Curating Differently : Feminisms, Exhibitions and Curatorial Spaces [1 ed.] 9781443887380, 9781443885775

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Curating Differently

Curating Differently: Feminisms, Exhibitions and Curatorial Spaces Edited by

Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe

Curating Differently: Feminisms, Exhibitions and Curatorial Spaces Edited by Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe This book first published 2016 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2016 by Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-8577-0 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8577-5

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations .................................................................................... vii Preface........................................................................................................ xi Acknowledgements ................................................................................... xix Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Curatorial Strategies on the Art Scene during the Feminist Movement: Los Angeles in the 1970s Eva Zetterman Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 29 A Short History of Women’s Exhibitions from the 1970s to the 1990s: Between Feminist Struggles and Hegemonic Appropriation Doris Guth Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 41 Reformulating the Code: A Feminist Interpretation of the Curatorial Work of Sara Breitberg-Semel and Galia Bar Or during the 1980s and the 1990s in Israel Osnat Zukerman Rechter Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 65 Transformative Encounters: Prior and Current Strategies of a Feminist Pioneer Margareta Gynning Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 91 MoMA’s Modern Women Project, Feminisms, and Curatorial Practice Alexandra Schwartz Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 101 Moments of Contradictions: Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti, 1982–1983 Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe

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Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 115 women artists@home or Why are There Still No Equality-Marked Collections? Malin Hedlin Hayden Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 129 Major Global Recurring Art Shows “Doing Feminist Work”: A Case Study of the 18th Biennale of Sydney: All Our Relations (2012) Sibyl Fisher Bibliography ............................................................................................ 141 Contributors ............................................................................................ 157 Index ........................................................................................................ 161

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1-1. Barbara T. Smith, Nude Frieze (1972), F-space, Santa Ana. Photograph by Boris Sojka. © Barbara T. Smith, courtesy of the artist. Fig. 1-2. Suzanne Lacy, A Woman Was Raped Here…, side walk chalking, part of Three Weeks in May (1977). © Suzanne Lacy, courtesy of the artist. Fig. 1-3. Judy Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles (1976–983), San Fernando Valley. Photograph by Eva Zetterman. © Eva Zetterman. Fig. 1-4. Asco, Decoy Gang War Victim (1974) with Gronk. Photograph by Harry Gamboa, Jr. © Harry Gamboa, Jr., courtesy of the artist. Fig. 1-5. Self Help Graphics & Art’s Barrio Mobile Art Studio. Sister Karen Boccalero (back row, far right) and Linda Vallejo (front row, far right). © Self Help Graphics & Art, courtesy of Self Help Graphics & Art. Fig. 1-6. Installation view of the exhibition Women Artists: 1550–1950 at Brooklyn Museum (1977), curated by Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin in 1976 for LACMA. Photo: Brooklyn Museum Archives. © Brooklyn Museum, courtesy of Brooklyn Museum. Fig. 1-7. Asco, Spray Paint LACMA or Project Pie in De/Face (1974) with Patssi Valdez. Photograph by Harry Gamboa, Jr. © Harry Gamboa, Jr., courtesy of the artist. Fig. 3-1. David Reeb, Landscapes 1983 (1983), installation view, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion. Photo: Dalia Amotz. Courtesy of Einem Amotz. Fig. 4-1. Hanna Hirsch-Pauli, Konstnären Venny Soldan-Brofeldt, Paris 1887. Göteborgs konstmuseum, Gothenburg, Sweden. Photo: Göteborgs konstmuseum. Fig. 4-2. Interior from the exhibition Artists Couples at the turn of the 19th century at Nationalmuseum, Stockholm 2006. Photo: Nationalmuseum. Fig. 4-3. Carl Larsson, Getting Ready for a Game, 1901, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Photo: Nationalmuseum. Fig. 4-4. Peter Johansson, How to cook a Souvenir, 1994. Photo: Nationalmuseum Fig. 4-5. Interior from the exhibition Look out! Image awareness and visual culture. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm 2004. Photo: Nationalmuseum.

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Fig. 4-6. Catalog cover of the exhibition Look out! Image awareness and visual culture, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm 2004. Photo: Nationalmuseum. Fig. 4-7. Workshop photo with gender activist group at Nationalmuseum in connection with the exhibition Masquerade—Power, gender and identity in 2004. Fig. 4-8. Interior from the exhibition Alexander Roslin. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm 2008. Photo: Nationalmuseum. Fig. 4-9. Flyer from the exhibition Hand-Made—Drawings from Nationalmuseum. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm 2008. Photo: Nationalmuseum. Fig. 4-10. Interior from the exhibition Hand-Made—Drawings from Nationalmuseum. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm 2008. Photo: Nationalmuseum. Fig. 5-1. Installation view of the exhibition, Lee Bontecou: All Freedom in Every Sense. April 16 through September 6, 2010. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photographer: Thomas Griesel. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 5-2. Installation view of the exhibition, Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography (Part 1). February 3 through August 30, 2010. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photographer: Thomas Griesel. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. Fig. 5-3. Installation view of the exhibition, Mind and Matter: Alternative Abstractions, 1940s to Now. May 5 through August 16, 2010. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photographer: Thomas Griesel. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 5-4. Installation view of the exhibition, Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen. September 15, 2010 through May 2, 2011. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photographer: Jonathan Muzikar. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 6-1. Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), The two Fridas, 1939. Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno, Mexico City. © 2015. Photo Art Resource/Bob Schalkwijk/Scala, Florence. © Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, México D.F/Bildupphovsrätt 2015.

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Fig. 6-2. Tina Modotti (1896-1942), Illustration for a Mexican Song, 1927. Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Gelatin silver print, 9 1/2 x 7 5/16" (23.4 x 18.6 cm). Given anonymously. Acc. n.: 341.1965. © 2015. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence. Fig. 8-1. Iris Häussler, He Dreamed Overtime, the 18th Biennale of Sydney: all our relations, 2012. Photo: Sibyl Fisher. Reproduced with kind permission of BildKunst and the artist.

PREFACE

Feminisms, Exhibitions, and Curatorial Spaces Feminist theories and methodologies are by now well integrated into art historical research and artistic practices. In recent years, feminisms in art have been institutionalized in major art exhibitions, predominantly in Europe and North America, and have attracted vast attention. Some examples are WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (Los Angeles and touring), Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art (the opening exhibition for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum in New York), REBELLE: Art & Feminism 1969– 2009 (Arnhem), Konstfeminism: Strategier och effekter i Sverige från 1970-talet till idag (Helsingborg and touring), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: 45 Years of Art and Feminism (Bilbao), Goddesses (Oslo), Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe (Vienna and Warsaw), Gender Battle (Santiago de Compostela), and The Beginning Is Always Today: Contemporary Feminist Art in Scandinavia (Kristiansand). In addition, public art museums have shown a growing interest in working with feminist perspectives and gender equality in relation to museum collections (see e.g. the Second Museum of Our Wishes project, Moderna Museet, Stockholm and the Modern Women Project, Museum of Modern Art, New York). Obviously, feminist art curating, as a practice of art interpretation and a politics of display, intersects with the diverse area of feminist research and artistic practices. On the other hand, the institutionalization of feminisms, its relative success, or failure, is under debate.1 Institutional critique has been a crucial feminist methodology and many interventions have taken place outside the institutional context of the white cube and have strategically targeted established art practices and ideologies. Indeed, as Hilary Robinson, with reference to Griselda Pollock, recently warned: What is the effect of separating feminist aesthetic interventions from the larger political and cultural revolution that was feminism and feminist theory, and isolating works and artists within a relatively unaltered curatorial approach and exhibitionary model? We might gain this work for art, but miss its significance in transforming art. For feminism was never an art movement.2

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Curatorial strategies ideologically frame the encounter between art and its publics. If we, as Reesa Greenberg proposes, understand exhibitions as discursive events, it becomes urgent to ask for a deeper understanding of feminist exhibitions and curatorial practices in relation to wider political, economic, and social structures in local and global contexts.3 It is only recently, however, that a theorization of feminist art curating and feminist exhibition histories as a specific field of knowledge have emerged. A seminal publication was the “Curatorial Strategies” issue of n.paradoxa edited by Renee Baert and Katy Deepwell in 2006.4 Four years later, Feminisms is Still Our Name: Seven Essays on Historiography and Curatorial Practices, edited by Malin Hedlin Hayden and Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe, focusing on historiographical critique and the relation between academic and curatorial feminist practices, was published.5 The international research network Transnational perspectives on women’s art, feminism and curating, whose participants included scholars, curators and artists, arranged a number of workshop seminars and symposia between 2010 and 2012 devoted to this particular field of research.6 Related to this international collaboration is the volume on Working with Feminism: Curating and Exhibitions in Eastern Europe, edited by Katrin Kivimaa, which claims the emancipation of Eastern European perspectives in feminist thinking and curatorial practice.7 Further major contributions to the field are Politics in a Glass Case: Feminism, Exhibition Cultures and Curatorial Transgressions, edited by Angela Dimitrakaki and Lara Perry, which investigates the impact of feminism on curatorial practice and exhibition cultures in Europe and North America, and Women’s:Museum. Curatorial Politics in Feminism, Education, History, and Art, edited by Elke Krasny, which offers a transnational historiography of feminist strategies and curatorial activism in and out of the museum.8 Another example of the growing research interest in feminism, art, and the politics of exhibitions is Monika Kaiser’s Neubesitzungen des Kunst-Raumes: Feministische Kunstausstellungen und ihre Räume, 1972–1987, which is an in-depth study of feminist exhibitions of women’s art with particular focus on spatial meaning production. Research related to issues of feminist exhibitions, curatorial practices, and art museums’ collections has also been presented in publications concerning museum critique and cultural politics, e.g. Griselda Pollock’s Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive, Griselda Pollock and Joyce Zemans’ (ed.), Museum after Modernism: Strategies of Engagement, and the Swedish Arts Council’s research report Representation och regionalitet. Genusstrukturer i fyra svenska konstmuseisamlingar edited by Anna Tellgren and Jeff Werner.9

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Curating Differently The essays in Curating Differently: Feminisms, Exhibitions and Curatorial Spaces present critical perspectives on and analyses of feminist art curating and exhibiting, its strategies, interventions and histories. The general objective of the volume is to present scholarly analyses and critical reflections on the diverse practices of feminist art curating and exhibition practices from the 1970s onward. The context is not limited to art museums and exhibitions alone, but includes alternative spaces for artistic and curatorial interventions. The essays included in the anthology depart from case studies that theorize diverse strategies and interventions in curatorial space and relate them to socio-political and national contexts as well as global economic structures. Moreover, they critically scrutinize feminist exhibitions and “gender equality” strategies in public art museums in recent years and present a specifically curatorial perspective on exhibition practices. Collectively, the essays contribute with historical perspectives on feminist exhibition practices and curatorial models, firsthand accounts of feminist interventions within the art museum as well as timely analyses of current intersections of feminisms within curating in the global art world. The majority of the essays in the volume were presented in the “Feminisms and Curating” sessions, chaired by Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe, at the NORDIK X art history conference in Stockholm in October 2012. “Feminisms and Curating” amounted to three sessions and was the largest session at the conference due to considerable national and international attention, hence substantiating the current scholarly interest in the transnational field of feminist curatorial and exhibition studies. The topical questions addressed in the sessions thus also form a framework for the essays in this book: How can the diverse practices feminist art curating and feminist exhibitions be theorized and historicized? Which feminist theories and methodologies have informed the strategies of feminist art curating? Departing from the exhibitions Women Artists: 1550–1950 (1976) and Womanhouse (1972), both held in Los Angles, Eva Zetterman in her essay “Curatorial strategies on the art scene during the Feminist Movement: Los Angeles in the 1970s” explores the curatorial strategies within different sectors of the city’s art scenes during the 1970s by examining the mainstream and the alternative approaches, respectively. Los Angeles was a major site for both the Chicano Civil Rights Movement and the Feminist Movement at the time, but as Zetterman highlights, white Anglo American feminists and brown Chicano feminists mainly organized in separate

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networks, which resulted in different curatorial strategies and in a geographical separation of the alternative art scenes that paralleled the socio-spatial division of Los Angeles in the 1970s. Her discussion on Chicana artists’ collaborative groups and Chicana/o alternative art spaces serves as a reminder of the feminist art movement’s exclusion of nonwhite artists and calls attention to Chicana artists opposing intersecting structures of discrimination and marginalization and hence organizing into coalitions of greater diversity. Critically examining the mainstream art scene of Los Angeles in the 1970s, Zetterman shows how the Eurocentric selection criteria guiding feminist “landmark” exhibitions such as Women Artists: 1550–1950 (1976) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art have been justified in retrospect, thus perpetuating the marginalisation of Chicanas in the historiography of the feminist art movement in the US. The practices and strategies of two curators are at the centre of Osnat Zukerman Rechter’s essay “Reformulating the Code: A Feminist Interpretation of the Curatorial Work of Sara Breitberg-Semel and Galia Bar Or During the 1980s and 1990s in Israel”. In her in-depth account of their work, Zukerman Rechter traces the manner in which they attempted to redefine the boundaries of their curatorial roles within the institutional setting of the museum. She defines Sara Breitberg-Semel’s curatorial strategy to resist the institution from within—a way of exploring and emphasizing the gap between the curator’s individual action and the institutional apparatus of the museum to which she belonged—as a principle that aligns to a feminist consciousness, even though BreitbergSemel herself never overtly declared a feminist position. In contrast, Galia Bar Or explicitly emphasized her curatorial model—based on values of solidarity and cooperation and a critical stance towards canonical and geographical centres and peripheries—as a feminist approach. In her analysis, Zukerman Rechter points out the separate courses that BreitbergSemel and Bar Or have followed, but she also indicates a strategy of closeness as a common feminist denominator in their curatorial work. In “Moments of contradictions: Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti, 1982– 1983”, Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe calls attention to juxtaposition and montage as curatorial strategies employed in the exhibition Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti that toured Europe and North America in 1982 and 1983. She locates the curatorial model of the exhibition within a specific intellectual framework of politically motivated cultural practices, fostered by a renewed interest in the theories and practices of the German poet, dramatist and director Bertolt Brecht within British cultural debates of the 1970s and 80s, and argues that the exhibition produced a critical space beyond the implicit or explicit generalizations inherent in survey

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exhibitions of women’s art and the strategic adaptation of mainstream art history’s values and norms in the one woman show. Thus, despite the dilemma that the discursive framework of the exhibition might cause for today’s feminists, Sjöholm Skrubbe maintains that its critical mode of juxtaposition and montage, and its disturbing effects, might still provide a curatorial model to build on for future feminist interventions in the art world. In her essay “A short history of Women’s Exhibitions from the 1970s to the 1990s—between feminist struggles and hegemonic appropriation”, Doris Guth discusses “women’s exhibitions”, a phenomenon that since the 1970s has evoked critical debates along the contradictory positions pending between those who advocate exhibitions with women’s art only as a necessary strategic act and those who question women’s exhibitions as a curatorial model that risks ghettoizing women artists and reinforcing the hegemonic system of canonical art history. In a close reading of three women’s exhibitions of the 1990s—Women artists of the 20th Century in Wiesbaden (1990), Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth Century Art in, of and from the Feminine in Kortrijk, London, Boston, Washington, and Perth (1994–1997), and Bad Girls in London and Glasgow (1993–1994)—Guth critically elaborates on some basic phenomena pertaining to the all-women-show as possible strategic act. Her analysis shows that good intentions and critical interventions in mainstream curatorial models might well end up as counterproductive, reifying essentialist concepts of identity or de-politicizing pertinent feminist issues in superficial analyses. Guth locates a more promising approach to the concept of the women’s exhibition in Vraiment. Féminisme et art, shown in Grenoble in 1997, where the curator Laura Cottingham managed to negotiate female identity and feminist aesthetics in relation to actual socio-political conditions for artistic production and reception. The ambition to enable “transformative encounters” between the curator, the art object and the public is at the core of Margareta Gynning’s work as an art pedagogue, curator and feminist scholar at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. Departing from her many years of professional experiences, her contribution to this book “Transformative Encounters—prior and current strategies of a feminist pioneer” discusses the diverse feminist strategies that she has adopted in order to oppose the hegemony of canonical, modernist art history within the museum. Gynning’s extensive feminist work includes publications, temporary exhibitions, interventions in the museum’s permanent collections, art educational programs, and diverse collaborative projects. Her feminist strategies focus on pedagogical

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and relational aspects, image awareness, the importance of dialog, and the use of body language, always with the role of the viewer at the centre. She hence strives to activate museum visitors and creating a laboratory space within the museum that fosters active engagement, sharing, and collaborative processes of interpretative work. Gynning’s essay is a strong argument for the importance of doing feminist work from within large public institutions in order to be able to differentiate canon in the long term. The Museum of Modern Art, New York’s Modern Women Project (2005–2010), was a key contribution to the vast number of exhibitions, conferences, and projects on art and feminism that developed in the mid2000s, particularly in Europe and North America. The Modern Women Project included, inter alia, a major scholarly publication on work by women artists in MoMA’s permanent collection, two international symposia, a “Feminist Future Lecture Series”, collaborations with Columbia University, and a series of exhibitions. The project’s co-director Alexandra Schwartz in “MoMA’s Modern Women’s Project, Feminisms, and Curatorial Practice” offers a first-hand account of the development of the project and an analysis of this remarkable, and much debated, moment in the history of art and feminism. Schwartz perspicaciously expounds several societal, political, and art historical reasons for the resurgence of interest in art and feminism in the United States during the mid-2000s and elaborates on the effects of the Modern Women Project within and beyond MoMA, concluding that the project contributed to a fundamental shift in the general culture of gender at MoMA. Among the many exhibitions and museum projects that elaborated on women’s and/or feminist art in the 2000s, elles@centrepompidou: Women artists in the collection of the Musée national d’art modern, Centre de création industrielle, presented at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2009– 2010), gave rise to a particular set of questions as it was a display event that negotiated between the temporary exhibition and the presentation of permanent collections and, despite its being a display of women artistsonly, claimed not to deal with either feminist issues or issues of gender. In her contribution to this book, Malin Hedlin Hayden thus departs from an interest in the difference between an exhibition and a re-arrangement of a museum’s collection and the employment of the notions of “women”, sex, and gender in the theoretical framework of elles@centrepompidou. In her analysis, she locates a crucial paradox in the event’s curatorial model with regard to history as a narrative mode of understanding the past and astutely elucidates on the importance of national context in relation to how and what concepts such as sex and gender come to mean.

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In her essay “Major global recurring art shows ‘doing feminist work’: A case study of the 18th Biennale of Sydney: all our relations (2012)”, Sibyl Fisher offers an insightful consideration of how the 18th Biennale of Sydney enacted a feminist ethos and/or politics. The theoretical and curatorial framework of the Biennale articulated an expanded concept of relationality—encompassing social, intercultural, trans-subjective, and trans-species relations—and the show thus dedicated itself to “inclusionary practices of generative thinking”. Employing the concept of feminist work, Fisher focuses on experiences of affect in the exhibition and offers a personalized and critical reflection on her ambivalent experiences of the Biennale. She asks what feminist work was made possible by the exhibition, through its performative and active potentialities, and prompts the question of whether the curators of the Biennale described relations or produced them, concluding that the curatorial framework pushed her into new considerations and thus expanded the idea of what feminist work might be and do.

Notes 1

See e.g. Amelia Jones, “The Return of Feminism(s) and the Visual Arts, 19702009,” in Feminisms is Still Our Name: Seven Essays on Historiography and Curatorial Practices, eds. Malin Hedlin Hayden and Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe, (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 11–56; Connie Butler, Amelia Jones, and Maura Reilly (in dialogue), “Feminist Curating and the ‘Return’ of Feminist Art,” in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Amelia Jones (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 31–43; Hilary Robinson, “Feminism meets the Big Exhibition: Museum Survey Shows since 2005,” Anglo Saxonica 3, no. 6 (2013): 129–152. http://www.ulices.org/images/site/publicacoes/anglo-saxonica/ASaxoIII-N6_2.pdf. 2 Robinson, “Feminism meets the Big Exhibition,” 147. Italics in original. 3 Reesa Greenberg, “The Exhibition as Discursive Event,” in Longing and Belonging: From the Faraway Nearby (Santa Fe: SITE Santa Fe, 1995), 118–125. Available online at: http://www.yorku.ca/reerden/Publications/EXHIBITION/exhibition_discursive_ev ent.html. 4 Renee Baert and Katy Deepwell, eds., n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal, vol. 18, “Curatorial Strategies” (July 2008). 5 Malin Hedlin Hayden and Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe, eds., Feminisms is Still Our Name: Seven Essays on Historiography and Curatorial Practices (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010). 6 The network participants were Lara Perry, University of Brighton, UK; Angela Dimitrakaki, University of Edinburgh, UK; Marko Daniel, Tate Modern, UK; Kristina Huneault, Concordia University, Canada; Nancy Proctor, Smithsonian,

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USA. The documentation of the network’s activities, e.g. webcasts and reports, is available online: University of Brighton: Arts and Humanities, “Transnational perspectives on women’s art, feminism and curating,” http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/projects/irn. 7 Katrin Kivimaa, ed., Working with Feminism: Curating and Exhibitions in Eastern Europe, (Tallinn: Tallinn University Press, 2012). 8 Angela Dimitrakaki and Lara Perry, eds., Politics in a Glass Case: Feminism, Exhibition Cultures and Curatorial Transgressions (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013); Elke Krasny and Frauenmuseum Meran, eds., Women’s:Museum. Curatorial Politics in Feminism, Education, History, and Art/Frauen:Museum. Politiken des Kuratorischen in Feminismus, Bildung, Geschichte und Kunst (Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 2013). 9 Griselda Pollock, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, space and the archive (London and New York: Routledge, 2007); Griselda Pollock and Joyce Zemans, eds., Museums after Modernism: Strategies of Engagement (Malden, USA, Oxford, UK, and Victoria, Australia: Blackwell Publishing, 2007); Anna Tellgren and Jeff Werner, eds., Representation och regionalitet. Genusstrukturer i fyra svenska konstmuseisamlingar, (Stockholm: Statens kulturråd, 2011). Available online: http://www.kulturradet.se/Documents/publikationer/2011/representation_regionalit et_web.pdf.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First of all I would like to thank Alexandra Schwartz, Eva Zetterman, Doris Guth, Malin Hedlin Hayden, Margareta Gynning, Osnat Zukerman Rechter, and Sibyl Fisher for their excellent work with the essays in this anthology and for their enduring patience during the editing process. I developed the conceptual framework for this book as I was part of the international research network “Transnational Perspectives on Women’s Art, Feminism and Curating”, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, UK, and I am grateful to Lara Perry and Angela Dimitrakaki for inviting me to join the project as a network participant together with Katrin Kivimaa, Kristina Huneault, Nancy Proctor, and Marko Daniel. It turned out to be a truly collaborative and creative adventure that fostered new ideas for further research. As a result I organised a session on “Feminisms and Curating: Strategies, Interventions, Histories” at the NORDIK X art history conference in Stockholm in 2012. The majority of the contributions in this book originates from papers presented at the conference and have been rewritten and revised into essays for the present volume. I would like to thank Angela Dimitrakaki, Joanne Heath, Katrin Kivimaa, and Vivian Ziherl, who enthusiastically participated at the conference but did not have the possibility to partake in the book project. I am very grateful for the professional guidance of Carol Koulikourdi, Sam Baker, and Victoria Carruthers at Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Also I would like to thank the artists, museums, galleries, and other copyright holders that have granted permissions to reproduce the illustrations in this book. Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders, but if there are any serious omissions in this regard I would be pleased to rectify them at the first opportunity. The Lars Hierta Memorial Foundation has financially supported this publication, for which I am very grateful.

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The most valuable support during the process of editing this volume— not least in its final, hectic stages—was offered by my family. I would like to thank my husband Jens Skrubbe for his tolerance and patience with my working hours and my wise and witty daughters Hedda and Harriet Skrubbe for constantly reminding me that I am a cherished, even if sometimes absent, mother. Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe Stockholm August 2015

CHAPTER ONE CURATORIAL STRATEGIES ON THE ART SCENE DURING THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT: LOS ANGELES IN THE 1970S EVA ZETTERMAN In the historiography of feminist art, the 1970s is recognised as the most important decade. Originating in the context of the social Civil Rights Movements in the 1960s and contemporary art activities during that decade addressing issues of race, gender and sexuality, feminism in the 1970s became a political movement, an aesthetic strategy and a pedagogical framework. In the geographical context of the USA, major sites for feminist art activities were the cities New York and Los Angeles. Los Angeles is the city in the USA with the largest concentration of Mexican Americans and Chicanas/os, and in the 1970s Los Angeles was a major site for the contemporary Chicano Civil Rights Movement. The art scene in Los Angeles in the 1970s has been described as misogynist, sexist and racist, with lines of contention characterised by race, gender and sexuality issues.1 Two important feminist exhibitions were held in Los Angeles in the 1970s. One was Women Artists: 1550–1950 (1976) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the other was Womanhouse (1972) in a deserted mansion in the Hollywood district. Both of these exhibitions play important roles in the historiography regarding feminist artists and feminist art. Each of them has their own specific preand post-histories and represents different sectors of the Los Angeles art scene: the mainstream and the alternative. The curatorial strategies and manner in which these exhibitions met their audiences were also different. Departing from these two exhibitions, this essay investigates curatorial strategies on the alternative and mainstream art scenes during the feminist movement, with Los Angeles as a spatial framework and the 1970s as timeframe. Since Los Angeles was a major site in the 1970s for both the Chicano Civil Rights Movement and the Feminist Movement, this essay

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includes a documentation of the presence of Chicana/o artists on the alternative and mainstream feminist art scenes.

The feminist alternative art scene Several artist-run and alternative feminist spaces were initiated throughout Los Angeles in the 1970s. The initial idea in 1971 for the feminist exhibition Womanhouse (1972) was Paula Harper’s, an art historian at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Valencia, where the Feminist Art Program led by artists Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro had started in 1971.2 The Feminist Art Program established in Fresno by Chicago in 1970 was relocated to CalArts in 1971, where Shapiro had been awarded a professorship in 1970. Shapiro and Chicago engaged the twenty-one students in the women-only Feminist Art Program in role-playing and consciousness-raising sessions as pedagogical tools for the collaborative process that led to Womanhouse.3 In the exhibition, the students were granted the professional status of artists working among artists, not as trainees in an academic art programme.4 The abandoned building in Hollywood, lent to the project by the city of Los Angeles and later demolished, housed more than twenty spaces designed as separate environments with installations and staged performances by twenty-six artists in total, including the Los Angeles artists Wanda Westcoast, Sherry Brody and Carol Edson Mitchell.5 According to Judy Chicago, Womanhouse was the first time that “female subject matter” was openly addressed in a public exhibition.6 During the month of the exhibition, from January 30 to February 28 in 1972, Womanhouse gained national press coverage and received approximately 10 000 visitors, its first day being only open to women.7 The following year, Judy Chicago, art historian Arlene Raven and graphic designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, co-founded the Woman’s Building (1973–1991) in a renovated two-story building that had housed the Chouinard Art School at Grandview Boulevard in Venice.8 When the building was sold in 1976, the Woman’s Building moved to a house on North Spring Street located in the downtown area. The Woman’s Building comprised various feminist activities, such as the Feminist Studio Workshop, the Center for Feminist Art Historical Studies, the Women’s Graphic Centre, the Los Angeles Feminist Theatre, several Lesbian Art Projects, women-owned businesses, such as Sisterhood Bookstore and Associated Women’s Press, and several art galleries, such as Gallery 707, Womanspace, Grandveiw I and Grandveiw II.9 Several individual performance artists and performance groups “connected, were nurtured and came of age” in the Woman’s Building as a performance venue,

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Fig. 1-1. Barbara T. Smith, Nude Frieze (1972), F-space, Santa Ana. Photograph by Boris Sojka. © Barbara T. Smith, courtesy of the artist.

including Barbara T. Smith, Rachel Rosenthal, Suzanne Lacy, Leslie Labowitz, Cheri Gaulke, Nancy Angelo, the Feminist Art Workers, Terry Wolverton and the Oral Herstory of Lesbianism, as well as Jerri Allyn and the Waitresses.10 Another performance venue was the F-Space Gallery (1969–72) in an industrial park in Santa Ana in the southern outskirts of Los Angeles, cofounded by performance artist Barbara T. Smith. Several experimental performances were held at F-Space Gallery, such as Smith’s ritualistic performance Nude Frieze in 1972 (and Chris Burdens’ shoot performance in 1971) (fig. 1-1).11 Smith had already in the 1960s experimented with a Xerox machine installed in her dining room, creating multiple versions of replicated exposures of her nude body. With these prints she produced a series of bound “books”, such as Emergence (1965) and Coffin Books (1965), followed by The Letter (1967), produced as a way to copyright her experimental methods with xerography, and mailed in various copies to colleagues in the art community “as an act of pissing on creative territory”.12 The performance artist Rachel Rosenthal was the founder of the improvisational space Instant Theatre (1955–65, 1976–1977), located in a variety of sites throughout Los Angeles in the 1970s. Rosenthal was also co-founder in 1972 of the Womanspace Gallery in western Los

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Angeles with artist Linda Levi, in addition to her founding with the Grandview Gallery, a woman’s art collective.13 When the Woman’s Building opened in 1973, the Womanspace Gallery was relocated there before it closed in 1974. Rosenthal’s studio at Robertson Boulevard in Hollywood later housed the exhibition space Doing by Doing, called Espace DbD (1980–83), showing performances by among others The Waitresses, Stellarc and Eleanor Antin, and works by graphic artist June Wayne.14 June Wayne was the founder of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in her studio at Tamarind Avenue in 1960 in Hollywood. In 1971, Wayne organised a workshop in her Tamarind studio for women artists pursuing a career in the “male-dominated art world”.15 The workshop, with the heading Business and Professional Problems of Women Artists, engaged the participants in role-playing and dealt with various aspects of “how to function effectively in the art world,” from documenting and pricing works to negotiating with dealers and galleries.16 Performance artist Suzanne Lacy staged several of her early performances in the Woman’s Building, and by 1974 she was teaching performance in the Feminist Studio Workshop.17 In a large studio in Venice, functioning as a “transition point” after Womanhouse was completed in 1972, and before the opening of the Woman’s Building in 1973, Lacy participated with Judy Chicago, Sandra Orgen and Aviva Rahmani in the creation of the performance Ablusions (1972) that addressed rape and everyday violence against women.18 Together with Leslie Labowitz-Starus, Lacy brought performances addressing rape and violence against women into the public urban space of Los Angeles, thus making feminist activist art even more public. Appropriating the strategies by media reporters, the performance In Mourning and In Rage (1977) was staged with the intention of raising awareness of the taboo subject rape, while simultaneously deconstructing sexist patterns in media reporting on violence against women.19 In so doing, the performance reached an even larger audience than those present at the actual public site of the Los Angeles City Hall, where ten women dressed in black and in high-veiled hats entered the stairs. Lacy explains: The performance, staged at City Hall as a media event for an audience of politicians and news reporters, was designed as a series of thirty-second shots that, when strung together in a two- to four-minute news clip, would tell the story we wanted told. We considered, for example, camera angles, reporter’s use of voice-over, and the role of politicians in traditional reporting strategies.20

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Fig. 1-2. Suzanne Lacy, A Woman Was Raped Here…, sidewalk chalking, part of Three Weeks in May (1977). © Suzanne Lacy, courtesy of the artist.

The project Three Weeks in May (1977) by Lacy and Labowitz-Starus, together with Barbara Cohen, Melissa Hoffman and Jill Soderholm, was organised as a citywide project that lasted three weeks.21 During the threeweek period close to thirty public art events took place across the city of Los Angeles, including sidewalk chalking of actual rape locations, selfdefence workshops, rallies, educational lectures and ritual readings and performances (fig. 1-2).22 The project also included two monumental city maps of Los Angeles installed in a pedestrian shopping centre beneath the City Hall. One map had RAPE stamped in red on locations where women had been raped over a three-week period in May 1977, while the other had markers in black for rape crisis centres in Los Angeles, indicating routes to recovery.23 Lacy and Labowitz also organised the carefully planned project Record companies drag their feet (1977) on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood.24 Staged as a media event, pre-identifying the mediated camera gaze of TV-reporter crews, activists in rooster costumes pantomimed record company executives beneath a massive billboard for the rock band Kiss, that “depicted scantily clad women at the feet of the

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platform-heeled rockers”.25 Developed in collaboration with Julia London from Women Against Violence Against Women and the National Organization for Women, the project was a kick-off for a national boycott announced by these groups of albums from three major record companies in objection to their use of sexually violent images of women in the selling records.26 From these performances by Lacy and Labowitz-Starus in the mid-1970s grew the umbrella organisation Ariadne: A Social Art Network (1978–1980), a coalition of artists, activists, media reporters and politicians with the purpose of direct political action on violence against women.27

Chicana artists on the feminist art scene It has been claimed in retrospect that by 1970, “the women’s movement had grown to include radicals and conservatives; white, blacks and Chicanas”.28 Very few Chicana artists, however, were included in the art programmes and art activities going on in the 1970s among white feminist artists in Los Angeles. In her historical account of Chicana/o art in California, Shifra Goldman argues: Though both the Chicano political movement and the feminist movement were emerging in California at the same time, there was very little political contact. For the community at large, Mexicans and Chicanos were an invisible presence.29

Despite diversity among Chicanas/os as a group with genealogical ties to Mexico and resistance to a normative social US identity as WASP (whiteanglo-saxon-protestant), Chicana artists did not only oppose sexism and discrimination against women, but also intersecting structures of marginalisation and discrimination in terms of race (mixed IndianSpanish), ethnicity (Mexican), skin colour (brown), religion (Catholicism), class (the working class poor), and language (Spanish).30 Of the feminist movement in the 1970s, Chicana artist Yolanda Lopéz recounts: Despite the many efforts and good intentions of white women in the arena of political art, racial separation and racism existed de facto within the feminist art movement from the beginning.31

The history of the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles includes several reported accounts of racism among white feminists.32 When looking at the large number of exhibitions held in the various galleries at the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles, the exclusion of non-white artists becomes

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obvious.33 During its Venice location (1973–1975), the names of only two Chicana artists appear: Olivia Sanchez, included in a juried exhibition at the Woman Space Gallery in 1973, and Rosalyn Mesquite invited to participate in a three-woman show.34 After the Woman’s Building moved to North Spring Street (1976–1991), only one exhibition was held with Chicana artists, Venas de la Mujer in 1976, a collaborative art installation created by a group calling themselves Las Chicanas, including Isabel Castro, Judithe Hernández, Olga Muñiz, Josefina Quesada, and Judy Baca.35 Even though sporadic contact existed between white Anglo American and brown Chicana feminist artists in Los Angeles, they organised in separate networking groups. Through its highway system, Los Angeles is a spatially divided city, and this division of the urban space is mirrored by a social segregation patterned along lines of race and ethnicity. In East Los Angeles and the unincorporated areas east of the Los Angeles River, are the areas with the lowest incomes and the highest percentage of households without a car:36 the majority of inhabitants are Mexican Americans and Chicanas/os. This socio-spatial division of the city is reflected in a geographical separation of the alternative art scenes in Los Angeles in the 1970s, with the feminist alternative art scene concentrated in western Los Angeles while Chicana/o art activities primarily took place east of the Los Angeles River. Chicano scholar Chon Noriega explains: “the way in which [Chicana/o] artists navigated the city itself is intrinsically tied to the psychogeography of the built environment”, and for the Chicana/o community, […] a schematic of highways overlaid on top of existing neighbourhoods, a dead-end public housing system, and a perceived border formed by the Los Angeles River, combined with an inadequate public transit infrastructure, effectively limited mobility within the urban core.37

Among Chicanas/os in East Los Angeles, mural painting was an important visual media. This activity of community-based street murals in the 1970s has, according to the amount of murals produced, been labelled a “mural movement”.38 These street murals represent a form of public art that not only reached audiences constituted by diverse groups of people in urban street spaces, but also the spread of permanent visual art throughout neighbourhoods where visual art in public spaces was often scarce. Several mural groups were organised by Chicana artists in California in the 1970s, such as Las Mujeres Muralistas of San Francisco, Las Mujeres Muralistas of San Diego, Las Mujeres Muralistas of del Valle of Fresno, and Mujeres in the Grupo de Santa Ana.39 In Los Angeles, several mural

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projects were organised in the 1970s as part of educational youth programmes. These educational programmes include the mural projects led by Judy Baca as well as the mural projects in the East Los Angeles housing projects in Ramona Gardens (1973–1977) and in Estrada Courts (1973–1978), where eighty-two murals were produced by trained and untrained muralists in collaboration with young residents and gang members from the surrounding area.40 With the feminist movement not only marginalising brown Chicanas, but also separating non-white women from non-white men, Chicana artists organised in networking alliances that included both women and men and in mixed-gendered mural groups active in East Los Angeles.

Chicana artists in collaborative groups A Chicana artist active throughout the 1970s with murals was Judy Baca. In 1969, Baca was hired by the Los Angeles department of Recreation and Parks to teach art classes in public parks in Boyle Heights, East LA.41 In 1973, she was appointed the director of the East Los Angeles Mural Program, securing funds from the federal urban aid programme Model Cities Program. In 1974, the East Los Angeles Mural Program was expanded and became the Citywide Mural Program, producing more than four hundred murals throughout the Los Angeles area under Baca’s direction. In 1976, the same year Baca participated with Las Chicanas in the exhibition at the Woman’s Building, she co-founded the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) with filmmaker Donna Deitch and artist Christina Schlesinger. Schlesinger, a painter and muralist in the Citywide Mural Program led by Baca, was a student of Judy Chicago in the Feminist Studio Workshop at the Woman’s Building, while Deitch, a film maker, showed her work in the Woman’s Building, including her UCLA thesis film, the feminist documentary Woman to Woman: A Documentary about Hookers, Housewives, and Other Mothers (1975). SPARC, located since 1977 in a two-storey Art Deco building on Venice Boulevard that has served as a jail, comprises workshop facilities, a gallery, mural archives and artist studios. SPARC engages community members in the collaborative development of cultural programmes and public murals, and Baca’s first mural project through SPARC was the Great Wall of Los Angeles (1976–1983). Started in 1976, and executed with over four hundred youths and artists over the course of five summers between 1978 and 1983 in the Tujunga Flood Control Channel in the San Fernando Valley in the northern outskirts of Los Angeles, the Great Wall is considered the “longest mural in the world” with a visual narrative of

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Fig. 1-3. Judy Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles (1976–1983), San Fernando Valley. Photograph by Eva Zetterman. © Eva Zetterman.

the history of California, told through the “ethnic groups underrepresented in history texts and public consciousness” (fig. 1-3).42 Baca, working as a mural artist in a male dominated visual media and active on the Chicana/o art scene that until the mid-1970s was “largely dominated by men”,43 later recalled: “Activism in the 1970s had to do with me turning upside down the notion that the creation of monumental art was a male act”.44 Among Chicana artists who worked with Baca on the Great Wall of Los Angeles were Judith Hernández, Olga Muñiz, Isabel Castro, Yreina Cervántez and Patssi Valdez.45 Three of these artists, Hernández, Muñiz and Castro, were also members of the group Las Chicanas that including Judy Baca and Josefina Quesada held the exhibition Venas de la Mujer at Woman’s Building in 1976. Judithe Hernández and Patssi Valdez also are examples of Chicana artists who were active on the Los Angeles art scene in mixed-gendered group in the 1970s. Hernández was from 1970 to 1974 a resident artist for the first five volumes of Aztlán: Chicano Journal of the Social Sciences and the Arts, published by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center that had been established in 1969.46 Apart from collaborating on Baca’s Great Wall, Hernández painted several murals in the 1970s together with Carlos Almaraz in the housing projects of Ramona Gardens. Almaraz was member of an art collective called Los Four, including Frank Romero, Roberto de la Rocha and Gilbert Luján, and in 1974, Hernández became the fifth member of the group Los Four, who during the 1970s and early 1980s worked in various media, including murals.47

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Fig. 1-4. Asco, Decoy Gang War Victim (1974) with Gronk. Photograph by Harry Gamboa, Jr. © Harry Gamboa, Jr., courtesy of the artist.

