in 2016, Ellipsis Gallery in 2014, Gallery Mana in 2014, Kazım Taşkent Art Gallery in 2013. With the lack of organizational and financial support, Amber Platform had to cancel Amber’17 Art and Technology Festival in 2017. Between 2007 and 2009, Şükran Moral, Ayşe Erkmen, Hale Tenger, Füsun Onur and Gülsün Karamustafa had solo shows at Yapı Kredi Kazım Taşkent Art Gallery with Rene Block as curator. In the second decade of the 2000s the visibility of feminist artists has considerably increased with the retrospective of Füsun Onur in Arter, Through The Looking Glass (2014) curated by Emre Baykal; İnci Eviner, Who’s Inside You? (2016), curated by Levent Çalıkoğlu at the Istanbul Modern Art Museum; and the solo exhibitions of Fatma Bucak, Yet Another Story About to Fall (2013), curated by Başak Doğa Temür; of Ayşe Erkmen, Travelling and Living (2014), curated by Ali Akay in Açıkekran New Media Art Gallery; of Nil Yalter, 20th Century/21st Century (2011) curated by Necmi Sönmez in Galerist, Off The Record (2016), curated by Eda Berkmen; of Nancy Atakan, Sporting Chances (2016) curated by Nat Muller in Pi Artworks Gallery; and of CANAN, Behind Mount Qaf (2017), curated by Nazlı Gürlek in Arter. Solo exhibitions that did not have a named curator are of İpek Duben, Azade Köker, Mürüvvet Türkyılmaz, Neriman Polat, Nalan Yırtmaç, Fulya Çetin, Yasemin Özcan, İnci Furni, Leyla Gediz, Özlem Şimşek, Selda Asal, Banu Cennetoğlu, Selma Gürbüz, Gözde İlkin and Işıl Eğrikavuk. Jones, Amelia (2016) ‘Feminist subjects versus feminist effects: The curating of feminist art (or is it the feminist curating of art?)’, OnCurating, Elke Krasny, Lara Perry, Dorothee Richter (eds), May 2016, Issue 29, http://www.on‐curating.org/issue‐29‐reader/feminist‐ subjects‐versus‐feminist‐effects‐the‐curating‐of‐feminist‐art‐or‐is‐it‐the‐feminist‐ curating‐of‐art.html?file=files/oc/dateiverwaltung/issue‐29/PDF_to_Download/ OnCurating_Issue29_AJones_DINA4.pdf, accessed 16 November 2018, p. 5. Wendy M. K. Shaw, ‘Where did the women go?: Female artists from the Ottoman Empire to the early years of the Turkish Republic’, Journal of Women’s History, vol. 3, no. 1 (2011), pp. 13–37. Akkoyunlu Ersöz and Bahar, ibid. Masters, H.G. (2012), ‘Dream and reality: Modern and contemporary art from: Part one,’ ArtAsiaPasific, January 2012, http://artasiapacific.com/Magazine/WebExclusives/ DreamAndRealityModernAndContemporaryWomenArtistsFromTurkeyPartOne, accessed 16 November 2018; and Masters, H.G. (2012), ‘Dream and reality: Modern and contemporary art From Turkey: Part two,’ ArtAsiaPasific, February 2012, http:// artasiapacific.com/Magazine/WebExclusives/DreamAndRealityModernAndContemporary WomenArtistsFromTurkeyPartTwo, accessed 16 November 2018. Ceren Özpınar, ‘Playing out the ‘differences’ in ‘Turkish’ art‐historical narratives’. In: Martha Langford (ed), Narratives Unfolding: National Art Histories in an Unfinished World (Quebec, McGill University Press, 2017), pp. 42–61. Istanbul Modern Art Museum (2008) Held Together By Water: Press Release. Official website, http://www.istanbulmodern.org/en/press/press‐releases/held‐together‐with‐ water_673.html, 16 November 2018. It is critical to note that the identification of the exhibition with the curator as its author (instead of focusing on the curatorial intervention by the exhibition and neglecting the artist or the artwork) is a limitation for the considerations of contemporary feminist curatorial practices. My comments here only aim to reveal the differences between the feminist critical interventions adopted by the curator and the artists of the exhibition.

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37 Doğuş Group (2016) ‘Building’, https://www.dogusgrubu.com.tr/en/agreement‐has‐

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been‐signed‐for‐istanbul‐moderns‐new‐museum‐building, accessed 16 November 2018. Hasan Bülent Kahraman (2015), ‘Louise Bourgeois: Dünyadan Büyük’, Haberler.com, 31 August 2015, https://www.haberler.com/louise‐bourgeois‐dunyadan‐ buyuk‐7647268‐haberi/, accessed 16 November 2018. The workshop was part of Columbia University’s Women Creating Change initiative led by the Center for the Study of Social Difference and organized in collaboration with the Columbia Global Centers. It was Columbia Global Center Turkey (Istanbul), Sabancı University Gender and Women’s Studies Forum (Istanbul) and Depo Gallery (Istanbul) that hosted the activities. Support was also provided by the Blinken European Institute (Columbia University, New York), Sabancı University, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (New York), Hafiza Merkezi (the Truth Justice Memory Centre in Istanbul) and Friedrich‐Ebert‐Stiftung Turkey Office, which is a German political foundation associated with the Social Democratic Party of Germany, but independent of it. The Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University, ‘Mobilizing Memory: Women Witnessing’ Exhibition’, 5 September 2014, Official Website of the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University, http://socialdifferenceonline.org/mobilizing‐memory‐women‐witnessing‐exhibition‐ opening/, accessed 16 November 2018. Atakan, op. cit. Beral Madra, Sphinx Will Devour You (2004) http://www.beralmadra.net/exhibitions/ the‐sphinx‐will‐devour‐you‐15‐women‐artists/, accessed 16 November 2018. Atıl Kunst, Jump if you are a real man exhibition, ‘Haksız Tahrik’, ‘Unfair Provocation’, Hafriyat Karaköy, Istanbul, (2009), http://atilkunst.blogspot.com.tr/2009/03/2009‐ haksz‐tahrik‐unfair.html, accessed 16 November 2018. Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1991). Neriman Polat, Without Hat, 2009, http://www.nerimanpolat.com/ works/2009/2009_03.htm, accessed 16 November 2018. Deniz Yücel, ‘Art’s networks: A new communal model’, Ibraaz, 21 November 2012, http://www.ibraaz.org/essays/52, accessed 16 November 2018. Tobias Nöbauer and Işıl Önol, ‘Learned helplessness: On authority, obedience and control’, Official Website of Işın Önol (2014), http://isinonol.com/learned‐helplessness‐ on‐authority‐obedience‐and‐control/, accessed 16 November 2018. Burcu Ezer (2016) ‘Kadın Sanatçı Tanımı Beni Rahatsız Ediyor’, Artfulliving, 22 January 2016, http://www.artfulliving.com.tr/sanat/kadin‐sanatci‐tanimi‐beni‐rahatsiz‐ ediyor‐i‐4908, accessed 16 November 2018. For an account of paratactical curating in Turkey, see Amber Platform, ‘Paratactic Commons.’ In amber ’12 Art and Technology Festival, Fatih Aydoğdu and Ekmel Ertan (cur.) (Istanbul: Body-Process Arts Association, 2012/2013), http://amberplatform.org/ wp-content/uploads/2015/07/amber12_katalog_web_v2.pdf, accessed 3 February 2019; Başak Şenova, Scientific Inquiries / Bilimsel Sorgulamalar, Basak Senova (cur.) (ed.) (Istanbul: Koç University, 2014); Ebru Yetiskin, ‘Paratactical curation of bio art and performative political imaginaries,’ Technoetic Arts, vol. 15, no. 2 (2017), pp. 203–213.

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From Within, From Without: Configurations of Feminism, Gender and Art in Post‐Wall Europe Martina Pachmanová When I was writing an essay for the catalogue of the exhibition Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe (held at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna and in Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw in 2009–2010),1 I mentioned in one of the footnotes a disturbing case of ignorance of women in the Prague‐ based Kunsthalle, Rudolfinum Gallery. During the sixteen years of its existence, as I noted, one of the most prestigious and visible art institutions in the Czech Republic did not run a single solo show of a Czech woman artist. When asked about this blatant disproportion by Mirek Vodrážka, a feminist activist, writer and musician in his documentary film titled Mlha a moc (Fog and Power) (2006), the director of the Rudolfinum Gallery rejoined: “Give me names of those women who would deserve to be exhibited [here] … Czech women artists do not … reach quality of their male colleagues.”2 Considering the fact that since the 1990s the Rudolfinum Gallery exhibited a number of significant women artists from the West whose oeuvre is inextricably related to gender politics (Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, Rineke Dijkstra, Ana Mendieta), this reaction was quite paradoxical. Now, at the time of writing (2015), the situation remains basically the same. The only exception was a small exhibition in 2011 called Vyjevování (Revealing) by Adriena Šimotová, the outstanding figure of the Czech post‐war art scene who just then reached the age of 85. Compared to 25 solo exhibitions by Czech male artists of different generations, both alive and dead, many of which were retrospective, Šimotová’s exhibition could hardly balance the striking underrepresentation of local women artists. For the last 22 years, the state‐ funded institution located in the center of the capital city is a bastion of patriarchal dominance. Is this just a case of gender arrogance of a single male director who has been masterminding one gallery for almost a quarter of a century or does is tell something more fundamental about the configurations of feminism, gender and art in post‐Wall Europe?

­Neutralizing feminism The case of the Rudolfinum Gallery undoubtedly deserves a more prominent place than being mentioned in a footnote. Besides gender inequality, it also documents the hegemony of a largely de‐politicized discourse that demonstratively turns away from A Companion to Feminist Art, First Edition. Edited by Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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examining any social effects of art, choosing instead to preserve the myth of art as absolute, transcendent, and innocent through‐and‐through. Even the women artists from the West who are wreathed in international success and are apparently privileged over their less internationally renowned Czech colleagues are subordinated to the transcendent category of art as an entity distant from life and politics, and the feminist agency of their “imported” work is often concealed. The most striking recent example of neutralizing the feminist content of the work and the feminist stand of the artist was the gallery’s 2014 show of Ana Mendieta entitled Traces that travelled to Prague from the Hayward Gallery in London. Despite the presence of Mendieta’s key works, the show, including all the related events, was constructed as an ideologically neutral product for mass consumption that bothers the visitors neither by posing complicated and disturbing questions related to violence against women and identity politics nor with any political agenda. Mendieta was thus “sold” in the essentialist “package” as an artist of female sensibility whose main interest is reaching harmony with earth and the “mother” nature. Of course, the de‐politicizing strategy should be ascribed not only to the hosting institution but also to the guest curator Stephanie Rosenthal from the Hayward, who thought of the exhibition in terms of a globally marketable product as opposed to a site that might –just like Mendieta’s own work – arouse critical thinking and disturb social and cultural norms. However, it was the director of the Rudolfinum Gallery who repeatedly vocalized in public that Traces was under no circumstances a feminist show and should not be seen as such.3 If the most common opinion in post‐1989 Eastern Europe is that art has no gender and should not be mixed with politics, and if the importance of feminist ideas and gender is largely dismissed in local societies “which stubbornly perpetuated the myth of being [societies] not without gender then at least without ‘gender trouble,’”4 there is no wonder that the possibility of feminist art as a vital force in a reorganization of cultural hierarchies is silenced or obscured under the mask of ideological neutrality or the ­“eternal feminine.” Moreover, showing feminist artists from the West while neglecting local women maintains the widespread notion that feminism is a Western concept (its proponents mostly ignore the multivalence of Western feminism and conceive it as a monolithic bloc) that is alien to Eastern European mentality, and therefore it can come and go. Last but not least it also reinforces nationalist voices that promise to protect the authentic local art scene from galloping globalization which the feminist movement – for better or worse – is part of. Contemptuousness towards the “F” word expressed by institutions’ authorities undoubtedly has a big impact on how, when, and where (if at all) women artists in post‐communist countries want to identify themselves with feminism. Their ambiguous attitude to feminism is exemplarily manifested by the experience of a Slovak art historian, Jana Oravcová, who was asked in the mid‐1990s to write an entry about feminism for the encyclopedia of post‐war art.5 “I was standing in front … of a tough task since I … assumed that I will face a certain animosity on the side of Slovak women ­artists that I wanted to include into the entry,” she later recollected. “My expectation was practically fulfilled when some of them strictly rejected to be mentioned in my text. Although Ilona Németh, for example, finally agreed that I could refer to some of her work as feminist, she  –  just like many others  –  argued that she ‘doesn’t want to be identified with feminism’, and also ‘doesn’t want to switch from one minority into the other’ (in her case Hungarian).”6 Furthermore, Oravcová pointed out that some women

­Where are the women artists

who refused to figure in the “controversial” entry later agreed to participate in some international exhibitions with an explicit gender agenda that were organized by Western curators. It seems that while the gender framing helps emancipating women artists from the “East” to be more smoothly incorporated into the Western structures, gender blindness or even openly expressed antipathy to feminism help them to be more smoothly incorporated into the local/national institutional structures.7 These kinds of double‐standards that many women artists in Eastern Europe hold when the issues of gender politics and feminism are at stake have unfortunate consequences on both local and international levels. On the one hand, they contribute to minimalizing any political agenda among local women artists and curators, which disables their affront to the patriarchal system and, in the long run, reinforces the discriminatory practices of art institutions.8 On the other hand, the complicated relationship of Eastern European women artists to feminism that has been, among other things, nourished by both a strong mistrust in political art and powerful and glorified myth of modernism increases a danger of being simply co‐opted into the canon of the West, which often leads to cardinal misunderstandings.9 When Suzana Milevska, a Macedonian art theorist and curator, wrote about the highly problematic attitude of Western curators to Balkan women artists (although her comment can be applied to Eastern Europe as a whole), it was just this risk of misrepresentation she stressed: “A very well‐known phenomenon is that Balkan female artists, when selected and curated by foreign curators, are usually put in an obsolete theoretical framework when it comes to the questions of ethnicity and gender, and that the female writers and curators were either not consulted or when invited did not want to go against the grain by discussing this topic. This has to do on the one hand partly with the Balkans not being ready to deal with gender issues but on the other hand with the West not being ready to hear even the existing voices discussing these issues within the domestic art scenes.”10

­Where are the women artists? Whether and how women artists in Eastern Europe should struggle for a higher representation in local art institutions when, as it is well known, inclusion entails advantages but also risks is obviously a crucial question vis‐à‐vis the continuing invisibility of their work. To be represented by mainstream institutions means visibility but the centrality requires loyalty to the institutional mechanisms. The greater number of women artists in galleries and in higher ranks of other art institutions might disturb the patriarchal canon and patrilineality of art history, but it is less likely that it would make gender an integral element of contemporary debates about art, and would not instead lead to the integration of feminist agendas into the system which usually blunts its most radical blades. That artists’ freedom is logically jeopardized in the system of still prevailingly public (state‐ or region‐funded) museums and galleries in the “former East” is evident even from the recently published interview with the director of the Rudolfinum Gallery who openly claimed that “none of the participants [of the exhibition], i.e. artist, curator, economist, program director, owner of the art works, graphic designer or production manager, can claim absolute freedom, and assert only themselves, since every little ­element [of the project] is closely linked to its other elements.”11

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The question whether a true feminist discourse can even be practiced in institutions that take “an active role in the evacuation of critical knowledge, de‐linking art from political and social questions, producing only one history of arts and dismissing any possibilities for an understanding of new alternative histories and new platforms of knowledge”12 is fundamental for the discussion about feminism and visual art in Eastern Europe. The Rudolfinum Gallery is just one of many examples of such neoliberal logic that predominates in public art institutions in post‐communist countries. Looking at the feminist art production in these locations, the most challenging works have been usually produced outside of the system: in non‐profit galleries, artist‐run centers, public spaces, nature, or underground. This oppositional locatedness of emancipatory practices applies to the pre‐1989 totalitarian, the period of transition as well as to the present day, when most countries of the “former East” entered the European Union.13 However, there is trouble with the oppositional tactic of separation on the level of (writing) art history. Although historical narratives are often rightly criticized as usable tools in the legitimation of violence and oppression, historicizing is also an important vehicle for legitimation of difference and autonomy. Building a separate zone of feminist art practices without confronting existing exhibition cultures and inextricable acquisition policies is, I believe, less likely to generate a vital and much needed process of revising local but also global art histories. Bojana Pejić was right to ask, “How come that the women artists who worked in the GDR, Hungary, Soviet Latvia, and Macedonia (as a former Yugoslav republic) are still excluded from their national art histories?”14 especially since the given countries are just a few examples of many in Eastern Europe where women artists do not figure in art history and where gender power and sexuality are not recognized as historical forces of significance. Including women into local and global art histories, or – more accurately – generating new, critical art histories which would question the patriarchal and fundamentally heterosexual canon of the discipline and show women as active subjects of history, should stay an integral part of the feminist practices and theories in the “other” Europe where the second wave of feminism was often skipped, and largely de‐politicized debates about postfeminism prevailed.15 Yet, there is also another reason why historicizing as a process of situating women’s liberation, emancipation, and creation should stay central. Since most debates about gender, feminism, and art in Eastern Europe are focused on post‐war and contemporary art, while older history is neglected, there is a danger of a growing ambivalence toward or, worse, disinterest in earlier generations of female and feminist artists (and women in general) that might eventually cause “the amnesia of an a‐historical present.”16 Understanding how various power mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion work today is impossible without comprehension of historical contexts of eclipsing particular groups of people based on gender, sexual, or other differences. Situatedness in place and time prevents women (and other subjects on the margins) to be approached as singular and timeless, and makes them more aware of changing modes of oppression: “Feminism’s continuing relevance to contemporary culture/s lies p ­ recisely in the fact that the outcome of feminist praxis brings to the surface something almost inexplicable each time, something which already demands a different approach from the one which just rendered it partly visible.”17 As a feminist art historian who is “straddled” between research of modernism of the first half of the twentieth century and contemporary art, I am convinced that the act of historicization is crucial for contemporary women artists’ identification with “mothers”

­Writing art history without men and without politic

but also, and perhaps most importantly, for the formation of a site from which one can speak as a feminist. As Hildtrud Ebert wrote in her text on women artists in the GDR, one should be wary of being trapped in the circumstances to which one was opposed but “there is one experience that everyone should remain conscious of: subjectivity ­cannot be achieved in and through exclusion alone.”18

­Writing art history without men and without politics In 2014, the Moravian Gallery in Brno in the Czech Republic organized the exhibition In a Skirt – Sometimes: Art of the 1990s. Curated by Pavlína Morganová, it charted the work of fourteen women artists who entered the art scene in the first decade after the Velvet Revolution19 – in the period of post‐revolutionary euphoria but also consequent disillusion from economic instability and growing “ostalgia” (nostalgia for life under the communist system – or nostalgia for the “Ost” [East]): Milena Dopitová, Veronika Bromová, Markéta Othová, Kateřina Vincourová, Štěpánka Šimlová, Míla Preslová, Ellen Řádová, Michaela Thelenová, Zdena Kolečková, Lenka Klodová, Martina Klouzová‐Niubó, Markéta Vaňková, Alena Kotzmannová, and Kateřina Šedá. While until 1989 women had been more or less solitary in Czech art, in the course of the 1990s, as Morganová rightly claimed, the Czech art scene witnessed a quick succession of several generations of female artists who introduced new, often technology‐ and time‐based and also conceptual, art practices that challenged traditional methods and genres, who subverted standard representational patterns, and who in many respects overshadowed their male colleagues. The key statement of the curator was that the 1990s was “the first period in which the history of Czech art could be written without men.”20 This statement was the one most often quoted by journalists and reviewers but it was also the most criticized. For narrating art history without male artists in a country where the communist ideology of egalitarianism is still alive (although egalitarianism was often mixed with uniformity and equal rights were never respected by the system in which – as one joke ironically commented – “all people were equal but some were more equal than others”) but is fundamentally anti‐feminist, and where survey exhibitions and books focused on local modern and post‐war art are often written (almost) without women,21 Morganová was accused of introducing undesired “ghettoism” into the discipline of art history and curatorial practice. However, whereas Morganová’s strategy of separation proved that the “transition of the classic postmodernism to post‐conceptual art of the present”22 was largely initiated and elaborated by women artists in the Czech Republic, the exhibition avoided any fundamental reflection of gender agenda. The resentment against the politicizing of gender identity in art was openly declared in the introductory text for the catalogue. “It is important to point out,” wrote Morganová, “that the … project is not a product of some feminist grievances or feelings that the 1990s female artists should be collectively promoted and subjected to positive discrimination, on the contrary. The project is rooted in the idea that it was women who played the most important part in 1990s Czech art … and introduced new artistic expression.”23 Although her dismissal of framing the exhibition as feminist and her emphasis on artistic expression might be interpreted as a diplomatic strategy (without which the exhibition might not even take place in one of the largest and most visible state‐funded galleries in the country), it also

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indicates more principle issues that are emblematic of the precarious relationship between feminism and art in most countries of Eastern Europe. First, the project showed that the concept of art as an apolitical and autonomous creation is still a vital force in curatorial and art historical discourse, even in situations when it concerns emancipation of the disadvantaged and when the deconstruction of the patriarchal canon is at stake. Besides this de‐politicized and universalist approach that generates her‐story as a seamless and linear narrative, it also documents the naturalization of liberalism that started to dominate the lives of women (and men) in the post‐1989 “East,” and weakens the chances of feminism and gender politics to become an integral part of art and its theory. As the Czech sociologist Alice Červinková stresses in her essay “Emancipation without feminism?”, while the subject of a liberal discourse is an autonomous individual (which was a dream of people who lived under the communist oppression, in the system that favored collectivism and equality over freedom), feminism turns to women as a social group, which is exactly what women artists in this part of Europe felt most ambivalent about. “It seems that the liberal emphasis on the individual and his/her autonomy as the main ideological fundament of the 1990s [in former Eastern Europe] productively met the modernist idea of an autonomous artist‐creator and played – in contrast to feminism … – the central emancipatory role: women artists lost their diffidence about standing up for themselves in the male art world. The ­question is, nevertheless, whether the figure of the autonomous artist who averts him/herself from engaged art since he/she understands it as a reverse of his/her individuality and inner inspiration will be further sufficient.”24 The trouble with writing the history of art without men but also without politics is then multiple: not only does it neutralize socially and politically charged works that are included in such narratives (which was also the case of In Skirt  –  Sometimes which contained a number of remarkable works that dealt with gender roles and identities, or that critiqued sexist imagery which accompanied the boom of advertising and first commercial mass media after the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc), but it also reinforces the stereotypically used term “women’s art” that identifies women artists through their sex and approaches them as a homogeneous collective. In a longer perspective, it has an impact on the continuing elimination of women artists from exhibitions, ­academic positions, art history books, and other decision‐making structures inside the art world since it deprives them of real social and political interests and, of course, of real power.

­Against the “monoculture” of gender However, it is more and more obvious that any serious talk about feminism, gender politics, and art in any part of today’s globalized world should not be reduced to the representation and visibility of women artists (in history books, exhibitions, etc.) and/ or to visual representation of femininity and masculinity. The issues of power, hegemony, hierarchy, and dominance reach further than just to patriarchy; or, to put it differently, patriarchy’s foundation is the subordination of women, but it is also maintained by other means of power control. As Mirek Vodrážka puts it, “it is important to work with gender critically and reflectively, and mainly to examine in what kind of hidden relations and power ‘coalition discourses’ gender functions … It is apparent that gender

­Against the “monoculture” of gende

can be more strongly legitimized when it is connected with broader political issues such as injustice or violence. It is – not only in art – a much more effective strategy than to assert gender specialization and gender monoculture.”25 If we acknowledge that the truly feminist discourse in art can barely be reached today without exploring the existence of these power coalitions, then we can also more easily locate where these discourses are mostly generated: outside the mainstream, mostly conservative institutions, and by those who are usually pushed to the edge. Although there are feminist artists and theorists in Eastern Europe who in their work seriously consider the ramifications of globalization and the expansion of the capital’s competitive logic to the “East” as a crucial issue for understanding the local feminist and gender agenda,26 and although some others rightly criticize the rule of heteronormativity and introduce a much needed queer context (which was understandably most heavily subdued in countries with strong Catholic tradition and population, such as Poland),27 and – last but not least – although there is a growing interest in how gender and nationalism overlap,28 only flimsy attention in these debates has been so far paid to how ­gender operates in the community of the largest Eastern European ethnic minority whose members are spread all over the region, and have almost no real political power and also no chance for building an autonomous political and economic unit: the Roma. Ethnic, cultural, and also linguistic otherness means that the twelve million people of the Roma have almost no cultural presence in wider society. If there is any, it is usually embedded in specialized institutions that were built to collect, exhibit, examine, and preserve Roma cultural heritage.29 Roma visual culture is thus presented and “consumed” as an object of ethnographic and anthropologic rather than art historical interest, and thus maintains the exoticization and further racial segregation of Roma. That feminist and gender‐based art and art theory in the ex‐East continues to be ­prevailingly created and written by white women and focuses on white femininity (sometimes on white men/masculinity) comes as no surprise. If compared with the emancipation of, for instance, black women artists in the West, the situation of most ostracized ­“ex‐centrics” in the “other” Europe naturally calls for comparison. Yet, the case is not as simple as it might seem on first sight; while many women artists of color asserted themselves in the Western world through political movements specific just to their color, Roma women cannot mobilize and assert themselves: not only because most of them live in very traditional patriarchal communities but also because, due to discrimination (and criminalization), they can rarely reach higher than elementary school education and a professional art (or any other) career is thus largely forbidden for them.30 However, it is an issue not only of authorship but also of the subject matter. Women artists in Eastern Europe  –  whether they identify themselves with feminism or not – ­usually avoid reflecting the double‐marginalization of women of “color,” most of whom live either in forced assimilation or (much more likely) in segregation and ­poverty: disdained, demonized, or even sterilized. It would be misguiding to claim that issues of ethnic difference did not enter the feminist art and theory in the “grey zone of Europe.”31 Especially in ex‐Yugoslavia that was going through a civil war and ethnic cleansing in the decade following the collapse the East Bloc, nationalism, ethnic identity, and gender were important issues for a number of women artists. As art historian and critic Jovana Stokić documented on the work of Sanja Iveković (Croatian), Sanja Ostojić (Serbian), Milica Tomić (Serbian), Andreja Kuluncic (Croatian), and Jelena Tomasević (Montenegrin), the “nation’s body” turned

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into an important “idiom” of feminist art investigations of national and ethnic identities. “These women artists are indeed ‘self‐positioned on borders,’ while constructing contemporary feminine identities in their cultures. Thus, exploring art practices at the southern and eastern boundaries of Europe that incorporate experiences of the disintegration of both the former Yugoslavia and the socialist project sheds light on the formation of feminine identities in the processes of fragmentation (‘balkanization’).”32 Yet, these artists certainly do not represent the invisible margins; as Stokić put it, they “are widely represented on the global art world scenes in big international shows.”33 The peripherality of other female “others” that no have chance of constructing either national/ethnic or female identities, since their existence is inevitably diasporic and dispersed is, however, a different case.

­Wonder mother and Eastern Europe’s black skin In order to destabilize the multiple “monocultures” in the peripherally Western regions of Eastern Europe – that of patriarchy, of the white majority as well as of gender – and to foster the political agenda of feminist art and scholarship in this part of the “old continent,” it is worth looking at the real margins: at those who deal with gender and politics in the truly blind spots of Europe represented by Roma, who are, significantly, themselves classified as “other.” Coping with nationalism, xenophobia, and ethnicity in the background of gender, feminism, and queer can be traced in the multidisciplinary work by Tamara Moyzes. Born in Bratislava to a Jewish Hungarian family with Roma ancestors, studying art in Bratislava, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Prague, and living currently with both a Slovak and an Israeli passport in Prague, Moyzes practices as an artist and curator what she calls “artivism” in the form of strongly politically charged (and often guerrilla) projects that target various aspects of social injustice mostly in East Central Europe, but also in the Middle East. As such, Moyzes is an antithesis of academic or institutionalized feminism, and – as a woman who is a “minority everywhere,”34 and who has a first‐hand experience with minorities, including Roma  –  she represents transnational and ­transethnic feminism that is so scarcely present in intellectual and art debates in Eastern Europe. One of the most radical projects realized by Tamara Moyzes in collaboration with Roma artist Věra Duždová (Roma Kale Panthera Group) is the video and objects installation SuperMom, shown as part of the European Roma art exhibition Have a Look into My Life! in Strasbourg and Graz in 2014 (Figure 6.1 and Figure 6.2). The project is based on the story of the quintuplets recently born to a Czech Roma couple that was extensively reported by local media and also accompanied by hostile racist reactions from right‐wing extremists, but also from the “normal” population. The central part of the project is a six‐minute video mocking the format of popular TV shows in which the female moderator demonstrates and promotes the newest and most desirable product for prospective mothers: Prenatal Luxury Box. A small pink suitcase for baby girls (a boy variant is designed in blue) with white dots and a cute portraiture of a black‐haired child is designed as a survival kit with basic emergency equipment that, as the ending titles of the video underline, “none of the Czech moms got in the past” and that should – “ensure … fearless and carefree nights and relaxation.”

­Wonder mother and Eastern Europe’s black ski

Figure 6.1  Roma Kale Panthera (Tamara Moyzes, Věra Duždová), SuperMom, video, 6.24 min, 2014.

Figure 6.2  SuperMom, installation (posters, objects, video) in the exhibition Have a Look into My Life!, Aubette, Place Kléber, Strasbourg, 2014.

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The iconography of the PLB equipment – fire extinguisher, plastic safety window films against Molotov cocktail (whose quality “is adapted to the danger that your family is currently in”), voucher for the police escort from the hospital directly home, Legal Act on the Special Protection of Persons – strongly contrasts with the kitschy interior of the studio: superficial, yet dulcet music and mainly the annoyingly glib voice and precious smile on the face of the affected moderator. The show reaches its peak when the ­moderator – after holding a lottery and randomly picking up one out of many threatening anonymous letters addressed to Roma families – introduces a “special” guest – a pregnant Roma woman called Alžběta (played by Duždová). After the opening small talk, the mother‐to‐be is asked to use the PLB extinguisher to fight the fire that the moderator’s assistant lights up directly in the studio. A short moment of pretended drama is over after Alžběta successfully conquers the flames, and wins the kit as an award for her brave action. Although the association of Roma woman with motherhood conforms to the stereotypical image repertoire that was also voiced in the racist reactions to the birth of the quintuplets and that the artists quoted on posters in the installation (she is a womb, a mere baby‐pouch whose multiplex progeny will be a parasite on white society), the figure of Alžběta is more complex than merely reproducing the ruling “idiom” of gender and racial normativity in Eastern European societies. Fighting the fire and confidently talking to the white moderator, she turns into a role model of a female superhero, a Roma Wonder Woman. Moreover, an armed mother radically subverts the idealized image of mother as “the keeper of traditional values, hearth and home,”35 and also shows that the dichotomy between public and private that is central to feminist writing and struggle is not as absolute and self‐evident when transplanted to a different cultural setting; unlike the majority of women’s homes that can be a harbor of peace as well as a battleground of domestic violence, there is no fixed boundary between private and ­public in an Eastern European Roma mother’s life, for their home is often a site of anonymous public violence. Using pop‐culture clichés for challenging such a serious social problem is risky, for it can turn it into a situation comedy. Yet, just like Tamara Moyzes’ previous projects of (including, for instance, the video Miss Roma, 2007, which documents a young Roma woman who is repeatedly denied access to various public places in the Czech Republic, and then “white‐washed” to be accepted or even celebrated by the majority – made‐up into a blond vamp with alabaster skin who represents both racial superiority and dominant beauty ideology)36 – the SuperMom employs the means of pop culture and mass entertainment to open up issues that usually have no place in prime‐time TV shows: the fake show presents fear, threat, survival, and even death as a “natural” part of mothering and family life. Appropriating the iconography characteristic for commercial TV channels, the artists manage to evoke the friendly and relaxed atmosphere that strongly contrasts with the offered life‐saving (as opposed to nurturing) products. What makes this piece particularly interesting is the oscillation between the convincing illusion of commonplace and the absurdity of the situation that challenges the limits of “normality” which is based on stereotypes and ostracism cultivated by conventional society. Bringing SuperMom close to both popular TV shows in which contestants accept wacky challenges to reach their fifteen minutes of fame to the genre of black – metaphorically as well as literally – comedy makes it more effective than trying to “objectively” represent the ordeal of the diaspora of 12 million people that largely exist outside of the

­Extra‐national counter‐narratives: Building the feminist allianc

hegemonic power structures, but are for the darker color of their skin exposed to discrimination and to the permanent danger of being chosen as an easy object of violence. Besides gender and ethnic otherness that defines the lives of non‐white women in prevailingly white society, SuperMom also documents well the manipulative power of contemporary mass media that use voyeurism (often sexually charged) and spectacularization as key tools for turning “trash” (Roma people are often derogatorily called by this word) into a commodity.

­ xtra‐national counter‐narratives: Building the E feminist alliance When Audre Lorde wrote about women, art, and patriarchy, she underlined that, besides celebrating differences between white women as a creative force for change, one should try to recognize that “those differences expose all women to various forms and degrees of patriarchal oppression, some of which we share, some of which we do not. … The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical with those boundaries.” In other words, “to imply … that all women suffer the same oppression simply because we are women, is to lose sight of the many varied tools of patriarchy.”37 Recognizing un‐reflected forms of difference and multivocality allows for the possibility of resistance and also of the destabilization of the dominant white‐centered feminist (art) agenda in what is routinely called Eastern Europe (but what is in fact a construct that is far from a unified bloc). Also, counter‐narratives that are based on social, cultural, and other experiences of those who are denied power and visibility for being the “second” sex as well as the “second” race can challenge the frequent self‐­ colonization of the “East” and thus make the East–West divide more porous.38 Last but not least, bringing the “ex‐centrics” into the gender discourse can help undermine the mainstream narratives of (proto)feminist art in Eastern Europe that are defined by and subordinated to the normative model of feminist art in the West.39 Of course, none of this is possible without understanding the differences between how femininity and masculinity are constructed in the “white West,” in the “white East” and in their black diasporas whose members “for centuries … have been victims of ­representations created exclusively by the non‐Roma.”40 Tímea Junghaus, the first Eastern European Roma art historian and activist, has made a great effort to show that “Roma art does exist,”41 and some of her recent curatorial projects, including, for instance, Roma Body Politics (2015), also address the position of Roma women in Eastern European (art) history and present times, question the master(piece) discourse which underlies the concept of the “universal,” and offer models for revolting against the double (gender and racial) oppression and for constructing new Roma women’s identities.42 In her text “Schengen women” (2008), Slovenian art historian Zdenka Badovinac raises an important question of who is the subject that defines the identity of a European and what role gender and space play in this definition. “(W)hen an Eastern European female artist speaks about women’s issues through her own body, she becomes the subject of her own transformation and of her own social position. When analyzing the question of women in Eastern Europe, the dialogue between the external and internal

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gazes  –  between interpretation and self‐interpretation  –  is extremely important.”43 Facing the slowly emerging generation of Roma women artists and curators who draw attention to gendered aspects of Roma life today as well as in the past (that is who collaterally work on historicization of Roma women’s culture and assert themselves as political activists), it is more than obvious that such dialogue must be set up also along the lines of ethnicity and race. Making the Roma identity part of gender and feminist (art) discourses is essential not only for enhancing solidarity between women (artists) in Eastern Europe, for slowing down the fragmentation of local as well as global feminisms and for building the alliance between academic feminists (such as myself ) and activist feminists, but also for stepping over the national borders that usually demarcate these discourses.44 As Mária Hlavajová, a Slovak curator living in Netherlands who organized the realization of Roma Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2011, declared, the extra‐ national character of Roma art “offers an invitation and a possibility to … make it everyone’s.”45

Notes 1 Martina Pachmanová, “In? Out? In between?: Some notes on the invisibility of a nascent

Eastern European feminist and gender discourse in contemporary art theory.” In: Bojana Pejić (ed.), Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe, Vienna: MUMOK, 2010, pp. 241–248. 2 Mirek Vodrážka, Mlha a moc (Fog and Power), independent documentary film, 66 ­minutes, 2006. Translated from Czech by Martina Pachmanová. 3 Here I refer to several of the director’s presentations of the show, including the introduction of my own talk on Ana Mendieta that took place at the Rudolfinum Gallery on 2 December 2014. 4 Katrin Kivimaa, “Relevance of gender: Feminist and other practices in contemporary Estonian art.” In: Bojana Pejić (ed.), Gender Check: A Reader, Cologne: Walter König Verlag, 2010, p. 291. 5 See Jana Geržová (ed.), Slovník svetového a slovenského výtvarného umenia 2. pol. 20. storočia (Encyclopedia of International and Slovak Fine Art of the 2nd half of the 20th Century), Bratislava: Profil, 1999. 6 Jana Oravcová quoted in the transcript of the round table discussion “Behind the Velvet Curtain: Bodies, languages, institutions” that reflected how contemporary Czech and Slovak artists deal with the issues of gender and various social and cultural constructions of femininity and masculinity, and that also focused on gender politics of galleries, museums, art schools, and (under)representation of women in public art institutions (organized moderated by Martina Pachmanová in the Brno House of Arts, 14 January 2010). In: František Kowolowski (ed.), Formáty Transformace 89–09. Sedm pohledů na novou českou a slovenskou identitu. Sborník (Formats of Transformation 89–09. Seven Views on the New Czech and Slovak Identity), Brno: House of Arts, 2010, p. 136. Translated from Slovak by Martina Pachmanová. 7 For a complex analysis of a reticent relationship of women artists to feminism in East Central Europe, especially in the Czech Republic, see Alice Červinková, Kateřina Šaldová, Barbora Tupá, ‘‘Bez názvu: Mozaika ženských uměleckých aktivit na přelomu tisíciletí’’ (Untitled: Mosaic of Women’s Art Activities at the Turn of the Millennium). In:

Notes

Hana Hašková, Alena Křížková, Marcela Linková (eds.), Mnohohlasem: Vyjednávání ženských prostorů po roce 1989 (Polyphonically: Constructing Women’s Spaces after 1989), Prague: Sociological Institute 2006, pp. 205–220. 8 Besides galleries that programmatically (albeit not declaratorily) do not exhibit local women artists, there is an apparent absence of debating gender issues at art schools where – significantly – more students are female, while the majority of art teachers are male. 9 For more detailed analysis of the ambivalent relationship of Eastern Europe to Western modes of feminism see, for instance, Martina Pachmanová, “In? Out? In between?” (note 1). 10 Suzana Milevska, “Feminist research in visual arts.” In: Mara Ambrožič, Angela Vettese (eds.), Art as a Thinking Process: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production, Venice: Sternberg Press, 2013, pp. 171–172. 11 “Domácí produkce se točí v kruhu” (Local art production is in vicious circle) (interview with Petr Nedoma by Sylvie Šeborová), Artalk.magazine, http://artalk.cz/2015/06/25/ domaci‐produkce‐se‐toci‐v‐kruhu/, retrieved on 2 September 2015. Translated from Czech by Martina Pachmanová. 12 Marina Gržinić, “The performative and the political in global capitalism.” In: Katja Kobolt, Lana Zdravković (eds.), Performative Gestures – Political Moves, Zagreb: Red Athena University Press, 2014, p. 195. For the role of gender in curatorial practice in Eastern Europe and conservativism of local art institutions, see Suzana Milevska, “With special thanks to: Balkan Curator, first person feminine.” In: Mária Orišková (ed.), Curating “Eastern Europe” and Beyond: Art Histories through the Exhibition, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang – Bratislava: VEDA, SAS Publishing House 2013, pp. 177–185. 13 See Marina Gržinić, “From transitional postsocialist spaces to neoliberal global capitalism.” Third Text, vol. 21, no. 5, 2007, p. 563–575. 14 Katrin Kivimaa, Gender Check, Feminism and Curating in Eastern Europe. Interview with Bojana Pejić in: Angela Dimitrakaki, Lara Perry (eds.), Politics in a Glass Case: Feminism, Exhibition Cultures and Curatorial Transgressions, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013, p. 178. 15 A rare exception was Yugoslavia (mainly Croatia) where existed a viable feminist scholarship even before East Bloc fell apart. A crucial point about the historical “leap” was made recently by Mirek Vodrážka: “We miss the experience of the second wave of feminism, not on the level of the theoretical discourse (theory can be studied in a couple of semesters) but on the level of life practice … When we compare it with the transformation that occurred in the Western societies on the level of identity politics, whether it concerned black people who fought for their rights, Native Americans, or finally even women, in our [Czech] society we miss lived (and experienced) politics of new social bodies thanks to the long‐lasting low participation of people (women and men) in the public sphere.” Mirek Vodrážka quoted in: František Kowolowski (note 5), p. 143. 16 “Pop Goes Politics: Martha Rosler Interviewed by John Slyce,” Dazed & Confused 54, May 1999, p. 75. 17 Angela Dimitrakaki, “Space, gender, art: Redressing Private Views.” In: Angela Dimitrakaki, Pam Skelton, Mare Tralla (eds.), Private Views: Spaces and Gender in Contemporary Art from Britain and Estonia, London: Women’s Art Library, 2010, p. 40. The exhibition Private Views was originally produced for the Estonian Art Museum in Tallinn in 1998.

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18 Hildtrud Ebert, “Where are the women artists? An attempt to explain the

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disappearance of a generation of East German women artists.” In: Bojana Pejić (note 3), p. 191. The term “Velvet Revolution” is used by Czechs to describe the non‐violent transition of power in former Czechoslovakia that started on 17 November 1989. Pavlína Morganová (ed.), Někdy v sukni: Umění 90. let (In a Skirt – Sometimes: Art of the 1990s), Brno: Moravian Gallery, Prague: Prague City Gallery 2014, p. 10. English translation of the Czech original from the exhibition catalogue. A telling example of such disproportion was a large survey exhibition of Czech art Ostrovy odporu: Mezi první a druhou moderností 1985–2012 (Islands of Resistance: Between First and Second Modernity 1985–2012) that took place in the National Gallery in Prague in 2012: only 16% of exhibiting artists were women. Pavlína Morganová (note 18), p. 7. Ibid., pp. 5, 7. Alice Červinková, “Emancipace bez feminismu?” (Emancipation without feminism?), Translated from the Czech by Martina Pachmanová. In: ibid., p. 61. Mirek Vodrážka quoted in: František Kowolowski (note 5), p. 140. As for the specialization, gender agenda apparently continues to be a “business” of specialized curators in Eastern Europe, most of whom are women. Not only that such compartmentalization separates gender issues from broader discourse of art but it also makes it easier to keep critical and subversive potential of gender politics under control. Translated from the Czech by Martina Pachmanová. See Susana Milevska, Capital and Gender, Skopje: Museum of the City of Skopje 2001; Angela Dimitrakaki, “‘Five o’clock on the sun’: Three questions on feminism and moving image in the visual arts of non‐Western Europe.” Third Text, vol. 19, no. 3, 2005, pp. 269–282. See, for instance, Paweł Leszkowicz, “National secret: Gay art in Poland.” In: Bojana Pejić (note 3), pp. 245–249. See, for instance, Tal Dekel, “Body, gender and transnationalism: Art and cultural criticism in a changing Europe.” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, vol. 9, no. 2, 2009, pp. 175–197. There are only five museums or cultural centers devoted to Roma that are currently located in Europe: Belgrade (Serbia), Brno (Czech Republic), Heidelberg (Germany), Murska Sobota (Slovenia), and Tarnów (Poland). In the Czech Republic, many Roma children are sent to special remedial primary schools without receiving an approved mental/brain diagnosis; up to 35% of children in these types of schools are Roma and the chance that they will reach higher than elementary education is infinitesimal. Consequently, less than 1% of the Roma population has a university degree and 85% of Roma are unemployed. The term was first used by Piotr Piotrowski ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall to describe the former East. “There is no doubt that the historico‐geographical coordinates of Central Europe are in a state of flux,” he wrote “We are experiencing both historical and geographical transformation, that we are between two different times, between two different spatial shapes.” Piotr Piotrowski, “The grey zone of Europe.” In: David Elliott, Bojana Pejić (eds.), After the Wall: Art and Culture in post‐Communist Europe, Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1999, p. 36.

Notes

32 Jovana Stokić, “Un‐doing Monoculture: Women Artists from the ‘Blind Spot of

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Europe’ – the former Yugoslavia.” ARTMargins, 10 March 2006, http://www.artmargins. com/index.php/8‐archive/532‐un‐doing‐monoculture‐women‐artists‐from‐the‐blind‐ spot‐of‐europe‐the‐former‐yugoslavia, accessed 16 November 2018. See also Ileana Pentilie, “Zur einer bestimmten Identität – der Fall Südosteuropa.” In: Pavel Liška (ed.), Grenzgänger, Regensburg: Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie Regensburg, 2006, pp. 36–55. Ibid. Erika Litváková, Tamara Moyzes: Všade som menšina (I am a minority everywhere), (interview), SME, 4 April 2015, http://kultura.sme.sk/c/7730665/tamara‐moyzes‐vsade‐ som‐mensina.html#ixzz3fuA0N1Gg, accessed 16 November 2018. Translated from the Slovak by Martina Pachmanová. Izabela Kowalcyz, “Vizualizing the mythical Polish mother.” In: Bojana Pejić (note 3), p. 219. For other projects by Tamara Moyzes and Roma Kale Panthera, see http://www. tamaramoyzes.info/. Audre Lorde, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” In: C. Morraga, G. Anzaldúa (eds.), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981, pp. 95, 97. As several authors cogently argue, the act of self‐production of otherness maintains the stereotypical notion of Eastern Europe as marginal and/or peripheral. The self‐ colonizing metaphor was first used by Alexander Kiossev, “Notes on the self‐colonising cultures.” In: Cultural Aspects of the Modernisation Processes, Oslo: TMV Skriftserie, No. 15, 1995. Beata Hock recently tried to deconstruct the hegemonic universalism of Western feminism and proposed new perspectives on how to trespass the automated applications of the concepts and categories of Western art and art history and/or criticism on/in Eastern Europe. See Beata Hock, Gendered Artistic Positions and Social Voices: Politics, Cinema, and the Visual Arts in State‐Socialist and Post‐Socialist Hungary, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2013. Tímea Junghaus, Meet your Neighbours: Contemporary Roma Art from Europe, Open Society Institute, 2006, p. 6. Ibid. The exhibition series Roma Body Politics was focused on the visual representation and participation of Roma – and especially Roma women – in the mass media, art and public life, and took place from March through June 2015 in the Gallery 8, The Roma Contemporary Art Space in Budapest, located strategically in the city district mostly populated by Roma inhabitants. Zdenka Badovinac, “Schengen women.” In: Pejić (note 4), pp. 202–203. As Gender Check, the so‐far largest project dedicated to mapping gender politics in visual arts in Eastern Europe exhibition (see note 1), and the collection of texts in the accompanying reader (see note) clearly demonstrate, the scholarly research, curatorial projects, and theory that thematize the body, sexuality, and feminine and masculine identities in socialist and post‐socialist art are predominantly delineated by nationalities. Sanneke Huisman, “Call the Witness: An Interview with Mária Hlavajová.” Metropolis M, 27 May 2011, http://metropolism.com/features/call‐the‐witness/, accessed 16

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November 2018. Vis‐à‐vis the current massive influx of immigrants that triggers a fear of social disorder, unemployment, and terrorism and reinforces the already existing nationalism and racism (a superiority complex about nationality and race has been growing enormously in Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism), the need for transnational identity seems even more urgent.

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Crossing Borders and Other Dividers in Western Europe and the British Isles Alexandra Kokoli The task of charting artistic practices informed and motivated by feminism in a designated geographical area may be approached in two seemingly opposed but actually interconnected ways: as a flawed premise that would be in need of dismantling were it not already deconstructed or as a provocation to entertain its (im)possibilities by attempting to trace rhizomes of shared questions, perspectives and practices. Taking the latter, more positive option surprisingly leads back to the former: the search for common ground reveals vital links and dialogues beyond the European border in a centrifugal spin. This chapter begins with an instance of the fundamental dialogue between European and North American feminisms, proceeds through a consideration of the decentring of gender in feminist art practices, and ends with a multilingual performance by a Greek artist on Turkish soil, in which both boundaries and their watery dissolution are put into play. At the time of writing, the relationship between the British Isles and continental Western Europe1 is undergoing seismic and, for many, traumatic changes.2 Over the past decades artists, writers and curators have split their time between (mostly) urban Britain and mainland European metropoles, taking advantage of the diverse resources and opportunities of each location, including affordable studio rents, networks and differently international cultural contexts. Such professional and, inevitably, also personal arrangements are at the time of writing under threat due to uncertainty around the future of free movement between the UK and the EU following the results of the 2016 EU referendum in the UK, and also due to unfolding changes in civil society as well as government policies which suggest that the conditions that made the UK attractive to EU citizens may soon cease to apply. Conversely, the right of UK citizens to live and work in the rest of Europe (and vice versa) hangs in the balance. Keep It Complex – Make It Clear, an evolving toolkit and events platform, aims to act as a source of inspiration and solidarity for all those who have ‘too many tabs open in [their] brain’ but want to use ‘art to have conversations with people [they] don’t usually talk to’ and not give in to fear and apathy.3 Developed out of EU‐UK.info, an artist‐run Remain campaign in the 2016 EU referendum, Keep It Complex – Make It Clear explores paths of intersectional and intergenerational resistance to austerity, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and xenophobia from the point of view of socially engaged artists and art workers invested in political involvement.4 Unite Against Dividers (13–15 January A Companion to Feminist Art, First Edition. Edited by Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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2017) was the third major event by Keep It Complex, coordinated by a transnational UK/EU‐based group of women (Kathrin Böhm, Rosalie Schweiker, Divya Osbon, Harriet Kingaby and Beth Bramich, with a website designed by An Endless Supply), consisting of a weekend of workshops, debates, questions and networking to equip and activate the arts community after the UK’s EU Referendum.5 The outlook, online presence and activities of Keep It Complex – Make It Clear exemplify an of‐the‐moment DIY entrepreneurialism, with highly successful crowdfunding initiatives and the dual deployment of their campaign slogans and designs on stickers, posters and T‐shirts as both protest gear and merchandise. They also help introduce the three key strands of this chapter: learning from and referencing the aesthetics and methods of feminist ­protest in the recent and distant past, acknowledging but no longer privileging gender as the main (let alone sole) identifier of the constituency and audiences of feminist ­practices in art and activism alike and a reinvigorated preoccupation with – and protest against – national borders in the face of a resurgence of anti‐immigration and white supremacist racisms across Europe, and the global refugee crisis, whose impact has been keenly felt on Mediterranean shores along the south‐eastern borders of the continent. The following text is therefore organised in three sections, each principally addressing one of the strands identified above, although clear distinctions between them aren’t simple to maintain. ‘Transhistorical solidarities’ focuses on the open dialogue between different historical moments in feminist practices and how it is activated in and through durational art projects. ‘Within and against gender’ examines the shifting place of ­gender as a category of analysis and a point of convergence for the constituencies of feminism, from intersectional complexities and digital culture to gender abolitionism. And, finally, ‘Border crossings’ reflects on transnationalism in and beyond Europe, experiences of migration and diaspora, and their inflection through feminist art practices.

­Transhistorical solidarities The series of collective readings of I Want a President… was initiated in 2010 in Sweden, by artists Malin Arnell, Kajsa Dahlberg, Johanna Gustavsson and Fia‐Stina Sandlund in collaboration with Zoe Leonard, author of the text. Originally written in 1992, Leonard’s manifesto‐like prose poem famously begins with the provocation ‘I want a dyke for a president’ and proceeds to demand power in its narrowest and most obvious manifestation (as the ‘leader of the free world’) for the sexually and socially marginalised: the president should be someone who is HIV positive and has lost loved ones to AIDS, a deportee, a victim of gay bashing and sexual harassment, someone ‘with bad teeth’ and who ‘has committed civil disobedience’. In the last lines Leonard rhetorically wonders why it is that a president is ‘always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker’.6 In revisiting Leonard’s text, Arnell, Dahlberg, Gustavsson and Sandlund ‘wanted to gather activists, artists, friends and colleagues as a response to an increasingly neoliberal political climate in a country just about to give space in parliament to an upcoming fascist, racist and homophobic party’.7 The Swedish general elections of 2010 did indeed give twenty parliamentary seats to the far‐right party Sweden Democrats, who thereby

­Transhistorical solidaritie

entered the country’s only assembly for the first time.8 Nevertheless, this defeat of ­progressive politics did not mark the end of the project. Malin Arnell’s website lists collective readings of I Want a President… from 2010 to 2012 in cities including Copenhagen, Helsinki, Madrid and Paris, but such readings appear to be ongoing and not always widely publicised, or conceived as artistic performances. National elections tend to spark flurries of collective readings, and in the run‐up to the 2016 US presidential elections re‐writings of the text were also organised with the aim of ‘initiat[ing] wide‐ranging conversations about the original text by Zoe Leonard, considering what has changed and what has stayed the same regarding to horizons of “representational politics” since she wrote it in 1992, and what experiences, identities and social realities we still don’t see represented in 2016’.9 Leonard’s text was also amended in 2015 on the eve of the UK general elections in readings organised by artists, where changes included the phrase ‘I want an immigrant for a president’ (with ‘immigrant’ replacing ‘dyke’).10 The collective readings motivated a number of translations to European and non‐ European languages, including Estonian and Arabic, with or without amendments. A reading of the original text in English and Arabic served the dual purpose of protest and of marking the commencement of A Stage for Any Revolution by Alia Farid, a Kuwaiti‐Puerto Rican artist who works at the intersection of art and education, developed through the Serpentine Galleries’ Centre for Possible Studies/Edgware Road Project in London, and presented during the Shubbak Festival in July 2015.11 Based on an architectural model from 1929 by constructivist set designer Viktor Shestakov, Farid’s ‘stage’ remained virtual, or rather conceptual, and was only temporarily materialised in a series of collective events and performances, including a recitation on 19 July 2015 of Anniversary: An act of memory, a performance series in 60 acts by Monica Ross and co‐recitors.12 In the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential elections, the content of Zoe Leonard’s text acquires added urgency as its radical aspirations have never seemed more removed from actuality since its writing. What interests me more here, however, is not the text itself but the network of returns to it as well as other previous instances of revolutionary politics in practice, such as Shestakov’s architectural model. Both I Want a President… (2010–) and Farid’s A Stage for Any Revolution (2015) exemplify an ‘intense, embodied enquiry into temporal repetition’,13 and transform any notion of homage to a revolutionary past into something altogether more dynamic, generative and complex. Theorisations of re‐enactment in a feminist art practice have underlined the potential of ‘temporal disruption as a space of possibility’ and also, specifically, ‘a space of learning’,14 while the archival turn in feminism in the neoliberal present has been convincingly described as ‘an attempt to regain agency in an era when the ability to collectively imagine and enact other ways of being in the world has become deeply eroded’.15 The archive as valuable resource; model of collection, curation and dissemination; theoretical concept; and metaphor continues to figure in art and feminism, both within art practices and as a driver for their preservation and celebration. Notable initiatives include AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, a non‐profit organisation co‐founded in 2014 in Paris by Camille Morineau, art historian, curator and specialist in the history of women artists.16 In London, the Women’s Art Library (MAKE), previously known as the Women Artists Slide Library (WASL), in collaboration with the journal Feminist Review, has developed Art in the Archive: Living with Make (2009–), a programme of artists’ residencies with the aim of tapping into the

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performative potential of their archive as well as staging an encounter between past, present and future feminist art practices.17 Albeit not confined to the visual arts, the Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL), grew out of an arts organisation, Women in Profile, which was set up in 1987 with the aim of ensuring the representation of women during Glasgow’s tenure as European City of Culture in 1990. Read Out! Read In! Feminist Lines of Flight in Art and Politics, a project initiated by artists Faith Wilding and Kate Davis, the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA), Glasgow and the GWL included the transgenerational discursive exhibition between Wilding and Davis, The Long Loch: How Do We Go on from Here? (CCA, Glasgow International 2010), a user‐generated archive following a call from the two artists, and a series of consciousness‐raising/reading groups that aimed ‘to explore the question of how we have gone on, how we do go on now, and how we dream/ desire to go on in the future in response to a feminist heritage’. This expansive archive of texts, audio, video and images, in both its physical and virtual manifestations, was designed to offer ‘a range of starting points for feminist lines of flight in art and politics’.18 A Room of One’s Own/A Thousand Libraries (Ett eget rum Tusen bibliotek) (2006), an artist’s book in an edition of 1000 copies to mirror its title, is one iteration of an ongoing project by Kajsa Dahlberg, one of the four artists behind the 2010 reboot of Zoe Leonard’s I Want a President.19 The book consists of a compilation of notes that readers made in the margins of library copies of Virginia Woolf ’s essay A Room of One’s Own. According to Dahlberg, the piece functions as: an analogy to the content of the essay where Woolf, using Mary Beton as her alter ego, is searching for the representation of women throughout the history of ­literature. Throughout the book she is describing, not only the search for literature written by women, but the conditions under which it was written.20 In its collective and transhistorical annotation by sympathetic readers, Woolf ’s inspirational essay is cast as an instrument of autodidactic learning, anachronistically ­contiguous with consciousness‐raising, a method of feminist activism that wasn’t developed until nearly half a century after the first publication of A Room of One’s Own.21 Dahlberg’s book reveals that among the most underlined passages is this much quoted sentence: For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.22 Dahlberg’s book materialises this mass thinking body behind Woolf ’s single voice, a listening/reading body, who is also a writing one. The German‐language iteration of the project, Ein Zimmer für sich/Ein eigenes Zimmer/Ein Zimmer für sich allein/ Vierhundertdreiunddreißig Bibliotheken (A Room of One’s Own/Four Hundred Thirty‐ Three Libraries) (2011) consists of a much larger edition artist’s book in 10,000 copies, and further expands the documentation of Woolf ’s readership from Berlin public libraries.23 The readership of Dahlberg’s books, all 11,000 copies passing through many hands, makes for a dense network of virtual correspondences which builds on and exponentially amplifies those captured in each copy of Woolf ’s annotated text. In a

­Within and against gende

repeated and revisited gesture of dialogue, learning, solidarity but also subversive rule‐ breaking (Dahlberg’s primary materials were, after all, found in public libraries, where users are expected to minimise their personal traces on loans), the thoughts of a feminist hive‐mind, at once scattered and pulled together over the same pages, are printed, handwritten, reprinted and (re)circulated anew. Dahlberg’s books are ­perhaps themselves being annotated as I am typing this text, lying in wait for a future feminist reader/ writer/artist to find, archive, revisit and revive them.

