Addressing the other woman: Textual correspondences in feminist art and writing 9781526125989

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Addressing the other woman Textual correspondences in feminist art and writing Kimberly Lamm

Addressing the other woman

S E R I E S E D I TO R S

Amelia G. Jones, Marsha Meskimmon Rethinking Art’s Histories aims to open out art history from its most basic structures by foregrounding work that challenges the conventional periodisation and geographical subfields of traditional art history, and addressing a wide range of visual cultural forms from the early modern period to the present. These books will acknowledge the impact of recent scholarship on our understanding of the complex temporalities and cartographies that have emerged through centuries of world-wide trade, political colonisation and the diasporic movement of people and ideas across national and continental borders. Also available in the series Colouring the Caribbean: Race and the art of Agostino Brunias  Mia L. Bagneris Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960  Amy Bryzgel Art, museums and touch  Fiona Candlin The ‘do-it-yourself' artwork: Participation from fluxus to relational aesthetics  Anna Dezeuze (ed.) Fleshing out surfaces: Skin in French art and medicine, 1650–1850  Mechthild Fend The political aesthetics of the Armenian avant-garde: The journey of the ‘painterly real’, 1987–2004  Angela Harutyunyan The matter of miracles: Neapolitan baroque sanctity and architecture  Helen Hills The face of medicine: Visualising medical masculinities in late nineteenth-century Paris  Mary Hunter Glorious catastrophe: Jack Smith, performance and visual culture  Dominic Johnson Otherwise: Imagining queer feminist art histories  Amelia Jones and Erin Silver (eds) Photography and documentary film in the making of modern Brazil  Luciana Martins After the event: New perspectives in art history  Charles Merewether and John Potts (eds) Women, the arts and globalization: Eccentric experience  Marsha Meskimmon and Dorothy Rowe (eds) Flesh cinema: The corporeal turn in American avant-garde film  Ara Osterweil After-affects|after-images: Trauma and aesthetic transformation in the virtual Feminist museum  Griselda Pollock Migration into art: Transcultural identities and art-making in a globalised world  Anne Ring Petersen Vertiginous mirrors: The animation of the visual image and early modern travel  Rose Marie San Juan The synthetic proposition: Conceptualism and the political referent in contemporary art  Nizan Shaked The paradox of body, building and motion in seventeenth-century England  Kimberley Skelton The newspaper clipping: A modern paper object  Anke Te Heesen, translated by Lori Lantz Screen/space: The projected image in contemporary art  Tamara Trodd (ed.) Art and human rights: Contemporary Asian contexts  Caroline Turner and Jen Webb Timed out: Art and the transnational Caribbean  Leon Wainwright Performative monuments: Performance, photography, and the rematerialisation of public art  Mechtild Widrich

Addressing the other woman Textual correspondences in feminist art and writing Kimberly Lamm

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Kimberly Lamm 2018 The right of Kimberly Lamm to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 1 5261 2126 4  hardback First published 2018 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or any third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited

This book is dedicated to Michael Eng with all my love

Contents

List of figures page viii Acknowledgements xv Introduction: addressing the other woman I  Writing the ‘I’ otherwise: telegraphing black feminism in the work of Adrian Piper and Angela Davis

1 2

23

Adrian Piper’s textual address

29

Letters from an imaginary enemy, Angela Davis

72

II  Typing the poetry of monsters: Nancy Spero and Valerie Solanas write aggression

3 4

1

101

Writing the drives in Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud 107 Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and the texts of aggression

146

III  Hieroglyphs of maternal desire: the collaborative texts of Mary Kelly and Laura Mulvey

179

5

Rewriting maternal femininity in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document 186

6

Feminist desires and collective reading in the work of Laura Mulvey

232

Conclusion 267 Bibliography 269 Index 286

List of figures

1.1 Adrian Piper, Context #7, 1970. 7 black notebooks, ink, graphite, crayon, postage stamps, photograph, sugar package on paper. 11.75” × 11” each (29.84 × 27.94 cm each). Detail: Information page. Collection of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA. T.B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2008 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. 30 1.2 Adrian Piper, Here and Now, 1968. Artist’s book: cardboard portfolio, 64 loose leaf mimeographed pages with typescript, 9” × 9” (22.8 × 22.8 cm). Detail: Column 3 Row 6. Collection of Alan Cravitz, Chicago. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. 37 1.3 Adrian Piper, Concrete Infinity 6” Square [‘This square should be read as a whole …’] 1968. Pagework: typescript, 11.5” × 8.5” (29.2 × 21.6 cm). Private Collection, USA. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.39 1.4 Adrian Piper, Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City, 1970. Performance documentation. 4 black and white photographs, silver gelatin on baryta paper (prints c. 1998) 41 × 41 cm each; framed 49.8 × 51.6 cm. Detail. Collection Generali Foundation, Vienna. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. 41 1.5 Adrian Piper, Concrete Infinity Documentation Piece, 1970. 57 framed graph paper pages with black and white photographs and handwritten-script, 11.5” × 9.75” (29.2 × 24.7 cm). Detail: Thursday 6/18/70. Collection of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. 44 1.6 Adrian Piper, Concrete Infinity Documentation Piece, 1970. 57 framed graph paper pages with black-and-white photographs and handwritten script, 11.5” × 9.75” (29.2 × 24.7 cm).

Figures

Collection of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. 45 1.7a and b  Robert Morris, I-Box, 1962. Painted plywood cabinet coated with Sculptmetal, containing black-and-white photograph, 19” × 12¾” × 1⅜” (48.26 × 32.39 × 3.49 cm). Photo Courtesy Castelli Gallery. © 1962 Robert Morris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 48–49 1.8 Adrian Piper, Catalysis IV, 1970–71. Performance documentation: 5 silver gelatin print photographs, 16” × 16” (40.6 × 40.6 cm). Detail: 2 of 5. Collection of the Generali Foundation, Vienna. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin and Generali Foundation. 54 1.9 Adrian Piper, Catalysis III, 1970. One silver gelatin print photograph on paper, 16” × 16” (40.6 cm × 40.6 cm). Detail: #1 of 3. Photocredit: Rosemary Mayer. Collection of the Generali Foundation, Vienna. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin and Generali Foundation. 57 1.10 Adrian Piper, Food for the Spirit, 1971 (photographic reprints 1997). 14 silver gelatin prints and original book pages of a paperback edition of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, torn out and annotated by Adrian Piper. 15” × 14.5”. Detail: photograph #11 of 14. Collection Thomas Erben. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. 58 1.11a and b  Adrian Piper, Food for the Spirit, 1971 (photographic reprints 1997). 14 silver gelatin prints. 15” × 14.5”. Collection Thomas Erben. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.60–61 1.12 Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: A-108 (Kant), 1975. 6 vintage silver gelatin print photographs altered with oil-crayon. 25.5” × 17.75” (64.7 × 45 cm). Detail: #5 of 6. Private collection. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. 64 1.13 Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: I Embody Everything You Most Hate and Fear, 1975. Gelatin silver print photograph altered with oil crayon. 9.96” × 8.3” (25.3 × 21.1 cm). Collection of Thomas Erben, New York. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. 65 2.1 FBI Wanted Poster of Angela Davis, 1970. Courtesy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. 73 2.2 Cover of Life magazine, 11 September 1970. Photograph by David Dornlas. LIFE logo and cover design © Time Inc. LIFE and the LIFE logo are registered trademarks of Time Inc. used under license. 77

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Figures

3.1 Nancy Spero, Codex Artaud I, 1971. Cut-and-pasted typed text and painted paper on paper 23” × 7’ 5”. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts. Licensed by Vaga New York/DACS London/Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York.111 3.2 Nancy Spero, detail from Codex Artaud I, 1971. Cut-andpasted typed text and painted paper on paper. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts. Licensed by Vaga New York/DACS London/Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York. 111 3.3 Nancy Spero, Codex Artaud XVII, 1972. Cut-and-pasted typed text and painted paper on paper. 45” × 18”. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts. Licensed by Vaga New York/DACS London/Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York.116 3.4 Nancy Spero, Codex Artaud III, 1971. Cut-and-pasted text and painted paper on paper. 20” × 6’ 4”. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts. Licensed by Vaga New York/DACS London/Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York. 123 3.5 Nancy Spero, Mummified, 1950. Newspaper, nylon stocking, plaster, and string, 15” × 4⅝”. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts. Licensed by Vaga New York/ DACS London/Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York. 128 3.6 Nancy Spero, Les Anges, Merde, Fuck You, 1960, gouache and ink on paper, 17½” × 22”. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts. Licensed by Vaga New York/DACS London/Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York. 130 3.7 Nancy Spero, Homage to New York (I Do Not Challenge), 1958. Oil on canvas, 46⅞” × 31⅛”. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts. Licensed by Vaga New York/DACS London/Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York. 132 3.8 Nancy Spero, Letter to Lucy R. Lippard, 29 October 1971. Lucy R. Lippard Papers, 1930s to 2010, bulk, 1960–1990. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 135 3.9 Nancy Spero, Codex Artaud VIII, 1971. Cut-and-pasted typed text and painted paper on paper, 15½” × 8’ 3”. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts. Licensed by Vaga New York/DACS London/Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York. 138 3.10 Nancy Spero, Codex Artaud IX, 1971. Cut-and-pasted typed text and painted paper on paper, 18” × 10’ (45.7 × 304.8 cm).

Figures

3.11

4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 5.1

5.2

5.3

5.4

Los Angeles County Museum of Art. © 1971 Museum Associates, LACMA. Licensed by Art Resource, New York. 138 Nancy Spero, detail from Codex Artaud IX, 1971. Cut-andpasted typed text and painted paper on paper. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. © 1971 Museum Associates, LACMA. Licensed by Art Resource, New York. 139 Cover of the 1968 Olympia Press Edition of SCUM Manifesto. Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah. 160 Photograph of Valerie Solanas by Fred W. McDarrah, 1967. © Getty Images. 162 Cover of the 1970 Olympia Press Edition of the SCUM Manifesto.163 Cover of the 1971 Olympia Press Edition of the SCUM Manifesto.164 Still from I Shot Andy Warhol, dir. Mary Harron, 1996. Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Playhouse International Pictures. Solanas and Monroe. 166 Still from I Shot Andy Warhol, dir. Mary Harron, 1996. Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Playhouse International Pictures. Solanas’s screen test. 168 Still from I Shot Andy Warhol, dir. Mary Harron, 1996. Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Playhouse International Pictures. Solanas at the typewriter. 171 Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Introduction, 1973. Perspex units, white card, wool vests, pencil, ink. 4 units, 20 × 25.5 cm each. © Generali Foundation. Photo credit: Werner Kaligofsky. Reproduced with permission from the artist.189 Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Introduction, 1973. Perspex units, white card, wool vests, pencil, ink. Detail, 20 × 25.5 cm. © Generali Foundation. Photo credit: Werner Kaligofsky. Reproduced with permission from the artist. 191 Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Documentation I, Analysed faecal stains and feeding charts, 1974. Perspex units, white card, diaper lining, plastic sheeting, ink. 1 of 31 units. Detail, 28 × 35.5 cm. Collection, Art Gallery of Ontario. Reproduced with permission from the artist. 193 Mary Kelly, Margaret Harrison, Kay Hunt, Women and Work, 1973–1975, black-and-white photographs, charts, tables, photocopied documents, film loops, audiotapes, dimensions variable. Installation, South London Art Gallery, 1975. Tate Gallery, London. Reproduced with permission from the artist. 196

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Figures

5.5 Mary Kelly, Margaret Harrison, Kay Hunt, Women and Work: Daily Schedules, 1975, detail. Collection, Tate London. Reproduced with permission from the artist. 197 5.6 Mary Kelly, Antepartum, 1973. Video loop transferred from Super 8 film, black-and-white, 1 minute 30 seconds. Collection, Whitney Museum of American Art. Reproduced with permission from the artist. 198 5.7 Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Documentation II, Analysed Utterances and Related Speech Events, 1975. Perspex units, white card, wood, paper, ink, rubber. 1 of 26 units. Detail, 20.5 × 25.5 cm. © Generali Foundation. Photo credit: Werner Kaligofsky. Reproduced with permission from the artist.210 5.8 Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Documentation III, Analysed Markings and Diary-perspective Schema, 1975. Perspex units, white card, sugar paper, crayon, 4 of 10 units, 35.5 × 28 cm each. © Generali Foundation. Photo credit: Werner Kaligofsky. Reproduced with permission from the artist.212 5.9 Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Documentation III, Analysed Markings and Diary-perspective Schema, 1975. Perspex units, white card, sugar paper, crayon, 1 of 10 units. Detail, 35.5 × 28 cm each. Collection, Tate Gallery, London. Reproduced with permission from the artist. 213 5.10 Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Documentation IV, Transitional Objects, Diary and Diagram, 1976. Perspex units, white card, body/hand imprint in clay, plaster of Paris, cotton fabric, string. 1 of 8 units. Detail, 28 × 35.5 cm. © Generali Foundation. Photo credit: Werner Kaligofsky. Reproduced with permission from the artist. 214 5.11 Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Documentation V, Classified Specimens, Proportional Diagrams, Statistical Tables, Research and Index, 1977. Perspex units, white card, wood, paper, ink, mixed media. 3 of 33 units, 13 × 18 cm each. © Generali Foundation. Photo credit: Werner Kaligofsky. Reproduced with permission from the artist. 216 5.12 Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Documentation VI, Pre-writing Alphabet, Exergue and Diary, 1978. Perspex units, white card, resin, slate. 1 of 15 units. Detail, 20 × 25.5 cm. © Generali Foundation. Photo credit: Werner Kaligofsky. Reproduced with permission from the artist. 217

Figures

5.13 Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Documentation VI, Pre-writing Alphabet, Exergue and Diary, 1978. Perspex units, white card, resin, slate. 1 of 15 units. Detail, 20 × 25.5 cm. © Generali Foundation. Photo credit: Werner Kaligofsky. Reproduced with permission from the artist. 220 6.1 Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, still from Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. British Film Institute. Opening shot of Midi-Minuit Fantastique. Reproduced with permission from Laura Mulvey. 235 6.2 Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, still from Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. British Film Institute. Title. Reproduced with permission from Laura Mulvey. 235 6.3 Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, still from Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. British Film Institute. Chapters. Reproduced with permission from Laura Mulvey. 236 6.4 Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, still from Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. British Film Institute. Image of Woman as Bird. Reproduced with permission from Laura Mulvey. 236 6.5 Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, still from Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. British Film Institute. ‘Sphinx Moderne.’ Reproduced with permission from Laura Mulvey. 236 6.6 Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, still from Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. British Film Institute. The Sphinx and Oedipus. Reproduced with permission from Laura Mulvey.237 6.7 Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, still from Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. British Film Institute. Laura at her writing desk. Reproduced with permission from Laura Mulvey. 238 6.8 Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, still from Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. British Film Institute. The lips of the Sphinx. Reproduced with permission from Laura Mulvey. 240 6.9 Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, still from Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. Daughter in high chair. Reproduced with permission from Laura Mulvey. 241 6.10 Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, still from Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. British Film Institute. Louise and Maxine. Reproduced with permission from Laura Mulvey. 253 6.11 Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, still from Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. British Film Institute. Mary Kelly reading from Post-Partum Document. Reproduced with permission from Laura Mulvey. 254

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Figures

6.12 Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, still from Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. British Film Institute. Image of Mary Kelly with son.255 6.13 Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, still from Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. British Film Institute. Image of Maxine at the mirror. Reproduced with permission from Laura Mulvey. 256 6.14 Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, still from Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. British Film Institute. Image of Louise at the mirror. Reproduced with permission from Laura Mulvey. 257 6.15 Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, still from Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. British Film Institute. Image of director between curtains. Reproduced with permission from Laura Mulvey. 257 6.16 Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, still from Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. British Film Institute. British Museum, mummy in glass case. Reproduced with permission from Laura Mulvey.259 6.17 Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, still from Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. British Film Institute. Mother and daughter entering Egyptian Gallery. Reproduced with permission from Laura Mulvey. 260

Acknowledgements

Many people have helped me write this book. My mother, Carolyn Lamm, consistently encouraged my interests in art, writing, and feminism, though the latter in an oblique and complicated way. I can trace the beginnings of this project to my time in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (ISP), where I was a Helena Rubinstein fellow in Critical and Visual Studies. Working with Carol Armstrong in the ISP program underscored the value and centrality of close reading for my work and gave me a crucial model for bringing visual art, literature, and feminism together. Priscilla Wald has been a reliable source of support and has encouraged all of my intellectual interests with generosity and passion. Working with Alys Weinbaum marked an important shift in my scholarship. Encountering her work helped me to specify and deepen my feminist commitments. Robyn Wiegman gave me real encouragement and shrewd advice during the writing and publishing process. I will always be grateful for this help and the model of intellectual rigour she cannot help but offer. In 2013, I was lucky enough to be able to participate in a Mellon Manuscript Completion Workshop through Duke University’s Franklin Humanities Institute. I thank Ian Baucom for supporting and organising this event and also the two outside interlocutors, Carol Mavor and Jennifer Doyle, who responded to my project and helped me reconfigure it in compelling ways. During the workshop, a number of Duke faculty generously offered their advice and insight – Anne Allison, Joseph Donahue, Michael Hardt, Negar Mottahedeh, Kristine Stiles, Antonio Viego, Priscilla Wald, Robyn Wiegman, and Kathi Weeks – in ways I found both inspiring and humbling. My year as a post-doctoral associate in the Women’s Studies program at Duke University helped get this project off the ground, and I thank Ranjana Khanna and Tina Campt for an enriching year in which they responded thoughtfully to my ideas. My colleagues in the department of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies – Elizabeth Grosz, Frances Hasso, Ranjana Khanna, Gabriel Rosenberg, Kathy Rudy, Priscilla Wald, Kathi Weeks, and Ara Wilson – have given me support and freedom in equal measure and I feel lucky to have encountered the insights of their work.

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Acknowledgements

Emma Brennan, my editor at Manchester University Press, deserves special thanks for her kind, professional, and steadfast support, and I am moved by the fact that Amelia Jones and Marsha Meskimmon have included my work in their series Rethinking Art’s Histories. My largest and most fulfilling debt is inscribed in the dedication.