Patssi Valdez, who worked with Baca both with Las Chicanas and on the Great Wall of Los Angeles, was a member of the conceptual art group Asco (1972–1987) that in various constellations comprised a number of Chicana artists, including Diane Gamboa, Barbara Carrasco, Teresa Covarrubias, Sylvia Delgado, Consuelo Flores, Maria Elena Gaitán, Karen Gamboa, Linda Gamboa, Cindy Herrón, Sylvia Hidalgo, Marisela Norte, Lorraine Ordaz, Betty Salas, Debra Taren, Virginia Villegas, Dianne Vosoff, Kate Vosoff and Marisa Zains.48 Starting with collaborative work for the local Chicano publication Regeneración in the early 1970s, the four original members of Asco—Patssi Valdez, Harry Gamboa, Jr, Willie Herrón and Gronk (aka Glugio Gronk Nicandro)—moved on to conceptual street performances. These include two Christmas Eve processions down Whittier Boulevard in East LA, Stations of the Cross (1971) and Walking Mural (1972); a Christmas Eve ritual sitting on a traffic island on Whittier Boulevard, First Supper (after a Major Riot) (1974); and two staged enactments, Instant Mural (1974) and Asshole Mural (1975). Asco’s street performances, according to scholars Chon Noriega and Pilar Tompkins Rivas, “at once critiqued and engaged murals as a strategy of reclaiming public space, just as Gronk and Herrón’s own murals incorporated graffiti”.49

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Asco’s performances were filmed and photographed by Harry Gamboa, and some of these photographs were distributed as correspondence pieces and spread through the correspondence art network The Eternal Network, an international constellation of artists producing and exchanging projects by mail.50 Asco also staged the performance Decoy Gang War Victim (1974) at night in an empty street in East LA as an intervention into the circulation within mass media of stereotypical portrayals of the Chicana/o community as a “gang culture”, revealing the manipulative spreading of unauthentic images as “true” (fig. 1-4). As scholar Ondine Chavoya describes the intervention with Gronk “sprawled across the asphalt with ketchup all over him, posing as the ‘victim’ of a gang retribution killing”, the photograph of the performance was distributed to various publications and television stations and was accepted as a real scenario of violence. [The] image was broadcast, for example, on a KHJ-TV L.A. Channel 9, as an “authentic” East L.A. Chicano gang murder and condemned as a prime example of rampant gang violence in the City of Angels.51

Asco also produced a series of No Movies, with photographed scenes staged as film stills from fictive Chicano Movies that were never intended to be produced. Of these film stills, Noriega and Rivas notes: Asco staged countless celebrity shots of themselves and their cohort, for which, unlike Andy Warhol’s Superstars or Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (1977–80), there were neither referents in the culture industry nor a marketplace in the art world.52

Chicana/o art spaces in East LA When the feminist movement excluded Chicana artists, and when most mainstream and commercial galleries were closed to Chicana/o artists, Chicana/o alternative art spaces in East Los Angeles provided important sites for exhibitions, art studios, cultural programmes and arts education.53 Among the alternative art spaces available in East Los Angeles in the 1970s were the Goez Art Studios and Gallery, Plaza de la Raza, the Self Help Graphics & Art, the Mechicano Art Center, and Centro de Arte Público. These art spaces are shortly presented in the following. The still existing Goez Art Studios and Gallery was co-founded in 1969 on East First Street by David Rivas Botello and the brothers JoseLuis (Joe) Gonzalez and Juan (Johnny) Gonzalez.54 Goez Art Studios and Gallery organised atelier-style training in various media so that artists could become self-sustaining and gain commissions selling work through

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the internal non-profit subsidiary The East Los Angeles School of Mexican-American Fine Arts (TELASOMAFA).55 Exhibitions at Goez Art Studios and Gallery comprised a wide range of styles and techniques, and Josefina Quesada, who participated in the group Las Chicanas at the exhibition at Woman’s Building in 1976, exhibited here.56 In 1975, its cofounder Botello and muralist Wayne Healy formed the muralist art collective Los Dos Streetscrapers (renamed East Los Streetscrapers in 1980), whose members executed over twenty murals and large-scale public artworks throughout the Los Angeles area.57 Plaza de la Raza was initiated in 1969 by the Mexican-born singer and actress Margo Albert and the labour union organiser Frank López.58 Located in an old boathouse in Lincoln Park, and officially becoming a non-profit organisation as a Cultural Center for Arts and Education in 1970, the primary focus for Plaza de la Raza was on education through the arts as a “critical means of transforming current social conditions”.59 One of several funding sources was the Catholic campaign for human development, established by US catholic bishops in 1970, which provided “grants for community organisations, community-run schools, and minority owned cooperatives”.60 Patssi Valdez from Asco held art classes here, and the still existing Plaza de la Raza also sponsored arts education classes at Goez Art Studios and Gallery, Mechicano Art Center, and Self Help Graphics & Arts.61 Self Help Graphics & Art was co-founded in 1970 in an East Los Angeles garage by Karen Boccalero, a printmaker and Franciscan nun, and two Mexican gay men, muralist Carlos Bueno and photographer Antonio Ibañez.62 After holding exhibitions at El Mercado, a Mexican-style market in Boyle Heights, they moved in 1972 to a space financed by the Order of the Sisters of St. Francis in an office building on Cesar Chavez Avenue (formerly Brooklyn Avenue), owned by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.63 Self Help Graphics & Art ran silk-screening and mural programmes with an underlying pedagogy oriented towards education for social mobility and involved Chicana/o artists “as role models for self-expression rooted in cultural identity”.64 Its first educators, artists Linda Vallejo and Michael Amescua, developed together with artists Richard Duardo and John Valadez a curriculum that combined theoretical studies with hands-on art training. In 1975, Sister Karen Boccalero and Michael Amescua developed the Self Help Graphics & Art’s Barrio Mobile Art Studio (1975–1985) by converting a step van “into a moving cultural center on wheels” (fig. 15).65 Managed by Linda Vallejo, the Barrio Mobile Art Studio took classes to the streets, reaching not only students at elementary schools during weekdays, but also “adults and even gang members on weekends”.66 Besides

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Fig. 1-5. Self Help Graphics & Art’s Barrio Mobile Art Studio. Sister Karen Boccalero (back row, far right) and Linda Vallejo (front row, far right). © Self Help Graphics & Art, courtesy of Self Help Graphics & Art.

Linda Vallejo were several Chicana artists involved in teaching at Self Help Graphics & Art in the 1970s, including Yreina Cervántez, Diane Gamboa, Delores Guerrero, Cecilia Casinera, Margaret Garcia and Ofelia Esparza. Its present location, since 2011, is on East First Street. Mechicano Art Center was initiated as a gallery space in 1969 by Mura Bright, a Russian emigrant and donator, Victor Franco, an artist and journalist, and Leonard Castellanos, an artist and graphic designer.67 In 1970, Mechicano Art Center moved from its first location on Melrose at La Cienega Boulevard in the art district in the west to a former Laundromat on Whittier Boulevard in the east that was leased from the East Los Angeles Doctors Hospital.68 Mechicano Art Center served as an educational environment, hosted community meetings, held youth-oriented printmaking and drawing classes, ran silk screening and community mural programmes, and involved youth groups and gang members as assistants to teaching artists.69 In 1972, Mechicano Art Center initiated the mural programme at the Ramona Gardens Housing Project (1973–1977) under

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the direction of artist Armando Cabrera, in which Judithe Hernández participated. Also in 1972, Mechicano Art Center initiated the Bus Bench Project, funded by the East Los Angeles Doctors Hospital, with the goal of “adding something beautiful to our community”.70 The Bus Bench Project involved thirty Mechicano artists painting backs and fronts of bus benches along main thoroughfares in East LA, mostly along Whittier Boulevard, as sites for Chicana/o art becoming visible to passing drivers and bus passengers. Several Chicanas/os who were establishing themselves as artists held their first-time exhibitions at Mechicano, including Judithe Hernández, Carmen Lomas Garza, Carlos Almaraz from Los Four, Wayne Healy from Los Dos Streetscrapers, and Willie Herrón, Gronk, and Harry Gamboa from Asco with mixed-media works.71 Late in 1975, Mechicano Art Center moved to North Figueroa Street in Highland Park, where its exhibitions included solo exhibitions by Linda Vallejo and Lucila Villaseñor Grijalva, an Asco exhibition, and a Chicana exhibit with Judithe Hernández, Isabel Castro, and Sonya Fe.72 In 1976, Sonya Fe was hired to run the silkscreen workshop. Other Chicana artists involved in Mechicano Art Center were muralist Susan Saenz73 and Maria Elena Villaseñor.74 Barbara Carrasco, a member of the nearby Centro de Arte Público, did several projects at Mechicano around 1977, including a poster for a women’s conference.75 Its last exhibition was in November 1977 for Dia de los Muertos that included among others Harry Gamboa from Asco and Carlos Almaraz from Los Four.76 Due to lack of funding, Mechicano Art Center closed in 1978. In 1972, its founders Bright, Franco and Castellanos also initiated the Los Angeles Community Arts Alliance that promoted “the arts as a tool for social change through education”.77 The Arts Alliance coordinated community efforts among fifty-one communitybased art groups and centres in the south, east and central areas of Los Angeles. Centro de Arte Público on North Figueroa Street in Highland Park was co-founded in 1977 by Carlos Almaraz from Los Four, Guillermo Bejarano, a painter, and Richard Duardo, a printer from Self Help Graphics & Art.78 The Centro de Arte Público was oriented towards producing works in various media that focused on Los Angeles street scenes and urban Chicana/o youth. Several Chicanas were invited to participate in exhibitions and maintained a studio here, including Judithe Hernández, Barbara Carrasco and Dolores Guerrero Cruz.79 Lack of support led to its closing in 1979 and the transformation of the space in 1980 by Guillermo Duardo and his sister, business manager Lisa Duardo, into the print studio Hecho in Aztlán Multiples and the Chicano punk club the Vex.80 Among the Los Angeles punk groups hosted at the Vex were Los Illegals, with

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Asco member Wille Herrón as lead singer. A final example of alternative art spaces initiated in Los Angeles in the 1970s is the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), which was established in 1978 in the abandoned Victor Clothing building on downtown South Broadway by a small group of artists, including Asco members Gronk and Harry Gamboa.81 Since the mid-1990s, LACE is located on Hollywood Boulevard in western Los Angeles.

The mainstream art scene in the 1970s Of the two feminist exhibitions organised in Los Angeles in the 1970s, the Women Artists: 1550–1950 (1976) at LACMA represents the mainstream art scene. This exhibition was not the first historical survey exhibition with women artists organised by mainstream venues in the USA.82 In 1965, Women Artists of America, 1707–1964 with one hundred twenty-nine artists was held at the Newark Museum, New Jersey. In 1972, Women: A Historical Survey of Works by Women Artists with seventy-eight artists was held at Salem Fine Arts Center in North Carolina, later travelling to the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. Also in 1972, Old Mistresses: Women Artists of the Past with thirty-five artists was held at Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore. In Montréal, Canada, Artfemme ‘75’: An Exhibition of Women’s Art with ninety-four artists was held at Musée d’Art Contemporain in 1975, the international women’s year. In Los Angeles various women-only-exhibitions had been held in the early 1970s with contemporary artists. The exhibition Four Los Angeles Women Artists was held at LACMA in 1972. Also in 1972, the exhibition Invisible/Visible: 21 Artists, organised by artist Dextra Frankel, was held at the Long Beach Museum of Art. In 1974, scholar Lucy Lippard organised the exhibition c. 7,500 at CalArts in Valencia with twenty-six artists, including Adrian Piper. This exhibition later toured in the US and to London. None of the exhibitions above included any Chicana artists. The prehistory to the Women Artists: 1550–1950 exhibition at LACMA was feminist artists protesting against the marginalisation of women artists on the Los Angeles art scene. In 1971, an exhibition titled Art and Technology had been held at LACMA with seventy-six artists, all of them men. Out of political action by feminist artists in Los Angeles protesting the Art and Technology programme (1967–1971) at LACMA, and the exhibition in 1971 under the same heading, came the formation of the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists (LACWA).83 LACWA served as a networking agency for critics, curators, collectors, art historians, and artists, including graphic designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, co-

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founder of the Woman’s Building in 1974, and initially led by artist Joyce Kozloff. In protest to the Art and Technology exhibition, LACWA conducted a survey of works by women in the LACMA collection, and the members of LACWA shared testimonies of discrimination that were collected by the council and turned into statistics to be used as the basis for political demands.84 Meetings in protest to the Art and Technology exhibition in 1971 were also held in June Wayne’s Tamarind studio.85 In 1972, Wayne’s Tamarind Workshop issued a survey exposing gender-bias in art publication reviews that covered shows by men and women.86 These actions combined led to a dialogue with the board of trustees of LACMA and eventually resulted in the exhibition Women Artists at LACMA in 1976. Established in 1961, LACMA is one of the most prestigious art museums in Los Angeles and the largest art museum in the western USA since 1965. It is located in the highbrow Wilshire district in the west. The exhibition Women Artists was organised by two art historians, Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin, whose influential article “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” had been published in ARTnews in January 1971, five years previously. The historical survey exhibition with eighty-five women artists was organised as an additive complement to the art historical canon of fine art. Arranged in a traditional linear narrative, paintings and drawings were hung on walls in darkened rooms and highlighted by spotlights so the visitors could walk in pre-organised paths and quietly inspect each painting (fig. 1-6). After the show at LACMA, from December 1976 to March 1977, the exhibition travelled to the University Art Museum of Texas in Austin, the Museum of Art at Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, and the Brooklyn Museum in New York. In 2007, celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the Women Artists exhibition at LACMA, two large exhibitions were organised at its first and last destinations. In Los Angeles was WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution organised by Cornelia Butler at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). This exhibition later toured the country and travelled to Canada. At Brooklyn Museum in New York Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art was organised by Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin. In the catalogue introduction by Reilly, the Women Artists exhibition is declared “the first” historical survey exhibition with women artists at a large-scale museum in the USA.87 Erasing the memory of previous historical survey exhibitions at various US locations in the 1960s and 70s, Reilly praises the Women Artists exhibition as “a landmark event in the history of feminism and art”, a “pioneering exhibition”, and “by far the most significant curatorial

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Fig. 1-6. Installation view of the exhibition Women Artists: 1550–1950 at Brooklyn Museum (1977), curated by Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin in 1976 for LACMA. Photo: Brooklyn Museum Archives. © Brooklyn Museum, courtesy of Brooklyn Museum.

corrective in the 1970s”.88 In the catalogue essay by Nochlin, the selection criteria that she and Sutherland Harris had for Women Artists is justified in retrospect, revealing a narrow view on artists as primarily painters “back then” in the 1970s: […] the first show [Women Artists at Brooklyn in 1977] was historical rather than contemporary. From this it followed that it consisted almost entirely of drawing and painting; even sculpture was omitted in the interest of consistency. Clearly, back then, the word “artist,” female as well as male, implied that the individual was primarily a painter.89

The guiding Eurocentric perspective of Nochlin and Sutherland Harris, which steered their selection criteria for Women Artists, is retrospectively justified by Reilly:

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Chapter One The canon within which Sutherland Harris and Nochlin were trained as art historians and within which they chose to work was the dominant, Western one. No one questioned in 1976, therefore, why the exhibition focused solely on artist from America and Europe, or that it included only one woman of color (Frida Kahlo). The academic canons of art history, literature, philosophy, and so on were being challenged by feminists at that time for their masculinist tendencies, for the most part, not their Eurocentric and imperialistic ones. It would not be until the 1980s that the hegemony of the Western canons themselves was questioned.90

One might ask: Who in the 1970s would have questioned this perspective? Perhaps not white feminists, as Reilly states, but certainly Chicana/o artists in Los Angeles. It was precisely in protest to such “Eurocentric and imperialistic” exclusions that the conceptual art group Asco performed an art intervention against LACMA in 1972. The prehistory to this political action was a visit to LACMA by Asco member Harry Gamboa when he approached one of the curators and asked why the museum never exhibited art by a Chicano artist, to which the curator replied, “Chicanos they don’t do art, you know, they’re in gangs”.91 In response to this categorical, prejudiced answer, the three Asco members Harry Gamboa, Willie Herrón and Gronk returned after the museum had closed and tagged the museum entryways with their graffiti-styled names, with Herrón also applying a typeface of cholo graffiti typical among gangs in East LA, further emphasising a presumed gang relation. The fourth Asco member Patssi Valdez later explained that she did not participate in the action since the male members of Asco did not expect her to be able to run fast enough if they were to be chased by the police.92 Harry Gamboa returned with Valdez before their graffiti-styled signatures the next morning were whitewashed and documented her in photographs standing beside the signatures on the walls (fig. 1-7). With these photographs, known through the circulation of Gamboa’s photographs and referred to as Spray Paint LACMA or Project Pie in De/Face, Asco claimed LACMA as a conceptual art piece, appropriating the whole museum and its contents as a signature ready-made, “the first conceptual work of Chicano art to be exhibited at LACMA”.93 As Noriega argues, with these photographs Asco: […] exposes the underlying racial and class dynamics that exclude Chicano artists and that align curatorial judgment with graffiti abatement. […] The image that circulates is not of isolated signatures, but of the art group manifest in name and body before the public art museum. Through its aesthetic selection the signature image for Spray Paint LACMA documents the conceptual action as well as the gender politics that resulted in three signatures, not four, and four artists, not three. They are one and the same.94

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Fig. 1-7. Asco, Spray Paint LACMA or Project Pie in De/Face (1974) with Patssi Valdez. Photograph by Harry Gamboa, Jr. © Harry Gamboa, Jr., courtesy of the artist.

Two years after Asco’s conceptual tagging, an exhibition was held at LACMA with the Chicano art group Los Four, including its fifth member Judithe Hernández. This exhibition has been claimed to be “the first exhibition of Chicano artists held at a major art museum”.95 The title of the exhibition, Los Four: Almaraz/de la Rocha/Luján/Romero, erases the participation of Judithe Hernández in the show, as does the group’s name, indicating a fixed number of members with its fifth female member as an invisible appendix. Apart from eventual insights gained from Asco’s protest in 1972 and LACMA’s exclusion of Chicana/o artists within its premises, the Los Four exhibition in 1974 followed lobbying efforts by African American museum employees at LACMA who had formed the Black Arts Council (1968–1974). The lobbying efforts by the Black Arts Council had resulted in two previous non-white exhibitions at LACMA: Tree Graphic Artists in 1971, and Los Angeles 1972: A Panorama of Black Artists in 1972.96 In 1974, Asco, still protesting against the selection criteria at LACMA and challenging the exclusionary social codes at mainstream art institutions and the prestigious context of LACMA, “crashed the opening reception” at the Los Four exhibition,97 and “became integrated into the opening” as “moving works of art”.98 Herrón explains:

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Chapter One [W]e costumed to the max. We painted our faces. We hung things from our bodies. And we went to that exhibit like we were going to a costume party or like we were going trick or treating. And we just went like wanting people to see some part of Chicano art that still didn’t exist, that wasn’t in that show that we felt had to be in that show. So we attended that exhibit, the opening, but we were moving works of art […] We performed without even performing.99

Curatorial strategies on the art scene in Los Angeles Comparing curatorial strategies applied by groups of artists in the 1970s, performance artist Suzanne Lacy notes: There were many differences, but there was an uncontested parallel between feminist and ethnic [sic] artists: obtaining equality—of resources, representation, and power—was the political motivation that fuelled both art practices. This aspiration led artists in both groups to examine the interactive potential of art making, both within the work itself through collaboration and between the work and its audience. This activist orientation toward the audience challenged artists to seek and identify specifically who their work was for. More broadly, it signalled the beginnings of today’s theories that articulate a diverse and differentiated public for art.100

Operating outside of and sometimes in opposition to the mainstream art scene in Los Angeles, feminists in the west and Chicanas/os in the east initiated some shared strategies, such as art activism as social protests, carefully planned street performances in public urban spaces to reach new audiences, correspondence pieces distributed as mail art, and media critique through appropriation of the strategies of mass-media. Additional shared strategies were artists developing their own cultural infrastructure of independent, non-profit, artist-run or artist-centric venues. The alternative gallery system made it possible to view work outside of museums and for-profit galleries, and gave artists training and education opportunities through the pragmatic experience of raising funds, developing press coverage, and running the business side of galleries.101 As Brodsky has noted, the alternative gallery system also provided artists with a support and mentor structure that helped many to develop the confidence and long-term commitment necessary for producing a lifetime body of work.102 The Chicana/o art scene in the east differed, however, from the feminist one in the west in that it was community-centred and characterised by the support of methods such as printing and street art, in

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particular street murals, and an underlying pedagogy oriented toward the education and social mobility of the whole Chicana/o community. The inclusion and exclusion of participants in collaborative groups also differed. Whereas feminist alternative spaces, such as the Woman’s Building, were strategically separatist, Chicana/o artists organised into networking alliances that included both women and men. Other important differences were economic circumstances and access to financial support. As Walter Benn Michaels has argued, not taking into account class inequality and poverty as obstacles for the production of art denies the relevance of being working class or poor.103 Goldman explains: Everywhere the [Chicana/o] movement encountered an insoluble problem: the working-class communities it wished to address did not have the economic resources to support an artistic constituency. In addition, the communities were frequently not conversant with the kind of art being brought to them, and sometimes—being caught up with primary problems of survival—did not welcome it, or were indifferent to it. To solve the second problem, educational programs were organized. To solve the first (since artists must have material, space, walls, rent, transportation, and living expenses), the artists sought support for their endeavours from small businesses, government on all level, educational institutions, and corporate agencies, in addition to community fund-raising.104

The strategies applied by Asco illustrate their lack of economic resources and the working-class community in which they were active; by using their own bodies as their main visual tool for staged scenes and street performances in public urban spaces in East LA, they addressed people in their immediate surroundings as their main audience. Asco member Gronk once explained: “Coming out of a sense of poverty, we used whatever was available”.105 With limited access to Los Angeles art museums and the gallery system in the west, Asco “took action” in the streets, as Pattsi Valdez explains: No gallery was gonna call us up and say “were giving you a show.” And we didn’t wait around for that. We didn’t sit around and complain. We took action. We made it happen.106

My point here is that concrete and material circumstances are crucial both for the production of art and the choice of curating strategies in exhibiting this art, in addition to initiating alternative galleries and exhibition spaces. This is illustrated by the examples given above of alternative art spaces in East LA in the 1970s. Some were funded by the Catholic Church, the Order of the Sisters of St Francis, or the East Los Angeles Doctors

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Hospital and run as part of educational programmes, or closed down due to lack of funding. For Chicana artists, the feminist movement was a white middle-class Anglo American enterprise with non-white women in its distant periphery.107 The history of the Woman’s Building is a clear indication of colour-based marginalization, including only two exhibitions in the 1970s with non-white artists, Black Mirror (1973), organised by Betye Saar with five African American artists, and the Venas de la Mujer (1976) with the group Las Chicanas. The mainstream art scene in the 1970s was even more hostile towards including non-white women artists in its exhibitions. Apart from the resistance recounted above at the prestigious Los Angeles museum LACMA, another illustrative example from the 1970s is the AfroAmerican Women Artists Exhibition for the National Women’s Caucus for Art, for the College Art Association Meeting in Washington, D.C. in 1979, that was cancelled before opening due to lack of funding.108 Of feminist groups in the USA in the 1970s, it has been noted that unlike feminists in New York, the feminists in Los Angeles were “devoted to the creation of separatist institutions”.109 These spaces allowed women artists in Los Angeles to show work addressing “their bodies, their sexuality, and their lives in images that were considered unacceptable to mainstream galleries and museums”.110 Of the feminist art scene in Los Angeles in the 1970s, Lopéz and Roth claim: In Los Angeles, protest art was often addressed to two very different audiences. When presented in the Woman’s Building, it reconfirmed beliefs and energized an audience that already shared the artists’ feminist viewpoint. At the same time, women left such sheltered spaces and sallied forth into the streets, galleries, public spaces, and the media to confront and/or convert unknown, often unpredictable audiences.111

This feminist protest art of the 1970s were gradually incorporated into the mainstream art field, exhibited in major art museums and included in the canon of fine art. Activist art by Chicanas/os, on the other hand, came to remain in a marginalised position. As Noriega and Rivas notes: Chicano artists understood their work in community-based, social movement, and art historical terms, but their ability to open up a dialogue within art criticism and with respect to museum curatorial frameworks remained extremely limited.112

The mainstream art scene is a cultural sector that is exceptionally slow in changing its curatorial strategies and broadening its selection criteria. In a

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critical reading of the catalogue to the exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at MOCA in Los Angeles in 2007, Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe notes that of the artists included, only twenty percent were selected outside of the USA and Europe.113 A selection criteria in mainstream art venues that is repeated even more often than the artists’ nationality, however, is the artists’ skin colour, i.e. the exclusion of nonwhite artists irrespective of their nationality. Of the one hundred and fifteen artists in the WACK! exhibition, over fifty artists were from the USA. Among them was only one Chicana, Judy Baca. In an historical account of the feminist movement in the 1970s in the USA it has been noted that, “before the 1970s, women artists were almost invisible”.114 For the feminist art scene in the US of today, forty years later, the conclusion is that when it comes to brown Chicana artists, they are still almost invisible.

Notes 1

Susan Schrank, Art and the City: Civic Imagination and Cultural Authority in Los Angeles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). 2 Arlene Raven, “Womanhouse,” in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 48. 3 Faith Wilding, “The Feminist Art Programs at Fresno and Calarts, 1970-75,” in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 39–41. 4 Raven, “Womanhouse,” 48. 5 Ibid. 6 Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, “Conversation with Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro,” in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 67. 7 Raven, “Womanhouse,” 61. 8 Shifra Goldman, Dimensions of the Americas: Art and Social Change in Latin America in the United States (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 218. 9 Judith K. Brodsky, “Exhibitions, Galleries, and Alternative Spaces,” in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 109. 10 Josephine Withers, “Feminist Performance Art: Performing, Discovering,

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Transforming Ourselves,” in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 168. 11 Alexis Donis, “California Dreamin’: Performance, Media Art, and History as Gossip,” in Collaboration Labs: Southern California Artists and the Artist Space Movement, ed. Nicole Gordillo (Santa Monica, CA: 18th Street Arts Center, 2011), 40. 12 Donis, “California Dreamin’,” 35. 13 Ibid., 24. 14 Ibid., 30. 15 Richard Meyer, “June Wayne,” in WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution, ed. Lisa Gabrielle Mark (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press, 2007), 313. 16 Mary D. Garrard, “Feminist Politics: Networks and Organizations,” in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 91. 17 Withers, “Feminist Performance Art,” 170. 18 Ibid., 168. 19 Donis, “California Dreamin’,” 51. 20 Suzanne Lacy, “Affinities: Thoughts on an Incomplete History,” in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 267. 21 Withers, “Feminist Performance Art,” 170. 22 Donis, “California Dreamin’,” 53. 23 Vivien Green Fryd, “Ending the Silence,” in Doin’it in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building, eds. Meg Linton, Sue Maberry and Elizabeth Pulsinelli (Los Angeles: Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, 2011), 163–164. 24 Donis, “California Dreamin’,” 53. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Lacy, “Affinities,” 267; Donis, “California Dreamin’,” 56. 28 Garrard “Feminist Politics,” 91. 29 Goldman, Dimensions of the Americas, 217. 30 Gloria Anzaldúa, “Speaking in Tounges: A Letter To 3rd World Women Writers,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 2nd ed., eds. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (New York: Kitchen Table – Women of Color Press, 1983). 31 Yolanda M. López and Moira Roth, “Social Protest: Racism and Sexism,” in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harry N. Abrams 1996), 140. 32 Michelle Moravec, “Fictive Families of History Makers: Historicity at the Los Angeles Woman’s Building,” in Doin’it in Public: Feminism and Art at the

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Woman’s Building, eds. Meg Linton, Sue Maberry and Elizabeth Pulsinelli (Los Angeles: Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, 2011). 33 Otis College of Art and Design, “Woman’s Building: History Timeline,” accessed February 14, 2014, http://www.otis.edu/ben-maltz-gallery/womansbuilding-history-timeline. 34 Goldman, Dimensions of the Americas, 218. 35 Ibid., 218, 305. 36 Chon A. Noriega and Pilar Tompkins Rivas, “Chicano Art in the City of Dreams: A History in Nine Movements,” in L.A. Xicano, eds. Chon A. Noriega, Terezita Romo and Pilar Tompkins Rivas (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2011), 84. 37 Noriega and Rivas, “Chicano Art in the City of Dreams,” 82. 38 Eva Cockcroft, John Weber and James Cockcroft, Towards a People’s Art: The Contemporary Mural Movement (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1977); López and Roth, “Social Protest,” 47. 39 Shifra M. Goldman, “How, Why, Where, and When It All Happened: Chicano Murals of California,” in Signs From the Heart: California Chicano Murals, eds. Eva Sperling Cockcroft and Holly Barnet-Sánhez (Venice, CA: Social and Public Art Resource Center; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 40. 40 Noriega and Rivas, “Chicano Art in the City of Dreams,” 82. 41 Ibid., 80. 42 D. Flores Estrella, “Great Wall Introduction,” in Great Wall of Los Angeles: Walking Tour Guide, ed. D. Flores Estrella (Venice, CA: SPARC, 2011), 3. 43 Goldman, “How, Why, Where, and When It All Happened,” 219. 44 López and Roth, “Social Protest,” 151. 45 Goldman, Dimensions of the Americas, 47. 46 Noriega and Rivas, “Chicano Art in the City of Dreams,” 76. 47 Ibid. 48 C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez, “Asco and the Politics of Revulsion,” in ASCO: Elite of the Obscure, ed. C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011), 38. 49 Noriega and Rivas, “Chicano Art in the City of Dreams”, 86. 50 C. Ondine Chavoya, “Ray Johnson and Asco: Correspondences,” in ASCO: Elite of the Obscure, ed. C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011), 300. 51 C. Ondine Chavoya, “Internal Exiles: The Interventionist Public and Performance Art of Asco,” in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, ed. Erika Suderburg (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 197. 52 Noriega and Rivas, “Chicano Art in the City of Dreams”, 88. 53 Goldman, “How, Why, Where, and When It All Happened,” 219. 54 Karen Mary Davalos, “‘All Roads Lead to East L.A’: Goez Art Studios and Gallery,” in L.A. Xicano, eds. Chon A. Noriega, Terezita Romo, and Pilar Tompkins Rivas (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press,

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2011), 29. 55 Noriega and Rivas, “Chicano Art in the City of Dreams,” 96. 56 Davalos, “‘All Roads Lead to East L.A.’,” 29. 57 Noriega and Rivas, “Chicano Art in the City of Dreams,” 90. 58 Plaza de La Raza: Cultural Center for Arts and Education, “History,” accessed February 25, 2014. http://www.plazadelaraza.org/about/history/. 59 Noriega and Rivas, “Chicano Art in the City of Dreams,” 96. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., 81. 62 Ibid., 78. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid., 85. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid., 84–85. 67 Repository Library, “Mechicano Art Center, 1972,” accessed February 25, 2014. http://repository.library.csuci.edu/bitstream/handle/10139/5314/mechicano_art_ce nter$.pdf?sequence=1. 68 Reina Alejandra Prado Saldívar, “On Both Sides of the Los Angeles River: Mechicano Art Center,” in L.A. Xicano, eds. Chon A. Noriega, Terezita Romo and Pilar Tompkins Rivas (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2011), 43. 69 Repository Library, “Mechicano Art Center, 1972”. 70 Ibid. 71 Noriega and Rivas, “Chicano Art in the City of Dreams,” 71; Harry Gamboa Jr., “In the City of Angels, Chameleons, and Phantoms: Asco, a Case Study of Chicano Art in Urban Tones (or Asco was a Four-Member Word),” in Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, eds. Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano (Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, UCLA, 1991), 124. 72 KCET, “Highland Park: Mechicano Art Center”, accessed February 25, 2014. http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/highland-park/painting-the-walls/mechicanoart-center.html. 73 Prado Saldívar, “On Both Sides of the Los Angeles River,” 43. 74 Noriega and Rivas, “Chicano Art in the City of Dreams,” 81. 75 Ibid., 92. 76 KCET, “Highland Park: Mechicano Art Center.” 77 Repository Library, “Mechicano Art Center, 1972.” 78 KCET, “Highland Park: Centro De Arte Publico,” accessed February 25, 2014. http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/highland-park/painting-the-walls/centro-dearte-publico.html. 79 KCET, “Highland Park: Mechicano Art Center.” 80 Self Help Graphics and Art, “History,” accessed February 25, 2014. http://www.selfhelpgraphics.com/about/history. 81 Noriega and Rivas, “Chicano Art in the City of Dreams,” 82.

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82 Jenni Sorkin and Linda Theung, “Selected Chronology of All-Women Group Exhibitions, 1943–83,” in WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution, ed. Lisa Gabrielle Mark (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press, 2007), 473–499. 83 Garrard, “Feminist Politics,” 91. 84 Moravec, “Fictive Families and History Makers”, 85; Garrard, “Feminist Politics”, 91. 85 Meyer, “June Wayne,” 313. 86 Garrard, “Feminist Politics,” 91. 87 Maura Reilly, “Introduction: Toward Transnational Feminisms,” in Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art, eds. Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin (London and New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2007), 27. 88 Ibid. 89 Linda Nochlin, “Women Artists Then and Now: Painting, Sculpture, and the Image of the Self,” in Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art, eds. Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin (London and New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2007), 47. 90 Reilly, “Introduction,” 27. 91 Harry Gamboa Jr., “Videotaped interview,” interview by Del Zamora, Del Zamora Actor Reel Part 39, uploaded August 30, 2010. Accessed March 12, 2013. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2ieIoWvz3c. 92 Patssi Valdez, “Videotaped interview,” interview by Del Zamora, Del Zamora Actor Reel Part 39, uploaded August 30, 2010. Accessed March 12, 2013. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2ieIoWvz3c. 93 Gamboa, “In the City of Angels, Chameleons, and Phantoms,” 125. 94 Chon A. Noriega, “Conceptual Graffiti and the Public Art Museum: Spray Paint LACMA,” in ASCO: Elite of the Obscure, eds. C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzalez (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011), 260–261. 95 Noriega and Rivas, “Chicano Art in the City of Dreams”, 91. 96 Ibid., 76. 97 Gamboa, “In the City of Angels,” 125. 98 Willie Herrón, “Oral history interview with Willie Herrón, 2000 Feb. 5–March 17,” by Jeffrey J. Rangel, Archives of American Art, Washington D.C: Smithsonian Institute, accessed February 25, 2014, www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/herron00.html. 99 Ibid. 100 Lacy, “Affinities,” 267. 101 Brodsky, “Exhibitions, Galleries, and Alternative Spaces,” 104. 102 Ibid. 103 Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble With Diversity: How we Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (New York: Holt, 2007), 201. 104 Goldman, “How, Why, Where, and When It All Happened,” 389–390. 105 Gronk, “Videotaped interview,” interview by Del Zamora, Del Zamora Actor Reel Part 39, uploaded August 30, 2010. Accessed March 12, 2013.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2ieIoWvz3c. 106 Valdez, “Videotaped interview.” 107 Goldman, Dimensions of the Americas, 199. 108 Sorkin and Theung, “Selected Chronology,” 492. 109 López and Roth, “Social Protest,” 149. 110 Brodsky, “Exhibitions, Galleries, and Alternative Spaces,” 104. 111 López and Roth, “Social Protest,” 151. 112 Noriega and Rivas, “Chicano Art in the City of Dreams”, 91. 113 Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe, “Centripetal Discourse and Heteroglot Feminisms,” in Feminisms is Still Our Name: Seven Essays on Historiography and Curatorial Practices, eds. Malin Hedlin Hayden and Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 97. 114 Brodsky, “Exhibitions, Galleries, and Alternative Spaces,” 104.

CHAPTER TWO A SHORT HISTORY OF WOMEN’S EXHIBITIONS FROM THE 1970S TO THE 1990S: BETWEEN FEMINIST STRUGGLES AND HEGEMONIC APPROPRIATION DORIS GUTH I will negotiate the phenomenon of “women’s exhibitions,” that is art shows that present the work solely of women artists, from the 1970s to the 1990s. These exhibitions were frequently designed in the 1970s and represent a reaction to discrimination against women in the arts, specifically to women’s marginalized position regarding processes of constructing meaning within institutions such as galleries, museums, magazines, etc. Women’s galleries, women’s magazines, and women’s exhibitions are forums initiated and created by women artists and theorists, in which they are able to discuss inequalities and power structures in the arts. These alternatives to the established representation systems provide platforms where women are welcome to realize their own concepts.

I. Women’s exhibitions—motivation and function The following catalog text accurately describes the intention of many women’s exhibitions during the 1970s. Valie Export, curator of the 1975 exhibition Magna in Vienna, Austria, writes: I hope that this event will reach its goal, which is women’s self-realization and the self-discovery of women’s potential; this not only manifests women’s entitlement to cultural participation, decision-making, and formation, but also their freedom to develop locked away powers/talents, and to make a small contribution to consciousness-raising for women and men [...].1

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Here, Valie Export expresses several premises of feminist politics during the 1970s that also reflect numerous other theoretical approaches such as those of Mary Daly and Kate Millett, whose theories were used as a starting point for many women’s exhibitions then. They conceived art as a political field of contention in which women’s identity, buried by patriarchy, was to be brought back to the surface by the women themselves. They believed that the female subject was defaced by social constraints and needed to be set free and rediscovered. To some extent, this identity concept is contradicting. On the one hand, it acknowledges the significance of socio-political conditions that contribute to women’s oppression, as this is not perceived as part of the natural order. Simultaneously, such thoughts still express “true” female identity as embodied by nature, ranking the body as the foremost ontological signifier. The origin of one’s identity and the origin of a dualistic gender difference concept is therefore the body, which individuals “possess.” Most will agree today on the presumption that identities are not simply “natural” but are produced within a social process, or as Judith Butler says, are repeatedly constructed through performative acts: “Having” an identity means living according to a number of descriptions and to act within conditions which are created through these descriptions.2

Back to the 1970s: Separatist forms of public spaces, such as women’s exhibitions, are acknowledged as a necessity in self-discovery and in politically claiming power, but they indeed evoked controversial debates within the feminist movement. Were they addressing the isolation of those already excluded, which simply results in a reification of their discriminated and excluded positions? From this point of view, the concept of a “women’s exhibition” could be seen as reinforcing the hegemonic system, and therefore as constituting questionable means. Women artists’ marginalized role is thus stated as a given within the power structure of the arts. Such artificially induced frameworks would restrict and ghettoize the reception of women’s art. Many women’s exhibitions of the 1990s are too close to universalistic essentialism for comfort. Often employed in the 1970s, universalistic essentialism groups and unites women according to a universal binding and common feature. Nevertheless, do not alliances among women aim to support strategic acts in attaining sufficient opportunities, to create a space for dialog without being interrupted, and to receive ample space and attention for project development? Are not women’s exhibitions therefore necessary interventions in pointing out relations of dominance within the art system?