­Within and against gender The diversity of current feminist art practices and discourses accommodates a vast range of perspectives and preoccupations, some of which may be clearly traced back to the 1960s/1970s, and some which appear to be new, although upon closer inspection may rather suggest new ways of defining what feminist art has always been capable of encompassing. Some strands tap into the power of popular (or populist) feminisms,24 such as the amusingly named London collective Desperate Artwives consisting of ‘female artists whose creative practice interrogates their experience of being wives and mothers and questions social expectations and values which frame this role’.25 The collective is motivated by the realisation that the day‐to‐day care duties of artists impact on both their confidence and their capacity to undertake and see through the arduous extra labour required to get one’s work into galleries, promoted, viewed and reviewed, even once the artwork has been conceived or completed. Similarly, the international UK‐ based Procreate Project, ‘a social enterprise encouraging and promoting the works of female artists who are mothers’, strikes a delicate balance between a strategic essentialism that reads into the procreative capacity of female bodies certain social and creative predispositions, and a sober acknowledgement of the double burden of working m ­ others (artists or not), unsupported by publicly subsidised childcare and adequate parental leave for all. So while, in the words of founder Dyana Gravina, art and motherhood alike are ‘about expression, intense feelings, experiences, chaos, madness, profundity, richness, blood, love’,26 Procreate also focuses on creating infrastructures that aren’t as unaccommodating or blind as the mainstream artworld (and even pockets of the alternative artworld) to duties of care for which outsourcing isn’t possible, affordable or desirable. Their initiatives include The Mother House, a London space for making and showing work for artists who are mothers with a collectively maintained childcare model, which started as a short‐term residency in September 2016 with the ambition of being turned into a permanent experimental studio‐cum‐gallery space for people with childcare responsibilities.27 Such stock feminist concerns aren’t consistently foregrounded or indeed present in current feminist art practices in all their diversity. As a result, the reliance of feminist theories and practices on the category of gender demands some qualification, if not reconsideration, in light of recent debates in which practices and discourses heretofore associated with women’s movements are deployed against the centrality of gender, and also of art practices which either superficially do not seem to be ‘about’ gender or intersectionally dethrone gender as a privileged category of social identification, its experiences, representations, and performances. In her curatorial statement for the exhibition Feminist And…, at the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh (2012–2013), British feminist

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educator and writer on art Hilary Robinson explains that a definition of feminist art that hinges on ‘women’s issues’ is both limiting and misleading; the transgenerational and transnational group of artists brought together in the Feminist And… exhibition ‘have turned their gaze upon aspects of the world at large that may not at first glance have been considered to be “about women.”’28 Informing this is the position that feminism is a set of politics, not based upon ostensible gender identities or identifications, and therefore can address all matters. All the same, for Robinson a keen attention to the fluid gender‐coding of both individuals and structures remains a defining feature of feminist art practice.29 For some, the usefulness of gender as a category of both self‐identification and analysis is placed in serious doubt. The questioning of gender as a central or even meaningful category leads to two seemingly contradictory or rather highly contextual reactions. On the one hand, the complexity and openness of earlier feminist texts and practices to the mutability and ongoing dialectical or other (re‐)production of gender in both discourse and experience is often misrepresented and underplayed by self‐proclaimed queered feminisms, for reasons ranging from out‐of‐context misreadings to caving to the pressure to be novel, exercised by art and academic institutions alike. To Amelia Jones’s proposal for a ‘parafeminism’, namely ‘a conceptual model of critique and exploration that is simultaneously parallel to and building on […] earlier feminisms’,30 one could counterpoise that feminism worthy of the name has always been both multifarious and beside itself, perpetually interrogating its own foundations and resisting fixity, even at the cost of instability. On a more basic level, attacks on gender and other identifications are often based on the assumption that identity is a personal issue and, furthermore, a question of free choice rather being subject to power relations and a dialectic between autonomy and heteronomy. On the other hand, such challenges to feminism reinvigorate and test this key feature of feminism’s radicalism: a refusal to put to bed some of the most fundamental questions, including its own raison d’être. If certain manifestations of feminism disenfranchise groups who share the patriarchal oppression assumed to be feminism’s motivation, then feminism needs to be reconsidered, challenged, broadened, subverted or (not so) simply queered. Gender outlaws,31 gender terrorists,32 and largely post‐humanist gender abolitionists33 share little political or cultural common ground. Originally launched in 2015 on Twitter and subsequently published by Verso as Xenofeminism: Politics for Alienation by the transnational collective Laboria Cubonics formed in Berlin in 2014, xenofeminism or XF announced itself as a post‐accelerationist, neo‐rationalist, neo‐universalist movement that locates liberation in the abolition of gender (and, following that, also race and class).34 The language of XF is unmistakeably reminiscent of Futurist anti‐ humanism (which eventually embraced fascism), when, for example XF offers (or threatens) inoculation against melancholia and similar ‘maladies’ of the political left.35 Other attacks on the category of gender come from intensely embodied approaches based on lived social experience. The practice of Berlin‐based intersex artist Ins A. Kromminga is informed by histories of otherness, especially configurations of the abnormal and the monstrous, by contemporary human rights advocacy as well as by gender‐critical activisms. They make drawings on a variable but generally small scale which, clustered on the wall, allow for diverse associations and bring together the private (of the location where this intimate practice on paper was undertaken) and the public (the exhibition wall), so that the personal may be read as political. Other times,

­Within and against gende

their drawing escapes from the page onto the wall in dark swirls, like a monstrous infestation. Through their appropriation of abjection, Ins A Kromminga explores ‘why is the outside(r) so scary to the insider, is there really a difference between in‐ or o ­ utside, and how can I draw it so the viewer might get a glimpse of how this leads to madness [sic] we call normality’.36 In a similar vein to the reversal strategies of Kate Bornstein,37 Kromminga retains the binary logic of the gender norm(al) and its monstrous opposites only to flip it: coercive gender conformity is revealed as the true monster. Scottish artist Rachel Maclean also explores and exploits a visual lexicon of revulsion, operating right on the ‘discomforting boundary between the sickly sweet and the grotesquely abject’.38 In Wot u :‐) about?, her contribution to Tate Britain’s Art Now series, Maclean exemplifies a point of view that doesn’t specifically address feminism but assumes and builds on an intrinsically feminist understanding of gender, body politics, consumption and visual culture. Her film It’s What’s Inside that Counts (2016), commissioned by HOME, Manchester, has been described as an exploration of ‘the murky boundary between childhood and adulthood’ where happiness and popularity, grounded in social media platforms, are both comically quantifiable and terrifyingly contingent. Riffing on the ‘supersaturated, candy‐coloured palette of children’s television’,39 Maclean creates an ambiguous parable in which the material supports of the Internet are thrown into relief. Mischiefs of red‐eyed rats (all played by Maclean herself in special effects makeup, as are all the characters in her work) are dressed in Victorian doll dresses and go on hacking sprees, gnawing on Internet cables with literally murderous consequences, but are also easily seduced into adoring fandom by Data, the idealised social media persona of an impressionable obese cyborg. Intriguingly, Data’s human fans pre‐ exist her: clad in dirty onesies and ripped up fleece dressing gowns, they appear as the only survivors of an unexplained catastrophe which left them bereft and zombie‐like, pathetically calling for Data (‘We Want D/data!’), and perhaps also calling her into being. The language of self‐help is mined for its exploitative absurdity (‘F is for freedom. The freedom to be beautiful.’) and rendered literal with gruesome results: after being repeatedly admonished by ‘Happy Man’, a charlatan guru who turns violent, that inside her is ‘a beautiful, confident woman’, the obese cyborg is ripped apart for Data to be born. Yet Data turns out to be just as hollow or, more accurately, full of blue gore: her destruction is precipitated when the head‐hacker rat plugs an Internet cable into its anus. Although It’s What’s Inside that Counts is not looped but technically has a beginning, middle and end, it is insistently inconclusive and, after watching it a few times, I would describe it as disorientatingly circular. Maclean’s meaty, bloody virtuality could be interpreted as a defiant response to accelerationist techno‐feminisms and an assurance that the carnivalesque and the grotesque are in no threat of digital extinction but will continue to mutate. Just as Maclean deploys fleshy abjection in a decisively gender‐aware analysis of (social) media, Quilla Constance revisits racist stereotypes with an attention to the making and unmaking of subjectivity founded upon feminist psychoanalysis which foregrounds the contingency and fragility of identity through identification, especially but not only gender identity. Through the invented persona Quilla Constance, aka #QC, British artist, costumier, cellist and freelance lecturer Jennifer Allen explores ‘points of agency for the negotiation of black female identities within high art and majority culture’. ‘QC over‐identifies with an “exotic” militant punk persona to traverse pop culture and interrogate category‐driven capitalist networks’.40 #QC is, indeed, both resistant to

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and highly evocative of categories, taxonomies and codes. She conjures up the repugnantly racist figure of the golliwog to disturbingly transform it into an androgynous trickster, periodically breaking into scat vocalisations mixed in with screams of despair and intimidation. Her video piece Pukijam (2015) scrutinises food as a signifying system onto which social class and ethnic identities are mapped out, from fried chicken in cardboard take‐away boxes to tea in fine bone china cups (Figure 7.1). #QC’s invitation to the viewer to decode is so persistent that even an innocent root of fennel, playfully revolving on a screen and chosen principally for its formal properties, as the artist

Figure 7.1  Quilla Constance, Pukijam, 2015, HD digital video still. Courtesy of Jennifer Allen. (Note: Quilla Constance is the artist’s name of Jennifer Allen.)

­Border crossings: Between exile and diaspor

explained,41 made me think of the Italian homophobic slur finnochio.42 Signifiers abound and overwhelm, until in a subsequent iteration of Pukijam in 2016 #QC’s eyes turn into QR codes, indecipherable by the viewer’s eyes and yet pregnant with withheld meaning. The live performance equivalent of this tension between opacity and semiotic plenitude can be found in #QC’s lectures, in which a rigorous engagement with critical theory devolves (or evolves) into inarticulate cries. Although clearly not ‘about women’ and possibly even not ‘about gender’, #QC’s attention to the boundaries between sense, nonsense and different kinds of sensibility acknowledges the inflection of knowledge and its systems by the vicissitudes of power and identity.

­Border crossings: Between exile and diaspora A Turkish immigrant based in Paris since 1965, Nil Yalter’s practice over the past 40 years also challenges easy definitions of feminist art, especially when viewed in the context of 1970s feminist art practices. The reason is not simply that she usually focuses on the experience of migration and diaspora over gender positions, but rather that ‘her main concern is less with representing marginalised perspectives than it is with problematising the nature of representation itself, upsetting the certainties of any one, single perspective’.43 In this respect, Temporary Dwellings (1974–1977), consisting of seven archival board panels and six videos, announces its multivocality visually and discursively, through its combination of different media and methods of documentation of immigrant everyday life in three cities, Paris, Istanbul and New York. Yalter combines social scientific and poetic methods of documentation and representation, including interviews, text, detailed drawings and collages of detritus found on location, such as wall fragments and litter. The simultaneously attenuated and overdetermined relationships between migrants and place(s) are conveyed not only within any one work but between the multiple iterations of projects across different cities. The fifth instalment of Exile Is a Hard Job (El Exilio Es Un Duro Trabajo V) is a durational performance/ installation on a public street in Valencia, Spain, in two main acts: putting up large posters on which the same black‐and‐white photograph of a group of children is repeated in a grid, with some frames altered through drawing and erasure, and finished with the slogan ‘EL EXILIO ES UN DURO TRABAJO’ painted across in large red letters; and the painstaking removal of the posters, or rather their torn remains, soon thereafter. This work plays out Yalter’s typical flicker between the public and the private, in which migrant experience is most accurately captured. It also articulates Yalter’s view of living spaces as a shaping force on the human lives accommodated within them, and specifically her approach to the city as: a space of transition along an axis of adjacency, or a point of intersection. The city is not only experienced as a physical reality, the sum of collective history, memory and memorials, neither is it reduced to a fixed fancy; rather it becomes a fluid signifier containing unexpected, incalculable, multi‐layered interpretations and stories.44 At the south‐eastern border of Western Europe, Greek artist Mary Zygouri also homes into places of multilayered intersections and different stories to complicate and

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enrich them further. Her performance at a defunct Istanbul hammam, titled Bath of the Constitution, 1911–2016 (2016), consists of a collective recitation in Greek, Turkish and Armenian of a composite ‘constitution’ drawn from diverse sources including documents of the Paris Commune, the works of Samuel Beckett and surrealist manifestos.45 As well as intertextually mashed up sources, different registers and styles are mixed, and separate historical contexts are anachronistically mingled. The words of José Martí, heroic figure in Cuba’s anti‐colonial struggle (‘A man who obeys a bad government is not an honest man’), are blended into the article on free expression, while the slogan of the 1989 elections in Poland – ‘There is no Freedom without Solidarity’ – concludes an article that grapples with the definition of humanity. Another combines André Breton’s thoughts on automatism with the evangelists: Article 22. Every human being has the absolute right of equality before the unconscious message, the wireless imagination and the unsatisfied curiosity. The right of free preservation of the memory of the disaster. ‘Underneath the whitewash, everything is rot.’ Each article is printed on a length of cloth and read out by a participant, who then hangs it from a clothes line. The sound of dripping water dominates the video documentation of the performance, a reminder of the site’s original function as a hammam, and also of the pervasive cultural associations between cleansing rituals, purification and redemption.46 Once the recitation is complete, the performance continues in a quasi‐mystical vein, with the artist collecting, washing and spinning the printed textiles with an intensity that suggests that her actions may magically contribute to the realisation of the radical aspirations of the recited constitution. Zygouri’s work connects daily rituals with sacred ceremonies and affirms the multilingual and polyphonic aspiration of contemporary feminist art practices, their historical and archival preoccupations, and their questioning of boundaries and borderlines of all kinds. The video documentation of the performance opens with a resonant scene whose relevance may not be immediately obvious: a lone worker shoves a large bundle of plastics for recycling, ­surrounded by mounds of the same; in the next shot, jam‐packed bin bags rest against old buildings. The viewer is firmly located in an old world, the Old World drowning in its own debris, tired, squalid and brimming with baggage it can barely contain let alone confront. Zygouri’s ritual, a (wise) woman’s work, suggests a material inflection to the feminist preoccupation with archival building, demolition and sifting through the rubble of history. Bath of the Constitution, 1911–2016 proposes a new kind artist‐shaman, the feminist washer/witch, a sage time‐traveller unafraid to get her hands dirty.

Notes 1 As a designation, the ‘West’ (a synonym for the equally problematic, trans‐continental

‘First World’) has been the subject of much critical debate, from both post‐/decolonial and anti‐capitalist points of view. The transnational research, education, publishing and exhibition project Former West eloquently argues why its ‘search for ways of formerizing the persistently hegemonic conjuncture that is “the West”’ is about more than

Notes

nomenclature and could ‘suggest the possibility of producing new constellations, another world, other worldings’, http://www.formerwest.org/About, accessed 16 November 2018. 2 On 23 June 2016 the UK electorate voted to leave the European Union by 51.9% to 48.1% of the vote on a national referendum (Electoral Commission EU Referendum Results, http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/find‐information‐by‐subject/ elections‐and‐referendums/upcoming‐elections‐and‐referendums/eu‐referendum/ electorate‐and‐count‐information, accessed 16 November 2018). See also the Reuters EU Referendum page for live updates on the process and impact of UK’s withdrawal from the EU: http://live.special.reuters.com/Event/EU_Referendum?Page=0, accessed 16 November 2018. 3 http://makeitclear.eu/information/, accessed 16 November 2018. 4 http://makeitclear.eu/impressum/, accessed 16 November 2018. 5 http://makeitclear.eu/posts/3‐unite‐against‐dividers/ accessed 16 November 2018. 6 Zoe Leonard, I Want A President (1992), https://iwantapresident.wordpress.com/i‐ want‐a‐president‐zoe‐leonard‐1992/, accessed 16 November 2018. 7 http://www.iwantapresidentdc.com/project‐history/, accessed 16 November 2018. 8 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world‐europe‐11367622, accessed 16 November 2018. 9 ‘DC Reading and Re‐Writing’, http://www.iwantapresidentdc.com/, accessed 16 November 2018. 10 https://iwantapresident.wordpress.com/2015/04/29/london‐wednesday‐ may‐6‐2015‐6‐15pm‐on‐the‐steps‐of‐trafalgar‐square/, accessed 16 November 2018. 11 https://iwantapresident.wordpress.com/2015/07/04/london‐saturday‐11‐ july‐2015‐330pm‐on‐edgware‐road/, accessed 16 November 2018. 12 http://www.shubbak.co.uk/the‐stage‐for‐any‐revolution_a‐stage‐for‐any‐sort‐of‐ revolutionary‐play‐victor‐skestakov_1929/, accessed 16 November 2018. On Anniversary: An Act of Memory, a performance series in 60 acts of solo, collective and multilingual recitations from memory of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (2008–2013) by Monica Ross and co‐recitors, see http://www.actsofmemory.net/, accessed 16 November 2018, and also Alexandra Kokoli, ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working Through in Anniversary: An Act of Memory by Monica Ross and Co‐Recitors (2008–)’, Performance Research, vol. 17, no. 5 (2012), ‘On Duration’, pp. 24–30. 13 Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (Routledge, 2011), p. 2. 14 Catherine Grant, ‘A Time of One’s Own’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 357–376, December 2016, p. 362. 15 Kate Eichhorn, The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013), p. 9. 16 http://www.awarewomenartists.com/en/about/, accessed 16 November 2018. 17 https://www.gold.ac.uk/make/archive/orianafox/, accessed 16 November 2018. 18 http://womenslibrary.org.uk/2011/06/11/read‐out‐read‐in‐2/, accessed 16 November 2018. Unfortunately the digital Read Out! Read In! digital archive appears to be down at this time. 19 http://kajsadahlberg.com/work/a‐room‐of‐ones‐own‐‐a‐thousand‐libraries/, accessed 16 November 2018. 20 Ibid. 21 Grant, ‘A Time of One’s Own’, p. 373.

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22 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1957),

pp. 68–69.

23 http://kajsadahlberg.com/work/ein‐zimmer‐fuer‐sich‐‐ein‐eigenes‐zimmer/, accessed

16 November 2018.

24 My paraphrase alludes to Jane F. Gerhard, The Dinner Party: Judy Chicago and the

Power of Popular Feminism, 1970–2007 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013).

25 http://www.desperateartwives.co.uk/about/, accessed 16 November 2018. 26 http://www.procreateproject.com/manifesto/, accessed 16 November 2018. 27 http://www.procreateproject.com/portfolio/the‐mother‐house/, accessed 16

November 2018.

28 http://mattress.org/archive/index.php/Detail/occurrences/298, accessed 16

November 2018.

29 Cf. Joan W. Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, The American

Historical Review, vol. 91, no. 5 (1986), pp. 1053–1075.

30 Amelia Jones, Self/Image: Technology, Representation and the Contemporary Subject

31 32

33

34

35

36 37 38

39 40 41 42

(London: Routledge, 2006), p. 61. On the differences or rather lack thereof between feminism and parafeminism see Alexandra Kokoli, The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), pp. 61–62. Kate Bornstein, S. Bear Bergman (eds.), Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation (New York: Avalon, 2010). Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us (London: Routledge, 1994), esp. pp. 71–86. The performance artist Rose Wood also describes herself as a gender terrorist, see http://forward.com/culture/200341/bearded‐lady‐and‐ gender‐terrorist‐take‐performance/, accessed 16 November 2018. Francesca Ferrando, ‘Is the post‐human a post‐woman? Cyborgs, robots, artificial intelligence and the futures of gender: A case study.’ European Journal of Futures Research, doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40309‐014‐0043‐8; https://link.springer.com/ article/10.1007/s40309‐014‐0043‐8, accessed 16 November 2018. For a survey and critique of accelerationist theories and practices see Benjamin Noys, Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (Zero Books, 2014). On the relationship between xenofeminism and accelerationism, see https://www.furtherfield. org/revisiting‐the‐future‐with‐laboria‐cuboniks‐a‐conversation/, accessed 16 November 2018. Laboria Cuboniks, XF Manifesto (Trap), http://www.laboriacuboniks.net/#trap/1, accessed 16 November 2018; see also Laboria Cubonics, The Xenofeminist Manifesto (London: Verso, 2018), p. 41. http://www.abject.de/, accessed 16 November 2018. Bornstein, Gender Outlaw, pp. 71–86. Rachel Maclean interviewed by A. Will Brown, Studio International, 5 June 2015, http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/rachel‐maclean‐interview‐video‐ lolcats‐britney‐spears‐scottishness‐internet, accessed 16 November 2018. https://homemcr.org/exhibition/rachel‐maclean‐wot‐u‐smiling‐about/, accessed 16 November 2018. http://www.quillaconstance.com/home/, accessed 16 November 2018. Unpublished interview with the author, March 2015. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=finnochio, accessed 16 November 2018. The etymology of finnochio as a homophobic slur is uncertain and largely

Notes

43 44 45

46

apocryphal: http://www.giovannidallorto.com/cultura/checcabolario/finocchio.html, accessed 16 November 2018. To English speakers the slur may be familiar from sports journalism: https://uk.sports.yahoo.com/news/sarri‐possible‐used‐homophobic‐ slur‐230100066.html, accessed 16 November 2018. Gabriel Coxhead, https://artreview.com/reviews/april_2015_review_nil_yalter/, accessed 16 November 2018. Derya Yücel, Fragments of Memory, March 2011, http://www.nilyalter.com/texts/12/ n‐l‐yalter‐fragments‐of‐memory‐by‐derya.html, accessed 16 November 2018. I am grateful to Theodore Markoglou, art historian and curator at the State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, for bringing this work to my attention, and to the artist Mary Zygouri for access to the performance documentation. Turkish hammams have also long been recognised as homoerotic as well as LGBT‐ friendly spaces, simultaneously mainstream and with distinct alternative potentialities. For a queer history of Istanbul hammams see Ralph J. Poole, ‘Istanbul: Queer desires between Muslim tradition and global pop.’ In: Jennifer V. Evans, Matt Cook (eds.), Queer Cities, Queer Cultures: Europe since 1945 (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 171–190.

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Wheels and Waves in the USA Mira Schor Amnesiac Return Amnesiac Return1 A 1999 survey on feminist pedagogy proposed for the journal Documents was prefaced by a brief statement from Documents co‐editor Helen Molesworth: Recent years have seen an upsurge in attention toward feminism. […] Documents [was] interested in presenting a survey on the contemporary experience of teaching feminism in a “post‐feminist” era.2 Fifteen years later, we still seem to be in a condition of “post‐feminism” –when, supposedly, feminism had accomplished its goals and was no longer necessary – and what bell hooks, referring to Sheryl Sandberg’s brand of “lean in” feminism, has called “faux feminism.” There is a constant cycle of amnesia and return, of desire and demonization, commercialization and corruption of basic principles, and of impediments from ­without and dissension from within. The focus on pedagogy is important: back in 1991, I examined the mechanism of “patrilineage” in art canon formation and in art education. I noted that women artists’ entry into the canon was still based on validation through patrilineal referencing, even for artists working within tropes developed by feminism. I pointed to the Guerrilla Girls’ 1989 poster, When Racism & Sexism Are No Longer Fashionable, What Will Your Collection Be Worth? and suggested that women artists working today should know all the names and work of the women artists listed on the poster whose work could be purchased, at least one by each, for the price of just one Jasper Johns picture at auction. But feminism has little such collective memory. Despite the exponential increase in the numbers of women artists with international careers, and the increase in value at auction of works by some women artists, not much has changed since 1989. The reality of progress and of prejudices and inequities affecting women artists was recently demonstrated in two radically different stories: in July, Tracey Emin’s 1998 work, My Bed, sold for over $4 million; in a recent blog entry on the Huffington Post, art collector and ­former MoMA Board president Agnes Gund noted the persistent prejudice among ­collectors and art institutions against the investment value of work by women, despite

A Companion to Feminist Art, First Edition. Edited by Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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four incredibly productive decades of women artists transforming art content and media. She noted that: Some younger artists seem little aware of how hard it has been for women, though they do acknowledge the discrepancies, even today, in rewards and recognition between themselves and the men they know. There is even reason to fear that a younger generation lacks knowledge of the challenges, the claims for place, and the revolution in attitudes that have actually secured their careers. So the “success” of feminism has created amnesia and disassociation, while The facts and statistics for women artists in market share, in museum and gallery showings, are dismaying.3 Thirty years after the Guerrilla Girls applied humor to statistics so as to critique inequality of representation of women in galleries and museums, and 10 years after the Brainstormers continued the task, in 2013, Los Angeles‐based artist Micol Hebron started the project Gallery Tally: Calling for gender equity in the art world. Hundreds of women contributed posters illustrating, in a great diversity of visual and discursive ­registers, the continued appalling statistics for the representation of women artists in commercial art galleries. Thankfully, as Hebron’s project reflects, within each generation there are women who are drawn to feminism. But, in the ongoing era of “post‐feminism” and of general social fragmentation, traces of the backlash against feminism lurk even within efforts at activism, for example in the reference to a “feminine voice” rather than a feminist voice. Femininity is a gendered characteristic that is available to any human being, just as masculinity would be, but it’s always had particular cachet if displayed by a man while being of questionable interest when ascribed to a woman since it is supposedly inherent to her as a cis‐female and, thus, mainly useful as a mechanism of societal control. The slippage from “feminist” to “feminine” took place in the 1990s, during one of the many amnesiac returns to feminism, as a way of marking important contributions by women artists while neutralizing the disruptive radicality of feminism. I am interested in the reality that women are human beings with talents and desires is doubly meaningful because of how little interest and power they hold for the rest of the world. Here are some recent amnesiac returns: Between 2006 and 2008, there were many exhibitions and symposia on the history of feminist art focusing particularly on the 1970s Feminist Art Movement. MoMA, with targeted funding by Sarah Peters, focused on women artists in a series of major surveys and small niche exhibitions and symposia, culminating in the 2010 MoMA volume Modern Women. The Tate is planning to focus on women artists in the coming year. Are these gestures true transformations towards equity or reparatory exceptions? There don’t need to be symposia on art by men – that is just art, still. This winter, the Bruce High Quality Foundation decided that their last Brucennial would feature only women, although they refused to publicize this as such to the media, a decision that was interesting in that it insisted on a normalization of the all‐women’s show, a situation that many women reject as ghettoizing and frustrating since the show dramatically underlined the force and diversity of women artists working just in

Amnesiac Return Amnesiac Return

New York City alone. The call went out through a rapid‐fire chain of email forwards of the invitation among women artists; long before the deadline, so many had registered that BHQF had to close the show for lack of space (and we are talking salon style installation to the max). If there had been more wall space, any number of additional women would have participated. And comparing it to the 2014 Whitney Biennial, which opened at the same time, it was clear that if you had edited the 600+ women artists in the Brucennial to about 100 you would have had as “high quality” and as random an exhibition as the Biennial, whose statistics for women and artists of color were dismaying: Eunsong Kim and Maya Isabella Mackrandilal mounted a laceratingly brilliant attack on the white male racist sexist curatorial practices of the Biennial in their online text, “The Whitney Biennial for Angry Women.”4 In May 2014, the orchestration of efforts in the media to restore Carl Andre’s personal reputation in advance of his retrospective at Dia led to a number of protests. No Wave Performance Task Force picketed Dia in Chelsea the evening a talk about Andre’s work was to be held (it was postponed at the last minute). A small group of people chanted, “We wish Ana Mendieta was still alive,” and spilled bloody animal guts on a long banner laid on the sidewalk on which these words were written. What has haunted me from coverage of the event was a photo of two young female Dia employees – or, as likely, unpaid interns – sent downstairs to clean up the mess. What were those young women thinking? Did they understand the outrage? Did they feel solidarity? Or did they think  the protesters were some annoying 1970s feminists who had left them with a bloody mess? On the August 5th cover of the New York Times, under the header “Justices’ Rulings Advance Gays; Women Less So,” an article featuring Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg raised important questions about why five right‐wing Republican Catholic men have been more sympathetic to gay rights than issues concerning women – it only scratched the surface of that question. Overall, the article was deeply dispiriting about the “progress” of women 45 years after the Women’s Liberation and second‐wave feminist movements. Here I must interject a personal experience: 40 years ago at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where I was, at age 24, the only woman on a faculty of 14 men, I said something at a large group crit. The student to whom I had addressed the comment quoted it, saying, “as (insert name of young male professor) said.” Since it was apparently an interesting statement, it must have been said by a man; my voice was erased from the equation. And here we are 40 years later, from the Times article: Justice Ginsburg has suggested that her male colleagues sometimes do not hear a woman’s voice, including her own. In a 2009 interview with USA Today, she said the other justices, who were then all men, sometimes ignored the arguments she made at their private conferences. “I will say something – and I don’t think I’m a confused speaker  –  and it isn’t until somebody else says it that everyone will focus on the point,” Justice Ginsburg said.5 Ginsburg noted that things got a bit better when two more women were added to the court, but the awful fact remains: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is not a confused speaker, is erased from the equation. The woman’s voice is not heard.

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There is a lot of work yet and always to be done. But how many amnesiac returns can feminism take before the condition becomes permanent?

­The feminist wheel 1) One certainty is that when you put together a panel or lecture series with the word feminist in it, a lot of people will show up because people, mostly women, are always hungry to have someone tell them something about feminism. It is a word that appears like a chimera and a promise. Maybe they will finally learn the answer to the puzzle of the unequal status of women in most societies. 2) Feminism is always in a state of revival, because any culture whose actual practices subjugate and devalue women one way or another cannot incorporate it into collective memory, even that of women. 3) The task of the political activist is to keep saying the same thing over and over again, repeating the same history, over and over again for decades, and greeting new arrivals to the cause with enthusiasm rather than despair. I am not always so cheerful about it. Tweet around 9:05PM Thursday September 18 from the all too appropriately titled The Hole: @miraschor: Future feminism. Preview: is there something more basic than feminism 101? So naive & essentialist it’s all I can do not to walk out. In September of 2014, promotional material began to circulate about an exhibition and series of events at the downtown New York exhibition space, The Hole, titled Future Feminism. The events seemed diverse and also suspect. Point one: When you see Marina Abramovic listed as a guest speaker at yet another “feminist” event, warning alerts sound for anyone who has attended any number of major feminist symposia, such as at “The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts,” a two‐day symposium that was held at MoMA in January 2007 and heard her inevitably begin her talk with the words, “I am not a feminist artist.” It’s not that I don’t believe her; in fact, I do believe her. If she says she isn’t, she isn’t. Unfortunately the complex story of her personal and artistic biography in relation to a feminist narrative and how she has learned to play the dynamics of the art world’s intersection with fame and fashion is lost on young women artists around the world who emulate her because her fame is less and less problematized the farther away it expands globally, becoming a brand rather than an artist. She’s a woman, she uses her body (now she uses other ­people’s bodies), she’s famous, this must be a feminist model. But if she is asked yet again to speak at a “feminist” event, then you know some star fucking is going on rather than some serious thinking about feminism… OK, never mind. Point two: what were these “13 tenets of Wheels and Waves Future Feminism” they were proclaiming? I only saw the full list at the Future Feminism panel itself. I’ll get to that presently (Figure 8.1). Oh, don’t let me forget the T‐shirts: adjacent to the main door of the gallery is a separate storefront which was festooned with T‐shirts with the slogan “The Future is Female.” In the window were two blackboards, one advertised the price for the T‐shirts at $20 and the other for $25. I was trying to figure out whether there were two different designs when, as the line waiting outside filled out, the young woman in the store came

­The feminist whee

Figure 8.1  “The 13 Tenets of Future Feminism,” scan of hand‐out to audience at “Future Feminism” panel at The Hole, 18 September 2014, New York City.

over, tipped the signs back so she could see them, and removed the one with the $20 price (Figure 8.2 and Figure 8.3) The women of my generation, what I’ve called “Generation 2.5”, show up for these things.6 We have a lot of history in feminism but we want to know what’s going on too, in a different way than the people who show up without any previous background in feminism and who have that inchoate longing for an answer. So a friend suggested we go hear veteran feminist Ann Snitow interview the “Future Feminists,” and we ran into a group of women artist friends who were there for the same reason: let’s see what this is. And that is the basic thing: we had come to hear what these people had to say. Eventually, the evening’s speakers – musicians Bianca and Sierra Casady of the band Cocorosie, performance artist Johanna Constantine, singer/songwriter Antony (Hegarty, now known as Anohni) and performance artist Kembra Pfahler – filed in and took their place. And then it took about a half‐hour until we actually heard them say

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Figure 8.2  “The Future is Female,” T‐shirts for sale in the Future Feminism Shop at the Hole, September 2014, photo: Mira Schor.

Figure 8.3  “The Future is Female,” T‐shirts for sale in the Future Feminism Shop at the Hole, September 2014, photo: Mira Schor.

­The feminist whee

anything because Ann Snitow made the peculiar choice of asking a man to talk to us about listening. That is, Snitow had waxed enthusiastic about the FFs, how this group of friends had taken a vacation and they had talked to each other, about feminism, and this was what Consciousness Raising was; they had reinvented CR, they were interested in circles, circular forms of governance, they wanted nothing less than everything. That is to say that after Snitow had failed in introducing this group we had come to learn about, by failing to fully introduce each person, and by failing to give them any kind of historical context – as it turns out, they don’t seem to have any, but it was her responsibility as a long‐time feminist educator to situate these people in relation to some kind of history  –  after this very enthusiastic and very uninformative introduction, just as we thought we would hear from members of the group, she asked Robert Sember of the activist group Ultra‐red to talk to us about listening. And so he did, for at least 15 or maybe 20 minutes. As he went on my mind was increasingly torn between thinking, on the one hand, “Well, this is kind of interesting”: he spoke about the practice of intentional listening, space made for listening in non‐hierarchical ordering of processes of change, and said that Ultra‐red had been engaged in a deep investigation of the intentional practice of listening in social movements. He mentioned that women in the civil rights movement had created listening circles, building literacy out of experience, conversation into action. On the other hand, as he said this, having spoken by now for several minutes (and he was not the speaker we had come to hear), I thought about how the poor treatment of women in the civil rights and anti‐war movements led directly to the women’s liberation movement. I remembered that, when asked what the position of women was in SNCC (Student Non‐Violent Coordinating Committee), Stokely Carmichael said, “the only position for women in the movement is prone,” and how my anger at the casual sexist injustice of that statement was certainly part of my own early attraction to the feminist movement – by the way this well‐known snarky quip is not included in online collections of significant statements by Carmichael, but of course he was a brilliant and dynamic figure and had a lot to say. Sember continued, emphasizing that the commitment to actually really listen is a profound act of solidarity and care, of love in the name of the future, of transformation, of the reordering of power. He then noted that the Future Feminists were indeed a collective. Later, however, Antony said they were not really a collective; they were just a bunch of friends who hung out together. Sember made an interesting distinction between activism, where there are ones in the know, experts, where it is strategic to speak with one voice, and organizing, which is a long‐term process of working together, woven together by process, learning and developing. So the FFs had engaged in CR, how is feminism practiced and lived, the building of the “we,” CR had held generalizations about women up to their own experience. At this point, I interrupted my long‐time practice of verbatim note taking to insert a personal comment in my notebook: It is weird to have this lectured to us – at us – with the confident voice of a white man. He continued: The question for us tonight, what do we know? What brought you here? What did you come here to hear? He then asked for a moment of silence. During which I continued my commentary in my notes, and the other side of my brain spoke, the side that drew me to feminism: I kind of resent this quasi‐religious confident male voice lecturing to me about listening and Consciousness Raising and

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feminism even if what he is saying is of some interest. Rebecca Solnit has wonderfully named this phenomenon “mansplaining.”7 It’s important to distinguish between that which patriarchy offers of history, literature, and art, which is valuable and that I insist on assuming as my own heritage, and the mechanism of power always devolving to the male voice, so confident, so privileged, even when it is taking the side of the underprivileged. The rebellion is not so much in my anger at being talked at but in assuming a voice of my own and giving others a voice too if possible. Now, a half‐hour into this event, held in a hot airless room which had been recently painted white so that it reeked of new paint fumes, would we begin the actual Q & A with the Future Feminists? No. We were now asked to turn to the person in back of us, in alternating rows, and talk. The very nice young man in front of me asked me what I thought about the 13 tenets, copies of which were on each seat. I said I couldn’t believe how essentialist it all was and how out of keeping with the time it was to use words like “feminine” and “female” without problematizing them and to unquestioningly link women with nature, and he totally agreed. We had a nice chat. He had no idea of my history and I have no idea if he was familiar with the debate within feminism during the 1980s over essentialism and how corrosive it could be, which means that he had no idea that if the lady he was talking to said that something was essentialist, then the amnesiac wheel has definitely turned. (Young man, you are blonde and were wearing a dark cap which I was going to ask you to take off before I spoke to you, because it was blocking my view, but after I talked to you I didn’t mind anymore; if you are out there and see this, I was the lady with short white hair and multicolored reading glasses. Just want to say hello.)8 When the conversation finally turned to the panelists, their vagueness was such that the discussion somehow immediately reverted back to the audience. Someone asked about the gendering of language. The toxic paint fumes or the perilous effects of déjà vu on the brain made me freeze. Someone suggested the word “God.” Only two days later did I remember that old chestnut of an example, history. Tweet around 9:09PM: @miraschor: Language defaults to “he.” Yes, anyone here heard of Mary Daly? These people seem sweet but apparently just landed on Earth & they aren’t that young. But at last someone in the audience asks why the “tenets” of this group are so binarist and points out there are a lot of people in the room who have been working on this – feminism – for a long time. The audience member challenged the group: Where is the transgender in these tenets? What are your racial politics? At this point Antony said that they were not really a collective, but an affinity group, of friends, who “took time out of capitalism to talk.” Well that is interesting. I’ve been part of groups of women who have taken time out of capitalism for all of our lives to talk. It is, indeed, a wellspring of strength, but if you get up in front of people you have to have a bit more to say. These are performance artists,; they should at least know that. At $10 admission fee. Give the audience something. But, Antony continued, “the crowd in the room is the dream we all envisioned.” If you reverse engineer that, you may end up somewhere else: we wanted an audience and we thought, hey feminism seems like something, it’s been somnolent for years, until 2011 when Pussy Riot… OMG, that is a

­The feminist whee

very limited way of looking at the history of feminism and by the way, as I said, Antony said this, because, Tweet around 9:16PM: @miraschor: By the way men are doing most of the articulate speaking. White men telling us how important it is to listen. Snitow asked them how they came to choose the word “feminist.” They said they had looked it up in the dictionary and it seemed perfect … They talked about how dangerous it was to use the term. FYI, cf. my essay “The ism that dare not speak its name.”9 They asked, why does misogyny exist? A good question. But no one on the panel seemed to speak from experience of misogyny or a personal history with feminism. Feminism was something they might have picked up in the Future Feminism gift shop adjoining the gallery. Not one of the women in the group seemed to speak from a lived existence of experiencing discrimination or misogyny. I had wanted to leave the event early on – mansplaining does that to me – but my natural drive to see things through because you never know what you might miss if you leave an event early was stronger than the outrage that makes me spring from my seat and stop wasting my time (as far as I remember I’ve only walked out of one quote‐ unquote feminist event, when Camille Paglia spoke at the New York Public Library, years ago). Also my friend Maureen Connor wanted to stay and say something to them, offer some information on the history of patriarchy and misogyny and also question their activism, now that they had just discovered feminism. She eventually did speak. In her comments she quoted Gerda Lerner (see below). As I eventually left the Future Feminism event, people in the audience were sharing some of their own experiences and seemed grateful for the discussion, naive and ahistorical as it was. People come to a room because they want to learn something about feminism. There is a constant need. This crowd had slightly more men in it than usual for such events. But just because people sit on a stage or give themselves a name which contains the word “feminist” doesn’t mean they have much to say. But all events are of interest, because it’s all theater, and because of what anything reveals about the state of a politics, and because even simple truisms and naive statements can have some genuine meaning. One of the FFs, Bianca I think, made my eyes roll when she hazarded that “the future is really this utopia thing…” but then the discussion turned to apocalyptical thinking and she said that “to dream that there was a future that includes human beings” is what feminism meant to her. That seemed sincere. Tweet around 9:19PM: @miraschor: Antony: “most people don’t hope so it felt radical to suggest hope” – that’s much more interesting than their feminist stance. I’m still tweeting at The Hole, future feminism but my phone is about to lose power. A report of the show at The Hole and other concurrent feminism‐inspired exhibitions quotes Katie Cercone, member of the collective Go! Push Pops, as believing that “the future of the [feminist] movement is genderless, raceless, and boundaryless. Ms. Cercone said, ‘It explodes all definitions of what (feminist) art is and who should make it.’” (Figure 8.3)10

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This utopian ebullience is wonderful and perhaps this will become the case if humans continue on this earth. Perhaps it is possible to all of a sudden explode old obstacles like the history of the inequality of women which historian Gerda Lerner among others has traced to the beginnings of archaic civilization.11 Instances of radical performativity can sometimes be genuinely generative of political transformation, but if there are no women, if there is no gender, then whatever society we are talking about, it is not feminist, according to the dictionary definitions of the term (the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities; organized activity in support of women’s rights and interests; the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes; organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests). And, according to the rules of the spectacle and social network society, if you make something unspecific and fun enough, it won’t threaten any status quo. Lerner distinguishes between the “unrecorded past” and “History – the recorded and interpreted past” and she notes that while of course women were always “actors and agents in history” with a small h, “history‐making, on the other hand, is a historical creation which dates from the invention of writing in ancient Mesopotamia. … Until the most recent past, these historians have been men, and what they have recorded is what men have done and experienced and found significant. They have called this History and claimed universality for it. What women have done and experienced has been left unrecorded, neglected, and ignored in interpretation.”12 Let’s put aside the “13 tenets” promoted by the Future Feminists, and – keeping in mind just some recent news items, including continued efforts to control female reproductive rights in the US, the abduction, rape, and enslavement of Nigerian schoolgirls by Boko Haram, and the NFL’s problem of how to manage reports of domestic violence by its players –consider how so much is still true from the first few of Lerner’s introductory propositions in her 1986 book The Creation of Patriarchy: a) The appropriation by men of women’s sexual and reproductive capacity occurred prior to the formation of private property and class society. Its commodification lies, in fact, at the foundation of private property. b) The archaic states were organized in the form of patriarchy; thus from its inception the state has an essential interest in the maintenance of the patriarchal family. c) Men learned to institute dominance and hierarchy over other people by their earlier practice of dominance over the women of their own group. This found expression in the institutionalization of slavery, which began with the enslavement of women of conquered groups. d) Women’s sexual subordination was institutionalized in the earliest law codes and enforced by the full power of the state. Women’s cooperation in the system was secured by various means: force, economic dependency on the male head of the family, class privileges bestowed upon conforming and dependent women of the upper classes, and the artificially created division of women into respectable and non‐respectable women.13 Tweet around 9:50PM: @miraschor The feminist wheel has to be reinvented all the fucking time.

­Intervie

­Spin cycle My first year in graduate school at CalArts I was in the CalArts Feminist Art Program run by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro and I worked on the 1972 Womanhouse project. At least three rooms in the house dealt with menstruation, most overtly in Judy Chicago’s didactic and polemic installation, Menstruation Bathroom, more indirectly in my walk‐in painting Red Moon Room, and, suggestively if not purposefully, in Camille’s Grey’s Red Lipstick Bathroom. Consciousness‐raising was used as a technique to elicit consciously female/feminist subject matter for art, including discussions of one’s period and the commercialized methods for containing it. In the 1980s feminist discourse was riven by a polemic battle between social construction of gender and so‐called essentialism – the presumed belief that biology is destiny and that there is such a thing as an immutable essence of femininity, a belief ascribed by one generational and ideological group of feminists to its immediate predecessors in a manner that could be g­ eneralizing, had damaging effects on careers, and contained within it also a critique of the essentialism of material practices in art such as painting and sculpture as opposed to photography, appropriative art practices, and some performance art. Blood as a feminist subject was repressed as an essentialist marker, except when it wasn’t (cultural and ethnic background being among the unspoken considerations). In the 1990s the abject body returned as a trope, and the construction/essence dispute was tabled by the ­market success of a new sub‐generation of women artists who ignored the terms of the divide while at the same time often distancing themselves from an outright identification with feminism. In recent years, the discourse of essentialism  –  that is, in particular, the ­critique of essentialism  –  has gone underground, so that any practices which might actually be essentialist and would have been once attacked as essentialist are no longer subject to that critique. For example, in November 2015 I attended Period Piece, an evening of visual presentations, performances, and readings about menstruation organized by the New York‐ based performance artist Christen Clifford. An entertaining and lively celebration of female embodiment and experience as I have not heard since the early 1970s took place to great appreciation of the audience. But the whole issue of essentialism was not addressed. The evening did not take place in the same theoretical arena, and no one discusses that anymore even when it is a relevant consideration, just as the critique had not been applied to the tenets of the “Future Feminists.”

­Interview A young woman artist visits my studio to interview me. She asks, “Do you consider yourself a feminist artist?” No, more likely she puts it this way, “Do you call yourself a feminist artist?” That is more significant: Do you take responsibility for the public identification and accept the consequences? I edit the question to “Are you a feminist artist?” and place it in a painting, where the woman artist answers by holding up a painting of the word “flesh” and a book, both created from threads of blood coming from eyes, breasts, and cunt  –  anticipating by a few weeks Donald Trump’s August 2015 slur about FOX News reporter Megyn Kelly, “You could see there was blood coming

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out of her eyes,” Trump told CNN’s Don Lemon …. “Blood coming out of her – whatever.” This provoked a hilarious Twitter movement where women started live tweeting their periods to Trump, and women artists posted gore‐filled art on social media. In my painting, the artworks marked and created by the materiality of blood are proffered as answers to the question or proof of the identity of “feminist” which remains fraught in a society which at one side of the political spectrum regresses whatever women’s rights that were fought for and gained in the second wave, while the other side finds other gender issues more pressing than the issues affecting the lives of “cis‐­gendered” women that remain unresolved even after 200 years of an articulated politics of women’s rights, liberation, and parity. The issue is so fraught that I could not bring myself to copyedit the transcript of the interview for it to be published online. My response is the painting.

­Obituary Miriam Schapiro died in June 2015. For her students, friends, and admirers her death had a tragic undercurrent that went beyond personal loss  –  Schapiro had some form of dementia for several years and so had entered a kind of living death in terms of art and feminist discourse. Her death raised enormous issues about feminism, legacy, and about the role an artist plays in how she enters a history she helped to create – even the idea that such a history could and should exist, one that included the voices and images of women. Because of Schapiro’s long decline and old age, her friends had anticipated this moment and been haunted by it because an amnesia had already formed around a figure who was still living. This is of course the fate of most artists, living and dead, but if bringing into history a politically conscious representation of female experience was the artist’s struggle, amnesia and disappearance had a particular poignancy that stung and haunted.

­Amnesia (third iteration, 2015) Amnesia is a trope of film noir. The result of trauma, it sets up a condition of horror and mystery. Something awful has happened to the psyche, to the brain, leaving the present to be faced without the benefit of experience, the past to be recovered with maximum danger. Waves crashing against the bottom of a rocky cliff during a stormy night is another trope of film noir, whether it is the instance of the initiatory trauma or the formal device of a transfer shot signaling a flashback to a moment out of the past that will move the plot forward. Feminism is described as coming in waves – the first, the second, the third, now the fourth. It is a fluid periodic pulse. What comes in must go out. A wave comes back in because a wave went out. Patriarchy has no waves. It has been the ocean and the land that the feminist waves seek to reshape. Between the waves, amnesia. When the feminist wave comes back in it’s always as if it’s for the first time. Women are faced with the same dilemmas, the same injustices, only partially addressed and resolved in the previous wave. Feminism exists in a state of revival because all cultures to some degree subjugate, subordinate, derogate,

­Note

legislate female sexuality, subjectivity, and agency. Amnesia for feminism is always beginning to and then forgetting to question the political dimensions of the seemingly personal. But amnesia is also seen as a positive value. After the exodus from Egypt, the Jews were made to wander in the desert for 40 years until the generation that knew slavery had died and the generation entering the Promised Land would have shed the mindset of the slave. It is a paradox that this story which has been retold every year for millennia is based as much on the necessity of forgetting as it is on the imperative of remembering.

­Note This text includes material from four previously published works: Mira Schor, “Amnesiac Return Amnesiac Return,” Brooklyn Rail, September, 2014, http://www.brooklynrail. org/2014/09/criticspage/amnesiac‐return‐amnesiac‐return; Mira Schor, “The Feminist Wheel,” A Year of Positive Thinking, 20 September 2014, http://ayearofpositivethinking. com/2014/09/20/the‐feminist‐wheel/; Mira Schor, “Remembering Miriam Schapiro (1923–2015),” 22 June 2015, http://hyperallergic.com/216461/remembering‐miriam‐ schapiro‐1923‐2015/; Mira Schor, “Amnesia,” Shifter 22  –  Dictionary of the Possible, edited by Avi Alpert and Sreshta Rit Premnath, 2016.

­Notes 1 The repetition without punctuation of the words “Amnesiac Return Amnesiac Return” in

the title of this section reflects the fact that in 1992, for a special issue of the art journal Tema Celeste dedicated to “The Question of Gender in Art,” I wrote a short essay titled “Amnesiac Return.” I thought of the same title for this piece before realizing that it sounded familiar – because, in fact, I had used it before. 2 Helen Molesworth, “Teaching feminism: A questionnaire.” Documents vol. 17, guest editor, Amy Lyford (Winter/Spring 2000),17. 3 Agnes Gund, “Fame, fortune, and the female artist,” Huffpost New York, 22 July 2014, updated 21 September 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/agnes‐gund/fame‐fortune‐ and‐the‐fema_b_5610852.html, accessed 16 November 2018. 4 Eunsong Kim, Maya Isabella Mackrandilal, “The Whitney Biennial for Angry Women.” The New Inquiry, posted 4 April 2014, http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the‐whitney‐ biennial‐for‐angry‐women/, accessed 16 November 2018. 5 Adam Liptak, “Justices’ rulings advance gays; women less so.” The New York Times, 5 August 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/05/us/as‐gays‐prevail‐in‐supreme‐ court‐women‐see‐setbacks.html?_r=0, accessed 16 November 2018. 6 Mira Schor, “Generation 2.5.” In: A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009): 47–69. 7 Rebecca Solnit, “Men explain things to me.” In: Men Explain Things to Me (Chicago: Dispatch Books, Haymarket Books, 2014). 8 It took only five days for the Web to work its connective wonders: I published “The Feminist Wheel” on my blog A Year of Positive Thinking 20 September 2015, on 25 September, I received a wonderful email from the young man in the dark cap, who

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turned out to be West Coast based American writer, activist and zine editor Erick Lyle. He had heard about my post from a friend and he concurred with my view of the event. Erick Lyle is now Erica Dawn Lyle and her website is http://www.ericadawnlyle.info accessed 3 February 2019. 9 Mira Schor, “The ism that dare not speak its name,” A Decade of Negative Thinking, 21–35. 10 Kate Messinger, “The Hole and Sensei Galleries redefine the F‐word – Feminism,” Observer Culture, 19 September 2014, http://observer.com/2014/09/the‐hole‐and‐ sensei‐galleries‐redefine‐the‐f‐word‐feminism/ accessed 27 March 2016. 11 Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 12 Ibid., 4. 13 Ibid., 8–9.

Part II

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Essentialism, Feminism, and Art: Spaces Where Woman “Oozes Away” Amelia Jones In a 1994 interview with Ellen Rooney, Gayatri Spivak, a hugely influential transnational feminist scholar, grapples extensively with the question of essentialism in feminist thought, arguing towards the end of the lengthy dialogue, “[i]t is my task as a reader to see where in that grid there are the spaces where, in fact, woman oozes away, you know? … Essences, it seems to me, are just a kind of content. All content is not essence.”1 Spivak’s formulation makes clear that essentialism lurks at the foundations of feminism – for what has feminism been but a politics associated with the rights of people identified as women through their experiences, which are in turn based on supposedly immutable, or at least determinable, anatomical, psychological, and intellectual traits? And yet Spivak’s point about woman “oozing away” reminds us that “woman” (or “women” for that matter) are illusory constructions, not essential “content” defining what it means to be identified as female. Is essentialism lurking in all feminist discourse? While women’s rights claims could be and sometimes are based on the argument that men and women are exactly the same and should thus be treated completely equally, this has not been a common form of feminism in academic and artistic work. So‐called cultural feminism  –  including an influential arm of the 1970s feminist art movement in the United States  –  has long rested on essentializing bases in its assertion that women have different values, sensibilities, and experiences from men.2 As feminist art historian and co‐founder of the California feminist art movement Arlene Raven noted in answer to the question “What is feminist art?”: “It is, first of all, women’s art – a point of view about female experience from the inside of that experience.”3 And even the feminist visual theorists and artists who challenged such arguments, often called “anti‐essentialist” or “poststructuralist” in purview, built their models of analysis on the notion that gender constructs can be identified across cultural formations through models such as Freudian theories of sexual difference; these theories, too, are thus also (though in different ways) arguably implicitly proscriptive or naturalizing in the end. Essentialism – making claims that gender or gender experience is in some way structurally inherent – is thus to some degree “essential” to feminism, but also the bane of its existence. Among other things, in feminist art discourse the essentializing tendency we see in Raven’s claim implies that all women are feminist artists, and that no anatomically male artists can be feminist – as well that we all know what “female experience” is (or that it is universalizable). This was to some degree a crucial claim to be able to make in A Companion to Feminist Art, First Edition. Edited by Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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the age of coalitional identity politics. But if gender is based on anatomy, experience, or immutable and inherent structures of sexual difference then it is presumably determinable and determining in advance of interpretation or relational exchanges among ­subjects. Spivak’s “oozing away” implies otherwise and I will get back to her point at the end of this essay, where I grapple with new formulations of gender surfacing in our current age of public gender transitions and legalized same‐sex marriage burgeoning across western European, South American, and anglophone countries. Visuality and embodiment have everything to do with how we identify and make sense of gender identity (or more accurately gender/sex identity, since sexuality is central to the public articulation of transgender, among other, subjects). Feminist visual theory (coming from art as well as film discourse) has thus had a central role in debates about essentialism. The consistent use of Freud’s theory of fetishism in feminist visual theory in the 1970s and 1980s testifies to the persistence of notions of visible difference as somehow essentially determinant in “male” versus “female” experience.4 Freud’s theory of fetishism and his related models of sexual differentiation have been foundational to common understandings of gender/sex identity as well as to feminist visual theory from Laura Mulvey’s classic 1975 essay “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema” onward. Even as most of the feminists deploying Freudian theory, such as Mulvey, were anti‐essentialist or social constructionist in their arguments (and assertively so: gender for them was socially constructed, not strictly speaking anatomically secured), they nonetheless drew heavily on a theory indisputably based on a ground of visible – thus implicitly essential  –  anatomical difference between the male and female subject to define the perception and experience of gender.5 Freud’s model of fetishism clearly relied on clinical, analytical “evidence” of the occurrence of a moment of visual subjectification. For Freud, the castration complex (foundational to the subject, or at least the normative male subject) is based on the boy ostensibly seeing the “lack” of penis of his female caretaker, usually the mother, when she is in a naked state, which thus catapults him into a lifetime of castration anxiety. Because the moment of visual horror is often followed by his glancing aside to an object he uses to replace the missing phallus metaphorically – a “fetish” such as a woman’s shoe (or for that matter the woman’s naked body as a whole) – his castration anxiety is to be ­palliated through visual fetishism (for example painting or ogling images of female nudes as available fetish substitutes) or other modes of objectifying and diminishing “lacking” women as objects of his desire. So, while Raven and her fellow California feminists often tended towards more obviously essentializing arguments, by drawing on Freudian psychoanalysis (or the later reworkings of Freud in Jacques Lacan’s work) and by polarizing the debate, the self‐ proclaimed anti‐essentialists such as Mulvey and her UK‐based colleagues Griselda Pollock, Mary Kelly, and Lisa Tickner, drew on psychoanalytic models of gender/sex that arguably still implied that they were determinable through moments of visual identification. The implications here are certainly on first glance apparently essentializing, given Freud’s clear reliance on visible anatomical gender in the anecdotal narratives describing how the subject becomes differentially gendered, or Lacan’s arguments about the privileged “phallus,” which, though he insists it is “symbolic” rather than literal, continually elides with the anatomical penis in his theory.6 By the 1980s, these debates had been deeply polarized into so‐called first generation, essentialist versus “second generation,” self‐proclaimed “anti‐essentialist” camps.7 And

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yet, for most feminists across the board working on feminist art and theory, gender/sex identifications are processed and enacted, as well as understood, through the body as a felt and visible field. The question of whether a theory is essentialist (or not) comes down to perceptions of how this felt and visible field is articulated and understood.

­Nominal essentialisms and the body The body, in its visibility and materiality (its putative identifiability as either “male” or “female” as well as its social and individual experience), is key to feminist theories of gender/sex identification. But this body is never simple. As Ellen Rooney has put it, quoting Denise Riley, “[t]he body is of course essentialism’s great text … The body can figure here as a trump card, seeming literally to embody the woman‐ness of woman, obscuring the fact that ‘only at times will the body impose itself or be arranged as that of a woman or a man’.”8 Thus, importantly, Riley’s observation in the late 1980s already made clear that any essentialism based on embodiment (as all gender essentialisms tend to be) nonetheless can only imagine immutable difference in relation to bodies. As such, feminist theories are always courting essentialism; they cannot not court essentialism, given their goal of mapping how we identify ourselves in heteronormative regimes of sexual difference, not to mention our continual return to our own and others’ bodies as sites of gender/sex identification, as well as sites of theorizing or making art. Any method that seeks to analyze existing modes of identification, address modes of oppression of particular groups or classes of identified subjects, and open ways for change will entail essentializing moments. My point here, then, is not that any essentializing elements of an argument should (or can) be avoided and dismissed but, rather, that the essentializing elements of all theories and politics of identity must be self‐reflexively acknowledged. Coming to a fuller understanding of what we do when we essentialize is an important part of this self‐reflexivity. The idea that “essence” (whether of the gendered body or any other “materialized” thing) can only be imagined, and never fully known, has a long history in European philosophy. In his 1689 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, English philosopher John Locke explores essentialisms (the belief in essences pre‐ existing human experience and perception) in a way that is still productive for gaining a fuller sense of how we still dance around essentialism. We continually assume essences as part of our understanding even as we attempt to undermine a belief in them, and in fact these dual gestures or tendencies may be necessary in inhabiting selves in a social regime that is still more or less identity based, as indeed Euro‐American culture still clearly is.9 Locke begins with the Aristotelean concept of “real” essences; in the words of queer feminist theorist Teresa de Lauretis, citing Locke, the “real” essence is the “[o]bjective character, intrinsic nature as a ‘thing‐in‐itself ’; ‘that internal constitution, on which all the sensible properties depend.’” In contrast, the nominal essence is the way in which we come to know a thing: “[t]he totality of the properties, constituent elements, etc., without which it would cease to be the same thing.”10 For Locke, the nominal essence is the interpreted idea (based on linguistic descriptions) of what something is as determined through our experience of its shared qualities with other like substances or things. Clearly, as de Lauretis and Diana Fuss have both pointed out, when even the most

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supposedly die‐hard essentialist feminists make their arguments, they tend to be relying on nominal essentialism, not on the idea of an immutable, embodied femininity or woman‐ness that can never be changed.11 However, as Fuss warns, “I would, however, wish to point out that nominal essences are often treated by post‐Lockeans as if they were real essences.”12 As long as we live in heteronormative patriarchy, we will need to conceptualize sex/ gender identification in terms of Locke’s concept of nominal essences, imagining we know what a “woman” is in order to counter the oppression of people identified as women as a class. This argument will provide an armature here for a further discussion about twenty‐first‐century attitudes towards essences, identities, and theories or politics of identification in debates about feminism and contemporary art. To this end, I will highlight the role of transgender (trans or trans*), transnational, queer, and global feminisms in consciously shifting theories and practices away from a belief in “real” essences or bodies as guarantors of an “essential” gender/sex, no matter how suppressed or veiled these beliefs have been, to a more mobile, experiential, relational, and intersectional concept of “nominal” essences. Given the huge surge in the 1990s and early 2000s of debates about the limitations of feminism in accommodating the myriad other aspects of identification – from ethnicity and race to nationality and class as well as the visibility of gay, lesbian, queer, bi‐, gender‐fluid, and transgender subjects in American culture in particular – it is clearly an excellent moment to rethink what essentialism has meant and what it means going forward for a feminist visual theory. Accordingly, the remainder of this chapter will examine in more detail arguments about essentialism within feminist visual theory, and end by returning to the currently hotly debated issue of transgender identification or transidentification, the most radical, gender‐fluid versions of which are often indicated through the shorthand “trans*.”13

­ ssentialisms in US‐ and UK‐based feminist art E discourse, 1970–1995 Due to the stakes involved, as I have suggested, feminist art and the debates around it were invested in particularly interesting and telling ways in interrogating the uses and dangers of essentialism. As noted above, the raging debates in feminist art history and visual theory tended to position as radically antagonistic the so‐called essentialists and the self‐proclaimed anti‐essentialists. I have written extensively about these debates elsewhere, and pointed out how each both constituted/defined and resisted the other, creating more of a binary than, in fact, the complexity of the artwork and theory being made on either “side” actually justified.14 Other feminist theorists have also pointed to the co‐constitutive nature of “essentialist” and “anti‐essentialist” feminisms, most notably Fuss, who in 1989 noted polemically that “essentialism is essential to social constructionism.”15 The most important founding moment in the establishment of an arguably essentializing view of feminist visual art was the 1973 publication of the polemic crystalized by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro in their influential article “Female imagery” in Womanspace Journal. Those who had not read the journal, which was a relatively obscure Los Angeles publication linked to the various institutions founded by Chicago and Schapiro in the area (including the Feminist Art Program, first founded by Chicago

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at Fresno State College – now called California State University, Fresno – in 1970 and moved in 1971 to California Institute of the Arts in Valencia with Miriam Schapiro’s collaboration), learned about Chicago and Schapiro’s theory of “central core imagery” either through attending one of their many lectures on the topic, through studio visits, or through word of mouth or other citations of Chicago’s views in her many publications and published interviews.16 The initial impetus for the concept of female imagery was the consciousness raising groups that Chicago spearheaded at the Feminist Art Program, where she discovered repeated themes in women’s stories of their lives and experiences. Accordingly, Chicago and Schapiro begin with questions and end with assertions crystalizing her concept of “central core” imagery as defining “female imagery”: What does it feel like to be a woman? To be formed around a central core and have a secret place which can be entered and which is also a passageway from which life emerges? What kind of imagery does this state of feeling engender? … [W]e are suggesting that women artists have used the central cavity which defines them as women as the framework for an imagery which allows for the complete reversal of the way in which women are seen by the culture. That is, to be a woman is to be an object of contempt and the vagina, stamp of femaleness, is devalued. The woman artists [sic], seeing herself as loathed, takes that very mark of her otherness and by asserting it as the hallmark of her iconography, establishes a vehicle by which to state the truth and beauty of her identity.17 Many feminist art historians, artists, and critics debated this concept, from Cindy Nemser and Lucy Lippard (in the US) to Lisa Tickner and Mary Kelly (in the UK). A growing number of feminists based in New York, such as Jane Weinstock, vehemently rejected the concepts of central core imagery, goddess imagery (another common trope of feminist art in the 1970s), and a “female imagery” or “female sensibility.”18 Even at its most extreme exemplification in the texts and artworks of Chicago, however, the idea of a particular women’s art, based on ideas about women’s experience that courted essentialism, was only ever equivocally essentialist (in Locke’s terms, it was nominally essentialist). Chicago and Schapiro’s elision of anatomy into gender aside, the general argument was that a woman’s experience of her body and self in patriarchy formed the basis for a “female iconography,” as Holly Hughes put it in a 1980 essay on Schapiro’s pedagogy.19 Feminist theorists reacted strongly against what they perceived either as a brute essentialism (which Chicago and Schapiro’s elision of women’s bodies into a universalizing notion of women’s experiences exemplified) or as a less direct but equally insidious courting of essentialism through repeating stereotypes associated with femininity or females. The London‐ (and later, Glasgow‐) based film journal Screen was a key site of these critiques. British feminist film theorist Stephen Heath, one of the key critics to define and theorize gender in terms of sexual difference, based on psychoanalytical models, argued that there is not an “immediate, given fact of ‘male’ and ‘female’ identity but a whole process of differentiation.”20 Famously, the feminist artist and critic Mary Kelly argued explicitly in a 1982 interview with British cultural theorist Paul Smith that there is “no essential femininity.” In the 1970s Mary Kelly, who is American, and spent time studying in Italy and Lebanon, studied and worked in London alongside Mulvey,

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Pollock, Heath, and other Screen writers. In the interview Kelly also asserted that “a method needs to be employed which foregrounds the construction of femininity as a representation of difference within a specific discourse … there is no pre‐existing sexuality.” At the same time, she acknowledged that the women artists claiming a female sensibility or imagery (she names Hannah Wilke, Gina Pane, and Adrian Piper) for the most part “feel that there is, not necessarily a biologically determined ­femininity, but an essentially feminine experience of the body, … dominated by r­ epresentations of the body.”21 In spite of these attempts at nuance, a clear shift had occurred from the mid‐1970s, when many feminists in the visual arts had been calling for some kind of attention to women’s experience and/or “female imagery,” to an emphasis in the 1980s on a Freudian model of sexual difference underlaid by Marxist concerns  –  Mulvey’s 1975 “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema” was hugely influential and often cited in the 1980s social constructionist arguments. As British feminist art historian Lisa Tickner noted in 1984, the influx of Althusserian (Marxist/psychoanalytic) and Lacanian (psychoanalytic and generally Freudian) theory into British debates about film and art was key to this change: The result was a shift in emphasis from equal rights struggles in the sexual ­division of labor and a cultural feminism founded on the evaluation of an existing biological or social femininity to a recognition of the processes of sexual differentiation, the instability of gender positions, and the hopelessness of excavating a free or original femininity beneath the layers of patriarchal oppression.22 This influx of critical models of analysis had encouraged Tickner herself a few years earlier, in 1978, to argue directly against arguments in feminist art discourse she ­perceived as essentializing. In the earlier article, Tickner asserts that women artists should avoid using their bodies in their work (claiming that women’s body art was largely reactive) and notes that Chicago’s vaginal imagery “just rework[ed] an existing set of associations” linked to stereotypes of women.23 At the same time, Tickner argued here for a reversal of these associations and relied on a language of essence (or “authenticity”) in her argument that in images of women “[n]arcissism and passivity must be replaced by an active and authentic sexuality.”24 In Tickner’s defense, this article was written at a turning point in the shift from more body‐oriented work and arguments about feminist art to work drawing on postmodern strategies; and essentialism has always been easier to excoriate in others than it is to avoid. As I have argued, some idea of being progressively aligned with feminist goals, which tends to encourage overt or covert links to concepts of women’s experience, is “essential” to feminism. The key strategy that the anti‐essentialist or social constructionist feminist theorists called for around 1980, aligning them with the rise of postmodern theory, was that of what Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman in a 1980 article in Screen called “critical awareness … of the construction of femininity,” a criticality that could be put in motion by feminist artists (drawing on Mulvey’s idea in “Visual pleasure”) using methods to thwart visual pleasure, or the easy appreciation of a fetishized female body.25 For British ­feminist visual theorists publishing in Screen and other key venues, including Griselda Pollock in her influential 1988 book Vision and Difference, this criticality had to be one  based on distanciation or defamiliarization.26 Drawn from Russian formalism and the work of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, these terms indicated an

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avant‐garde strategy informed by Marxist theory, calling for the artist to produce a work aimed at shocking or “defamiliarizing” the viewer such that she or he would be distanced from the pleasures of the image. As Barry and Flitterman put it in their 1980 Screen article, the feminist art bringing viewers to “critical awareness” functions by transforming “the spectator from a passive consumer into an active producer of meaning by engaging the spectator in a process of discovery rather than offering a rigidly‐formulated truth.”27 Or, as Pollock put it in Vision and Difference in terms explicitly drawn from Brecht’s theory of radical theater and returning us to Mulvey and Freud: “Distanciation is not a style or aesthetic gambit but an erosion of the dominant structures of cultural consumption which … are classically fetishistic.”28 Pollock becomes prescriptive in her passionate exhortation that “feminist critical practice must resist such specularity, especially when the visible object par excellence is the image of woman. It has to create an entirely new kind of spectator as part and parcel of its representational strategies.”29 Needless to say this entreaty served to exclude the supposedly essentializing work of feminist body artists or (as with Judy Chicago) artists and theorists focusing on central core imagery.