Introduction: addressing the other woman

In the late 1960s and 1970s, women artists in the United States and Britain began to make texts and images of writing central to their visual compositions. This book explores the feminist stakes of that choice. It analyses how three artists – Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly – worked with the visual dimensions of language to transform how women are perceived. I became interested in the way women artists engaged with text and writing when I saw WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at MoMA PS1 in New York City in the summer of 2008.1 This large-scale exhibition was devoted to artwork from the 1960s and 1970s produced by women and reflected the galvanising impact of feminism. Walking through the halls of what was once a public school (PS1), I was initially taken, not by how many different artists utilised texts, but by the disparate images of women’s bodies placed on and protruding from the exhibition walls. These images ran the gamut from severe, minimalist, and spare (Eleanor Antin’s Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, 1972) to the messy, liquid, and amorphous (Lynda Benglis’s For Carl Andre, 1970). Some images gave the body a sculptural malleability and an imaginative range of motion that transformed the spaces around it. Artists climbed ladders (Gina Pane’s Escalade non-anesthésiée, 1971) and hung from swings (Barbara Hammer’s Double Strength, 1978), and painted walls with blood (Ana Mendieta’s [Untitled] Blood Sign #2/Body Tracks, 1974). While these artists revealed what women’s bodies can do, other artists exposed what women have been expected to do to their bodies. Many pieces in WACK! enacted the regimes of modification to which women often subject themselves in order to produce pleasing images of femininity. In her Double Life (1974–1975), Sanja Iveković juxtaposed colour advertisements selling lingerie and black-and-white photographs in which she mimed the poses of the women displayed in those advertisements. A year before Eleanor Antin created Carving (1972), in which she lined up photographs of her naked body in a grid to document how a diet ‘carves’ her body, she created Representational Painting (1971), also included in WACK!, a thirty-eight minute video in which she sits in front of the camera at a three-quarter angle and applies make-up to her

2

Introduction

face. In Les tortures volontaires (1972), Annette Messager placed eighty-six small black-and-white photographs into an assemblage that depicts the array of technologies for producing beauty: surgeries, masks, straps, and lifts. Each of these artists made the production of the artwork a site for disrupting two interrelated expectations: that a woman should present herself as a beautiful image, and if an artist, will create aesthetically pleasing objects.2 This disruption exposed the efforts so many women have put into comporting their bodies to fit the visual ‘sign’ of woman: the term feminists working within semiotics and critical theory used to identify a representation that purports to represent all women but actually reflects an idea of woman that serves masculine dominance.3 Aligning their artwork with theoretical investigations of ‘woman as sign,’ these artists resisted the imperative that women compose images of their bodies that transmit their willingness to become what Simone de Beauvoir identified two decades before as the ‘Other’ of patriarchy.4 Encountering the dynamic range of the artwork in WACK!, I saw how many of the defining movements in contemporary art coincided with women artists’ attempts to expose the limitations that have constituted woman as a visual sign.5 One can see women artists’ dialogue with Pop Art’s use of seriality to detach the image from its referent, Conceptual Art’s sober reflection on art’s discursive production, Performance Art’s presentation of the body as a visceral medium, and Video Art’s intimate exploration of the image of the self as an other. These movements, all of which erode the image and its authority, became part of women artists’ work challenging the overdetermined relationship between images and women. If, as John Berger observes in his classic book Ways of Seeing (1972), ‘men act and women appear,’ then the artwork displayed in WACK! reminded viewers that women artists in the 1960s and 1970s passionately developed strategies to act against the entrenched connection between the sign woman and the imperative to appear as an image that submits to patriarchal desires.6 WACK! is one of many exhibitions to take place in the last decade that returned to women’s art practices from the late 1960s and 1970s. Though there were significant efforts in the 1990s to curate nuanced histories of feminist art, in 2005 there was a renewed focus among museums, galleries, and institutions around the world to highlight feminist art’s multiple iterations, narrate stories of their emergence, and speculate about their futures.7 This renewed attention, which manifested on a global scale, marked a positive shift for women artists. Vibrant careers, long buried by the patriarchal criteria of choice (both within the art world and the world at large), were brought into well-deserved public view.8 Building on earlier curatorial projects that defied the forces that have obscured artwork by women, WACK! and the other exhibitions like it continued the important work of unhinging the category of feminist art from the stubborn assessment that it was a short-lived embarrassment from the 1960s and 1970s,

Introduction

obvious and obsolete.9 And yet, by drawing attention to the various manifestations of feminism in contemporary art practices, it became clear that ‘feminist art’ could only really serve as a limited art historical placeholder, one that it is ultimately inadequate to the disparate array of practices that gather under its name.10 At the same time, the exhibitions demonstrated the importance of the category – despite but also because of the contestations inherent to it – for valuing art practices by women. Situating itself within feminist art’s limitations and possibilities, exhibitions like WACK! reanimated familiar questions about the relationships among feminism, women, and visual art, but also created openings for seeing dimensions of the artwork that have yet to be fully explored. WACK! and the global trend of which it was a part made new forms of engagement – both scholarly and popular – possible, this book included. Though I had been writing about the relationship between artwork by women and feminism for a while, the array of art linked to feminism had never been so vividly present before me. The exhibition’s title reflected the revolutionary demands inspiring the artwork and echoes the names of collectives such as Women Artists in Revolution (WAR) that coalesced in the late 1960s and 1970s to protest the entrenched sexism and racism of the art world and link it to the larger politics of inequities in cultural representation. By highlighting the demand for revolutionary change, WACK! underscored Griselda Pollock’s argument that the proliferation of art practices by women in the late 1960s and 1970s was a crucial moment in the history of the avant-garde, a belated continuation of the avant-gardes of the 1870s and 1920s that neglected the contributions of women.11 The connections WACK! made between feminist art practices and revolutionary protest drew attention to the aspiration to make artwork contest how dominant images circulating through western culture reinforce the idea that women are – or should be – passive and subordinate. But to think of the artwork composed under feminism’s broad auspices as demonstrations of strength or claims to equality would be a mistake. The aspiration was to compose images that would allow women to recognise themselves differently. Turning to text and writing was a subtle articulation of this aspiration. It was not until I saw WACK! a second time that I started noticing how many of the artists made the formal properties of language part of their work. In Concrete Infinity Documentation Piece (1970), Adrian Piper annotated blackand-white photographs of her naked body with handwritten diary entries carefully composed on graph paper. In photographs documenting her performance Interior Scroll (1975), a naked Carolee Schneemann pulled from her vagina a long and narrow handwritten script that tells the story of how a ‘structuralist filmmaker’ dismissed her films. Also displayed was Nancy Spero’s Torture of Women (1976), in which she placed typewritten and bold hand-printed fragments of written stories, myths, and reports together to tell a pervasive

3

4

Introduction

story of gendered violence. In Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s video Passages/Paysages (1978), single typed words appeared on a grey screen at unpredictable intervals to mark the passage of time away from a communal/national home (‘pays’). There was also Angry Gertrude (1973), in which Louise Fishman painted the letters of her title in thick strokes of dull pinkish red and grey paint that almost take over the entire picture plane and are placed amidst red and green crosshatched marks that drip angrily down the canvas. In 10 Months (1977–1979), Susan Hiller placed black-and-white photographs of a growing pregnant belly above white cards typed with black typewritten text that reflect on pregnancy’s configuration of proximity, distance, time, and sensation. In La Roquette, Prison de Femmes, Nil Yalter (with Judy Blum and Nicole Croiset) (1974) wrote thin and simple white letters on grey paper to narrate a story of a woman entering prison and explain the significance of objects and body parts depicted in a series of black-and-white photographs. In Post-Partum Document (1973–1979), Mary Kelly composed written charts, graphs, and diary entries on and within an array of textured surfaces to mime the discursive positioning of maternal femininity in psychoanalytic discourse and impede visual access to satisfying images of motherhood. Echoing the focus on textuality in the 1996 exhibition Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art in, of, and from the Feminine, this sample from WACK! demonstrates how many women artists in the late 1960s and 1970s deployed text and writing as visual materials.12 While a few key arguments have identified this turn and its stakes, the fact that so many women artists of this period made language one of their materials has not been explored with any sustained attention.13 The artists’ choice to move between visual and linguistic registers creates what Mieke Bal identifies as ‘visual textuality,’ a texture of signification that addresses viewers and asks them to engage in the act of reading.14 To create this ‘visual textuality,’ these pieces aligned with contemporary art’s multiple engagements with language: the sober displays of information and sentence-like sequences of Conceptual Art, the ordinary and playful typographies of Fluxus, and even the calligraphic gestures of Abstract Expressionism. These movements continued the attention many avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century paid to the visual and material qualities of language. Whether cutting and pasting typographic fragments from newspapers, composing calligrams in ink, or arranging swirls of unmoored letters, artists linked to Cubism, Surrealism, and Dadaism worked with the ‘word-image’ to fragment the illusions of pictorial space and draw attention to the picture plane as a two-dimensional surface.15 What this rich history cannot account for is feminism’s impact on the choice to make language a visual material. Whether they identified with feminism or not, the artists of the 1960s and 1970s who chose to work with text and writing were responding to the fact that language had become central to feminist efforts

Introduction

to transform the material conditions of women’s lives. With protest signs, fliers, leaflets, periodicals, manifestos, banners, and an array of emergent writing practices, feminists were seizing language to write other worlds for women.16 Though not often noted, visual artists contributed to the feminist claim to language. They worked with texts and writing to show they had something to say about how women are seen and then wrote that claim upon the image itself. Central to this claim was a rejection of a long history in which women were depicted as images but were restricted from producing them. The artwork was also implicitly rejecting an unfolding historical present, one that was characterised by an unprecedented proliferation of mass-produced images in which visual signs of woman fix and naturalise the expectation that woman serves as the ‘Other’ of patriarchal culture. Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly are three artists who deployed text and images of writing with a particularly inventive intensity in the late 1960s and 1970s. In this period of feminist dissent, they created bodies of work that manifested the subtle and compelling innovations language made available. Though there are significant stylistic differences among these artists’ work – which perhaps explains why they have never been read together – their shared use of text allows us to see the correspondences among their projects and the emergent feminist desires to address other women and embark upon a collective effort to rewrite perceptions of women. As my survey of WACK! suggests, there are many women artists from this period whose work I could have analysed. I pursue the work of Piper, Spero, and Kelly here because it emblematises interrelated dimensions of women’s art production in this historical period and identifies three crucial mechanisms for keeping women aligned with and measured against the sign of woman, respectively: pathologising racial difference, repressing women’s aggression, and idealising maternal femininity. With text and images of writing, these artists targeted these mechanisms at work in the prevailing images circulating through western visual culture. Language became a tool to expose the work these images perform, confirming the assumption that woman serves as ‘Other’ to man. It also opened spaces for imagining women, as Griselda Pollock puts it, ‘other than being other to men.’17 In the incisive work she produced in the late 1960s and 1970s, Piper worked with the interplay of words of images to break down how sexism and racism function as visual pathologies that call black women into subordinated positions and thereby exposed the fears and fantasies projected on to black women’s bodies. Typing the writings of Antonin Artaud on paper and placing them in proximity to monstrous, sexually ambiguous figures in her epic scroll Codex Artaud (1971–1972), Spero staged an elaborate protest against the repression of aggression white American women are presumed not to possess and punished for wielding. And by composing intricate charts, graphs, and diary entries to

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portray the relationships among maternal femininity, language, and loss, Kelly’s Post-Partum Document represented the psychic complexity of maternal desires to undermine the idealisation granted to white women that keeps the feminist potential of desires in check. Through and across these distinct bodies of work, I argue that by making language a primary material, Piper, Spero, and Kelly made a powerful claim: to compose representations of women that push beyond patriarchal desires and definitions, images are not enough. Writing across images, imprinting visual materials with texts, or making words into images by highlighting their formal and material qualities – these aesthetic choices ask viewers to see beyond the forms of visibility images make available and thus question the image as the only site through which to transform how women are perceived. Piper, Spero, and Kelly ask viewers to see the ‘picture’ embedded in language and then notice that words shape not only how people see but determine what and who is allowed to appear.18 Which is to say that their artwork reflects upon language as a system that governs what can be said and what can become visible.19 Conversely, the artists invite viewers to see images as a kind of ‘language’ with their own syntax of construction that allows them to convey meaning. They exposed the imaginary conditions that set out in advance the proper place of identification, speech, and subject positions that are available to women. Aligned (with different degrees of intention and intensity) with the theory of language posited in the work of Jacques Lacan, the artists demonstrated that language functions as an tool of patriarchal dominance. By making this argument part of their work, they linked their projects to feminist efforts to create arenas in which women can find their voices and speak back to the patriarchal discourses by which they have been silenced and confined. But more than voice or speech it is writing – and in particular, the idea of writing offered by deconstruction – in which this artwork seems to be invested.20 Within deconstruction, writing is regarded as cohering around fundamental absences, which undercuts the prestige of presence bestowed upon speech. The work of Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous stands out for their attention to writing as a confrontation with the gaps and absences at the heart of signification. Whether women artists drew explicitly from deconstruction or not, the movement between presence and absence enacted through writing challenged the fantasmatic presence attributed to the sign woman (which is paradoxically premised on her absence and lack) and the punitive absences that have awaited women outside its recognisable boundaries. Indeed, by working with text and writing, Piper, Spero, and Kelly created images that were ‘writerly,’ Roland Barthes’ term for texts that solicit readers’ engagement through their porous openings and unfixed significations.21 Working to unravel the historical orders consolidated through language and images, these artists’ engagements with text and writing suggest meanings that exceed the signs through which women are habitually recognised

Introduction

and therefore create the possibility of representing women through gaps and absences without filling them up with ready-made meanings that justify subordination. To understand the stakes of this writerly artwork, it has to be set in relationship to the visual cultures of capitalism, or what French Situationist Guy Debord identified in 1967 as the ‘society of the spectacle’ in his manifesto of the same name. Diagnosing the political economy that produces and benefits from proliferation of mass-produced images, Debord argues that capitalism had colonised everyday life to such a degree that visual perception itself had become a mode of consumption.22 The society of the spectacle installs the image as the dominant signifier of western society, the primary site through which subjectivity, experience, and history are made into mirrors of capitalist imperatives. Needless to say, the society of the spectacle occludes and mutes language, reducing it to one purpose: buttressing acts of visual consumption. Words appear, but are given undervalued jobs as logo, caption, and copy.23 In Signatures of the Visible, Fredric Jameson develops Debord’s picture of visual dominance to argue that the ‘all-pervasive visuality’ of late capitalism has a ‘pornographic’ dimension that provokes an impulse to ‘stare at the world as though it were a naked body’ and ‘possess’ it.24 Jameson claims that a betrayal is necessary if an analysis of visual culture is not simply an ‘adjunct’ to the ‘rapt, mindless fascination’ visuality seductively provokes.25 Overshadowed by spectacle, language has the capacity to stage this ‘betrayal.’ With different degrees of explicitness, the artwork of Piper, Spero, and Kelly suggests that the ‘naked body’ Jameson argues is central to western visual culture was most often imagined as and portrayed through the visual sign of woman. Their use of text deflects the impulse endemic to late capitalist visual culture to see through and visually possess this naked sign and insist that she serve as the other to western culture. Inscribed upon the image, language creates the possibility of seeing subjective differentiation – the differences between the sign woman and women as singular and historically specific subjects. While certainly language has been an instrument of women’s dispossession, and is by no means free from capitalism’s distortions, the artwork of Piper, Spero, and Kelly demonstrates that in an age of visual saturation, the choice to work with both the restrictive orders and imaginative possibilities of language made brief interruptions of visual dominance possible.26 In this way, the artwork aligns with feminism’s intervention into visual culture, which itself overlapped with the theoretical investigation of ‘woman as sign.’27 Work in feminist visual culture exposed the fact that patriarchal powers are buttressed by an imaginary set of relationships that relies upon the visual sign woman as an object of exchange. In ‘The Other Side of Venus: The Visual Economy of Feminine Display,’ Abigail Solomon-Godeau argues that images of women’s sexual display are conflated with the commodification of

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visuality itself and offers a history of how ‘femininity, display, and spectacle become visually collapsed into each other.’28 This collapse makes images of sexually available women have a ‘banal possessability’ that transports viewers into acts of consumption without recognising it as such.29 Such images represent the alienation inherent to capitalist exchange, but they can also mollify the feelings that emerge from it because they are imagined to be outside it – in the realms of bodies, sexualities, and feelings – and therefore ‘manage’ the conflicts and contradictions of capitalism and soften its corrosive force.30 The sign woman transmits a ‘fantasy of possession’ in which men are reassured that they have privileged capacities to control exchange relations.31 SolomonGodeau’s critique underscores the importance of reading the sign woman as a mirror that reflects the pervasive fiction that masculinity is not vulnerable to exchange relations. The emergence of black feminist visual theory made clear what many women of colour had known all along – that the sign woman is a product and reflection of racial hierarchies. In 1992, artist Lorraine O’Grady argued that the sign woman was not ‘unitary’ but split by racial difference. Comparing this sign to a ‘coin’ (thereby situating her analysis within capitalist discourse and inflecting it with the question of value), O’Grady argues that it has ‘two sides.’ Needless to say, the sides are not equal. As O’Grady explains: on the one side, it is white; on the other, not-white or, prototypically, black. The two bodies cannot be separated, nor can one body be understood in isolation from the other in the West’s metaphoric construction of ‘woman.’ White is what woman is; not-white (and the stereotypes not-white gathers in) is what she had better not be.32

It is Piper’s work in particular that aligns itself with O’Grady’s vivid description of the racial hierarchy the sign woman reinforces and occludes. Juxtaposed against O’Grady’s argument, it becomes clear that the artwork Piper produced in the 1960s and 1970s, which denaturalises the raced female body, vehemently exposes and critiques the assumption that women who bear the physical signs of racial difference have been historically excluded from the sign woman. Though far less explicitly, the work of Spero and Kelly contributed to calling the implicit whiteness of the sign woman into question. Their work undoes the mandate that white women should align themselves with the narrow ideals of white femininity that are assumed to be the natural ground of the sign woman. Drawing attention to this artwork’s implications for race (whether explicit or implicit) and the ways in which the artists reveal the various ways race inflects gender, I build upon recent work in feminist art history that refuses to see its objects of analysis with ‘colour blind’ eyes.33 When read in relation to each other, we can see that Piper, Spero, and Kelly produced their work during a historical period in which feminism was