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Or are women’s exhibitions places of isolation and implicitly reproducing the hegemonic order? The two substantially controversial positions taken in this conflict are that of autonomy and integration. On the one hand, autonomy stresses the difference between hegemonic systems—if an “outside” even exists to begin with—and on the other hand, integration emphasizes demands for equality within power structures. Women’s exhibitions at mainstream exhibition venues tend toward breaking down the binary concept of public versus private, thus reducing the private to a female sphere and the public to a male sphere. The debate on gendered concepts of public and private during the 1970s, and its supportive or reductive functions, are reflected in Maria Lassnig’s thoughts (1975): Ten years ago I would have never imagined an exhibition only with women as even a possibility. At the time, an Austrian personality strongly suggested that I not participate in a group exhibition that was to feature three women painters. “That can only hurt your career, the only thing women have in common - the only thing you will see in their exhibitions is their weaknesses multiplied,” etc. I did it anyway. He didn’t know that prejudices multiplied would never even be able to stop the trampled grass beneath his feet from still standing tall again, to quote Bernhard Shaw. He said that in 1939 when he encouraged the Negro minority not to demonstrate against segregated train compartments, but to demand their own compartments, ones which “poor white trash” would be excluded from. And when women do the same, when it is finally their turn, they will close off the train compartments and say “we want to be among ourselves, to even become aware of our own weakness,” ha ha!3

Reading Bernhard Shaw’s words within the context of women’s exhibitions would mean the following: The common grounds of gender or ethnicity codify hegemonic structures because they exclude so-called “Others” and thus consolidate collective identity. Conclusively, if women’s demands for an all-male exhibition were to be met, men would be consciously excluded, enabling women to gain the position of (self) confident subjects. Within cultural practices, if this demand were to be made, it would hardly be understood as women’s empowerment. The innumerable exhibitions over the past few decades that exclusively presented men’s artwork were certainly never called “men’s exhibitions,” nor were they noted as special programs; they were simply taken for granted as “normal” art exhibitions. This renders discrimination against women artists as not merely a phenomenon of exclusionary mechanisms; it also requires the total negation of gender difference. Hence, men, or male artists, are conceived and codified as “the” art producers.

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A consequence of these mechanisms is that the gender of women artists is often incessantly (over) emphasized. This perpetually (re)production of the connection between the woman artist and femininity is the equivalent to the apparently gender neutral grounds male artists are allotted. Women artists are not only marginalized, but are also stereotyped in the same breath. They are primarily perceived as women, not as professionals of their trade. These are some reasons for many women artists’ refusal to take part in women’s exhibitions in the 1990s (and still today). They are afraid their artwork’s reception would be restricted to a gender-specific context, thus impeding or fully preventing their work from attaining a fitting position within the art world. Artist Elke Krystufek (1994) comments on this problem in an ironic manner: Why am I in a women’s exhibition? I don’t know. I am more powerful and stronger than the other women shown here. I’m not missing an ounce of masculinity... Maybe it’s time for a sex change. I have often thought about it. So then the topic of a women’s exhibition would no longer have anything to do with me. But can men masturbate better? I don’t think so. I think women can do it more often.4

Maria Lassnig, an artist who once proclaimed the political importance of women’s exhibitions during the 1970s, presented another aspect in 1998, when she said that […] women’s exhibitions are just as discriminatory as shows with only Black, yellow, or white artists. This may have made sense in New York in the 1970s, but this sense of group belonging no longer exists today.5

Against the background of socio-political change and theoretical frameworks of the 1990s, we are confronted with the meaning of gender politics and how these function when dealing with women’s exhibitions. By no means do I endeavour to provide a comprehensive study on all women’s exhibitions; I will, however, highlight some basic phenomenon pertaining to this form of artistic presentation and introduce some exhibition concepts as examples. My study is based upon research of exhibition catalogs. These publications stand for a specific aspect of representation in exhibitions, yet they do not always reflect the actual presentation of the artists’ work within that particular exhibition. Nevertheless, the catalogs function as documentation and are sources for theoretical and content information on an exhibition.

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II. Pluralism in the 1990s Exhibitions cannot be simply grouped into unified categories. For this reason, I will expound upon three specific strands of gender politics and provide examples of exhibitions in the 1990s for each one. The first group can be summarized under the label of “women as artists.” The main function of this type of exhibition is to point out the fact that women artists exist (and that they should have support). Such exhibitions process the fact that women are subjects of actions and, in this vein, also work as artists. Today’s codes of practice in cultural policy reveal that women are still fighting for acknowledgement. The agency of women as artists, which was a central issue in the 1970s, is still very important in the 1990s. However, from a contemporary perspective, and from the standpoint of differential feminist discourses, such exhibitions are not viewed as exceptionally enthralling or even as adequate means for creating change. To what effect certain policy makers’ and curators’ good intentions can still end up as counterproductive is demonstrated by the exhibition Women Artists of the 20th Century (1990) at a museum in Wiesbaden, Germany.6 In their catalog, contribution curators Renate Petzinger and Volker Rattermeyer lament about the underrepresentation of women artists in museums and large-scale exhibitions, revealing their main objective of increasing the visibility of women’s art. The method they used was to select several artists from each decade of the twentieth century; the result was a show with fifty-eight largely well-known artists from Gabriele Münter to Isa Genzken. The catalog mainly concentrates on texts about each individual artist. The curators treat art history as the biographic history of individuals, as their approach to feminism is to revise history through rediscovering or promoting women artists. A simple chronology of referential consuetudinary art-history “isms” provides the structure they aim to enrich through the addition of women artists. Their approach fails to question the fundamental categories of art history and art. The curators allow parameters of art history and their effects on women artists’ situation to remain untouched, as they reiterate linear stories on success and the genius cult, and continue to measure art according to certain quality standards. Their efforts cumulate in a presentation of women artists, which merely demonstrates that they are “equals” to their male counterparts. In summary, this exhibition remains blind to women’s experience of structural barriers, such as having little or no access to institutional art education in the past, lack of role models, etc. For example, the catalog

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only offers sparse and incomplete contributions that target the structural and historical problems of how women artists are marginalized. The exhibition Inside the Visible, curated by Catherine de Zegher, exemplifies a group of “women’s exhibitions” that has fallen prey to the “magic of female attraction.”7 Inside the Visible is Catherine de Zegher’s attempt to make an historical corrective to twentieth century art history by presenting thirty-seven women artists from three decades of the twentieth century: the 1930s, the 1960s, and the 1990s. According to de Zegher, the selection of artists contributes to the deconstruction of established codes and represents the artists’ independent positions. She also believes these artists’ work does not conform to hegemonic systems and had therefore not been noted in the past. Through feminist and psychoanalytic approaches, she researches women’s positions and delves into the dark and hidden layers, which can only be facilitated through different levels of awareness.8 The title of the exhibition refers to this level of awareness, for the name is a shortened version of “The Invisible is Inside the Visible,” meaning the invisible is inscribed in the visible and is inherent within it. The title also alludes to a focus on inclusionary and exclusionary models of thought concerning difference, which is a central theme throughout the exhibition. Catherine de Zegher’s undertaking does not involve consolidating difference as a bipolar or oppositional model of thought posed at eliminating the disturbing, abnormal, dangerous or oppressive. Naming the “Other” identifies, classifies, separates, and solidifies the Other in its “Otherness.” She questions the feasibility of even being able to think in terms of difference without naming and thus subsuming it under a totalitarian system.9 The exhibition and her response to these questions intended to show that artwork can destabilize or even go beyond deadlocked categories of signification and naturalized differences rooted in patriarchal discourse, such as gender and race. Her selection of work reflects her search for “beginnings,” which are the production of difference as the result of combining the familiar with enriching new elements, as Edward Said proposes.10 Catherine de Zegher’s approach favours repetition and recurrence over purely linear conceptions.11 In transferring this to artistic practice, it implies that artistic production always has a “female dimension.” This is, according to de Zegher, where equality and difference are in a permanent condition of mutual exchange and thus do not omit one another.12 She proposes that the artwork shown reflects this dimension, for each piece has a certain absence of staunchness, constancy and tends toward ambiguity, flexibility, ephemeralism, and fusion.

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Within the context of the above mentioned theoretical positions, de Zegher’s work on difference is an attempt to examine the question if there is any way around hierarchically imposed exclusion, or if it is even possible to negate difference. De Zegher formulates her reply in her catalog contribution and introduces a series of inexplicit strategies, which she reckons with under the problematic label of “female dimensions.” What are we supposed to think about artwork that is described as a space where equality and difference are constantly in a condition of mutual exchange, and thus do not omit one another? Or, in other words, what kind of artwork shows an absence of staunchness, constancy and tends toward ambiguity, flexibility, ephemeralism, and fusion?13 This could describe all or none of the artwork in this exhibition. It also allows these pieces to function as sounding boards for misinterpretations stemming from conceptualizations of femininity as “the indeterminable.” The political content of certain pieces, such as Martha Rosler’s or Charlotte Salomon’s, is eclipsed by de Zegher’s emphasis on the sensual aspects of the artwork reflected in her selection. Yet, de Zegher’s attempt to flee from oppositional differences puts her in danger of reifying essentialist identity concepts and the idea that women’s art is “different.” Aside from these critical points, there are some positive aspects I would like to mention here. First, de Zegher exerted much effort in presenting unknown women artists, and displaying diverse points of views and perspectives. Second, in contrast to many other curators, her lines of argumentation are based on comprehensive readings of contemporary theory compounded with critical questions. Third, she reflects on the structural significance of exhibitions as media as well as her position as a curator. She emphasizes that she consciously veers away from using socalled mainstream categories or speculations on primacy, influence, and imitation, which are instruments that oppress, suppress, and marginalize artistic practices. She sees exhibitions not as self-contained, innate systems, but as cyclically structured and open processes of thought. An example for this unorthodox, non-linear approach is her selection and thematic interlinking of three time periods. The third category of “women’s exhibitions” is linked to a typical 1990s phenomenon that carries the label “bad girl.” Strategies subsumed under this particular form of feminist politics are found in the exhibition Bad Girls curated by Kate Bush, Emma Dexter, and Nicola White, and shown at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 1993 and in the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow in 1994.14 The curators note in their catalog introduction that the exhibition does not attempt to cover the full spectrum of feminist artistic practices. It does, however, propose

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their reaction to what they call “instructional” artwork of women artists, such as Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger, during the 1980s. The curators’ main intention is, through showing the “irreverent, personal, shocking, funny and fey” work of six women artists, to attack both the narrow-minded feminist, as well as reactionary patriarchal, fronts.15 They feel their exhibition works with the seductive power of the images and materials, basing their aesthetic approach on the pleasure the materials utilized in the pieces evoke. For example, Helen Chadwick’s use of luxurious furs, Dorothy Cross’ employment of leather, Nan Goldin’s use of marvellous and expensive colors in her photographs, Rachel Evans’s employment of filigreed delicateness in her drawings, Nicole Eisenman’s extraordinary desire, and Sue Williams’ graphic and explosive crudeness in her pictures.16 In a different light, Cherry Smith’s catalog text aims to correct to a certain degree the curators’ funny, humorous, and purely sensual position toward their own exhibition. Smith interprets the title Bad Girls as women’s resistance to predominant conceptualizations of femininity that began to gain importance in the 1960s. From this perspective, this exhibition follows in the tradition of taking back forbidden territories through artistic production. These territories’ ownership is reclaimed by the artists in the exhibition, for example through Helen Chadwick’s and Dorothy Cross’ unsettling use of taboo material, or through Sue Williams’ blatant articulation of social taboos. Nicole Eisenman and Nan Goldin’s work go beyond the structures of “normal” choices of objects of sexual desire, whereas Rachel Evans discretely parodies romantic and artistic endeavours.17 Apparently, the curators were inspired by the “girlism” phenomenon, favouring the “new” fun culture over customary feminist strategies that are seemingly didactic and lack pleasure. The curators are also aware of the fact that their opinion is not the only one, as they allowed Laura Cottingham to appear in their catalog with a critical commentary. Cottingham ties the concept of the “bad girl” to the myth of the good girl and her rebellious attempts. She states that the “bad girl” stands for freedom from conventions, carefreeness, independence, and decisiveness, and that the title, Bad Girls, transports somewhat traditional, pejorative, and childish attributes. Cottingham mentions that all the artists’ approaches to socially and aesthetically dominant codes are an attempt to shift them, but that none of them actually call themselves a “bad girl”.18 If they were to do so, they would be conceived as part of a subculture and not as part of dominant cultural production. Cottingham’s critique points out the problematic, oppositional position of the “bad girls” in relation to

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other strategies of critical approaches to representation. Defiant and youthful girl power enables a subversive strategy based on humor and pubescent rebellion that does generate pleasure, yet the “bad girl’s” position still remains within the limits of identity concepts that correspond with the conservative good girl concept. The curators’ reading of the artists’ work remains superficial as they do so only according to their sensual aspects, thus forcing socio-political aspects to take a back seat.19 Throughout this mainly critical examination of different women’s exhibitions, one important question still remains. Were any exhibitions in the 1990s able to maneuver around such conceptual and ideological traps? Were they capable of dealing with these aspects in a positive manner? Vraiment. Féminisme et art is one positive answer to this question, an exhibition curated by Laura Cottingham, shown in the Magasin Centre National d’Art Contemporain in Grenoble, France, in 1997. The curator selected artwork by women from the USA and France, concentrating on pieces from the 1970s and 1990s. In this way, she set out to compare French and US-American feminism and to analyze the relationship between contemporary artistic practices and the women’s movement in the 1970s and the 1990s. In addition, the exhibition aimed to provide a general reflection on how feminist art practices have transformed the notion of art. The curator arranged the exhibition according to her theoretical concept. The first room contained two video projections of political activities from the women’s movements in France and the USA during the 1970s and showed demonstrations, protests, etc. Another room exhibited a selection of political posters, influential publications on feminist theory as well as written correspondence between artists and theorists. The selection of artwork was grouped according to political and social topics, for instance homosexuality or identity issues. In her catalog, Laura Cottingham addresses the under-representation of women artists via a brief history of the US-American Feminist Art Movement (FAM). This group’s aesthetic approaches exemplify the exhibition’s major purpose, that is to lift modernist borders between art and social life, overcome conservative categories of high and low art or arts and crafts, address culturally determined aspects of women’s experience like gender-specific division of labor or sexuality, and to dethrone the hegemonic position of painting and sculpture in favour of other art forms such as performance and video.20 What Vraiment does, as opposed to the above-mentioned exhibitions of the 1990s, is negotiate female identity and feminist aesthetics along with concrete socio-political conditions of artistic production and reception. She replaces universal, immanent concepts with contextual frames of reference.

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III. Finally, I would like to convey some central findings based on the analyses of women’s exhibitions in the 1990s. An extremely important question within this context would be the following: why did established institutions, such as the Museum in Wiesbaden, the ICA in London and the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London put so much money into largescale women’s exhibitions in the 1990s? An optimistic response would be that these were the fruits of extensive labor by feminists over the past thirty years who worked to enforce women’s participation in all fields including the arts. Alas, when we look at the whole situation more closely, this first enthusiastic response begins to fade. On the one hand, exhibitions, such as Inside the Visible and Women Artists of the 20th Century, are results of feminist struggles. On the other, they are also institutions’ interpretations of the category “women’s exhibitions” and their instrumentalization and utilization of feminist ideals and goals used to polish up their own images. Women’s exhibitions send out a signal of being progressively orientated and politically involved. However, if we take a look at concepts of gender transported via “women’s exhibitions,” we can easily see that they are not automatically based on contemporary forms of feminist thought. Sometimes even feminist forms of presentation are, in part, also manipulated in order to uphold conservative ideas and identity concepts. Inside the Visible gives agency to models of femininity, which stand in opposition to a logocentric patriarchy. The positioning of the woman as the “Other,”—as cyclical, unpredictable, flexible, sensual, irrational, and open—caters more to a universal, pre-discursive identity concept. Such approaches deny the identity of any political field of action while veiling its complicity in power struggles over identity politics. If identities are not perceived as a “site where struggles for power to be able to explain the world in one’s own terms” occurs, then these exhibitions will not become powerful political instruments in asserting identity concepts.21 To this effect, “natural” pre-givens would be seen as innocent or quasi neutral, while individual interests would eclipse the political background or motivation of gender concepts. Organizers and curators may believe they are acting politically within a feminist context, yet what they are really doing is often not, or maybe just partly, setting actions in order to break out of patriarchal concepts and codes. The construction of these problematic models of feminine identity are closely connected to a conservative understanding of art, which results in leaving intact and not questioning categories that govern paradigms of art history, such as the

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artist and the work of art paradigms. These constructs disregard the fact that authentic sovereign identity and authorship do not exist, just as there is no such thing as a “true” work of art. Both the author and the artwork are perpetually entwined in an interdependent relationship constituted within contexts of acts and speech. In addition, exhibition, as a form of presentation, is a historic development and has no neutral dispositive, as they contribute to the production of meaning, their vehicle being specific modes of presentation. Most exhibitions of the 1990s adhere to traditionalist forms, such as placing one piece of art next to another as if to emphasize the inherent quality of the art space itself. A women’s exhibition, such as Vraiment. Féminisme et art, as I have shown, is one of the important efforts in the 1990s to create awareness to the underrepresentation of women artists, structural discrimination, and relationships of socio-political domination. Finally: A women’s exhibition is a form of representation, which can not be judged or valued per se, yet through merely examining its intention and framework of content we are able to make statements about what its political aims could be.

Notes 1

Author’s translation, original text in lower-case. Valie Export, ed., Magna: Feminismus, Kunst und Kreativität: ein Überblick über die weibliche Sensibilität, Imagination, Projektion und Problematik, suggeriert durch ein Tableau von Bildern, Objekten, Fotos, Vorträgen, Diskussionen, Lesungen, Filmen, Videobändern und Aktionen, exh.cat. (Vienna: Galerie Nächst St. Stephan, 1975), 1. 2 Sabine Hark, Deviante Subjekte: Die paradoxe Politik der Identität (Opladen: Leske+Budrich, 1996), 22. 3 Maria Lassnig, “Für den Katalog der Ausstellung Magna,” in Magna: Feminismus, Kunst und Kreativität: ein Überblick über die weibliche Sensibilität, Imagination, Projektion und Problematik, suggeriert durch ein Tableau von Bildern, Objekten, Fotos, Vorträgen, Diskussionen, Lesungen, Filmen, Videobändern und Aktionen, ed. Valie Export, exh.cat. (Vienna: Galerie Nächst St. Stephan, 1975), 8. 4 Elke Krystufek, “Auf meinen Leib ist nichts geschrieben,” in Auf den Leib geschrieben, exh.cat. (Vienna: Kunsthalle Wien, 1994), 121. 5 Vitus H. Weh, “Ich habe Talent: Interview with Maria Lassnig,” Falter, no. 12 (1999), 58. 6 Volker Rattemeyer and Renate Petzinger, eds., Künstlerinnen des 20. Jahrhunderts: Museum Wiesbaden, 1. September – 25. November 1990 (Kassel: Weber und Weidemeyer, 1990).

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The exhibition was curated by Catherine de Zegher for the Beguinage of SaintElizabeth in Kortrijk, Belgium in 1994–1995 and shown at Whitechapel Art Gallery in London in 1996 and at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC, and the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth in 1997. 8 Catherine de Zegher, “Inside the Visible. Introduction,” in Inside the Visible: An elliptical traverse of 20th century art in, of, and from the feminine, exh.cat., ed. Catherine de Zegher (Gent: Les Editions La Chambre, 1996), 20. 9 Ibid., 21. 10 Ibid., 23. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 27. 13 Ibid., 22. 14 Katy Deepwell did research on two exhibitions with the same title independent from one another on “Bad Girls” (ICA London 1993 and New Museum in New York 1994). See Katy Deepwell, “Bad Girls? Feminist Identity Politics in the 1990s,” in Juliet Steyn, ed., Beyond Identity. Other than Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 152–166. 15 Kate Bush, Emma Dexter and Nicola White, “Foreword,” in Bad Girls, exh.cat. (London: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1993), 3. 16 Ibid. 17 Cf. Cherry Smith, “Bad Girls,” in Bad Girls, exh.cat. (London: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1993), 6. 18 Cf. Laura Cottingham, “What’s so Bad About ‘Em?,” in Girls, exh.cat. (London: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1993), 54. 19 Cf. ibid., 55. 20 Cf. Laura Cottingham, “Vraiment féminisme et art,” in Vraiment: Féminisme et art, exh.cat. (Grenoble: Magasin, 1997), 8. 21 Hark, Deviante Subjekte, 29.

CHAPTER THREE REFORMULATING THE CODE: A FEMINIST INTERPRETATION OF THE CURATORIAL WORK OF SARA BREITBERG-SEMEL AND GALIA BAR OR DURING THE 1980S AND THE 1990S IN ISRAEL OSNAT ZUKERMAN RECHTER Introduction This essay deals with the work of Sara Breitberg-Semel and Galia Bar Or, two dominant curators in Israel. It focuses on the 1980s and 1990s, a period in which they worked in parallel: Breitberg-Semel as the curator for Israeli art at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (1977–1989), and later as an independent curator (until 2010), and Bar Or as the director and head curator of the Ein Harod Museum of Art (1985–present). First I will present them and their work, and then I will trace the manner in which each of them attempted to redefine the boundaries of their role in the museum in which they operated. Finally, I will try to determine if their mode of operation can be seen as “feminist” and in what sense, and whether the curatorial practices they chose can be characterized as models of feminist curation. The curatorial work of Sara Breitberg-Semel (b. 1947) is identified with the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the only institute in which she held the position of curator. In the beginning of the 1970s she was engaged in journalistic writing and art critique, which led her to museal work.1 In 1977 she was appointed curator of Israeli art by Mark Scheps, the museum director.2 For the majority of her years at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art she served as curator of Israeli art, presenting, for the most part, solo exhibitions, including exhibitions dedicated to female artists. The first

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exhibition she curated was dedicated to Aviva Uri (1977). In 1982 she was appointed curator of the Israeli pavilion at the Venice Biennale—the first woman to hold this position—where she curated two solo exhibitions for the artists Michal Na’aman and Tamar Getter. Despite the numerous solo exhibitions, the group exhibitions were actually the most memorable ones that she curated: A Turning Point: 12 Israeli Artists (1981); Two Years: Israeli Art—Qualities Accumulated 1983–1984 (1984–1985); and her landmark exhibition (with the most quoted curatorial text), “The Want of Matter”—A Quality in Israeli Art (1986), which became synonymous in Israel with artistic style and a foundational example of a curatorial thesis exhibition. In her last two years at the museum, between 1987 and 1989, she served as the curator of American art. In this role she managed to curate only one exhibition, of David Salle (1989). Her work on the second planned exhibition was suspended at its peak, and was ultimately never realized.3 In July 1989, the Tel Aviv Museum found itself in a 5 million NS deficit and the Tel Aviv Municipality, headed by Mayor Shlomo Lahat, demanded immediate cuts. Scheps fired 22 staff members, including Sara Breitberg-Semel. These firings were followed by intense protests by artists, which ultimately led to Scheps’s resignation.4 Between the years 1993–2003, Sara Breitberg-Semel edited the Studio Art Magazine, which at the time was a lively platform for discussing the field of local art.5 Since she left the Tel Aviv Museum, Breitberg-Semel has curated only three exhibitions: Friction: I-Body, I-language, I+You at the Israeli Pavilion, the 47th Venice Biennale (1997); Dalia Amotz: The Dark Land, Fields of Light (2000), which Breitberg-Semel curated as a gesture for her close friend, the photographer Dalia Amotz who passed away in 1994; and Gershuni*: A Retrospective (2010). Although Breitberg-Semel’s career as curator was relatively short and her curatorial experience—except for the two exhibitions at the Israeli pavilion of the Venice Biennale—was linked to only one institution, she enjoys a canonical standing in the local curatorial field, and she is identified with the 1980s. When the Ministry of Education and Culture’s Curator Prize was established in 2005, Breitberg-Semel was unanimously chosen as its first recipient. Examining the entire range of Breitberg-Semel’s curatorial activities, one can identify moments of friction with the art establishment and attempts to resist the institutional power of the museum, despite the fact that she always operated from within them. Some of these moments, which will be described below, will be used to demonstrate the split position that she adopted, which I will term “resistance to the institution from within”. This position enabled Breitberg-Semel to belong to the

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establishment and act critically towards it at one and the same time. The last three exhibitions she curated can be seen as a formulation of this position. I will aim to characterize Breitberg-Semel’s split position as a curatorial practice and to shed light on its feminist character, this despite the fact that Breitberg-Semel never explicitly declared a feminist stance. Galia Bar Or (b. 1951) was the director and curator of the Ein Harod Museum of Art from 1985 to the present. Her work was characterized by dedication to the history of the museum and its ideological heritage. Therefore, she came to be completely identified with the institute she headed, even though she also curated exhibitions in other contexts, throughout the years. As a kibbutz member (Ein Harod Meuhad) she represents a modus operandi that is linked to the heritage of the kibbutz movement, its cooperative ideology, and its customary structure of dual responsibility—the individual to the group and the group to the individual. Bar Or began working at the Museum when she was still a young girl, when Zusia Efron (1911–2004), her predecessor as museum director, invited her to do small, partial jobs.6 In the second half of the 1970s she took upon herself the cataloging and organizing of the museum collection, which according to Efron already comprised at that time “1000 paintings, 8000 pages of graphics and sketches, 300 sculptures, and over 1000 objects of Jewish folklore art from 30 countries”.7 The first exhibition she worked on was Batia Grossbard’s (1978).8 The first exhibition she initiated after she became director was Frontline (1985), to which she invited Pinchas Cohen Gan to be guest curator. Through this exhibition she redefined the museum’s spaces and surroundings. A year later she inaugurated the Israeli Photography Biennale, which was held three times in all (1986, 1988, and 1991). Throughout the years, she curated numerous solo exhibitions and worked with a series of guest curators who were invited to curate alongside her, including Gideon Ofrat, Adam Baruch, Ben Lifson, Jean-Luc Monterosso, John Stathatos, and Jean Francois Chevrier. Bar Or chose to also consistently engage with artists who were outside of the canon and did not receive recognition. Her curatorial approach offered a critical view of the Israeli art canon. She initiated and curated several group exhibitions, through which she offered emphases that differed from the accepted and familiar ones. Such were the exhibitions Towards the 90s (April 1990), Critical Utopia (1996), “Hebrew Work”— The Disregarded Gaze in the Canon of Israeli Art (1998), Sixty Years of Art in Israel: The First Decade (1948–1958)—A Hegemony and a Plurality (with Gideon Ofrat), and the collection exhibitions of Raffie Lavie (2008) and Gaby and Ami Brown (2009, 2010). A significant

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portion of the exhibitions she curated—and especially the retrospectives— were accompanied by comprehensive catalogs and research essays that she penned herself. In 1992 Bar Or was selected to curate the Israeli pavilion at the third biennale in Istanbul. In 1996 she curated the Israeli exhibition at the biennale in São Paulo. In 2007 Bar Or was awarded the Ministry of Culture Curator Prize. Her book Our Lives Requires Art, dealing with the history of art museums in kibbutzim and based on her doctoral dissertation, was published in 2010.9 The book extensively discusses the foundation of the Ein Harod Museum of Art, the vision of its founder, Chaim (Atar) Aptaker and the unique structure of the museum, designed by Samuel Bickels.10 That same year she curated with Yuval Yaski the exhibition Kibbutz—Architecture without Precedents in the Israeli Pavilion at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice Biennale (2010). In doing so she expanded the discussion of art in kibbutzim to include architecture, not only in relation to the planning of art museums in kibbutzim but also with regard to principles of planning the entire kibbutz habitat. Bar Or constructed a modus operandi that was planned from the moment she was appointed, as a long-term move based on the uniqueness of the museum, its collections, and history. This consistent modus operandi created for the museum under her direction an image of a museum with a clear guiding hand, managerial and historic responsibility, and a high level of commitment to culture. As a result, prominent collectors of Israeli art, such as Ami and Gaby Brown, and dominant artists such as Raffie Lavie, cooperated with the Ein Harod Museum and not with the main museums of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, despite its distance from the center of the country. Bar Or created an extensive network of relationships with artists, curators, collectors and gallery owners with the understanding that cooperation is crucial in every cultural institute and even more so in a peripheral museum. At the same time she nurtured for years an operational logic that she termed “breaking the rules with all your heart”, which meant taking risks at both the ideological and operational levels since, as she put it, when one is located in the geographical periphery, […] pushing the limits creates the spice of life of the place and requires hard work. This hard work must be felt, it must be trustworthy, and it must be done with all your heart.11

Her combined work, as director, curator, and researcher of Israeli art, turned Bar Or into one of the dominant curators in Israel. She strengthened

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the relevancy of artistic and curatorial work in the (geographical) periphery and the kibbutz and preserved it as an alternative to urban work. Bar Or, in contrast to Breitberg-Semel, explicitly emphasized her feminist approach. I will attempt to examine the entire range of her actions as director and curator of the museum through a feminist perspective. Finally, I will try to show that despite the significant differences between the nature of their positions and attitudes as curators, there are also similarities between them and that they can be interpreted as reflecting different aspects of feminist thought.

Sara Breitberg-Semel: Friction Sara Breitberg-Semel’s activities in her first years as curator of Israeli art at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art can be identified as a direct continuation of two past trends in Israeli curation: the approach of Yona Fischer, curator of Israeli, contemporary, and modern art at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem (1965–1990)—whose activities were perceived as groundbreaking at the end of the 1960s and throughout the 1970s—and the approach represented by Haim Gamzu, director of the Tel Aviv Museum prior to her appointment. In a sense, Breitberg-Semel internalized the Fischer modus operandi at the Israel Museum until the mid 1970s, and especially the way in which he dealt with the exhibition space. According to Breitberg-Semel, Fischer was “the only example” of curating: “I didn’t travel abroad to see what’s going on there, so the only live model I saw in action was Yona.”12 The artists that she curated solo exhibitions for, such as Aviva Uri, Joshua Neustein, Raffie Lavie, Benny Efrat, and Moshe Kupferman were unequivocally identified with Fischer. When Breitberg-Semel displayed them at the Tel Aviv Museum, they were no longer anonymous artists nor were they considered young, and she was not part of their creative development, as Fischer was when he put them on display. Nevertheless, considering the standards set by Gamzu in the Tel Aviv Museum, her choice to display them in Tel Aviv was perceived as a statement of change and taking a clear contemporary stand. Breitberg-Semel became one of the formulators of the post-conceptual “return to painting” trend in Israel. As journalist and art critique Adam Baruch pointed out, the catalogs that she produced for the solo exhibitions and the texts that she wrote in them marked a change and disengaged from the “tradition of a catalogue as a collection of blessings, flowery endearments and social niceties, and a few reproductions”, which were the custom at the time in Israel.13 Nevertheless, as mentioned, alongside walking the path made by Fischer, Breitberg-Semel also kept in touch with the curatorial trend

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prevalent during Gamzu’s directorship of the Tel Aviv Museum. She continued the tradition of annual summary exhibitions, such as the general exhibitions of Israeli artists and the autumn exhibitions, which were held almost annually during Gamzu’s time (1965, 1966, 1968, 1969, and 1970). Gamzu’s autumn exhibitions were eclectic zeitgeist exhibitions that lacked any focal curatorial point. They were diversified exhibitions with numerous participants that were supposed to present the season’s harvest, and as he himself described it, they were “an organic part of the feeling of the period, its hopes, disappointments, rebellions.”14 They displayed mainly two mediums, sculpture and painting, and expressed an elitist conception of art based on the idea of “quality” as a point of departure, since Gamzu believed that the sole criterion for such exhibitions must be “the quality of the exhibits and their propensity to merge into the ensemble.”15 Breitberg-Semel also focused her attention on the quality of the works of art and preserved the tradition of displaying paintings and sculptures as the sole representatives of artistic activity. The blend that she created in her work, between Fischer’s modus operandi and the Tel Aviv Museum exhibition tradition, was manifest in the group exhibitions Artist and Society in Israeli Art 1948–1978 (1978), A Turning Point (1981), and Two Years: Israeli Art—Qualities Accumulated 1983–1984 (1984–1985). Artist and Society in Israeli Art 1948–1978 was a multi-participant exhibition with a historical summary aspect, which was curated in honor of Israel’s 30th birthday. The exhibition was funded and produced as part of an initiative of the Public Council for Culture and Art. It was a “dictated exhibition” that harnessed the artistic narrative to the meta-nationalist narrative, and Breitberg-Semel adamantly avoided curating such exhibitions after that. A Turning Point was a group exhibition with 12 artists. In this case, Breitberg-Semel attempted to understand the “state of change” and phenomena that could not yet be named but that in her eyes testified to a new and different spirit in Israeli art as well as in the West in general (New York, Germany, Britain). In her eyes they expressed part of a general, comprehensive change occurring in Israel and not only in the field of art.16 In this exhibition Breitberg-Semel demonstrated for the first time the spirit of change by contrasting two academic institutions of art instruction: HaMidrasha (an art teachers training college), which was operating at the time in Ramat HaSharon, near Tel Aviv, and the Bezalel Academy of Arts in Jerusalem. This contrast became in future exhibitions a paradigmatic contrast between the two cities, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and an attempt to delineate the fundamental differences between them. A Turning Point contained the ideological seeds of the “the want of matter”

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thesis, which expressed this contrast in a dominant fashion and which matured into an exhibition only in 1986. Qualities Accumulated 1983–1984 was split into two consecutive exhibitions: The first was dedicated to painting and had 29 participants, and the second was dedicated to three-dimensional art and had 18 participating artists. It was an attempt to create a regular format that would be repeated and would define in a museum framework a moment in time in which the bi-annual harvest is put on display, a kind of mini-biennale, without any pretensions or thesis. In the beginning of the catalog Breitberg-Semel wrote: The last few years in Israeli Art have not seen any breakthrough. They have been characterized by the consolidation of processes started at the beginning of the 1980s. Thus, the need was felt to combine qualities, old and new; to show the various associations accumulated in the concept of quality.17

Further on she wrote, “The exhibition will reflect a preference for cultural standards and for quality rather than for a mere expression of youthfulness and innovation.”18 In the two exhibitions, A Turning Point and Qualities Accumulated 1983–1984, Breitberg-Semel marked the period in which she operated as a post-revolutionary moment, a moment of searching that came after a groundbreaking period in the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. She argued that museums—and in particular relatively young institutes, which was the case of the Tel Aviv Museum when she began working there19— always act in two ways: On the one hand they comply with the museal tradition and produce a fossilized culture, and on the other hand they produce contemporary action. Also, she stressed that museums are “institutes that operate according to elitist principles under the cover of ‘art for the people.’”20 In her work she exposed the existing tension between “the elitist values” upon which the museum relied, including quality, and the politically correct obligation to represent everyone. Regarding this dual tension, she defined her actions as curator and the nature of the authority given to her in the museal framework in relation to this tension. As curator of Israeli art, Breitberg-Semel assumed that quality is a recognizable value, and in this sense she continued to reflect in her work the thinking of Clement Greenberg’s notion of quality, artistic quality as an absolute value “one and not many.”21 She also believed that the museum’s mission as an institute is “to create history” according to criteria of quality and not to “display history” as she notes:

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Since this approach was implemented with regard to contemporary art, whose appreciation lacks the perspective of history, it allowed her to judge works and determine their quality based on intuition and personal taste. As part of the definition of her post at the museum, Breitberg-Semel viewed herself as being in a position to choose and organize, a position that grants exclusivity to her world-view as curator: It was clear to me that if I’m curator of Israeli art at the Tel Aviv Museum, then the view of Israeli art at the Tel Aviv Museum must be the view of Israeli art as I understand it and that one thing will support another—the things that I did and will do will coalesce into a sort of picture.23

When Mark Scheps decided to himself display and curate exhibitions of Israeli artists such as Osvaldo Romberg (1980) and Dani Karavan (1982), he penetrated, as she sees it, into a territory that was supposed to be hers alone. “The question came up if this was a reason to resign from the Museum or that the Museum should include the point of view of the director and not only my own,” she said.24 During her time in the Tel Aviv Museum, Breitberg-Semel believed that it was her duty as curator of Israeli art to reflect her positions, preferences, and opinions in clear fashion. Pluralism, the multiplicity of tastes, was possible in her eyes only through changing the curator.25 Ignoring the prominent standing of the museum in which she operated and her position of influence within it testified to a lack of awareness on her part, but also to a curatorial position of her choosing that contained an inner contradiction. This dual conflict within which she formulated her way—that is, operating in the present versus a struggle over historical consciousness, and a need for the museum’s support versus an unwillingness to moderate her positions and to comply with broad principles of choice necessitated by the nature of the museum—reached a point of crisis in the 1980s. In May 1983, Breitberg-Semel curated the exhibition Landscapes 1983 at the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion in Tel Aviv, which included two artists: David Reeb and Gabi Klazmer. Klazmer presented large canvasses with sunset paintings. Reeb presented canvasses with images, painted in black

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Fig. 3-1. David Reeb, Landscapes 1983 (1983), installation view, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion. Photo: Dalia Amotz. Courtesy of Einem Amotz.

and white acrylic, that represented Israeli reality—for instance the image of Menachem Begin alongside Pluto, the Disney dog, fighter planes diving, Arab workers collecting garbage, soldiers fighting, the Bank Leumi logo. Alongside the walls, above and below the paintings, rows of identical sheets were hung, each one painted with equal vertical stripes of blue, white, green, black, and red. The flag-like rectangles merged the colors of the flags of Israel and the PLO (later the Palestinian flag) into one colorful, repeating sequence (fig. 3-1.). Reeb’s exhibition reacted to a series of central political, economic, and military events including the peace treaty with Egypt that led to the evacuation of Yamit and the Sinai peninsula (April 1982), the Lebanon War (Operation Peace for Galilee) that began in June 1982, the Sabra and Shatila Massacre (September 1982) and the demonstrations that followed it. The exhibition led to a disagreement between Breitberg-Semel and the

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Museum Director, Mark Scheps, and in an unusual move, the museum did not publish the exhibition’s catalog.26 Breitberg-Semel recalled that Scheps fired her following the Landscapes 1983 exhibition, due to the display of the Palestine flag.27 However in actual fact, Breitberg-Semel was not fired but just received a warning according to item 21a of the employment agreement.28 The disagreement touched only indirectly upon the display of Reeb’s political position, and revolved around the fact that she did not inform Scheps of his plan to hang the flags, even though she knew about it beforehand. In a series of letters between Scheps and Breitberg-Semel, their differing positions regarding the role of the museum curator and her loyalty were expressed.29 According to Scheps, throughout the years, he disagreed more than once with Breitberg-Semel’s choices regarding exhibitions and artists, since he viewed them as based on “narrow considerations.”30 In this specific case, however, he expressed his displeasure with the lack of transparency in her conduct and in the fact that she bypassed his judgment regarding the issue of the flags, which was a sensitive issue for the public and for which he as director was responsible. Scheps wrote: I expect that in the future you inform me and allow me to consider, beforehand, every issue that is sensitive to the public because in this area, the responsibility is entirely upon the director of the museum.31

The political expression of the artists—and in particular the direct one by Reeb—was indeed highlighted due to the curatorial selection and was reinforced when the museum provided backing for it and the main exhibition space. It immediately became identified not only with Reeb but also with the museum and its representatives. Scheps found himself unwittingly involved in Reeb’s act. It was a moment of double bravery, political and artistic, and also a dual political-curatorial act on the part of Breitberg-Semel, directed on one hand from the museum outwards, to Israeli society, and on the other to the museum inward and to its director. Following the incident, Breitberg-Semel felt, she said, that her standing in the museum was harmed. A group of artists showed up at the mayor’s office, Shlomo Lahat at the time, to defend her and protested the injury done to her standing.32 The broad backing that Breitberg-Semel received from artists exposed her divided position towards the institute in which she served and raised questions regarding her loyalty. “I had a strong feeling that my primary audience was the artists and not the Tel Aviv audience,” she said. The friction with Scheps following the Landscapes 1983 exhibition exposed the intimate and cooperative relationships that Breitberg-Semel had

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established with the artists she exhibited, but also fractured her authoritative curatorial position, and she felt that the entire affair cast a burdensome shadow on her as being dependent upon artists. A solution to the dual conflict inherent in her position as curator was formulated, or at least a way to deal with it was formulated in the last group exhibition that Breitberg-Semel curated in the Tel Aviv Museum, “The Want of Matter”—A Quality in Israeli Art (1986):33 “near you” was defined here as a principle of selection and a mark of quality.34 The thesis of the exhibition emerged as a clear case of “Qualities Accumulated” based on Breitberg-Semel’s close professional connections with many artists. Twenty one artists participated in the exhibition. The thesis of the exhibition opposed two groups of artists: the Tel Aviv artists, who were connected to Raffie Lavie as the leader of the group and who worked in the urban landscape of Tel Aviv, and “the other approaches,” which presented various artists who could not be seen as a group or as belonging to any specific place. Breitberg-Semel analyzed the manner in which artists from the two groups used “meager” materials as a choice that is not merely aesthetic but also ethical and involves definitions of identity and questions of “the taste of the place.” She linked this choice to the values of socialist-Zionism, to provinciality, to the landscapes of the country, and to secularity, and interpreted them as an attempt to renounce pathos and as precision that can turn the “meager” into something spiritually full and rich. She aimed to position the “The Want of Matter” as a local alternative of quality vis-à-vis the rich culture and art of the West. The exhibition acquired a unique standing in the art field in Israel. It was mentioned and quoted profusely, the catalog essay was republished twice, two detailed Wikipedia entries were dedicated to it, and the term “The Want of Matter” came to be used routinely and identified not only with Breitberg-Semel as a curator, but with an entire group of artists with an Israeli style and identity. The principle of “the meagerness of materials as quality” was based on the inner logic of creating an inversion and even creating ex nihilo. The low became high, the meager became rich. In other words, it worked as a principle of transformation from one pole of a binary dichotomy to the opposite one through a position of belonging, affiliation, and empathy. The things closest to Breitberg-Semel’s heart were loaded with quality, so that for her, intimacy turned into a central and powerful component, into a principle of selection according to which that which is close to you is also “quality.” This principle, which guided her work as curator of Israeli art almost from the moment she assumed the position, was explicitly formulated in this exhibition. Throughout the years it was

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the main reason for her struggles over the need to defend her personal choices, with the friction being primarily within the museum, between her and Scheps and the acquisition committee, or the municipality.35 The subject of rebellion, confrontation, and conflict as a strategy of the individual for the purpose of self-definition and self-defense vis-à-vis the surrounding systems, arose time and again for Breitberg-Semel, and more acutely in 1997, when she was invited to curate the Israeli pavilion at the Venice Biennale for the second time. She chose three artists: Miriam Cabessa, Sigalit Landau and Yossi Breger. The exhibition was called Friction: I-Body, I-language, I+You. According to the catalog, the three artists strive to actualize the focal point of the individual’s resistance—a resistance that arises from a trapped self “that precedes any method, any order, any symbolization.”36 Friction and resistance were the main impetus in this exhibition and were identified as modes of action that allow the individual to “try to preserve his singular identity against an ideological system which claims his brain, his body, his soul, and sometimes his life […]”37 According to Breitberg-Semel, the selection of the three artists was due to a lack of time and the process of constructing the exhibition also became a not-so-insignificant arena of friction. In Breitberg-Semel’s preliminary planning, the inside of the pavilion was intended for the works of Miriam Cabessa (first floor) and Yossi Breger (second floor), while Sigalit Landau’s work, which was created inside a shipping container, was supposed to be set up outside the pavilion.38 Breitberg-Semel told the story: Sigalit [Landau] refused to display inside the space but Germano Celant, the Biennale director, did not accept the idea of “outside”. When I tried to explain to him that she is representing a state of homelessness in her work and also refers to the Israel-Palestinian conflict and that it is very important to her that it stand outside and not inside, he absolutely refused to accept it and said that it is imperialism. In the end, the container was displayed nearly outside the Biennale area, in a location where almost no one got to.39

Sigalit Landau, who arrived at the Biennale with “her own space” signified in the container work not only foreignness and enclosure inside a metal shell but also, according to Breitberg-Semel’s interpretation, a symbolic rejection of Venice and the Israeli pavilion. Landau’s visual image represented not only a homeless logic, detached and uprooted, which often characterized her work, but also Breitberg-Semel’s own attitude towards the Biennale, her being included but wrapped in an isolating shell, inside

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and outside at the same time, or in other words, an attitude of resistance to the institution from within it. Breitberg-Semel’s position in the Biennale expanded and emphasized the gap between individual action and the apparatus to which she belonged, a gap she took care to actualize throughout her years as curator.