­ ueering essence: The rise of theories Q of “performative” gender It is not surprising, given the intensity of these debates, that the history of 1970s and 1980s feminist art and art discourse seems to fall within a clearly drawn opposition between “essentialists” and “anti‐essentialists,” even though the two were (per Fuss’s argument) co‐constituted rather than unconnected polar opposites. At the extreme ends of the polemic, Mary Kelly’s theory and her art were lauded as epitomizing the anti‐essentializing ideal (by Pollock, Barry and Flitterman, Tickner, and others), while, by the 1980s, Judy Chicago and her work were often dismissed as paradigmatic of an essentializing theory and practice, linked to her increasingly spectacular and explicit central core imagery (which reached its apogee in Chicago’s ambitious installation piece the Dinner Party with its largely vulvar ceramic plates and massive table and floor structure, completed in 1979). Kelly’s Post Partum Document (also completed 1979), released in segments even as the Dinner Party was being made and revealed to the public, becomes in the anti‐essentialist feminist theory the antithesis of Chicago’s opus. These binarizing accounts are clearly to some degree caricatures of the complexities of Kelly’s and Chicago’s thinking, not to mention of the vast array of feminist debates on the topic over the decades of the 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s. What finally shifted attention away from essentialism as a key term of debates in feminist art, leaving these antagonisms behind, was the dramatic explosion of queer feminist literary theory and philosophy in the early 1990s, in particular the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (in literary theory) and Judith Butler (in philosophy). Sedgwick’s profoundly de‐essentializing accounts of queer feminist theory and subjectivity have had a lingering effect on feminist visual studies through her own writings but also through the highly influential feminist visual culture and performance studies scholarship of her former students, such as José Esteban Muñoz and Jennifer Doyle.30 Butler’s impact has been more singular, reducible largely to the key arguments on gender as a performance, published first in an essay in 1988 that was then revised into her widely read and translated book

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Gender Trouble (1990), which became a classic by the mid‐1990s and shaped discussions about gender and sexuality across the humanities and arts.31 The queer feminist intervention into feminist cultural theory has moved feminism far away from the idea of “female imagery” or “female experience” as knowable entities. The role of the AIDS crisis, particularly intense in the US from the mid‐1980s through the 1990s, also had an impact on how feminists navigated community and the political issues surrounding sexuality.32 The brute physical aspects of the transmission of AIDS emphasized the absolute necessity of attending to bodily differences, desires, limits, and functions in articulating any politics relating to feminism. Women identified as straight, lesbian, bi‐sexual, as well as transwomen and transmen, often claimed common cause with the primarily gay male urban communities beset by AIDS. Within this context, essentialism as a central polemic, and claims for a specific “female experience” or “imagery,” faded into the background and gender performativity moved to the ­foreground as a more progressive and convincing way to theorize how we occupy gendered/sexed bodies and a social scene of gendered and sexed spaces and ­ representations. Through the work of scholars such as Sedgwick, Butler, and Teresa de Lauretis, queer feminist theory emerged in the 1990s in humanities and arts departments in universities across the US and the UK in tandem with shifts in feminist theory and a turn, in politically radical and marginalized communities, towards political action inspired by antiracist identity politics and postcolonial theory, and seeking to dissect conventionally fixed or at least narrowly defined notions of identity. Entering the arenas of gender and sexuality, queer feminist theorists picked up Foucault’s social constructivist and historical work on discourses of sexuality, merging it with elements of psychoanalysis, a Marxist attention to class critique, and performance theory, and put these to work destabilizing gender and sexuality studies as they had developed to that point. To this end, Butler’s and Sedgwick’s models relied on the notion of the performative, developed first in the 1950s lectures at Harvard by British linguistic philosopher J.L. Austin and published posthumously in 1962 as How To Do Things With Words.33 Butler applied the Austinian idea of the performative to gender and sex identification, writing, famously: Gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time – an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts. Further, gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.34 As well, the “master–slave dialectic” was an underlying trope for Butler, who had written her dissertation and first book on Hegel’s reception in French philosophy (including the work of Simone de Beauvoir, whose 1949 book The Second Sex was foundational to second‐wave feminism).35 Butler solidified a queer feminist notion of gender as performative and thus unfixable, although, with her background in Hegelian philosophy, it is not surprising that gender is still relatively binary in her model. It was thus Sedgwick who most expansively played out performativity as defining a queer feminist politics explicitly against the grain of oppositional models. In her 1993 Tendencies,

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Sedgwick argued against the binarisms of previous models of identity politics, including many forms of feminism: The binary calculus I’m describing here depends on the notion that the male and female sexes are each other’s “opposites,” but I do want to register a specific demurral against that bit of easy common sense. Under no matter what cultural construction, women and men are more like each other than chalk is like cheese, than ratiocination is like raisins, than up is like down, or than 1 is like 0. The biological, psychological, and cognitive attributes of men overlap with those of women by vastly more than they differ from them.36 Attending to race and sexuality as always already constitutive of gender, Sedgwick is clear on articulating a feminist theory that insists on gender as performative, queer, and never fully determinable: “That’s one of the things that ‘queer’ can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”37 With gender performativity as a point of departure, this radical new theory, called “third wave” by some in order to differentiate it from the debates of the 1970s and 1980s, was simultaneously queer and feminist even if, in Butler’s case, it was structured still by lingering binarisms (which arguably court essentialism). It responded critically and creatively to the essentializing understandings of and approaches to sex, gender, and sexuality that had prevailed in much of second‐wave feminism. However, it is important to stress here that second‐wave feminism (as these queer feminist theorists themselves would probably agree) had tended towards fixities and essentialisms for good reason. In the 1970s the urgent goal had been clear: to form a coalition of people identifying with the category “women” (or, in its more universalizing forms, in the singular “woman” or “female”) in order to begin to attack the structures of patriarchy still in place. Judy Chicago, for example, certainly makes it clear that she felt she did not have time for nuances as she battled the sexism of the Los Angeles art world in the 1960s, when she began developing a feminist point of view.38 Other problems still beset feminist visual theory through the 1990s. For example, while Butler’s gender performative became hugely influential in feminist art history, these discourses (as with Butler’s work itself ) were still circumscribed by the tendency not to acknowledge gender as co‐constituted by and through racial, ethnic, class, national, sexual, and other identifications. Feminist art historians began to address the performativity of gender as it had already been articulated in photographic and performance practices in the visual arts  –  for example Claude Cahun’s, Lynn Hershman Leeson’s, Hannah Wilke’s, and Cindy Sherman’s gender/sex performative self images – seemed ripe for Butlerian analysis.39 But still lurking within these models an implicit essentialism implied that these white women artists from relatively privileged Euro‐American backgrounds could perform femininity in radical but implicitly universalizable ways. Focusing entirely on a neutralized gender/sex performative, the models of analysis tended conceptually to separate gender and sexuality off from other aspects of experience or identification.40 Through the 1990s feminist visual theory and practice tended still to assume normatively white, middle‐class, Euro‐American femininity as its basis of analysis and production  –  even if, as with Cahun, this femininity was

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definitively queered, or other kinds of “female experience” and feminist artists of color were dutifully added on to every analysis in order to diversify.41 Many other key feminist scholars and theorists from fields as diverse as law, sociology, and anthropology were, however, busy interrogating these assumptions, pointing to lingering essentialisms limiting feminism through the tendency to cite white middle‐class Euro‐American women’s experience as universalizable to all women. For example, bell hooks has persistently and courageously developed a feminism that is inherently race‐critical and pointedly addresses the experiences of black women in the US in relation to visual culture.42 And US‐based black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw developed her theory of intersectionality in the early‐1990s at the culmination of debates about identity politics and around the question of multiculturalism, which became a code word for US cultural institutions’ attempts to deal with racial and ethnic difference (attempts themselves defined as racially essentializing by astute theorists/artists such as Guillermo Gómez‐Peña and Coco Fusco).43 Crenshaw’s theory argues for a consideration of the interrelation of forms of oppression (particularly race‐, gender‐, and class‐related) affecting black women and troubles a simplistic belief in the universalizable, shared experiences of all women.44 At the same time, the advent of third‐wave feminism or transnational feminism, trans studies, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, and masculinity studies, all burgeoning in the 2000s, have also offered models for complicating the tendency in feminist and gay and lesbian histories of art to posit categories of gendered identity as knowable, as binaristic at their foundations, and as separate from intersectional identifications. Since the early 1990s, feminist visual, cultural, and performance studies scholars, often working from a queer and antiracist agenda – such as Donna Haraway, José Esteban Muñoz, Anne Pellegrini, Jack Halberstam, Jasbir Puar, Jennifer Doyle, and Daphne Brooks  –  have drawn on theorists from Audre Lorde to Gloria Anzaldúa, Chela Sandoval, Gilles Deleuze, and Sandy Stone to articulate nuanced feminist arguments addressing gender/sex power relations always already within a matrix of complex and fluid identifications and relations. It must be said, however, that these authors have emerged from other disciplines than art history; few of them are aware of or build on the extensive debates about essentialism within feminist art history and feminist film theory.

­ ransnationalism, trans* identification, and feminist visual T theory: New bodies, new genders, new theories Since the exhilarating moment in the 1990s of the consolidation of queer feminist theories of performance and visual culture, queer theory and praxis have opened out into more and more complex variants. The additive tendency developing out of the gay and lesbian movements of the late 1960s, which ultimately resulted in unwieldy acronyms such as “LGBTQQIAAP” (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, allies, and pansexual), is less convincing as an effective tool for claiming rights and freedoms for those of all sexual/gender identifications than the more fluid models of gender and sexuality developing in tandem with increasingly visible trans and genderqueer communities and politics. One could argue that the “acronymic” approach, if we could call it that, continues to essentialize by assuming that, if we just

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include enough categories, each person can be placed within one category and will fit securely somewhere. To fit a category is to be essentially determinable. In contrast, genderqueer and trans*  –  a term including multiple gray areas and interrelated concepts of gender identification (from genderqueer, gender‐variant, to gender‐nonconforming)  –  provide a more useful way of thinking gender/sex identification away from or against the grain of singular “positions” or “identities,” no matter how multiplicitous these are. To this end, it is important to note the way in which even in queer theory a belief in nominal essences still continually slides back into an implication that “real” essences underlie nominal ones. So much is clear if one attends closely to claims made in debates in art discourse and beyond about queer (subjectivity, art, or otherwise) in the 1990s and early 2000s. As signaled by Sedgwick’s argument noted above, these discourses, which deploy aggressively anti‐essentialist and/or social constructionist language, claim a radical openness in relation to sexual identification, separating sexuality from anatomical attributes or even sexual object choice. But at the same time, they continually slide back into assumptions that a person is “queer” if he/she has sex with or expresses desire for a person perceived not to be the opposite gender (eliding queer with gay and lesbian). This slippage relies on the idea that the “original” gender of the body of the person in question can be determined and identified in relation to the person’s sexual object choice – implying that even “queer” can be (and often is) deployed in an essentializing way. But at the same time, the stakes of queer theory are such that using “queer” to accommodate any subject or cultural product for which one wishes to make radical claims is also deeply problematic, as Sedgwick herself recognizes well, noting that “[because of the] historical and contemporary force of the prohibitions against every same‐sex sexual expression, for anyone to disavow those meanings, or to displace them from the term’s definitional center, would be to dematerialize any possibility of queerness itself.” But, she concludes, “[a]t the same time, a lot of the most exciting recent work around ‘queer’ spins the term outward along dimensions that can’t be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all…”45 Sedgwick’s argument challenges us to define queer. Exhibitions and curatorial practices in general also challenge most insistently, since by definition they are based on categorizing practices (for example choosing a theme or a title and choosing and grouping works of art, which are always implicitly or explicitly attached to making bodies which we assume to be identified in various ways). Maverick shows such as Dan Cameron’s 1982 Extended Sensibilities: Homosexual Presence in Contemporary Art, which was at the New Museum in New York, and Lawrence Rinder and Nayland Blake’s In a Different Light, at the Berkeley Art Museum in 1995, worked from a more open concept of queer (as a “sensibility” in Cameron’s terms, linked to either “gays or straights,” though more commonly attached to the former, or as a “poetics rather than polemics” in Rinder’s argument).46 These projects demonstrated that, even with the more instrumental logic of curating, one could propose an open and fluid concept of gender/sex identity that was not heteronormative or binary: the Berkeley show even included Judy Chicago’s work as exemplary of a queer aesthetic. Queer feminist curators becoming known internationally since the mid‐1990s, particularly often in Europe, have continued to work in this vein  –  including Pawel Leszkowicz (in Poland), Juan Vicente Aliaga (Spain), and Xabier Arakistain (Spain).47

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If we take Sedgwick’s point and the argument put forth in the In a Different Light exhibition seriously, Chicago’s gorgeous spray painted central core images can be considered queer. However, given Chicago’s own stated and artistically rendered allegiance to identifiable “male” and “female” bodies, and her career‐long interrogation of gender roles within heteronormative structures, this designation of her work as queer again asks what queer means as well as how this queer signification or effect relates to the works’ feminist claims and effects. At the same time, if we guard the boundaries of queer and only define as queer art that which was made by artists clearly identified as one gender with clearly identifiable same‐sex partners, we are completely betraying the very texture of queer, as Sedgwick’s nuanced arguments make clear. In fact, if we police categories we are, in effect, essentializing – from the very get‐go we are acting as if we know what a woman is, and then extrapolating from that to make determinations about sexual identification based on that assumption. Any attention to essentialism (and Locke assists in understanding this) must honestly address what is going on in the interpretive process through which we identify each other and works of art and through which we thus make meaning. Even when we think we are not relying on an idea of pre‐determined essences or identifiable attributes, we arguably are always doing so in some way: we cannot even speak of redressing social inequities, for example, unless we identify particular bodies/subjects through mostly visible (but also possibly linguistic or aural) tropes or signs linking them to the oppressed class or group, the members of which are being unfairly treated because of this apparent identity. Even when we point the finger at other feminists for essentializing we are ourselves reductively categorizing and excluding, most often failing to acknowledge our own dependency on their putative “essentialism” for our own self‐proclaimed “anti‐ essentialism,” as Fuss’s insights make clear. Spivak most brilliantly excavates these contradictions in both feminist and postcolonial theory in the 1994 interview cited at the opening of this chapter, weaving together questions about the essentialisms central to feminist discourse with questions about those called upon in “subaltern studies,” a subset of postcolonial theory focusing on issues in South Asia, and of which Spivak has been a key member. Spivak’s arguments are useful in reminding us that essentialisms are necessary to any discussion about power, oppression, or rights issues, as well as in insisting on the interrelatedness of gender/sexuality with other forms of “essential” identification, including class, nationality, ethnicity, and race. In terms of analyzing cultural texts, Spivak is very clear on the uses of essentialism, as partially cited at the beginning of this chapter: It is my task as a reader to see where in that grid there are the spaces where, in fact, woman oozes away, you know? … Essences, it seems to me, are just a kind of content. All content is not essence. Why be so nervous about it? … I’m now thinking of Derrida’s notion of a minimal idealization, without a minimalizable essence, an essence as ce qui reste, an essence as what remains, there is no exchange. Difference articulates these negotiable essences. So, I have no time for essence/anti‐essence.48 Spivak’s comments, which remind us of the continual dance with the “minimal idealization” of essence whenever new identity issues and conflicts arise, are particularly perspicuous if viewed in relation to the massive shifts in the acceptance and even

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glamorizing of gay, lesbian, and transgender subjects in the early 2000s, especially in the US. While gay (and lesbian) civil partnerships were legalized in the UK in 2004, and same‐sex marriage declared legal in 2013, in the US no consensus was supported at the federal level until 2015, when the US Supreme Court delivered a decision that effectively ratified the legality of same‐sex marriage across the country. All of the debates about same‐sex marriage, however, have tended to reinforce rather than to erode essentializing binary categories of gender (with the male/female binary simply doubled by the hetero‐/homo‐sexual one). Just because two women can now marry does not mean that the state, either in the UK or in the US, is ratifying an open or fluid concept of gender identification. To the contrary, the legal rhetoric of same‐sex marriage in the US, for example, relies heavily on the assumption that we know what we mean or see when “woman” or “man” is evoked. Marriage, after all, is by definition a binary structure, whether or not of opposite or “identical” genders.49 In 2015, such assumptions are being both reinforced and profoundly challenged by the rise of a visible trans culture in the US and other European‐based cultures. “Trans” with no asterisk can imply any transgender or transsexual discourse or person, including that attached to historical figures such as Renée Richards, the m‐to‐f tennis star who underwent sex reassignment surgery in 1975; Richards has tended to be viewed not as fluid in gender but in conventional terms as aligning with the “opposite” gender to that of her original “male” anatomical body. As Julie Nagoshi and Stephan/ie Brzuzy have argued, “[t]ransgenders differ widely in their degree of belief in the fluidity of gender identity. Some accept such fluidity only to the extent that one can switch between two otherwise separate, essentialist, and pure gender categories, whereas others believe that an embodied gender identity is still highly malleable.”50 As noted, trans* is linked to the latter, and to genderqueer identifications – with gender/sex understood as “malleable” and as functioning on a continuum rather than through a binary – and to a particular radical strand of feminist discourse (the work of Judith/Jack Halberstam and Beatriz/ Paul Preciado, for example51). Some trans cultures and discourses are trans, not trans*, because they affirm essentialism (or rely on it, which comes to the same thing) by claiming that the publicly emerged transgender subject is simply seeking to conform to his/her “true” or “authentic” gender. The most visible case being debated in the summer of 2015 as I write this is that of Caitlyn Jenner, the former Bruce Jenner (gold‐medal Olympic athlete and former husband of media mogul Kris Kardashian), who transitioned publicly through a televised interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC’s 20/20, a cover story in Vanity Fair, and a reality television show called I Am Cait.52 In this narrative, Caitlyn was always meant to be Caitlyn in some “essential” way and was simply born with the wrong genital apparatus and hormones. This particular variant of transgender narrative is overtly essentialist. Claims of “authenticity” (such as: she is becoming her “authentic” self ) are made frequently in I Am Cait. And Jenner’s attempts to reassure herself that transwomen (whom she meets through the show as she attempts to join their community) are “normal” reveal other assumptions about this populist version of trans.53 And yet the obvious essentialism of such claims is complicated by Jenner’s brute anatomy, as she has not undergone sex change surgery (or so we are told). What does it mean (from a feminist point of view) to claim a person is “authentically” female when her body (albeit sans makeup and clothing) would appear to coincide with masculinity? Clearly, until emerging as Caitlyn, Jenner cannot have experienced the kind of gender

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oppression that people identified as women have. And yet the claim of this populist show is to insist that the “felt” gender is still clear, authentic, and of course profoundly opposed to the rejected (formerly visible, anatomically and, at least in a provisional way, hormonally or genetically secured) gender. Caitlyn Jenner’s claimed femaleness is enunciated and enacted, if also clearly deeply felt: as such it exposes the constructedness and performativity – and thus the ultimate unknowability and unfixability – of gender. In the context of debates about essentialism, I would insist that there is nothing “authentic” about this particular kind of femaleness. That said, there is nothing “authentic” about gender, period. And self‐proclaimed feminists who are reacting against the new visibility of trans* culture by asserting essentialist claims about being a woman, or to reclaim “women’s spaces,” are clearly not getting the point.54 But popular culture versions of transgender people hardly tell the full story of the twenty‐first‐century trans* narrative and the relation between trans* subjects and previously understood “men” and “women” as theorized in feminist visual theory, or of increasingly fluid conceptions and experiences of gender/sexuality among younger generations.55 In fact, trans* cultures and discourses develop more or less consistently from queer theory’s insistence on gender and sexuality as determined through relational and always psychically overdetermined interactions; the most convincing of such theories necessarily account for the social scene, with its myriad codes of behavior, and individual identifications and desires. As Halberstam, theorizing what he calls “gender ambiguity” in relation to visual culture, has noted “there are a variety of gender‐deviant bodies under the sign of non‐ normative masculinities and femininities, and the task at hand is not to decide which represents the place of most resistance but to begin the work of documenting their distinctive features.”56 This documenting (and analyzing) process might begin with visuality, but it cannot depend upon it; as Halberstam recognizes, “gender ambiguity … results from and contests the dominance of the visual” within contemporary culture.57 In this way, Caitlyn Jenner’s transition – which is publicly enacted through theatrical visual strategies involving the adoption of hyperbolically “feminine” clothing, make up, and hairdos – might seem visually to confirm her “authentic” femaleness. However, as I suggested above, this femaleness, because it is performative but also based on explicitly superficial attributes, can ironically only ever point to the impossibility of gender being fully knowable or livable or visible in any secure way. In fact, as a queer feminist viewer I find that the most appealing thing about Caitlyn is her springy, muscular, arm‐swinging athletic gait; the least appealing thing might be her tendency to speak for and at others, including her new transwomen sisters. Both attributes come across as culturally masculine (whatever that means). Lifting Caitlyn’s skirt, as it were, would only produce apparently irrefutable, “essential” visual evidence that would contradict the femaleness enacted through these superficial means and provide more confusion as to what gender means or is. The mistake in this formulation is to believe that visual codes can secure or confirm “authentic” gender or, in fact, that “authentic” gender exists at all.58 Jenner’s claim to authentic femininity is just as riven with moments of pure disidentification and disjunction as it is with moments wherein her femininity or woman‐ness seems secure, for example the visible disjunction and discomfort for Jenner when her new transwomen friends ask her if she is attracted to women or men is telling; and, after writhing in apparent embarrassment (as if she had never thought through this part of asserting her transfemale identity!), she

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answers that having a man’s attention would make her feel more feminine. Jenner’s answer suggests that she believes that sexual object choice, rather than being spurred by uncontrollable desire, is just a matter of deciding which sexual object is more psychically or socially advantageous.59 In a sense, with trans and trans* cultures and modes of embodiment and visuality we are back at square one of the problem of essentialism as it haunts feminist theory, visual and otherwise. At the same time, while no trans theory (and no queer theory) has succeeded in being fully anti‐essentialist, trans* discourse (including inhabitings of trans* selves) radically challenges even the idea of gender, founded as it has been in European‐ based cultures, and in psychoanalysis, on a binary opposition between male and female as staged within a heteronormative binary of “proper” object choice and identification. The heteronormative model of gender as “male” or “female,” and as aligned with opposite‐sex or same‐sex object choice (as “hetero‐” or “homo‐” sexual) is profoundly thrown in question by trans* bodies and modes of being that refuse to align easily – and visibly – to these binary categories. Given the complexities of this terrain opened up by the popular enactment of trans subjects, perhaps the point now for feminist theory might be to acknowledge the right to the desire to essentialize. Why shouldn’t Jenner or anyone else less advantaged and with less access to mainstream popular media be allowed to fantasize a kind of “essential” gender identity – to imagine they have an “authentic” inner gender that only needs to be matched by their outer attributes? The very desire to essentialize itself, spoken aloud, can freeze and prohibit expression, but it can also create a space of movement where the essential is revealed as both activated and necessary to imagine, and yet impossible to achieve.

­Trans* feminist futures? One of the powerful things about the visual arts broadly speaking is that, in contrast to mainstream television, more subtlety can be brought to such important questions as identification (whether transnational, transgender, or other modes of identification). Most visual arts viewing situations – including the performance art venues and communities – allow for a range of nuanced self‐expressions that avoid the reification of identification by actively acknowledging the role of interpersonal relations in determining any “identities,” provisional as these always are. In closing, an example of this overt staging of the relational (and thus the impossibility of an inherent essential identity, gender or otherwise) will I hope be suggestive of new directions for feminist visual theory and art history in relation to the question of essentialism. Amazon television’s 2014/15 show Transparent, which is far more nuanced than I Am Cait, still narrates the main transfemale character, “Maura,” as more or less having yearned her entire adult life to be fully and authentically female. However, a potentially radical thread runs through Transparent and I Am Cait: Zackary Drucker, a trans* performance artist, actress, and producer can be seen on both shows and is in fact a producer on Transparent. In Transparent (season 1, 2014) Drucker plays a minor character at a trans support group; in I Am Cait she plays herself, part of the community of transwomen by whom Jenner is hoping to be embraced. Pulling this thread out (Zackary Drucker), I find a figure, a persona, an artistic subject who enacts the instability of

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trans* even as she generously offers herself to Jenner as a transwoman friend (hoping to offset Caitlyn’s previous tendency, as “Bruce,” to hang out with cis‐gendered male Republicans).60 Gorgeously and glamorously “feminine” in embodiment and gestures, and with long blonde hair (a particularly strong signifier in southern California’s entertainment industry), Drucker speaks with a husky voice that lingers between the stereotypically masculine and feminine (as I am often misidentified as a man on the phone, I find her voice particularly seductive and appealing). Access to her art practice might begin with the opening page of her website, which includes an image of her lovely face surrounded by fur with “WELCOME” written across her face and the exhortation: “Okay – so now you found me. What now? Should we have a conversation? You and me? … Things are changing, I know, the unknown is scary, but we will navigate this new landscape together … I aim high, I am to please, I love you.”61 The S&M and generally erotic but also generous overtones of Drucker’s invitation  –  there is inevitably violence in any person‐to‐person engagement, where one person’s self‐asserted identity can only ever be betrayed by the other (hence the face as a welcome mat)  –  are deeply relational. Across her modes of expression (including installation, videographic, and photographic artworks, recently with former transmale partner Rhys Ernst, and performances), Drucker, flirting with and never disavowing the power of essentialisms, insistently enacts a profoundly “welcoming,” erotically charged, trans* subjectivity that calls us forth to receive, negotiate, and relate to her beautifully equivocal self‐enactments. She asks us, already, to walk over her virtually rendered face (as welcome mat) and with her to navigate the “scary” territory of gender slippage within which we might find ourselves in twenty‐first‐century American culture. Engaging Drucker, we must acknowledge that any gender determination is reciprocal – based on inevitably essentializing guesses, assumptions, attributions, as well as de‐essentializing disidentificatory moments. There are no simple answers here. The power of this invitation, and its complex de‐essentializing thrust, is evident in Drucker’s recent “Relationship” project with her then partner Rhys Ernst, a series of photographs documenting their lives together as an “opposite‐oriented transgender couple.” As well, Drucker’s 2008/9 performance The Inability to be Looked at and the Horror of Nothing to See (performed three times in California, once in London, and once in New York) expresses a body that can only be identified in dramatic relationship with those of us who apprehend and manipulate it.62 Drucker invites visitors into a room in which she lies, almost naked (she wears only underpants, and sometimes a pair of strappy sandals), with a large silver ball in her mouth. Her voiceover addresses visitors: “clear your mind … look at the body on the table in front of you; while you’re concentrating, try to feel that you yourself are this body … Now, approach the table … Thank you … Gently rest your hands on the body … Locate a five inch radius [of skin and] … remove these hairs one by one through extraction … Don’t be afraid. The bitch can take it.” Laughing in response to the sardonic self‐labelling as “bitch,” visitors commence plucking, uprooting “all of the ugly things that are growing inside of you,” as Drucker’s voiceover intones. Suddenly the mood shifts: “This body is a receptacle for all of your guilt and shame and trauma … The art you make is derivative … Your world is collapsing into a scum filled puddle of … lard ass thighs … You will never be desirable…”63

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In this work, Drucker both presents a genderfluid body and asks those of us who engage with the piece to imagine ourselves as similarly turned inside out (our inner “ugliness” expiated through the act of touching and plucking her body; her body a “receptacle” for our otherwise internalized shame and trauma). One imagines the title to refer to her reluctance to “be looked at,” and the “horror of nothing to see” reflects back on our tendency to project our own fears onto others. By turning against us (or rather against herself – since she could well be talking to herself in the third person) at the end of the piece, Drucker reminds us that all identifications are reciprocal and mutable. Bodies might appear to be identifiably gendered (as well as raced, etc.), but their perceived gender has as much to do with how they are engaged with and embraced or repulsed by others. Drucker’s splitting of her voice from her body (where the mouth is literally blocked) also complicates our tendency to believe in bodies as clearly “spoken” in one way or another, as coherent and fully identified within themselves. If her voice comes from elsewhere, clearly we cannot trust this body to reside firmly in a ­singular category of identity and meaning. Vaginal Davis is a transgender impresario whose radical queer feminist cabarets, music, and performances in the 1990s and early 2000s in Los Angeles set the stage for Drucker’s de‐essentializing feminist performances of gender. In her infamous “Bricktops” cabaret, Davis resurrected fabulous creative women from history such as Ada Smith (a red‐haired bisexual performer in 1920s Paris whose nickname was “Bricktop”) by channeling them through her own statuesque and gorgeous, cross‐ dressed, six‐foot‐five‐inch, black Latino, anatomically male body (see Figure  9.1). As Davis describes the situation in her inimitable diaristic prose, her body is “a car‐crash of Figure 9.1  Vaginal Davis, headshot from her website, http://www.vaginaldavis.com/ photos/vaginaldavispressphoto.JPG, 2008. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

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excessive significations, … stag[ing] a clash of identifications within and against both heterosexual and queer cultures, and Black and Hispanic identities.”64 If Drucker ­highlights the intimacy and potential violence of the identity‐determining encounter, Davis (who now lives in Berlin) parodically enacts this violence, proactively performing the fear she assumes she will invoke through what she calls a “disruptive performance aesthetic known as terrorist drag.”65 Not coincidentally it was Davis who inspired José Muñoz to coin the term “disidentification,” which has become a crucial term in queer feminist theorists’ rethinking of gender identification away from facilely essentializing tendencies. Muñoz defines ­disidentification as a performative mode of tactical recognition that various minoritarian subjects employ in an effort to resist the oppressive and normalizing discourse of dominant ideology. Disidentification resists the interprellating call of ideology that fixes a subject within the state power apparatus. It is a reformatting of self within the social. It is a third term that resists the binary of identification and counteridentification.66 Zackary Drucker’s violent yet welcoming generosity, Vaginal Davis’s hilarious and brilliant sex/gender equivocations around her identifiably black/Hispanic body, and José Muñoz’s model of disidentification, hugely influential within queer art and performance theory, all exemplify ways of dancing with essentialisms (and their attachment to visible bodily attributes) while refuting their ultimate closures. These models all, in Muñoz’s terms (applied to Davis), “create desire within uneasiness,” and – if we allow them – profoundly challenge our desire to know, to have, and to be “essentially.”67 These are the spaces where “woman” or any gendered subject “oozes away,” as Spivak puts it. These are the spaces we can most productively occupy if we wish to continue the valiant efforts of feminisms to interrogate and redress power imbalances relating in some way to perceived sex/gender identities.

Notes 1 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak with Ellen Rooney, “In a word, interview,” The Essential

Difference (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 173; emphasis added.

2 See Charlotte Moser, “The legacy it’s left,” Artweek, special issue on 1970s California

feminism, vol. 21, no. 5 (8 February 1990), 20–21. Or, as Lucy Lippard put it, “[w]omen are different from men,” in From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (New York: EP Dutton, 1976), 9. 3 Arlene Raven, “Feminist content in current female art,” Sister vol. 6, no. 5 (Oct/Nov 1975), 10. 4 I extensively historicize and analyze the feminist use of Freudian fetishism in “Fetishizing the gaze and the anamorphic perversion,” Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (New York and London: Routledge, 2012), 63–116. See also Anne Emmanuelle Berger’s brilliant synopsis of feminist and queer debates in relation to visibility and essentialism in “Paradoxes of visibility in/and contemporary identity politics,” The Queer Turn in Feminism, tr. Catherine Porter (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 83–106.

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 5 See Laura Mulvey, “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema” (Screen, 1975), reprinted in

Amelia Jones, ed., Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, second edition (New York and London: Routledge, 2010), 57–65; and Freud, “Fetishism” (1927), tr. Joan Riviere in Sigmund Freud, Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier Books, 1970), 214–19. Joan Scott critiques the reliance on visibility in determining gender experience in her article “The evidence of experience,” Critical Inquiry vol. 17, no. 4 (1991), 773–797.  6 See Lacan, “The meaning of the phallus” (1958), Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, tr. Jacqueline Rose (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985), 74–85. See also Jane Gallop’s nuanced analysis in Reading Lacan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).  7 See the hotly debated article codifying this generational division, Thalia Gouma‐ Peterson and Patricia Mathews, “The feminist critique of art history,” Art Bulletin vol. 69, no 3 (September 1987), 326–357. See, for example, Griselda Pollock’s effective critique of their periodizing tactics in “The politics of theory,” her introduction to her edited volume Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings (London: Routledge, 1996), 2–28.  8 Spivak with Rooney, “In a word, interview,” 152, citing Denise Riley, “Am I That Name?”: Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 103.  9 See my book Seeing Differently for an elaboration of how we are still playing out identity politics even as we may hope to move beyond identifying each other via gender or race through terms such as “postfeminism” and “postblack.” 10 Teresa de Lauretis, “The essence of the triangle or, taking the risk of essentialism seriously: Feminist theory in Italy, the U.S., and Britain,” The Essential Difference, ed. Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Weed (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 3. 11 Fuss argues: “When feminists today argue for maintaining the notion of a class of women, usually for political purposes, they do so, I would suggest, on the basis of Locke’s nominal essence”; Fuss, “Reading like a feminist,” The Essential Difference, 99. 12 Ibid., 100. 13 The asterisk, which originated with the Boolean search language (wherein typing “trans*” into a search field would deliver all terms beginning with the prefix trans), began to be placed immediately after the abbreviated “trans” around 2010 as a way of indicating a more fluid concept of transgendered identification, one not determined through binary alignments of gender. See Allyson Mitchell, who cites Folie à Deux’s definition of trans*, which is very helpful: “The asterisk has been used recently by some people at the end of Trans* to indicate the inclusion of transsexual, transgender, gender‐nonconforming, gender‐neutral, gender‐queer, gender‐variant, and other varying gender identities. It is insufficient, like all other possible denotations, but we are using it here,” from “Not at the beginning and not at the end: A conversation among Deirdre Logue, Allyson Mitchell, and Helena Reckitt,” in Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories, ed. Amelia Jones and Erin Silver (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2016), 273; Mitchell’s reference is to Folie à Deux in Fuse Magazine 35, no. 3 (2012), 13. However, very recently, in early 2016, the Trans Student Educational Resources website proclaimed that “trans*” should no longer be used because it can be applied in “transmisogynist ways” that imply that trans (without the asterisk) people are inherently essentializing in their relationship to gender, clinging to

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14

15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31

extreme masculinity and femininity as trans men and trans women. See “Why we used trans* and why we don’t anymore,” TSER website; available at: http://www.transstudent. org/asterisk, accessed 16 March 2016. See Amelia Jones, “Sexual politics,” and “The ‘sexual politics’ of The Dinner Party: A critical context,” in Sexual Politics, ed. Amelia Jones (Berkeley: University of California Press), 20–38 and 82–118. Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature & Difference (NY, London: Routledge, 1989), 1. See Lucy Lippard on coming into contact with Chicago and Schapiro’s arguments about female imagery in “Prefaces to catalogues of women’s exhibitions,” 1971, reprinted in From the Center, 48–49. Lippard ratifies their basic argument as follows: “Is there a women’s art? And if so, what is it like? … the overwhelming fact remains that a woman’s experience in this society – social and biological – is simply not like that of a man. If art comes from inside, as it must, then the art of men and women must be different too. And if this factor does not show up in women’s work, only repression can be to blame,” 48. On their numerous studio visits of women artists as research for a show organized by Dextra Frankel (Visible Invisible), see Holly Hughes, “Miriam Schapiro: Toward a feminist art education,” Women Artists News vol. 6, nos. 2–3 (Summer 1980), 16. Ibid., 14. See Jane Weinstock’s critique in “A lass, a laugh and lad,” Art in America vol. 71, no. 6 (Summer 1983), 7–10. Hughes, “Miriam Schapiro,” 16; Hughes notes that the idea of central core was “only one metaphor for femaleness,” and not an exclusive one, 16. Stephen Heath, The Sexual Fix (New York: Schocken Books, 1984), 144; see also Heath, “Difference,” Screen vol. 19, no. 3 (1978), 51–112. Kelly, “No essential femininity: A conversation bet. Mary Kelly and Paul Smith,” Parachute vol. 37, no. 26 (1982), 35, 32. Lisa Tickner, “Sexuality and/in representation,” in Difference: On Representation and Sexuality, exhib. cat. (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 19. Lisa Tickner, “The body politic: Female sexuality and women artists since 1970,” Art History vol. 1, no. 2 (1978), 239, 242. Ibid., 239. See Barry and Flitterman, “Textual strategies: The politics of art‐making,” Screen vol. 21, no. 2 (1980), 48. Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (New York and London: Routledge, 1988). Barry and Flitterman, “Textual strategies,” 48. Pollock, “Screening the seventies: Sexuality and representation in feminist practice – A Brechtian perspective,” in Vision and Difference, 163. Ibid., 181. Beginning with Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), and culminating with her work on performance and queer theory cited below. See Muñoz’s Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), and Doyle’s Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990). The original argument was published first in Butler,

Notes Notes 177

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33 34 35

36 37 38 39

40

41

42 43

44

45 46

“Performative acts and gender constitution: An essay in phenomenology and feminist theory,” Theatre Journal vol. 40, no. 4 (1988), 519–531. This section on AIDS activism is indebted to Erin Silver, who wrote a related section in the chapter we co‐wrote, “Queer feminist art history, an imperfect genealogy,” in our co‐edited book Otherwise, 14–50. Austin, How To Do Things With Words (1962), ed. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). Butler, “Performative acts and gender constitution,” 519. Butler subsequently published a book out of this dissertation research, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth‐Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 7, note 6. Ibid., 8. Chicago details the misogyny in the art world in Los Angeles and her struggles in Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist (New York: Doubleday, 1975). See Whitney Chadwick, ed., Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self Representation exhib. cat. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); and Amelia Jones, Self Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject (New York and London: Routledge, 2006). On this point and on black women’s relationship to self‐imaging, see the groundbreaking article by Lorraine O’Grady, “Olympia’s maid: Reclaiming black female subjectivity” (1992), reprinted in Jones, ed., Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, 208–220. Joan Borsa applies a related concept of “politics of location” (not performativity per se) to the case of Frida Kahlo, who is an exception to the Euro‐American and white dominance of this model of performative gender (although it should be noted that her father was a white German immigrant to Mexico). See Joan Borsa, “Towards a politics of location: Rethinking marginality,” Canadian Women’s Studies/Les Cahiers de la Femme vol. 11, no. 1 (1990), 36–39. She cites the feminist arguments of Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey from the exhibition catalogue of their 1982 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti, which articulates their interest in Kahlo’s practice as deeply questioning the male and female roles; see p. 38. See in particular hooks’ essays in Black Looks: Race and Representation (New York: Routledge, 1992). See Fusco, “The other history of intercultural performance,” TDR (The Drama Review) vol. 38, no. 1 (Spring 1994), 143–167. Fusco writes of her and Gómez‐Peña’s collaborative performance project, Two Undiscovered Amerindians…, 1992. See Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Whose story is it anyway? Feminist and antiracist appropriations of Anita Hill,” in Racing Justice, En‐Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Pantheon, 1992), 402–440. Sedgwick, Tendencies, 8–9. Dan Cameron, “Sensibility as content,” Extended Sensibilities: Homosexual Presence in Contemporary Art (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1982), 7; Lawrence Rinder, “An introduction to In a Different Light,” In a Different Light: Visual Culture, Sexual Identity, Queer Practice, ed. Nayland Blake, Lawrence Rinder, Amy Scholder

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48 49

50 51

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53 54

55

exhib. cat. (San Francisco: City Lights Publisher, 1995), 1. This discussion is not meant to erase the epic and hugely important ongoing efforts of feminist curators, from Bojana Pejić to Maura Reilly and Camille Morineau; however, ambitious queer feminist shows, with a few exceptions, have tended to be mounted by curators identified as male or transgender. I discuss legacies of feminist curating in “Viable or merely possible?: A dialogue on feminism’s radical curatorial project,” dialogue with Angela Dimitrakaki, published in Elke Krasny, ed. Women’s: Museum. From Collection Strategies to Social Platforms (Vienna: Löcker Publisher, 2013), 67–78. See, for example, Aliaga’s groundbreaking show and catalogue Gender Battle (A batalla dos xéneros) (Santiago de Compostela: Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, 2007). All three of these curators are featured in Otherwise, ed. Jones and Silver. Spivak with Rooney, “In a word, interview,” 173. The Toxic Titties, a Los Angeles queer feminist collective active in the late 1990s and early 2000s, including Julia Steinmetz, Clover Leary, and Heather Cassils [now Cassils], produced a performative piece where they found a way to circumvent and highlight the duality (not to mention the heteronormativity at the time) of legal marriage, holding a union ceremony where they legally bound themselves together as three people through the structure of incorporation. I discuss this and other works by the group in “The contemporary artist as commodity fetish,” Art Becomes You! Parody, Pastiche and the Politics of Art: Materiality in a Post‐material Paradigm, ed. Henry Rogers and Aaron Williamson (Birmingham: Article Press, 2006), 132–149. Julie L. Nagoshi and Stephan/ie Brzuzy, “Transgender Theory: Embodying Research and Practice,” Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work 25, no. 4 (2010), 432. See Judith [now Jack] Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); and In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural lives (New York: NYU Press, 2005); and Beatriz [now Paul B.] Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (New York: The Feminist Press, 2013). The Diane Sawyer interview took place on 24 April 2015; and see Buzz Bissinger (with photos by Annie Leibovitz) cover story, “Call me Caitlyn,” Vanity Fair (July 2015), 50–69, 105–106. I Am Cait was a reality TV series that was aired on E! channel from 2015–2016; it was produced by the same team behind the successful Keeping Up with the Kardashians. See especially episode 3, I Am Cait, which aired Sunday, 9 August 2015. I am referring to the newly reinvigorated antitransgender arm of the feminist movement, sometimes called “TERFS”: trans‐exclusionary radical feminists. On this point and for a critique of this position, see Kelsie Brynn Jones, “Trans‐exclusionary radical feminism: What exactly is it and why does it hurt?,” Huffington Post, 2 August 2014, and updated 2 October 2014; available online at: http://www.huffingtonpost. com/kelsie‐brynn‐jones/transexclusionary‐radical‐terf_b_5632332.html, accessed 16 November 2018. As Noah Michelson argues in an online Huffington Post story, common identifications for young people today include “no label or fluid or open to the possibilities,” from a video interview, “New survey says young people aren’t 100% heterosexual,” at HuffPost Live (breaking story, 22 August 2015), available online at: http://live.huffingtonpost. com/r/highlight/new‐survey‐says‐young‐people‐arent‐100‐heterosexual/55d601a82b8c 2abb9d00035c, accessed 22 August 2015.

Notes Notes 179

56 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 76, 148. 57 Ibid., 76. 58 Jenner is also obsessed with her voice and its timbre; clearly the codes are not only

visual.

59 I Am Cait, episode 3, aired Sunday 9 August 2015. 60 Zackary Drucker to Amelia Jones (in conversation), 29 June 2015. “Cis‐gendered” refers

61 62

63 64 65 66 67

to people identifying with the sex that corresponds with their anatomical gender or socially recognized sex, and is offen assigned by trans people labeling those they perceive as non-trans. I leave aside for now the potentially essentializing implications of this term. See the website: http://zackarydrucker.com/, accessed 22 August 2015. See Drucker’s website on the project, http://zackarydrucker.com/performance/ the‐inability‐to‐be‐looked‐at‐and‐the‐horror‐of‐nothing‐to‐see/, accessed 16 March 2016, which includes the video from which I access the piece as I did not experience it live. Ibid. “Vaginal Davis biography,” at http://www.vaginaldavis.com/bio.shtml, accessed 16 November 2018. Ibid. Muñoz in “The ‘white to be angry’: Vaginal crème Davis’s terrorist drag,” in Disidentifications, 97. Ibid., 115.

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Feminist Ageing: Representations of Age in Feminist Art Michelle Meagher In a striking review of Carolyn Heilbrun’s book on old age, The Last Gift of Time, Kathleen Woodward writes: “We live in a time of unparalleled change for older women, yet ageing has not been taken up by feminism in any sustained and concerted way.”1 Critics of the youthful focus of feminism point to its political, aesthetic, and theoretical preoccupations with issues like reproduction, parenting, labor, and intimacy as they affect younger, pre‐menopausal women; more recent concerns with “media focused questions of representation,”2 sexualities, and queer theory have redirected theoretical concerns, but rarely away from youthful bodies. Social issues like health, elder care, late‐life poverty, and widowhood have rarely made it to the center of feminist analysis, and recognition of old women’s sexuality  –  straight, queer, polyamorous, or otherwise – is often greeted with nervous laughter or derision. Feminist gerontologist Julia Twigg identifies “the exclusion of older women from feminist writing itself ”3 as a reflection of a larger cultural gerontophobia, which she understands as an aversion to old age that affects both how the young understand the old and how the old perceive their place in the world. Indeed, old women, and the political, personal, embodied, and existential issues associated with old age, have rarely been at the center of contemporary feminist projects. As such, in this essay, I consider the emergence of art that that takes on the topics of old women, ageing, and ageism. As a starting point, it’s necessary to point out that, within the field of art, age and ageing are surprisingly underexplored. Art historian Linnea Dietrich describes ageing as a theme in art as “uncharted territory.”4 Anca Cristofovici, author of one of the only book length studies on ageing and art, maintains that the “aesthetics of ageing – the most immediate ways in which we come into contact with the realities of ageing – is still very much ignored.”5 Griselda Pollock describes age as “a radical lack in our repertoire of cultural representation.”6 Like these scholars of art, and inspired by feminist cultural analysts and social scientists like Woodward, Twigg, Heilbrun, and Lynne Segal, I am interested to explore the lacuna in feminist thinking when it comes to the matter of art and age. Though this essay will look at the different strategies and discoveries of a variety of artists whose work is associated with feminist projects, it will also take the larger position that attending to the theme of age can offer rich perspectives on some of the key themes in feminist art thinking. For some artists, age is deployed as simply another layer of patriarchal oppression – as women age, their already limited value in patriarchal social formations is lost and their social status is A Companion to Feminist Art, First Edition. Edited by Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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even further eroded. Others reject the devaluation of age and have modelled strategies for doing age in vibrant and resistant fashions. Some emphasize old age as a time of renewed political activism and resistance. Still others place the experience of living in and as old bodies at the center of their projects in ways that draw attention to the passage of time and disrupt the linear singularity of narratives of age. It is this final point that is most significant, for it gestures to the capacity for a feminist aesthetics of ageing to renegotiate the terms through which ageing is both perceived and experienced. Though ageing is conventionally imagined as a steady and linear process of physical decline, I take up a feminist cultural gerontological and critical approach to ageing, understanding it primarily as a process of growth and transformation (see Woodward, Twigg, Segal). Rather than imagine the shift from youth to age as “a catastrophe of a moment,” Helene Moglen suggests an understanding of ageing as a “multiple, ambiguous, and contradictory process, which provides us – continuously and simultaneously – with images of past, present, lost, embodied, and imagined selves.”7 Against melancholic approaches to age that are structured around loss, Moglen introduces the term transageing to refer to a dynamic understanding of ageing that “resists categorical identities.”8 Her approach is relentlessly material in its understanding of age as a lived and embodied experience; it is “rooted in an acknowledgement of the social, psychological, and, above all, physical meanings of difference.”9 In theorizing transageing, Moglen is in alignment with art historian Anca Cristofovici, who describes ageing as “a permanently inchoate process.”10 Cristofovici continues, “As a rule loss and mourning accompany the discourse of ageing. Yet loss’s travel companion is accumulation.”11 With the passing of time, she maintains, we accumulate multiple age‐selves. Rather than imagine ageing as a process during which one moves slowly but surely from youth to middle age to old age to the time of deep old age that gerontologists now call the fourth age, theorists of age whose work most resonates with feminist art about age and ageing imagine ageing as a complex lived experience that is unstable and disorderly. As Cristofovici points out, our recollections (real and phantasmatic) of ourselves as young and our anticipations (real and phantasmatic) of ourselves as old are not discrete, but rather collide and interact.12 Much of the work I explore in this chapter gives expression to experiences of transageing as well as to the interaction between age‐selves described by Cristofovici. Much of it is photographic, much of it is self‐representational. Most of it is produced by white women working in an American context and informed by Western second and third wave feminist ­politics. Finally, most of it is made by women as they begin to experience themselves as “­ middle‐aged” or “old.” Although cultural gerontology insists that ageing is a complex, historically and culturally bound embodied experience, in the current moment, these terms are conventionally understood by way of chronological age, with 45 being a marker of the entry into middle age and 65 the marker of old age.13 Given the revolution in longevity enjoyed by many, especially in the West, these age‐based markers suggest that we are “old” for several decades of our lives. Despite the endurance of terms like “middle‐aged” and “old,” the scholars and artists whose work grounds this chapter suggest not only that chronological age is culturally constructed and gendered but that it contradicts the lived realities of ageing, experienced so often as transageing. What Segal calls the pleasures, perils, and most significantly the paradoxes of ageing are lost when we are compelled to define ourselves and others through chronological age alone.

­Feminism’s ageis

Taken as a whole, the work discussed here constitutes a significant challenge to the gerontophobia that Twigg describes as characterizing contemporary visual culture, and the representational lacunae identified by art historians; it also speaks back, on the one hand, to the cultural invisibility of old women and, on the other, the discourses of “successful ageing” that increasingly dominate popular culture. The work considered here challenges the limiting representations of old women, and in so doing, it continues the important feminist practice of multiplying the means by which women are represented in visual culture. Moreover, by exposing the “underdeveloped and under‐theorized” intersections between age and gender,14 this work contributes to both the expansion of feminist age studies and to feminist art thinking.

­Feminism’s ageism One early exploration of ageism in the American feminist movement is Barbara Macdonald and Cynthia Rich’s 1983 co‐authored book, Look Me in the Eye: Old Women, Ageing, and Ageism. Macdonald and Rich recount the ways in which their age difference – at the time of publication, Rich was 50 and Macdonald was 69 – shaped how the people around them interpreted their relationships to one another and to the movement. Macdonald notes that in almost every radical setting she was the oldest woman in attendance. Where, she wonders, have the women of her generation, the lovers of her youth, gone to? She writes with rage and consternation about attending a Take Back the Night march at which a young woman organizer expressed concerns about Macdonald’s ability to keep up with the other marchers. She recounts with fury and frustration that the young woman took her concerns not directly to her but to Rich, her younger partner. Macdonald is right, I think, to point out that the young organizer made a number of assumptions not only about the older woman’s capacity to participate in a march but also about Macdonald’s capacity to judge her own ability to participate in the march. There is a clear discrimination here, and Macdonald is compelled to call it out; but what strikes me as even more significant is the young woman’s explanation: “I didn’t know what to do. We didn’t know what to do.” In other words, she didn’t know what to do with or about the old woman in her midst. This not knowing points to the absence of old women not only in the women’s movement, its marches, its actions, and its organizations, but in the public sphere more broadly. For the young Take Back the Night ­volunteer, the nearly 70‐year‐old woman, the “old lady” in her midst, is little more than a flat caricature aligned with mental and physical frailty. Look Me in the Eye reveals the underlying and often unexamined assumptions of ­feminism and stands as a challenge to actively include analyses of old women and old women’s social justice issues. Pointing to this book as an example, contributors to a 2006 special issue of the NWSA Journal on the topic of ageing claim that the question of age has been present though marginal, and indeed marginalized, in contemporary feminist scholarship and activism from its very onset.15 Before Macdonald and Rich, Simone de Beauvoir took on the question of ageing in her remarkable La Vieillesse, translated to English as Coming of Age. Taking up a method that resonates with her far more influential Second Sex, in Coming of Age Beauvoir argues that age is more than a biological category; it is a lived experience that is deeply shaped by a society’s economic, spiritual, and political goals.16

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With the emergence of the fields of social and cultural gerontology, there has been increasing feminist scholarship on the question of age,17 but few art historians have centered explicitly on the question of how ageing is represented in art. One exception is Linnea Dietrich. In a 1996 article in the Journal of Ageing and Identity, she provides a broad introduction to contemporary artists whose work approaches old age and whose work, she suggests, “use[s] the visual as a force for positive image building.”18 Most of the artists she considers are women, and many are familiar figures in the field of feminist art – among them Alice Neel, Louise Bourgeois, Betsy Damon, Rachel Rosenthal, Barbara Hammer, and Anne Noggle. In looking briefly at work produced by each of these artists, Dietrich is mainly concerned to identify the ways in which they contravene the conventions within art history that reinforce negative stereotypes about old women. The negative view of ageing is distilled in the conventional Western art historical depiction of old people as “declining or deteriorating.”19 Reflecting directly on the position of old women, Griselda Pollock puts it this way: “Old women in art are there to terrify us as memento mori, juxtaposed as scary witches, hags, old bags to the soft ­fullness of the one moment of feminine desirability: youth.”20 Pollock attends to the question of old age in an article that starts with her encounter with a series of photographs of the timeless bodies of Antonio Canova’s 1817 sculptural interpretation of the Three Graces. She offers a genealogy of the Three Graces, and reveals that they have stood for, at one time or another, three kinds of knowledge, three qualities of grace, and/or three different stages of a woman’s life (daughter, mother, crone). They have not always been nude, and, most significantly for Pollock’s argument about time, timelessness, and femininity, they have not always been young. Pollock’s encounter with Canova’s Three Graces leads her to reflect on what she describes as “our culture’s profound loss of ideological and psychological support for the image of the feminine through time.”21 It’s not, she insists, that there are no images of old women, but rather that old women have been pictured in ways that sustain a cultural fascination with youthful femininity – femininity fixed in a specific time of life, female bodies unmarked by the processes of ageing, caught magically and fantastically in the fullness of youth. In response, Pollock imagines a “counter archive of women and time,”22 a virtual feminist museum that includes Camille Claudel’s Helen in Old Age – a remarkable sculpture that ages the mythological figure equated with feminine beauty – along with work by Jo Spence, Melanie Manchot, and Ella Dreyfus. Her goal in examining these works is not to undo the negative thinking associated with old women by celebrating those artists who draw old women into the cultural repertoire. Such a move is, in Pollock’s view, a naive gesture overly invested in the politics of representation. To think about age in feminist theory – or to get at the real crux of this chapter, to think about age as a category of analysis and expression in feminist art practice – one might start by looking at and looking for representations of old men and women in art; but given Pollock’s trenchant warnings, it can’t just be about replacing “negative” representations (scary witches, hags, old bags) with “positive” ones. Though I will point to several artists who disrupt the limited and limiting cultural repertoire of old age, my interest here is less in how they make the old body visible and more focused on understanding how their representation of ageing as a process and a lived experience can contribute to ongoing feminist projects. Certainly, feminist artists who have taken on the topics of ageing, old age, and ageism draw attention to the ways that ageist stereotypes, shifting social and economic status, and lived realities of ever‐changing

­Approaching old ag

embodiment are experienced as gendered. Artists who incorporate issues of age and ageing, who look at feminism through the register of ageing, or who look at ageing through the register of feminism can expand feminist art thinking by offering creative and generative works of art that enable viewers to think differently not only about age but about history, time, and identity.

­Approaching old age I want to begin by considering Faith Wilding’s Waiting (1972) and Karen LeCocq and Nancy Youdelman’s Lea’s Room (1972). These now iconic feminist performances offer insight into the way that young women artists have engaged with old age by embedding it in a broader narrative of gendered oppression. Waiting and Lea’s Room were part of Womanhouse, a month‐long exhibition held in February 1972 at a crumbling mansion in Hollywood, California. The exhibition was a class project for the 25 students enrolled in the Feminist Art Program at California Institute for the Arts and their teachers, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. As LeCocq, one of the student artists working on Womanhouse, put it, the goal of the project was to work collectively and in a feminist register “to transform an abandoned mansion into an environment reflecting the dreams, ideas, and emotions of women.”23 LeCocq worked with her classmate Youdelman to transform a bedroom into a lavish boudoir for Lea, an ageing courtesan drawn from Colette’s novel Cheri (1920). LeCocq performed as Lea and sat, night after night, at a dressing table, applying multiple layers of cosmetics to her face. Reflecting on the experience, she writes: “At first I was excited about doing the piece and I enjoyed doing it. But as the performance nights went by, I began going into a severe depression. Confronting myself in the mirror became a nightmare. I could see my own vanity, my own fears of growing old, becoming less and less beautiful.”24 For LeCocq and Youdelman, Lea’s desperate desire to conceal the signs of ageing draw attention to the ways in which, for women, ageing is often experienced as a loss  –  “she was ageing,” writes LeCocq, “losing her beauty, losing her livelihood and losing her identity.”25 Inhabiting Collette’s character, a woman merely in her forties, the 23‐year‐old LeCocq realizes her own fears of ageing. In the process, the work reveals the internalization of a gerontophobic c­ ultural attitude that fetishizes youth and renders “old woman” an inhospitable and uninhabitable position. Faith Wilding’s Waiting was a 15‐minute performance in which the 29‐year‐old artist recited a poem while slowly and rhythmically rocking her seated body. The text, now a classic and often reproduced, “condenses a woman’s entire life into a monotonous, repetitive cycle of waiting for life to begin while she is serving and maintaining the life of others.”26 Inspired by second‐wave feminist critiques of the limitations placed on women by the structures and strictures of patriarchy, this performance poem reveals the ways in which so many middle‐class white North American lives are pre‐arranged. Lara Shalson describes Waiting as a presentation of “a narrative of a heterosexual ­woman’s normatively scripted passivity.”27 Feminine existence emerges here as fundamentally passive, as contained by patriarchal social and cultural forces. These very early examples of explicitly feminist performance art direct our attention to the gendered experience of time and age. In Waiting, Wilding implies that, while women are encouraged to sit, waiting for boyfriends, babies, houses, and death,

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men (some men) are enabled to actively move through time and space rather than have it wash over them. She also ties women’s experience of time to a female lifecycle punctuated by bodily markers of maturity  –  puberty (“Waiting for my breasts to develop/Waiting to wear a bra/Waiting to menstruate”), pregnancy (“Waiting for my baby to come/Waiting for my belly to swell/Waiting for my breasts to fill with milk”), and menopause (“Waiting for the first gray hair/Waiting for menopause/Waiting to grow wise/Waiting”). These bodily processes have been drawn into cultural constructions of both femininity and age. Nevertheless, they are, as cultural gerontologists point out, social rather than biological markers of time. Wilding’s narrative of old age is marked by ­illness, sagging flesh, pain, loneliness, and death. She offers a dire view of old age, though it is no less dire than the rest of the story she paints about feminine existence. Taken together, LeCocq and Youdelman’s Lea’s Room and Wilding’s Waiting point to the ways in which age loomed and for many continues to loom over young women. They wrestle with a social imaginary that aligns old age with the loss of feminine markers of identity. In the forty‐plus years since Faith Wilding first sat in front of an ­audience, rocking gently to the words of her poem Waiting, the possibilities for feminist politics have shifted dramatically. One marker of the shift is her own shift toward thinking about waiting. If waiting was an incontrovertible sign of socially mandated gendered passivity in 1972, by 2007, at the age of 64, she was able to understand waiting as a strategy of political engagement and resistance. As Lara Shalson puts it, in a performance connected to the American exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, Wilding “recommitted to the act of waiting, this time not as a sign of passivity, need, and dependency, but as a collaborative act of refusal.”28 In the 2008 re‐performance, Wilding offers a more theoretically complex and communal understanding of what it means to wait. Waiting is no longer experienced individually as an enforced passivity, but rather is imagined as a political gesture. She describes in her performance that she waits with others, with those who resist violence and hatred, for a different world. Waiting‐with emerges here as a gesture of resistance within a late capitalist economy that requires active consumption, active production, and, to use Shalson’s term, “an ever‐accelerating pace of life.”29 Here we see a re‐orientation of the artist toward time, a re‐orientation paired with and perhaps enabled by a re‐orientation of age. Shalson is certainly not the first to note that in the context of late capitalism ageing is further devalued insofar as it is symbolically linked to decreased productivity, decreased capacity for consumption, and increased vulnerability and dependence. Vera Klement points out in an article in Art Journal that the current cultural moment is marked by speed, by “the fast turnover,” and by a constant search for the new.30 She laments the fact that this has an impact on the selling, making, and teaching of art. More to the point of ageing, she also points out that in a culture obsessed with the Now, “there is no room for the ageing, who embody what has just been left behind.”31 Over and above the disruption that representations of old women constitute to the cultural repertoire of images of women as youthful and timeless, in this context, working as an old artist, and working on the broad topic of age itself ruptures the conventions and preoccupations of the field of art. In the next sections of this chapter, I look at the ways in which contemporary women artists – many of them in or moving past middle age – produce work that disrupts the limited and limiting ideas about old women. I’m interested in thinking about this work as more than simply a reversal of representational conventions or practices

­Challenging the invisibility of ag

within patriarchal and sexist and ageist cultural contexts; I want also to think about the ways in which these works are meditations on time produced in a cultural moment marked by anxiety around bodies that show the signs of age.