Introduction

impacting multiple dimensions of western culture and creating an expansive picture of feminism that does not consolidate into one easily consumable story. However, in response to black and post-colonial feminist critiques of western feminisms that gained rightful prominence in the 1980s, and the pervasive impact of intersectionality as a conceptual tool for bringing anti-racist and feminist critiques to bear on each other, there is a strong impulse in the feminist narratives of the present to see the feminisms of the late 1960s and 1970s primarily in terms of its racial exclusions.34 These narratives are part of what Clare Hemmings identifies as a story of ‘progress’ in which black feminisms of the 1980s transformed and transcended what has been deemed the white middle-class essentialist feminism of the 1970s.35 The racial exclusions to which these narratives point are central to feminism’s histories, and cannot be denied. But attention to these exclusions should not elide iterations of black feminism that emerged in the 1970s, nor should it occlude the utopian aspirations of feminism, which extend beyond its discrete historical appearances and have offered the possibility (however small) for investigating how the sign woman allowed white women of the late 1960s and 1970s to perpetuate racisms with unreflective ease.36 When we look at and read the work of Piper, Spero, and Kelly together, it is possible to read it as animated by the hope that as artists they could create images that have yet to be seen and they invite viewers to collaborate in that creation. Text and writing are central to these interrelated aspirations. In Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art (2007), Liz Kotz points to the fact that language is always in two places simultaneously, ‘here,’ as she explains, ‘concretely present on the page, or in the moment of utterance,’ but also ‘elsewhere,’ pointing toward ‘sets of ideas, objects and experiences that are somewhere else.’37 With text and writing, Piper, Spero, and Kelly all inventively drew upon the capacity of language simultaneously to be ‘here’ (appearing before the viewer) and ‘elsewhere’ (beyond the immediate field of vision and outside the frame of appearance). Text and writing enacted this movement and addressed viewers to see women beyond the ideas that dominant images allow into visibility. Moving between ‘here’ and ‘somewhere else,’ Piper, Spero, and Kelly asked viewers – other women – to become readers of the visual histories they inherited and engage in the process of imagining women beyond familiar words and images that reinforce women’s subordination. ‘Addressing the other woman’ is my term for the utopian wish to reach other women and correspond with them across differences. To make the artwork’s aspirations to address the other woman concrete, I place these artists in correspondence with writers who, from aligned historical contexts, also addressed the limited range of images through which women are allowed to become visible. The images and texts Piper arranged to identify the psychic impact of racism and sexism have clear (if unintentional) correspondences with the

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writings of Angela Davis and the story she tells in her written reflections on becoming the ‘imaginary enemy’ of the US nation-state. The unruly shouts Spero typed across Codex Artaud correspond with Valerie Solanas’s infamous SCUM Manifesto (1967) and its angry claim to language as a revolutionary tool to dismantle the grim picture of the world patriarchy has created for itself. And finally, Kelly’s efforts to stage an intricate resistance to the alienating myths of maternal femininity in Post-Partum Document aligns with the feminist reconfiguration of woman in both the theoretical writings and film practices of Laura Mulvey, who reflected upon how the cinematic image became a site for connecting women to the project of ‘bearing’ meaning rather than ‘making’ meaning.38 Because they hold iconic places in the histories of feminism, identifying Davis, Solanas, and Mulvey as writers does not adequately capture the reach of their work. Mapping feminism’s political and intellectual interventions, drawing out its possibilities and revealing its limitations, their writings represent some of the most compelling aspects of feminism’s histories in the late 1960s and 1970s. Reflecting on her experience as an African-American woman on the run from the FBI, Davis crafted a sober picture of the punishments that are wielded when black women refuse to create images of subservience that appease dominant white culture. Composed with anger and humour, Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto makes feminism into a counter-cultural force capable of destroying the foundations of patriarchal culture by ‘cutting up’ the imaginary picture of the world that masculine dominance has created for itself. Mulvey’s theoretical writings on film have defined the fields of feminist film theory and feminist visual studies. Her essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ which originally appeared in Screen in 1975, has been habitually cited in feminist analyses of film, included in countless anthologies of film theory, and is a staple of university film courses. ‘Visual Pleasure’ demonstrated how images of women on the screens of western cinema reinforce masculine dominance and exposed the psychic investments in women’s subservience. The archive of Mulvey’s theoretical writing on film (which extends far beyond ‘Visual Pleasure’) testifies to her commitment to writing a ‘new language of desire’ in both theory and cinematic images.39 Since there was so much compelling artwork produced by women from the late 1960s and 1970s that could be analysed alongside the work of Piper, Spero, and Kelly, my attention to writers might seem unnecessary. But I am interested in the ways in which the textual dimensions of these art practices corresponds to the work of writers who, with language as their ‘medium,’ wrote to expand the representations through which women could recognise themselves. While they did not use their hands to make images that can be framed and placed on walls, Davis, Solanas, and Mulvey were also contesting the dominant images of woman circulating in the eyes and minds of western culture. These

Introduction

writers identify, narrate, and analyse specific experiences of living within the visual cultures produced by capitalist patriarchy and do so to create feminist publics that could read these articulations and extend the work of intervening in punitively narrow deployments of the sign woman. Finally, these writers expand the frames through which the artwork can be seen and point to its relevance beyond the art world’s discourses and institutions. They help us see how deeply the artists were responding to visual culture, and their written efforts to imagine, create, and reach their audiences deepens our understanding of how and why the artists turned to language to create textual correspondences with their viewers. Psychoanalysis informs my readings of this constellation of work in both broad and specific ways. To different degrees, the writers and artists operate from the premise that words and images are the materials through which subjectivity is composed, and they deploy these materials to reveal and rewrite the idea of women’s subordination as it stubbornly lives in the psyche. Together they demonstrate a shared commitment to undoing the ways in which the subordination attached to women has an ideological tenacity that, in the words of Juliet Mitchell, ‘live[s] in the heart and in the head and [is] transmitted over generations.’40 Jacques Lacan’s ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function’ (1977) is an important argument from which to think about the textual correspondences among these artists and writers.41 ‘The Mirror Stage’ demonstrates how images create a foundation upon which the ego is composed and then points to the ways in which the subject, through its social determination in language and symbolic order, becomes intertwined with psychic investments, defences, and identifications.42 Indirectly, ‘The Mirror Stage’ highlights what the artists and writers in this book sought to contest: a picture of subjectivity founded upon women’s subordination. Positioned as a submerged maternal structure – which Lacan relies upon rather than questions – the suppressed figuration of woman in ‘The Mirror Stage’ represents the physical and psychic dependency the male subject imagines himself overcoming by mastering his image in the mirror. This identification lays the foundation for the entrance into the patriarchal order of language and culture and the Oedipal struggle enacted through them, which positions woman as site of fantasmatic plentitude and loss. The differences of actual women are occluded from vision and are replaced by polarised signs of woman (that are often made to correspond with racial divisions). A blueprint for the composition of masculine subjectivity and an implicit endorsement of the white patriarchal imaginary, ‘The Mirror Stage’ precisely identifies the stakes of feminist art and writing: to reconfigure the images through which women recognise themselves and rewrite their attenuated place in language. While ‘The Mirror Stage’ highlights the central role images play in the composition of gendered subjectivity, Lacan’s Seminar II outlines his ideas

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about language that reinforce the silencing of women. Drawing from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s alignment of woman and words as objects of exchange, Lacan argues that woman is doubly subjected to the castrating force of language and presents woman as a prime example of the alienation language inflicts. In Seminar II, Lacan argues that man is able to identify with the ‘Name of the Father’ because it threatens him with castration and can shift between the concrete and the transcendent, man and god. Woman, on the other hand, is twice removed from the symbolic order; she is subjected to its castrating force as man is, but she is also a sign exchanged among men. That is, woman is marked – through the paternal signifier – by her exchangeability, a status that translates into and is confirmed by the positions of daughter, mother, wife, and sister. These positions are accompanied by expectations that they mirror patriarchal culture to itself, hence the relegation of woman to the imaginary. Woman is nothing but the sign ‘woman.’ By mastering the sign woman through exchange, man masters woman and overcomes the lack and losses she signifies. Lacan’s formulations are clearly extreme, but his depiction of woman in the symbolic order does help account for the silencing of women, particularly in public discourse.43 If this silencing was going to be overturned, if the objectification of woman in the symbolic order was going to be rewritten, if the linguistic structure of the patriarchal unconscious was going to be reconfigured, and if there was going to be a greater range of positions with which women could identify, feminists had to intervene at the level of the imaginary and expand the forms of recognition offered to women by writing a woman other than the patriarchal sign of woman. This is precisely what the artwork of Piper, Spero, and Kelly began to make possible. While Lacan’s work identifies what the artists and writers of this book worked to undo, Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman (1974) – which I understand as the writing of a feminist mirror stage – illuminates what they wanted to create: a feminist imaginary, a virtual site in which women can recognise themselves beyond the dominant signs of woman. Speculum stands out as one of the guiding texts for thinking the possibility of a feminist imaginary and offers a theoretical groundwork for proposing ‘the other woman’ with whom women could identify. Exemplifying French feminism’s investment in embodied writing as a means to challenge the patriarchal orders of language, a dense literary and theoretical text that works with language as a supple material, Speculum is a textual investigation of western philosophy that defamiliarises the dominant sign of woman and her work constituting western culture.44 Aligned, as Hilary Robinson shows, with women artists’ efforts to find a visual language that can make women’s subjectivities legible, Speculum works within and against the narrow forms of visibility woman has been granted within the patriarchal imaginary.45 Irigaray interrogates the canonical texts of the western philosophical tradition to demonstrate how woman has been

Introduction

flattened into a one-dimensional mirror of similitude, made into the ground of western culture’s philosophical and economic speculations, and reduced to a figure for the unconscious, but not allowed to access her own.46 Irigaray’s analysis reveals the myriad ways women are coerced into serving as mirrors for patriarchal culture, which keeps the ‘other woman’ of her title suffocated and barely visible. Building upon Irigaray’s work excavating and revealing a feminine imaginary from within the western philosophical tradition, the artists and writers whose work I analyse in Addressing the Other Woman deployed text and images as the materials of subjectivity to create work in which women can recognise themselves beyond the dominant sign of woman and thereby imaginatively address the possibility of an other woman.47 To illuminate the specific ways in which these artists and writers contribute to the production of a feminist imaginary, this book is composed of three parts, each of which are separated into two chapters: one devoted to the work of an artist, and the other devoted to the work of a writer. The paired chapters highlight the textual correspondences between the art and writing and formally suggest how they mirror each other. Part I charts the correspondences between the artwork of Piper and the writings of Davis. Piper was the first artist to draw upon Conceptual Art’s attention to language to expose racism and sexism as visual pathologies, and Chapter 1 analyses the artwork she created in the late 1960s and 1970s, the years in which she began using text to create artwork that moves between what is known and what is unknown, opening spaces for perceiving what Piper identifies as ‘the singular reality of the “other.”’48 Together with images of her own body, Piper arranged texts and images of writing on a variety of materials to create artwork that investigates the black woman as the hyper-visible icon of sexual and racial difference that impedes the possibility of rendering a subjective relationship to one’s place in the orders of images and language. I read Piper’s work through Hortense Spillers’ (1987) concepts of ‘telegraphing’ – the means by which iconic images of black women have been transmitted across American culture – and ‘ungendering’ – the specific form of abjection inflicted upon black women in the transatlantic slave trade.49 Bringing psychoanalysis to bear on the gendered history of slavery to draw out its historical and psychic legacies, Spillers argues that the repressed history of ungendering translates into black women’s limited access to a place of value in the American symbolic order. Tracing Piper’s early engagements with text and writing reveals her work’s investment in making the image of the black female body move imaginatively between visibility and invisibility to rewrite the traumatic repetitions of ungendering. The stakes of this movement become clearer by setting Piper’s early work in relation to Davis’s written reflections on her transformation into the ‘imaginary

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enemy’ of the US nation-state. A spectacle in the most consequential sense, the iconic images of Davis transmitted across American visual culture demonstrate that the black female body is perceived to be a malleable ground upon which fears and fantasies can take visual form. Therefore, in Chapter 2 I analyse how Davis’s writing exposes the fictions animating those projections. By following the related ways Piper and Davis rearranged the words and images that have reinforced the legacies of ‘ungendering,’ this part of the book highlights their works’ corresponding efforts to create images through which black women could recognise themselves and reject the icon of the black woman and her fixed place in the American racial imaginary. Part II of Addressing the Other Woman focuses on aggression and traces how its repression plays out across Spero’s Codex Artaud and Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto. Chapter 3 begins with a close reading of Codex Artaud, an epic artwork in which Spero collaged together figures painted in gold and copper gouache and typewritten passages from the work of the notoriously crazed twentieth-century French poet Antonin Artaud. Analysing Codex Artaud closely, I show that by working with Artaud’s writing, Spero worked with and reconfigured the aggression white women of post-war American culture were forbidden to wield. Tracing how Spero represents Artaud’s work in Codex Artaud, it becomes clear she was not just emulating his aggressive acts. Knowing he was wracked with pain (both psychic and physical) and tortured by psychiatric institutions, Spero cites Artaud’s work to question the ease with which he represents his aggression. By enacting this contestation through her formal choices, Spero shows that Artaud was able to imagine himself on both sides of the patriarchal orders of language. He could make aggressive declarations, but he could also represent himself as a victim of linguistic authority who mourns the presence and plentitude language cuts away. To explain this licence to aggression, I draw from Sigmund Freud’s early definitions of sexuality, particularly those that highlight the expectation that women should not indulge in the pleasures of aggression but should instead create an image of a ‘normal’ sexuality free from disgust and shame and aimed toward heterosexual reproduction. By resisting the imperatives Freud identifies, Codex Artaud resonates with Solanas’s tightly crafted address that plays with the fantasy of a violent feminist collectivity. Chapter 4 traces how Solanas deploys language as a weapon capable of ‘cutting up’ patriarchal authority and shows how her history as a feminist lesbian of the 1960s helps evoke a historical milieu that brings the stakes of Codex Artaud into sharp relief. If Spero used text and writing to lash out against the suffocating contours of an idealised white femininity, then in Post-Partum Document, the subject of Chapter 5, Kelly worked with the visual appearance of language to enter idealised myths of maternal femininity and deconstruct them from within. In

Introduction

this well-known installation, Kelly made letters, words, and sentences into visual objects by inscribing them on images that lyrically ‘document’ the mother’s acts of fetishising her child. I argue that in Post-Partum Document, texts and pieces of writing become fetish objects that Kelly arranges into visual and linguistic ‘poems’ that forestall a confrontation with loss. I show that by portraying the mother’s desirous attachments to her child, so often dismissed and pathologised, Kelly challenged white ideals of maternal femininity as an identity women naturally assume. Informing this challenge is the psychoanalytic argument that through pregnancy and the first months of infant care, women re-experience their psychic lives before their negative entry into the Oedipus Complex and what Lacan identifies as their castrated place in language. While Freud and Lacan see this negative entry as inevitable, Kelly shows that mining the feminine pre-Oedipal for its affective and aesthetic plentitude opens up the feminist possibility that women can do more than serve as the ground for patriarchal losses; they can actually compose their own forms of fetishisation, a ‘language’ capable of writing women’s desires and subjectivities into cultural visibility. In Post-Partum Document, it is the visual language of the hieroglyph that Kelly draws upon to represent this fetishisation and the feminist efforts to excavate the repression of maternal femininity, not just from the force of patriarchy, but also in the psychic lives of women themselves. While the British Marxist feminism with which Kelly’s work aligns most often focuses on repressive class hierarchies as the impediments to feminist alliances, I build on this work to argue that by staging an imaginary excavation of maternal femininity through hieroglyphic forms, Post-Partum Document also touches upon the legacies of British colonial history and its manifestations as metropolitan racism in London in the 1970s. As Kelly quite subtly demonstrates, this structural racism was consolidated through the naturalisation of maternal femininity Post-Partum Document puts into question. Since it is so well known, readers familiar with Post-Partum Document and the rich body of scholarship devoted to analysing Kelly’s contributions to feminist art, visual theory, and psychoanalysis might wonder why it is included in Addressing the Other Woman. But it is precisely because Post-Partum Document is familiar to those interested in feminist art practices that I have featured Kelly’s now canonical artwork here. I want to acknowledge the significance of Post-Partum Document for women’s art practices in the 1970s – it exemplifies the array of feminist work text and writing can perform – but also place it in a broader context that will undermine its iconic isolation and draw out aspects of the artwork, such as its engagement with the legacies of British colonial history, that have yet to be fully revealed but have everything to do with the feminist collectivities from which the artwork emerged. To better see the feminist politics of Post-Partum Document, in Chapter 6 I trace its correspondence with Mulvey’s theoretical writings on film and her

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essay film Riddles of the Sphinx (1977). Like Post-Partum Document, Riddles of the Sphinx creates a hieroglyphic aesthetic that mines the feminist possibilities of repressed maternal desires and draws out their connections to British colonial history. By placing the hieroglyph and the colonial extractions for which it figures in the context of women’s atomised struggles with reproductive labour in late capitalism, Riddles writes collective feminist reading practices that might allow women to correspond across the divisions created by colonial, racial, and class hierarchies and therefore create a ‘new language of desire.’50 To reveal the collective feminist reading practices their work emerged from and made possible, I place the corresponding works of Kelly and Mulvey in the context of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain. Though Kelly and Mulvey became actual collaborators through this specific (and quite rich) historical conjuncture, I show that their collaboration was no less interested in creating forms of differentiation within the feminist imaginary – and no less invested in addressing the ‘other woman’ that is distinct from the sign woman upon which patriarchal culture insists. While Addressing the Other Woman is primarily focused on artists working in the United States, I have chosen to include the work of Kelly and Mulvey, and situate it squarely within the British context. I do so knowing that they ‘corresponded’ (both literally and figuratively) with their American counterparts as feminists in the West confronted how the histories of women’s subordination were becoming written into and naturalised by western visual culture. By analysing the ways in which these artists and writers shared in the aspiration to address the other woman, this book creates a variegated image of the feminisms that emerged in the United States and Britain in the late 1960s and 1970s. Presenting this textual archive of feminist art and writing, I trace the desire that women, despite and because of their differences, might see and create correspondences among their feminist interventions and participate in the collective project of directing images of women into unforeseen meanings. Notes 1 WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, organised by Cornelia Butler and presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (March–July 2007). The exhibition travelled to PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York, February– June 2008. Another exhibition of this period was Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art, organised by Linda Nochlin and Maura Reilly and originally presented at the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York (March–July 2007). 2 An articulation of the first expectation is just under the surface of Linda Nochlin’s discussion of the ‘lady painter.’ ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’, Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays (1971. Harper & Row, 1988), 145–178: 164–168.

