Pain and Politics in Postwar Feminist Art: Activism in the Work of Nancy Spero 9781788312608, 9781501365065, 9781786735997

Table of contents :
Cover
Halftitle page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Pain and its politics
Pain’s metaphor and metonymy
Chapter outline
CHAPTER ONE Personal and Political: Pain and Emotion 1966–76
Anti-war anger and feminist hurt
Pain 1966–76
CHAPTER TWO The Suffering of War and the Pain of Alienation
From symbols of war to the fractured symbolic
CHAPTER THREE Codex Artaud : Hysteria and Silence
Picturing silence
Hysteria and the politics of pain
The American Woman Artist Show, GEDOK and the Amerika Haus
CHAPTER FOUR Torture of Women as Devotional Object
Unreliable witness
Torture and information in the 1970s: feeling the pain of others
Affective meditation and beholding: medieval modes for feminism
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Pain and Politics in Postwar Feminist Art

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Pain and Politics in Postwar Feminist Art Activism in the Work of Nancy Spero Rachel Warriner

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BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Rachel Warriner, 2023 Rachel Warriner has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Tjaša Krivec Cover image: Nancy Spero, Helicopter Blinding Victims (detail), 1968. Gouache and ink on paper, 59.7 × 90.4cm. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

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Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction Pain and its politics Pain’s metaphor and metonymy Chapter outline 1

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Personal and Political: Pain and Emotion 1966–76 Anti-war anger and feminist hurt Pain 1966–76

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The Suffering of War and the Pain of Alienation ‘Fantasy, the Beast, and Herman Kahn’: metaphors and metonymy of war From symbols of war to the fractured symbolic

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Codex Artaud: Hysteria and Silence Picturing silence Hysteria and the politics of pain The American Woman Artist Show, GEDOK and the Amerika Haus

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Torture of Women as Devotional Object Unreliable witness Torture and information in the 1970s: feeling the pain of others Affective meditation and beholding: medieval modes for feminism

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Conclusion

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Notes Bibliography Index

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Illustrations Plates 1 2

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Nancy Spero, All Writing Is Pigshit, 1969. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022 Nancy Spero, Androgynous Bomb and Victims, 1966. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022 Nancy Spero, L.O.V.E. T.O. H.A.N.O.I., 1967. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022 Nancy Spero, Helicopter Blinding Victims, 1968. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022 Nancy Spero, Swastika Eagle, 1967. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022 Nancy Spero, I died at Rodez under electroshock, 1969. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022 Nancy Spero, Codex Artaud VII, 1971. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022 Faith Ringgold, The American People Series #18: The Flag is Bleeding, 1967. © 2018 Faith Ringgold, ARS member; Courtesy ACA Galleries, New York

Figures i.1 Nancy Spero, Torture of Women, 1976 (detail). Gouache, typewritten texts, collage and handprinting on laid paper, 60.7 × 292 cm each, framed. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: NGC. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/ VAGA, New York 2022. 2 1.1 Anti-war demonstration, New York. 27 vi

Illustrations

1.2 Claes Oldenburg, Proposed Monument for the Intersection of Canal Street and Broadway, N.Y.C. – Block of Concrete, Inscribed with the Names of War Heroes, 1965. Crayon and watercolor. 16 × 12 in. (40.6 × 30.5 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Bequest of Alicia Legg. Photo courtesy the Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio. Copyright 1965 Claes Oldenburg 1.3 Performance by Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz, In Mourning and In Rage, 1977, City Hall Los Angeles. Photo credit – Maria Karras 1.4 Haeberle, Ronald L. (b. 1941): Q. And babies? A. And babies, 1970. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Photograph by Ronald L. Haeberle, poster published by The Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC). Offset lithograph, printed in color, 25 × 38’ (63.5 × 96.5 cm). Gift of the Benefit for Attica Defense Fund. Acc. n.: 498.1978. © 2018. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence 2.1 Nancy Spero, All Writing Is Pigshit, 1969. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022 2.2 Nancy Spero, Male Bomb, 1967. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022 2.3 Violet Ray, Revlon Oh-Baby Face, 1967. Collage on paper. Gift of Violet Ray. 2013:36.29. Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art 2.4 Martha Rosler, Cleaning the Drapes, from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, c. 1967–72. Photomontage. © Martha Rosler. Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York 2.5 Rudolf Baranik, Angry Arts Against the War in Vietnam, 1967. Courtesy of the estate of Rudolf Baranik and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York 2.6 Nancy Spero, Androgynous Bomb and Victims, 1966. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/ VAGA, New York 2022 2.7 Life, 2 July 1965 picturing battle of Đô`ng Xoài. 2.8 Nancy Spero, L.O.V.E. T.O. H.A.N.O.I., 1967. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022 2.9 Life Magazine Cover, 7 April 1967. Photo: Lee Lockwood/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images

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2.10 Nancy Spero, Helicopter Blinding Victims, 1968. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022 2.11 Jeff Kramm, My Lai, 1970. Offset lithograph, 24 × 18 in. © Jeff Kramm. Courtesy the artist 2.12 Nancy Spero, Female Helicopters, 1966. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022 2.13 Nancy Spero, Atom Bomb, 1966. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022 2.14 Nancy Spero, Mars, Victims, Airplane Wings, Eagle Claw, Mercury, 1970. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022 2.15 Nancy Spero, Swastika Eagle, 1967. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022 2.16 Nancy Spero, Pilot – Eagle – Skull, 1968. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022 2.17 Nancy Spero, Eagle, Victim, Medusa Head, 1969. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/ VAGA, New York 2022 2.18 Nancy Spero, I died at Rodez under electroshock, 1969. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022 2.19 Nancy Spero, O VIO PROFE , 1969. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022 2.20 Nancy Spero, Avant de me suicide, 1970. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022 3.1 Nancy Spero, Codex Artaud I (detail), 1971. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022 3.2 Nancy Spero, Codex Artaud XXX , 1972. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022

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3.3 Robert Rauschenberg, White Painting [seven panel], 1951. Oil on canvas. 72 × 125 × 1 1/2 inches; overall (182.9 × 317.5 × 3.8 cm). Robert Rauschenberg Foundation © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/DACS, London 3.4 Nancy Spero, Codex Artaud VII , 1971. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022 3.5 Nancy Spero, Codex Artaud XXVII , 1972. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022 3.6 Nancy Spero, Codex Artaud V, 1971. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022 3.7 Nancy Spero, Codex Artaud XXII , 1972. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022 3.8 Nancy Spero, Codex Artaud XXIII , 1972. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022 3.9 Faith Ringgold, The American People Series #18: The Flag is Bleeding, 1967. © 2018 Faith Ringgold, ARS member; Courtesy ACA Galleries, New York 3.10 Nancy Spero, Codex Artaud VIII , 1971. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022 4.1 Still from Domination and the Everyday (color video, 32 minutes) 1978. © Martha Rosler. Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York 4.2 Leon Golub, Pinochet (1976) IV , 1977, Acrylic on linen, 18 × 16 in. (46 × 41 cm). Hall Collection. Courtesy of Hall Art Foundation. Photo: Mark Woods © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022 4.3 Hans Haacke, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Board of Trustees, 1974. © Hans Haacke/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York 4.4 Nancy Spero, Torture of Women, 1976 (detail). Gouache, typewritten texts, collage and handprinting on laid paper, 60.7 × 292 cm each, framed. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: NGC.

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© The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022 Nancy Spero, Torture of Women, 1976. Gouache, typewritten texts, collage and handprinting on laid paper, 60.7 × 292 cm each, framed. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: NGC. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/ VAGA, New York 2022 Nancy Spero, Torture of Women, 1976. Gouache, typewritten texts, collage and handprinting on laid paper, 60.7 × 292 cm each, framed. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: NGC. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/ VAGA, New York 2022 Nancy Spero, Torture of Women, 1976. Gouache, typewritten texts, collage and handprinting on laid paper, 60.7 × 292 cm each, framed. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: NGC. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/ VAGA, New York 2022 Nancy Spero, Torture of Women, September 1976. The Museum of Modern Art Library (front). New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). © 2018. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence Nancy Spero, Torture of Women, 1976 (detail). Gouache, typewritten texts, collage and handprinting on laid paper, 60.7 × 292 cm each, framed. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: NGC. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022 Nancy Spero, Torture of Women, 1976 (detail). Gouache, typewritten texts, collage and handprinting on laid paper, 60.7 × 292 cm each, framed. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: NGC. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022 Nancy Spero, Her Body Itself, 1977. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022

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Acknowledgements Throughout the process of writing this book I have been incredibly fortunate to receive moral and material support from numerous people. First, I am grateful to the editorial team who have guided me through this process, particularly Lisa Goodrum, Margaret Michniewicz, April Peake, Ross Fraser-Smith, Charlotte Askew and Yvonne Thouroude. I am also grateful to those who have granted me permission to include reproductions – including the Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Claes Oldenburg, Martha Rosler, Jeff Kramm, Eugene Tulchin, Faith Ringgold, Suzanne Lacy, Hans Haacke, Violet Ray, the National Gallery of Canada and The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art – as well as those that have supported this process: Samm Kunce, Grace Hong and Danielle Wu at Galerie Lelong, Hallie McNeill at Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio, Isabelle Hogenkamp at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Dorian Bergen at ACA Galleries, Anna Ayeroff at Suzanne Lacy Studio, Laura Hunt at the Paula Cooper Gallery, Andrea Mihalovic at the Artists Rights Society, Judith Pamplin and Claire Reinertsen at W.W. Norton, Emily Antler at the National Gallery of Canada and Austin Yoon at Hall Art Foundation. The guidance and support from libraries and archives has also been invaluable and I am especially grateful to the staff at the Archives of American Art, the Getty Research Institute and the University of Iowa libraries, and particularly to Stephanie Crawford and Fernanda Perrone at Special Collections and University Archives at Rutgers University. The support of the Irish Research Council Postgraduate Scholarship made my initial research on this project possible and its continuation and development was supported by the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. Research conducted thanks to the Terra Foundation Travel Grant and the Getty Library Research Grant also added significantly to this book. I have been extremely lucky to be supported by fantastic, generous colleagues and collaborators who have greatly enriched my work. Foremost are Ed Krčma and Jo Applin, whose discussions about, and kind encouragement of, my research has been invaluable to the development of this book. I have also been grateful to receive support and guidance from Alixe Bovey, Lee Jenkins, Sarah Garland, Graham Allen, Fiona Kearney, Sabine Kriebel and Flavio Boggi. The patience and generosity of the many colleagues and friends who have helped me shape xi

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my ideas through conversation, discussion and moral support has been especially appreciated. Sarah Hayden, Kerstin Fest, Sarah Kelleher, Amy Tobin, Catherine Grant, Sophie Jones, Elizabeth Johnson and Edwin Coomasaru in particular deserve special thanks. I have been lucky to work in institutions that have been collegial, supportive and generous in sharing ideas and research in both the Courtauld Institute of Art and University College Cork. Both have greatly enriched my work and I am grateful to colleagues and students at both institutions for providing such interesting environments to research and develop ideas. Finally, I am lucky to have incredible support from my family and my heartfelt thanks goes to them: Jimmy who has listened, read and discussed ideas throughout; my parents, Elizabeth and David, who have helped make space and time for thought in the challenging moments of early parenthood; and Walt and Rosa who – while one actively runs away from anything associated with art history as if it will attack him, and the other draws on all my books as though they were canvases ordered expressly for her creative purposes – have shaped my thinking about everything. Though I am sure at least one will run away from it, I dedicate this book to them.

Introduction

On panel I of Nancy Spero’s 1974–6 work Torture of Women the word ‘PAIN’ is typed repeatedly in text that is fractured, overwritten and barely legible [Figure i.1]. This fragment, which is one of a number of typographic interventions into extracts taken from sources describing torture, sits at the bottom of the picture plane, a thin strip that needs to be deciphered rather than read. The word is repeated multiple times without spaces between the letters, the ‘P’ of ‘PAIN’ is raised above the rest of the word in the first row, creating not a block of text but instead a broken landscape of lettering. Like the phrase ‘INHUMAN TREATMENT’, which Spero treats similarly, its meaning is both eroded and reinforced by the repetition, Ps overlap turning the word into ‘RAIN’ and ‘BAIN’; at points it is so condensed that the text is barely more than a jumble, at other times the word ‘pain’ stands out, comprehensible as an assertion of suffering. With its erosion of legibility, this fragment suggests some of the ways in which pain operates; being on the threshold of language and image the vignette recalls pain as a sensation that is marked by the difficulty of its translation and the felt need to communicate, demanding empathy in its outcry. Torture of Women, with its focus on the experience of inflicted bodily suffering, is a fitting place for this text’s inclusion. Coming in 1976, this piece marks the end of an eleven-year period that, I argue, saw Spero using the notion of physical and psychological pain as not only her subject, but also the foundation of her artistic activism. Seeing pain as neither purely psychic torment nor internal physical experience, it is instead understood here as an interaction between the personal and the social. Pain, in Spero’s adoption of it, brought to the fore the suffering that resulted from political injustice. Creating a visceral iconography, Spero’s language of pain filters the body through the imagination, representing the way in which physical experience is processed through fantasy, and interacting with social structures that determine our behaviour. By thinking about the way it felt to suffer, and placing it in the context of those structural decisions that were its cause, Spero developed a practice that represented pain as 1

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Pain and Politics in Postwar Feminist Art

Figure i.1 Nancy Spero, Torture of Women, 1976 (detail). Gouache, typewritten texts, collage and handprinting on laid paper, 60.7 × 292 cm each, framed. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: NGC. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

a subject. This book explores the period from 1966 to 1976, during which I propose that a visual language of pain as a physiological and emotional metaphor transformed the artist’s work. Emerging from the activism that shaped the New York art world of the 1960s and 70s, I argue that Spero’s pain-works provide a compelling case study of a practice that – for ideological purposes – represents how politics feels.1 This way of working is inherently tied to its political moment. The date 1966 is important: at this point the artist had made a conscious decision to intervene in social and political problems through her work, urgently focusing on the Vietnam War, and starting a life-long pursuit of an effective and active political iconography. Although working as an artist since her training in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1940s where she developed a practice that focused on the figure, considering it in relation to its representation in ancient cultures and mythology, the late 1960s saw a change in Spero’s practice as she moved to respond to the American war in Vietnam. Having lived in Europe for much of the 1950s with her partner, the painter Leon Golub, and their three young sons, Spero and her family had moved back to New York in 1964 just in time for the escalation in the conflict that had been running for nearly a decade.2 The change in her

Introduction

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work is notable, a shift from the large, dense canvases laden with oil paint of the Paris Black Paintings – figurative works that explored themes of alienation which had been her focus for much of the late 1950s and early 60s – towards paper and gouache sketches that expressly addressed the politics of the moment. Her War Series (1966–70) marked a turning point, something Spero articulates when writing in response to a 1976 questionnaire by Nina Yankowitz on political art: ‘In 1966,’ she states,‘I radically transformed my work to a political/personal statement. (The Viet Nam [War] was the primary impetus in rethinking my position as an artist).’3 Although not alone in seeking to situate Spero’s activism in relation to her artistic practice, this book is the first to argue for the particular significance of the moment wherein Spero introduced politics into her oeuvre.4 Departing from other scholars such as Mignon Nixon, Kimberly Lamm and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh who trace a continuity between the earlier paintings that trouble representation (and particularly figuration) and the later explicitly political work, I focus on the break that occurs with the start of the War Series.5 To my mind not enough has been made of how the artist’s turn to activism in the mid-1960s impacted her approach to image-making.6 Although there is without question a politics to the earlier paintings that pre-empts the feminist statements in the later work, through tracing a hysterical subjectivity as Nixon does or themes of aggression and anger as Lamm has, what interests me is what happens when Spero starts making artworks that are designed to act politically. It is useful to understand this shift in her practice in context. Spero was not alone in her turn to politics at this moment: Vietnam had drawn the attention of much of the New York art world as the 1960s wore on, acting as a focal point for the artistic politics that emerged during the decade.7 Indeed, rather than proposing Spero’s move towards representing political feelings as being exceptional, I see it as reflecting broader shifts in the landscape of American art. Focusing on the development of Spero’s work created around the turn of 1970, this book examines it in context of a moment when emotional metaphors were being politicized and deployed against oppressive structures, and proposes that Spero’s practice is exemplary of an activist interest in emotion. Although the time period of the book is defined by significant moments in Spero’s practice, starting with the introduction of works designed as political artefacts in the War Series and ending as she turned to consider women’s pleasure in Notes in Time on Women (1976–9), its coincidence with the escalation and eventual end of the Vietnam War, the accompanying rise of the New Left, and the emergence of the women’s movement – and particularly developments in New York arts-activism which included the formation of Artists and Writers Protest (1965), the Art

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Pain and Politics in Postwar Feminist Art

Workers’ Coalition (A.W.C.) (1969), Women Artists in Revolution (W.A.R.) (1969) and the A.I.R. Gallery (1972) – is crucial. As I will explore in Chapter One, this moment of anti-Vietnam War protest and the emergence of the women’s movement was infused with emotional metaphors of anger, indignation and disgust as well as explorations of hurt and mourning. In the art world, emotion had long been associated with the overwrought and suppressed internal struggle of the romantic artist that had most recently been reincarnated in the damaged masculinity of the Abstract Expressionists theorized by critics such as John McCoubrey and Harold Rosenberg. With the outbreak of war in Vietnam, however, emotional metaphors became valuable weapons of dissent, no longer framed in terms of subjective experience; instead emotion was forced into the realm of the social and the political, invoked as part of a general activist language that was embraced and developed by artists seeking to contribute to social change. For anti-Vietnam War activists, political emotions manifested in a chorus of splenetic disapproval that differentiated the protestors from what they perceived as a heartless, technocratic and murderous government that, with calculating and impassive violence, was responsible for the deaths of innocents. For feminism, the tactic of making visible personal feeling – epitomized in the slogan and activist proposition that the ‘personal is political’ – built a picture of patriarchy’s damaging effect on women, exposing its harmful reality and legitimizing the fight back. Spero’s work, which was part of both the anti-war and feminist art movements, offers a way of thinking through the implications of using feeling as a way to represent political ideas at this moment, a model of an affective practice that used emotion as a weapon against war and patriarchy.8 In this book I chart the development of Spero’s visual language of pain alongside its historical context. In the violent and visceral War Series and Artaud Paintings (1968–70), the anguished Codex Artaud (1971–2) and the explicit and angry Torture of Women, the trajectory of emotional metaphors during this period can be traced, allowing a detailed picture to emerge of the ways in which a language of feeling was developed and dispatched. But why pain? Pain specifically, rather than emotion generally, is interesting for the ways in which it describes a suffering that is at once physical, social and psychic, something I will explore in more detail below. Spero is an apt model for this approach because, in addition to her interest in fighting state-sponsored aggression and patriarchal violence through her work, she also had direct daily experience of pain. She was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis after suffering symptoms following the birth of her third son, a disabling condition that

Introduction

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progressed during the late 1960s and early 70s and eventually affected her ability to use her hands. The daily experience of pain that came with this condition was a constant presence for the artist from the late 1960s on, as she told Mary Beth Edelson in 2002, ‘the avoidance of pain was ever on my mind’.9 Pain was affecting her both physically and psychically during this period, not only ‘the terrible havoc it’s claimed on my hands’ but also the ‘self-denial’, and the distress that came from knowing she was developing a progressive and debilitating condition: she describes ‘running from doctor to doctor. This started happening in Paris, and I didn’t want to admit to myself that I had this terrible disease.’10 The development of her physical pain from something that showed few outward symptoms to something that visibly affected her ability to move occurred during the period that is the focus of this book.11 Alongside an increased immersion in political activism in both her life and her art came the experience of pain. The importance of this suffering for her practice is something the artist herself explored in discussions of her work; speaking to Robert Enright in 2000 about the Artaud works, she outlined how pain manifested in her early career: I was in great pain and it resonated: Artaud, the art world, my being silenced, bourgeois society’s indifference, my physical pain and the inherent futility and/ or tragedy of life itself. It fuelled my imagery.12

In this description, three aspects of pain are established: the exclusion of ‘being silenced’, the social violence experienced in confrontation with ‘bourgeois society’s indifference’, and the artist’s ‘physical pain’. All three have been recognized in the literature on Spero’s work as being important to understanding her practice. Social violence and alienation particularly have been subject to exploration by a number of writers, often rightly described as related phenomena in key texts on Spero’s work including those by Nixon, Christopher Lyon and Jon Bird.13 Her experience of being silenced has arguably taken on most significance for writers on Spero’s work, her description succinctly articulating the anguish of being neglected by an art world which celebrated her male peers. This pain, one shared by many women artists of her generation, is rightly regarded as a symptom of the injustice of art-world bias, and it is a significant pain for thinking about twentieth-century art history, fuelling as it did the women’s movement in the arts. However, for thinking about Spero’s particular intervention, I argue that the inclusion of Spero’s experience of physical pain is important, shifting the implications of representing pain so that it exceeds a conceptual, intellectual outcry to also encompass this lived – insistent, gnawing and visceral – reality for the artist.

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Pain and Politics in Postwar Feminist Art

Physical pain has been neglected in the literature around Spero. With the exception of Catherine de Zegher’s ‘Tongue, Torture and Free Reign’, and sections of Bird’s ‘Dancing to a Different Tune’ and Lyon’s comprehensive survey, critics tend to mention her condition in passing as a footnote to her oeuvre, something that is of minor importance to her overall practice.14 While not trying to reduce Spero’s diverse career to biological fact, the aversion to seeing the physical pain that the artist experienced as connected to her work in more than practical terms seems strange. Facts about Spero’s personal life are by no means lacking in the literature on the artist; that she was a mother to three sons and that she worked at night, for example, recur in texts that address the artist’s work.15 However, discussions of her physical pain are mitigated. For instance, speaking about the equivalence of Artaud’s and Spero’s pain, Amy Schlegel states: ‘Because Artaud’s and Spero’s physical ailments and conditions are not parallel, an autobiographical interpretation of the Codex can not [sic] claim too much significance without foreclosing other significant but unrelated analytical approaches.’16 Joanna Walker states: ‘Spero’s hand-prints are certainly not intimate portraits of her arthritic condition completed in order to document the deteriorating state of her mobility.’17 Although undoubtedly correct in both instances, the need to qualify mentions of physical pain and the assertion that each work is not the result of this bodily reality is worth noting, given the ease with which critics tie this practice to the body more generally.18 It seems that the artist’s body in pain is less welcome in scholarship than the pleasurable body, the sexual body or the maternal body. There are a number of ways to interpret this. First, Spero’s aversion to the idea of the individual, suffering artist seems pertinent. Dismissing the concept of the heroic artist expressing their inner turmoil in the studio – pithily belittling the caricature in a 1985 interview by stating: ‘There, you guys can splat on your big canvasses’ – Spero saw herself as politically and socially engaged, something that her critics assent to.19 Focus on the artist’s biography therefore, particularly where it relates to her own internal experience, works against positioning Spero as someone who sought to rethink the art world as relational, collaborative and community-driven. Secondly, body art of the 1970s tends to dominate considerations of physical pain as it relates to feminism.20 The notion of pain central to the work of artists such as Gina Pane and Marina Abramović, which challenged the limits of the body, is very differently inflected by the decision to cut, burn or otherwise cause harm to yourself as part of an artistic work.21 Given the historical coincidence of these practices, perhaps it is unsurprising that the kind of pain that exists in Spero’s work is framed as almost exclusively

Introduction

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psychological, an existential pain caused by patriarchy rather than one also informed by physical experience. However, although physical pain is less often considered in writing on art in general as a possible driving force for practice, in this case I see it as offering something productive for thinking through how an artwork can act politically, seeking a visceral response to an ideological concern. In this, I am not blind to Schlegel’s warning about reducing a complex practice to a reading based purely on biography. Clearly, to suggest these works as solely the result of physical pain would be reductive in the extreme; these are not artworks as coded reference to the difficulties of Spero’s own life, and to suggest as much would do a disservice to an artist who was seriously concerned with finding a way to meaningfully intervene against violence and suffering.22 However, while agreeing to the aversion to biographical readings still I maintain that pain understood as encompassing the artist’s physical suffering alongside her sense of alienation and the political commentary put forward in her practice offers a novel way in to considering how her artworks can act as ideological objects. What I am proposing here is that Spero was exploring an iconography of pain that drew on both its psychological and its physical experience to examine pain as a subject, representing the body as processed by the imagination, and laying it bare for political intent. Thinking of pain as an alternative to the metaphor of pleasure that has been much discussed as a feminist force, this study examines how pain might work for feminism.23 Pain is suggestive for feminist practice in a number of ways. First, it is a sensation that is of the body but is deeply socially determined. How we feel pain, what we think it means, how we interpret it in others and how it is judged by both sufferer and witness to suffering are all subject to prejudice and social codes. Secondly, although pain works against language, erasing sentience in the sufferer, it also relies on language – or at least some form of expression – for its communication. Empathy and caring are dependent on our attempts to explain how we feel, relying in large part on shared experience and an understanding of the sensation. Pain is not purely physical, it is also emotional; the language used to describe a physical injury and a personal tragedy relies on similar terms in order to convey the feeling. As a political tool, pain has the capacity to force recognition of suffering onto the witness; it is a demand for empathy and an invitation for action against that which wounds. Therefore an aesthetics of pain does not necessarily include the display of images of hurt and injured bodies – although they are of course important factors and ones that I examine in more depth later in the book – but something

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Pain and Politics in Postwar Feminist Art

that invites the viewer to feel. That call to empathy is powerful and affecting. As Maggie Nelson has argued, even where people ignore or refuse claims to suffering, still it is demanding on those who hear it, often unwelcome claims to injury are not brushed off but are angrily rejected; the contemporary accusation of ‘snowflake’ is a prime example of the contempt held for those who are seen to be claiming a suffering that is unjustified.24 Indeed, contemporary political and cultural discourse is riven by claims of injury. Pain, particularly that which is often gendered in sexual discrimination and accounts of assault, is central to global movements like #MeToo, and women’s marches. Looking at the campaign to repeal the eighth amendment to the constitution in the Republic of Ireland (which was effectively a total ban on abortion in all cases including those of rape and of fatal foetal abnormality, repealed on referendum in 2018) offers a sense of how these kinds of discourses are still prevalent and powerful. Following the original decision to call the referendum on the amendment, in part made due to personal testimony of those who had suffered as a result of the law, the repeal movement was run on the basis of the pain caused by the legislation.25 The ‘In Her Shoes – Women of the Eighth’ campaign run on Facebook is a good example of how pain was made central, with multiple harrowing accounts of individual cases put forward as evidence of the injustice of the law.26 Pain, both physical and psychological, was presented as the reason to act, asking people to understand it as social, inflicted by bad legislation that came ultimately from patriarchal attitudes. Women discussed the physical effects of being forced to travel for abortion, how their relationship with their bodies had been affected by the law, how they had been made to feel shame or anger, and how these still pained them. Women’s silent suffering was exposed, articulated and connected not only to the legal framework but the underlying social attitudes that caused it to be introduced in the first place. Although for the sake of historical precision this study does not elaborate further on the connection of the late 1960s and 70s to our present day – until the conclusion which offers some thoughts on the ways in which the model I outline might relate to contemporary practice – the echoes are clear in the increasingly urgent need to act against manifest injustice, and the emotional turmoil that surrounds political decisions. Feeling similarly, Spero was part of a movement that was outraged and affected by ideological violence and oppression. Wanting to create objects that could express this, not only communicating revulsion to the viewer but affecting them with the work, this book proposes that the artist focused on pain as a means to do so. Drawing on exactly those forces that distinguish pain from other emotional or physiological metaphors, I argue that

Introduction

9

Spero sought to create a formal approach that not only demonstrated suffering, but also kept it insistently in the public realm, attacking the actions that caused hurt as well as the structures that facilitate injustice. The concept of pain is useful, I suggest, for describing the unconscious experience that Spero’s work calls on in her viewer, its visceral effect, and its focus on effecting change in society. It is a social mode, a strained and traumatized one, but one that seeks to bring the specific damaged body of the individual to bear on contemporary politics.

Pain and its politics My proposal that pain is used as a force for political action in Spero’s work draws on critical and creative practice that has considered pain’s role in culture. As in my reading above which considers how pain is described by Spero in her conversation with Enright as not just bodily hurt or existential anguish but instead is always at once physical, psychic and social, so too does the broader literature argue for pain’s particularity. Scholars describe the ways in which pain is a sensation determined by the culture and society in which it is felt, examining how bodily hurt, the angst of alienation and outrage at social injustice – or, in Spero’s terms, ‘Artaud, the art world, my being silenced, bourgeois society’s indifference, my physical pain and the inherent futility and/or tragedy of life itself ’ – are brought together to invite an investment from the viewer that is understood as at once deeply personal and profoundly political. Adrienne Rich’s lines from her poem ‘Contradictions: Tracking Poems’ are helpful here. She writes: ‘remember: the body’s pain and the pain on the streets / are not the same but you can learn / from the edges that blur’.27 Not seeking to collapse the boundaries between the body, the experience of alienation, and politics, instead I am interested here in the ways in which a focus on pain blurs the edges between them, bringing together internal, insistently private hurt and the social and cultural factors that structure and define its experience. A useful way of conceiving of this is Sara Ahmed’s formulation in which she posits that ‘feelings might be how structures get under our skin’.28 As scholars such as Lauren Berlant and Ann Cvetkovich have demonstrated, emotions and affects are at once social and personal.29 We are taught to feel; we are instructed through intimate relationships, education and culture as to expected emotional responses, encouraged to feel in particular ways at certain times: happiness at births, for example, sadness at death. These responses are often genuinely felt and purposeful; sadness at the death of a loved one is not only understandable but

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Pain and Politics in Postwar Feminist Art

useful for working through the loss; joy at the birth of a child helps a bond to develop between carer and infant. Emotions therefore respond to social conditions, but in ways that are felt internally. If you are overwhelmed with joy at the arrival of a new child you are reflecting not only your own emerging relationship with that infant, but also the ways in which the arrival of a child is socially encoded, likely inflected by physical factors such as hormonal responses to the baby and social expectations of the conventional understanding of the family as a unit, regardless of your family’s relationship to that structure. Emotion is therefore both something genuinely belonging to the subject but also something that reflects their social and ideological context, at once deeply personal and at the same time politically determined. Here the feminist maxim that emerged at the time that Spero was working – that the personal is political – is understood not only as the way we experience the world around us, but also as the ways in which ideology becomes embodied and lived. Within this framework, pain has a particular status. As Ahmed points out in her 2004 book The Cultural Politics of Emotion, pain is often understood as a physical sensation rather than an emotion. Contesting this reading, she draws on previous scholarship to demonstrate that pain is not only physical but also socially determined, positing pain as ‘not simply an effect of a history of harm; it is the bodily life of that history’ [emphasis Ahmed’s].30 Building on Elaine Scarry’s writings wherein she sees pain as a sensation that is without an object and without intention, Ahmed considers how the experience of pain is usually social both in interpersonal terms and in broad societal ones. On its most intimate level, pain is something that is communicated between the person who suffers and those people closest to them – ideally those who care for them, but also those who witness or inflict suffering – with efforts to communicate pain fundamental to its experience. Like other emotions, pain is learned to be interpreted as pain; multiple experiences – sensory and emotional – are described in terms of a language of pain, including discomfort, agony and anguish.31 What is categorized as pain, then, takes in a range of different unpleasant or fractious experiences, not homogenous, but something heterogeneous and deeply personal. However, these are also socially inflected. Pain is, for example, expressed differently in different cultures, with some conventions dictating quiet suffering and others encouraging its articulation as healthy, meaning that those moving between countries can suffer from medical staff ’s misreading of their reactions as a sign of lesser suffering. Women’s pain and the pain experienced by people of colour, too, is more likely to be seen by medical professionals as overstated, and as a result is often under-medicated.32 As Judith Butler has argued, this extends

Introduction

11

to our perception of suffering in others, particularly in war or disaster. Whose pain is counted as significant and exceptional and therefore in Butler’s terms grievable reflects broader political trends tied into global networks of power and colonial legacies, misogyny, homophobia and racism.33 Sitting on the threshold between the individual, the social and the political, pain works to entangle all three. Most significant for the purposes of thinking about how a language of pain might prove a productive political tactic for Spero is the way in which its expression reflects a relationship between sufferer and those who observe the suffering, and for this the myth of Philoctetes proves useful. According to the myth, on the journey to Troy, Philoctetes accidentally stumbled on a shrine and was bitten by a snake. The wound festered, leaving Philoctetes in agony, his cries so bothersome and his wound so suppurate that he was exiled to the island of Lemnos, left alone for ten years.34 In Sophocles’ play, Odysseus, who was responsible for his abandonment, decries the ‘foot diseased and eaten away with running ulcers’, explaining: ‘We had no peace with him: at the holy festivals we dared not touch the wine and meat; he screamed and groaned so, and those terrible cries of his brought ill luck on our celebrations; all the camp was haunted by him.’35 Philoctetes, someone who refused to conceal his pain and the oozing wound which caused his distress, was abhorrent to his compatriots. His pain too evident to be borne, he was deemed bad luck and cast aside.36 The myth of Philoctetes describes the anxiety caused by his insistence on showing pain. It was his cries, ‘screams’ and ‘groans’ that led to his exile, his failure to conceal his suffering upsetting daily life, his agony ‘haunting’ the rest of society. In this we can see the unsettling power of pain; it is an insistent and almost unbearable irritant; one which disrupts existing orders and begs for recognition. This is ultimately the ethical demand that pain issues: suffering seeks empathy. Creating a fundamental disjunction between sufferer and those around them, pain is invisible to the bystander and all-consuming to the patient. Scarry describes how this creates an asymmetrical relationship between those who are in pain and those who encounter it, saying that ‘to have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt’.37 Pain invites expression of something inexpressible that can at best be half-articulated through imperfect means. Therefore, a cry of pain is an appeal for care; an empathetic response is an act of compassion built on the belief in the suffering of others. It is this that, I argue, Spero seeks to exploit in her turn to making explicitly political work which aimed at actively opposing injustice. Foregrounding a wound, or a state of woundedness, places an ethical imperative

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Pain and Politics in Postwar Feminist Art

on those who encounter it, demanding that they confront not only the suffering body but also the cause of the injury. As Joanna Bourke states, ‘unpleasant sensations compel sufferers to “pay attention” ’, meaning that ‘identifying the cause of the body’s discomfort becomes imperative’.38 The knowledge of an external cause issues a plea to the witness to intervene. Wherever there is pain, there is the appeal to make it stop. That is pain’s promise as a political mode, but there are, of course, drawbacks to something based on an unbalanced relationship which requires suffering from one subject and compassion from the other, and it is worth taking a moment to consider them before launching into a more in-depth analysis of Spero’s practice and description of what a visual language of pain might look like. One of the central problems of using pain for politics is that those who see pain are not always sympathetic, and compassion for those who suffer is not only notoriously fickle, but is often impacted by existing imbalances in the perception of pain resulting from underlying bias. This is particularly pertinent for thinking about Spero’s work, as critiques have often focused on her appropriation of symbols from across time and culture, and her use of other people’s voices to discuss the suffering she experienced as a white, Western woman. Although not identical to these, the critical writing which examines the broader cultural role played by suffering and empathy, particularly in relation to race and power, is valuable here to help consider the limits and the boundaries of pain’s potential. The ways in which the suffering and brutalized bodies of people of colour have been spectacularized has been discussed by scholars such as Elizabeth Alexander, Courtney Baker and Saidiya Hartman. Alexander, for example, has considered the ways in which ‘Black bodies in pain for public consumption have been an American national spectacle for centuries’.39 Written in the wake of the video of the assault on Rodney King and subsequent trial and acquittal of the four white policeman who attacked him,her analysis articulates the ways in which African Americans’ experience of their own bodies are shaped by internalized racial violence that is present in culture through description, photography and video. It is not only explicit physical violence that has been considered: writers such as Hartman have offered complications of how we perceive suffering and terror in accounts of slavery, examining not explicit recordings of violent acts and their aftermath but the terror that exists in the mundane.40 The controversy over the inclusion of Open Casket (2016) at the 2017 Whitney Biennial painted by the white American painter Dana Schutz offers an insight into the ways in which different relationships to racialized violence matter when it comes to their representation, and how claims to empathy can fail. Schutz’s

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painting was based on one of the most famous documents of racist violence in American history, a photograph taken of Emmet Till’s violently disfigured face after the 14-year-old was brutally murdered by two white men in 1955. It was circulated at the will of Till’s mother, Mamie Till Bradley, who had insisted on an open casket at his funeral to force recognition of the extreme and indefensible violence her son had been subjected to. Schutz described her impetus behind the painting as being both in response to the contemporary violence against the Black community by police, but also in her thinking as a mother, empathizing with Till Bradley’s pain and her demand that the gaze of the world should fall on the violence enacted against her innocent child. However, the painting was protested by those who felt that this appropriation of the image of the Till’s mutilated face was inappropriate and exploitative of Till’s –and by extension Black people’s – suffering. British artist Hannah Black’s open letter to the curators and staff of the Biennial – signed by a number of other artists, writers and art historians – outlined the objections, stating that ‘the painting should not be acceptable to anyone who cares or pretends to care about Black people because it is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun, though the practice has been normalized for a long time’.41 Protests took place at the exhibition: Scott W. H. Young’s image of Parker Bright standing in front of Open Casket neatly captured the sense of injustice that this painting and its display in a prominent American institution stirred. Centring on the message on Bright’s t-shirt that read ‘Black Death Spectacle’, Young’s photograph shows Bright standing in front of the painting to block the image, placing his body between it and the white viewers who photographed his demonstration, visualizing the distinction in the emotional responses of white viewers as opposed to viewers of colour.42 The painting and reaction to it reflects the problem of using pain for politics: not only do representations of violence always intersect with social injustice, oppressive systems and particularly histories of racist representation, the imbalance in how images of violence impact the viewer is also exacerbated, as Alexander reminds us, when subject to the gaze of those who benefit from the privilege of not having had to internalize the lessons of Rodney King, Emmett Till or Frederick Douglass. Turning back to Spero, the criticism regarding the role of suffering in her work and its potential to focus on the empathy of the witness rather than the suffering of those whose pain is described is best seen in reaction to Torture of Women. Critics such as Desa Philippi and Mel Ramsden have pointed to the problematic nature of Spero’s appropriation of suffering, pointing to the skewed

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Pain and Politics in Postwar Feminist Art

focus on the global South and the suggestion that the work represents all women as victims.43 Ramsden is harsh in his dismissal of Spero’s political integrity. He states: [T]here’s something obscene, something scandalous, about the artist protesting suffering in far-flung parts of the globe. We can call this mindless-Thirdworldism, something which is not of course, by any means, restricted to artists. A lot of people prefer to see politics taking place in South America, China or Africa — or even, particularly in the Sixties — in Vietnam. In fact the further away and more exotic the better since it is then easier to stick with indignance but hard (though not impossible) to make it socially specific and hence begin to internalize or include yourself as part of the problem.44

Ramsden’s critique – that Spero fails to grapple with the racial politics of her appropriation of historical imagery and source materials – is important to keep in mind, particularly when embarking on a study that focuses on her use of suffering as a political tool. The case histories that Spero collates in Torture of Women imply a link between violence and less ‘developed’, more repressive, societies; appropriated ‘primitive’ imagery is often used in order to suggest emotion rather than reason; and her focus on the violence of war elsewhere – even if as a way to critique the injustice of American foreign policy – risks the creation of two categories: victims and perpetrators, one which allows the artist and her viewers to align themselves with the former without having to do the work of investigating their own complicity in the structures that facilitate war.45 This is true throughout Spero’s work. Although her interest in representing pain aims towards an ethical practice that intervenes against injustice, it is not always successful, her appropriation of images can be problematic, and the approach of focusing on suffering risks flattening complex social questions to an arguably simplified way of representing political violence which pictures relatively interchangeable bodies as victims of malicious forces. It is a recurring criticism that Spero does not allow enough for the specificities of experience not only in the works that are my focus, but as her practice goes on to consider pleasure, particularly in light of the scholarship completed in the fifty years since these works were made that asserts that point to the racial and colonial politics to appropriating images.46 The critique is important to bear in mind: while this practice is political, affecting and a genuine attempt to address injustices that Spero sees as being the result not only of patriarchy, but also racism and colonialism, at times there is an unintentional repetition of those constructs that underpin the structures she critiques. Acknowledging this does not need to

Introduction

15

include a dismissal of her political project, indeed to my mind examining it in all its complexity is the best way to do justice to Spero’s serious and thoughtful practice. What is important when proposing this as a model of an artist using a visual language of pain for activist ends is to keep in mind the potential pitfalls of this approach: where the politics of a work stems from the empathetic response of the artist, there is always a risk that it becomes more about this empathetic response than the issue that is ostensibly its focus. This tells us something about the foregrounding of pain as part of a political method; it needs more than sympathy, but requires something from the viewer, too: that they invest in the suffering put forward for their consideration and use it as a starting point for a deeper contemplation of the wider implications of that suffering. It is this that Baker’s proposal of humane insight describes, reflecting the ambition of Spero’s turn to pain, and the potential this approach offers for political image making. She states: ‘Whereas the gaze ignores or denies the humanity of the person being looked at, humane insight seeks knowledge about the humanity of that person.’47 Proposing an ‘ethics-based look that imagines the body that is seen to merit the protections due to all human bodies’, she proposes humane insight as a way of considering the value of the gaze, whether from a person of colour or from a white beholder, as part of anti-racist campaigns including abolition, civil rights and Black Lives Matter.48 Her description of humane insight recalls discussions on the value of bearing witness, which is an important model for this book: it is a framework for thinking about how Spero aimed to enact political action through creating a mode of viewing which invites the viewer to imagine how suffering feels in order to connect on a political level. Ahmed elaborates on this in her discussion of the work of Wendy Brown which warns against a focus on the wound as a political identity. She proposes a way out of the states of injury that Brown describes, rejecting sympathy, which collapses the distinction between the suffering body and the person who inhabits it, and instead suggesting a mode of witness that facilitates an ethical response to suffering.49 Recounting her relationship with her mother, a sufferer of chronic pain due to long-term illness, she argues that witnessing does not appropriate the other’s pain, but instead frames it, giving it the ‘status of an event, a happening in the world, rather than just the “something” she felt, the “something” that would come and go with her coming and going’.50 Pain makes an appeal, asking the person who witnesses suffering to engage in visceral empathy. Ahmed describes how her attention to her mother’s pain gave it ‘a life outside the fragile borders of her vulnerable and much loved body’, recording the desire to feel her mother’s pain for her.51 ‘This is love as empathy,’ she states. ‘I

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Pain and Politics in Postwar Feminist Art

love you, and imagine not only that I can feel how you feel, but that I could feel your pain for you’ [emphasis Ahmed’s].52 Acknowledging how this futile wish only serves to re-establish the difference between the pained and the witness, in that it is impossible to know the sensations they experience no matter how earnestly it is wished for, nonetheless it demonstrates the ways in which the urgent expression of pain can create a profound willed connection between bodies. Suggesting that pain requires an ethics, Ahmed states: ‘[T]he ethical demand is that I must act about that which I cannot know, rather than act insofar as I know. I am moved by what does not belong to me.’53 As she describes, although we do not know the precise sensation of another’s pain, we can read this unknown suffering from their body: we are both kept distant from it and, if empathetic with the sufferer, seek to draw it into ourselves. Pain stimulates what Veena Das describes as a ‘gnawing encounter’ with its witness, the appeal for compassion marking ‘the beginning of the relationship and not the end’.54 This kind of relationship has potential for building a feminist community that offers an insistently visceral means to share the alienation and suffering caused by patriarchy and injustice in order to build bonds of trust and love. Pain is well suited to an appeal for support; not only is there the empathy that witnesses feel for sufferers, but there is also the community created by those who suffer similarly. The shared experience of hurt ties people together, forging ways of understanding and combating the causes of injury. In the same way as solidarity can be built through consciousness-raising, expressing pain invites an intellectual compassion. This is the frame through which I view Spero’s work made during the late 1960s and early 70s; more than artworks to be looked at and contemplated, they act as invitations to feel with the artist, objects that contain something of the pain the artist feels personally and perceives socially in order to convey it to an ideal, empathetic viewer.

Pain’s metaphor and metonymy Having outlined the potential of a visual language of pain, it is worth taking a moment here to explore in more detail what this might consist of, and how it relates to scholarship that explores pain more generally. After all, what a ‘visual language of pain’ looks like is not obvious, particularly when separated from images of hurt and injured bodies. Scholarship on pain offers ways of thinking about how the sensation, one which is difficult to translate into language and by

Introduction

17

extension visual representation, is communicated. Thinking back to Philoctetes we can consider how an artwork might act as a conduit for representing pain, a sensation that is after all to some extent unknowable and unrepresentable. In the myth, two aspects of pain emerge: on the one hand is Philoctetes’ festering wound, on the other his vocalization of its experience. The representation of pain, then, happens through metonymy or metaphor: through the symptom or its description. Historians and theoreticians of pain have fleshed out these modes of articulation, pointing to faltering language and silence, a reliance on a conventional vocabulary of pain, representation of the wound, and a focus on the borders of the body as key themes in its representation. Central to my discussion throughout the book, it is worth briefly establishing here the specific terms of how I understand the visual articulation of pain as a basis for what follows. Metaphor has dominated considerations of descriptions of pain since Scarry’s examination of the language used by those who suffer in her 1985 book The Body in Pain which has long been a touchstone for the subject.55 Describing a voice that falters and fails she states: ‘[W]hatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language.’56 Over the course of her book, she makes wide-reaching claims for the silencing power of pain, arguing that ‘resistance to language is not simply one of its incidental or accidental attributes but is essential to what it is’.57 Marked by the ‘shattering of language’, pain forces a person to retreat from sentience, annihilating expression almost entirely.58 Pointing to Virginia Woolf ’s conclusion that in contrast to love, which has a rich and varied language of expression, even the most mundane of pains is indescribable,59 Scarry claims a homogeneity to pain that exceeds cultural differences and instead maintains ‘the universal sameness of the central problem’.60 She suggests that this is the objectlessness of pain; that is, ‘unlike any other state of consciousness, [it] has no referential content. It is not of or for anything’ [emphasis Scarry’s].61 Considering this factor central to the distance between pain and language, Scarry claims: ‘It is precisely because it takes no object that it, more than any other phenomenon, resists objectification in language.’62 An ephemeral and inchoate force, pain exists outside reference, making it absorptive and consuming, leaving the victim bereft of a language through which to express their suffering. Pain, in Scarry’s understanding, attacks the sufferer’s ability to speak, silencing the victim. In her 2014 The Story of Pain, Joanna Bourke corrects this assertion, dedicating a chapter to those metaphors that are commonly used by those who suffer.63 Demonstrating the way in which there is a conventional language of pain that is

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Pain and Politics in Postwar Feminist Art

richly inflected by the sufferer’s experience but that relies on recognizable tropes, Bourke identifies a vocabulary of analogies used in order to communicate the experience of suffering. First, objectifying pain is a common tactic for sufferers, seeing their pain as an external and invading force, sometimes monstrous, sometimes almost like a companion or lover that is constantly with them.64 Secondly, it manifests in the imagination as a weapon attacking the victim, sharp needles and knives that pierce, hammers that strike, vices that crush, teeth that bite, where bodies are imagined as punctured and shattered by violent attacks. Thirdly, fire and burning are common metaphors, the heat describing an intensity of sensation. Finally, pain is often related to colour, with reds, greys, blacks and whites being invoked to describe the nature of an injury.65 Importantly, as Ariel Glucklich points out, the way we feel pain is not related to the way in which we articulate it. When we describe a stabbing pain, for example, it is unlikely that this is a description of the actual sensation that being stabbed would create; as Glucklich states, ‘The selection of metaphors to describe pain is based on an entirely different principle from an extension of the effects of a tool or weapon on our body. What is at work, instead, is an analogy based on the formal properties of different senses.’66 When we talk about stabbing, burning or crushing, they are not invoked to describe the actual feelings of those experiences, but instead point to specific qualities we metaphorically associate with those activities: stabbing: sharpness; fire: heat; crushing: weight.67 This is key: pain in its metaphoric description is not an accurate account but is instead the body as processed by the imagination. This is equally true of emotional pain. When we talk about the darkness of despair or the weight of depression, these are not literal descriptions but interpretations that translate perceived qualities of darkness or weight onto our experience of suffering. These conventions establish the vocabulary of metaphor that is invoked in order to describe pain, with claims that the voice is silenced, too, describing not only a physical obstruction to speech but also functioning as an analogy for pain’s effects. A focus on the sites of injury involves a metonymic representation of pain. The wound comes to stand in for pain, giving the witness a sense of the kind of damage done and the opportunity to imagine how it would feel to be wounded in a similar way. Scholars have discussed the ways in which this focus on the representation of the wound has been important for photographing and communicating the effects of war.68 Wounds become not only the representation of the pain suffered by victims, but also of the conflicts that cause them. Susan Sontag begins her 2003 exploration of representations of conflict, Regarding the Pain of Others, by examining Virginia Woolf ’s arguments in Three Guineas for

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the importance of confronting photographs of suffering and dying victims of the Spanish Civil War. Sontag describes their effects: ‘Look, the photographs say, this is what it’s like. This is what war does. And that, that is what it does, too’ [emphasis Sontag’s].69 The violently destroyed bodies shown in photographs – described by Woolf as ‘a photograph of what might be a man’s body, or a woman’s; it is so mutilated that it might, on the other hand, be the body of a pig’ – represent injury understood to be inherently connected not only to the bomb that has exploded and caused harm, but to the realities of the conflict itself.70 As Sontag demonstrates, images of damaged bodies have long been used to establish a narrative of justifiable violence or to encourage dissent. Standing in for the ideas that they represent, the viewer is invited to see wider ideological stakes than the specific instances on display, though this is not a necessarily fixed terrain; in Woolf ’s example, for instance, the photographs were dispatched by the Spanish government as evidence of the violence of their enemies, where Woolf is more interested in considering the evils of war itself and the gendered nature of conflict.71 Thus far in studies of images of pain, there has been an emphasis on this kind of photographic representation of war and suffering. Questions around the ways in which the photograph’s claim to document and how it frames the scene that it displays have driven scholarship on images of pain. However, although my focus is different in that I am looking at the ways in which the experience of pain – as opposed to the painful effects of violence or injury – can be represented, still the language of metonymy remains pertinent to how the body is imagined when in pain. Pain’s expression often concentrates on the wound itself, a description of the cause of bodily harm standing in for its experience. An injury becomes a focus for the sufferer’s bodily sensation, as Elizabeth Grosz describes it: ‘The effected zones of the body become enlarged and magnified in the body image.’72 A wound draws the sufferer’s attention, meaning that the otherwise disregarded borders of the body become suddenly perceptible.73 Of course, wounds often are sources of pain, but pain is not simply located in a single source; as Bourke states, ‘Pains are modes of perception: pains are not the injury or noxious stimulus itself but the way we evaluate the injury or stimulus.’74 Metonymic of harm and the trauma of injury, a wound is a visual marker of the experience of pain on the body. The representation of a wound therefore is something that stands in for the experience of pain in the other. We do not need to look to the brutal or violent for evidence of this; those who have cared for small children that have grazed a knee or banged their head will be able to attest to the ways in which a scrape can be produced as evidence of pain, even

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if the child had been playing untroubled before they noticed the mark. Metonymy also occurs in accounts of wounding. Hearing of the means by which a body was hurt is often more effective in conveying the experience of pain than description of the pain itself. Scarry offers an example which illustrates this: In medical case histories of people whose pain began with an accident, the sentences describing the accident (the moment when the hammer fell from the ladder onto the person’s spine) may more successfully convey the sheer fact of the patient’s agony than those sentences that attempt to describe the person’s pain directly, even though the impact of the hammer (lasting one second) and the pain (lasting one year) are obviously not the same.75

Descriptions of the causes of pain come to represent it, offering an effective substitution of the sensation that is the result of the accident. Therefore, anything from the photograph of the explosion at Hiroshima taken after the atomic bomb was dropped, to an image such as Robert Capa’s 1936 (possibly staged) photograph Death of a Militiaman, to descriptions such as those used by Amnesty International that offer detailed accounts of the means of causing harm to a body metonymize the pain that resulted from the actions described. It bears noting that in discussing a language of metaphor and metonymy, there is a coincidence with the account of the unconscious as described by Lacan in his ‘The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious’, in which they are likened with key processes of the unconscious: metaphor with condensation; metonymy with displacement.76 As Grosz explains, metaphor mimics the repression of the unconscious symptom, the original signifier remaining unconscious, registering through replacement that points to but conceals the original. Metonymy relates to desire, reflecting the process of displacement from the lost first object of desire along a chain of always inadequate substitutes.77 While the debates on the psychoanalytic value of this claim are not relevant to my consideration of pain and its expression, it is worth noting the ways in which the relationship of linguistic operation to the organization of the unconscious mind can be useful in conceptualizing the articulation of pain.78 Lacan formulates the representation of metaphor and metonymy as, respectively, vertical and horizontal. In metaphor, the repressed signifier remains underneath the line of the conscious mind frozen and fixed in the unconscious. It is transformed into a signified to which the conscious expressions unknowingly refer, and is overlaid by the signifier that builds on top of the signified that lays at its base. Metonymy by contrast keeps the repressed signifier active, always in associative relation to the subject’s language, allowing the unconscious to intervene in conscious speech. This

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operation moves sideways, a chain of signification that is not fully repressed into the unconscious. The intersection between the two provides a good way of thinking about how pain operates, too. Working through language, an inherently social form, expression is of both known feelings and ones repressed and bodily. The object under discussion is itself inexpressible and so a series of substitutions are brought to bear in order either to build on or replace the feeling that is the object of expression. Sitting at the junction between the bodily and the social, pain’s articulation through metaphor and metonymy reflects the ways in which it is experienced and how this experience translates into expression.