­Challenging the invisibility of age One approach to bringing old women and matters of ageing and ageism into the orbit of feminist art thinking is distilled in a series of actions organized by American feminist artist Suzanne Lacy. Well known for public art actions that drew attention to issues including violence against women and public health, Lacy approached the question of age in large‐scale productions of tableaux vivants produced in the 1980s. The first action was 19 May 1984, Whisper, The Waves, The Wind. Lacy brought 154 women between the ages of 62 and 99 to a beach in La Jolla, California. Dressed in white and taking seats at tables covered in white tablecloths, the participants talked to one another about their lives. An audience of about a thousand looked on while listening to the women’s stories about their lives, which were pre‐recorded and scored by Susan Stone. The second action was held on Mother’s Day, 1987, in a downtown Minneapolis ­shopping center. For Crystal Quilt, Lacy recruited 400 old women from a variety of racical, cultural, and class backgrounds to participate by sitting at tables of four and, as in Whisper, The Waves, The Wind, talking to each other about their lives. In this work, Lacy was motivated to respond to “the scarcity of images acknowledging both the strength and the struggle of older women.”32 E.M. Broner writes about her 81‐year‐old mother’s experience on the beach: “on this day, elderly women will be ­oracles at sea, speaking in their true range, from deep to high, about matters of import: their ageing…”33 Not only are old women treated with reverence in these actions, they are treated as people with things to say and knowledge to pass on. Perhaps most ­significant, as Broner points out, they reveal a wide range of experiences, a cacophony of voices. This in itself contributes to a disruption of the narrow, limited and limiting stereotypes through which old women are otherwise understood. A more recent incarnation of this project was Silver Action, held at the Tate Gallery in London in 2014. As with the earlier events, for the most public aspect of the action, Lacy directed women over the age of 60 to share stories about their lives. The focus of Silver Action was these women’s experiences of discrimination and inequality, and their relationships with activist movements, especially between 1960 and 1985. This focus picks up on a broader preoccupation within feminist thinking  –  including feminist art thinking – with what is still persistently described as the second wave of the women’s movement, but it also recognizes the deep trove of experience and history that old women hold and that will be lost if not recognized and recorded. Taken together, these works lay claim to the presence of women in the public sphere. Silver Action has a particularly intimate connection also to the matter of time. Lacy’s participants are asked to reflect not only on their own lives and their own experiences but on the specific roles that they played in activist movements. As with the other actions, these women’s words are recorded, but they are also encouraged to fill out a timeline. The timeline here stands as a materialization of the accumulated knowledge and practices of the women participants which is now recognized as a vital resource for contemporary feminist and other activist projects.

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Other efforts to value ageing come from artists including American Jacqueline Hayden and London‐based Melanie Manchot. Hayden’s Figure‐Model Series (1991– 1995) is a series of more than thirty black‐and‐white silver gelatin prints featuring ageing male and female figure models. In each image, one model stands, sits, or balances, nude, against a stark black background. This work came into prominence after their exhibition in 1996 at the University of Wisconsin‐Milwaukee Art Museum in conjunction with a conference titled “Women and Ageing: Bodies, Cultures, Generations.” In an essay that emerged out of this conference, Cristofovici identifies the artist’s purpose as “to challenge canons of beauty in western art that have informed our sensibilities for centuries, shaping what we see.”34 Though the vitality and confidence exhibited by these models pushes against the memento mori that Pollock identifies as old women’s fate in Western art history, the more significant feature of the work is its capacity to draw attention to the wide gap between the bodies idealized and celebrated in Western art and the realities of human bodies. Hayden’s interest in exposing this gap and, by ­extension, shaking any lingering attachments viewers might have to the ruse of bodily perfection, is apparent in Ancient Statuary Series. Here, Hayden digitally alters her ­photographs to place many of the same ageing models from the Figure‐Model Series in the museum. Grey‐haired women with wrinkled knees and sagging breasts replace the stone, stilled, and eternally youthful figures in classical statuary. Melanie Manchot’s Look at You Loving Me (1998–2000) and Liminal Portraits (1999– 2000), both of which feature nude images of her mother, then in her sixties, similarly puts the old body at the center of the frame. In Mrs Manchot, Hands on Hips (1996), from the series Look at You Loving Me, Manchot’s mother stands almost defiant, hands on her hips, and torso twisted to her right. The black‐and‐white graininess of the ­photographs, which have been printed onto canvases and then marked with chalk and charcoal, distinguishes it from the crisp photographic realism of Hayden’s Figure‐Model Series. At the heart of the project is an interest in portraiture as a project of relations. Pollock writes briefly on these works, pointing out that what is represented in Look at You Loving Me is an encounter with maternal corporeality. Although she says that these images may be viewed as gestures of defiance, she also implies, in her psychoanalytic readings, that these are less about old bodies than they are about fantasies of the ­maternal body. Though Pollock is right to caution our reading of them, I think it’s also vital to recognize the ways in which these intergenerational representations draw attention to the connections between younger and older women. Intergenerational pairings of women with biological bonds and physical similarities are particularly valuable for the ways in which they seem to expand and collapse time. Consider Manchot’s Double Portrait, Mum and I (1997), which is the only one of the Look at You Loving Me series that includes two figures. While they’re both nude, only the younger woman’s head and shoulder are visible from behind her mother’s body. By placing herself in the image, Manchot compels me to think not only about the psychic relationship between mother and daughter but about the physical similarities of these bodies and the distinct ways in which they are each situated in time. What I see here is an insistence on the part of Manchot – the artist – to think about her relationship to the maternal body not only as a source of her life but as the old body – this specific old body – as a vision or premonition of her future. Hannah Wilke’s intergenerational portrait with her mother similarly draws attention to the matter of temporality. In Portrait of the Artist with her Mother, Selma Butter

­Renegotiations: Age as performanc

(1978–1981), a young and normatively attractive Wilke is set in contrast with her elderly mother, Selma Butter. As with Manchot’s portrait with her mother, both women are nude. These photographs were taken during a period when Wilke was caring for her mother as she was ill with, and dying from, cancer that had led to an earlier mastectomy that is so apparent in the nude portrait. Butter’s body is marked by scars and vivid lumps, Wilke’s body is “adorned – armed – with odd, frail little examples of her ray gun collection.”35 Though the images are structured primarily around the matter of illness (Butter’s frailty is set against Wilke’s “insolent health”36), they are simultaneously about age and temporality. Wilke’s body is posed to highlight its association with the fullness of youth, the timelessness of feminine desirability. By comparison, Butter’s body is ravaged and abject, signifying the cruelties of time, illness, and death. It is against the performed feminine vitality of her daughter that Butter’s decline and loss of femininity come fully into view. In relationship with their mothers, Manchot and Wilke construct the ageing female self as extensions of their youthful selves, and their own youthful selves as extensions of their ageing mothers’ selves. The value of Manchot’s and Hayden’s images for an aesthetics of ageing lies in their capacity to offer a starting point for what Cristofovici describes as “the visual integration of the realities of old age into an aesthetic circuit.”37 They have the capacity to work against what Moglen describes as cultural constructions of “the ageing female self as the disparaged other.”38 Here, the ageing woman is loved rather than disparaged; she is not an absolute other but rather an other that represents the artist daughter’s future self. The risk, however, of this sort of effort at realist representation of old bodies is that they “become the distorting mirror in which a sorrowful and angry daughter sees her own mental and physical decline.”39 Ultimately, though these works critique and correct the invisibility of old women’s bodies from a position of recognition and love for the old (maternal) body, they don’t actively renegotiate the terms by which old age is rendered abject.

­Renegotiations: Age as performance Despite efforts on the part of artists like Lacy, Hayden, Manchot, and Wilke to rethink and revalue old women, Segal points out that there remains “a toxic sexism to cultures of ageing, where the personifications of old age almost invariably take a monstrous feminine form, whether gorgon, witch, hag, or crone.”40 For Moglen, these figures play a haunting role in our culture – they are “fantastic females [who] exceed social laws and cultural practices.”41 Feminist artist and scholar Joanna Frueh argues against the social laws that divest old women of their femininity and, more significantly, their connection to the erotic. She describes artists like Carolee Schneeman, Hannah Wilke, and Joan Semmel as “radical agents of change”42 insofar as their work incorporates a feminine eroticism that “challenge[s] the cultural constructions of old(er) women as sweet grandmothers and ridiculous and voracious hags.”43 More recent and explicitly feminist projects to undermine the cultural dismissal of femininity and feminine sexuality in old age have taken on a contemporary form of monstrous femininity: the cougar. In North America, “cougar” is a derogatory term used to describe a hyper‐heterosexual middle‐aged woman who is on the prowl for young men. She is aggressive, monstrous, even abject, because she has not followed

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the indictment to set aside sexuality in middle age; she leaves neither sexual desire nor desirability to the young. The cougar, in other words, fails to consent to the limiting stereotypes placed on old women, particularly as these guidelines monitor sexual identity and mute one’s sense of self as erotic and appealing. Montreal‐based Dayna McLeod, for example, engaged in a year‐long performance piece Cougar for a Year (2012–2013), organized around the slogan “because life begins at cougar.” McLeod recorded herself wearing animal print every day for a year, beginning on her fortieth birthday. To wear animal print was a way to inhabit and, given her critical and queer perspective, interrogate the stereotype which disparages the overt expression of sexuality over a particular age. Central to the performance was McLeod’s reflection on the responses that her s­ artorial play brought out in strangers. With responses ranging from admiration (a 7‐year‐old girl who exclaims, repeatedly, “C’est beau!”) to disgust (snorts from women passersby) to anger (a woman who mutters “caliss” – a French Canadian profanity – under her breath as she passes), McLeod is able to reflect on the female body over forty as a site of public examination. In the online Cougar Diary that she kept for the duration of the project, she positions this work within the public performance art tradition of artists like Schneemann, Yoko Ono, Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Milan, Marina Abramovic, Vanessa Beecroft, and Jess Dobkin, all artists whose own ageing bodies have shaped the choices they make as they plan and execute their performance art projects.44 Like McLeod, UK artists Rosy Martin and Kay Goodridge take on the abjection of old age and the cultural limitations associated with the expectation of ageing gracefully. Lodged in the method of phototherapy developed by Martin and Jo Spence in the 1980s, their work titled Outrageous Agers (2000) intends “to counter the hegemonic voices that ­consigned post‐menopausal women to silence, invisibility and decline.”45 In the first stage of the project, they set out to “confront stereotypes of the ageing woman, which currently leave little space for negotiation and suggest decline, loss of sexuality and redundancy.”46 From this project, Trying it On (2000) is a set of 60‐ by 40‐inch lightboxes ­containing photographs of the two artists taken in the changing room of Top Shop, a clothing store that features, to use Martin’s terms, “a range of trendy clubwear, lycra‐stretched sequins, leopard skin print and PVC.”47 Their middle‐aged bodies had to be forced into the off‐the‐rack Top Shop wares, but failed in epic and carnivalesque ways to attain the fashionable and desirable femininities promised by the clothing. American artist Cindy Sherman’s photographs of ageing starlets, housewives, and socialites similarly explore the contradictions between old bodies and idealized hegemonic femininities, though not with the gleeful resistance of Outrageous Agers or Cougar for a Year. In Sherman’s adroit hands, what we are faced with is not a model of resistance but an unsentimental glimpse at the desperation that attends women’s experiences of getting old. In untitled works produced in 2000 and 2007, Sherman exposes the abjections of age through performances that confront the discontinuity of old age and femininity. This question of discontinuity is of particular interest to Woodward, who has productively drawn attention to the ways in which age is performed within a c­ ultural milieu characterized by what she describes as the youthful structure of the look. Drawing on and extending feminist theories of the male gaze – or the gendered structure of the look – Woodward identifies “the culturally induced tendency to degrade and reduce an older person to the prejudicial category of old age.”48 In the face of this look, women are exhorted to conceal their age, to “pass for younger,” or to fall gracefully into invisibility. Woodward draws attention to artists who

­Renegotiations: Visualizing transagein

expose the discourses that produce a sense of discontinuity between old age and femininity. For Woodward, feminist ageing – practiced, she argues, by artists Rachel Rosenthal and Louise Bourgeois, and I would add McLeod, Martin and Goodridge, and Sherman – involves a refusal to settle in to the caricature of the sexless and post‐feminine post‐menopausal woman and, instead, insist on engaging gender and sexuality as continuing sites of identity.

­Renegotiations: Visualizing transageing In the early seventies, American feminist artist Joan Semmel took on the male gaze in a series of large paintings of her nude body. Her most famous – perhaps infamous, given the reticence of many galleries to show the work – were large and graphic paintings of heterosexual sexual intercourse (see, for instance, Erotic Yellow, 1973). She also painted a series of self‐images from 1974 to 1979, which included portraits of the naked artist, sometimes alone, sometimes with a male lover, that depict what a body looks like from the perspective of a figure who looks down at her own body. Me Without Mirrors (1974), for instance, depicts the artist’s body as it is subjectively experienced rather than as it is seen from without. This, and other images from work produced by Semmel in the late 1970s, actively disrupts the conventional power politics involved in the display of female nudes and they are as effective today as they were forty years ago when feminist artists and theorists were beginning to articulate an understanding of the male gaze. Semmel has continued to use her own body as a model for her painting. Transparencies (2011– 2014), completed when she was in her late seventies and early eighties, is a series of large canvases – they range from 48 by 48 inches to 84 by 80 inches – each of which depicts nude female figures. What makes Transparencies particularly compelling is not simply that they are paintings of an old woman but that they multiply and blur her figure in a way that suggests both movement and temporality. In The Unchosen (2011; see Figure 10.1), for instance, an old woman with long gray hair and arthritic fingers appears in three related poses. To the left, she looks down toward the ground, her right leg poised to move. The center figure is slightly off kilter, in the midst of a step, her gaze directed at the viewer. The third figure turns her back to me, her arms slightly outstretched, stepping into the background of the painting. Semmel represents her body as a body in motion and insists upon both the vitality and non‐singularity of her body. Although each body occupies a particular moment in time, the figures are overlapping and intertwined. Art historian Rachel Middleman describes an earlier painting in this series, Transitions (2012), this way: “The multiple bodies overlaying one another convey motion and fragmentation as the undulating lines of hips, elbows, thighs, and breasts flow through one another.”49 One might respond to the indistinct boundaries between each body as disquieting. In a review of Semmel’s paintings, Alexander Adler says that they “display the memories and fragments of an ageing woman, weathered certainly and withering before our eyes.”50 For Adler, the blurring of the multiple figures on the canvas suggests a haziness associated with the decline of old age. His analysis avoids the more sophisticated and challenging possibility that what Semmel represents here is old age as an experience characterized by both movement and multiplicity. In this way, these works resist the singularity of bodily identity associated with narrow stereotypes of old women. It’s as if her old body – a body marked by age, by temporality, and by movement through time – cannot be represented adequately as singular.

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Figure 10.1  Joan Semmel, The Unchosen (2011). Reproduced by permission of Alexander Gray Associates.

Like Semmel, American feminist artist and gallery director Martha Wilson engaged in self‐representational work in the early seventies, when she was in her twenties and living in Nova Scotia, Canada. In recent years, Wilson has produced self‐representational images that reflect on her experiences of ageing. Growing Old (2008–2009), for instance, is a series of five color photographs of the artist taken over a series of months as she let her trademark red‐dyed hair grow out as grey. Without a shock of bright red hair, Wilson seems to fade into unremarkable old age, into the sort of invisibility that Woodward and Twigg and others working in social and cultural gerontology so often identify. Growing Old was included in a 2011 exhibition at PPOW in New York City titled I Have Become My Own Worst Fear, which centered on the artist’s exploration of ageing. Among the most compelling works in this exhibition are those that pair contemporary images of the artist with images she took more than forty years ago. In Beauty + Beastly (1974/2009; see Figure 10.2), her ­bodies – one young, one old – register the passing of time, but also insist that those who look at her today recognize that she is also – and importantly I do not want to say she was – other bodies. I don’t read Wilson’s Beauty + Beastly as a melancholic reflection on lost youth but as an insistence that these bodies exist together and in productive relationship to one another.51 Beauty + Beastly thus aligns with Moglen’s

­Renegotiations: Visualizing transagein

Figure 10.2  Martha Wilson. Beauty + Beastly 1974 and 2009 (B/W photographs, image size: 9.25 × 7.25 in each; text size: 0.5 × 1.25 in each) Beauty, vintage print, 1974, photo by Victor Hayes. Beastly, digital print, 2009, photo by Michael Katchen. Courtesy of the artist and PPOW, New York.

articulation of transageing – an understanding of ageing as a “­ multiple, ambiguous, and contradictory process, which provides us  –  continuously and simultaneously  – with images of past, present, lost, embodied, and imagined selves.”52 The representation of multiple age‐selves in Wilson’s work points to a desire to proliferate the meanings of old age. More significantly, they do not only offer multiple visions of the complexity and variety experience of old age, but to think about the multiplicities of identities more generally. Like Semmel’s paintings of intertwined figures, they put into play a self that is multiplied but not fractured. These works insist that the selves we are and have been and will be are all part of the way that we occupy the world. Wilson’s negotiation with and exploration of age in the work described above is particularly striking when it is considered in relation to some of her earliest work. In Posturing: Age Transformation (1973), she presents herself as “a twenty‐five year old artist trying to look like a fifty year old woman trying to look like she is twenty‐five.” Here, the young artist imagines a future self that is caught up in the pressures to maintain a youthful femininity. In the explanatory text accompanying Posturing: Age Transformation, Wilson reveals that she is afraid not only of middle age but of what she calls “past thirty status.” Turning to these works produced in the early 1970s reveals not only that the matter of ageing, as culturally constructed, negotiated, disciplined, and demanded has been a recurring theme for Wilson but that feminist transageing and a broad engagement with the ­complex experience of ageing and time continue to inform and influence this work.

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When she writes about ageing, Moglen uses the term “discontinuous yet persistent thread of our identities,”53 revealing a dynamic version of ageing. She maintains, and I am suggesting that work by Wilson and Semmel materialize, the experience of age as “Endlessly overlapping states of being and stages of life.”54 For Moglen, this approach to thinking about ageing resonates more fully with her own experience but, more importantly, functions to “explode the flattened, stereotypical projections”55 through which the old are projected and through which we often come to experience ourselves and the old others around us.

­Conclusion In an essay written only months before her suicide at age 70, American feminist scholar Carolyn Heilbrun ends with this observation on life after 70: “[it] is an adventure so far largely unrecorded, unanticipated, unacknowledged.”56 The work I’ve discussed here – all by white women artists working within feminist frameworks in the Western, and mainly North American context – takes valuable steps toward the acknowledgement of the experience of old age that is so vital for the expansion of feminist ageing studies. For most of these artists, incorporating matters of age, ageing, and ageism into their work is an extension of ongoing artistic practices centered on their own bodies. In the face of Heilbrun’s declaration that old age is an unrecorded adventure, feminist artists who are entering middle age or old age thus offer fine starting points for thinking about age not only as an adventure but as a resource for feminist thinking. In the most literal of senses, Lacy’s Silver Action asserts that the knowledge of old women, particularly the knowledge of political struggle and success accumulated by activists, ought to be recognized as a resource for contemporary feminisms. Other artists respond to the cultural invisibility of old women by drawing old bodies into the visual field. Using photography to represent old women enables Manchot and Hayden to take on the widespread “fear of and disgust with growing old” that characterizes Western cultures,57 and in the process, they are able to counter cultural dictates aimed at women to age “gracefully.” Pushing the irreverence for cultural mores around old age even further, artists like Macleod and Martin and Goodridge serve as “radical agents of change”58 who model what Woodward describes as feminist ageing. Just as vitally, they draw attention to the youthful qualities of the gaze, and compel reflection on the c­ ultural frameworks that render age and femininity discontinuous. At their best, these works expand feminist thinking by insisting upon a conversation about shared cultural definitions of and assumptions about femininity, sexuality, and age. Like other artists whose work attends to the matter of age, Semmel and Wilson ­contribute to the effort to populate the visual field with representations of old women. Their work offers a particularly valuable contribution to feminist ageing studies insofar as it reorients feminist approaches to age, which have so often focused on the fears and anxieties that surround old age. These works absolutely point to and unsettle “the shame and taboo surrounding old age,”59 but they also suggest that the category of old woman is itself an unsteady and unstable category. Read through the framework of Moglen’s transageing, these works reveal that age is a complex lived reality marked by accumulation rather than loss. By centering age as it is lived rather than it is imagined – and, indeed, feared – these artists give expression to an understanding of identity

Notes

as a “multiple, ambiguous, and contradictory process.”60 The work of those who move old women from their positions of invisibility compel feminist scholars to think not only about the partiality of media and art images but rather about the partial perspective on the world that political projects take up when only the young are centered. Ultimately, though, this work does more than simply stake an argument for the inclusion of age in feminist studies. It points to the ways that identities are formed in relationship to age, understood as a system of power distribution not unlike those systems in which race, class, gender, and sexuality are produced. Incorporating age, ageing, and ageism in feminist art practice contributes to the expansion of feminist thought more broadly; it contributes to a realization that addressing issues that seem to impact old women in fact also shape our entire social order.

Notes 1 Woodward, Kathleen. “Performing age, performing gender: The legacy of Carolyn

Heilbrun.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 24.2 (2005), 283.

2 Twigg, Julia. “The body, gender, and age: Feminist insights in social gerontology.”

Journal of Ageing Studies 18 (2004), 60.

3 Ibid., 60. 4 Dietrich, Linnea. “Ageing and contemporary art.” Ageing and Identity: A Humanities

Perspective edited by Sara Munson Deats and Lagretta Tallent Lenker. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999, 185. 5 Cristofovici, Anca. “Touching surfaces: Photography, ageing, and an aesthetics of change.” Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations edited by Kathleen Woodward. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999, 270. 6 Pollock, Griselda. “The grace of time: Narrativity, sexuality, and a visual encounter in the virtual feminist museum.” Art History 26.2 (2003), 194. 7 Moglen, Helene. “Ageing and transageing: Transgenerational hauntings of the self.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 9 (2008), 303–304. 8 Ibid., 307. 9 Ibid., 308. 10 Cristofovici, “Touching surfaces: Photography, ageing, and an aesthetics of change,” 269. 11 Ibid., 269. 12 Cristofovici, Anca. Touching Surfaces: Photographic Aesthetics, Temporality, Ageing. New York: Rodopi, 2009, 18. 13 It’s important to note that the chronological age associated with these terms – and others, including “senior” or “elderly” – varies historically and culturally. As a 1999 government report called “A portrait of seniors in Canada” pithily points out, “Trying to find objective definitions of ‘old,’ ‘senior,’ or ‘elderly’ is unrealistic.” http://www. statcan.gc.ca/pub/89‐519‐x/89‐519‐x2006001‐eng.htm, accessed 16 November 2016. 14 Dolan, Josephine and Estella Tincknell. “Introduction.” In Ageing Femininities: Troubling Representations, edited by Josephine Dolan and Estella Tincknell. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012, viii. 15 See Leni Marshall’s introduction to this special issue, titled “Aging: A feminist issue”; and the essay by Calasanti, Toni, Kathleen F. Slevin, and Neal King. “Ageism and feminism: From ‘et cetera’ to center.” NWSA Journal 18.1 (2006).

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16 Beauvoir’s interest in ageing and death as limit experiences was not limited to Coming

17

18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

of Age, which Lynne Segal describes as “her most neglected book” (Segal, Lynne. “All ages and none: Commentary on Helene Moglen’s ageing and transageing.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 9, (2008), 315). See also her section titled “From maturity to old age” in The Second Sex, as well as A Very Easy Death and Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, which consider, respectively, the deaths of her mother and her lifelong interlocutor and partner. Thanks to Kristin Rodier to pointing out Beauvoir’s longstanding interest in age and ageing. Margaret Morganroth Gullette and Kathryn Woodward have both contributed to the interdisciplinary field of age studies. Gullette’s Aged by Culture makes a social constructionist argument for understanding age as a social category. Woodward reads age from a psychoanalytic approach in her 1991 Ageing and its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), and has more recently considered representations of gender and age in the collected volume Figuring Age and in an essay in the NWSA Journal special issue titled “Performing age, performing gender.” Dietrich, 255. Ibid., 255. Pollock, 193. Ibid., 196. Ibid., 193. Youdelman, Nancy and Karen LeCocq. “Reflections on the first feminist art program.” Entering the Picture: Judy Chicago, The Fresno Feminist Art Program, and the Collective Visions of Women Artists edited by Jill Fields, 64–77. New York and London: Routledge, 2012, 74. Ibid., 76. Ibid. Wilding, faithwilding.refugia.net, accessed 16 November 2018. Shalson, Lara. “Waiting.” Contemporary Theatre Review 23.1 (2013), 81. Shalson, 82. Shalson, 82. To view Wilding’s Waiting With, see: http://www.reactfeminism.org/nr1/ artists/wilding.html. Klement, Vera. “An artist’s notes on ageing and death.” Art Journal (Spring 1994), 75. Ibid., 75. Koelsch, Patrice. “The crystal quilt.” Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics 23 (1988), 31. Broner, E.M. “Whispering.” Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics 23 (1988), 29. Cristofovici, “Touching surfaces: Photography, ageing, and an aesthetics of change,” 276. Princenthal, Nancy. Hannah Wilke. Munich: Prestel, 2010, 111. Ibid., 105. Cristofovici, “Touching surfaces: Photography, ageing, and an aesthetics of change,” 277. Moglen, Helene. “Feminism, transageing, and ageism: A response to Lynne Segal.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 9 (2008), 324. Ibid., 324. Segal, Lynne. Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing. London and New York: Verso, 2014, 315.

Notes

41 Moglen, “Feminism, transageing, and ageism: A response to Lynne Segal,” 323. 42 Frueh, Joanna. “Aesthetic and postmenopausal pleasures.” M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An

43 44 45 46

47 48 49

50 51

52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism, edited by Susan Bee and Mira Schor Durham. London: Duke University Press, 2000, 66. Ibid., 68. McLeod, Dayna. “Cougar diary: More on intent and duration,” 9 February 2013, https:// cougarthis.com, accessed 16 November 2018. Martin, Rosy. “The performative body: Phototherapy and re‐enactment.” Afterimage 29.3 (2001), 19. Martin, Rosy. “Challenging invisibility: Outrageous agers.” Gender Issues in Art Therapy, edited by Susan Hogan London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Pub. 2003, 204. Ibid. Woodward, Kathleen. “Performing age, performing gender.” NWSA Journal 18.1 (2006), 164. Middelman, Rachel. “Ageing feminism: Joan Semmel’s visible bodies.” Conference paper presented at the Feminist Art History Conference, Washington DC (November 2014), n.p. Adler, Alexander. “Joan Semmel paintings.” Huffington Post, 26 April 2011. In a 2014 talk given at the Art League and available on YouTube, Wilson says that, in her current work, she is “playing with old age and having a wonderful time.” Melancholy is not a part of her practice. Moglen 2008, 303. Ibid., 304. Ibid., 306. Ibid., 309. Heilbrun, Carolyn. “Taking a U‐turn: The ageing woman as explorer of new territory.” The Women’s Review of Books 20.10–11 (July 2003), 19. Calasanti, Slevin, and King, 2006, 15. Frueh, 66. Segal, Lynne. “All ages and none: Commentary on Helene Moglen’s ageing and transageing.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 9, (2008), 320. Moglen 2008, 303.

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Letters to Susan Lubaina Himid Dear Susan Thank you for asking such interesting questions. The business of answering all of them is going to be a test of my resolve, my memory and my pride. The best way for me to begin to discuss any strategy for exhibiting visual art is always to list the artists. I could describe the objects or make clear my philosophy and illustrate the theoretical underpinning which supports the whole project; this will unfold soon but a list of names has to come first. 5 Black Women (1983), The Africa Centre, Covent Garden, London ●● ●● ●● ●● ●●

Sonia Boyce Veronica Ryan Houria Niati Claudette Johnson Lubaina Himid

Black Woman Time Now (1983/4), Battersea Arts Centre, London ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●●

Ingrid Pollard Veronica Ryan Claudette Johnson Sonia Boyce Lubaina Himid Chila Burman Mumtaz Karimjee Houria Niati Jean Campbell Andrea Telman Margaret Cooper Elizabeth Eugene Leslee Wills Cherry Lawrence Brenda Agard

A Companion to Feminist Art, First Edition. Edited by Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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The Thin Black Line (1985), Institute of Contemporary Art, London ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●●

Marlene Smith Veronica Ryan Sonia Boyce Claudette Johnson Maud Sulter Chila Burman Brenda Agard Sutapa Biswas Jennifer Comrie Lubaina Himid Ingrid Pollard

You don’t often see all the artists listed together  –  especially the line‐up for Black Woman Time Now; it’s not in Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen’s Creativity (1990) or The Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture (2002), even though the exhibition is mentioned, or Shades of Black (2005), or the catalogue for Transforming the Crown (2007). Our names, along with much other very useful information, can be found in the publication Recordings: A Select Bibliography of Contemporary African, Afro Caribbean and Asian British Art. It was published by INIVA and Chelsea College of Art & Design in 1996. If you want to track the creative and cultural shifts that have happened during the past 25 or so years since the idea for these three shows came into my head, you have to hear the names to be able to assess the influence these then young and emerging artists had on the visual art landscape of the following decades; to adequately either navigate the  terrain or map the course you must remember who was (and wasn’t) in the exhibitions. The whole story started for me when I was accepted as a student without a bursary for an MA in Cultural History at the RCA in 1982. Sir Christopher Frayling and Paul Overy took me on, then both encouraged and supported, chivvied and parried with me for two years. It was Paul Gough who helped me to apply for the money to pay part of the fees and Bridget Astor who gave me several hundred pounds for the remainder. Marlowe Russell allowed me to live in her house virtually free in exchange for nothing but heartache. I was single‐minded and didn’t hesitate to ask for help, then demanded total ­support for my plan to tip the British art world upside down. Looking back, piecing together the tapestry of it now, these shows were simple to stage because Eddie Chambers, Keith Piper, Claudette Johnson and Donald Rodney had already surmounted huge amounts of diffidence, prejudice, hostility and hatred by staging ‘Black Art an’ done’: An Exhibition of work by Young Black Artists (Wolverhampton Art Gallery) in 1981, The Pan Afrikan Connection: An Exhibition by Young Black Artists (Ikon Gallery) in 1982, and The First National Black Art Convention Open Exhibition of Black Art at the Faculty of Art and Design Gallery at Wolverhampton Polytechnic. All the tour venues of The Pan Afrikan Connection exhibition – including 35 King Street Gallery Bristol, Midland Group Gallery Birmingham, Herbert Museum and Art Gallery Coventry, the Africa Centre London and the Black‐Art Gallery in London – had exhibited work curated by Eddie Chambers and his colleagues before any of my shows had reached the walls of anywhere.

Letters to Susan

I was writing about them in my MA thesis at the RCA (1982–1984), the underlying challenge of which was how to articulate the idea that black women had a voice and a creative energy which needed nurturing; each paragraph emerged very slowly as I struggled on a portable typewriter in a converted kitchen/studio in South London. Keep going with your film. Love Lubaina * * * Dear Susan I am tempted to be glib in answer to your question ‘Why did you stage these exhibitions?’ There are many reasons, not all of them thoroughly thought through, none of them financially sound and only a few strategically efficient. Women artists were not being recognised as having a place in the visual arts generally and even the feminist art movement had not given us enough room to manoeuvre within the discussions being had in the art school and around the kitchen table. Black women artists were not getting the grants they deserved, because they did not know the right avenues to follow. I was hungry to show with other black women to see whether there was a conversation to be had amongst ourselves around showing space, political place and visual art histories, how to develop ideas around making, visual representation, belonging and identity. What were the global realities of black sisterhood? In the main the exhibitions came about because I responded to other people’s urgent desire for a physical and tangible proof of our creative activity. The Africa Centre was a familiar venue; I worked in a restaurant I had helped to design on the opposite side of Covent Garden Piazza. The curators there knew me as an artist/organiser of small exhibitions by emerging artists on the walls of eating places in London. I promoted shows of drawings and paintings by Theatre Design graduates with whom I had completed a BA at Wimbledon School of Art. Battersea Arts Centre was around the corner from where I lived at the time. The space was rough and ready, friendly and loud. Working with Yvonne Brewster’s Talawa Theatre Company as a designer led us to working with a group of black women activists who had been asked to stage a festival of black women’s creativity. They asked me to join them to organise a large exhibition of women’s work. The opportunity was too tempting to ignore. I had visited the ICA at least once a month for the previous decade or more, either to see films or watch new plays or to engage blissfully with exhibitions; the place was part of my life. A curatorial post was advertised and because I was a naive and yet ferociously ambitious black woman with an MA and a few exhibitions on my CV I applied for the job. The people who planned to become pivotal to the contemporary art world in Britain and Europe usually started their careers at the ICA. As a theatre design graduate I knew about British theatre and loathed it, could not penetrate it and had abandoned it. In addition, the complex system enabling British art galleries and collections to invent, produce and develop the exhibitions I had been visiting with my mother since the age of 9 or 10 at the Tate on Millbank, the Hayward on the South Bank and the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square was completely unknown to me. I didn’t get the job (I don’t think there was a job), but the director Bill McAllister called me on the telephone and asked me to put forward some ideas for a black arts festival for the ICA.

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I wrote some energetic ideas for a cinema, theatre and exhibitions programme but cannot now remember any significant details. I went to a meeting and discovered that there had been pressure (funding pressure) from the Greater London Council for much more evidence of a black cultural contribution to the programme at the ICA. I was the best or actually the worst the ICA could come up with. Unsurprisingly, the festival never materialised but I was offered the 20 metre corridor to present an exhibition. The very experienced Declan McGonagle (Director, 1984–1986) oversaw the project and Andrea Schlieker was his assistant (1985–1988). Sandy Nairne had just left (1980–1984). Iwona Blazwick, his assistant, was later that decade to return to take over the visual arts post herself (1986–1993). In his article ‘Mainstream Capers: Black Artists White Institutions’ for Artrage (Autumn 1986), Eddie Chambers wrote, ‘It is my view that no persons (least of all Black artists) have the right to determine what Black artists (other than themselves) are represented in white galleries.’ It would be foolish of me to pretend that his remarks were not influential once I understood his disgust. * * * Dear Susan The contents of this letter could be the answer to why much of what I set out to do did not make the rapid changes to artists’ lives we all envisaged and yet unleashed a torrent of energetic and optimistic women into the exhibiting world who would go on to influence the way museums, collections and educators think about creative communication with audiences. Why make exhibitions containing the work of young black women in that way, as an artist/selector, in those particular spaces? I have only put together four or five such shows in thirty odd years but at the time it seemed right to showcase this huge variety of voices with visual stories to share. Rules were being broken all across the landscape of British gallery spaces by young artists who were not aware of the underlying strategies through which they were being manipulated. Shows emerged in response to strategically friendly requests by organisations, politically obliged, for funding reasons, to be seen to shift their way of defining who could be an artist. In tandem with this, understand that we wanted to exhibit the work we were making in our kitchens and back bedrooms, but were determined to be as inclusive as possible. It suited us to show alongside each other, presenting a whole variety of beliefs, life choices and philosophical narratives. We exhibited in this way to make visible our richness of vision. We did not all think about audiences in the same way or use materials the same way. We prioritised differently in relation to politics, money or faith and were brave enough to expose this. We were not a movement or a group or a sisterhood or even close friends but instead a fluid set of women who were not prepared to be herded into a single way of expressing ourselves. We were happy to liaise with anyone in almost any busy space and encourage our friends and families to participate in the looking experience. Good decisions about place and space were and still are often determined by footfall; offer me a space to show in the middle of a city where there is the chance that hundreds of people may happen upon us while engaged in another activity and I will consider it above a secluded space for a pre‐selected audience, especially when the creative output

Letters to Susan

is by artists starting out. They need to have the chance to be seen by as many people as possible then grow their own audiences over time. My initial letter/leaflet – sent out across Britain to art schools, community centres, women’s groups and friends – was a simple but effective, totally random, typed and copied slip of paper. It attracted a particular kind of artist: optimistic and determined, ambitious and young with no fear of failure. The other four artists in 5 Black Women were women who had responded quickly and with clear images of art work coupled with a passionate desire to be exhibited. I made a decision to select 11 artists including myself, for the then 20 × 2 metre corridor of the ICA, essentially and absolutely to illustrate that there was not enough room for the amount of visual endeavour being produced. * * * Dear Susan Hopefully the screening went well and you are enjoying the deliciousness of Rome. This seems an odd exercise, to chronicle in 2010 what the artists who were working with me in 1983/4/5 are doing now; it isn’t proof of success or failure. I still remember and re‐imagine those three exhibitions in terms of artists and what they were trying to achieve, rather than a gathering or juxtaposition of aesthetically interesting objects displayed for pleasure or analysis. The process by which artists invent and devise is endlessly interesting to me. I want to facilitate space and time for them to make and think for themselves. We sometimes discussed the impact of the ideas during the months before their emergence into the public space, but I am a sounding‐board not a midwife. Success largely depends on what each artist decides success actually is. I have included this list for you so that it can act as a starting point for further discussion and just in case we want to make some commitment to an archive/collection ­project or an article for Colourcode. Sonia Boyce has an MBE and two works in the Tate collection. She exhibits all over the place and her latest exhibition Like Love Parts One and Two was shown at Bluecoat Liverpool in 2010. Maud Sulter died in 2008; her work is in the collections at the V&A, the Arts Council and the National Portrait Gallery. Jean Campbell and Cherry Lawrence have both practised as art therapists in medical, community and educational settings. Each has written articles on the subject and been part of the Art Therapy, Race and Culture group. Leslee Wills is a history teacher in a secondary school and organises events for Black History month. Veronica Ryan has seven works in the Tate collection, including one she showed in The Thin Black Line. She works in America and her work was included in a show at Brooklyn Museum in 2007. She exhibited a piece called ‘Between Spaces 2003 to the present’ in a show called Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art. Ingrid Pollard received a Leverhulme Individual award, has work in the Arts Council collection and has been associate research fellow at the Centre for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths. She teaches at Kingston but has recently held a number of international residencies. Brenda Agard is a storyteller and worked with the North London Partnership, wrote plays and worked as a photographer.

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Sutapa Biswas was Reader in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art & Design University of the Arts and worked within TrAIN (The Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation). Houria Niati works in performance and has been represented by Janet Rady. Jennifer Comrie, Elizabeth Eugene, Andrea Telman, Mumtaz Karimgee and Margaret Cooper have fallen off my radar and I have fallen off theirs. Chila Kumari Burman was most recently Leverhulme artist in residence at the University of East London and shows frequently in a wide variety of venues. Marlene Smith was director of The Public when it opened in West Bromwich in 2008 and in 2015 started to run a project in Birmingham called The Room Next to Mine. Claudette Johnson does not exhibit widely but still contributes to discussions about visual art and works with groups to develop their visual skills. She may work with us at UCLan in the Print room soon but is part of the Carte de Visite project I’m curating at Hollybush Gardens Gallery in London [in 2015]. I have an MBE, am Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire and have works in numerous collections, including three paintings in Tate, several in the V&A and a series in the Arts Council collection. My own exhibitions in recent years in museums and galleries, including The V&A, The Judges’ Lodgings Lancaster, The Merseyside Maritime, Lady Lever, The Whitworth, Sudley House and Manchester Art Gallery, have interrogated important issues around audiences that are central to my practice. It seems rather slight, a string of words about collections awards and careers, written here without reference to the families these women have nurtured and the places they have visited or the music they have listened to or the conversations they have had with each other during the past 25 years but it is obvious that in between the stark lines there nestle some very deep, significant, dramatic, scandalous and even tragic narratives, all of which we could bring to the surface with hundreds of drawings and photographs, stories and illustrations to link the multiple developments and influences. It’s a story waiting to be told. Each woman could tell it. * * * Dear Susan I’m glad the trip is going well and the set up at the screenings is as good as they promised. In the meantime I will try to unpack the whole funding thing around the exhibitions. It’s important to make things clear about how the finances worked, because to some degree the projects seemed well supported. Two of the venues were well used and well known and were in receipt of fair amounts of public money. On the whole the money in circulation was very modest: I received modest expenses for Black Woman Time Now in line with the other women in the creative steering group; I received a small fee of £100 for the six months’ work on The Thin Black Line which covered some of my expenses, and no fee at all for the exhibition at the Africa Centre. I realised at the time that not very many people could ever have afforded to work on these shows, but it is only during the past decades that I have wondered whether the fact that I agreed to do this work for nothing meant that it was difficult for other artist/selectors to develop relationships with the venues, the ICA or Battersea Arts Centre, because they had to support themselves without help from friends.

Letters to Susan

I received a huge amount of help from Marlowe Russell. She had been a good friend of mine since the age of 15. She was an artist and I lived in her house. She was always there for me to exchange ideas with. She agreed to hire and then drive large unwieldy old transit vans to transport work from all over London to the various exhibiting spaces. Not having to be at work at 9 a.m. every day, not having to pay much rent to her and not having to commit to a job for five days a week meant that I was able to work part time, near to home, earning small amounts of money as a youth worker. This privilege allowed me to work with all three venues, virtually for free. The artists received nothing at all from the Africa Centre but some of us sold work. They were not paid for showing at the Battersea Arts Centre and at the ICA we had to share £250 between 11 of us to speak at a public event. Maud Sulter cleverly had the sense and nerve to ask for her own fee for speaking. It sounds utterly naive now but these opportunities to work with other women on projects resulted in a huge increase in our ability to communicate ideas to people in a way we truly believed in. It was a privilege for me but the other artists might want to develop and unpack that notion of working for nothing and tell you what it meant for them. There was money to produce leaflets, invitations and the launch parties at all the venues, but at the ICA there was also technical help to hang the exhibitions and a catalogue. * * * Dear Susan You want to know about the nitty‐gritty of the actual installation of these shows! It certainly does help when the technical staff are willing to take their time and give you experienced advice without being patronising. At the Africa Centre we did it ourselves. My contribution of five naked life‐sized painted cut‐out men with one‐metre‐long erections raised some sceptical eyebrows, but all I had to do was decide on an order, position the figures and then lean them against the wall. I placed them early in the audience experience of the exhibition; the worst space of course but I understood that it takes some time to acclimatise to the environment. It was a disconcerting space to hang: essentially the gallery is an actual gallery hovering high around a large hall with a vast, ornate and elaborate ceiling. Standing back to look at the placing meant walking around the room at its edge and looking at what you had placed across a yawning chasm beneath you. The layout dictated that it was inevitable that an audience would see the work at very close quarters or from nine metres away; nothing was ever quite seen in the comfortable medium distance. Claudette Johnson’s deeply sensuous large‐scale richly coloured almost life‐sized pastel drawings of women were light and easy to hang. They could hold the space and were so beautifully rendered that it was a joy to be close to them and to see the crafted marks and blended colours. Veronica Ryan chose to contribute a series of fascinating small objects, gourds, fruits, strange shaped things, dark mud brown and matt gun metal grey rubbed and scratched, with pitted surfaces. A series of twisted, curved and familiar yet uncanny creatures, all in rows on a metal three‐tiered display device. They looked like something abandoned by an unknown force displayed as products for sale in the corner shop. We simply had

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to fix the shelving and then place the objects in the order according to the plan. There was never a question that anyone would steal or move the pieces; it wasn’t necessary to engage in long conversations with the visual art team there about securing the sculptures or invigilation, insurance or health and safety. It was an arts centre, predominantly a performance venue and meeting place for people from all over the continent, famous in London for the crowded restaurant in the basement serving delicious West African food, almost unheard of at the time. People came and went from the building in between meetings, meals, dance performances and visits to the shop, all day and late into the night. It was unpretentious, low key yet ­challenging because every minute we were there either arranging the work or visiting during the run, we would be intellectually stretched by audiences demanding answers to their questions about our unfailing commitment to being aspiring contemporary ­artists making work with personal and political narratives. We were feminists, two African women and three Caribbean women working together as artists. We were seen as a formidable group. Houria Niati exhibited her extraordinary re‐imaginings of Delacroix paintings in which, using every colour imaginable, she questioned and argued with his interpretation of how North African women think and feel, look and behave. They were bold, active and rude paintings which refused to unnecessarily respect the masterworks yet acknowledged their significance. They could hold the distance and were able to shout loudly at you from across the massive airiness of the space. In those far‐off days Sonia Boyce made large‐scale pastel drawings, full of pattern and portrait, seductive autobiographical narratives revealing absolutely everything about real life and young love, secret conversations, working people’s aspirations, ­difficult relationships and childhood memories. Many people wanted to buy this work: after all, who told these stories in the wider public then? Sonia later stated in print in a leaflet produced for a display she had at The Whitechapel Gallery that she was not altogether happy to be exhibited in this show, confessing that she felt she was not ready for the attention, the praise, of critics, collectors and audiences. She was not happy either with the venue, feeling the Africa Centre was too far away from the homes of the people to whom the work was directed, the people with whom she had grown up. It only took a day to make the installation work but it was dizzifying, either because we had to go round and round the gallery to see what the show looked like from every angle or because to look down instead of across the space brought on terrible vertigo! * * * Dear Susan Thanks for the notebook. I still remember snatches from the events of the installation at each of those shows every time I complete an exhibition hang now. It is still a nerve racking business, fraught with anxiety about the technical details and full of excitement for the possibilities of the project. Just trying to ensure that all the work actually arrived at the ICA was a challenge, one which occupied many hours prior to the opening date. Maud Sulter had happily agreed to be part of The Thin Black Line but as we neared the dates for collection and delivery of the work we kept missing each other’s calls. In the end I tracked her down to her office at a women’s education project and picked

Letters to Susan

up her collages from there. She had had the brilliant idea of remaking Salvador Dali’s Christ of St John on the Cross; a strange depiction with vertiginous, smooth, kitsch, slippery blue‐grey forms. Maud’s painting designed for the walls of the staircase was to be the Dali work remade as a black woman crucified. Unfortunately, she never did make the piece nor did she come to the opening of the exhibition. Sonia Boyce arrived with her work when everyone else’s was almost fixed to the walls. I was slightly upset but only because I had not actually seen the work she had been working on. At the time it was a new piece, a work on paper called Mr Close Friend of the Family (1985), a most extraordinary and powerful black‐and‐white pastel drawing about 4 × 3 foot. All around the edge as a border is a pattern of small life‐sized child’s hands; each with fingers spread wide. Layered on top is a short text. At the centre of this intense work is a young black girl looking out of the frame at the viewer. She seems numb and silent but is trying to be strong. She is dressed in a plain top and is depicted from the waist up. Standing close to her is the figure of a black man with a slight paunch, in shirt and trousers whose head we do not see, depicted from his groin to his chin. The man reaches across the heavily scalloped patterned surface towards the young girls breasts; his hand is millimetres away from her. The border text read ‘Mr Close friend of the family pays a visit whilst everyone else is out.’ Chila Burman had a typically wild and funny idea for the staircase as well as installing paperwork in the main corridor display area. Her project was a whole body print for the venue; to facilitate her making the piece we had to clear the area as she removed all her clothes, smeared herself in paint/printing ink and pressed herself repeatedly against the wall in a kind of body kiss. Veronica Ryan was chosen by me to exhibit for just two weeks in the beautiful Nash room on the first floor of the ICA as well as in the main corridor with everyone else. The room was available to us, in between other projects, and it seemed like a superb opportunity to display the work of an artist who was at the time very prolific and serious about her ambitions to work as a professional contemporary artist. One of the pieces was later purchased by Charles Saatchi, which he donated to the Tate collection. Sutapa Biswas’s Housewife with Steak Knives was an astonishing larger‐than life‐sized pastel drawing in deep red, black and brown, a contemporary translation of the multi‐ armed goddess Kali brandishing knives, flowers and flags. The installation of it was smooth as it took its place at the end of the corridor near the bar and restaurant. Later in the run some idiot spat on the piece and we began to understand the power of what we had achieved. I realise that all exhibitions have elements of danger, shifting and shimmering amongst the ghosts of past lives, plenty of my own work has been wilfully broken or damaged with knives, boots and screwdrivers in the gallery setting. Immense energy flashed and flew around that space at the ICA. Luckily, the rest of the work in The Thin Black Line emerged at the end of the run unscathed. * * * Dear Susan Thanks for asking about the impact factor. The work was made for other black women to engage with. We made it to communicate, to swell the ranks of active, creative and political artists. We made it for young women like ourselves and for the thousands of older black women in Britain who had supported the system for decades.

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We each brought favourite family photographs and those of singers, dancers and musicians to adorn the space, to make it feel like home. I was called a ‘cultural terrorist’ by one freelance commercial curator; it hurt then, but she couldn’t deal with the apparent speed and strength of our progress, nor our disregard for the market. Issues we wanted to express in a very direct way were also revealed in the catalogue. It contained some extraordinary texts; the following extracts may give you an idea of the determined opinions we were happy to share. Sutapa Biswas said: ‘All art forms are political and must be read within a socio‐ historical context. Much of my work is satirical and insists upon the multiplicity of meaning. One of its intentions is to re‐assess, question and re‐write that ­history which belongs to imperialism.’ Jennifer Comrie wrote: ‘My blackness and spiritual awareness are important elements within the work. With a sense of black consciousness, I am able to speak as a black woman who feels that her sexuality within this society is reduced to rabidity; whose intelligence, confidence in herself is still being reduced to inefficiency. Though others of a different racial group may be able to intellectualise and rationalise the problems I face as a black person, experiencing similar problems one is only truly comforted when one’s own kind states, “I understand, I have been there myself.”’ Marlene Smith said: ‘As Black women artists our work revolves around and evolves out of an experience which is our own. As a Black woman I feel a responsibility to address that experience, to embrace it, to explore it. In so doing many of my images deal with brutality and violence. It is important to point out here that such work is about the continued attempt to dehumanise us. My work is not about a dejected people nor does it portray a degraded black womanhood. I seek to contribute to the building of a material culture that might have been denied were it not for the struggles of my people.’ Claudette Johnson said: ‘The black women in my drawings are monoliths. Larger than life versions of women, invisible to white eyes and naked to our own. They are women who have been close to me all my life – with different stories. They are not objects. Every black woman who survives art college fairy tales & a repressive society to make images of her reality – deserves the name artist.’ Sonia Boyce wrote: ‘A child’s curiosity and fear of the adult world, religion and personal relationships: these have been my main themes. The familiar/sensual, the familiar/uncomfortable. I work mainly on paper with paper and crayons.’ The pastel work she produced for this show, that I described in some other letter to you, was among the last of its kind she made for public showing. Maud Sulter’s text was long in comparison; she was, after all, a poet. She didn’t include images at all. One section read: ‘The primary area of my creative production is my writing. Poetry, prose, articles. Covering a range of subjects; personal/ political. ‘The images I produce incorporate photography, drawing, newspaper cuttings and texts; both my own and by others. Within this context the significance of the image modulating the text fascinates me.’ Later in the text towards the end she says, ‘Yes being visible can be dangerous. But being invisible eats away at your soul. Night and Day.’

Letters to Susan

Veronica Ryan wrote about her practice and allowed the political to emerge: ‘In my studio I have a collection of natural objects. These objects I have decided have their origins in a primal past. More specifically they are partly reminiscent of the very unlikely way these objects grow. Their relationship to the ground or bulging out of a tree trunk continually arrests my imagination. They are ridiculous and wonderful at the same time. ‘I am trying to establish a sense of place both historically, culturally and ­psychologically. The word heritage conveys a rich sense of tradition and security. But there is a sense in which I use sculptural language to make and explore boundaries in a contemporary context. The sculpture could be described as ­having a direct parallel with the diverse ways in which human behaviour communicates, or remains alienated.’ Ingrid Pollard submitted 41 simple words of biographical text which held within them such a rich tapestry of experience it still moves me when I read it today. She said: ‘Born in Georgetown Guyana I came to England when I was 4 years old and have lived in London since then. I have spent recent years as a photographer and as a printer in a Community Arts Project in Hackney.’ Our families had come from somewhere else, at some point; we were all educated in Britain and knew we had a great deal to contribute to the cultural landscape. None of us has ever given up being creative and all of us who are still alive continue to attempt to share what we know. See you soon Love Lubaina * * * Dear Susan These early‐morning train journeys from the South to the North of England feel like time travel clichés in student architects’ films. I spend time thinking about the Carte De Visite project for Hollybush Gardens Gallery in Clerkenwell and the Plymouth Arts Centre; working with Ingrid Pollard, Claudette Johnson and Helen Cammock is so brilliant. Since Thin Black Line(s) (TBL[s]) closed at Tate Britain an astonishing shift has taken place right across the fertile terrain in and upon which we have been strenuously digging, strategically planting, diligently watering and actively feeding; yet unsurprisingly so much has stayed the same. I loved the Making it Happen symposium (2012) we staged at Conway Hall as part of the Tate exhibition, but how frustrating it was that all through 2011/12 neither the Education people at Tate nor the curators at the ICA would countenance hosting a symposium at their venues. Since then we’ve been to events at Tate which directly link to our aims then; Courtney Martin talking to Frank Bowling, Zoe Whitley talking to Helen Cammock. They were discrete but very powerful. The Conway Hall event, though very intimate, was one of the most important gatherings we’ve ever organised; so many plump seeds were planted, many of which have come to fruition merely three years later. Of those participants (all of them women, bar one) who did give a day of their lives to talk and listen, eat and photograph, record and make plans to collaborate:

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Ingrid Pollard has been awarded several residencies, including the year‐long VARC (Visual Arts and the Rural Community) residency in Highgreen, Northumbria, which resulted in a multifaceted exhibition Regarding the Frame (2013). She is central to Staying Power: Photographs of Black British Experience 1950s–1990s at the V&A and the Black Cultural Archives. She is in residence in France in June for a month at the Chateau De Sacy, and before that she’ll be down the road in East Lancashire with William Titley’s project In‐Situ with her Camera Obscura. Tate acquired Oceans Apart (1989) and Seaside Series (1989) in 2013. Claudette Johnson is making new work in a new studio for the Carte de Visite project; exactly the point of encouraging her to present at the symposium. Sutapa Biswas is now working full‐time as an artist. Marlene Smith’s The Room Next to Mine project has staged four public conversations with artists Claudette Johnson, Barbara Walker, Amanda Holiday and Keith Piper in Birmingham. Chantal Oakes recently contributed to the publication Audre Lorde’s Transnational Legacies edited by Stella Bolaki and Sabine Broeck published in July 2015 by University of Massachusetts Press. Ella Mills, a Stanley Burton Research Scholar in the Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies department at the University of Leeds, has given several excellent papers, including one at The Future of Feminist Histories of Art: Working towards a Shared History conference (2014) and another at Old Mistresses Revisited at the National Gallery (2013). In 2015 she’ll be speaking at the IBAR UCLan Lost Children: The Black Atlantic and Northern Britain symposium, giving a paper on Maud Sulter and Caryl Phillips. She’s had a baby and is writing up now. Deborah Cherry, Professor of Art History at the University of the Arts London, and Deputy Director of TrAIN, has co‐curated the exhibition Maud Sulter: Passion which is an Autograph ABP/Street Level Photoworks partnership in association with TrAIN, and is the outcome of a curatorial research project with artist curator Ajamu, funded by Arts Council England. Griselda Pollock worked in 2013–2014 with the Leverhulme Visiting Professor Carolyn Christov‐Bakagiev: on Transdisciplinary Encounters in Fine Art, History of Art and Curatorial Studies through a Critical Assessment of the Significance of the Project, Process, Realization and Retrospective Analysis of dOCUMENTA13(2012) and on an AHRC 4‐year research project Concentrationary Memories: The Politics of Resistance with Max Silverman exploring the totalitarianism, aesthetic opposition and the seepage of the totalitarian into popular culture. Matrixial Aesthetics and the Post‐Catastrophic in visual and other cultural practices. Jane Beckett continues to teach Art History at NYU. Diana Winch is now the Manager of Elizabeth Gaskell’s House in Manchester. Yvonne Hardman is now Head of Collections at Leeds Museums Service. Frances Scott who worked on the sound recordings that day has completed numerous projects since then but her Apex work at Tintype Gallery (2014) and her Another Way of Reading (2014) at Swiss Cottage Library (a Zabludowicz residency) are her most recent. You (Susan Walsh) seemed to have achieved almost continuous, rather quiet, small‐ scale public place and museum projects, using old carts and blue plaques, piano keys and paintings, collages and billboards.

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Ajamu as well as working on his own photographic projects has of course been working with Prof. Deborah Cherry on the ABP Maud Sulter Legacy project – the monograph is out soon and the show was on at Streetlevel Glasgow and reviewed in Art Monthly by Ella Mills. Sonia Boyce wasn’t there but she is 0.5 Professor of Fine Art at Middlesex, as well as being Chair of Black Art and Design at UAL and exhibited in the Venice Biennale 2015. Brenda Agard wasn’t there and she is dead now. Veronica Ryan wasn’t there either but exhibited at the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, in 2012. I didn’t see it so it’s good to know.

It seemed so rare even in 2012 for black artists to be given the space and time to give insights into their practice, to talk at length about their making rituals and processes about their choice of materials, their relationship to studios and their experiences on residencies. It was so enlightening to listen to everyone share their connections to other artists and to how their work had developed sometimes in tandem with that of sympathetic art historians. We got an insight into developing ideas, ongoing projects, ­abandoned plans and learned what each artist or theorist actually thought about how archives and collections were central to their practice and essential to the survival of their creative work and activist/art political endeavours. As the years have flashed past we’ve met some amazing women who encountered the show itself but were not at the symposium, and it is really Christine Eyene, who so succinctly and helpfully reviewed the Tate Britain show, who has had the most significant impact on everything I do now. She has been part of our team here at UCLan as the Guild Research Fellow since 2013, specialising in socially engaged urban cultures, experimental sound, music and design. Her current research areas focus on South African photographer George Hallett (1970s–1980s), Britain’s Black Arts (1980s), contemporary African art, gendered perspectives in contemporary art, sound art and non‐object‐based art practices. She has completely re‐invigorated the Making Histories Visible project, so we now reach right across the globe thanks to her bringing George Hallett and Zanele Muholi from South Africa. We could never have developed the research project in the way we have without her amazingly energetic input. She has already curated Maud’s work and your selection of archive materials from TBL(s) as part of Where we’re at (BOZAR 2014) and has included Ingrid in Residual: Traces of the Black Body at New Art Exchange in Nottingham. Carole Dixon has chosen to develop her own research at Sheffield exploring how curatorial approaches to the display and interpretation of art objects from the African continent in Western museums and galleries have changed over time, focusing on the history and geographies of acquisition, collection development and exhibiting practices in selected British and French cultural institutions. When we met recently, she said that she had never been in a space like the TBL(s) show where she understood on quite a deep level that the work in the display was speaking directly to her. Zoe Whitley, who at the time of TBL(s) worked as a curator at the V&A, now works as contemporary curator at Tate Britain and Tate Modern, and, while a PhD candidate here at UCLan, co‐curated Afro Futurist exhibition The Shadows Took Shape (2013) at the Studio Museum in New York. My latest curating project Carte de Visite (2015) with Hollybush Gardens Gallery is gradually developing shape now. It plays with the potential conversation women have with each other as we introduce ourselves for the first time. What does it mean to know

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yourself and know others, to be known and yet unknown? The artists Ingrid Pollard, Claudette Johnson and I have known each other since 1983 but we have only just encountered Helen Cammock’s work during the past couple of years. Amazingly (or perhaps not) Christine Eyene has known Helen since working with her during her four‐ year co‐directorship of the Brighton PhotoFringe. The three artists are producing material in response to the new conversations which we are having with ourselves and each other in new spaces and new places to work. The exhibition will emerge from: the new studio in Hackney for making drawings; the Print Room in Preston using 19th‐century presses; the Making Histories Visible archive investigating late‐20th‐century black art practice; a residency in France using a camera obscura; a series of social occasions in London and the north of England; thoughts about a residency in Barbados in a year’s time. My curatorial vision is this: that I am most interested in working with artists who are not afraid to experiment with the disruption of space and place, either physically or as if undoing the threads of how a place might be held together intellectually. The Thin Black Line (ICA 1985) filled the corridor with loud but silent conversation about black women’s lives in 1980s London. Thin Black Line(s) (Tate Britain 2011/2012) seamlessly merged into the strategic narrative offered to the visitor by the art museum about the quality of works held in a public collection. With Cartes de Visite I wish to present a project in which the artists imagine the space to be private and the conversations impossible to overhear. I have known Betye Saar since 1990 and Evan Ifekoya since 2014 and will ask them to respond in some way to the work produced by the core artists, at two or three points during its development. The purpose of the project is the development, through visual art practice, of a long and intense conversation about what it means to communicate ideas about being both visible and invisible, seductive and rejected, the epitome of sexual availability and frightening harridan at one and the same moment. While public discussions about an authentic representation of the black woman and her life may be perceived to be totally redundant in 21st‐century Europe, I am still interested in how we wish to be seen and how we see ourselves when the choice is ours, and whether this can be achieved visually with intelligence and humour. Essentially the project is designed to give some working time and production space for a group of artists to explore new ways of examining the possibilities of what could be. An impressive line‐up of artists, curators, theorists and historians have visited the Making Histories Visible archive on a monthly basis from all over the world, including members of the Preston Black History Group. We’ve also welcomed: Celeste Marie Bernier, Evan Ifekoya, Raisa Kabir, Raju Rage, Ella Mills, Carole Dixon, Amy Dean, Ingrid Pollard, Tina Campt, George Hallet, Noo Saro Wiwa, Carole Dixon, Helen Cammock, Mothertongue (Tiffany Boyle and Jessica Carden), Zanele Muholi, Lerato Dumse, Gabriella Vaz Pinheiro, Autumn Knight, Lisa Milroy, Amy Dean, Alice Correia, Kirsty Fitzpatrick, Andrea Sillis, Yvonne Reddick, Raphael Hoermann, Caryl Phillips, Alan Rice, Richard Parry, Clarissa Corfe, Anna Kesson and the Preston Carnival Group. It’s difficult to be at all certain about whether the cultural landscape for black women artists in Britain shifted because TBL(s) was part of BP’s display at Tate Britain between 2011 and 2012. There are certainly a number of curators and academics aged between

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35 and 45 who simply cannot understand why the strategies drawn up in the early 1980s by artists such as Maud Sulter, Claudette Johnson, Eddie Chambers, Shaka Dedi, Keith Piper and myself have not after all radically transformed the perception of what it means to make work as a black artist. They want to know why between 1990 and 2015 British art galleries including p ­ ublicly funded venues such as INIVA, the ICA, Chisenhale, Matt’s Gallery, Fruitmarket, Spike Island, Cornerhouse, Bluecoat, Whitechapel, Hayward, Kettle’s Yard, Ikon, Serpentine, Camden Arts Centre and Whitworth have only shown the occasional black British ­artist and never consistently displaying and developing their international profiles or professional careers. They want to know why there are not monographs published by Phaidon or Thames & Hudson or Routledge or Serpents Tail, Bookworks or LUP. I don’t have the answers to give the next generation of emerging artists or the current generation of curators and academics who persistently dig about in the Making Histories Visible archive trying to unearth solutions. There is a far‐too‐gradual realisation that open debate, honest collaboration, free access to information and cross‐disciplinary events, academic support and the use of alternative venues for display could help a genuine engagement with multiple audiences and the active recruitment of thousands of students. Our work can actually encourage debate about the politics of representation across multiple platforms and there are opportunities for intellectual exchange and old‐fashioned skill‐sharing. People who want to engage in what the visual arts can offer and are curious about the different ways of seeing can easily map their own experiences onto those of strong, motivated artists by enlivening and animating wide‐ranging debates about what it means to feel deeply and want to share it. I sincerely hope that Carte de Visite (2015) when read together with 5 Black Women at the Africa Centre (1981), Black Woman Time Now (1983), The Thin Black Line (1985) and Thin Black Lines (2011/12) will be experienced as a long rambling unfolding of an everyday narrative about how women placing themselves at the centre of debates around representation, equality and excellence actually can make a difference to how these central issues of human rights can be addressed. Let’s keep going. Love Lubaina

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Feminist Art Re‐Covered Richard Meyer ­2007 A Technicolor sea of bare‐breasted women spills across the cover for the catalogue to WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, an international survey of women’s art from 1965 to 1980 on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles from March to July 2016. Designed by Lorraine Wild, the dustjacket reproduces a large detail from a Vietnam‐era photocollage by Martha Rosler titled Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain: Hot House, or Harem, 1966–72. More than any single work in the exhibition, more perhaps than the exhibition itself, the WACK! cover has become a site of interpretive conflict and controversy. In an otherwise largely positive review of the show, Holland Cotter in the New York Times commented that the catalogue jacket “needs rethinking,” noting that “Martha Rosler’s sardonic collage of Playboy centerfolds loses its point out of context and turns into just another sex‐sells pitch.”1 In Artnet online magazine, Hunter Drohojowska‐Philip quipped: “When composed by Martha Rosler, it was a critique of representation. Today, it looks like an advertisement for The L Word.”2 Both critics contrast the original context of Rosler’s collage with the (allegedly) commercial aims of its reappearance on the jacket of an exhibition catalogue. What was once a critique of pornographic display has become, in their eyes, yet another slick commodification of the radical past. (An unacknowledged irony: The Artnet review, titled “Pussy Power,” was at the time of its initial publication surrounded by ads for auction houses, commercial galleries, and designs by Diane von Furstenberg.) One feminist art historian told me that the cover sends the wrong message to her students, many of whom already equate female sexual freedom with pole‐dancing parties and Girls Gone Wild self‐abandon. According to MOCA, several of the 119 artists in the show have voiced concerns – and in one case, incredulity – over the cover design. On WACKsite (www. moca.org/wack), an online community forum hosted by the museum, far more comments have been posted about the cover than about any other topic. They range from expressions of dismay (“The women are all young and thin … thus reiterating a very narrow notion of beauty”) to declarations of empowerment (“I am woman hear me roar! RRRRRRRRRRRRRRR”), from frankly perplexed responses (“I must say I was a bit confused when I first saw the cover”) to open‐ended, even ethical, questions (“If this image ‘seduces’ someone into learning more about feminist art, is that a bad thing?”). Both A Companion to Feminist Art, First Edition. Edited by Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Lorraine Wild and MOCA director of publications Lisa Gabrielle Mark contributed postings on the subject; the latter notes: “After looking at over thirty possible covers, we opted for something we expected would provoke discussion on issues fundamental to feminism, and clearly this cover has.”3 See Figure 12.1. Now, I have a confession to make. I am both a contributor to the WACK! catalogue and an admirer of its jacket design. I like that it cannot be parsed into either a familiar critique of female objectification or a simple reflection of male sexual privilege. Like a peepshow device spinning out of control, Hot House exposes too many naked women, too many scenes of seduction and subjection. Its appearance on the cover of WACK! recalls the difficulty, but also the pleasures, of explicitly sexual imagery within feminist art of the 1970s. In conjunction with the catalogue’s exclamatory title and its smaller print subtitle (Art and the Feminist Revolution), Rosler’s overflow of female nudes

Figure 12.1  Lorraine Wild, cover of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles catalog for WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, 2007, with detail of Martha Rosler’s Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain: Hot House, or Harem, 1966–1972. Courtesy LA‐MoCA.