Introduction

3 See Elizabeth Cowie, ‘Woman as Sign,’ in The Woman in Question m/f, Parveen Adams and Elizabeth Cowie (eds) (1978. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 117–131. Theresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); Christine Brooke-Rose, ‘Woman as Semiotic Object,’ Poetics Today, special issue ‘The Female Body in Western Culture: Semiotic Perspectives,’ 6:1/2 (1985), 9–20. A word that represents the rule of elder males, ‘Patriarchy’ was a crucial concept for second-wave feminism. It operated as a strategic concept within radical feminisms to identify the systemic nature of women’s oppression and mark its difference from class oppression, but was subsequently critiqued for its connotations of a totalising trans-historical oppression that is rooted in biology. 4 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila MalovanyChevallier (1949. New York: Vintage Books, 2011). 5 The term ‘contemporary art’ is notoriously ill defined but has been utilised to identify art post-1945 as well as the art practices that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s. Richard Meyer offers a history of the ‘contemporary’ in western art history in What Was Contemporary Art? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). 6 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 47. 7 Exhibitions devoted to feminist art in the 1990s include: Bad Girls (New York, New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1994); Division of Labor: ‘Women’s Work’ in Contemporary Art (Bronx, New York, Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1995). Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art in, of, and from the Feminine (Boston, Institute of Contemporary Art, 1996); Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in Feminist Art History (Los Angeles, Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, 1996). In the 1980s, the New Museum exhibition Difference: On Representation and Sexuality stands out, both for its attention to the impact of feminist art practices and its engagement with psychoanalytic and post-structuralist feminist theory. Difference: On Representation and Sexuality (New York, New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984). Here is a sampling of the exhibitions devoted to feminist art since 2005: [Prologue] New Feminisms/New Europe (Manchester: June–September 2005); Life Actually (Tokyo: Museum of Contemporary Art, March 2005); It’s Time for Action (There’s No Option) About Feminism (Zurich: Migros Museum for Gegenswart, 2006); Cooling Out: On the Paradox of Feminism (Basel, Switzerland: Kunsthaus Baselland, 2008); Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Bilbao, Spain: Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2007); The Furious Gaze (Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Victoria-Gasteiz, Spain: Montehermoso, 2008); elles@centrepompidou (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2009); rebelle: kunst & feminisme 1969–2009 (Arnhem, The Netherlands: Arnhem Gemeentemuseum, 2009); Gender Check (Vienna: mumok, 2010). Reviews, scholarship, and roundtables on this return to feminism in contemporary art include: Rosalyn Deutsche, Aruna D’Souza, Miwon Kwon, Ulrike Müller, Mignon Nixon, and Senam Okudzeto, ‘Feminist Time: A Conversation,’ Grey Room 31 (Spring 2008), 32–67; Connie Butler, Amelia Jones, and Maura Reilly, ‘Feminist Curating and the “Return” of Feminist Art,’ in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, Amelia Jones (ed.) (2nd edn, London: Routledge, 2010), 31–43; Angela Dimitrakaki, ‘The 2008 Effect: Thoughts on Art World Feminism in the Shadow of Global

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Capitalism,’ Third Text 27.4 (August 2013), 579–588; Amelia Jones, ‘The Return(s) of Feminisms and the Visual Arts 1970/2009,’ in Feminisms is Still Our Name: Historiography and Curatorial Practice, Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe and Malin Hedlin Hayden (eds) (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010), 11–56; Siona Wilson, ‘Destinations of Feminist Art: Past, Present, and Future,’ Women’s Studies Quarterly 36:1/2 (Spring/Summer 2008), 324–330; Amelia Jones, “Feminist Subjects Versus Feminist Effects: The Curating of Feminist Art (or is it The Feminist Curating of Art)?” www.on-curating.org/issue-29-reader/feminist-subjects-versus-feministeffects-the-curating-of-feminist-art-or-is-it-the-feminist-curating-of-art.html#. WDR8P-%E2%80%A61/47, accessed 1 February 2017. 8 The term ‘patriarchal criteria of choice’ comes from Benjamin H.D. Buchloch’s essay ‘Spero’s Other Traditions,’ in Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 429–442: 431. I understand the patriarchal criteria of choice as an articulation of taste that confirms the value of masculinity. 9 For feminist curatorial projects in the 1990s, see n. 7. Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in Feminist Art History deserves special mention in this context. Curated by Amelia Jones, this 1996 exhibition tackled the stubborn accusation of biological essentialism leveled against so many of the feminist art practices that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s, particularly those like Chicago’s, that explicitly engaged with images of the female body. Jones challenges the essentialism levelled at Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974–1979) by placing it in the larger historical context of art practices, debates, and discourses that crystallised around this epic installation. See Jones, ‘Sexual Politics: Feminist Strategies, Feminist Conflicts, Feminist Histories,’ in Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in Feminist Art History, Amelia Jones (ed.), exhibition catalogue (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 22–38. See Angela Dimitrakaki, ‘The lessons of Sexual Politics: from the 1970s to Empire. An interview with Amelia Jones,’ in Politics in a Glass Case: Feminism, Exhibition Cultures and Curatorial Transgressions, Angela Dimitrakaki and Lara Perry (eds) (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 93–103. 10 In her introduction to the WACK! catalogue, Cornelia Butler addresses the fact that many of the artists do not identify as feminists: ‘It is my contention that – whether unintentionally or lacking the language or cultural context to support a feminist idiom – the artists in this exhibition contributed to the movement of development of feminism in art, if only by reinforcing two central tenets: the personal is political, and all representation is political.’ ‘Art and Feminism: An Ideology Of a Shifting Criteria,’ in WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, Cornelia Butler and Lisa Gabrielle Mark (eds) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 14–23: 15. 11 Griselda Pollock, ‘Moments and Temporalities of the Avant-Garde “in, of, and from the Feminine,’” New Literary History 41.4 (2010), 795–820. 12 This exhibition was curated by Catherine de Zegher initially for the Beguinage of Saint-Elizabeth in Kortrijk, Belgium, in 1994–1995 and expanded for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in 1996. Inside the Visible included work from the 1930s up to the 1990s, focused on women artists’ shared focus on the elliptical difference the feminine makes possible.

Introduction

13 Katy Deepwell articulated one of these arguments. She coined the term ‘scripto-visual’ to identify and negatively describe artwork that was informed by or in direct dialogue with theory. According to Deepwell, ‘scripto-visual’ artwork and its theoretical citations were tools of exclusion used to downplay women artists who worked in painting and sculpture. Katy Deepwell, ‘In Defence of the Indefensible: Feminism, Painting, and Post-Modernism,’ Feminist Art News 2.4 (1987), 13–15. For a response to Deepwell’s critique, see Griselda Pollock’s article ‘Framing Feminism,’ which originally appeared in the Women Artists Slide Library Journal 26 (December/ January 1988) and has been reprinted in Twenty Years of Make Magazine: Back to the Future of Women’s Art, Maria Walsh and Mo Throp (eds) (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 101–105. See also Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman, ‘Textual Strategies: The Politics of Art Making,’ Screen 20.2 (Summer 1980), 35–48. 14 Mieke Bal, Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition (1991. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 19. 15 Johanna Drucker, The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 285–286; Judi Freeman, ‘Layers of Meaning: The Multiple Readings of Dada and Surrealist Word-Images,’ in Judi Freeman, The Dada & Surrealist Word-Image, exhibition catalogue (Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 13–55. David Lomas, ‘“New in art, they are already soaked in humanity”: Word and Image, 1900–1945,’ in Art, Word and Image: Two Thousand Years of Visual/Textual Interaction, John Dixon Hunt, David Lomas, and Michael Corris (eds) (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), 111–177: 111. 16 My thinking about the materiality of language in the feminist movement has been shaped by Kathryn Thoms Flannery’s Feminist Literacies 1968–1975 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), and Jaime Harker and Cecilia Konchar Farr (eds), This Book Is an Action: Feminist Print Culture and Activist Aesthetics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016). 17 Griselda Pollock, ‘Killing Men and Dying Women: A Woman’s Touch in the Cold Zone of American Painting,’ in Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock (eds), Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 222–294: 248. Original emphasis. 18 I am referring to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s formulation, ‘a picture held us captive. And we could not get outside of it, for it lay in our language, and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.’ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (1951. New York: Macmillan, 1968), 48. Original emphasis. 19 I am drawing upon Michel Foucault’s definition of the archive as ‘the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events.’ The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (1969. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 129. 20 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1967. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). For an explicit example of Cixous putting deconstruction to work for feminism see Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 21 Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (1970. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 5.

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22 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1967. New York: Zone Books, 1994), 12. 23 Roland Barthes, ‘The Photographic Message,’ in Image–Music–Text, trans. Stephen Heath (1961. New York: Noonday Press, 1977), 15–31: 26. The ‘invisibility’ of language in the twentieth century extends into typography. Against what they identify as the ‘ethic of typographic visibility,’ Paul C. Gutjahr and Megan L. Benon feature scholarship that focuses on typography and its role in the production of a literary text’s meaning. See Illuminating Letters: Typography and Literary Interpretation, Gutjahr and Benon (eds) (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 1. 24 Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1992), 1. 25 Ibid., 2. 26 For an exploration of capitalism’s impact on language see V.N. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunok (New York: Seminar Press, 1973). 27 For overviews of feminist visual culture, see Jones (ed.), The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. The second section, ‘Representation,’ provides a helpful overview of feminism’s approach to visual culture in the 1970s. See also Feminist Visual Culture, Fiona Carson and Claire Pajaczkowska (eds) (New York: Routledge, 2001). 28 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ‘The Other Side of Venus: The Visual Economy of Sexual Display,’ in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, Victoria de Grazia (ed.) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 113–150: 117. 29 Ibid., 123. 30 Ibid., 117. 31 Ibid., 123. 32 Lorraine O’Grady, ‘Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,’ in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, Jones (ed.), 174–186: 174. 33 Rosemary Betterton, An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists, and the Body (London: Routledge, 1996); Amelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (New York: Routledge, 2012); and Marsha Meskimmon, ‘Chronology through Cartography: Mapping 1970s Feminist Art Globally,’ in WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, Butler and Mark (eds), 323–335. 34 Texts that defined black feminism in the 1980s include: Hazel Carby, ‘White Women Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood,’ in Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America (London: Verso, 1999), 67–92. Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage, 1981); bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1984). For definitions of intersectionality, see Kimberlé Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalising the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,’ University of Chicago Legal Forum 140 (1989), 139–167; Kimberlé Crenshaw, ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,’ Stanford Law Review 43.6 (July 1991), 1241–1299. On the pervasive impact of intersectionality and the uses to which it has been put, see Jennifer C. Nash, ‘Re-thinking Intersectionality,’ Feminist Review 89 (June 2008), 1–15.

Introduction

35 Clare Hemmings, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 43. 36 Crucial examples of black feminism’s emergence in the 1970s include Toni Cade Bambara’s The Black Woman: An Anthology (New York: Washington Square Press, 1970); Patricia Haden, Donna Middleton, and Patricia Robinson, ‘A Historical and Critical Essay for Black Women,’ in Voices for Women’s Liberation, Leslie B. Tanner (ed.) (New York: Signet, 1971), 316–324. In 1971, the collective ‘Where We At’ formed to create spaces and opportunities for black women artists. Members included artists Faith Ringgold, Jean Taylor, Carol Blank, Akweke Singho, and Kay Brown. See Valerie Smith, ‘Abundant Evidence: Black Women Artists of the 1960s and 70s,’ in WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, Butler and Mark (eds), 400–413. See also Kay Brown, ‘The Emergence of Black Women Artists: The 1970s, New York,’ The International Review of African American Art 15.1 (1998), 45–51, 54–57: 47. See also Kimberly Springer’s study of black feminist organising in the late 1960s and 1970s. Springer argues for understanding the history of black feminism as a ‘parallel development to the predominantly white women’s movement, rather than merely a reaction to racism.’ Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 3. 37 Liz Kotz, Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 3. 38 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ in Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, 2nd edn (1975. New York: Palgrave, 2009), 14–27: 15. 39 Ibid., 16. 40 Juliet Mitchell, ‘Introduction, 1999,’ in Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis (London: Basic Books, 2000), xviii. The full title of Mitchell’s 1974 text was Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing, and Women. 41 Two texts that place women artists’ engagement with text in a psychoanalytic framework include: Mary Kelly, ‘Art and Sexual Politics,’ Imaging Desire (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 2–10; Hal Foster, ‘Subversive Signs,’ Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (New York: The New Press, 1998), 98–118. 42 Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function, as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,’ Écrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (1977. New York: Norton, 2004), 3–9: 4. 43 See Cora Kaplan, ‘Language and Gender,’ Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1986), 69–94. 44 Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (1974. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). 45 Hilary Robinson, Reading Art, Reading Irigaray: The Politics of Art by Women (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 18. 46 Regarding the expectation that women embody the unconscious, Irigaray writes, ‘Unconscious she is, but not for herself, not with a subjectivity that might take cognisance of it, recognise it as her own.’ Irigaray, Speculum, 141. 47 My ideas about virtuality of feminism and the feminist imaginary are heavily indebted to Griselda Pollock’s Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time,

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Space and the Archive, though I differ with Pollock in that I do not limit the imaginary to images. Griselda Pollock, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive (New York: Routledge, 2007). 48 Maurice Berger, ‘The Critique of Pure Racism: An Interview with Adrian Piper,’ Adrian Piper: A Retrospective (1980. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 1999), 77–98: 90. 49 Hortense Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,’ Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 203–229. 50 Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure,’ 16.

Writing the ‘I’ otherwise: telegraphing black feminism in the work of Adrian Piper and Angela Davis

I

Writing the ‘I’ otherwise

Introduction

When reading and looking at the artwork of Adrian Piper, the stakes of undoing the sign woman become clear. Much more than an idealised image of femininity, the sign woman functions as a tool of exclusion that solidifies race and gender as recognisable categories of identity and helps to naturalise the social hierarchies they put into place. By using text and writing to defamiliarise the image of the black woman’s body (her body, but as it appears in photographs, drawings, and performances), Piper’s artwork contributes to challenging the entrenched perceptual histories that place black women on the ‘other side’ of the sign woman. Piper’s career did not begin by confronting race and gender. She was an art student who worked in the figurative tradition, and then, after encountering the artwork of Sol LeWitt in 1967, became a Conceptual Artist. By engaging with the tenets of Conceptual Art – its deployment of text and writing to erode and expand the object of art, its attention to geometric forms and orderly systems, and its deflation of the artist’s presence and its corresponding address to viewers – Piper created artwork that can be understood as an examination of the histories that have accrued in the narrow set of images through which black women have been allowed to become visible in western culture. Piper’s work is quite unique in this respect. She is one of just a few artists who deployed Conceptual Art’s attention to language for such ethical concerns and consequential stakes. Chapter 1 begins by analysing Piper’s engagement with the textual dimensions of Conceptual Art in the late 1960s and the ways in which it aligned with her work in philosophy to develop the aesthetic and perceptual conditions that open on to what she identifies as the ‘singular reality of the “other.”’1 I then read the artwork Piper produced after 1970: a year of political upheaval in which she began to question, as Kobena Mercer puts it, ‘socially embedded relations of visuality,’ and worked with text and writing in such a way that the artwork stages a process of deflecting racial and sexual denigration.2 Throughout the transformations of her oeuvre, Piper’s artwork enacts the ways in which racism and sexism call black women into narrow forms of visibility. Her textual address to viewers is part of this enactment. It is a counter call that compels viewers to read the image of the black woman with eyes that do not blindly repeat the fears and fantasies that have constituted the habitual forms through which black women have been allowed to appear. Piper’s textual address also creates openings for women of colour to reimagine their placement within the recognisable orders of language and images. Angela Davis composed a parallel address, and in Chapter 2 I analyse Davis’s written reflections on the ways in which she became an imaginary enemy of the nation-state in the early 1970s. Coinciding with the beginning

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Writing the ‘I’ otherwise

of Piper’s career, the hunt, imprisonment, and acquittal of Davis offer a forceful context for understanding the stakes of Piper’s interventions. Reading Davis’s writing in relationship to Piper’s artwork, we can see that she also deploys language to undo the fears and fantasies that have determined black women’s visibility. Beginning with the FBI’s ‘Wanted’ poster of her, images of Davis circulated through the American media and came close to inscribing the accusation of her criminality into legal truth and commonly held belief. Davis’s ordeal demonstrates that visual culture serves as a site where the pathologies of racism and sexism compound each other and force black women into positions of subordination. There are compelling parallels between the intellectual trajectories of Piper and Davis. Both earned PhDs in German philosophy and made the work of Immanuel Kant central to their research.3 There is also an austere, sober, and deceptively simple aesthetic their work shares, which is often read as indicative of its overtly polemical orientation. But of course the strongest connection between their bodies of work is the fact that both Piper and Davis had to confront the meanings attributed to black women in the late 1960s and 1970s and decided to cut through those meanings with texts of unequivocal clarity. To wage this effort, they drew upon their bodies, lives, and histories, not for strict autobiographical purposes (to make and communicate subjective expressions) but to garner materials that could be used to imagine black women as other than abject others who threaten white patriarchal dominance.4 Despite their parallels, the oeuvres of Piper and Davis have never been read together. Conceptual Art and the Black Power movement are not often linked, but the fact that both Piper and Davis have been anomalous icons in their respective fields is a factor in their separation. Anyone who writes about Piper’s work knows that she was, in the words of Kobena Mercer, ‘the only African American female artist in the New York scene of conceptual art in the late 1960s and early 1970s.’5 And while Davis was not the only woman associated with Black Power, photographs of her, which consistently highlight her Afro, serve as highly recognised icons of the movement. Her image is often placed on book covers or film posters devoted to the historical period in which Black Power emerged, even if her work is not featured or discussed.6 These visual appearances manifest the broader iconicity of the ‘black woman,’ an example of what Nicole R. Fleetwood identifies as ‘racial iconicity,’ which, as she argues, hinges upon ‘intertwined forces of denigration and veneration.’7 Piper’s and Davis’s engagement with text and writing erodes these poles. Analysing the textual correspondences between Piper’s artwork and Davis’s writing highlights their shared contribution to rewriting the forms of seeing and self-identification – the ‘I’ – through which black women have been given to imagine themselves.