Galia Bar Or: Breaking the Rules with all Your Heart Bar Or’s long-lasting activity as director and curator of the Ein Harod Museum of Art can be divided into three parts, each one characterized by a different cultural commitment and responsibility. In the first period, her first years as director, she concentrated on redefining and reorganizing the museum, branding it and building up its centrality, despite its distance from the big cities and the central region. This was made possible, among other things, through the use of the event format, which enabled bringing a wide range of visitors to the periphery. The second period, from the mid1990s, was characterized by an effort to expand the horizon with regard to the history of Israeli art and its canon. This move was gradually constructed and was expressed in the curation of numerous solo exhibitions of artists who were not in the spotlight and also in the consistent and continuous formulation of a thesis that was also a departure point for group exhibitions. The third period, primarily the past decade, relates to the commitment to the ideological principles of solidarity and social justice that she grew up on as a kibbutz member, and the possibility of offering through them, based on the curatorial power she accumulated, a cultural alternative in a broad and comprehensive sense. As mentioned above, Galia Bar Or grew up in the Ein Harod Museum of Art, and her selection as director was not a product of a candidate search process, but rather was built up gradually as a process of apprenticeship that occurred through the years and was therefore selfevident. The museum was run by a small and permanent staff, as is usual with small, peripheral art institutions in Israel. According to Bar Or, at a certain moment in 1985 she found herself almost all alone there: It turned out that funds barely existed and the museum was in a pretty bad shape. With the help of my spouse, Itamar, the museum was computerized. At the time I laid out a three level plan: the first level was development and construction, the second was content, and the third was man power. This was more or less the approach in the ensuing years. In the context of defining content and since the museum was far from the center, the idea was that at least once a year there would be exhibitions that would exhaust

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The first exhibition opened in June and was called Frontline (1985). Forty five artists participated, mainly from the agricultural communities, most of whom were not part of the relatively small circle of artists who enjoyed the privilege of being shown in the museums and galleries of the big cities.41 This was the first exhibition to be considered by Bar Or a complete and whole action of her own, even though Pinchas Cohen Gan was the curator, since it reflected the content and managerial decisions that she had made and expressed her world view. The exhibition emphasized the new use of the museum and all of its spaces, the display of active artists who were beyond the limelight, and the choice of an artist as a curator. Bar Or’s next big move was the First Israeli Photography Biennale held in Succoth of 1986. The event extended beyond the museum and its surroundings to the entire kibbutz. The team of curators included Avraham Eilat, who initiated the exhibition (and got the idea from the bi-annual photography festival Les Rencontres d'Arles held in Arles, France), Avi Ganor, Micha Kirshner, Simcha Shirman, and Bar Or herself. The main display included the selected works of 37 Israeli photographers. The outdoor events included various pavilions with a variety of activities for the broad public, as well as a rotating display wall upon which amateur photographers could hang their work. Guests were invited from abroad, including: Ian Jefferey, a British historian of photography; Alain Desvergnes, who was the art director of the photography festival in Arles (1979–1982); Maria Morris Hambourg who was, at the time, at the beginning of her career as curator of photography at the New York Metropolitan Museum; and John Stathatos, a Greek photographer and curator of photography, who took part in the third biennale (1991) as curator. For the documentation of the Biennale, a special edition of the journal of literature and art, Prose, was produced.42 Bar Or argued that one of the goals of the Biennale was to create historical awareness and to begin to mark a genealogical continuum of Israeli photography.43 It seems that Bar Or was also searching at the time for activities that would distinguish the Museum of Art, and one of the effective ways to achieve that goal was through “project-dependent curation.”44 The production of the Biennale was a comprehensive operation for the museum and its staff. It required the mobilization of all the partners, starting with the curators who worked as volunteers and ending with the kibbutz members who housed the guests in their homes. The Gilboa Regional Council sponsored the event to benefit from the tourism, and the

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artists brought their works ready for hanging.45 Bar Or believed that the Biennale was produced only due to the fact that the Museum of Art was not yet established when she began her tenure, and because in the beginning unconventional thinking and “breaking the rules with all your heart” is often required. The data show that ten thousand people attended the first week of the exhibition, and an additional fifteen thousand did so until it closed.46 The principle of team work and recruiting curators, artists, kibbutz members, and the media in order to create a multi-participant art event for the broad public as well as professionals proved itself and became a modus operandi for the next biennales as well. The second and third biennales continued the idea of institutionalizing a permanent platform for presenting contemporary activities in Israel, and expanded the view on photography by displaying European and American photography in addition to Israeli photography. The third biennale was also the last. According to Bar Or, the decision to stop holding the event was taken due to two main reasons: First, after three times, which demanded complex effort and risk, no financial infrastructure was located that could permit institutionalizing the project and guaranteeing its continuation; and second, the great sense of urgency that accompanied the initiative in the beginning had, in the meantime, settled down due to the changes that had occurred in Israeli photography during the five years that had passed.47 The Frontline exhibition and the photography biennales positioned the Ein Harod Museum of Art at the center of activities despite its distance from the center. They testified to Bar Or’s motivation—which was, to an extent, similar to Breitberg-Semel’s—to create an infrastructure for the organization of a historical and genealogical view through contemporary materials. In her curatorial work, Bar Or aimed to formulate a language and to lay the ground for a discussion—not only in relation to the medium of photography but also regarding Israeli art in general—in order to “link together scattered activities” in a manner that would leave behind clear traces. She called this an “enhanced discourse.” In actual fact, the photography biennales did not succeed in reorganizing the historical view, in part because they completely ignored the photography events that preceded them (for instance, the photography triennials conducted in the 1970s in the Israel Museum) and also because they did not leave behind them significant texts that mapped the field. Nonetheless, they definitely created a basis and infrastructure for a contemporary discussion of photography, provided comprehensive exposure of the museum’s activities, and presented a model of museal curation based on team work, cooperation, integration of the entire community, and project-based

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actions. Deviating from the museum’s boundaries in the three photography biennales could be interpreted as an act of expansion for the purpose of displaying art, and therefore as an act of deterritorialization in the sense intended by Cornelia Butler in her discussion of the “Numbers Shows” initiated and curated by Lucy Lippard between 1969 and 1974.48 One of the acts most identified with Bar Or and her activities in the museum was, as mentioned, the move to construct an alternative history and the subversion of the Israeli art canon, which fixed in consciousness groups, such as the New Horizons group (1948–1963)49 or the artists of “The Want of Matter” in the 1980s, as almost exclusive representatives of artistic innovation, value, and quality. The act of constructing an alternative history consisted of two fundamental moves. The first was manifest in her decision to display at the Museum of Art solo exhibitions and retrospectives of artists who had been rejected from the canon or who were never considered worthy candidates. This move included the exhibitions that she herself curated as well as those that she initiated and permitted as museum director. The second move involved the theoretical grounding of her point of view on the history of Israeli art and creating the effective conditions for its exposure through a series of thesis exhibitions and the research catalogs that accompanied them. The exhibitions worth mentioning in this regard are Towards the 90s (1990), Hebrew Work (1998), and The First Decade (1948–1958)—A Hegemony and a Plurality (2008). These two moves required years of perseverance in order for the activities to coalesce into a clear statement—as opposed to the immediate but short-lived impact of project-based curation. Towards the 90s was an exhibition characteristic of Bar Or’s first period as director, in which she concentrated on solidifying the status of the Museum of Art as a contemporary and relevant museum, and on building a network of connections. The exhibition was held around Independence Day, which in Israel is the customary period for “artistic soul searching.” Bar Or invited four curators, in addition to herself, to present their personal positions regarding the situation of Israeli art. Thus she split the curatorial statement and enabled multiple positions and a discourse, not only of Israeli art, but also of the customary timing. Towards the 90s was a clear “Zeitgeist” type of exhibition and accordingly lacked a distinct historical statement. It raised directions of thought, questions, and predictions, and created a meeting of different curatorial tastes. Bar Or demonstrated here, as in the biennales, the ability to conduct an “enhanced discourse” in the context of a museal exhibition, and not only in the production of large events.

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The exhibition Hebrew Work included, unlike Towards the 90s, a reasoned historical statement and offered an expanded view of the canon. Bar Or treated it as a “historical alternative,” although later on she suggested forgoing this expression. “I called it at the time ‘alternative history’ but the name isn’t entirely accurate, since it isn’t alternative history. It creates an alternative but its history—history that is perhaps richer,” said Bar Or. Hebrew Work was a thesis exhibition based on academic research, as Bar Or explained: Hebrew Work was created during my M.A studies at the Tel Aviv University Cohn Institute. I argued there that there is a contradiction between the state’s ideology and rhetoric and the artistic canon, which is different from what is usually argued, that there is a contradiction between the state’s ideology and the artists, who are busy with social conflicts. In Israel it seemed that those who represented the ideology of the state were the realistic artists or social realism [artists such as Avraham Ofek, Yohanan Simon, and Leo Roth]. They promoted the idea that the social and the artistic can go together, and in this they supposedly continued the ideology of the state. It seemed that those that rebelled against this were the New Horizons artists who said, “we’re not the country, we’re individuals, and we create art of individuals.” What Hebrew Work did was to try to show that it was actually the social realism artists that engaged with the structural conflicts of Israeli society, while the abstract and New Horizons artists served in many respects the mainstream position and helped leave these conflicts behind. As a result, the canon was viewed in a way that entirely lacked Judaism and the pain of the Holocaust, and it is not obvious why. Is there no place for this in the central experience of the 20th century? Can modern art not bear the testimony and reflection of the consciousness of time and the experiences of the period?50

The exhibition presented three chapters of Israeli history and art: the 1920s, the 1950s, and the 1990s, and concentrated on “labor” as an organizing concept and on the Hebrew laborer and the local landscape as central images. In the exhibition text, Bar Or defined the canon as a story written by people in the highest echelons of the art system and backed by its institutions.51 She argued that this story was perceived as the “official” one and as “correctly representing” art and its history. In contrast to Breitberg-Semel, Bar Or emphasized that “artistic value” and thus the “quality” are a-historical concepts that were created regardless of social relations, and she aimed to place beside them art that was socially motivated and that exposed distress, pain, and suffering. In Hebrew Work, Bar Or formulated a modus operandi of cooperation and dialog that was an inclusive model of both realism and the abstract,

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artists from the center and the periphery, and artists of the past alongside artists from the 1990s. Bar Or avoided embracing the dichotomous approach and also the resistance and negation approach required by this mode of operation. In this eight-year period, between Towards the 90s, which offered multiple curatorial positions and responded to the challenges of the period, to Hebrew Work, which offered a critical thesis, Bar Or further developed her criticism of the canon and turned it into one of the characteristics of her curatorial work. In this sense, the exhibition did not undermine the idea of a canon but rather strove only to expand it. The possibility of expressing through curatorial means the uniqueness of the kibbutz and the power of its underlying values of solidarity and social justice gradually ripened in Bar Or. In light of the deep ideological crisis that kibbutz society experienced in the past four decades, and the accelerated privatization processes experienced by most of the kibbutzim, the promotion of these values was far from obvious.52 As mentioned, Bar Or emphasized, from the beginning of her tenure as director, the uniqueness of the structure and the story of its establishment by Chaim (Atar) Aptaker (1902–1953), thus continuing the activities of Zusia Efron, her predecessor.53 Efron, and Bar Or after him, studied the dominant figure of Aptaker as an artist and founder of the museum, and Bar Or even dealt with the way in which his image was constructed, beginning in the 1930s as “an individual obsessed with an idea.”54 At the same time, Bar Or also highlighted the figure of Samuel Bickels (1909–1975), the architect of the museum and the only kibbutz architect who also a kibbutz member, and linked the logic that guided him in planning the museum to his overall conception, which prioritized cultural institutions and emphasized their importance to identity and society.55 Already in her first actions, Bar Or’s ability to leverage the uniqueness of the place for the purpose of creating significant artistic events was evident. Throughout the years she also displayed at the museum many artists from the kibbutz and emphasized the ability to conduct significant operations from the periphery. Nevertheless, it was only in the past two decades that she began to emphasize the cooperative and egalitarian ideology as a focus of her curatorial work. With the maturation of her critical position regarding the canon and the development of her academic research regarding the place of art in the world view of the kibbutz, the possibility to rely on the uniqueness of this way of life, and its ethical and cultural values in order to disseminate them through curation, was also formed. In her book ‘Our Life Requires Art’, Bar Or distinguished between two models of art conception in kibbutzim, which led to the establishment of

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two types of art institutions: the Wilfrid Israel Museum of Asian Art and Studies, founded in Kibbutz Hazorea in 1951, and the Ein Harod Museum of Art, which was founded in 1948. Bar Or argued that their contrasting characters were derived from differences in the social vision they were founded on, and the different ideological and political trends that characterized the two large kibbutz movements: The first trend was linked to Mapam (the United Workers Party) and promoted international values, championed social art, and saw in it an inseparable part of the struggle of the working class. The international discourse strove for a complete identification of man as worker and total solidarity between members of the class, considering the historical, social, and political conditions in each nation. The second trend, which was linked mainly to Mapai (the Workers’ Party of the Land of Israel) and the The Kibbutz Hameuchad, championed “universal” values and autonomous art, which was perceived essentially as coming from the depths of the individual’s psyche. Compared to the international dimension that stressed class, the “universal” dimension stressed the general-human element based on the individual as part of a system of values that are valid in a certain time and place.56

The museums of the two kibbutzim represented, according to Bar Or, two different models of art institutes. The museum at Kibbutz Hazorea was founded with funds from the estate of Wilfrid Israel, who belonged to a wealthy family and engaged in rescuing Jews during World War II. The museum was intended first of all to house his personal collections and preserve his name and works. On the other hand, the Ein Harod Museum of Art was established by the community and its collections are accumulated. Also, according to Bar Or, the Ein Harod Museum was built “as an art institution that aims inside and outside,” and has a more urban character, according to the vision of “The Large Kvutzah” (Village/Town), which integrates industry and agriculture, and physical labor with spiritual work.57 Through a reexamination of her kibbutz’s past and a return to the ideology that led to its founding, Bar Or aimed to lean on the strong points of its ideology and achievements and not on the failures, problems, and weaknesses. These strengths served to emphasize the values of cooperation, preservation of the heritage of the past, mutual responsibility and reliability through curation, as well as highlight the different educational aspects of museal work. The curatorial work of Sara Breitberg-Semel and Galia Bar Or represents in two different ways principles of the feminist consciousness that was formulated towards the end of the 1960s in the United States.

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Breitberg-Semel identified the museum as an institution whose founding rationale included an inherent contradiction. Therefore, she assumed a curatorial position that contained an inner split and that enabled her to respond to this conflict and define her role towards it. Additionally, the interpretation of the concept of “quality” that she created in her work— which emerged from a tradition of aesthetic thought that she defined as absolutist—anchored quality in the personal, and thus subverted the principles of this tradition. Galia Bar Or created a long-term interpretative process that highlighted the distinction between center and periphery in its two expressions: geographical and canonical. Also, the reliance on the strengths of the Ein Harod Museum and the distinction between the two types of museums that rose in the kibbutz movement enabled her to emphasize values of solidarity and cooperation, which are central to contemporary feminist thought. In both of the modes of action she avoided adopting an exclusive dichotomy and used a strategy that Cornelia Butler called “politically intentional anti-exclusive aesthetic” and inclusive and expansive principles of thought. 58 In conclusion, it is possible to say that despite the significant differences between Breitberg-Semel and Bar Or in their professional development, modes of action, and the natures of the positions they held, from a feminist perspective, a correspondence can be found in their decision to use a declared strategy of closeness and personalism—in Breitberg-Semel’s case closeness to a group of artists of her generation whose professional development she accompanied and defined in curatorial terms, and in Bar Or’s case closeness to a place in which she was born and raised and to the ideology she grew up on. Once, when asked if it is not problematic that the New Museum in New York, which she initiated and directed, reflects her own personal taste, Marcia Tucker answered: An “objective” exhibition is an illusion; there is always something deeply personal about choosing the artists, the topic, or even the way you want to display the work in it. But again, for me the personal is not about selfindulgence—it is an ideological position.59

Notes 1

Breitberg-Semel wrote art critiques from the beginning of the 1970s in LaMerhav, Davar, and later in Yedioth Ahronoth (1973–1977). She began her career as a reporter on Jerusalem affairs and covered, among other things, the

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activities of the “Black Panthers” movement, a social protest movement of young, second-generation Jewish immigrants from Arab countries, founded in 1971. 2 Mark Scheps was director of the museum between 1977 and 1989. He began working there in the beginning of the 1970s and was appointed director with the retirement of Haim Gamzu (1910–1982), his dominant predecessor. Between 1991 and 1997, Scheps directed the Ludwig Museum in Cologne and since then he acts as an independent curator. 3 Sara Breitberg-Semel, in interview with the author, August 2, 2011. 4 See Smadar Shefi, “Mark Scheps Returns,” HaAretz, July 29, 2004 (in Hebrew). 5 Breitberg-Semel began working in Studio Art Magazine at the end of 1992. The first edition she edited was Studio 41(January 1993) and the last was Studio 149 (December 2003). The magazine was closed in 2008. 6 Zusia Efron was art director of the Ein Harod Museum of Art from October 1953 to July 1977. 7 Zusia Efron, “‘Mishkan LeOmanut’: Museum of Art, Ein Harod,” December 1970, Museum of Art, Ein Harod, http://www.museumeinharod.org.il/english/about/articles/zusia_efron.html. 8 Galia Bar Or, in interview with the author, September 14, 2010. 9 Bar Or completed her M.A. (2000) and PhD (2007) studies at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, and both her final papers dealt with the conception of art in kibbutzim and the story of the establishment of the Ein Harod Museum of Art. 10 Galia Bar Or, ‘Our Life Requires Art’—Art Museums in the Kibbuzim, 1930– 1960 (Beer Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2010, (in Hebrew). 11 Galia Bar Or, in interview with the author, September 14, 2010. 12 Sara Breitberg-Semel, in interview with the author, August 2, 2011. 13 Adam Baruch, “Sara Breitberg: A new conceptual system,” Yedioth Ahronoth, October 17, 1980 (in Hebrew). 14 Haim Gamzu, “Introduction,” The Autumn Exhibition: Israeli Artists (Tel Aviv: The Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Helena Rubinstein Pavilion, December 1965). Cited in Gila Ballas, ed., Dr. Haim Gamzu: Art Critiques (Tel Aviv: The Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2003, in Hebrew), 133. 15 Ibid. 16 Sara Breitberg-Semel, A Turning Point, exh.cat. (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 1981). 17 Sara Breitberg-Semel, Two Years: Israeli Art—Qualities Accumulated 1983– 1984, exh.cat. (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 1984), 108. 18 Ibid. 19 The Tel Aviv Museum was inaugurated in 1932 at Dizengoff House, Tel Aviv’s first mayor’s private house. It moved to the site where it stands today and to a large, modern building only in 1971. 20 Dalia Manor with Yona Fischer, Yigal Zalmona, and Sara Breitberg-Semel, “Local Nuance in an International language—The Discourse of Curators of Israeli Art,” Prose 100 (1988): 178 (in Hebrew).

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21 Clement Greenberg, “Avant Garde Attitudes” (The John Power lecture in contemporary art delivered at the University of Sidney on Friday 17 May, 1968). http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/avantgarde.html. 22 Manor, “Local Nuance in an International language,” 182–183. 23 Sara Breitberg-Semel, in interview with the author, August 2, 2011. 24 Ibid. 25 Manor, “Local Nuance in an International language,” 183. 26 Raffie Lavie, “The Plastic Year,” HaAretz, September 7, 1983, 26 (in Hebrew). 27 Until the Oslo Accords, raising the PLO flag was against the law in Israel, due to the PLO being defined a terrorist organization. In 1993 this flag became the Palestinian Authority flag and thus the Palestinian national flag. 28 See letter from Mark Scheps to Breitberg-Semel from June 28, 1983 (in Hebrew), the Mark Scheps Archive, Tel Aviv. 29 See also Breitberg-Semel’s response to Scheps from July 11, 1983 and Scheps response to her from July 14, 1983 (in Hebrew); both are in the Mark Scheps Archive, Tel Aviv. 30 Mark Scheps in interview with the author, September 9 and October 16, 2012. 31 Mark Scheps’s letter to Breitberg-Semel’s from July 14, 1983 (in Hebrew), the Mark Scheps Archive, Tel Aviv. 32 Letter from artists to Tel Aviv Mayor and the Museum’s Board of Trustees, February 17, 1984 (in Hebrew), the Mark Scheps Archive, Tel Aviv. 33 This is the official translation of the exhibition’s title. However, a complete and more accurate translation would be “But the word is very near you”: The Meagerness of Materials—A Quality in Israeli Art. I will refer to this translation in the ensuing discussion. The quote is from the Book of Deuteronomy 30:14: “But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.” Online Bible at GospelHall.org (King James Version), http://www.gospelhall.org/bible/bible.php?passage=Deuteronomy+30&search=&v er1=kjv&ver2=&commentary=&submit=Search. 34 Sara Breitberg-Semel, “The Want of Matter”—A Quality in Israeli Art, exh.cat. (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 1986). 35 See Adam Baruch, “Stella, Scheps, ‘Cheech’, Tumarkin, Breitberg: The Real Issue,” Yedioth Ahronoth, March, 2, 1985, 25 (in Hebrew). 36 Sara Breitberg-Semel, ed., Friction: I-Body, I-language, I+You, exh.cat. (Venice: The Israeli Pavilion, 47th Venice Biennale, 1997). 37 Ibid. 38 The composition is Resident Alien 1 (1997), in which Sigalit Landau twisted and stretched a shipping container to the shape of a landscape that one can enter and walk in. 39 Sara Breitberg-Semel, in interview with the author, August 2, 2011. 40 Galia Bar Or, in interview with the author, September 14, 2010. 41 Ein Harod Museum of Art, Frontline, 1-27 June, 1985. 42 Prose 89 (November 1986; in Hebrew). 43 Galia Bar Or, “A Question of Urgency—On the Photography Biennale and the

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Ein Harod Museum of Art,” Studio Art Magazine 113 (May 2000): 80–83. See also Museum of Art, Ein Harod, http://museumeinharod.org.il/hebrew/articles/biennale.html. 44 Oliver Marchart, “The Curatorial Subject: The Figure of the Curator between Individuality and Collectivity,” Texte Zur Kunst, no. 86 (June 2012): 28–40. Marchart adopted the term “project-based polis”, coined by the sociologists Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, to describe the centrality of the concept of “project” in the organization of contemporary society. His discussion of the business patterns of the new capitalism is based on their book The New Spirit of Capitalism, London, 2005. 45 M. Yahel, “Photography as Art,” Al HaMishmar, August 31, 1986 (in Hebrew). 46 Ruth Rubin, “The Way to Ein Harod is Paved with Good Intention,” Hadashot, October 2, 1988, 16–17. 47 Bar Or, “A Question of Urgency,” 80–83. 48 Cornelia Butler, “Women—Concept—Art: Lucy. R. Lippard’s Number Shows,” in From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Number Shows, 1969–1974, Cornelia Butler et al. (London: Afterall Books, 2012), 16–69. 49 The New Horizons group was founded in 1948 and was headed by several dominant and canonical artists such as Yosef Zaritsky, Yehezkel Streichman, Avigdor Steimatzky, and Marcel Janco. 50 Galia Bar Or, in interview with the author, September 14, 2010. 51 Galia Bar Or, “Hebrew Work”—The Disregarded Gaze in the Canon of Israeli Art, exh.cat. (Ein Harod: Museum of Art, Ein Harod, 1998). 52 The crisis of the kibbutzim and their privatization is wide ranging. Among the researchers who dealt with this issue are: Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Reuven Shapira, Yonina Gerber-Talmon, Yehezkel Dar and Yosef Lanir. 53 See Zusia Efron, Chaim Atar (Ein Harod: Museum of Art, Ein Harod, 1975); Zusia Efron, ed., Ein Harod Museum of Art (Ein Harod: Museum of Art, Ein Harod, 1970); Zusia Efron and Cecil Roth, eds., Jewish Art (Tel Aviv: Masada, 1957). 54 Bar Or, ‘Our Life Requires Art’, 217–233. 55 Ibid., 253–287. 56 Ibid., 2. 57 Ibid., 54–74, 100. 58 Butler, “Women—Concept—Art,” 24. 59 Martina Pachmanova, “Marcia Tucker Empowerment and Responsibility,” n.paradoxa online issue no.19 (May 2006), 119. http://www.ktpress.co.uk/pdf/nparadoxaissue19_Martina-Pachmanova_110122.pdf.

CHAPTER FOUR TRANSFORMATIVE ENCOUNTERS: PRIOR AND CURRENT STRATEGIES OF A FEMINIST PIONEER MARGARETA GYNNING Introduction My own hands on experience, as an Art pedagog, curator and feminist scholar at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, Sweden is the basis for this article. I have for the last thirty-five years tried to reach beyond institutional boundaries and use different spaces for artistic interventions by collaborating with actors, relational artists and feminist activist groups. Our main focus has been on sharing and working with active museum visitors in an open laboratory like process. Museums are important meeting places for discussions on contemporary visual culture, and not only on what is traditionally defined as art. I want to discuss how a curator, by using diverse feminist strategies, can make educational programs and exhibitions that break with the “Canon” and the hegemony of Modernist Art History. By foregrounding the pedagogical and relational aspects, I will try to show how dialog and the use of body language are essential to enabling “transformative encounters” in the museum between the curator / the art object / and what was “formerly known as the public.”1 How meaningful works of Art can make us relate to our own lived experience and how we by sharing them with others together can change the way we see the world. Art as practice and process, where the limits of the current symbolic can be transgressed and generate new meaning.2 At the core of this is “the role of the viewer,” since looking at significant works of art and “doing by imitating,” involves not only perception and performativity, but also the sharing of feelings, thoughts and connections with existing cultural meanings.3 Interpretative and collaborative activity is of outmost importance to human identity. One of our strongest motivations is the wish for mutual recognition and a desire

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to relate to the world, a process whereby we actively engage and create ourselves by connecting with others.

“The role of the viewer” My work with the permanent collections at the Nationalmuseum has therefore evolved around questions concerning the role of the viewer, both from the present museum visitor’s perspective to the historical observer. Artists are also “viewers” and influenced by the visual structures and conventions of their own time. In an age where our visual culture is expanding at a rapid pace, there is a vital need for image awareness and for finding tools for decoding to help viewers. It is therefore essential for Art Museums to participate in current discussions on vision and visuality by finding parallels between Now and Then, showing how the past is part of the present. How our ways of seeing and looking is structured by current norms, and that gender / ethnicity / sexuality / class / age / religion influence the positions we take in relation to them, is of particular importance.

Pivotal Images I am therefore interested in the connection between Nationalmuseum’s collections and the images that surrounded us in everyday life. That includes works of living artists and photographers, but also images from advertisement and from the web. I try to find what I call Pivotal Images filled with visual tools that help the viewer to evolve, “to turn,” habits and thoughts in new directions. These images build bridges to other images, often with the help of a sense of humor, and give keys to complex contextual layers of meaning. They are then incorporated into my own (digital) kind of Warburgian archive, images that then can be used to enable Transformative Encounters with the help of an iPad, either in discussions, in “doing by imitating” in front of significant works of art in the collections, or on screens placed on walls or floors in exhibitions or juxtaposed on the museum’s own homepage.4

Body language and performativity I have found that by looking at significant portraits in our collections, from periods other than our own, being together in a group and “doing by imitating” is the best way to understand how crucial gender norms are in shaping our body language. I have collaborated with the theater in order to

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develop the role playing technique that is needed for enabling transformative gender bending encounters in the museum. I have worked with innovative actors to learn more of how they create a more direct dialog with their theater goers. How they through their body language try to get every single one in the auditorium to recognize, with all their senses and their lived experience, what they are “doing” on stage. I have with their help come to know what a finely tuned instrument the body can be, and how with its help we can understand complex human processes and thereby see what a potential for change role playing has for changing the present norms.

I. Feminisms and curating In this first part of my article I want to give a short introduction to my main field of research, describing the most important themes and projects that I have worked with as a feminist/scholar/curator, and the Swedish context in which they were made.

The “solitaire,” the exception to the rule Though many feminists have held different positions on that “Map” that today is known as feminisms, Swedish feminist curators have, and have had, a privileged position compared to their international counterparts. The feminist movement is still influential on all levels of society since we have had active support from the government during the last thirty years. All state institutions including museums are asked to work from a gender perspective and in their annual reports to the Ministry of Culture give an account of what they have accomplished. Swedish feminist curators and artists have during these years succeeded in establishing a large following of visitors that continually go to see their exhibitions. Furthermore, since Sweden, according to the EU, has the highest number of museum visitors in Europe, that is quite a large and influential group.5 Nevertheless, that does not mean that all has been smooth sailing. In the majority of Swedish art museums, where most of the curators are very conservative, these exhibitions have been made by a few pioneers,6 and it is only recently that their colleagues have succumbed to visitor pressure and felt compelled to make exhibitions including women artists. That notwithstanding, most of them still adhere to the Canon, and make exhibitions as if there never had been a feminist critique, especially not from an intersectional perspective. They only focus on single women artists, which are presented as solitaires, as exceptions to the rule. They

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thereby choose to ignore the overwhelming evidence, brought forward by feminist scholars in the last fifty years, of the many women who despite prevailing patriarchal norms have been involved as professionals in public life on all levels of society and especially in the arts. Lately this could be seen in 2013, when Moderna Museet in Stockholm in their marketing campaign for the exhibition Hilma af Klint: Abstrakt pionjär, launched her as a modernist pioneer who had never before been presented to the “public.”7 This was done despite the fact that there had been more than seventy exhibitions of Hilma af Klint’s work in the last twenty five years, many of them in international venues, and that Moderna Museet itself [sic!] gave a large solo exhibition on her pioneering work already in 1989.8 The same happened to the 19th century portrait painter Eva Bonnier at an exhibition at Prince Eugen’s Waldemarsudde in Stockholm in 2013, an artist whose work was already well known to the Swedish public through many exhibitions, anthologies, articles, a published PhD dissertation and a publication with a large collection of her letters.9 This is also true of my colleagues at the Nationalmuseum. They collaborated in 2012 with the National Museum of Women in the Arts from Washington DC with an exhibition, which in Sweden was called Pride and Prejudice, that explored the conditions and opportunities for female artists in France and Sweden in 1750–1860.10 It was made from a gender perspective by a group of well-known international and Swedish scholars, with the exception of one of the Swedish curators who had no prior knowledge in the field and who took it upon herself to present the exhibition to the public from a Canon-orientated perspective. Thus the exhibition was shown with a double message, split into two incompatible narratives both in the museum and in the catalog, which was not well received by our regular visitors, and as a result, the exhibition did not get the attention that it deserved.

Primary research field I have mainly devoted myself to various aspects of the culture of the 1800s and 1900s. Initially, I was focused on Nordic Women Artists between 1870 and 1920, and the interconnected European Art Scene from St. Petersburg to Lisbon, to which they belonged. I have been active in various Feminist Nordic Networks, and participated in many joint projects and exhibitions including De drogo till Paris at Liljevalchs konsthall in Stockholm 1988 and Women Painters in Scandinavia 1880–1890 at Kunstforeningen in Copenhagen in 2002.11 In 1999 my PhD dissertation was published, The Ambiguous Perspective on the Swedish portrait

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Fig. 4-1. Hanna Hirsch-Pauli. Konstnären Venny Soldan-Brofeldt, Paris 1887. Göteborgs konstmuseum, Gothenburg, Sweden. Photo: Göteborgs konstmuseum.

painters Eva Bonnier and Hanna Hirsch-Pauli and their relation to the contemporary art of the 1880s.12 I also published a large collection of Eva Bonnier’s letters from Paris 1883–89 to her family in Stockholm, and it was here that I found the main original sources for my feminist critique.13 I discovered that the women artists of the period were numerous and occupied considerable space in the art world; they were acknowledged in national and international exhibitions, and by the press. They thereby challenged the prevailing gender norms, and most importantly, changed the role of the artist. The Swedish women artists were especially privileged, since the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm was open to them already in 1864. There they could paint nude models in all female classes. There was a strong Women’s Movement in Sweden, where writers and philosophers like Fredrika Bremer and Ellen Key were especially

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active. In the cultural sphere there were professional women on all levels, and in the 1880s there were more plays by women dramatists being performed on the Stockholm theater stages than those by their male colleagues.14 One of the pivotal images that I have used as a tool for understanding this dynamic period was Hanna Hirsch-Pauli’s portrait of her Finnish colleague Venny Soldan-Brofeldt from 1887. In my thesis, various exhibitions and work as an art pedagog I have compared and juxtaposed it together with other portraits of women artists from the period. My main purpose was to question if the portrait of Venny Soldan-Brofeldt was an emancipatory image of the “New Woman,” which had been suggested in the 1970s by other feminist scholars. From my point of view, Venny Soldan-Brofeldt is portrayed from an ambiguous perspective, sitting on the floor in their joint studio in Paris, France (fig. 4-1). It is a pioneer image of a bohemian woman artist, caught right in the middle of the creative process, not posing, but being absorbed by her work. Nevertheless, at the same time, the placing of the figure on the floor without any signs of bourgeois femininity, in a position only reserved for working class women or prostitutes, shows how complicated it was for women artists to portray themselves in their professional role in a period when the male artist was the norm. The will to create art is acknowledged as being paternal within a patriarchy, and as long as patriarchy is considered natural it is “unnatural” and “unfeminine” for a woman to be an artist. According to the Danish feminist pioneer and literary historian Pil Dahlerup, the patriarchal norm was then in decline and there was a shift in the male norm, from the lifegiving father to the sexual male role and from life to desire.15 Hanna Hirsch-Pauli’s ambiguous perspective made it possible for her to paint subjects that were previously taboo for women artists. There was, however, a price to pay for this transgression, as the culturally oppressed from this position will also evaluate themselves from the perspective of the oppressor—having the male gaze. The majority of the Nordic Justemilieu-painters did not portray the modern life of Paris, not even like the women impressionists did from the balconies. The most significant spaces of representation for the Nordic women painters were their studios. It was the frontier of their spaces of representation. The studio was both their home and place of work, but also a social space associated with professional life, and thereby with the public realm.