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variously suggests a sudden slap or confrontation (“whack”), an act of sexual self‐­ gratification (“whacking off ”), and a kind of craziness or sensory overload (“wack job”). The cover challenges our expectations that feminist art will make itself clearly identifiable as such, that it will renounce heterosexual pornography and all other forms of what Playboy would call “Entertainment for Men.” As the catalogue cover for an exhibition devoted to “Art and the Feminist Revolution,” Hot House reminds us that men have no monopoly on desiring women’s bodies and that female artists of the 1970s took up a wide range of strategies to confront issues of erotic desire and inequity. Feminist art, in other words, often got a lot hotter than the Emily Dickinson plate in Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party. The sexually forthright works displayed in WACK! extend from Joan Semmel’s oversize paintings of copulating couples to Cosey Fanni Tutti’s illustrated career in 1970s British porn, from Tee Corinne’s Cunt Coloring Book of 1975 to Lynda Benglis’s dildo ad in the November 1974 issue of Artforum, from Carolee Schneemann’s silent sex film Fuses, 1964–1967, to Barbara Hammer’s 16‐mm Multiple Orgasm, 1976. WACK! does not celebrate female sexuality as a space of untrammeled plenitude and power. But it does demonstrate the boldness with which various women artists, both lesbian and straight, claimed explicitly sexual imagery as a viable possibility for feminism. For all the controversy over WACK!’s dustjacket, the historical specificity of Hot House has been largely overlooked. Critics allude to the original context of the collage without telling us what that context was. As a result, a key question posed by one of the WACKsite commentators (“Emily”) has remained largely unanswered. “What,” she asks, “are the differences … between how this artwork by Martha Rosler was seen when it was created and now?” In the remainder of this piece, I will try to respond to Emily’s question. Each of the nudes in Rosler’s collage originally appeared in Playboy magazine issues of the mid‐ to late 1960s and early 1970s. They were not centerfold spreads (which would be rather larger in scale) but rather photographs snipped from other pages in the magazine. Rosler told me that she “never bought a single issue” of Playboy but instead retrieved copies from the communal trash area in her New York apartment building and, following her move to San Diego in 1968, from local city dumps. Rosler was interested in what she calls the “just past” status of the found magazines. The female nudes she reclaimed had already been discarded by someone else, presumably a man, in favor of those on offer in a more current issue. In its wild proliferation of Playmates, Hot House mimics both the mass production of mainstream porn and its built‐in disposability as Miss August inevitably gives way to Miss September and, eventually, to the garbage bin or garage sale. (In 1973 Rosler organized an installation/performance/ rummage sale at the University of California, San Diego, titled Monumental Garage Sale. Among the items available for purchase from the artist were Playboy centerfolds.) The color printing of Playboy in the 1960s varied so widely that some of the figures in Hot House appear to be tinted green or yellow or orange. This “off‐color” effect is heightened by the juxtaposition of the women’s bared flesh with blue sheets, orange cushions, and pink blankets as well as with the groovy green and orange throw pillows that a couple of the models employ – with strategic inadequacy – to cover themselves. By the standards of today’s hardcore porn – or, for that matter, of John Currin’s most recent paintings – Hot House appears rather tame. Even as the collage conveys sexual titillation, it does so through the (Vaselined) lens of nostalgia. Notice, for example, the seemingly endless variety of ways in which the models manage to bare their breasts,

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legs, and buttocks while keeping their genitals hidden, whether through a well‐placed bend of the knee, a handy blanket or ruffled bedspread, or, in one case, a head of fabulously long hair. No such gestures of deflection would be necessary after 1971, when Playboy started to publish full‐frontal photo spreads. The retro modesty of Rosler’s nudes, along with their period hairdos, bikini tan lines, and silicone‐free breasts, returns us to an earlier moment in American popular culture. In contrast to the majority of works in WACK!, Hot House was not exhibited or published at the time of its making. The collage hung for several years above a couch in the artist’s San Diego studio and surfaced in reproduction in some of her slide lectures of the 1970s. In those lectures. Rosier presented Hot House alongside her other photomontages, many of which likewise responded to the status of the female body as sexual commodity. In the piece Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain: Kitchen I or Hot Meat, 1966–1972 (also included in the exhibition), the artist slapped a photographic fragment of a naked female torso (likely lifted from Playboy) against the door of an oven. The resulting image both literalizes and ridicules the alignment of women’s bodies with “meat” to be prepared for male pleasure. In related collages, cutouts of breasts and vulvas are pasted incongruously over advertising images of women in wedding gowns, bathing suits, or bras and panties. Through these cut‐and‐paste interventions, Rosler recharges the original slogans and advertising copy (“Isn’t It Nice to Feel Feminine Again?”) with a feminist irony verging on rage. Were Kitchen I to have appeared on the cover of WACK!, the feminist politics of the gesture would have been unmistakable. Hot House sends a far less determinate message. While creating works such as Hot House and Kitchen I, Rosler also produced a series of collages protesting the Vietnam War, several of which were published in the feminist press or distributed as flyers at antiwar rallies. In these now well‐known works (not exhibited in WACK!), Rosler introduced the visual traces of guerrilla warfare, napalm attacks, bombings, and military massacres into the mod interiors of fashionable American homes. In doing so, she forced domestic comfort and political cruelty into simultaneous visibility. Like the Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain collages, 1966–1972, the antiwar works (later known as Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful and Bringing the War Home: In Vietnam, both 1967–1972) were never displayed or sold as art objects in the late 1960s or early 1970s. The collages functioned as agitprop, whether directed against the subjection of women or the war in Southeast Asia. In one collage, Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (Playboy: On View), 1967–1972, Rosler combined the two forms of protest by insinuating a naked Playboy model into a group of Vietnamese civilians confronted by American GIs with rifles. By forcing a Playmate into news photographs from Vietnam, the collage draws out the connections between male domination at home and at war, between private pleasure and public violence. In a related, if rather more oblique, gesture, Rosler positioned several Asian Playmates in the foreground of Hot House, thereby suggesting a link between sexual and military colonization, between an orientalist fantasy of exotic submission and the brute reality of the war in Southeast Asia. It would take some twenty years for works such as Hot House to enter the art market. When they did so, it was in the form of editioned photographs (which is to say, commodities) rather than rough‐and‐tumble paste‐ups or agitprop flyers. The feminist and

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antiwar collages have, in Rosler’s words, “migrated from the street to the gallery … They have become art, and in becoming art they no longer ‘are’ the works I made but rather representations of them.”4 How, then, are we to understand the representation twice removed that is the cover of the WACK! catalogue? What does it mean that a work produced with no intention of being sold should resurface 35 years later as the dustjacket of a massive $59.95 exhibition catalogue? Is the cover a brazen marketing ploy or a brilliant pornotopia? An affront to the legacy of 1970s feminist art or a genuine unraveling of patriarchal pleasure? As you’ll already have guessed, I do not believe the WACK! cover affords any clear resolution to these questions. In attempting to locate the original context for Rosler’s collage, I have found instead a work that continually eludes my historicizing grasp, a work whose individual title, series name, exhibition history, circulation, and reemergence as an editioned photograph cannot be securely dated or conceptually stabilized. In the absence of more concrete information on Hot House, it occurred to me that I might consult the magazine that furnished Rosler with her source images. Drawing upon a favorite archival resource (eBay), I sought to match images from back issues of Playboy with the women on the cover of WACK! Eventually, I found several of the nudes in Hot House – including the fully recumbent redhead with an orange pillow in the right midground – in a photo‐essay called “The Girls of Rio,” published in the February 1966 issue. Part of Playboy’s ongoing paean to sexual tourism (“The Girls of Tahiti” would follow later that year), the pictorial presents a “cosmopolitan potpourri of infinitely ­varied … emphatically eligible senhoritas” against the “lush tropical verdure” of Rio’s landscape. Although some of the women appear fully clothed, some topless, and some in the altogether, they never appear with one another. The 28 “Girls of Rio” are set, one by one by one, within the frame of 28 different images. The assignment of each woman to a specific locale – the beach, the mountains, the rain forest, the hotel pool, the botanical gardens  –  helps promote the fantasy that each is individually and exclusively ­available to the Playboy reader. Rosler flouts Playboy’s enforced separation of women. She explodes the visual frames and flimsy narratives that would otherwise divide and organize these female nudes for the male gaze. Stripped of their original contexts (whether Rio beach or Tahitian village, Ivy League campus or English country estate), the women now recline upon, fit up against, and snugly overlay one another. Their seemingly boundless proliferation, their refusal to stay within the prearranged space of male fantasy, creates a new visual and narrative context, a context that is Hot House. Rosler’s Playmates have been asked to provide “Entertainment for Men” one too many times. In response, they overproduce female submission to the point where it becomes something like its opposite – a wave of naked defiance. Among the list of donors acknowledged in the WACK! catalogue for their “generous support” of the exhibition is the Hugh M. Hefner Foundation. Like Rosler’s recycling of Playboy, Hefner’s patronage of WACK! disarms our expectations of feminist art and exhibition. It reminds us that sexuality, politics, and commerce interact unevenly and to unpredictable effect. Like WACK!’s cover image, the dialogue between art and the feminist revolution remains an open question, an ongoing struggle, and a site of wild contradiction.

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­2017 The text printed above appeared under the title “Feminism Uncovered” in the Summer 2007 issue of Artforum magazine. In those pages, it functioned as contemporary art criticism rather than art‐historical scholarship. Which is to say, the article was shaped by a journalistic mission: to share with readers of Artforum the interpretive conflict sparked by the catalogue of a show on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and travelling, several months later, to P.S. 1 in New York. I was, in other words, reporting the feminist art news to the magazine’s readers. Revisiting the controversy today, a decade later, entails effects that could not have been recognized or reckoned with at the time. One of the most significant of these occurred shortly after my article was written when the artist Mary Beth Edelson crafted what she called “an alternative book cover for the exhibition.” Taking a page from her most famous works of the 1970s (The Last Supper/Some Women Artists, The Death of Patriarchy), which replaced the faces of men in canonical paintings with those of female artists (e.g. Georgia O’Keeffe for Jesus Christ), Edelson replaced the Playmates’ faces in Hot House with those of the artists featured in WACK!: Judy Chicago, Louise Fishman Mary Kelly, Ana Mendieta, and Martha Wilson, among many others. The head of Martha Rosler, now attached to the breasts and torso of a prone female nude, appears in arguably the most prominent position on the front cover, just above the “A” and “C” in “WACK!” A few of the Playboy pin‐ups have been left unaltered by Edelson and so retain their original faces and dreamy expressions. Contemporary female artists thus mingle with archival Playmates in a purposely uncomfortable dialogue between self‐possession and sexual exposure, individual agency and erotic acquiescence. According to Edelson, her alternative cover was completed “on the day” my Artforum article “hit the newsstand.”5 A few weeks later, a copy of the photomontage appeared, free of charge, at my work address (Figure 12.2). With characteristic generosity, Edelson offered her response to the WACK! cover as a means of acknowledging my own. The gesture was also a way, perhaps, of staking out a critical position not represented in the article. I framed my copy of Edelson’s montage and hung it above the entrance to my home office. I enjoy seeing this work every day, in part because of the visual appeal and multicolored fantasia of flesh on display. But I also have mixed feelings about it. One the one hand, Edelson’s “alternative cover” asserts the primacy of the women whose work constituted the WACK! exhibition. But rather than displacing the male figure, the alternative cover substitutes one woman’s face for another. While the substitution renders women artists visible, it also gives them, however winkingly, the bodacious bodies of Playboy playmates. And it is difficult to say whether face or body are, in the end, more definitive. I was struck as well by the purposeful crudeness of Edelson’s cut‐and‐paste technique in the alternative cover by contrast to the precise, almost seamless, collage technique of better‐known works such as The Death of Patriarchy. In a sense, however, Edelson’s crudeness was particularly appropriate in this case because her jacket design was created as a quick, almost agitprop, response to the official version. Equally as important, Edelson’s ragged visual style and imperfect cut‐and‐paste technique draws out the rather different crudeness of the WACK! cover – namely the way in which it presses naked women’s bodies into the service of marketing feminist art. Instead of resolving the tension between feminist art and female objectification, Edelson renders it literal.

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Figure 12.2  Mary Beth Edelson, WACK! Alternative Cover, 2007. Courtesy Mary Beth Edelson and David Lewis Gallery.

A different and largely unexamined tension structures my Artforum article. It surfaces, however briefly, in the following passage: “Now, I have a confession to make. I am both a contributor to the WACK! catalogue and an admirer of its jacket design.” Notice how quickly this confession glides past my status as both catalogue essayist and Artforum critic so as to return to the aesthetics and politics of the cover. Any potential conflict of interest is smoothed over in the space of a single sentence. My confession likewise forecloses the question of how the book’s cover might relate to its contents, including not only my essay but those of ten other feminist scholars, critics, and curators. Most of these contributors were originally invited to write not for the catalogue itself but for a companion volume of essays intended to complement the catalogue without focusing exclusively on the artists represented in the exhibition. Due to budgetary ­constraints, however, the companion volume was cancelled and its contents folded into the catalogue. As a result, several of the catalogue essays corresponded less closely to the exhibition than readers might have expected. My piece, for example, focused on feminist struggles against the censorship of the male nude in the 1970s. It looked in particular detail at Anita Steckel and the Fight Censorship group of women artists she founded in 1973. Because Steckel’s work (like that of most of the other members of the

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Fight Censorship group) was not in the show, I thought it necessary to address issues of curatorial selection and exclusion within a feminist context: Several of the artists I discuss have not been included in … the exhibition this catalogue accompanies. By featuring them here, I mean both to respond to the curatorial limits of the exhibition and to suggest that even the most progressive art‐historical projects are constituted in part by their own blind‐spots.6 The head of the museum’s editorial department took strong exception to my use of the word “blind‐spots” as it was, in her view, “unsupportive” of both the exhibition and its curator and thus “unfeminist.” When I reiterated my belief that blind‐spots shape every art‐historical project and, indeed, are in some sense productive of them, the ­editor insisted that the word was inappropriate within the context of the catalogue. We came to a temporary standoff as I refused to remove the offending word and the editor refused to publish it. Ultimately, I agreed to change the word “blind‐spots” to “omissions” and to add two sentences of additional “clarification.” Although caught off‐guard by the editor’s objection, I was ultimately grateful for it. It forced me to think more carefully about the relation between editorial invitation and control, particularly within the context of the museum. Institutional and discursive constraints shape the writing of art‐historical scholarship no less than ideological and professional constraints shape the production of art. The brief note of clarification I added to my essay sought to convey a sense of both critical distance and intellectual debt. “This essay charts a rather different ­interpretive course from the exhibition that occasioned it. What follows would never have been written at all, however, were it not for the broader feminist project – and inspiration – of WACK!.”7 Although I was unaware of it at the time, there was something else at stake in the dispute over a single word. “Blind‐spot” connotes an obstruction or partial failure of vision – an inability to see the full picture. Literally speaking, a blind‐spot can be either physiological  –  a lesion affecting the optic nerve causing a loss of visual acuity  –  or spatial as in the spot that cannot be seen by an automobile driver, even in a rearview mirror, unless she turns to look over her shoulder. The word “omission” signifies an exclusion, sometimes inadvertent or in error. It has no particular connection to the visual. My essay for the WACK! catalogue explored two questions relevant, metaphorically speaking, to the blind‐spot: What do we see when we look at feminist art and what is blocked from view? What women artists, works of art, and sites of struggle remain outside our field of vision unless we, as it were, turn to look over our shoulders? Rosler’s Hot House, a collage intended as feminist agitprop rather than as an object for display in a museum (or museum catalogue), provides a case in point. As I argued in Artforum, part of the power of Hot House is that pornographic pleasure and feminist critique cannot be fully disentangled. The power of erotic ambivalence is something rarely addressed in the context of feminist and progressive art by women in the late 1960s and 1970s. Although I did not discuss Rosler’s work, my WACK! essay focused on a group of straight women artists, including Steckel and Semmel, who sought to make sexually explicit art that was also feminist, something most other feminists at the time thought

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impossible. Semmel was a member of the Fight Censorship group founded by Steckel, as were Judith Bernstein, Louise Bourgeois, Eunice Golden, Juanita McNeely, Barbara Nessim, Anne Sharpe, and, on occasion, Hannah Wilke. Before I started researching the topic of feminist art and censorship in the 1970s, I had never heard of this group or most of its members. Especially striking in this regard is the professional success and international recognition subsequently enjoyed by one member of the group, Bourgeois, as well as the significant, if largely posthumous, attention directed to Wilke. In recent years, the previously overlooked art of Semmel and Bernstein has become increasingly visible in galleries and exhibitions. I was disappointed but not completely surprised when I learned that only the four most prominent members of the Fight Censorship Group would be included in the WACK! show. Curatorial projects are structured as much by their exclusions as their inclusions. And so, of course, is feminist art. In the early 1970s, the members of the Fight Censorship group insisted on making female sexual pleasure visible in their work. This frequently involved eroticized representations of the male body including, in the case of Steckel, Bernstein, Bourgeois, and Edelheit, renderings of erect penises. On the occasion of the group’s first meeting, Steckel read a manifesto prepared for the occasion. It read in part: “We women artists … demand that sexual subject matter, as it is part of life, no longer be prevented from being part of art!” And, in words that deserve immortality, she added: “If the erect penis is not ‘wholesome’ enough to go into museums – it should not be considered ‘wholesome’ enough to go into women.”8 By the time she wrote the Fight Censorship manifesto, Steckel’s art had already been denounced as unfit for public display by male critics, university administrators, and an arts commissioner, but also by women artists who saw the work as glorying male domination. It was other women artists, then, with whom Steckel sometimes found herself in conflict. The controversy over the WACK! jacket in 2007 reminded me of this paradox. Although no one would question Rosler’s commitment to feminism, many found the appearance of one of her most erotic works on the cover of WACK! to be, in effect, anti‐feminist. By way of conclusion, I would like to place a recent and rather more public event in dialogue with the idea of feminist art as a site of “wild contradiction.” In October 2015, Playboy announced that it would no longer publish nude centerfolds or any other photographs of naked women. According to Scott Flanders, the company’s chief executive, “That battle has been fought and won … You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it’s just passé at this juncture.”9 As Flanders sees it, a victorious cultural “battle” has delivered virtually instantaneous views of every form of sexual activity, whether real or imagined. Given the promiscuous access to pornographic images offered by contemporary technologies, nude centerfolds cannot, in his view, appear as anything but outmoded relics from a pre‐Internet era. Flanders’ comment reminded me that Rosler’s approach to Playboy’s nudes was always already “passé” insofar as she scavenged old issues of the magazine in the late 1960s and early 1970s rather than purchasing new ones. That Rosler’s nudes were recycled rather than hot off the presses was part of the artist’s point as was the fact that, by contrast to Playboy magazine, pictures such as Hot House were not for sale. Or, to be more precise, they were not for sale at the time of their making. But even when, decades later, Hot House became an editioned print offered by a blue‐chip gallery and, later still, the cover illustration for a major museum exhibition, the work could not be reduced to its commodity status. Neither, however, could it be fully rehabilitated as politically

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correct. At once an overproduction of compliant femininity and an unapologetic appropriation of male pleasure, Hot House flouts the protocols of both soft‐core porn and progressive ideological critique. Now that Playboy has retired the nude photo‐spreads that formerly provided its raison d’être, Rosler’s remaking of those images in Hot House – and the reproduction of that collage on the cover of WACK! – may have more work than ever to do in the world. Feminism rarely seems more urgent to me than when I hear my students dismiss it as hopelessly passé or when I read another op‐ed piece or blog entry regarding “postfeminism.” The WACK! exhibition did not retrieve a lost ideal of women’s revolution, and nor did it berate museum visitors, including female artists, who distance themselves from or disidentify with feminism. Rather, the show demonstrated the historical, political, and aesthetic value of work produced by women artists across the globe in the late 1960s and 1970s. No less importantly, it argued for the continuing relevance of this work to the current moment. As the controversy over Rosler’s Hot House on the cover of the exhibition catalogue confirms, the feminist past still has the power to disrupt business‐as‐usual in the present.

Notes 1 Holland Cotter, “The art of feminism as it first took shape.” The New York Times

(9 March 2007): E29.

2 Hunter Drohojowska‐Philp, “Pussy power.” Artnet (23 March 2007): http://www.artnet.

com/magazineus/features/drohojowska‐philp/drohojowska‐philp03‐23‐07.asp, accessed 16 November 2018. 3 After a recent overhaul of the museum’s online presence, the special WACK! site no longer exists on MoCA’s website. 4 Martha Rosler, “Place, position, power, politics.” The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society, and Social Responsibility, Carol Becker, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994): 57. 5 Mary Beth Edelson, “Alternative book cover for the exhibition.” Artist’s Note prepared in advance of the opening of WACK! at P.S. 1 in New York, 17 February 2008. 6 Richard Meyer, “Hard targets: Male bodies, feminist art, and the force of censorship in the 1970s.” Draft submitted for publication in WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution (exhibition catalogue). 7 Richard Meyer, “Hard targets.” WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution (Los Angeles and Cambridge, MA: Museum of Contemporary Art and MIT Press, 2007): 363. 8 Cited in ibid., 366. 9 Cited in Ravi Somaiya, “Nudes are old news at Playboy.” New York Times (12 October 2015).

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Collecting Creative Transcestors: Trans* Portraiture Hirstory, from Snapshots to Sculpture Eliza Steinbock “Why are there no great trans* artists?”1 one might ask, paraphrasing feminist art historian Linda Nochlin’s rhetoric of 1971.2 This companion volume to feminist art practice and theory seeks to rectify the problem of trans omission by including this essay that focuses on trans visual art, but therefore also begs an explanation for what is awry in canonization processes that it (previously) would exclude trans‐identified artists and works. Like Nochlin, I won’t take the bait to answer the question as it is put: “that is, to dig up examples of worthy or insufficiently appreciated [trans] artists throughout ­history” without questioning the assumptions and power differentials couched in the question.3 In founding a feminist art historical project, Nochlin proposes the methodological study of artistic production, namely by debunking the entrenched sexist notions that art creation arises through autonomous genius, which channels the personal expression of individual emotional experience. She does not advocate, however, for studying feminine expression as a comparable essence to the masculine genius. To assert there are such great woman artists, as yet undiscovered, would confirm the status quo of the terms by which “great art” is judged. It would be to ignore the necessary conditions generally productive of recognizable art practices that are largely unavailable to subjugated subjects. In this chapter I will make the case that the marginalized conditions of creative practice for most trans artists working today may prevent them from being considered “great,” but certainly does not occlude them from being meaningful practitioners worthy of serious study, or from being influential within the art world and society at large. Foremost, the combined sociopolitical conditions of being perceived as less than human, lacking autonomy, and unable to access one’s herstory or hirstory presents an obstacle to both trans and cis‐gender feminist artists.4 Just as women making art confront how usually spectacularized, thin, young, white female bodies pass for women’s representation, trans bodies most often arrive in visual culture degraded, dismissed, or ridiculed. This context of identity politics centered in fact on the body poses complex issues of how to best engage representation. Feminist and trans artists alike may employ strategies of mimicry, masquerade, or deconstruction, for example. But also, I offer, trans art practices have been neglected in art theorizing because of a formal condition: the prevalent use of the portraiture genre and its varieties. Joanna Woodall surmises that between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries a robust portrait culture was established, escalating with the rise of print culture, which proportionally saw A Companion to Feminist Art, First Edition. Edited by Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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portraiture downgraded within the academic hierarchy.5 She reasons that the degree of artistic invention demonstrated in a work of portraiture was and is perceived as too truncated. Theoretically, the portrait is assimilated into a concept of realism through the achievement of a mimetic likeness of the outer self and a truthful account of the sitter’s inner self. The confluence of a downgraded form and unbecoming content potently combine to prevent trans representation in portraiture from being taken seriously as high art, much less as great art. Therefore, this bias in art theory might reduce trans portraits to the “we exist” social interventions that stage a seemingly simple visual form of activism. In many ways, feminist portraits that frame women with dignity, individuality, and beauty similarly seek to expand the genre while changing the record of creative ancestry. Lynda Nead, for example, examines the predominance of nudes,6 also noted by the Guerrilla Girls in their 1989 billboard, “do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?” with the statistic of “less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.” After appearing in art history mostly as props or commodities, other ways women most appear are as caricatures, or in the guise of historical figures. Feminist artists who engage critically with portraiture’s ­representational tropes, such as Cindy Sherman in her History Portraits series (1988– 1990), seek to challenge the naturalness of how gendered subjects appear through re‐ enactment and appropriation. What trans portraitists face is less a disparaged lineage of artistic representation than representations by medical doctors who drew, photographed, and less often painted or sculpted their anatomy for its noted “anomalies.” Though appearing within the discourse of disease or pathology, in some ways trans artists share the same fate that Whitney Chadwick says results from sexism in which women were reserved for contemplation, “objects of art rather than its producers.”7 Gallingly, the British Royal Academy of Art’s women‐inclusive history was revised to tell this story: in “The Academicians of the Royal Academy” (1771–1772, Johan Zoffany), a group portrait celebrating its first year, only male members were depicted animated, engaged in studying live nude male models. Above the fray hang the stilted painted busts of the two women members as it would not be seemly for women to work from the naked model of any sex. A noted exception to the absence of aesthetic trans portraits are the many images portraying Charles‐Geneviève‐Louis‐Auguste‐André‐Timothée d’Éon de Beaumont, known as the Chevalier d’Éon (1728–1810), who held positions as a dignitary, solider, and spy at the court of France’s King Louis XV. Though born into a poor noble family, their career brought great wealth and prestige, which enabled many of the Chevalier d’Éon’s portraits to confer high status, overlaid onto their ambiguous gender status. Though these portraits accord with the aesthetics of their era, we can find continuities between the jolly, glamorous, and spectacularized “gender‐swapping” figure as they were represented, and the cross‐dressers and drag performers portrayed today. Though trans portraiture nominally includes a wide swath of gender non‐conformity and ­variance, far more often cis‐gender artists prefer to depict trans people presenting themselves in costume, like Caitlyn Jenner in a corset, rather than as “authentic” selves, which is to say, like cis‐gender people would be. Jay Prosser’s critique of Bettina Rheims’ ­stylized photographic series of French trans woman Kim Harlow, entitled Kim (1994), is paradigmatic of how trans people are asked to perform for the camera a (reverse) strip of gendered self through the subtraction or addition of clothing.8 For this reason I have

­Towards a transfeminist art hirstor

decided to select trans artists working in portraiture whose works redress the ways their lives have been undermined as impossible, non‐existent, or a mere performance. It lies beyond this chapter to write the hirstory of trans art, even though I would ­suggest such a canonical gesture as recuperative and necessary.9 Instead, I want to resituate portraiture as a significant transfeminist artmaking practice even while noting its conservative, humanist tendencies. Portraiture as a genre turns upon a central problematic: each portrait invests in a certain belief about the nature of personal identity evidenced through adherence to convention, color, or format. Editors Julian Carter, David Getsy, and Trish Salah of the TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly issue on “Trans Cultural Production” observe that the bounded individual self has “artifactual counterparts in the related creative forms of autobiography, portraiture, and the novel” that celebrate and enable self‐creation.10 Visual art and photographic (self ) portraiture, more than literary forms, refutes the solitary voice by allowing trans people to construct an archive of affirmative images of themselves and their communities. The journal’s editors note that autobiography and portraiture are such major practices of cultural production by trans people that they overshadow other hirstories, for instance of artists experimenting with non‐narrative or non‐realist forms, performance, magazines, and journalism.11 The subaltern cultural production of portraits, however ubiquitous in trans representation, should not be reduced to a modernist act of self‐creation with potentially misguided implications. This would be to downgrade again the academic significance of trans portraiture and discount its popularity and staying power. I propose to gather together creative transcestors neglected by traditional, feminist, and even trans‐oriented art histories both for insisting on trans content as well as for their use of the portrait form, even if oblique or barely legible. There is certainly no death of the naturalistic portrait today. Granted, the portrait’s status as elite art in the twentieth century may have been undermined; Woodall cites celebrity culture, caricatures, and burgeoning pictorial modes that I would say constitute the “selfie” today.12 Along with Ernst van Alphen’s general claim for the dispersal of portraiture into broader art practices,13 I posit that it returns in trans cultural production with a difference: to irritate and query the boundedness of the gendered subject that historically anchors the authority of a portrait. I will present three modes of dispersed portraiture by trans‐ identified artists that (1) confront the imperative of self‐portrayal for trans people in order to be seen as human, (2) critically explore a portrait’s possibilities as documentation, and (3) mobilize the genre to re‐inhabit the body and offer new subjectivities. Before I begin my analysis, I lay out concerns broadly shared by feminist and trans scholars that point to how we may move forward with developing a transfeminist approach to hirstorizing art practices and theory.

­Towards a transfeminist art hirstory Granted that portraiture is a central if conservative genre for working out gendered representation; however, a feminist approach teaches us that all art forms press the question of how gender status, identity, and expression influence the various processes of art creation, exhibition, and reception. A transfeminist art history would examine the conditions of these processes for how sexism affects women (and men), but equally how cis‐sexism affects transwomen and transmen. For example, we could investigate how

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the exclusion of trans people from artmaking practices and histories comes through the practice of cultural cloning within personal networks, as well as lack of access to art academies and training programs due to trans‐ignorant curriculums or phobic policies. We should also ask why feminist art theorizing has neglected its trans sisters and ­brothers. Primarily, the strand of art criticism that invests in feminine essence, woman’s tradition, legacy, etc. creates cis‐normative barriers. Take, for example, the 2007 WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution catalog, which documents the first exhibition on feminist art artists and groups (120 in total) and includes no artwork by a trans artist. A transfeminist art hirstory would be sensitive to the conditions under which one can appear as human. It would rail against an art market that continues to devalue bodies that do not appear masculine, white, or properly cis‐gender. It would counter the assumption not only that a woman must appear heterosexual or feminine to be in the lineage of women’s cultural production but that a trans artist should include their own transitioned body in order to be marketable as trans art. Many trans artists working today grapple with this aspect of their aesthetic archive inherited from creative transcestors, particularly. This chapter will consider how from snapshot photography to sculptural forms transcestor portraits refigure the expectations of a marked trans body. The following group of artists are assembled together because of their practices that carry on various threads within feminist art theory/practice that works with portraiture’s potent force for creating as well as critiquing the subject and collective subjectivities.

­The imperative to portray oneself People’s bodies are regularly investigated, surveyed, and read by others whose gaze commands said body to show visual evidence of their gender identity. For trans people this daily experience might end with “the reveal,” which Danielle M. Seid describes generally as a moment “when the trans person is subjected to the pressures of a pervasive gender/sex system that seeks to make public the ‘truth’ of the trans person’s gendered and sexed body.”14 In the dominant “natural attitude about gender,”15 this bodily truth is that genitalia are the essential determinants of sex, which in turn determine gender. Though naive, this genital epistemology also plays a structuring role in an audience’s grasp of any image depicting trans bodies. Talia Mae Bettcher explains the double bind of a conflated gender presentation (appearance) and sexed body (reality) as locking in a trans person to being either visible as a pretender or invisible and risk forced disclosure; either way, she states, “we are fundamentally viewed as illusory.”16 The implicit and often explicit imperative to prove yourself to be who you say you are combines uncomfortably with the imperative for “trans art” to include a body marked as transitioning. As Carter, Getsy, and Salah ask of trans cultural production, “What does trans look like? Must it be apparent and legible?”17 Trans portraiture confronts this problem of determining the legibility of identity head‐on by staging the artist’s conceptualization of subjectivity along with the portrayed person. Many scholars cite Loren Cameron’s (United States) photographic monograph Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits from 1996 as heralding a new era of trans representation for how it centers trans masculine people’s experience.18 The cover image is a nude self‐portrait titled God’s Will (1995) in which the muscular and tattooed Cameron strikes a body building pose to inject a testosterone filled syringe into his buttock with

­The imperative to portray onesel

his right hand, while the left hand squeezes the mechanical shutter. It concisely inserts the artist as image‐maker doubly producing a portrait and the poiesis of his own embodiment. Cameron’s artistic gestures appear to cherish “the cornerstone of bourgeois Western culture, where the uniqueness of the individual and his accomplishments is central,” which van Alphen cautions is an overly basic understanding of portraiture.19 The ascription of who plays God here is key to a more complex reading. The chiaroscuro lighting creates a sculptural effect by guiding the eye through contrasts in light and dark, which maps onto the other dualities at stake: man/woman, human/­animal, God/man, willful/disobedient. Cameron’s confident, precise hands channel divinity through a double creative act even as they craft an earthly body. The image constitutes an act of fierce self‐determination to become human, whereby Cameron positions himself as a higher power to gain access to basic humanity. The triptych Distortions (1994) has in the third image a framed Cameron cropped to a medium close‐up looking at the viewer with hurt bewilderment. The bold text wrapping around the frame of the image, imposing on Cameron’s body, reads as a catalogue of transphobia: “This is womyn‐only space. Where’s your dick? Sorry, but I don’t like men. You’re not a man: you’ll never shoot sperm. You must be some kind of freak … You don’t belong here.” T. Benjamin Singer sees that the accusations narrate, “subjectivity under erasure, and at the same time undercuts any viable discursive or social position that Cameron, its subject, might occupy,”20 namely this person crouched into the cage of the frame appears subhuman, cast from gendered belonging. The framing as illusory and impossible demands the usurpation of a godly self‐determination in order to gain legibility. Rather than wholly unique or autonomous, though he stands alone, Cameron’s self‐portraits recall a broader social field of social stigma and medicalization that condition his identity options. Extending the investigation of the trans self in relation to social spaces the photographic book Trans Avenue (2013) by Ianna Booker (Canada) presents a series of ­photographic self‐portraits taken in Montreal and New York from 2011 to 2013. The cityscape is more than background or battleground, but is shown to accommodate and reflect back Booker’s experience of her “transformation and emancipation,” as the ­artist’s statement says. After the cover image, the first portrait is of her right foot, partially entering the frame from the top right corner. The red chipped nail polish hanging onto most of the toenails has the same texture as the white street divider running along the pavement, aligned with her foot. We are denied a face to identify, but this portrait tells us she found her inner mirror in the city’s marking, its strips that are not quite straight, not quite new, that are worn from friction. These self‐portraits transpose rather than expose the self. The crisscrossing lines framing Booker’s body in the other portraits  –  externalized lines from bars, sidewalks, door frames, columns  –  seem to sediment rather than constrain her transitioning body. Faciality, so key to identification of a unique bourgeois self, or a criminal’s physiognomic peculiarities, is denied here. The viewer is not asked to compare the flesh and blood Ianna Booker with her ­portrayed likeness, but with these revealed, emerging parts of her in relation to the built urban environments. It diverts the imperative to portray away from the genital epistemology, while still allowing the subject to express her embodied femininity signified with red polish. Like Cindy Sherman’s famous performative photography in which her body appears in every image transformed into another kind of woman, many trans portraits work the

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irreconcilable gaping split between signified and signifier, which van Alphen concludes can be seen as the crisis of modernity.21 Jay Prosser’s study of snapshot portraits included in nearly all trans memoirs considers the work these images carry out in claiming the semiotic unity or breach of the portrayed trans subject.22 The images narrate: “I have always been here,” or, “I am no longer that person.” In short, employing the narrative framing of before and after for paired images can accomplish multiple tasks. Deriving from beauty, fashion and surgical advertisements, the “before‐and‐after” photograph obeys the imperative to portray the self, improved. Working with the title Before/After for a series of photographs, Zackary Drucker and A.L. Steiner (United States) invoke the performative femininity of Sherman’s photographic style, with a distinctive trans difference. Two bodies, rotund and thin, large‐breasted and budding, blond hair and dark; each masquerading as the other transformed, if we follow the invited trans logic of before‐and‐after. Where Sherman engages narrative in single film stills, in which she is the lonely star, this series performs a preposterous split temporally distributed across dual, dueling bodies. Ducking the portrait’s investment in realist resemblance, the split image suggests a transformation trick shot more like in the cinema of attractions, for instance by citing the use of a sheet over the body as was used in theatrical and then cinematic magic acts of disappearance/reappearance (Figure  13.1). The double‐ exposure of their bodies also invokes the ghostly apparitions of the phantasmagoria; but who is channeling who here? It is unclear in which direction or into which body we place the unsatisfactory before and the desired‐for after. The blanket functions as a screen for our projections of which body might be more desirable: the curves of Steiner or Drucker’s leanness? The double‐ exposure image, in which two bodies seated and smiling are overlaid, more forcefully confronts the viewer’s ability to determine the relationship of difference. It embodies a generosity of sharing trans femininity by aesthetically layering, almost a gifting, in which body areas and parts could be gained/lost through an optical game of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Engaging Roland Barthes’s theory of the photographic referent, Prosser writes that visual media promise to “realize the image of the ‘true’ self that is originally only apparitional”; therefore, incarnating the trans subject.23 And yet these before‐and‐after portraits depict bodies cloaked in the transitioning narrative without any clear resolution of which would be the “true” self, or even which body should be taken as realized after the transformative event. The pairing of Steiner and Drucker seems to accomplish a transfeminist practice by contributing in different, even contradictory, ways to the notion of incarnating the trans subject via a radical split. Instead, trans femininity incarnates with mutual longing that pursues an accommodation of difference within. Pyuupiru’s (Japan) Self Portrait (2008) series also scrambles the semiotics of gender transitioning; though, rather than the narrative of “the surgery” transformation that Drucker and Steiner’s series invokes in order to displace, her close‐up face and body shots confront the viewer with grotesque, odd stereotypes. Many are titled beginning with gender markers followed by a trait or description, such as A young girl with a nice smell or A boy that has been beaten and threatened. Pyuupiru’s face and upper body morphs through make‐up and costume, but each image has a white studio background, cleared of any narrative setting that Sherman’s work largely relies upon. This eclectic approach to trans subjectivity (including herself as a clown, hiker, and cat) is made even

­Vital documentatio

Figure 13.1  Untitled, photography from series “BEFORE/AFTER” (2009–ongoing) by Zackary Drucker and A.L. Steiner (©Zackary Drucker and A.L. Steiner).

more concrete in Leon Mostovoy’s (United States) mix‐and‐match Transfigure project, shown in a three‐part flipbook and film form.24 In the two‐minute film version the head, torso, and legs continuously become swapped out to create exponential versions of the selves; it asks the viewer to consider in which changed part of the body does subjectivity reside? And if one part changes, would that mean the whole person is changed? Also using a white background, like Pyuupiru’s self‐portraits, these figures are set into a space that could be either aestheticized as a studio or sanitized like a clinical room. Both are settings that judge, evaluate, and determine standards of beauty and health while surreptitiously surveying gender.

­Vital documentation Thus the imperative to portray the transitioned self leads into the vital documentation of the transition process, filling in what happens between the before and after shots. Documentation is politically useful in order to expand the visual vocabulary of a trans body beyond the static, binary terms of womanhood or manhood. The documentation

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process of gendered becoming is also central to feminist process‐based art that wishes to reveal the ways in which one (un)becomes a woman, such as Eleanor Antin’s Carving: A Traditional Sculpture (1972) in which she daily documents her weight‐loss of ten pounds over 37 days, and Hannah Wilke’s last work, Intra Venus series (1992–1993), which documents her transformed physical and mental state during the last stages of lymphoma. Today’s ubiquitous selfie culture also provides a platform for making use of new media as a mode for self‐invention as well as documentation of a myriad ways of being and appearing as trans.25 Tobias Raun’s research on vlogging demonstrates that trans people seem to excel at using technology to provide an account of oneself in a cultural landscape that says you don’t exist, or are not beautiful.26 One can also point to the potential positive impact on people who participate in the hashtag community building and affirmation of Janet Mock’s #girlslikeus and Laverne Cox’s #transisbeautiful that collate trans self‐portraits in snapshot form worldwide. A portrait is always more than just documentation, as van Alphen insists: it comments on the field of representation and offers a theory of subjectivity. Within the wide array of trans portraits that appear aimed at recording a transition’s process, a number of series stand out that critically explore a portrait as straightforward documentation. An early example is the collaboration between photographer Del LaGrace Volcano (United States/Sweden) and trans activist Zachary Nataf (United States/United Kingdom), who invited Volcano to assist in creating a “visual transsexual autobiography” of his transition in the mid‐1990s.27 The intimacy that pervades the photographs is remarkable; Nataf stands at ease in a suit and tie in one image, flexes his arm topless in another, but also evident is the care taken to depict Nataf ’s transforming genitals. In Transcock (1996), a large‐scale black‐and‐white silver gelatin print, shows an extreme close‐up of Nataf ’s clitoris after hormonal treatment has encouraged its growth; framing the curly pubic hair and lying along the length of the transcock is inserted a worn measuring tape reading either 2 “FEET” or 2 “INCH.” Which measurement should the viewer follow? We are offered a visual pun on racial fetishization,28 certainly, but it also argues that black trans masculinity is a viable option in that this body proudly “measures up” against both standards. Engaging the anthropometrical gaze for a parlay is a regular strategy in Volcano’s self‐portraits, which often include a scientific measuring grid in the background. The grid appears, for instance, in his own more recent INTER*me self‐portrait series, which captures the excess of affective negativity surrounding the de‐subjectivized black as well as hermaphroditic body, and shunts it into a generative process of becoming a subject.29 The use of seriality to coax the viewer into seeing transitions as ongoing and complex can be found in Yishay Garbasz’s (Israel/United Kingdom) two‐year project of weekly self‐documentation of her transition, which resulted in a flipbook and large‐scale zoetrope both called Becoming (2010). The 911 photographs of her nude body against a white backdrop show her one year before and one year after her gender clarification surgery on 18 November 2008, detailing the slight changes underway. Through appearing as “a straightforward look” at a physical transformation, as she writes,30 the flipbook lowers the threshold for the viewer to take part in the process, flipping forward, back or stopping to play “spot the difference” on the full‐frontal body lying small scale in their palm.31 In contrast, the zoetrope project installed at the 2010 Busan biennale in South Korea insists on the unique physics of Garbasz’s movement.32 Here a select number of self‐portraits were printed life‐size, then lit from within and cast in a rhythmic

­Vital documentatio

movement. Crucial to Garbasz’s decision for this format, unlike the projection of video or film, the early modern optical device achieves movement on its own without requiring a projection from elsewhere. Not only is the documentation self‐made but also the display retains authority over how the viewer can visually grasp her bodily transformation. With the flipbook and zoetrope, Garbasz inserts the stuttering of movement, the nuanced jerks where difference arrives to point to the things unseen. Many trans artists have also developed long‐term projects that portray a diverse array of trans people, in part to insist on the myriad ways of embodying “transness.” Their critical approach challenges dominant tropes of either gorgeous passing or suffering non‐passing by pointing to the local and everyday experience. For example, the visual field of trans‐normativity often includes mirrors that stand in for a cis‐gender gaze, reflecting back approval or disapproval. By placing trans men outside on location, photographer Manuel Garcia Ricardo (Mexico/Germany) insists that the titular Trans Men of the World (2012) also belong to their cities; like the local architecture, they are integral to the built environment. It concurs with the insight from Susan Stryker that trans poesis is an act of artistic creation within and through which the body materializes in relation to its location.33 Photographer Amos Mac (United States) approaches his participants in the Original Plumbing (OP) quarterly magazine with an editorial eye that shows deep appreciation for “trans male culture” that he both documents and creates. Co‐founded with Rocco Kayiatos and run by an army of interns and expanding list of contributing editors and writers, OP has appeared online and in print since 2009.34 Shooting the cover for each thematic issue, and much of the content, has enabled Mac to develop an art‐pop blended visual vocabulary for approaching trans portraiture as if shooting alluring celebrities and lovable neighbors: his participants appear familiar, casually gesturing to the camera, or at ease, confidently posing their sexually desirous bodies. Elisha Lim’s (Singapore/Canada) collection of hand‐drawn and graphic illustrations in 100 Crushes (2014) also relates to popular culture by mobilizing forms such as the calendar portrait and poster art.35 Lim derives the image’s outline from photographs, often selfies or snapshots, posted on Facebook, which then are traced and elaborated with Lim’s own block color and embroidery style (Figure 13.2). Originally a musician who began to shift from lyrics to write short reflective narratives, Lim combines text with image to create comic‐type image‐word panels. They want their work to have the infectious power of propaganda in the sense of widely ­disseminating lovingly drawn trans and queer people of color. Fantasy and utopian thinking infuse their portraits, such as The Illustrated Gentleman, an imagined fashion magazine for trans masculine people and butches, “our own illustrated book of subversive sartorial splendor.”36 Documentation is central to Lim’s artmaking, especially the calendar edition of Sissy: Sissies and the femmes that inspire us, which includes statement texts and another project interviewing genderqueers who use “they.” With They the accompanying short texts written by Lim attest to how the portrayed touched or taught Lim personally. This affective dimension of the testimonial fosters a respectful regard for trans and non‐binary identified people of color as well as two‐spirit ­indigenous people who are largely excluded from trans‐normative portraiture populated by the white bodies. Many of the portraits discussed challenge the limits of thinking of subjectivity as its uniqueness; rather, subjectivity emerges through social connections and cultural

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Figure 13.2  Images of Kiley May, from the They project in the 100 Crushes series. © Elisha Lim. Reproduced with permission. Images courtesy of Elisha Lim.

­Re‐inhabiting the bod

appreciation. Likewise, the seriality of a portrait shot repeatedly over a longer duration, which is engaged by many artists, refutes the ability to ever capture someone’s interior essence. Instead, subjectivity appears to be an ever‐developing differential process. Portraits are more than documentation; however, the “more” accomplishes different politically vital ends, including shifting the field of visual representation and producing the effect of authorizing new theories of subjectivity. The final section discusses works that wholly re‐orient our thinking about subjectivity necessarily being anchored to a gendered human body.

­Re‐inhabiting the body Portraying the trans sexed body has its historical trappings in diverse visual cultural sites, such as medical photography and Grecian renderings of mythical androgynous or “hermaphroditic” bodies. Nevertheless, some trans artists continue to conjure portraiture in order to relay new subjectivities through the genre that is most responsible for the exposure of dominant subjectivities. Though a portrait can be of any object, human, or animal, the heroic and authenticating function has a sincere benefit for trans bodies. When portraying subjects formally excluded from portraiture, as in series by Rineke Dijkstra, Marlene Dumas, and Nan Goldin, van Alphen claims that the images offer a “visual thought” about the history of the genre, even while recalling a tradition of universalist humanism.37 The portrait is the space of conflict, a battleground of images that are always cast in terms of the already represented. Like women who so often are the objects portrayed, portraiture enables trans subjects to re‐inhabit and own their bodies.38 This gesture has the potential to rehabilitate the genre simultaneously. Lorenzo Triburgo’s (United States) colorful photographic series Transportraits (2012) depicts a trans masculine person in the foreground while the background is filled by a large oil painting by Triburgo of one of the natural landscapes designed by TV “painting instructor” Bob Ross. Shot from slightly below the subjects, exaggerated by their upward tilt of the chin directing the gaze off to a lofty place, they appear majestic, transcendent even. The staging interrogates nature as fabrication, while also imbuing the subjects with a heroic masculinity in the tradition of American painters John Singer Sargent and Alfred Jacob Miller. The following project Policing Gender (2014–) turns away from the outside world to capture an interior space filled with folds of rich fabric gently hanging from an invisible source. The series titles each piece like Policing Gender (for May) to name an incarcerated trans and/or queer person, visually presented in their absence. Though clearly related to the art historical tradition of depicting femininity through sensuous folds (from Caravaggio to Catherine Opie), the emphasis on a unique textile also references Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (1974–1979) place settings. Along with the 39 women represented in Chicago’s famous installation with a special one‐off plate and a personalized fabric runner, it reminds us to question who is missing from our visual and social histories. If we were able to speak with them here, communing at the table, what would they have to tell us? The 3‐D scanned plastic statue Juliana (2015) by Frank Benson (United States) also recasts history, reaching back to the ancient Hellenistic marble sculpture Sleeping Hermaphroditus (artist and year unknown, after 155 bce) whose life‐size, vulnerable body lies supine, granting erotic views of the buttocks and genitals. Artist Juliana

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Huxtable (United States) is cast in a pose lying on her side too, but her head is erect, gazing outward, her left hand holding a mudra. Depicted alert, greeting the viewer, and in the color of a hard, shiny metallic that encases the body, suggests that this “hermaphrodite” is far from an accident of nature: Huxtable is open about being born intersex and hormonally transitioning to “push everything a bit further.”39 The sculpture was first on view at the New Museum Triennial (2015) surrounded by futuristic inkjet self‐portraits and poems by Huxtable herself. In Untitled in the Rage (Nibiru Cataclysm) (2015) she revisions herself in lurid colors as a member of the Nuwaubian Nation, a sect of the Nation of Islam that, according to Huxtable, “believes black people are the descendants of lizard aliens and created white people.”40 Though she has no association with this cult, the fantastical visions suits her “self‐imaginings” as cyborg, witch, and lyrical writer. A New York City transcester to Huxtable’s characters might be found in Greer Lankton’s dolls, most recently showcased posthumously in the LOVE ME exhibition at Participant Inc. in Lower Eastside, Manhattan (November–December 2014).41 Most active in the 1980s and early 1990s before her death from a drug overdose in 1996, Lankton crafted sculptural figures that were often installed in elaborate theatrical sets. The bodies range from larger than life‐sized to handheld, each hand‐sewn over moveable wire armatures, adorned with glass eyes and human hair; though many are nude and simply painted, others are outfitted with custom clothing and accessories. One doll, named Sissy (1979–1996), is said to be Lankton’s own likeness and was remade continuously during her adult years, sometimes bulking up but mostly thinning down, reflective of her own eating disorder.42 Desiccated chest cavities, addicts outfitted with needles, detached genitals, and dolls of Candy Darling and Jackie Kennedy – the figures could all be seen as self‐portraits. Developing this technique of performing “surgeries” on her dolls in the 1980s, however, presages feminist interrogations of the mutable body, and makes her a forbearer of trans art works that explicitly deal with experiences related to transitioning.43 The performative arranging of the dolls – she posed them in shop windows and around her living space  –  lends an uncanny liveliness to the soft forms. Many scholars have remarked on the temporality of transitioning being for some an experience of ongoing death/rebirth, in which polar gendered personae appear to live in one body doing battle with each other.44 The trans experience of such a body in perpetual transition returns in painted forms arranged by eddie gesso (United States) in the series Attempt to complicate (2007). His abstract paintings methodically layer “baby pink with baby blue and baby yellow” in a demanding process. The title of each panel lists which colors were used and what number attempt it was. The flesh tones that ­surface from the dull mixtures range from caramel to bronze, from taupe to rose. Placed together, hung proximate to the viewer’s own shape and size, the panels become ­animate glowering figures. A quick glance to the side of the panels, though, reveals the drips from the process of layering color. The mono‐color drips stand in stark contrast to the intricately worked surface. The streaking drips look like blood, spurting and hemorrhaging from the creation, from some internal wound. This detail indexes the v­ iolence wreaked by the achievement of the surface color, which in turn indexes the violence of genderization. The paintings border on sculpture, offering what Gordon Hall calls an “object ­lesson,” or a methodology for seeing bodies and genders differently.45 Hall proposes

­Re‐inhabiting the bod

that sculpture’s formalism, particularly minimalist works, is a unique place to learn about the gendered body, “not primarily because of what we see in the sculptures, but because of how they might enable us to see everything else.”46 The dispersal of portraiture into sculptural forms perhaps usefully deflects the problem of portraying a gender onto another medium that confronts the viewer in space. David Getsy’s Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (2015) reminds us that when two bodies meet in space, such as in sculpture, performance, or the trace of a gesture, it presents an instance of possible gender assignment even when there is no context or content for “transgender identity.”47 Getsy develops the concept of “transgender capacity” for moments of recognition of gender multiplicity, mutable morphologies, and successive states of personhood in works that inadvertently visualize transgender and queer theory. This conceptual lens opens up a huge field for considering a wide variety of art works that portray trans bodies in relation to the nonfigurative, rather than the expected figuration of transness as a gendered body in transition. Whereas Getsy’s book‐length study makes the argument for cis‐gender artists whose works offer evidence of transgender capacity, I find it crucial to locate trans artists who are already working in this direction.48 Some examples of transgender capacity, explored elsewhere by Getsy, can be found in the painted pictograms and sculptural objects by Math Bass (United States), which are emptied of a human body, but nevertheless comment on the mutability of the body and the need for a viewer for this to be recognized. Newz! (2014), for example, presents images that can be seen in multiple ways, borrowing from optical illusion traditions like a picture of a rabbit that can also be a duck. In an interview, Bass explains that “People have anxiety about ambiguity,” in response to being asked whether Bass subscribes to the notion that gender is the first segregator in portraiture and performance.49 Exploring gender multiplicity in Body No Body Body (2012), Bass arranges three forms covered in painted canvas, making for lumpy but approachable colorful, zippy objects. In contrast, Jonah Groeneboer (Canada) creates much colder 3‐D forms out of string, light, and painted canvas in order to point to embodiment issues. The Presence of Certain Invisibilities: Some Known, Some Unknown (2010) involves the installation of a light bulb, a large and small prism, and Plexiglas to create delicate, present, and yet immaterial light drawings. The spectrum reminds the viewer of all the ways perception can be expanded to see more, to see successive states of being. The growing number of exhibitions that bring together trans thematics with post‐minimalism and object‐based art indicate this movement has hit on a renegade strategy for presenting the shape, mass, and form of the body “that strips the body of its flesh, framework, and constraints,” in the words of curator Orlando Tirado on his show FLEX (Kent Fine Art, September– October 2014).50 The extent to which such work is recognizable as feminist, trans, or queer is explicitly at stake. Consider the exhibition text for Lifestyle Plus Form Bundle (Spring 2012), by artist‐curator Daniel Luedtke: Can we make space for a political interpretation of non‐representation? … Without dicks, vaginas, menstrual blood, references to Jean Genet, cum, anuses, bondage, surgery, scars, reclaimed pronouns, reclamation of the male/female ga(y)ze, sidelong glances cast at Women’s Work (Womyn’s Werq), etc. etc. etc. HOW DO WE KNOW IT’S FEMINIST/QUEER?51

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The identity fatigue and press for referential material, if not bodies themselves, has set in. The desire to escape history, however strong and urgent, cannot be eradicated from our viewing experiences. As Jennifer Doyle notes in her defense of “reading into” artworks when they lack the iconographic depiction of sexual acts or trans markers, “we bring a history of sensation to them.”52 The current trend for exploring gender non‐­ representationally still grounds the body in a presented object. It seems that feminist portraiture that sought subjectivity in portraits after appearing in art history mostly as props or commodities has come full circle with trans abstractions of re‐inhabiting embodiment through objects.

­Concluding thoughts: An uneven uptake So far I have only made a case for a very select number of works from a far larger collection of trans art that one would hope has found its public. The exhibition history of these and other artists is one place to gage the integration of trans art/artists into the formal art world, art trends, and histories. A key dimension to transfeminist practices of art history would be to consider the uptake of trans masculine versus trans feminine artists. We need to ask ourselves: who’s included, who is gaining more of a presence through galleries and catalogs, in the major shows that produce a record of creative transcestors for tomorrow’s trans artist? An impoverished sense of curatorial accountability combined with transphobia in the (queer) art world has led to a hugely disappointing number of missed opportunities. For example, Yishay Garbasz issued a press release in response to the joint project between the Gay Museum Berlin and the German Historical Museum of a survey show Homosexuality_ies (June–December 2015) that did not include one trans woman artist. I might add that this is despite choosing a highly trans citational portrait by Cassils (Canada) (in collaboration with Robin Black, United States) from their series Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture (2011–2013) for the catalog cover and promotional material. The exhibition notes also clearly state the aim of presenting a cultural history of the “third gender,” which is now damagingly narrow, and appears to erase political and creative histories of trans people under the dominance of the homosexual optic.53 Further, still productive creative transcestors include performer Nina Arsenault (Canada), painter Hans Scheirl (Austria), and photographer J. Jackie Baier (Germany) are rarely included in the US‐centric canonization process of solo and group shows. I want to return to my editing of the 1971 question: “Why have there been no great [trans] women artists?” With her original, Nochlin invokes the aesthetic and political category of greatness that needs to be reimagined, but I want to underline the urgency for addressing this symbolic, epistemological, and literal violence. The suicides of rising art stars Effy Beth (Argentina, 1998–2014) and Mark Arguhar (United States, 1987– 2012), both trans feminine and of color, direct attention to the disproportionate structural exclusions as well as daily micro‐aggressions faced by those who confront white masculine hegemony.54 Though simply entering them and others into the record of art historical evidence is a first step towards doing justice to their contribution, a transfeminist account of the masculinist art scene, racist art market, and cis‐sexist aesthetics is necessary to revolutionize the means of cultural production and scholarship. For my part in these efforts, I have shown how trans artists engage the generic category of

Notes

portraiture that cites identitarian authority in order to transform the hirstories of exclusion from the visual field and proffer trans‐affirmative concepts of subjectivity. I see that trans aesthetics practiced today consists in taking on the inheritance of creative transcestors, then re‐shaping and dispersing them through mimetic recording, ­networked digital, and abstract sculptural forms.