Chapter outline Throughout this book I argue that thinking through the lens of pain provides a unifying frame to understanding Spero’s work of this period. Elaborating this for the context of my study, each chapter offers an examination of the ways in which pain and emotion work for artistic practice over the period from 1966 to 1976. My first chapter offers a broader historical perspective on the central thesis of this book, examining the ways in which emotional metaphors were useful rhetorical modes for communicating outrage at the war in Vietnam and for forming feminist communities. With the connection between the personal and political outlined by Carol Hanisch central, I consider how emotion worked as a way to consolidate communities and appeal for support in the New Left broadly and artistic activism specifically during the late 1960s and early 70s, particularly thinking through Berlant’s description of intimate publics. Going on to elucidate the particular history of pain during this period clinically, socially and in its use by artists, I outline how the understanding of pain as personal, social and political emerges at this time. In Chapter Two, I move on to focus on Spero’s first engagements with pain as a framework in her War Series and Artaud Paintings, looking at how pain can be registered in the work itself. For this, the framework of symbols and the symbolic discussed above is crucial, examining her treatment of signs and considering how they relate to pain’s expression. Looking at how Spero’s visual language develops over 1966–70, I consider how a relationship to documentation of Vietnam is visible in the War Series, putting this engagement with images of hurt and suffering bodies into the context of anti-war arts-activism and production. Developing this, I look to the writings of Jacques Lacan in order to consider how a visual language of pain can be seen to speak politically, relating it to the

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symbolic order and its breakdown. I then turn to the Artaud Paintings in order to examine the implications of this fully, engaging with Artaud’s theoretical writings and considering the distance between Spero’s ambitions and Artaud’s in order to better examine the significance of using his words for her politics. As Spero’s turn to the author coincides with her first engagements with feminist activism, the development from the anti-war political mode to the politics of the women’s movement is examined as a significant driver for an increased attention to the structures that underpin society. This chapter seeks to establish the iconographic registers of pain in the work, relating this to its wider activist context and considering how the War Series and the Artaud Paintings reveal something of the politics of the turn to pain. Chapter Three focuses on a shorter historical range – 1971–2 – in order to consider the dynamic of silence and speech that are at work in the Codex Artaud, and how this relates to wider discussions being held in the feminist community. Starting with a consideration of the paper supports that are such an important part of the visual language of Spero’s work, I consider how this pained and muted iconographic approach contrasts with the artist’s written statements and manifestos produced during the same period. Situating silence and speech as historically significant modes for feminism in the early 1970s, I turn to hysteria, a concept that has been repeatedly considered in work on Spero. Examining discussions of the condition that occurred in the feminist community in the 1970s, particularly that of Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous, I consider how these offer insight into the stakes for silence and speech in the women’s movement at this time. Thinking of this in relation to the politics of the art community, I then discuss the different conclusions on the power of silence in relation to The American Woman Artist Show organized by the GEDOK organization in Germany in 1972. Considering how Spero’s practice reflects the debates of the feminist art community as it was being established, this chapter investigates how Spero’s pained iconography was informed by its context. My final chapter focuses on Torture of Women which offers the most sustained and explicit engagement with pain as a political mode. In my discussion on the work, I focus on pain’s appeal to empathy, considering how it invites a visceral engagement with the viewer through its treatment of real accounts of torture taken from sources such as Amnesty International and the New York Times. In order to develop this discussion, I turn to a perhaps unexpected theoretical association: medieval affective meditation. This mode comes from recent scholarship into the ways in which medieval objects invite a relationship with the viewer that goes beyond contemplation and instead asks them to feel the

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suffering described as part of a Christian devotional practice. Engaging with writings by Sarah McNamer and Jill Bennett that elucidate this, I consider it a productive parallel for thinking about how Spero’s representations of pain invite visceral empathy in the viewer and consolidate feminist support. This chapter focuses on the relationship between the object and the viewer, considering how pain is central in this, and examining how visceral empathy might work for feminist politics. As the book progresses, I turn my attention to the different media that Spero used, mirroring the artist’s own interest in different techniques as her practice progressed. Perhaps predictably in a book that considers pain in visual art, body art figures in my introduction, being as it was an important part of the context for Spero’s practice. Photography, too, especially images of pain as part of artistic anti-war agitation, is a touchstone, one that I go on to explore in more detail in Chapter Two in thinking about the ways in which Spero translated war photography as part of her turn to creating works that address pain. In addition to these more familiar formal approaches to representing pain, I will think about how drawing, collage and print are important methods in Spero’s pain works. Scratching at the paper in indexical marks which register her righteous anger in the War Series, cutting through Artaud’s words in Codex Artaud to amplify his disjointed and hysterical sensibility, and focusing on interruptions and errors in the printing process to create breaks and shocks in representation are all, I argue, vital to Spero’s visual language of pain. Analysis of these formal aspects of her work form a crucial part of my argument, which dwells on their detail in order to consider how they signify more broadly in the context in which she was working. By reading Spero’s works of this period through the lens of a theoretically and historically inflected concept of pain, I propose a new way of understanding this important moment in the artist’s career. Focusing on these eleven years allows for an intensive study of a particular selection of works, and on the way in which the artist’s practice was brought into the service of an emerging and evolving politics. By considering Spero as part of her historical context, as someone both very much engaged with contemporaneous activism but also determinedly individual in her approach to making, this project interrogates the wider implications of Spero’s turn to a politics of emotion in relation to the art world of the time. Situating this feminist practice in terms of its foundation from within anti-Vietnam War activism, I assert the importance of considering the emergence of feminism out of this context, seeing how anti-war iconography and political tactics for art developed into ways of representing personal

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oppression. Complicating existing scholarly interpretations of feminism’s relationship with contemporaneous movements, I consider feminist activism as another politicized reconsideration of the art object during this crucial moment for American art politics. By turning to pain as my theoretical model for examining this, I am interested not in the object as an isolated or even affective site of contemplation; instead I want to consider the interaction between the visceral, social and political. Throughout I argue that objects made to be politically active and politically persuasive act in distinctive ways to facilitate a different kind of relationship with the viewer. For Spero this was necessarily bodily and after 1969 focused on women’s experience. Connecting individuals together through visceral empathy, politics is internalized, inviting action. Thinking about how pain offers a framework for creating exactly this kind of connection, I examine this turbulent moment in art politics thinking about pain as a strategy for making the personal political.

CHAPTER ONE

Personal and Political: Pain and Emotion 1966–76 Feminism has been exploring the contention that ‘the personal is political’ for nearly fifty years, troubling the distinction between the assumed public realm of politics, with its masculine associations, and the private, feminized world of personal experience. Asserting a continuity between two realms long seen to be separate, as the women’s movement evolved the personal was increasingly understood as the sphere in which the structural effects of political systems were felt, and this understanding offered women a way to formulate their sense of how patriarchy shapes and frames women’s experience. It was Carol Hanisch’s paper published in Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation in 1970 which popularized the phrase. Writing in response to Dottie Zellner who had questioned whether consciousness-raising was in fact more therapy than activism, Hanisch argued for its value as a political tactic, championing the method as a kind of active politics that effectively interrogated the lived conditions of women. For Hanisch, the work of consciousness-raising was the opposite of therapy, which she saw as a false solution to problems that resulted from patriarchal oppression. Instead it offered the opportunity for women to analyse their situation in detail and develop a theoretical understanding of the ways in which patriarchy effects women as a group, allowing for the development of carefully devised and effective protests that addressed its realities. In the short essay, Hanisch describes the ways in which this new kind of political organizing differed from her experience in the New Left (known colloquially as ‘the movement’). She states: I do not go to these sessions because I need or want to talk about my ‘personal problems’. In fact, I would rather not. As a movement woman, I’ve been pressured to be strong, selfless, other-oriented, sacrificing, and in general pretty much in control of my own life. To admit to the problems in my life is to be deemed weak. So I want to be a strong woman, in movement terms, and not admit I have any real problems that I can’t find a personal solution to (except those directly related to the capitalist system).1 25

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Painting the experience of being a ‘movement woman’ as a demand for a strength defined in terms of a stoic self-sacrifice, Hanisch’s text articulates the ways in which emotion evolves in understanding during the shift from the politics of the 1960s to that of the 1970s. At the moment of the text’s first delivery in 1969, the idea of feminized emotion as a negative force was being interrogated; as Hanisch states, ‘The bad things that are said about us as women are ... actually things that we want to carry into the new society and want men to share too (women are sensitive, emotional).’2 This chapter examines the relationship between emotion, politics and art during the late 1960s and early 1970s, considering how the conceptual stakes of being seen as emotional changed during this period. Looking first to the ways in which political and arts-activist communities were built through a shared sense of outrage and disgust at war and the development of this into a collective exploration of how feelings reveal power imbalances in feminist activism, I then go on to consider how pain relates to these trends. Establishing the historical and political context in which pain changes in its understanding, I will consider how the physiological aspect of pain differentiates it from other emotions, while also maintaining its connection to the broader trend in which pain is seen as revealing political truths. Throughout, the relationship of the personal and the political will be central; as Hanisch’s text demonstrates, a consideration of the connection between the two was under investigation at this time. Offering some of the context in which Spero was working, this chapter considers how the personal and political can be understood in relation to the emotional metaphors that supported and consolidated activist groups during the period in which the artist was making work that developed her aesthetic of pain. Demonstrating the stakes of Spero’s turn to emotion – which I will examine in detail in the following chapters – this chapter will establish both how pain was understood historically, and the environment of artistic activism which Spero learned from and spoke to during the 1960s and 70s.

Anti-war anger and feminist hurt It’s in the back of our minds, as fear or as rage . . .3 Nestled in a section termed ‘The Angry Years’ in Roel Arkesteijn’s 2009 book Codex Spero is a small photograph that depicts Spero and Golub taking part in an anti-war demonstration [Figure 1.1]. Likely part of a protest organized by

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Irving Petlin for the A.W.C. and Artists and Writers Protest in 1969, the image shows the couple walking as part of a group carrying body bags down a wet New York street. The action, in which a number of key arts activists were involved, was described by Lucy Lippard in her 1990 book A Different War. She states: In one moving and effective demonstration piece, we carried black body bags (exactly the kind used in Vietnam, hunted down by Irving Petlin) marked with the number of American and Vietnamese dead, whose names were written on white cloth runners, over a block long, flanking the procession. People threw flowers on the bags; even the police, recognizing the names, were respectful.4

Photographed from behind, the group stands in two rows. The shadows of the towering skyscrapers that they walk past create a line of light in the centre of the street, made bright in the photograph by the reflection of the damp tarmac. It serves to emphasize the empty bags that separate the columns of protestors, pointing to the real dead bodies of soldiers being sent back from the war zones

Figure 1.1 Anti-war demonstration, New York.

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of Southeast Asia. A grim spectacle, this ritual of protest puts death at centre stage, with the demonstrators parading funereally in a public performance of mourning.5 Here, the language of ritual and memorial form the basis of the protest, blocking the street for traffic in order to create a physical space that is dedicated to grief. The claim to territory recalls Claes Oldenburg’s Proposed Monument for the Intersection of Canal Street and Broadway, N.Y.C. – Block of Concrete, Inscribed with the Names of War Heroes (1965) [Figure 1.2] which ironically proposes obstructing an entire intersection of the busy New York streetscape as a memorial. Oldenburg’s scheme suggests creating an obstacle which prevents the continuation of daily life and aggressively transforms a living environment into one dedicated to the dead. In the protest, the ceremonial terms devote the space to the memories of those killed in action. Standing apart from each other the protestors claim territory, redefining it temporarily as a space for remembrance, putting their sorrow on show and asking the public to respond similarly. The white cotton runners that flank the group construct real and imaginary boundaries, the group becomes a moving embodiment of the sadness caused by unnecessary death; the recognizable names of the young, innocent enlisted command reverence even from those who, as Lippard’s descriptions suggest, might be expected to object. In this protest, grief is not politically neutral; instead it is invoked as a powerful ally for the underlying claim about the injustice of the war. War means death, this protest asserts, and grief drives dissent. Emotion is used to bolster the political message; not unpatriotic objectors, instead the protestors foreground their grief at the deaths of their countrymen, motivated by their pain to speak out against an unfeeling government.6 This protest is one example of how emotional metaphors were important for the anti-war movement. Making explicit the anger, grief and shame felt at the actions of the American government, the protestors ask people to come together to focus on their disgust and outrage at the unnecessary death of the young men being sent back in body bags from Vietnam. As with most protests, the action is not only a remonstration, but also an appeal for support. Not shouting for policy change, instead it is the recognizable names of the casualties of war that are foregrounded, interpellating those who are empathetic to the losses to support the action. Grief acts to override any intellectual justification for war; the traditional division between the rational and the emotional is flipped on its head: intellectual justification is all well and good, but it does not measure up to the sadness of a young man lying dead on a battlefield thousands of miles from home. Asking witnesses to the action to focus on that grief, the emotional

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Figure 1.2 Claes Oldenburg, Proposed Monument for the Intersection of Canal Street and Broadway, N.Y.C. – Block of Concrete, Inscribed with the Names of War Heroes, 1965. Crayon and watercolor. 16 × 12 in. (40.6 × 30.5 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Bequest of Alicia Legg. Photo courtesy the Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio. Copyright 1965 Claes Oldenburg.

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response is put forward as the more authentic one: no amount of rationalization can override the realities of death and mourning. The role of emotion in creating a community of feeling has been explored by feminist writers who seek to understand how this feminized mode of experience relates to broader social and political trends.7 Lauren Berlant, for example, has described the ways in which groups can be formed around emotional economies through what they term as intimate publics. Although Berlant’s focus is not on overtly political groups – instead considering the ways markets open up in which various cultural and commercial products come to form a ‘culture of circulation’ that for participants of the intimate public feels ‘as though it expresses what is common among them’ – the concept of people grouped around a particular set of feelings is pertinent to thinking about how the anti-war movement’s appeal to emotion operates.8 As they explain of individuals’ investments in intimate publics: Their participation seems to confirm the sense that even before there was a market addressed to them, there existed a world of strangers who would be emotionally literate in each other’s experience of power, intimacy, desire, and discontent, with all that entails: varieties of suffering and fantasies of transcendence; longing for reciprocity with other humans and the world; irrational and rational attachments to the way things are; special styles of ferocity and refusal; and a creative will to survive that attends to everyday situations while imagining conditions of flourishing within and beyond them.9

Grouped around a shared sense of the world, intimate publics are not formalized organizations, but instead an imagined community that thinks like you, something that the individual can connect to simply through feeling a part of it. Emotional experience is central to this; as Berlant describes, it circulates as ‘an already felt need’ and is based on a sense of ‘emotional continuity’ between those who identify with the idea.10 The formation of the New Left has been credited to just such an identification in largely affluent young white students who saw the disparity between the ideals of ‘freedom, equality, love and hope’ positioned as central to American society, and the realities of racial discrimination, broader social and economic inequality, and war, as fundamental injustices demanding action.11 As Sara Evans states in her account of the development of women’s liberation from anti-war activism, people who identified with the New Left were those alienated from mainstream campus life, part of a subculture that rejected the trappings of the bourgeois world of their parents. Seeking to act against the injustices that they saw, activists

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were inspired by civil rights, and wanted to add their support, ‘welcom[ing] the opportunity to make a moral witness’.12 The sense of what that moral witness consisted of developed throughout the 1960s among the various groups that emerged as the movement splintered. For some wings, morality meant militancy and, at its most extreme, led to the paramilitary violence of the Weathermen; in others it meant peaceful civil disobedience and led to political careers.13 As Todd Gitlin writes in his part-history, part-memoir The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, what connected members of the movement was their shared outrage: ‘In the spreading cross-hatch where the student movement and the counterculture intersected, a youth identity said, in effect: To be young and American is to have been betrayed; to be alive is to be enraged.’14 The intimate public that emerged in the anti-war movement was built around a shared sense of the horror of war and the feelings that resulted from it. Contrasted to impassive and self-interested authority, the emotional response was put forward as a moral position that bolstered ideological claims by various groups that would otherwise remain unconnected. However, the importance of outrage, disgust and shame repeats itself, visible in commentaries such as the statement issued by the academics and professionals associated with the antiwar movement in ‘A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority’ which condemned the war as that which ‘outrages [draftees’] deepest moral and religious sense[s]’;15 the ‘deep distress’ registered in the full-page advertisement taken out in the 4 April 1965 edition of the New York Times, ‘2500 Ministers, Priests, and Rabbis Say: MR PRESIDENT, In the Name of God, STOP IT’; and the resolution passed in 1963 by Women Strike for Peace that they would ‘alert the public to the dangers and horrors of war in Vietnam and to the specific ways in which human morality is being violated’.16 With diverse political focuses, still these disparate groups came together through their shared sense that outrage was moral in the face of an unjust and illegal war. Although inspired by the movement, the wider New Left was often not directly connected with the artistic anti-war activism. Where there certainly were overlaps between the two – with individual artists involved in other activist groups, movement figures contributing to the organization of art events, and the imagery of the artistic anti-war movement being adopted by student protestors – for the most part the artistic anti-war movement was not a central force in the New Left, and the major groups that emerged in the late 1960s and early 70s, such as the Art Workers’ Coalition and the New York Art Strike, focused their attention on the museums and art world rather than the government.17 That said, the broader account offered by Gitlin certainly applies to the actions undertaken

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by members of New York-based anti-war artistic groups. As in Berlant’s description of intimate publics, the groups organized around similar aims, identifying themselves within the broader terms of a movement that seemed to represent their ‘experience of power, intimacy, desire, and discontent’. The rhetoric of outrage and shame was echoed in the artistic anti-war community. The ‘End Your Silence’ advertisement in the 18 April 1965 edition of the New York Times by Artists and Writers Protest, for example, states: ‘We are grieved by American policies in Vietnam.’18 Similarly in the 27 June 1965 advertisement that repeats the demand, the writers state: ‘[W]e will not remain silent in the face of our country’s shame.’ Various artistic anti-war actions were arranged that varied in their approach. Some, such as Lippard, Robert Huot and Ron Wollin’s exhibition at the Paula Cooper Gallery in 1968, Benefit for the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, involved offering largely apolitical minimalist works for sale with profits donated to the committee; others such as the People’s Flag Show held at the Judson Memorial Church in 1970 featured explicitly political work that sought to challenge the repression of protestors’ use of the American flag as a symbol for attack and subversion. However, the majority of exhibition and explicitly anti-war artistic and agit-prop production sought to tap in to the shared outrage of the New Left, making it manifest in their work in order to both communicate and consolidate the feeling of anger that lay at the root of much anti-war protest. One such event was Angry Arts Week which was held on 29 January–8 February 1967. The event, organized by Artists and Writers Protest, brought together over 200 artists during this week of performances, protests and exhibitions against the war. The contributions from visual artists were compiled in the Collage of Indignation which was described by Max Kozloff as a ‘Wailing Wall’.19 Similar to the 1966 Los Angeles Peace Tower – a collection of anti-war works surrounding Mark di Suvero’s tower of steel girders, chains and cables which was exhibited in a vacant lot on Sunset Boulevard – the collage was a patchwork of offerings from a range of artists in a range of styles that demonstrated the widespread dissent of the art community. Anger and indignation took centre stage in this anarchic collection of contributions that responded to the invitation sent by Kozloff and Dore Ashton on behalf of Artists and Writers Protest which solicited works that fumed and fomented. It read: We, the ARTISTS AND WRITERS PROTEST, call upon you to participate in a Collage of Indignation, to be mounted in the cause of peace . . . Titled The Angry Arts, it will feature, in a context of happenings, poetry readings, films,

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music and theatre, panoramic sized canvases, upon which you, the artists of New York, are asked to paint, draw, or attach whatever images or objects that will express or stand for your anger against the war. (Statements or signatures additionally will be welcome.) We are also interested in whatever manner of visual invective, political caricature, or related savage materials you would care to contribute. Join in a spirit of cooperation with the other artistic communities of this city in a desperate plea for sanity.20

Resulting in contributions from 150 to 200 artists the 10 by 120-foot collage was sprawling, unkempt and fragmented.As Beth Ann Handler points out, some, like Roy Lichtenstein and Nancy Graves, gave work that was an example of their current practice, adapted to suit the anti-war message.21 Others abandoned their signature styles to contribute a direct political statement through artworks. A third strand did not attempt to make artworks at all but instead wrote notes of protest that were attached to the collage; the activist group Black Mask, for example, contributed panels that declared ‘HUMP WAR’ and ‘REVOLUTION’.22 As the photo documentation of the show demonstrates, the result was indeed angry, if disjointed: a vociferous execration of the government and its war.23 Contributions to the collage were solicited not in terms of aesthetic criteria, nor for their clarity of message; instead it was artworks that ‘stand for your anger against the war’, which were ‘invectives’, ‘savage’ and contributed to the ‘desperate plea for sanity’ that the organizers sought. Privileging emotion was seen as a necessary departure from the dominance of formalism as can be seen in Golub’s critical writing on the collage. He states: Today art is largely autonomous and concerned with perfectibility. Anger cannot easily burst through such channels. Disaffection explodes as caricature, ugliness or insult and defamation – the strong disavowal of intellectuals and artists . . . Such anger today can only be made up of pieces of art, guises of art, gestures using art habits, caricature, calumny, etc. This is not political art but rather a popular expression of popular revulsion. Artists came to demonstrate their fury and shame. There is a refined and subtle protest on the Collage. But essentially the work is angry – against the war, against the bombing, against President Johnson, etc. The Collage is gross, vulgar, clumsy, ugly! – exaggeration to the point of bombast.24

The anger that unites the New Left features here in Golub’s account as something that needs to be expressed. Expression is restricted by formalism, specifically in the ways in which rage is unable to break through. In order to act

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politically, the sense of revulsion, disgust and anger must be allowed to flow from the collage, departing from the restricted conditions of art that had been so important in New York in the previous decade; it is as though strict aesthetic criteria needed to be rejected given the urgency of the war. Almost all responses to the collage privileged its sense of purpose and its violent protest rather than its aesthetic worth. Often ambivalent accounts of its artistic value were tempered by the sense of its angry and violent opposition – the strength of feeling it represented. In the context of the 1960s American art world that was still dealing with the legacies of Greenbergian formalism, rather than modernist experimentation, the value of the work was seen as the strength of political feeling it represented with visible emotion proposed as a weapon against injustice.25 This is echoed by those involved in anti-war actions. Allan D’Arcangelo, for example, describes the importance of expressing the emotion that came with anti-war sentiment. He states: ‘I wasn’t considering aesthetic problems but rather how to convey a particular feeling that I had about the war, about that situation in a way and with materials that I usually use.’26 Golub puts it somewhat more succinctly, saying, ‘Paintings don’t change wars. They show feelings about wars.’27 Looking at the make-up of the Collage reflects something of the sense of an angry and outraged intimate public. Although representing ‘a popular expression of popular revulsion’ and the sense of a public that that implies, it is not a work made collectively. Instead, each artist created some form of intervention to be attached to a panel of the collage, whether it was an example of their work, a slogan or a message of support. The photographs – which are all that remains of the collage after it was burnt by an organizer in an attempt to preserve the nature of the protest and prevent it from being commodified – provide evidence of how this manifested on the surface of the structure that stretched across the Loeb Student Centre. On one section, a crudely drawn phallus is decorated in the stars and the stripes; labelled ‘love sword’, it occupies nearly half the height of the board. Above it is a caricatured picture of President Johnson, complete with Stetson hat, baring his teeth at the viewer; he holds a rifle in one oversized hand that points down the panel and a hand grenade in the other. Around the images are scrawled various slogans and signatures, filling in the space between them. At the base there is a rectangular panel which features a portrait of a female figure staring out at the viewer, a format that is mirrored in the panels to either side which include statements and declarations: ‘Johnson’s Filthy War’ is painted over one image in scrawled handwriting, a panel is inscribed with the words ‘Morrison will never die’ (possibly by May Stevens), referring to the self-immolation of Norman Morrison in 1965.

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Differentiated by style and message, still, the format connects each panel, subsuming their specifics underneath the overall framing of the work. Every artwork, signature or graffiti-like scrawl manifests the indignation of a mass of outraged citizens, inviting the audience to imagine their own angry contribution to the ad hoc construction. Contained as they are by the boards, this structure could in theory extend endlessly, zigzagging across the room in identical sections that sit perpendicular to one another and create the body of the collage. As it stands, the number of contributions combines to conjure the idea of a community that is furious. Often unsigned, instead they stand in for a chorus of voices that raise this cacophonous cry of anger and dissent. The intimacy of this public is based on their emotional rejection of war: it is that that unites the various demands and agitations; although related, a call for democracy as made in one panel is not necessarily a call for revolution as made in another, but both relate to an outrage about the status quo and an angry demand for its transformation. One panel of the Collage of Indignation offers a sense of how this notion of intimate publics relates to the relationship between the personal and political. Made by Dorothy Koppelman, it shows a falling dove captioned by the text, ‘I am ashamed of what we are doing in Vietnam.’ Mimicking the ways in which the language of an intimate public interpellates people through a sense that it speaks to something that was already part of their personal world view, in this announcement, political objections are put forward as personal. Although speaking to US governmental foreign policy, still the phrase is not an assertion that the government should feel ashamed of itself, nor a demand for change. Instead, remorse for public policy is presented here as being felt internally, expressed from a subjective position. Hanisch’s description of the ways in which the movement expects ‘strong, selfless, other-oriented, sacrificing’ feels relevant here. The outrage that connects the movement needs to become part of the subject, with declarations of shame, anger and grief aligning the individual with the cause, demonstrating their ardent, passionate wish for an end to the violence. Not a strength of feeling that emanates from their own experience, instead it is feeling for others that marks you out as part of the moral rejection of war; the more passionately you internalize the shame of Vietnam and express your outrage, the more convincing your objections will become and by extension the movement’s claim to moral rectitude. This is further revealed by the ways in which those who were seen as supporting or complicit with the war were described as unemotional, establishing feeling as one of the boundaries that separated – in their understanding – the principled, peace-seeking New Left from their murderous hawkish enemies.

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Dramatizing this was the Communiqué released by the Guerrilla Art Action Group after their A Call For The Immediate Resignation Of All The Rockefellers From The Board Of Trustees Of The Museum Of Modern Art, also known as Blood Bath. In itself, Blood Bath stands evidence to a belief in the power of performing emotion for protest. On 10 November 1969, Silvianna, Poppy Johnson, Jean Toche and Jon Hendricks entered the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and threw to the floor a hundred copies of their demands for the Rockefellers’ resignations. In a sudden burst of violent performance, the four then started to rip at one another’s clothes, bursting the two-gallon bags of beef blood that they had taped to their bodies, and screaming gibberish with the occasional cry of ‘rape’. The emotional drive of this protest action is emphasized in their descriptions of it; they state: ‘[T]he shouting turned to moaning and groaning as the action changed from outward aggressive hostility into individual anguish.’ Creating a charge that exploded affect into the dispassionate environment of the museum, outpourings of emotion here acted for dissent, cleaving apart the dominant ideological framework in order to introduce an irritant into its detached midst. The disturbing rite acted to make room for the ideological proposition: like Oldenburg’s imagined concrete block that both broke the flow of daily life and forcefully intervened in the public’s ability to push aside the realities of war, the violence of this performance with its deliberately hysterical tenor interrupted the contemplative neutrality of the museum, insisting that its visitors confront the problematic ideological investments that underlie this seemingly apolitical space. Contrasted to the passionate performance of the GAAG in the Communiqué was a figure of authority who came to intervene just as the action was ending. Presented from the point of view of the protestors, this account illuminates the way in which those involved in arts-activism viewed their opponents. The group describe the meeting: At that point a tall well-dressed man came up and in an unemotional way asked: ‘Is there a spokesman for this group?’ Jon Hendricks said: ‘Do you have a copy of our demands?’ The man said: ‘Yes, but I haven’t read it yet.’ The artists continued to put on their clothes, ignoring the man, and left the museum.28

This figure, notably described as ‘unemotional’, is put forward as representative of institutional indifference. In the face of the GAAG’s abject outpouring, he remains unmoved, reluctant even to read the demands issued by the group. Becoming synecdochal of the unfeeling figures that use culture as a means of washing clean their money – described by the GAAG as those who ‘use art as a

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disguise, a cover for their brutal involvement in all spheres of the war machine’ – the artists refuse to explain themselves in any way that diverts from their political statement, ignoring him as they leave the museum.29 Immune to the emotions that overwhelm the artists – the grief and shame fuelled by the empathetic investment in others’ anguish – the protestors’ description of this institutional figure as ‘unemotional’ becomes a damning indictment of his indifference. What is most interesting in this description is the ways in which the artists themselves juxtapose their own excessive, abject and affectively laden performance and the disinterest of the institutional figure. His response is not to censure the artists, nor even in their account to ask them to leave; instead he barely registers their protest and it is the guards who apparently call for the police. He is described as a ‘well-dressed man’ and stands in for exactly the kind of figure they wish to unravel in their outpouring of emotion and affect which reduces them to bloodied rags, invoked as it is by Toche and Hendricks who are dressed in suits and ties at the start of their action. Alison M. Jaggar’s observation that ‘although western epistemology has tended to give pride of place to reason rather than emotion, it has not always excluded emotion completely from the realm of reason’ can be related to this comparison.30 Describing how in ancient Greece emotions were not seen as purely irrational as they came to be considered later, but instead were sometimes rational responses to situations that needed guidance from reason, Jagger states: ‘[I]n a genuinely threatening situation, it was thought not only irrational but foolhardy not to be afraid.’31 In this model, ‘emotions were thought of as providing indispensable motive power that needed to be channelled appropriately. Without horses, after all, the skill of the charioteer would be worthless.’32 Literally ripping apart the uniform of conformity that the suit and tie represents, the artists attack its indifference, too. The abject grief that emerges from underneath, driven by the knowledge of unnecessary death, can be seen as akin to Jagger’s horses, driving the subject away from their expected passivity towards action to end the war. However, the engagement with grief that the viewer is being urged to feel is not for the most part a personal one. The witnesses at the MoMA were not asked to investigate their own lives in order to tap into this emotional reservoir that would drive them towards demanding peace, but instead were asked to imagine the feelings of other people who were overwhelmed by the loss of loved ones. This was the overriding mode of the New Left engagement with emotion. Strong, heartfelt emotion was felt for the cause, for the benefit of other people, its sincerity key for both forming the movement and communicating its message. Even in those who diverged from the dominant mode of outrage such as Abbie

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Hoffmann and the Yippie movement, it was love that underpinned their wider tricksterish interventions. Although the appeal to outrage and affect was by no means unique to Vietnam, the movement in general, and anti-war arts-activism particularly, was marked by the sense that internalizing this feeling on behalf of an imagined other, and communicating it in unruly and excessive displays was an effective means of manifesting dissent. Discussing the 1974 student revolution in Greece, digital media scholar Zizi Papacharissi considers a similar kind of imaginary investment in the feelings of others. Looking at the ways in which people seek out and identify with historical movements, she articulates how emotion is important to creating a connection: Tuning in affectively does not mean that reactions are strictly emotional; they may also be rational. But it does mean that we are prompted to interpret situations by feeling like those directly experiencing them, even though, in most cases, we are not able to think like them.33

Any investment that we make is one where identification with the emotional experience involved is not based on personal experience but on our perception of the kind of truths that are revealed by the event, and our connection to the ideas we feel it exposes. In the 1960s, American anti-war protestors felt empathy for Vietnamese victims based on their own sense of betrayal as described by Gitlin. Indeed, he quotes at length from a report by journalist Christopher Jencks – one of an envoy that had travelled to North Vietnam to meet with members of the National Liberation Front – who articulates the significant difference between the two groups. He identified the connection as not ‘a common dream or common experience but a common enemy: the US government, the system, the Establishment’.34 As Papacharissi describes it, ‘[W]e imagine what it might feel like for them, but our experience of their reality is precisely that: imagined. It lacks the gravitas of actuality.’35 Even in spite of the ways in which strength of feeling evidences earnest dedication to the cause, at its heart it is for the most part an expression of vicarious emotion, rather than something that relates to the subjects’ responses to their own direct experience. The emergence of the women’s movement changed this. Beverley Jones’s 1968 manifesto, which addressed the ways in which the politics of women’s oppression had been neglected by those in the New Left, makes this clear when she claims: ‘People don’t get radicalized fighting other people’s battles.’36 Formed among the splintering factions of the New Left in the late 1960s, the women’s liberation movement took up some of the anti-war rhetoric of threat and outrage, seeing that it had been a significant force for peace and therefore might be a useful

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mode of communicating women’s emerging understanding of their own oppression. The wider feminist movement invoked their collective outrage in protests and pickets, making clear their disgust at the ways in which women were treated, communicating this with at times almost gleeful play with threatening language, exemplified in the range of names assigned to the radical feminist group WITCH which was named variously Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, Women Inspired to Tell their Collective History, and Women Interested in Toppling Consumer Holidays, among others. With many in the women’s movement dedicated members of the broader social movements of the New Left in the years preceding and concurrent with the emergence of feminism, this rhetorical strategy positions cries for women’s justice as a continuation of its mission, adopting its tone in order to make the case for patriarchy as the next obvious target for ire. This was mirrored in the art world. Examples abound in the texts that record the origins of feminist art-world activism collated together in A Documentary Herstory of Women Artists in Revolution in 1971, which includes excerpts of newspaper articles and reviews published in the early 1970s that foreground the loneliness, pain and anger of being a woman artist. Terese Schwartz’s ‘Tigers, Wolves and Pussycats’, published in The New York Element in April–May 1970, for example, explores in detail the isolation of being what she describes as ‘a lone tiger in the art jungle’.37 ‘What is it like to be a woman artist?’ she asks herself; the picture she paints in response is bleak: ‘it has been hard and often hurtful to live as an artist and a woman’; and later: ‘For me this loneness [sic] is the hardest, and I think has been the reason I’ve had only a part of the life I want and truly need.’ In Muriel Castanis’s ‘Behind Every Artist There’s a Penis’, published in the Village Voice in March 1970, anger comes to the fore, simmering with outrage aimed at the defensive boys’ club that conspires to exclude women artists. Ending her tract, Castanis issues a threat: ‘Women artists are in revolt. Too long the females have supported the male ego to the point of pampering . . . Art must be the expression of the total human world, and only an art fed by male and female views inter-acting can be vital. The time is now and is overdue.’38 Women Artists in Revolution go further in a March 1971 statement, declaring war on their enemies. They state: ‘Women artists are tired of being stereotyped, of being told what their “role” and limitations are supposed to be, of being denied the same opportunities as men to develop and show to the public. That is why we are at war with those institutions and persons responsible for this discrimination.’39 Underlying these bombastic declarations is what critic Emily Genauer describes as ‘their belligerent anger’, an outrage that motivates, one that has been caused by

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the pain of exclusion and that drives the artists on to demand change from those who have hurt them.40 With each text, a wider public is invoked as though speaking for a large and threatening group. Again negative emotions form the basis of this intimate public, but this time not on behalf of others who suffer: now women are expressing their own fury, coming together to enact change. This public expression of negative emotions was part of feminist artistic protest, too. At its most explicit, emotion was used as a way to consolidate support for action, and issue threats against those forces that are responsible not only for specific violence, but the broader social and political structures that facilitate it. Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz’s performance In Mourning and in Rage (1977) [Figure 1.3], which took place outside Los Angeles City Hall to an audience of invited journalists, offers an example. Responding to the murders of ten women and girls – Yolanda Washington, Judy Miller, Lissa Kastin, Dolly Cepeda, Sonja Johnson, Kristina Weckler, Jane King, Lauren Wagner, Kimberly Martin, Cindy Hudspeth – perpetrated by Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono (given the media epithet the ‘Hillside Strangler’), it was a highly ritualized work that responded to the media frenzy that was spreading fear and perpetuating sexist myths at a time when the killers were still at large. Standing in front of the governmental building and delivering their message to power through performing at a site inherently tied to government and authority, the eleven

Figure 1.3 Performance by Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz, In Mourning and In Rage, 1977, City Hall Los Angeles. Photo credit – Maria Karras.

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women, ten of whom were dressed in black with tall veils that covered their faces, each issued a statement through a microphone expressing solidarity with female victims of violence and against the depiction of women in the media. The women dressed in black were both an allusion to the real murdered victims and an excessive representation of the trappings of mourning; looming over the reporters and supporters who were there to witness the action, they engage with the social language of grief in their towering black veils and layers of black material. Rage and mourning are here performative strategies similar to those used in anti-war actions that seek to amplify the message and enhance its effects. Rhetorical defiance based on the eponymous rage is central to the work, maintained throughout by two banners painted with the slogan ‘In memory of our sisters we fight back’ stencilled onto the material; it is repeated by the crowd after each declaration in a resolute tone. An argument is built that justifies rage statement by statement. Each woman makes her declaration pointing to instances of violence, both those publicly discussed and those that continue on unchecked: ‘I am here for the ten women who were raped and strangled between October 13 and November 29’; ‘I am here for the 388 women who have been raped in Los Angeles between October 18 and November 29’; ‘I am here for the 4033 women who have been raped in LA last year’; I am here for the half million women who are being beaten in their own home’; ‘I am here for the one out of four of us who is sexually abused before the age of 18’; ‘I am here for the hundreds of women who are portrayed as victims of assault in film, television, and magazines’; ‘I am here to speak for the thousands of women who have been raped and beaten and who have not yet found their voices’; ‘I am here for the women whose lives are limited daily by threat of violence’; ‘I am here to mourn the reality of violence against women’. With their exaggerated height, covered faces, and declarations of grief and outrage, here the anger, fear and sadness that had been heightened by the story were packaged and presented for media consumption. The nature of the emotional language that the artists invoked is perhaps most clear in the statement of the eleventh woman to speak. Dressed in red and unmasked, she declares: ‘I am here for the rage of all women.’ Although the voices of the other ten who present the basis for their collective fury are sometimes strained and saddened, this figure emphasizes rage in her pronouncement. Intoning her statement more slowly and with more affect than those who precede her, she places emphasis on the word ‘rage’, speaking it slowly, lengthening the open vowel of the ‘a’ and delivering it with an increased volume that accents it and adds weight to its importance in the piece. After delivering her final line – ‘I am here for women fighting back’ – she maintains eye contact with the witnesses

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to the action, fixing them in her resolute glare as she pauses before walking backwards and rejoining her group. Comparison to Blood Bath here is useful in highlighting the continuities and divergences from anti-war actions that engaged emotion as a powerful tactic for dissent. Both are designed to shock, to break the continued operation of existing structures – for the GAAG, the museum; for Lacy and Labowitz, the media – through usurping their traditional means of communication. In the museum, dispassionate appreciation was the focus of the group’s attack, their emotional and visceral outpouring disrupting the continuation of this mode. In the media, particularly in relation to these violent assaults in which the tenor was sensationalized, creating a climate of fear that implied that attacks on women were random and inevitable, the resolute and determined fury of the women involved in the protest is deliberately not hysterical, rejecting this feminized emotional mode; instead they stare down injustice through an unwavering, justifiable and justified anger. Although rhetorical threat was an important part of the activism of the women’s movement, what distinguishes it from its anti-war predecessor is its underpinning in the more complex and enduring engagement with the politics of emotion in consciousness-raising – something that not only invoked a group identity through representing feeling, but used shared emotional realities as a way to form community and develop the theory of the movement.41 Starting with the consciousness-raising groups associated with the Women’s Liberation Movement and radical feminism, which took hold in 1967 and grew in popularity within the feminist movement more broadly throughout the 1970s, identifying hidden pains, embarrassments and wounds was central to moving beyond the vociferous and performative outrage expressed in anti-war actions, and instead formed the basis of a community of women working to effect change. Consciousness-raising developed the significance of emotional experience, rather than feeling earnestly for the suffering of others; instead it was personal feelings that women at the forefront of the movement explored, interrogating them for traces of the patriarchal system they were in the process of theorizing. As Hanisch argued, ‘[O]ne of the first things we discover in these groups is that personal problems are political problems.’42 Articulating the connection, she states: There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution. I went, and I continue to go to these meetings because I have gotten a political understanding which all my reading, all my ‘political discussions’, all my ‘political action’, all my four-odd years in the movement never gave me. I’ve been forced to take off the rose colored glasses and face the awful

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truth about how grim my life really is as a woman. I am getting a gut understanding of everything as opposed to the esoteric, intellectual understandings and noblesse oblige feelings I had in ‘other people’s struggles’.43

Rather than politicized emotion that involved internalizing the imagined suffering of others to fuel angry reaction to injustice, instead this was personal emotion externalized in the name of politics. In her 1968 text ‘Consciousness Raising: A Radical Weapon’, Kathie Sarachild describes the ways in which this was understood: ‘The idea was to take our own feelings and experience more seriously than any theories which did not satisfactorily clarify them, and to devise new theories which did reflect the actual experience and feelings and necessities of women.’44 The importance of taking the correct feminist approach to personal feelings in politics is illustrated by a diagram that sits at the bottom of the 1970 reprint of Sarachild’s essay in the anthology Feminist Revolution. Delimiting three categories – ‘Left liberalism error’, ‘Revolution’ and ‘Right Liberalism error’ – the revolutionary potential of engaging with personal experience as a political tool is revealed through its opposition to the faulty interlocutors offered as comparisons. Left liberalism, with its focus on ‘preordained conclusions’, ‘book worship’ and ‘generalizations divorced from personal experience’, represents a movement in which ‘the personal is not political’, individual experience is entirely absent from their intellectual investigation, leading to a kind of thinking that is overly focused on structures with insufficient attention to personal realities of oppression. Right liberalism, which comes up with ‘no conclusions’, does not generalize from personal experience and fetishizes ‘empiricism’, is a way of approaching ideology in which ‘the political is personal’, unwilling to investigate the implications of how personal experience might relate to broader structures: it fails through its individualist focus. Only the revolution of the consciousnessraising group sits goldilocks-like in the middle ground with its ‘investigation & discovery’, ‘science (theory)’, ‘generalizations from experience, personal and historic’, and ‘radicalism’: here ‘the personal is political’.45 Positioned as the right combination of personal feeling and authentic investigation, reflected in earlier claims that the methods of consciousness-raising are closer to those of early science than they are to therapy, feelings are not a tactic for establishing solidarity with unknown others who suffer, but instead are revelatory of the system, offering a way to better understand the personal realities of patriarchal alienation. These tactics for building a nuanced and productive feminist theory developed from early texts of the women’s movement which had been exploring the

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implications of emotion as both contributor and counter to women’s oppression since the early 1960s. Probing the experience of subjugation through theoretical writings and artistic practice, accounts of the consequences of the system emerged, articulating its heavy cost to those whose ambitions and achievements were belittled and suppressed. Among the first to document the emotional turmoil suffered by women was Betty Friedan in her landmark study The Feminine Mystique. Published in 1963, Friedan detailed what she famously described as ‘the problem that has no name’: the emptiness experienced by women who worked in the home, its reality emerging against the heavily mythologized contentment that women were supposed to experience as housewives and mothers.46 In the development of her thesis, Friedan repeatedly described the turmoil experienced by women struggling under the weight of this repressive conventional role, the ‘strange feeling of desperation’ that ran through the heart of the American suburbs.47 Using first-hand accounts from housewives as evidence, Friedan paints a picture of the pained, turbulent life experienced by women who were restricted and repressed by patriarchy. In these reports, an emotional language comes to the fore, one in which feelings expose the shortcomings of the myth. One woman states: ‘The times when I felt that the only answer was to consult a psychiatrist, times of anger, bitterness and general frustration too numerous to even mention, I had no idea that hundreds of other women were feeling the same way. I felt so completely alone.’48 The unwelcome feelings of anger, bitterness and frustration are framed in the text as warning flags, the symptoms of oppression manifesting themselves within the subject. Almost whispered, revelations about women’s true feelings regarding their roles in the home were the opposite of the angry declarations of the New Left. These were the unspoken secrets, hushed and medicalized; they were narratives excluded by mainstream society, with women instead being told that their unhappiness reflected their own individual inadequacy. In making these public and declaring them as revealing a broader social truth it was a move to reveal the ambivalence and dissatisfaction of women in the home, speaking against the dominant mythology of happy suburban mothers contented in shiny kitchens and raising their well-groomed children. Decrying the pathologizing of women’s feelings, Friedan argued that these emotions were the natural result of inequality.49 With the publication of The Feminine Mystique, Friedan opened a conversation about the realities that women experienced in which their emotions revealed the inadequacies of the system. The tactic of consciousness-raising proved crucial to forging solidarity between artists, facilitating feminist arts-activism and allowing the identity of

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the serious, self-identified woman artist to emerge. This is most clearly seen in the 1973 Rip-Off File organized by the Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists and co-edited by Spero. The document is described by its editors as a ‘ “dossier” of reports of sexism (rip-offs, put-downs, discrimination) in the Art World and Art Schools’.50 Separated into sections that discuss jobs, students and art world, it documents forty-one personal accounts of the discrimination suffered by women artists, curators and critics in the male-dominated art world. Describing acts of sexism, both blatant and insidious, the Rip-Off File presents a range of accounts of the ways in which misogyny operates. Included are stories of women students refused critique by their art school instructors who saw them as destined to become homemakers and school art teachers; resistance to hiring women on the basis that they were women; of artists refused representation because they were too ‘good-looking’; and of gallerists using professional studio visits to pursue unwanted relationships with women artists. Describing the power of bringing together private examples of hurt, the introduction to the document outlines the motives for compiling these accounts together: ‘We hoped to openly show how widespread are sexist attitudes and behavior – so that women would discover that the humiliations they’d endured were not unique or personal.’ An early example of a tactic that retains its power to this day – as evidenced in recent events in which powerful figures in politics and culture such as Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein have been exposed, censured and sometimes prosecuted as a result of women raising their voices together – the stories of denigration, rejection and sexual harassment are often so similar that a picture builds of the structures of sexism. By sharing the pain of these rejections and humiliations, of the judgements on individuals based on their physical appearance, of the professional slights and the sense that there should be a limit on the amount of women teaching or showing art, a sense of solidarity emerges. This is the explicit intention of the publication. The accounts are presented according to the same format – name, location, account, presented in sans-serif font in columns – the selection of texts has been ‘restricted to specific indictments and particular incidents’, with ‘more general and philosophical statements’ not included due to the cost of printing, creating a consistent tone throughout accounts in which events are recounted and feelings described. This editorial decision is not only expedient, it also contributes to the political message of the pamphlet; the multiple contributors are presented as a group, their hurt made identical through the presentation of the material. In resembling a newspaper, the Rip-Off File assumes the visual language of objective account. Reporting on the emotional truth of patriarchy and its effect on women,

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the publication produces evidence of upset, humiliation and hurt. These kinds of experiences and recurring struggles that emerged through consciousness-raising formed part of the source material for feminist art. Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro’s Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts in 1971–2, for example, relied in part on women sharing their experience of living under patriarchy. With its representation of an oppressive domestic sphere that epitomizes the exploitation of women, installations such as Sandy Orgel’s Linen Closet and Karen LeCocq and Nancy Youdelman’s Leah’s Room shown as part of Womanhouse asked women to consider their treatment through analysis of conventional roles and expectations.51 From its early moments, the women’s movement relied on a complex language of emotion as both that which exposed the truth of patriarchy and as a means to counter it. Emotion was a complicated area for women’s liberation; as Friedan so deftly articulates, love had long been used against women in the drive towards marriage and child-rearing, women’s given status as ‘emotional beings’ used to justify their infantilization and social and political exclusion. However, as the women’s movement established itself, shared pain had the potential to transform the meaning of love from a romantic fiction that resulted in oppression to something that could facilitate emancipation. Consciousness-raising meant building profound connections between women, forging solidarity in order to productively work through trauma together. Resulting in the collectivity of sisterhood, a love that is profound and authentic emerges from underneath the false, oppressive love of patriarchy. Feelings of anger, outrage, loneliness, frustration and pain make way for supportive, connected love that empowers women and breaks the isolating effects of women’s oppression. It was with these traumatic terms that feminism was shaped, the emotional language established in its early years becoming crucial to the development of the women’s movement. In the February 1970 editorial for the first issue of off our backs, a feminist news journal published in Washington DC, the writers articulate this position: In order to succeed we need you to use this paper to relate what you are doing and what you are thinking, for we are convinced that a woman speaking from the agony of her own struggle has a voice that can touch the experience of all women.52

In the art world, too, writers articulated a similar tension between the pain of the past and the hope and love for the feminist future. Indeed, the feminine propensity for feelings in general was subverted and reclaimed by women artists from its denigrated position and pushed forward as part of a celebration of

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traditionally female qualities. In the announcement for the X12 exhibition, one of the first all-women exhibitions held in New York, the artists align femininity with emotion, stating: ‘We do not deny our true femininity whatever it may be. We affirm all the vital values: HEALTH, BEAUTY, CREATIVITY, COURAGE, SENSITIVITY, STRENGTH, FEELING, ENERGY. Between the fully liberated man and woman we see no difference but biology.’53 Emotions belong to the ‘fully liberated’, crucial to both political enlightenment and creativity. In his review of the exhibition, Robert Levin cites an unnamed participating artist who declares: ‘In the future it will only be women who are healthy enough to make art because men are so emotionally and socially corrupt. Women have been allowed to cry (like blacks have been allowed to feel), that’s why we’re healthier. The civilized white man is dead – all his education only gets him ready for the grave.’54 Supporting this thesis, another artist goes further, saying: ‘Women have a more intrinsic personal humanity than men do.’55 More broadly, similarly to the dismissal of institutional indifference in the anti-war movement, in feminist arts-activism a lack of feeling is connected to male artistic practice, particularly to Modernism. The adherence to formalist doctrine is read as a denial of human subjectivity. Judy Chicago, for example, states in an interview with Lippard: I feel very alienated from most art that’s made; it exists in narrow strata and does not come out of the depths of human emotion and experience. I can’t relate to work that is cerebral and has to do with process or the nature of art. That’s dehumanized.56

Perhaps the wittiest articulation of this distinction between unfeeling formalist men and humanized women artists comes in Carolee Schneemann’s 1975 text read as part of her performance of Interior Scroll, the text of which had been adapted from her film Kitch’s Last Meal (1973–7).57 Describing a conversation with a male ‘structuralist filmmaker’, Schneemann establishes a contrast between ‘the personal clutter/the persistence of feelings/the handtouch sensibility/the diaristic indulgence/the painterly mess/the dense gestalt/ the primitive techniques’ seen in her own work and the filmmaker’s approach of ‘tak[ing] one clear process/follow its strictest implications/intellectually establish[ing] a system of permutations/establish[ing] their visual set’. Chided in this semi-fictional account by what she describes as the male filmmaker for her reliance on ‘metaphor and meaning’ – though talking to Scott MacDonald in 1988, she describes it in fact as a ‘secret letter’ to the film critic Annette Michelson – Schneemann quotes her gendered interlocutor as saying ‘my work has no

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meaning beyond the logic of its systems/I have done away with emotion intuition inspiration’.58 Mischievously dismissing his claims – stating ‘it’s true I said when I watch your films/my mind wanders freely during the half hour/of pulseing [sic] dots I compose letters/dream of my lover/write a grocery list/rummage in the trunk for a missing sweater/plan the drainage pipes for the root cellar’ – Schneemann agrees to the split between formalism and humanism, putting herself firmly in the realm of lived experience and valorizing the ‘persistence of feelings’. The new aesthetic proposition that American feminist art pursues is theorized and promoted by the movement as being more emotional and therefore more human than those that have gone before. Embracing feelings and claiming them as both authentically female and powerfully human, feminist arts activists attacked the status quo in part for its erasure of the subject evidenced by its lack of emotion. Emotional metaphors and explicit declarations of feeling are also visible in artworks produced as feminism emerges. Feelings are important to a range of works from Faith Wilding’s Waiting for Womanhouse (1972) in which she lists the ways that women’s ambitions are constantly frustrated through their denigrated position; Mary Kelly’s Postpartum Document (1973–9) which details the complex emotional realities of motherhood; Hannah Wilke’s What does this represent? What do you represent (Reinhardt) (1978–84) in which she restates Ad Reinhardt’s words into a portrait of the artist surrounded by the trappings of gendered power, naked and dejected; or Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) which shows a woman devoid of the expected maternal warmth in her portrait of women’s experience. Louise Fishman’s Angry Paintings of 1973 also offer an example of a sustained assertion of anger. Responding to her exclusion from the male-dominated art world of the 1960s, Fishman put paint and graphite to paper and created a self-portrait that represented her rage. The words ANGRY LOUISE are handwritten in capital letters traced in murky red and crossed over with dark green scratches. Below the text are the words ‘SERIOUS RAGE’, capitalized and underlined. The first of a series of thirty paintings that similarly created portraits of women who were associated with the artist, either personally, through their engagement with feminist politics, or as historical role models, Angry Louise pictures the subject through a declaration of her fury. Furthermore, the similarity of the paintings in the series, with each being made on 20 × 40 inch paper out of some or all of acrylic, pastel, pencil and charcoal, and featuring the same description – Angry Harmony, Angry Paula, Angry Djuna and so on – asserts anger as the continuity between the women. Anger acts here to unite, creating a community of sometimes historically distant individuals that are

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connected through their rage. The indexical frenzied marks and scratched surfaces work to exorcise personal frustration and outrage, the paintings’ urgency comes from a need to make visible the internalized ire of women forced to live with the effects of patriarchy. A comparison to In Mourning and In Rage is useful here. The two approaches to the public expressions of hurt, informed by the interrogation of emotion that resulted from consciousness-raising, reveals something of the nature of the relationship between the personal and political in feminism. Although Fishman’s passionate declarations focus on an internal state rather than an urgent public problem as in In Mourning and In Rage, the two works exist on a continuum. Both Labowitz and Lacy’s and Fishman’s projects work to make the personal political: for the former, it is to bring to public attention the realities of violence against women that happens not only in sensational news narratives, but as part of daily life, creating the conditions that facilitate the most shocking attacks; for the latter, individual anger is articulated as something that binds the feminist movement, and with it there is the implicit potential for a surge of action that could destroy patriarchy. Both approaches to the personal is political are important to establishing the feminist movement, inviting women to examine their own feelings and connect to those of other women in solidarity against patriarchal violences, large and small. Feeling with others is not only a tactic in feminism, it is something seen as authentically part of women’s culture, a powerful force that has been denigrated by patriarchy because of its emancipatory potential. That is not to champion the feminist form of co-feeling over that of the anti-war movement, but merely to note the distinction. In the anti-war movement, feelings break through indifference as part of an urgent need to act; in feminism, they are the signifiers of your own internal understanding and rejection of a system, and they offer the potential to form powerful bonds able to break the structures that oppress.