Writing the ‘I’ otherwise

The following two chapters trace how the work of Piper and Davis claim the ‘I’ within and against familiar icons of the black woman that impede the imaginative composition of the self in its singularity and differentiation. Rearranging the words and images that coerce women of colour into performing the work of serving other people’s needs and allaying their fears, both Piper and Davis wrote against the black woman as the ready-made other for white patriarchal culture. They also wrote to reveal what that othering hides: the self as a site of interlocution, or what Mae G. Henderson identifies as ‘aspects of “otherness” within the self,’ which, when attended to, allows for textual forms that address the other woman in her singularity and her capacity for self-differentiation.8 Because the work of Piper and Davis contributed to unmaking the fears and fantasies projected on to the black woman and makes spaces in which this ‘“otherness” within the self ’ can emerge, I understand it as an iteration of black feminism. A capacious political and intellectual movement, black feminism encompasses multiple definitions, but across all registers it depicts the unequal demands placed upon women of colour as continuations of the thefts endemic to racial slavery and colonial extraction. Black feminism is particularly attentive to the ways in which slavery, segregation, and institutionalised state violence have imprisoned black women in the projected fears and fantasies of a white patriarchal culture. The readings of Piper’s and Davis’s work offered here are less invested in the work’s alignment with black feminist politics than in its elegant development of the black feminist imagination. This concept, the black feminist imagination, identifies the aesthetic practices that reflect upon and enact the creative means by which black women have imaginatively crafted their lives despite (but also because of) punitive histories. The vitality of the black feminist imagination comes from African-American women artists carving out forms of visibility strong enough to assert the value of black women against a historical background of denigration, but also nuanced enough to render the singularities of black women’s subjectivities. While Davis’s investment in feminism is a consistent part of her work, Piper articulates a more ambivalent connection. In a statement she composed in 2007, Piper declares that she is a feminist, but her artwork is not; it does not strive to create conditions, in which women ‘give support and encouragement to one another.’9 Piper also expresses disappointment ‘we still are not even close to anything that deserves the name of feminism,’ as she does not see strong alliances among women. While Piper’s observations are lamentably true, by creating artwork that subtly draws attention to the roles racism plays in the production of the sign woman, Piper contributes substantially to feminism’s historical impasses, which are integral to its study and a necessity for its futures. Moreover, the textual address that is so central to Piper’s artwork can be understood as reaching beyond feminism’s limitations and enacting the utopian wish to imagine and create correspondences among women. But it is important to stress that Piper’s resistance to presenting her artwork in feminist terms

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highlights the fact that the readings offered in Chapter 1 are my interpretations alone. They take Piper’s work beyond her intentions and into what I see as its implications for the project of undoing the sign woman. Notes 1 Maurice Berger, ‘The Critique of Pure Racism: An Interview with Adrian Piper,’ in Adrian Piper: A Retrospective, exhibition catalogue (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 1999), 77–98: 90. 2 Kobena Mercer, ‘Adrian Piper, 1970–1975, Exiled on Main Street,’ in Exiles, Diasporas, and Strangers, Kobena Mercer (ed.) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 155. 3 Piper’s engagement with Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is discussed in the first section of Chapter 2. Davis addresses her doctoral research on Kant’s theories of violence in the opening defence statement for her trial. She states that in the summer of 1970, she was ‘engaged in research for my doctoral dissertation. The object of my study is the theory of force in Kant’s political philosophy of history and in German idealism in general.’ ‘Opening Defense Statement Presented by Angela Y. Davis in Santa Clara County Superior Court, March 29, 1972,’ in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, Joy James (ed.) (1971. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 329–346: 345. 4 Interrupting the pattern of reducing Piper’s artwork to autobiographical expressions and psychological symptoms, which racial difference sanctions, Laura Cottingham underscores Piper’s argument that the ‘self ’ in her artwork is not necessarily Piper herself, and that personal experience, as Piper explains in the interview with Berger, ‘plays the role of the concrete, immediate, and specific.’ Maurice Berger, ‘The Critique of Pure Racism: An Interview with Adrian Piper,’ in Adrian Piper: A Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, 77–98: 97. Laura Cottingham, ‘The “Autobiography” of Adrian Piper,’ in Adrian Piper: A Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, 61–75. Margo V. Perkins reads Davis’s autobiography alongside those of Elaine Brown and Assata Shakur, and analyses how Davis makes her story representative of collective histories of racial oppression. Margo V. Perkins, “‘I am We’: Black Women Activists Writing Autobiography,’” in Margo V. Perkins, Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 1–20. 5 Mercer, ‘Adrian Piper, 1970–1975,’ 147. 6 See, for example, Charles E. Jones (ed.), The Black Panther Party [Reconsidered] (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998). Though her image appears on the cover, Davis’s work is not explored in this book. 7 Nicole R. Fleetwood, On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 9. 8 Mae G. Henderson, ‘Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer’s Literary Tradition,’ in Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, Henry Louis Gates Jr. (ed.) (1989. New York: Meridian, 1990), 116–142: 118. 9 Adrian Piper, ‘Feminist Artist Statement,’ Elizabeth A. Sackler Centre for Feminist Art: Feminist Art Base. Brooklyn Museum, www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/ feminist_art_base/gallery/adrian_piper.php>. https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/ eascfa/feminist_art_base/adrian-piper, accessed 22 November 2016.

Adrian Piper’s textual address

In part my work stems from a compulsion to embody, transform, and use my experiences as a woman of color in constructive ways, in order not to feel trapped and powerless. Adrian Piper, ‘General Statement about My Work’ (1989)1

An austere visual archive thick with words, the artwork of Adrian Piper demands an encounter with language. Through a wide array of textual materials – typewriter fonts, swathes of paint, stencilled letters, and her own cursive handwriting – Piper works from the premise that language is a material embedded with perceptions that shape how people see. In turn, she seems to use language as a tool to cut through the materialisation of those perceptions in visual culture. Like the Conceptual Art practices she drew from and contributed to, Piper’s deployment of text and writing sabotaged what many artists and intellectuals in the late 1960s saw as the increased reification of art as an object for visual consumption.2 Working consistently with the textual appearances of language to layer, fracture, and even compose the image, Piper’s artwork exemplified Conceptual Art’s resistance to post-war art practices as yet another cultural arena circumscribed by the visual cultures of capitalism. She used language to create ‘a different kind of visual attention,’ in the words of Peter Osborne, one that involves ‘reading’ and is therefore ‘much closer to thinking and imagining’ than the transparent looking perpetuated by spectacle.3 Just into her twenties and still a student at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, Piper began exhibiting spare pieces composed of words and geometric forms (maps, grids, and diagrams) in some of the exhibitions that would come to define Conceptual Art.4 Many of these pieces feature language as their most prominent medium to frame reading as a perceptual experience and exemplify Conceptual Art’s basic participatory syntax: the work is instigated by the artist and enacted by the viewer. Take, for instance, Context #7 (1970) (see Figure 1.1) which was exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Information. On a blank piece of paper placed in a notebook, Piper typed the

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Adrian Piper, Context #7, 1970. Collection of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA. T.B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2008 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

Adrian Piper’s textual address

following statement in what Claudia Barrow identifies as her ‘familiar gritty typewriter-typeface text style:’5 You (the viewer) are requested to write, draw, or otherwise indicate any response suggested by this situation (this statement, this blank notebook and pen, the museum context, your immediate state of mind, etc.) in the pages of the notebook beneath this sign. The information entered in the notebook will not be altered or utilized in any way.

This text engages viewers by transforming them into readers and then ‘request[ing]’ that they contribute their own written inscriptions. By refusing to bring her presence to the artwork, it could be said that Piper is rewriting the expectations viewers bring to art and defamiliarising western culture’s traditional idea of the artist.6 While she arranged the piece and wrote the directions, she has done so with detached anonymity. Piper has withdrawn from Context #7 as much as possible. In place of the ‘I,’ the emphasis is instead on ‘you.’ Placed within the relatively large blank space of the page, the two typewritten sentences, which could be mistaken for a corporate memo, enact the artwork’s authorial detachment and its resistance to expected aesthetic pleasures. Many viewers responded to Piper’s textual address and produced enough inscriptions to fill seven notebooks.7 The artwork became an archive of shouts and signatures, a collective graffiti that highlights Piper’s concept of art as a reciprocal experience. Context #7 demonstrates how the historical events of 1970 were imprinted upon viewers’ ‘immediate state of mind.’ One viewer composed a small manifesto about the imprisonment of Bobby Seale. In a large improvisatory hand, his or her statement begins with the exclamation: ‘Free All Political Prisoners!’ The writer then links individual encounters with the law to the crackdown on black militancy during the presidency of Richard Nixon – of which the hunt for Davis was a significant part. Another note complains about Piper’s detached aesthetic: ‘Adrian – What ever happened to lyricism and poetry? You used to possess a great deal of both.’ By making ‘lyricism and poetry’ qualities Piper herself is presumed to possess, this writer reiterates an assumption that the artwork expresses the artist’s subjective essence. This address to ‘Adrian’ and its evocation of ‘lyricism and poetry’ demonstrates that Piper’s conception of the piece reverses the expectation that the artist – and especially the woman artist – creates a pleasing aesthetic experience for viewers. Produced just as Women’s Liberation was beginning to take hold in the United States, Context #7 can be understood as a challenge to the assumption that women artists will create a beautiful image for viewers. It is also an early and significant articulation of the textual address animating art practices by women in the late 1960s and 1970s.

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Reflecting the tendency among Conceptual Artists to ‘knot together,’ as Peter Wollen puts it, ‘art object, art theory, and art manifesto,’ Piper has written a large number of critical essays that accompany her artistic practice.8 In the introduction to the collection of her writings, Out of Order, Out of Sight, Piper reflects upon the impetus for her writing: living within cultural terrains in which she is designated as a person who does not belong: It seems to me now that the writings in these two volumes are best understood as evolving expressions of a coerced, reflective interiority that develops in response to my increasing grasp of the point: that I am not, after all, entitled simply to externalize my creative impulses in unreflective action or products, because, being merely a foreign guest in the private club in which I entertain, my self-confident attempts at objective communication with my audience would be permanently garbled, censored, ridiculed, or ignored, were it not for a critical and discursive matrix that I – with effort – eventually supply.9

Confronting the fact that her ‘self-confident attempts at objective communication’ become distorted, this passage suggests that writing could function as a tool for reflecting on what it means to be denied access to a valued place in the symbolic order and perceived to be an irrational person whose words can easily be ‘garbled.’ This denial reinforces the expectation that she will, as ‘a foreign guest,’ ‘entertain,’ which likely means mirroring the value of white patriarchal dominance. At the same time, this passage indicates that in Piper’s artwork, language works to create a ‘critical and discursive matrix’ that identifies the stakes of her work and the irrational distortions it counters. The ‘critical and discursive matrix’ Piper felt compelled to compose is intimately connected to her artwork’s textual address to the viewer/reader. This address plays a significant role in what Piper would come to identify as the ‘catalysis’ her work aims to create: the response of the viewer that realises and completes the artwork.10 Scholars of Piper’s work agree that what John Bowles identifies as Piper’s ‘aesthetics of direct address’ is a significant feature of her oeuvre, important to the artwork’s anti-racist arguments, and a unique contribution to contemporary art.11 As Piper explained in an interview with Maurice Berger, ‘I actually want to change people. I want my work to help people to stop being racist (whether they ask for that help or not).’12 While most often the textual address of Piper’s work is directed at viewers who benefit from white dominance, what has yet to be considered is that Piper’s work might also be addressing women of colour who have been forced to recognise themselves within a punitively narrow range of images and who are looking to imagine themselves beyond the imperative that they embody the fears and fantasies of white patriarchal culture. Provoking viewers to reflect upon the presuppositions they bring to an engagement with another person is the ethical centre of Piper’s artwork and

Adrian Piper’s textual address

reflects her lifelong engagement with the philosophical writings of Immanuel Kant.13 In her philosophical writings, Piper reveals how Kant’s work is valuable for making it clear that rationality is indispensable for ‘ordinary personal concerns’ and ‘guid[ing]’ ‘personal behavior.’14 Writing on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787), which maps out the conditions of human knowledge and experience, Piper focuses on his ‘conception of the self as a rationally unified consciousness.’15 This self is ‘unified’ and ‘integrated’ because it is hardwired with fundamental categories for recognising and organising the sensory data of the world. She emphasises that Kant’s epistemology is based upon ‘a rationally consistent and conceptually coherent theory of the world that enables us to fit every kind of experience we have into a priori categories.’16 As Piper explains, ‘if we did not categorise our experience, we would be confronted with total chaos.’17 Yet, it is precisely the disorder of ‘chaos’ – that which is unknown and does not fit into a priori categories – that Piper will make part of her artwork. As Piper argues, Kant’s idea of the self as ‘rationally unified consciousness’ is ‘inadequate.’18 It privileges the familiar and recognisable and therefore does not allow for the possibility of ‘making sense of the plethora of experience, information, and new phenomena that bombards us daily.’19 For these reasons, Piper also maintains that Kant’s work provides a ground for examining what she identifies as the ‘defensive rationalizations’ that are racism, sexism, and xenophobia. She argues that the ‘conception of the self ’ Kant puts forth in Critique of Pure Reason ‘affords potent resources’ for seeing how these defences function at the cognitive level.20 Kant’s work allows us to see how these rationalisations mistakenly map onto what Piper identifies as the ‘singular reality of the “other.”’21 Piper draws on Kant’s work to explain how racism, sexism, and xenophobia function and then provides alternatives for encountering difference in less defensive ways. Whereas Kant conceives human subjectivity as obeying strict structures (what he describes as his transcendental and empirical categories of cognition), Piper argues against this fixity. She reads Kant’s epistemology for the spaces between these cognitive structures, which open onto the possibility of revising human personhood.22 This revision is particularly important for African Americans, Piper explains, because they are ‘unwelcome intruders in white America’ and ‘objects of xenophobia on a daily basis.’23 This formulation resonates with Piper’s description of herself as a ‘foreign guest in a private club in which I entertain,’ and helps us see that this entertainment is assigned to intruders to confirm their exiled status.24 In her interview with Berger, after identifying the ‘defenses’ and ‘pseudo-rationalizations’ her work seeks to revise, Piper explains the encounter she wants her artwork to create: ‘My ultimate goal is to make viewers so aware of all of those defences as pseudorational defenses that they stop generating them entirely; that they simply stand silently,

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perceiving and experiencing at the deepest level the singularity of object or person.’25 Nothing is more pertinent to black feminism than making viewers aware of the defensive rationalisations that take place at the level of vision and asking them to engage instead with the ‘singular reality of the “other.”’ When discussing the ‘visual pathology’ of racism and its connection to sexism, Piper points to the ways in which black women are perceived through the body parts that serve as signifiers of sexual and racial difference: ‘Some people are discriminated against because they have breasts, while others are discriminated against because they have woolly hair. If you happen to have breasts and woolly hair, you are in double-trouble.’26 Piper evokes two physical signifiers that compose the icon of the black woman and its work identifying black women as those who, as Piper puts it, ‘do not conform to one’s preconceptions about how persons ought to look or behave.’27 In the artwork she began to produce after 1970, Piper created conditions for revising the pathologies that make visual signifiers of the black female body into emblems of the strange, disorderly, and criminally out of place. She did so by making photographs of herself and placing them in relationship to text and images of writing. While such strategies may appear small in comparison to the monumental task of dismantling racism and sexism, her engagement with Kant’s schema for the conditions of human knowledge and experience makes this aesthetic choice more substantial than it might initially appear. Piper worked with language as a visual material that is at once ‘here’ before the viewer and ‘somewhere else’ beyond the immediate field of vision and outside the frame of appearance. It is language that brings this movement to ‘somewhere else’ – which evokes the foreign and the unknown – into the artwork and destabilises the viewer’s existing cognitive categories of perception and recognition. Order and disorder

Feminism was never high on Conceptual Art’s anti-aesthetic agenda, but its emphasis on dismantling aesthetic categories encouraged women artists to put it to work for feminist interventions. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the questions Conceptual Artists posed to art and its institutions encouraged women artists to challenge myths of the male artistic genius. And by ‘dematerialising’ the art object and eroding the primacy of vision – a negation to which language significantly contributes – Conceptual Art offered women the possibility of creating artwork that scrutinised the visual sign of woman.28 In 1973, Lucy R. Lippard made the provocative claim that encouraged women to ‘move through [a] crack in the art world’s walls.’29 Along with Martha Rosler and Mary Kelly, Piper was one of the first women artists to pursue this opening, and she was the first to utilise Conceptual Art’s vocabulary of orderly forms

Adrian Piper’s textual address

and sober propositions to challenge the defences brought to images of black women. Piper’s introduction to Conceptual Art hinges upon an encounter with the work of Sol LeWitt. In Talking to Myself: The Ongoing Autobiography of the Art Object, Piper tells the story of this transformative encounter. In 1967, while a student at the School of Visual Arts, she had an instructor who required that his students see at least fifteen gallery exhibitions every two weeks and write about them.30 This assignment came at an important moment in the development of Piper’s art practice. She was starting to realise the limitations of working with the figure in traditional mediums and had begun experimenting with abstraction and Minimalism.31 At the Dwan Gallery in New York City, she saw an exhibition of Sol LeWitt’s work that featured 46 3-Part Variations on Three Different Kinds of Cubes (1967), a three-dimensional sculpture that consists of aluminium structures that are 45 inches high. Each aluminum structure is a different arrangement for stacking three cubes on top of each other. Some of the cubes are complete and have all their sides; the others have one or two sides missing, which allows viewers to see through some of the cubes, only to encounter the opaque side of another cube. Systematic and orderly, 46 3-Part Variations tips into disorder and chaotic excess, which become visible as viewers follow the play of pattern and variation, an ‘infinite multiplicity’ that Bowles describes as ‘quasi-surrealistic.’32 Seeing and responding to 46 3-Part Variations was an important part of Piper’s immersion in Conceptualism.33 Writing in 2007 to honour LeWitt after his death, Piper reflected on the effect of 46 3-Part Variations and why it ‘revolutionized her practice as an artist.’34 She writes that by ‘presenting an ordered series of objects as exemplars of a personal but highly logical system of permutations,’ LeWitt’s 46 3-Part Variations ‘demonstrated the potentially infinite number of ways in which reality could manifest.’35 Piper was compelled by the possibility that an artwork could confound the sense of order viewers would bring to it. She writes that the steel cubes ‘radiated presence, significance, and also mystery, because the conceptual scheme they embodied was not perceptually obvious.’36 Echoing the first proclamation of LeWitt’s ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’ – ‘Conceptual Artists are mystics rather than rationalists’ – the ‘mystery’ Piper sees in LeWitt’s work is not the ‘complete chaos’ that a person confronts if she does not have the categories for placing an object or a person into a recognisable order.37 And yet, the ‘mystery’ she sees in 46 3-Part Variations does evoke that which is unknown and not immediately clear or recognisable, laying the groundwork for an encounter that is open to the disorder of difference. LeWitt’s 46 3-Part Variations confirmed what Piper would soon find in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: a rigorous meditation on the orders of perceptual experience as well as the possibility of expanding and revising the categories through which other people become recognisable.