Notes 1 In my title and first sentence I use the term trans* to indicate the widest possible range

of gender identities, expressions, and perceptions possible that are gender variant or gender non‐conforming. The * sign attached to trans derives from online communities where an asterisk in a search engine functions as a wild card for any term with the same prefix. For legibility I will use trans throughout the text, also widely used as shorthand for transgender, transsexual, transvestite, genderqueer, and so on. 2 Linda Nochlin, “Why have there been no great women artists?” Art News 69 (January 1971), reprinted in Women, Art and Power and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 145–178. 3 Nochlin, “Why?,” 145. 4 Much like herstory emphasizes the inclusion of feminine and female‐assigned subjects in narratives of the past, the term hirstory borrows the gender neutral (or multiple) pronoun “hir” to mark the previous exclusion of trans subjects from the great and small events that compose our understanding of the past, which bears on present discussions of cannons, talent, and even evidence of existence. I will also use the gender‐neutral (non‐binary and plural) pronoun of they to refer to some trans people if their gender identity is not known or is a known preference. The term “cis‐gender” is used throughout the text to refer to a non‐transgender person, that is “cis” describes someone who experiences no or little incongruence between their assigned sex and gender identity (i.e. assigned female and living as a girl/woman). Cis, like trans, comes from Latin meaning “on the side of ” whereas trans means “to cross”, hence it refers to a gender identity that stays on the side of one’s assigned sex rather than crossing a socio‐cultural barrier erected if not maintained by biomedical sciences. 5 Joanna Woodall, “Introduction: Facing the subject.” Portraiture: Facing the Subject, ed. Joanna Woodall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 5. 6 Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art Obscenity and Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 1992). 7 Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art, and Society (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990), 7. 8 Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 228–230. 9 Chris E. Vargas has mounted the conceptual art project the Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art (MOTHA). The website has this mission statement: “MOTHA is dedicated to moving the hirstory and art of transgender people to the center of public life. The preeminent institution of its kind, the museum insists on an expansive and unstable definition of transgender, one that is able to encompass all trans and gender non‐conformed art and artists. MOTHA is committed to developing a robust exhibition and programming schedule that will enrich the transgender mythos both by exhibiting works by living artists and by honoring the hiroes and transcestors who have come before. Pending the construction of MOTHA, the museum will function as a series of

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10 11 12 13

14 15

16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26

27 28

autonomous off‐site experiences in North America and throughout the world.” http:// www.sfmotha.org/about, accessed 16 November 2018. For the Transgender Hirstory in 99 Objects project Vargas was awarded a 2016 Creative Capital grant. See announcement on Creative Capital’s online news, http://www.creative‐capital.org/ news_items/view/561, accessed 16 November 2018. Julian Carter, David Getsy, and Trish Salah, eds, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1.4 (2014), 470. Carter, Getsy, Salah, “Introduction,” 471. Joanna Woodall, “Introduction: Facing the Subject.” Portraiture: Facing the Subject, ed. Joanna Woodall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 7–8. Ernst van Alphen, “Chapter 2: The portrait’s dispersal.” Art in Mind: How Contemporary Images Shape Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 21–47. My decision to structure the analysis along these lines of dispersal takes inspiration from van Alphen’s own chapter that similarly divides the analysis. Danielle M. Seid, “Reveal.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1.1–2 (2014), 176. Harold Garfinkle, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall 1967), first developed this term, “the natural attitude,” with further elaboration of the eight elements that compose the natural attitude about gender by Wendy McKenna and Suzanne Kessler, Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1978), 113–114. Talia Mae Bettcher, “Evil deceivers and make‐believers: Transphobic violence and the politics of illusion.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 22:3 (2007), 50, 59. Carter, Getsy, Salah, “Introduction,” 469. Cameron’s work is discussed prominently in the following: Prosser, Second Skins; Benjamin Singer, “From the medical gaze to ‘Sublime Mutations’: The ethics of (re) viewing non‐normative body images.” The Transgender Studies Reader, eds. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006); Josch Hoenes, “KörperBilder von Transmännern. Visuelle Politiken in den Photographien Loren Camerons.” Queere und heteronormativitätskritische Perspektiven auf Männlichkeiten, eds. Robin Bauer, Josch Hoenes and Volker Woltersdorff (Hamburg: Männerschwarmskript, 2007), 135–148, 201. Van Alphen, “Portrait’s dispersal,” 21. Singer, “From the medical gaze,” 610–611. Van Alphen, “Portrait’s dispersal,” 25. Prosser, Second Skins, 207–223. Prosser, Second Skins, 211. Leon Mostovoy’s Transfigure video can be seen online at https://vimeo.com/76974471, accessed 16 November 2018. For an analysis of trans selfie culture’s decolonial tendencies see my article “Catties and T‐selfies: On resilience and transanimal cute aesthetics.” Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, issue “Tranimacies” 22.2 (2017): 159–178. Tobias Raun, “Video blogging as a vehicle of transformation: Discussing the intersection between trans identity and technology.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 18.3 (May 2015), 365–378. Nataf ’s words are quoted in Prosser, Second Skins, 230. This interpretation is in Prosser, Second Skins, 232.

Notes

29 Eliza Steinbock, “Generative negatives: Del LaGrace Volcano’s Herm Body

photographs.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1.4 (2014), 539–551.

30 Yishay Garbasz, Becoming (New York: Mark Batty Publisher, 2010), 180. 31 Vivian Sobchack remarks on the potential for playfulness in her essay in the book On

Becoming (New York: Mark Batty Publisher, 2010), 183–184.

32 A video documentation of the zoetrope’s installation can be viewed on YouTube,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5diBtcul_4, accessed 16 November 2018.

33 Susan Stryker, “Dungeon intimacies: The poetics of transsexual sadomasochism.”

parallax 14.1 (2008), 39.

34 Cover images of OP can be found online, http://originalplumbing.bigcartel.com/,

35 36 37 38 39

40

41

42 43

44

45 46 47 48

accessed 16 November 2018. The online version has more extensive content, http:// www.originalplumbing.com/, accessed 16 November 2018. Elisha Lim, 100 Crushes (Toronto: Koyama Press, 2014). Lim, 100, n/p. van Alphen, “Portrait’s dispersal,” 47. Ina Loewenberg, “Reflections on self‐portraiture in photography.” Feminist Studies 25. 2 (Summer, 1999), 398–408. Ana Cecilia Alvarez, “Juliana Huxtable: #SHOCKVALUENYC.” Topical Cream, posted on 26 February 2014, http://topicalcream.info/editorial/juliana‐huxtable‐shock‐value/, accessed 16 November 2018. Antwaun Sargent, “Artist Juliana Huxtable’s bold, defiant vision.” Vice.com, posted on 25 March 2015, http://www.vice.com/read/artist‐juliana‐huxtables‐journey‐from‐ scene‐queen‐to‐trans‐art‐star‐456, accessed 16 November 2018. A couple of weeks before she died in 1996, Lankton opened an exhibition at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh entitled It’s all about ME, not you that was an installation work of her personal bedroom where she lived and worked in Chicago. The work was restored and in 2009 put on permanent exhibition there. Details of the dolls can be found at https://mattress.org/archive/index.php/Detail/Collections/114, accessed 16 November 2018. Johanna Fateman, “Lia Gangitano on Greer Lankton.” ArtForum.com. http://artforum. com/words/id=48864, accessed 16 November 2018. Andrew Durbin and Paul Monroe, “Unalterable strangeness: Andrew Durbin and Paul Monroe on Greer Lankton.” Flashartonline.com, issue 301 (March–April 2015), http:// www.flashartonline.com/article/unalterable‐strangeness/, accessed 16 November 2018. See, for example, a discussion of this motif in memoir literature by Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.” Transgender Studies Reader, eds Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006). Gordon Hall, “Object lessons: Thinking gender variance through minimalist sculpture.” Art Journal 72.4 (Winter 2013), 46–57. Hall, “Object lessons,” 47. David Getsy, Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), xiv–xv. The artists included are David Smith, John Chamberlain, Nancy Grossman, and Dan Flavin, and elsewhere Getsy focuses on trans and queer artists whose work also informs his conceptual framework of “transgender capacity.” See his edited collection Queer in the series Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

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2016), and with Jennifer Doyle the conversation “Queer formalisms.” Art Journal Open (31 March 2014): http://artjournal.collegeart.org/?p=4468, accessed 16 November 2018. Bill Powers, “‘People have anxiety about ambiguity: A talk with Math Bass.” ArtNews. com, posted on 17 March 2015, http://www.artnews.com/2015/03/17/bill‐powers‐ talks‐with‐math‐bass/, accessed 16 November 2018. “Flex” includes artists Math Bass, Dan Finsel, Gordon Hall, and Molly Lowe, alongside works by Richard Artschwager, James Lee Byars, Guy de Cointet, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Morris, and Myron Stout. Another important example is Kris Grey’s curation of “Queer objectivity” at the Stamp Gallery, University of Maryland (October–December 2013). Featuring AK Burns, Heather Cassils, Nicolaus Chaffin, Mary Coble, Lauren Denitzio, Brendan Fernandes, Kris Grey, Gordon Hall, Katherine Hubbard, J.J. McCracken, Cupid Ojala, L.J. Roberts, Coral Short, Caitlin Rose Sweet, Tobaron Waxman, and Jade Yumang. Daniel Luedtke and Joel Parsons, Lifestyle Plus Form Bundle, press release for the exhibition, Beige Space, Memphis TN, 16 November 2012. Jennifer Doyle and David Getsy, “Queer formalism: Jennifer Doyle and David Getsy in conversation.” Art Journal 72.4 (2014), 58–71. Federal Cultural Foundation and Cultural Foundation of Laender, “Introductory note.” Homosexuality_ies: English Booklet (Dresden, Germany: Sandstein Verlag, 2015). Both artists were included in the recent exhibition Bring Your Own Body: Transgender Between Archives and Aesthetics organized by Jeanne Vaccaro with Stamatina Gregory at 41 Cooper Gallery, New York City (October–November 2015): http://www.cooper. edu/sites/default/files/uploads/assets/art/files/2015/BYOB‐catalogue_sm.pdf, accessed 16 November 2018. Effy Beth was one of three participating artists from outside the United States, only one of whom was living at the time. The show was mounted during the writing of this chapter, and I was delighted to find synchronicity in the catalog description, which asks, “Why have there been no great transgender artists?” in the tradition of Nochlin. The curators explain, “Our curatorial assembling of non‐ identitarian and visual landscape of transgender in sculpture, film, textiles, performance, photography and archival objects is an effort to assign values where it has been withheld” (3). Hence, while I commend the show’s efforts to include less esteemed materials, I find it crucial to offer a sustained analysis of how portraiture and nonconforming and variant gender difference have become excluded from categories of greatness. To this end, I’ve sought to explain the aesthetic strategies of said artists for exposing the exclusionary conditions that have kept trans art/artists from recognition, even within feminist art historical traditions.

Part III

Doing

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Witness It: Activism, Art, and the Feminist Performative Subject Hilary Robinson If you choose to seek it out, it is possible to find online the original Pathé footage of Emily Wilding Davison stepping into the path of Anmer, the horse owned by King George V, at the Epsom Derby on 4 June 1913. The grainy, jerky images still have the power to shock, disturb and move the viewer. Cameras from three angles catch the moment: holding something in her hand Davison ducks under the barrier intended to keep the spectators from the race track, and stands resolute for a couple of seconds looking down the track at Anmer while two horses pass between her and the barrier, and others pass on her other side. She lifts the object in her hand: and Anmer lifts his front legs as if trying to jump over her. He hits her, the force throwing her into the air, and she falls to the ground, unmoving. Four days later she died of her injuries, which included a fractured skull.1 The object she held is revealed to have been a scarf in the suffragette colours of green, purple and white, carrying the words ‘votes for women’.2 Her tombstone in Morpeth, Northumbria carries the motto of the Women’s Social and Political Union: Deeds Not Words.3 In a programme made to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Davison’s action and death, popular UK TV presenter Clare Balding worked with forensic film analysts who produced cleaned versions of the original footage and used the three films to ­triangulate Davison’s exact position and actions. As the analysts talk Balding through their findings, showing the cleaned sections of film and their mapping of the event, she reacts with sudden insight that Davison had ‘absolutely worked out the place on the course to suit her needs the best, but also to have all the cameras on her’ – to which the film analyst’s response is: ‘She was in absolutely the right position to do what she intended to do.’4 This opens the intriguing possibility: that what we see when we watch these pieces of film is the first intentional feminist activist performative gesture to camera. In the UK, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) had formed in 1903 when they split from the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) over the issue of militant activism. NUWSS members, known as suffragists, held to tactics of persuasion; WSPU members, dismissed as ‘suffragettes’ by the Daily Mail (a term re‐appropriated by the women5), embraced a strategy of what might later have been called ‘by any means necessary’: hence their motto, ‘deeds not words’.6 Early suffragette activism, such as arson or damage to buildings, had the aim of being carried out, if not precisely anonymously, then without being arrested.7 Davison’s action, however, was an explicit, visible, A Companion to Feminist Art, First Edition. Edited by Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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gesture performed with feminist political intent: to change the nature of the debate about women’s suffrage. As Boris Groys has written: ‘By now, we have heard of the many deaths of the subject, the author, the speaker, and so forth. But all of these obituaries concerned the subject of philosophical reflection and self‐reflection – or also the subject of desire and vital energy. By contrast, the performative subject is constituted by the call to act, to demonstrate oneself as alive.’8 Whether or not Davison intended to die is not clear – though she must have been aware of the risk of injury – but, called to act, she demonstrated herself as alive in the moment and in her intent. She performed her ­feminist activism. It was an act that cost Davison her life, that brought suffragettes and their supporters onto the streets in their thousands for her funeral and subsequent demonstrations and that galvanized public opinion. It was not just the desperation of the act – after all, the hunger strikes of imprisoned suffragettes were also acts of political desperation – but the fact that it was caught on film. ‘She did that’; ‘I saw her do it on film,’ viewers of the Pathé news reels would say that night in cinemas throughout the country. ‘I witnessed it.’ Three hand‐cranked cameras, perfectly positioned to record the moment, the activist and her intent: to capture the attention of the King and thus his subjects through an intervention, disrupting his horse at a national spectacular event. It was an event redolent of what we might refer to today, post‐Occupy, as the 1% at play, gawped at by the working class who also laid down money to bet on the outcome, in a reverse of the ‘trickle‐down’ effect. It was also an event, the cameras show, that the King’s horse had no chance of winning. ♀♀♀ One hundred and one years later, summer 2014, an article is published in a respected left‐wing theoretical journal. If I pick this one out, not quite at random from many others, it is because its subject resonates with the subject of this essay: cultural revolution, what it means and what it takes to enact it.9 It is an interesting essay, picking the term ‘cultural revolution’ first used by Lenin in 1923, picked up by Guy Debord in 1958, and by European avant‐gardes in the 1960s as well as, of course, by Chairman Mao. The author, Sven Lütticken, uses the concept for its possibility to disrupt the division of political art practices into what he describes as their present two main camps: ‘genealogies of institutional critique on the one hand, and extra‐institutional aesthetic activism on the other’ and instead to ‘probe the logic and contradictions of radical practice’ since the 1970s. Perfect. Except… this is an article bristling with references and names, but the first reference to a woman is the invocation of Thatcherism on its eighth page. The first woman artist, writer or activist mentioned is a passing reference to Martha Rosler on its tenth page. Hito Steyerl is later discussed, and is herself quoted as citing two further women (Susan Boyle and Hannah Arendt). Then Sharon Hayes and Andrea Fraser are discussed; and that is it: just six women among 47 men (or, if footnotes are included, seven women among 57 men). These namings are scaffolding for Lütticken’s question: ‘But where does the decline of old classes and the emergence of new classes or micropolitical c­ lass‐ like formations  –  perhaps on the basis of gender or race  –  leave class as a project, ­possessing historical agency?’10 to which I want to pose a number of counter‐questions: What has happened to feminism (as a project?) if an article exploring revolutions in culture and radical thinking can almost forget to include women? What has happened

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to sexual politics or the analysis of white privilege if discussions of gender and race are potentially to be reduced to the category of ‘micropolitics’? What has happened to radical thinking if it is now acceptable to be so blatantly sexist in print – is feminism ‘so last century’ for the academic left? Above all, to apply Groys’s formulation to sexual politics, has the feminist subject died the ‘death of the author’ at the hand of male authors?11 Where is the feminist, activist performative subject? Where is the legacy of Emily Wilding Davison, holding a scarf with an unequivocal message, every inch of her shouting, ‘I am doing this! Witness it!’? ♀♀♀ In his long essay ‘Image, Space, Revolution’, W.J.T. Mitchell provides an iconographic response to the 2011 occupations of public spaces in the Arab Spring and in Occupy Wall Street.12 On his way to concluding that the empty public space is the best monument to revolutions and potential future democracy, he distinguishes between images (including art) produced directly for activist purposes on the one hand, and on the other hand, images, frequently in the form of documentary journalism, that are an often‐ potent by‐product of activism. He also lays over these two forms their supposed differing functions of bringing joyousness and documenting violence. Rather than see them as opposing, he suggests there is ‘a certain dialectic between images of triumphal ­defiance and joy […] and images of abjection, humiliation, and police violence’.13 As iconic exemplars of each of these categories of imagery from 2011, Mitchell posits the image of a ballerina dancing on the bronze bull in Wall Street, New York and the image of a woman in Tahrir Square, Cairo being dragged by the military in such a manner that her clothes are stripped from her and her blue bra exposed. ‘The fact that both these iconic images are centrally focused on women is no accident,’ he argues, for the whole tactic of nonviolence has an inherently feminine and feminist ­connotation, in striking contrast to the macho violence it elicits. (This is a tradition that goes back to Lysistrata and the restraint of male violence by women.) The Ballerina does not try to kill the bull; she turns him into a support for her performance. The Woman with the Blue Brassiere does not fight back, but ­compels the police [sic] to play their part in the tableau of active nonviolence. Like Martin Luther King Jr. confronting the fire hoses and police dogs of ‘Bull’ Connor in Birmingham, Alabama, the Ballerina and the Woman with the Blue Brassiere are Performance Artists.14 Are these two women therefore carrying the legacy of Emily Wilding Davison’s performance of resistance? Behind the representation of the ballerina’s elegant, bare‐footed attitude on the back of the massive charging bull are seen, through smoke, protesters with hoodies and gas masks. The whole image is evocative of Emma Goldman’s declaration that she did not want to be part of a revolution that does not allow dancing. The ballerina image did not, however, come about as a photograph of a dancer making an actual performative action on the Wall Street bull sculpture during Occupy, but was a composite image created in July 2011 by the organization Adbusters in Vancouver, Canada for their magazine. They superimposed the image with ‘#occupywallstreet’ and ‘September 17’, adding ‘bring a tent’. It was the initial call to action, to which thousands of people were to respond. The

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woman with the blue bra was part of a demonstration in Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt, 17 December 2011. At the moment caught on video, the woman was trying to run from the Egyptian military (not, as Mitchell suggests, the police) who were swarming the area; they grabbed her, some beating a man and a woman who tried to help her, and others dragging her in such a way that her black abaya came undone and her jeans, naked stomach and bra were exposed. In distressing amateur footage, it can be seen that she is repeatedly dragged, kicked and beaten, her breasts stamped on, and she is possibly unconscious.15 A single frame taken from this footage with the blue of the bra enhanced (such a particular and unusual colour that it became emblematic of the event), and other colours muted, was used for posters carried by Egyptian women in mass demonstrations against violence against women, and the image of a woman with a blue bra – and also of a blue bra by itself – was used in street art and other graphics for resistance. Mitchell surely cannot have seen the footage from Cairo but only the still image, or he could not have made his argument, compelling as it appears to be on the surface. There is no choice for this woman, massively outnumbered by the military as she was. Her intention was to be part of the demonstration that day, not to make (even as passive resistance) the action (that was forced upon her) to camera (or rather, a phone, held by a chance observer). The ballerina, too, did not perform for camera for that particular image. Micah White, at that time part of Adbusters, confirmed to me that ‘the image violated copyright’ and after the ballerina and the Bull’s sculptor contacted Adbusters’ founder, Kalle Lasn, Lasn agreed not to distribute it.16 Lasn himself exposes the deeply romanticized approach that made appropriation of the dancer’s image possible: ‘The poster was a ballerina – an absolutely still ballerina – poised in a Zen‐ish kind of way on top of this dynamic bull. […] I felt like this ballerina stood for this deep demand that would change the world. There was some magic about it.’17 Mitchell’s reference to Lysistrata is both telling and apposite: Lysistrata is the woman in the eponymous comic play by Aristophanes (411 bce) who organizes Greek women to go on a sex strike to persuade the men to stop fighting their wars. Lysistrata’s performance is as fictional as that of the ballerina on the bull, and both are as lacking in self‐determination as the real exposure and beating of the woman in Cairo. ♀♀♀ In the 1980s, Lucy Lippard made a distinction between activist art and political art. In her catalogue essay for the exhibition she curated in London, Issue: Social Strategies by Women Artists (1980), and citing Griselda Pollock’s 1979 call for an exhibition ‘conceived and structured as a sustained political intervention’, Lippard indicates that the work in Issue is activist. It is not about the ‘politics of being female’, she says, or a general exhibition of political art by women, but it is art that is actively working towards social change. She states: ‘the contributions of feminist art to the full panorama of social‐ change art and the ways in which a politicized or topical art approaches, overlaps and diverges from the various notions of a feminist art are crucial to its further development. […] The transformation of society, at the heart of both feminism and socialism, will not take place until feminist strategies are acknowledged and fully integrated into the struggle.’18 Four years later she further refined this: ‘Although “political” and “activist” artists are often the same people, “political” art tends to be socially concerned and “activist” art tends to be socially involved – not a value judgment so much as a personal choice. The former’s work is a commentary or analysis, while the latter’s art works

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within its context, with its audience.’19 Lippard does not engage here with the aestheticization of politics or its placement into the space of the gallery; her focus is on the intent and methods of the artist. This for me gets to the heart of what feminist practices of art are: political intent, enacted with differing methods. This is probably a good time to pause and consider the term ‘feminist art’. This is frequently understood as being a compound noun, and has often been used as such since it first emerged in the 1970s. However, this is highly problematic if it takes its place within the broader artworld typologies. For example, critic Rosalyn Deutsche stated, 20 years after Lippard’s distinction of ‘political’ and ‘activist’ artists, that she ‘avoid[s] the term “political art”: precisely because it asserts that other art […] is not political. […] Similarly, the term “feminist art” insinuates that art itself is free of sexual politics’.20 While I would tend to agree with Deutsche’s first implication, that all art can be located in what we call ‘the political’, I can only agree with her second proposition if she is using the term Feminist Art in its problematic sense as a compound noun, but I cannot agree with her if the word ‘feminist’ is understood as a modifier of the noun ‘art’. Where the problem comes is that, unlike most categorizations of art, the term ‘feminist art’ does not indicate style, media, geographic location and/or chronology: it has to resist such reductiveness because, instead, it indicates the meeting of a set of politics – feminism and feminist thinking  –  with the practices of art and the artworld. So if we discuss ­feminist art we are talking about critiques or analyses from a particular political ­position – art made from a feminist position and informed by feminist thinking. Feminist Art – as a compound noun – would indeed tidily categorize, even periodize, itself; while ‘feminist art’ – as art informed by feminist thought – would maintain that nothing is beyond its purview, and therefore that no art is free of sexual politics. Deutsche’s use and definition of ‘the political’ adheres to the word’s etymology: from the Greek polis, the city‐state. As Hannah Arendt states, the Greeks’ organization of the city‐state gave rise to ‘the political’ – communities that were ‘founded for the express purpose of serving the free – those who were neither slaves, subject to coercion by others, nor laborers, driven and urged on by the necessities of life.’ She continues that if ‘the political’ is used in this sense of the polis, ‘its end or raison d’être would be to establish and keep in existence a space where freedom as virtuosity can appear. This is the realm where freedom is a worldly reality, tangible in words which can be heard, in deeds which can be seen, and in events which are talked about, remembered, and turned into stories before they are finally incorporated into the great storybook of human history.’ Then Arendt lays down the premise that many on the left later embraced – though she does so with a caveat that is often ignored within modern, and now neoliberal, assumptions and re‐definitions of ‘freedom’: ‘Whatever occurs in this space of appearances is political by definition, even when it is not a direct product of action. What remains outside it, such as the great feats of barbarian empires, may be impressive and note‐worthy, but it is not political, strictly speaking.’21 The space of appearances, therefore, is a place of choice and of choosing to make an appearance; it is not a place in the realm of representations, though it does prefigure that realm. Further, freedom, for the polis, is freedom to act with virtuosity, to be in dialogue; while the polis pertains to a minority of the population of the time, and those who are not of the polis are not free, this is a place of dialogue as equals, before the philosophical development of freedom as ‘sovereignty, the ideal of a free will, independent from others and eventually prevailing against them’22 – despite their being ‘free’ and of the polis.

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There are complexities in Arendt’s definitions that give us pause for thought on our search for the feminist performative subject and the traces of Emily Wilding Davison’s legacy in recent art practices. For Arendt, virtuosity of performance in the place of freedom is distinguished from the work of labourers. In another essay in the same book, she goes on to state that artists and artisans are (in the ancient Greek definitions) not in the realm of the free but are fabricators (homo faber), who think in terms of function and utility: ‘The mistrust and actual contempt of the artists arose from political considerations’ because fabricating things, including art, ‘is not within the range of political activities; it even stands in opposition to them’ precisely because of the utilitarian nature of fabrication. ‘Fabrication, but not action or speech, always involves means and ends.’23 For Arendt, artists do not have the same relationship to the public realm as the things they make, which have ‘appearance, configuration, and form’. The artist requires s­ olitude to work, while ‘Truly political activities, on the other hand, acting and speaking, cannot be performed at all without the presence of others, without the public, without a space constituted by the many.’24 What she calls the ‘malaise’ of artists is to do not with their distrust of society but with their distrust of the realm of the political. ‘At this point,’ says Arendt, in an oft‐quoted statement, ‘the conflict between art and politics arises, and this conflict cannot and must not be solved.’ This tension, to be clear, is in the relationship between the artist and the political, not between artworks and the political – so long as they enter the public realm, rather than remaining as concealed private possessions: ‘These things obviously share with political “products,” words and deeds, the quality that they are in need of some public space where they can appear and be seen.’25 As may be deduced, Arendt distinguishes what she calls, on the one hand, the ‘creative arts, which bring forth something tangible and reify human thought to such an extent that the produced thing possessed an existence of its own’ from, on the other hand, ‘the performing arts, [which] on the contrary have indeed a strong affinity with politics. Performing artists […] need an audience to show their virtuosity, just as acting men [sic] need the presence of others before whom they can appear; […] both depend upon others for the performance itself. Such a space of appearances is not to be taken for granted wherever men live together in a community.’26 The performative subject and the political subject, therefore, are deeply inter‐related; but it is the polis – the ordered and ordering community – that produces the space constituted by the many, the space of appearances. This freedom allows for the historical appearance of the performative and political subject. Such subjects have the choice to act (to perform an action); but the contingencies and precarities are clear. ‘Action and politics […] are the only things of which we could not even conceive without at least assuming that freedom exists,’ says Arendt, before considering the role of what we would now call activism: ‘freedom, which only seldom – in times of crisis or revolution – becomes the direct aim of political action, is actually the reason that men live together in political organization at all. Without it, political life as such would be meaningless. The raison d’être of politics is freedom, and its field of existence is action.’27 Arendt does not further distinguish between ‘the political’ and ‘politics’; but Deutsche’s comments (quoted earlier) were a response to comments that do, made by Chantal Mouffe: ‘What I call “the political” is the dimension of antagonism – the friend/enemy distinction. […] This can emerge out of any kind of relation. It’s not something that can be localized precisely; it’s an ever‐present possibility. What I call “politics”, on the other hand, is the ensemble of discourses and practices, institutional or even artistic practices,

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that contribute to and reproduce a certain order. These are always in conditions that are potentially conflictual because they are always informed by, or traversed by, the dimension of “the political”. […] In that context, artistic and cultural practices are absolutely central as one of the levels where identifications and forms of identity are constituted.’28 So, while Arendt is thinking of the artist as a labourer, a maker whose ‘creative process is not displayed in public and not destined to appear in the world,’29 forty years later Mouffe has moved that labour into a set of practices (and a space of appearances) which are themselves socially determined by the community of the polis, in Arendt’s terms. This takes us back to Lippard’s distinction between political and activist artists, which we can now augment using Arendt’s terminology: political artists are those who place their works within the space of appearances granted by the polis; and activist artists are those who choose to be actors within the polis. Looking at her wider writings I suspect Lippard would agree with Mouffe’s premise that ‘Every form of art has a political dimension’, and Arendt’s more inclusive premise that ‘whatever occurs in the space of appearances is political by definition’. However, Lippard is using that word, ‘political’, differently from Arendt here, and, as I indicated, discussing artists and their practices rather than art works, which is what Mouffe and Arendt are discussing. What I think we find if we jam Mouffe’s definitions and Lippard’s definitions together is that Lippard’s focus is on artists who engage with Mouffe’s realm of ‘politics’ rather than ‘the political’: she is refining a difference between artists who address politics within the terms of the ­artworld and artists who intend to do politics and have impact beyond the artworld (what she calls activism). This is, of course, a very slippery categorization, both parts of which can be seen as interventionist in different realms; indeed, Lippard herself indicates that artists engage with both areas of practice. Arendt does recognize that cultural phenomena tend to shift – for example, her recognition that ‘mass culture’ appeared between the late 1940s and her time of writing in the late 1950s. At that time, the late 1950s, another shift was under way: from thinking (as did Arendt) that the artist undertakes labour to make their art, to thinking (as did Mouffe) that they enact processes and practices: they bring their subjectivity into being through performativity. One of the best‐known early exemplars of this thinking is Alan Kaprow’s essay ‘The Legacy of Jackson Pollock’, published in 1958 alongside photographs taken in 1950 by Hans Namuth in Pollock’s studio of the artist at work.30 Kaprow names Pollock’s moments of painting as captured in Namuth’s photographs precisely as ‘acts’: Pollock, he writes, ‘would judge his “acts” very shrewdly and carefully for long periods before going into another “act.”’31 Further, Kaprow places the viewer of the painting also as a performer embodying a dialogic relationship between Pollock’s own performances and their results: the paintings. The paintings themselves, he argues, also enable the viewer’s imagination to ‘continue outward indefinitely’ in distinction from older paintings where the edge of the canvas demarcated the world of the artist and that of the spectator. In this, Pollock leaves us ‘at the point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life’.32 In a few short pages, Kaprow brings the painter out of the privacy of the labourer’s workshop (as described by Arendt) and into the space of appearances, into the polis; he recognizes in the mid‐20 century the emergence of the performative subject whose acts – like those of Arendt’s performing artists – then are in dialogue with the wider community but also have impact. They intervene. ♀♀♀

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The framework I am building between the understandings of Lippard, Arendt and Mouffe takes us to an interesting place. I will attempt to summarize this, using terminology already discussed, before moving on to use it to discuss artworks. There is a concept of the political, created from and as a result of being in a community of free people – the space of appearances constituted by the many. In this realm, all appearances contribute to the discourse that determines the nature of the community, its identity and identifications within it. It is ordered and maintained structurally by politics. All of this is contingent upon a notion of freedom. Those people who are part of that community can choose to act in it, intervening to shift or maintain the consensus of what constitutes that community. It is a discourse‐based community that needs virtuosity of performance (for persuasiveness?) as it depends upon appearance, and action, for its maintenance. Yet ‘discourse’ suggests more than a passive audience for performance, but the action of engagement: bearing witness. Thus, there is interdependence of freedom, community, structure, discourse, action and virtuosity. Artworks and performances take part in the realm of the political. Artists are in a place of tension between being, on the one hand, outside the community to make work (the demi‐monde, bohemia and similar romantic concepts of the ‘otherness’ of the artist come to mind), and on the other hand, being increasingly determined by the discourses of the community itself to be performative subjects – not only thanks to Kaprow in 1958 and others within the artworld but thanks also to Judith Butler and the growth of critical theory around gender and ‘performativity’ in the late 1980s and 1990s.33 If freedom is the direct aim of political action in times of revolution, as Arendt states, then we can begin to understand those who identify as women as also constantly caught between two modes of being. Ostensibly part of the realm of the political, nonetheless in democratic states women have had to undertake ‘the longest revolution’34 to be part of political life and to be part of the structures of politics; yet when they attain that status they (we) have found that they are still forced to speak from elsewhere, that their actions in the realm of appearances are still not counted as equal, and indeed, that they do not appear in equitable numbers. This is not only a problem for those who identify as women, but for anyone who is other to the community that has defined ‘freedom’. See Figure 14.1. Figure 14.1 

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This analysis can help us build upon Lippard’s distinction between political artists (socially concerned; whose artwork produces commentary or analysis) and activist artists (socially involved; whose artwork includes active involvement and intervention with the work’s context, witnesses and participants). Thus, it can help us develop strategies of art practices and actions that are effective in different arenas. I suggest that we can add to Lippard’s definitions, now over 30 years old, responding to shifts in modes of production in the artworld, and in global politics. For example, the growth of ‘social practice’ and of ‘institutional critique’ as modes of making art that are not only critically legible but also legible in the market complicates the notions of concern, engagement and audience that were more straightforward to define and less easy to sell in the 1970s. It is possible to look back to the time leading up to Lippard’s development of her notions, and suggest how she might have categorized particular artworks. For example, Mary Kelly’s Post Partum Document (1979), with its gallery setting and interventions in established artworld discourses of critical and visual languages, can be readily aligned to Lippard’s category of ‘political art’. On the other hand, Leslie Labowitz and Suzanne Lacy’s In Mourning and In Rage and Lacy’s collaborative work Three Weeks in May (both 1977), with their interventions in shopping malls, streets and public spaces, their liaisons with rape‐prevention workers, police, politicians and the media, and their aims of changing public practices, can be equally, readily aligned to Lippard’s ‘activist art’. Yet with the framework developed through reading Arendt, Mouffe and Lippard, we can now see Kelly, Labowitz and Lacy as negotiating differing realms, both as artists and as women, between ‘the political’ and ‘politics’. For example, Kelly, in the space of the gallery, exposed not only the psychoanalytical structures of mothering but also the socialized structures of mothering – and indeed, how those structures are performed in and through language. There is an address to mothers, and those with a relationship to mothering, in Post Partum Document. Encountering the work may cause the viewers of the work to produce change in their lives. Labowitz and Lacy used their knowledge of visual aesthetics to increase the impact of their artworks; and they used their skills (virtuosity) in performing (making actions) to convey the messages they intended to those who saw, or took part in, the works, and in incorporating the political and media actors to shift the civic and social structures: to make a change. At the same time, the participants or viewers may also find aesthetic pleasure and purpose in these works. Lacy has said of Three Weeks in May that her struggle has been to have its contribution to art recognized as much as its contribution to discussion and social action about rape: ‘[it] is normally represented by its subject matter – exploring the taboo topic of rape – but I would argue that its real contribution to the arts (as opposed to politics) is as a predecessor of social practice and as an early example of media analysis and intervention.’ She goes on to place (her) art in a dynamic relation to feminist activism: ‘I don’t privilege art over other forms of activism, such as public speech, voter campaigns and protests, but I do prefer to communicate through art. I believe art is a method for pushing the feminist movement beyond the borders of the movement itself and into its surrounding public spheres.’35 The direction in which Lacy takes us here adds to Lippard’s definitions. Not only can artists make both ‘political work’ and ‘activist work’, but individual works themselves can make interventions in both realms. This seems clear: a shift intentionally and specifically to use ‘work’ in both senses of this word – both the labour/performative gestures of work – working at making art; and also the resultant art – the artwork. In addition, we can now understand Lippard’s definition of ‘political

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work’ as work that primarily insists in making its interventions in the realm of ‘the political’ – the civic communities of free people formed through discourse; while her definition of ‘activist work’ insists on making its interventions primarily in the realm of ‘politics’ – the structures that order those communities. I use the word ‘insist’ in both cases. It is in the nature of the insistence that feminist thinking and action is located: the insistence upon being as free as other members of the community, upon being within the space of appearances, and upon being contributors to the politics, culture and ­discourse of the community. This is how we can now understand Emily Wilding Davison’s intervention in the Derby as feminist activist performativity: using those film cameras as she steps under the barrier, insisting upon entering the space of appearances, hence into the political; and insisting upon an address to the realm of politics – from which all women were excluded – in the metonymic form of the King’s horse. Bear witness to it. ♀♀♀ One particularly notable aspect of much of the political activism of the last few years (say, since the global financial crisis of 2008) is how much of it is led by women. Not only in the rise of overtly feminist groups like Femen in Ukraine and France, La Barbe in France, the Gulabi Gang in India, or Sisters Uncut in London, but also crucially #blacklivesmatter, which was established in the USA by queer black women.36 Much of this activist practice has also been informed by artists; and institutions like the Victoria and Albert Museum (to give just one example) has responded with exhibitions like Disobedient Objects (26 July 2014–1 February 2015) and by adding a pussy hat from the global women’s marches of 2017 to its collection.37 But I want to conclude this essay with two examples of art works made by artists who insisted on intervening in the polis, into the space of appearances, into the political and into politics. On 9 April 2015 the large statue of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes that was prominently positioned in the grounds of the University of Cape Town (UCT) was removed from its site.38 Originally placed there to commemorate him as the donor of the land on which the university was built, students had been actively protesting its presence for a month as a symbol of the (mainly white) governance of UCT which had been slow to respond to the changed political circumstances and educational needs of South Africa.39 When some who defended its presence did so in the name of ‘pro‐colonialism’ it became clear to MA Fine Art student Sethembile Msezane that it would be removed, and also that she wished to make a piece of work in relation to its demise.40 Msezane had been working on a series of interventionist durational performances and/or photographs called The Public Holiday Series, always using in her work aspects of dress that refer to the history of the event commemorated, and to African culture. For example, Untitled (Workers Day) (2014) is a photograph showing Msezane in a blue boiler suit with a red kerchief tied round her head and a veil of Zulu beadwork covering her eyes, nose and mouth, striking the pose of the woman worker in J. Howard Miller’s famous American WW2 poster We can do it (1942). For Chapungu – The Day Rhodes Fell (2015), Msezane again wore the beaded face veil, and also a pair of wing‐like structures made from wood and hair tied to each arm, and reaching about 45 cm (18 in.) beyond her hands. Chapungu is the Shona name for a bird that appears in stone sculptures in a sacred site in the eleventh‐ to fourteenth‐century city of Great Zimbabwe. The best‐preserved of these birds was plundered from the site in 1889 by a European hunter, Willi Posselt, who

Witness It: Activism, Art, and the Feminist Performative Subject

hacked it from its plinth and later sold it to Rhodes. Rhodes put it in his library in his Cape Town house, where it remains (the only plundered bird that has still not been returned), and had enlarged replicas made to decorate the gates to his house near Cambridge, England.41 Msezane stood on a plinth with her back to the massive statue of Rhodes for four hours during the whole process of its removal.42 At the time that the crane lifted the statue, she lifted her wings. Photographs taken of her performance show one of her wings positioned overlapping the arm of the crane, as if the crane was an extension of the wing that was lifting Rhodes from his assumed vantage point. Ten years earlier, in Europe, Serbian artist Tanja Ostojić was bringing to a close her durational artwork Looking for a Husband with a EU Passport. She started the project in August 2000 as a response to websites where women who were from the war‐torn Balkan states, yet who were unable to gain asylum or EU entry visas, would advertise their willingness to marry and commit to sexual and domestic relationships with strangers in return for a life in EU countries. Such women were highly vulnerable, not only in the situations from which they were trying to flee but also because such sites were often used as a means of conning them, importing them like goods into prostitution and pornography rings, or virtual slave‐labour conditions. Once in the EU, denied papers, and facing potential prosecution both in their place of residence and in their home countries, the women are trapped (this is still an ongoing situation). The women usually advertised themselves on these sites in ways that were sexualized and living up to popular stereotypes of appropriate femininity. Ostojić produced an advertisement for herself, photographed standing naked in a harsh light, with a neutral expression, and with all of her body and head hair shaved. Up the right hand side of the photograph she placed the text ‘Looking for a husband with a EU passport.’ The image was posted online with an accompanying email address. As a result of this, Ostojić exchanged over 500 emails with people, mainly men, mainly from Europe but also from the USA and Australia. Making it clear that this was part of an art project, that no romance or sex would be involved, Ostojić entered into a six‐month correspondence with German artist Klemens Golf. They met on 28 November 2011 as a 60‐minute Web‐streamed performance in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade. Having signed an agreement on 8 January 2002 that their lives and possessions would remain separate and distinct, and that either would be free to divorce the other whenever they wished,43 Ostojić and Golf married in the Serbian capital Belgrade in a private ceremony witnessed by two other people only, as an artwork in the medium of law, on 9 January 2002 (Figure 14.2).44 Ostojić then applied for a visa, and after an eight‐week wait was granted a single‐ entry, three‐month visa. Eventually she gained entry to Germany for three years, after sending a number of letters to different art organizations seeking opportunities for her work, and followed a language course. After her three‐year visa expired, she was not granted a permanent residence visa but only another temporary one, this time for just two years, after which she was refused permission to live in Germany. Ostojić and Golf legally divorced, celebrating the event as an artwork, Divorce Party, at the Integration Project Office exhibition in Berlin, on 1 July 2005.45 How can we begin to understand the activism of these very different works by Msezane and Ostojić, their interventions and effectiveness, using the framework derived from reading Arendt, Lippard and Mouffe? Chapungu – The Day Rhodes Fell appears on the surface to be straightforward. However, the polis, the space of

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Figure 14.2  Tanja Ostojić. From: Looking for a Husband with a EU Passport, 2000–05. Participatory Web project/combined media installation. Detail. Photo by Srdjan Veljović, Courtesy/copyright: Tanja Ostojić).

appearances constituted by the many, into which it intervened, is layered. There are the legacies of the infrastructure of colonialist South Africa, of apartheid South Africa and of post‐apartheid South Africa in the statue of Rhodes, its placing, the history of UCT, the struggles for knowledge and the determination of disciplines and discourses that gave rise to the Rhodes Must Fall movement. The area surrounding the statue and Msezane’s work is filled by those who, before 1994, were not of the free, and who since then have had to insist upon their rights to contribute to the dialogue among equals in a process that has not been easy or automatically granted. They are of the polis, and are ensuring a major shift in the visual dialogues in the space of appearances. The removal of the statue was not straightforward, either: as well as the ‘pro‐colonialist’ supporters of keeping it, others, like veteran anti‐apartheid activist and judge Albie Sachs, held that the statue should remain to keep the history visible, but that new artworks should be made in direct dialogue with it.46 I am not suggesting that this was Msezane’s position, but at the moment of transition in the dialogue that constituted UCT’s space of appearances of the free (and symbolically, that of the wider city and country), for four hours, and in the photographs that remain, this work did that. The veil over her face removed the work from being ‘about’ any one individual and instead shifted its significance to the insertion of the/a black African woman’s body and performativity into the moment, and also into the developing determination of what constitutes the new community of the free. (It is significant that shortly after the Rhodes Must Fall movement, there were articles in UCT’s student paper, Varsity, stating that ‘patriarchy must fall’.) The space is

Notes

formed – and filled – by the many, recording the transition with their phone cameras. Standing with her back resolutely to the statue, Msezane both insists on dialogue with the legacy of Rhodes and the emerging community, and refuses direct dialogue with the image of the man. He is not her equal. By embodying the bird, Chapungu, Msezane r­ e‐ inserts African visual and verbal languages into the space formed by the many. In one of the photographs, she appears to displace Rhodes with her wing. It is a powerful, lasting and purposeful intervention into South Africa’s shifting realm of the political. Bear ­witness to it. Ostojić’s work engages primarily with a different realm from that of Msezane. She enters directly into politics – the structures that keep the political ordered: definitions of nationality and of identity, the rights of a body to be in a particular place, the meanings of marriage, the law in relation to all of this and more. Less obviously visible than Chapungu – The Day Rhodes Fell, Looking for a Husband with a EU Passport nonetheless intervenes in many aspects of the polis, and in so doing exposes the lines between freedom in the political realm and its opposite in the realm of politics. The personal (marriage, living choices, identity), the private (sexual and emotional realms) and the coercion of the state in relation to these is exposed. While Looking for a Husband was underway and she was in Germany, Ostojić also created other, long‐term, research and action‐based projects. For Integration Project Office she set up an office at Project Room Gallery 35 to gather information, leading to an archive of research. In a video, Naked Life (2005), she reads statements gathered by the UN Human Rights Committee about the deportation and forced migration of Roma people from Germany. Dinner Discussion (2003) focused upon information about and discussion of the EU’s asylum laws.47 At the heart of the five‐year project Looking for a Husband is the deeply ironic feminist aesthetic action (and enactment of the classic example of performative speech), the ‘I do’ of the wedding ceremony. Uttered in this instance before the officials and two witnesses, the ceremony a legal space constituted by the polis, it determines all else: complicity with the coercive politics of the state(s), the aesthetic actions of the artist(s), national identity, visas, passports, the right of the body to be in a place, living with (civil) war or living away from it. As Arendt said, ‘Truly political activities, […] acting and speaking, cannot be performed at all without the presence of others, without the public, without a space constituted by the many.’48 Bear witness to it.

Notes 1 Maureen Howes, Emily Wilding Davison: A Suffragette’s Family Album (Stroud: The

History Press, 2013), p. 86.

2 This scarf is now on display in the Houses of Parliament in London. 3 See Vanessa Thorpe, ‘Truth behind the death of suffragette Emily Davison is finally

revealed.’ The Observer (26 May 2013). http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/ may/26/emily‐davison‐suffragette‐death‐derby‐1913, accessed 16 November 2018. 4 Secrets of a Suffragette, Broadcast 26 May 2013, Channel 4. Clare Balding OBE is a popular sports presenter with a horse‐racing background who has also presented national events like the Trooping of the Colour and the Lord Mayor’s Show. She has appeared in the top 10 of the World Pride Power List, the UK Pride List, the Independent’s Pink List and Women’s Hour list of the most influential women in the UK.

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5 Howes, Emily Wilding Davison, p. 85. 6 ‘By any means necessary’ was first used in 1963, in French, by Jean‐Paul Sartre, in the

play Dirty Hands: ‘I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born. It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary.’ It was used, more prominently for Anglophone cultures, on 28 June 1964 by Malcolm X at the founding rally of the Organization of Afro‐American Unity in New York: ‘We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.’ 7 Mary Richardson, who slashed Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery, London, in 1914 and clearly expected to be arrested, claimed in her autobiography to have been at Epsom the day of Davison’s action. http://www.hastingspress.co.uk/ history/richardson.html, accessed 16 November 2018. 8 Boris Groys, In the Flow (London: Verso, 2016), p. 63. 9 Sven Lütticken, ‘Cultural revolution: From Punk to the New Provotariat.’ New Left Review no. 87, May/June 2014, pp. 115–131. 10 Lütticken, ‘Cultural revolution’, p. 127. 11 I deliberately place the political subject and the gendered author in an antagonistic relationship here. 12 W.T.J. Mitchell. ‘Image, space, revolution.’ In: W.T.J. Mitchell, Bernard E. Harcourt, Michael Taussig, Occupy: Three Essays in Disobedience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 93–130. While Mitchell name‐checks 46 men to nine women – almost as egregious as Lütticken – he genders his putative viewer of events and art as ‘she’. 13 Mitchell, ‘Image, space, revolution’, p. 107. 14 Mitchell, ‘Image, space, revolution’, p. 108. 15 Sherine Hafez, ‘Bodies that protest: The girl in the blue bra, sexuality and state violence in revolutionary Egypt.’ Signs, vol. 40, no. 1 (2014), pp. 20–28; Sherine Hafez, ‘The revolution shall not pass through women’s bodies: Egypt, uprising and gender politics.’ Journal of North African Studies vol. 19, no. 2 (2014), pp. 172–185. Special issue of the Journal. For the original footage, see http://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/ 2011/12/21/144098384/the‐girl‐in‐the‐blue‐bra, accessed 16 November 2018. 16 Micah White. Personal email to the author, 31 October 2016. 17 http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2012/02/occupy‐wall‐street‐201202, accessed 16 November 2018. 18 Lucy Lippard, ‘Issue and Tabu.’ Issue: Social Strategies by Women Artists (London: ICA, 1980), n.p. 19 Lucy Lippard, ‘Trojan horses: Activist art and politics at play.’ In: Brian Wallis (ed.), Art After Modernism: Re‐thinking Representation (New York: New Museum, 1984), p. 349. Original emphases. 20 Rosalyn Deutsche, in Chantal Mouffe, Rosalyn Deutsche, Brandon W. Joseph and Thomas Keenan, ‘Every form of art has a political dimension.’ Grey Room no. 2 (Winter 2001), pp. 98–125, p. 100. 21 Hannah Arendt, ‘What is freedom?’ Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (London: Faber and Faber, 1960) pp. 143–171, pp. 154–155. It is crucial to remember that Arendt was a German‐Jewish intellectual, writing the essays in this book 10–15 years after the end of WW2.

Notes

22 Arendt, ‘What is freedom?’, p. 163. Clearly the concept of freedom in a state that relied

23

24 25 26 27 28

29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38

39 40 41

upon slavery is complex. Arendt, who also wrote on totalitarianism, has produced a long, nuanced essay on the concept; I refer readers there rather than attempt to summarize it here. Hannah Arendt, ‘The crisis in culture: Its social and its political significance.’ Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), pp. 197–226, p. 215. Arendt, ‘The crisis in culture’, p. 217. Arendt, ‘The crisis in culture’, p. 218. Arendt, ‘What is freedom?’, pp. 153–154. Arendt, ‘What is freedom?’, p. 146. Chantal Mouffe, in Chantal Mouffe, Rosalyn Deutsche, Brandon W. Joseph and Thomas Keenan, ‘Every form of art has a political dimension.’ Grey Room no. 2 (Winter 2001), pp. 98–125, pp. 99–100. Arendt, ‘What is freedom?’, p. 154. Allan Kaprow, ‘The legacy of Jackson Pollock.’ Art News vol. 57, no. 6 (1958), pp. 24–26, pp. 55–57. Reprinted in Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 1–9. Only one of the Namuth photographs is reproduced in this later reprint – and it is one showing Pollock sitting contemplating the canvas before him on the floor, and strangely not one of the many showing him in the act of working on the canvas, which were a catalyst for Kaprow’s essay. Kaprow, ‘The legacy of Jackson Pollock’, p. 4. Kaprow, ‘The legacy of Jackson Pollock’, pp. 6–7. While noting Butler’s huge importance, I have focused upon Kaprow here because of his synchronicity with Arendt, and his grounding in the world of art. Juliet Mitchell, ‘Women: The longest revolution.’ New Left Review, no. 40, December 1966, pp. 11–37. Suzanne Lacy, ‘Not new: Reclaiming the radical in feminism.’ Women Environmental Artists Directory Magazine, vol. 8, January 2016, http://weadartists.org. http://femen.org/about‐us/; http://labarbelabarbe.org; www.sistersuncut.org; http:// blacklivesmatter.com/herstory/. ‘“Pussyhat” acquired for Rapid Response Collection’, V&A Blog, 8 March 2017. http:// www.vam.ac.uk/blog/network/pussyhat‐acquired‐for‐rapid‐response‐collection, accessed 16 November 2018. Pussy hats were two knitted pink squares which, when stitched together and worn as a hat, formed ‘ears’. They were made for the protests against the inauguration of Donald Trump. Rhodes (5 July 1853 to 26 March 1902), for whom Rhodesia, now known as Zimbabwe, was named, was a colonialist and imperialist businessman and politician, who became Prime Minister of what was then the Cape Colony 1890–1896. Brenda Schmahmann, ‘The fall of Rhodes: The removal of a sculpture from the University of Cape Town.’ Public Art Dialogue vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 90–115, p. 90. Sethembile Msezane interviewed by Erica Buist: ‘Sethembile Msezane performs at the fall of the Cecil Rhodes statue, 9 April 2015.’ The Guardian (15 May 2015). Henrika Kuklick, ‘Contested monuments: The politics of archeology in Southern Africa.’ In: George W. Stocking (ed.), Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge (University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 135–138.

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42 Sethembile Msezane interviewed by Erica Buist. 43 Tanja Ostojić, ‘Crossing borders: Development of different artistic strategies.’ In:

44 45

46 47 48

Marina Gržinić and Tanja Ostojić (eds), Integration Impossible? The Politics of Migration in the Artwork of Tanja Ostojić (Berlin: Argobooks, 2009), pp. 161–170, p. 163. Tanja Ostojić, ‘Mission statement’, http://www.van.at/see/tanja/, accessed 16 November 2018. Serbia began informal negotiations to enter the EU in 2000, after the fall of Milošević. In 2003 the EU officially declared that the Balkan states could potentially become members of the EU. Formal negotiations, begun in 2005, were suspended in 2006 due to Serbia’s lack of plans to arrest Ratko Mladić and its non‐cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal. Negotiations began again in 2007. Radovan Karadžić was arrested in 2008, and Mladić in 2011. The EU gave permission for Serbia to attain candidate status in 2009, and it did so in 2012. It has still not (in 2018) joined the EU. Albie Sachs, Keynote address, ‘Dominance/Diversity/Disruption.’ 7th ELIA Leadership Symposium, 2 December 2015, University of Cape Town. See Gržinić and Ostojić (eds), Integration Impossible? for these and other works. Arendt, ‘The crisis in culture’, p. 217.

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Feminism and Language Griselda Pollock Language is an issue for feminism. Feminism is an issue for language. This operates at the level of theory because of the position attributed to language in the wake of twentieth century theories of structuralism, deconstruction and psychoanalysis. We think, and can only think, in language. We are thought and, indeed, spoken by language because it is not merely an instrument used to say things. Language is a system that precedes any individual and through whose signs we are enabled to speak ourselves and to speak with others. We are ‘captured’ if not imprisoned by the language we use and notably by its figures – metaphors – that shape our thinking and thus who we are: we are speaking subjects. Thus language is a serious issue for feminism as we try to think against the racist, heteronormative, gender‐normative and capitalist patriarchal ­universe of meanings that form our symbolic systems. Feminist discourses on/in art thus participated in a ‘linguistic turn’ in Western humanities at the end of the twentieth century. Although such a focus on language has since been challenged and even superseded by other turns: the ‘pictorial turn’, the ‘image turn’, the ‘affective turn’, the ‘material turn’, and so forth, it is important to appreciate its significance for feminism and feminist cultural theory, while also noting what feminism has itself brought to the discussion of language as terminology, as discourse and as the site for the production of concepts with which to think.1 Languages are indices of social formations and power blocs as well as archives of imaginative and poetic thinking. This operates at the level of both theory and politics as a result of the challenges to colonialism and systems of geopolitical domination. Languages are thus an issue for international feminism. Feminism presents challenges to the vocabularies of different languages. (For instance, gender, a key term for Anglophone feminist analysis, does not exist in many languages, or if it does, it refers to types of literature, genres). Some of the novelty of feminist theoretical language may alienate readers by its unfamiliarity to the usual vocabularies of art: expression, form, style, period, etc., or through its relation to specific theoretical systems such as Marxism or psychoanalysis, queer theory or postcolonial critique. Are many of these terms, theories and the concepts arising from/within Latin‐based languages translatable to all languages? Each language encodes each culture’s own gender systems and histories. Some elements of feminist language have, however, been associated with privileged languages, notably the English in which I write, thus in turn inflicting Northern or Western hegemony even in A Companion to Feminist Art, First Edition. Edited by Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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international feminist struggles. Yet it has been argued that the now widespread use of English language on the back of various colonial legacies and current globalizing tendencies, nonetheless, enables transversal communication across linguistic barriers that might have separated and enclosed different feminisms because of their own rich diversity of languages worldwide. Moreover, English is no longer the English language of the English or the American; it is constantly being made by all who inhabit, use or translate it, however this came about. Thus at every level, the core question – ‘Who is speaking what to whom?’  –  is a fundamental and profoundly political issue for feminism and language. It both enters into art and frames our discussion of it. In their own complex formation, furthermore, feminist theory and politics have borrowed and reframed concepts from a range of other theoretical projects. They have, however, to produce new meanings in language. Joining in and being shaped by theoretical‐political enterprises, feminist engagement differences them. This term  – differencing – is a politically necessary neologism to avoid reducing feminism to being an addition or an alternative; the alternative remains outside an unchallenged centre.2 Feminism is part of these major movements for change, and thus inflects each of many aspects of social, political, cultural, aesthetic and linguistic fields through which questions of power and powerlessness, subjectivity, agency, meaning and suffering are explored. It is also entangled in such power systems as a result of who is speaking and from where and with what resources. This chapter will use a small range of examples to probe this issue of language and feminism through its theoretical foundations and political effects.

­Language as discourse Language is understood as a socially produced system of signs and meanings. ‘Discourse’ is a term that enables us to trace patterns of meaning, ways of saying, groupings of statements in language that build up to form and sustain systems of power. For instance, art history is a discourse: ways of writing and speaking about art, about history that have effects. Feminism also constitutes a discourse or set of discourses that challenge the discursive formation that is art history. Gender, sexuality, race, difference are at once names of socially created ‘conditions’ and positioning in relation to power and well‐being (or its compromise). They are thus the concepts through which to think socially and historically relations between people. They function in that social and historical process through real economic and political exclusion and privilege. They also operate as and are sustained by patterns of statements across a range of practices, scientific, medical, legal, political and, of course, cultural: discourses. What I suggest we think of as ‘feminist interventions in art’s histories’ have of necessity, therefore, analysed both the linguistic terms and the discursive patterns that form art and art history to expose the production of a hierarchy of meaning within that specific field and for society as a whole, hierarchies which are also policed and preserved.3 The decisive summing up of the first phase of gender theory in the Anglophone humanities was offered by the American historian Joan Scott in a landmark essay ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’ published in 1986. Scott offers two definitions of gender, related but distinct. Firstly, ‘gender is a constitutive element of

­Gender and terminology: Woman artist/artist who is a woma

social relations based on perceived differences between the sexes’ and, secondly, gender is a ‘primary way of signifying relationships of power’. The critical move here is that differences between the sexes are ‘perceived’, thus social and representational, and not givens. These differences are used to create forms of social relations, that is, distributions of persons according to these differences in relation to systems of power and privilege. The second element makes this asymmetrical hierarchy, based on ‘perceived differences’ between two human groups now made into two by making these differences matter so much, a metaphorical language for any kind of asymmetrical hierarchy of power. Gender is at once a representation of a specific order of power and difference and a generalized way of representing power and difference that runs through language and culture. Scott links the socio‐political changes in power relations to changes in the representations of power, allowing the representations – we might say, the language, the words and the images – to work back on actual power relations while also being shaped by them. Sometimes the representations are of ‘gendered’ figures. At other times gender is signified through abstract or metaphorical hierarchies, such as darkness and light, pollution and cleanness, low and high. Scott concludes with a list of elements relating to these two major definitions. I have selected the second: normative concepts that set forth interpretations of the meanings of the symbols, which attempt to limit and contain their metaphoric possibilities. Scott writes that ‘These concepts are expressed in religious, educational, scientific, legal, and political doctrines and typically take the form of a fixed binary opposition, categorically and unequivocally asserting the meaning of male and female, masculine and feminine.’ As a result any alternative way of thinking is repressed or outlawed from reason.4

­ ender and terminology: Woman artist/artist G who is a woman Let me now consider, by way of example, the linguistic politics of the titles of the early publications produced in German and Anglophone art history. One of the earliest of modern art historical compilations was published, not surprisingly, in Germany, which  was the founding site of academic art history during the nineteenth ­century – Kunstgeschichte, Ernst von Guhl, Die Frauen in die Kunstgeschichte. (Berlin: Verlag von J. Guttentag. 1855). This means Women in the History of Art. He did not call the women artists. The German language has gendered terms for men and women in professions or activities. Kunstler means artist. Kunstlerin means an artist who is a woman. The additional suffix marks difference, which easily becomes, as Guhl’s project indicates more a hierarchy, different but certainly not equal. As a result of this distinction, Kunstler really means an artist who is a man, while being the default position for talking about artists. If a woman is the subject she will be called Kunstlerin. In current German (and other European) feminist circles it is now the custom to create composites of masculine and feminine nouns that insure that at all times the masculine and feminine versions of substantive nouns are used together. Thus both terms and both masculine and feminine pronouns must be always used, for instance L’artiste il/elle… in French. The translation and reworking of Guhl’s book into English was by Elisabeth F. Ellet, Women Artists in All Countries and Ages (London: Richard Bentley, 1859). Ellet has to

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name the artists in her version ‘women artists’, thus adding to the term ‘artist’ the additional adjectival noun ‘women’ in order to indicate their gender specificity. If you have to qualify the term ‘artist’ by any adjective or noun, the effect is to disqualify them from being simply ‘artists’, a term then left to white men without their having to name themselves as white and as men: a specific and selective group. It is here we see most clearly the politics of language. A later book by Ellen C. Clayton is titled English Female Artists 2 vols. (London: Tinsely Brothers, 1876). This adjective, ‘female’, with its nineteenth century resonance, moves us onto a new plane. In the English language, ‘woman’ derives from wifmann to wimman to wumman to woman. Originally, wifmann meant female human since monn or mann signified the generic human. Male human was signified by the term wer. ‘Female’ derives from the diminutive of the Latin femina for woman: feminella, little or young woman. It is unrelated to the origin of the word ‘male’, which comes from the Latin mas, via masculus, Old French masle. One concerns age or stage; the other relates to sexual definition. Usage matters. We might argue that male and female now function in the arena of biological sciences where the specificities of what distinguishes the sexes with regard to reproduction is the key focus and thus maintains the notion that gender difference is a core, sexual, fact. At the level of social and political or cultural discourse, the entities of social being are men and women, the co‐presence of the letters m e n disguising from us the totally different origins and meanings and making wo‐men seem a secondary subset of the primary men. Gender in distinction from sex thus carries the intriguing dimension of the word ‘women’, in its linguistic history, bearing the idea of a gendered ‘human’, to which wer (like the Latin vir) slowly accommodated and then fully colonized identifying humanness itself only with masculinity. This linguistic history is a genealogy of radical cultural, imaginative, political and economic realignments of power. When we thus come to French, the phrasing is les femmes artistes, which functions as a kind of single category again using a noun as qualifier. For their important study of women in art in Paris since 1880 published in 2007, Cathérine Gonnard and Élizabeth Lebovici doubled it to make space for a differencing: femmes artistes/artistes femmes. In their preface, they write and I translate: Woman artist, artist woman or simply artist? Painter or paintress, sculptor or sculptress? The semantic variations are not neutral. Questions of gender that the French language currently poses pretty well define the project of this book. These questions reflect one of the major transformations of the status of the ­artist in the twentieth century as a result of the fact that the position was increasingly opened to women. This translates itself in language as uncertainty, which even those interested in these (feminist) questions have not stabilized, sometimes asserting femininity, sometimes stressing gender indifferentiation … the play between the specific and the universal is thus at the centre of our research into the artistic milieu of twentieth century Paris.5 Gonnard and Lebovici’s book was published just before the massive exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris that gave over the second of the two floors of its exhibition space usually reserved for showing the collection to works all by artists who are women. This problem was dealt with by the curator, Camille Morineau, by titling her installation elles@pompidou. This use of the third person plural feminine pronoun cannot be

­Gendering the artis

translated into English: ‘shes’ does not exist in English, which assimilates all to the neutralizing (masculinizing) ‘they’. This French title asserted the prime issue for the show: all women, thus a womenization of the entire Pompidou collection’s exhibit from the 1960s to the present. When the catalogue was translated into English, the witty intervention was lost with the politically conventional reinstallation of ‘women artists’.6 The most radical assault on the gender politics of a grammatically gendered language such as French was mounted by radical lesbian and materialist feminist writer Monique Wittig, whose feminist work on language may have inflected Morineau’s attempt to make language work for her feminist intervention in the museal space of exhibition curation. In 1969 Wittig wrote a utopian feminist science fiction titled Les Guérillères, translated as the Warrioresses, during the course of which Wittig consistently uses ‘elles’, rarely used in French as the general third person plural pronoun. Lacking this possibility, the English translator undid Wittig’s vital grammatical politics with the word ‘women’ despite the fact that Wittig argued in her other writings that lesbians are not women, since ‘women’ and ‘woman’ are effectively the linguistic signs for those subjected to a heterosexual patriarchal capitalist social and economic system.7 Furthermore, in order to indicate the difficulty of articulating a she‐subject position at radical odds with that system, Wittig would write j/e for the first person pronoun: I. English cannot perform this split, creating a displacing, queering virgule or slash. I does not do the same job of creating this visible gap between the one, the subject and the condition of women or, further, of the lesbian subject as an escapee from the sex‐class system in which ‘women’ are the sexual‐domestic proletariat. Looking back over my own work in the last forty years, I now see how the linguistic terminology of feminist work on art and art histories formed a solid thread in my writing as a feminist and an art historian/writer. The titles of my books have played out a linguistic politics. I do not work on topics, periods, artists, themes typical of existing art historical writing that tends to produce surveys, themed studies or monographs. Each of my titles involves creating concepts with which to think as a feminist about art: Old Mistresses (borrowed from curators Ann Gabhart’s and Elisabeth Broun’s originating US feminist exhibition of that title in 1974 and extended it to mount a critique of art history as ideological discourse); vision and difference, avant‐garde gambits, generations and geographies, differencing the canon, the virtual feminist museum, aesthetic transformation.8 These built a theoretical architecture for my own work while offering ways of thinking by creating a critical vocabulary.