Pain 1966–76 Within this model wherein political feeling is a means of consolidating and building activist communities, it is worth considering pain’s role within the broader emotional landscape. As discussed in the Introduction, pain is not something that sits straightforwardly within the category of emotion; it is both physiological and psychological, of both body and mind. Although it is possible to argue that other emotions could be similarly conceived – anger, for example,

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through its engagement with physical processes such as the release of adrenaline – pain’s relationship to physical problems, to injury or illness differently inflects its experience and influences its expression. Bringing in a physical aspect of the personal sometimes absent in considerations of how the personal can be conceived of as political, the ways in which the individual experiences their own body is a crucial part of understanding pain. Significantly, it was during the 1960s and 70s that the clinical understanding of pain as perceptual first occurred, establishing it as related to both sensation and emotion. Pain became a subject under discussion in the medical community, one which reimagined not only pain itself but how those who suffered should be treated. Pain was being explored culturally, too: artists and activists were investigating suffering as material, using it both for the physical challenge it presented to those interested in examining the body, and also the ways in which personal aggression connected to wider political questions. What follows considers how our understanding of pain was evolving during this period, first in its medical definition, and secondly as a tactic for artists seeking ways to examine their historical moment through representing physical and psychological extremes, in order to contextualize Spero’s practice and provide a foundation for my analysis of her work in the next chapter. These developments in the understanding of suffering provide a background to Spero’s attention to the theme, with her particular focus on physical pain, alienation and social violence coming out of a cultural climate that saw pain as multifaceted and potentially useful. Medically, the period between 1966 and 1976 marked a turning point in pain’s clinical understanding, bracketed by two important moments in its technical definition: the Gate Control Theory of Pain in 1965 and the establishment of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) in 1976. In 1965, Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall developed the Gate Control Theory that revolutionized the understanding of pain.59 Following a number of studies that recognized the role of the mind in affecting the experience of pain for the sufferer, Melzack and Wall put forward a theory that suggested that people’s perceptions of pain were influenced by a ‘gating mechanism’ in the dorsal horns of the spinal cord.60 Acting to either block or open the passage for pain signals to get to the brain, the Gate Control Theory suggested that (as Melzack states): Pain is not simply a function of the amount of bodily damage done alone. Rather, the amount and quality of pain we feel are also determined by our previous experiences and how well we remember them, by our ability to understand the cause of the pain and to grasp its consequences. Even the culture in which we

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have been brought up plays an essential role in how we feel and respond to pain.61

This description, in which the body and mind work together to create the sensation we describe as pain, defining its degree and intensity, points to the developing understanding of physical pain in the 1960s. As Joanna Bourke explains, Melzack and Wall acknowledged that ‘people’s perceptions of pain were influenced by physiological, cognitive, and affective processes’.62 This model complicated the distinction between body and mind that had first been suggested by René Descartes in 1641.63 Seeing the body in mechanical terms, Descartes proposed pain as sensation, something experienced apart from thought.64 An understanding of pain in which the body was the sole cause and determining factor for the intensity of its experience dominated conceptions of pain in the medical community, meaning that body and mind were treated as separate in clinical practice.65 Although continuously problematized throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,66 this division was still prevalent during the 1960s, with doctors thinking it safer not to consult their patients on how they were feeling or what their treatment should be for fear of being misled by those who were overly emotional, something especially true in the case of women’s health.67 With Melzack and Wall, there came a theory acceptable to the medical community which described a way in which psychology and history could affect the bodily experience of pain.68 A decade later, the Gate Control Theory of Pain had required that pain itself was reconsidered, meaning that its definition needed revision. In 1976 the IASP was formed. Coming out of the First International Symposium on Pain Research and Therapy in 1973, the IASP brought together a diverse group of pain specialists in order to devise an authoritative clinical definition of pain. Resulting from that study came the following classification: (a) pain is subjective; (b) pain is more complex than an elementary sensory event; (c) the experience of pain involves associations between elements of sensory experience and an aversive feeling state; and (d) the attribution of meaning to the unpleasant sensory event is an intrinsic part of the experience of pain.69

This definition, though much discussed especially in terms of its failure to properly account for psychological suffering, has since dominated pain’s understanding, accounting as it does for the important role of the mind as well as the body in physical suffering.70 The period from 1965 to 1979 was crucial for

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the study and definition of pain, which was transformed in its conception from a sensation that was bodily and the result of physical injury, to something that spoke to the emotional, cultural and physical history of the person who suffered. Pharmaceutical, medical and cultural developments evidence this shift: painkillers became more common in the 1970s,71 the McGill Pain Questionnaire which sought to get more accurate descriptions of pain from patients was devised in 1971,72 and the journal Pain was launched in 1975.73 There is a gendered aspect to pain’s development during this period, too: this was a moment in which pain’s role in childbirth was being reconsidered. As Paula A. Michaels shows, following a growing interest in ‘natural childbirth’ that was developed in the USA and UK by Grant Dick-Reed and psychoprophylaxis that was developed separately by I. Z. Vel’vovskii in the USSR and by Fernand Lamaze in France, by the 1960s and 70s, in the USA, pain was seen as a means of ‘affirm[ing] women’s authority’ in labour.74 As the women’s movement grew, pain in childbirth was increasingly conceived of as something for women to overcome, giving them back control in the context of what was seen as the overly medicalized environment of the labour ward, where women’s natural instincts were dismissed by domineering male doctors.75 In this context pain was not something to be avoided, but instead something that women could master as part of their natural, bodily expertise. Rather than remaining an entirely negative sensation, pain was also seen as having potential for enabling self-determination and for acknowledging the connection between body and mind.76 In the same moment, physical pain was something that was increasingly a concern for artists in practices Kathy O’Dell has described as ‘masochistic performance’, being used as a way to explore not only fraught internal experience, but also as a means to intervene in wider social violence through creating a mirror of brutality and suffering in artistic works.77 In Europe, pain had been an important part of post-World War II artistic practice, particularly in the work of performers like the Viennese Actionists during the 1960s at a moment in which the suffering body was inherently connected to the trauma of World War II. Performance artists like Marina Abramović and Gina Pane developed this approach in the 1970s.78 Both artists put the body in extreme situations, testing its capacity to endure pain through predetermined and often uncomplicated tasks that allowed the viewer to focus on injury and stamina. Abramović’s Rhythm 10 is an example. In it, she played a game which involves placing her hand down flat on a table and then stabbing a knife between her fingers at increasing speed, wounding herself the pre-decided ten times before repeating the action – and the wounds – as the audience watched. Pane’s Escalade non

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anesthésiée also involved showing the body’s ability to withstand violent mistreatment in her action that involved her climbing a ladder-like structure that had built into it sharp metal shards that cut her as she ascended; the action was performed not for an audience, but the photographer Françoise Masson who produced the photo documentation that was an integral part of the work.79 In both examples, injury was put on show to demonstrate the realities of the wound and the body’s ability to overcome pain. In America, artists like Chris Burden began to explore physical limits, often involving painful actions that tested the body. His 1971 performance Shoot, in which he was shot by Bruce Dunlap in front of a small audience, and his 1974 piece Transfixed, in which he was nailed onto a car in a crucified position, conceived of extreme and painful acts as artworks.80 Less dangerous was Vito Acconci’s work which focused on self-inflicted wounds: his Trademarks from 1970 involved the artist biting himself with such force as to leave teeth marks behind which were then documented.81 The exploration of physical pain expressed the visceral, drawing attention to the body and its limits through often extreme acts against it. Evoking a number of ideas including religious ritual, the limits of art and a re-examination of the body, physical pain was also used at this time to point to broader political concerns. Pane accompanies her action with a list of factors that are related to the work: ‘American escalation in Vietnam. Artist – artists too escalate/ascend. Pain – physical pain in one or several parts of the body. Internal pain, deep, suffering. Moral pain.’82 As Frazer Ward has shown of Acconcci, Abramović and Burden, even in those practices not explicitly tied to the politics of Vietnam, which Pane invokes here, there is a complication of the lines between public and private experience, informed by the political climate of the late 1960s which comes with performing painful acts that trouble the notion of community invoked and complicated by presentations of dangerous or injurious actions.83 Images of physical pain made in Europe and America in the 1960s and 70s were often influenced by the presence of documentation of the violence in Vietnam, used to illustrate the need for moral objection. Some actions that invoked the idea of death and dying bodies – such as those of the GAAG – have been described above, but also important was the imagery of war.84 The A.W.C., for example, organized a protest in the MoMA in front of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, using the chilling And Babies? poster to express their disgust at the violence that was being committed in Southeast Asia [Figure 1.4]. The poster used the photograph taken by US combat photographer Ronald L. Haeberle of the aftermath of the My Lai massacre in which between 300 and 500 civilians were

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Figure 1.4 Haeberle, Ronald L. (b. 1941): Q. And babies? A. And babies, 1970. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Photograph by Ronald L. Haeberle, poster published by The Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC). Offset lithograph, printed in color, 25 × 38’ (63.5 × 96.5 cm). Gift of the Benefit for Attica Defense Fund. Acc. n.: 498.1978. © 2018. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

murdered by American troops in March 1968. Overlaying it with text taken from an interview conducted by Mike Wallace for CBS with soldier Paul Meadlo, who had taken part in the violence, the poster reads: ‘Q. And Babies? A. And Babies.’ in blood-red font.85 Relying on the horror expressed by both image and concept, it focuses attention on the dead bodies, piled up so as to be almost indiscernible from one another, and captions them with the description of violence, at once factual and horrifying, in order to encapsulate the worst of human aggression. This is something I will return to in my next chapter; however, it is important to register the significance of Vietnam in discussions of representing pain, not only as something that people sought to act against, but also as something that provided the raw material for picturing suffering offering an influx of shocking images of the vulnerable body under attack: injured, dying and dead. In both medicine and culture, this is a moment when pain is not only physical, but is social and political. Emotional, too: as discussed above, consciousnessraising is something that deals with internal hurt and brought pain to the forefront.86 The communities of love and sisterhood that were built around

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shared experience started with accounts of women’s suffering, creating a picture of the way that women felt living under patriarchy and forging solidarity against previously unfought wrongs.87 The power of recognizing and vocalizing pain played a vital role in feminist politics. Painting a picture of the realities of being a woman in a patriarchal world, consciousness-raising produced evidence of the physical and psychological damage done to women by a system that continued to denigrate them, saw them as sexual objects, or required of them to be selfless, contented mothers. In this, a further point of interaction between the emotional and the physical is revealed. After all, the kinds of injuries done are sometimes to an individual’s sense of self, but often there is an element of actual violence in accounts of sexual assault, or demands on the body in subjugation in the home and in raising children. Pain describes both violence and its effects, the moment that the subject is wounded and the ongoing life of that wound physically and psychologically. Pointing to pain’s contingency in the social, the understanding of pain during this period was influenced by the violence of war, the violence of exclusion and the rejection of the dichotomy of body and mind that came in the late 1960s. This was a moment in which pain was at the forefront, on the one hand in its increased relief and understanding by Western medical practitioners and pharmaceutical companies, and on the other in the increased identification of the aggressive nature of society, not only through the oppression exposed by civil rights groups and feminism, but also in the explicit brutality regularly meted out by American soldiers on the orders of the government. The concept of the personal is political again is relevant. As pain is something that is both of the subject but is deeply socially determined, both physical and psychological, both emotion and sensation, it sits on the boundary of the individual and ideological experience. The pain under discussion here is not the silent internal experience that is described by Scarry, but instead it is pain that is part of a wider network of public speech. The idea of emotion generally and pain specifically which was circulating in anti-war and feminist circles at the time – circles that Spero was directly involved in – is something that is about those injuries that occur because of other’s abuse of power, whether the government in its unjust war, or the structures that denigrate and exclude women. Physical pain in the activist vocabulary is not about illness, but about injury caused by bombs and napalm; psychological pain is not about mental health but is a symptom of patriarchy. Therefore, pain’s silence can be understood as voicelessness, oppression, exclusion; its metaphors clues to the ideological origins of its effects; its appeals for intervention related to the broader political landscape that made that a

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necessity. It was against this backdrop that Spero was creating works that ‘objectif[ied] my pain’.88 Drawn to act against the pain of social violence, Spero called on her own experience of pain in order to create meaningful interventions that considered pain as subject. Looking now to the first works made in this context and that demonstrate her initial rejection of war and articulations of exclusion, my next chapter examines the War Series and Artaud Paintings to think about how this language of pain emerges.

CHAPTER TWO

The Suffering of War and the Pain of Alienation

‘A LL WRITING IS PIGSHIT’ declares one of Spero’s Artaud Paintings in dark red capital letters, citing the author and dramaturg Antonin Artaud from a text that seems to rail against itself [Figure 2.1]. Painted on a white support, it shouts out to the viewer in capital letters, with the phrase unpunctuated so as it reads both as a quotation from Artaud and as an assertion of keen agreement with his sentiment (All writing is pigshit Artaud). Although the coherence of the letters fades in the G of ‘writing’, the Is and H of ‘pigshit’, and the U and D of ‘Artaud’, its contradictory message in which a written text denounces the written word is pictured in plain terms, aggressively confronting the viewer. In citing this text, Spero’s interpretation of Artaud’s approach to meaning in language – itself instructive for understanding her political aesthetic – is foregrounded. Extracted from the 1925 Pèse-nerfs, the text that Spero chooses centres on Artaud’s impassioned rejection of communication, legibility and transparency: all those who are masters of their language; all those for whom words have a meaning; all those for whom there exist sublimities in the soul and currents of thought; all those who are the spirit of the times, and have named these currents of thought – and I am thinking of their precise works, of that automatic grinding that delivers their spirit to the winds – are pigs.1

With this tract against didacticism and communication, meaningful words and currents of thought are rejected violently. Instead, he proposes that there should be ‘no works of art, no language, no word, no thought, nothing. Nothing; unless maybe a fine Brain-Storm’. Highlighting a section of Artaud’s text which posits that communication is reductive, even offensive, Spero echoes his call for the obliteration of language, and supports his appeal for an alternative that registers the perspective of a suffering and alienated mind through the uneasy void of ‘a fine Brain-Storm’. With its language that evokes pain’s expression, recalling as it does Elaine Scarry’s writing on the structure of pain’s communication 57

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Figure 2.1 Nancy Spero, All Writing Is Pigshit, 1969. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

with its description of the inaccessible nature of internalized sensation that cannot be adequately represented in speech, this citation comes at a significant moment for thinking about Spero’s political development. Made in 1969, it was created when the artist was working on both the War Series and the Artaud Paintings, at the moment of her shift from a focus on Vietnam towards Artaud and the accompanying consideration of her experience of being silenced as a woman living under patriarchy. It was also the year in which both the Art

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Worker’s Coalition and Women Artists in Revolution were formed, a moment when Spero became more active in art political communities. Focusing on the contradictions of expressing a fraught and pain-filled reality, the coincidence of this citation with Spero’s deepening involvement in activism suggests something of how her fractured and faltering visual language relates to her developing political consciousness. It was in the War Series that Spero had both first consistently engaged with the representation of the pain of others and had introduced a specific politics to her work. Given her investment in the figure, for Spero considering war meant considering the body during war, leaving behind the oil paint of the Paris Black Paintings, but not the focus on the abstract human figure that was central to their iconography. Where before her figures had been quiet, pictured caught in moments of alienated intimacy, in the War Series they were cut up, disfigured and made monstrous. Not only were people pictured as victims, screaming in pain and soaked in blood-red gouache, but the smoke clouds of bombs turned into violent abjected bodies which exploded into multiple screaming heads, leaking blood and fluids from their torsos and genitals. Moving from focusing on the private sometimes erotic body to the public, brutalized and brutalizing one was important for her developing approach to artistic activism, creating works which intervened into the political world through considering the realities of bodily suffering. Like many of her contemporaries, Vietnam was the impetus for this shift. With her move back to America from Paris in 1964, the artist felt a duty to act against military violence: ‘[I]t just suddenly hit me,’ she says, ‘the responsibility was mine, as well as that of other Americans.’2 Creating ‘broadsheets’ and ‘manifestos’ against the war in work that was at once a protest and a call to action, the suffering body took centre stage.3 Setting out to make something that acted against the violence being perpetrated by American troops in Southeast Asia in the War Series’s approximately 150 works, Spero’s denouncement of the American war in Vietnam introduced a violent iconography into her work which represented the sadism and suffering of conflict through extreme representations and monstrous allegories. This excessive imaging paved the way for Spero’s sustained consideration and citation Artaud’s work. First exposed to his writing through translations by her friend Jack Hirschman, Spero was immediately attracted to the violent, abject language that Artaud used in his poetry and prose so much so that they would dominate her attention for the next three years. The Artaud Paintings, of which there are approximately sixty-five individual works on rectangular paper, cite extracts of his tormented voice, coupled with figures and abstract representation.

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Much as the War Series had paralleled an involvement with the anti-war movement, so did the Artaud Paintings accompany engagement with feminist activism for the artist. Facilitating an exploration of the experience of being a woman living in a patriarchal society and the pain that resulted from this, Artaud offered Spero a vocabulary for expressing her emerging understanding of her own exclusion as a woman artist. The War Series and the Artaud Paintings are often seen as demonstrating two sides of Spero’s practice, moving from representing, on the one hand, the intensely public phenomenon of death in war, and on the other, the private experience of personal exclusion. For considering Spero’s work through the framework of pain, they also represent something more, and that is the introduction of a linguistic approach to the treatment of signs that mirrors the ways in which pain intervenes in language. In pain’s obliteration of meaning, it is the symbolic order that is attacked. As discussed in the Introduction, the language of the symbolic is eroded in attempts to communicate pain, its expression is stilted and metaphoric, it reaches towards this social mode of speech but fails to fully articulate itself within it.4 Sufferers are both silenced by the sensation and also driven to attempt to communicate their experience, relying on conventional metaphors and metonymy to gain recognition for their feelings. The visceral connects to the social in the need to translate an interior reality into something that can manifest outside the body’s borders. In cries for help and descriptions that attempt to represent sensation, the bodily realities of suffering are translated into expression, making present something that resists adequate translation into the symbolic order. This is significant for thinking about how language that falters might relate to a politics. If we take Jacques Lacan’s description of language as a foundation of culture as our basis, then attacking it as proposed by Artaud suggests a direct challenge to the ‘currents of thought’ and the ‘spirit of the times’ which can be understood as prevailing ideological and cultural attitudes. Mimicking the ways in which pain intervenes in language, both Artaud and Spero attack the symbolic, eroding rather than destroying meaning, evoking a language of pain that acts politically. Considering the work that Spero made at the start of her engagement with art-world activism, this chapter examines how her manipulation of the symbolic played an important role in communicating an ideological message on a visceral level. In what follows I consider the evolution of this tactic which starts with an iconography that abstractly represents suffering and injury through an engagement with documentary photography, and becomes an attack on the symbolic. This development of Spero’s particular political approach is set alongside those of others in her activist community, considering how her

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methods relate to those of the wider anti-war and women’s liberation movements. Establishing how Spero’s first turn to making explicitly political work came through a meditation on the real suffering body, I trace the evolution of this focus on pain from something that figures in the iconography to something that becomes an organizing structure of the work, registering in the artist’s formal approach. For this, the ways in which pain intervenes in language is important, with metaphor and metonymy a means to articulate the cause of suffering, and pain’s obliteration of language being central ideas that are figured in both the War Series and the Artaud Paintings. Through close analysis of individual paintings in context of their historical political and artistic moment, I trace the development of Spero’s iconography of pain from a frenzied first response to war to a terse, abstracted representation of women’s alienated suffering under patriarchy.

‘Fantasy, the Beast, and Herman Kahn’: metaphors and metonymy of war In 1967, Spero’s Male Bomb exploded on the cover of Caterpillar magazine. With two screaming heads emerging from a single body the reader was made witness to carnal destruction [Figure 2.2]. From the bomb’s crotch extend five absurdly long penises, tipped with screaming heads, tongues extended, resembling the helicopter blades that were cutting across the skies in Vietnam. Accompanying the publication of reproductions inside Caterpillar was a statement by Leon Golub which described the images; it read: The Bomb, imperator of death, orgiastic, spews out its victims – the triumphant erectile carnalization of the Bomb: the cock proliferates and explodes heads, the heads and tongues slaver blood and spittle – bombs shit out their victims, fecal heads drop – the freaking of the Bomb, misshapen, mutilated, insane, jissoms of blood. This is carnage, the holocaust, the sanguinary abattoir. The Bomb squirts, hemorrhages, puses [sic] – frenzied, copious, spastic – a stew of garbage and death, gross, lewd, foul – the prolixity of destruction.5

Capturing the visceral language of oozing unruly bodies, thick with liquids, Golub describes Spero’s particular indictment of war as one where combat is not only destructive or unjust, but is excessive, irrational and driven by fantasy.6 The excessive nature of the War Series has been the lure for scholars since Golub’s early response; they are remarkable images that seem to reveal something just

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Figure 2.2 Nancy Spero, Male Bomb, 1967. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

under the surface of a war that stands in for the military aggression of overblown American foreign policy historically and culturally. What Golub describes as ‘the freaking of the Bomb’ – which we could interpret as the phantasmal violence of war – has dominated critical responses, and the extract above has been reprinted and cited as part of its ongoing reception.7 In accounts that refer to this text, it is used to establish the series’s indictment of violence and its psychosexual underpinnings, exemplified by Mignon Nixon’s compelling account which describes the ways in which the paintings in the War Series ‘incarnate the

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phantasmic dimension of war’ and ‘invoke the infantile, sadistic, often sexualized mania that pervades even the most calculated and controlled forms of aggression’.8 However, there is another aspect of Golub’s text the implications of which are neglected. He states: Destruction is literally in our living rooms via TV. All drops away, time, distance, the unthinkable. The malign fantasy and virtually insane imaginings of these paintings – the grotesqueries which form the delusions of the psychopathological – are given body by Hiroshima, by napalm. Fantasy encounters the calculations of the Pentagon, holocaust is factual (probabilisitically speaking). The eschatological is as real as a Chrysler or a tank and more real than a Brillo box. The power of this art is in its virtually insane and strained correspondence to what is possible – to what is actual. Fantasy, the Beast, and Herman Kahn are inscribed on the head of a pin engraved L.O.V.E.9

Here, Golub makes claims for the connection to real events that the War Series represents, not only in fantasy, but the experience of physical violence in the most extreme acts of combat. Pointing to the fact that, more than just ‘malign fantasy’, violence is ‘given body’ in Vietnam, he claims that Spero’s images represent a lived experience for the victims, suggesting that the War Series pictures the moment in which the ‘Fantasy’ of combat, ‘the Beast’ incarnated in murderous technology, and the policy of intense military intervention – represented by advisor to the US Department of Defense Herman Kahn – meet. The connection articulated in Golub’s short essay between the fantasy life of the sufferer and the reality of the body that is attacked, injured and destroyed resonates with the ways in which pain is understood in its theoretical description. The underlying reality of injury that causes pain is taken up in the imagination, built on through metaphor and metonymy, revealing something about the sufferer’s understanding of their physical distress. While this process is not identical in the making of the War Series, still we have a series of images that are based on the idea of the body under attack and are processed through the imagination to overlay signifiers that are suggestive of the artist’s political understanding of the injury she pictures. Considering how a register of the ‘actual’ inspires Spero’s imagery, I want to begin this examination of her introduction of the linguistic structure of pain into her work by thinking about how the War Series relates to documentary images coming out of Vietnam. Taking up Golub’s claim that the ‘eschatological is as real as a Chrysler or tank’ in what follows, I am going to consider the ‘insane and strained correspondence to what is possible – to

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what is actual’ in the work, investigating how the destruction that is ‘literally in our living rooms’ comes into contact with ‘malign fantasy and virtually insane imaginings’ in the War Series. Here, unlike the abstracted figures that related to mythological and archetypal narratives in her painterly practice up to this date, the relationship is to documentation of a specific war that is being recorded through already mediated reporting in photographs and television broadcasts. Through close attention to Spero’s engagement with documentary images, we can better understand the excessive nature of the artist’s representation of war, facilitating an analysis of how a metaphoric and metonymic language – tied in its first adoption to the imagined pain of others – emerges in Spero’s practice. By turning to the body in pain to oppose war, Spero was following in a long artistic tradition of political dissent. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag points to the ways in which images of suffering have been used to protest against political conflict since the seventeenth century, something that has remained an important way to communicate abject violence.10 Describing Francisco Goya’s 1810–20 series The Disasters of War, she argues that visual representation could be used to ‘awaken, shock, wound the viewer’, forcing a recognition of violence in distant spectators.11 This was particularly true in the conflict in Vietnam, in which the significance of the recording and broadcasting of violence – summed up in Marshall McLuhan’s famous claim that the conflict ‘was lost in the living rooms of America’ – has received much attention.12 Reports such as Morley Safer’s account of the burning of the village of Cam Ne by US Marines in 1965, Eddie Adam’s photograph of the extrajudicial execution of Lê Công Nà by Nguyê˜n Ngo·c Loan in 1968, or Haeberle’s previously discussed images of My Lai, shocked American viewers with details of the conflict in Vietnam and laid waste to the sense that US troops were noble liberators. Through images such as these, specific acts of violence in war made their way into American homes, offering a shocking insight into the brutal conflict raging thousands of miles away in which young – and often reluctant – American soldiers were not only fighting and dying, but were also involved in violent, sadistic and sometimes murderous acts. Sontag dedicates attention to the recording and documenting of Vietnam for domestic viewers, describing how ‘the color photographs of tormented Vietnamese villagers and wounded American conscripts . . . certainly fortified the outcry against the American presence in Vietnam’.13 She has pointed to the ways in which documentary images seem to testify to atrocities; despite the fact that they can be staged either by those photographing them or by those creating scenes for the camera, she highlights how photographs come to represent war

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itself, standing in for wider political truths.14 Judith Butler describes this as ‘ “frames” of war’, that ‘selectively carv[e] up experience as essential to the conduct of war’, arguing that documentary photography is used in processing the meaning of conflict.15 For Butler, this is inherently tied to wider questions of sexuality and race, and establishes a hierarchy of grief wherein some victims are seen as more grievable than others.16 Not straightforward documents, still, those who present documentary photographs treat them as evidence for a point they wish to illustrate, whether in support of or in opposition to the war. This was arguably at a zenith in Vietnam: the anti-war movement was fuelled by documentary images to the extent that articles such as ‘Angle Shots’ published in the 6 May 1966 issue of Time felt it important to contextualize those which had taken on anti-war significance. A photograph of a North Vietnamese prisoner hanged upside down by mercenaries working with a US Special Forces unit was cited in the article. It had acted as evidence of unremitting brutality by American troops and their allies and was described in the text as having ‘caught an ugly tableau found in every war’ adding that ‘it was widely reprinted in the U.S. press, often with indignant captions’. Implying an irresponsible inaccuracy, the article issued a paternalistic rebuke to its use as an illustration of American violence: ‘As so often happens with coverage of Allied harshness, neither the picture nor many of its captions told the whole story,’ the text suggests.17 But there is something more to photographs of war and violence that such accounts of their instrumentalization overlook. Georges Didi-Huberman’s 2003 book Images in Spite of All discusses four photographs taken by a prisoner known only as Alex, a member the Sonderkommando (the team of Jewish prisoners who were forced to work in the gas chambers), that pictured the workings of the machinery of extermination taken in an operation led by Polish resistance fighters. As part of his discussion, Didi-Huberman argues that these photographs exceed their status as documents of that which they picture, suggesting that they register a trace of the resistance to erasure that drives their making, while also offering an opportunity – albeit complicated – for the viewer to imagine otherwise unimaginable situations. Arguing that even though the images do not and cannot represent the whole truth of the camps, he asserts that still they contain within them a register of events, always inadequate but nevertheless reflective of not only the truth of the horror experienced, but also the prisoners’ will to resist. Although he acknowledges that the photographs are flawed in terms of a representation of the gas chambers and their operation, in that they fail to reflect the scale of the violence, being by necessity photographs snatched in the most unimaginable circumstances – and as Didi-Huberman examines at

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length, the idea that these or any document might be able to represent the holocaust is itself extremely fraught and fiercely contested – what they capture is something that registers the conditions in which they were taken. The four photographs taken from the extermination camps show not only the violent images of murdered bodies or people being driven to their deaths, but moreover these images, which also include less obviously violent scenes of the fences and treetops that hid the gas chambers, exist as a trace of the will to act against the conditions of the camp by the prisoners themselves. In these representations, the circumstances of the violence and their authorship by a person who was both victim and witness are folded into the image. Taken by those who suffered unimaginably in order to act as records of the horror that they experienced and that led to their deaths, these photographs of Auschwitz contain within them the extraordinary and extreme conditions of their making, including the will to document, registering a desperate appeal to remember and to act. It would be wrong to assert that photographs of Vietnam under discussion here are equivalent. Although also recording atrocity, fear and violence, the conditions experienced by war photographers during the conflict make them very different kinds of images. However, Didi-Huberman’s complication of the conversation around photographs of atrocity is worth considering. Photographs of war are deliberate representations of the extreme, of the unthinkable, taken in an attempt to make something unspeakable imaginable to those who remain distant from the events they record. Furthermore, the photograph’s relationship to the index inflects the excessive nature of representations of the extreme. The indexical nature of the analogue photograph – created through the direct contact of light on photographic paper – means that it can be seen as at once something that is an image that documents and speaks to war’s meaning, but also is an imprint of the original event. With this in mind, the violence that is pictured can be seen as inherent to the image: there is a truth to the representation that stems from its connection to the real events it captures. When looking at images of war, we know that, even when used to make a broader political point about the ethics of conflict, images of bodies, violence or brutality relate to something that really happened, either literally or as a stand-in for real death in real conflict. Images of war insist that we dwell on the uncomfortable knowledge that for conflict to be effective it requires suffering, it requires death. Within the image – indeed, constitutive of the image – is the violence that war needs in order for it to be powerful as a political tool. The contention that photographs of war exceed the status of documents and can act to register the emotional and ideological conditions under which they

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are made is worth considering in relation to artistic anti-war works that used images of the conflict. During the late 1960s and early 70s, artists seeking to act against the war appropriated and intervened in visual records of Vietnam, using manipulated photographs to represent not only the horror of the conflict – often taking photographs of suffering and dying Vietnamese people and contrasting them to idealized imagery of comfortable American life – but also their own outrage at the violence being committed in their name. Violet Ray, for example, was one of a number of artists that contrasted the icons of capitalist America through aspirational advertisement and lifestyle editorials to the violence of war. In Revlon Oh-Baby Face (1967), he collaged the image of a wounded child over an advert for Revlon’s Blushing Silk foundation [Figure 2.3]. Playing on the copy which claims ‘it’s like stealing beauty secrets from a baby!’, the child’s burnt, disfigured face half covered with a bandage is contrasted to the model whose confident stare into the camera is transformed into the arrogant disinterest of affluent Americans. Similarly, Martha Rosler’s photomontage series Bringing the War Home, House Beautiful brings into sharp relief the violence being experienced in Vietnam with a fictional version of American suburbia [Figure 2.4]. Inserting soldiers, dead bodies and captured, blindfolded children into the sleek photographs of ideal homes and beauty techniques, the patriarchal model America is pictured as built upon the violence and death of others. More explicit images were used to advertise protests and events. Rudolf Baranik’s poster Angry Arts (1967), for example, features a picture of a child, naked to the waist, with burns to his face so severe that his features are unrecognizable [Figure 2.5]. Part of the work’s efficacy was its reliance on the viewer’s familiarity with the look of the war in Vietnam that came from the unprecedented access for the news media and extensive coverage both on TV and in illustrated news magazines. The contemporary American audience, it was assumed, were not only familiar with the source of the suffering pictured, but were also well versed in the politics behind the appropriated images. Manipulations of photographs of war were part of a moral rejection of the violence and its ideological basis and record something of the impulses that drove artists to produce their images of protest. Within artistic representations of Vietnam is a trace of the outrage felt by those who rejected the war, and their horror at acts being done in their names. They were appropriated and dispatched to represent – even reveal – what was seen (probably rightly) as the ‘truth’ of war – its brutality, its cruelty and its reliance on apathy from people at home who insulate themselves from both. Spero’s manipulations of images are driven by this trace of outrage and disgust at the war. Although less literal in her appropriation of documentary photography,

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Figure 2.3 Violet Ray, Revlon Oh-Baby Face, 1967. Collage on paper. Gift of Violet Ray. 2013:36.29. Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art.

there is a legible translation from images circulated in the media into Spero’s iconography which would have similarly been recognizable for contemporary audiences. Christopher Lyon points to this in his writing on the War Series where he identifies Peace, Helicopter, and Hanging Christ (1967) as being unusual in that it used a photograph of the S-64 Skycrane as the basis for the collage,

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Figure 2.4 Martha Rosler, Cleaning the Drapes, from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, c. 1967–72. Photomontage. © Martha Rosler. Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.

pointing to Spero’s engagement with documentary images of the war in her work.18 However, it is not only in this literal inclusion or in the recognizable forms of helicopters used in the war in which this is visible, but throughout the imagery of the series. Androgynous Bomb and Victims [Figure 2.6] from 1966 offers an example. Traced in blood-red gouache with grey-blue sky, and split on the horizon line by an abject and sexualized mushroom cloud that spews streams of blood and fire from mouths and breasts, the imagery of the cloud of smoke that explodes on the horizon resonates not only with the concept of nuclear threat, but also with war photography of the conflict in Vietnam. The photo essay ‘New Fury in Vietnam’ published on 2 July 1965 in Life, for example, pictures scenes from the battle of Đô`ng Xoài which took place in June of that year [Figure 2.7]. Featuring an image taken from ground level of a cloud of smoke bursting on the horizon in the aftermath of a mortar explosion, its mushrooming top looms over the landscape, not only an index of the destruction of battle, but also monstrous in its own right. Looked at alongside Androgynous Bomb and Victims, the billows of smoke could be read as a threatening and excessive form which needs only minimal changes to become one of Spero’s

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Figure 2.5 Rudolf Baranik, Angry Arts Against the War in Vietnam, 1967. Courtesy of the estate of Rudolf Baranik and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York.

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Figure 2.6 Nancy Spero, Androgynous Bomb and Victims, 1966. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

Figure 2.7 Life, 2 July 1965 picturing battle of Đô`ng Xoài.

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screaming and vomiting death clouds. Similarly, the broken bodies of victims that litter the foreground of Spero’s landscape echo the images of dead bodies that are included in the article. A particularly gruesome example in which a member of the National Liberation Front is dragged out of a bunker after a grenade fight across a pile of dead adults and children reads alongside the broken forms traced in black on Spero’s bloody ground. That Androgynous Bomb and Victims resembles a landscape only makes the connection to the imagery of the Vietnam War more explicit, pointing to the fact that the images of bodies that were crushed, split and destroyed in the War Series, and of the effects of the weapons being unleashed, are only marginally more extreme than those featured in the news media at the time. L.O.V.E. T.O. H.A.N.O.I. from 1967 offers another example. It, too, correlates closely to documentary photography of the time, overlaying the original with the effects of an imaginary US bomb that explodes in a screaming noxious green cloud killing those trapped beneath it [Figure 2.8]. The victims, their bloodied bodies screaming and dying in front of the viewer, sit in round holes traced in black paint. Sinking into a ground that is not in any other way defined as material, the position of the victims in semi-buried pits is strange enough to be notable. The reference becomes more legible when compared to another feature in Life, this time a cover image from the 7 April 1967 edition entitled ‘North Vietnam Under Siege’ [Figure 2.9]. In it, a line of people stand half emerging from individual bomb shelters, concrete tubes that were sunken into pavements across Hanoi to protect its residents from aerial attacks. Standing chest-deep, the mostly men wait for the all-clear to sound with mild impatience registering on their faces, only a small girl in the foreground expresses fear in her eyes that peek over the edge of the pavement. Although the affect is markedly different in the photograph, the echo with L.O.V.E. T.O. H.A.N.O.I. is clear in both the ways in which the figures stand emerging from within the ground, and the pavement which traces a similar trapezoidal shape in the photograph as that which defines the lower half of the painting. In Spero’s rendering, those who await the end to the interruption to their day in the photograph are pictured under attack, screaming, bleeding and dying from a nuclear strike. Similar relationships to documentation are visible throughout the series: images of White Phosphorous bombs exploding with burning trails snaking lines of smoke across the sky mirror the trails of Spero’s sperm bombs; the swarm of aircraft in works like Fuck (1966) reflect the multiple examples of images of the air war; Vietcong Prisoners (1968) shows figures kneeling and brutalized, echoing the footage of fighters being blindfolded, bound and dragged out as they

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Figure 2.8 Nancy Spero, L.O.V.E. T.O. H.A.N.O.I., 1967. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

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Figure 2.9 Life Magazine Cover, 7 April 1967. Photo: Lee Lockwood/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images.

were taken captive. Although not all images represent something that has a real life correlative, even Spero’s representation of the monstrous and phantasmal is echoed in the language of war with aeroplanes named Skyhawks, Skyraiders, Skywarriors, Intruders, Invaders, Thunder chiefs, Cobras, Spectres and F4 Phantoms. The unworldly acrid colours that reappear throughout the series resemble the coloured smoke of landing zones, and call to mind the deadly Rainbow Herbicides: Agents Green, Pink, Purple, Blue, White and Orange. Looking at the documentation of war alongside the series demonstrates that it is not fixed in phantasy but instead at points closely aligns with the ways in which the war was being made visible for American viewers at home. Therefore, the ways in which Spero’s images exceed the documentation she draws on is instructive, telling us something about her formal approach to political art making at the moment of its introduction into her work. Instead of directly appropriating indexical images of the war itself, she uses them as a spur to meditate on just exactly the horrors that are enfolded within the images. She dwells on both aspects of the representation of war: that it is a political act based on the perspective of those who choose to engage with its imaging, and that it

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speaks to an essential reality, one in which real people suffer and die. As her work turned to the war in order to intervene against political injustice, Spero develops a tactic in which she seeks out the essence of those horrors shown in documentary photographs and literalizes the metaphoric language of war. As I will examine below, this approach to representing the excessive nature of war changes over time, moving from an imaging that focuses on rendering anger and aggression through extreme images towards a terse and symbolic visual language. However, even in spite of the change in her practice over the course of the five years that she engaged with the subject of war, throughout her interventions propose an almost ecstatic suffering as the overwhelming, urgent truth of conflict. This is Spero’s framing of the war: she accentuates its abjection, its sublime horror, the malevolence of destruction, sexualized malice, the moment of death. It is centred on the body in pain, divorced from context and isolated for the viewer’s meditation. This focus on the suffering body was a political statement, an urgent appeal against what she saw as indefensible governmental aggression. However, in addition to introducing a moral imperative to her work, her call to action drove a formal shift in her practice which established new ways of working that differ significantly from the Paris Black Paintings. Shifting emphasis from art historical and mythological source materials that had inspired the earlier works, the focus on horror, brutality and pain lead to the development of an approach that eroded the symbolic in order to represent a visceral reality. As stated in my introduction, I see the move from the Paris Black Paintings to the War Series as significant, both in terms of the introduction of a specific politics into her work, but also formally. Before moving on to consider how the series develops in its move towards a visual language of the eroded symbolic, it is worth taking some time to investigate the ways in which the War Series itself introduced new ways of working for the artist. During the War Series, three formal tactics emerge, ones which become central to her political picture-making throughout the 1960s and 70s: indexical traces of anger that offer a sense of the artist affected by the subject; isolated violent images that invite the viewer’s sustained focus on suffering and pain; and a turn to the use of metaphor and metonymy. In what follows I am going to examine these in more detail, considering how her formal approach developed alongside her deepening interest in increasing the political efficacy of her work. Visceral mark-making is prevalent in early works in the series, demonstrating a violent formal approach to the page. In Androgynous Bomb and Victims, for example, diluted crimson paint is scribbled over the top of the images, sketched lightly and violently over the support. Inexact brushstrokes scrawl over the black outlines that describe bombs and bodies. Seeming to be a representation of the

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blood that flows from the recently murdered corpses, the crimson is also painted, picked up by the artist’s brush and moved around the paper as an index of the scrawls of a frenzied artistic hand. In this, the borders of bodies are erased. Spero performs a direct rendering of Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection: that which ‘disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.’19 In this image, paint both is and is not blood; it both oozes from corpses and washes over the paper support. Forming a continuity between bodies, no one cadaver is left to be alone in its own fluids. Instead, the artist’s brush transmits it across representations and fake blood is pushed between depicted bodies: they meld into one bloody pile of death. At the base of the mushroom cloud, the artist has rubbed over the images of bodies, piling the paper and erasing the representation. Even the border between representation and materiality is made indistinct and it is the trace of the artist’s hand that makes it so. It is through these indexical marks that Spero’s rage bursts from the page, communicated in the traces of the artist’s angry hand.20 Her scratched brushstrokes enact violence: sharp loops and angles, lines made by rapid backand-forth motions and thinly washed paint with bright flashes of red and acrid colours. Spero’s descriptions of the process of making the War Series privilege the speed, violence and viscerality that were a fundamental part of their construction. When looking at these sharp, gestural brushstrokes, we are led to imagine her making the images, the evident speed of marks conjuring artistic frenzy, the crumples and breaks in the paper invoking urgency and intensity. Serving as an index of the artist’s movement, the obscenity and content of the works provides the context that allows us to read fast and indeliberate as angry and outraged. The violent dissolution of image and material that imbues these drawings with so much affect is linked in our imagination to the angry artist working in her studio, spitting, rubbing and scratching the surface of the paper, churning out these protest works in fits of disgust at the horrific violence of war. In a 1992 interview with Stephan Götz, Spero makes clear that this is designed to signify in the works, stating: ‘I wanted to preserve the aggressive initial moment of the stroke – not embellish or censor it. I used the stroke as a more externalized language-oriented sign.’21 The second formal technique for registering suffering is that the majority of the series’s representations of violence float on largely empty paper supports, removing the specifics of documentary photography and instead creating an image that focuses in on the painful results of war. This was a departure from the heavily laden canvases that had made up the majority of the artist’s output up

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until this point, in which the ground was created from layers of oil paint to image a thick and atmospheric world in which her figures resided. By contrast, in the War Series, from early on the painted ground was removed entirely, making the figure the focus. In Helicopter Blinding Victims (1968), for example, heads, roughly sketched in black gouache that crumples the paper, stare up at the almost invisible helicopters which are traced in silver-white paint [Figure 2.10]. The heads’ empty eyes are painted red, emphasizing in their blood-like smears the point of attack. Gaping mouths suggest screaming, a silent representation of an oral and aural marker of pain. By removing the painted ground, the focus is on the representation which is pared back to emphasize the suffering of the victims. Rounded lines that make up the back of their jaws suggest that, although disembodied, the figure is complete; the burning, bloodied eyes and the cries of pain are accentuated on the otherwise empty page. With the ground removed, Spero focuses our attention onto those points of injury, decontextualizing the violence to remove reference to specific events in the war and homogenizing victims. Unlike the direct appropriation of images from the news media by other artists working at the time, Spero’s engagement with the visual representation of the war edits the documentary images down to focus on the suffering that results from acts of violence being carried out in Vietnam.