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Piper’s most immediate response to LeWitt’s work was Sixteen Permutations on the Planar Analysis of a Square (1968), a photostat image that presents sixteen squares all with smaller geometric shapes traced within them that explore and exhaust the possibilities of three-dimensional spatial arrangements within the square. The eye can recognise that there is logic that determines the placement of these squares within squares, but it struggles to follow an orderly system within its intricate, almost kaleidoscopic forms, and thereby enacts the perceptual shifts provoked by an encounter with difference. That same year, Piper created Here and Now (1968) and Concrete Infinity 6” Square (1968). These pieces bring text and writing to the order of the square and exemplify the prominent role language plays in Piper’s attention to expanding the categories of recognition. Together, Here and Now and Concrete Infinity 6” Square suggest that Piper was in the midst of developing a concept of language as a malleable tool that can move between what is ordered and known and the disorder that has yet to be fully known. It is through this movement that Piper undoes familiar categories and creates perceptions that are open to difference and singularity. Piper’s Here and Now (1968) (see Figure 1.2) is an artwork composed at the edge of its own negation. It is a white piece of paper (an 8 inch square) made into a grid of 64 one-inch squares through the careful application of thin intersecting lines. Each of the squared-off spaces remain empty, except for one. Just two squares away from the bottom left-hand corner, a square has been filled in with small typed letters. The type marks the square of ‘here,’ but it is the viewer/reader of the piece who creates the work’s context and present tense, the ‘now’ of seeing and reading as he looks at the piece of paper. If the viewer/reader comes in close enough to see the words placed in this square, she will read: ‘Here. The square area 3rd row from the bottom, 3rd row from the right side.’ The words appear in the ‘grainy, typewriter-style typeface’ that characterises her early work.38 The textual appearance of this matter-of-fact statement within its designated square reverberates through the piece and highlights the emptiness of the other squares. Though any of the other squares could be marked as ‘here’ in the same way, which highlights the absence of linguistic signification. Indeed, Here and Now is one page of a 64-page book. Every one of the sixty-four squares has its own page. On each page, Piper types in the words in a square that indicate that square’s exact coordinates. If Here and Now was the only artwork by Piper one encountered, it would be hard to predict that she would soon create work that directly addresses racism and sexism. The piece is deliberately austere. The straight lines organise the paper into a strict pattern of squares, and there are barely any traces of Piper as an artist. She is only really ‘present’ as a detached arranger of austere lines, shapes, and words. And yet, the words are crowded into the square, and some of them are awkwardly split up to accommodate its narrow allotment

Adrian Piper’s textual address

Adrian Piper, Here and Now, 1968. Collection of Alan Cravitz, Chicago. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. ‘Here. The square area 3rd row from the bottom, 3rd row from the right side.’

of space. The broken words suggest that which exceeds the recognisable order of the grid. Quite subtly, they register the arbitrariness of location and identity, and suggest the malleability of the body. The grid is the primary organising principle for both Here and Now and Concrete Infinity 6” Square. A signature form of both Minimalism and Conceptual Art, the grid represents a rational mapping of space and concepts stripped down to their barest components. The grid allows the artist to create a system of signs that begins, as we say, from ‘square one.’ The grid and language are partners in Piper’s early work: she plays with their similarities – the fact that

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they are simultaneously concrete and abstract – while allowing their material distinctions to play off each other.39 Concrete Infinity 6” Square (see Figure 1.3) also works with the relationships among grids, space, and words, but it is as dense and excessive as Here and Now is spare. Piper is putting the same materials to work, but she has chosen to make one square fill the page and then has packed it with sentences that give directions about how to read it. This makes Concrete Infinity 6” Square a meditation on how words build perceptions and experiences of space. In the first sentence, Piper writes: ‘This square should be read as a whole.’ This proclamation expands from pointing to the square in front of the viewer to a commentary upon vertical rectangles, horizontal rectangles, and four squares. The attempt at absolute precision within these directions moves into a pattern of phrases: ‘upper left,’ ‘upper right,’ ‘lower left,’ ‘lower right.’ Both the directions and the words that indicate them become abstract, almost deliriously so. The words are the most concrete part of the piece, but they also point beyond the page to the ‘infinity’ in the title.40 If you read Concrete Infinity 6” Square until its conclusion, the words seem to float in textual suspension; they become marks and inscriptions unhinged from even the possibility of a referent, except for the unknown disorder of infinity. Concrete Infinity 6” Square highlights the affinities between Piper’s artwork and twentieth-century literary experimentation. Piper notes that in her early twenties she engaged with the writers of the modernist avant-garde. She cites as key influences the work of the French Nouveau-Roman author Alain RobbeGrillet, the Irish avant-garde playwright Samuel Beckett, and the American modernist writer Gertrude Stein.41 In distinct ways, these writers draw attention to the materiality of language and the way it exceeds strict, reliable orders of signification. They highlight how that materiality moves across visual, aural, and textual registers, which ultimately reveals the absence at the heart of linguistic signification. Concrete Infinity 6” Square connects to Robbe-Grillet’s sober, scrupulously detailed attention to the ways in which visual objects are arranged within space. It also resonates with the rich but attenuated rhythms of Beckett’s work. Finally, Piper’s square, packed with repeated words and phrases, transforms both language and the image of space into ethereal abstractions, which resembles Stein’s capacity for creating a thick linguistic blur. As much as Piper engaged with modernist predecessors, Here and Now and Concrete Infinity 6” Square are also very much of their historical moment. The poets Bernadette Mayer and Vito Acconci (who later became a visual artist) were Piper’s friends and contemporaries, and she published some of her first conceptual pieces in their journal 0 to 9.42 Taking its title from a painting by Jasper Johns, the journal 0 to 9 exemplified the ‘mimeograph revolution’ that took place in the late 1960s. The journal ran from 1967 to 1969.43 All of the work in 0 to 9 blurred the lines between literature and visual

Adrian Piper’s textual address

Adrian Piper, Concrete Infinity 6” Square 1968. Private Collection, USA. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. ‘This square should be read as a whole; or these two vertical rectangles should be read from left to right or right to left …’

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art, substituted lyric subjectivity for deskilled austerity, and took up procedures that highlight language as an orderly system that can quickly become chaotic and strange. Piper would soon turn away from the detachment and abstraction of Here and Now and Concrete Infinity 6” Square and would begin to make artwork that sets photographs of her body in relationship to text and images and creates the effect of a more direct confrontation with racism, sexism, and xenophobia. This turn, however, is not a complete break with her previous work. In her 1988 essay on ‘Conceptual Art,’ Piper revisits her early Conceptual experiments and discusses how it laid the foundations for her subsequent explorations. She explains that she started working with language because it ‘refer[s] both to concepts and ideas beyond themselves and their standard functions, as well as to themselves.’44 This is another way of saying that language has the capacity to be ‘here’ concretely on the page while also gesturing to ‘somewhere else’ at the same time. Piper worked with this capacity of language to create a textual address that moves between order and disorder. Writing the ‘I’ otherwise

Not long after composing Here and Now and Concrete Infinity 6” Square, Piper’s artwork transformed. In Talking to Myself, she explains, ‘In the spring of 1970 a number of events occurred that changed everything for me: 1) The invasion of Cambodia; 2) The Women’s Movement; 3) Kent State and Jackson State; 4) The closing of CCNY, where I was in my first term as a philosophy major, during the student rebellion.’45 The cultural upheaval and political militancy of 1970 spurred reflection, and Piper’s understanding of how she belonged in her own artwork began to shift. She writes that she thought a lot about her ‘position as an artist, a woman, and a black’ and began to see this period as an ‘invasion by the “outside world” of my aesthetic isolation.’46 This ‘aesthetic isolation’ points to the self-effacing tendencies of Conceptual Art, and Piper’s spare, depersonalised aesthetic was no longer acceptable in a historical moment with so much at stake – politically, ethically, personally. As Bowles writes, Piper’s ‘increasingly urgent need to respond to current events required that she imagine herself anew.’47 Part of this imagining entailed reflecting upon how she was perceived by others as ‘an artist, a woman, and a black.’ After 1970, the image of Piper’s body becomes suddenly present, almost directly opposed to its detached absence of the earlier pieces (yet still without becoming a direct expression of Piper herself).48 She began by staging a mute but highly visible confrontation. In Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City (1970) (see Figure 1.4) (hereafter referred to as Untitled Performance), Piper donned a blindfold, gloves, noseplug and earplugs and walked through Max’s Kansas City, a New York City restaurant

Adrian Piper’s textual address

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Adrian Piper, Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City, 1970. Collection Generali Foundation, Vienna. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

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and club on 17th Street and Park Avenue South. In a place dense with sensations, Piper created a work that attempted to block them completely. Rather than composing two-dimensional grids and arranging texts within their proposed spaces, Piper placed herself on the grid of New York City and inside the fulcrum of art, music, and sex that was the city’s bohemian artist enclave. In the black-and-white photographs documenting Untitled Performance (taken by her friend Rosemary Mayer), Piper is a stiff three-dimensional sculpture. Her arms are placed firmly at her sides, which makes her body looks like a narrow vertical line moving tentatively through space. Though Piper does not explain the performance in these terms, Untitled Performance can be read as a protest against the art world and her place within it. In her written reflections on the piece, Piper describes Max’s Kansas City as an ‘Art Environment, replete with Art Consciousness and Self Consciousness about Art Consciousness.’49 She composed the performance to stage her resistance

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to the ways in which these forms of ‘art,’ ‘self,’ and ‘consciousness’ fold in on each other and create an enclosed, exclusionary world. As Piper explains, I didn’t want to be absorbed as a collaborator, because that would mean having my own consciousness co-opted and mapped by that of others … . My solution was to privatise my own consciousness as much as possible, by depriving it of sensory input from that environment; to isolate it from all tactile, aural, and visual feedback.50

It seems as though Piper was trying to find a way to be represented in the consciousness of others without having her subjectivity exposed, vulnerable to the intrusive definitions of others: ‘I presented myself as a silent, secret, passive object, seemingly ready to be absorbed into consciousness as an object.’51 The performance did not go as Piper planned. Instead of becoming an object, the resistance she was staging exhibited ‘aggressive activity and choice’ and made her subjectivity evident.52 Here Piper sums up the reversal: ‘my objecthood became my subjecthood.’53 At the same time, her status as an object was confirmed, but not on the terms Piper originally imagined. While Untitled Performance expresses a desire to present her subjectivity as impermeable and intact, resistant to the impulse of others to ‘co-opt’ and ‘map’ her consciousness, the customers at Max’s Kansas City reinforced her status as an object. As Bowles explains, ‘Piper was helpless to prevent her fellow artists from appropriating her for their own amusement … and could not help being seen as anything other than an “image” at Max’s.’54 Her appearance only confirmed the defensive rationalisations of her audience and duplicated their transparent, unreflective ways of seeing. Though it turned out differently than Piper imagined, Untitled Performance allows us to think about Piper’s work in relationship to visual commodification and how it relies upon well-known categories of perception. Moreover, since text is not a material in Untitled Performance, it indirectly highlights how crucial language is to Piper’s artwork and what exactly the choice to include its textual appearance achieves. By presenting an image of her body in Max’s Kansas City, and having the performance photographed, Piper created an artwork that could be said to reflect upon the visual objectification of women in post-war American culture to which women of colour were subjected with a particularly thorough force.55 Max’s Kansas City was a ‘scene’ in every sense: a living theatre of fantasy, a place to see and be seen, a favourite hangout of Andy Warhol and the denizens of the Factory. Regulars represented the vibrant crossovers among visual art, dance, performance, popular music, and fashion. Artwork from the heterogeneous schools of post-war art – Abstract Expressionism, Pop and Conceptual Art, Minimalism – could be seen on the walls. Dan Flavin’s light sculptures hung from the ceilings.56 A place for trafficking in celebrity fantasies, certainly Max’s

Adrian Piper’s textual address

could serve as an example of spectacle’s encroaching dominance, but it was also a place that allowed people to imaginatively write themselves otherwise. Untitled Performance brings race and gender to bear on these fantasies and thereby puts them into check. It simultaneously exposes and negates the expectation that as a black woman Piper is ‘merely a foreign guest’ who will ‘entertain’ in ‘private clubs.’ She presents herself as a mute, denigrated sign to be visually consumed, a ‘gendered and ethnically stereotyped art commodity,’ but defies that form of consumption by making the passivity it entails so explicit.57 In Untitled Performance, Piper made herself into a representation of the strange, foreign, and disorderly, but instead of revising the categories of recognition, the artwork confirmed the fact that in American culture she was easily placed in an order through reified categories that allow her image to be appropriated for other people’s amusement. Piper’s subsequent artwork will do more to revise the categories of recognition and compose strategies that deflect appropriation. The same year of Untitled Performance, Piper composed Concrete Documentation Infinity Piece (hereafter referred to as Concrete Documentation) (see Figures 1.5 and 1.6). In this piece, she juxtaposes black-and-white photographic images of herself with meticulously handwritten diary entries and places them together to compose a grid. Concrete Documentation is far more private than Untitled Performance, and represents Piper’s efforts to, in Bowles’s words, ‘imagine herself anew.’58 Concrete Documentation consists of a 57-page text in which Piper attempted to record all of her physical actions across the month of June 1970 on pieces of graph paper. Each day she also photographed herself in a mirror and then placed the photograph in the upper-right hand corner of the graph paper. When the 57 pages of text are framed and placed on the wall, viewers see squares within squares and a dense field of writing. Piper’s body is not pinned down into the order of recognition that the grids suggest. Instead, it becomes disorderly in the imaginative movement between the photographs and the handwritten texts. Concrete Documentation works at the interval between the imperative to document the reality of the black female body ‘here’ while also suggesting its capacities to imaginatively be ‘somewhere else’ at the same time. On a piece of paper titled ‘Object Maintenance,’ Piper wrote down a series of restraints that would guide the composition of the artwork and how she would appear within it. Placed at its uppermost left hand corner when the artwork is installed on the wall, this set of notes serves as the artwork’s preface. In it, Piper pledges to ‘write everything’ she does. When she wakes and goes to sleep, she will record her weight and her temperature. She will also write without the first person pronoun ‘I,’ and she will commit herself to one verb for each sentence. As with Untitled Performance, Piper creates austere conditions of refusal so as to control the entrance of the outside world. She states: ‘No incoming information, environmental condition, sensory input (saw, heard,

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1.5 

Adrian Piper, Concrete Infinity Documentation Piece, 1970, detail. Collection of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. ‘Woke up at 5:30 am. Peed. Went back to bed. Woke up at 6:30 am. Turned off alarm. Went back to bed. Woke up at 7:00 am. Turned on radio. Peed and shat. Weighed 98 lbs. Body temperature 97.3 F …’

Adrian Piper’s textual address

Adrian Piper, Concrete Infinity Documentation Piece, 1970. Collection of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

smelled, touched, tasted).’ Excising all the senses would be impossible, so she amends this list and writes that she will describe her actions of seeing, reading, and eating. Linking these acts together highlights the figurative relationship between language and food, which connects back to the visual consumption of Untitled Performance and highlights Piper’s efforts to resist the imperative that a black woman become an easily consumable visual object. Piper’s limitations on subject matter – at the conclusion of ‘Object Maintenance’ she writes ‘[r]estrict content whenever possible’ – can be seen as an important part of this resistance, as feelings, thoughts, and responses are excised with this restriction. With the missing ‘I,’ these feelings are pulled back from the surface of the artwork. Similar to Context #7, Concrete Documentation rewrites expectations viewers bring to artwork and uses language to claim the self as an object that cannot be easily consumed. By restricting the ‘sensory input’ recorded in the diary entries, Concrete Documentation can be read as a meditation on consumption and internalisation and therefore can be applied to ideas a young black woman is expected to ‘take in.’ A large part of the subject matter in Piper’s diary entries are drinking, eating, and excreting what she has consumed, indicated by the phrase ‘peed and shat.’ Piper was on a fast of some kind. She ate very little, but consumed a lot of vitamins, tea, cod liver oil, and soup. This restricted diet resonates with the artwork’s austere aesthetic. Without the ‘I,’ and restraining herself to one verb for every sentence, the writing is dry, flat, and matter of fact. The writing has been compared to the literary productions of Robbe-Grillet, which Piper cites as an influence.59 Robbe-Grillet’s rigorous attention to visual objects and their placement in space, and his creation of a sober map of an estranged