­Gendering the artist How and with what effects or desires do we gender artists? In what terms can we recognize all interlocking axes of difference and domination so that the term ‘women’ in the phrasing women artists does not exclude those who are not the seemingly hegemonic concept of ‘women’, which is de facto, in postcolonial global systems, white, privileged, straight, able‐bodied and gendered. As many African American feminists have argued, their history includes the violating exclusion of black women from the category of ‘women’ (passive, protected, non‐labouring, maternal, etc.) itself when their enslaved ancestors were treated as property without family rights and or any ownership of their own sexual or procreative bodies. Moreover, what happens when we explore the

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transformations and fluidities within and beyond gender, the suspension of the gender binary, the emergent or transformed subjectivities of transgender subjects in relation to designating artists by gender as categories of contestation of exclusion or of representation and identity? Thus if the discourse of dominant art history used gender as a means to establish an all‐male canon of great art, and feminist critique had to counter such gross sexism by asserting that women too were artists of merit, are we locked into a gender binary that limits itself to working with existing notions of gender and also of the identity politics of the artist’s gender? What terms can we use if we focus not on the artist but on the analysis of artistic practices as representation, signification, inscription, transformation, that is the understanding of the field of representation as both signification (the production of meaning through signs) and the renegotiation of meaning through transformative semiotic, material and aesthetic practices that touch on what is repressed in or escapes from dominant meaning systems?9 How do we balance this stress on meaning with the potential for aesthetic and material dimensions of art’s sub‐linguistic effectivity and affectivity? Is there then a tension between the politics of representation and the ­aesthetics of politics?

­Art and/as language Is art, however, anything to do with language? Some might argue that language colonized art under the linguistic turn in the wake of structuralism and conceptualism.10 Another position argues that art is indeed a kind of language, not necessarily verbal, as the semiotic approach in cultural analysis suggests. An extreme proposition is that art is supra‐ or non‐linguistic, hence, metaphorically speaking, it is a universal language any one can ‘read’ or ‘decipher’ because it simply involves visuality and seeing. Countering this view of art’s autonomy and transparency, or the neutrality of vision and hence the gaze, another major argument leads us to consider artistic practices as practices of intertextual representation so that even the marks, signs, gestures, forms and colours through which visual art is made are a kind of grammar already embedded in cultural codes, infused with histories, shaped by interests and ideologies even while turned through the singular imaginations and concerns of each practising artist or ­community of art‐makers. Let me consider the debate about the universal and the particular through one ­example. Consider the abstraction created by the artist Nasreen Mohamedi (1937– 1990), born in Lahore (before Independence and the formation of Pakistan) and dying in Vadodara, India (after Independence) whose work, coming into international view only at the beginning of this century, has been situated in, alongside or in creatively singular conversation with a Western idea of the culturally transcendent language of abstract art. She has been associated with the work of the Canadian‐born American artist Agnes Martin (1912–2004) with whom Nasreen Mohammedi was paired in a supplement to a show, 3 X Abstraction that included Emma Kunz (Switzerland, 1882– 1963) and Hilma af Klint (Sweden, 1862–1944) at the Drawing Center in New York in 2004 and at Documenta 12 (2007). Nasreen Mohamedi studied at St Martin’s School of Art in London in from 1954 to 1957 and again in Paris from 1961 to 1963, referenced and admired Kandinsky and Malevich and thus had access to certain trends in European

­Feminism, language, powe

abstract modernism, while later teaching in Mumbai and Baroda and working closely with leading Indian artists, abstract and figurative, of the twentieth century. Without overt figurative references, both her refined and disciplined engagement with an art of lines and with grids that she dynamically unsettled and moved, and her economic ­formal means and recurring mark‐making processes, might suggest an aesthetic without bonds to ‘generation and geography’. I have named this pair the double axes on which artistic practices in our postcolonial situation can be studied without inflicting geo‐ethnic essentialism or national identity on individual but situated, internationally-attuned artists.11 Generation positions the artist in history/ies, both public and personal. It touches on temporalities and genealogies. Geography locates artistic practices in geopolitical space (home, diaspora, international education or exhibition, as well as political histories of specific countries and regions under the legacies of colonial and imperial distributions of power) without inflicting essentializing notions of nationality or ethnicity. It allows for belonging and displacement, politics and space. In a lecture given on Nasreen Mohamedi in Delhi in January 2009, however, Indian feminist art historian Geeta Kapur drew on German non‐feminist art historian Hans Belting’s exploration of the specificity of the aesthetic legacies of medieval Arab/Islamic mathematics and the European Renaissance to rethink the specificity and singularity of Nasreen Mohamedi’s aesthetic ‘geometry’. Kapur argued this approach rightly demonstrated knowledge of and pleasure in that which every artist and art tradition from anywhere of interest to Mohamedi offered to her as an artist, while, at the same time, renegotiating a specific legacy within Islamic aesthetics in conjunction with the use the artist made of Western modernist possibilities that she also ‘owned’. While requiring detailed readings of changing artworks to arrive at this reading, Kapur’s analysis made it clear that Mohamedi’s processes were distinct from those through which Agnes Martin came to create her contemplative paintings and drawings, even while analogy with the latter functioned as a key to open the door to international recognition of Mohamedi’s work after her early death. Furthermore, at no time could an easy interpretation be made by simply referencing Islamic iconoclastic traditions as a basis of Mohamedi’s choice of abstraction.12 Close reading of generational/historical and geographical/cultural specificity alone ensured that we might see the work of Mohammedi in its multiple levels of conversation with all that enriched her nonetheless situated and specific practice as an artist.13

­Feminism, language, power The next issue is the critical evaluation of the language of feminist studies and feminist historiography themselves. These are not homogeneous or consistent. They have been the sites of several contestations. In a now benchmark analysis of the inadequacy of feminist concepts generated out of the specificities of the class, ethnic and geopolitical privilege that ‘whitened’ dominant feminist discourses, Hazel Carby called upon ‘white women’ to ‘Listen!’ Piercing feminism’s own potentially universalist illusions, Carby insisted that the racial hierarchies between white and black women which were the effects of the enslavement of black people by white people created different targets and afflictions for black and white women. Thus concepts such as oppression through the

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imposition of familial structures and motherhood identified by white women have radically different meanings for enslaved women who had been denied access to their own motherhood and family relations.14 If white women struggled for access to sexual agency, black women struggled against being violently reduced to and identified with sexuality. While race and gender analysis thus meet in agonized relations rather than providing neatly paralleled systems of oppression, where, in the history of struggles, are black lesbian subjects? African American poet Audre Lorde asked this when she wrote of the powerful political slogan: ‘women of the world unite’ using the specific cadences of her poetic writing to open the space of difference. Being women together was not enough. We were different. Being gay‐girls together was not enough. We were different. Being Black together was not enough. We were different. Being Black women together was not enough. We were different. Being Black dykes together was not enough. We were different. … It was a while before we came to realize that our place was the very house of difference rather than the security of any one particular difference.15 At the end of the 1980s, Kimberlé Crenshaw formalized Lorde’s poignant protest into a sociological theory of intersectionality, which was taken up in the 1990s by law professor Patricia Collins. Both stressed not merely adding up race, gender, class, ethnicity or sexuality as vectors of difference between women, with each a parallel strand. Instead, to borrow a feminist metaphor, violence and oppression are plaited together, interlocking oppressions, placing most but not all of us in positions of oppressed and oppressor in relation to others while burdening some positions with relentless pressure from all forces.16 This is vital in feminist studies in art where idealization of heroines can occur when women, who have been narcissistically wounded by the denigration of women’s creativity or its enforced erasure, seek affirmation in ‘great women’ rescued from oblivion or asserted in the present. How does our desire for such reaffirmation in the mirror of art’s histories shape the style of feminist writing? How do the traumatic and unbearable ­histories inflicted on formerly enslaved or colonized peoples or unacknowledged subjectivities and (trans)sexualities determine the need to work through trauma when little idealization is possible?

­Art, feminism, language If feminism meets art, art meets feminism: neither is a subset of the other. Feminism thus needs to guard against being contained, discursively, as a mere addition to art history, a minor revision easily confined to our own conference panels, special interest teaching and partisan readership. The creativity of feminist thought in art and art history arises from the challenge of feminist thought and politics in general, which provide conceptual frameworks and theoretical debates that those of us working as artists or art writers or art historians then conjugate, critically, with the specificity of making, ­representing, reading and writing (in) art and visual culture, a field expanding but not replacing art history’s attention to the specificity of aesthetic practices historically and culturally.

­Art, feminism, languag

Language is, of course, not merely an empty vehicle to be filled with the meanings we think up and wish to communicate. It is not a train carrying what we consciously intend – an idea interrupted at the beginning of the twentieth century by Freud’s psychoanalytical interpretation of dreams, slips of the tongue and jokes. Freud taught us that ‘we are spoken’ by an unconscious we do not control. Freud’s insight links with major revolutions in linguistics which asked: ‘What is language?’ and answered that language is a system of signs producing meanings systemically by means of differences between graphic and acoustic signifiers that are not dictated by reference to the world but to each other. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) – his lectures were published in 1916 – opened the understanding of language as a sign system into cultural analysis: Language is no longer regarded as peripheral to our grasp of the world we live in, but as central to it. Words are not mere vocal labels or communicational adjuncts superimposed upon an already given order of things. They are collective products of social interaction, essential instruments through which human beings constitute and articulate their world. This typically twentieth‐century view of language has profoundly influenced developments throughout the whole range of human sciences. It is particularly marked in linguistics, philosophy, psychology, sociology and anthropology.17 Words are thus potent ways in which dominant social and political systems sustain their hegemony, performing various asymmetrical hierarchies that simultaneously normalize one group and render a subordinated group either invisible or negatively ‘different’. Feminist philosophies and analyses of language identify several key issues: the use of a gender‐neutral but in fact selective term for general statements about humanity such as ‘man’ or ‘he’; the resulting installing of maleness and masculinity as a norm against which ‘others’ become abnormal, deviations, different; the pairing of man and woman such that the latter term has no independent meaning or capacity to signify outside of the pairing as the subordinated term making women qua women invisible; the encoding of a world view associated with privileged men (since the category of men is itself internally divided by class, racialized hierarchies and geopolitical positioning). Language (and by extension representation in general) is infused with and iteratively performs the structures of differentiation and power in ways that not only determine what we can think and say, 18 but also, in effect, create our reality.19 Why does it matter that the he is the one, the human, and the she, is the other? Two reasons can be given amongst the many. The he depends for his supremacy on the constant production of an other – a not‐he – whose negatively valued difference consolidates ‘his’ occupation of the site of the One: the norm as human subject. This plays out in any asymmetrical hierarchy, such as, for instance, the colonial version of power where the colonized person is positioned as what Gayatri Spivak names the self‐consolidating other: the other whose negation confirms the power of the Colonizer as sole subject.20 Thus Gender is to be understood as an index of a social and a historical relation between, and not as an attribute of, persons. This social relation positions its pairs oppositionally in relation to power and material life. In the case of class, this power derives from the entwining of economic and social hierarchies. In the case of gender, the nature of the hierarchies and their effects across social, political, economic but also

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sexual, bodily and psychological dimensions necessitated the emergence of a transdisciplinary politico‐theoretical project to understand the implications of this newly conceptualized relation: gender, to define its bases, and to work out how to ­challenge them. The conversation between emergent feminist theory of gender and established socialist and Marxist social analysis of class was paralleled by an equally vital conversation with those who needed to raise the violence of racialized differentiation to the level of political and theoretical urgency while all three forms of social structuring and experience needed to be thought together, interacting, but differentiated and, at times, agonistic. Women privileged by class, sexual preference and place in a racial hierarchy represent powerful configurations of privilege in relation to those women oppressed in any or all three of these positions. To these massive formations of power, difference and social meaning, the recognition of the field of sexuality and ultimately gender variability and creative indecipherability was also added. The key point is that these words can become enclosed categories: ‘race’, ‘gender’, ‘sexuality’, ‘class’. They are not descriptions of given conditions of human beings or inert categories. They are dynamic social signs. They signify materially lived sets of differential and asymmetrical and intersecting relations. They are thus also loci of experience. They shape consciousness. They become sites of resistance, contestation and conflict. They structure social, political and economic life. They are also produced and negotiated through representation. They are terms in the making of cultural meanings, and thus in the making of the subjects of such meaning: subjectivity.

­Gender as performativity In 1990, gender theory took a turn. Its potency as a term of analysis was recharged by American philosopher Judith Butler’s intervention which drew on speech act theory via British moral philosophy, which focuses on things we do by speaking words such as ‘I promise’. Such utterances are called ‘performatives’. Butler argued that feminist theories of gender, even those that revealed its linguistic constructedness, participated in a deeper structuration of human subjectivity in gendered and sexual terms. Having sought to escape any kind of physiological, anatomical or biological determination of the hierarchy of the sexes by arguing that gender is social, that we are not the males and females of natural history but the men and women of socio‐political history, feminist theory had in fact ‘performed’ another kind of elision, leaving no space for the subjectivity of those whose sexualities did not correspond with the heterosexual normativity of men and women as mutually desiring partners. The language of gender makes no living space for those whose sense of self is not fixed to external bodily determination of their ‘sex’ or translating itself across the frontiers of either gender. For Butler there were also dangers in defensive self‐labelling as lesbian or gay, since the phrasing ‘as a…’ speaks once again the language of fixable identity. Butler thus drew on linguistic philosophy to argue that certain words do things: by saying words, we commit ourselves to become what we have spoken. This is called ‘performativity’ and is not to be confused with performance, play‐acting, putting on, changing roles by choice. In so far as culture offers us the limiting frame of gender language as a modelling of sexual (in)difference within a phallocentric and heterosexual normativity, and in so far as we

­Sexual differenc

have to avow our gender in the use of pronouns or words (mother, wife, sister, daughter, girl, woman, she…) we are imprisoned in a ceaseless iteration this ordering into gender. It is not a matter of finding other labels. Against this depressing realization of the power of language to make some lives unspeakable and unliveable, the concept of queering emerges to complement the post‐structuralist differencing and the psychoanalytical arguments of the inherent fallibility of the ceaseless negotiability of sexed subjectivity. Applying to gender performative possibilities of language (its opposite is constative, merely stating things), Butler reminded us of our tragic subjection to coded language and pointed to a space of revolt and renegotiation working through queered disobedience. This is not about sexual subjects with non‐heterosexual identities. In one sense the call for queering language goes out to all because not to unsettle it forces melancholy – a perpetual mourning – on many subjects. Butler’s ideas were in part already adumbrated by lesbian film theorist Teresa de Lauretis, writing on experience and semiotics in film studies, when she posited gender as itself both the effects of representations made to us and of the self‐representations we make of ourselves by absorbing but also reworking what is given in our cultures. She indicated a space of work/reworking not outside of culture, but already in its ‘spaces off ’, outside the dominant frame.21 Both Butler and de Lauretis make us ask: what is the object of feminist analysis of culture, representation, meaning? Is our object women? Is/ are woman/women already an occupied term? The drive of feminist theory is towards making, creating, revolting. De Lauretis suggests that we are in the process of imagining a new subject. She names this the subject of feminism. Not a coherent or homogeneous subject, the subject of feminism is rather a position for making change and a position that represents change. ‘The movement in and out of gender as ideological representation, which I propose characterizes the subject of feminism, is a movement back and forth between the representation of gender (in its male‐centred frame) and what that representation leaves out or, more pointedly, makes unrepresentable.’ She continues: ‘[The] other spaces both discursive and social that exist, since feminist practices have (re‐)constructed them in the margins, (or between the lines, or against the grain) of hegemonic discourses … co‐exist concurrently [with] and in contradiction [to]… the tension of contradiction, multiplicity and heteronomy.’22

­Sexual difference Feminist theory does not propose a hierarchy between gender, race and class. But what it does offer by theorizing gender and, indeed, ‘sexual difference’ as a further concept is a means to recognize a relay between real social relations and the metaphors created for such hierarchical relations of gender and other sites of socio‐cultural hierarchies. The imaginative power of the asymmetry of gender hierarchy lends its terms to the representation and hence the experience of racialized and social hierarchies. So we need to take seriously what feminist theories of sexual difference offer across these fields. The theory of sexual difference argues that man and woman are thus not given entities. They signify psycho‐sexual and psycho‐linguistic positions that are ceaselessly produced in an asymmetrical hierarchy whose effect affirms the masculine position as the one, the human, the norm. Conceiving humanity only as the one human subject and his negative other denies what Belgian philosopher Luce Irigaray argues is the key issue

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with which we need to grapple because it has yet to be thought: twoness. Twoness is not the difference between the sexes (man/woman, masculine/feminine as if they are some kind of nature pairing), an idea which serves to prop up what is, in fact, a lack of recognition of sexual difference. If we talk of woman/the feminine being different from man/ the masculine, we maintain the linguistic distinction ‘a and not‐a’: this is in fact a form of indifference. There is the one and the not‐one, leaving that second position, the feminine, only negatively defined and in effect without any significance except its structural role as not‐ness. For Irigaray, sexual difference is difference, and that would mean grasping the idea of the co‐existence and equal value of at least two. This is a challenging thought, since the notion of difference is so bound up with the metaphors derived from the perceived differences between the sexes, in which their sexual bodies are presented as having/not‐having. The relatively slight bodily differentiations relating to the genesis of children (which, it is important to remember, is different from sexual pleasure since women’s sexual pleasure is associated with the clitoris and, unlike masculine sexuality associated with the penis, is unrelated to the processes of reproduction) has been produced as the ‘natural’ foundation for depriving women of rights in their own bodies and minds, for the use of violence against them, for depriving them of education and access to economic autonomy. To counter the systematic use of sexual indifference to hierarchically order the relations of masculinity and femininity, Irigaray proposes a novel feminist ontology – the theory of being – based on twoness. Replacing the one by the two of sexual difference thus constitutes a decisive philosophical and political gesture, one which gives up a singular or plural being [l’être un ou pluriel] in order to become a dual being [l’être deux]. This is the necessary foundation for a new ontology, a new ethics, and a new politics, in which the other is recognized as other and not as the same: bigger or smaller than I, or at best, my equal.23 Some queer‐gender theorist feminists are uncomfortable with Irigaray’s focus on the necessity for philosophy to ‘think’ sexual difference, which Irigaray opposes to reaffirming hierarchy through the modelling of one sex and his other. They denounce Irigaray’s ideas as implicitly heterosexualizing, making the sexual pair man and woman the core terms of philosophical thinking and social practice. Philosophers Pheng Cheah and Elizabeth Grosz offer a different reading of Irigarayan sexual difference. It is not the difference between the heterosexual couple. Instead, we are being asked to think anew about the interesting fact about human beings (whatever the sexualities and, indeed, mobility of their gender positions). There are two – not derived from anatomy of biology, but lived as a complex result of being embodied conscious, sensate, sexual, imagining and thinking subjects. At whatever level we position this question, thinking two‐ness and beyond, as opposed to remaining confined in the phallocentric logic of one and its negative other (with that other obliged to mirror its own emptiness so as to guarantee the sole fullness of the One), opens up avenues for challenging all the oppressive, binary structures against which we struggle: structures that impose hierarchy, asymmetry, relative valuation, silence, invisibility for what is not consistent with the norm that occupies the place of the One (and only). It addresses thinking about coloniality and race, about sexuality and gender variability, about self and other, about human and non‐human life

­Sexual differenc

forms. Thus Irigaray relates the hierarchy of phallocentric sexual indifference (she is situated in a psychoanalytical‐philosophical tradition) to the violation not merely of women but of all that has been placed, through language, in the category of the other to be used by the one: life, the planet that sustains us, the environment, all of which is denied its own vitality through the phallocentric (the rule of the one, the phallus as signifier of that logic of one and its negative other). Pheng and Grosz explain: According to Irigaray, the violent logic of the one that leads to the establishment of patriarchy and the repression of sexual difference is historically coextensive with the human subject’s disavowal of his indebtedness to nature and his loss of respect for the nature in himself. She argues that the identification of the mother with nature; the reduction of childbearing to a function of the genealogy of the husband/father; and the alienation of the daughter from her mother as a result of the sundering of woman’s genealogy occur alongside the replacement of a cosmological view of nature as fertile, life‐giving earth with an instrumentalist view of nature as brute matter to be conquered and transcended by the human subject and shaped in accordance with the human will.24 Elegantly showing the links between capitalism’s relentless brutality with colonial exploitation and enslavement through the structural prism established by the non‐existence of women as difference but merely muted other to the one, Irigaray also argues that women are thus alienated from ‘woman’s genealogy’ through a degrading of the mother that sunders the daughter from the mother (or binds her to repetition) as a constituting other for her sexual difference. Such philosophical arguments, however contested, are invaluable for thinking about what a feminist intervention in art’s histories might achieve. It is much more than a recovering of lost names and hidden heritages for a system that still thinks indifferently while practising violent forms of oppressive difference. That latter term, created by Eleanor Tufts for her important early recovery work, gets a little closer to the idea of a genealogy of women’s cultural participation and contributions that take creativity and link it to a symbolic, to a metaphorical level, the level of cultural transmission.25 Feminist work in art’s histories has been caught between asserting the historical presence of women as artists in ways that might make their work re‐assimilable to the existing stories of art, and on the other hand plotting out a different history of women as artists that risks linking diverse people through a shared ‘gender’ irrespective of their sexualities, ethnicities, geo‐politics etc. Could women have had any language that articulated their difference if they were forced to inhabit phallocentric imaginaries and symbolic systems? Is our project to read for ‘difference’ often unknowingly implanted in the phallocentric territory of dominant culture? What would that difference look like, if even we who look for it as feminists cannot exist outside of the present symbolic systems? Can any of us know what sexual difference might be? By positing a woman’s genealogy, Irigaray is not imagining an already given ‘women’s (art) history’ but suggesting both its potential to have been traced, illegibly or unconsciously, ‘against the grain’ into culture for us to find means of reading it, and the necessity for us to create it, as a way of creating the space for sexual difference. This project at once aesthetic‐creative and art historical‐discursive has implications for the ‘daughter’ – not the child of a mother but the figure of the feminine subject entering the world, a figure of a future in the making.

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In myth, the daughter represents the new in the space of the feminine as making newness: she is a figure of the new woman, in necessary genealogical but not patriarchal or proletarianized familial relation to the degraded mother. The mother of myth is not the biological generator but the symbolic feminine other through which a daughter‐woman could thus imagine herself not as the ‘lacking’ girl of phallocentric culture, whose lack consolidates and threatens the masculine. Thinking in this way the other maternal‐ feminine signifies a hospitality to newness, a space for the unexpected, in contrast to the patriarchal system that inflicts on women merely repetition and subjection to patrilinear descent. The patriarchal model of transmission is familial, or rather Oedipal, the mythic core of the phallocentric legend: father to son, never mother to daughter. This father–son narrative is enshrined in and has become the patrimonial and national histories of art in most cultures. But if ‘woman’ is reduced to and psychologically shaped as only the term (and the real) space of what is not‐man, having little access to the goods of the world, material or symbolic, what has she to pass on to her daughter? Why would the daughter want to be like her? Why would she desire knowledge of art made by her – by women? Why would there be feminist art historians seeking for knowledge of what women have created? The patriarchal silencing and the erasure of those women who consistently have broken the silence, made art, written poetry, created new thought, is not haphazard. It is both systematic and structural. It is vital to grasp that the discourse of art history did not forget or omit women; there are records of women across the annals of art’s histories. It was only in the twentieth century that modern art history forming as a discipline in universities and museums actively erased women as artists even as that century witnessed more women enabled by modernity to access its means and to co‐create modernism. This counter‐intuitive idea was one of the most important discoveries Rozsika Parker and I made when researching and writing Old Mistresses in the late 1970s.26 The conventional wisdom then was that progress against age‐old discrimination was being gradually made and that, as we moved into the enlightened twentieth century, things must surely be getting better. We were able to trace a consistent recording of women as artists, sometimes inflected with prejudice or ideology, right into the first decade of the twentieth century, culminating in major encyclopaedias of women in art. The radical change towards a virtual absenting of women from the record occurred just at the point of women’s maximum participation and modernist ambition. It is modernist art history that after 1930 actively erased women and rendered the historical field a created blank so that early feminist projects in the 1970s were forced into the recovery of hidden heritages, recovery that was of course only possible because of the existence of preceding documentation and evidence. Why do we need this knowledge of what women have done as artists over time and in our own time? It is more than an issue of historical accuracy. If everyone comes to know what all women have done, said, made, built and dreamed, in all their variety, a ‘she’ can imagine herself in relation to the she‐them, no longer represented as degraded mothers in the patriarchy, the lacking bodies/minds in the phallocentric system but as hospitable, generative, even agonistic and different others to her own kind of self, and to the many selves ‘in the feminine’ (as the feminist psychoanalytical‐philosophical community would say). Irigaray’s non‐spontaneously decipherable concept of sexual difference thus offers ‘twoness’ as a thinking machine. It thereby enhances creative relations between women

­Feminism:

What does this term mean

different from each other, and articulates a capacity to situate oneself in a time‐space of different differences that do not homogenize all women under one geopolitical, social or sexual women’s ‘woman’. We do not need to be afraid of the dreaded curse of ‘essentialism’  –  namely that by positing the idea of woman or women we will all become lumped into one categorical basket: all women artists express a shared womanhood, for instance, or share a feminine aesthetic. This is another of the phallocentric devices of devaluation adopted even by anxious feminists. By positing difference – and not women as merely otherness to the masculine one – the entire complexity of work and thought past and future from that difference we name non‐categorically ‘the feminine’ opens up like a vast vista for research. We do not yet know what it is, and it will not confine ­anyone to a sexuality or a gender. It is the means to imagine the specificity of a sexual difference that does not leave us stranded between equality discourses – women’s life gets better if women get more like certain men – or collective discourses – women are categorically different from men. Who knows what we are or have been without closely reading what different and hence singular women have inscribed or are inscribing into culture from this unexhausted virtuality of their difference from which they have been estranged but which, through aesthetic inscription and its histories, may have been traced into the text of art over history? Thus by means of language we are also able to intervene and interrupt this constant work of installing hierarchies and repressions. We are not trapped in language. We can use its sociality and its politics to effect transformations and explore the possibilities of creating meanings that connect the existing systems. This requires creative, poetic and critical interventions, which lead us back to practices in art that knowingly or unconsciously engage in breaching the limits of existing representation.

­Feminism: What does this term mean? Feminism too has a history. First recorded in French from about 1837, and coined by Utopian socialist thinker Charles Fourier, féminisme derives from the Latin word femina for ‘woman’. The term appears in an English dictionary in 1851. The definition is ‘the state of being feminine’. Feminist is thus a synonym for feminine, but with a certain ambiguity the twentieth century thinkers and artists would tease out. Is being feminine the alignment with conventional and imposed notions of what is considered by man‐ dominated culture proper to a woman? Is being feminine an assertion of the special values or singularities of feminine sexual difference? While it seems simple enough that there should be a noun or an adjective for the ‘state of being feminine’, its very existence indicates that being feminine is a state, but also one susceptible to the need for assertion through having a term for it. A small gap opens between ‘being’ and ‘being in a state of…’. It indicates the beginning of a political space in which the condition of women, or the state in which women are placed, might be critically considered as an object of social thought and political change. By 1895, however, this slightly uncertain but seemingly tautologous term had a very different meaning: ‘feminism’ had come to mean ‘the advocacy of women’s rights’. Between the coining of the word and its new currency lie two major events. The first is a worldwide movement of women who ‘become’ the political and social collectivity: the collective category of women through the political gestures of resistance to the

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status quo and through demanding ‘rights’ in terms of a new political identity: ‘women’. The moment that the eighteenth century revolutionary thinkers asserted against feudal and monarchical absolutism the notion of the Rights of Man, and the question was posed, ‘Does this include Woman?’, women had entered the political arena of modernity. Coinciding with the very radical moment of asserting that all persons have rights in themselves to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ (the United States of America’s constitution’s version) or to ‘life, liberty and property’ (the French revolutionaries’ formulation), the question of Man as men and Man as capable of allowing for internal gender differentiation and inclusiveness was on the table. Political feminism is the result and articulation of that modern question. Thus a hitherto non‐political ‘state of being a woman’ bursts forth as a political collectivity imagining, and linguistically creating, a transversal and vertical subject of political consciousness: women.27 I cannot stress enough the radicality of this and its continuing significance for feminist thought and culture. Women are called forth by what we say and do. They (we) are not the given source. As Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) called for the Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), she declared war on what her contemporary women had become through imposed conventions and the lack of education: silly, narcissistic, sentimental, trivially sexual. Thus it was not in the name of her sex as such that Wollstonecraft wrote. It was to create women in the image of the Man (not men) to which the political project of the struggle for rights was being propounded at this revolutionary moment of political modernity. As industrialization of labour affected all who worked and changed the conditions of life, it impacted the newly formed working women as much as men, similarly and differently. Yet the discourse of class as it emerged spoke only to men’s experience of deskilling or new modes of industrial labour. Equally, the new bourgeoisie talked a language of rights, freedom, autonomy, self‐making, progress – all based on access to education and the development of reason – while enacting a particularly divisive and gendered concept of their core institution, the family, that actively excluded women from all of those rights. At this same time, some peoples from African nations had been subjected to the most radical erasure of even the basic right to humanness through the barbarity of chattel enslavement. Out of the different revolts of working women, of women of the bourgeoisie, of women who had been enslaved, all drawing on the new language that had led to massive political change from fixed, feudal or aristocratic hierarchy  –  namely the discourse of rights – ‘women’ emerged onto the political stage as a political identity, already fissured but also already articulating something profound in the notion of their collectivity that would be fractured inevitably by difference and power inequalities even while it proclaimed an imaginary and necessary fiction of potential solidarity. Thus feminism does not stand for the ‘beliefs’ or ideologies of just some women. It marks the historic event of the becoming of women initially as contestants for citizenship and full humanity, for participation in the world in a self‐naming whose content had to be made anew. This is how we can understand the significance of belated, but historical, emergence of feminism in culture, in literature, art, music and other cultural sites of what feminist cultural theory names as representation (punning on the term for political participation), and inscription.28 Beyond the political claim lay the work of imagining and effecting the radically new. The worldwide women’s movements can be seen to erupt wherever a modernizing process begins to offer this new vocabulary, in whatever fashion. Women are awakened to possibilities within which they then had to create new words and images to articulate

­Feminism:

What does this term mean

their specific claims. Thus the gap between Fourier and the meaning of feminism as a struggle to advocate women’s rights is the existence of a movement of those becoming ‘women’ in this new sense. The second element within this gap goes beyond the struggle for women’s rights, which, of course, only became a struggle because the demand for the right to be persons was contested by those who, in this struggle, were being made as ‘men’: not the universal Man, but a gender‐class who, having certain rights, had refused those rights to their sisters and to all who were now women in their negative otherness to men. In this resistance, the politics of feminism was divided. A militant movement emerged with an analysis of the situation completely different from those who campaigned for the outward signs of acknowledgement of personhood: the right to vote. The militants, named suffragettes in a typically sexist battle of words waged against ‘women’, perceived a much deeper, more structural issue. In her study of the relation between this militant moment of British feminist politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when women took on the British state and modernist aesthetics, literary theorist Ewa Płonowska Ziarek identifies their radicalism in the following move. Instead of demanding the right to vote, the militant feminists argued for the right to revolt. This expresses a discontent with the world as is, and a claim for the radical right to world‐making anew, to thinking the unforeseen and as yet unknown. Far from merely seeking to be integrated in the bourgeois state, nation or political sphere as is, the militants demanded more: ‘On the contrary, the redefinition of women’s right to vote as the right to revolt announces women’s participation – in their novel socio‐political and intellectual identity as women I would add – in a transformative, creative praxis, its inaugural temporality, and the plurality of political agents.’29 Ziarek finally explains that the very nature of this feminist right to revolt is at once premised on the becoming of women as political subjects and the transcending of the politics of gender as its passage out of the figurations of femininity imposed on ‘women’ and blocking the vision of other kinds of subjectivities and sexualities: The configuration of revolutionary freedom as an intersubjective, relational political agency to create new political structures with others  –  to enact the ‘birth’ of a new world  –  is even more shocking and unprecedented when it claimed by femininity, which is associated in Western modernity with either reproductive necessity or commodified objects of sexual exchange, in the private sphere or with consumerism, labor or philanthropy in the public sphere, but never with political agency or revolutionary praxis. Because such agency is ­relational, created through and for action, it does not require or presuppose a common gender identity.30 (Emphasis added.) Grasping the most revolutionary force of feminism as the right to revolt, which means the ambition to make something new, to imagine, think and create the unforeseen, the unknown to women themselves, we will not confuse various ways in which modern capitalist and bourgeois societies have tried to accommodate themselves to the novelty of women as persons by expanding the labour market and its upper echelons without yielding real power, or by granting some forms of sexual freedom, if only to make sexual exploitation easier and commodification (self‐commodification and sexualization) the false signs of being a liberated woman.

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Words can change and open new vistas; they can also be abused to confuse us as to what has been gained. It is vital not to confuse seeming advances of some women into a world of obligatory work and thus overwork, over‐sexualization and lack of lifestyle choice with the vision of remaking the world and genuine freedom of choice and diversity for all. By discussing feminism and language, I have in effect made a case for the intimacy between feminism and thought. Rather than posing philosophy as a master discourse to which art might be subjected, I have written from the premise that art is itself a form of thought, a thinking through making. We do not impose words on it, but allow a passage from what is thought through varied forms of artistic practice into the wider debates by which we can understand feminism as more than a series of local disturbances caused by uppity women in this field or that. Feminism enacts the ‘pathos of the new’. Ziarek invokes ‘pathos of the absolutely new’ from the work of political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906–1974) who, writing on the cusp of civil rights, decolonization, students’ and women’s movements of the 1960s, stated: ‘only where this pathos of novelty is present and where novelty is connected with the idea of freedom are we entitled to speak of revolution.’31 For the radicality of feminism to be thus grasped as it encounters art, and as art is transformed by the encounter with the feminist movement in life and thought, both feminism and art have to work as thought‐systems embedded in lives and worlds, whose complexity we are using language to articulate, to analyse and poetically to uncover and share. If I started by saying language is an issue for feminism, I wish to conclude by affirming how feminism moves through language, unstopping patriarchal blockages and lifting the silencing of phallocentric logic, imaging the feminism that is still to come and which we can learn to know both by re‐reading the multiple histories of art through its lenses and sustaining aesthetic creativity now.

Notes 1 W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1994).

2 Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s

Histories (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). Differencing is a neologism drawing on Derrida’s work on différance, a spelling of the French word which combines the notions of differ and defer and points thus to the instability of language at the point at which it seeks to establish opposition as the basic unit of meaning production. Thus ‘differencing the canon’ resists allowing women artists to become the supplement to the canonical, leaving that hierarchy in place; it reveals the constant work of producing the oppositional pairs, and undoes the fixity of any subject or gender position showing art to be constantly working in the play of difference and deferral. 3 In 1988, I proposed the phrase feminist intervention in histories of art in order to avoid the dangers of merely adding ‘feminist’ as an adjective to art history. Looking like a mere adjectival inflection, adding feminist to art history would effectively define feminism as a merely supplementary ‘approach’ rather than a fundamental challenge to art history’s core discursive strategies and ideological effects. Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988; Classic Edition, 2002).

Notes

4 Joan W. Scott, ‘Gender: A useful category of historical analysis.’ The American

Historical Review, vol. 91, no. 5. (December 1986), 1053–1075, 1067–1068.

5 Catherine Gonnard and Élizabeth Lebovici, Femmes artistes/artistes femmes: Paris, de

1880 à nos jours (Paris: Editions Hazan, 2007), 6.

6 Camille Morineau (ed.), elles@centrepompidou: femmes artistes dans la collection national

du Centre Pompidou (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2009). The show travelled to Seattle in 2012. They titled their show Elles: Women Artists from the Centre Pompidou. The Paris version presented 130 works by 75 artists; a smaller exhibition was shown in Seattle. 7 Monique Wittig, ‘One is not born a woman.’ In Henry Abelove et al., The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 103–109. 8 Ann Gabhart and Elizabeth Broun, Old Mistresses, special issue of the Walters Art Gallery Bulletin, 24:7 (1972) ‘The title of this exhibition alludes to the unspoken assumption that art is created by men. The reverential term, “Old Master”, has no meaningful equivalent; when cast in its feminine form “Old Mistress”, the connotation is altogether different, to say the least.’ 9 One of the critical phases of work in feminist aesthetic theory concerns the analysis of the semiotic structures and their transformation because there is always something in excess of the dominant order of meanings. Literary theorist Julia Kristeva identified as ‘feminine’ this excess, this untapped resource that certain creative art practices such as dance, music, poetry and art can tap into and introduce as ‘revolutionary’ forces in the field of meanings and subjectivities shaped by such systems of meaning. See Julia Kristeva, ‘The system and the speaking subject.’ In: Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 23–33. 10 By not accepting this was a turn, and arguing it was a historical event in Western thought taken up and transformed worldwide, we cannot pretend it never happened and revert to a pre‐semiotic understanding of meaning‐making. Yet we must critically assess any new theoretical hegemony as feminist analysis unfolds hitherto ignored areas. 11 Griselda Pollock (ed.), Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Perspectives (London: Routledge, 1995). 12 Geeta Kapur kindly gave me access to an unpublished lecture relating to the presence of Nasreen Mohamedi at Documenta 12 in 2007. 13 Another example serves at least to raise the question of geo‐culturally specific ways of thinking and inflecting artistic practices or even the uses of technologies. The contemporary Taiwanese artist Hsu Hsian‐Hui works with new technologies. Playing with the idea of the digital camera as a prosthesis for human perception rather than a technological machinic other, Hsu is equally exploring the ways in which her Mandarin character‐formed wordscape intersects with Latin and Greek derived terms for mind, brain, memory and imagination. Language inflects the ways in which she understands the concepts she encounters in her theoretical research in Europe which are articulated in English or French or German. The question working at the level of her making arises: ‘Is character‐thinking potentially creatively distinct from alphabetic, Latin and Anglo‐ Saxon thinking as it frames and linguistically explains artistic effects and researches?’ Hsu Hsian‐Hui, The Digital Prosthesis: Between Perception, Representation and Imagination (PhD, University of Leeds, 2015). 14 Hazel Carby, ‘White women listen! Black feminism and the boundaries of sisterhood.’ In: Heidi Safia Mirza (ed.), Black British Feminism: A Reader (London Routledge, 1997), 45–53.

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15 Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Trumansberg, NY: Crossing Press,

1982), 226.

16 Kimberlé Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist

17 18

19

20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28

critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politic.’ In: Reitumetse Obakeng Mabokela and Anna L. Green (eds), Sisters of the Academy: Emergent Black Women Scholars in Higher Education (Sterling, Virginia: Stylus Pub, 2001), 57–80. Roy Harris, Language, Saussure and Wittgenstein (London: Routledge, 1988), p. ix. The strongest account of this is provided by Teresa de Lauretis in Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1987). Deborah Cameron, Feminism and Linguistic Theory (Basingstoke and London: MacMillan, 1985), Verbal Hygiene (London: Routledge, 1995),The Feminist Critique of Language (London and New York: Routledge, 1998); Dale Spender, Man Made Language (New York: Routledge, 1985). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘History.’ In: A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). This chapter includes her most influential text on ‘The Rani of Sirmur’. Deeply relevant for feminist art history, it traces the shadow of an irrecuperable historical woman through the archives of colonialism while explaining how colonial discourse ‘worlded’ what then became British India producing the representation of that space that then mirrored back to its inhabitants their function as the other to consolidate the thus‐ created imperial master. Teresa de Lauretis, ‘Semiotics and experience.’ In: Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1984), 158–186. Teresa de Lauretis, ‘The technology of gender.’ In: Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1987), 26. Luce Irigaray, ‘The question of the other.’ Noah Guynn (trans.), Yale French Studies, 87 (1995): 7–19, 19). Pheng Cheah and Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Of being‐two: Introduction.’ Diacritics, 28(1): Irigaray and the Political Future of Sexual Difference (Spring, 1998), 2–18. Eleanor Tufts, Our Hidden Heritage: Five Centuries of Women Artists (Paddington Press, 1974). Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (London, I.B. Tauris, 2013). Women as a political category promises a potential alliance across all peoples, while at the same time, they are themselves inserted into hierarchies, classes, ethnicities. Thus the notion that we can think race, class, gender as discrete forms of social experience and power relations is challenged as vertical power relations fracture the collectivity of women while the potential for challenging the specificity of gender oppression relies on the invocation of a transversal collectivity whose potential is to make visible at the same time the multiple wounds inflicted on subjects through racialized and socio‐economic and sexual oppression. For a brilliant analysis of the issue of political and artistic representation see Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907–14 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1987), notably her chapter on representation, 149–226.

Notes

29 Ewa Płonowska Ziarek, Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism (New York:

Columbia University Press, 2012), 24.

30 Ziarek, Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism, 25. 31 Cited in Ziarek, Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism, 24; Hannah Arendt,

On Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 34.

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Busy Hands, Light Work: Toward a Feminist Historiography of Hand‐Made Photography in the Era of the ‘New Materiality’ Harriet Riches It is perhaps ironic when writing an essay on lens‐based media to focus instead on the contemporary trend for making photographs in which the lens is of little importance, if any at all. With the popularisation of digital technology, in what has been described as the ‘post‐photographic era’ it is not only the assumed veracity of the photographic image that seems to have disappeared once and for all, but other elements of the ­apparatus itself: cameras, lenses, processing and the reassuring solidity of the three‐ dimensional print as object to be held, shared, collected.1 Photography is dead, we are told, killed off by digitalisation. But, as Joanna Sassoon suggests, with the ‘tactility and materiality of the original object being reduced to both an ephemeral and ethereal state’, the question of the photograph’s ontology has come under renewed question.2 Emerging in photographic practices over the past two decades as a renewed concern for the physicality, presence and objecthood of the photograph in both its analogue and digital forms, a contemporary trend has crystallised around a shared exploration of photography’s ‘new materiality’.3 Encompassing myriad photographic methods, print technologies and materials, this trend has taken divergent forms. In some practices, a renewed focus on the materiality of the support foregrounds a self‐referential reflection on the structural processes of the image’s own making rather than any representational depiction – a focus that recalls the photo‐conceptualism of the 1970s, and the precedence of artists such as John Hilliard.4 The essential material action of light on the sensitive emulsion‐coated paper or film is central to the lens‐less photograms being produced in practices as diverse as the watery washes of Susan Derges, tracing the light filtering through the river’s ebb and flow; Wolfgang Tillman’s vivid, sculptural folded paper fields of colour; or the ephemeral light‐filled ghosts of Adam Fuss. For others it is the fragility of the photographic surface that is put under pressure, seen in the fractured and flaking surfaces of Catherine Yass’s damaged transparencies. That attention to surface is further heightened in the h ­ and‐ punched lacunae that Alike Braine crunches into her photographs ‘to make its materiality felt and understood’ through the blackened holes and rough edges she creates; while it is the chance element of analogue photography’s chemistry that Steffi Klenz exploits to attack and break down its own emulsions.5 Representative of a ‘moment’ rather than a ‘movement’, for photo historian Geoffrey Batchen the success or otherwise of these post‐photographic practices can be measured by the extent to which they do – or do not – ‘reflect on the “objectness” of the photograph’ A Companion to Feminist Art, First Edition. Edited by Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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itself.6 Suggestive of a return to a modernist pursuit of medium specificity in which photography’s status as the most realist medium intimately connected to mass media and the language of the everyday is somewhat overlooked, such analysis threatens to isolate the medium within its own space of self‐reflexivity. This reductive interpretation of photography’s contemporary concerns is perhaps indicative of the anxious state of photographic discourse itself – a discourse that is unable, or unwilling – to account for the fact that, rather than being ‘dead’, the everyday production, circulation and manipulation of photographic images in vernacular, popular and commercial contexts has never been more alive. It is this anxiety that this essay addresses by examining some of the neglected implications of this material turn, particularly the close relationship between constructions of photography, materiality and femininity, both past and present. By addressing the so‐ called new materiality through a focus on the hand‐made picture, and taking as my examples a series of practices by women in which photographs are manipulated with needle and thread, I wish to re‐forge severed connections to a photographic tradition that has been ignored and devalued. At the same time, by considering the ways in which the forgotten presence of women’s crafts, women’s work  –  and thus women’s hands – haunt the discursive production of photography today, I pose the possibility that the metaphorical feminisation of the medium at various points in its history are symptomatic of a medium in flux – its gender identity fluctuating at those key moments in which the question of what photography is has been open to debate.

­The fabric of Photography It has always fascinated me that one of the earliest pioneers of photography was a woman whose experimentation with light‐sensitive gold salts created what were effectively photographic images on cloth.7 Although no examples of these fabric ‘photographs’ have ever been found, Elizabeth Fulhame’s discoveries were remembered through the 1794 publication of her book With a View to a New Art of Dying and Painting. With her words feeding into the experiments of later photographic chemists such as John Herschel in the following century, Fulhame’s contribution has earned her a nomination as perhaps the earliest of those ‘proto‐photographers’ whose knowledge of photo‐chemical processes preceded the invention of the medium as we know it.8 Throughout the nineteenth century, the photograph was considered a product of its materials, with each new form’s specific appeal closely related to its chemistry or substrate – to the papery fuzz of the calotype, to the daguerreotype’s mercurial surface as it was held up to the light or the textural pigmented layers of the gum bichromate print. The making of the photographic print was important as the taking of the image with the camera: it was a form of printmaking until George Eastman’s commercialisation of the dry‐plate process enabled the development of roll‐film and the industrial outsourcing of print production to Kodak factories in the 1890s and beyond. And while at this time Alfred Stieglitz and the Pictorialists attempted to elevate photography to the status of high art through the cultivation of the painterly tones of the gum print as it traced the impression of the all‐important ‘artist’s hand’ in its making, that recourse to another medium of representation was ultimately jettisoned. After Paul Strand’s proto‐modernist declaration that the photographer should instead pursue the medium’s own ‘purity’ of

­Soft processes and pastel hues: Photography and printmakin

use, exploiting its ‘intensity of vision … without tricks of process or manipulation, through the use of straight photographic methods’, there was no turning back.9 Photography as a form of hand printmaking was lost to the modernist adoption of the ‘straight up’ silver gelatin photography that dominated the twentieth century, privileging the crystalline vision of photography that Walter Benjamin saw had ‘freed the hand’, devolving artistic functions ‘upon the eye looking into a lens’.10 In that shift from hand to eye, the gender associations of touch and vision are not insignificant. Women were active in the making of photography right from the start: pioneer Anna Atkins’ album of hand‐made botanical cyanotype impressions British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions pre‐dated William Henry Fox Talbot’s book The Pencil of Nature by a year. Each of her unique camera‐less prints traced the touch of her hand in their exposure, the varying pressure of her touch. As photography became industrialised from the mid‐1850s, working women took up the arduous manual labour of cracking eggs for albumen prints, hand‐coating photographic papers and hand‐colouring and retouching prints. At the same time, for aristocratic women photography became acceptable as another genteel ladies’ domestic pastime, and women took up photography eagerly as a craft‐like practice that often refused easy categorisation. But the importance of that hand‐making is perhaps most evident in women’s albums, in which women such as Mary Georgina Filmer (in the 1860s) and Kate Edith Gough (in the 1870s) were not producers behind the lens, but picture editors, arranging family and society portraits within the pages of their albums to create narratives of domestic life. In her study, Patrizia di Bello argues that, by using mixed‐media techniques to create hybrid objects that combined photographic image with hand‐made effects, the albums were subsequently seen as old‐fashioned, employing redundant hand‐crafts rendered o ­ bsolete by machine production to over‐decorate a technologically advanced medium.11 As di Bello points out, dismissed by photographic historian Beaumont Newhall as ‘charming’ but little more, their close associations with feminine pastimes and the feminised spaces of the home served to distance women’s albums from the historical accounts of the medium of modernity.12 What is more, they were ‘feminised by being touched, interfered with, and manipulated by techniques associated with feminine skills and visual literacy.’13 This feminised construction of photography had no place in the histories of the medium as they emerged in the twentieth century: histories in which the privileging of the camera’s capacity for rationality, veracity and objective vision over the print’s production through hand‐making contributed to a masculinised discourse in which the photograph as a material object could find no place – and all but disappeared.

­ oft processes and pastel hues: Photography and S printmaking In fact, so widespread was the adoption of the straight, silver gelatin print in the twentieth century, other photographic process came to be seen as experimental, and faddy. Many non‐silver processes became obsolete, forgotten until the late 1960s when some artists began to find new interest in the medium’s earliest practices. Information was hard to come by, but amateurs and professionals grouped together to produce manuals and ‘howto’ guides to what became known as ‘alternative photography’ – alternative, that is, to the market‐leading products that dominated the ‘Kodakification’ of the mainstream.14

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It was within this alternative undercurrent that women made an important contribution to the era’s experiments, one that has been overlooked. Women were active in developing and disseminating information about these re‐found processes through publications such as Bea Nettles’ Breaking the Rules: A Photo‐Media Cookbook (Inky Press) published in 1977. Nettles had already begun to break those rules as a student at the end of the 1960s, combining photographic processes old and new, experimenting with both the gum bichromate printing process beloved of turn‐of‐the‐century Pictorialists at the same time as making use of the contemporary ‘Kwikprint’ bichromate papers of her own era. Their shared painterly effects suited Nettles’ approach, combining them with painting and hand‐stitching to produce hand‐made photographic books that overlaid images with fragments of autobiography. There is an explicit connection to the traditions of women’s crafts in Nettles’ approach, located in her relationship with her mother, and remembered in one such autobiographical book, Flamingo in the Dark from 1979: When I was a teenager she began to paint in oil again and I was fascinated. She set up an easel in their dining room. This was the center of the house, the center of her world, and her territory … dominated by her sewing machine, fabric chest, and card tables with various crafts projects in progress. The smell of turpentine sweetened the air and colored threads from her sewing clung to everything.15 Inspired by maternal agency, it was also the materiality of her mother’s crafts that clung to the corners of her memory: those ‘colored threads’ reappeared in her own practice, that by 1969 consisted of an ‘unorthodox mixing of media: quilted paintings, etchings printed on fabric, and handcolored photographs sewn together on a sewing machine’.16 As we know from Roszika Parker’s work on the production of gender identity through domestic crafts, women artists’ use of needlework has often been dismissed because of its close association with femininity.17 A toxic cocktail of traditionally devalued feminine subject matter and references to the maternal expressed via a domestic craft a­ esthetic, Nettles’ teachers and peers (and photographic historians) alike found her work’s combination of ‘highly personal, dreamlike biographical images and narratives’ and alternative processes ‘hard to understand and accept’.18 And when she brought a sewing machine into the darkroom, she was effectively cast out.19 As Lyle Rexer ­suggests, this resistance to Nettles’ practice reveals several layers of discomfort, most obviously her transgression of the gender conventions of photography at the time, as she dared to carry into the darkroom ‘with all its associations of occult knowledge and male fellowship, a domestic female machine, with distinctly art‐less associations.’20 But not only was the darkroom a masculine space not to be sullied by the presence of the domestic machine, Nettles’ desire to reconfigure the photograph as a three‐dimensional object rather than as a silvery window onto the world conjured feminine associations in itself. At that time, the return to gum bichromate printing was considered too close to the ‘ancillary art’ of printmaking  –  a secondary form of representation associated with mechanical reproduction rather than original creation, but which at that time, Rexer points out, was also considered ‘women’s work, impure and unphotographic, “tits on a bull”, as one photographer eloquently remarked.’21

­Photography as folk ar

Reflecting on the construction of printmaking within its own historiography, Kathryn Reeves suggests that it has always been coded as feminine, its technical language of bleed and matrix invoking the absent body through which images are not created but only reproduced. Photography, like printmaking, has been gendered through the ­similarly bodily metaphor of the ‘handmaid’, the low‐class female body, made for reproduction.22 And as both media forms converged in the work of non‐silver photographers as they combined hand‐making with contemporary reproductive technologies such as offset litho, photo silkscreen, 3 M’s colour transfer and Thermo‐Fax, and Kwik printing, that feminisation resurfaced within critical interpretations that relegated such ‘impure’ practices to the margins, evidence of an anxious reaction to hybrid practices that were difficult to place. That anxiety is reflected in Jonathan Green’s 1984 account of this period, in which the growing body of what he calls ‘non‐silver printmakers’ was dismissed as having failed to harness the critical potential that manipulated photography offered. Contrasting the work of figures such as Nettles with the more sophisticated ‘authority, intelligence and wit’ of (male) silver‐based photographers such as Jerry Uelsmann and Ray Metzker, Green condemned their rejection of straight photography, and the adoption of so‐called soft‐processes, such as cyanotype, gravure, gum and carbon printing, bromoil transfer and hand‐colouring.23 Not only did they further debase photography by borrowing from American craft traditions ‘banal’ subjects and processes such as ‘stitching, hand‐ binding, embroidery, and handmade fabrics’, by refusing the glossy window offered by the silver print, these ‘new Pictorialists’ only ever succeeded in ‘muting the original photographic perception in pastel colors, vagueness and broad tonal masses’.24 The presence of the female artist’s hand in the act of printmaking put the original referent at further remove, further destabilising the imagined veracity of the straight photographic image.

­Photography as folk art One such printmaker who partially escaped opprobrium was Betty Hahn, who shared Nettles’ use of stitching to create hybrid pictures.25 Like Nettles, she questioned the supposed clarity of vision that the conventional photograph seemed to offer, often working with fabrics as a more tactile support. She too was undoubtedly influenced by early Pictorialism; but rather than simply looking backwards to a photographic past, she looked to the present, inspired by the feminist politics of the era, and by other artists who were beginning to reclaim the value and visibility of women’s creative practices. Hahn, like Nettles and other artists such as Elaine Reichek and Deborah Willis combined traditionally feminised craft practices of sewing, embroidery and quilting in order to re‐make connections to the past by materialising links to women’s creative histories, both individual and shared.26 Yet Hahn was as equally engaged with using mixed media in order to question the status of photography itself, combining hand‐stitching with degraded photographic imagery in order quite literally to puncture its elevated claims to realism and truth. Deliberately seeking out mundane subject matter, she saw her use of photography as a form of contemporary folk art, democratic in its mode of appeal: as she put it, ‘everybody’s snapshots look alike’.27

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Such explicit connections to vernacular practices located her work within a contemporaneous critique of hand‐made photography, perhaps explaining her relative absence from photographic histories. As Jerald Maddox described in his 1975 essay ‘Photography as Folk Art’, that period in American photography saw the emergence of a trend for simple, everyday subject matter and sometimes unknowingly naive methods that disrupted fine art photography’s methodological basis in either expert technical control or aesthetic inspiration.28 Seen as ‘basic’ and a return to the medium’s original fundaments, as a form of folk art photography was invested with a primitive quality that further reconfirmed its place outside of the mainstream. For Hahn, it seems clear that it was the sense of photography as a fundamental shared language and form that interested her. The titles of the pair Passport Photo: Dan and Passport Photo: Betty (1970) locate the images within the disciplinary function of authoritarian photography. Yet, in their almost total abstraction, any possibility of reading identity from the surface of the body – that process with which the camera has been trusted since the emergence in the nineteenth century of what Alan Sekula called the photograph’s ‘repressive function’ – is denied.29 We see the full‐frontal pose, we see the blank, institutional background: but her process of photographic reproduction has degraded the image, details are abstracted and reduced, areas bleached out or over‐ darkened to create unreadable gaps. Such manipulations of the photograph draw attention to the surface, to the materiality of the image as object, further exposed by her use of stitching here. While making reference to women’s crafts, Hahn’s use of sewing is not only a reinsertion of the presence of feminine creativity. Although the influential curator Van Deren Coke described her approach as ‘fearlessly decorative’, damning her work with a faint praise that placed it firmly within the register of debased feminine crafts, it would be reductionist to describe Hahn’s use of embroidery purely in this way.30 The stark black stitches on her Passport photos reinsert detail, divide and unite black‐and‐white, negative and positive states. And while the colourful rainbow arching through Road and Rainbow from 1971 is certainly pretty in contrast with the grey tones of the printed fabric, the spare white stitches on the building’s roof offset the decorative aesthetic. That spareness is emphasised in Bristol Garden from the same year – undeniably beautiful, but the careful precision of the French knots that punctuate the border creates an abstract language, a pared down Morse code amid the minimalism of the running stitch that stops just short of the frame. In this way, Hahn’s photographs defy easy categorisation. But according to Green, these types of hybrid practices failed, being the banal, decorative, folksy results of mere printmakers who failed to grasp what ‘Warhol and Rauschenberg knew so well: that one had to juxtapose, not merge, the differences between media’.31 While such male artists were seen somehow to maintain the purity of each discrete medium in their juxtapositions, other (often female) artists’ similarly hybrid practices became the site of criticism, constructed in gendered terms: apparently ‘overwhelmed’ by the ‘mere pleasure’ of their techniques, their hand‐crafted pictures instead reduced the possibilities of photographic expression to imitative and unoriginal ‘mannerist techniques’.32 By locating feminised photography within a devalued craft tradition of pleasure, excess and reproductive making, Green distances it from the photographic appropriation central to the era’s celebrated postmodernist artists’ continuation of the historical avant‐garde project of working between high and low cultures.

­The nostalgic imag

But in her abstract method, Hahn maintains a tension: there is no simple confusion of photography and craft here. The flattened tones of the degraded photograph draw attention to the fragility of its realist promise, its indexical surface flaking away, or scorched into overexposed oblivion. At the same time, the needle‐punctures and pulls of thread draw attention to the materiality of the object, the stuff and matter of the support on which that fragmented illusion sits, image and object, binding the two. And it is through this tension – through Hahn’s juxtaposition of the hand‐sewn stitch as both gendered physical intervention and principle of femininity with the photographic image that a thread can be drawn to reconnect her practice to the contemporary world. To a time in which photography has been physically and conceptually reconfigured as a digital medium apparently devoid of materiality and reduced to a condition or effect, to consider the way today’s hybrid image‐objects are positioned within current debate concerning the status of photography as it emerges in similarly feminised terms.

­The nostalgic image Just as the recuperation of archaic ‘alternative’ processes in the late 1960s was described as conservative, so too the more recent trend for similar photographic techniques has been cast in the same retrogressive light. For example, although he describes this trend as evidence of a progressive yet ‘antiquarian avant‐garde’, critic Peter Schjeldahl argues that the contemporary adoption of alternative processes is symptomatic of a disillusionment with what photography had by the 1990s become – a new kind of ‘anti‐photography’ that (in the hands of someone like Cindy Sherman) was reduced to mere cultural documentation, without (in the hands of someone like Thomas Ruff ) any aesthetic value, or ‘authorial intervention’.33 With echoes of the castigation of earlier hand‐made practices’ divergence from the authorial modernist tradition of the master print, this new material turn is also interpreted as a defiant rejection of digitalisation – the slow process set in motion by Sony’s introduction of the first digital camera in 1982, and whose domination of photographic image culture today Schjeldahl described as an attack both on photographic realism and on its ‘alchemy, secrets and tactile fascinations’.34 Through this language of mysterious secrets and bodily seductions we are taken back – right back to the photographic magic of the nineteenth century, investing today’s hand‐made photograph with a nostalgic longing for the medium’s earliest days before industrialisation and machine reproducibility guaranteed its place as a mass medium. Prompted in part by technology’s promise of teleological progress and so symptomatic of the everyday ‘micropractices’ of what Svetlana Boym describes as our era’s ‘proliferation of nostalgias’, the desire to rediscover an outmoded photographic ‘aura’ could be an example of the seductive allure of the hand‐made artisanal object in the alienating conditions of the twenty‐first century transformed by global capitalism’s transformation of labour and of digital lives increasingly lived online.35 It is perhaps not surprising that the nostalgia for pre‐digital photography has condensed both in the material object of the analogue photograph and the body of a female photographer of the day – Sally Mann, unofficial ‘poster girl’ for photography’s turn to the past. Her rejection of digital technology is explicit: through her adoption of a cumbersome antique camera and old lenses; through her experimentation with the hand‐ poured wet collodion process and ambrotype printing that traces the photographer’s

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body like a fingerprint on its surface; through her celebration of the ‘reverential’ quality of the process. 36 Her practice seems illustrative of Boym’s mapping of an ‘off‐modern’ impulse, nostalgia for a slower time, a slower photography, a detour from photography’s progressive teleology that takes us instead down ‘side shadows and back alleys’.37 Drawing attention to the hand‐crafted nature of wet collodion photography – a process in which glass plates are carefully covered with a hand‐poured collodion liquid – Mann contrasts the material act and product of analogue photography with the ‘drive‐by’ violence of the digital snapshot, understood as another practice altogether. ‘You fashion an object, you don’t just take a picture’, she suggests.38 On the other hand, the ‘digital image’, she claims, ‘is like ether, like vapor that never comes to ground. It simply circulates, bodiless. It has no material reality.’39 But it is curious that, despite the controversial nature of her imagery’s focus on pre‐ pubescent girls, violated children and decaying bodies, Mann was named in TIME magazine in 2001 as ‘America’s Greatest Photographer’, an acclamation that is perhaps testament to the allure of her prints. Their seductive materiality is clear; but her celebration of the print’s hand‐made production locates analogue photography within the craft traditions of printmaking once again. Threatening to lapse into a form of contemporary cultural neo‐Luddism illustrative of what craft historian Paul Greenhalgh describes as a utopian but ultimately conservative ‘marching backwards’ in time,40 the reclamation of analogue practices as defiant resistance to digitalisation also speaks of what Glenn Adamson sees as a romanticisation of the hand‐made that only further embeds skill‐ based craft practices in the mythical past.41 In the hands of a female photographer, that sentimental connection to an imaginary past is reinforced. As Susan Stewart argues in her reflection on the ways that objects mediate our relationship to the world, there is an intimate connection between nostalgia and the hand‐made artefact, its promise – however spurious – of authentic connection with both the past and the skilled labours of the craftsperson’s hand condensed in its physical stuff. Evident in the souvenir, but exaggerated in the kitsch object, that, she suggests, ‘offers a saturation of materiality’, an insistent, overblown physicality becomes a repository of nostalgic longing for something that never really was.42 Invoking Huyssen’s analysis of the inscription of femininity on kitsch mass cultural products, the closely connected excessive materiality and regressive nostalgia is located at the same time in the body of a female artist, whose articulation of the subjective ‘I’ introduces a transgressive, physical presence that disrupts the self‐referential autonomy and purity of art through its ‘lapse into subjectivity or kitsch’.43 That double materiality is evident in Mann’s work; when looking at the textural surfaces of the Faces series (2004), it is easy to be seduced by their overwhelmingly material presence, their excessive scale. Every line and feature leaves its mark on the large format plate, to be enlarged in the final prints that measure over a metre high and nearly as wide. What is more, each print’s surface traces the process of its making: the tidemarks left by the wash of sticky collodion when coating the plate, pock marks where it has not stuck, chips and cracks in the delicate surface where it has lifted away. As the glitches and artefacts littering the surface demonstrate the fragility of the photograph’s illusionary realism, by drawing attention to the photograph’s chemical and textural materiality as well as the materiality of her own hand, Mann’s insertion of her own presence further disrupts the photograph’s connection to the physical world it promises to imprint.