Figure 2.10 Nancy Spero, Helicopter Blinding Victims, 1968. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

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It bears noting that in separating the experience of suffering from the events that cause it Spero’s imagery registers wider anxieties about the ways in which the war was experienced by American viewers, calling to mind debates about how documentation of suffering and violence could depoliticize those who come across it in the media. John Berger explores this in his 1972 essay ‘Photographs of Agony’, in which he expresses concern regarding the ways in which explicit photographs of the effects of violence in Vietnam depoliticize the conflict, inviting either apathy or the confrontation with individual rather than political realities. Looking closely at a photograph by Donald McCullen of a man and child taken in Hue in 1968, Berger argues that, because images disrupt the flow of our daily experience of life, the disjunction between this and the suffering pictured is too much to reconcile. Events like ‘An Act of Respect for the Vietnamese People’ that took place during Angry Arts Week indicate similar anxiety regarding the representation of suffering in their ambition to move away from spectacularized imagery of injury, dying and death to something that registered the realities of the conflict in Vietnam without using the people affected as visual representations of its evil. This has political implications; when confronted by extreme images Berger suggests that the only avenues available to the viewer are to be engulfed by despair or indignation, something projected as a personal moral inadequacy that obscures the structural and political causes of the scene, preventing action against war. Summing up this effect he states: ‘The picture becomes evidence of the general human condition. It accuses nobody and everybody.’22 As shown by Carrie Lambert-Beatty and Catherine Wood in their respective studies of Yvonne Rainer’s work and Erica Levin in her writing on Carolee Schneemann’s Snows, the discomfort around images of suffering was common among anti-war activists.23 Artists discussing the phenomenon of images of suffering register the strange, fragmentary experience of living with these horrific records of other people’s pain. In the programme notes for The Mind is a Muscle performed in March 1968, Rainer describes how Vietnam registers in her work: ‘It is a reflection of a state of mind that reacts with horror and disbelief upon seeing a Vietnamese shot dead on TV – not at the sight of death, however, but at the fact that the TV can be shut off afterwards as after a bad Western. My body remains the enduring reality.’24 Spero, too, describes the discomfort of encountering Vietnam in among the flow of television programmes: ‘[W]hat struck me was that mixed in with the ads, the news and the soaps were these flash reports from Vietnam . . . I felt, my god, they’re showing this on TV.’25 Reflecting some of this experience, Schneemann’s contribution to Angry Arts Week, the performance of Snows in 1967, includes a range of sensations and

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bodily responses that, despite featuring little explicit reference to the Vietnam War bar the inclusion towards the end of her film Viet-Flakes, sought to register the fraught bodily experience of the disassociated violence that Rainer describes. Snows starts with newsreel footage of a string of disasters that is followed by a projection of snowy landscapes and winter sports. The footage was identified by Schneemann as having been shot in Bavaria during World War II at a time when, as she states, ‘all hell was breaking loose elsewhere in the world’.26 A metaphor that runs throughout, snow falling acts as an analogy for the anxiety of the violence in Vietnam in the lives of the American audience, an unsettling reality that is slowly covered over by daily experience until it is no longer visible, even if it still lies underneath. The common thread in the three responses to the experience of viewing violence is the way in which attention to the body – in Rainer’s terms, that which ‘remains the enduring reality’ – offers resistance to this disassociation. Both Schneemann’s and Spero’s approaches to imagery of the war are informative here. By engaging with documentary images on one level, with the shocking and, in Berger’s term, ‘arresting’ reality, both artists incite that will to act that comes from viewing the extreme. However, rather than relying on photographs of war, both also maintain an excessive and visceral register that inflects the presentation of the images. For Schneemann, this focused in on the experience of those Americans disturbed by the imagined horror of the continuing war that ran in parallel to their comfortable daily existence. The artist used interactive media, supported by Experiments in Art and Technology, which reacted to the physical response of those watching the performance, acting as a feedback loop that registered the shifting of audience members in their seats as a way to change the lighting, signalling to the performers to progress to the next in the series of movements, and changing the sound and projections.27 The mix of action, sound, strobe lighting, and film that moved across the walls of the theatre, and the performers’ use of tactile materials, was overwhelming, a type of sensory overload that reflected the troubling experience of living with knowledge of the war through its representation, demanding an empathetic response. Furthermore, this focus on the bodily – and emotional – experience of looking is reflected in the direct reference to images of the war in Viet-Flakes. In filming the photo documentation of the victims of the Vietnam War, Schneemann’s camera zooms in and out of individual pictures in what Levin describes as ‘a visual trace of the embodied act of looking itself ’.28 Spero, too, centres on the body as the irreducible factor in the focus on the imagined experience of pain in the victims of war. As described above, images of

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pain in bodies under attack are central to the War Series; although not always literally picturing war in terms of physical hurt, traces of illness and injury are everywhere, particularly in the figures who scream violently and the paint that represents fluids – blood, vomit, sperm, shit – that flow unregulated, creating an image of the body that is out of control, leaking and excreting, breaking down under the violence being so unjustly inflicted upon it. Helicopters Blinding Victims offers an example: the parts of the body that are represented are those that are under attack, edited down to focus on not only the moment of blinding but also the affected sites. By removing specific context from documentary images, it could be argued that Spero is doing exactly what Berger warns of, picturing suffering as a universal condition. However, the distillation of these images to represent suffering as such is compelling, the screaming heads and disintegrating bodies ask the viewer to remain focused on the fundamental injustice that lies at the heart of war. The reduction of representation to its essential components in the sparsely painted supports concentrates the viewer’s attention on this bodily experience, demanding that they stare at the suffering of others without the distraction that accompanied its inclusion in the media. This is, of course, not unproblematic. Spero’s removal of specifics and the focus in on the suffering of others elides not only the particulars of the conflict but also the uniqueness of those who were killed and injured in Vietnam. As discussed in the Introduction, since the work of Desa Philippi there has been little critique of Spero’s treatment of race in her work, with recent texts claiming, as Kimberly Lamm has, that Spero was an artist who troubles the category of white femininity.29 Not entirely at odds with Lamm’s reading, I still think it important to register the problems of Spero’s approaches to representing conflicts and violence in non-Western countries. Not unlike images critiqued for their spectacularization of brutalized black and brown bodies as those which deny their humanity and instead reduce them down to bodies horrifically mistreated, in the War Series the focus in on the representation of suffering not only obscures the political underpinnings of the conflict but also the actual people who have died. In her rendering, those who suffer are homogenized, described as ‘victims’, further refused their humanity on the basis of their victimhood. Although the ambition to create what she described as ‘manifestos’ does not easily reconcile with a complex picture of a life destroyed, Spero’s descriptions in interviews of the people who she depicted as ‘the Vietnamese peasants’ does little to complicate this reading, reinforcing the sense that the War Series, at least to an extent, invites an orientalist gaze which creates a distance between the real people under attack and the viewer who, even if not white themselves, will engage with these images

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in spaces which encourage a white gaze.30 While I am certain that Spero would vociferously reject this reading, as she did in response to Philippi’s examining of the relationship of race and essentialism in her 1987 text, it still feels important to acknowledge this.31 Spero’s ambition to act against the violence elsewhere, while undoubtedly based on genuine empathy, is also framed in terms of her own disgust and fear which is very much centred on her own white femininity.32 In universalizing the experience of war, she retains ownership over its pain as part of a more general disgust at society, in line with the emotional politics of the New Left as described in the previous chapter. Both the register of her own anger and the removal of background emerge early in the series, marking a clear change in direction from the dark, overworked canvases of the earlier works. The introduction of metaphors and metonymy of war, however, emerges more subtly. Although increasingly visible as the series progresses – something I will examine in more detail below – attention to the language of war occurs throughout in the interest paid to the ways in which extreme acts of violence were presented, processed and euphemized. Metaphor and metonymy not only depict suffering but also echo pain’s logic, reflecting its linguistic structure. They are excessive, inadequate means to capture the horrors of war by transforming the machinery of attack into various monstrous and sometimes sexualized forms. It is in this treatment that the artist’s understanding of the war is most present. In the visceral mark-making and in the reduction of the image down to its most essential form there is an affective register that suggests an angry response to imagined suffering; however, with the metaphors that the artist chooses we can see more of her understanding of what the war reveals about the political underpinnings of the conflict in a way that reflects how social causes manifest in the metaphors used to describe pain. An image represents larger concepts in an attempt to adequately conceptualize not only the experience of being attacked but also those forces that seem to be driving it, rendered in a highly symbolic language of fantasy which refers to an underlying signifier.33 Although the development of this language towards an obscured symbolic is important to thinking about how pain acts politically in Spero’s work, it is worth first establishing the lexicon of metaphors and metonyms that the artists is engaging with. Through the visual language that emerges over the course of the series, political points are made through signs that stand in for wider ideas: sexual imagery representing obscenity, helicopters the military industrial complex, bombs that suggest nuclear apocalypse.34 Sexual metaphors have featured prominently in scholarly responses to the War Series, positioning Spero’s work within feminism’s broader concerns at an

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early moment in the movement and illustrating the gendered violence of war.35 Although it bears noting that focus on sexual metaphors in scholarship tend to misrepresent the series as a whole which is just as much interested in animalistic, insectile and mechanical metaphors as it is sexual and scatological ones, they remain an important part of the visual language that the artist develops. Throughout the series sexualized bodies that are excessive to the point of grotesque parody feature: Female Bomb (1966), for example, shows a mushroom cloud with heads flying out from its billowing top, seven breasts washed in a thin, bloody red, a fluid that also flows from its crotch, pooling on the ground below; S.U.P.E.R.P.A.C.I.F.I.C.A.T.I.O.N. (1967) depicts naked figures that feed at the bloody teats of a grinning reptilian helicopter; Androgynous Bomb – Rape (1968) pictures the torso of a figure with breasts and a five-pointed star on the crotch which forms the background for a scene in which a naked male figure appears to attack a crouching female one, while an androgynous head watches on, screaming open-mouthed. As Matthew Israel has shown, sexual imagery is a common thread in anti-Vietnam artwork. However, unlike an image such as Jeff Kramm’s poster My Lai – which shows a naked machoistic military figure pouting at the viewer, his penis replaced by three huge pink cannons and testicles with grenades to suggest rapacious militarism [Figure 2.11] – Spero’s work is less clear-cut; its condemnation is not of the conventional image of the hard masculine military body, but instead ambiguous forms that are as fragile as they are deadly.36 In her sexual and scatological metaphors there is not only pictured the psychosexual drives of war, but also the weak, vulnerable body that it targets. These representational choices are suggestive, especially when thinking about the ways in which metaphor acts to sublimate the original signifier as discussed in the Introduction. What is shown both suppresses and reveals the underlying realities of war; the obscured signified that is suggested by the metaphor of selfdestructive and destroying sexuality is not quite articulated, but even still a dream-like connection between sex and power is imaged in its violent endgame. In Male Bomb, the body is emaciated, its five penises taper strangely, not flaccid exactly but neither really hard [Figure 2.2]. This is not, therefore, a direct threat of violent sexuality attacking the viewer; the strong aggressive body does not emerge from underneath war’s representation as the underlying reality of combat. Instead, this is a body that is in the process of being destroyed itself, the lines that delineate its form not hard or complete but loosely traced in fading gouache wash. Pointing not only to the ways in which deathly forms emerge from the plumes of smoke that explode in war, it also acts as a metonymy of bodies that are literally torn apart when bombs explode, deforming people in the

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Figure 2.11 Jeff Kramm, My Lai, 1970. Offset lithograph, 24 × 18 in. © Jeff Kramm. Courtesy the artist.

most abject of ways. This was something in evidence throughout the news media, no more so than in the 14 October 1966 article in Life which described surgery to remove a live mortar shell from inside a living soldier.37 The body is abjected and threatened through the process of war; the imagined experience of its total destruction, perhaps darkly ecstatic in this sexualized rendering, is revealed through Spero’s picturings. Relating to a wider vocabulary of conflict, sexualized

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imagery reflects the prevalence of carnal metaphors in war; as Lisa Tickner has said, ‘Anal and ejaculatory metaphors were common speech in Vietnam—‘I laid my stuff all over it,’ in pilot’s language.’38 The conclusion she reaches, shared by Nixon, is that ‘Spero’s apocalyptic imagery exposed the sexual and sadistic obscenity of modern warfare’.39 This description reflects the connection between the metaphoric and the actual experience of war. A phrase like ‘I laid my stuff all over it’, which the artist ascribes to a pilot in the aftermath of a bombing raid, offers an ejaculatory metaphor for the release of bombs, adding a layer of meaning to the act that both obscures its real effects – death and destruction – but also reveals his sense of what the act means. Violent and sadistic helicopters and aircraft, too, reveal a sense of the monstrousness of the fetishized technology that attacks innocent victims. This mirrors the wider anti-war movement that used the metaphor of the attacking machine as a tactic to force Americans at home to recognize the monstrousness of the war. An advert promoting the International Days of Protest Against the War in Vietnam in March 1966 which features on the pages of New Left Notes stands as an example of the analogy of machinery designed for killing as voracious, unfeeling beasts. ‘The machinery of destruction feeds upon itself,’ it states. ‘Its appetite is unending. The more violence it produces, the more it craves. It demands more and more men, and yields more and more corpses.’40 Contrasting to this is the individual: ‘Man [sic], though, if not countries, knows what pain, hunger, and death are. Man at least knows the difference between freedom in words and freedom in reality, between a newspaper statistic and a dead child.’41 It is the understanding of the specific experience of sensation in ‘pain, hunger and death’ that separates the individual from the murderous machine; technology is imagined as monstrous but unfeeling, a brutal and voracious automaton. By contrast, empathy is positioned here as human and accessed through knowledge of the experience of suffering. The individual body in pain is separated out as the basis of our empathy and from that our outrage, mimicking the distinction drawn in the anti-war community between the moral, humanized citizen who reacts to death and violence and the disinterested, dehumanized voices of the establishment. A register of this can be seen in Spero’s swooping Female Helicopters (1966) which resemble images of the chopper in combat transformed into strange voluptuous whirlybirds [Figure 2.12]. Though pictured as if fertile and fecund, there is nothing life-giving in these creatures; they are beasts sent to destroy; they dive across the sky with blood-red tongues extended leaving disembodied heads screaming in their wake, with rounded breasts that lactate blood. By creating biomorphic renderings of the machines that for Spero were ‘the symbol

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Figure 2.12 Nancy Spero, Female Helicopters, 1966. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

of this war’, she engaged with images like Horst Faas’s iconic 1965 photograph of helicopters protecting South Vietnamese forces, seeking to manipulate them in the imagination of her viewer.42 Rather than offering safety for the troops, instead they are looming, violent creatures, stalking and attacking innocent victims. Devouring bodies because they are unthinking, aggressive and bestial, the symbol of the helicopter is transformed from icon of heroic American intervention into a representation of mindless animalistic violence. Replacing their human pilots, in Spero’s rendering the helicopters become the ‘monsters’ and ‘terrible machines of destruction’ that she imagined they would have seemed to have been for Vietnamese victims of the war.43 Through representing aircraft as reptilian and insectile, they are transformed into machine-monsters that can no longer be framed as efficient tools for defence, but are revealed to be murderous and driven by bloodlust. Connected as they are to the dehumanized military-industrial complex, they stand evidence of a lie that underpins the seemingly scientific, strategic aspects of the war; with their excessive and unnecessary attack, the machines serve a system that wants and needs death.

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The metaphors that Spero uses all draw on a language of the extreme and the excessive, both in terms of a phantasmal violence and its ideological underpinnings. In those cited above, they have related, at least tangentially, to the realities of the Vietnam War. However, there is another strand of her metaphors that invoke events that are unconnected to the conflict, specifically the statesponsored violence of the holocaust and the threat of the atomic bomb. These are revealing, pointing to the ways in which the War Series accuses and indicts. Speaking more to the legacy of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the repeated imaging of nuclear annihilation, for example, brings to mind more the ongoing tensions of the Cold War than the military strategy in Vietnam in which the use of nuclear weapons was never seriously considered.44 However, although not in actual fact involved in the conflict, the imaginary currency of the image was high: in 1966, the Cuban Missile Crisis was still a recent memory and mutually assured destruction was a real threat. Metaphorizing abject destruction, mushroom clouds reappear throughout the series in works like Atom Bomb (1966) in which disembodied heads, still alive and screaming with their tongues extended, are violently rendered, in scratchy, wavering lines [Figure 2.13]. The explosion itself is painted in a faecal reddish-brown, heightening the abjection of the imagery. Centred on the page, the bomb seems to burst into the air, the heads

Figure 2.13 Nancy Spero, Atom Bomb, 1966. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

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spin with the power of the blast. As with other representations of nuclear explosions, here the mushroom cloud stands in for the imagined experience of total indiscriminate extermination, transformed into a potent symbol. This is something that is at work in each of Spero’s metaphors. Not only explaining a feeling or objection to the war, all the metaphors that the artist returns to again and again are potent symbols in their own right, and it is their symbolic implications that she draws upon. Their relevance to this specific war varies; aircraft were key to Vietnam and sexualized violence was (and remains) a constant presence in war, but fascism, death camps and nuclear threat played no role in the conflict. Instead acting as symbols they established the ideological outcry expressed in the War Series. With this in mind, it is worth considering the development of the series in more detail, focusing on her treatment of symbols over the course of the five-year period in which the War Series was being made and the ways in which these transformed in the Artaud Paintings into something that represented the artist’s developing feminist politics.

From symbols of war to the fractured symbolic The symbolic plays an important role for thinking about both pain and Spero’s practice. As scholars have noted, symbols had long been of interest to Spero. She had engaged with symbolic representations as source materials in work made during the 1950s, particularly in her series of Tarot Paintings which took on the emblematic language of tarot as a basis for considering the figure.45 However, in the War Series, the symbolic in Charles Sanders Peirce’s description of it emerges in earnest – that is, images which are connected arbitrarily to an object requiring familiarity with its denotation in order to understand its meaning, an order of the sign that is profoundly connected to society and culture. Because this turn to the symbolic is tied with her developing political understanding, it follows that Spero’s engagement with it as a visual tactic for representing her outrage at injustice would develop over the course of the War Series and into the start of the Artaud Paintings. Images like Androgynous Bomb and Victims stand in sharp contrast to the pareddown symbolic language of works such as Mars, Victims, Airplane Wings, Eagle Claw, Mercury from 1970 [Figure 2.14] which concatenates the objects in the title to create something new. Spero represents the war and its results in markedly different ways, ranging from bloody and literal depictions of dead and dying bodies in 1966 and 1967, to clear-edged collaged bodies being dismembered by geometric aeroplanes or swooping eagles by 1969. Over the period 1966–70, the

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Figure 2.14 Nancy Spero, Mars, Victims, Airplane Wings, Eagle Claw, Mercury, 1970. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

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War Series transforms in its visual language from a legible representation of war to an iconographic approach that is abstract, tense and fractured. This development can be better understood when put into its historical context of the escalating activism of the anti-war movement which increasingly understood the structures that drove America as immoral, broadening its reach and influence. In 1967, protests against the war were becoming more vociferous, with numerous intellectuals and leaders speaking out against the conflict. Highprofile figures started to voice their condemnation and quickly these objections mounted: Noam Chomsky published ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’ in the New York Review of Books in February of that year; Martin Luther King delivered a speech in New York that condemned the war in April; and Bertrand Russell ran the ‘Russell Tribunal’ in Stockholm, charging war crimes against the American Government in May. Major protests were organized more and more often. In April, for example, 400,000 people marched in New York from Central Park to the UN Building protesting against the war. Spero was involved in the intensifying protest culture. By 1967, she was an increasingly enthusiastic member of the movement, joining in with both general protests against the war and also those mounted by the activist artistic community in groups like Artists and Writers Protest. If considered not as a homogenous group of works, but instead as a series that develops over the course of its making, the War Series reflects the artist’s deepening investment in the anti-war movement, and can be seen as increasingly legible alongside the New Left’s reading of the significance of Vietnam for understanding the injustice of American society. The increased relationship between the series and the events of the war can be seen in the ways in which the artist describes her work. Writing in 1966 in a statement designed to contextualize the War Series, Spero offers a description without reference to specific political ambitions: I continue with the subject of lovers in an abrupt and symbolic way. During this past year I have spent a good deal of time working on a series of large gouaches – the subject, the atom ‘Bomb.’ These are extentions [sic] of separation and devastation – the bomb as paroxysmic metaphor. The bomb assumes many aspects; terrible angels of death and destruction emerging from the clouds of the bomb – either their tongues or blood gushing from their mouths; the bomb sometimes assumes the form of a canopic vase, or the bomb’s pillar becomes a human torso with obscene angels emerging, etc. Too, I have done scenes of the bomb at the horizon of the earth with the suggestion of dead or drowned people strewn about (I had in mind the apocalyptic manuscripts of 10th century Spain).46

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Although inspired by war, as she begins the series the works are framed by the artist in terms of a development of the exploration of alienation that was central to her Paris Black Paintings. It is interesting in this description that the subject of Vietnam and American aggression in Southeast Asia is absent. Instead, Spero invokes ancient metaphors of the ‘angels of death’ and the ‘apocalyptic manuscripts of 10th century Spain’, showing an attention more focused on the eschatological than the political. By 1993, twenty-three years after the series was completed, Spero’s description of the work changes to one that is notably more explicit in its political claims, stating: ‘These works were intended as manifestos against our (the U.S.) incursion into Vietnam, a personal attempt at exorcism.’47 This shift in the political ambition of the work is also visible in the symbols that Spero invokes as the series develops. Whereas, in 1966, the majority of titles and scenes depicted are vague in their representation of this particular conflict rather than war in general, in 1967, among the works named Bomb and Victims, Female Bomb and Helicopters and Victims, Spero titles works with names like the straightforwardly legible Kill Commies and the more historically entwined Chinese Bomb and Victims, F-111-Victims in Rivers of Blood, referencing the aircraft that first entered service in Vietnam in 1967, and Cardinal Spellman, Helicopter, Eagle, Cross, Angel, referencing the Catholic Archbishop of New York and his hawkish support for the war. As Spero’s involvement in anti-war activism developed, so too did her symbols, the metaphors she was using reflecting a wider anti-war vocabulary. Throughout the anti-war movement in the arts, the interrogation of symbols and their place in the ideological framework that scaffolded support for the war formed the basis for the iconography of protest. Doves and hawks were common reference points, invoked for their allusion to positions that were taken regarding the war, with doves seeking peace and hawks more military involvement. Using their respective associations of hope and reconciliation versus calculating attack, artists exploited the moral association of the dove and the ruthlessness of hawks, paying particular attention to the latter’s useful similarity to the eagle that sits on the United States Government Official Seal.48 The US Flag was also being manipulated and attacked by artists, with many falling foul of anti-desecration laws. Marc Morrel’s flag works shown in the Stephen Radich Gallery in December 1966 stand as an example. Created by the Vietnam veteran on his return from fighting in the conflict, the flag was presented in various unflattering ways, most explicitly as a phallus being crucified on a cross. Morrel described his use of the flag as seeking to engage with ‘the one symbol that could reach people other than a burnt or bloody doll or a draft card’.49 The power of the attack on the symbol is

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evidenced by the official response to it. Stephen Radich was convicted of flag desecration and sentenced to either sixty days in prison or a $500-dollar fine.50 At this moment of heightened ideological sensitivities, the power that symbols held to represent those things that dissenters stood against made them fertile ground for attack. Their inclusion in political work reflected a vocabulary that was building up around the rejection of war. As the War Series develops, the symbols that Spero used were increasingly drawn from this lexis of the anti-war movement, and reflected her developing understanding of the political underpinnings for Vietnam. Her use of the symbols of the swastika and the eagle demonstrate this. Appearing first in the series in 1967, by bringing together the swastika and the eagle a structured understanding of war, and particularly the Vietnam War, emerges in which it is presented as part of a wider political schema rather than the result of a more general human aggression. Spero’s use of the eagle as a symbol seems to elide its association with the Third Reich; her repeated dispatch of it in 1967 sees it as representative of America itself, taking on the bald eagle for its status as a national symbol.51 Swastika Eagle (1967) [Figure 2.15] shows the eagle transmuting into the emblem of German National Socialism. Unevenly spread

Figure 2.15 Nancy Spero, Swastika Eagle, 1967. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

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across the paper, red and black swastikas form the basis of both the eagle and the Christian cross in six separate vignettes. Scratchily painted and rubbed aggressively, the individual icons look as though they trace the transformation of this creature, moving from the small but complete swastika on the top left of the picture plane through various stages of its larval development until the symbols of eagle and swastika are combined in the centre. The central concatenation of eagle and swastika shows both symbols as fearsome and deathly. The swastika is blood red, its borders are not secure but are rubbed over, the bloody colour escaping its confines. The eagle’s mouth gapes open with a sharp and piercing beak. It looks as though the blood paint is both spewing from its mouth and being consumed lustily by the bird. Its shape is reminiscent of the bombs that Spero pictures elsewhere and the hard black outline of the bird draws the eye down to the sharp and murderous claws that sit under the vertical line of the swastika. This disturbing image of symbolic violence that asserts a continuity between the Nazi and American states is shadowed by a more absurd conflation in the bottom right-hand corner. Brightest of all the symbols and the least mired in the traces of aggressive rubbing of the paper by the artist, this eagle-swastika appears hieroglyphic, its face and claws are almost erased by deliberate and precise rubbing. This vignette makes the central picture into a single image: eagle is swastika. The swastika-eagle is a striking icon of symbolic violence. Blood red and representative of a profound evil, the animal is one that attacks and destroys in the name of ideology. Swastika Eagle uses the connotations of symbols in order to put forward a particular reading of their implications for the violence in Vietnam. America’s association with this war has made it evil, the Christian cross that represents the presumed morality of the country becoming the backbone for this murderous beast. As the series develops, indexical traces of anger still visible in the intensively rubbed surface of the paper in Swastika Eagle are replaced by an increasingly resonant and sparse imagery that relies on the metaphoric associations of symbols in order to act politically. Pilot – Eagle – Skull (1968) [Figure 2.16], for example, shows three signs stacked vertically along the centre of the paper: a skull at the bottom of the support, constructed of ripped and fragile paper; the pilot who stares forward off to the left of the picture plane; and the eagle that sits atop his head. The eagle’s position on the pilot’s head implies a connection to an official US ideological standpoint, its control and direction. Rather than the markers of violence of the early series, the obscenity and the frenetic mark, instead we have frozen in front of us a three-step allegory of the war: a man, deformed by public ideology and personal aggression; an eagle – an ideological

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Figure 2.16 Nancy Spero, Pilot – Eagle – Skull, 1968. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

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symbol – hunting for its prey; and a broken and mutilated skull, the end point of violence. The helicopters and bombs of the earlier paintings are notably absent from this rendering of war. Lyon describes this in terms of a shift towards symbolism. He states: ‘The images are often entirely symbolic, with cutout gouache paintings of the Eagle, representing the US, dismembering a Victim or wielding an airplane wing, rendered as an abstract painted geometric shape.’52 Instead of flying in a helicopter, the eagle swoops between the pilot and the skull perhaps taking on the role of the machine; it invites a reading of a similar narrative to the earlier works – pilot flying on top of eagle-helicopter, leaving its dead victims in its wake – but one that is abstracted to the point of obscurity.53 In the earlier works that draw on recognizable social symbols and attack them there is a condemnation of the ideas that lie at the basis of those signs. However, as the series progresses, Spero begins an attack on the symbolic order in Lacan’s description of it. In 1953, Lacan introduced the recently formed Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP) to the concepts of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real.54 Connecting to different parts of the psyche, the concepts interact to manifest the repressed and inconceivable into fantasies which can be processed into the social form of language, allowing us to relate to others and form communities governed by both enforced and understood laws and taboos. The symbolic is engaged as part of a social relationship – that is, one that is outside of the dyadic relationship of mother and child, forming and asserting those laws that shape our culture. In his ‘Rome Discourse’, Lacan shows that the realm of the symbolic manifested in language is that which forms the basis of ‘the reign of culture over the reign of nature’.55 The symbolic order, then, is foundational of society, law and taboo. Although not fixed as a specific set of rules, the symbolic order is that which forms and governs culture.56 Lacan states: Symbols in fact envelop the life of man with a network so total that they join together those who are going to engender him ‘by bone and flesh’ before he comes into the world; so total that they bring to his birth, along with the gifts of the stars . . . the shape of his destiny; so total that they provide the words that will make him faithful or renegade, the law of the acts that will follow him right to the very place where he is not yet and beyond his very death.57

In this understanding, language and its rules, taboos and expectations are powerful makers of society, and whether a person is ‘faithful’ or a ‘renegade’ is reflected through their approach to the symbolic. A symbolic that remains unfractured, that is legible and comprehensible, then, can be read as a means to smooth over the ruptured and compromised nature of culture.

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In this sense, the ways in which pain intervenes in language can be used to act against culture and its corruptions. The expression of pain calls on the symbolic but fails, attempting communication but in a way that is unsettled and only partially legible. To some extent this relates to the register of the Kristevan semiotic as outlined by Jon Bird in his 1996 essay ‘Dancing to a Different Tune’, in which the unconscious drives intervene into language through its material resistance. The semiotic chora registers the history of the subject in their infantile experience of the dyadic relationship with the maternal body. Subsumed by language, for Kristeva the semiotic still has the capacity to emerge in interventions into the symbolic, particularly at moments where bodily realities intrude on the subject. Bird describes this in relation to Spero’s imaging of women: These are the sacral moments – transgressive or transcendent – when the semiotic body is most intensely present and most profoundly the substantiation of another reality: of childbirth, wounding, sexual pleasure, menstruation, excretion, death. These phases of acute embodiment, of the dominion of the body, evidence an incontestable reality. Extreme sentience denies the symbolic order; language is reduced to its most basic and indexical function, a pure existential expression of ‘abjection’ or ‘jouissance’.58

Pain is clearly related to this mode; as Scarry states, pain involves the ‘shattering of language’, not ‘simply resist[ing] language but actively destroy[ing] it’.59 However, what a framework of pain adds is the inherent appeal to support and intervention, related here to its anti-war politics. The semiotic is pre-symbolic, heterogeneous, creating multiple and ambiguous meanings. While Spero’s representation is not unambiguous, it is about something specific and aims to create a particular reaction in the viewer. Representing this language of pain, one which pictures the experience of suffering not through showing images of wounds or bodily damage done but through a voice that attempts to translate the sensation, undoes the logic of symbolic expression. However, in Spero’s rendering the symbolic relates to specific aspects of society deliberately chosen; it is these that are undermined. She articulates this in a later description that establishes the distance between herself and Artaud, when she states: ‘I decided to incorporate Artaud’s words with my images, not in an illustrative manner, but word and image in stress as a statement of exclusion, of protest, as existential anger.’60 Spero’s intervention into the symbolic, therefore, is not the return of the semiotic being figured in creative production; instead it is a deliberate political act that seeks to register dissent. As she explains, ‘I was interested in pushing my work to some kind of outer edge as the center implies a kind of compliance and ease.’61

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Figure 2.17 Nancy Spero, Eagle, Victim, Medusa Head, 1969. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

This begins to emerge in the later works of the War Series. In Eagle, Victim, Medusa Head (1969), in place of the explicit, roughly sketched, rubbed and scribbled lines, there sit a number of collaged symbols concatenated to become a scene [Figure 2.17]. Unlike the bombs of the earlier series which, while unworldly, were legible through their titles and imagery as an excessive representation of war, the connection of this image to Vietnam is not obvious. Restrained in their affect, no blood or fluids flow, nor do heads with tongues stuck out explode across the page. The pain and suffering implied by the claws that sever body from head is subsumed by the hard edge of the collage on paper and the symbolic nature of the representation. Symbols invoke rather than describe aspects of the war that are important to Spero’s understanding of it. The eagle that seems to have sliced the classical torso of the victim in half can be connected to the hawks that supported the war, and also to the various aircraft that rained down destruction in Vietnam. The Medusa’s head that spins off screaming floats above the scene; her inclusion seems to allude to the destruction of female power by male violence. Instead of a legible narrative of war and suffering, here symbols are being included for their metonymous connection to other ideas, brought together to connect concepts on the page – the violent hawks, bodies under attack, and aggression towards women. By moving away from a legible account of war and its suffering, what emerges is a set of images

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that seem to represent an entire order at odds. Mars, Victims, Airplane Wings, Eagle Claw, Mercury, too, offers a clear sense of the structures that underpin violence. Mars, the god of war, stands in to represent conflict. His left arm is raised in what looks like a call to imagined armies to charge their enemies, demanding combat because it is his role to do so. Victims cry in agony, half absorbed into the aeroplane wing as though its metal has turned into liquid. The talons that sit below the planet Mercury are disjointed, not sharp enough to pierce skin, but clearly claw-like. They render this shape zoomorphic, making it resemble a strange, headless bird. Without the bloodied corpses of the early works, the political implications of these symbols is legible only through attention to their associations: Mars and Mercury are, respectively, the Roman gods of war and of commerce; the eagle’s claws and aircraft wings suggest aspects of the military-industrial complex. Only the victims are left as they are; standing in solely for more victims, these bodies in pain are irreducible. It is interesting that this shift towards an iconography that attacks the symbolic order coincides with Spero’s involvement in feminist activism. As a founding member of Women Artists in Revolution, she was working as part of a community of women artists dedicated to understanding women’s experience, and particularly the subtle but systematic exclusion and alienation experienced by women living under patriarchy. As discussed in the previous chapter, this is a different kind of political questioning than existed in the anti-war movement. In protesting against the war, artists had been drawn to images that could – in Morrel’s terms – ‘reach people’. Feminist activism by contrast was not only about promoting the cause, but perhaps more importantly about groups working together to understand the ways in which patriarchy had shaped individual women’s psyches. The developing language of the War Series reflects this change in political approach. With an image like Eagle, Victim, Medusa Head, it is not only symbols that are explored for their underlying meanings, but also systems of representation. The world that creates war is one in which logic has broken down, where violent concepts meet to perform vicious acts against the person. Looking back to Golub’s claim that ‘[t]he power of this art is in its virtually insane and strained correspondence to what is possible – to what is actual’, towards the end of the series the ‘actual’ becomes the system itself, one that is violent towards the vulnerable and the innocent, particularly to women, but that carries out its brutal acts in a way that is obscured by its structures. By the end of the series, a visual language has been built up that represents not only the act of violence, but also its structural underpinning in American imperialism and its connections to patriarchy; ‘reality’, as it is represented in the media and presented by government as justification for

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the war, is something to intervene in, used as a set of signs to manipulate in order to visualize the artist’s horror, outrage and disgust. This is further inflected by Spero’s claim that the series represents ‘personal attempts at exorcism’ in that it lends its visual language a visceral register. To exorcise implies to bring something that is trapped inside the body and spirit of the sufferer out, ridding them of the malign forces that cause them pain. The attempts at exorcism are specific to the individual artist, expelling harmful forces from within her body and psyche through an attack on the symbolic order. However, while emerging in the War Series, Spero’s move from the depiction of pain to representing its logic emerges most convincingly in her work that engages with the tortured prose of Artaud. To Spero, Artaud was ‘probably the most extreme writer of the twentieth century’, and using short extracts of his writings juxtaposed with her own anguished iconography, she began to make works inspired by his texts in 1969.62 The Artaud Paintings continued Spero’s attention to the scatological and obscene, selecting phrases from Artaud’s extensive and wrought oeuvre such as ‘forming God in the slimey egg white of my left ball’ and ‘A horrible turd trembling expectantly in the void, on the verge of the still uncreated man, exploded.’ However, the paintings also tapped into Artaud’s acute attention to the sense of being divorced from society, the profound anguish that defined his tortured prose. Working through Artaud’s pained and fractured language, Spero used his words to represent her own alienated experience, one that was informed by the feminism that was a growing influence on the artist. Artaud appealed to the artist for his extreme and violent utterances, and Spero described her turn to his writings in terms of identifying with ‘his sense of victimage, his anger, his defiance, using his text to exemplify my lack of voice’.63 This decision to represent women’s alienation through his words has often been seen as a contradiction in that he has been interpreted as, in Lamm’s words, ‘a raging misogynist’.64 Although, as Lucy Bradnock has demonstrated in her study of Artaud’s reception in postwar American practice, this accusation more closely reflects his later reception, inflected by accounts of specific exchanges with particular women, than the reality of his texts, nevertheless Spero understood Artaud in these terms, stating in 1989: ‘Artaud hated women.’65 This misreading is interesting; the repetition of the fact of Artaud’s unevidenced misogyny reveals something of the artist’s sense of the extreme nature of Artaud’s prose. Gendered voices have been seen as important for understanding this collaboration, asserted by the artist and repeated throughout writing on the work.66 Most recently Lamm has argued that Artaud is a useful voice for Spero to adopt because he straddles the line between having the authority associated with

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the male voice and the silencing experienced by women in his hysterical, alienated writings.67 Indeed, the characterizing of Spero’s use of Artaud’s voice as adopting a hysterical – and therefore feminized – persona is apt; she cites texts that represent a violent rejection of society through explicit and unrelenting anger. Reflecting Bradnock’s description of the reception of Artaud in the 1960s American art world in which ‘Artaud’s narrative of self was identified in terms of its direct emotional relevance to New York artists and poets at the turn of the Sixties, rather than as a distant set of historical facts’, Spero foregrounded Artaud’s pain and used it to represent the artist othered by society.68 In interviews and statements about the Artaud works, Spero tends towards a simplified reading that funnels Artaud through madness; a 1986 description is typical in its framing of him: ‘in choosing Artaud, I chose a pariah, a madman. He was the other, a brilliant artist, but a victim running in circles.’69 Claims for his misogyny are in line with this reading. It represents someone out of control: not quietly complicit with women’s oppression, he is put forward as someone ranting and raving, expressing extreme and unwelcome ideas in a language that acts as a concerted attack. According to Spero, her engagement with Artaud worked to express her anger, alienation and pain. She describes it after the fact as a kind of catharsis.70 That said, this reading obscures the sympathy of approach between the two artists. Artaud is also a figure who theorizes art as something that can attack the symbolic order as a means to develop an authentic, emotional and effective form of culture. Given that numerous scholars trace the association between the two artists it remains surprising that in the reception of Spero’s Artaud works, Artaud’s theoretical writings are almost entirely neglected; the focus instead is on his fractured letters, prose and poetry. Among Artaud’s theoretical texts, his major contribution to artistic theory, The Theatre and Its Double, is a dense and intriguing theoretical proposition that elucidates not only his practice, but offers ways of understanding the ideas at work in Spero’s, too. Reading Spero’s work through Artaud’s theories both develops our sense of what the relationship was between these two practitioners, offering a more compelling reason for Spero’s engagement with Artaud as a source, but moreover in their shared dedication to the revolutionary power of foregrounding feeling, something of the political potential of an aesthetic of pain is revealed. It is not only his excessive declamations, but that he sees this kind of articulation as a powerful and transformative force in art; his theories, which provide a background for understanding much of his own prose, align him with Spero’s approach in which the viewer is forced to confront the extreme.

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The exact relationship that Spero had with Artaud’s theoretical writing is unclear. Certainly in quoting from Artaud, she tended towards the more frenzied and fractured texts of his letters, poetry and prose; however, we do know that she possessed the majority of his Oeuvres complètes and, as we can see through Bradnock’s and Schlegel’s careful studies of the reception of Artaud in America, his theatrical theory was prominent at the time that the Artaud works were being made.71 Furthermore, despite the fact that in his own implementations of his theatrical practice he was markedly unsuccessful – as Susan Sontag bluntly puts it in her introduction to his Selected Works, ‘Both in his work and his life, Artaud failed’72 – his writings do manifest much of his theory, reading them is an onslaught of pain and suffering that Sontag describes as ‘nothing less than an ordeal’.73 First published by Gallimard in 1938, Le Théâtre et son Double was Artaud’s most coherent outline of his vision for theatre. Comprising of a number of manifestolike essays that describe the concept of the Theatre of Cruelty, the book engages with metaphors of plague, alchemy and cruelty to explain the character of this new type of arts practice. Outlining his vision for the new type of theatre in his preface, he asserts that it is one of magic and of shadows, one that rejects the posture of objectivity and psychology taken up by contemporaneous theatre. As he says, ‘If our life lacks brimstone, i.e., a constant magic, it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in considerations of their imagined form instead of being impelled by their forces.’74 In his drive towards this primal magic, Artaud draws a distinction between art and culture, saying: ‘True culture operates by exaltation and force, while the European ideal of art attempts to cast the mind into an attitude distinct from force but addicted to exaltation.’75 By reinstating true culture as the authentic form of art-making, he claims that we can initiate a revolutionary practice. He states that ‘we can begin to form an idea of culture, an idea which is first of all of a protest’, but one which leads to a revolution of the human spirit.76 His claim for the resulting theatrical practice is considerable. He states: ‘This leads to the rejection of the usual limitations of man and man’s powers, and infinitely extends the frontiers of what is called reality.’77 In his manifestos on the Theatre of Cruelty, while agitating for a ‘theater that wakes us up: nerves and heart’, Artaud outlines a number of tactics for creating a theatrical event that generates ‘that immediate and violent action which the theater should possess’.78 Drawing on Balinese theatre, Artaud suggests a theatrical language of gesture, sound and light that rejects psychologism and privileges a dream-like experience, working against the symbolic order and towards the abstract and brutal exposure of a profound anguished reality. His tactics are ones that seek to connect with the audience on a physical and primal

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Figure 2.18 Nancy Spero, I died at Rodez under electroshock, 1969. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

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level, elements are included in order to shock and manipulate the body and the senses, shaking the viewer out of their comfortable existence and instead forcing them to witness the spiritual authenticity of pain. Spero’s investment in this approach is demonstrated in a work like I died at Rodez under electroshock (1969) [Figure 2.18]. The declaration of a cruel death, scrawled in jagged handwriting, is coupled with a violent explosion that is centred on the page. It is painted heavily on the paper support in gold and red, bursting out towards the edges of the page in thick brushstrokes. Just below centre is a head, similar to those that had been a major feature of the War Series, that looks down to the bottom right of the page. In line with its mouth is a spurt of red paint that could be blood. Despite the statement being written at the bottom of the page, it does not look like an illustration, it is not a literal depiction of a death; instead, the explosion, the disembodied head that screams, possibly spewing blood as it does, and the overloaded paper support all contribute to a sense of violence and force, the tone of the brutal declaration echoed in the cruel and uncompromising imagery. In selecting and creating intense and explosive scenes Spero’s iconographic approach relates to Artaud’s promotion of a language of obscure and concentrated signs. He states: ‘Words say little to the mind; extent and objects speak; new images speak, even new images made with words. But space thundering with images and crammed with sounds speaks too, if one knows how to intersperse from time to time a sufficient extent of space stocked with silence and immobility.’79 Focusing in on violent signs, condensed together, Spero adopts the intensity Artaud champions, creating abject and brutal vignettes that violently confront the viewer. However, although in sympathy with Artaud’s interrogation of the extreme, Spero’s engagement with Artaud was inherently tied to her search for an effective means of transforming her existing practice into something that would act politically. In a 1986 interview, she states: ‘I decided to incorporate Artaud’s words with my images, not in an illustrative manner, but word and image in stress as a statement of exclusion, of protest, as existential anger. And probably as a statement of my position, excluded from art discourse, unseen.’80 As such, her use of his words is less focused on rendering the feeling of suffering in language, but instead on putting its structures on display. Although similarly interested in the attack on the symbolic rendered through semiotic expulsions that are in evidence throughout Artaud’s oeuvre, Spero’s use of his words is less chaotic, interested in revealing an order that underlies the fragments that she transcribes. O VIO PROFE (1969) [Figure 2.19] stands as an example. The text reading ‘O VIO PROFE / O VIO PROTO / O VIO LOTO / O THETHE / ARTAUD’,

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Figure 2.19 Nancy Spero, O VIO PROFE , 1969. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

an extract of Artaud’s 1947 text, ‘Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society’ – itself an excoriation of the alienation suffered by visionary artists, marginalized by a cruel and blinkered culture – sits in the centre of the right-hand side of the picture plane. Painted in the same red as All Writing is Pigshit, the colour is nearly blood-like, but brighter and pinker so as to lend the text a vibrancy that separates it from the brownish-copper colour of the image. A disembodied head floats above the text, its rounded form not falling, but instead seeming unnaturally

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suspended on the paper. To the right, there is a polygonal form with varied colours that are flat in their rendering. Across the shape are four black lines that trace into it a pyramid. These kinds of geometric representations and their allusion to ancient imagery suggest a visual language that has an obscured meaning. A sense of failed translation is transmitted by these paintings. There is a logic here and one that seems possible to comprehend, but it lies just out of reach, referring to the familiar but not fully articulating its purpose. In O VIO PROFE , the painting seems as though it must be representing a situation that is profoundly disturbed: the odd angles, the decapitated head and language all contributing to a world at odds, threatening and unsettled. Mimicking the language of pain, the symbolic is not destroyed by Spero’s manipulations of its order; instead, meanings remain, neither entirely legible nor completely inaccessible. This is also reflected in her treatment of his language. Spero’s adoption of Artaud’s original French, in relation to her obscuring of message and doubling of Artaud, bears on this.81 Spero’s transition from Englishlanguage translations of Artaud’s words to transcription of his writings direct from their original French is often read as a move away from legibility towards a more abstract practice that sees language as a means to represent alienation in an opaque way. The 1970 Artaud painting Avant de me suicider [Figure 2.20], for example, is transcribed entirely in French from his 1925 text ‘Sur le Suicide’. It reads: ‘Avant de me suicider je demande qu’on m’assure de l’être Artaud.’ This imperfectly translates to: ‘Before I kill myself I demand that someone tells me I exist.’ Written in her left-handed scrawl, the text loops and fades, making it harder to decipher. Made in the United States for a predominantly Englishspeaking audience, the use of French obscures this message from the assumed anglophone viewer; the application of some structure that is coherent but inaccessible can be seen to be in operation. However, the use of French means that this is a system to which even the most determined non-francophone can have some access. The words ‘suicider’, ‘demande’ and ‘assure’ share a common Latin source that makes them comprehensible to an English speaker. The exact substance and grammar of the sentence are kept at a distance; however, some of their meaning breaks through.82 Therefore the logic of this image is not one that is entirely incomprehensible; instead it is a system we recognize to a certain extent, but without full access to its complication and nuance. This is echoed visually by the figure to the left of the text. Comprising of entirely recognizable elements – a triumphant naked figure standing on an upside-down pair of legs that stems from the shoulders of another naked figure where the head and neck should be – their combination fails to make sense. This strategy echoes the

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Figure 2.20 Nancy Spero, Avant de me suicider, 1970. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

language of pain, creating through the use of what look like metaphoric signs a visual world that implies sensation without an apparent interpretation; a meaning to this work is implied through certain visual markers rather than explicitly described. Drawing on the kinds of metaphor and distance that pain suggests, Spero creates a language of pain that is entwined with the symbolic, one which relies on disrupting language in order to represent attempts and failures to communicate.

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By referring to this language of the body in pain, Spero creates implications of structure, the suggestion of an ordered world that is unfamiliar and strange. The effect on the viewer is to feel structures of representation as visible and alien, making pictures seem word-like but without the means to translate them. Drawing on the manipulation of the symbolic that occurs with physical pain, wherein metaphors are invoked as inadequate descriptors leaving a significant gap between sensation and description, Spero erodes the coherence of symbols in order to represent an anguished state of alienation. In attacking the symbolic, it is the realm of culture that is being dissected, the man-made world – gendering intended – of war, violence and exclusion. Pain’s impenetrable cry is represented here, complete with piecemeal implications of significance that suggest the sensation and hint at a source. As with all experiences of pain, there is contained a cry of both accusation and imploration: pain is caused. Similar to the War Series, an expression of pain brings with it a demand for its end. The power of communicating pain for feminist activism is apparent, especially given women’s traditional exclusion from declarative rhetorical modes. After all, feminism suffers from the profound difficulty of describing a condition in which women are systematically repressed by their own daily experience, particularly of domestic life, and it is an oppression which is perpetrated unknowingly by the people they are closest to. Picturing structures that look familiar but that are in some way inaccessible or nonsensical is a way of picturing a feminist interpretation of female experience: structures are shown as being distant, despite the elements being familiar and seeming comprehensible. The language of pain, one in which familiar concepts stand in for profound and inexpressible sensations, is an apt expression for this. Spero’s Artaud Paintings make the move towards being effectively feminist, revealing that something is hidden, that there is a language and order at work, one that is seemingly inscribed within the subject, but an order that fails to make sense. Given that this change in iconography is framed by the artist as being a shift towards examining her own subjectivity, Spero depicts a psyche that cannot make sense of the world around it, one which lacks the coordinates to translate the systems that are inscribed within it, one which is profoundly alienated from itself. The deep anguish of being alienated from your own experience acts as a powerful undercurrent to this iconography, imploring the viewer to consider the nature of the suffering, and by extension its wider, societal cause. Over the course of the five years from the start of the War Series until the start of the Codex Artaud it is possible to trace the emergence of both a visual language of pain and a focus on politics in Spero’s work. Her turn from a literal

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picturing of the brutalized body towards a symbolic representation that pictures the distanced and metaphoric language of pain establishes a powerful tactic for the artist in her move into feminist art-making, one which she embraces more fully in the extended support of the Codex. Filtered through her engagement with New York activism, we can see through Spero’s eyes a programmatic control that underlies society. Spero’s relatively late turn to politics makes its visibility the more compelling; at the start of the War Series Spero has an established practice with its own iconographic idiosyncrasies and recurrent themes. When closely examining this period of Spero’s career, one in which she is coming abruptly into politics, it is a change in the artist’s ideological underpinning that is so visible. Having developed a language of pain that relies on a distortion of the symbolic, Spero moved towards an extended exploration of the relationship between fractured text and anguished iconography. Thinking through the concept of silence, my next chapter will turn to an examination of the Codex Artaud.

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CHAPTER THREE

Codex Artaud: Hysteria and Silence

In 1971, moving away from the relatively modest dimensions and the serial form of her Artaud Paintings, Spero began pasting sheets of Japanese Sekishu-brand paper together to create long, thin works that developed her explorations of Artaud’s writings and their expression of her own alienation rendered through extracts of his texts. Turning again to Artaud, she sought a way to bring her increasing interest in feminism and her own sense of alienation into her practice. The result was the thirty-seven panels of the Codex Artaud, a work that explores the nature of alienation through her artistic alter ego. Shifting emphasis from representing Artaud’s texts almost as aphorisms as was her strategy in the Artaud Paintings, Spero instead transcribed writings ranging from sentences to long sections on her bulletin typewriter, combining them on the elongated paper panels with fragmented and sexualized figures. This fraught and disturbed imagery was described by the artist as a way of speaking in a world that refused to listen: ‘I was sticking my tongue out and trying to find a voice after feeling silenced for so many years.’1 The move to an elongated form introduced to the Codex Artaud large areas of white space. On the one hand, this space – which left the paper onto which her fragmented texts and anguished figures were collaged bare – delineates the borders of a chaotic and disorderly pictorial world. On the other, despite being clear of her signifying collaged elements, the paper does not seem empty. Resonating with an aura of aggression and anguish, the support mutely communicates through the ripped and crumpled paper. This turbulent empty space forms the ground of the image, creating something that metaphorizes silence. Establishing a dynamic between silence and speech, the Codex was an experiment in creating an object that expressed the artist’s painful and alienated experience. Given that the work mostly consists of extensive empty panels it is possible, then, to see this anguished and loaded silence as the predominant mode of the Codex. Coming alongside an increased involvement in feminist art-world activism and an attention to the political potentials of artworks, Spero’s representations of silent, empty spaces were an example of the trope of silence which had recurred 109

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throughout twentieth-century art. Susan Sontag’s 1967 essay ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’, first published in Aspen magazine’s ‘The Minimalism Issue’, argued that silence in contemporary art was associated with a modern relationship to spirituality. For Sontag, the modern era sought not to affirm God’s existence, but instead to negate it. By turn, ‘art must tend toward anti-art, the elimination of “the subject” (the “object”, the “image”), the substitution of chance for intention, and the pursuit of silence’.2 Outlining a number of different approaches to silence, including a Duchampian disavowal of art, an Artaudian self-punishment, a Beckettian nihilism and a ludic Cagean disinvestment of meaning, Sontag suggested that silence proliferated out of a need to resist bourgeois culture.3 Not a silence of saying nothing, instead it spoke volumes through a refusal to articulate in a framework of articulation. However, this understanding of silence as a negation does not match up to Spero’s terse, muted pictorial language. Silence here is not an uninflected blankness; instead it points to an absence, to something that is not said, either suppressed or withheld. Diverging from the practices that Sontag cites in her essay, Spero’s depiction of silence in the Codex does not picture a decision to negate culture. Instead, within the framework of voicelessness of the female experience of patriarchy, she pictures the experience of a silence that is enforced, created by the neglect of society that rejects the voice of the artist. Erased by a culture that refused to listen, the artist made the Codex not as an act of cultural negation but instead to represent the effect of it. Framed in this way, silence is something imposed, forced onto the artist who wants to speak. Voice is fought for, constantly obliterated by a violent oppression. This mimics the ways in which pain restricts expression, creating a voice struggling to be heard from underneath an aggressive and obliterating experience. As discussed in Chapter One, in Elaine Scarry’s description, pain’s ‘inexpressibility’ is central to its alienating effect, establishing distance between the sufferer and the witness to suffering. Describing this, she states: ‘[T]here is no language for pain . . . it (more than any other phenomenon) resists verbal objectification.’4 Joanna Bourke diverges from Scarry’s sense that pain is untransmittable and instead examines the ways in which pain is manifested in language, looking to metaphor and figurative description in order to do so.5 However, even in spite of this, she acknowledges the ways in which pain is described as ‘ “unspeakable” or “absolutely evanescent” ’, an entirely subjective experience reliant on analogy in order to be understood.6 In Sara Ahmed’s description, pain is something legible in the other, but distanced. Concerned with the ways in which we sense and respond to others’ pain, Ahmed suggests that ‘pain, which is often experienced as

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“already there”, is difficult to grasp and to speak about’.7 In these understandings, the gap between sensation and communication is elaborated. Similar to Sontag’s description of silence as a refusal to articulate, pain’s silence is fraught and turbulent. Although communicative in that it is possible for those who suffer to convey it in cries and screams, to describe it in metaphor, pain is something that evades language, requiring some form of translation in order to represent it externally to the body. The sensation of pain, in all its obliterating force, is unrepresentable but knowable. Its power to destroy all other sensations, all sentience, is overwhelming, allowing the imagination to conjure its causes, drawing on the language of fantasy in order to do so. It is this that the Codex pictures: articulation fails but this failure signifies. The turbulent paper boundaries of the scrolls create a world invested with meaning, charged and auratic, signifying pain. Being made in 1971 and 1972, Codex Artaud was conceived at a time when Spero was actively seeking to picture her own sense of pain at the alienation she suffered under patriarchy. At this point, although Women Artists in Revolution had disbanded, its continuing influence was apparent on her writing and activism. At the start of the decade Spero produced a number of hostile texts that illustrated a voluble aggression aimed at what she described in a letter to Lucy Lippard as ‘the enemies of women’s liberation in the arts’.8 This was also the period in which artists were coming together to discuss the formation of the A.I.R. gallery and feminist activism was felt to be taking effect. An identity as a woman artist was becoming legitimate; not a discreditable subcategory, instead it started to be a means of identifying with others, forging solidarity between peers. Spero’s correspondence and writings from this period evidence a moment of both excitement and anger, in which she discovered a supportive community which she felt she belonged to along with a growing disgust triggered by her evolving sense of the causes of her previous exclusion.9 In her practice, however, the elongated scroll form showed none of the rhetorical bombast of her texts and manifestos. Instead, Spero brought suffering to the fore, working against explicit meaning and evoking in the fragments of text and the disjointed images a sense of deep alienation and anguish. Framing the thirty-seven panels of the series in 1989 as ‘acts of revolt’, the Codex’s reliance on Artaud was described by the artist as being motivated by a shared ‘sense of victimage’, using ‘his anger, his defiance [and] his text to exemplify my lack of voice’.10 Exploring her pain through his anguish, Spero continued to ‘forc[e] a “collaboration” ’ with Artaud.11 Considering voicelessness as key to their shared alienation, in the Codex Spero set about picturing this experience.

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Having examined signs and their expression of a structure that is at odds in the previous chapter, in this chapter I am going to consider how the artist represents silence and how this in turn communicates pain, using this as a basis for an interrogation of the political implications of this mode. Approaching this from a number of positions, including the relationship of silence to pain, the way in which silence manifests in the work, feminist claims for hysteria and the context of activism, this chapter will interrogate the dynamic of silence versus speech. Turning to the discussion between Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément regarding the value of Freud’s famous hysteric Dora as a feminist exemplar, I will consider how the Codex is inflected by this contemporaneous debate surrounding hysterical silence. Furthermore, I will think about the implications that silence has in the context of protest, considering the Codex alongside Spero’s involvement in the American Woman Artist Show in Hamburg in 1972, and examining this as a case study of refusal. Throughout, I want to bring into contrast Spero’s anguished silent spaces with her increasingly vociferous activism, comparing her writings and actions of this period at the start of the 1970s as a counterpoint to her aesthetic strategy. First, I will outline the connection between silence and pain in order to consider this dynamic of silencing and censorship versus vociferous dissent.