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world dense with minute perceptions, resonate with the precision and austerity of Piper’s artwork, Concrete Documentation in particular. Piper’s resistance to subjective revelation is evident throughout Concrete Documentation. The diary entries are not windows into Piper; they occlude more than they reveal. The visual appearance of Piper’s cursive handwriting, with its disciplined circular forms crammed within and moving across the grids of the graph paper, announces that this artwork is mapping spaces between what can and cannot be seen. The diary entries move the image of her body from the concrete to the expanse of infinity without allowing it to become unhinged beyond Piper’s own control. The photographs of Piper contribute to this movement. Consistent with the use of photographic images in Conceptual Art, the photographs of Concrete Documentation are deliberatively deskilled.60 Roughly shot and imperfectly printed, they are not finely rendered visual objects. In every one of these photographs, Piper is standing up, looking straight into a mirror, and holding up her Brownie camera at mid-torso level.61 There is a raw matter of factness asserted in these images that transmit strength and vulnerability. The flash lights up the image of Piper’s body so that it looks as though she is emerging as the centre of consciousness from an opaque darkness. The ordinariness of the photographs do not take away from the depth of Concrete Documentation, but adds to it. In some of the images Piper is nude. In other instances she wears a long-sleeved white nightgown, flannel pyjamas, or unassuming street clothes. While sensuous and appealing, the photographs do not line up with recognisable grammars of sexual availability. The flatness of the photographs, the upright verticality of her body, the consistent presence of the camera, the seriality of the images, and the cryptic density of her diary entries filling graph paper: these intertwined aspects of the work make it impossible to ‘consume’ the image of Piper’s body quickly or easily, which is to say that the photographs require as much reading as the diary entries. They assert Piper’s centrality but do not insist on her visibility and document her capacity to create the conditions of her own recognition. Indeed, these aspects of Concrete Documentation strongly suggest that the artwork can be understood as a version of ‘The Mirror Stage,’ as it transforms the imaginary conditions in which black women are given to recognise themselves and rewrites the meanings mapped onto their negative signification in language. The most compelling aspect of Concrete Documentation is the movement between Piper’s written diary entries and her photographs. They both represent the body, but through different sign systems and mediums. This play between similarity and difference destabilises the image and concept of her body, makes it hard to see and locate. While the piece definitely highlights the shared markmaking of both photography and writing (which metaphors of ‘writing with light’ and the ‘pencil of nature’ bring into relief), the photographs are instantly

Adrian Piper’s textual address

recognisable and therefore distinct from the diary entries that force readers to wade through the densely rendered inscriptions of the body in time. Between the photographs and the writing, the image of Piper’s body comes to stand in for the ‘I’ that is not present in her written renditions of her body’s quotidian life. Taking the ‘I’ out of the diary entries, but suggesting its visual form in the photographs, the artwork keeps the materials of ‘The Mirror Stage’ in flux and appears to be a revision of the conditions through which the artist becomes recognisable to herself. Indeed, Concrete Documentation uses the interplay of words and images and suggests a picture of subjectivity that is dialogic and allows for the ‘aspect of “otherness” within the self ’ to emerge into visibility.62 Concrete Documentation could be seen as in dialogue with I-Box (1962) by Robert Morris and its playful deconstruction of the artist’s presence (see Figures 1.7a and 1.7b). I-Box is a 19 inch by 12¾ inch box made of plywood. Cut into the front of the box is an ‘I,’ which Morris has painted pink. This large graphic ‘I’ is actually a door with a little doorhandle. Behind the letter-shaped door, viewers see a full-length photograph of Morris. He stands completely naked and looks out from the top of the ‘I’ shape with a smirk. The piece draws attention to the parallels among the vertical line of his body, his genitals, and the letter ‘I.’63 Morris’ I-Box shows that the first person pronoun is not only a position in language from which one speaks, but a place where the body is located and a site from which one sees. By literalising this set of relations, Morris demonstrates their fictive instabilities, but the deconstruction at play in I-Box only goes so far. It actually reasserts the centrality of the male body and links it to the centrality the ‘I’ announces. By contrast, Concrete Documentation empties out the ‘I,’ which allows it to fill with black feminist meanings and opens the work to the possibility of rewriting women’s attenuated place in the symbolic order. Unlike I-Box’s naked assertion, Piper’s ‘I’ is suspended between acts of writing and photographic images, ‘present’ in the differences between those material inscriptions. Concrete Documentation assertively but subtly encroaches upon the subjective coherence readily given to the beneficiaries of white patriarchal culture, but does not repeat its habitual arrangements. It claims the ‘I’ while also rewriting the exclusions it has historically blocked from view. With Concrete Documentation, Piper created a way to visibly anchor the image of the black female body in space and time. She gave it the order and predictability of ‘here’ while also allowing that order to expand in relationship to the disorder of ‘somewhere else’ and its evocation of the foreign and the unknown. ‘A radically different text of female empowerment’

By using language to create a movement between order and disorder, Concrete Documentation rewrites the conditions in which black women have been given

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A 1.7a

Robert Morris, I-Box, 1962.

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B Robert Morris, I-Box, 1962 (continued).

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to appear. The conceptual depth and rigour of this revision suggests that Piper’s artwork can be put into dialogue with Spillers’ ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,’ which excavates the histories that have shaped the conditions of black women’s visibility. In this essay, Spillers identifies the specific forms of violence to which black women were subjected during the transatlantic slave trade. She argues that this violence turned the black female body inside out and punitively denied it access to the recognition bestowed by the sign woman. To be clear, Piper has never referred to Spillers’ essay or the ideas within it. Therefore, reading her artwork through Spillers’ argument risks narrowing it to a reflection on African-American history, which is by no means Piper’s only subject. However, ‘Mama’s Baby’ offers a rich historical background for bringing the black feminist stakes of Piper’s artwork into relief. It also offers another way to connect Piper’s work in Conceptual Art, her engagements with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and the artwork she produced after 1970 that manifests her reflections on her ‘position as an artist, a woman, and a black.’ Spillers’ historical reading of the enslaved female body and the particular violence to which it was subjected provides a specific account of the disorder and chaos attributed to African-American women, an attribution that has allowed recognisable icons of the black woman to be forcefully projected onto their bodies and lives. Spillers’ attention to language and the symbolic order, which she identifies as ‘American Grammar,’ deepens our understanding of Piper’s engagement with language and how it functions in her revision of the disorder attributed to the black female body. On the one hand, ‘Mama’s Baby’ confirms black women’s exclusion from the symbolic order. Spillers argues that black women have been named and identified through a limited set of typologies invented by white patriarchal culture that mirror its power. On the other hand, Spillers opens the possibility of seeing how the history of the transatlantic slave trade, and its violent denial of black paternity, opened spaces in which AfricanAmerican women could access linguistic powers that are granted masculine subjects in dominant western culture. This is the normative order that Lacan’s work identifies, but which the legacies of slavery in the United States radically complicate. At the opening of ‘Mama’s Baby’, Spillers enumerates a highly recognisable set of icons through which black women have been allowed to appear in American culture. Addressing her readers directly, Spillers writes: ‘Let’s face it, I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. “Peaches” and “Brown Sugar,” “Sapphire” and “Earth Mother,” “Aunty,” “Granny,” God’s “Holy Fool,” a “Miss Ebony First,” or “Black Woman at the Podium.”’64 This set of typologies is composed of verbal icons densely embedded with visual perceptions. Suspended between the ‘intertwined forces of denigration and veneration’ that characterise black iconicity according to Fleetwood, these icons have been composed and

Adrian Piper’s textual address

obsessively reproduced to underscore the expectation that black women serve and satisfy the needs and desires of others, even if these others include the large and unwieldy subject of the nation itself.65 Using the first-person strategically – ‘in the service of a collective function’ – Spillers explains, ‘I describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.’ This compelling formulation points to the black woman as a site of overdetermination, a ‘place’ where national fears and fantasies materialise. Spillers’ formulations begin to suggest the multiple forms of affective and reproductive labour congealed in the icons she identifies: ‘the names by which I am called in the public place render an example of signifying property plus.’66 This plus represents multiple excesses: the affective surplus black women are expected to give to their country, but also the disorderly excesses attributed to black women that are actually displacements of white patriarchal culture’s fears and fantasies.67 Inscriptions of white patriarchal power, the icons function as defences that manage the disorder of racial and sexual difference. Spillers will refer back to the ‘nicknames’ that opened her essay as illustrations of ‘the powers of distortion that the dominant community seizes as its unlawful prerogative.’68 ‘Mama’s Baby’ gives an account of why these icons are instantly recognisable and how they are habitually transmitted across historical time. Spillers writes that the icons are ‘so loaded with mythical prepossession’ they ‘demonstrate a sort of telegraphic coding.’69 The metaphor of the telegraph evokes pithy messages composed of words so compact they become visual signs. (And, of course, in telegrams, the letters of the alphabet are themselves transmitted through graphic dashes and dots.) An obsolete technology, the telegraph figures for the long histories inscribed into the icons Spillers describes; but it also evokes the development of fast-moving communication technologies that transported images and words across vast spaces with an ideological efficiency capable of cohering national imaginaries. ‘Mama’s Baby’ provides a psychoanalytically informed history that explains how these icons were produced and what purpose they serve. They are the result of histories in which black women were severed from the bodily and psychic coherence the category of woman bestows. Spillers argues that within the transatlantic slave trade, a radically violent ‘ungendering’ of the female body took place, reducing it to a ‘zero degree’ of flesh: an undifferentiated physiological mass in which the coherence of the body – and the gender integrity inherent to it – becomes undone and the physical outlines of a woman could not be discerned.70 Through ‘specifically externalised acts of torture and prostration,’ anything resembling gender identity was violently destroyed, broken up, turned inside out, denuded, and made bare, bloody, and abject. Ungendering identifies a lived form of abjection that undergirds black disposability and

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justifies the attribution of chaos and disorder to black women. The icons Spillers identifies are prefabricated, easily exchanged and consumable images that repress the disorder of ‘ungendering,’ and thereby keep its threats of disorder intact. Spillers devotes much of her essay to making the case that the ungendering enacted so thoroughly during the transatlantic slave trade continued far beyond that bloody crucible. She argues that not only do black women inherit histories of ungendering through the maternal line, they also are required to negotiate such inherited states within lifeworlds organised by the idea of gender integrity and consistently shuttle the history of ungendering to the categories of chaos and disorder. While it is perpetually displaced ‘somewhere else,’ ungendering never goes too far away. Spillers suggests that it has created a gap in national consciousness, a form of constitutive non-knowledge that has made it easy for others to assume that images of black women are blank screens upon which their fears and fantasies can be projected. This process, ubiquitous and invisible, is crucial for recognising aspects of black women’s lives and histories that racism and sexism work so diligently to erase. The masculinisation of black women that is the outcome of ungendering is a perpetual target and resource for those who like to benefit from pathologising black women and denying the systemic impact of racism and sexism in American culture. Not surprisingly, the Moynihan Report is a consistent refrain of ‘Mama’s Baby.’71 Moynihan’s reliance upon and reinscription of the myth of the emasculating black matriarch demonstrates that ungendering is the repressed centre of national consciousness. It relies heavily and unconsciously on slavery, as it ‘borrows its narrative energies from the grid of associations, from the semantic and iconic folds buried deep in the collective past, that come to surround and signify the captive.’72 ‘Mama’s Baby’ accounts for the violent histories that place women of colour beyond gender’s recognisable forms, but Spillers is not arguing for inclusion into the stable grammar of visible coherence the sign woman provides. She argues instead for the possibilities that black women can ‘gain the insurgent ground as female social subject.’73 In other words, ungendering identifies a violent theft but also a radical black feminist possibility. Ungendering destabilises the sign woman and the bodies, characteristics, and inheritances that constitute it. In response, ‘Mama’s Baby’ is a call to develop forms of writing that can move between the repressed disorder of bodily erasure and the recognisable order of hyper-visibility. Spillers argues that the psychic legacies of ungendering need not automatically translate into disorder, nor do they have to be covered over or compensated for with the familiar icons through which black women have been named. Both can be revised. At her essay’s conclusion, Spillers argues not for redeeming or repressing the abjection attributed to the psychic legacies of ungendering, but claiming its ‘monstrosity’ and the African-American woman’s unprecedented

Adrian Piper’s textual address

power to name. This power is a perverse gift. It has been systematically pathologised, but holds enormous black feminist potential. She cites the infamous figure of Sapphire, whom she identifies as ‘“Old Man” in drag’ to stress the masculinity to which the African-American woman has access and the gender malleability she can perform. A monster who has seized her power to name, Sapphire becomes, in the space of Spillers’ essay, the figure of a black feminist writer with the potential to create ‘a radically different text for female empowerment.’74 The next and final section of this chapter analyses three performances by Piper: Catalysis, Food for the Spirit, and Mythic Being, tracing how they align with the insights of ‘Mama’s Baby’ and underscoring how deeply Piper’s artwork contributes to the project of rewriting the conditions in which black women are allowed to appear. Revising visibility

When Spillers writes that it is ‘our task to make a place for this different social subject’ who has been shaped by the history of ungendering, she addresses writers and artists, asking them to create new forms of recognition that challenge the validity of strict gender differences the sign woman works so efficiently to reinforce.75 This rewriting is vital, because the highly recognisable icons Spillers identifies keep the history of ‘ungendering,’ and its effects on black women, perpetually displaced into the chaotic and the disorderly. Spillers demonstrates that this displacement makes ungendering invisible but ubiquitous, which gives ungendering its entrenched and almost unquestioned power. Part of what motivates ‘Mama’s Baby’ is making ungendering visible while also resisting the hyper-visible icons she gestures to at the beginning of her essay. Piper’s performance series Catalysis (1970–1971) can be read as an attempt to make ungendering visible. In these pieces, Piper sculpts her body into a malleable state by loading it with objects and materials that draw attention to sounds, smells, and secretions that disrupt the civilised boundaries of the body and muddy its gendered outlines. Using the ‘plastic possibilities of [her] own body,’ Piper spontaneously solicited responses from unwitting participants on the streets of New York City.76 Set against the analytic rigour and order of her Conceptual pieces, Catalysis has a decidedly corporeal messiness that locates disorder and chaos not in the abstract delirium of language, but in ideas about the black female body and its historical proximity to ungendering. Each performance in the Catalysis series provokes disgust and discomfort. Developing the themes of consumption and internalisation we saw in Concrete Documentation, many of the performances in Catalysis centre upon the mouth, food, and eating. In Catalysis I (1971), Piper soaked her clothes in vinegar, eggs, milk, and cod liver oil and then wore them while browsing through a New York City bookstore and riding the D train at rush hour. In Catalysis IV

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(1970–1971), Piper stuffed a large white bath towel in her mouth and sat quietly and decorously on a New York City bus as the towel awkwardly hung from her face. In the photographs documenting Catalysis IV, her cheeks became distended bulges, suggesting the unwieldy and irrational ideas women of colour have been asked to swallow as they have accepted their own silence (see Figure 1.8). In Catalysis V (1971), while doing research at the Donnell Library in New York City, Piper played audio recordings of herself belching – at full volume. Composing the work of art from inside the experience of being consumed, and with such a strong emphasis on the mouth as a threshold of the acceptable and unacceptable, Piper materialises fantasies of consuming the detested racial other. She makes those fantasies visible, turns them inside out, and evokes their damaging effects. These performances do not mimetically correspond to the ungendering Spillers identifies, but we could say that Catalysis disinters the repression of ungendering, exteriorises its physical and psychic remainders, and makes them visible.

1.8 

Adrian Piper, Catalysis IV, 1970–1971. Collection of the Generali Foundation, Vienna. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin and Generali Foundation.

Adrian Piper’s textual address

Piper composed Catalysis to engage and confront viewers. They are premised on the idea of eliminating the distance between the artwork and the viewer and, as Piper explains, ‘letting art lurk in the midst of things.’77 As the title of the series suggests – ‘catalysis’ is an element that provokes a chemical reaction but does not itself change – the performances were designed to provoke reflection and change in the participants. In Piper’s theorisation of a catalytic encounter, the viewers’ response actually constitutes and completes the artwork.78 While the performances of Catalysis are aleatory, they deliberately address the people who found themselves proximate to Piper’s body. At the core of this address is a request that they do not see the body before them – strange, offensive, and disorderly – through defensive rationalisations, but instead revise the categories through which they recognise personhood and reflect upon their own appetites for the despised racial other. Catalysis enacts what David Marriott identifies as the ‘excessive visibility of the socially undesirable,’ and refuses the idea that black people’s bodies and lives are never proper to the spaces they occupy.79 Though executed more than a decade before the term acquired critical currency, Catalysis is a textbook example of abjection. It is Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection that brought abjection to the fore of critical theory in 1982. Subsequently, the concept became useful for characterising the tendency within post-war and contemporary art practices to put the traumatised and distorted body on raw display and thereby revolt against its commodification and instrumentalisation.80 As Kristeva explains, the abject ‘disturbs identity, system, order … [and] does not respect borders, positions, and rules.’81 The abject is the unruly corporeal excess that is produced through the repressions that build psychic coherence. It is the precondition of narcissism and it ‘lurks,’ as Kristeva writes, behind ‘the beautiful image in which I behold or recognise myself,’ making that image ‘permanently brittle.’82 Referring to neither the subject nor the mirror of the object but the more chaotic spaces between them, the abject can be described as the messy leftovers of acquiring language and becoming a discernible ‘I.’83 Seeping beyond the regularised syntax of subject/object relations, the abject helps to identify the physical chaos to which the black female body has been repeatedly associated in order to make it mirror Euro-American dominance.84 The thick and disorderly materiality of Piper’s Catalysis performances suggests an affinity with ungendering and its physical dissolution, but there are aspects of Catalysis that could be said to reflect upon the particular form of the abject often attributed to black femininity. This abjection certainly overlays the history of ungendering, but also highlights the particular anxieties about disorder black women’s bodies provoke when they display signs of femininity. In Catalysis VI (1971), Piper rode the subway at rush hour with Mickey Mouse balloons floating above her head and bulging out of her clothing, ‘like I had breasts coming out of my knees,’ as Piper explains in a 1976 interview.85 In Catalysis