­Hand‐made photograph

But while this figure of the female photographer, her hands messy with temperamental collodion emulsion, has come to be celebrated as an enduring figure of resistance and nostalgic stasis in the face of the (equally artificial) teleological progression of ­photographic technology, the construction of this feminised figure is perhaps also symptomatic of gendering of analogue photography itself. As theorist of digital media Lev Manovich argues, in the ontological split created in the revolution through which all non‐digital photographs have been retroactively designated analogue, all such photographs are ‘nostalgic’. Nothing to do with its chemical process, or vintage patina, or sepia‐toned ‘look’, the just‐outmoded analogue photograph is inherently nostalgic at its most basic structural level.44

­Hand‐made photographs In his discussion of other ‘hand‐made photographs’, Thomas Crow argues that artists have combined the vernacular and devalued medium of photography‐based illusionism with the innate ‘drive to represent by hand’ in order to map the limits of other, higher, representational systems, from fine art painting to architecture. Photo‐realistic drawing and painting is described as a means of better mediating and fixing visual information via a ‘slow process of synthesizing intelligence and accumulated feeling’, resulting in a form of hand‐mediation that can be put to different sorts of uses – to be ‘encountered and contemplated in ways that a photographic print cannot be’.45 While far from photo‐realistic, a similar process of defamiliarisation through hand‐ mediation is operating in the contemporary manifestation of the hand‐made photographs that are emerging in the wake of precedents such as those of Nettles and Hahn, and in the shadow of Mann. Photographs that, in different ways, introduce the presence of the hand in the photograph’s making in ways that slow down easy consumption of the photograph as image, and fulfil the contemporary potential for a reconfigured referentiality that Batchen celebrates as that necessary reflection on the medium itself.46 At a moment in which photography has suffered a split, and effectively reconstructed as two distinct forms – analogue object and digital image – each with their own ontological bases, it is the limits of its own fluctuating form that are mapped and placed under duress. And it is in these critical interstices between image and object, material and immaterial, that today’s hand‐crafted photographs sit, invoking women’s hands, women’s crafts and women’s bodies in a way that puts under pressure, just for a moment, the evacuation of materiality that digitalisation seems to have produced. British artist Julie Cockburn doesn’t take her own photographs, choosing instead to use found images as the basis of her work, searching out portraits from collections of vernacular photographs sold in flea markets, car boot sales and online on eBay. Having their origins in the Surrealist working methods of André Breton, such narratives of chance encounters with the found photograph threaten to become somewhat clichéd in contemporary practice. But through her manipulation of the objects that she finds, Cockburn aims not just to bring them back to life but also to reconfigure their meaning in ways that put under pressure the nature of the old, discarded analogue photograph’s existence in the digital present. Having found the perfect shot, she embroiders the surface with geometric patterns and blocks of neat, regular stitching to alter its appearance, her needle both metaphor and tool for her inquisitiveness about the image’s

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origins. Like having a conversation with the photograph and its subject, she sees her actions as creating a dialogue with the past, her actions on the original emphasising their materiality and their status as ‘beautiful objects’.47 In some, the original beauty of the hand‐coloured images is heightened by her embroidery: in Honeymoon Period 3 (2014), for example, the circles of pastel‐hued silk are redolent of the rhythmic paintings and textiles designs of Sonia Delaunay. But despite their undeniable aesthetic appeal, there is often an unsettling undertone: the shadowy grey of the overlapping circle that joins the honeymooners in a crafted Venn diagram speaks of a future disconnection; in the recent works Melancholia (2015) and Steeling (2015) the sitters’ features are obliterated by the dense working of the satin stitch that covers their face, while The Doubter’s (2013) identity is reduced to a series of dots. While connections have been made to domesticity in what one critic describes as Cockburn’s ‘family‐album images’, the painstaking uniformity of her stitch‐work in fact relocates the photograph elsewhere. These are not simple attempts to give voice to the past. Ordered, regular, repetitive, her stitching both traces and resists the connections to feminine decoration, at once reinserting the presence of her anonymous female ­sitters’ bodies into a shifting and anchorless discourse of geometric abstraction, and reinserting her own hand – the unseen hand of the female artist – into that same history. Her act of reclamation through using found images can be read as an assertion of agency that resists the modernist authorial tradition so central to photographic histories, recreating the photograph as something made – and re‐made – rather than snapshot by the lens. Although trained as a photographer, emerging Irish artist Inge Jacobsen also uses found photos, but rather than discarded vernacular objects, she chooses contemporary digital and highly manipulated fashion shots as her medium. Taking her source material from glossy magazine covers and editorial spreads as the bases for her own hand‐ stitched interventions, she ‘hijacks’ their original purpose, her turn of phrase suggesting an act of appropriation rooted in an attempt to take control of its meaning. But it is an ambivalent act, at once aggressive and referential. Her use of commercial imagery reflects her interest in materiality: in the associations she sees between the photograph as object and the ways in which fashion media produces women as objects too  –  as perfected surfaces far removed from the material reality of flesh and skin. At the same time, her use of cross‐stitching remakes the mass‐produced image as a hand‐made object, with her Vogue covers taking up to fifty hours of intensive needlework to produce. Jacobsen acknowledges traditions of feminine pastimes and women’s labour in her use of stitching and a genealogy of creativity in her grandmother’s role in teaching her the techniques but is not interested in celebrating or even demonstrating craft skill. Hers is not a romanticised fetishisation of the hand‐made, or an attempt to resituate contemporary art within a female creative tradition. Instead, the repetition of the very ordered form of cross‐stitching conjures the disciplinary nature of the process. When looking at the dense surface pattern of Jacobsen’s threaded covers, for example, I cannot help but be reminded of my own experience of learning cross‐stitch at school as a girl: the constant demands for neatness and regularity, and the reminder that the back should be as perfect as the front, the cross‐shaped stitches on the fabric’s right side registered as neat parallel lines on its reverse. But Jacobsen’s lines waver, her crosses are not consistent, following a wobbly trajectory across the original photograph’s lines and details. And in later works that order is

­Hand‐made photograph

all but lost: in the Dazed and Confused cover neat stitches are replaced by heavy lines of running stitch and messy frayed ends, with cover star Beyoncé’s eyes all but obliterated by thick knots of black thread. Through its excessive materiality, the surface is destroyed, suggestive of a frenetic attack by needle and thread that is at once out of control yet held in place by the tight space and typography of the cover itself. If embroidery is traditionally one of the means through which femininity is acquired through the body itself, the breaking down of the discipline, order and self‐control through the act of stitching itself hints at a kind of hysterical transgression: a symbolic refusal in which the mass media form of the fashion photograph, its interpellation of women through a complicated configuration of the desiring gaze, and the spurious relationship to the real that the artfully manipulated digital image presents as pure, glossy surface become dislodged, unravelling like the threads that Jacobsen leaves just a little undone. Originally a filmmaker, US‐based artist Sabrina Gschwandtner now combines photography, film and video with textiles, often using knitting as a form of making that she has stated is itself the ‘model’ for her approach.48 Knitting itself, she declares, is a ‘form of broadcasting’, media a ‘textile’ and the single thread from which the looped fabric is created the literal and metaphorical point of origin from which her work emerges as ‘a surface, a fabric, an outfit, a pattern, a text’.49 An activist who recognises the power of stitching, knitting and other handcrafts as sites of women’s empowerment and potential resistance, Gschwandtner is interested in the way that artisanal crafts contribute to the mobilisation of participatory communities through their creation of real and virtual social spaces. To do this, her practice examines the symbolism of thread, of the humble material of string and its marking of space, and the knots and loops and whorls through which social connections are made.50 While her use of stitching can be interpreted as a celebration of overlooked crafts and women’s communities, it is also concerned with the medium itself. The stitch is the critical tool through which she examines the nature of the realism associated with indexical media. Although her latest work has settled on knitting as both medium and metaphor, it was sewing that led her move away from straight filmmaking and into a more sculptural approach in which its material support was the focus. Her 2007 project Photoactic Behaviour in Sewn Slides was the result of a happy accident; some 35 mm negatives she’d sent to be processed as slides were returned to her blurry and of little use; but instead of discarding them, she used needle and fine cotton thread to sew into their surface, before then projecting them. When projected, the blurred image became of even less visual importance. All focus was thrown onto the patterns of the thread and the holes left by the needle, as the projector’s automatic focus fluctuated, zooming in and zooming out in an attempt to lock onto the fraying threads as they fluttered in the machine’s humming breeze. With these material artefacts marking the slides’ surface, that visual field assumed to be stabilised by the act of photographic framing was thrown into flux. Unable to show its promised image, the projector ‘gave up, leaving the viewer to inspect a blurry field in between thread and image’.51 The photograph’s promise to show us a window onto the world and the vulnerable materiality of its surface is suspended: as the needle punctures the slide’s window‐like field, the thread is the material bond that both connects and disconnects the image from its physical referent, placing the optical and the haptic, and touch and vision, in tension. In this project, it is the materiality of the analogue photograph’s fragile relationship to that world that is foregrounded, the act of stitching into its surface both an attack and

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an act of mending that could be read as the attempt to pin down a medium on the brink of obsolescence. Gschwandtner sees as complex the relationship between the recuperation of handcrafts in the digital age, and their promise of ‘slowness, corporeality and tactility’ in an age of disembodied connectivity.52 As the drawn thread traces the interaction of the artist’s hand, the photograph is haunted by that presence, that corporeality, and refuses to be forgotten, animated in the thread’s flutter. She recognises as nostalgic the appeal of handcraft’s solitude and the meditative effects of stitching’s repetitive actions: as she puts it, when stitching ‘I was completely concentrated on the rhythm of my hands and my frenetic mind would go empty’.53 On one level, the artist’s reminiscences perpetuate the construction of feminised crafts as in some ways mindless, and purely of the hand. Yet her comment at the same time brings to mind Parker’s exposure of stitching’s transgressive potential, and her recognition that, while endless hours of hand‐stitching promoted the bodily inculcation of modes of feminine behaviour and being, the repetitive nature of its learnt embodied action was also empowering. It freed up those women’s minds to do those most dangerous of things – to wonder, to imagine, to think.54 In Gschwandtner’s stitched image, in the moment suspended by the whir and hum and of the projector’s beam, the photograph is emptied of all visual content or information. Its only focus is the materiality of the medium itself. There is nothing else. In that moment in which it is not quite image and not quite object, the photograph comes alive, animated by the material memory of the artist’s action on its surface, as if just for a second it thinks for itself.

­Busy hands Like Hahn’s before them, the hand‐sewn photographs by these contemporary female artists hold the medium in tension: there is little recourse to a romanticised recuperation of ‘women’s crafts’ here.55 Combining the always‐disruptive presence of a feminine principle with a strategic use of needle and thread, the stitch both violates and decorates, joins and separates. Their hand‐made sutures create connections between the photographic image and the world it seems to represent, at the same time as becoming the material principle of its displacement. Tracing the hand’s repetitive gestures, their sewing becomes an abstract punctuation and materialised grammar against which the photographic medium strains to conform. Unlike some other material practices today, those of Cockburn, Jacobsen and Gschwandtner neither simply exploit the potential offered by digital photography’s reconfigured ontology and new capacities, nor represent a simple and nostalgic return to the archaic forms of the analogue photography of the past. These are hybrid pictures in which the actual act of photography itself has all but disappeared. And it is in that rejection of photography’s traditional bases – the authority of the eye, the perspectival correction of the lens, the authorial capturing of the decisive moment, the fetishistic celebration of the master print – that these three practices contribute to the contemporary redefinition of photography today. The wholesale adoption of digital technology within photography has changed our understanding of what photography is: unlike the familiar analogue photograph and its reassuring (yet spurious) claim to indexical truth, the digital photograph is in contrast unreliable, its indexical boundaries having collapsed, infiltrated by the machine logic of the computer. Digitalisation

Notes

signals the replacement of photography’s essential ‘light painting’ with what Gottfried Jäger describes as the ‘existence of a new category of pictures’, combining analogue production and digital information to create ‘photo‐based’ hybrids that exist somewhere between the two.56 This cut‐and‐paste ‘picture mix’ has no essential ontology, no unique characteristics – bar the essential capacity for limitless ‘manipulation’ that Manovich argues is the single defining quality of all digital media. Of the hand, by the hand: the manipulation of data conjures the image of a newly digitised photographic craftsman, a revival of the ‘suspect hand of the artist’ in which ‘the era of human intervention in the photographic process has returned’.57 Overturning Benjamin’s declaration that in the twentieth century the eye of photography freed the artist’s hand, in the twenty‐first the gaze is free, and ‘the hand busy’ once again.58 But in the very language of this ontological debate – a debate evocatively described by Duncan Wooldridge as the anxious murmurings of a ‘panicked crowd’ reacting to a photography in crisis – we are returned to the hand‐made image.59 We are reminded of the anxiety of the impure hybrid picture made by women’s hands – from cut‐and‐paste scrapbooks of the late nineteenth century to the stitched surfaces of Nettles and Hahn. At the same time as feminised metaphors of nostalgia and sentimental kitsch combine with romanticised and essentialising traditions of women’s crafts to reconfigure analogue photography within a retrogressive register, a parallel discourse of digital photography is emerging in similarly gendered terms, haunted by the absent presence of women’s busy hands. And that is why photography’s ‘new materiality’ is in need of feminist analysis – one that examines women’s presence in these debates, both real and metaphorical. In these contemporary practices in which that hand is traced, via the needle‐prick and thread‐pull as it punctuates the photograph’s surface, the materiality of the act cannot help but remind us of that devalued hand – both the bodily metaphors of photography’s gendered language through which its fluctuating status has been endlessly defined and re‐defined and the presence of a real, lived, working body. Drawing attention to the operation of sexual difference in the discursive production of photography – past and present – the insistent presence of the photograph’s own materiality as object also invokes the materiality of its own facture. As it continues to rely upon a gendered language of hand‐making, craft, manipulation and reproduction, photographic discourse continues to be haunted by the absented bodies of the makers that its own metaphors and analogies work to both reveal and conceal. Perhaps, then, it is necessary, as Myra Hird argues, to rethink feminism’s engagement with materiality itself. As she points out, even in feminist attempts to analyse and identify the operation of sexual difference at the level of discursive production, there is the potential for the materiality of women’s bodies and lived experience to be written out – to disappear. Our desire to identify the construction of the feminine in language and discourse threatens ‘ultimately [to] erase the materiality of the doer’.60 By recognising the materiality of the thing, we cannot overlook the materiality of the maker, and the praxis of women’s hands making light work of the complex question of what photography is, today.

Notes 1 See Timothy Druckrey’s essay ‘From data to digital: Montage in the twentieth century.’

In: Metamorphoses: Photography in the Electronic Age, edited by Geoffrey Batchen (New York: Aperture, 1994), 7.

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2 Joanna Sassoon, ‘Photographic materiality in the age of digital reproduction.’ In:

Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, edited by Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart (London: Routledge, 2004), 190. 3 Photography’s ‘new materiality’ was explored in the online project Either/And conceived by the National Media Museum; see my essay (with Sandra Plummer and Duncan Wooldridge), ‘Photography’s “new materiality”.’ Photoworks Magazine, no. 18 (2012). 4 Plummer et al., ‘Photography’s “new materiality”’. 5 Aliki Braine, in Robert Shore, Post‐Photography: The Artist with a Camera (London: Laurence King, 2014), 178. 6 See Robert Shore’s ‘Introduction: Post‐photography is…’ In: Post‐Photography, 7; and Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Post photography.’ In: Each Wild Idea (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2002), 109. 7 See Larry Schaaf ’s ‘The first fifty years of British photography: 1794–1844.’ In: Technology and Art: The Birth and Early Years of Photography, edited by Michal Pritchard (Bath: Royal Photographic Society Historical Group, 1990), 11–12. 8 See Batchen’s discussion of early pioneers in Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1997), 28–50. 9 Paul Strand, ‘Photography’ (1917), reproduced in Classic Essays on Photography, edited by Alan Trachtenberg (Sedgewick, ME: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 142. 10 Walter Benjamin, ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.’ In: Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), 213. 11 See Patrizia di Bello, Women’s Albums and Photography in Victorian England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007), 123. 12 Di Bello, 123. 13 Di Bello, 123. 14 See Lyle Rexer, The Antiquarian Avant‐Garde: The New Wave in Old Processes (New York: Harry N Abrams, 2002), 10. 15 Bea Nettles, Flamingo in the Dark (Rochester, NY: Inky Press, 1979), unpaginated. 16 Nettles, unpaginated. 17 Roszika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: IB Tauris, 2010). 18 Jonathan Green, American Photography: A Critical History 1945 to the Present (New York: Harry N Abrams, 1984), 159; and Nettles, unpaginated. 19 Nettles, unpaginated; and Rexer, Antiquarian Avant‐Garde, 22. 20 Rexer, 22 21 Rexer, 22. 22 References to the ‘handmaid’ appeared in early writings, including Elizabeth Eastlake, ‘Photography.’ Quarterly Review (April 1857) and Oscar Rejlander, ‘Photography as the handmaid of art: To artists.’ The British Journal Photographic Almanac and Photographer’s Daily Companion (1866). For a discussion of the other metaphors with which photography was related, see Jennifer Green‐Lewis’s chapter ‘Pencil of Fire’ in her Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 37–64; and my essay ‘Women’s role in photography: From handmaid to hand‐made.’ In: Photoworks, vol. 22 (2015). 23 Green, American Photography, 156. 24 Green, American Photography, 156.

Notes

25 Having studied with Henry Holmes Smith and Nathan Lyons, Hahn established her

26 27

28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50

career at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1969, replacing retiring professor Minor White, before settling at the University of New Mexico in 1976. See Naomi Rosenblum, A History of Women Photographers (New York: Abbeville, 2010), 248. Hahn, quoted by David Habertstich in his essay ‘Betty Hahn: The early years.’ In: Betty Hahn: Photography or Maybe Not, edited by Steven Yates (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 31. Jerry Maddox, ‘Photography as folk art.’ In: One Hundred Years of Photographic History: Essays in Honor of Beaumont Newhall, edited by Van Deren Coke (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1975), 103–108. See Alan Sekula, ‘The body and the archive.’ October, no. 39 (Winter 1986), 3–64. Van Deren Coke, quoted by David Habertstich, ‘Betty Hahn: The Early Years’, 31. Green, American Photography, 160. Green, American Photography, 160. Peter Schjeldahl, ‘Preface’, in Rexer, Antiquarian Avant‐Garde, 6. Schjeldahl, in Rexer, Antiquarian Avant‐Garde, 7. Svetlana Boym, ‘Nostalgia and its discontents.’ The Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture, vol. 9, no. 2 (Summer 2007), 17. See also The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001). Rexer, Antiquarian Avant‐Garde, 72. Boym, ‘Nostalgia and its discontents’, 9. Sally Mann, ‘The angel of uncertainty: An interview with Sally Mann on the lure of the poured image.’ In: Rexer, Antiquarian Avant‐Garde, 82. Mann, ‘The angel of uncertainty’, 83. Paul Greenhalgh, introduction to The Persistence of Craft (London: A&C Black, 2002), 8. See Glenn Adamson, Thinking Through Craft (Oxford: Berg, 2007); and The Invention of Craft (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 167. Andreas Huyssen, ‘Mass culture as woman: Modernism’s other.’ In: After the Great Divide (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986), 46. Lev Manovich, ‘The paradoxes of digital photography.’ In: Photography After Photography, edited by Hubertus von Amelunxen et al. (Munich: G + B Arts, 1996), 58. Thomas Crow, ‘Hand‐made photographs and homeless representation.’ October, vol. 62 (Autumn 1992), 123–132; 128. See Robert Shore’s ‘Introduction: Post‐photography is…’ In: Post‐Photography: The Artist with a Camera (London: Laurence King, 2014), 7; and Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Post photography.’ In: Each Wild Idea. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2002), 109. Julie Cockburn, quoted by Sean O’Hagan in ‘A stitch in time: The dream‐like world of embroidered vintage photography.’ The Guardian (28 November 2014). Sabrina Gschwandtner, ‘Knitting is…’ In: Museum Objects: Experiencing the Properties of Things, edited by Sandra H Dudley (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 50. See Glen Adamson, ‘Sabrina Gschwandtner.’ In: Motion Blur: American Craft (Gustavsbergs: Gustavsbergs Konsthall, 2009); and Gschwandtner, ‘Knitting is…’, 50. See the artist’s reflection in ‘A brief history of string.’ Cabinet, no. 23 (Fall 2006). Online at: http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/23/gschwandtner.php, accessed 16 November 2018.

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51 Sabrina Gschwandtner, ‘Knitting is…’, 51. 52 Sabrina Gschwandtner, ‘Flying kites and knitting.’ In: In the Loop: Knitting Now, edited

by Jessica Hemmings (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2010), 25.

53 Gschwandtner, ‘Knitting is…’, 51. 54 See Roszika Parker’s discussion of Colette’s daughter, in The Subversive Stitch, 9. 55 For a discussion that problematises the reclamation of women’s creative practices and

56 57 58 59 60

essentialising stereotypes, see Maria Elena Buszek and Kirsty Robertson’s introduction in Utopian Studies, vol. 22, no. 2 (2011); and Kirsty Robertson’s ‘Rebellious doillies and subversive stitches: Writing an craftivist history.’ In: Extra/Ordinary: Craft in Contemporary Art, edited by Marcia Buszek (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 184–203. Gottfried Jäger, ‘Analogue and digital photography: The technical picture.’ In: Photography After Photography, 107, 109. Jacques Clayssen, ‘Digital (R)evolution.’ In: Photography After Photography, 79. Clayssen, ‘Digital (R)evolution’, 80. See Sandra Plummer, Harriet Riches and Duncan Wooldridge, ‘Photography’s “new materiality”?’, Photoworks (2012). See Myra J Hird, ‘Feminist matters: New materialist considerations of sexual difference.’ Feminist Theory, vol. 5, no. 2 (2004), 223; and Hird, MJ (2003) ‘From the culture of matter to the matter of culture: Feminist explorations of nature and science.’ Sociological Research Online, vol. 8, no. 1 at http://www.socresonline.org.uk/8/1/hird. html, accessed 16 November 2018.

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Reading Posthumanism in Feminist New Media Art Maria Fernandez The work of women artists working with technology is poorly represented in the art historical record. Even today, when both digital media and feminism have become popular, few publications about this art exist.1 The paucity of recognition in the art world notwithstanding, digital media art by women continuously proliferates. These rich and varied practices include net art, digital video, networked performance, tactical media, video games, remix, installation, virtual reality environments, and robotics. While some works address longstanding feminist concerns, such as the female body, identity, representation, feminist history, labor, and consumerism, others directly engage with recent theoretical currents in posthumanism and new materialisms. Some scholars understand these latter theoretical orientations to be in tension if not in distinct opposition to previous feminisms of the 1980s and 1990s to which notions of embodiment, subjectivity, legibility, and signification were central.2 In this essay I will show that in new media art from the early 1990s to the present often it is difficult to make a sharp distinction between feminist, posthumanist, and new materialist art. I will also suggest that this art has precedents in work from previous decades. It must be understood that neither feminist theory nor feminist art has ever been monolithic. Both fields encompass a diversity of positions and oppositions, including visionary feminisms that call for imagining new ways of being and living that constantly challenge existing feminisms.3 Katherine Hayles describes posthumanism as the deconstruction of the humanist subject and the attributes normally associated with it, such as free will, self‐determination, and mastery.4 In her book How We Became Posthuman (1999), Hayles responds to currents of posthumanism that envisioned a posthuman future in which the human mind would function as pure data and humans would be superseded by machines. Drawing from evolutionary biology and cognitive science, she argues for an embodied posthumanism that recognizes minds as inseparable from the material and historical specificities of bodies. She posits posthuman subjectivity as emerging from a world permanently in the process of change. Consequently, this subjectivity is chaotic rather than in control, distributed rather than autonomous, and located in consciousness.5 After the philosophers Gilbert Simondon and Bernard Stiegler, she posits that humans have always co‐evolved with their environments. In our era, digital technologies are integrated to such an extent in our surroundings, daily lives, and communications infrastructure that it is challenging to differentiate human from nonhuman agencies.6 A Companion to Feminist Art, First Edition. Edited by Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Similarly, the feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti associates humanism with a unitary notion of the subject (white, male, and able bodied) and proposes a critical posthumanism with special attention to subjectivity, a focus that she finds missing from science studies’ perspectives on posthumanism.7 Her critical posthuman subject is relational, constituted in and by multiplicity, and is simultaneously embodied and located, not only geographically but also affectively along hierarchies of gender, race, and class. In her view, this relational locatedness demands ethical bonds and accountability to specific communities of belonging. Critical posthumanism involves interconnections between humans, nonhumans, and the environment as well as the dissolution of “self‐ centered individualism,” associated with classical humanism.8 Braidotti defines classical humanism as a doctrine established during the European Enlightenment, which is based on a notion of teleologically ordained rational progress for humanity, buttressed by faith in the unique, self‐regulating, and intrinsically moral powers of human reason. In her opinion this approach fostered a binary opposition between mind and body, nature and culture, which – due to scientific and technological advances in areas such as genetics, robotics, and neuroscience – currently is being replaced by a non‐dualistic understanding of these domains with stress on the self‐organizing agencies of matter.9 For Braidotti, the end of classical humanism is less a crisis than an opportunity to create new kinds of subjectivities, exemplified by the cultural mestizaje (intermixing) and the recomposition of genders and sexualities already underway. In her opinion, transversality (the ability to foster connections across differences) is fundamental for humans to be able to valorize relationality and interdependence among themselves, non‐humans and “the vital force of life in itself.”10 The critical posthuman subject enacts an affirmative ethics of relationality by building interconnections with humans and nonhumans. Drawing upon Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” (1985), Braidotti recognizes that contemporary techno‐science has eroded the boundaries between the biological and the synthetic; hence, for her as for Haraway, nonhumans include machines.11 For her, affirmative politics integrates critique with inventiveness to construct new visions and projects.12 Posthumanism shares some of the concerns of “new materialisms,” which investigate interrelations between technological, biological, environmental, and social processes and human action.13 Drawing from recently established knowledge in physics, biology, chemistry, neuroscience, and technological fields such as computer science and nanotechnology, new materialists (including Karen Barad, Jane Bennett, Elizabeth Wilson, Samantha Frost, and Diana Coole, among others) refute traditional notions of matter as inert and predictable and instead understand it to be active, self‐generating, and unstable. In this framework, phenomena emerge and develop in relation to a multiplicity of interacting systems and forces, in which context the ontological distinctions between organic and inorganic, animate and inanimate, human and animal, individual and environment are unsustainable. Consequently, like many posthumanists, new materialists reject traditional notions of subjectivity, unilinear models of causation, human mastery over nature and other nonhuman entities and detach intentionality from agency. It is difficult to separate the two theoretical currents neatly. The main difference between them is the new materialists’ emphasis on the dynamism and agency of matter. The way in which new materialists approach matter also differentiates them from older materialist discourses, including Marxism and psychoanalysis. According to the new materialist theorists and political scientists Diana Coole, and Samantha Frost,

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older materialisms were influenced by the natural sciences, Euclidean geometry, and Newtonian physics for understanding the material world. In these models, objects were identifiably discrete, quantifiable, measurable, and inert. They moved only through contact with an external force or agent and these interactions observed the logic of linear cause and effect. Paired with the humanist belief in a rational, self‐aware, and free subject, these understandings had the effect of imparting humans with a sense of mastery over the natural world.14 New materialists differ from these philosophies in recognizing that all things are enmeshed in multiple interconnecting and constantly evolving systems that erode distinctions between bodies, objects, and contexts.15 Like old materialisms, however, new materialists are attentive to power and hold that social change cannot be achieved without consideration of material, socioeconomic, and economic conditions.16 Frost has argued for the necessity of feminism to come to terms with the interdependence of bodies and matter including the matter or the body itself. In her opinion, for several decades feminism was invested in constructivist analyses of how bodies were formed by power through language, culture, and politics. In contrast, new materialists argue for the preeminence of neither culture nor biology, recognizing the interdependence of organism and environment. This relationship presupposes complex entanglements of chemical, biological, geological, social, and cultural processes that shape both organisms and environments. New materialist feminists do not demand that feminists abandon the insights provided by constructivism. They do ask that, in addition to the effects of culture on bodies, feminists acknowledge “the agency of matter and biology in their own right“ and “relinquish the unidirectional model of causation in which either culture or biology is determinative and instead to adopt a model in which causation is conceived as complex, recursive, and multilinear.”17 In other words, they ask feminists to integrate current knowledge from the sciences – physics, biology, chemistry, computer science, and neuroscience – into their conceptualizations of the body to arrive at more complex notions of agency. The goal is to investigate the ways in which the processes of matter contribute to support, consolidate, or disrupt power relations. Both posthumanists and new materialists recognize all bodies, including animals and machines, demonstrate capacities for agency. Despite challenging previous feminisms, the posthumanist and new materialist thinkers previously discussed do not renege feminism. Rather, theorists such as Braidotti, Barad, Coole, and Frost see themselves as updating feminist theory. Because of the complex way new materialists view agency, they prefer affirmative interventions to explicitly oppositional or critical ones. Like Braidotti’s critical posthumanism but rejecting critique, new materialist feminists seek to create new concepts and images that make evident matter’s immanent vitality.18 Frost’s remarks about feminist theory’s relation to matter could be extended to feminist art. Before this century, few feminist artists directly engaged with topics such as the human microbiome, the physics of virtual particles, and nanotechnologies. The scarcity of work in these areas may be related to factors such as the traditional isolation of the arts from the sciences, the historical underrepresentation of women in either area, and the relatively recent development of some of the fields of interest to new materialists such as the Human Microbiome Project, an interdisciplinary effort to collect all the microorganisms associated with the human body, established in the United States in 2008.19 While new materialists identify the social construction of the body, identity,

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discursivity, and performativity as the central tenets of previous feminisms and postfeminisms (including the work of theorists such as Judith Butler), the fragmentary records that exist (not always acknowledged in the canonical history of art) evidence the existence of orientations now identified as “posthumanist” or “new materialist” in previous feminist new media art. This suggests that, as in other fields, new paradigms in both artistic practices and in the history of media arts come into being gradually as constellations, aggregates, and recombinations of old and new knowledge to produce significant shifts in the understandings of concepts, forms, and matter.20 I will now turn briefly to discuss relevant aspects of new media art. New media art is an area of artistic practice that emerged primarily after the Second World War and from the 1970s until the end of the last millennium developed in parallel with, and sometimes overlapped, contemporary art as the latter was represented in museums, art institutions, and art historical literature.21 Lev Manovich defined new media as the cultural objects that use digital computer technologies for distribution and exhibition, including websites, computer games, and digital animation. In his opinion, other cultural objects that use computer technologies for production and storage but not for final distribution such as films, limited editions of photographs, and books were not new media.22 Some artists and critics expanded this definition to present new media as the use of digital tools to explore the relation of society and technology.23 More recently, others argued for abandoning the term “new media” altogether because the ubiquity of computer technologies in the present period made the category obsolete.24 Regardless of how one understands new media, it should be recognized that digital technologies defined the field during the formative period of the late 1980s and 1990s and in some circles continues to do so.25 For several decades, new media art predominantly emerged from Europe, Australia, North America, and occasionally Japan. Most of the existing media art histories reflect this orientation, although important conferences and exhibition venues in the field, such as ISEA International (formerly International Symposium for the Electronic Arts) and Ars Electronica progressively, have embraced an international approach.26 Despite the limited geographical compass of former media art histories, I have chosen to focus here on the work of new media artists recognized in the field as traditionally defined because in its integration of science, technology, and social concerns – such as the relation of humans to machines and the environment – new media art resonates with posthumanism and new materialisms. In the interest of chronology, I will begin my discussion with older works, some of which preceded the artists’ involvement with ­digital media, and proceed to more recent ones. Since the 1970s, the American artist Lynn Hershman Leeson has investigated posthuman dimensions of identity and the body. In Hershman’s media works female identity transcends the boundaries of the given body to admit a variety of couplings, structural and prosthetic, with machines in the spirit of both posthumanism and new materialisms. Her photographic series Phantom Limb, 1988, portrays women‐machine hybrids in a variety of poses (Figure 17.1). The machines, such as TV monitors and cameras, signal the media’s alluring power over body and psyche to the extent that they have become naturalized body parts. The integration of humans and machines is reminiscent of David Cronenberg’s film Videodrome (1983), yet these images lack the anxious, nightmarish quality of Videodrome and most depict a harmonious unification of women and machines, suggesting the complicity of the women with the technology.27

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Figure 17.1  Lynn Hershman Leeson, Phantom Limb, 1988. Courtesy of Lynn Hershman Leeson.

The  works also could be compared with Alan Rath’s robotic sculptures of the same decade, but while Rath’s machines exhibit detached human body parts such as eyes and hands, in these photos the machines are literally embodied. Like the TV series The Bionic Woman (1976–1978), these photographs suggest a developing posthuman subjectivity through the unification of woman and machine, but in contrast to the Bionic Woman’s human appearance, here the machines overtly disrupt the integrity of the human body. Hershman Leeson’s film Teknolust (2002) confronts the viewer with unexpected intimacies between embodiment and computer code as a brilliant scientist, Dr. Rosetta Stone, creates three self‐replicating automatons by downloading her DNA into her computer and mixing it with a “live brew” she has developed inside it. The automatons have the capability to cross from the digital world inside the computer to the lived world. As they rely on human sperm to survive, one of them, Ruby, regularly goes out to procure food. In a humorous way, the work alludes to analogies between genetic and computer code, which inform contemporary biotechnologies.28 As in the photographs in the Phantom Limb series, Hershman Leeson alludes to the dependence of modern subjectivities on media as the three sisters learn to relate to potential sperm donors by downloading romantic Hollywood films and memorizing the dialogs in their sleep. In DiNA (2004), an artificial intelligence agent running for Telepresident, Hershman Leeson draws from then contemporary research in artificial intelligence and from her previous Web agent (Agent Ruby, 2002) to demonstrate that intelligence develops and increases through interaction.29 DiNA can converse with users, remember questions and names, and express specific moods. She interacts with visitors while accessing information from the Web to respond to current events in real time. This work alludes to both posthumanist and new materialist interest in nonhuman and synthetic agencies. The artificial intelligence agent demonstrates being able to respond to questions appropriately almost instantly, simulating in its ability rapidly to collect information,

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surpassing human capacities. DiNA’s digital likeness is modeled on the actress Tilda Swinton, the protagonist in several of Hershman Leeson’s films. An Australian artist residing in New York, Natalie Jeremijenko (b. 1966) has in her work sought to provide opportunities for convivial collaboration, communication and exchange between the environment, humans, and animals, including geese, amphibians, fish, pigeons, butterflies, salamanders, and rats. Her projects exemplify aspects of the critical posthumanism outlined by Braidotti, as they foster relationality across species and materially distinct entities. Many of Jeremijenko’s experiments investigate the health of the environment, humans, and other living beings. She understands “health” as a project shared among all of these entities, and in her work she employs contemporary technologies to facilitate transversal connections among them. In 1991 in collaboration with radio journalist Kate Rich and artist Daniela Tigani, Jeremijenko founded the Bureau of Inverse Technology (BIT), which over 10 years launched a number of environmentally concerned projects. In Bangbang (1999) the Bureau installed a radiation‐triggered webcam at Fresh Kills landfield in Staten Island. The camera would record 2–4 seconds of video if the radiation reading exceeded the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) designated “safe” level. The repeated triggering of the camera demonstrated higher levels of radiation than official records (consulted by the artists) reported for the site. BIT also found that the cameras were activated by flying seagulls, which indicated a concentration of radioactive materials in the birds. The project made public information about the environment that was otherwise unapparent.30 In the spirit of situationism, the installation left the viewers to respond individually and ­collectively to these conditions and did not prescribe any course for action. In her renowned work OneTrees, which began in 1999 in collaboration with plant geneticists at the University of California, Davis, Jeremijenko obtained, cultivated, and later planted clones of a hybrid walnut tree around California’s Bay Area to show how the environment and the climate affected the growth of each tree. In the project as each specimen grew, it developed unique characteristics through interaction with its surroundings. Thus the physical identity of each tree was both singular and multiple, an idea communicated in the title of this work. This synchronous multiplicity in singularity indicates that genetics alone did not determine the evolution of each tree but rather its health was the product of a complex of interacting factors. The physical condition of the trees relayed information about the environment to humans, inviting them to ask how sharing the same environments might affect them. Jeremijenko’s project also provided a map that showed the location of the trees and environmental details such as bird flight patterns and toxic emission areas. In addition, people could purchase artificial life clones of the trees in a CD‐ROM to grow in their computer monitors. The a‐life clones were linked to CO2 monitors that analyzed the air in the location of the monitor, which in turn affected the growth of the simulated trees. The CD also alerted users when the quantity of paper used in their printer (if available) equaled one tree. Far from offering a linear view of causation, this early work demonstrates complex interconnections among multiple systems in the development of living entities. In that respect it could be seen as foreshadowing new materialist orientations. Like other of her works, OneTrees also was an early representative of bio art, a branch of new media art compatible with posthumanism and new materialisms, in which artists work with live materials including organisms, bacteria, tissue cultures, natural elements, and environmental processes using scientific methods often supported by digital media.

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Around 2003 Jeremijenko initiated OOZ (zoo spelled backwards), an open‐ended series of projects that consist of habitats without cages where the animals live by choice.31 At the core of the project lies the question of what constitutes quality of life for different animal species. In OOZ Jeremikenko and her collaborators, who vary with each project, provide designs for shelter, nutrition, and species‐specific conveniences that the animals judge through their behavior. The designs also provide opportunities for interactions based on reciprocity between humans and nonhumans. The aim is to create environments that lead to species’ sustainability and health. The Bat Billboard, a collaborative OOZ project between Jeremijenko and the German artist Chris Woebken, functions simultaneously as an advertisement medium and a ­living environment for bats. Bats play important roles in the health of the planet. They pollinate plants essential for the survival of humans and other animals, consume ­millions of insects, including dangerous agricultural pests, and produce guano (bat and bird excrement) that is a valuable agricultural fertilizer. Without bats, some ecosystems might risk collapse.32 An underutilized billboard functions as a high rise building for bats to provide an alternative to caves and other habitats that expose these creatures to the fungus associated with white nose syndrome, a deadly disease that accounts for millions of bat deaths in North America. The artists placed monitoring equipment in the structure to observe the activities of the bats and also voice recognition software to translate bat calls into messages. The translated messages are displayed on the billboard to advertise the activities of the bats in the community. The artists experimented to make the framework an optimal environment for the bats. Later improvements included climate controls to keep the temperature in the billboard above the threshold required for the mold to grow.33 This work exemplifies a living environment free of cages, which the bats choose to inhabit. Like OneTrees, OOZ projects (including dinners that can be enjoyed by animals and humans) encourage interspecies conviviality and make evident the interdependence of diverse systems. In their vast outreach these projects by far exceed the self‐centered individualism that Braidotti associates with traditional humanism. OOZ share the goals of Environmental Health Clinic and the Farmacy, both ongoing projects began in 2006 in New York, in which Jeremijenko with multiple collaborators identify problems and devise solutions for environmental health.34 These works are collaborative and geared to awareness raising, information sharing, and community building around specific issues. One could read them as reaching towards similar goals as Braidotti’s critical posthumanism. Additionally, the works transcend disciplinary practices as each may function simultaneously as an experiment, art, design, engineering, advertising, and architecture. Another artist who worked in a vein similar to Jeremijenko was German‐born Beatriz da Costa (1974–2012), who lived and worked most of her adult life in the United States. Her early work, Cello (2000), consisted of an automated acoustic cello and microphones linked to a computer program that enabled the cello to self‐tune by comparing the sounds it generated to sine wave tones generated by the computer. Once the cello finished tuning itself, it performed simple musical phrases without human intervention. If a visitor approached it too closely, the cello responded with random sounds. When disrupted over a long period of time, the instrument would “untune” itself and once left alone it would restart its tuning process.35 While the cello’s unsophisticated musical

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performance made evident to the viewer the absence and the necessity of human embodiment and control for musical skill, the instrument’s independent actions and responsivity signaled to the potential of machine learning and to possible affiliations between humans and machines. Later da Costa would employ her knowledge of electronics and engineering to make works that promoted environmental awareness. With Brooke Singer and Jamie Schulte, in 2002 da Costa founded Preemptive Media (PM), a multidisciplinary art and research collaborative dedicated to promote public discussion around technological developments. For the project Area’s Immediate Reading (AIR), PM designed portable air kits to monitor pollutants such as carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, and ground‐level ozone in lower Manhattan. Volunteers ­carrying the devices could communicate with one another and transmit the data they gathered in the city streets to a centralized database where it could be translated to visual form. The work premiered at Eyebeam in New York in 2006. In PigeonBlog launched in the same year, da Costa, with Cina Hazegh and Kevin Ponto designed and coordinated “a collaboration” between pigeons and humans to collect and disseminate information about air quality in Southern California. Working with birds facilitated by select pigeon fanciers, da Costa and her team designed a miniature backpack for each pigeon. The backpack included pollution and temperature sensors, a microcontroller, antennas, a global positioning system (GPS) to determine the bird’s position, and a messaging system that transmitted in real time the information gathered by the sensors to an online mapping and blogging environment. PigeonBlog was controversial to animal right activists, who questioned the scientific validity of the work, under the assumption that a legitimate scientific experiment might pose less risk to the birds.36 Nonetheless, the work was well received in some scientific communities, such as the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, from which researchers invited da Costa to serve on the board of their Urban Bird Gardens Project, an initiative that involved bird observation data gathering by non‐expert citizens.37 Da Costa later studied with Donna Haraway at the University of California Santa Cruz where she enrolled in a PhD in the history of consciousness. Stimulated by Haraway’s ideas, she continued to involve nonhumans in later projects. Da Costa realized her most powerful work while undergoing cancer treatment at Sloan Kettering and NYU. In Dying for the Other and the Lab and Life Garden (2011–2012), both part of The Cost of Life series, da Costa poignantly stressed the dependence of human health on nonhuman others. The video diptych Dying for the Other offers the viewer glimpses of the artist’s daily life during her cancer treatment and of the experiences of mice used as models for cancer research.38 In a segment of the video da Costa walks slowly in what seems to be the hall of a hospital or clinic. A man walks by her side holding her hand. The camera focuses on her gaunt figure, her thin face showing deep dark circles under her eyes. The window switches to da Costa performing an eye–hand coordination test and then to da Costa walking in a New York City street with the aid of a walker. As she is about to cross the threshold of a building, the shot cuts to two small, hairless, wrinkly pink mice running across pebbly ground. One of the mice stops, looks up, inhales and then disappears from view. The camera points to the ground and moves its focus to the right. A mouse follows the camera’s path, pointing its nose upward as if interacting with the device. Suddenly the focus switches to da Costa in a kitchen unpacking fresh vegetables from a market bag and to her placing pills in the labeled compartments of a pill box.

Reading Posthumanism in Feminist New Media Art

The screen opens to a second channel to show a lab where three women researchers work around transparent boxes housing lab mice. One of the women puts on gloves. A group of mice cowers under a cube balanced at an angle inside the box. The cube is removed, exposing the recoiling mice. The screen then reverts to a single window to focus on a single mouse. The rodent moves, it stands on its back legs, it sniffs the transparent walls of the box and finally sits at rest on its hind legs looking out. The scene switches to one of the researchers injecting a small mouse cradled in one of her hands with a standard‐size syringe, which looks large in relation to the small animal. Back to two channels: on the left, a box with several mice moving about and insistently standing on their back legs and inhaling upwards as if searching for a way out. On the video window to the right, da Costa sits on a sofa with her partner and recites a list of numbers backwards, each time subtracting seven. Then he enunciates a series of words and she spells each word backwards. These activities require her concentration and she goes about them slowly. Again the two channels change. The left window shows da Costa’s index finger tapping on a man’s extended index finger as he instructs her to do it faster. The right window focuses on her feet and lower legs as she tries to keep her balance standing with one foot in front of the other as if taking a step forward. She loses balance. Back to one channel. The camera moves slowly from her knees to her upper body as she tries to balance her body. Her arms are crossed against her chest and her eyes are closed. She falters. She opens her eyes, looks in the direction of the viewer and then upwards with a dignified expression. This video is hard to watch. It compels the viewer to imagine switching places with both da Costa and any of the lab mice intermittently and sometimes simultaneously. Neither one appears as less sentient than the other, no less vulnerable or endangered than the other. Leaving didacticism aside, the work makes no case for either one. It makes their shared suffering palpable. For Haraway, “shared suffering” is no sacrifice. It entails honoring the entangled labor of humans and animals together. It demands respect for the nonhuman other and the recognition of its responses.39 In the video, da Costa looks at the mice and the mice return her gaze. As we watch, the artist and the mice look back at us and beckon us to hold their gaze. One walks away from the work loaded with the understanding, at least fleetingly, of the magnificence and the fragility of all life as well as the ethical predicaments that we must face to live and die responsibly. Da Costa produced these pieces at the end of her life; the other artists discussed above have had long careers and are still active. Thus it is problematic either to set their work apart from or to situate it exclusively within the context of art from the present. All of these artists imagined the human beyond the traditional white male subject of humanism and often explored the interrelations of humans and nonhumans. Even if some of the artworks from the last century did not directly engage with biology and other scientific fields the pieces decisively gestured towards posthumanism. Artists conversant with feminist posthumanisms and new materialisms extend the desire for relation and transformation evident in the works aforementioned, to explore transhistorical and transcultural relationships as well as to engage in sustained considerations of “the matter of the body itself ”. Argentine artist living in Providence, Rhode Island, Paula Gaetano Adi (b. 1981) makes art in a variety of media including sculpture, installation, performance, and robotics. By her own description, her work attempts “to promote bodily inter‐species, intercultural live encounters and explore the effects and

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Figure 17.2  Paula Gaetano Adi, Alexitimia, 2006–2007. ©Paula Gaetano Adi. Photo courtesy of Espacio Fundación Telefónica.

‘affects’ of different discourses in technoscience”.40 This statement alone indicates the artist’s commitment to posthumanist explorations. Her robot Alexitimia, 2007, (Figure 17.2), winner of the First Prize in the 2009 Vida: Art and Artificial Life Awards (held yearly in Madrid, Spain, 1999–2015) consists of an autonomous agent, a semi‐sphere made of clay covered with a soft latex skin, that responds to touch by perspiring.41 Plastic hoses and sensors carefully placed under the robot’s skin trigger water flow from a receptacle placed beneath the agent to simulate perspiration. By reducing the robot’s expression to a corporeal process, the artist indicates the affective potential of robotic agents and calls attention to a potently expressive and underestimated organ of the body: the skin. According to a variety of commentators, including the psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Didier Anzieu and the theorists Elizabeth Grosz and Brian Massumi, the skin plays a fundamental role in the formation of subjectivity as it functions as the body’s boundary between the inside and the outside and also defines its openings. Hence it is central to the formation of the subject’s body image and her identification with it. Through touch the skin becomes a site of communication and negotiation basic to identity formation, the differentiation of the self from others.42 The title of the work, Alexitimia (in English Alexithymia), refers to a deficit in emotional awareness due to which an individual is unable verbally to identify, express, or describe feelings experienced by the self or by others.43 People with alexithymia can only communicate emotions through their bodies and behavior. In humans, perspiration is associated not only with systemic regulation but also with affective states such as nervousness, excitement, and fear. By sweating, the robot simulates the powerful effect of material bodily processes in emotional communication in the absence of language.

Reading Posthumanism in Feminist New Media Art

The affective power of bodily behavior in synthetic agents continues to preoccupy Gaetano Adi. Her project TZ’IJK (2013), designed in collaboration with the architect Gustavo Crembil, incorporates traditional Latin American building technologies with contemporary robotics. The projected installation consists of a group of five spherical robots. The body of each robot has a layered structure consisting first of an interior laser‐cut polycarbonate geodesic membrane which is held together with an armature made with angarilla wood. The exterior of the sphere is then covered with quincha, an indigenous construction method consisting of clay mud mixed with thick grass, which is found in the Americas, especially in Peru. In comparison to colonial constructions in brick, quincha buildings are significantly more resistant to earthquakes.44 The robots lack the capacity to see, make sounds, or ambulate. They do have the ability to rock back and forth via motorized wheels set in the sphere’s interior, but the movement serves no specific purpose. According to Gaetano Adi, the project draws from the history of mestizaje and critical theories of postcolonial technoscience. Its tactical use of high and low technologies embodies “Latin America’s anthropophagic, cannibalistic, and hybrid nature, and so proposes an alternative approach to the development of embodied artificial life.”45 TZ’IJK is inspired from the Quiché Popol Vuh (Book of the People), which in one passage recounts the first attempt of the Gods to create humans: “Of earth, of mud, they made man’s flesh. But they saw that it was not good. It melted away, it was soft, did not move, had no strength, it fell down, it was limp, it could not move its head, its face fell to one side, its sight was blurred, it could not look behind. At first it spoke, but had no mind. Quickly it soaked in the water and could not stand.”46 Like Alexitimia, TZ’IJK’s behavior evokes affective states. Rocking back and forth in humans and other animals signals stress, anxiety, and perhaps a measure of self‐­ protectiveness towards the world. The unification of traditional indigenous technologies with modern robotics constitutes the robot’s mestizaje, which probes underexplored possibilities for connectivity, creativity, and assertion of indigenous ingenuity. The inability of the agents to speak and their seemingly erratic, purposeless behaviors not only questions the instrumental efficiency of traditional robots but also bring attention to the value of different kinds of abilities or “intelligence” and open to reinterpretation recurrent narratives about the backwardness and the technological naiveté of indigenous and colonized peoples. The segment of the Quiché creation myth that TZ’IJK re‐enacts was only the first attempt of the Maya gods to create humankind. According to the story, the gods persisted and tested other materials until finally they found in maize the perfect medium to create humans in their own image.47 Consequently, TZ’IJK can be read an invitation to future mestizo tactical experiments. Both Alexitimia and TZ’IJK are part of an influential current in artificial life and contemporary robotics that questions notions of intelligence as centralized and expressed through the manipulation of symbolic systems, ideas fundamental to traditional artificial intelligence research.48 The roboticist Rodney Brooks defines intelligence as an incremental process that begins with interacting with the real world through perception and action. To Brooks, the essence of intelligence consists of the ability to move around and sense a surrounding environment to the degree required to sustain an organism’s life and reproduction.49 Observing that the arrival of humans in their present form to the planet is relatively recent in comparison to the evolution of other species from s­ ingle cell organisms to primates, he believes that the achievement of those simple functions

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is the most challenging aspect of intelligence; consequently, it is there that evolution took the most time.50 To investigate these capacities in electronic devices there is no need of expensive laboratories and hardware. Some roboticists have demonstrated that even simple mechanisms such as a weasel ball (a motorized toy ball) valued at $4 can learn to explore its environment.51 Unlike the weasel ball, neither of Gaetano Adi’s robots ambulates. Alexitimia sweats and TZ’IJK stays in place moving. Through these actions they evoke another kind of awareness that resides in the material body. The expression of emotion in robots and other artificial agents also has been a concern of artificial intelligence and robotics. Until very recently, however, in robotics this research largely focused on the ability of anthropomorphic or animal‐like agents to emulate and respond to human emotion.52 Gaetano Adi’s robots are neither anthropomorphic nor biomorphic. They evoke affective states solely through their materials and behavior. In this respect the artist explores the expressiveness of matter and extends the concept of the body to include inorganic components in line with new materialisms. Karolina Sobecka, born in Poland in 1977 and now based in Brooklyn, New York, works with a variety of media to engage public space and explore the ways humans interact with the world they create. Thinking Like a Cloud is an ongoing research ­project that is part of Project Ski + and the series Nephologies. The project consists of sending to the sky a Cloud Collector launched on a weather balloon. Inspired by modern fog ­collectors deployed in areas of the world where water is scarce, the Cloud Collector consists of two wings made with a raschel‐weave mesh that extracts 30% of moisture or 0.5–1.5 g of water per cubic meter of cloud, with a connecting funnel and a sample container with a reflux valve to prevent the water from escaping.53 The collector gathers cloud samples in the troposphere. The water collected from the cloud samples is then consumed by volunteers who record their transformation in a log. According to Sobecka, “The transformation occurs through microbial exchange: The cloud microbiome is incorporated into the human microbiome, rendering its new host part‐cloud.” A diagram in the project’s blog, also shown in exhibitions, explains that the resulting human is “10 trillion cells 5% human, 1% cloud, 94% other.”54 The “other” refers to microflora in the human body. The project offers participants a bacteria tasting menu that includes some species of microbes found in the cloud in a specific location, day, and time. Sobecka advances that the cloud water may affect the participants’ ideology. She asks: “Can one drink a concept? Perhaps not. But drinking a glass of cloud water containing microbial life which influences one’s own microflora makes one think about these things  –  water, clouds, microbes, humans, systems  –  a little differently. Thus, one’s mind is changed.”55 The artist’s suggestion resonates with the work of the new materialist feminist theorist Elizabeth Wilson, who argues for the primacy of the gut in the psychological development of humans. Literally, the gut is an open tube that brings the outside world inside of us. In the psychological sphere, Wilson argues, the outside world engenders the relations of self and other and through them the development of the self.56 Then, one could propose, like Sobecka does, that possibly one could ingest ideas and ways of being. Thinking Like a Cloud interrogates the humanity of the body by emphasizing its material and nonhuman components as well as the agency of microorganisms. It destabilizes notions of a singular subjectivity by foregrounding the interdependence of human and nonhuman agencies. In sync with new materialisms, Sobecka’s work emphasizes the systemic relations of environment, mind, and body.

Notes

The work of both Gaetano Adi and Sobecka shares with previous feminist art in new media interests in expanding notions of subjectivity and opening routes for thinking about collective futures. Like Jeremijenko, Davis, Hershman, and others, the work of these artists exceeds the social and political construction of individual human identities and the restatement of human rationality and control by engaging with other organisms, materials and environmental factors that render the human unstable and distributed. Resonating with both posthumanist and new materialist feminisms, these works, like Jeremijenko’s projects, are not explicitly critical or oppositional, but make material statements that ­conjure new images of humans and nonhumans. While Gaetano Adi and Sobecka address subjectivity and affect in their work, they incorporate new technologies and scientific knowledge in their art to affirm the vitality of matter and reach across geographical, ­historical, cultural, and material differences and establish affirmative and generative connections. In so doing they address present social and ethical concerns, such as the present course of technological development and the health of the planet. Gaetano Adi’s works signal to futures in which hierarchies of power based on technological development might be disturbed by the technological innovations of marginal peoples. Sobecka links the bacterial populations essential to human gastrointestinal functions with the makeup of clouds and in so doing points to the joint constitution of organisms and environment. In this essay I have argued that in the history of new media art feminist, posthumanist, and new materialist orientations overlap and remain difficult to disassociate. The artwork addressed here represents a small fraction of artistic production in new media art by women. Jeremijenko’s and Sobecka’s interest in systems has parallels in the work of artists working in more traditional media. For example, the American artist Kim Abeles made several “Smog Collectors” beginning in the 1990s. These objects, ranging from dinner plates to fabric chairs, registered through color changes the quality of the surrounding air when exposed to it.57 Posthumanist new media art also has more distant antecedents in the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in works by artists such as Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, and the ecologically concerned work of Betty Beaumont, Agnes Denes, and Patricia Johanson.58

Notes 1 Jennifer Way, “Back to the future: Women art and technology,” in Cyberfeminism 2.0 (Peter

Lang Publishing Inc., 2012), 192–193; Charlotte Alter and Jennifer Latson, “This may have been the best year for women since the dawn of time,” Time. http://time.com/3639944/ feminism‐2014‐womens‐rights‐ray‐rice‐bill‐cosby/, accessed 16 November 2018. 2 Sara Ahmed, “Open forum: Imaginary prohibitions,” European Journal of Women Studies, vol. 15, no. 1 (2008): 23–39; Noela Davis, “New materialism and feminism’s anti‐biologism: A response to Sara Ahmed,” European Journal of Women’s Studies, 2009, 67–80; Karen Barad, “Posthumanist performativity: Toward an Understanding of how matter comes to matter,” Signs, vol. 28, no. 3 (2003): 801–831, doi:10.1086/345321; Karen Michelle Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 3 bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000); Amelia Jones, ed., The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (London/ New York: Routledge, 2003).

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4 Katherine N. Hayles, “Posthumanism, technogenesis, and digital technologies: A

conversation with Katherine N. Hayles,” The Fibreculture Journal, vol. 23, interview by Holger Pötzsch. http://twentythree.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj‐172‐posthumanism‐ technogenesis‐and‐digital‐technologies‐a‐conversation‐with‐katherine‐n‐hayles/, accessed 16 November2018. 5 Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 291. 6 Katherine N. Hayles, “Posthumanism,” 23, 98. 7 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 38–39. 8 Ibid., 49–50. 9 Ibid., 1–3. 10 Ibid., 95. 11 Ibid., 90. Donna Haraway, “A manifesto for cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s,” Socialist Review, vol. 2, no. 80 (March/April 1985): 65–107. 12 Braidotti, 50. 13 Katherine N. Hayles, “Posthumanism,” 23, 97. 14 Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, “Introducing the new materialisms,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, eds Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 7–8. 15 Ibid., 5. 16 Ibid., 25. 17 Samantha Frost, “The implications of the new materialisms for feminist epistemology,” in Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science, ed. Heidi E. Grasswick (Springer Netherlands, 2011), 71–72. 18 Coole and Frost, “Introducing the new materialisms,” 20. 19 “Human Microbiome Project DACC: About the HMP.” http://hmpdacc.org/overview/ about.php, accessed 1 May 2015; Peter J. Turnbaugh et al., “The Human Microbiome Project,” Nature, vol. 449, no. 7164 (2007): 804–10, doi: 10.1038/nature06244. 20 For discussions about historical change in other areas see Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 14–17; Thomas Nickles, “Scientific revolutions,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (2014). Alain Badiou with Fabien Tarby, Philosophy and the Event (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). 21 See Lev Manovich, “New media from Borges to HTML,” in The New Media Reader, eds Noah Wardrip‐Fruin and Nick Monfort (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 15–16; Christiane Paul, Digital Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003), 7; Anne Collins Goodyear, “From technophilia to technophobia: The impact of the Vietnam War on the reception of art and technology,” Leonardo, vol. 41, no. 2 (2008): 169–173 and Domenico Quaranta Beyond New Media Art (self‐published work, lulu.com., 2013). 22 Manovich, ibid., 16–7. 23 Mark Tribe and Rena Jana, New Media Art (Cologne, Germany: Taaschen, 2006), 6. 24 Michael Connor, “What’s Postinternet to do with Net Art”? Rhizome, 1 November 2013. http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/nov/1/postinternet/, accessed 16 November 2018. Josephine Bosma, Nettitudes (Rotterdam, Holland: Nai Publishers, 2011). 25 The prize categories at Ars Electronica indicate this orientation http://www.aec.at/prix/ en/kategorien/. For an account of new media arts in the 1990s see Simon Penny, “Desire for virtual space: The technological imaginary in 1990’s media art,” in Space and Desire edited by Thea Brejzec et al. (Zurich: Zurich University of the Arts, 2011).

Notes

26 See, for instance, Relive: Media Art Histories edited by Sean Cubitt and Paul Thomas

27 28 29

30

31 32 33

34 35 36

37 38 39

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts, edited by Margot Lovejoy, Christiane Paul, and Victoria Vesna (Chicago: Intellect, 2011); Christiane Paul, Digital Art (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2008); Frank Popper, From Technological to Virtual Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Media Histories, edited by Oliver Grau (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Digital Art History: A Subject in Transition, edited by Anna Bentkowska‐Kafel, Trish Cashen, and Hazel Gardiner (Bristol: Intellect, 2005); Margo Lovejoy, Digital Current: Art in the Electronic Age (New York: Routledge, 2004); Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). Lynn Hershman, “Private I: An investigator’s timeline,” in The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 25–26. Eugene Thacker, Biomedia, 1st edition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). See Marvin Lee Minsky, The Society of Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986); Kevin Kelly, “The three breakthroughs that have finally unleashed AI on the world,” WIRED (27 October 2014). http://www.wired.com/2014/10/future‐of‐artificial‐ intelligence/, accessed 16 November 2018; Ruby Rich, “California dreaming: The cinematic fusions of Lynn Hershman Leeson,” in Civic Radar, 260. https://www. worldcat.org/title/lynn‐hershman‐leeson‐civic‐radar/oclc/933585490, accessed 16 November 2018. The project was documented in the artist’s website, of which now there is an archive.