Picturing silence Spero’s decision to create elongated works marked a move away from her earlier adoption of paper as a medium. Originally, Spero had started using it as part of a wish to create works quickly, a response to the self-importance of materials that oil on canvas implied.12 However, with the decision to create scrolls, there was a shift in emphasis. Gluing together sheets of thick Japanese handmade paper with Higgins’ Vegetable Glue to create elongated panels on which she attached her collaged images and typewritten transcriptions of Artaud’s texts, the effect was of bursts of signification onto an extensive white support. Rather than the ‘broadsheets’ of the earlier paper works, the Codex was a sustained and coherent proposition, a multi-panel work instead of a series.13 Spero sought to create something that interrogated her own position, evoking with it the language of ancient cultures and myth that so many scholars point to.14 With the extended panels came an important development of her aesthetic strategy, a deliberate move away from an emphasis on the elements drawn and collaged onto the page towards this turbulent, meaningful silence. The signifying elements act in tension

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with the silent space of the scroll; blank paper creates meaning in the Codex, articulating a mute, but anguishing silence. Paper in the Codex is a tactile material presence. Although interested in the ephemerality and impermanence of paper, Spero chose to work with highquality specialist Sekishu-brand sheets that were not as friable as cheap acidic wood-pulp paper and were significantly more resistant to ageing. This type of paper is thick, soft and flexible; elements that are attached to its surface buckle and crease it gently, allowing ridges and dips to emerge that do not damage the integrity of the sheet but instead extend through the paper, changing its surfaces. Insistently material, the feathery layers of fibres from which it is made are visible at its rough edges. The artist was interested in combining textures throughout, creating a visually rich basis for her images and texts. An example can be seen on Codex Artaud I: there is a triangle of tracing paper attached to the thicker Sekishu panels, which draws the eye to examine the differences between the two, foregrounding the fragility of the material [Figure 3.1]. That these are such extended panels, often only sparsely interrupted with signifying elements, is also important to the ways in which they contribute to the visual language of the work. The intricacy of the detail invites the viewer to move in nearer to the support.15 Up close, the paper fills the field of vision; the world that is being pictured punctuated with signifying bursts extends into the peripheries of sight in the horizontal panels, and looms over the viewer in the vertical ones. Because these elements are for the most part small, often on first impression in the gallery the paper overwhelms the signification, larger elements and the disruptions to the white spaces caused by the smaller ones register, but it is against the extensive space of the support. Hung at eye level, we are invited to scrutinize the empty paper panels as much as we are the collaged figures and typewritten texts. For the most part the paper is not directly painted or drawn on; because it is not covered over to create an illusionistic ground for representation, as it would if it were, for example, washed in colour, it does not recede to become background. Furthermore because the paper is not the ubiquitous kind that people would encounter daily, it does not suggest the aesthetics of administration in Benjamin Buchloh’s terms.16 Rather it invokes something that is materially precious, referring to ancient scrolls in its composition, asking us to think about the paper itself as both resonant and meaningful, and delicate and fragile. The relationship of the paper panels to the imagery used is also important to thinking about how the support can picture the failure of articulation. The signs in the Codex are obscure and concentrated – broken and fragmented bodies, animalistic and insectile figures, and screaming, Egyptian-esque heads – these

114 Figure 3.1 Nancy Spero, Codex Artaud I (detail), 1971. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

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images combine with texts, pictures of silencing that infuses the paper around them with the implications of the terse words and fragmented figures. With its deliberate focus on representing alienation and suffering, this practice, that imagines silences interspersed with bursts of signification and discomfiting signs, mirrors the experience of pain as something that erodes language.17 The Codex focuses on the body, with distorted figures pictured throughout. This concentration evokes the nature of pain as something that is both of, and alien to, the body: as Bourke describes it, it is something that ‘alienates sufferers from themselves’.18 In a visual language that, similar to that of the Artaud Paintings, uses strange and contorted versions of recognizable signs, the introduction of white space acts to absorb the affect of symbols. Infusing the paper support with the incoherent symbolic discussed in the previous chapter, the torment of broken, screaming bodies and Artaud’s fragmented and violent texts, the ground resonates with feeling, creating a world of subsumed agony in which the characters reside. With its largely blank support, Codex Artaud XXX offers an example [Figure 3.2]. Standing as an illustration of the way in which the scrolls of the Codex signify, its small section of imaging, which consists of copulating figures above an extract of text, is dwarfed by its extensive white support. Above this section, which is about a centimetre from the bottom of the panel, there is a vast expanse of paper containing no collaged elements. At 127cm in height, the picture plane’s three sheets of paper pasted one on top of the other are mostly unmarked by the artist’s hand. Given the work’s dimensions and orientation, the signifying elements sit below the gaze of the viewer, and instead at eye level is the creased and dented paper. Calling our focus not to the signifying elements of the work – a monstrous wolf-like creature and a fornicating couple with a text that bemoans the celebration of dead poets who would have received no kindness in life – Spero de-emphasizes this vignette, asking the viewer instead to confront the paper itself at first glance. The collaged fragments are stuck low on the picture plane, nearly skimming the bottom of the support; it is the paper and its void that dominates. The white spaces of Codex Artaud XXX can be illuminated by a comparison to a practice that also presents white works of similar shape and dimensions: Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings from 1951 [Figure 3.3]. First shown at the Stable Gallery in New York in 1953, Rauschenberg’s white canvases were described by the artist as representing ‘the plastic fullness of nothing, the point a circle begins and ends’.19 His assertion that ‘TODAY is their creater [sic]’20 is echoed by John Cage’s critical response to them as ‘airports for lights, shadows and particles’.21 Seeing these blank canvases as a way to let the world in, Rauschenberg referred to the paintings as ‘dealing with the suspense,

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Figure 3.2 Nancy Spero, Codex Artaud XXX, 1972. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

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Figure 3.3 Robert Rauschenberg, White Painting [seven panel], 1951. Oil on canvas. 72 × 125 × 1 1/2 inches; overall (182.9 × 317.5 × 3.8 cm). Robert Rauschenberg Foundation © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/DACS, London.

excitement and body of an organic silence, the restriction and freedom of absence’.22 By contrast, Spero’s whiteness is one that repels outside reference. No shadow falling on this work can change its meaning. That said, although the paper panels themselves create meaning, it is the interaction between elements that allows the support of Codex Artaud XXX to resound with tortured affect. The crumples and fault lines of their construction echo the angst of the iconography; the message of the texts seeps into the paper support, the puckered edges of the affixed sections reading like channels through which their meaning runs into the paper. In Codex Artaud XXX , the extract of text is surrounded by creases that extend into the paper panel behind it like veins. The buckled material is infiltrated in all directions. The tactility of Spero’s choice of paper – described by the artist as thick ‘art paper’– means that it maintains its status as an object in itself.23 Her use of Higgins’ Vegetable Glue was designed so as to create ‘a puckered look’.24 The weight of the paper hanging from its push-pinned mount made it buckle slightly against the wall. Rather than a still silence, then, this is one resonant with meaning, the slightest instance of signification infusing the totality of the scroll with its dark and brutal message. The strange temporality of the scrolls creates a stillness that intensifies this sense of a world at odds. Codex Artaud VII [Figure 3.4] provides a good example. To the left of the panel there is a faint line drawing that resembles an eye inscribed

118 Figure 3.4 Nancy Spero, Codex Artaud VII , 1971. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

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into a large piece of silver and gold paper attached to the support. The details that are added to the fragment appear to be lightly traced figures. The paper is similar to that which Spero’s figures are constructed out of: it is marked with smudges of green paint and is curved on the left-hand side but straight on the right. The impression is of an abstracted, iconic head in profile. Crouching to the right, overlapping it, and composed of similar colours is an androgynous figure that points a gun across the picture plane to the right. Although the figure seems to be taking aim with its weapon, targeting something distinct, nothing lies directly in the line of fire. The next cluster of images is topped by a series of heads, insect-like creatures, contorted bodies and figures constructed solely of arms and legs that sit stacked on top of the vignette. It looks almost as though the armed figure is taking potshots at this grouping, but aimlessly and across an abyss. The sense of separation between sections is palpable. Despite the similarly hieroglyphic figure that sits across the void and sticks its tongue out at the figure with the gun, it seems impossible that they would make contact. The space between them, not exactly empty given the crumples and dents that mark the paper support, still reads as vacant and expansive. In an imagery that implies some future narrative – the sniper firing and either hitting or missing one of the figures that sit apart from it – the composition feels entirely fixed. There is no sense of a future here. Everything is solid and immovable; this present is all there is. The text that is appended to the cluster of insect-figures reinforces the sense of stillness. Although heavily manipulated through the interjection of punctuation marks made symbolic by overtyping, the texts suggest a silence, a void. One reads : ‘Un magnifique absolu. Artaud’ [‘A magnificent absolute. Artaud’]; another: ‘J’ai une imagination stupéfiée’ [‘I have a stunned imagination’]. The references to the absolute and to a state of being stunned or dazed suggest not just a void, but a space in which the mind isovercome. A language shattered by pain is literally represented. Affixed to the picture plane are splintered texts, written in French and manipulated so as to erode their legibility. These interferences with another’s (and an Other’s) words picture language nearly destroyed by the experience of suffering; unable to describe or explain the circumstances of its making, instead communication’s breakdown speaks. This is emphasized by Spero’s manipulations of the last quotation: starting as repeated lines typed underneath one another, they become condensed and overlapped, creating one solid block of typing that curves to the left, eventually making a sharp diagonal out of Artaud’s name. There is a sense of blurred boundaries to the typed textual fragments. Despite being separate pieces, because they are constructed of the same material as the scroll they meld into the background,

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both distinct and indistinct; they could have been cut and repasted from other parts. Not foreign elements, instead they are moments of silence that have been penetrated by language. In this way, Spero works towards creating meaning against denotation. Rejecting the ordered systems of language, she confronts the viewer with something that exists on the edge of meaning, using language’s structure in a way that refuses significance. Even in spite of the volume of text, its heavy black print and its significant presence, the text is made meaningless. Rather than an absence of voice, this section pictures too much noise; voicelessness is created through an excess of speech, silence is made through an erasure of sense. Codex Artaud XXVII [Figure 3.5] provides the best example of this, being purely constructed of text collaged onto the support. The rips and fractures, stains and marks on the paper take on a violent tone. The material form of this layered and glued paper creates a sense of a world that is collapsing in on itself under the weight of its own meaning. The sheer volume of fragments stuck onto the support of Codex Artaud XXVII disturbs the coherence and, by extension, stillness of the paper. Spero overlays fragment on fragment. A short extract from Artaud’s 1945 letter to Henri Parsot which lists his five imagined daughters, many of whom were women he knew, overlaps an extract from his 1925 collection The Umbilicus of Limbo. The name of ‘Annie Besnard’, his friend and correspondent, cuts into the text below, concealing the elements that it overlaps. The paper that the fragment is constructed of nearly dissolves in its delicacy, obscuring rather than erasing that which lies below. Sections of the extracts have been cut into, leaving circular scars. The effect is of something just out of place, jolted and disjointed, a world deeply disturbed by its contents. Furthermore, the way in which the paper defines space contributes to the sense that Spero has created a world that is familiar in form but unsettled. Reading as a description of a non-space, a void, a vacuum in which bursts of articulation manifest themselves, the overwhelming impression of the scrolls is of a work that exceeds its own borders. In their original mode of display, mounted with pins, the distance between the support and the wall to which it was attached would have been minimal. Indeed, in a number of the panels the paper is so thin that it is almost transparent. Codex Artaud I, for example, contains a triangular section that looks like it is constructed from tracing paper. Looking at Codex Artaud V [Figure 3.6] is reminiscent of looking at Spero’s later murals which printed elements directly onto the walls of galleries. It is as though the support bleeds into the wall behind it. Not exactly borderless, instead the boundaries of the works are insecure. There is also a sense that the scrolls could extend

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Figure 3.5 Nancy Spero, Codex Artaud XXVII , 1972. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

exponentially in that they are constructed of pieces of paper pasted end on end. There is nothing concrete about the borders of these panels; instead they seem to delineate a sort of non-place that is atemporal and depthless. In this, Spero creates a silence that is reminiscent of the silence of a dream-space – something Sheldon Annis in his study on museums describes as ‘a field of subrational image formation’.25 In this context, space demarcates an environment in which elements can appear in bursts of signification. Seeming unanchored, they float on the support; bodyless heads, amputated arms and fractured texts materialize without context or explanation. The scrolls’ silence, fragmented by intense vignettes that

122 Figure 3.6 Nancy Spero, Codex Artaud V, 1971. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

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signify obliquely, is resonant and meaningful. Although not didactic, they communicate the affect of suffering, picturing a failed attempt to translate pain into images and words. Spero’s scrolls and their silent spaces contrast directly to the texts that Spero produced at the time when the Codex was being made. Throughout her career, Spero wrote statements and conducted interviews about her work. These ranged from practical accounts of plans for future projects to more abstract statements about the art world and her relationship to it. At the time when the Codex was being made, Spero composed a number of manifestos. These angry, declarative statements focused on the nature of women artists’ experience, arguing violently against the bourgeois order that was seen by Spero as inherently tied to patriarchy. The written manifestos are characterized by a passionate sense of purpose coupled with a derisive wit aimed furiously at what Spero perceived as the exclusive and self-serving institutional art world. Far from the fractured and silenced world imaged in her scrolls, the texts that she produced put forth coherent arguments, composed in the tone of the artist’s angry voice. Attention to these texts can act as a counterpoint to the silence that was so important to Spero’s representational strategy, contextualizing it and providing evidence of the artist’s understanding of and ambitions for feminism at this time. Although writing manifestos is by no means unique among activist artists, Spero’s dedication to this political form of writing demonstrates a deliberate and considered programme that underpinned her fraught pictorial world.26 An example is her text dated November 1970 which was written just before the transition from the Artaud Paintings to the Codex. In this, Spero programmatically accounted for what she saw as an essential correlation between general social inequality and the bias of the art world. She states: In a bourgeois world, sex differences and roles are accentuated possessively. Our society is changing rapidly, but is still insistent on maintaining the old controls, an inflexible nostalgia to the past. Art in our epoch is not in an extreme or revolutionary state, but reflects the acquisitiveness of the consumer-oriented bourgeoisie. The art market is kept desirable and chic since in the bourgeois world everything is viewed as property – art, women, etc. Viewed as property, the aggressive male ego seeks satisfaction by control over objects: woman is an object, art is an object.27

In this piece of deductive reasoning, Spero suggested that patriarchy feminizes the art object and objectifies the female. Pulling them together, woman and art object are positioned in the same subjugated space. This is created not only by

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patriarchy, but also by an outdated capitalism. Spero focused on the ‘bourgeois world’, asserting that it was maintained by ‘an inflexible nostalgia to the past’ that kept art and women commodified: ‘everything is viewed as property – art, women, etc.’ The connection between woman and art object is important when considering her visual works for two reasons. First, it shows that Spero’s formal methods – of fragmentation, making extended works, and the use of nonvaluable materials such as paper and gouache – were deliberate political acts designed to refuse commodification and subjugation of the artwork in bourgeois culture. Secondly, because woman and artwork occupy the same symbolic space of objectification and commodification in bourgeois patriarchy, these formal operations extended to become actions of a similar refusal for women. In this way, by her own logic, Spero’s scrolls are in themselves acts of resistance, creating a type of practice that cannot be subsumed by masculinist culture and defining a symbolic space that pictures both defiance and utopian freedom. Furthermore, Spero’s manifesto, written c. 1970–1, demonstrates the rhetorical frankness of her writing, issuing a series of condemnations and demands to her unspecified audience. First, she states: ‘The woman artist demands an autonomy equal to man’s. Women artists must rebel against male caste and economic control . . . Women artists are increasingly angry and militant.’28 This was followed by a cascade of denunciation that marks the conclusion of the statement: Women artists today condemn male dominance in a bourgeois society. We condemn male suprematist elitism. Women artists demand the immediate break-up of the repressive, sexist male ego domination of museums, galleries, etc. We demand that equality of movement and opportunity taken for granted by men. We demand a new kind of space, a space free from repression to develop new roles of freedom.29

The demands that she issues underline the connections between artistic and social freedom. What she describes as the locations of dominance – the ‘museums, galleries, etc.’ – do not declare themselves as political places. However, for Spero as for so many of her activist peers, they were the major site for resistance, a space in which, when released from ‘male ego domination’, women and men could create their ‘space free from repression to develop new roles of freedom’. The pursuit of condemnation and demand, the aggressive and accusatory tone, and the cogent, though unevidenced, arguments mounted against patriarchy show the alternative to the silenced anguish of the pictorial world that Spero constructed. Demanding an end to the violent experience of patriarchy, her activist voice diverged from her artistic one, although both looked to the same

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experience as their basis. Given this vociferous activist practice, it is perhaps unsurprising that to Spero the Codex was not seen as a feminist work but instead as ‘prefeminist’.30 Although disputed by critics, the distinction is notable for thinking about the nature of silence in Spero’s practice.31 In the Codex, the focus on pain was not about feminist argument but feminist suffering – her injured sense of alienation motivating her silenced and anguished pictorial world. In this way, the Codex related to a personal investigation of pain, one that can be inflected by turning to an examination of contemporaneous debates on hysteria.

Hysteria and the politics of pain Considering silence as an aesthetic form for feminism, and the political implications of the silence and speech pictured in the Codex, invites an investigation of hysteria, understood at this moment as a protest in which the voice was withheld, replaced by an active and bodily manifestation of dissent. Feminist theorists writing in the 1970s and 80s such as Hélène Cixous, Elaine Showalter, Luce Irigaray and Toril Moi sought to examine the condition, reframing it as a symptom of patriarchy, an effect of the oppression women suffered rather than a physical or psychological illness.32 In this view, the verbal silence of hysteria allowed the body to speak, articulating through symptoms a deep disaffection with the subject’s subordinated position. For readings of Spero’s work, hysteria has been an important critical coordinate. Mignon Nixon, for example, suggests that it ‘was the pivotal dynamic of Spero’s work for over a decade’, describing the Codex Artaud as ‘an extended reflection on hysterical subjectivity’.33 Constructing a convincing case for the hysterical threads of Spero’s work, thinking about its implications for war, gender and censorship, Nixon argues that the artist assumed the role of the ‘silenced subject that yet speaks’.34 Nixon is not the only critic to see hysteria as relevant; it has been invoked widely and varyingly in the scholarship on Spero. Using the condition – which encompasses a remarkably wide-ranging set of symptoms – as a means to describe laughter, mimicry and overt passivity, critics have drawn on secondwave feminist claims about the condition as proto-feminist protest in order to assert the political potency of Spero’s practice.35 The metaphor is a good one. Nixon’s extended consideration aptly demonstrates hysteria’s value for a critical exploration of Spero’s themes, as it elaborates on those aspects of the practice

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that are more generally celebrated: psychic turbulence; an allusion to the body; mocking, derisive laughter; a resistance that exists on the borders of communication.36 Taking this as a starting point, and historicizing the condition, I am going to examine its role in the debates of the 1970s that inflected the received understanding of hysteria as part of the wider search to establish feminist forebears.37 Without this history being elaborated, the significance of the tension between silencing and speaking is obscured. The hysterical metaphor points to wider debates about the ways in which feminist protest should manifest, particularly by those interested in including the body as part of feminist discourse.38 Whether to represent the anguish of patriarchy by showing a subsumed bodily rage or by mounting a vocal and coherent protest, then, was a significant question for the women’s movement generally, and feminist art specifically, in the 1970s. Thinking of hysteria-as-protest at this time was part of a debate which looked to the ways in which women should represent themselves: asking whether it was more effective to interject in the realm of male political and philosophical discourse or if feminist writers and artists should seek out an alternative, authentically female, language instead.39 Writers such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and Phyllis Chesler first invoked hysteria as part of this examination in the 1970s, considering the nature of the malady and proposing it as an early incarnation of feminist dissent.40 Exemplifying the debate was the published conversation between French critics Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément included in their 1975 book La Jeune Née (translated into English in 1986 as The Newly Born Woman). The text, ‘The Untenable’, discussed Freud’s 1905 account ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’, in which he outlined his analysis of the patient he monikered ‘Dora’.41 Dora’s story was a complicated account of a fraught network of relationships that centred on her father’s affair with a family friend, Frau K. Freud recounts how Dora was close to both Frau and Herr K, feeling like she was one of the family, until Herr K attempted to seduce Dora.42 Disgusted, Dora interpreted this as being the result of a tacit agreement between her father and her seducer, concluding that she was being offered up to Herr K as a consolation in return for his tolerance of their adulterous relationship. Furious at her treatment, Dora railed against the trio, who denied the story; her hysterical symptoms worsened until she was brought to Freud in order that he ‘try and bring her to reason’.43 The Dora story provides a model of a daughter who would not play the part assigned to her by the patriarchal structures that dominated her experience. Dora’s involvement in, and later outrage at, the sexual dramas of her immediate

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circle made her an attractive character for feminist revision. Her unwillingness to cooperate and her determination to exact revenge on those people who betrayed her laid the groundwork for her installation as a model for feminist protester avant la lettre. However, as the unwilling daughter, the model of protest she offered was not one that straightforwardly rejected the demands made on her. Instead, her resistance was of an (appropriately) adolescent kind: throwing tantrums, demanding that her father chose her over Frau K, inhabiting sickness and seeking attention. The discussion between Cixous and Clément that formed the basis of ‘The Untenable’ hinges on the question of whether Dora should be seen as a feminist hero or a flawed victim. These contemporaneous debates are informative for thinking about the implications of Spero’s silenced pictorial worlds and her vociferous statements. For Cixous, Dora was a feminist hero; she effusively declares: ‘What woman is not Dora?’44 In her text, Cixous argues that Dora’s behaviour disrupted the silence that allowed the adulterous hypocrisy of supposedly moral adults to continue, claiming that ‘Dora broke something’: exposing the lie by which her family was living.45 In breaking her silent complicity, she argues that Dora stands as the model of the hysteric who exposed hidden injustices, and that in having spoken out, Dora’s behaviour had wider implications for feminist activism. This is an understanding in which hysteria has the potential to ‘put disturbing images back into circulation’,46 to force people to confront the realities of a system that is ‘based on blindness, on denial’.47 Claiming that the revolutionary potential for hysteria lies in its ability to say what has been silenced, Cixous states: ‘Hysteria is necessarily an element that disturbs arrangements . . . It is very difficult to block out this type of person who doesn’t leave you in peace, who wages permanent war against you.’48 Privileging Freud’s accounts of Dora’s lesbianism and repressed sexuality, hysteria here is interpreted as an embodied form of protest in which ‘the body speaks’.49 In Cixous’s descriptions, hysteria is dominated by speaking out, by women’s attraction to women and by a connection to the body. In Cixous’s feminist revision, symptoms act as a metaphor for oppression. Hysteria is transformed into ‘carnal, passionate body-words . . . inaudible thundering denunciations’.50 Published in the same year as her manifesto ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, which argued for an ecriture féminine, a type of writing that rejects the masculine in language and instead attempts to write the female through a connection to the body and to jouissance, sexual and bodily freedom, Cixous’s essay in La Jeune Née argues that Dora is a precursor to this practice. She writes:

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It is you, Dora, you, who cannot be tamed, the poetic body, the true ‘mistress’ of the Signifier. Before tomorrow your effectiveness will be seen to work – when your words will no longer be retracted pointed against your own breast, but will write themselves against the other and against men’s grammar.51

This rhymes with critical claims for the Codex’s feminist efficacy: Spero’s pained fury is the mode so powerful that, like her fragments that shatter the silence of her scrolls, it breaks through the patriarchal mirage of a system contented.52 Like Cixous, Spero, too, is attracted to the language of the body and the potential for an anti-symbolic, feminine form of image-making. Her later adoption of peinture féminine was directly inspired by Cixous’s theoretical appeal to women to ‘write through their bodies’.53 However, although the Codex is infused with a corporeal language, it is one that is alienated and distraught. Spero cuts and dismembers, bodies are fractured and fragmentary. In Codex Artaud XXII [Figure 3.7], a head is quartered, and is attached to the support as a fragmented whole. The text ‘Je ne demande plus qu’à sentir mon cerveau. Artaud’ [‘I ask nothing more than to feel my brain. Artaud’], which interjects into the space created between quarters, simultaneously appeals for the head’s reattachment and prevents it from happening.54 To the right of the picture plane are two disembodied heads, stacked one on top of the other. The highest is cut in half and, without eyes or a scalp, is just a nose and mouth with extended tongue, the tip of which licks an extract of text. The lower head is complete and also has its tongue sticking out. However, this tongue is tied into the figure of a red swastika. The text ‘Le feu de langues. Le feu tisses en toursades de langues. Artaud’ [‘The fire of tongues, fire twisted into braids of tongues. Artaud’] emphasizes the sense that in the Codex, bodies are not the positive force that Cixous posits, but instead are threatening and violated. Codex Artaud XXIII [Figure 3.8] provides another example of this. As against Cixous’s claims for the potential of female desire, in the Codex sexuality is treated in deeply fraught iconographic terms. A collaged female figure, constructed of paper mottled with grey paint and almost featureless, is attacked by disembodied heads with protruding tongues. These sharp tongues suggest sex by crossing over her genitalia, but not a sexuality of desire; instead it is an aggressive and alienated interaction. In their placement they look almost parasitic, humanoid creatures feeding from a dehumanized body. Throughout the series there are pictures of copulating couples, but again, far from pleasure, they are made

Figure 3.7 Nancy Spero, Codex Artaud XXII , 1972. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

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analogous to serpents and monsters. In Codex Artaud XXX are two images of sexual acts. As small elements on a large sheet of paper, the shapes mirror one another, the elongated bodies, the extended tongues, the pointed limbs. One copulating couple almost resembles a swastika. This is the polar opposite of jouissance. Despite Cixous’s version of hysteria positing a more positive vision than Spero’s, her conception that a hysteric is someone whose body speaks of the suffering they cannot articulate does resonate.55 Nuancing the description of the ‘silenced subject who yet speaks’, then, in this reading the hysteric is the subject who speaks in spite of herself.56 It is in this way that the concept of speaking as a measure of resistance can be based on the physical manifestation of psychical symptoms. In order to find a means of speaking out, feminists sought a language that was not controlled by the paternal symbolic and instead looked to this physical language that was symptomatic of a profound resistance to the expectations and structures imposed on the subject by the system that the victim suffers from. If Spero is imaging women’s pain, it is through this bodily and fragmented iconography. In the feminist imagining of hysteria, the condition represents a protest that cannot be resisted, one that the psyche unleashes through the body, causing the sufferer to manifest her unhappiness whether she likes it or not. Although Spero’s approach draws more on Cixous as her practice progresses, it seems that in 1972 at the end of her engagement with Artaud, her position aligns more closely with Clément’s. For Clément, Dora is a victim. Unable to control her own circumstances, she rages against those around her, but ineffectually: ‘Raising hell, throwing fits, disturbing family relations.’57 To Clément, this is futile in that it ‘can be shut back up’; the only effective means of protest is one that ‘will arrive at symbolic inscription’, behaviour that acts on the world like that of Anna O, whose case study is included in Studies on Hysteria.58 Anna O – who was in reality Bertha Pappenheim, an activist working at the beginning of the twentieth century – resolved her hysteria to become a forthright social campaigner. Clément identifies hysteria as inextricably tied to language, claiming that hysterics ‘are part of one of the deepest reenforcements [sic] of the superstructures, of the Symbolic. It keeps the net of the Imaginary in a tight grip, and the hysterics are inside it.’59 Far from dismissing the hysteric’s protest, Clément understands hysteria as a reaction to the untenable position of being a woman excluded and denigrated by patriarchy. However, she contends that a hysterical position is at once antiestablishment and conservative. She explains that it is

Figure 3.8 Nancy Spero, Codex Artaud XXIII , 1972. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

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antiestablishment because the symptoms – the attacks – revolt and shake up the public, the group, the men, the others to whom they are exhibited . . . the hysteric unties familiar bonds, introduces disorder into the well-regulated unfolding of everyday life, gives rise to magic in ostensible reason.60

However, in spite of this, the hysteric also inhabits a conservative role in that ‘every hysteric ends up inuring others to her symptoms, and the family closes around her again, whether she is curable or incurable’.61 Although it is a position of protest, because it is so bound to personal suffering and describable as illness, it is easily subsumed into a wider patriarchal system. The problem, as Clément sees it, is that it is ‘an attack of spectacle, a crisis of suffering’, one that is trapped in the Imaginary and therefore fails to break through into the symbolic and inscribe resistance.62 As she says, ‘[T]he hysteric does not write, does not produce, does nothing – nothing other than make things circulate without inscribing them.’63 Because of this failure, the system remains unaffected: ‘[T]he deceitful and triumphant hysteric disappeared. But the master is there. He is the one who stays on permanently. He publishes writings.’64 Of course, Spero does inscribe in the Codex; her depictions of an abstract suffering ‘passes into another register’, recording her protest in a way that is permanent and within an artistic framework that is critical and reflective.65 However, her sense that it is necessary to be more explicit about the nature of suffering and by extension the nature of patriarchy is made clear in her writings. In a 1986 interview with Barbara Flynn, Spero described Artaud as ‘a brilliant artist, but a victim running in circles’.66 In this exchange, a similar concern with the dialectic explored in Clément’s writings on hysteria is articulated. Flynn suggests a continuity between the Artaud works and the later Torture series. She states: It comes as an incredible shock to realize [in the Torture works] that what you are reading is not a narrative or a fiction, but rather a report of violences so hideous as to be viscerally painful to read . . . my feeling is the work went into this realm of super-reality not much after those other works on Artaud. Extremely different really.67

Spero’s response is instructive. She states: ‘Yes. They’re both reports. The Artaud writings are mediated by art, a stressed response to his real sufferings, whereas the case histories of tortured women political prisoners are reports on actual physical and mental abuse.’68 In articulating the importance of the ‘actual’, we can determine the nature of the change in her practice and the reasons for her move away from Artaud. What Spero sought was a shift from subjective accounts of pain to objective ones; from a sense of injustice to evidence of it.

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It seems that, similarly to Clément, Spero saw the subjective, individual revolt of the hysterical mode as too restrictive, seeking instead ‘an art that depersonalizes the subjective portrayal of the individual’.69 Framing her shift from Artaud as towards ‘real events, to real victims in real prisons, tortured for political reasons’, we can hear an echo of Clément’s criticism of the hysterical mode. She states: ‘There is imagination, desire, creation, production of writing . . . and then somewhere else, on another level of reality, there is class struggle, and within it, women’s struggle.’70 Clément compares the destructive force of the hysteric to the game of taquin wherein players move pieces around a set of fixed ‘taquins’ in the centre. The result is that ‘one shifts an element within a perfectly rigid structure, which is all the better for it’.71 Only working through language, Clément suggests, is a similar exercise: some positive action is required in order to effect ‘the real distribution of elements’.72 In Spero’s vision, this means representing what she sees as real experience, confronting the lived realities of patriarchy through accounting for women’s lives. She states: In dealing with these extreme and actual situations I further began to explore other aspects of women’s experience, not only torture, but war and rape, birth, aging, work, dance, and women from many cultures and time periods even going so far as to envision the utopian possibilities of women taking charge of their own bodies, challenging the prevailing standard of the male ‘gaze’, the way in which women are coerced culturally and physically.73

In the dynamic between the silent spaces of the Codex and the demands and condemnations of her statements, it is the rhetorical mode that starts to dominate. Leaving behind hysteria as tactic, Spero moved towards direct articulation, argument and inscription. Shifting the focus from personal suffering onto social violence, Spero made the attempt to broaden her terms, searching out the tangible effects of patriarchy in the ‘actual’ world.

The American Woman Artist Show, GEDOK and the Amerika Haus The move away from a focus on subjective experience is clearly a wider concern for the feminist art world, the influence of Carol Hanisch’s slogan ‘The Personal is Political’ being felt. Explorations of individual experiences of patriarchy and its influence on women’s lives led to a number of works that used a politically inflected autobiography to reflect on the realities of female subjecthood. Artists

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like Carolee Schneemann, Eleanor Antin and Judy Chicago used their own bodies, relationships and experiences as conceptual starting points for their work, putting them in the broader context of how women’s private lives are restricted and directed under patriarchy. In these examinations, hidden female experience was brought into the discourse of culture. Feminist art was shaped by such considerations of the personal, with political statements made through careful examinations of lived experience. However, as feminist art developed, questions arose regarding the political efficacy of such practices. In her 1980 statement ‘Well, is the Personal Political?’, delivered to the conference ‘Questions on Women’s Art’ at the ICA, London, Martha Rosler articulated the problematic nature of practices based on autobiographical and individualistic self-analysis. Arguing that artists must understand their position within a wider structure in order to be able to make a claim to political practice, she was dismissive of those artists whose ‘attention is narrowed down to the privatized tinkering with one’s solely private life, divorced from any collective effort or public act, and simply goes on to name this personal concentration as political’.74 Much of her ire is focused on the artist who ‘simply insists on protecting one’s right to autonomy and regards the triumph of personal politics as a publicly emancipatory act’.75 Highlighting the stakes of being actively political and the perceived failings of speaking from a subjective perspective, Rosler pointed to the ways in which this tactic could be conflicted and at times politically suspect. Although it is clear that Rosler’s condemnation does not apply to Spero after her contact with feminism, the focus on the need to ‘act’, ‘challeng[e]’ and ‘expose’ are sentiments that Spero was deeply concerned with at the moment of her turn away from Artaud.76 In her statement ‘What is Feminist Art?’ from c. 1973, she declared: ‘[F]eminist art is art made by women artists with the intention of having feminist political, social or biological content, messages to the viewer proclaiming the gender of the artist.’77 She was also dismissive of those who claim ‘feminist rhetoric, an interpretation accompanying the work to mold it into a feminist ideology’, and instead appealed to feminist artists ‘to build and maintain alternate, separatist structures, to continue working politically for women artists within, breaking thru the highly structured art world as it now stands’.78 Her attention firmly planted on the collective struggle of women and women artists, the self-regard of the Artaud works no longer seemed tenable. Having experimented with anguished silence, Spero sought a way of working that spoke more directly. Given her involvement with feminist activism at this moment, Spero’s changing response to representing the pain of patriarchy in terms of silenced anguish demonstrates the evolving understanding of the value

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of being explicit about the nature of suffering at this moment. Considered in the context of a women’s movement that was increasingly determined to force recognition of cultural misogyny onto wider society, the tension between personal politics and unambiguous action had reverberations throughout feminism. This debate about the value of speaking either through written statement, through artwork, or refusing to engage entirely was brought into focus in the dispute that surrounded The American Woman Artist Show in 1972. Organized by Sybille Niester and Lil Picard for the German GEDOK organization, a group, founded in 1928, dedicated to the promotion of women in the arts, the exhibition was meant to showcase women’s art made in the USA to the German public.79 Although a seemingly uncontroversial proposition, with the plan to tour the work to the Amerika Haus in Berlin, the priorities of feminism came into conflict with anti-war politics. Leading to a terse exchange between a number of the artists involved, including Faith Ringgold and Spero, the competing political implications of speaking and silence were actively and aggressively contested. The exhibition was based on a quest for greater visibility for women artists. In 1972, Niester was the president of GEDOK and, working with Picard, organized an extensive collection of the work of American women artists to be shown in the Hamburg Kunsthaus. Considering the visibility of women’s work vital to pursuing equality in the arts, Niester and Picard selected forty-six artists to be represented as part of the show.80 The artists were at different stages in their careers, some American-born, some immigrants working in New York; among the most prominent were Lynda Benglis, Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois. The works had no dominant style, nor ideological drive, ranging from colourful abstraction to naturalistic painting, figuration, sculpture and performance. Although some works were explicitly feminist – Jackie Ferrara’s Square Ball (1971) with its flaccid phallic shape constructed of oakum, rope and cord – and others were politically driven, particularly against the Vietnam War – for example, May Stevens’s Big Daddy Draped (1971) which pictures her quintessential patriarch Big Daddy draped in the American Flag, a bulldog perched on his knee – the exhibition was a showcase of a range of styles and methods. Despite the visible concern for women’s issues across the work, this was not an outspoken feminist statement; instead, it was a survey of the productions of women artists in New York at the time, regardless of politics.81 The American Woman Artist Show opened successfully in April 1972 and received some press from German and American reporters with reviews in Der Spiegel,82 and a slot on a radio show entitled ‘Listen Ladies’, which claimed:

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‘Hamburg residents are showing great interest in the event. They consider it a first step in the women’s lib movement in the international art field, and therefore of historical significance.’83 The feminist aim of raising visibility for women artists was brought into the spotlight. However, when a tour of the show was proposed in which it would move from Hamburg to Berlin, before going to Munich to coincide with the Olympic Games that were to be held there that year, the ‘ideal’ aims of the exhibition were usurped by the politics of display. The tour, which was not the original plan for the exhibition, was suggested in a letter dated January 1972 from Niester to the participants and proposed the Amerika Haus as the Berlin and Munich venues.84 These were cultural centres that had been set up by the US government after World War II under the remit of the United States Information Agency.85 Although officially steering away from propaganda, the mission of the United States Information Agency was to cast American culture and government in a positive light abroad.86 It was because of this association with cultural diplomacy that the tour ran into trouble. In May 1972, there was an escalation in the Vietnam War. Operation Linebacker, ordered by Richard Nixon, was the first bombing campaign on North Vietnam after Lyndon Johnson had halted aerial attacks in 1968. For a number of the women artists involved in the show the increased violence in Vietnam meant that exhibiting in the Amerika Haus became problematic. It came at a moment when there was general suspicion of governmental use of the arts for propaganda purposes. Key to this were revelations in 1966 and 1967 about CIA investment in supposedly neutral groups, particularly the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Radio Luxemburg and Radio Free Europe, all involved in working against communism and producing sometimes inflammatory propaganda. The idea that the government was directly manipulating culture for its own ideological ends became fixed in the minds of the New Left, making cultural diplomacy seem to some as malfeasance, a nefarious manipulation of information that encouraged rebellion to fuel American interests. A slew of publications examining the role of art in the Cold War emerged around the time of the American Woman Artists Show, including Max Kozloff ’s ‘American Painting during the Cold War’ and Eva Cockroft’s ‘Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War’, both published in Artforum in the early 1970s.87 To artists involved in the burgeoning protest movements, the government’s interest in art was one that sought to manipulate artworks’ intentions to justify an increasingly unjustifiable international policy. Interrogating the role of culture, the artists involved in anti-Vietnam War actions started to reassess the way that their work could be used. Aware that the language of artistic freedom could be

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dispatched as, in Kozloff ’s words, ‘a commodity in the struggle for American dominance’ and ‘a form of benevolent propaganda’, artists were suspicious of official ties and wary of being seen to endorse cultural institutions whose political affiliation made them metonymous of American military aggression.88 For women artists it was also important that the visual art practice that was most strongly associated with cultural diplomacy, Abstract Expressionism, was a focus of feminist ire. Spero in particular saw the work of the New York School as being symbolic of an overbearing masculinism that was unfairly championed by the art world and the major institutions. Therefore, to some extent, resistance to cultural diplomacy and the existing feminist art-political agenda were aligned: those practices that were able to be co-opted were already seen as the enemy. This bears on a dialogue between silence and speaking. Understood in its most formalist incarnation, Abstract Expressionism was a practice that focused on materials and as such did not seek to speak directly, avoiding message as part of its painterly practice. As opposed to the vociferous statements of anti-war and feminist art-making, to Spero Abstract Expressionism’s refusal of meaning facilitated its use for propaganda.89 Unwilling to be co-opted into what they saw as a sanction of American warmongering, a number of artists who were uneasy with the move – seen to be led by May Stevens, but including Joyce Kozloff and Spero – lobbied the group to react.90 Rather than a withdrawal of work they issued a demand that the exhibition of their works should be accompanied with an anti-war statement was proposed. It was to read: We, American women artists participating in this exhibition, are outraged at the inhuman war the U.S. Government is waging against the people of Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia. We can exhibit in the Amerika Haus in Berlin only if this statement is prominantly [sic] displayed along with our work. We are willing to show in this building in the spirit of cultural cooperation between the German and the American people. We are part of the international cultural and artistic community which stands for peace and against America’s war in Indo-China.91

Surveying artists for their responses, the protest group solicited the opinions of the forty-three contributors, asking them if they would sign in support of the statement, if they wanted to offer an individual statement and if they wanted to withhold their work.92 There were thirty-two answers: twenty signed the proposed general statement, sixteen signed ‘individual statements expressing various views’, and seventeen refused to exhibit without a statement being displayed that explicitly outlined their opposition to American policy in

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Vietnam.93 Unfortunately, though not surprisingly, Amerika Haus refused the artists’ demands and the tour of the exhibition was cancelled altogether. It closed in May 1972 and, to much disappointment, the artwork was sent back to America. Although the protest put forward by the group was not enacted, the decision to mount some form of protest demonstrates that some artists felt it necessary to register dissent within the space of the American institution. The connection to the United States Information Agency, particularly in the tense and politically strategic context of West Berlin, meant that putting a message of protest in the heart of this space operated on a similar logic to the programme of sending exhibitions abroad, articulating an opposing view, registered the complexity of the politics that was proposed in the heart of a space of propaganda. How effective this would have been in practice is debatable, given that much American propaganda rested on the idea that Americans were free to think and speak for themselves.94 However, a gesture was felt by some to be necessary: this was a pushback against co-option, an active resistance to being used in a propaganda war. Some kind of direct statement was deemed appropriate in order to mitigate the continued display of work; without making explicit the artists’ resistance to the politics that the Amerika Haus supported, the work itself was seen to be compromised. However, against this stand opposing complicity with the state, the question of visibility for women artists and patriarchal silencing became an equally charged ideological position in the publications that emerged in the fallout from the show’s cancellation.Following the decision by the AmerikaHaus to withdraw from the show, Ringgold, too, had solicited opinions from the women artists involved. In her initial letter she had approached the artists with warmth, suggesting that ‘the purpose of this article is purely to provide a platform for the airing of views of opposing sides concerning Amerika Haus and the war’.95 Looking for the input of those who contributed – ‘one paragraph or 2 – 4 sentences expressing your feelings about showing art in Amerika Haus in Berlin in view of Nixon’s recent escalation of the war in Vietnam’ – Ringgold’s approach seemed like a genuine attempt at assessment.96 Certainly, although those who protested felt justified, others were angry at their decision: Lil Picard, Annick du Charme and Bonnie Elliott produced a statement condemning ‘some of the exhibitors [sic] insistence to use the show to change the original idea of a Women’s (feministe Lib. Show) with emphasis on cultural exchange into an antiVietnam War demonstration action against America House, West Berlin’.97 Ringgold’s letter reads as a measured investigation, addressing the women she writes to as ‘Sister’ and signing off ‘in Peace and Progress’.98

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The article that appeared in the Feminist Art Journal entitled ‘The Gedok Show and the Lady Left’, however, was not so supportive.99 Clearly frustrated by the actions of the protest group, whom she derisively labelled ‘the Lady Left’, Ringgold accused them of mounting this weak and self-defeating protest in order to gratify the ‘dangerously irrelevant male art world’.100 Dismissing their actions as ‘protestant protest’, Ringgold suggested that they should have put feminism above their anti-war politics.101 The reference to the ‘irrelevant male art world’ signposts one of the differences between feminist activism in the arts and anti-war activism: for male anti-war artists, the refusal to show was a powerful gesture of negation. If enough male artists agreed to work against the system of the art world, interrupting its normal hierarchies by asserting that their moral rights and obligations prevented them from engaging, the structure at least suffered and at worst broke down. During the Vietnam War a number of protests evidenced this, including the Los Angeles ‘White-Out’ in 1965, in which artworks were covered with white paper marked with the anti-war ‘Stop Escalation’ image, and the New York Art Strike of 1970, prompted by the Kent and Jackson State killings and inspired in part by Robert Morris’s decision to close his show at the Whitney in protest. For women artists, though, a refusal to engage was arguably less powerful, suffering as they already did from the aggressive neglect of the art world.102 For Ringgold, removing their voice from the debate, particularly in the context of an exhibition designed to counteract their exclusion, failed to account for the difference between male and female dissent. She states: ‘American women didn’t start this war, haven’t profited from it and haven’t the power to stop it, just like the German women didn’t have any power to stop Hitler. We’ve got to get our own thing together first before we can stop theirs.’103 Ringgold was brutal in her assessment of the protest group, accusing them of ‘suddenly [getting] extremely peace conscious’, being ‘ever faithful to the adored image of their male left predecessors’, and ‘perpetrating a hoax’.104 Her reasonable criticisms – that this type of action was ‘mild’ and that they were inconsistent in being willing to show in a German governmental institution but not an American one – were mixed in with vicious barbs about how ‘a little peace art action publicity never hurt anybody’, and how ‘after the show was dead . . . the women continued protesting the war on the arms of the men artists until early June at which time every self-respecting white middle class New York City artist goes to East Hampton for the summer, Vietnam or not’.105 Ringgold’s insinuation was that the middle-class white women protesters had, through their somewhat paranoid focus on the role of the government in the venue, duped themselves into bolstering

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patriarchy. She argued that by privileging their concerns about Vietnam over their position as women artists they resulted in censoring themselves and others in a protest that would be ineffectual, even if it had occurred. Ringgold’s comment on ‘white middle class New York City artists’ points to some of the underlying stakes for silence and speech in relation to race at this moment. Then – as now – there was a sense that the dominant voices in the women’s movement failed to adequately address issues of racism and the different experiences of women of colour. As Toni Morrison articulates in her 1971 article ‘What the Black Woman thinks about Women’s Lib’, in its early moments the women’s liberation movement felt myopic in its concerns. She states: The early image of Women’s Lib was of an elitist organization made up of upper-middle-class women with the concerns of that class (the percentage of women in professional fields, etc.) and not paying much attention to the problems of most black women, which are not in getting into the labor force but in being upgraded in it, not in getting into medical school but in getting adult education, not in how to exercise freedom from the ‘head of the house’ but in how to be head of the house.106

The concept of being silenced in the ways articulated by feminist writers, too, tended to universalize that experience, failing to account for the differences that Morrison identifies. In Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, a text critiqued for its centring of a narrow experience of white affluent femininity, the very premise of the work revolves around the ‘unspoken’ nature of the ‘problem with no name’.107 The imagined woman described in accounts of those trapped and silenced at home did not reflect the experience of many black women who were working to support their families in low-paid undervalued jobs, and neither did the idea of the woman conceived of as fragile and childlike, denied her right to speak. Women of colour remained outside of the imagined femininity that the feminism of writers like Friedan sought to destroy, excluded from the categories which remained the focus of political discussion – in Morrison’s terms, ‘maleness’, ‘whiteness’, ‘ladyhood’.108 However, although often excluded from white feminist considerations of silencing, still silence was a concern for women writers of colour, who developed debates on voicelessness and societal silencing to consider their specific experience. A significant example came from Audre Lorde in her 1977 lecture to the Modern Languages Association, ‘The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action’. Considering the ways in which black women ‘have on the one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been

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rendered invisible through the depersonalisation of racism’, she articulates the need to fight for visibility for black women in spite of the vulnerability that it causes.109 While maintaining the distinct nature of the erasure that women of colour suffer, she still insists on the value of speaking not only one’s own reality but also that of others, no matter the differences, arguing that ‘it is not difference which immobilises us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.’110 That said, she maintains the importance of making clear specific voices: ‘What are the words you do not have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?’ she asks her audience.111 Ringgold’s position about her own voice is recognizable within Lorde’s framework. In her memoirs We Flew Over the Bridge, published in 1995, she describes the ways in which her work and activism were influenced by her doubly marginalized position of being a black woman artist. Establishing her artistic voice initially in relation to the civil rights movement and later as a feminist, articulating her own voice was urgent and political, tied into the wider movements. She states: James Baldwin had just published The Fire Next Time, Malcolm X was talking about us ‘loving our black selves,’ and Martin Luther King Jr. was leading marches and spreading the word. All over the country and the world people were listening to these black men. I felt called upon to create my own vision of the black experience we were witnessing . . . I had something to add – the visual depiction of the way we are and look. I wanted my painting to express this moment I knew was history. I wanted to give my woman’s point of view to this period.112

Her new style, which she termed ‘Super Realism’, was dedicated to communicating that view, articulating a complex picture of race and gender in American society. Making this immediate and legible was part of that intention, as she says: ‘I wanted my audience to make a personal connection with its images and the message.’113 Unambiguous and forthright, Ringgold was ‘concerned with making truthful statements in my art and having it seen’.114 This position informs the argument put forward by Ringgold in relation to the American Woman Artists Show in which she contends that artists should trust in their work to make statements about ideological issues, rather than engaging in mild mannered protests.115 She asks: ‘When will artists learn that if you are political, then you show it in your work?’116 Ringgold believed that the exhibition as it was had a power of its own, quoting Jeanne Miles as saying, ‘To withdraw the Women’s Exhibition at this time would be like removing the

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leavening agent by which we can rise and become a real force for Peace.’117 Ringgold suggested that the exhibition was a stronger statement than the protest, its power to change more potent than the direct action against the Amerika Haus. Silencing the message of the work had no power in Ringgold’s view; it was the particularity of the message, the specific position of the artists and the act of being seen and getting your point across that carried with it the most potential for political change. In her response to Ringgold’s article, which was equally terse and swipes back with reciprocal accusations of privilege, Spero outlined her reasoning for being involved in the protest. She states: Artists, no more than other citizens should be tyrannized into silent complicity with governmental actions. The artists lost their chance to show in Berlin – but I believe indicated to the US government authorities there that they couldn’t be bought off. Our doing this does not stop the war, or alleviate the suffering in Vietnam, but at least it’s not ‘business as usual’ – artists willing to do anything to show their work.118

In this reasoning, agreeing to show your work was something that allowed a system to continue. Artworks, therefore, only bolstered the environment they were in; rather than invading the official site of its ideological enemy with their political message, they were necessarily co-opted by context. Despite Spero’s belief in the power of visibility for changing a system, the possibility of the dissenting work to speak on its own terms was seen to be subsumed under the propaganda value of the site. Fearful of complicity, Spero outlined that, for her, ‘to have remained mute would have meant that we “went along” showing under the auspices of the U.S. government while the government enlarged the air war in Southeast Asia’.119 According to Spero’s position, in order to object to the ideological grounding that the Amerika Haus stood for, it was necessary to move into another register from art, one that was explicit and legible. Within this, and thinking about the different qualities of silence for different identities, we can perhaps see an unconscious faith in the ways in which a voice is valued, inflected by the authority of whiteness while still undermined by gender, though such a reading is necessarily speculative, not reflecting the artist’s own understanding of the dispute. Instead, Spero saw Ringgold’s objections to the protest as being ‘recrimination, and pretense masking a self serving act. (Many who went to Gedok received much publicity).’120 The reason to show, then, was a career decision, the reason to protest a moral one. Silence here was seen by one faction as a politically effective tactic and by the other as a form of professional erasure.

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Figure 3.9 Faith Ringgold, The American People Series #18: The Flag is Bleeding, 1967. © 2018 Faith Ringgold, ARS member; Courtesy ACA Galleries, New York.