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Public and private spaces One of my principal concerns has therefore been the hierarchal division between public and private space, which was established in the 19th century and still exists today. In Modernist Art History the home is described as a timeless zone. The so-called women’s space is regarded as a static stage in relation to the narrative of modernity, taking place in the public space of the dynamic metropolis. In 2006, I made an exhibition called Artists Couples at the turn of the 19th century at Nationalmuseum, which stressed the importance of collaboration and domesticity for modernity.16 I tried to show that this was the time of the “Gesamtkunstwerk,” a pluralistic era where all the fine arts were involved, including interior design, fashion and dance. It was a period when sexuality and subculture was significant for changing norms and the role of the artist. In the exhibition Vanessa Bell / Duncan Grant and Margaret Macdonald / Charles Rennie Mackintosh were presented to Swedish museum visitors for the first time, together with four couples from Scandinavia: Anna and Michael Ancher, Oda and Christian Krohg, Karin and Carl Larsson, and Sigrid Hjertén and Isaac Grünewald. Part of the exhibition later went on to Skagens museum in Denmark. One of the Pivotal images that I used as a tool for understanding in the exhibition was a dancing couple who were projected on a wall (fig. 4-2), as a metaphor for the gender powerstructure. I have found that couple to be a simple way to show and explain that complex process called gender-choreography, in order to understand the meaning of norms and the variability of gender contracts.17 That couple is constantly in motion: the white middle class male norm takes the lead and the female norm and various other suborders are defined in relationship to it. It is a sign, though, that has a potential for change, for in that ever moving dance the limits of the current symbolic can be transgressed.

Nationalism In the early 1890s there was a major backlash in which women’s emancipation was thwarted, and there was a widespread fear of the “New Woman.” Much of the opposition came from symbolist circles influenced by a patriarchal nationalist ideology. Many male, symbolist painters were alienated by modern city life, because they saw it as the source of the breakup of traditional gender roles. To avoid being associated with “the feminine,” and thereby women’s subordination, they therefore created a new ideal “the Should-be Mother,” a timeless symbol of nature and

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Fig. 4-2. Interior from the exhibition Artists Couples at the turn of the 19th century at Nationalmuseum, Stockholm 2006. Photo Nationalmuseum.

fertility.18 This figure was, for them, the opposite of that threatening image “the City Woman,” who they regarded as either a dangerous prostitute or the barren “New Woman,” that together with the bourgeois housewife was effeminized through consumerism. Sundborn in Dalecarlia, the home of Karin and Carl Larsson, was heavily influenced by this patriarchal ideology. The Larsson’s were involved in creating and launching the National Romantic Movement at the turn of the 19th century, a period when many of the present conceptions of what is Swedish were formulated. The underlying structure in Carl Larsson’s biography “I” [sic!] is that he, the degenerate product of the dangerous, modern city, through his parent’s poverty and his father’s depraved life, is saved by both his marriage to Karin “the Should-be Mother” and their flight to the country, to Arcadia.19 In this narrative, their children are seen as the bright hope for a new future. Karin and Carl Larsson marketed their image of themselves, for a wider audience, through the illustrated books from Sundborn: a symbiotic creation by both of them and a manifestation of the success of their collaboration.20 However, Karin Larsson is only presented, in all the images, as a wife and a mother, caretaker of the house, and never as an artist and designer (fig. 4-3). She is portrayed as an elusive shadow in her own studio. It is therefore a paradox that Sundborn is

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Fig. 4-3. Carl Larsson. Getting Ready for a Game, 1901, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Photo: Nationalmuseum.

viewed today as a Swedish national symbol for design and a democratic role-model when one of its creators has been denied the right of recognition due to its own patriarchal structure. Getting Ready for a Game is therefore a Pivotal Image that I have used both in the Artists Couples exhibition and in my project Nationalism—From a midsummers dance to a sliced Dala-horse.

National identity It is important for us at my museum to discuss the meaning of national heritage and national identity since we are the National Museum of Sweden and have been seen as a unifying agent for the nation. National identity is something that is constantly being constructed and reconstructed, visualized in pictures, and influencing our understanding thereof. It is especially important to discuss this today, when fascism is rearing its ugly head in Europe and where inequality and xenophobia are increasing at an alarming rate.

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One of the most useful Pivotal images that I have worked with through the years is the Swedish artist Peter Johansson’s How to cook a Souvenir from 1994 (fig. 4-4). Johansson is a contemporary artist who in his work has pointed to the arbitrariness of national identity. In How to cook a Souvenir, he has sliced and packaged red wooden horses decorated with a folkloristic pattern that is common in the county of Dalarna. They are familiar to all Swedes and known as “Dala-horses” and are one of the most popular souvenirs that tourists bring with them from Sweden. These wooden horses can be read as symbols of Swedish national identity, displayed and packaged here as meat in a supermarket freezer; national identity as a commodity with an expiration date. I bought some of these significant works of art for the museum, put them in a shopping trolley, and used them in exhibitions and in educational programs as with Nationalism—From a midsummers dance to a sliced Dala-horse, which lasted for more than ten years and was both a school program, SFI-project for New Swede’s and part of an EU-project called The learning eye.21 They were all interconnected and part of my intersectionality studies program which focused on gender, race and class issues. The main topics that we discussed dealt with “Swedish” conceptions of nature, folk and Christmas traditions and interior design. My workshops together with Framtidsverkstan in Botkyrka, with schoolchildren that had backgrounds with numerous nationalities, were of vital importance for the museum since we received visitors who had never set their foot in an art museum. We worked both in their studio environment and at Nationalmuseum. Botkyrka is a suburb of Stockholm where the municipality has invested heavily in culture exchange projects, but nowadays with increasing gaps between social classes, it is mostly identified as a suburb with social unrest and teenage riots. I also focused on “Swedish” conceptions of nature, folk and Christmas traditions in two exhibitions at Nationalmuseum: one about Jenny Nyström in 1996 and Elsa Beskow in 2002, who were Sweden’s most popular artists from the turn of the 19th century. My main purpose was to show how fundamental picture book illustrations had been and still are significant for generations of Swedes and to thereby question what is traditionally defined as Fine Art. The exhibition Jenny Nyström: Målaren och illustratören that I curated was built on the already mentioned feminist art historian Barbro Werkmäster’s ground breaking work on the Swedish Picture Book Tradition.22 Today we have an exceptionally lively and radical children’s book tradition, and Jenny Nyström was one of its pioneers with her illustrations of the “ideal child” and her images of Jultomten (an amalgamation of a folkloristic gnome, Santa-Claus and Father

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Fig. 4-4. Peter Johansson, How to cook a Souvenir, 1994. Photo: Nationalmuseum.

Christmas). She created the popular image of a Swedish Christmas that is still relevant today, which was built on cohesion of Romantic Germanic Folk customs and the upper-class Christmas traditions of the period. My intention in the exhibition Elsa Beskow: Vår barndoms bildskatt, where I was a co-curator, was to show how surprisingly subversive her National perspective was compared to her contemporary colleagues, and how she addressed ecology, gender, ethnicity and class issues in her often subtly ironic illustrations. Her images were made from a child’s perspective, exploring nature and especially the new Swedish National romantic landscape, the wooded hillside and its simple and rustic fauna and wild life. She was thereby instrumental in the creation of the new and still reigning concept “The Nature loving Swede.”

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The New Woman In 2007–2009 I participated in a project called Modern Women—19thC Swedish Women Dramatists with Stadsteatern in Stockholm and worked with two different plays and made a small exhibition about portraits from the period at Nationalmuseum. As I already mentioned, there were more plays by women dramatists being performed on the Stockholm stages in the 1880s than by their male counterparts. It was one of the major reasons for the Backlash in the 1890s, which was orchestrated by misogynist male writers and dramatists, especially August Strindberg, who felt threatened by their success. I also worked with the connected Spetsprojektet, which had started the initiative, a joint venture between Riksteatern, Östgötateatern, Länsteatern in Örebro and different University Gender Studies Centers in Sweden.23 All in all I worked with four different theater companies, and the Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts and The Jewish Theatre in Stockholm.24 Present day feminists directed the plays of which some had not been staged since the 1880s. The main purpose was to show what a great influence the women writers had had on that period and how radical and relevant their plays still were for theater goers today. The actors Ann Petrén and Åsa Sarachau led the project at Stadsteatern in Stockholm where plays by Ann Charlotte Leffler and Frida Stéenhoff were staged. I had body language workshops with the cast, “doing by imitating,” in front of portraits from the period at Nationalmuseum. We tried to explore and analyze the gendered social spaces that the characters in the plays inhabited. I had for a long time used a bourgeois woman’s corset from the period as a metaphor for control and subordination and it now became a pivotal tool for understanding. Stadsteatern’s ateliers made copies of period corsets and the cast worked with a gender bending choreographer. Two of the actors were asked to wear them every day for a week and wrote web diaries and kept us posted on how it restricted their interaction with others on all levels of everyday life. The cast and I then had similar workshops in Nationalmuseum and at Stadsteatern for both museum visitors and theater goers.

II. Image awareness—feminism and curating In this second part of the chapter my relationship to the art pedagogy tradition in Sweden is described together with some of my major projects about body and identity. These collaborative projects were shown in exhibitions or as interventions in the Nationalmuseum’s permanent collections.

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Dialog and the use of body language When I started to work at Nationalmuseum in 1977 I was a graduate student and was recruited because of my reputation as a dynamic summer guide at Drottningholm Palace and Gripsholm Castle, where part of the museum’s collections are housed. It was my hands on experience with all kinds of groups, mostly with school children, that laid the foundation for my later work. When I came to the museum I was very fortunate to have Carlo Derkert as my mentor; he was the son of the legendary feminist artist Siri Derkert. Carlo Derkert was a pedagog and curator who in the 1960s had been instrumental in the creation of what is today Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the collections of which originally came from Nationalmuseum, and who was also known for his groundbreaking work with children. It was Carlo Derkert who really made me focus on the relationship between the museum and its visitors, contrary to the other curators at Nationalmuseum, who were then and now mainly art object orientated and had, and still have, a one way communication with what they called “the public.” Anna Lena Lindberg, a pioneer feminist art historian, has claimed in The Dilemma of Art Pedagogy—Historical roots and modern strategies from 1988 that there were two predominant traditions in Sweden in the 20th century.25 The first was characterized by its “Art Educating Attitude,” where what she refers to as the “receiver’s mind” is like an empty slate that has to be filled in by the art pedagog, and the other by a “Charismatic Attitude,” where the “receiver’s” feelings and intuition has to be released and freed by the art pedagog. In my view Lindberg’s analysis, with its inherent dichotomy, underestimates the complex interaction that is involved in all interpretative and collaborative activity; it bars our way of understanding the meaning of dialog and the “encounter moment”. Carlo Derkert had studied acting and stressed the importance for the art pedagog to use a body language that would enable the museum visitors to open up for dialog, that is to get them to use their own empathy and sensibility in the process. Derkert’s critics, like Lindberg, accused him of over acting and of seducing what they called his “audience.” Nevertheless, what he brought with him from the avant-garde theatre was its focus on enabling a dialog with their theater goers. He also made me understand how important it was for art pedagogs to be aware of the environment and architectural space that we work in. Derkert struggled to bridge the gap between our visitors and Nationalmuseum’s monumental architecture, a hierarchal space that is quite daunting and makes the visitor feel small and insignificant. It was built in the 19th century, when many museums were erected as national “temples,” as a kind of substitute for the old cathedrals,

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when art and patriotism was used as compensation for religion. Carlo Derkert’s body language was therefore carefully choreographed; he used to stumble in the museum’s magnificent staircase, just as he started working with a group. He did that in order to break down the distance, to question the authoritarian role of the art educator, in order to open up for mutual communication. I have learned through the years how fragile that initial interaction is, how the dynamics of the group is decisive in order for my open laboratory like process to work, without it you truly cannot enable transformative encounters in the museum.

Breaching institutional boundaries My work in trying to reach beyond institutional boundaries started early, already in 1981–82, when Carlo Derkert and I made two exhibitions for a communal art gallery, Trappan, in Vällingby Centre, a suburb of Stockholm. The first year we showed a selection of art works from the Nationalmuseum’s collections together with Pivotal images from my Warburgian archive, and the next year, with paintings from Moderna Museet. The main purpose was to have workshops and interact with school children, especially teenagers, in their own neighborhood. We thereby succeeded in establishing a more profound dialog with our visitors, which also included many adults, of which many both young and old returned to the gallery on a daily basis. We also had an art club at Nationalmuseum in 1980–84 where we made occasional visits to Moderna Museet. We had consecutive workshops for ten to twelve year olds and tried to establish a habitual and more engaged group of museum visitors. I had already as a ten year old in the middle of the1960s participated in the now famous workshops that Carlo Derkert held for children at Moderna Museet, and where he taught me the importance of using humor as an agent for learning and vaccinated me against taking Fine Art aesthetics seriously.

Vitalism and creativity As my knowledge and hands on experience increased, both as an art pedagog and feminist art historian, I became increasingly skeptical to the vitalist and modernist ideologies that were the basis for Carlo Derkert’s work. At Moderna Museet they adhered to vitalist ideals of creativity, their role model being the lone and misunderstood avant-garde male genius, that brave groundbreaking solitary explorer. Their main purpose was to put their visitors on a similar quest and to help them find their “real” self, their innate child, that infant that possessed the “true creative force.” I

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came to feel a deep sympathy for those visitors, especially the schoolchildren, who looked like question marks when they were asked to be “spontaneous” and creative in Moderna Museet’s orthodox studio workshops that were run by Carlo Derkert epigones. I came to learn that children are not mini-artists; the small child is born with a wish for mutual recognition and a desire to relate to the world. The gaze and the role of the viewer is an important part of that process, whereby we actively engage and create ourselves by connecting with others. For the infant it starts with the encounter with another face. Viewing is a process filled with meaning and emotions, and children learn to use a pictorial language at an early age as one of the many languages that they can make use of, since it increases their capacity to decode and connect with all their senses with the world around them. In that process the child, depending upon which part of the world it lives in, is subjected to different hegemonic visual structures and norms. That is why it is so important to work with children in museums, in order to enable transformative encounters by looking at significant works of art where the limits of the current symbolic can be transgressed and generate new meaning.

Body and image awareness In 2001–2008 I collaborated with the relational artist Eva Saro, from Switzerland, who is today the head of the Fondation images et société in Geneva.26 She then had an interactive website called Watch it! Together with Eva Saro I learned to use role play and body language exercises. We explored and merged our different methods through open workshops, and worked both with “doing by imitating” in the Nationalmuseum’s collections and with media stereotype collages in our studios. We learned that in order for a dynamic mutual dialog to develop you need both to interact with the collective group and the smaller constellations within it. The role playing, “doing by imitating,” is best done in smaller groups in front of the work of art, when looking at a portrait with three figures, for instance each group is given one of the figures. They in turn select one amongst themselves who should imitate that specific figure’s pose. The rest of the group are “directors,” helping the figure in the painting and the imitator merge into one, whilst studying every aspect of the portrayed figures age, body language and facial expression. They are asked to analyze the gender norms, race, class and power relations in the portrait and to share feelings, thoughts and connections with existing cultural meaning. After fifteen minutes each figure is asked to show their “pose”

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Fig. 4-5. Interior from the exhibition Look out! Image awareness and visual culture. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm 2004. Photo: Nationalmuseum.

and to tell the whole group how it felt to imitate someone from another age, how it related to their own lived experience. Then, the rest have to relay what they have been discussing in their respective group. In the ensuing dialog the art pedagog helps intermittently with the decoding, with layer by layer of contextual references, analyzing visual structures and conventions with the help of pivotal media images.

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Interventions in the permanent collections As I have already pointed out, curating exhibitions is not a separate endeavour but an integral part of my work which I have hitherto been trying to describe. In the 1980s and 1990s I made a whole series of interventions in the permanent collections at Nationalmuseum that had their starting point in current feminist issues; many small exhibitions that were in their turn connected to school programs and walking-tours. I have chosen to mainly work with museum collections since I believe that historical and contextual analyses are vital to focus on in a “liquid world” like ours.27 It is important to move away from the seductive nature of a culture that focuses on the surface of things and challenge the present aesthetics of consumption, especially blockbuster exhibitions. In 2004, I made an exhibition called Look out! Image awareness and visual culture.28 The exhibition stressed the role of the viewer and compared the museums fine art collections with contemporary media images (fig. 4-5). There were five main themes: Vision and Cognitivity, Image and Text, Gender and Power, The Role of the Artist and Body and Surface. Commodification,

Fig. 4-6. Catalog cover of the exhibition Look out! Image awareness and visual culture, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm 2004. Photo: Nationalmuseum.

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Fig. 4-7. Workshop photo with gender activist group at Nationalmuseum in connection with the exhibition Masquerade—Power, gender and identity in 2004.

beauty ideals, the mastering gaze, femininity, gender power roles and queering the body were some of the issues that were discussed (fig. 4-6). When preparing the exhibition, I collaborated with Eva Saro and Nationalmuseum’s then artist in residence Bongi Jarne MacDermott. We had workshops with gender activist groups from high-schools in the Stockholm area. We worked with gender norms and role playing. The activist’s used digital cameras when “doing by imitating” and then made collages mixed with media ads in our studio (fig. 4-7). We made a documentary video where we interviewed some of them on how transformative the encounters with significant works of art in the collections actually had been, and how it connected with their own lived experience as feminist activists. The video and some of the collages that they had made were shown in our studio Minigallery under the title Masquerade—Power, gender and identity in connection with the exhibition. For the last ten years I have also worked with similar workshops for Ruter Dam, which is a famous women’s executive network

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in Sweden. During this period, between 2003 and 2008, I was also involved in two EU-projects, See for yourself and The learning eye, together with teachers, artists and anthropologists with very different theoretical backgrounds and perspectives. We published books, made two interactive websites and gave image awareness workshops in Austria, Liechtenstein, Sweden, Norway, Ireland, Switzerland and China (the Academy of Fine Arts in Xi’an and Beijing Film Academy).29

Conspicuous consumption and the “Aristocratic Role” In 2008 I co-curated the exhibition Alexander Roslin at Nationalmuseum, where I continued to develop my work on gender norms and role playing by focusing on the aristocratic role and the meaning of conspicuous consumption.30 Roslin was a Swedish artist who lived in Paris in the 18th century and became a celebrated portrait painter of the European elite. I tried in the exhibition to show the similarities between Roslin’s fashionable portraits and the way our own time focuses on the surface of things and the culture of the elite in the 18th century, which was characterized by luxury and consumption. I juxtaposed contemporary media images in the exhibition and discussed Sofia Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette, a world characterized by femininity, with its dream like mood, the seductive nature that is the driving force of the aesthetics of consumption (fig. 4-8). What we today define as femininity has its roots in an aristocratic beauty ideal that in our time is seen as androgynous and transgressing the sexes, and which came from the European royal courts as an expression of a form of social choreography that sought to balance body, movement, expression and attire in a perfect picture of nobility. The extravagant luxury consumption of the power elite controlled the entire lifestyle of the individual, which had to be geared to their place in the hierarchy. Not being able to live up to what was expected meant a loss of social standing. However, in the 18th century when it was not only royalty and the aristocracy but a growing burgher class that could also gain access to luxury goods, the role of the portraitist “to refine nature,” now became even more important. Only women and men from the elite could be beautified and portrayed as noble and with grace, which was just as much a male quality, but during the second half of the 18th century, the aristocratic ideal was seen as a symbol of the autocracy: that which had originally been a staging of an androgynous ideal was now defined purely in terms of “femininity” and thus of subordination. Grace was transformed into a specifically female quality. The American art historian Mary D. Sheriff means that this should be regarded as an expression of a backlash

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Fig. 4-8. Interior from the exhibition Alexander Roslin. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm 2008. Photo: Nationalmuseum.

that was directed towards the many women who had managed to acquire power, by making use of loopholes in the gender contracts of the time, a maneuvering space that was later blocked in the early 19th century.31 During the exhibition I had workshops on body language, together with art historian Patrik Steorn and his graduate students from the Centre for Fashion studies at Stockholm University, which stressed the importance of using a queer perspective, and with RFSL activists groups / transsexual teenagers.32

Identity and gender In my last two exhibitions I have tried to develop my work with identity and gender. In 2010 I curated an exhibition called Hand-Made—Drawings from Nationalmuseum about the meaning and contemporary comeback of the drawn line.33 Due to the media interest in things made by hand, we invited the illustrator Stina Wirsén to enter into a dialog with the drawings in our outstanding collections (fig. 4-9). Stina Wirsén is one of the contemporary artists who transcends boundaries in her attempts to change gender norms, creating androgynous figures with a few terse, effectual lines. The artists in the exhibition from the year 1500 to today shared an

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Fig. 4-9. Flyer from the exhibition Hand-Made—Drawings from Nationalmuseum, Stockholm 2008. Photo: Nationalmuseum.

interest in human identity. Many of them studied not only their own surroundings but also visited countries outside Europe. In their fashion drawings, portraits and storybook illustrations our visitors could see how gender and ethnicity (norms) had changed over the years (fig. 4-10). I had gender workshops where we worked with how we as viewers are triggered by every line in a drawing, and how our ability to decode is put to the test since we have to use our imagination to fill in the missing pieces and provide meaning.

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Fig. 4-10. Interior from the exhibition Hand-Made—Drawings Nationalmuseum, Stockholm 2008. Photo: Nationalmuseum.

from

My most recent project Selfies—Now and Then, which was part of an exhibition called Highlights: Famous and Forgotten Art Treasures from the Nationalmuseum, was opened in May 2014 at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, our new venue when the museum is being refurbished.34 I wanted to contribute to the current debate about identity and what are called “selfies”—self-portraits taken at arm’s length using the camera of a mobile phone. Drawing on the museum’s collection of portraits, I tried to identify parallels between now and then and discuss how people have “wanted to be seen” down the centuries. A slide show on stereotypes and body language with the actor Ann Petrén was shown interacting with our portraits. Is a selfie simply an egocentric facet of contemporary life, or is it first and foremost an expression of our need for mutual recognition and an instrument of social communication? What are the characteristics of a selfie? I would argue that it is not, as it is now claimed, a completely new visual genre, but one firmly rooted in the tradition of the self-portrait. Artists paint their own portrait by looking at themselves in a mirror. It is a process marked by slowness, depth and introspection, while the modern-day selfie, with its cropped, from-above perspective, seeks to give the impression of being the work of a moment, improvised and laid-back. Nevertheless, both as a pictorial construction and in relation to body

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language, fashion and social conventions, it recalls the practiced pose we adopt when we view ourselves in a bathroom mirror. In the consumer culture of our own day, women are defined by their appearance, as objects, not allowed to age and controlled by their weight. A new study of young people’s media behaviour in Sweden shows that girls as young as ten market themselves using manipulated selfies with “duck face” poses, while boys mostly play computer games and have dynamic but unmoved “stone face” poses as their physical ideal.35

Conclusion I have in this article tried to show the benefit of combining the roles of an art pedagog, curator and feminist scholar and the importance of sharing and working “hands on” with active museum visitors in an open laboratory like process. It has not always been easy to work in such a conservative environment as the Nationalmuseum, where they have even tried to destroy and censor my work, but through my collaborations with actors, relational artists and feminist activist groups and networks I have received the support that I have needed. My advice is therefore that feminists should try to work more in large public institutions, because they have both the funds and the permanent collections that are essential for long term development, and that real change is only possible if you get more people to question the Canon from inside the museum. I have tried to prove that in order to do this you need a strong red thread to pursue, and I have constantly been developing my work on image awareness and the various aspects of the culture of the 1800s and 1900s from an intersectional perspective. Through my workshops and exhibitions throughout the years I have shown how dialog and the use of body language are essential for enabling “transformative encounters” in the museum between the curator / the art object / and what was “formerly known as the public.” At the core of my work has been the focus on “the role of the viewer,” looking at significant works of art and “doing by imitating” which involves not only perception and performativity, but also the sharing of feelings, thoughts and connections with existing cultural meanings. Interpretative and collaborative activity is of outmost importance to human identity. One of our strongest motivations is the wish for mutual recognition and a desire to relate to the world, a process whereby we actively engage and create ourselves by connecting with others.

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Notes 1 Griselda Pollock, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, space and the archive (London: Routledge, 2007); Griselda Pollock, “What if Art Desires to be Interpreted? Remodelling Interpretation after the ‘Encounter Event’,” Tate Papers, Issue 15, Spring 2011, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tatepapers/what-if-art-desires-be-interpreted-remodelling-interpretation. 2 Griselda Pollock and Catherine de Zegher, eds., Art as compassion: Bracha L. Ettinger (Brussels: ASA Publishers, 2011). 3 “Doing by imitating” means that we focus on role playing and body language exercises in front of original paintings/portraits. Each group is given one of the figures in the image, they in turn select one amongst themselves who should imitate that specific figure’s pose. The rest of the group are “directors”, helping the figure in the painting and the imitator to merge into one, whilst studying every aspect of the portrayed figure. The relationship between the different figures in the image and the context in which the painting was made is also analyzed. See also pages 76 and 79–80 for a further description of the process. 4 I am here alluding to the German art historian Aby Warburg’s Social Memory Archive; the Mnemosyne Atlas from 1927–29. 5 See current reports with statistics from the Swedish Government Agency (Myndigheten för Kulturanalys). 6 Significant feminist scholars/curators that need to be mentioned are Barbro Werkmäster, Eva-Lena Bengtsson, Eva-Lena Karlsson, Maria Lind, Gertrud Sandqvist, Nina Weibull, Cecilia Widenheim, Sara Arrhenius and Annika Öhrner. 7 Iris Müller-Westermann, ed., Hilma af Klint: Abstrakt pionjär (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 2013). 8 Åke Fant, Hilma af Klint: Ockult målarinna och abstrakt pionjär (Stockholm: Raster, 1989). 9 Margareta Gynning, “Paris – självförverkligandets stad,” in De drogo till Paris: nordiska konstnärinnor på 1880-talet, exh.cat., Lollo Fogelström and Louise Robbert, eds. (Stockholm: Liljevalchs konsthall, 1988), 29–34; Margareta Gynning, “Eva Bonnier,” in Fogelström and Robert, De drogo till Paris, 42–50; Margareta Gynning, “Hanna Hirsch-Pauli,” in Fogelström and Robert, De drogo till Paris, 95–100; Margareta Gynning, “The Juste-Milieu Artists,” in Women painters in Scandinavia 1880–1900 [in conjunction with the Exhibition Women Painters in Scandinavia 1880–1900, Kunstforeningen Copenhagen, Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum Hannover, and Bergen Kunstmuseum 2002– 2003], Jorunn Veiteberg et al. (Copenhagen: Kunstforeningen, 2002), 50–60; Margareta Gynning, Det ambivalenta perspektivet: Eva Bonnier och Hanna Pauli i 1880-talets konstliv, diss. Uppsala University (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1999); Margareta Gynning, ed., Pariserbref: Konstnären Eva Bonniers brev 1883–1889 (Lund: Klara förlag, 1999). 10 Eva-Lena Karlsson, ed., Stolthet & fördom: Kvinna och konstnär i Frankrike

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och Sverige 1750–1860 (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, 2012). 11 Gynning, “Paris – självförverkligandets stad,” 29–34; Gynning, “Eva Bonnier,” 42–50; Gynning, “Hanna Hirsch-Pauli,” 95–100; Gynning, “The Juste-Milieu Artists,” 50–60. 12 Gynning, Det ambivalenta perspektivet. 13 Gynning, Pariserbref. 14 See page 76 and Åsa Sarachu and Moa Holmqvist, eds., Är de här för att stanna nu? Teaterarvets akilleshäl (Hägersten: Rosenlarv, 2010) for more information on this subject. 15 Pil Dahlerup, Det moderne gennembruds kvinder: 70 oversete kvindelige forfatterskaber fra århundredskiftet, deres menneske och samfundssyn, diss. Copenhagen University (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1985). 16 Margareta Gynning, “Inledning,” in Konstnärspar kring sekelskiftet 1900, ed. Margareta Gynning (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, 2006), 8–19; Margareta Gynning, “De sex konstnärsparen,” in Konstnärspar kring sekelskiftet 1900, 78– 240. 17 Gender-choreography is a term created by the Swedish historian Yvonne Hirdman which she uses to describe the power structure and balance between different gender norms. See Yvonne Hirdman, “Genussystemet,” in Demokrati och makt i Sverige: Maktutredningens huvudrapport, SOU 1990:44 (Stockholm: Allmänna förlaget, 1990), 73–116. 18 Sharon L. Hirsh, Symbolism and modern urban society (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 19 Carl Larsson, Jag: En bok om och på både gott och ont, new ed. (Stockholm: Forum, 1992). 20 Carl Larsson, De mina: Gammalt krafs (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1895); Carl Larsson, Ett hem: 24 målningar (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1899); Carl Larsson, Åt solsidan: En bok om boningsrum, om barn, om dig, om blommor, om allt: Taflor och prat (Stockholm: Bonnier 1910). 21 SFI / Swedish for Immigrants, are schools for learning Swedish. 22 Margareta Gynning, ed., Jenny Nyström: Målaren och illustratören (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, 1996). 23 Sarachu and Holmqvist, Är de här för att stanna nu?. 24 The play at The Jewish Theatre was called My Grandmother Glady’s and was written by the actors Jessica Zandén and Gunilla Röör. 25 Anna Lena Lindberg, Konstpedagogikens dilemma: Historiska rötter och moderna strategier, diss. Lund University 1989 (Lund: Lund University Press, 1988). 26 See their interactive website at: imagesetsociete.org. 27 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Life. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005). 28 Margareta Gynning, Se upp! Om bildförståelse och visuell kommunikation (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, 2004). 29 Margareta Gynning, “Creating identity with images,” in The learning eye: Contributions to visual literacy, eds. Christian Doelker, Ruth Gschwendtner-

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Wölfle, and Klaus Lürzer (Aarau: Sauerländer, 2003), vol. 1, 111–119 and vol. 2. 137–151. 30 Margareta Gynning, “Now and Then: Where surface and body intercept,” in Alexander Roslin, ed. Magnus Olausson (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, 2007), 121–125. 31 Mary D. Sheriff, Moved by love: Inspired Artists and Deviant Women in Eighteenth-century France (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 32 RFSL is the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights. 33 Margareta Gynning, Handgjort—Teckningar från Nationalmuseum [HandMade—Drawings from Nationalmuseum], exh.cat. online [in Swedish] (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, 2010), http://www.nationalmuseum.se/Global/PDF/webb_handgjort.pdf. 34 Margareta Gynning, “Selfie—Now and then,” in Highlights: Famous and Forgotten Art Treasures from Nationalmuseum, eds. Mikael Ahlund, Ingrid Lindell, and Janna Herder (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum 2014), 162–183. 35 Michael Forsman, Duckface/Stone face: Sociala medier, onlinespel och bildkommunikation bland killar och tjejer i årskurs 4 och 7 (Stockholm: Statens medieråd, 2014), available online at: http://www.statensmedierad.se/upload/_pdf/duckface_rapport.pdf.

CHAPTER FIVE MOMA’S MODERN WOMEN PROJECT, FEMINISMS, AND CURATORIAL PRACTICE ALEXANDRA SCHWARTZ This essay presents a combination of a first-hand account of the development of The Museum of Modern Art, New York’s Modern Women’s Project, initiated in 2005 and culminating in a book and series of exhibitions in 2010, together with an early attempt at an analysis of this particular moment in the history of art and feminism. (I served as the project’s codirector from 2005 until 2010, co-editing, with former MoMA Chief Curator of Drawings Connie Butler, the book Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art, organizing two exhibitions, and serving as the project’s director of research.)1 While the past decade has been an exceptionally fruitful period in the history of feminism and curating, the story of the Modern Women’s Project at MoMA is both an idiosyncratic and, perhaps, a representative one, and had meaningful repercussions not only within the curatorial practice of one of the world’s major museums, but within the broader curatorial and art historical fields. MoMA’s Modern Women Project was born a particular confluence of events, some wide-ranging and some quite specific, that came together to make it possible. The mid-2000s saw the simultaneous development of an unusual number of projects on art and feminism, particularly in the United States and Europe. In the U.S. alone, a remarkable number of these projects opened to the public in 2007, including Connie Butler’s exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (subsequently touring to Washington, DC, Vancouver, and New York); the exhibition Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art, which celebrated the opening of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum; and a wide variety of exhibitions and programs spearheaded by the Feminist Art Project, a loose consortium of artists, curators, and academics around the United States.

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The reasons—societal, political, art historical—for this dramatic spike in interest in art and feminism has been much debated. These reasons indubitably vary significantly depending on the country in which they occurred, so I will speak only to the circumstances in the United States. On a societal level, the mid-2000s saw a reinvigorated debate about the meaning and significance of American feminism, especially with the election of Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2007 (the third-highest elected office in the United States), and moreover with the presidential candidacy of Senator Hillary Clinton in 2008, along with the vice presidential candidacy of Sarah Palin (the latter being the cause of much conflict among feminists). On an art historical level, the most common explanations for this resurgence of interest in art and feminism usually include: one, the fact that the mid2000s marked thirty-plus years since the height of the women’s movement and the feminist art movement of the 1970s, three decades constituting an appropriate amount of time for this period’s historicization; two, the fact that the mid-2000s marked the coming of age of a generation of art historians and curators who were trained in feminist theory in the 1980s and nineties (including myself), and who were then in leadership positions in museums, the academy, etc.; and, three, the fact that a new generation of female philanthropists, who were part of the 1970s-era “women’s liberation” movement and are now in their sixties and seventies, are beginning to think about their own legacies, and to donate significant amounts of money to museums in support of projects on women artists and feminism. Dr. Elizabeth A. Sackler, the founder of the Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, is perhaps the mostly widely known of this category of philanthropists. MoMA’s Modern Women’s Project was also made possible by an extraordinary female benefactor. Prior to the 2004 opening of MoMA’s expansion and renovation, Sarah Peter, an artist and philanthropist, took a hardhat tour of the new building site, was inspired by what she saw, and subsequently met with MoMA’s director, Glenn Lowry. She offered Lowry an open-ended proposal: to make a gift that would somehow benefit women at MoMA. Lowry, in response, convened the women curators at the Museum, and asked what they might want and need. Numerous ideas were floated, ranging from a daycare center at the Museum (which was nixed because the insurance would have been too costly); to additional administrative assistance for female curators; to a book on work by women artists in the Museum’s permanent collection. After extensive debate, it was this final idea that stuck.2

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This decision was, in itself, complicated. The overall rationale behind undertaking a scholarly book on work by women artists in MoMA’s collection was that the Museum wanted to do a project that was lasting and permanent, and that a book would have a long “shelf life” in the way a temporary exhibition would not. While MoMA has historically been criticized, often quite harshly, for the lack of work by women artists on view in its galleries, it in fact has very rich holdings of work by women (albeit a relatively low percentage of its overall collection). There also existed methodological and ideological issues surrounding the proposal for the book. One persistent question concerned whether it was “ghettoizing” to base a project exclusively on women artists, and whether singling out women was contrary to the ideal of equality. This ghettoization argument is a common one, and though often tainted with sexism, it has some core validity: in an ideal world, the singling-out of an overlooked group would not be necessary. Among supporters of the project, the prevailing counterarguments included: one, that women are not in fact a minority group (making up over half the world’s population, as we know); two, that the Museum had an obligation to try to rectify the fact it has historically collected and exhibited work by women artists far less than men (although these numbers are far better for contemporary art, for myriad historical reasons); and three, that it was high time that feminist methodologies made its way into MoMA’s art historical discourse. That feminist art history had not, until this time, played much of a role in MoMA’s curatorial practice was, in itself, remarkable, and may again be explained by the fact the mid2000s saw the first time there existed a critical mass of curators on staff who were trained in these methodologies. The Modern Women’s Project became a formalized initiative in 2005, underwritten by a large gift from Sarah Peter, and led by an interdepartmental committee of curators, comprising at least one representative from each of the Museum’s seven curatorial departments, and headed by Deborah Wye, then Chief Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books; Anne Umland, Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture; Susan Kismaric, then Curator in the Department of Photography; and me as coordinator. About a year after Connie Butler was hired as the Chief Curator of Drawings in 2006, she took over as head of the committee. The practical work of the Modern Women’s Project began with a systematic study of MoMA’s holdings of work by women artists, with each department making and refining checklists of the works they found most essential to include in the book. The committee met regularly to discuss these lists and refine the proposal. Additionally, we undertook an initiative to shoot digital images of as many of the works in the collection

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as possible, to include in the Museum’s database, the rationale being that not only would this help with our conception of the book, but the more works in the database had images, the more likely they were to be included in future exhibitions and other projects. (Most of the works that had not been photographed were works on paper, especially prints, because the Museum’s collections in these areas are so large.) In 2007 the committee also team-taught a class for Columbia University’s Masters Program in Modern Art and Curatorial Studies, in which students undertook original research on work by women artists in MoMA’s collection. Connie Butler and I co-taught another Columbia course, “Feminist Practices and Art Institutions” in 2008; a more theoretically oriented seminar, it featured weekly guest speakers working on art and gender throughout the art world and in academia. At the same time that the Modern Women’s committee was conducting this research, its members decided that we wanted to host a scholarly program that would convene the some of the leaders in the field of art and gender to help begin a conversation with the Museum, and guide our research; it would also serve as a public announcement of the Modern Women’s Project. The resulting two-day international symposium, “The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts,” was held in January 2007, and featured twenty speakers, including academics, curators, and artists.3 The response to the symposium surpassed any of our expectations: from the excitement among speakers; to the selling-out of the 400-person lecture hall in record time; to the extensive coverage in the mainstream and arts press; to the passionate responses from the audience (including some shouting matches).4 This audience included all ages of art historians, students, and artists. The generation of women artists who began their careers at the height of the feminist movement in the 1970s represented the audience’s most vocal contingent; having felt they had been shut out of MoMA until that moment, they expressed strong, mixed feelings about finally witnessing a shift in the Museum’s “official” attitude toward feminism. Indeed, the overall interest in the symposium prompted us to initiate the year-long “Feminist Future Lecture Series” in 2007–08, the “Women and the Bauhaus Lecture Series” in 2009, and eventually another, one-day international symposium, “Art Institutions and Feminist Politics Now,” which celebrated the publication of the Modern Women book in 2010. Following the success of the “Feminist Future” symposium, the Modern Women committee felt reaffirmed and reinvigorated. Work on the book accelerated, and its contents began to take shape. When it was first proposed, the book was conceived as a general-audience guide to work by

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women artists in the Museum’s collection; however, Connie Butler and I, who had recently taken on the roles of co-editors, felt strongly that the book should be a scholarly anthology that would make a definitive contribution to feminist art history. (The distinctions between writing a book on “women artists” versus one of “feminist art history” were much debated by the committee, as was the meaning of the term “feminist art.”) The resulting book, Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art is a 500-page tome by forty authors, approximately two-thirds of which are MoMA curators, and one-third academics and curators at other institutions.5 The book’s contents are divided into three sections: early modern, mid-century, and contemporary, and include a mixture of longer thematic essays and shorter considerations of single artists. It does not attempt to present a comprehensive history of women modern and contemporary artists, or even a full survey of work by women artists in MoMA’s collection. Rather, it offers a critical examination of the art historical issues surrounding a representative selection of work by women artists at MoMA. In choosing the artists and themes covered, we tried to be as diverse as possible historically, internationally, and in terms of medium. We were, however, limited by the Museum’s collection, which though obviously extensive, had some glaring omissions, most severely the so-called “Feminist Art” of the 1970s, which was almost completely at that time, overlooked by the MoMA’s curators. (It is only in the last few years that MoMA has begun actively to collect this work, attempting to fill this gap in its collection.) To impart a sense of how we tried to address such lacunae, I will turn briefly to the example of my own essay, which examined the work of Alice Aycock, Mary Miss, and Jackie Winsor, three American sculptors working in abstraction in the early 1970s. I was interested in how all three were personally involved in the women’s movement and numerous activist groups, yet did not directly address issues of gender or politics in their work. Unlike many of their contemporaries making more overtly political art, these artists’ work was both exhibited and collected by MoMA during this time. To be sure, their abstract sculpture fit well within the modernist narrative that MoMA has historically embraced. But one must also assume that their (at least ostensibly) apolitical work was then more palatable to MoMA’s curators and donors than that of their “feminist artist” contemporaries, who created representational work with overtly gendered imagery.6 As I suggested earlier, a question that lingered over the Modern Women’s Project from its inception was whether we would organize an exhibition, in addition to the book. In an interesting turn from the Project’s

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Fig. 5-1. Installation view of the exhibition, Lee Bontecou: All Freedom in Every Sense, April 16 through September 6, 2010. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Fig. 5-2. Installation view of the exhibition, Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography (Part 1), February 3 through August 30, 2010. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

early days, there existed a strong desire on the part of curators across MoMA to organize some kind of exhibitions to celebrate the publication of the book. Among some curators, resistance to the idea of an overarching survey of work by women artists in the Museum’s collection persisted, and as Global Feminisms was shown at the Brooklyn Museum in 2007, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution was shown at MoMA PS1 in 2008, and elles@centrepompidou was shown at the Pompidou Center,

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Fig. 5-3. Installation view of the exhibition, Mind and Matter: Alternative Abstractions, 1940s to Now, May 5 through August 16, 2010. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Paris in 2009–10, the overall feeling among the Museum staff was that another large-scale exhibition would be redundant. As a result, from 2009– 11, the Museum presented a series of exhibitions of work by women artists, at least one from each of its seven curatorial departments, drawn primarily from the permanent collection. While some of these exhibitions were directly tied to essays in the book, others addressed broader themes. These exhibitions ranged from Lee Bontecou: All Freedom in Every Sense, a solo exhibition of the mid-century American artist (organized by Veronica Roberts and representing the Department of Painting and Sculpture) (fig. 5-1); to Pictures by Women, a reinstallation of the Department of Photography’s permanent collection galleries, telling the history of the medium using only work by women (fig. 5-2); to Mind and Matter: Alternative Abstractions, 1940s to Now, an examination of issues of gender in throughout the history of abstraction (fig. 5-3); to Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen, an exploration of the development of kitchen design and its relationship to evolving notions of gender (fig. 54).7 Today, the Modern Women’s Project has largely morphed into the Modern Women’s Fund, which underwrites acquisitions, exhibitions, and programming relating to women artists, and is supported by a special donor group. The Modern Women’s Project as such is complete, begging

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Fig. 5-4. Installation view of the exhibition, Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen, September 15, 2010 through May 2, 2011. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

the question: from several years’ distance, what appear to have been its effects within MoMA, within the larger curatorial and art historical fields, and in regard to the museum-going public? In terms of the most basic museum metrics, the book has been a steady seller, and the exhibitions were all very well attended (as indeed all MoMA’s shows are). It is perhaps more useful to examine the effects of the Modern Women’s Project on MoMA’s larger culture, which in turn shapes the Museum’s program, and then may influence larger curatorial practices and the general public’s experiences of museums. Perhaps the most direct consequence of the project is that, at MoMA, gender is no longer viewed as a novel (or even, as it was sometimes considered, suspect) lens through which to view collection. This shift also represents a more general expansion of the methodological “tool-kits” employed by MoMA’s curators, who are more likely to embrace critical methodologies related to issues of difference—gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity—than ever before.