This can be elucidated by comparing the works contributed to the American Woman Artist Show, which were Faith Ringgold’s The American People Series #18: The Flag is Bleeding from 1967 [Figure 3.9] and Spero’s Codex Artaud VIII [Figure 3.10]. Both show very different approaches to political art-making between the two artists at this moment. Ringgold’s American People Series #18: The Flag is Bleeding is explicit in its politics; people with arms linked stand behind the flag, its stripes which on their source represent the original thirteen British Colonies that went on to become the United States, are made into bars that block the American People of Ringgold’s title from the viewer. Despite their placid faces, violence is clearly marked in the image in the knife that sits in the hand of the black man and the guns on the hips of the white man. The woman stands between them, gently restraining the men and keeping them apart. The figures’ faces are marked by their situation, their eyes are surrounded by dark shadows, the woman’s hands droop heavily and the hand of the black man which is patriotically held to his chest is obscured by a thick drip of blood, one among a number of blood spatters that mark the image. Ringgold’s ambition to ‘show some of the hell that had broken out in the States’ comes through clearly.121

144 Figure 3.10 Nancy Spero, Codex Artaud VIII, 1971. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

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By contrast, in Spero’s Codex Artaud VIII the large paper panel reads from a distance as quiet and obscure. The panel is marked with typewritten elements that are not immediately legible. It is only when put under scrutiny that the multiple collaged texts render an angry, violent picture. In the small panel of images which shows figures warped and deformed – some turned into insects, some with legs splayed or bent and buckled unnaturally – there is an eagle’s head; the iconography of the hawkishness of the system registering threat and destruction. Text is typed backwards, repeated compulsively and placed upside down. Spero uses letters and punctuation to create shapes, further undoing meaning in the service of a frenzied aesthetic, cutting into the communication of language with marks and fissures. Although fierce under scrutiny, this picturing relies on a less direct language than Ringgold’s, requiring engagement and contemplation from the viewer, implying that an existing sympathy with the questions that Spero raises is necessary or at least helpful to seeing the politics in the work. The context of the different values ascribed to women’s voices in terms of race again feels pertinent. As someone who had more or less recognized herself in the descriptions of women’s oppression put forward by Friedan, Spero’s imagery reflected that tension of the silenced (white) woman trapped and unheard in the home. Manifesting the anger that results from this experience, this is how Kimberly Lamm sees Spero troubling white femininity, expressing the rage that was supposed to be anathema to that role.122 Given Spero’s usual practice at this time was to exhibit in feminist or anti-war exhibitions whose audiences would have been versed in the theoretical basis for Spero’s imaging, the change in framing that the Amerika Haus brought might have undermined the understated critique that Codex Artaud puts forth.123 Although this vision of active protest as opposed to speaking through work contrasts with the statement Spero made in 1976, in which she stated, ‘Successful political art alerts one to a situation’, by that stage she had started making explicitly message-driven work.124 At the moment that the move to the Amerika Haus was posited, Spero was unwilling to trust that art could subvert state-sponsored propaganda, failing to interrupt ‘business as usual’. This was not the case with all those who objected. Stevens, for example, protested despite her inclusion of the Big Daddy Draped wherein the message is relatively explicit, though perhaps less so than Ringgold’s. However, the faith in actively agitating against the status quo through direct action implies a similar position to the one Clément takes in discussing Dora. Standing up and forthrightly engaging with the enemy rather than showing outrage in a form that is mediated – for Cixous, in Dora’s symptoms; in Ringgold’s terms, the artwork – is more potent and

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less ambiguous. By speaking directly, the message was secure and the artist uncompromised. This is further supported by Spero’s involvement in the establishment of the A.I.R. Gallery at this time. In the proposal for the gallery composed in 1972, the artists involved in its establishment argue for the pressing need for the gallery in order to erase collective invisibility, citing statistics from commercial galleries that claim 95.4 per cent of artists represented are male.125 The decision to open a physical space was motivated by a wish to create ‘a space and sense of freedom to exhibit their work outside of the commercial gallery system, to establish a gallery different from the typical male-oriented art world situation’.126 In allowing the voices of women to be heard, the A.I.R. Gallery was conceived of by its founders to be somewhere in which ‘artists will investigate what are the roles women can play as artists’.127 The utopian ambition to speak freely is created by this space carved out within the male-dominated art world; in speaking, new possibilities for women artists were seen to emerge.128 Interestingly, the primary function of the space is described by those proposing it as being to teach: ‘[T]o teach by example through its program of independently produced exhibitions; to teach through personal contact; to teach through specific written and visual media.’129 Formulating the purpose of this utopian space as literally didactic, speaking directly is written into the foundations of the gallery. This conflict between registering protest through shows of fury and speaking forthrightly points to the difficulties that using pain as a political metaphor brings forth. Although the tense, anguished language of the distressed body affectively charges work, the message that it elucidates and the purpose that it serves can be obscured underneath the silence of torment. As Scarry points out, the inarticulateness of pain means that despite its cries it is easily repressed. She states: ‘[T]he relative ease or difficulty with which any given phenomenon can be verbally represented also influences the ease or difficulty with which that phenomenon comes to be politically represented.’130 In its profound and marked silence, pain is only effective if there is sympathy with the person who suffers. Without this, similar to the anguish expressed by the hysteric, it can be subsumed into the symbolic. Furthermore, in Spero’s expressions of pain in the Codex, the tie to feminism is established in the most part through her writings and activism. Because the voice that speaks is that of Artaud, despite the fact that he was feminized as an hysteric, the interpretation of the Codex as a representation of female subjectivity requires explanation. Without a knowledge of the artist’s persona, her interests and personal circumstances, the connection to feminism would be lost.

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This is where the Torture works diverge. Learning lessons from her experiments with Artaud and hysteria, Spero continued to articulate bodily experience in their careful descriptions of pain. However, Torture in Chile and Torture of Women rely on a language of fact. Turning from Artaud’s expulsions to accounts published by agencies like Amnesty International marked a significant shift from individual pain – albeit one inflected by social and political approaches to mental health and its medicalization – to focusing on the suffering of political prisoners and violence in the name of ideology. Even though individual experience was still at the centre of the source texts, it was a language that sought to establish something as true, something uncovered at the heart of repressive regimes. Not an entirely different form of speaking out, in that both seek to evidence different kinds of authentic suffering, it was an important development in the kinds of speech that the artist privileged. In looking to those agencies which sought the recognition of torture, Spero moved into a more recognizable realm of activism, politics and human rights. With this move, a form of didacticism came to the fore that was an explicit and unambiguous vilification of physical violence.

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Torture of Women as Devotional Object

Unreliable witness Alongside the factual accounts of torture and the description of its history and practice in Spero’s 1974–6 Torture of Women, there is a curious inclusion unexamined by scholars of the work. In among the evidentiary texts that recount first-hand descriptions of torture and collaged images, there is a fragment that suggests fantasy more than evidence: a small section that quotes Artaud. On a rectangular piece of paper cut out and collaged onto the support, Spero includes the typewritten text which reads: ‘I saw the corpse of my daughter Annie incinerated, and her sexual organs squandered and divided after her death by the police of France. Artaud.’ It is bordered on four sides by Artaud’s name, typed repeatedly in such a condensed form so as it makes a near-solid shape. Sitting above the extract is a disembodied, Medusalike head that appears to scream out in the same way as other figures which are collaged onto the white paper support of this 38-metre, fourteen-panel work. Artaud’s account is included as though recording a direct experience of violence, yet his text is based not on real events – his daughter Annie is an imagined character – instead it recounts fantasies that are symptoms of his paranoia. The extract sits among harrowing accounts of the practice and experience of torture that Spero had gathered from sources such as the New York Times, the USLA Reporter and Amnesty International’s Matchbox and Report on Torture. Spero’s drawn and collaged figures, taking the form of winged monsters, naked dancing women, goddesses, disembodied heads and crudely drawn bodies, surround and inflect the extracts, mourning and protesting against the violence factually described. Not limiting herself to texts that refer directly to torture, Spero also included quotations from mythological sources, contemporary literature and statements used previously in the The Hours of the Night (1974). Foregrounding female experience, Spero included only female bodies and women’s stories in Torture of Women, in line with the artist’s decision made in 1974 ‘to view women and men by representing women, not just to reverse history 149

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but to see what it means to view all this through the depiction of women’.1 The work was seen by the artist as a political and feminist artefact, designed to draw the viewer’s attention to the realities of gendered social violence. Scholars are in agreement, with Torture of Women widely seen, in Jon Bird’s terms, as ‘an art of witness, a stoic memorial to the violence and abuse done by men to women’.2 Although not the only text included in the work that is not factual, the Artaud extract is unusual in that it seems to describe a real event similar to the extreme acts documented on the rest of the work, meaning that if unfamiliar with Artaud, the viewer could easily mistake this for another descriptive account of the practice of torture. Given that the artist’s stated intent for this work was to dedicate attention to ‘real events, to real victims in real prisons, tortured for political reasons’, it raises the question of what Artaud’s inclusion points to here; why incorporate this extract with the accounts of horrific state-sponsored violence?3 A 1988 text on the Artaud works provides a clue: Spero states that in her turn to Artaud in 1970 she had ‘used these fragments of text in tension with my painted cut-out images to exemplify the artist (myself) rejected in a bourgeois society’.4 Given the connection established between herself and the writer in Codex Artaud, if Artaud here acts as a cipher for her alienated experience on the page, the artist’s claims that this work is about ‘real victims in real prisons’, are cast into doubt. When considered in this manner, the Artaud extract can be seen as indicative of the ways in which Spero manipulates evidence in Torture of Women more generally. Even in its premise, the work can be put under pressure: Spero knowingly disregards the facts of torture as a means of social control in order to make it more apt as a metaphor for the violence of patriarchy, stating in an interview with Carole De Pasquale that ‘the greater portion of torture victims have been men, but I zeroed in on the torture of women because symbolically the abuse of women sexually, and their vulnerability historically speaking is very significant’.5 With this in mind, the impartial position implied by claims to testimony for Torture of Women which see it as ‘an extension of the work of organizations such as Amnesty International’ does not stand up to scrutiny.6 Spero’s use of published accounts of torture reframes them, moving their political focus from acts perpetrated by violent governments to look instead at the experience of women. Critical claims for Torture of Women as testimony elide examples in which facts are manipulated and accounts of violence real, mythic and imaginary are all framed in the same way, presented as equal evidence of the brutal realities of patriarchy. The comparison made here between patriarchy in general and specific acts of statesponsored violence demands further investigation, suggesting that if Spero stands as witness, then she is, at best, an unreliable one.

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However, as Dori Laub reminds us, an unreliable witness can still evidence something worthwhile.7 In an oft-cited passage, Laub refers to the testimony of a woman in her late sixties given to interviewers from the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale. During her interview, the woman described her memories of the Auschwitz uprising in which one of the chimneys of the four crematoria was blown up: ‘ “All of a sudden,” she said, “we saw four chimneys going up in flames, exploding. The flames shot into the sky, people were running. It was unbelievable.” ’8 Laub uses this erroneous recollection as an example of the vicissitudes of testimony. In the debate that followed its recording, historians who viewed the tape suggested that this account should be disregarded because of its inaccuracies. Psychoanalysts, by contrast, suggested that this was a valuable record of a moment in which the crushing inevitability of the holocaust was interrupted, the mistakes of the report being of more value for how the possibility of resistance became inscribed on the psyche of the prisoner. With this in mind, Spero’s manipulations of the facts of torture can be read as an informative kind of unreliable witnessing. Undoubtedly Spero was deeply concerned with the effects of violence, her wish to act against real pain a coherent and credible motivation for the making of this work. Therefore, her selections and knowing occlusions provide us with evidence of how Spero understood this subject and of the reality it revealed for her. Witnessing, with its conflict between accurate description and experiential record, is, then, a productive way of understanding both Torture of Women and Spero’s affective practice more broadly. However, the previous scholarly emphasis on testimony as in something seen or experienced, particularly when recounted in a legal context, is perhaps less useful than its other understanding suggested by the presentation of facts and feelings in order to evidence a wider idea, that is religious witnessing: attesting to faith.9 Religious witness, I suggest, offers a theoretical framework for viewing Torture of Women and for deciphering its particular relationship to pain, one which brings together those aspects discussed in previous chapters and provides a way of understanding the effect of viewing the body in pain. Drawing on studies, particularly those of Jill Bennett and Sarah McNamer, that demonstrate how thirteenth- and fourteenth-century iconography was designed not to represent the crucifixion but instead to affectively connect the devotee to Christ’s suffering, I argue for a similar effect at work here that translates a devotional mode into a political one.10 It is my contention that using the framework of medieval empathetic viewing in order to consider Spero’s practice suggests a mode that is dependent both on pain and the transmission of its physical experience for a contemporary activism.

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Important to my interest in a form that resembles religious witnessing is the implied ambition to convert and consolidate. Despite being left unexamined in the majority of existing scholarship on her practice, as I have argued elsewhere about her 1976–9 Notes in Time on Women, it is important for understanding Spero’s work to acknowledge that it seeks to persuade her audience, outlining a sometimes manipulated history in order to demonstrate the necessity of feminism.11 Here, while not claiming that the political and social activism of feminism is identical to religion in its programmes, organization or drives, I maintain that it is useful to consider how objects understood by the artist and her champions as political might seek to convert the viewer to the ideological viewpoint that they propose. Not propaganda or agitprop in that the message it serves is not declared, still Torture of Women acts for feminism and is considered by the artist to be an explicitly feminist work.12 Similar processes to those identified in practices of medieval affective meditation might provide a way of thinking about how a visual language of pain rendered through detailed descriptions; clear subjective interventions by the artist and evocative figures could be used to convert non-feminist viewers and consolidate the feminist audience. In what follows, I am going to pursue a close analysis of Torture of Women, focusing first on Spero’s use of information, examining her interventions in relation to her contemporaries and her manipulation of her sources to make them more apt for her ideological ambitions, before going on to consider how this relates to medieval affective meditation, investigating her feminist mode of affective witnessing.

Torture and information in the 1970s: feeling the pain of others Appalled by revelations of the violent realities and global prevalence of statesponsored violence, Spero decided to turn to torture as a subject in order to ‘put my art where my politics were’.13 Torture had been the focus of much concern in America during the time Torture of Women was being made. Reports of violent governments had gained attention through the rise of the human rights movement, resulting in public outrage and calls to action against persecution, described by Amnesty International in 1973 as a ‘social cancer’.14 Violent regimes were being exposed for their brutality across the world, with a particular focus falling on South America for the practice of torture in Argentina and Brazil and particularly for the Chilean coup in 1973, in which the military seized power from the socialist president Salvador Allende in a bloody battle, eventually

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installing Augusto Pinochet as leader. In the USA, despite initially ambivalent responses to the deposal from the press, academics and activists vociferously objected, leading to widespread condemnation of the regime. The art world also responded. Before the coup, figures in the New York art world had been influenced by Latin American political art. Lucy Lippard, for example, had been in Buenos Aires as a juror for the 1968 Materiales: nuevas técnicas, nueva expression exhibition organized by the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, and had been impressed and influenced by the Rosario Group and their merging of art and politics in the face of government repression.15 In its aftermath, artists and art-world figures responded in protests and campaigns. Lippard was involved in the recreation of murals by the Chilean muralists Brigada Ramona Parra that had been destroyed following the coup, influenced by the work of the People’s Painters group who had completed similar acts of solidarity in Piscataway, New Jersey, organized by Eva Cockroft among others.16 In 1974, Rudolf Baranik, May Stevens and others were involved in organizing the Chile Emergency Exhibition, which invited members of the New York art community to donate work to be sold in aid of the victims of Pinochet’s regime. The exhibition included works from Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Marísol and ‘200 other international artists’.17 Latin American diasporic artists including Luis Camnitzer and César Paternosto, as part of the two groups Museo Latinamericano and Movimiento por la Independencia Cultural de Latino América, organized the book Contrabienal as a protest against and a call to boycott the 1972 Bienal de São Paulo through work donated by artists to help draw attention to the cause.18 Aside from exhibitions and publications that were conceived as acts of protest, a number of American artists created work that sought to directly intervene in the politics of South America which explicitly referenced its violent regimes and the complicity of the US government in supporting their actions, but these mainly occurred towards the end of the decade. Examples include Martha Rosler’s Domination and the Everyday from 1978, which opens with an image of General Pinochet in uniform flanked by his cohorts [Figure 4.1]. The text that runs across the bottom of the screen states: [H]e and his friends are props for U.S. interests. For the interests of the international bourgeoisie . . . though we in the states can afford the luxury of despising him . . . But what I want to tell you about him right now is that he represents naked force. the dropping away of the civility that often masks reactionary economic, social and political ideas. He represents the raw fact of domination, repression, torture, starvation and death.

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Figure 4.1 Still from Domination and the Everyday (color video, 32 minutes) 1978. © Martha Rosler. Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.

The soundtrack that accompanies this vilifying text records Rosler talking to her young child about the food they are eating while a programme discussing Abstract Expressionism and the American art world plays in the background. Art, politics and everyday life are brought into interaction, the flow of conversation and the competing demands of written text and soundtrack creating a strong analogy for how politics is obscured by the concerns of everyday life. Leon Golub made a series of political portraits towards the end of the 1970s which included images of Pinochet such as Pinochet 1976 IV , 1977 [Figure 4.2]. The close-up paintings that feature his smiling face painted directly onto raw linen belies the horrors perpetrated under the dictator’s direction. Golub went on to create his large-scale explorations of the violence of torture such as Interrogation I and Interrogation II in 1981, showing acts of violence taking

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Figure 4.2 Leon Golub, Pinochet (1976) IV , 1977, Acrylic on linen, 18 × 16 in. (46 × 41 cm). Hall Collection. Courtesy of Hall Art Foundation. Photo: Mark Woods © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

place. The lifeless naked body that hangs upside down in Interrogation I contrasts to his attacker’s active, uniformed bodies, their faces registering effort but not affect in the pursuit of torture.19 Despite these various responses, torture and state repression were not the focus of sustained artistic examination in the way that the war in Vietnam was. During the mid-1970s, Spero was one of the few who had been involved in A.W.C. and feminist art-activism who were creating work that agitated against torture. At the time Spero started working on Torture of Women in 1974, the Vietnam War was still raging, the New Left was splintering, and feminist activism was focusing on the more subtle hegemonic repression of women in American society. Spero’s turn to the events in the outside world was, of course, not her first engagement with contemporary political issues. As seen in Chapter Two, her War Series had protested violently against American involvement in Vietnam,

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using a visceral and pain-ridden language in order to do so. However, Torture of Women was arguably a more developed thesis, not only on the effect of violence but also on its motivations and underlying causes. As Spero states, the move to torture as a subject matter ‘had to do with my activities within the women’s movement and more immediate concerns within my own life’.20 Torture of Women can be understood to be aligned with other activist practices in the 1970s that filtered their political message through a focus on and critique of the art world itself and the way in which it reflected broader ideological structures. The work that is most often offered as a comparison to Spero’s, Hans Haacke’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Board of Trustees from 1974, for example, tracked the business interests of Guggenheim museum board members to show their various involvements in South America and particularly in companies implicated in the political coup in Chile [Figure 4.3]. Amy Schlegel has written an extended consideration of the similarities and differences between Spero’s approach and Haacke’s, noting Spero’s ‘motivation of commemorative solidarity’ as the source of Torture of Women’s success as a work of protest.21 However, where Schlegel centres on the activist efficacy of both pieces, the shared focus on art and the art world remains unexamined. Haacke, as has been well documented, exposes the networks of power that govern both the art world and political world, revealing the complicity of the art world in the worst kinds of social and political crimes. In Spero’s case, her protest against torture was also a protest against patriarchy. For Spero at this time, her understanding of the general oppression of women was focused through attention to the way female bodies – and by extension women artists – were misrepresented and elided by overbearing and masculinist art practices and institutions.22 It is no coincidence that Torture in Chile (1974), the immediate precursor to Torture of Women, was the first work in which Spero chose to make woman the protagonist as her major feminist tactic, rejecting the picturing of male experience in order to foreground women’s lives in a space from which they are more usually excluded.23 At this moment, Spero saw the representation of the female form in the art world as an effective strategy against patriarchy generally.24 As Julia Bryan-Wilson demonstrates, those involved and influenced by the Art Worker’s Coalition ‘understood themselves to be polemically working both within and against the auspices of very specific kinds of military-industrial institutions – that is to say, art museums’ [italics author’s own].25 Spero was no different, seeing her work as a means to change the art world’s exclusion of women both as serious subjects and as art professionals, considering this in itself to be an effective move against patriarchy.26

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Figure 4.3 Hans Haacke, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Board of Trustees, 1974. © Hans Haacke/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

Another factor that the connection with Haacke illuminates is that although there was not a major drive in the New York art world towards discussing torture as subject, there was a strong interest in information.27 Bryan-Wilson shows how Haacke and other artists had turned towards an almost journalistic mode, conducting research and uncovering information as part of their artistic practices.28 The group show Information, curated by Kynaston McShine and held at the MoMA in 1970, featured many artists involved in the A.W.C., bringing together practices that examined the connection between art and information. In the press release for the show, McShine stated:

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The general attitude of the artists in this exhibition . . . enables us to participate, quite often as in a game; at other times it seems almost therapeutic, making us question ourselves and our responses to unfamiliar stimuli. The constant demand is a more aware reaction to our natural and artificial environments . . . These artists are questioning our prejudices, asking us to renounce our inhibitions and if they are reevaluating the nature of art, they are also asking that we reassess what we have always taken for granted as our accepted and cultural conditioned aesthetic response to art.29

Although Spero was not included, which is unsurprising not only given the work she was creating in 1970 but also the perhaps predictable disparity between the representation of male and female artists in the show, this description touches on her project in Torture of Women. Undoubtedly not ‘a game’, or ‘therapeutic’, the piece does work to ‘demand . . . a more aware reaction to our natural and artificial environments’ and ‘question[s] our prejudices’.30 In making Torture of Women Spero included sixteen references from ten sources, gathering material over the course of the two years it took to construct. Rejecting frivolity or whimsy, Spero’s feminist version of information, one that loosely appropriates conceptual methods, demands that we develop our perception not of art, but, through her assertion of female experience and the representation of the female body, of art’s and art institutions’ complicity in patriarchy, forcing her viewer to confront its implicit violence.31 The multiple accounts in the scholarship that present Spero’s work as reportage – such as Sylvère Lotringer’s proposition that Spero is ‘building a tight case as a journalist does’ – reinforce this.32 Eve Meltzer has examined this exhibition as part of her wider discussion on the role of affect in conceptual art. Considering how the visual language of technology was more than a stylistic choice for artists looking for a new approach, she points to the ways in which information represented an emerging sense of underlying social orders and structures. She states: For the practitioners represented in this exhibition, the field of ideas represented by the word lived, wrestled with, and thrived off of the very same baseline claim: that only within sign systems were the individual and the social comprehensible as such, and that, more profoundly still, the world itself could not be, indeed was not, without the sign.33

While Meltzer is discussing those whose aesthetic approaches are quite different from Spero’s, still this explanation of the ways in which engaging with information facilitates an exploration of broader social structures is useful for examining Torture of Women. Information was not only a contemporary aesthetic, but an exposure of

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the ways in which society operated. Disrupting and exposing systems through interrogating the documents and texts that represented them was seen as productive and political; Haacke’s text in his catalogue submission for the contemporaneous Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects demonstrates this belief: ‘Such an approach is concerned with the operational structure of organizations, in which the transfer of information, energy and/or material occurs.’34 The documents that Spero engages with are not official communications, indeed they are subversive accounts retold in order to cut across disinformation and propaganda coming from repressive regimes. Still, her interventions into the text with breaks, rips, repetitions and fractures intrude on the means by which information is conventionally communicated, interrupting a form that is inherently connected to the underlying structures of society and creating a register of that which exceeds it. For Spero, this is directly tied to the body, mediated through her own angry and affected transcription. This feminist informational mode is vital to the efficacy of Torture of Women as a work of protest. In Spero’s version of information, the death and suffering that are her subject are not only reproduced; accounts of bodies under attack are re-presented by the artist, who cites them through imperfect transcription on her bulletin typewriter, keeping mistakes intact as part of the finished work. Spero hones in on the specific details of the accounts she uses, inviting the viewer to dwell on these through her interventions in their transcription. Her amplification of detail is crucial to the approach her work takes to gaining the empathy of the viewer, sharply focusing their attention on the experience of pain. In this way, of Spero’s works that foreground pain, Torture of Women is the most literal. While the War Series, Artaud Paintings and Codex Artaud all thematize pain as unjust, angry and isolating, Torture of Women describes its direct, physical experience. This is pain that is not only felt but also directly inflicted, a description of deliberate acts that are planned out in order to be as painful as possible and executed by individuals to produce information or punish dissent. Torture of Women relies on description for its ethical efficacy, the horrific accounts of real torture being the foundation of the work, their terrible frankness inflecting both the iconography and support. The first panel of Torture of Women provides a good example of this approach. Introducing the work, panel I incorporates typewritten texts that describe a variety of cruelties. Captioned by the large, yellow woodblockprinted statement ‘Explicit Explanation’, the texts not only carefully detail personal accounts of violence but also include an official definition taken from the Amnesty International Report on Torture from 1975. There is a consistency in the tone of the language used; notably affectless considering the events that are described, the texts are matter of fact in their reportage. However, in spite of this, violence

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pervades the work. Rather than manifesting in grotesque representation, it is relayed through both the blunt affectlessness of the texts and through interventions made by the artist that interrupt the informational format and suggest a respondent who mourns. The first extract on the page, transcribed from the Amnesty report, is concerned with taxonomy, noting the distinction between ‘one blow [which] is considered to be “ill-treatment” rather than “torture”’ and pointing out that ‘intensity and degree are factors’ in its classification. In addition, the text also considers the effects of inflicting pain, carefully describing how torture is designed ‘to make the victim submit, to “break him” or to “break her”’, concluding that ‘the breaking of the victim’s will is to destroy the victim’s humanity’. The language of ‘breaking’ people is echoed by interventions into the text made by Spero that suggest a voice that falters. The sentence ‘pain is a subjective concept’ is interrupted by the artist who creates a large separation between the ‘P’ and the ‘ain’ of the word. [Figure 4.4]. In the centre of this incongruous pause is a small rip in the support. It suggests a deep, silent cry that enacts the pain factually described.

Figure 4.4 Nancy Spero, Torture of Women, 1976 (detail). Gouache, typewritten texts, collage and handprinting on laid paper, 60.7 × 292 cm each, framed. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: NGC. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

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Maintaining the tone of reportage, testimonials are attached to panel I. Both the account marked ‘Thieu’s police’ and the report from Uruguay given by victim Maria Dina Roggerone de Greco focus on facts of the events, recording mistreatment in detail. ‘Thieu’s police’, which recounts the treatment of a woman in South Vietnam, is an extract from a journalistic report on practices under the wartime president. The report recounts the testimony of a witness who describes the torture of a young, nameless woman in South Vietnam under the regime. Focusing exclusively on her body without further context, she is fragmented in the description. Only the parts that are deliberately mistreated are discussed: her ankles and stomach which are tied to a chair, her kneecaps which are beaten, her ribs which are pulled out by the hands of the torturers, her mouth which is forcibly filled with soapy water, her earlobe and genitals which are electrocuted. Instead of a person under attack, the woman is reduced to individual parts of a body that are singled out for mistreatment, some according to their physiological specifics – her mouth and ribs – others as arbitrary locations for pain. We hear nothing from the victim, not even in the vicarious report of her torture; there are no accounts of screams or cries and she herself is not described. She stands as an illustration of the victim whose humanity is refused by the act, perfectly fitting the category as outlined in the Amnesty report. Maria Dina Roggerone de Greco’s story, by contrast, is a first-hand account describing her personal experience of the torture chamber. Although there is more context and more sense of the person involved, the emphasis still lies on the specifics of violence. Roggerone de Greco gives some idea of the spurious reason for her arrest in that she is associated with a mayor who seems to be the focus of her persecutors’ inquiries and she provides us with a vague sense of her personal circumstances, having been arrested with her husband and being pregnant. However, like the newspaper report on South Vietnam, the account still rests on the bodily specifics of violence and the cruelty of her captors. In addition to detail about beatings, electrocutions and near-drownings we are told about the lack of food and water, the insects that are deliberately put into her bed to bite her, the refusal to let her remove her contact lenses over the course of days. Roggerone de Greco gives us little sense of her feelings about this treatment; only the words ‘I couldn’t take any more’ provide a commentary on the way it felt to be tortured, an extraordinarily muted reaction to the extreme violence recounted. The representation of the torturers, by contrast, reports their speech; we are given a sense of personality in their snide words and cruel actions. Roggerone de Greco’s requests are reported in the past tense by the victim – ‘I said that before answering I requested a lawyer’ – whereas the responses are

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direct quotations: jeering at Roggerone de Greco’s request for a lawyer, they state, ‘We will show you that we are lawyers, prosecutors and judges’; on reporting her pregnancy she is told ‘that is the pretext of all whores’; on entering the torture chamber she is told, ‘Now you’re for it’. This emphasizes the already present sense of active torturer versus passive victim. Roggerone de Greco is someone whose body is acted upon and she is unable to intervene; all she can do is offer a detached report on the facts of her experience. Hers is another extract included in the Amnesty International Report on Torture, Amnesty’s policy of reporting the facts without commentary creating an image of passive victim versus active persecutor that intensifies the sense of oppression and attack on the innocent and vulnerable body.35 This focus on representing defenceless bodies violated by extreme acts continues throughout the work. On panels VI, VIII, X and XII there are descriptions of women who were gunned down by authorities, or who were victims of beatings and of sexual abuse. There are also descriptions of the kinds of violence used. On panel VIII, for example, the start of a fragment describing torture techniques reads ‘ice baths; manhandling of women; removal of fingernails; hanging’. Those accounts that refer to real stories focus closely on visceral details through the specificity of matter-of-fact description, allowing a sense of real pain to come through. Rather than an attempt to describe the subjective experience of violence that is inflicted on the specific victim’s body, the viewer is left to imagine the feeling that would result from the practice of torture. Writing in a 1966 essay on her curatorial project Eccentric Abstraction, Lucy R. Lippard considers the question of how viewers can identify physically with an artwork. Drawing on a text by Gaston Bachelard to describe what she calls ‘body ego’ or ‘muscular consciousness’, Lippard suggests that certain forms invite sensuous identification, a mode of viewing in which personal, physical experience is brought to bear when encountering work.36 She describes ‘the viewer’s indirect sensations of identification, reflecting both his [sic] personal and vicarious knowledge of sensorial experience in general’.37 Returning to the idea as ‘body identification’ in 1976 in order to apply it to a reading of the ways in which viewers engage with art thematized around sex, she considers a type of desire that applies to ‘that sensation of physical identification between a work of art and the body of the maker and/or viewer’, articulating a physical investment in and appetite for the work itself.38 Though not motivated by sexual desire, there is a similar kind of visceral identification invited in the detailed descriptions of acts against the body, which

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asks us to imagine our own bodies as vulnerable and subject to attack. In the quiet and contemplative space of the gallery which invites a sustained attention and consideration, the typewritten text that describes fingernails being removed or ice baths, near drowning or beatings, invites physical empathy in the viewer. Spero surrounds her texts with the empty spaces of her resonant, meaningful paper support (as discussed in Chapter Three), asking us to dwell on the details, to imagine our own bodies under the same attack. Moving past an understanding that is purely cognitive we are given enough information to conceptualize the experience. When we are told, for example, that ‘they thrust their hands in under her ribs and pulled them out’, we are invited to imagine the agony of the experience, the feeling of such a brutal attack on the body, the pain of recovery. By providing such clear and precise description focused on specifics, this process is made more straightforward, the lack of personal detail meaning that there is little impediment to the imaginative process. In this way, the sensation of pain and its sensorial knowledge are invoked to trigger bodily empathy in the viewer. The body in pain then acts to imaginatively connect bodies. However, as discussed previously it is important that these are female bodies under discussion. This work is not only dedicated to registering the sociopolitical phenomenon of torture, but also uses the real suffering body as the basis for an argument that seeks to convince the viewer that violence against women is not only contemporaneous, but that it is the very basis of civilization. Illustrating this on panels IV and V is the story of Marduk and Tiamat. With its inclusion, Spero frames the factual reports of torture through their relationship to the narrative suggested by the allegory. Using reports that similarly offer detailed accounts of violence, albeit mythological, Spero creates an equivalence between the bodies described in newspaper and Amnesty reports to a broader set of references in order to suggest that the suffering female body is the (literal) ground on which patriarchy is built. Spero’s citation of the myth reads [Figure 4.5]: marduk caught tiamat in his net and drove the winds which he had with him into her body and whilst her belly was thus distended he thrust his spear into her and stabbed her to the heart and cut through her bowel and crushed her skull with his club. on her body he took his stand and with his knife he split it like a flat fish in two halves and of one of these he made a covering for the heavens.

This extract is well chosen; the language here reads in a similar way to the language of reportage used in the other citations: brutal but affectless. Salient aspects of the story are highlighted and inflected so as to speak to the violence of patriarchy. The myth has an emphasis on a language that implies violent

164 Figure 4.5 Nancy Spero, Torture of Women, 1976. Gouache, typewritten texts, collage and handprinting on laid paper, 60.7 × 292 cm each, framed. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: NGC. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

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penetration – ‘drove the winds’, ‘thrust his spear’, ‘stabbed her’ – Marduk’s violence is blunt, crushing Tiamat’s skull and splitting her open. That said, the connection to torture is oblique. The original context is one of a war in which Marduk challenges Tiamat, a primordial ocean goddess who is more dragon than woman, fighting her for control of the Babylonian Table of Fate.39 It is in battle that Tiamat perishes, not as a result of an asymmetric division of power, but as part of an ongoing conflict. However, the parable clearly resonated for Spero. She describes its inclusion: This ancient Sumerian myth dating (5000 BC) from one of the origins of human culture tells what must have already been the timeless fear, hatred of and cruelty directed towards women . . . This hatred expressed in the dismemberment of Tiamat is seemingly absolved by the idealization of Tiamat as the sky. The elevation of Tiamat to the unattainable is a sublimated version of the fear. ‘Tiamat’ is today still subject to such attacks in prisons in much of the world . . . Despite the mythologizing, the story of Tiamat is another case history comparable to those reported by Amnesty International.40

This reading is reminiscent of Erich Neumann’s interpretation of the myth in The Great Mother, a Jungian analysis of the archetype of the great mother throughout history. Influential on 1970s feminism, Neumann’s text examines Tiamat as a model of the primal feminine, as mother and goddess rather than her more monstrous form. This reading suggests that in killing Tiamat, Marduk installed patriarchal law.41 Connecting Tiamat with both the ‘open gullet’ that ‘seeks to devour Marduk’ and ‘the generative cave-womb’, this description of the mythological character can then be read in line with contemporaneous feminist recuperations of ancient goddesses, seeing the demise of the archaic deity as evidence of matriarchy destroyed.42 Spero’s understanding and reframing of the myth focuses on the ways in which the female body has been subsumed under patriarchy, the myth included not because it stands as evidence but because it is an effective and visceral metaphor for violence that is based on reinforcing a political structure. As a metaphor for the foundation of patriarchal society, the Tiamat myth works both on the level of a goddess having power wrenched violently from her and also because her body is so cruelly mistreated, viciously attacked and then ripped apart in order for a new world to be founded on her remains. However, as a metaphor for the experience of women who are tortured – as ‘another case history comparable to those reported by Amnesty International’ – it is inconsistent. Tiamat comes from a position of power and is challenged because of it. The violence that is done to her body is made eternally visible in the creation of heaven and earth, whereas, as

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is so painfully apparent in the accounts that are given, the body under torture is one that is concealed, people who die from its effects often euphemistically described as having ‘disappeared’.43 Mythology serves to aid the reinterpretation of torture; on top of the pain that has been factually described in the texts above, this text uses the idea of pain as an analogy of suffering in order to tie the stories of torture into a wider narrative of patriarchal violence. The suffering body, gendered female, is therefore dispatched as evidence of patriarchy’s true hostility towards women. However, this reading of Torture of Women is insufficient as an explanation for the work’s efficacy. As the Artaud fragment suggests, the conclusion that this is a visual thesis on historical violence elides the purpose of Spero’s personal interventions into meaning and the index of the artist’s suffering that is registered on the page. Although undoubtedly trying to establish an alternative history in line with feminist practices of the time, which refused patriarchal triumphalism with its narrative of progress and instead suggested that patriarchy was an aggressive system built on the submission of others, the conflict between emotional truth and objective fact remains pertinent. The formal interventions that imply pain, such as the rips and fragments, the mistakes in printing and typing and the smudges of the paint, distinguish Spero’s kind of information from something that mimics a journalistic mode or attempts to enact an historical recovery. Instead, this is work created from a subjective position, made by an individual who responds to the accounts she is reading with embodied empathy, preventing her from accurately transcribing the accounts she has read due to her outrage and compassion. The index of the artist’s hand shows someone unsteady; words are mistyped or written over. In a 1994 interview, Spero states: ‘I typed these reports out on an old bulletin typewriter for the installation. I type badly, and I kept all the messy corrections which revealed my emotion in transcribing these personal accounts of torture and incarceration.’44 What we can see of Spero in this work suggests someone traumatized by what she has read, suffering along with the victims whose words she transcribes. E. Ann Kaplan’s discussion of vicarious trauma suggests a constructive avenue for considering how we can think of the artist’s emotional response to these reports. Kaplan describes how those who hear testimony can themselves experience traumatic symptoms, explaining that particularly therapists working with people who have been violently mistreated are subject to similar symptoms that one would expect to see in people who were direct victims of trauma.45 Drawing on the understandings of how the brain processes limit events, Kaplan concludes that vicarious trauma would most likely be registered in the cortex: the conscious and cognitive mind. Unlike primary traumas, which can be immediately

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dissociated or repressed shortly after the event, secondary trauma works off the hearer’s conscious thought processes. Likely to resonate with some previous trauma experienced by the listener, the secondary traumatization is based on empathy and the emotions it evokes, rather than a subjection to trauma itself.46 This mode of understanding Spero’s response to the information she transcribes is useful not only because it suggests both a genuine engagement with the stories that she hears and recounts, but also a way in which this reframing of torture as an extension of patriarchy works through the artist’s traumatized experience. While I have no wish to discount the problematic nature of this appropriation similar to that of the War Series, nor push aside critiques such as Desa Philippi’s or Mel Ramsden’s discussed in the Introduction, I still believe that interpreting Torture of Women as being conceived of as a work of empathy that records and encourages a literal experience of the pain of others is a fruitful critical path for understanding the motivation of the artist and the defence of Torture of Women as an ethical work.47 By unravelling claims made by both Spero and her champions which see this skewed representation – one that records not the facts of torture but instead the artist’s interpretation and reframing of it – as an ethical ‘act of witness’, we can better understand the ways in which Spero’s politics infused her art.48 Given the nature of Spero’s response, which is framed by the artist in terms of an overwhelming, emotional and visceral reaction to accounts of torture, we can see Spero as vicariously traumatized, a sense of her own mistreatment under patriarchy triggered in the artist, her consideration of the victims’ pain focused through her own feelings of isolation and of her body as vulnerable and suppressed. Therefore, Torture of Women can be understood through the idea that at its basis Spero was attempting to empathetically connect to the victims of violence, engaging in a bodily compassion in order to act against patriarchy, seen by the artist as the cause of their mutual suffering. With this in mind, much of the way in which Torture of Women creates meaning rests on the idea of Spero’s response to the reports that she cites. As suggested above, the texts serve to register Spero’s emotion on the page. In the same way as in Codex Artaud, where quotations are taken from another source and then translated to work for Spero’s examination of her situation, here accounts of torture are converted into a visual testament to Spero’s understanding of patriarchy and the pain that it gives her. Similarly, although other critics have interpreted the figures in Torture of Women as illustrative – Diana Nemiroff, for example, sees the characters as enacting the relationships of power in situations of torture or as representing a universal mourning witness – I would instead suggest that they form an extension of Spero’s response to the stories, similar to

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what Lippard describes as ‘an attenuated image of the artist in a paper mirror’.49 The figures in Torture of Women are sometimes mutilated, as in her disembodied heads on Panel VIII or the strange sexualized, headless figure on panel V; in other places they represent figures in movement, jumping or dancing. Alongside these are monstrous forms, winged, serpentine creatures that dominate the panels. The images are similar to those that feature in the Artaud works, made of comparable materials and with strange malformations and phallic tongues. Because Spero uses the visual language that she developed in the Artaud Paintings and Codex Artaud, which had been established as ‘using Artaud as a vehicle of my angst, of my oppression as a woman artist’, images continue to register Spero’s subjective response to violence on the support in the same way as in the Artaud Paintings and Codex Artaud.50 What we are looking at in Torture of Women is a record of Spero’s empathy: her sense of pain at the way in which patriarchy practises its violent hatred of women upon them. However, rather than a straightforward representation of sympathy, Spero uses pain as the lens through which empathy is enacted. By submitting herself to an enveloping compassion for the tortured, her own iconography delves into the language of myth, pointed to by Benjamin Buchloh as the major intervention that Spero makes into modernist histories, in order to create a work that examines the way that pain is conjured in the brain, not purely as sensation but as something that includes the physical and the emotional, something that is both inflicted unjustly but is also felt by the victim, something that is social and political but also deeply personal and internal.51 Thinking about Torture of Women in this way allows for a more satisfying interpretation of Spero’s iconography. Instead of seeing her images as considered illustrations, we can think of them as affective interpretations: that which Spero imagines when she considers torture. The Egyptian-like figures, sky goddesses and disembodied heads are evocations of the artist’s imagining of the body in pain. Her images serve to illustrate both psychic pain and the way that physical pain manifests itself in the mind and the metaphors it conjures. Coming not directly from the victims whose stories she recounts, instead what we see is the result of those fantasies that occur when thinking about the pain of others. This is reflected in the way that she creates her figures. There are those who seem to illustrate some narrative of injustice, registering the social aspects of a corrupt legal system. An example comes on panel III [Figure 4.6]. In the centre of the support there stands a vignette of a figure whose Roman-esque appearance implies some kind of judicial role, seeming to sentence another figure whose body is almost entirely vertical, either jumping or perhaps being strung from their hands. The diminutive figure to the far right-hand side looks as though they are

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Figure 4.6 Nancy Spero, Torture of Women, 1976. Gouache, typewritten texts, collage and handprinting on laid paper, 60.7 × 292 cm each, framed. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: NGC. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

desperately reaching out to intervene, kept at a distance by the white space that separates them. This scene is legible in the language of corrupt legal systems and those who try to save their loved ones, agonized by their helplessness. However, other images are more abstract, not legible in the framework of narrative. On panel XI [Figure 4.7] there is a scene that shows an elongated winged monster stand over a group of six women. Although one kneels before it with hands raised in a gesture of surrender, the others are ambiguous, seeming to dance in front of it as it looms over them. The meaning of this scene is unclear; Spero calls it an ‘intimation of hope’,52 Nemiroff suggests that it represents a confrontation with the ‘spectacle of death’, claiming that this ‘can only be confronted by the symbolic spectacle of the living embodied spirit’.53 However, there is nothing defiant in the dance; it looks calm and unchallenging in the face of the huge serpentine monster. Three of the six figures face away from its looming head, seeming unable to look at it directly. Furthermore, their faces and the scumbled silver, bronze and gold surfaces that they are constructed from are so similar to the monster’s that there is an undeniable correspondence between the figures of ‘hope’ and the threat of the monster. Perhaps the monster is not a representation of pain and torture but instead, like the sky goddess, represents primal femininity. If so, why does she loom? What does this say about the mythical gods that Spero seeks to recover, that they prey on women, or are curious about their freedoms? If that is the case, then why do the figures turn away, why do they beg in front of her? To my mind a more straightforward reading of this panel is that it is not legible in terms of message, instead the figures evoke: they evoke looming, monstrous pain; they evoke pleading and moving; they evoke contemplation; they evoke strangeness and distance; most of all they evoke a language that is untranslatable. Kept at a remove, the viewer sees a visual manifestation of a psychic understanding of pain.

170 Figure 4.7 Nancy Spero, Torture of Women, 1976. Gouache, typewritten texts, collage and handprinting on laid paper, 60.7 × 292 cm each, framed. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: NGC. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

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The imagined monsters of real pain roam around the body – jabbing, constricting, weighing down, seizing, ripping – fighting against those fantasy escapes, an imagined body that is free from the strictures imposed by suffering. Moments of narrative clarity may emerge as they do in panel III, but they recede in the imagining of pain. Pain destroys logic, as Elaine Scarry says: ‘[W]ord, self and voice are lost, or nearly lost, through the intense pain of torture.’54 Even in the concluding panel that shows a sky goddess doubly printed and two woodblock-printed pieces reading ‘KNIFE CUT’ and ‘FASCIST PIG’, what emerges is inflected by the anger and disgust of a victim. The text ‘KNIFE CUT’ printed in yellow is punctuated by a sharp, phallic tongue; the slogan ‘FASCIST PIG’ sounds more like an insult hurled at someone who has inflicted pain on the speaker, rather than an assessment of a real situation or an appeal to an audience to act to end injustice. Spero’s use of her own recurring cast of characters – the sky goddess, Artaud, the Egyptian-like iconography – and her focus on her own perception of the experience of torture make this a work that is filtered through her. Even in the text used as the epigraph to the 2010 facsimile of the work ‘and it still goes on, and I wonder how this can possibly be’, while sounding like something that describes an ethical outcry, the emphasis is still shifted to the ‘I’.55 Quoted from a 2009 interview, for an artist who rarely includes her own voice in the work, this addition at the opening to the reproduction of Torture of Women, coupled with a Medusa-like head that acts as a symbolic signifier for the artist, marks this clearly as Spero’s heartfelt response. In the text, ‘it’ and ‘this’ remain ambiguous, referring to some type of unjust suffering; they are non-specific examples of something to be regretted or mourned. By contrast, ‘I’ is a specific and knowable quantity, Spero’s determined incomprehension in the face of inexcusable, though ambiguous, evil the emphasis of the statement. Far from objective witness, this is about a subjective interpretation. Her feelings of outrage, indignation and disgust are strong enough and justifiable enough to seem to be objective through their righteous indignation, in spite of their removal from specific circumstances. Thinking through the language of empathy and witness, this shows that the drive to empathy does not necessarily demand direct action from the viewer. Unlike a work such as Haacke’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Board of Trustees, which asks the viewer to examine their complicity in a system that is implicated in political violence, Spero’s mode subsumes context underneath suffering, the texts here building a thesis on pain and violence, rather than inviting specific action. That said, I do not want to suggest that the bodily empathy that Spero seeks to enact is ineffectual in itself. This manifestation of pain as iconographic material is compelling, pushing the audience to consider suffering as a physical and

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aesthetic material. However, the focus on the suffering female body means that the political drive of this work is to fight patriarchy more than torture, asking women to see their own bodies as subject to persecution and demanding that they act against the system that traumatizes them as a way to end physical violence more broadly. In this way, the political potential of an iconography of pain is made visible; empathy is invoked to immerse the viewer in feeling, to tap in to the experience of pain in the body of the viewer and tie that personal, indescribable anguish to the experience of others, aiming not to propose specific solutions, but instead to invoke anger and forge connections between bodies. Spero encourages her viewers into a compassionate rage, pushing pain to the forefront as a means to induce ire in her spectators. The framing of the work in the context of reportage and witness suggests that outrage is the correct response, that anger is the most objective reaction to accounts that detail the horrors that Spero repeats. Pain is brought into the body: it is something that is meant to be felt and therefore is, if the work is successful, internalized. Empathy in the viewer stems from this at once visceral and psychic language, an understanding of pain that comes from the experiences that are recounted. In this way, the idea of the religious witness re-emerges; the suffering body is brought into significance in order to attest to its experience.

Affective meditation and beholding: medieval modes for feminism In her 1976 text written for the invitation to the opening of the first exhibition of Torture of Women in the A.I.R. Gallery, Lippard makes the suggestive claim that Spero’s works ‘ “scratch” the eye’.56 Manipulating the text, presumably to make it more appealing as an invitation, Spero transcribed Lippard’s prose in her signature fractured type, overprinting an image of her sky goddess to intervene into the text as though this were another of her works [Figure 4.8]. In cutting through the text, the foot of the sky goddess brackets out the Es of ‘the’ and ‘eye’, mimicking the text’s suggestion of an assault on the eye and putting emphasis on how vision is directly wounded through contact with her words and iconography, attacked by their content. Coming in 1974 in the wake of formalism’s influence on the American art world, this description of the work as something that makes physical contact with the eye is jarring. Although somewhat eclipsed by 1974, high modernism had privileged a kind of viewing that imagined an eye which stands back from a work, absorbing and assessing line, colour and form. Both

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Figure 4.8 Nancy Spero, Torture of Women, September 1976. The Museum of Modern Art Library (front). New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). © 2018. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried celebrated a version of opticality in which a disembodied distance is implied, the artwork an object available to what Caroline A. Jones describes as the critic’s ‘free floating Eye whose synecdochic links to mental experience and physical reality became attenuated in the extreme’.57 Despite minimalism’s complication of this trope with its privileging of phenomenological experience, postwar American art’s formalist movements retained a distance between artwork and viewer. In the invitation to Spero’s exhibition, this distance is inverted. Turning away from the conception of artwork perceived by the viewer in an almost disembodied way, Spero’s presentation of Lippard’s words offers another version in which her works enact a physical effect on the eyes of the viewer. Recalling the medieval understanding of sight as intromission – that is, the idea that ‘all matter replicates its own image

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through intervening media until the image strikes the human eye’ – this section of text and Spero’s intervention into it suggest that she favoured the idea of an alternative ocularity, one far more in line with the medieval than the modern.58 Spero’s attention to her audience and their engagement in her work has long been the basis for scholarly claims for its feminist success, her mobile viewer moving around the work in a critically and physically engaged non-hierarchical relationship between spectator and artist.59 However, I suggest that in her works made between 1966 and 1976, the use of pain as a metaphor also creates a compassionate engagement in which the object itself becomes an icon of politics and protest. Although made at a moment when devaluing the art object was of critical concern, it is my contention that Spero’s proto-feminist and feminist works were created with a view to imbuing the object with a political spirit that was almost divine. I suggest that in being asked to feel suffering in Torture of Women, Spero’s audience was encouraged to engage in a secular version of devotional practice: channelling their pain through a more profound account of feminine suffering in order to steady their commitment to feminism itself, heightening their political zeal. In order to pursue this argument, I am going to turn to literature that examines devotional practices from the Middle Ages to suggest that this medieval proto-feminist form of worship provides a loose model for Spero’s reinterpretation, present in all of her pain works but manifested most clearly in Torture of Women. The connection of Spero’s work generally and Torture of Women specifically with a medieval mode has been made by a number of critics. Christopher Lyon, for example, describes the work as ‘a modern version of a medieval illuminated Apocalypse’,60 and Nemiroff proposes that the Beatus Apocalypse of Gerona alongside other ‘metaphors drawn from the ancient world . . . provide[s] the poetic structure of the work, giving it universal significance’.61 At this moment in the American art world, Spero was not alone in evoking archaic artworks in the search for a path away from high modernism.62 Benjamin Buchloh suggests that it was by looking to myth that, along with Cy Twombly, Spero managed to interpret and transform modernism’s lessons.63 However, despite Spero’s interest in the archaic and the medieval having been recognized, its implications have not been interrogated. This was a moment when Spero was actively looking for ways of making that were unlike those dominant in the American art world at the time.64 To Spero, formalist practices were aggressive and controlling. Speaking to Buchloh about Minimalism, she states: ‘It excludes. It is exclusionary. It is like a covering. It is like an impenetrable barrier to me of what I think should be.’65 Therefore, by embracing a medieval mode, with her evocation of the tapestry and manuscript forms in both the shape of the whole work, and the headline text ‘Explicit

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Explanation’ that sits at the start of Torture of Women, Spero was not simply looking to history, but was searching for a mode of making that could push back against the dominance of masculinist modernist forms, described by the artist as a ‘cover-up’.66 In rejecting formalism, Spero sought to enact a visceral empathy that establishes an invested and complex relationship between the viewer and artwork in which described suffering is imaginatively projected onto their body. While still very much shown in the context of feminist display – that is, alternative galleries that largely maintain modernism’s white cube format, albeit while complicating the notion of the institution – Spero’s focus on provoking a bodily empathetic response suggests a mode of making designed to challenge disconnected modes of spectatorship. Thinking about how a work of art might leap out and scratch the eye of the viewer means thinking about active works that are demanding of the spectator. More than just an objective recording of the facts of torture, these works instead seek to compel you to understand it on a bodily level. Considering how medieval documents of devotion were used by their owners, seen as possessing apotropaic and amuletic qualities, I want to forge an analogy between these active objects and Torture of Women, thinking particularly about the visceral kinds of engagement with materials that were part of medieval culture, and the role of detail in creating this relationship. In doing so, I do not want to assert a direct equivalence between the kind of engagement I see Spero as inviting and the historically distant and distinct practices of religious piety that defined the lives of the devout in the Middle Ages. Clearly, the relationship between those who actively mourned Christ as part of their daily worship and the objects and texts they used to do so was a more complex and intertwined relationship than that which I describe. Reading The Book of Margery Kempe, for example, offers some insight into the ways in which this practice was intense and visceral, in her case defining how she lived her life, something that she desperately needed to enact in order to repent for what she saw as her sinful earlier years. Her writings speak to a more codified, though subversive, kind of religiosity, something very distant from the ways in which viewers engage with art objects in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Scholars have written extensively on the complex and varied devotional practices that were part of religious life during the Middle Ages, as well as the material world that supported devotional practice, and it is beyond the scope of my study to fully represent or even do justice to the range and intricacy of this fascinating area of research.67 What is clear is that religious faith – especially when experienced as something ecstatic and sublime in the way evidenced in accounts of Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich or Catherine of Siena – or as a practical aid to health and well-being – manifested in objects like birth girdles wherein prayers

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and religious symbols were inscribed onto parchment to act as possible relief and protection in childbirth – is very different from political belief. Although Spero similarly sought to elicit a kind of potent compassion to act as a political force, it is not so overwhelming, its relationship to the society in which it was experienced very different. However, as Spero looked to history as a source of inspiration and metaphor, so too do I look to contemporary theoretical understandings of medieval affective devotion as ripe for borrowing and adapting to investigate something similar at work in Torture of Women. Its basis in belief, its physical, visceral practice, and its gendered understanding are all productive for describing Spero’s approach to political art-making, this framework particularly valuable for the way in which the viewer is at once viscerally, emotionally and ideologically invested through contact with the object. In short, for me the connection to the medieval is something of a thought experiment in line with Spero’s own treatment of historical sources: one in which I imagine what a twentieth-century feminist devotional practice might be, looking to the parallels with medieval modes of reception to think through the implications of centring on pain. Jill Bennett’s 2001 article ‘Stigmata and sense memory: St Francis and the affective image’ argues that the focus on details of the crucifixion in medieval iconography stemmed not from a wish to explain scripture to those who could not engage with the Bible themselves, but instead was a means for people to identify with Christ’s pain. Demonstrating how, in devotional texts designed to aid in reflection on Christ’s suffering, there is a focus on detail that allows the reader to imagine pain rather than on a narrative representation of the process of crucifixion, Bennett notes the focus on the ‘“sense memory” or “emotional memory” of the subject’, identifying that texts are devised in order to ‘resonat[e] within your bodily memory’.68 Detail, for Bennett, becomes a way of engaging with the idea of suffering, working through memory in order to recall sensations that are similar. In order to do this effectively, images were selected not for their representational acuity, but instead for their emotional stimulation; they were the imago agens or active images that invoke affect in the viewer.69 Citing Mary Carruthers’s description of ‘the importance of tagging material emotionally as well as schematically, making each memory as much as possible into a personal occasion by imprinting personal associations like desire and fear, pleasure or discomfort’ to effective mnemonic technique, Bennett identifies the connection between affect and devotion.70 Spero’s transcription of detail and focus on the body can be understood as similar to the heuristic mode that Bennett describes: that which is ‘concerned principally with retrieval’.71 This is in the service of a greater knowledge not of the object, but of the experience of pain. Bennett states: ‘Viewing, on this account,

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Figure 4.9 Nancy Spero, Torture of Women, 1976 (detail). Gouache, typewritten texts, collage and handprinting on laid paper, 60.7 × 292 cm each, framed. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: NGC. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

is not restricted to retinal impression and interpretations; the engagement of the senses implies a transformative process through which the properties of images are transferred to the viewer. In effect, one becomes the image through an encounter with it.’72 The interventions into the texts in Torture of Women provide an illustration of this process. On panel XII, for example, there are printed four sections of typewritten text that are collaged on to the support. Spero transcribes a horrific account of sexual violence in Turkey [Figure 4.9]. It reads: ------------------------------------------When I did not answer, they sta -----------------------------------------did not answer, they started threatening me in the following -----------------------------------------When I d -----------------------------------------. . . When -----------------------------------------. . . When I did not answer, they started t reatening me in the following manner. ‘You don’t talk

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now .’ they would say ; ‘in a few minutes, when our hands will start roaming in between your legs, you will be singing like a nightingale. -------------------------------------------

Echoing a faltering and hesitant voice, Spero’s initial failures at transcription cut words into two, not undermining their significance but instead asserting their trauma. Across the surface are stains and rips that remove sections of the text or mark them; the fragility of the paper implies a language that is barely able to be registered, one that could disappear at any moment. After the word ‘now’ and between the word ‘say’ and the semicolon that follows it, there are two rounded marks on the paper that resemble faded cigarette burns or watermarks. Either rips in the page or stains on its surface, these moments draw the viewer into their detail. Asemic marks provide the absorptive points of focus that Bennett describes through Roland Barthes’s description of the punctum, the ‘prick or shock that characterizes our affective response to the photographic image, cutting across the narrative reading’.73 Implying a depth to the surface, these rips and marks evoke wounds: openings created through violence that recede into the unrepresentable but familiar depths of physical pain. These unruly breaks in the surface intervene in the story recounted. In another extract to the right of the one cited above, breaks in the surface erase letters in words. Their meanings are always decipherable, yet the interventions affect the way the text communicates, picturing the language of trauma, the suppressed experience behind its telling. The failed attempts at typing in the extract above adds a similar effect, the loss of the ‘di’ in ‘did’ and the ‘h’ in ‘threatening’ creating moments of detail that emotionally tag the texts, offering repeated reminders of suffering for the viewer as they move along the expanse of the work. The text to the far right- hand side of the picture plane further demonstrates this tagging. The sky goddess figure is printed within a text, her form intervening into the type so as it makes space for her, sometimes creating gaps, sometimes typing over her [Figure 4.10]. The text reads: they hanged me from my onto a pipe in the corridor. sI hung half naked, several people beat me with truncheons. I

wrists

fainted

Because the sky goddess is enveloped by this text, something of its meaning is transferred onto her form; she becomes infused by this suffering as she seems at

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Figure 4.10 Nancy Spero, Torture of Women, 1976 (detail). Gouache, typewritten texts, collage and handprinting on laid paper, 60.7 × 292 cm each, framed. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: NGC. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

once to be illustrating, interrupting and subsumed by this narrative. The scale of the scroll and the invitation to treat the relationship to it as unfixed and mobile, rather than a linear progression, means that every sky goddess becomes a representation of this sentiment. The viewer who then sees the goddess in panel IX, cramped and imprisoned, connects this imprisonment to the tale that is recounted, or else if they are progressing though the work in a different way, sees the text as explicatory of her confinement. This repetition and development of iconography, of rips and fissures, of stains and marks builds moments for reflection and experience, ‘points of resonance’ that act as metaphors for suffering throughout the work.74 Spero describes this in a 1977 interview with Carole de Pasquale: ‘You can go to any place on the work, and it is simultaneous with any other part of the work.’75 We can think of Spero’s detail, then, in the way that Bennett describes detail in late medieval naturalism, something that ‘enlivens the whole, but is never contained by it, as it would be in perspectivally constructed space; on the contrary, it retains the capacity to obtrude from the whole, to expand to fill the devotee’s field of vision’.76 The potential of this empathetic mode in the medieval period is drawn out by Sarah McNamer in her fascinating book Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion. McNamer outlines a compelling argument that affective meditation was a kind of proto-feminist pursuit that empowered its practitioners, an active and productive form of gendered engagement with Christ that allowed both the possibility of spiritual advancement and a subtle form of protest against patriarchal

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violence.77 Examining the sponsae Christi, religious women who were married to Christ in what was understood to be a legal betrothal, McNamer suggests that the success of the marriage, and therefore the assurance of the bride’s place in heaven at Christ’s side, was based on the proof of love through vicarious suffering. Describing the process of suffering through mourning that focused on the Passion of Christ, McNamer describes the underlying assumption that underpinned this practice: ‘the assumption that actions and emotions are of a piece, that actions both produce and reflect emotion’.78 Thinking back to Spero, although the experience of suffering and the promised reward diverge, there is something similar at work in the invitation to empathy issued by Torture of Women. Emotion and action are interlinked; by seeking to create her transformative viewing mode, Spero encourages the audience to take this suffering into themselves in order to better know patriarchy and its effects. Rather than comparing the suffering of others to the suffering of women in the West, in this version the suffering of torture victims becomes something for viewers to feel through in the service of a wider battle. Steadying feminist devotion to the cause, Spero installs victims as martyrs, inviting her audience to bring the victims’ pain into their own body as she has done, first in order to know pain and then to fight the source of suffering. This is the ‘private, reflective and ultimately individualized encounter with the ethical dilemma posed by political subject matter’ that Schlegel describes, one which echoes the private reflections of the devout.79 Thinking of Spero’s feminist picture-making in terms of a religious mode of viewing may seem counter-intuitive, but the reliance on affect and allegory creates a work that uses the metaphor of personal pain and suffering as an ideological tool. However, because this work is not made as an artefact of religion, but instead of a feminist politics, it needs a different language in order to be convincing. What is required to induce feminist faith is evidence filtered through a language of personal experience, rather than sacred vision. The gathering of personal accounts of torture are necessary to evidence its realities to contemporary audiences, seeming to make the information contained more true than it would be if it did not contain these references. Here, the slogan‘the personal is political’and the practice of consciousnessraising are again relevant. Demonstrating the contemporaneous trend of seeking the realities of oppression through accruing personal accounts, conclusions about structural oppression can be drawn from specific circumstances. However, as filtered through Spero’s iconography of angry, pain-filled images, evidence becomes like religious testament, proof of an idea because it is framed in those terms. Spero’s repeated assertions about the nature of torture being connected to the realities of women’s experience more broadly stands as an assertion of faith over fact. It is worth here returning to her interview with Pasquale in which she states:

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The greater portion of torture victims have been men, but I zeroed in on the torture of women because symbolically the abuse of women sexually, and their vulnerability historically speaking is significant. Women have supposedly been protected, yet they have been universally victimized. It’s an institutional thing. Torture is an institution of the state largely controlled by men.80

With a zealot’s passion, Spero remakes the information she is presented with, seeing the martyrs she selects as victims of an infernal violence. Her comments to Pasquale underline this conclusion; at one point she states: ‘[T]heir case histories are out of hell.’81 For Spero, her belief in the cause of feminism and her faith in it as a world view allow her to create this secular vision. In this devotional picturing, we, the audience, witness suffering in order to feel it and understand it. Pain here works to instruct. If you are unconvinced by the affect, the work fails, the images of stalking, guntoting figures, bears and three-headed monsters, reading as more kitsch than ethical.82 The connection to the undeniable horrors recounted adds weight to the reading of artistic pain and therefore to the success of the work. If each can be infused with the other, the factual accounts with the language of visceral disgust and the iconographic representation with genuine trauma, then the work can communicate a powerful indictment of violence. The success of this is, of course, down to the aesthetic judgement of the particular viewer, whether the weight of the stories connects for the viewer with the type of iconographic rendering that Spero pursues. For the convinced, ‘Spero’s collages “scratch” the eye’, creating a physical connection to the piece. The viewer is attacked by it, in Lippard’s violent terms actively marked by a work and its affecting message. It is brought into the body: it is something that is meant to be felt and therefore is, if it is successful, internalized. Empathy in the viewer stems from this visceral, psychic language, an understanding of pain that is connected to the experiences recounted. Spero’s engagement in an art of witness for a feminist cause reveals a proselytizing drive that was important to Spero’s feminist art practice. Evidenced through her angry writings, involvement in activism and consciousness-raising, the need to create evidence against patriarchy was keenly felt. As Günter Thomas states, ‘[A]ny act of witnessing, confession, or testimony – even in “historical” cases – relates to disputes, unstable, conflicting, or transitory realities.’83 In Torture of Women, Spero’s evidence is created through the register of suffering, pain put forward as testament to the real conditions of women under patriarchy. It is important, then, that affective devotion was as McNamer argues a feminine practice; although the devotee could be of either gender, compassion itself was

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gendered feminine through a belief that women were more equipped to feel emotions of medieval religious compassion and grief which were opposed to male stoicism or even aggression in response to the Passion. In a practice McNamer identifies as ‘beholding’, the reader sees through Marian eyes, perceiving the suffering of Christ from the point of view of the grieving mother. Beholding, to McNamer, implies both that you are in physical contact with the suffering you see – literally holding with the eyes – but also that there is an ethical imperative that underlies the concept: the reader is beholden to Christ.84 Therefore, in line with recovery of matrilineal histories enacted by feminist contemporaries such as Mary Beth Edelson’s Woman Rising / Spirit (1974) or Betsy Damon’s The 7000 Year Old Woman (1977), by using this mode of affective devotion, Spero is also arguably recovering a lost female practice. The focus on women’s experience, women’s stories and the representation of female figures suggests something similar to beholding: because women are ‘victims par excellence’ the viewer is more able to feel compassion for them, to connect to their suffering, less likely to blame them for their punishment. In this way, the empathy enacted by Torture of Women is marked as feminine, an invoking of female empathy for women. For clarity, that is not to suggest that this work was made only for female audiences; instead it is to suggest that Spero privileged women’s abilities to empathize with each other and foregrounded this way of feeling which she gendered feminine. In this, her practice resonates with her contemporaries and colleagues: Ana Mendieta’s Silueta series (1973) with its faceless bodily traces, for example, or Carolee Schneemann’s Fuses (1965), with its softened, flickering detail that gives the impression not only of sight but of touch and experience.85 Spero’s contemporary version of affective devotion was designed for a feminist audience in order to testify to feminist pain. Although diverging from scholarship that seeks to remove feminist artists from their ghettoized status within art history, this reading is more historically accurate than seeing this work as being involved in a mainstream art world. In spite of her interest in and attention to established institutions, during this period Spero’s work was mostly shown as part of feminist art or leftist political exhibitions, her audience largely consisting of people who were already sympathetic to her activist message.86 During this early period of the 1970s, Spero’s focus was on her fellow feminist art community; her reference to political atrocity not serving the wider education of the public, but instead reminding her feminist sisters of the suffering of women at the hands of men. The agony described on the page is one that is framed by the artist as being distinctly female, pain both physical and emotional that was to be responded to with feminine empathy. Lippard quips: ‘No such thing as woman’s

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art or feminine? Well, a man never could have made these scrolls.’ Implicit is that men remain ignorant of the pain represented here; this is a female pain, one that the distance of geography and the diversity of experience does little to erase.87 Rethinking the ways in which the body could be brought into the artwork for activist effect, Spero used pain as a way to conceive of a political art that aimed not only to act against inequality and injustice but to create something to be felt and mourned, connecting bodies in visceral and political empathy.

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Enacting this bodily, affective and effective mode of witness, Torture of Women marks the culmination of an iconography of pain as a political mode. Influenced by Hélène Cixous’s The Laugh of the Medusa, which Spero read in 1976, she departed from the dominating logic of pain as a political weapon and instead started to investigate the potential that existed in pleasure in her next major work Notes in Time on Women (1976–9). The work that sits between these two important points of her canon, Her Body Itself (1977), demonstrates the beginnings of this shift [Figure 5.1]. Two typewritten extracts of text are transcribed onto the 7 feet of paper that makes up the support: the first is an extract from the ‘order rites for a consecration of Catholic virgins’ which details the process by which young nuns become the brides of Christ; the second an extended section from The Laugh of the Medusa. A Christian typewritten cross that intervenes into the first text is juxtaposed with the red triangle drawn into the extract by Spero; against the masculine symbol of Christianity is a feminine symbol implying the womb and the vagina. The imagery that accompanies the texts represents this shift towards positive representations of women that Spero chose to pursue around this time. On the left are three sets of disembodied legs linked by a thin line of paint. They walk away from the Catholic text, familiar dismembered bodies responding to the texts around them. To the right is an image of a woman kneeling to face the viewer, the red triangle in the text sitting almost exactly parallel to her abdomen, implying a transposition of her reproductive organs onto the text. Behind her are two small feet, seemingly of a young child, that appear to be coming from her body. The allusion to birth is clear. The female body has transformed in this piece from being victim of patriarchal violence to being fertile and (pro)creative, facing the viewer straight on to mark this change. Gone are what Lippard describes as the ‘flashes of intuition, anger, insight, love, hate need. Direct lines from one unconscious to another via ancient words dug out of vellum tombs’, as are the ‘recipes for resentment spread to the politics of prurience’.1 Instead of prurience, we see an 185

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Figure 5.1 Nancy Spero, Her Body Itself, 1977. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

imaging of female sexuality that is positive and opposed to masculine wishes to control it. From the restricted and suffering body in Torture of Women, this body is strong, fertile, confrontational and in control. Cixous had been important for Spero in moving on from a concentration on pain. The Laugh of the Medusa had appealed to the artist, and inspired by Cixous’s description of écriture féminine she had started her exploration of the potential for a peinture féminine. This imaging of the strong female figure whose body is her own is one of the first examples of a new approach in her work. By the point Torture of Women was completed in 1976, Spero’s explorations of the political potential of pain had developed the expressionistic language of her earlier career and transformed it into one for political significance. Responding first to the Vietnam War and then to the situation of women, the solution for creating an effective form of arts practice came not from a new aesthetic principle, but through inscribing the visual language that Spero had been developing since art college with the affect of activism. By engaging her sense of suffering, filtering her own experience of pain, fantasy and her imaginary idiom of anguish through the works, the language that she had developed became primed for feminism. As with her explorations of the bodies that suffered in Vietnam and of Artaud’s hysterical voice, the real pain of victims allowed Spero to add female martyrs to her muses of suffering, focusing her attention on the details of pain and allowing her to do the same for her audience. During these eleven years, a conceptual engagement with pain had worked with Spero’s turn to politics. One of a number of artists reconsidering the ways in which political art could harness emotion as a tactic against both corrupt governmental policy and societal injustice, Spero’s explorations of pain used private emotions as ammunition in political intervention. Rethinking the ways in which the body could be brought into the artwork for activist effect, Spero used pain as a way to conceive of a political art that aimed not only to act against inequality and

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injustice but to create something to be felt and mourned, connecting bodies in visceral and political empathy. What this work demonstrates is that pain is a powerful political mode, offering a way to explore ideological questions through how they make us feel, inviting a stronger investment in efforts to challenge injustice and make change. Again, Adrienne Rich points to the ways in which this can be effective. In her 1969 poem ‘Tear Gas’, she states: The will to change begins in the body not in the mind My politics is in my body.2

With the body as the site through which politics takes root within the subject, ideologies are felt: they have an internal presence that makes structures and injustices visceral and personal. Pain, with its inherent vulnerability and call to appeal, connects people, and creates communities of caring based on compassion. It is a mode that privileges care and love as responses to oppression and the suffering it causes. Having focused so closely on the historical moment of the late 1960s and early 1970s in America, it is worth briefly considering the relevance of pain as an iconographic strategy for activism and political art today. Although we live in a changed world, emotional metaphors have retained their power, and have in some ways amplified since the turbulence of the Vietnam era. As Zizi Papacharissi traces in her book Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology and Politics, social media has created the conditions where people’s feelings about political questions can be networked to create large communities of individuals who feel similarly despite geographic distance, and this can become a significant factor in major political changes.3 Feeling and politics are becoming more entwined thanks to digital platforms which allow for increased engagement between those who are similarly outraged or disgusted by social realities as well as those whose opinions explosively diverge. Although the exact role played by emotional investment in the recent global wave of populism is unquantifiable, still scholars have been exploring its effects on governmental elections in Turkey, India and America, and in the UK’s EU referendum, among others.4 This demonstrates the power but also the risks of emotional politics; while my study has focused on a community working against war, racism and misogyny and the benefits to this progressive programme offered by a politics of emotion, these are just as available to those who seek to enact regressive and violent measures, as Sara Ahmed describes in her chapter on love in The Cultural Politics of Emotion which considers how white nationalists build narratives about how love for your country results in the need to protect it from immigrant invaders.5 Of course,

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there is no political mode that is inherently moral, but the specific risk of emotional politics is also its potential: it invites people to follow their feelings rather than seeking objectivity (a mode that itself can be polluted by the social structures that underpin it; only slightly more than a century ago it was considered by some to be objectively true that women were not to be trusted with the vote) allowing for people to base their political knowledge on their intimate realities. In the art world, feeling in the service of a cause is a tactic still employed by activists. An example from 2015 is ‘CRYING: A PROTEST’ carried out at Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958–2010 (5 May 2014–7 March 2015) at Dia: Beacon in memory of Ana Mendieta. Intervening in the retrospective exhibition by the artist who was tried and acquitted of her murder in a case that many still question, activists cried for the loss of Mendieta and the celebration of Andre. The advertisement for the event posted on Facebook by Jennifer Tamayo and Christen Clifford read: ‘TEARS/ TEARS/ TEARS/ TEARS/ TEARS/ TEARS/ TEARS/ TEARS/ TEARS/ TEARS/ TEARS/ TEARS/ TEARS/ TEARS/ TEARS of JOY/ TEARS of TERROR/ TEARS for ANA MENDIETA/ come celebrate the last day of Carl Andre’s DIA retrospective at a public cry-in/silueta party. bring your own tears.’ Writing about the event in which the plan was to ‘walk around the Carl Andre exhibit for about 20 minutes, crying and/or emoting individually, then convene in the show’s main room for a “crying climax” of loud wails’, Marisa Crawford offers a powerful description of her experience of the protest which is worth quoting at length: I looked at an installation of metal squares placed in patterns and shapes along the floor. I thought about how women’s emotions are policed in our culture. How Mendieta’s powerful artwork—some of which features imagery challenging gendered hierarchies and violence against women—was used in court by Andre’s lawyer to suggest she committed suicide. How prominent male artists of the time came to Andre’s defense. How to this day we’re all too eager to defend male artists who are abusers and to point fingers at women who are abused. I thought about women artists like Yoko Ono and Courtney Love, who are often defined by their great artist husbands’ lives, and sometimes even blamed for their deaths; how their own powerful work is frequently eclipsed. I thought of how Mendieta’s work has been largely overshadowed by her death, yet Andre’s retrospective is not touched by it; I searched the museum booklet for Mendieta’s name and found it nowhere. I cried into my hands, wiping my eyes sloppily on my giant scarf as nearby museum guards eyed me suspiciously, speaking quietly into walkie talkies.

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I walked into the exhibit’s main room at 3:15 to end the performance with loud group crying. The space filled with a cacophony of sobs and wails and sniffing snot and choking back tears and gasping for air. It was stunning, and I started crying more intensely immediately, glancing from the artwork to the museum booklet and back again. Other museum attendees were stopped in all corners of the room, staring at us crying women and talking quietly to one another. Several performer/protesters collapsed on the floor, sobbing in front of individual installations like they were at a loved one’s grave. Many of these women are my best friends; they make up my community of feminist poets and artists mostly in our 30s, so close to the age Ana was when she died with still so much artistic brilliance to offer the world.6

Here we can see reflected the consolidating power of emotional politics, the potential to connect to your own sense of injustice, to others who feel similarly, and to your anger at the structures that allow it to continue. The ‘messy tears we cried in her honor’ are performative and aggravating, they seek to interrupt the implications of Andre’s retrospective in his continued canonization and make clear that his legacy will not go unchallenged by those who feel his celebration unjust. Appeals to visceral empathy are also important to contemporary practice. Jennifer Doyle has described this in her book Hold it Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art which considers artists who examine pain and complex emotional realities like Ron Athey, Franko B, Carrie Mae Weems and David Wojnarowicz. Furthermore, recent artists, too, can be considered as expanding and developing this framework. Sondra Perry’s complex and nuanced Typhoon Coming On at the Serpentine Gallery, London (2018), for example, explored histories of colonialism and its legacies in the racist structures of our contemporary moment. Taking as a starting point the painting by J. M. W. Turner, Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming On (1840), Perry created a dense installation in which the viewer was asked to invest physically and psychologically in its message, the massive projections of closeup video of the surfaces of the painting that appeared to ooze and roil were viscerally effecting, the video work TK (Suspicious Glorious Absence) – which showed body camera footage, adverts, snippets of Black Lives Matter protests, reports of curfews and raids relating to racist policing in the US, and Eartha Kitt’s ‘I Want to be Evil’ – is shown on a television positioned against a large-scale projection of a digitally manipulated rendering of the artist’s own skin that fills the gallery wall. In Graft and Ash an avatar of the artist describes the connections between the body, race and broader capitalist concerns regarding productivity

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and self-improvement, mounted on exercise machines that the viewer can use while listening to the avatar. While a very different approach to Spero’s, there is something of pain’s call to visceral empathy here. The viewer is immersed in the environment, the close-up digital renderings of paint and skin that have been manipulated so as to move like waves unsettle perception, its narratives ask us to consider the individual body as a territory marked by politics, the ways in which specific bodies have been violently mistreated over the course of centuries, and is related to the artist’s own experience in her various uses of her own manipulated image. If this roiling, ultra-saturated environment were just that, then perhaps we could think of it purely in terms of its affective presence, but instead with the knowledge that what are represented are historical and political realities: the projection that fills our perception is an artistic record of the Zong massacre, a real event in which 133 people held as slaves were thrown overboard a slave ship so that its owners could claim insurance money on their lost ‘cargo’; the footage in TK (Suspicious Glorious Absence) relates to the daily structural violence experienced by people of colour; and the artist’s avatar’s reflections on the ways in which our bodies experience the structures we live under – it connects the ongoing suffering of others to our own visceral experience, asking us to reflect on the relationship and feel something of the unsettlement and discomfit that the politics requires. Language used in the reviews of the show echo this: Ben Luke summarizes the experience as ‘sublime and gut wrenching’;7 Jonathan Jones claims it ‘wrenches my soul’;8 and Hélène Selam Rose Kleih suggests that the installation ‘invades our senses with a foreign fear’ making the viewer into ‘active participant, rather than a bystander of trauma’.9 This version of a practice that connects viewers through pain is perhaps more appropriate to our contemporary moment. Unlike Spero’s appropriation of the pain of people of colour, particularly in the Global South, to describe her own alienation and oppression as a white woman, Perry speaks to something of her own experience as a black woman, describing the historical and contemporary violence experienced by black people, asking her viewers of all races to viscerally contemplate black pain. This is just one example of contemporary art exploring a similar mode to the one that transformed Spero’s practice in the late 1960s. As pain and emotion are inherently related to the individual body, no one description of its relationship to art and culture can be adequate, bodies experience the world differently, according not only to their historical moment, but the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, age, disability, and the economic and geographical position they inhabit. Pain offers the opportunity to connect disparate bodies that diverge

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in these key ways, focusing on a sensation that although particular is nearly universally known and understood, and forging communities and political allegiances through this shared bodily reality. Pain’s insistent viscerality requires us not to focus on just our emotional responses but also the specific physical realities that underlie them. Certainly empathy can fail, but if effective it has enormous potential to connect individuals and form political communities. This study has considered one example of the ways in which objects can facilitate this, making artworks that not only speak to political questions but act politically, inviting their viewers to stand witness to injustice in a visceral, political empathy.

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Notes Introduction 1 This can be seen as being paralleled in recent political culture. The women’s marches in 2017 and 2018, for example, were in part an expression of personal outcry at the election of a man who had been recorded describing – and boasting about – sexual assault. 2 Born in 1926 in Cleveland, Ohio, Nancy Spero grew up in Chicago and trained in the School of the Art Institute in the city between 1945 and 1949. In her twenties and thirties, Spero spent much of her time in Europe. She went to Paris immediately after her graduation, training at the École des Beaux-Arts and with André Lhote. Returning briefly to New York and then Chicago where she married the painter Leon Golub and had her two eldest sons, the family then moved to Italy, spending a year in Naples and Ischia before moving to Bloomington, Indiana, where Golub taught. In 1959, they decided to move to Paris in part as a means to escape the dominance of formalism and the aversion to figuration which had swept the American art world, and which both artists positioned themselves against. It was during this period that she created the Paris Black Paintings, influenced by Art Informel; this is a series of heavily worked oil paintings that examined familial and intimate relationships in an abstract figurative language influenced by myth. These paintings were the first to gain Spero some sustained success, with shows in Galerie Breteau in 1962, 1965 and 1968 as well as an exhibition at the American Cultural Center. However, as an artist Paris was isolating for Spero, with her youngest son Paul born during this time, and domestic responsibility dominated her experience while there. In 1964 the family moved to New York. 3 ‘Response to Nina Yankowitz’s Questionnaire of December, 1976’, n.d., Box 5, Folder 9, Nancy Spero Papers 1940s–2009, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 4 See, for example, Amy Schlegel, ‘Codex Spero: Feminist Art and Activist Practices in New York Since the Late 1960s’ (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1997)’, 20–89. 5 Nixon, ‘Spero’s Curses’; Kimberly Lamm, ‘Writing the Drives in Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud’, in Addressing the Other Woman: Textual Correspondences in Feminist Art and Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 107–45; Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Spero’s Other Traditions’, in Inside the Visible ed. Catherine de Zegher (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 239–245.

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6 It is this that, for me, marks the distinction between works made before the War Series – such as her Paris Black Paintings (1961–5) with their terse affect, existential themes, and complex approach to figuration – and the works that I argue are conceived of through an attention to pain. When making the War Series, the Artaud works (1968–72), and Torture of Women, Spero was deliberately trying to affect change: no longer aesthetic explorations of alienation, instead the works sought to intervene in a wider political sphere, seeking results. Spero is an interesting case study in this regard as her turn to politics came relatively late, in the mid-1960s on her return to New York from Paris when the artist was in her late thirties. As such, she had an established career with established concerns making the change in her approach and iconography more apparent. While there is still much work to be done on her earlier practice to add to the existing scholarship by writers such as Elaine King, Geneviève Breerette and Christopher Lyon, to my mind there is a distinction to be made between, on the one hand, works for which there is an important underlying politics to be read, and on the other, work that is designed to act politically. I see the break between the former and the latter coming with the War Series. 7 By 1965, the war in Vietnam had been raging for a decade, claiming military and civilian lives as it grew. This was the year in which America had just begun to engage in earnest, sending in troops as combatants rather than the euphemistically termed Military Assistant Advisory Group which officially stood apart from taking direct action. Despite ongoing social and artistic protests against the war since its start – Wally Hedrick, for example, had been making work against the conflict throughout the decade – it was in 1965 that activities accelerated, and a mass movement began to take shape. Spero and Golub’s involvement in the anti-war action of this time can be dated to between April and June of that year when their signatures appear on the second of two anti-war advertisements taken out by the arts-activist group Artists and Writers Protest in the New York Times, published on 27 June. Despite not having been involved in political action before, Spero joined the movement from almost its outset, engaging with actions organized by Artists and Writers Protest and later the Art Worker’s Coalition (A.W.C.), which formed in 1969, in order to express furious disgust at US foreign policy. 8 It was through her contact with the A.W.C. that Spero first became involved in feminism. Emerging from within the activism that attacked the major institutions of art and demanded artists’ rights as part of a leftist, anti-war programme, feminist groups – feeling that the issue of representation for women was being sidelined by the A.W.C. – met to form Women Artists in Revolution (W.A.R.) in 1969. Consisting of fifty-four members, including some well-known figures such as Agnes Denes, Cindy Nemser and May Stevens, W.A.R. acted as a catalyst for other feminist arts-activist groups to emerge, with numerous organizations forming during 1970 and 1971 including the Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists, Women Students and Artists for

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Black Art Liberation and ‘Where We At!’: Black Women Artists Inc. Spero was an early and enthusiastic member of the feminist collectives that emerged at the turn of 1970, particularly of W.A.R. and the Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists. These groups sought to raise the visibility of women artists, while insistently revealing the bias of the arts institutions that shielded themselves from criticism through claims that they were gender – and race – blind, suggesting that their only criteria was ‘quality’. With sit-ins, protests and actions aimed at a variety of institutions, W.A.R. and the Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists collaborated to draw attention to women’s exclusion. Alongside the focus on protesting against the museums was an interest in creating structures that could address the lack of representation of women artists. A series of alternatives that sought to take on the role more normally provided by mainstream institutions and commercial galleries were put into place. W.A.R. established the first women’s alternative arts space in New York, The Women’s Interart Center, in 1969 to nurture and support women artists working across disciplines and the Ad Hoc Committee assembled a slide library, designed to counter exclusion that relied on the pretext that there was dearth of conceptual, sculptural and light works being made by women. Later, in 1972, a group of artists including Spero but also Barbara Zucker, Susan Williams, Mary Grigoriadis, Dotty Attie and Maude Boltz founded the Artists in Residence Gallery (A.I.R.), the first to exhibit only women’s work in a context that mimicked co-op galleries, signing up artists to represent in order to increase their visibility in an art market in which success was heavily influenced by gallery endorsement. Collaborating to contest the exclusion of women artists from the art world and to insist on their particular contribution, feminist arts-activists succeeded in, if not correcting institutional bias, at least starting the conversation around gender in art, one which is still developing at our current moment. Feminism was also key to Spero’s increased visibility as an artist and her connection to others. Gaining the solidarity of her peers and playing an important role in the emerging feminist art community, Spero’s professional profile underwent a significant change. Fighting against injustice, war and patriarchy, Spero’s artistic career became tied to her activism, leaving behind the individualistic, alienated artistic identity that she had embraced in Paris, and instead involving herself in a number of collective projects. During this period, the Spero that scholars champion emerged: the artist who was angry, forthright and political. 9 Nancy Spero and Mary Beth Edelson, ‘Conversations: Artist to Artist. An Interview with Mary Beth Edelson’, in The Art of Mary Beth Edelson (New York: Seven Cycles, 2002), 141–9; reprinted in Codex Spero: Nancy Spero—Selected Writings and Interviews 1950–2008 ed. Roel Arkesteijn (Amsterdam: Roma, 2010), 77. 10 Spero and Enright, ‘On the Other Side of the Mirror’, 31. 11 In a short section of Nancy Spero: The Work which describes the thematic coincidence between Spero’s attention to pain and Antonin Artaud’s, Christopher

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14 15

16 17 18

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Lyon points to the visible effects of the disease in the early 1970s in Patsy Scala’s film of the artist at work. Lyon, 141. Robert Enright and Spero, ‘On the Other Side of the Mirror. A Conversation with Robert Enright’, in Border Crossings 19, no. 4 (2000): 18–33; reprinted in Arkesteijn, 31. See Mignon Nixon, ‘Spero’s Curses’, October 122 (Fall 2007): 3–30; Jon Bird, ‘Dancing to a Different Tune’, in Nancy Spero (London: Phaidon, 1996), 40–97; Christopher Lyon, Nancy Spero: The Work (London, Munich, New York: Prestel Publishing, 2010). See Lyon, 141–3; Catherine de Zegher ‘Torture, Tongue and Free Reign’ in Nancy Spero (Birmingham: Ikon Gallery, 1998), 4–15. See Nixon, ‘Spero’s Curses’; Deborah Frizzell, ‘Nancy Spero’s Installations and Institutional Incursions, 1987–2001: Dialogues Within the Museum, and Elsewhere’, (PhD diss., CUNY, 2004), 86–90; Bird, ‘Dancing’, 40–6. Schlegel, ‘Codex Spero’, 178–9. Joanna Walker, Nancy Spero, Encounters (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 33. For example, Bird connects Spero’s fractured language with the bodily and preverbal semiotic chora as theorized by Julia Kristeva. See Bird, ‘Dancing’, 42–60; Frizzell claims that Spero ‘sought a “language of gesture” ’ in her works. See Frizzell, 99. Spero, Nicole Jolicoeur and Nell Tenhaaf, ‘Defying the Death Machine’, Parachute 39 (June–August 1985): 50–5; reprinted in Arkesteijn, 15. For example, quoting VALIE EXPORT’s Das Reale und sein Double: Der Körper (Bern: Benteli Verlag, 1987), Anja Zimmermann states: ‘The conviction that conventional representations, particularly the male projections onto the female body, cannot easily be challenged by seemingly authentic images of the female body has been the stimulus for many performance artists not to work with “positive” images of the female body, but to stage a body which re-articulates its status in patriarchy. Pain and disintegration of the body’s integrity in the representational practices of women have therefore been regarded as tools for the “deconstruction of the female body, as the undoing of its social definitions” (Export 14).’ See Zimmermann, ‘ “Sorry for Having to Make You Suffer”: Body, Spectator, and the Gaze in the Performances of Yves Klein, Gina Pane, and Orlan’, in Discourse 24, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 27–46. See Kathy O’Dell, Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 45–58. That this is a pain as a subject is important to note: when suggesting that pain is a dominant force in her work from 1966 to 1976, it is pain as a thematic concern, not as an autobiographical record of suffering that I allude to. Spero herself was quick to downplay her own biography as a motivation for making. Speaking to Schlegel in 1994, she states: ‘I’ve always thought about the autobiographical in art, and yet I’ve disclaimed that my art is autobiographical. I’ve always wanted my art to be on the

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27 28 29

30 31

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edge, not in the arena of normative behaviour. I wanted to explore the outer territories of experience, and so I shunned an autobiographical art because I felt that my own life wasn’t that extreme.’ Spero and Schlegel, ‘The Art of Getting to Equal: Nancy Spero’, in The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women’s Liberation eds. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998), 362–71; reprinted in Arkesteijn, 44. While not existing in the kinds of extreme situations she cites – ‘the rivers of blood with hundreds of corpses in Rwanda, the news reports from Bosnia’ – Spero instead searches out the extreme in her own experience. Tapping into her familiarity with suffering and pain, Spero drew on these experiences in order to create work that looked outward, to society and injustice. Jo-Anna Isaak, for example, outlines the potentials of pleasure for feminist art in her Feminism and Contemporary Art: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Laughter (London: Routledge, 1996). Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2011), 85–90. Ronan McGreevy, ‘Why did Citizens’ Assembly take liberal view on abortion?’, The Irish Times, 30 June 2017. See In Her Shoes Facebook page, 2018. Available at https://www.facebook.com/ InHerIrishShoes/posts/169204197087339:0 (accessed 13 June 2018). It bears noting that a claim to compassion is central to both sides of the vote: pro-life campaigners also used pain as a central part of their message, not only – erroneously – as an effect of abortion on the foetus, but also for the mother, asserting, again without evidence, that women suffer as a result of abortion. Adrienne Rich ‘Contradictions: Tracking Poems’, in Your Native Land, Your Life: Poems (New York: W.W Norton & Co., 1986), 111. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 216. Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 34. Ludwig Wittgenstein discusses this process of naming sensation; see Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953). Joanna Bourke, The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 131–58. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London, New York: Verso, 2009). A major strand in thinking about representing pain is the ways in which pain

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35 36

37 38 39 40 41

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and suffering of people of colour, particularly black Americans, are represented and represented as spectacle in the media. Sophocles, The Complete Greek Tragedies ed. David Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959). For more on Philoctetes, see Diskin Clay, ‘Introduction’, in Philoctetes trans. Carl Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Seth L Schein, Sophocles: Philoctetes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Sophocles, 401. Philoctetes as a political model stands as an alternative to Bartelby and his politics of refusal as described by a number of key thinkers: Giles Deleuze, ‘Bartleby; or, the Formula’, in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London: Verso, 1998), 68–90; Giorgio Agamben, ‘Bartelby, or On Contingency’, in Potentialities ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 243–71; Slavoj Žižek, ‘Notes towards a politics of Bartleby: The ignorance of chicken’, in Comparative American Studies: An International Journal 4, no. 4 (2006): 375–94. Although the gesture of demanding the recognition of one’s pain is not the same as Bartelby’s famous response ‘I would prefer not to’, both enact a mode of negation. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 7. Bourke, 131. See Alexander, ‘ “Can you be BLACK and Look at This?”: Reading the Rodney King Video(s)’, in Public Culture 7 (1994): 78. See Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenthcentury America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). See ‘Hannah Black’s Letter to the Whitney Biennial’s Curators: Dana Schutz painting “Must Go” ’, eflux Conversations, March 2017, available at https://conversations.e-flux. com/t/hannah-blacks-letter-to-the-whitney-biennials-curators-dana-schutzpainting-must-go/6287 (accessed 29 April 2019). Black’s assertion was challenged by Coco Fusco, who rejected what she saw as calls for censorship based on a reductive reading in her article ‘Censorship, Not the Painting, Must Go: On Dana Schutz’s Image of Emmett Till’. She states: ‘Arguing that Schutz’s painting must be destroyed because whites aren’t allowed to depict black suffering, blaming Schutz for capitalizing on the entire history of racist violence in America, suggesting, as some have done on social media, that she’s tainted by having collectors who are heartless real estate developers, while ignoring the work by a dozen or so black artists in the biennial is not going to advance anything.’ Coco Fusco ‘Censorship, Not the Painting, Must Go: On Dana Schutz’s Image of Emmett Till’ in Hyperallergic, 27 March 2017, available at https://hyperallergic.com/368290/ censorship-not-the-painting-must-go-on-dana-schutzs-image-of-emmett-till (accessed 29 April 2019). See Philippi, 35–54, and Mel Ramsden, ‘Nancy Spero’ (excerpts from the panel ‘Perimeters of Protest’), Art-Rite no. 9 (Spring 1975): 18.

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44 Ramsden, 18. 45 This problem is often dismissed by writers on Spero’s work, who tend to defend Spero against criticism as part of the necessary project of promoting neglected women artists at a time when they were too often sidelined by the art world. Amy Schlegel’s otherwise excellent discussion of Torture of Women offers an example. She claims that the work ‘encodes a feminist-humanist questioning of what torture is as a political phenomenon and as a patriarchal practice’, and suggests that Spero implies that ‘[t]he flip side of this coin is that we (that is, a general, educated western audience) must also learn to recognize how we are all oppressed’. See Schlegel, ‘Codex Spero’, 229. There are two serious problems with the argument that the oppression that is pictured is being used to encourage an ‘educated western audience’ to examine its own position. First, it remakes the real experience of torture into a metaphor for non-violent, hegemonic subjugation experienced by the relatively privileged thereby equating experiences that, although arguably existing on a continuum, are by no means equivalent. Secondly, it also assumes that in a Western society, the brutality being attested to is present only in a more complicated form. The unwritten assumption here is that in the more ‘developed’ West where general populations are educated, state violence is absent. Spero’s recourse to myth in relation to these tales of violence in developing countries does, consciously or not, often engage with a language of primitivism. This is a problem that underlies Torture of Women. It does not deliberately privilege the West, but nevertheless it sets up a dynamic that centres on ‘our’ outrage at ‘their’ mistreatment, complicating claims for her practice as straightforwardly ethical. 46 See, for example, E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Elizabeth Burns Coleman, Aboriginal Art, Identity and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2017); Lenore Keeshig-Tobias, ‘The Magic of Others’, in Language in Her Eye: Views on Writing and Gender by Canadian Women Writing in English eds. Libby Scheier, Sarah Sheard and Eleanor Wachtel (Toronto: Coach House Books, 1990); Karlyn Crowley, Feminism’s New Age: Gender, Appropriation, and the Afterlife of Essentialism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011). 47 Courtney Baker, Humane Insight: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 5. 48 Ibid. 49 Wendy Brown, States of Injury (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 52–76. 50 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 29–30. 51 Ibid., 30. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 31. 54 Quoted in Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 48.

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55 Scarry’s study was included as an extract in the 2010 facsimile of Torture of Women offering a useful starting point for thinking about how pain theoretically inflects Spero’s work. See Scarry, ‘from: The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World’, in Torture of Women, 132–41. 56 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 4. 57 Ibid., 5. 58 Ibid. 59 Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill (Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 2002). 60 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 5. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Alongside commonplace metaphors, Bourke also outlines those metaphors that have fallen out of use – the most telling being religious metaphors – and considers what this implies for understanding how people relate to their bodies. See Bourke, 53–87. 64 Bourke, 62. Friedrich Nietzsche provides a famous example of this when he states, ‘I have given a name to my pain and call it dog.’ See Nietzsche, The Gay Science trans. Walter Kauffmann (New York: Vintage Press, 1974), 249. 65 Bourke, 63–5. 66 Ariel G. Glucklich, Sacred Pain: Hurting the Body for the Sake of the Soul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 47. 67 Ibid. 68 See Butler; Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin Books, 2013); Maria Pia Di Bella and James Elkins, Representations of Pain in Art and Visual Culture (London, New York: Routledge, 2013). 69 Sontag, Regarding, 7. 70 Virgina Woolf, Three Guineas (London: Hogarth Press, 1938), 10. 71 Sontag, Regarding, 6–12. 72 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 76. 73 This is something Ahmed suggests, too, in her complication of Sigmund Freud’s description of pain as that which helps to establish the body’s surface, in which she sees pain pointing to the interaction between the external and internal world, a point of intensification which reconstitutes bodily space. See Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 24. 74 Bourke, 7–8. 75 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 15. 76 Jacques Lacan, Écrits trans. Fink (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006), 425. 77 Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London, New York: Routledge, 2002), 98–103.

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78 These claims have been examined from a number of different perspectives. An early feminist critique was developed by Jane Gallop in her 1985 book Reading Lacan in which she examines the privileging of metaphor over metonymy in structuralist writing, drawing on Luce Irigaray and Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe in order to do so (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). Writers such as Kristian Kahn have developed this; see ‘ “There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship”: Asexuality’s Sinthomatics’, in Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives eds. Karli June Cerankowski and Megan Milks (London: Routledge 2014), 55–78. Lacan’s formulation has also been reread for its structuralist claims; see Russell Grigg, Lacan, Language, and Philosophy (New York: SUNY Press, 2009).

Chapter One: Personal and Political: Pain and Emotion 1966–76 1 Carol Hanisch‚ ‘The Personal is Political’, Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation (New York: Radical Women, 1970). 2 Ibid. 3 Lucy R. Lippard, From the Center (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976), 92. 4 Lippard, Different War: Vietnam in Art (Seattle: Real Comet Press, 1990) 24. 5 See Matthew Israel, Kill For Peace: American Artists Against the Vietnam War (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 146. 6 There are a number of studies that examine the activism and artwork of this period. See Israel; Francis Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); Beth Ann Handler, ‘The Art of Activism: Artists and Writers Protest, the Art Workers’ Coalition, and the New York Art Strike Protest the Vietnam War’, (PhD diss., Yale University, 2001); Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley, London: University of California Press, 2009). 7 See Cvetkovich and Alison M. Jaggar, ‘Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology’, in Gender/body/knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 145–71; Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 8 Berlant, 5. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Sara Evans, Personal Politics (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 106. 12 Ibid., 107. 13 Tom Hayden, for example, author of the Port Huron statement, went on to run for various local and state government positions from the mid-1970s on.

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14 Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1993), 285–6. 15 ‘A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority’, signed by Dr. Benjamin Spock, Marcus Raskin, Mitchell Goodman, Michael Ferber and the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, 1967. 16 Quoted in Amy Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 129. 17 It also bears noting here that the other significant trends were those who moved from avant-garde artistic production to militant activism. This is deftly articulated by Gavin Grindon in his writing on the transition of Black Mask into Up Against the Wall Motherfucker during the late 1960s. See Grindon, ‘Poetry Written in Gasoline: Black Mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker’, Art History 38, no. 1 (2015): 170–209. 18 Published in the New York Times on 18 April 1965, ‘End Your Silence’, and signed by hundreds of artists, writers and art workers, this was the first public statement by the newly formed Artists and Writers Protest Group (AWP), demanding action both from the US government which was at that moment refusing to negotiate with the North Vietnamese to end the war, but also imploring the public to speak out to make their opposition to the conflict heard. The AWP were not the only groups issuing such demands – the Artist’s Protest Committee, for example, published their poster ‘A CALL FROM THE ARTISTS OF LOS ANGELES’ also in 1965 – nor were these public declarations the preserve of the art community. Indeed on the day that the AWP published their advertisement, a similar ad was placed two pages later by the Clergymen’s Emergency Committee for Vietnam entitled ‘16,916 Protestant Clergymen Say — INITIATE NEGOTIATIONS NOW’. 19 Handler, 52. 20 Ibid., 47. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 50–2. 23 It is necessary to rely on photo documentation of the collage as it was burnt by organizers after being displayed in NYU and then Columbia University. This was conceived of as a move against co-option by institutions, preventing it being used by either the government or museums in the future. See Israel, 76–7. 24 Leon Golub, ‘Trends: The Artist as an Angry Artist; The Obsession with Napalm’, Arts Magazine 41, no. 6 (April 1967): 48–9. 25 Of course, the relationship to emotion among the dominant movements in postWorld War II American art are varied and complex. The overwrought machismo of Abstract Expressionism was often conceived as an expression of an inner state. Meyer Schapiro, for example, described it in terms of its motivation by emotion, stating: ‘The impulse, which is most often not readily visible in its pattern, becomes

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tangible and definite on the surface of a canvas through the painted mark. We see, as it were, the track of emotion, its obstruction, persistence or extinction.’ Meyer Schapiro, ‘Recent Abstract Painting’, in Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: George Braziller, 1978), 219. By the late 1950s, there was a turn away from emotion as a motivating force. Frank Stella, for example, described the need to make ‘something that was stable in a sense, something that wasn’t constantly a record of your sensitivity, a record of flux’. See Stella in William Rubin, Frank Stella 1970–1987 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1987), 13. Susan Best points out that the initial sense that Minimalism was emotionless has been nuanced since early responses like Barbara Rose’s description of Minimal works as ‘vacant and vacuous’. See Barbara Rose, ‘A BC Art’ [1965] in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology ed. Gregory Battcock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 285. Best also examines emotion in relation to feminist practice. See Susan Best, Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminist Avant-Garde (London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 40–3. Ibid., 104. Ibid. Israel, 141. Ibid., 140. Jaggar, 145. Ibid. Ibid. Zizi Papacharissi, Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 4–5. Christopher Jencks quoted in Gitlin, 271. Papacharissi, 4. Beverley Jones and Judith Brown, ‘Towards a Female Liberation Movement’, 1968. Teresa Schwartz, ‘Tigers, Wolves and Pussycats’, The New York Element, April–May 1973; quoted in Women Artists in Revolution, A Documentary Herstory of Women Artists in Revolution (Pittsburgh: Know Inc., 1971), 14. Muriel Castanis, ‘Behind Every Artist There’s a Penis’, The Village Voice, 19 March 1970; quoted in Women Artists in Revolution, 15. Women Artists in Revolution, 17. Emily Genauer, ‘Art and the Artist’, New York Post, 7 February 1970; reprinted in Women Artists in Revolution, 45. Substantial critiques of consciousness-raising and its focus on the wound have been articulated by a number of critics for the way in which woundedness becomes the basis of identity. See Brown; and Lauren Berlant, ‘The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy and Politics’, in Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism eds. Ahmed, Jane Kilby, Celia Lury, Maureen McNeil and Beverley Skeggs (London, New York: Routledge, 2000), 33–47.

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42 Hanisch. 43 Ibid. 44 Kathy Sarachild, ‘Consciousness-Raising: A Radical Weapon’, reprinted in Feminist Revolution (New York: Random House, 1978), 148. 45 Ibid., 150. 46 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1963). 47 Ibid., 21. 48 Ibid., 33. 49 Ibid., 19. 50 Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists (Maude Boltz, Loretta Dunkleman, Joan Snyder, Nancy Spero, May Stevens and Joyce Kozloff, eds.), Rip-Off File, 1973. 51 Miriam Schapiro, ‘The Education of Women as Artists: Project Womanhouse’, Art Journal 31 (Spring 1972): 268–70. 52 ‘Editorial’, Off our Backs 1, no. 1 (27 February 1970): 2. 53 Women Artists in Revolution, ‘Woman Artist Revolutionaries of Art Workers Coalition: WAR’, 1969; reprinted in Women Artists in Revolution, 24. 54 Robert Levin, ‘Twelve Artists: Woman’, Changes, 15 February 1970; reprinted in Women Artists in Revolution, 43. 55 Ibid. It is worth noting here the ways in which violence is gendered more broadly. Recently, particularly in the wake of deadly random attacks by men, journalists have discussed the connection between masculinity and violence in articles such as Joan Smith, ‘The seeds of terrorism are often sown in the home – with domestic violence’, The Guardian, 10 July 2017; Helen Lewis, ‘Many terrorists’ first victims are their wives – but we’re not allowed to talk about that’, The New Statesman, 7 June 2017; Mark Berman, ‘One crime connects mass shooters and terror suspects: domestic violence’, The Independent, 19 August 2017. 56 Lippard, From the Center, 229. 57 Carolee Schneemann, More than Meatjoy: Complete Performance Works & Selected Writings (New York: Documentext, 1979), 238. 58 See Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 143. The words are, according to Schneemann, taken from one of Michelson’s students, a friend of hers who was explaining Michelson’s apparent aversion to Schneemann’s approach. This certainly complicates any straightforward reading of this account as representing the patriarchal exclusions of the art world, but nevertheless, Schneemann’s decision to include in her text the description of ‘a man, a structuralist filmmaker’ is telling for understanding her sense of how understanding of her work was restricted by patriarchal assumptions about women’s cultural production. 59 Melzack and Patrick Wall, ‘Pain mechanisms: a new theory’, Science 150, no. 3699 (19 November 1965): 971–9.