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Notes 1

I left MoMA in Autumn 2010 and my observations are based on my tenure there from 2004–10. 2 For an account of this process, see Cornelia Butler, “The Feminist Present: Women Artists at MoMA,” in Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art, ed. Cornelia Butler and Alexandra Schwartz (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 12–17. 3 The speakers included: keynotes: Lucy R. Lippard and Anne Wagner; panelists: Marina Abramoviü, Ute Meta Bauer, Connie Butler, Beatriz Colomina, Coco Fusco, Guerrilla Girls, David Joselit, Geeta Kapur, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Richard Meyer, Helen Molesworth, Wangechi Mutu, Griselda Pollock, Martha Rosler, and Ingrid Sischy; and respondents: Catherine de Zegher and Linda Nochlin. 4 The New York Times’ coverage of the symposium was particularly noteworthy; see: Holland Cotter, “Feminist Art Finally Takes Center Stage,” New York Times, January 20, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/29/arts/design/29femi.html?pagewanted=all. 5 The “non-MoMA” authors included: Carol Armstrong, Johanna Burton, Yenna Chan, Beatriz Colomina, Huey Copeland, Aruna D’Souza, Yuko Hasegawa, Pat Kirkham, Mary McLeod, Helen Molesworth, Griselda Pollock, T’ai Smith, and Sally Stein. 6 See: Alexandra Schwartz, “Mind, Body, Sculpture: Alice Aycock, Mary Miss, Jackie Winsor in the 1970s,” in Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art, ed. Cornelia Butler and Alexandra Schwartz (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 412–427. 7 The complete list of exhibition in the series included: Performance 7: Mirage, featuring the work of Joan Jonas, December 18, 2009–May 31, 2010, Barbara London, curator, Department of Media and Performance Art; Iris Barry: Re-View, May 10–24, 2010, Anne Morra, curator, Department of Film; Maya Deren’s Legacy: Women and Experimental Film, May 14–October 4, 2010, Sally Berger, curator, Department of Film; Sally Potter, July 7–21, 2010, Sally Berger, curator, Department of Film; Ida Lupino: Mother Directs, August 26–September 20, 2010, Anne Morra, curator, Department of Film; Lillian Gish, November 26–December 13, 2010, Jenny He, curator, Department of Film; Lee Bontecou: All Freedom in Every Sense, April 21–August 30, 2010; Veronica Roberts, curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture; Mind and Matter: Alternative Abstractions, 1940s to Now, May 5–August 16, 2010, Alexandra Schwartz and Sarah Suzuki, curators, Departments of Drawings and Prints and Illustrated Books; Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography, May 7, 2010–March 21, 2011, Roxana Marcoci, Sarah Hermanson Meister, Eva Respini, curators, Department of Photography; Experimental Women in Flux, August 4–November 8, 2010, Sheelagh Bevan, curator, Library and Archives; Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen, September 15, 2010–May 10, 2011, Juliet Kinchin, curator, Department of

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Architecture and Design; Modern Women: Single Channel, MoMA PS1, January 23–August 12, 2011, Alexandra Schwartz, curator.

CHAPTER SIX MOMENTS OF CONTRADICTIONS: FRIDA KAHLO AND TINA MODOTTI, 1982–1983 JESSICA SJÖHOLM SKRUBBE Between March 1982 and April 1983, the exhibition Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti travelled from the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, where it first was inaugurated, via Haus am Waldsee in Berlin, Kunstverein in Hamburg and Kunstverein in Hannover, to Kulturhuset in Stockholm and its final destination at the Grey Art Gallery in New York. Conceptualised and curated by the British film theorists and filmmakers Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, the exhibition displayed some forty works by Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) and more than eighty works by Italian photographer Tina Modotti (1896–1942). A catalogue with an essay on Kahlo and Modotti by Mulvey and Wollen, a short statement on photography by Modotti, and texts on Kahlo and Modotti by fellow artists and writers such as Pablo Neruda, André Breton, and Alejandro Gómez Arias accompanied the exhibition. In 1983, the exhibition was followed by a short film produced for the Arts Council of Great Britain with script and direction by Mulvey and Wollen. Importantly, exhibitionary logics have political implications as they are different ways of remembering and thus facilitate different narratives of the past. Looking back at Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti from the perspective of the 2010s, it is clear that in comparison to the models of curating the history of women’s and/or feminist art that have attracted the most attention in recent feminist art historical debate—i.e. either large group shows or occasional solo exhibitions—and that have been adopted as a standard reflex method by major art museums and galleries in the current institutionalization and de-politicalization of feminist art history, Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti offered another conception of curating differently.1 An explicit feminist perspective on art production and historiography and an interest in the dialectics between women’s art and revolutionary politics framed the exhibition, the accompanying catalogue, and the film.

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By returning to the work of Kahlo and Modotti, Mulvey and Wollen saw the possibility to raise urgent questions on both feminist and classical revolutionary politics in the present, in order to shape a different future: We need to know what has been achieved and how it was checked and deflected, to construct our own history in its own incompleteness. That is the purpose of this exhibition.2

Given the curators commitment to feminism and structuralist Marxism, Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti, as women artists who were deeply engaged in the radical politics of their time, offered a rich source for a politically invested attempt to create a narrative of and for resistance.3 Nevertheless, the juxtaposition of two strikingly different artists— whose only common denominators, at least on a surface level, seem to have been a shared political commitment and the fact that they were women who practiced their art in Mexico during the 1920s, 30s and 40s— was a conspicuous curatorial decision. Indeed, Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti’s radically divergent choices of medium, motif and pictorial means might seem to disqualify any comparison whatsoever. In the catalogue, Mulvey and Wollen declared why the juxtaposition of two contrasting artistic practices was of strategic importance: Through their differences they can spark off a new line of thought or argument (like montage in the cinema where bringing two images together can produce a third idea in the mind of the spectator).4

Obviously, as filmmakers and film theorists, Mulvey’s and Wollen’s orientation towards cinematic practices was not a coincidence. However, the reference to montage situates their curatorial method within a specific intellectual context and aligns it to a particular set of politically motivated cultural practices. More precisely, transforming the method of montage in film into a curatorial strategy clearly stemmed from a renewed interest in the theories and practices of the German poet, dramatist and director Bertolt Brecht within British cultural debates of the 1970s and 80s. In her essay “Screening the seventies: Sexuality and representation in feminist practice—a Brechtian perspective”, Griselda Pollock offers an account of the importance of the recirculation in the 1970s of the cultural politics of Bertolt Brecht through the British film magazine Screen and its implications for the political motivation of feminist art practices in the 1980s. Importantly, Mulvey and Wollen were a vital part of this intellectual context. Wollen became a member of Screen’s editorial board in 1971 and explicitly endorsed Brechtian strategies for radical art in the

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magazine.5 Mulvey published her seminal, now classic, feminist essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in the magazine in 1975.6 Pollock, who herself was put on the editorial board of Screen in 1980, elaborates from an insider’s view on the theoretical and practical relevance of Brechtian political strategies for feminism, including […] the use of montage, disruption of narrative, refusal of identifications with heroes and heroines, the intermingling of modes from high and popular culture, the use of different registers such as the comic, tragic as well as a confection of songs, images, sounds, film and so forth.7

Through Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti, Brechtian political strategies found their way into feminist curating as well. Thus, in the following, I want to explore Mulvey’s and Wollen’s curatorial model in more detail, focusing on what I consider to be its most significant, and interrelated, tactics: the juxtaposition of contradictory artistic practices and the montage of disruptive moments.

Juxtapositions A possible problem, or at least dilemma, when researching exhibition history is the fact that the spatial situation is lost. The conditions under which I have been writing this essay did not allow extensive archival research in order to trace documentation of the exhibition’s hangings and spatial contexts when touring through Europe and North America.8 I have necessarily relied on what is left of the curatorial work: the catalogue and the short film.9 In addition, I have been able to study the plan of the exhibition in its Stockholm version, as well as its critical reception in the Swedish press.10 In spite of the lack of photographic documentation of the show, it is possible to establish that the juxtaposition of Frida Kahlo’s paintings and Tina Modotti’s photographs must have been striking. The contrasts between Motdotti’s black and white, aesthetically coherent and poignantly registering photographs and the complex and colourful imagery of Kahlo, who, according to Eva Zetterman, conveyed like no other contemporary artist “a pictorial language that embraces such a broad spectrum of disparate pictorial traditions, periods of style, categories of motifs and symbolical languages” must have generated a disturbing visual effect (fig. 6-1 and fig. 6-2).11 Obviously, by the time Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen conceptualised Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti feminist art historians had since for quite some time begun the arduous task of establishing not only how women had been historically expelled from the practices and institutional contexts

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Fig. 6-1. Frida Kahlo, The two Fridas, 1939. Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno, Mexico City. © 2015. Photo Art Resource/Bob Schalk-wijk/Scala, Florence. © Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, México D.F/Bildupphovsrätt 2015.

of high art but also how ideological conceptions of art and gender were perpetually reproduced within the discursive formation of Western canonical art history and art criticism. In this context, the abundance of artist couples within modern art history arguably represented a distinctive set of problems. The naturalization of the mythic conception of the Great Master—a heroic male genius often seconded by a female muse, model, and/or mistress—had effectively contributed to canonical art history’s gendered mechanisms of limited selection and extensive exclusion.

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Fig. 6-2. Tina Modotti, Illustration for a Mexican Song, 1927. Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. © 2015. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

Essentially, this fictional story reproduces and maintains an essential, but culturally and socially constructed, idea in Western thought: that “identity, like art, is fundamentally binary.”12 Within this discursive framework, then, art by women always entails the risk of being associated with nature, body and tradition as distinguished from the culture, intellect and modernity of men’s art. The assumption of canonical art history—that creativity is a solitary, self-expressive endeavour, conducted by white Western men, rather than a complex process of cultural interaction and sometimes artistic companionship—thus became the object of critical analyses by feminist art historians who explored the creative and intimate

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partnership and scholarly and critical reception of artist couples such as e.g. Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Hans Arp.13 The “problem” of the artist couple had a special resonance with regard to Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti as they both, in Mulvey and Wollen’s words, “developed their own aesthetic from under the shadow of a male artist of international repute”14—the Mexican painter Diego Rivera and the American photographer Edward Weston, respectively. Modotti had been Weston’s apprentice and model, and in relation to Rivera’s commissions for monumental murals in public space, Kahlo’s focus on self-portraiture readily lent itself to reductive biographical readings in line with a gendered and hierarchical dichotomy. Mulvey and Wollen also argued that both Kahlo and Modotti implicitly challenged art historical hierarchies of genre, style and medium—Kahlo through her interest in popular traditions of Mexican art and Modotti through her use of photography as political reportage—and accordingly defined their imagery as “dialects” rather than the language of high art. Released from the fixed position as “Other” to a male partner, Mulvey and Wollen’s juxtaposition of Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti aimed at critical reflections concerning their differences and similarities on both the individual and structural levels, thus not only subverting the hierarchical binaries of art and identity established through conventional notions of the artist couple, but implicitly undermining the very idea of “women’s art” as a coherent category. The juxtaposition of two women artists who had employed widely differing artistic means was not only a critical intervention into prevailing canonical structures but also an implicit questioning of feminist theories and art practices of the early 1980s, whose recognition of women’s shared oppression had “permitted the domination of a white, heterosexual, middle-class definition of that oppression,” as Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock put it in their seminal book Framing Feminism.15 Collective work and strategic coalitions had been important methods for feminists desiring to disrupt the narrative of Great Masters and its adjacent myths on creativity and artistic production. However, even though Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti could, and would, be read as an exhibition of “women’s art”,16 it was not conceptualised as an act of strategic essentialism as the visual and spatial juxtaposition of Kahlo and Modotti did not put aside their differences in order to bring forward a shared identity as “women artists.” To the contrary, in comparison to large group shows of women and/or (proto)feminist artists—whose historical importance as spaces for social, cultural and political identification and as empirical ground for

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feminist knowledge production and historiographic critique, in spite of the problematic homogenizing side effects, cannot be overestimated—the juxtaposition of Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti aimed to avoid the problematical tendency to generalise women artists into a dislocated social category in favour of a detailed critical appraisal of both the artists’ oeuvres that embraced their differences in order to uncover further dimensions in their work. Mulvey’s and Wollen’s method of pairing two artists offered an exhibitionary logic situated at the intersection between the group exhibition and the solo show. On the one hand, the exhibition refrained from a curatorial model based on one individual artist—the “Great Master” [sic!]—and on the other hand, it differed from the collectivisation of diverse artists in large group shows.17 Put differently: the exhibition produced a critical space beyond the implicit or explicit generalizations inherent in a survey exhibitions of women’s art—always entailing the risk of ghettoizing women in a parallel “women’s art history”—and the strategic adaptation of mainstream art history’s values and norms, that is, canonizing individual “geniuses”—in the one woman show.18 Instead, the conceptual basis of the exhibition was a situated dialogue where Mulvey and Wollen put the works of Kahlo and Modotti in conversation within a specific historical, political, and spatial framework in order to let their differences “spark off a new line of thought or argument”.19 In the exhibition catalogue, Mulvey and Wollen put the work of Kahlo and Modotti in conversation in thematic sections: On the Margins; the Mexican Renaissance; Women, Art and Politics; Revolution; the Interior and the Exterior; Roots and Movements and the Discourse of the Body. Transforming and politicising “arbitrary element[s]” in their lives into feminist questions on “woman’s body and its place in representation,”20 such as the accident that left Kahlo with permanent bodily pain and Modotti’s photogenic beauty, which turned her into an object of desire for the male gaze (notably Edward Weston’s), Mulvey and Wollen aimed at blurring the polarisation between the private and the social, and the personal and the political, which immediately framed the reception of Kahlo’s paintings and Modotti’s photographs. Indeed, this was a moment in time when concepts such as “the personal as political” and “the significance of the body to representation” had not yet “become clichés rather than rallying cries, unchallenged norms rather than active sites of debate,” to borrow from Marsha Meskimmon’s recent account of the legacy of 1970s Western feminism in the contemporary art world.21 Mulvey and Wollen posited their work within a feminist framework whose critique of the Western canon had employed a two-folded method;

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on the one hand it initiated “a process of archaeological excavation” in order to uncover women artists omitted by art history and on the other conducted a critical examination of the hierarchy between high art and applied arts.22 Thus far, the curatorial agenda clearly corresponded to those tactical moments in feminist art history when feminists encountered the canon as a structure of exclusion, subordination, and domination.23 However, the exhibition distanced itself from both the transhistorical category “women artists”—homogenizing and ghettoizing women into a parallel art history—and the ideological label “Woman Artist”—as the exception from the male rule. Therefore, in its historical context, the questions raised in and through Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti were a timely intervention in the then current debates on women, art and feminism.

Montage As mentioned above, Mulvey and Wollen described their method of juxtaposing Kahlo and Modotti with reference to montage techniques in the cinema. Hence, there is no surprise that in the short film that accompanied Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti the use of montage is a predominant method besides further Brechtian strategies such as the disruption of narrative and the use of different forms of imagery— artworks, photographs, maps, and scenes from documentary, amateur, and feature film. As the catalogue, the film is divided into thematic sections— history, biography and the body—that are further divided into subsections. Thus “History” includes scenes from the Mexican civil war and revolution and Mexican “popular life and culture” as well as accounts on the artistic production of Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti. Within and between the sections of the film, however, there is no linear progression, but an accumulation of separate moments that emphasise the construction of the storyline rather than deceptively masquerading its fictive character in a coherent narrative—although it should be added that the voice-over might serve unifying effect. Nevertheless, by disrupting the narrative into a montage of scenes the film clearly relates to the reception of Brecht’s theories and practices disseminated through Screen.24 Within each main section of the film there are sequences where the art of Kahlo and Modotti are compared and contrasted. In these scenes, a selection of still images of the one artist’s artworks is shown in sequence while the voice-over relates them to a specific theme in the film— roots/movement, inward/outward, injury/beauty. Then the sequence of images is rewinded, before images of the other artist’s work are similarly

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introduced. This peculiar repetitive rewinding—the images are flashing by as if using a slide projector—is yet another way of disrupting the narrative. Moreover, it might be added that any art historian who has been trained before the introduction of digital images clearly recognises the allusion to the slide projections that formerly accompanied the oral narratives of (mostly canonical) art history conveyed in class at the university. Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti—the exhibition, the catalogue and the film—located the artists in a shared space of social, cultural and political specificity and thus disrupted the progressive narrative of canonical art history in favour of a montage of situated moments. By positioning the artistic practices of Kahlo and Modotti in the context of the cultural revival of the Mexican Renaissance—the progeny of the Mexican revolution— and a broader field of art and politics, the curators critically intervened in the Master Narrative of avant-garde art, its gendered biases and its extremely limited spatial extension. The Brechtian strategies employed in the curatorial work and the politically motivated contextualization, clearly demonstrated how the understanding of any artwork depends on the questions asked and the contexts employed in the analysis. However, as Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson have insightfully pointed out, contextualization too inevitably involves selections and omissions.25 There is no such thing as a “natural” or logical context for the art historian or curator to mobilise. To the contrary, the anachronistic dimension inherent in writing and curating art history—the object in all its historicity is present, but its past is inevitably lost—anchors the (textual, visual and/or spatial) narrative, its form, content, and proposed interpretations in its own discursive moment. Hence, looking back from the 2010s at Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti is as much revealing of Mulvey and Wollen’s situated theoretical framework and political agenda as it is of the artistic practices of Kahlo and Modotti. Thus, for all its merits, Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti also give rise to critical questions and dilemmas for today’s feminist curators and art historians, at least for this one. Finally, therefore, I want to briefly discuss some of the more pertinent problematic issues that relate to the curatorial concept of Mulvey and Wollen, but also to point out how and why the methods employed still might be of relevance for future feminist interventions.

Disturbing effects To begin with, in the discursive framework of the exhibition, it becomes clear that even if Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti effectively undermined the conception of “women’s art” as a coherent grouping, for obvious

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reasons it relied on second-wave feminist theories which uncritically accepted the category of “women” as the subject of feminism.26 The determinism of statements in the catalogue, such as “what they wanted to do and what was possible for them to do, their desires and limitations, were defined by the fact that they were women,”27 not only implies that we know what “women” are but also installs gender as a primary category for subjective and social identification. Moreover, the juxtaposition of Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti undeniably operated with dichotomies, hence unavoidably reinforcing a referential framework where interpretation and meaning production only seems to occur through binary propositions (this is most palpable in the conceptual pairings—“the interior and the exterior” and “roots and movements”—in the catalogue and the film). Hence, there is a tendency in the discursive framework of the exhibition, perhaps unavoidably, to reinforce polarities for the sake of the argument—even if the purpose is to blur those same polarities. Without commentary or explanation, the exhibition catalogue includes affirmative texts on Kahlo’s and Modotti’s work by Diego Rivera, Carleton Beals, Marti Casanovas, Pablo Neruda, André Breton, and Alejandro Gómez Arias. Thus the discursive framework of the exhibition adopted a patrilineal rhetoric, employing legitimation “through the father” in order to further substantiate the claim to cultural significance attributed to Kahlo and Modotti.28 Indeed, this objection later was raised by Mira Schor against Griselda Pollock’s promotion of the adherence to Brechtian strategies for feminist avant-garde practices in the above mentioned essay. Schor justly pointed out […] the ambiguities and ironies of relying so heavily on a male system to validate a feminist practice. In this significant example of feminist avantgarde canon formation, the woman artist is still subsumed to her megafather.29

In addition to this, Joan Borsa has pointed out that in relation to Mulvey and Wollen’s analysis of the political location that Frida Kahlo’s images occupy, they allude to […] a highly developed language of signs and signification which within a contemporary theoretical framework takes us into the realm of semiotics, psychoanalysis and particularly the female masquerade.30

Borsa’s point is that Kahlo’s work—just as Modotti’s, I would like to add—was produced outside a consciously feminist framework, hence imposing

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[…] specialized and centralized discourses on Kahlo’s margins seems like another exercise in colonialization, an act that would tell us more about the authority of the canon and avant-garde practice than about Kahlo’s work.31

Whether one agrees with Borsa’s conclusion or not, she reminds us of the importance of critical awareness concerning how we position the subjects and objects of our study, whom are we speaking of, for and to. However, in spite of the dilemma that the exhibition’s adoption of binary models and its dated theorization of gender and intersectional identifications might cause for today’s feminists, its merit as a radical intervention persists. Arguably, its critical juxtaposition and its montage of moments offer a mode of thinking that still might be of strategic relevance. Not as prescribed strategy, I must stress, but as a model to build on in line with Amelia Jones’s proposition of a parafeminist way of thinking and doing feminism, where parafeminism is understood as […] a conceptual model of critique and exploration that is simultaneously parallel to and building on (in the sense of rethinking and pushing the boundaries of, but not superseding) earlier feminisms.32

Indeed, if, as Dorothee Richter proposes, a feminist demand on curating would be to create disturbance through the image and the display in the encounter with the viewer,33 then unexpected juxtapositions and montages that allow for situated in-depth analyses still might hold the potential of creating disturbing effects. Suffice it to remind of the Second Museum of Our Wishes project at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm 2007–2009, where artworks of women artists were purchased in order to “fill gaps” in the museum’s collection of modernist art. Here, the resulting juxtaposition of artworks by men and women modernists on the walls in the museum occasionally relied on formal similarities, thus installing the women modernists as feminist tokens by way of mere mimetic qualities—i.e. they seemed to ratify the established stylistic isms of the male canon.34 In comparison, Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s decision to juxtapose paintings by Frida Kahlo and photographs by Tina Modotti is mindblowing.

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Notes 1

Moreover, as Joanne Heath has recently pointed out, Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti was part of a series of explicitly feminist exhibitions held in Britain during the 1980s and a detailed analysis of the curatorial strategies of these exhibitions would contribute to a more comprehensive historiography of feminist theory and art practice at the time. See: Joanne Heath, “Women Artists, Feminism and the Museum: Beyond the Blockbuster Retrospective,” Feminism Reframed: Reflections on Art and Difference, ed. Alexandra M. Kokoli, (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 32. 2 Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, “Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti,” in Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti, ed. Mark Francis (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1982), 7. 3 Ultimately, this might be the function of every critical intervention in canonical Art History. Griselda Pollock puts it this way: “In the end, all our stories will be just that: stories we tell ourselves, narratives of retrospective self-affirmation, fictions of and for resistance that are, nonetheless, answerable to a sense of the real processes of lived and suffered histories”. Griselda Pollock, “Introduction to the Routledge Classics Edition,” in Vision and Difference: Feminism, femininity and histories of art, new ed. (London & New York: Routledge, 2003), xviii. 4 Mulvey and Wollen, “Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti,” 10. 5 See Peter Wollen, “Manet: Modernism and avant-garde,” Screen 21, no. 2 (Summer 1980): 15–26, doi:10.1093/screen/21.2.15. 6 Still today, Mulvey’s text is the most read article of Screen magazine ever. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 6–18, doi:10.1093/screen/16.3.6. Cp. further Griselda Pollock, “Screening the seventies: Sexuality and representation in feminist practice—a Brechtian perspective,” in Vision and Difference: Feminism, femininity and histories of art, new ed. (London & New York: Routledge, 2003), especially 215–226. 7 Pollock, “Screening the seventies,” 226. 8 Not least in relation to Brecht’s theories on the crucial function of the spectator as an active participant that completes the work, it would have been interesting to examine the spatial organisation of the exhibition and how it positioned the spectator in relation to the artworks of Kahlo and Modotti. 9 I have consulted the catalogue in both its English and Swedish version. The English version is more lavishly illustrated, the Swedish version, though, includes a list of the works on display. Mark Francis, ed., Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1982); Frida Kahlo och Tina Modotti (Stockholm: Kulturhuset, 1982). 10 The archival documentation of the Stockholm version of the exhibition is in Kulturförvaltningens arkiv, Stockholm, Kulturhuset 1972–2013, Utställningshandlingar 1982, and includes press releases, plan of the exhibition, and exhibition reports. Unfortunately there are no photographs of the display. Reviews of the exhibition

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were published in all major Swedish daily papers. 11 Eva Zetterman, Frida Kahlos bildspråk—Ansikte, kropp & landskap: Representation av nationell identitet, diss. Gothenburg University (Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2003), 257. 12 Amelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A history and theory of identification and the visual arts (London & New York: Routledge, 2012), 20. 13 The standard work here is Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds., Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993). Cf. also e.g.: Riitta Konttinen, Konstnärspar (Helsingfors: Schildt, 1991); Margareta Gynning, ed., Konstnärspar: Kring sekelskiftet 1900 (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, 2006). 14 Mulvey and Wollen, “Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti,” 9. 15 Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, “Fifteen years of feminist action: From practical strategies to strategic practices,” in Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970-1985, eds. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock (London: Pandora Press, 1987), 64. 16 See e.g. Cecilia Stam, “Leve livet!,” Stockholms-Tidningen, December 3, 1982; Lisbet Ahnoff, “Frida Kahlo—mexikansk kvinnokonstnär långt före nya kvinnokonstens framväxt,” Göteborgs-Tidningen, December 5, 1982; Asta Bolin, “Människa i Mexiko,” Svenska Dagbladet, December 7, 1982; Bengt Olvång, “Kvinnokonst som ställer heroismen på sin spets,” Aftonbladet, December 9, 1982. 17 The ideological notion of the Great Master and its gendered implications has been the subject of astute critical analyses by feminist art historians and need not be rehearsed here. Suffice it to mention two seminal works: Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” ARTnews 69, January 1971, 22–39, and Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses. Women, Art, and Ideology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981). 18 I have discussed this kind of strategic canonicity in more detail in my essay “Centripetal Discourse and Heteroglot Feminisms,” in Feminisms is Still Our Name: Seven Essays on Historiography and Curatorial Practices, eds. Malin Hedlin Hayden and Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing) 85–103. 19 Mulvey and Wollen, “Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti,” 10. 20 Ibid., 9. 21 Marsha Meskimmon, “Chronology through Cartography: Mapping 1970s Feminist Art Globally,” in WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, ed. Lisa Gabrielle Mark (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 2007), 323. 22 Mulvey and Wollen, “Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti,” 9. This twofolded method refers to what Griselda Pollock has described as feminist art history’s first and second encounters with the canon. See Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (London & New York: Routledge, 1999). 23 Pollock, Differencing the Canon, 23-25.

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24 Stephen Heath, “Lessons from Brecht,” Screen 15, no. 2 (1974): 103–128, doi: 10.1093/screen/15.2.103, see especially 121–124. 25 Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, “Semiotics and Art History,” The Art Bulletin 73, no. 2 (June 1991), 176–180. 26 For a critique of “women” as the subject of feminism, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, (London & New York: Routledge, [1990] 1999), 3–8. 27 Mulvey and Wollen, “Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti,” 17. 28 On patrilinearity, see Mira Schor, “Patrilineage,” Art Journal 50, no. 2, (Summer 1991), 58–63. 29 Schor, “Patrilineage,” 63. 30 Joan Borsa, “Frida Kahlo: Marginalization and the critical female subject,” Third Text 4, no. 12, (1990), 32, doi:10.1080/09528829008576276. 31 Ibid., 33. 32 Amelia Jones, Self/Image: Technology, representation and the contemporary subject (London & New York: Routledge, 2006), 213. 33 Dorothee Richter [in Conversation with False Hearted Fanny], “Feminist Demands on Curating,” in Women’s:Museum: Curatorial Politics in Feminism, Education, History, and Art/Frauen:Museum. Politiken des Kuratorischen in Feminismus, Bildung, Geschichte und Kunst, eds. Elke Krasny and Frauenmuseum Meran (Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 2013), 96. 34 For a critical appraisal of the Second Museum of Our Wishes project, see Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe and Malin Hedlin Hayden, “A Serious Suggestion: Give up the Goat: Art Collections and Feminist Critique in Sweden,” in Politics in Glass Case: Feminism, exhibition cultures and curatorial transgressions, eds. Angela Dimitrakaki and Lara Perry (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 66–83.

CHAPTER SEVEN WOMEN ARTISTS@HOME OR WHY ARE THERE STILL NO EQUALITY-MARKED COLLECTIONS?

MALIN HEDLIN HAYDEN The many exhibitions of the last decade focusing feminist art in grand scale with ambitions to seriously think through the status, implications, and locations of feminisms and art, have already received much critical attention both scholarly and art critically, in texts as well as addressed at various art history conferences.1 The focus here is, however, limited to the so-called “exhibition-collection” elles@centrepompidou: Women artists in the collection of the Musée national d’art modern, Centre de création industrielle at the Musée national d’art moderne (Mnam), Paris, 2009– 2010, which was claimed as not dealing with either feminisms or issues of gender but on the history of 20th art. The aim was to state that the “representation of women versus men is, ultimately, no longer important. Proving it is another matter”: yet a “minimal requirement”.2 In her introductory essay, entitled “elles@centrepompidou: addressing difference,” curator Camille Morineau states that: “The way an event is inscribed in history can sometimes suffice to change the course of history”.3 The method by which history would be led into another course was to excavate the collection—including its storage—in order to relocate the gendered relationship between on display and in storage; that is, changing history by a temporary relocation of art works. My interest here is twofold: to address the difference between an exhibition and a visual re-arrangement of a collection, and to consider further the ideas regarding the different notions of “women,” sex, and gender as they are employed in the context of elles@centrepompidou. It is the theoretical framework and claims that surface by and through the concepts engaged and, moreover, how and what these come to mean in relation to this particular context that are my interests in the following. Since exhibition catalogues are what remain after these events, functioning henceforth as documentation, archive, source of information, and where the introductions operate as the instance where aims, ambitions, working

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processes, and theoretical and ideological grounds in the making of shows are presented, it is a rewarding way of addressing the presumed (or desired) outcomes (i.e. possible long-term effects) of an exhibition/display event. In short: this is the site where the agenda of the event is conveyed.4 The catalogue is, needless to say, also the location where the essays as particularly commissioned texts theoretically and ideologically frame the event—which is the reason why I turn specifically to the texts. Furthermore, I depart from a presumed split between short term curatorial productions taking place in present tense and long term agendas aiming for severe changes regarding visual representations of a collection manifested as art history “on display.” Location is indicative, most notably as a marker of narrative hence ideological consequences; therefore the relation between on display and in storage is emphasized in the following. Signed representations (i.e. works of art) have, as it seems, their proper (or “naturalized”) site either in the storage or at display, which is why the implications of gender afflicting basic definitions of both art and feminism is of importance. Therefore, “@” will play both a rhetorical and, hopefully, a strategic sign for re-thinking this particular relation between display and storage, gender parity and feminisms. That is, @ signifies both location and direction. This is yet another difference of emphasizes and meaning, since “@” as it is employed by the producers of this display event signifies works of art as simply part of the Mnam collection.

history@the collection With reference to Linda Nochlin’s essay “Why have there been no great women artists?,” of 1971, museum director Alfred Pacquement states that: […] it would seem today that the world of artistic creation has changed, that there is an impressive number of “great women artists”, so many that it is possible to unfold a full and entire history of art with “elles”. A history about which there is nothing feminine at all, and yet women artists’ artistic practice has been imprisoned and caricatured in that for a long time. This is the wager of “elles@centrepompidou”.5

elles@centrepompidou was planned to be on view for about a year, but as it turned into a real blockbuster it was prolonged for almost one more. In total, more than 500 works by 200 artists were on view during its extended timespan. It was continuously re-arranged during the time-span of this particular display relocation.6 Pacquement writes:

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The space in fact is not sufficient: we have planned to renew the presentation as time goes on so as to present other works, absent at the time of inauguration. And yet only one quarter of the collection’s women artists will thus be presented. This “over-representation” [sic] compared to usual exhibitions (perfectly deserved, it is true) is in no way artificial [sic] but truly translates the sizeable presence of women artists in the arts of the last fifty years.7

Both Pacquement and Morineau thus point out that all the works shown at the occasion of elles@centrepompidou belong to the museum. This is why it was not as much an exhibition as a “re-arrangement” of the proper collection. Important is thus that already were these art works chosen, purchased, donated, and hence there at the museum.8 It is thus the already @ that distinguishes a display event under the heading collection from that of a temporary display event such as a show; since no art work had to be borrowed from the outside of the museum in order to “rewrite history.” However, there is a crucial paradox at play here; the aim of re-location was to state that the history of art of the 20th and 21st centuries can be as adequately told by art produced by women-only as it has been told in previous (but also) sex-biased narratives and yet there was simultaneously an ambition to “change the course of history,” to “rewrite history,” and to “update and explicating history”.9 It is declared—as a rhetoric question— that there is “now sufficiently varied and numerous” women artists to stage this narrative from a distinctly separating perspective: the women only perspective.10 But then, what is history? Morineau uses both the words documentation and history when speaking about the aims of this project. They seem to function as synonyms in her text: that is, that history equals documentation. In that sense it would logically follow that if the history (as a narrative) remains the same despite the change of documents whereby it is narrated, then history turns out to be precisely something defined and handled as already there @. However, these words are not synonymous. The historical documents in this context are the art works in the Mnam collection, whereas the agents are all those individuals who in one way or another were engaged in the events of the past where these same documents circulated. Then, one needs to ask: can history be factual? Can history be found and/or true? Can history operate as an indexical representation of the past? And: if all the documents/artworks upon which one is to understand the past are not only changed but exchangeable—can there still be anything like history? Would it not simply rather be a haphazardly emanated heap of mere things? The point is, that not only were there a precisely planned unpacking of “things” from the Mnam storages but also

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a method of how to unpack them: by way of acknowledging categories and themes. Which mean involvement of theory, selection, evaluation et cetera. That is, history does involve methods of structure as well as specific choices: also in this context. History not only demands interpretations, it is a narrative mode of understanding the past. Documents are what most historical narratives depart from, but if one constructs a linear—perhaps even a progressive—historical narrative then the links between the documents, the causes and effects constructed thereby, are due to interpretations along the line of the what of the narrative one is investigating. This means that a historical narrative is never the same as neither “the past” nor the sum of the documents invoked. Still, it has to depart from a chosen set of documents of the past: i.e. a particular mode of procedure. And this is one of the problematic instances with elles@centrepompidou; the paradox of claiming the same narrative content, the same history yet changing who and what inhabits this conceptual site. A crucial aspect of difference is that I acknowledged history as a narrative construction and not as a reconstruction of past events. Therefore, history of art is defined as a practice always and inevitably ideologically charged by, for example, gendered aspects and a specific notion of art; the particular events and agents inscribed hence engaged in a historical narrative always affect the content of that narrative. Yet I make no claim that this is an authoritative or imperative employment of history—only that this is the one I work with.11 Thus, the paramount change regarding history—that is, the practice of this narrative format—is that it depends on who speaks it and from what position. The poststructuralist (in general terms) take on position is that it is unavoidably marked hence specifically performing ideas, ideology, politic, class, gender, race et cetera. History in this sense, then, can never remain the same—as a narrative that is, not as the past—if the agents, objects, and events of which it tells are changed. Whereas exchangeability in its extreme implies universalism and status quo no matter what documents are engaged, history as practice performed from, for example, a feminist position has entailed that what instantiates a particular history (as e.g. the history of abstract painting) operates as difference. As nothing can be documented in its entirety (since, in that scenario, one has to stipulate where “entirety” begins and ends) one needs categories and processes of selection. Neither can everything be turned into “history” because history is simply not the same, or synonymous to, the past. And only if history is a narrative mode is it possible to employ it in order to cause change, or at least to suggest future changes. Or: to keep status quo (which is defined as

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an existing state or condition that remains the same; that is, that despite options for change these are not activated). Status quo as the framing idea of the paradoxically claimed re-writing of the history of 20th century Western art, furthermore, relates to ideas of equality and gender parity. Consequently, it also implies that which agents are voiced in a historical narrative make agency obsolete. This is the logic of exchangeability and status quo in this particular context. The problem of the “re-writing” thus returns: Which history is it that this particular display event was to re-write? I am actually uncertain here. However, from the perspective of the curatorial team working with elles@centrepompidou, there might not be a troublesome paradox here. In the commissioned essays by Éric Fassin and Élisabeth Lebovici respectively, it becomes evident that history, like the concept of gender and theories of feminisms, is understood and employed, generally, from perspectives and aims rather different from those I am advocating here (and which are “general” in my own scholarly context).12

Women versus elles and the problematic concept of gender Despite the pronounced pretension to move beyond both feminism and questions of whether or either/or sex and gender are relevant in a contemporary French/art context, these issues are manifest in the context of elles@centrepompidou. Part of the disagreements concerning notions of sex and gender as well as history—about what they mean, their analytical usefulness, and the issue of their different ideological location—obviously have national implications too. This means that my reading is marked as a foreigner’s position; a conceptual site (marked by ideology, culture, gender et cetera) which circumscribes my present thinking. In the essay “Gender in representation” the French sociologist Éric Fassin notes that authors who have no “clear sex”—as for example J.K. Rowling did not appear to have for some time, before it became know that behind those initials was a “woman writer”—are always (reflexively) assumed to be male. But when one learns that the signature is a woman’s the work signed is read differently.13 If reading differently comes as an impulse teased by the now clearly and also specifically gendered signature, then elles@centrepompidou cannot be read as the same historical narrative as the collection does otherwise, since also the producer of this narrative will thus read agents and objects, i.e. signatures, in diverging ways. Fassin writes that “the sex of art is inscribed, not only in its production, but in its reception as well”.14 But “we” already know

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this, right? In trying to understand the paradox of claiming sex as of no importance regarding who and what are, or are not, significantly historicized while in conjunction with a completely sex-biased display event, I will address a few texts not part of this exhibition catalogue.15 In the article “A double-edged sword: sexual democracy, gender norms, and racialized rhetoric”, Fassin explicate the usage but also an assertion of the superfluous incorporation of gender/genre (the French word for both gender and semantic difference) in French vocabulary.16 In 2005, in France, “the state committee in charge of terminology published an official recommendation…against what was labelled an ‘abusive use of the term’” gender (“alien to French culture”), as it was used in media, administrative documents, and sociological writings.17 The motive was that the notion “sex” (sexe) suffices when addressing issues concerning gender parity—even when these are recognized as a cultural (and not a naturally given) sort. Hence, all differences are addressed—and possible to solve, as it seems—by dealing with the two (naturally given, i.e. biological) categories men and women. Fassin agrees with the idea that there certainly are instances when sexes are adequate when addressing “issues of equality between men and women”. His point is however that even if “‘gender’ is often used to mean ‘sex’, and if indeed that word is sufficient in most cases” there are also situations when “‘gender’ does not mean ‘sex’ and when ‘sex’ just won’t do”.18 Replacing one word with another consequently opens for replacing “one question with another, thus obscuring that they are intricately and intimately related”. The insistence is that words, like concepts, matter. Not all situations where, for example, disagreements surface are negotiable with the word sex: gender demands something else, perhaps even more. This division, with its political and ideological implications of difference, is, regretfully, a too comprehensive debate to do any justice to here. Still, in the present context there is particularly two issues where this opposition between words and concepts are of further interest; the idea of universal equality regarding the two sexes—which I will juxtapose to exchangeability—and what it means to not only re-write history but to work for serious and long-lasting changes concerning visual representations of narratives of art. “Gender is rejected as an alien to French culture” and rather regarded as particularly “American”, writes Fassin.19 When gender is used, in France, most often as a synonymous to sex, it has therefore nothing of the political, or subversive, critical potential as it does in its Anglo-American pronunciation. In her article “The difficulties of gender in France: reflections on a concept” Michèle Riot-Sarcey writes that imported concepts like gender are widely rejected by French historians.20 However, .