Notes 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69

70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

79 80 81 82

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Melzack and Wall. Melzack, The Puzzle of Pain (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 21. Bourke, 229. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy with Selections from the Objections and Replies ed. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Ibid., 27. Bourke, 13. There were a number of voices that sought to bring together physical and psychological suffering. Perhaps the most obvious in terms of emotions affecting the body is Sigmund Freud, particularly in his work on hysteria which forms the basis of Chapter Three. See Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria trans. James Strachey and Anna Freud (New York: Basic Books, 2009). Bourke, 135–54. Ibid., 229. IASP Subcommittee on Taxonomy, ‘Pain terms: a list with definitions and notes on usage’, Pain 6 (1979): 249–52. The IASP definition has come under scrutiny for its neglect of psychological pain. See Ahmed 23–8; and Benjamin Fink, ‘Knowing Pain’, in Knowledge and Pain eds. Esther Cohen, Leona Toker, Manuela Consonni and Otniel E. Dror (Amsterdam, New York: Rodophi, 2012), 1–24. Ibid., 4–7. Bourke, 290. Ibid., 147. Ibid., 291. Paula A. Michaels, ‘Pain and Blame: Psychological Approaches to Obstetric Pain: 1950–1980’, in Knowledge and Pain, 243. Ibid., 244. For more on this, see Bourke, 135–47. O’Dell, 2. For more, see Phillip Ursprung, ‘ “Catholic Tastes”: Hurting and Healing the Body in Viennese Actionism’, in Performing the Body, Performing the Text eds. Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson (London: Routledge, 1999), 138–52; Esther Adler, ‘Marina Abramović’, in WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution ed. Lisa Gabrielle Mark (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007), 209–10; and Jenni Sorkin, ‘Gina Pane’, in ibid., 279. See Frederique Baumgartner, ‘Reviving the Collective Body: Gina Pane’s “Escalade Non Anesthésiée” ’, Oxford Art Journal 14, no. 2 (2011): 247–63. See O’Dell, 1–16. See Christine Poggi, ‘Following Acconci / Targeting Vision’, in Performing the Body, 255–72. Quoted in Baumgartner, 251.

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83 See Frazer Ward, No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience (Lebanon, NH: UPNE, 2012). For more on the role of pain in performance art, see O’Dell; Helge Meyer, ‘Empfindnis and Self-Inflicted Pain in Performance Art’, in Representations of Pain in Art and Visual Culture eds. Maria Pia Di Bella and James Elkins (London: Routledge, 2013), 39–51. 84 For more on this, see Daniel C. Hallin, ‘ “The Living-Room War” Media and Public Opinion in a Limited War’, in Rolling Thunder in a Gentle Land: The Vietnam War Revisited ed. Andrew Wiest (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2006), 245–58; Michael A. Anderegg, Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and Television (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); Bruce Cumings, War and Television (London: Verso, 1994). 85 Bryan-Wilson, 20–2. 86 See Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 83–105. 87 MacKinnon, 84. 88 Spero and Edelson, 77.

Chapter Two: The Suffering of War and the Pain of Alienation 1 Antonin Artaud, Artaud Anthology, ed. and trans. Jack Hirschman (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1965), 38. 2 Spero, Jolicoeur and Tenhaaf, 13. 3 Ibid., 15. 4 Bourke, 53–87. 5 Leon Golub, ‘Bombs and Helicopters—The Art of Nancy Spero’, Caterpillar 1 (1967): 52. 6 Mignon Nixon discusses the fantasy element of war in relation to hysteria in her important study on Spero’s work, ‘Spero’s Curses’, 3–30. 7 For example, an extract is quoted in the catalogues for the survey of her work at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, 1987, see Nancy Spero: Works Since 1950 (Syracuse: Everson Museum of Art, 1987), 38–9; and the 2003 exhibition of the War Series, see Nancy Spero: The War Series 1966–70 (Milan: Charta, 2003), 14; Lyon, too, includes extracts of this text, 78. 8 Nixon, ‘Spero’s Curses’, 16. 9 Golub, ‘Bombs and Helicopters’, 53. 10 Sontag, Regarding, 38. 11 Ibid., 40. 12 Marshall McLuhan, quoted in Montreal Gazette, 16 May 1975. 13 Sontag, Regarding, 34. 14 Ibid., 23.

Notes 15 16 17 18 19 20

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22 23

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25 26 27 28 29

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Butler, 26. Ibid. ‘Angle Shots’, Time, 87, Issue 18, 6 May 1966: 43. Lyon, 90. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror ed. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4. In his ‘Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs’, C. S. Peirce outlines three categories of the sign. The categories are not exclusive, and a number of registers can exist in the same signifier; however, there are distinctive aspects to the classifications. The index is a trace of the object that makes it. Neither resembling nor referring by convention to the thing it represents, it is instead linked physically to its object. Examples include a shadow, a bullet hole or a sundial. The icon bears a resemblance to the thing represented, either abstractly or directly. Portraits and illustrations, for example, are iconographic. The symbol is something connected arbitrarily to its object, requiring a familiarity with its denotation in order to understand its meaning. The most significant example is language, but it also applies to things like traffic lights and signage. Charles Sanders Peirce, ‘Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs’, in The Philosophical Writings of Peirce ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), 104–15. Spero and Stephan Götz, ‘About Creation: Interview with Stephan Götz’, in American Artists in Their New York Studios. Conversations About the Creation of Contemporary Art eds. Craigen W. Bowen and Katherine Oliver (Cambridge, MA; Stuttgart: Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, Harvard University Art Museums; DacoVerlag Günter Bläse, 1992), 149–52; reprinted in Arkesteijn, 116. John Berger, ‘Photographs of Agony’, in About Looking (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 40. Erica Levin, ‘Dissent and the Aesthetics of Control: On Carolee Schneemann’s Snows’, World Picture Journal 8 (Summer 2013): 1–16; Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Catherine Wood, Yvonne Rainer: The Mind is a Muscle (London: Afterall, 2007). Yvonne Rainer, ‘A Quasi Survey of Some “Minimalist” Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, an Analysis of Trio A’, in Battcock, Minimal Art, 264–73. Spero and Enright, ‘Picturing’, 35–7. Schneemann interview with Gene Youngblood, in Expanded Cinema (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1970), 369. Levin, 6–8. Levin, 8. Desa Philippi, ‘The Conjuncture of Race and Gender in Anthropology and Art History: A Critical Study of Nancy Spero’s Work’, in Third Text 1 (1987): 35–54;

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41 42 43 44

45

46 47

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Kimberly Lamm, Addressing the Other Women: Textual Correspondences in Feminist Art and Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). Spero and Enright, ‘Picturing’, 37. This is evident in the letter she sent to the editors of Third Text in 1988 which rails against Philippi’s reading of the work and states: ‘I deny the charges of an imperialist strategy in terms of the other – the primitive.’ See Spero, ‘Letter to the Editor’, Third Text, 1988; reprinted in Arkesteijn, 130–1. Spero connects her objection to the war to her fear for her children in a number of interviews. See, for example, Enright ‘On the Other Side of the Mirror’, 30. As George Lakoff suggests, conflict is often discussed through metaphors and metonymy that suppress the reality of military actions. See ‘Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf ’, Peace Research 23, no. 2/3 (1991): 25–32. Frances Jacobus-Parker has noted this metonymic representation in ‘Shock-Photo: The War Images of Rosler, Spero and Celmins’, in Conflict, Identity, and Protest in American Art eds. Makeda Best and Miguel de Baca (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 57–74. See, for example, Nixon ‘Spero’s Curses’; Matthew Israel, Kill for Peace: American Artists Against the Vietnam War (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013). Israel, 64–7. ‘Viet Cong Mortar Shell inside a Living Soldier’, Life, 14 October 1966. Lisa Tickner, ‘Nancy Spero: Images of Women and la peinture féminine’, in Nancy Spero, exhibition catalogue (London: ICA, 1987), 6. Ibid. The National Co-Ordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam, ‘International Days of Protest Against the War in Vietnam March 25–6’, in New Left Notes, 4 March 1966, 4. Ibid. Spero and Enright, ‘Picturing’, 37. Ibid. As Nina Tannenwald states, ‘[O]ne of the remarkable features of the Vietnam War is how little serious thought U.S. leaders gave to the possibility of using nuclear weapons.’ Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 191. Joanna Walker, for example, has described the hieroglyphic nature of her signs in Notes in Time on Women, claiming that ‘each fragment operates as a condensed site of plural denotation’. Walker, 107. Nancy Spero, ‘Statement’, 1966, Box 5, Folder 9, Nancy Spero Papers, Archives of American Art. Spero, ‘The War Series’, in Nancy Spero (London: Phaidon, 1996), 122.

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48 See Israel, 56. 49 Ibid., 60. 50 Ibid., 204. Another notorious incident was the People’s Flag Show held at the Judson Memorial Church in 1970. Organized by John Hendricks, Jean Toche and Faith Ringgold, a flyer advertising the show described its mission as being to ‘challenge the repressive laws governing so called flag desecration’. The three were arrested on 13 November 1970 and convicted of flag desecration. 51 Lyon concurs with this reading, seeing the eagle as ‘representing the US’. Lyon, 77. Furthermore, in the course of an interview with Enright, he puts it to Spero: ‘The swastika and the imperial—or the American—eagle get conflated in your imagination.’ See Enright, ‘Picturing the Autobiographical War’, 40. 52 Lyon, 77. 53 Indeed, in the 1987 catalogue for Spero’s exhibition in the ICA in London, an illustration of a detail of this painting is labelled as being from Pilot, Eagle, Victim implying not just death, but murder. See Nancy Spero, 28. 54 1953 was a watershed in Jacques Lacan’s thinking in which he fully articulated the three orders which would dominate his thought from this point on. Lacan conceived of the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary as interlinked, combined so as to resemble the Borromean knot in which each section connects to the other sections, but if one link is broken, the entirety of the structure will unravel. Lacan’s work from 1953 until the late 1960s focused on the relationship of the Symbolic to the Imaginary and during the last period of his life examined the relationship of the Real to both the Symbolic and the Imaginary. His conception of each shifted with his writings and seminars and developed throughout. Lacan, ‘The Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real’, in On the Names of the Father trans. Bruce Fink (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 1–52. 55 Lacan, Écrits trans. Fink (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006), 229. 56 For Lacan, the Symbolic is the realm of analytic possibility. He sees Freud’s great discovery as being the potential for psychic cure that exists in language. Separating the domains of language and speech – language being the collective, social use of words, and speech being a subjective expression of personal experience – Lacan sees psychoanalysis’s role as bringing the two into an equilibrium that allows the patient to locate their unconscious desire and move past their symptoms. 57 Ibid., 231. 58 Bird, ‘Dancing’, 54. 59 Scarry, 4–5. 60 Spero and Barbara Flynn, ‘The Artaud Paintings. An Interview with Barbara Flynn’, in Nancy Spero. 43 Works on Paper. Excerpts from the Writing of Antonin Artaud (Cologne: Galerie Rudolph Zwirner, 1986), 1–4; reprinted in Arkesteijn, 65. 61 Ibid., 66. 62 Ibid, 65.

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63 ‘Statement for Magiciens de la Terre’, 1989, Box 5, Folder 11, Nancy Spero Papers, Archives of American Art. 64 Lamm, 122. 65 Spero, ‘Woman as Bearer of Meaning, Not Maker of Meaning’, 1988, Box 5, Folder 11, Nancy Spero Papers, Archives of American Art. 66 Spero says this in a number of interviews and statements on the work. For example, speaking to Jolicoeur and Tenhaaf, she states: ‘He was a very special male. He was a pariah and oversensitive; he was in great pain all the time, physically and mentally, so he took a lot of drugs – opium etc. There were a lot of things that made him acutely aware of his body, and perhaps of the insensitivity that derived from his pariah status. He analyzed himself to pieces and screamed out in anguish and torment at the world. That is not your ordinary male.’ Spero, Jolicoeur, Tenhaaf, 11. 67 Lamm, 107–45. 68 Lucy Bradnock, ‘After Artaud: Art in America, 1949–1965’, (PhD diss., University of Essex, 2010), 208. 69 Spero and Flynn, 67. 70 Ibid., 70. 71 Schlegel, ‘Codex Spero’; Lucy Bradnock, No More Masterpieces: Modern Art After Artaud (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020). 72 Sontag, ‘Artaud’, in Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), xix. 73 Ibid., lvi. 74 Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1958), 8. 75 Ibid., 10. 76 Ibid., 9. 77 Ibid., 13. 78 Ibid., 84. 79 Ibid., 87. 80 Spero and Flynn, 65. 81 The decision to use French rather than English was obviously something Spero had considered carefully and felt was important to her practice. On 12 December 1969, Jack Hirschman writes to Spero responding to a request to see the texts he has translated in the original French and asks her, ‘Are you so sure that the original French is necessary?’, which given her continued and developing use of the text implies a considered decision. See Jack Hirschman, ‘Letter to Nancy Spero’, 12 December 1969, Box 2, Folder 13, Nancy Spero Papers, Archives of American Art. 82 To be exact, this is not a whole sentence. It is the first half of a sentence that reads: ‘Avant de me suicider je demande qu’on m’assure de l’être, je voudrais être sûr de la

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mort.’ Spero’s excerption of it undermines the grammatical coherence of the sentence, meaning that the pronoun refers to nothing.

Chapter Three: Codex Artaud: Hysteria and Silence 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19

Lyon, Nancy Spero: The Work, 109. Sontag, ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’, Aspen 5&6, item 3 (1967): n.p. Ibid. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 11. Bourke, 53–87. Ibid., 53. Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 30. Nancy Spero, ‘Letter to Lucy R. Lippard’, 29 October 1971, Box 18, Folder 17, Lucy R. Lippard papers, 1930s–2010, bulk, 1960s–1990, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. See Box 5, Folder 8 and Folder 9, Nancy Spero Papers 1940s–2009, Archives of American Art. ‘Statement for Magiciens de la Terre’, 1989, Box 5, Folder 11, Nancy Spero Papers, Archives of American Art. Spero and Flynn, 65. Spero, Jolicoeur and Tenhaaf, ‘Defying the Death Machine’, 15. Ibid. See, for example, Mignon Nixon, ‘Book of Tongues’, in Dissidances (Barcelona: MACBA, 2008), 21. Judy Purdom, ‘Nancy Spero and Woman in Performance’, in Differential Aesthetics eds. Penny Florence and Nicola Foster (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 161–74. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions’, October 55 (Winter 1990): 105–43. Indeed, the concept of making suffering visible as a revolutionary gesture is a distinctly Artaudian position. Artaud’s theoretical texts advocate making pain, anger and brutality visible as a transformative experience for an audience. First published by Gallimard in 1938, Le Théâtre et son Double was Artaud’s most coherent outline of his vision for theatre. Comprising of a number of manifesto-like essays that describe the concept of the Theatre of Cruelty, the book engages with metaphors of plague, alchemy and cruelty to explain the character of this new type of arts practice. See Artaud, The Theater and its Double, 8. Bourke, 29. Robert Rauschenberg, ‘Letter to Betty Parsons’, in Robert Rauschenberg: The Early 1950s (Houston: Houston Fine Arts Press, 1991), 230.

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36

Notes

Ibid. John Cage, Silence (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 102. Rauschenberg, ‘Letter’. Spero and Stephan Götz, 117. Ibid. Sheldon Annis, ‘The Museum as a Staging Ground for Symbolic Action’, in Museum Provision and Professionalism ed. Gaynor Kavanagh (London, New York: Routledge, 1994), 20. Katy Deepwell’s collection of manifestos evidences the breadth of this kind of political writing amongt the feminist art community at the time. See Feminist Art Manifestos: An Anthology ed. Deepwell (KT Press ebook, 2014). Untitled, 1971, Box 5, Folder 9, Nancy Spero Papers, Archives of American Art. Untitled, circa 1970–71, Box 5, Folder 8, Nancy Spero Papers, Archives of American Art. Ibid. Schlegel, ‘Codex Spero’, 204. Ibid. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985); Hélène Cixous, ‘Portrait of Dora’, trans. Sarah Burd, Diacritics (1983): 2–32; Luce Irigaray, Speculum de l’autre femme (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1974); Toril Moi, ‘Representation of Patriarchy: Sexuality and Epistemology in Freud’s “Dora” ’, Feminist Review 9 (Autumn 1981): 60–74. Nixon, ‘Spero’s Curses’, 20. Ibid., 4. Nixon’s ‘Spero’s Curses’ traces the trajectory of Spero’s early career, describing the War Series in relation to hysterical violence that derives from an infantile aggression outlined by Melanie Klein. Placing Spero in context of her artistic peers, and particularly in relation to contemporaneous feminist performance artists, Schlegel’s study is wide-ranging but lacks an analytical focus on the implications of hysteria in relation to Spero’s activist practice. Jo-Anna Isaak and Lisa Tickner both see Spero’s work as an example of the politically subversive carnivalesque as outlined by Mikhail Bahktin in his 1940 dissertation Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Isaak connects this to the curatorial premise of her 1995 exhibition Laughter Ten Years After which is expanded in her 1997 publication Feminism and Contemporary Art: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Laughter (London: Routledge, 2002). The diagnosis of hysteria is notoriously difficult. Indeed, in 1880, George Beard identified over seventy-five pages’ worth of symptoms of nervous exhaustion, of which hysteria was described as a subset, and considered that the list was not

Notes

37

38

39

40

41

42

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complete. See Beard, A Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (New York: William Wood and Company, 1880). Going back to the origins of psychoanalysis’s emergence through hysteria, this history of symptom as psychic signifier stems from Sigmund Freud’s work with Jean-Martin Charcot and to his early publication in 1895 with Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria. Through the use of hypnosis, Freud and Breuer claimed that hysterical symptoms could be traced back to traumatic past experiences, particularly relating to sexual development, which had been suppressed by the unconscious mind. Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria ed. and trans. James Strachey and Anna Freud (New York: Basic Books, 2009). A number of studies and articles on hysteria emerge during the time that Spero was making the Codex. Ilza Veith published her Hysteria: A History of a Disease in 1965 with the University of Chicago Press. Although not a feminist work, this did trace the story of the disease again for contemporary audiences. Its influence for feminism can be seen in publications of the time: for example, in Phyllis Chesler’s Women and Madness (New York: Avon Books, 1972) which considered the ways in which the judgement of women as mentally ill came from patriarchal oppression. See, for example, Gisela Ecker, Feminist Aesthetics (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1986). More recent studies, such as Amelia Jones’s Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998) and Laura Cottingham’s ‘Are You Experienced? Feminism, Art and the Body Politic’, in Seeing through the Seventies: Essays on Feminism and Art (London, New York: Routledge, 2000), 117–32, have nuanced this debate. Most famously, writers such as Cixous and Irigaray proposed an ecriture féminine, a style of writing that came from the body and represented female experience. See Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Signs trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 875–93; Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). Julia Kristeva, ‘Freud and Love: Treatment and its Discontents’, in The Kristeva Reader ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 240–71; Irigaray, Speculum; Chesler, Women and Madness. Women have used illness as a tactic in writing as a way to challenge and subvert patriarchy. Scholars have examined this: see, for example, Diane Price Herndl, Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). The famous case study that Sigmund Freud published five years after the analysis had been abandoned by a defiant Dora was constructed from his notes and recollections about the eleven weeks of treatment that she received at the age of eighteen. See ibid., 17. See Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997). In this, Freud analysed two dreams in particular and drew out a narrative that suggests first of all that Dora has focused her suppressed desire

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43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

Notes

for her father onto Herr K, and then later, on revision, that she in fact harboured a homosexual desire for Frau K, her repression of which has caused her symptoms. Dora’s unconscious lesbianism is only briefly mentioned in the case study, but it becomes important in later feminist rereadings of the text. See Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman trans. Betsy Wing (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996), 154. Freud, Dora, 20. Cixous and Clement, 147. Ibid., 157. Ibid., 155. Ibid., 156. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 95. Ibid. See, for example, Nixon, ‘Spero’s Curses’, 22. Cixous, ‘Laugh of the Medusa’, 886. Lyon, 168. Gabrielle Dane examines this debate by saying: ‘In order for woman to speak (her subjectivity) then, must she either assume the role of the hysteric miming the traumatic history of her desire through a series of somatic symptoms, or acquiesce to speak her absence in the language of the Father?’ See Dane ‘Hysteria as Feminist Protest’, Women’s Studies 23, no. 3 (1994): 240–1. Nixon ‘Spero’s Curses’, 4. Cixous and Clément, 156. Ibid. Ibid., 155. Ibid, 5. Ibid. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 37. Ibid. Ibid., 37. Spero and Flynn, 67. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 65. Cixous and Clément, 159. Ibid., 157. Ibid.

Notes

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73 Spero, ‘Woman as Bearer of Meaning, Not Maker of Meaning’, 1988, Box 5, Folder 11, Nancy Spero Papers, Archives of American Art. 74 Martha Rosler, ‘Well, is the Personal Political?’, in Feminism, Art, Theory: An Anthology 1968–2014 ed. Hilary Robinson (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2015), 69. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid. 77 Spero, ‘What is Feminist Art?’, in Codex Spero ed. Roel Arkesteijn (Amsterdam: Roma, 2008), 55. 78 Ibid. 79 GEDOK was founded in 1928 by Ida Dehmel. Comprised of a number of regional groups, its remit was to promote the work of woman artists and writers in Germany; Mary Wigman and Käthe Kollwitz were among the early members of the group. In a letter sent by Niester to officially invite participants, she outlines the ambitions of the show. She states: ‘The show is meant to display a representative cross section of American lady-artists of the present epoch with a view to making them known in Germany. In its particular field it is to represent a complement to the “DOCUMENTA”.’ Series V, Box 29, Papers of Lil Picard, The University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa. 80 Ibid. 81 In an angry text written against the actions of the protestors, Lil Picard described the exhibition as ‘a cultural event, a none [sic] political art show’. Series V, Box 29, Papers of Lil Picard, The University of Iowa Libraries. 82 See ‘Wahl der Damen’, Der Spiegel, 8 May 1972, 156–7. 83 ‘Listen Ladies’, Series V, Box 29, Papers of Lil Picard, The University of Iowa Libraries. 84 Faith Ringgold describes the letter in her article for the feminist art journal, ‘The Gedok Show and the Lady Left’, Feminist Art Journal (Fall 1972): 8, 20. Spero, however, claims in her response that not everyone received a copy. See Spero, ‘The Gedok Exhibition’, in Codex Spero, 54. 85 See Nicholas Cull for a full account of the activities of the United States Information Agency and an analysis of the term ‘public diplomacy’. See The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 86 Ibid., xv. 87 Kozloff; Cockroft. 88 Kozloff. 89 See Spero, Jolicoeur and Tenhaaf, 15. 90 Series V, Box 29, Papers of Lil Picard, The University of Iowa Libraries. 91 Ibid. 92 Although the exhibition catalogue lists forty-five artists, the responses were sought from forty-three because Eva Hesse had died two years earlier and Georgia O’Keeffe

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94 95 96 97

98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108

Notes is marked in the statistics gathered on the unattributed tally included in Picard’s archive as ‘Not in show’. ‘Survey’, Series V, Box 29, Papers of Lil Picard, The University of Iowa Libraries. The twenty who signed the statement were Abish, Alice Adams, Pat Adams, Benglis, Bartlett, Bohnen, Boltz, Frank, Graves, Kozloff, Miss, Nevelson, Pindell, Sleigh, Snyder, Spero, Stevens, Thorne, Waitskin, Zucker; the sixteen who signed individual statements were Brody, Da Charme, Edelheit, Elliott, Denes, Johnson, Katzon, Kogelnik, Miles, Picard, Wilke, Yankowitz – Pat Adams, Benglis, Boltz and Frank also contributing individual statements alongside their agreement with the prepared one. The seventeen who refused to exhibit without a statement being displayed were Abish, Alice Adams, Pat Adams, Benglis, Bartlett, Frank, Graves, Kozloff, Miss, Nevelson, Pindell, Sleigh, Spero, Stevens, Thorne, Waitskin, Zucker. The unattributed document on which these are listed suggests that eighteen refused to exhibit but only lists seventeen names. See ‘Statistics on the Gedok Show 1 July 1972’, Series V, Box 29, Papers of Lil Picard, The University of Iowa Libraries. See Cull. ‘Letter from Faith Ringgold’, 31 May 1972, Series V, Box 29, Papers of Lil Picard, The University of Iowa Libraries. Ibid. ‘More more more’, Series V, Box 29, Papers of Lil Picard, The University of Iowa Libraries. The drive of this statement is against an earlier press release that it implies was produced by the protestors that presented the protest as almost unanimously supported, emphasizing the decision by the Amerika Haus to cancel. See ‘America House Censors Women Artists; Cancels Exhibition in West Berlin’, Series V, Box 29, Papers of Lil Picard, The University of Iowa Libraries. ‘Ringgold, Letter’, Series V, Box 29, Papers of Lil Picard, The University of Iowa Libraries. Ringgold, ‘The Gedok Show’, 8, 20. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 20. For Spero’s take on this neglect, see ‘The Whitney and Women’, in The Art Gallery Magazine, 14 January 1971, 26–7. Ringgold, ‘The Gedok Show’, 20. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 20. Toni Morrison, ‘What the Black Woman thinks about Women’s Lib’, The New York Times, 22 August 1971, 14. Friedan, 15. An incisive critique of this position was written by bell hooks in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (London: Pluto Press, 2000), 1–17. Morrison, 14.

Notes 109 110 111 112 113 114 115

116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128

129 130

217

Audre Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You (London: Silver Press, 2017), 3. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 3. Faith Ringgold, We Flew Over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold (Boston, MA: Bulfinch Press, 1995), 146. Ibid., 147. Ibid., 148. This said, it should be noted that Ringgold – one of very few artists of colour involved in the show – was by no means the only artist to take this position. The recording of Cindy Nemser’s conversation with Lil Picard held in collection of the Getty museum offers an insight into the similar positions by both the organizer and the critic. See Cindy Nemser papers, 1966–2012, Box 23, Item R11, Getty Research Institute. Ringgold, ‘The Gedok Show’, 20. Quoted in ibid. Spero, ‘The Gedok Exhibition’. Ibid. Ibid. Ringgold, We Flew, 157–8. Lamm. See Box 2, Folder 2, Nancy Spero Papers, Archives of American Art. See Box 5, Folder 9, Nancy Spero Papers, Archives of American Art. ‘Proposal for gallery, 1971–1972’, The A.I.R. Gallery Archive; MSS 184; Box 2; Folder 64; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries. Ibid. Ibid. The A.I.R. Gallery is described by its founders as ‘letting fresh air into the current art scene . . . acknowledging the existance [sic] of so many fine women artists, some working in total isolation, others who have exhibited widely. The women artists feel this is a provocative and timely act to open a woman’s gallery at this moment, and that it will encourage other similar endeavors by women.’ Ibid. Ibid. Scarry, 12.

Chapter Four: Torture of Women as Devotional Object 1 Spero and Carol De Pasquale, ‘Dialogues with Nancy Spero’, in Womanart (Winter/ Spring 1977): 8–11; reprinted in Arkesteijn, 85. 2 See Bird, ‘Dancing’, 56–7.

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3 Spero, ‘Woman as Bearer of Meaning, Not Maker of Meaning’, 1988, Box 5, Folder 11, Nancy Spero Papers 1940s–2009, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 4 Ibid. 5 Spero and De Pasquale, 85. 6 Nemiroff, 122. 7 Dori Laub, ‘Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening’, in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History eds. Laub and Shoshana Felman (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1992), 59. 8 Ibid. 9 Günter Thomas outlines the histories of these two understandings of witnessing in ‘Witness as a Cultural Form of Communication: Historical Roots, Structural Dynamics, and Current Appearances’, in Media Witnessing eds. Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 89–111. 10 In making this connection I am not suggesting a direct transposition of a medieval mode onto a twentieth-century one. Instead, I refer to the medieval in much the same way as Spero did, as a way of making and viewing that serves as a productive parallel open to misreading and evolution. 11 Rachel Warriner, ‘ “Then art will change. This is the future”: Nancy Spero’s manifestary practice’, in Mixed Messages: American Correspondences in Visual and Verbal Practices eds. Catherine Gander and Sarah Garland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 129–44. 12 See Spero and de Pasquale, 85–9. 13 Lyon, Nancy Spero: The Work, 181. 14 Amnesty International, Report on Torture, 1975. Samuel Moyn, ‘The Return of the Prodigal: The 1970s as a Turning Point in Human Rights History’, in The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s eds. Moyn and Jan Eckel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 1–14. 15 See Bryan-Wilson, 132–8 and Pip Day ‘Locating ‘2,972,453’: Lucy Lippard in Argentina’ in From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows 1969–74 ed. Cornelia Butler (London: Afterall Books, 2012), 78–98. 16 See Florencia San Martín ‘Aesthetics of Disobedience, Part I: A Piscataway Mural Made in Solidarity with Chile’ and ‘Aesthetics of Disobedience, Part II: Reconstruction of a Chilean Mural in New York’, Archives of American Art Blog, 31 July 2018 and 9 August 2018, available at https://www.aaa.si.edu/blog/2018/07/ aesthetics-of-disobedience-part-i-piscataway-mural-made-solidarity-with-chile (accessed 29 April 2019). 17 Chile Emergency Exhibition Advertisement, New York Magazine, 25 March 1974, 30. 18 For more detail about the Contrabienal, see Aimé Iglesias Lukin, ‘Contrabienal: Latin American Art, Politics and Identity in New York, 1969–1971’, Artl@s Bulletin 3, no. 2 (2015): Article 5.

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19 Despite not being associated with the activist community that surrounded the A.W.C. in the 1970s in New York, it should also be noted that No Wave Filmmakers Beth and Scott B, similarly to Spero, appropriated the texts of Amnesty International in their 1979 film Black Box. The film performs repression and control through violence rather than an indictment of specific events of torture. In one scene, a young man is forced to stand in a stress position while accounts of torture are shouted by a female guard, played by Lydia Lunch, directed at the camera. 20 Isaak, ‘Interview’, 18. 21 Schlegel, ‘Codex Spero’, 247. 22 See Spero and de Pasquale, 85–9. 23 Ibid., 85. 24 See Spero, Jolicoeur and Tenhaaf, 9–15. 25 Bryan-Wilson, 219. 26 Her various manifestos evidence this belief – for example, in her 1970–1 text she states: ‘Women artists today condemn male dominance in a bourgeois society. We condemn male suprematist elitism. Women artists demand the immediate break-up of the repressive, sexist male ego domination of museums, galleries etc.’ See ‘Untitled’, circa 1970–71, Box 5, Folder 8, Nancy Spero Papers 1940s–2009, Archives of American Art. 27 Bryan-Wilson, 189. 28 Ibid., 184–208. 29 MoMA Press Release, ‘Computer Print-out Makes Nine Foot Column in Museum Show’, 30 July 1970. 30 Indeed, in a 1977 statement, Spero suggests: ‘For 11 years political information (‘War Paintings’, ‘Codex Artaud’, ‘Torture of Women’, etc.) has been central to my work.’ See Box 5, Folder 9, Nancy Spero Papers, Archives of American Art. 31 For more on Spero’s relationship to conceptual art, see Buchloh and Bird, ‘Present Imperfect’ in Otherworlds (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), 113–36. 32 Sylvère Lotringer, ‘Focus’, in Nancy Spero, 101. 33 Eve Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 55. 34 Ibid. 35 Ramesh Thakur, ‘Human Rights: Amnesty International and the United Nations’, Journal of Peace Research 31, no. 2 (May 1994): 149. 36 Lippard, Changing: Essays in Art Criticism (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1971), 102. 37 Ibid. 38 Lippard, From the Center, 75. 39 Lorena Laura Stookey, Thematic Guide to World Mythology (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004), 215. 40 Spero, ‘Torture of Women, New York 1983’, in Torture of Women, 103.

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41 Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of an Archetype (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 215. 42 Ibid., 213. 43 See Katherine Hite, ‘Empathic unsettlement and the outsider within Argentine space of memory’, Memory Studies 8, no. 1 (2015): 42. 44 Spero and Marjorie Welish, ‘Word into Image. An Interview with Marjorie Welish’, in BOMB 47 (Spring 1994): 42–4; reprinted in Arkesteijn, 155. 45 E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 87–90. 46 Ibid., 89–90. 47 See Philippi, 35–54; and Mel Ramsden, ‘Nancy Spero’ (excerpts from the panel ‘Perimeters of Protest’), Art-Rite no. 9 (Spring 1975): 18. 48 Diana Nemiroff, ‘Fourteen Meditations on Nancy Spero’s Torture of Women’, in Torture of Women (Los Angeles: Siglio Press, 2010), 114–30. 49 Lippard, Torture of Women Exhibition Invitation (New York: A.I.R. Gallery, 1976). 50 See Spero, Jolicouer and Tenhaaf, 11. 51 Buchloh, ‘Spero’s Other Traditions’, 239–45. 52 Spero quoted in Bird, ‘Nancy Spero: Inscribing woman—between the lines’, in Nancy Spero (London, Edinburgh, Derry: ICA, Fruitmarket, Orchard Gallery, 1987), 30. 53 Nemiroff, 125. 54 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 35. 55 Spero, Torture of Women, n.p. 56 Lippard, 1976. 57 Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 9. Jones provides a detailed and fascinating reading of formalist ocularity and what she terms the bureaucratization of the senses by Greenberg. 58 Carolyn P. Collette, Species, Phantasms, and Images: Vision and Medieval Psychology in the Canterbury Tales (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press: 2001), 15. 59 See, for example, Purdom 161–74; Bird, ‘Dancing to a Different Tune’, 60–9; Rosetta Brooks, ‘If Walls Could Talk’, in Otherworlds, 89–109. 60 Lyon, 200. 61 Nemiroff, 114. 62 Recent publications have explored the connection between the medieval and the modern. See Alexander Nagle, Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012); Amy Knight Powell, Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); Marla Carson, Performing Bodies in Pain: Medieval and Post-Modern Martyrs, Mystics, and Artists (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Also, looking at a different period but making a similar argument for the mining of the past by twentieth-century artists,

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65 66 67

68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

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see Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Spero, Buchloh and Leon Golub, ‘Nancy Spero Interview’, in Dissidances, 100. Spero states: ‘We were all busy turning our backs on Western tradition: not only the Renaissance, but 20th century Parisian art . . . We were looking for something that was ungraceful and unintellectual.’ Quoted in Lyon, ‘Coming in from the Cold’, Chicago (May 1984): 160. Spero, Buchloh and Golub, ‘Nancy Spero Interview’, 100. Spero and Flynn, 66. See, for example, Robert Mills, Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture (London: Reaktion Books, 2005); Jessica Barker, Stone Fidelity. Marriage and Emotion in Medieval Tomb Sculpture (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2020); Damien Bouquet and Piroska Nagy, Medieval Sensibilities: A History of Emotions in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018); Kathryn M. Rudy, ‘Dirty Books: Quantifying Patterns of Use in Medieval Manuscripts Using a Densitometer’, in Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 2, nos. 1–2 (2010); Jennifer Borland ‘Unruly Reading: The Consuming Role of Touch in the Experience of a Medieval Manuscript’, in Scraped, Stroked and Bound: Materially Engaged Reading of Medieval Manuscripts ed. Jonathan Wilcox (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 97–114; Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). Jill Bennett, ‘Stigmata and Sense Memory: St Francis and the Affective Image’, in Art History 24, no. 1 (2001): 5. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 60; cited in Bennett, 3. Bennett, 4. Ibid., 6. Ibid. Bennett, 10. Bennett, 10. Spero and de Pasquale, Codex Spero, 89. Bennett, 10. Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). Ibid., 50. Schlegel, ‘Codex Spero’, 245. Spero and De Pasquale, 85. Ibid., 88. Indeed, Philippi’s response to this work seems to rest on a distaste not only for the content of the work but for its affect. Philippi deconstructs the premise of torture as a

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metaphor for the position of women under patriarchy. Identifying that Spero’s use of mythological and documentary accounts creates an interchangeability that is problematic in its lack of specificity, Philippi goes on to examine how Torture of Women repeats the myth of the woman as powerless victim. She dissects the truth claims that are made for the work, arguing that Spero’s focus on woman as victim calls the veracity of her argument into question. She states: ‘On the one hand, the work emphasizes the construction of “reality” in representation through pictorial processes which stress the physical and conceptual distance to the practice of torture while, on the other hand, that distance is undermined through the insistence on women as torture victims.’ See Philippi, 51. Spero responded angrily in a letter to the editors of Third Text in which she accused Philippi of misreading her work and suggests that ‘foreclosing other possibilities by the claim of a correct political position is a totalizing intellectual maneuver’. In this confutation, Spero claims that ‘by representing these figures with all the implications of revolt and control of one’s body I deny the charges of an imperialist strategy in terms of the other—the primitive’. See Spero, ‘Letter to the Editor’, Third Text, 1988; reprinted in Arkesteijn, 130. Thomas, 96. McNamer, 134–6. Susan Best discusses the affective nature of a number of feminist practices including Mendieta’s. See Best. Spero’s CV from circa 1979 lists involvement in the group exhibitions Mod Donn Art, 1970; Flag Show, 1970; Visualizing Feeling; Unmanly Art, 1972; Feminist Bookshop Benefit Exhibition, 1972; Women’s Art Exhibition, 1972; Women Choose Women, 1973; International Art Manifesto for the Legal Defense of Political Prisoners, 1973; Women’s Exhibition, 1973; 7 New York Women Artists, 1974; In Her Own Image, 1974; Decade of American Political Posters 1965–75, 1976; Women’s Art, 1976. See CV, circa 1979, Box 2, Folder 2; and CV, circa 1999, Box 2, Folder 3, Nancy Spero Papers, Archives of American Art. Lippard, n.p.

Conclusion 1 Lippard, n.p. 2 Adrienne Rich, ‘Tear Gas’, in Poems: Selected and New, 1950–1974 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1975), 140. 3 Zizi Papacharissi, Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 4 See, for example, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, ‘The Emotional Politics of the EU Referendum: Bregrexit and Beyond’, EU Referendum Analysis, available at https://

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7 8 9

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www.referendumanalysis.eu/eu-referendum-analysis-2016/section-8-voters/ the-emotional-politics-of-the-eu-referendum-bregrexit-and-beyond/ (accessed 15 June 2018); Cengiz Erişen, ‘Emotions as a Determinant in Turkish Political Behavior’, Turkish Studies 14, no. 1 (2013): 115–35; Kathleen Searles and Travis N. Ridout, ‘The Use and Consequences of Emotions in Politics’, in ISRE’s Sourcebook for Research on Emotion and Affect, available at http://emotionresearcher.com/the-useand-consequences-of-emotions-in-politics/ (accessed 15 June 2018). Ahmed, ‘In the Name of Love’, Cultural Politics, 122–43. See Crawford, ‘Crying for Ana Mendieta at the Carl Andre Retrospective’, Hyperallergic, 10 March 2015, available at https://hyperallergic.com/189315/ crying-for-ana-mendieta-at-the-carl-andre-retrospective/ (accessed 24 April 2017). Ben Luke, ‘Bold, Brilliant and Gut Wrenching Work at Serpentine’, Evening Standard, 6 March 2018. Jonathan Jones, ‘Sondra Perry’s Typhoon wrenches my soul but Ian Cheng’s AI is merely soulless’, The Guardian, 7 March 2018. Hélène Selam Rose Kleih, ‘Sondra Perry’s New Show Is An Overwhelming Racial Whirlwind Investigating Blackness And Technology’, Gal Dem, available at http:// www.gal-dem.com/sondra-perrys-new-show-is-an-overwhelming-racial-whirlwindinvestigating-blackness-and-technology/ (accessed 13 June 2018).

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Index A Documentary Herstory of Women Artists in Revolution 39–40 Abramović, Marina 6, 52–3 Abstract Expressionism 4, 6, 136, 137 Acconci, Vito 53 Ad Hoc Women Artists’ Committee 45 Ahmed, Sara 9–10, 15–16, 110, 187 A.I.R. Gallery 4, 111, 146, 172 Alexander, Elizabeth 12, 13 Amnesty International 20, 22, 147–50, 159–65 Q. And Babies? A. And Babies? 53–4 Angry Arts Week 32–35, 78 Art protesting against torture 153–8 Art Worker’s Coalition 3–4, 27, 31, 53, 55, 58–9, 149, 156–7 Artaud, Antonin 5–6, 9, 22–3, 57–60, 95, 98–104, 109–15, 120, 130, 132–3, 134, 146–7, 149–50, 166, 168, 171, 186 Artists and Writers Protest 3, 27–8, 32–5, 89 Ashton, Dore 32

Camnitzer, Luis 153 Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment 8 Castanis, Muriel 39 Chicago, Judy 46–7, 134 Chile Emergency Exhibition 153 Cixous, Hélène 22, 112, 125–7, 145, 185–6 Clément, Catherine 22, 112, 126–7, 130–3, 145 Collage of Indignation 32–5 Consciousness-raising 16, 25, 42–6, 49, 54–5, 180–1 Contrabienial 153 CRYING: A PROTEST 188–9 Cvetkovich, Ann 9

Baker, Courtney 12, 15 Baranik, Rudolf 67, 70, 153 Benefit for the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam 32 Bennett, Jill 23, 151, 176, 178, 179 Berger, John 78–80 Berlant, Lauren 9, 21, 30–2 Bird, Jon 5, 6, 95, 150 Black, Hannah 13 Black Mask 33 Bourke, Joanna 12, 17–19, 51, 110, 115 Bradnock, Lucy 98–100 Brigada Ramona Parra 153 Bryan-Wilson, Julia 156–7 Buchloh, Benjamin H.D. 3, 113, 168, 174 Burden, Chris 53 Butler, Judith 10–11, 65

Edelson, Mary Beth 5, 182 Empathy 7–8, 11–16, 22–4, 84, 159–75, 179–83, 186–91 Evans, Sara 30

Damon, Betsy 182 D’Arcangelo, Allan 34 De Zegher, Catherine 6 Descartes, René 51 Didi-Huberman,Georges 65–6 Doyle, Jennifer 189

Feminist Art Program 46 Fishman, Louise 48–9 Formalism 33–4, 47–8, 136–7, 172–4 Freud, Sigmund 112, 126–7 Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique 44, 46, 140, 145 Gate Control Theory of Pain 50–1 Gitlin, Todd 31, 38 Glucklich, Ariel 18 Golub, Leon 2, 26, 33–4, 61–3, 97, 154–5 Grosz, Elizabeth 19–20 Guerrilla Art Action Group 36–7, 42, 53

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238 Haacke, Hans – Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Board of Trustees 156–7, 159, 171 Hanisch, Carol 21, 25–6, 35, 42–3, 133 Hartman, Saidiya 12 Hirschman, Jack 59 Hoffmann, Abbie 37–8 Hysteria 22–3, 112, 125–33, 146–7 In Her Shoes – Women of the Eighth 8 Index 23, 66, 69, 75–6, 92, 166 Information MoMA 157–8 International Association for the Study of Pain 50–1 Intimate public 21, 30–4, 40 Israel, Matthew 82 Jaggar, Alison M. 37 Kaplan, E. Ann 166–7 Kelly, Mary 48 Kozloff, Max 32–3, 136–7 Kramm, Jeff 82–3 Lacan, Jacques 20–1, 60, 94 Lacy, Suzanne and Labowitz, Leslie 40–2, 49 Lamm, Kimberly 3, 80, 98, 145 Laub, Dori 151 Lippard, Lucy R. 27–8, 32, 47, 111, 147, 162, 167–8, 172–3, 181–2, 185 Lorde, Audre 140–1 Los Angeles Peace Tower 32 Los Angeles ‘White Out’ 139 Lyon, Christopher 5–6, 68, 94, 174 McNamer, Sarah 23, 151, 179–82 Medieval devotional practice 22, 152, 172–6, 179–82 Meltzer, Eve 158 Melzack, Ronald and Wall, Patrick 50–1 Mendieta, Ana 182, 188–9 #MeToo 8, 45 Morrel, Marc at Stephen Radich Gallery 90–1, 97 Morrison, Toni 140 Museum of Modern Art 36–7, 53, 157–8

Index Nelson, Maggie 8 Nemiroff, Diana 167, 169, 174 Neumann, Erich 165 New Left 3, 21, 25–6, 30–9, 44, 81, 84, 89, 136–7, 155 New York Art Strike 31, 139 New York arts-activism 3–4, 27–8, 31–9, 45, 47, 53–4, 59–61, 89, 97, 107, 111, 145–6, 153, 155, 157 Nixon, Mignon 3, 5, 62–3, 84, 125–6 O’Dell, Kathy 52 off our backs 46 Oldenburg, Claes, Proposed Monument for the Intersection of Canal and Broadway, N.Y.C. – Block of Concrete Inscribed with the Names of War Heroes 28, 29, 36 Pain In art 6–7, 23, 50, 52–6, 190 Exclusion 5, 39–40, 42–9, 55–6, 59–60, 95, 97, 102 And feminism 4, 7, 16, 55, 106 And language 1, 7, 16–21, 57, 60–1, 63–4, 94–5, 104–5, 110–15, 146, 171–2 And photography 19, 23, 63–7, 78 Race and suffering 12–16, 65, 189–90 Theory 4–20, 49–52 Pane, Gina 6, 52–3 Papacharissi, Zizi 38, 187 Paternosto, César 153 Paula Cooper Gallery 32 Peirce, Charles Sanders 87 People’s Flag Show 32 Perry, Sondra 189–90 Personal is political 4, 10, 21, 25–6, 42–3, 49, 55–6, 133–5, 180 Pharmaceutics 52, 55 Philippi, Desa 13, 80–1, 167 Picard, Lil 135, 138 Politics of pain 9–15, 24 Rainer, Yvonne 78–9 Ramsden, Mel 13–14, 167 Rauschenberg, Robert 117 Ray, Violet 67, 68

Index Rich, Adrienne 9, 187 Ringgold, Faith 135, 138–46 Rip-Off File 45 Rosario Group 153 Rosler, Martha 48, 67, 69, 134, 153–4 Sarachild, Kathie 43 Scarry, Elaine 9–11, 17, 20, 55, 57, 95, 110, 146, 171 Schapiro, Miriam 46 Schlegel, Amy 6, 7, 100, 156, 180 Schneemann, Carolee 47–8, 78–9, 134, 182 Schutz, Dana (protests) 12–13 Schwartz, Terese 39 Silence and silencing 5, 17–18, 22, 55, 60, 107, 109–25, 134, 140–6 Silencing and race 140–2 Sontag, Susan 18–19, 64, 100, 110–11 Sophocles – Philoctetes 11–12, 17 Spero, Nancy Activism 3–5, 26–8, 45–6, 59, 97, 109, 111, 123–4, 133–8, 142–3, 155 Arthritis 4–6 Being silenced 5, 9, 102, 109–10 Critiques of 13–15, 80–1, 167 Manipulation of language 59, 102–5, 119–20, 128, 145, 159–65, 169–72, 176–9 Medieval parallels 151–2, 172–83 Myth 2, 64, 75, 112, 149–50, 163–6, 168–71, 174 Peinture feminine 128, 156, 186 Relationship to formalism 6, 137, 174–5 Statements and manifestos 22, 59, 80–9, 90, 111, 123–5, 134–5, 146 Treatment of evidence 149–50, 163–6, 180–1 Use of detail 113, 152, 159–63, 175–9 Use of paper 3, 22–3, 109–24, 162–3, 178–9 Vietnam 59–64, 67–8, 136–42, 186 Whiteness 12–14, 80–1, 143–5, 190 Works All Writing is Pigshit 57, 58, 103 Artaud Paintings 4, 5, 21–2, 56–60, 87, 98–105, 109, 115, 123, 159, 167–8

239 Avant de me suicider 104–5 Codex Artaud 4, 22–3, 58, 106–7, 109–33, 143–5, 150, 159, 167–8 Codex Artaud I 113, 114, 120 Codex Artaud V 120, 122 Codex Artaud VII 117–18 Codex Artaud VIII 143–5 Codex Artaud XXII 128, 129 Codex Artaud XXIII 128, 130, 131 Codex Artaud XXVII 120, 121 Codex Artaud XXX 115–20, 130 Her Body Itself 185–6 I died at Rodez under electroshock 101, 102 O VIO PROFE 102–4 Paris Black Paintings 3, 59, 75, 90 Tarot Paintings 87 The Hours of the Night 149–50 Torture in Chile 156 Torture of Women 1–2, 2, 4, 13–14, 22, 132–3, 147, 149–52, 155–83 War Series 3–4, 21–3, 56, 58–64, 68–9, 71–98, 71–3, 75–7, 80–1, 86–9, 91, 96–8, 102, 106–7, 155–6, 159, 167 Androgynous Bomb – Rape 82 Androgynous Bomb and Victims 69, 71, 72, 75–6, 87 Atom Bomb 86–7 Eagle, Victim, Medusa Head 96–7 Female Bomb 82, 90 Female Helicopters 84–5 Helicopter Blinding Victims 77, 80 L.O.V.E.T.O.H.A.N.O.I. 72, 73 Male Bomb 61, 62, 82–4 Mars, Victims, Airplane Wings, Eagle Claw, Mercury 87, 88, 97 Peace, Helicopter, and Hanging Christ 67–9 Pilot – Eagle – Skull 92–4

240 S.U.P.E.R.P.A.C.I.F.I.C.A.T.I.O .N. 82 Swastika Eagle 91–2 Metaphor and metonymy 60–4, 81–7, 90–2 Nuclear imagery 86–7 Sexual metaphors 81–4 Use of Symbols 90–8 Stevens, May 34, 135, 145, 153 Symbolic 21–2, 60, 75, 81, 87, 94–107, 130

Index Vicarious trauma 166–7 Viennese Actionists 52 Vietnam War 2–4, 23, 32–5, 55, 59, 61–79, 82–98, 136–46, 186

Testimony 8, 150–2, 166–7, 181 The American Woman Artist Show 22, 112, 133–47 The Book of Margery Kempe 175 Tickner, Lisa 84 Till, Emmet 13

Walker, Joanna 6 Wider women’s movement 3–4, 23, 30, 38–9, 42–6, 52, 55, 125–6, 134–5, 140–1, 155 Wilding, Faith 48 Wilke, Hannah 48 witness 7, 15–16, 28, 30, 37, 149–52, 166–8, 171–2, 181–2, 185 Womanhouse 46, 48 Women Artists in Revolution 4, 39, 59, 97, 111 women’s movement in the arts 4–5, 39, 42, 45–8, 60, 97, 133–147

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Plate 1 Nancy Spero, All Writing Is Pigshit, 1969. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

Plate 2 Nancy Spero, Androgynous Bomb and Victims, 1966. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

Plate 3 Nancy Spero, L.O.V.E. T.O. H.A.N.O.I., 1967. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

Plate 4 Nancy Spero, Helicopter Blinding Victims, 1968. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

Plate 5 Nancy Spero, Swastika Eagle, 1967. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

Plate 6 Nancy Spero, I died at Rodez under electroshock, 1969. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

Plate 7 Nancy Spero, Codex Artaud VII, 1971. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2022.

Plate 8 Faith Ringgold, The American People Series #18: The Flag is Bleeding, 1967. © 2018 Faith Ringgold, ARS member; Courtesy ACA Galleries, New York.