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according to Fassin, this has changed not least since Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble was translated to French in 2005. Trying to understand why a politicized notion of gender—and therefore also of sexe—is not an issue to work with and from, but rather as a term of no real significance in the present context of elles@centrepompidou, I need to, even if briefly, turn to Joan Scott’s writing on historical productions of sex, feminists, and equality. In relation to France, Scott has discussed the notion of the two universal values that are of absolute importance to France as a nation and culture: the universal human rights and the universal sexual difference respectively.21 Morineau refers to Scott when writing about “the French paradox”. The important point made by Scott is that, historically, there was a hierarchy between the two: sexual difference scored higher than the human rights universalism. That is, human rights (which involved “citizenship” in Scott’s book) were (are) universally attached to the notion of man hence the mâle sexe, whereas sexual difference was (is) universal since it is biological. Human rights are thus based on a biological separation of humans already performed—a way of thinking in dichotomies and paradoxes that Scott—and Butler too—has deconstructed successfully. The paradox at play: in order to claim citizenship, women had to claim that the biological difference, from which they protested as a group of humans, did not have any significance in relation to laws stating rights.22 The two sexes were then, and seem still, to be understood as of complementary natures, and if there were (are) sex-biased fields in society then these reflect natural—i.e. biological—differences. Scott writes: Are women the same as men? And is this sameness the only basis upon which equality can be claimed? Or are they different and, because or in spite of their difference, entitled to equal treatment? Either position attributes fixed and opposing identities to women and men, implicitly endorsing the premise that three can be an authoritative definition for sexual difference. As a result, sexual difference is taken to be a natural phenomenon that must be reckoned with but that cannot itself be altered, when in fact it is one of those indeterminate phenomena (others are race and ethnicity) whose meaning is always in dispute.23

The historically “irresolvable dilemma” for understanding and politically engaging in equal rights also for “women” is presented as two major trajectories within French feminism by Scott. In short, this is a question of how to understand the individual in relation to sexual difference; in terms of an “abstract individual” where sexual difference is irrelevant, or the

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individual which is always already marked by sexual difference (and refuses “making masculinity the norm”).24 Returning, then, to the context of elles@centrepompidou where the paradox of the simultaneously claimed sexual difference (as a sex-biased display empowers) and universal equality (turning, here, individual artists and their signed works into completely exchangeable historical agents and documents) is emphasized. With the temporary re-arrangement of the collection, the museum wanted to show, Morineau states, that “the end result […] seeks to be universal despite that criterion” of sex.25 If I understand this correctly, this would mean that here the human rights scores higher—that sexual difference should have no say in how the collection is displayed: that there is no significant historical difference between male and female artists. In Scott’s analysis this implies to follow the Beauvoirian feminist trajectory, which disposes sexual differentiation in favour of the abstract individual.26 Can discarding gender—which is a concept that is not immune to history and politics—today work as a convincing, or adequate, perspective explaining why the number of works by women artists are fewer in the museum’s collection, and why particularly sexed signatures are relevant? The aim was not to show that there simply are women artists—neither to “produce a feminist event”. Instead, other viewpoints than (the) purely sex-biased ones were highlighted. The display event was arranged into themes (which is, by the way, also a way to narrate by way of categories) employed in order to reveal that elles@centrepompidou was not primarily about art by women artists, but still that they (too) have produced art works qualifying to all the main art movements of the past 100 years. Again: where is the re-writing located? Except for the signatures of the objects that the writing is about, which are both emphasized as such and argued to bear no importance? What I think this was then, was a collection-like display event, aesthetically that is, since museum collections are often arranged by themes and movements (a room with cubist paintings, a wall with abstract painting, a floor with minimalist objects and so on) and where “information” ranks higher than problematizing aspects. Relocations of signed objects acknowledges that display and storage are equal locations, and that relocations do not alter either information or historical narrative @centrepompidou. This display event was a curatorial project that “once-and-for-all” contrived to demonstrate that this (sex-biased) display of works by women artists-only would lead to a situation where one can finally avoid this kind of ghettoization and stop counting visual representation in percentage. That is, a situation where sex categories are no longer relevant. Logically, this

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line of argument means that differently gendered signatures are of no importance when the status quo of a specific historical narrative and trajectories are to remain intact. Returning to the inherent paradox with this display event implies, however, that this logic is not as much contested as it is cancelled; a rewriting is claimed yet not, the sex of artists are of no importance yet this display event was completely sex-biased. In terms of history, this implies that the same story, and not a rewritten one, can be produced no matter what the sex of the signatures tells us: because, according to the line of argument referred to above, it is universal. What is universal is in fact the narrative of Western art of the last one hundred years. This is where the sex-biased strategy comes in: elles@centrepompidou is only a “gendered phase” according to Morineau. The paradox is this: the only way to come to terms with inequality and to speak in Universalist terms is to claim the floor not as women but as humans. The crux, as always with feminisms, is to speak of equal rights not in the name of woman but from the perspective of difference as not a sufficient “reason” for subordination. By not speaking from a feminist position it seems, to me, that with the elles@centrepompidou they were trying to simply omit the gendered aspects and obstacles… As if, if there is only one sex on view—so to speak—then this sex can and must speak for all of us. And, perhaps only then. The category woman—even women artists—contains so many differences—a multiplicity in fact—that it simultaneously makes itself obsolete. This is stated by Morineau as well. And as such it can represent the entire collection. At least temporarily. But the crucial problem is that Morineau seems to know what she is talking about: women, women artists. Yet, the concept of woman is not questioned anywhere. Acknowledging this as a historical category is not addressed, which would, however, be to talk about gender, and not only sexual difference or sex-biased practices of display. Morineau is certain that the display event of only women artists will matter also after the closing and re-hanging when works by male artists are let back into the galleries. In addition, it will—for the first time she says— be possible to make an all-male show. As I understand her line of argument, this is possible because then it has been proven that the sex of agents hence the signatures—nor the objects and documents—really do not matter anymore. Evidently, the desired result was hence to tell the same historical narrative but with different signatures, which, more often than not, are normally located in the storages. The general version (the one also telling about male dominance in the art world) was displaced for a moment in order to tell not another story, but to tell it with different agents and objects. This implies, then, that agents and objects do not interfere in

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any profound way with the historical narrative; exchanging the sex of the art producers was not performed as a critical operation regarding a particular narrative. Yet, categories play a crucial part here since categorical thinking is the foundation—or at least one fundamental aspect—of elles@centrepompidou too; for if not, then why re-locate the collection so radically as to pack up all the works by “male artists”? By packing up particular kinds of signatures while unpacking others one is (I claim and surely not surprisingly) working with gendered categories of signatures. Admitantly, or not. Location and direction matters, as does ones theory of history. Even if the (Beauvoirian) abstract individual was only a temporary guest @centrepompidou—as the return of art works signed by male artists after this display event dominated the walls again— the re-arrangement of 2009 did rewrite history if only temporarily: the visual documents of the period spanned was a clear manifestation that signatures and significance have tectonic impact hence alter that narrative mode called history.

Notes 1

Most recently Hilary Robinson has addressed a number of the larger shows by consequently marking the difference between “feminist art and/or art by women”: Hilary Robinson, “Feminism meets the Big Exhibition: Museum Survey Shows since 2005,” Anglo Saxonica 3, no. 6 (2013): 127–152. Amongst the many larger thematic exhibitions on women’s art and feminist art during the 2000s are: Konstfeminism: Strategier och effekter i Sverige från 1970-talet till idag, Dunkers kulturhus, Helsingborg, Sweden, 2005; WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA, 2007; Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art , The Brooklyn Museum, New York, USA, 2007; Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: 45 years of Art and Feminism, Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain, 2007; Gender Battle, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 2007; REBELLE: Art & Feminism 1969–2009, Museum Voor Moderne Kunst, Arnhem, the Netherlands, 2009; Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria, 2009; Dream and Reality: Modern and Contemporary Women Artists from Turkey, The Istanbul Modern, Istanbul, Turkey. A more recent example focusing art by women artists exclusively is Woman: The Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s, where all the works on display belongs to the Sammlung Verbund collection in Austria: Woman: The Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s, Mjellby Konstmuseum, Halmstad, Sweden, 2014. 2 Camille Morineau, “elles@centrepompidou: addressing difference,” in elles@centrepompidou: Women artists in the collection of the Musée national

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d’art moderne centre creation industrielle, eds. Camille Morineau and Annalisa Rimmaudo (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2009), 13. 3 Morineau, “elles@centrepompidou,” 15. 4 I used a similar perspective in my essay “Women artists versus feminist artists: Definitions by ideology, rhetoric or mere habit?” focusing the Brooklyn Museum show Global Feminisms of 2008. In Feminisms is Still Our Name: Seven Essays on Historiography and Curatorial Practices, eds. Malin Hedlin Hayden and Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing), 57–83. 5 Alfred Pacquement, “Preface,” in elles@centrepompidou: Women artists in the collection of the Musée national d’art moderne centre creation industrielle, eds. Camille Morineau and Annalisa Rimmaudo (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2009), 13. Nochlin returns to this question in the essay “Why have there been no Great Women artists? Thirty years after,” in Women Artists at the Millennium, eds. Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 2006), 21–32. 6 Pacquement, “Preface,” 13. 7 Ibid. 8 In Pacquement’s preface it is stated that works were also given to the museum for the specific occasion of this display event. 9 Morineau, “elles@centrepompidou,” 15. 10 Cp. with Pacquement, who writes that this display event “amounts to a shocking proposal” partly since a “thematic approach” (such as this gender-biased format) implicitly implies the (rhetorical) question “how could simply separating women from men in the area of intellectual creation claim to be a theme?.” Pacquement, “Preface,” 13. However, the word separating is my choice—Morineau does not use it. 11 I discuss the notion of history vs the past at length in my book Video art historicized: Traditions and negotiations (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). There I acknowledge that within recent deconstructive history (and art history) the difference between “history” and “the past” has been thoroughly discussed by several scholars. See e.g.: Keith Jenkins, Refiguring History: New thoughts on an old discipline (London and New York: Routledge, 2003); Keith Jenkins, ed., The Postmodern History Reader (London: Routledge, 1997); Hélène Bowen Raddeker, Sceptical History: Feminist and Postmodern Approaches in Practice (New York: Routledge, 2007); Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” The American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (1986):1053–1075; Mary Sheriff, “Seeing beyond the Norm: Interpreting Gender in the Visual Arts,” in The Question of Gender: Joan W. Scott’s Critical Feminism, eds. Judith Butler and Elizabeth Weed (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 161–186; Richard Shiff, Doubt (London and New York: Routledge, 2008); Alan Munslow, Narrative and History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Willie Thompson, Postmodernism and History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). For narrative theory see also: Jean-Françoise Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A report on

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knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1979] 1984); Hayden White, Metahistory: The historical imagination in nineteenth century Europe (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An essay in Method (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, [1972] 1980); Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, [1983] 1986). For the art historical discourse see Robert S. Nelson, “The Map of Art History,” The Art Bulletin 79, no. 1 (Mar., 1997), 28–40; Carolyn Steedman, “After the archive,” Comparative Critical Studies 8, no. 2–3 (Oct., 2011): 321–340. 12 Éric Fassin, “Gender in representations,” in elles@centrepompidou: Women artists in the collection of the Musée national d’art moderne centre creation industrielle, eds. Camille Morineau and Annalisa Rimmaudo (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2009), 300–303; Élisabeth Lebovici, “Women’s art: What’s in a name?,” in elles@centrepompidou: Women artists in the collection of the Musée national d’art moderne centre creation industrielle, eds. Camille Morineau and Annalisa Rimmaudo (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2009), 276–279. 13 Fassin, “Gender in representation”, 300. 14 Ibid. 15 The easy way to respond to the latter is often performed by a strategy that one could call “gap bridging”; that is, to respond by regulating the percentage difference between differently gendered artists on display yet keeping the Story as intact as possible. See my and Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe’s “A Serious Suggestion: Give up the Goat: Art Collections and Feminist Critique in Sweden,” in Politics in Glass Case: Feminism, exhibition cultures and curatorial transgressions, eds. Angela Dimitrakaki and Lara Perry (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 66–83. 16 Éric Fassin, “A double-edged sword: Sexual democracy, gender norms, and racialized rhetoric,” in The question of gender: Joan W. Scott’s critical feminism, eds. Judith Butler and Elizabeth Weed (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011), 143–158. 17 According to Fassin, this was part of a reaction in the 1990s against Americanism, feminism, and American feminism. Fassin, “A double-edged sword,” 144. The notion of gender is by now “fashionable in France, in particular in academia” and the translation of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble in 2005 was met with enthusiasm. Fassin, “A double-edged sword,” 145. 18 Ibid., 144. 19 Ibid. 20 Michéle Riot-Sarcey, “The difficulties of gender in France: Reflections on a concept,” Gender & History 11, no. 3 (November 1999): 489–498. 21 Joan W. Scott, Only paradoxes to offer: French feminists and the rights of man (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, [1996] 1998). 22 Scott, Only paradoxes to offer. On “woman” as a historical category, see also Denise Riley, Am I that name? Feminism and the category of women in history

women artists@home (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 23 Scott, Only paradoxes to offer, x. My emphasis. 24 Ibid., 173. 25 Morineau, “elles@centrepompidou,” 17. 26 Scott, Only paradoxes to offer, 161–175.

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CHAPTER EIGHT MAJOR GLOBAL RECURRING ART SHOWS “DOING FEMINIST WORK”: A CASE STUDY OF THE 18TH BIENNALE OF SYDNEY: ALL OUR RELATIONS (2012) SIBYL FISHER Please note, this chapter contains the name of an Aboriginal person who is now deceased. The exhibition catalogue for the 18th Biennale of Sydney: all our relations (27 June–16 Sept, 2012) begins with an observation. The Artistic Directors Catherine de Zegher, Belgian curator, and Gerald McMaster, curator of the Plains Cree Nation, Canada, together write in the opening curatorial statement: We are moving on from a century in which the radical in the arts largely adopted principles of separation, negativity and disruption as strategies of change. Based on oppositional thinking, such modernist principles proved tenacious and acted as a default criticality in a world in which the drive to progress became more complicated and the consequences more ambiguous. A changing reality is apparent in a renewed attention to how things connect, how we relate to each other and to the world we inhabit. Art is a part of this growing awareness. Where once there was an emphasis on alienation and distance, there are now concurrent shifts of thinking that are informing the work of artists and writers across the world. These shifts— incipient and partly unformed—are only now beginning to be acknowledged, but are of real significance.1

The Artistic Directors identify and track a shift towards a “changing reality” characterised by interconnectivity and relationality in the twentyfirst century. The ongoing emergence of practices that tune into

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togetherness and commonalities is not portrayed as something altogether new, but as becoming more palpable. Although there is an emphasis on relationality in the catalogue, the exhibition was not (solely) concerned with those practices of the 1990s that comprised the framework of relational aesthetics proposed by French curator Nicholas Bourriaud in his text Esthétique Relationelle, published in 1998 in French, and translated into English in 2002. Grounding his observations in the Althusserian notion of the “materialism of encounter”, Bourriaud proposed that artistic practices of the 1990s were now so radically dependent on, and intimately mediated by historical circumstances or conditions, that it no longer made sense to speak of an object’s autonomy. As a theory of form based on a critique of capitalism, relational aesthetics decoded contemporary art in opposition to capitalism’s destructive effects, which included the reification of human relations in the form of commodity, and processes of alienation from labour.2 Bourriaud redefined form as social and relational, by locating the discursive object of relational aesthetics in the encounter between individuals. He wrote, “the contemporary artwork’s form is spreading out from its material form: it is a linking element, a principle of dynamic agglutination.”3 In other words, relational aesthetics described a move by artists to repair the social bond between people in capitalism. As curator Helena Reckitt argued in her text “Forgotten Relations: Feminist Artists and Relational Aesthetics” in 2013, however, relational aesthetics as a paradigm has selectively highlighted some relations and repressed others.4 The detail amassed in her text reveals that relational aesthetics does not represent the scope of relational practices. Its observations and critical angle have formed a crucial part of the contemporary field, but with certain blind spots, including feminist and artistic practices of relationality that were in fact culturally formative. Relational aesthetics stands therefore as a paradigm that operates within certain limitations. In the 18th Biennale of Sydney, the curators engaged with a range of artistic, theoretical, psychoanalytic and international indigenous forms of knowledge,5 and articulated an expanded concept of relationality. This was not unified or monolithic, but attuned to relations between people and therefore social, but also intercultural, trans-subjective and trans-species. They wrote in the catalogue, The 18th Biennale of Sydney focuses on inclusionary practices of generative thinking, such as collaboration, conversation and compassion, in the face of coercion and destruction.6

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Does this cultural diagnosis have traction? Or is this a curatorial claim designed to produce said shift in culture as much as reflect on it? In one way, these statements could be seen as contentious and idealistic in their insistence on a widespread and renewed awareness of connections and togetherness, in a global climate where it often seems like anything but. For instance, the large-scale recurring exhibition format as the primary mode of the global art circuit has been shown to exemplify and exalt the neo-liberal ideologies of commoditisation, consumerism and competition; functions that undoubtedly compromise the integrity of contemporary art.7 What is the significance of a curatorial emphasis on generative thinking, if the biennale format is ultimately rooted in contemporary capitalism? From another perspective, focussing on collaboration and compassion locally in Australia could be seen as misrecognising the national political context, as the living conditions and political agency of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in some spheres are still being actively held back in some spheres.8 There are strong arguments why the curatorial emphasis on relationality and generative thinking might not echo current political and economic realities. It would be remiss to ignore these possible critiques of the Biennale’s curatorial premise. Equally, however, it would be risky to dismiss the Biennale’s premise as out of touch, on the basis that it does not reflect realities. After all, the statement above does not ignore the problems of the present, but acknowledges coercion and destruction as forces—both historical and ongoing—that are met with practices of generative thinking. Coercive and destructive forces are part of the picture therefore, but do not define the parameters of artistic engagements. In this light, the aim of this chapter is to consider how the Biennale enacts a feminist ethos and/or politics, but not necessarily in the form one might first expect. The driving questions of this chapter are: how did the curatorial premise of the 18th Biennale of Sydney set up feminist work for itself, and how did this premise resonate with the artworks of the Biennale? This moves us beyond which discrete artworks or artists the Biennale showcased, and whether they didactically transmitted feminist content, directly engaged with most iconic of feminist debates, or exhibited a feminist style.9 Instead I shall investigate what feminist work was made possible by the exhibition, through its performative and active potentialities. This line of inquiry is based on the idea that exhibitions invite potentially transformative encounters with artworks, which may restructure relations or recalibrate the visitor’s position in unexpected ways. As art historian Griselda Pollock theorised in 1987, “tactical activities and strategically developed practices of representation [...]

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represent the world for a radically different order of knowledge of it.”10 She explained, It is not, therefore, the fact that activities or representations are undertaken by women which renders them feminist. Their feminism is crucially a matter of effect... [The work] has a political effect as a feminist intervention according to the ways the work acts upon, makes demands of, and produces positions for its viewers.11

In 2012 I visited the exhibition spaces of the Biennale, encountered many of its artworks and participated in their worlds and proposals, familiarised myself with the catalogue and assembled an initial archive of press coverage. I was not sure, however, that the proposed feminist work of the Biennale was, or even still is, consistently self-evident. I was even troubled by a few artworks in the exhibition itself, because they challenged my unacknowledged assumptions of how the embedded feminist ethic would manifest. The outcome was occasionally ambivalent and unsettling. I have come to appreciate, however, that it is sometimes productive to be pushed into a new level of questioning about what feminist work is and can be, than to be recognising an exhibition, or artwork, only for what it confirms. The concept of feminist work is partly inspired by Pollock’s book Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, space and the archive, in which she proposes that rereading the archive is remembering; reassembling the past as an act for a feminist future.12 But it is not a fixing process: it is also inflected with deferral and difference, […] that is the making and unmaking of relational, provisional, necessary but unstable meanings around something deeply central to human selfconsciousness and desire, hence around subjectivity but also central to social, economic and cultural organisation.13

Feminist work also signals labour, a concept which helps to identify the means by which artists and curators may make interventions—material and political—in relation to specific politico-economic conditions. Contemporary art theorist and writer Angela Dimitrakaki and others have drawn our attention to Michael Hardt’s analysis of the new global economy, which is dominated by communication and service industries. Hardt argues that at the “very pinnacle of the hierarchy of labouring forms” is immaterial labour, and in particular affective labour. The kind of affects outlined by Hardt include “a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, passion—even a sense of connectedness or community.”14

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This process is central to understanding contemporary culture, and is in fact addressed in the Biennale catalogue by Hardt himself, Brian Massumi, and others. But my focus is more on experiences of affect which are not necessarily “directly productive of capital.”15 Without disavowing modes of analysis specifically concentrated on capitalism, there are other contributions to feminisms and curating discourse concerned with affect in exhibitions. In a different sense, affect refers us to the feminist psychoanalytic sense of resonances with the “feminine trans-subjective borderspace of the matrix or womb” elaborated by the artist and psychoanalyst Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger. This theoretical elaboration is also inscribed in the Biennale catalogue by de Zegher, and in her curatorial practice more broadly.16 Ettinger articulates the Matrix as a psycho-symbolic signifier that does not define and relegate otherness to the category of negative difference or lack, as in Phallocentric logic whose primary signifier is the Phallus or the One. Matrixial theory metaphorically uses the image of the relationship between the m/Other-to-be and the unborn child, and allows for a relation of co-existence and becoming alongside the becomingother.17 The concept of labour remains vital, however, because in the Biennale, affect in the sense of aesthetic resonances is produced in or alongside the material or physical labour of art-making, and sometimes for visitors who participate in the unfolding meaning of artworks. There is definitely scope for a full and methodical investigation into this aspect of the Biennale, representative of its sites and spaces, however in the space of this chapter it does not seem possible to undertake a comprehensive analysis of the entire exhibition, given its size and scope. Instead I take the opportunity to consider select threads of the Biennale’s concept in relation to a small variety of artworks, out of the more than 200 on display. My reflection is therefore positioned part way between the actual encounter with the works and the exhibition’s spaces in 2012, and archival analysis developed subsequently. I draw primarily on the exhibition catalogue for clarity, however I am alert to its own function as text that may normalise and possibly regulate the encounter with the exhibition and its works. That said, in their catalogue introduction, de Zegher and McMaster explain how a plurality of experiences are integral to the exhibition, and encourage visitors to take their stories home and beyond.18 In the spirit of this wish of the curators, in this chapter I try to personalise and reflect critically on my experiences of the Biennale. The Biennale was structured around four broadly-themed sections in four distinct locations around central Sydney, linked by the Art Walk. At

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the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the section titled In Finite Blue Planet was concerned with the macrocosm and the finite resources of planet earth.19 The fragile materiality of artworks was noticeable with the emphasis on paper, thread, charcoal, water, powder and photographic prints on delicate materials. The section title referenced Blue Planet (2003) by Argentinian artist Jorge Macchi, a small work in which maps of oceans are collaged into a map of the world without land, suggesting Earth seen from afar, or above, as a delicate but beautiful composition. In her catalogue essay “ARC ARE ARK ARM ART... ACT!”, de Zegher asks of Blue Planet, Does this seascape foretell the threatening nemesis of climate change, or acknowledge the precarious beauty of the only planet in our solar system gifted with water and thus with life, in terms we understand?20

Nearby, photographs printed on cotton paper by Brazilian artist Maria Laet, in her work Untitled (Line and Snow) (2010) for example, depicted the act of stitching sand and snow, suggesting a series of delicate but insistent connections between particles and minute places. Work by indigenous artists from Australia and North America further contributed images of strong cultural intimacies with, and understandings of land and water; for instance the late Walpiri artist Dorothy Napangardi’s painting Salt on Mina Mina which shows the journey of the Mina Mina women ancestors across Lake Mackay. Visually there was a resonance between works that use a “bird’s eye view or satellite perspective,” as de Zegher and McMaster suggested in the exhibition text, for example Napangardi’s painting images her country from above. Japanese artist Yuken Teruya’s series of works titled Constellation (2012) was made from paper bags punctured with tiny pinholes through which light shone, “an imagined universe of galaxies in the museum space.”21 In In Finite Blue Planet, a correspondence unfolded whereby such micro- and macro-cosmic images made visible the Lakota saying “as above, as below,” which refers to the “relatedness and sacred order of all things in both realms of earth and sky.”22 De Zegher writes in the catalogue that she and Gerald McMaster took this concept of mirroring “for all to participate in the conceptualisation of each venue and to experience the sensation of a potential harmony and congruence.”23 Continuing the thread of fragility and precariousness, In Finite Blue Planet also attuned the visitor to the destructive effects of colonisation, urbanisation, the accelerated circulation of capital and excessive consumption, state-imposed violence and forced migration, for example visible in Chinese artist Yun-Fei Ji’s nine-metre wide scroll painting The Three Gorges Dam Migration (2009).

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At the Art Gallery of New South Wales, feminist work was detectable in several ways. Women artists were represented proportionately; in terms of “tactical strategies” this remains important.24 Thinking more conceptually however, time-based gestures, collectively slow and emergent, were prioritised by the curators over the spectacular. Likewise larger works were mostly an accumulation of intricate work, rather than singular gestures. Mongolian artist Gao Rong, for example, together with women embroiderers from Inner Mongolia, constructed a life-size version of her grandparents’ apartment from fabric and embroidery. The details of the tidy and loved yet semi-decaying space were so finely stitched that they were almost unnoticeable. Art critic John McDonald noted the Biennale’s unusual emphasis on the artist’s hand when he wrote: [F]or years the tendency for high-profile (and high priced) international art has been for the artist to play the role of designer and factory manager, while the manual labour is done by teams of assistants [...] The problem is that those who never get their hands dirty are missing out on the most exciting part of the creative process. Almost every artist knows the feeling of starting out to make a particular thing, only to find that the work changes form as if it had a will of its own. Revelations occur in the making, not the pre-planning.25

This review highlights the relational process of development between artist and material. Historically, the small, laborious and handmade has also strong relations with the feminine; not by some kind of essentialist association (for example because women are better suited to dainty work than men), but because the historical conditions of their production has often been either domestic or care work done by women. This is recognisably the realm of social relations and labour. At the transsubjective level, these artworks reflect on instances of co-existing compassionately with the other, witnessing the pain and healing of the other in a non-voyeuristic way, whether that other is animal, ecological, spirit, asylum seeker or grieving community. Of course the Biennale institution and sponsorship enabled the commission of the majority of these artworks, but the works arguably resisted the thoroughness and relentlessness of commoditisation in their slow temporalities, and also perhaps speak “in, of and from the feminine” in their focus on the affected, a plurality of others. Next I boarded the ferry to Cockatoo Island up Sydney Harbour, to visit the section titled Stories, Senses and Spheres. Through its convict-era prison buildings and ship-building machinery and dockyards, Cockatoo Island “tells the story of Australia’s development from a penal settlement

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Fig. 8-1. Iris Häussler, He Dreamed Overtime, the 18th Biennale of Sydney: all our relations, 2012. Photo: Sibyl Fisher. Reproduced with kind permission of BildKunst and the artist.

to a maritime industrial nation.”26 Crucially it is not a gallery or museum, although its spaces are relics of the same modernist era in which galleries and museums thrived, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here I wandered through disused tunnels and warehouses where the installed artworks again appeared to visualise relations or work in a reparative mode, in the sense of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of reparative reading.27 Works produced unexpected beauty out of reclaimed consumerist materials, for instance silk cloth dyed in vibrant Fanta, or bright colourful paper decorations out of pistols and machine gun silhouettes. Japanese artist Sachiko Abe worked live at set times for her work Cut Papers #13, cutting volumes of white paper into thin strips which accumulated into swathes. I missed her performances, but glimpsed the room in which she worked, which had masses of fragile threads of papers piled into fluffy heaps on the floor. I stood and watched visitors participate in the work Scar Project (2012) by Montreal-based artist Nadia Myre, an Algonquin member of the Kitigan Zibi Anishnabeg. Together participants sat around a table with the

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artist, and cut and stitched small blank stretched canvases in their own designs, recalling their own past wounds and traumas. I noted depictions of experiences of violence, abuse, and broken relationships, and more ephemeral sentiments and symbolic gestures: a gash in one small canvas, stitched back together; a love heart portrayed broken and then repaired. Scar Project seemed to correspond very clearly, almost literally, with the curatorial focus of the Biennale on interconnectedness and relations in the face of coercion and destruction. It did not feel like a simplistic work by any means, but it resonated with the other artworks in a familiar way. As a wider collaboration, it presented a chance to acknowledge that something feminist, or very similar, might be “at work” in the cumulative and coexisting acts of participants stitching together. I then quite unknowingly experienced an artwork that enfolded me in a fictitious narrative. In the old Superintendent’s House of Cockatoo Island, a half-ordered mess of furniture and research equipment filled rooms alongside strange wax objects and x-rays, sketches, open books and diagrams. Biennale Guides stood by to answer visitors’ questions about the objects, revealing an underlying story of eccentric characters gripped by loss and compulsion. A pest extermination contractor working for a company called Independent Pest Control Sydney had discovered the wax objects in a cave on the island. These had been made by a warden, Fred Wilson, mourning for his departed lover Nelly. Wilson had since gone missing himself. The pest control contractor had reportedly become obsessive in his research on the objects and the warden. I nosed around the house and drank in the atmosphere of clutter, the porous texture of the wax objects, the piles of detailed sketches and study notes. I asked a number of questions of two volunteer guides, to piece together the historical situation that led to such a treasure trove. But I got the feeling I asked one too many questions when a guide led me around the side of the house and explained in quiet tones that the work was a fiction. He told me that the Canadian/German artist Iris Häussler has developed an artistic practice based around the creation and production of characters, stories and archives that she describes as three-dimensional narratives. Even though Häussler’s work, titled He Dreamed Overtime (fig. 8-1), technically harmed nobody, at first I felt the deception was an ethical breech. This was the precise moment when the feminist ethic of togetherness that I had detected in almost every work at the Biennale rapidly unravelled. My initial response was that this artwork misfired. Subsequently however, I was able to consider in more depth the problematic of the work. The seeming stratification of the audience into two types was problematic. On the one hand, those who experienced the installation as a

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curious but plausible history were invited to imaginatively elaborate on the relations between the characters and their others, and perhaps in this broad way sociality was produced. As Michael Hardt has argued […] in the production of affects in the entertainment industry, for example, human contact [and] the presence of others is principally virtual, but not for that reason any less real.28

The same is perhaps relevant for affect in a trans-subjective sense, where the oppositional duality of truth/fiction is less important than participation and engagement with possible others. On the other hand, the privileged minority selected to learn the “truth,” were presented with the artwork’s multiple layers of narrative becoming increasingly visible, but what their meaning might entail was not clear. The psychoanalytic mechanisms of loss, fantasy and repression at play in the lives of the characters, which had seemed to imbue the house and the island with pathos, in fact became of secondary interest to me although no less poignant. Instead of dwelling on the story and the fascinating clutter, I thought more about the artist Iris Häussler and her thinking, and the curators de Zegher and McMaster, and the numerous Biennale guides and their straight faces. I was troubled and I questioned the rationale for this work. It was as if my expectations about what relationality looks like were being undone, rather than confirmed further. I had not considered the idea that I had had expectations or assumptions, or that I had been walking around the Biennale’s sites and participating in its works with a mental checklist, poised to identify relations or a feminist ethos of togetherness when I thought I recognised them. I do not think this had been my approach but Häussler’s work prompted the question of what relations look like, how do we know them when we see them? Who gets to decide what relations are, and whether they are significant or not? On the day, I did not wish to “pop the bubble” for the other visitors who were still deeply involved in the participatory narrative, or about to enter the house and discover it all for the first time. Instead I was struck by their (and my own short-lived) delight and wonder, and the unknown number of instances in which they took their experiences home and told the story of Fred Wilson and Nelly and the obsessive pest inspector to friends and family, spinning further strands in the web. It seemed too carefully-crafted, and moreover not really my business, to undo. The affinity people may have felt for the characters seemed to be at the expense of no one; so long as the engagement with the work can be seen as one story and instance of thought alongside others, not in place of others. To my mind the encounter seemed to transcend novelty value, a

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simplistic illusion or commoditised form, not just because of the depth of entangled minds and objects, but because it is just not possible to preclude the deeper resonances for fellow visitors. Now to draw together a final comment on the 18th Biennale of Sydney. By providing the artists and visitors with a space to explore our capacities for relational ways of thinking and working, the Artistic Directors largely expanded the idea of what feminist work might involve. For me, the Biennale posed the question of where visitors are positioned to enter this conversation or become sensitised to affective encounters. Furthermore this question turned out to be a nuanced one, rather than a given. Artworks that appeared to make simple interventions for me transpired to be thickly layered or densely woven. To return to my question at the beginning of the chapter, I asked whether the curators of the Biennale described relations or produced them. My sense from diverse encounters with select artworks is that sometimes the difference is not so great. Traumas, violence, destruction, decay, and immeasurable losses from the past as lived all seemed to be present in the works, but also actively re-united, re-counted, and repaired in the real time of the works and the exhibition. Does it matter so much if relations are sometimes constructed? Do they desensitise to political realities, or in fact humanise us, and help us tune into others’ losses and pain with a view to healing? Now more than ever I would argue that we need to acknowledge the heterogeneity of feminist strategies, curatorial and artistic, because of the multiple and entangled complexities of our lives, positions, histories, politics. This is not to shut down specific responses, but to think about mobilising on many fronts for the sake of survival.

Notes 1

Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster, “All Our Relations,” in 18th Biennale of Sydney: All Our Relations, eds. Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster (Sydney: The Biennale of Sydney Ltd., 2012), 49. 2 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002), 8–9. 3 Ibid., 21. 4 Helena Reckitt, “Forgotten Relations: Feminist Artists and Relational Aesthetics,” in Politics in Glass Case: Feminism, exhibition cultures and curatorial transgressions, eds. Angela Dimitrakaki and Lara Perry (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 131–156. 5 Regarding terminology, I use indigenous with a small ‘i’ here in the context of international indigenous peoples. In Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait

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Islander Peoples is currently a preferred collective term, although Indigenous is also used. Specific nations and language groups are usually appropriate as well. 6 de Zegher and McMaster, “All Our Relations,” 49. 7 “The Athens Biennial”, Athens Biennial, 2006. http://www.athensbiennial.org/pages/main_en.php. 8 For example see the debates and criticisms around the Stronger Futures policy (2011). 9 Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981); Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe, “Centripetal Discourse and Heteroglot Feminisms,” in Feminisms is Still Our Name: Seven Essays on Historiography and Curatorial Practices, eds. Malin Hedlin Hayden and Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 85–103. 10 Griselda Pollock, “Feminism and Modernism,” in Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970-1985, eds. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock (London: Pandora Press, 1987), 81. 11 Ibid., 93. 12 Griselda Pollock, “What the Graces Made Me Do... Time, Space and the Archive. Questions of Feminist Method,” in Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, space and the archive (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 14. 13 Ibid. 14 Michael Hardt, “Affective Labor,” Boundary 2 26, no. 2 (1999): 96. 15 Ibid., 90. 16 Catherine de Zegher, “ARC ARE ARK ARM ART... ACT!,” in 18th Biennale of Sydney: All Our Relations, eds. Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster, (Sydney: Biennale of Sydney Ltd., 2012), 97–143. 17 Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, “The With-In-Visible Screen,” in Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth Century Art, in, of, and from the feminine (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996), 87–113. 18 de Zegher and McMaster, “All Our Relations,” 49. 19 de Zegher, “ARC ARE ARK ARM ART... ACT!,” 105. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 107. 22 Ibid., 104. 23 Ibid., 104–105. 24 Griselda Pollock, “Feminism and Modernism,” 79– 122. 25 John McDonald, “18th Biennale of Sydney,” Sydney Morning Herald, July 14, 2012. http://johnmcdonald.net.au/2012/18th-biennale-of-sydney-2/. 26 de Zegher, “ARC ARE ARK ARM ART... ACT!,” 131. 27 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 123–52. 28 Hardt, “Affective Labor,” 96.

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CONTRIBUTORS Sibyl Fisher is developing her research and interdisciplinary practice in Leeds, UK, following the completion of her PhD at the University of Leeds on the intersection of care and curatorial practice in the field of contemporary art. Her doctoral research was structured around two case studies, one on the practice of Catherine de Zegher with a focus on the exhibition Inside the Visible (1996), and one on the practice of Brenda L Croft with a focus on fluent, the exhibition held at the Australian Pavilion in the 47th Venice Biennale (1997). Sibyl is co-curator of Past Caring, an exhibition exploring the political, economic and ethical dimensions of care, at Gallery II in Bradford (2014–15). These projects have shaped her current critical interest in care and support for people in the guise of Organisation Development in the corporate context of the National Health Service. Fisher has previously published in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. Doris Guth is an art historian and cultural scientist and is Assistant Professor at the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. Guth is Chairperson of the work group for equal treatment 2001–2008 as well as Member of the university senate and numerous committees. Other academic institutions where she has taught include: Vienna University, University of Applied Arts, Vienna, University of Arts and Industrial Design, Linz, University of Music and Fine Arts (MDW), Vienna, and Leuphana University Lüneburg (Germany). Guth’s research emphasis is Gender and Queer Studies in Contemporary Art and Visual Studies, Love and Feminism, Love in Fine Arts in Early Modern Time, Religion and Gender, Politics of Exhibtion, and Gender Politics in Universities. Guth’s last publications include Kunst.Theorie.Aktivismus. Emanzipatorische Perspektiven auf Ungleichheit und Diskriminierung (ed. with Alex Fleischmann, Bielefeld: transcript 2015) and “Einführung in Gender und Queer Studies,” in: Elke Gaugele und Jens Kastner (eds.), Critical Studies. Kultur- und Sozialtheorie im Kunstfeld (Wiesbaden: Springer Verlag, 2015). Margareta Gynning is Senior Curator in the Department of Communications and Audiences at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, Sweden, where she has worked for the last thirty-five years. Gynning holds a PhD in Art History from Uppsala University (1999) and has been affiliated with the

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Centre for Gender Research and the Centre for Fashion Studies at Uppsala and Stockholm Universities. She is a pedagog and feminist scholar who has been making exhibitions (36), educational programs (in house and online) and published books and articles on various aspects of the visual culture of the 1800s and 1900s. Her publications include Det ambivalenta perspektivet: Eva Bonnier och Hanna Pauli i 1880-talets konstliv, diss. Uppsala University (Stockholm 1999); Pariserbref: Konstnären Eva Bonniers brev 1883-1889, editor (Lund 1999); and “Now and Then: Where surface and body intercept,” in Alexander Roslin, edited by Magnus Olausson (Stockholm 2007). Malin Hedlin Hayden is Associate Professor in Art History at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University. Hayden’s research focuses on historiography with an emphasis on conceptual investigations, gender and curatorial practices in post-war and contemporary international art. Hayden has published extensively on contemporary art in anthologies, academic journals, art magazines and exhibition catalogues. Her publications include Video Art Historicized: Traditions and Negotiations, Ashgate, 2015; Feminisms is Still Our Name. Seven Essays on Historiography and Curatorial Practices, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010, co-edited with J. Sjöholm Skrubbe; Out of Minimalism: The referential cube. Contextualising sculptures by Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor and Rachel Whiteread, Acta Universitatis, Uppsala 2003. She is currently working on the project Rhetorical Feminism: women artists, video art and political beliefs 1970-2010, which aims to scrutinize the conceptual, institutional, ideological and rhetorical implications of gendered and political markings of artists (women artists and feminist artists). Alexandra Schwartz is the founding Curator of Contemporary Art at the Montclair Art Museum. Her exhibition Come as You Are: Art of the 1990s toured around the United States in 2015–16, and is accompanied by a major catalogue from the University of California Press. Previously she was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, where her exhibitions included Mind and Matter: Alternative Abstractions, 1940s to Now and Modern Women: Single Channel at MoMA PS1. Her publications include Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles (MIT Press, 2010), Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, 2010; winner of the Association of Art Museum Curators’ Prize for Outstanding Permanent Collection Catalogue), and Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages by Ed Ruscha (MIT Press, 2002). Schwartz has

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taught at Columbia University, the University of Michigan, Montclair State University, MoMA, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe holds a PhD in Art History from Uppsala University (2007). She is Senior Lecturer and Director of Graduate Studies in Art History at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University. Her research interests include feminist historiography, art and the public sphere, the gendered body in modern art and visual culture, and contemporary exhibition practices. Sjöholm Skrubbe’s recent publications include Nell Walden & Der Sturm (Mjellby konstmuseum, 2015), “Modernism Diffracted” in The Aesthetics of Matter: Modernism, the Avant-Garde and Material Exchange, S. Posman et al. eds. (de Gruyter, 2013), and Feminisms is Still Our Name. Seven Essays on Historiography and Curatorial Practices (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), coedited with M. Hedlin Hayden. She was co-producer of the exhibition Nell Walden & Der Sturm (touring Mjellby konstmuseum, Øregaard museum, and Landskrona museum, 2015–2016). Sjöholm Skrubbe is currently concluding the research project Collaborations: Nell Walden, Der Sturm and the Histories of European Modernism, which addresses questions of the spatial gendering of art’s practices, women’s visual self-presentation, and intersectional structures of power within early modernism and its historiography. Eva Zetterman is Associate Professor in Art History and Visual Studies at University of Gothenburg. After earning her doctoral degree in 2003 with the dissertation Frida Kahlos bildspråk—ansikte, kropp & landskap: Representation av nationell identitet (Frida Kahlo’s Imagery—Face, Body & Landscape: Representation of National Identity), she has worked at Växjö University, Halmstad University College, and Karlstad University. Among recent published articles are “The PST project, Willie Herrón’s Street Mural Asco East of No West (2011) and the Mural Remix Tour: Power Relations on the Los Angeles Art Scene” in Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research (2014), and “Crossing Visual Borders of Representation: Images of ‘Nordicness’ in a Global Context” in Globalizing Art: Negotiating Place, Identity and Nation in Contemporary Nordic Art (2011). Her main research interests are street art and Chicana/o visual culture.

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Osnat Zukerman Rechter is a researcher and lecturer focusing on Israeli art and contemporary curating. She holds a PhD from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research explores and theorizes the development of contemporary curatorship in Israel within international and global contexts. Her work presents the role of curators as cultural agents, exposes the debates vis-à-vis their authority, power, as well as the social, educational and political influence they may exert. Zukerman Rechter has published in academic journals and exhibition catalogues. Her publications include “Yona Fischer: A Dialogue with Now”, in Curator: Yona Fischer (Ashdod Art Museum, 2014); “In Between Past and Future: Time and Relatedness in the Six Decades Exhibitions”, in Studies in Contemporary Jewry 26 (Oxford University Press, 2012); Yacov Rechter, Architect, a book she edited on one of Israel’s most influential architects (Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, 2003. In Hebrew). She currently works on the topic of “grand thesis” exhibitions—thematic group exhibitions based on elaborate and often a-historic theses—and their role in shaping and articulating collective identity.

INDEX 12th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice Biennale . 44 A Turning Point: 12 Israeli Artists, exhibition ................... 42, 46, 47 A Woman Was Raped Here… (Lacy)...................................... 5 Abe, Sachiko ..............................136 Ablusions (Chicago, Lacy, Orgen, and Rahmani) .......................... 4 Abramoviü, Marina ..................... 99 Academy of Fine Arts, Xi’an ...... 83 af Klint, Hilma ............................ 68 Afro-American Women Artists Exhibition, exhibition ............ 22 Albert, Margo .............................. 12 Alexander Roslin, exhibition ........... .........................................83, 84 all our relations, 18th Biennale of Sydney ...................................... .... xvii, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139 Allyn, Jerri .................................... 3 Almaraz, Carlos........................9, 14 Amescua, Michael ....................... 12 Amotz, Dalia ............................... 42 Ancher, Anna .............................. 71 Ancher, Michael .......................... 71 Angelo, Nancy .............................. 3 Antin, Eleanor ............................... 4 Aptaker, Chaim (Atar)............44, 58 Ariadne: A Social Art Network ..... 6 Armstrong, Carol......................... 99 Arp, Hans ...................................106 Arrhenius, Sara............................ 88 Art and Technology, exhibition ....... .........................................15, 16 Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney ......................... 134, 135 Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth ...................................... 40

Art Institutions and Feminist Politics Now, symposium ...... 94 Artfemme ‘75’: An Exhibition of Women’s Art, exhibition........ 15 Artist and Society in Israeli Art 1948–1978, exhibition........... 46 Artists Couples at the turn of the 19th century, exhibition............. .................................. 71, 72, 73 Arts Council of Great Britain .... 101 Asco ... 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 18, 19, 21 Asshole Mural (Asco) .................. 10 Associated Women’s Press, Los Angeles ................................... 2 Aycock, Alice .............................. 95 Baca, Judy ..................7, 8, 9, 10, 23 Bad Girls, exhibition, UK .... xv, 35, 36 Bal, Mieke ................................. 109 Baert, Renee ................................ xii Bar Or, Galia ............................ xiv, .... 41, 43, 44, 45, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61 Barrio Mobile Art Studio, Los Angeles ........................... 12, 13 Baruch, Adam........................ 43, 45 Bauer, Ute Meta .......................... 99 Beals, Carleton .......................... 110 Begin, Menachem ........................ 49 Beguinage of Saint-Elizabeth, Kortrijk.................................. 40 Beijing Film Academy, Beijing ... 83 Bejarano, Guillermo .................... 14 Bell, Vanessa ............................... 71 Bengtsson, Eva-Lena ................... 88 Benn Michaels, Walter ................ 21 Ben-Rafael, Eliezer ..................... 63 Berger, Sally ................................ 99 Beskow, Elsa ............................... 74 Bevan, Sheelagh .......................... 99

162 Bezalel Academy of Arts, Jerusalem .............................. 46 Bickels, Samuel ......................44, 58 Black Arts Council, Los Angeles . 19 Black Mirror, exhibition ............. 22 Blue Planet (Macchi) .................134 Boccalero, Karen ....................12, 13 Boltanski, Luc ............................. 63 Bonnier, Eva...........................68, 69 Borsa, Joan .........................110, 111 Botello, David Rivas ..............11, 12 Bourriaud, Nicholas ...................130 Brecht, Bertolt ..... xiv, 102, 108, 112 Breger, Yossi ............................... 52 Breitberg-Semel, Sara ...xiv, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 57, 59, 60, 61 Bremer, Fredrika ......................... 69 Breton, André .....................101, 110 Bright, Mura ...........................13, 14 Brodsky, Judith K........................ 20 Brody, Sherry ................................. 2 Brooklyn Museum, New York ... 16, 17, 91, 92, 96, 124, 125 Brown, Ami ............................43, 44 Brown, Gaby ..........................43, 44 Bryson, Norman .........................109 Bueno, Carlos .............................. 12 Burdens, Chris ............................... 3 Burton, Johanna........................... 99 Bus Bench Project, Los Angeles . 14 Bush, Kate ................................... 35 Butler, Cornelia (Connie) ......16, 56, 60, 91, 93, 94, 95, 99 Butler, Judith ................ 30, 121, 126 c. 7,500, exhibition ...................... 15 Cabessa, Miriam.......................... 52 Cabrera, Armando ....................... 14 California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), Valencia ............2, 15 Carrasco, Barbara ...................10, 14 Casanovas, Marti ........................110 Casinera, Cecilia ......................... 13 Castellanos, Leonard ..............13, 14 Castro, Isabel ........................7, 9, 14

Index Celant, Germano.......................... 52 Center for Feminist Art Historical Studies, Los Angeles ............... 2 Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow ................................ 35 Centre for Fashion studies, Stockholm University............ 84 Centre Pompidou, Paris ........ xvi, 97 Centro de Arte Público, Los Angeles ........................... 11, 14 Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela ......................... 124 Cervántez, Yreina .................... 9, 13 Chadwick, Helen ......................... 36 Chan, Yenna ................................ 99 Chavoya, Ondine ......................... 11 Chevrier, Jean Francois ............... 43 Chiapello, Ève ............................. 63 Chicago, Judy ........................ 2, 4, 8 Chouinard Art School, Los Angeles ................................... 2 Citywide Mural Program, Los Angeles ................................... 8 Clinton, Hillary............................ 92 Coffin Books (Smith) ..................... 3 Cohen Gan, Pinchas .............. 43, 54 Cohen, Barbara .............................. 5 Cohn Institute, Tel Aviv University ........................ 57, 61 Colomina, Beatriz ........................ 99 Columbia University, New York .......................................... ....................................... xvi, 94 Concordia University, Canada....................................... ............................................ xvii Constellation (Teruya)............... 134 Copeland, Huey ........................... 99 Coppola, Sofia ............................. 83 Cottingham, Laura ........... xv, 36, 37 Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen, exhibition.. 97, 98, 99 Covarrubias, Teresa ..................... 10 Critical Utopia, exhibition .......... 43

Curating Differently: Feminisms, Exhibitions and Curatorial Spaces Cross, Dorothy ............................ 36 Cut Papers #13 (Abe) ................136 D’Souza, Aruna ........................... 99 Dahlerup, Pil ............................... 70 Dalia Amotz: The Dark Land, Fields of Light, exhibition ..... 42 Daly, Mary .................................. 30 Daniel, Marko ........................... xvii Dar, Yehezkel.............................. 63 De drogo till Paris, exhibition .... 68 de la Rocha, Roberto ..................... 9 de Zegher, Catherine ....... 34, 35, 40, 99, 129, 133, 134, 138 Decoy Gang War Victim (Asco) . 10, 11 Deepwell, Katy...................... xii, 40 Deitch, Donna ............................... 8 Delaunay, Robert........................106 Delaunay, Sonia .........................106 Delgado, Sylvia ........................... 10 Derkert, Carlo................... 77, 78, 79 Derkert, Siri................................. 77 Desvergnes, Alain ....................... 54 Dexter, Emma ............................. 35 Dimitrakaki, Angela .... xii, xvii, 132 Dream and Reality: Modern and Contemporary Women Artists from Turkey, exhibition ........124 Drottningholm Palace, Sweden ....... .............................................. 77 Duardo, Guillermo ...................... 14 Duardo, Lisa ................................ 14 Duardo, Richard .....................12, 14 Dunkers kulturhus, Helsingborg...... .............................................124 East Los Angeles Mural Program.. 8 Edson Mitchell, Carol ..................... 2 Efrat, Benny ................................ 45 Efron, Zusia...................... 43, 58, 61 Eilat, Avraham ............................ 54 Eisenman, Nicole ........................ 36 Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum, New York ....xi, 91, 92

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elles@centrepompidou: Women artists in the collection of the Musée national d’art modern, Centre de création industrielle, exhibition ...... xvi, 96, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124 Elsa Beskow: Vår barndoms bildskatt, exhibition ............... 75 Emergence (Smith) ........................ 3 Espace DbD (Doing by Doing), Los Angeles............................. 4 Esparza, Ofelia ............................ 13 Evans, Rachel .............................. 36 Experimental Women in Flux, exhibition .............................. 99 Export, Valie ......................... 29, 30 Fassin, Éric .........119, 120, 121, 126 Fe, Sonya ..................................... 14 Feminist Art Project, US ............. 91 Feminist Art Workers, US ............. 3 Feminist Studio Workshop, Los Angeles ........................... 2, 4, 8 First Supper (after a Major Riot) (Asco).................................... 10 Fischer, Yona ........................ 45, 46 Fisher, Sibyl .............................. xvii Flores, Consuelo .......................... 10 Fondation images et société, Geneva .................................. 79 Four Los Angeles Women Artists, exhibition .............................. 15 Framtidsverkstan, Botkyrka......... 74 Franco, Victor........................ 13, 14 Frankel, Dextra ............................ 15 Friction: I-Body, I-language, I+You, exhibition ............ 42, 52 Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti, exhibition .... xiv, 101, 103, 106, 108, 109, 112 Frontline, exhibition ........ 43, 54, 55 F-Space Gallery, Los Angeles ....... 3 Fusco, Coco ................................. 99 Gaitán, Maria Elena ..................... 10

164 Gallery 707, Los Angeles .............. 2 Gamboa, Diane.......................10, 13 Gamboa, Harry, Jr. .......................... ....................... 10, 11, 14, 15, 18 Gamboa, Karen ........................... 10 Gamboa, Linda ............................ 10 Gamzu, Haim ................... 45, 46, 61 Ganor, Avi................................... 54 Garcia, Margaret ......................... 13 Gaulke, Cheri ................................ 3 Gender Battle, exhibition ....... xi, 124 Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe, exhibition ... xi, 124 Genzken, Isa ................................ 33 Gerber-Talmon, Yonina .............. 63 Gershuni*: A Retrospective, exhibition .............................. 42 Getter, Tamar .............................. 42 Getting Ready for a Game (Larsson) ............................... 73 Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art, exhibition xi, 16, 91, 96, 124, 125 Goddesses, exhibition................... xi Goez Art Studios and Gallery, Los Angeles ............................11, 12 Goldin, Nan ................................. 36 Goldman, Shifra .......................6, 21 Gómez Arias, Alejandro .....101, 110 Gonzalez, Jose-Luis (Joe) ........... 11 Gonzalez, Juan (Johnny) ............. 11 Grandveiw I Gallery, Los Angeles ................................... 2 Grandveiw II Gallery, Los Angeles ................................... 2 Grandview Gallery, Los Angeles ................................... 4 Grant, Duncan ............................. 71 Great Wall of Los Angeles (Baca) . 8 Greenberg, Clement .................... 47 Greenberg, Reesa ........................ xii Grey Art Gallery, New York ......101 Gripsholm Castle, Sweden .......... 77

Index Gronk (aka Glugio Gronk Nicandro) 10, 11, 14, 15, 18, 21 Grossbard, Batia .......................... 43 Grünewald, Isaac ......................... 71 Guerrero Cruz, Dolores ............... 14 Guerrero, Delores ........................ 13 Guerrilla Girls ............................. 99 Guth, Doris .................................. xv Gynning, Margareta.............. xv, xvi HaMidrasha, Ramat HaSharon .... 46 Hand-Made—Drawings from Nationalmuseum, exhibition. 84, 85, 86 Hardt, Michael ............132, 133, 138 Harper, Paula ................................. 2 Hasegawa, Yuko.......................... 99 Haus am Waldsee, Berlin .......... 101 Häussler, Iris...............136, 137, 138 He Dreamed Overtime (Häussler) .................... 136, 137 He, Jenny ..................................... 99 Healy, Wayne ........................ 12, 14 Heath, Joanne ............................ 112 Hebrew Work—The Disregarded Gaze in the Canon of Israeli Art, exhibition ......43, 56, 57, 58 Hedlin Hayden, Malin .......... xii, xvi Helena Rubinstein Pavilion for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv 48, 49 Hermanson Meister, Sarah .......... 99 Hernández, Judithe ........ 7, 9, 14, 19 Herrón, Cindy .............................. 10 Herrón, Willie.......10, 14, 15, 18, 19 Hidalgo, Sylvia ............................ 10 Highlights: Famous and Forgotten Art Treasures from the Nationalmuseum, exhibition.. 86 Hilma af Klint: Abstrakt pionjär, exhibition .............................. 68 Hirdman, Yvonne ........................ 89 Hirsch-Pauli, Hanna .............. 69, 70 Hjertén, Sigrid ............................. 71 Hoffman, Melissa .......................... 5

Curating Differently: Feminisms, Exhibitions and Curatorial Spaces How to cook a Souvenir (Johansson)74, 75 Huneault, Kristina ..................... xvii Ibañez, Antonio ........................... 12 Ida Lupino: Mother Directs, exhibition .............................. 99 Illustration for a Mexican Song (Modotti) ..............................105 In Mourning and In Rage (Labowitz-Starus and Lacy) .... 4 Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth Century Art in, of and from the Feminine, exhibition .. xv, 34, 38 Instant Mural (Asco) ................... 10 Instant Theatre, Los Angeles ......... 3 Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston ................................... 40 Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London ........... 35, 38, 40 Invisible/Visible: 21 Artists, exhibition .............................. 15 Iris Barry: Re-View, exhibition ... 99 Israel Museum, Jerusalem .......45, 55 Israel, Wilfrid .............................. 59 Israeli Photography Biennale, exhibition ............. 43, 54, 55, 56 Istanbul Biennale, exhibition ....... 44 Istanbul Modern, Istanbul ..........124 Janco, Marcel .............................. 63 Jarne MacDermott, Bongi ........... 82 Jefferey, Ian ................................. 54 Jenny Nyström: Målaren och illustratören, exhibition ........ 74 Ji, Yun-Fei..................................134 Johansson, Peter .....................74, 75 Jonas, Joan .................................. 99 Jones, Amelia .............................111 Joselit, David ............................... 99 Kahlo, Frida ........ 18, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112 Kaiser, Monika ............................ xii

165

Kandinsky, Wassily ................... 106 Kapur, Geeta................................ 99 Karavan, Dani.............................. 48 Karlsson, Eva-Lena ..................... 88 Key, Ellen .................................... 69 Kibbutz—Architecture without Precedents, exhibition ........... 44 Kinchin, Juliet ............................. 99 Kirkham, Pat................................ 99 Kirshner, Micha ........................... 54 Kismaric, Susan ........................... 93 Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: 45 years of Art and Feminism, exhibition 124 Kiss, rock band, US ....................... 5 Kivimaa, Katrin ........................... xii Klazmer, Gabi ............................. 48 Konstfeminism: Strategier och effekter i Sverige från 1970-talet till idag, exhibition ......... xi, 124 Konstnären Venny Soldan-Brofeldt (Hirsch-Pauli) ........................ 69 Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve ........... 136 Kozloff, Joyce ............................. 16 Krasny, Elke ................................ xii Krohg, Christian .......................... 71 Krohg, Oda .................................. 71 Kruger, Barbara ........................... 36 Krystufek, Elke............................ 32 Kulturhuset, Stockholm ............. 101 Kunstforeningen, Copenhagen .... 68 Kunstverein, Hamburg .............. 101 Kunstverein, Hannover .............. 101 Kupferman, Moshe ...................... 45 Labowitz-Starus, Leslie ..... 3, 4, 5, 6 Lacy, Suzanne ............. 3, 4, 5, 6, 20 Laet, Maria ................................ 134 Lahat, Shlomo ....................... 42, 50 Lambert-Beatty, Carrie ................ 99 Landau, Sigalit ...................... 52, 62 Landscapes 1983, exhibition 48, 49, 50 Lanir, Yosef................................. 63 Larsson, Carl ................... 71, 72, 73 Larsson, Karin ....................... 71, 72

166 Las Chicanas group, US .. 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 22 Las Mujeres Muralistas of del Valle of Fresno group, US ................ 7 Las Mujeres Muralistas of San Diego group, US ..................... 7 Las Mujeres Muralistas of San Francisco group, US................ 7 Lassnig, Maria ........................31, 32 Lavie, Raffie............... 43, 44, 45, 51 Lebovici, Élisabeth .....................119 Lee Bontecou: All Freedom in Every Sense, exhibition ........ 96, 97, 99 Leffler, Ann Charlotte ................. 76 Les Rencontres d'Arles, photography festival.............. 54 Levi, Linda .................................... 4 Levrant de Bretteville, Sheila ...2, 15 Lichtenberg Ettinger, Bracha .....133 Lifson, Ben .................................. 43 Liljevalchs konsthall, Stockholm 68 Lillian Gish, exhibition ............... 99 Lind, Maria.................................. 88 Lindberg, Anna Lena................... 77 Lippard, Lucy ................... 15, 56, 99 Lomas Garza, Carmen ................. 14 London, Barbara.......................... 99 London, Julia ................................. 6 Long Beach Museum of Art, Los Angeles ................................. 15 Look out! Image awareness and visual culture, exhibition..80, 81 López, Frank ............................... 12 Lopéz, Yolanda ........................6, 22 Los Angeles 1972: A Panorama of Black Artists, exhibition ......... 19 Los Angeles Community Arts Alliance, Los Angeles ........... 14 Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Los Angeles ................................. 15 Los Angeles Council of Women Artists (LACWA).............15, 16 Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles . xiv, 1, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 22

Index Los Angeles Feminist Theatre, Los Angeles ................................... 2 Los Dos Streetscrapers (East Los Streetscrapers) group, US 12, 14 Los Four group, US ........... 9, 14, 19 Los Four: Almaraz/de la Rocha/Luján/Romero, exhibition ............................... 19 Los Illegals, punk group, US ....... 14 Lowry, Glenn .............................. 92 Ludwig Museum, Cologne .......... 61 Luján, Gilbert ................................ 9 Macchi, Jorge ............................ 134 Macdonald, Margaret .................. 71 Mackintosh, Charles Rennie ........ 71 Magasin Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble ....... 37 MAGNA. Feminism, Art and Creativity. A Survey of the Female Sensibility, Imagination, Projection and Problems Suggested through a Tableau of Images, Objects, Photographs, Lectures, Discussions, Films, Videos and Actions, exhibition .............................. 29 Marchart, Oliver .......................... 63 Marcoci, Roxana ......................... 99 Marie Antoinette (Coppola) ......... 83 Masquerade—Power, gender and identity, exhibition................. 82 Massumi, Brian ......................... 133 Maya Deren’s Legacy: Women and Experimental Film, exhibition ..................... 99 McDonald, John ........................ 135 McLeod, Mary ............................. 99 McMaster, Gerald ......129, 133, 134, 138 Mechicano Art Center, Los Angeles 11, 12, 13, 14 Meskimmon, Marsha ................. 107 Mesquite, Rosalyn ......................... 7 Metropolitan Museum, New York ... 54

Curating Differently: Feminisms, Exhibitions and Curatorial Spaces Meyer, Richard............................ 99 Millett, Kate ................................ 30 Mind and Matter: Alternative Abstractions, 1940s to Now, exhibition .........................97, 99 Miss, Mary .................................. 95 Mjellby Konstmuseum, Halmstad .............................................124 Modern Women Project, New York xi, xvi, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98 Modern Women: Single Channel, exhibition .............................100 Modern Women’s Fund, New York 97 Modern Women—19thC Swedish Women Dramatists project, Stockholm ............................. 76 Moderna Museet, Stockholm xi, 68, 77, 78, 79, 111 Modotti, Tina .... 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112 Molesworth, Helen ...................... 99 MoMA PS1, New York ............... 96 Monterosso, Jean-Luc ................. 43 Morineau, Camille..... 115, 117, 121, 122, 123, 125 Morra, Anne ................................ 99 Morris Hambourg, Maria ............ 54 Mujeres in the Grupo de Santa Ana, US ........................................... 7 Mulvey, Laura ... 101, 102, 103, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112 Muñiz, Olga ...............................7, 9 Münter, Gabriele ..................33, 106 Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montréal ................................ 15 Musée national d’art moderne du Centre Pompidou (Mnam), Paris ..................... 115, 116, 117 Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao......124 Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna ..........124 Museum of Art at Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh ............... 16

167

Museum of Art, Ein Harod ... 41, 43, 44, 53, 54, 55, 56, 59, 60, 61 Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles ... 16, 23, 91, 124 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York xi, xvi, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98 Museum Voor Moderne Kunst, Arnhem ............................... 124 Museum Wiesbaden .............. 33, 38 Mutu, Wangechi .......................... 99 Myre, Nadia............................... 136 Na’aman, Michal ......................... 42 Napangardi, Dorothy ................. 134 National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC ...... 40, 68 National Organization for Women, US ........................................... 6 Nationalism—From a midsummers dance to a sliced Dala-horse project, Stockholm .......... 73, 74 Nationalmuseum, Stockholm........... .... xv, 65, 66, 68, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87 Neruda, Pablo .................... 101, 110 Neustein, Joshua .......................... 45 New Horizons group, Israel .. 56, 57, 63 New Museum, New York ...... 40, 60 Newark Museum, New Jersey ..... 15 No Movies (Asco) ....................... 11 Nochlin, Linda ...16, 17, 18, 99, 116, 125 NORDIK X, conference .............. xiii Noriega, Chon ........7, 10, 11, 18, 22 Norte, Marisela ............................ 10 North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh .................................. 15 Nude Frieze (Smith) ...................... 3 Nyström, Jenny............................ 74 Ofek, Avraham ............................ 57 Ofrat¸ Gideon .............................. 43

168 Öhrner, Annika............................ 88 Old Mistresses: Women Artists of the Past, exhibition ........... 15 Oral Herstory of Lesbianism, US .. 3 Ordaz, Lorraine ........................... 10 Örebro länsteatern, Örebro .......... 76 Orgen, Sandra................................ 4 Östgötateatern, Norrköping and Linköping .............................. 76 Pacquement, Alfred .... 116, 117, 125 Palin, Sarah ................................. 92 Parker, Rozsika ..........................106 Pelosi, Nancy .............................. 92 Performance 7: Mirage, exhibition .............................. 99 Perry, Lara........................... xii, xvii Peter, Sarah ............................92, 93 Petrén, Ann.............................76, 86 Petzinger, Renate......................... 33 Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography, exhibition ................... 96, 97, 99 Piper, Adrian ............................... 15 Plaza de la Raza, Los Angeles11, 12 Pollock, Griselda ..... xi, xii, 99, 102, 103, 106, 110, 112, 113, 131, 132 Prince Eugen’s Waldemarsudde, Stockholm ............................. 68 Proctor, Nancy .......................... xvii Public Council for Culture and Art, Israel ..................................... 46 Quesada, Josefina .................7, 9, 12 Rahmani, Aviva............................. 4 Ramona Gardens Housing Project, Los Angeles ...................8, 9, 13 Rattermeyer, Volker .................... 33 Raven, Arlene................................ 2 REBELLE: Art & Feminism 1969– 2009, exhibition ............. xi, 124 Reckitt, Helena ...........................130

Index Record companies drag their feet (Labowitz-Starus and Lacy with London) ................................... 5 Reeb, David ..................... 48, 49, 50 Reilly, Maura ................... 16, 17, 18 Resident Alien 1 (Landau) ........... 62 Respini, Eva ................................ 99 RFSL, the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights ......... 84, 90 Richter, Dorothee ...................... 111 Riksteatern, Sweden ...................... 76 Riot-Sarcey, Michèle ................. 120 Rivas, Pilar Tompkins ..... 10, 11, 22 Rivera, Diego .................... 106, 110 Roberts, Veronica .................. 97, 99 Robinson, Hilary .................. xi, 124 Romberg, Osvaldo ....................... 48 Romero, Frank ............................... 9 Rong, Gao ................................. 135 Röör, Gunilla ............................... 89 Rosenthal, Rachel ...................... 3, 4 Rosler, Martha ....................... 35, 99 Roslin, Alexander ........................ 83 Roth, Leo ..................................... 57 Roth, Moira ................................. 22 Rowling, J.K. (Joanne Kathleen) ..... 119 Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm ....................... 69, 86 Ruter Dam, Sweden ..................... 82 Saar, Betye .................................. 22 Sackler, Elizabeth A. ................... 92 Saenz, Susan ................................ 14 Said, Edward ............................... 34 Salas, Betty .................................. 10 Salem Fine Arts Center, North Carolina ................................. 15 Salle, David ................................. 42 Sally Potter, exhibition ................ 99 Salomon, Charlotte ...................... 35 Salt on Mina Mina (Napangardi) ..... 134 Sanchez, Olivia.............................. 7 Sandqvist, Gertrud ....................... 88

Curating Differently: Feminisms, Exhibitions and Curatorial Spaces São Paulo Biennale, exhibition ... 44 Sarachau, Åsa .............................. 76 Saro, Eva ................................79, 82 Scar Project (Myre) ...........136, 137 Scheps, Mark .. 41, 42, 48, 50, 52, 61 Schlesinger, Christina.................... 8 Schor, Mira.................................110 Schwartz, Alexandra .....xvi, 99, 100 Scott, Joan ..........................121, 122 Second Museum of Our Wishes project, Stockholm ..xi, 111, 114 See for yourself EU-project ......... 83 Self Help Graphics & Art, Los Angeles ................ 11, 12, 13, 14 Selfies—Now and Then, exhibition 86 Shapira, Reuven .......................... 63 Shapiro, Miriam ............................ 2 Shaw, Bernhard ........................... 31 Sheriff, Mary D. .......................... 83 Sherman, Cindy ......................11, 36 Shirman, Simcha ......................... 54 Simon, Yohanan .......................... 57 Sischy, Ingrid .............................. 99 Sisterhood Bookstore, Los Angeles 2 Sixty Years of Art in Israel: The First Decade (1948–1958)— A Hegemony and a Plurality, exhibition .........................43, 56 Sjöholm Skrubbe, Jessica .... xii, xiii, xiv, xv, 23 Skagens museum, Skagen ........... 71 Smith, Barbara T. .......................... 3 Smith, Cherry .............................. 36 Smith, T’ai .................................. 99 Smithsonian, USA .................... xviii Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), Los Angeles .. 8 Soderholm, Jill .............................. 5 Soldan-Brofeldt, Venny .............. 70 Spetsprojektet, Stockholm ........... 76 Spray Paint LACMA or Project Pie in De/Face (Asco with Patssi Valdez).............................18, 19

169

Stadsteatern, Stockholm .............. 76 Stathatos, John ....................... 43, 54 Stations of the Cross (Asco) ........ 10 Stéenhoff, Frida ........................... 76 Steimatzky, Avigdor .................... 63 Stein, Sally .................................. 99 Stellarc........................................... 4 Steorn, Patrik ............................... 84 Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts, Stockholm .................... 76 Streichman, Yehezkel .................. 63 Strindberg, August....................... 76 Sutherland Harris, Ann .... 16, 17, 18 Suzuki, Sarah ............................... 99 Swedish Arts Council .................. xii Taeuber-Arp, Sophie ................. 106 Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles....................... 4, 16 Taren, Debra ................................ 10 Tate Modern, UK ...................... xvii Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv . 41, 42, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 61 Tellgren, Anna ............................. xii Teruya, Yuken ........................... 134 The Beginning Is Always Today: Contemporary Feminist Art in Scandinavia, exhibition .......... xi The East Los Angeles School of Mexican-American Fine Arts (TELASOMAFA), Los Angeles 12 The Eternal Network, international artists’ network ...................... 11 The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts, symposium ............................ 94 The Great Wall of Los Angeles (Baca) ............................ 8, 9, 10 The Jewish Theatre, Stockholm.. 76, 89 The learning eye EU-project.. 74, 83 The Letter (Smith) ......................... 3 The Three Gorges Dam Migration (Ji) ....................................... 134 The two Fridas (Kahlo) ............. 104

170 The Waitresses, US ....................3, 4 The Want of Matter—A Quality in Israeli Art, exhibition . 42, 51, 56 Three Weeks in May (Cohen, Hoffman, Labowitz-Starus, Lacy, and Soderholm) ............. 5 Towards the 90s, exhibition ..43, 56, 57, 58 Transnational perspectives on women’s art, feminism and curating, international research network ................................. xii Trappan, Vällingby ..................... 78 Tree Graphic Artists, exhibition ... 19 Tucker, Marcia ............................ 60 Two Years: Israeli Art—Qualities Accumulated 1983–1984, exhibition ................... 42, 46, 47 UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, Los Angeles ................ 9 Umland, Anne ............................. 93 University Art Museum of Texas, Austin.................................... 16 University of Brighton, UK ....... xvii University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) ..................... 8 University of Edinburgh, UK .... xvii Untitled (Line and Snow) (Laet) .134 Untitled Film Stills (Sherman) .... 11 Uri, Aviva ..............................42, 45 Valadez, John .........................12, 13 Valdez, Patssi ... 9, 10, 12, 18, 19, 21 Vallejo, Linda................... 12, 13, 14 Venas de la Mujer, exhibition ...7, 9, 22 Venice Biennale, exhibition ..42, 44, 52, 53 Villaseñor Grijalva, Lucila .......... 14 Villaseñor, Maria Elena............... 14 Villegas, Virginia ........................ 10 Vosoff, Dianne ............................ 10 Vosoff, Kate ................................ 10 Vraiment. Féminisme et art, exhibition ................... xv, 37, 39

Index WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, exhibition xi, 16, 23, 91, 96, 124 Wagner, Anne.............................. 99 Walking Mural (Asco) ................. 10 Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore ... 15 Warburg, Aby .............................. 88 Warhol, Andy .............................. 11 Wayne, June ............................ 4, 16 Weibull, Nina .............................. 88 Werkmäster, Barbro .............. 74, 88 Werner, Jeff ................................. xii Westcoast, Wanda........................... 2 Weston, Edward ................ 106, 107 White, Nicola .............................. 35 Whitechapel Art Gallery, London 38, 40, 101 Widenheim, Cecilia ..................... 88 Wilfrid Israel Museum of Asian Art and Studies, Hazorea ............. 59 Williams, Sue .............................. 36 Winsor, Jackie ............................. 95 Wirsén, Stina ............................... 84 Wollen, Peter .....101, 102, 103, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111 Wolverton, Terry ........................... 3 Woman Space Gallery, Los Angeles 7 Woman to Woman: A Documentary about Hookers, Housewives, and Other Mothers (Deitch) ... 8 Woman: The Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s, exhibition ....... 124 Woman’s Building, Los Angeles.. 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 16, 21, 22 Womanhouse, exhibition xiii, 1, 2, 4 Womanspace Gallery, Los Angeles 2, 3, 4 Women Against Violence Against Women, US ............................. 6 Women Artists of America, 1707– 1964, exhibition .................... 15 Women artists of the 20th Century, exhibition .................. xv, 33, 38 Women Artists: 1550–1950, exhibition xiii, xiv, 1, 15, 16, 17

Curating Differently: Feminisms, Exhibitions and Curatorial Spaces Women Painters in Scandinavia 1880–1890, exhibition .......... 68 Women: A Historical Survey of Works by Women Artists, exhibition .............................. 15 Women’s Graphic Centre, Los Angeles ................................... 2 Wye, Deborah ............................. 93

171

Yaski, Yuval ................................ 44 Zains, Marisa ............................... 10 Zandén, Jessica ............................ 89 Zaritsky, Yosef ............................ 63 Zemans, Joyce ............................. xii Zetterman, Eva ............ xiii, xiv, 103 Zukerman Rechter, Osnat ........... xiv