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VII (1971), Piper attended the exhibition ‘Before Cortés: Sculpture of Middle America’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She wore a tight mini-skirt, teased-up hair, and was chewing large wads of bubble gum. Piper would blow giant bubbles and let the gum collapse on to her clothing and face. Rather than cleaning off the sticky material, she allowed it to accumulate around her mouth, a refusal to swallow and hide the excesses of consumption. Anyone’s body can become a sticky, lumpy mess and emit bad smells, but whose bodies are imagined to be closer to the abject? The visceral fleshiness Piper creates in Catalysis has different connotations when it comes from the body of a black woman. Reflecting upon the hostility many of the performances provoked in viewers, Bowles writes, ‘Piper is incomprehensible to her audience except as a misbehaving woman, an object to be denigrated who appears to have denigrated herself already.’86 This ‘misbehaving woman’ is accused of bringing on her own sexual submission. In one instance, the abjection Piper staged across her body became a cause for sexual arousal. Riding the subway during Catalysis I (1970), standing passively but emitting the thick smell of cod liver oil (a liquid she consumed in Concrete Documentation), men would look at Piper ‘like they really wanted to fuck [her],’ as she puts it, which suggests that the image of a black woman participating in her own denigration can easily become a source of sexual pleasure.87 The performances of Catalysis can be read as mediations on a black woman’s exile from the symbolic order. Catalysis III (1970) makes this clear, as Piper placed herself outside Macy’s in Herald Square, New York City wearing a shirt painted white and a sign upon which the words ‘WET PAINT’ have been written in white (see Figure 1.9). Like the other pieces in Catalysis, Catalysis III draws attention to the messy irrationality attributed to the black woman’s body, and does so by making the artist’s body into a prop for a haphazard ‘sign’ that refers to white skin. There is nothing in the formal presentation of the artwork that suggests Piper – who walks with a stiff, mechanical gait and wears a blank, affectless stare – was the person who painted these words. Rather, Catalysis III suggests that this sign has been placed upon the woman; she is designated to carry its messy significations and her own estrangement from it. Catalysis is both an exposure and an excavation. The performances expose the appetites for the despised racial other and excavate their internalisation, both for the person who embodies racial otherness and the people who perceive others through that defensive rationalisation. Food for the Spirit (1971) contributes to these dimensions of Piper’s work. It attempts to create conditions for the possibility of different perceptions and less repressive, polarised forms of internalisation. What Food for the Spirit makes available is the possibility of accessing disorder without ricocheting into fixed, hyper-visible and hyperrecognisable icons. In this sense, Food for the Spirit can be situated between

Adrian Piper’s textual address

Adrian Piper, Catalysis III, 1970. Collection of the Generali Foundation, Vienna. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin and Generali Foundation.

the hyper-visible icons of black women Spillers identifies and the invisibility of ungendering she traces (and which Catalysis rematerialises). It exemplifies Piper’s work, claiming the ‘I’ with enough coherence and control that it can also be put under erasure and imagined otherwise. Food for the Spirit is a private performance that documents Piper’s ecstatic encounter with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. One of the pieces for which she is best known, Piper created Food for the Spirit in the summer of 1971. In her New York City loft, she fasted and practised yoga as spiritual disciplines, but it was reading Critique of Pure Reason that provoked experiences of disorder and disintegration that are the central themes of the work. Responding to the clarity of Kant’s analysis as he maps the conditions of human knowledge and experience, Piper tips into the disorder for which Kant’s categories of perception do not account. As Piper explains, ‘I felt as though I was on the verge of abdicating my individual self.’88 To gain control, she made audio recordings

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of herself reading passages from Kant’s text out loud and photographed herself in the mirror. The fourteen black-and-white silver prints that resulted from Piper’s efforts to give herself a discernible physical and psychic form are the objects that have come to represent Food for the Spirit, but the piece itself has multiple parts and iterations –including Piper’s own written meditations on the performance. Piper originally conceived of the work in a three-ring binder. She ripped out her annotated pages from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and placed them in pages opposite the photographs (see Figure 1.10). The audio recordings Piper created are unfortunately (but also quite provocatively) lost, erased by a former boyfriend. Consistent with Conceptual Art’s expansion of the artwork, Food for the Spirit does not cohere into one discrete object and disperses across multiple texts, mediums, and locations. Indeed, Food for the Spirit is a ‘portrait’ of the self that does not cohere, and begins to suggest the pleasures of the self ’s undoing without relinquishing complete control. Kept to herself for a long time, Food for the Spirit is as private as Catalysis is public. It was not until 1981, ten years after its original execution, that Piper presented it in the journal High Performance, and it was not until 1987 that Food for the Spirit was exhibited in her retrospective at the Alternative Museum. In High Performance, Piper published four of the photographs and an essay that renders the psychic unhinging and intense physical/affective sensations

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Adrian Piper, Food for the Spirit, 1971 (photographic reprints 1997). Collection Thomas Erben. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

Adrian Piper’s textual address

reading Kant provoked. ‘The Critique is the most profound book I have ever read,’ Piper writes, and my involvement in it was so great that I thought I was losing my mind, in fact losing my sense of self completely. I would read passages aloud that were so intensely affecting and deep that I would literally break out into a cold sweat. I could think of nothing else and became obsessed with Kant’s thought; I read it, talked about it, wrote about it, and even dreamed about it constantly.89

Piper was engaged in a process of internalising Kant’s ideas about disembodied self-consciousness, consuming them as voraciously as the ‘food’ of her title (continuing her thematisation of consumption and internalisation). At the same time, Piper was so engaged with Kant’s mapping of rationality, she experienced herself coming undone or, we could say, falling into the chaos and disorder for which Kant’s text does not account. To counter this vertiginous force, Piper created images of a coherent self she could also internalise. As she explains, I ritualised my frequent contacts with the physical experience of myself with the mirror through Food for the Spirit. I rigged up a camera and tape recorder next to the mirror so that every time the fear of losing myself overtook me and drove me to the ‘reality check’ in the mirror, I was able to record my physical appearance objectively and also to record myself on tape repeating a passage in that Critique that was currently driving me to self-transcendence. The sight and sound of me, the physically embodied Adrian Piper, repeating passages from Kant reassured me by demarcating the visual, verbal, and aural boundaries of my individual self, and reminded me of the material conditions of my mental state … .90

This passage transcribes an exhilarating process of losing the body, self, and consciousness, which necessitates ‘demarcating the visual, verbal, and aural boundaries of my individual self,’ and then producing and consuming that intact image that appeared in the mirror and was materialised through the photographs.91 The photographs, the writing, and the audio recording: this assemblage of texts gave Piper a system for claiming the concrete reality of her body.92 And yet, through acts of claiming and asserting a coherent self – ‘[t]he sight and sound of me, the physically embodied Adrian Piper’ – she moves between the stability of order and the ecstatic possibility of becoming otherwise. Similar to the photographs in Concrete Documentation Piece, these images are composed of only the barest photographic elements (see Figures 1.11a and 1.11b). Piper presents her body in various levels of undress; in some, she is fully naked. Lorraine O’Grady describes Food for the Spirit as a ‘retriev[al] [of] the mutilated body’ – but the artwork is a lot more than a set of positive images or an assertion of wholeness and presence.93 The fact that in each of the photographs Piper stands vertically and holds her Brownie camera just below her breasts is

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A 1.11a

Adrian Piper, Food for the Spirit, 1971. Collection Thomas Erben. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

Adrian Piper’s textual address

61

Adrian Piper, Food for the Spirit, 1971. Collection Thomas Erben. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin (continued).

1.11b

B

one aspect of the photographs that challenge the standard grammar for visually representing the black woman’s body. For, as Amelia Jones explains, she is ‘both embodied woman-as-object of the camera’s “gaze” and photographer-subject of the image.’94 The doubling Jones describes challenges one-dimensional images that assert black women’s sexual availability, but it also complicates the notion that a body can become whole or fully ‘retrieved’ through images. While the camera announces Piper’s claim to the means of representation, the serial repetition of the photographs suggests partiality and incompletion; they are sites where she could claim a demarcated self but also continually revise that visibility, allow it to come undone. So there is something more at stake in Food for the Spirit than Piper’s ability to create affirmative representations of herself and her body (though such a reading should not be dismissed). As with Concrete Documentation, these images suggest a black feminist rewriting of the mirror stage such that the woman reflected in the mirror can write the conditions of her appearance.

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The photographs in Food for the Spirit have varying levels of exposure, but on the whole they are quite dark. In a few of the photographs, viewers can only see faint panes of light that illuminate the contours of Piper’s body and give them a shimmering, almost ghostly presence. Piper barely takes up any space in the photographs. Her demure presence contributes to the sense that she is disappearing into the darkness and then barely emerging back into visibility. The darkness of the photographs can be thought of in relationship to racial blackness and the disorder it has been made to represent in the American racial imaginary.95 This is a form of disorder the artwork tips into but comes back from. Kobena Mercer reads Food for the Spirit as an example of Conceptual Art’s dematerialisation of the art object, and sees the photographs as examples of a ‘conceptualist sublime’ in which Piper ‘risked disembodiment as a source of both pleasure and terror.’96 As Mercer goes on to explain: ‘Shot in available light, Piper’s denuded presence in the photographs is at times almost illegible, she undermines the gaze by threatening to withdraw from the field of vision as an intelligible form.’97 It is this illegibility that suggests the artwork is moving into chaos and disorder while also creating a way to resist becoming completely engulfed by the imperative to embody the disorder of ungendering. Food for the Spirit is, fundamentally, an encounter with language. It documents Kant’s ability to map, through philosophical concepts, the categories through which the sensuous world becomes recognisable, but also demonstrates Piper’s ability to use language to anchor the categories of perception in the materiality of the body (an experience Kant does not address). Needless to say, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason exemplifies philosophy’s contribution to the patriarchal order of things. Though language itself is more powerful than any text Kant could compose – this is what Lacan’s work helps us see – Kant does identify how the world is ordered, implicitly reaffirming the power bestowed upon men to legislate the symbolic order. But of course, as Spillers argues, it is the power to name that is a perverse gift to which African-American women have had access. In The Mythic Being (1974–1975), a drag performance series that explores the links among racist fears, masculinity, and language, Piper stages this access. As with Catalysis, much of The Mythic Being takes place on the street and creates intersubjective ‘catalytic’ encounters between the artist and the public. But in contrast to the abject displays of bodily vulnerability in Catalysis, Piper plays a young man – a ‘3rd world, working class, overtly hostile male’ – who possesses a command of language and demonstrates his capacity to defend himself against the imaginary distortions to which people of colour are subjected.98 To become the mythic being, Piper wore an Afro wig, sunglasses, and rugged working-class clothes. With a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, the mythic being enacts an aggressive bodily movement unconstrained by decorum.

Adrian Piper’s textual address

Describing the freedom of movement bestowed upon this figure, Piper writes: ‘I swagger, stride, lope, lower my eyebrows, raise my shoulders, sit with my legs wide apart on the subway.’99 Perhaps an allusion to the Black Panthers, the mythic being embodies the threatening image of black masculinity in the white American imagination.100 Two performances central to The Mythic Being make this embodiment clear. In The Mythic Being: Getting Back #2 (1975), Piper staged the mugging of a white man, a performative act that highlights the fear of the criminality erroneously attributed to black men. And in The Mythic Being: Cruising White Women (1975), Piper seemed to embody the predatory sexuality attributed to black men by staging the forbidden exchange of white women across the terrain of the city. The most compelling images from this series are those that represent the mythic being as a philosopher. Through this portrayal, Piper displaces white men as the subjects who assume the position of the intellectual and makes philosophy part of her anti-racist and anti-sexist project. In The Mythic Being: A-108 (Kant) (1975), a series of six posters, the mythic being sits at a typewriter (see Figure 1.12). In each of the posters Piper has drawn white thought bubbles in which she has inscribed, in black letters, the philosophical meditations (about the ‘original and necessary consciousness of the identify of the self ’) the mythic being is in the process of typing. By portraying the mythic being typing a philosophical argument, these posters point to Piper’s work as a philosopher, but they also refer to the typewritten text that is such a consistent and central part of her artwork. Across the six posters that compose A-108 (Kant), Piper uses crayon to increasingly ‘black out’ the details of his study, so in the last image there is only an image of the mythic being looking at the viewer from behind dark glasses. Writing philosophy informs the power of this opaque and resistant gaze. Piper also demonstrates how the mythic being’s command of language extends into an assertion of his bodily presence in space. In The Mythic Being: I Am the Locus (1975), a series of 8x10 inch crayon drawings on photographs, Piper portrays him crossing a street in Harvard Square amidst a crowd of people. The language of the thought balloons (a clever borrowing from Pop Art), begins with philosophical reflections – ‘I am the locus of consciousness/ surrounded and constrained by animate physical objects.’ As he moves forward in space, the visual portrayals of other people become more amorphous. In the final image, the mythic being stands alone at the centre of the image, continuing to strive forward. Above him is the aggressive declaration ‘Get out of my way, asshole.’ A close-up of Piper as the mythic being, the piece The Mythic Being: I Embody Everything You Most Hate and Fear (1975) is the most compelling address in this series (see Figure 1.13). It confronts viewers and exposes the defensive

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1.12 

Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being A-108 (Kant), 1975. Private collection. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. ‘A consciousness of an equally necessary unity of the synthesis of all appearances.’

Adrian Piper’s textual address

Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: I Embody Everything You Most Hate and Fear, 1975. Collection of Thomas Erben, New York. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

rationalisations through which they see people of colour and provokes them to take responsibility for those perceptions. An oil crayon drawing on a photograph, I Embody not only emblematises the fears and fantasies the mythic being embodies, but deploys language to deflect the embodiment of others’ perceptions of racial difference. Piper is smoking, donning an Afro, and wearing sunglasses that mirror the spatial contours of the room in which the mythic being appears. The mythic being’s face, hair, and posture fill up the picture plane. Appearing in a white thought balloon, the statement ‘I Embody Everything You Hate and Fear’ highlights the image of Piper’s mouth, which suggests that The Mythic Being aggressively exteriorises how the black body has been consumed and placed inside the white imagination. The caption also directs a reading of the image – showing viewers how perceptions of black bodies make them into receptacles for white culture’s irrational hatreds and fears. With the second person pronoun, Piper makes that reading the viewer’s responsibility. I Embody clearly resonates with the production of Davis as an imaginary enemy of the nation-state, which took place just as Piper began creating work

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that made racism, sexism, and xenophobia its subjects. I Embody could be seen as a representation of the fantasmatic images of Davis that appeared in America’s paranoid eye and thereby reveals the threat of a black woman who uses her training in philosophy to craft a sober anti-racist and anti-sexist argument that challenges America’s image of itself. The next chapter analyses how Davis wrote to deflect the insistence that as a black woman she should become an imaginary enemy who embodies the fears and fantasies of white patriarchal culture. Working with language as a site of collective formation and a tool that cuts through ideologically fixed images, Davis addressed the other women with the possibility of rewriting these images and their insistence on fixed truths. Notes 1 Adrian Piper, ‘A General Statement about My Work,’ qtd in Cottingham, ‘The “Autobiography” of Adrian Piper,’ in Adrian Piper: A Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, 61. 2 Kobena Mercer writes, ‘Piper’s art has been fiercely antioptical from the start.’ ‘Decentering and Recentering: Adrian Piper’s Spheres of Influence,’ in Adrian Piper: A Retrospective, 47–59: 48. 3 This formulation draws from Peter Osborne’s section ‘Word and Sign’ in his survey for Conceptual Art (London: Phaidon, 2011), 16–51: 27. 4 For an understanding of Piper’s contribution to feminist art practices, it is important to note the appearance of her work in exhibitions curated by Lucy R. Lippard: 557, 087 (1969), 26 Contemporary Women Artists (1971), c. 7,500 (1973). 5 Claudia Barrow, ‘Adrian Piper: Space, Time and Reference 1967–1970,’ in Elizabeth A. Macgregor, Claudia Barrow and Arlene Raven, Adrian Piper, exhibition catalogue (Birmingham and Manchester: Ikon Gallery and Cornerhouse Publications, 1992), 11–15: 12. 6 Victor Burgin argues that Conceptual Art was a ‘revolt against modernism … as formulated in the writings of American critic Clement Greenberg,’ and then outlines how Greenbergian modernism underscores ‘received common sense’ about art and the artist. ‘The Absence of Presence: Conceptualism and Postmodernisms,’ in Burgin, The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1986), 29–50: 29–30. 7 John P. Bowles, Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 154–161. I first saw the pages from Context #7 in Bowles’s indispensable study. 8 Peter Wollen, ‘Global Conceptualism and North American Conceptual Art,’ in Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, exhibition catalogue, J. Farver (ed.) (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), 73–85: 76. 9 Adrian Piper, ‘Introduction: Some Very FORWARD Remarks,’ in Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, Vol. 1: Selected Writings on Meta-Art 1968–1992 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), xxix–xl: xxxix.

Adrian Piper’s textual address

10 In Talking to Myself, Piper explains the catalytic encounter: ‘I define the work as the viewer’s reaction to it. The strongest, most complex, and most aesthetically interesting catalysis is the one that occurs in uncategorized, undefined, nonpragmatic human confrontation.’ Piper’s Talking to Myself: The Ongoing Autobiography of the Art Object, which was originally published in 1975, is reprinted in Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight vol. 1, 29–53: 42. 11 Bowles, Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment, 257. Jean Fisher also underscores the importance of Piper’s address: ‘Piper takes great pains in ensuring that the work addresses the viewer with honesty and clarity, and among its qualities is a profound sense of the ethical responsibility or accountability of the artist toward the work–viewer relationship.’ Jean Fisher, ‘The Breath Between Words,’ in Berger: Adrian Piper: A Retrospective, 35–44: 35. 12 Berger, ‘The Critique of Pure Racism,’ 80–81. 13 Piper is an accomplished philosopher in the analytic tradition focusing particularly on Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Piper earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy at Harvard University in 1981. Her dissertation is titled ‘A New Model of Rationality,’ written under the direction of John Rawls and Roderick Firth. Piper is the first African-American woman to receive tenure in Philosophy. For a complete listing of Piper’s publications in the field, see the Curriculum Vitae on her webpage www.adrianpiper.com/docs/AMSPCV.pdf, accessed 8 June 2016. 14 Piper, ‘Xenophobia and Kantian Rationalism,’ in Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant, Robin May Schott (ed.) (College Park: Penn State University Press, 1997), 21–73: 22. 15 Ibid. 16 Berger, ‘The Critique of Pure Racism,’ 87. 17 Piper, ‘Xenophobia and the Indexical Present,’ in Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight vol. 1, 255. 18 Berger, ‘The Critique of Pure Racism,’ 87. 19 Ibid., 88. 20 Piper, ‘Xenophobia and Kantian Rationalism,’ 23. 21 Berger, ‘The Critique of Pure Racism,’ 90. 22 Piper, ‘Xenophobia and Kantian Rationalism,’ 25–26. 23 Ibid., 22. 24 Piper, ‘Introduction: Some Very FORWARD Remarks,’ xxxix. 25 Berger, ‘The Critique of Pure Racism,’ 90. Original emphasis. 26 Ibid., 94. Original emphasis. 27 Piper, ‘Xenophobia and Kantian Rationalism,’ 23. 28 Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler stress the relationship between ‘dematerialization’ and Conceptual Art’s ‘non-visual emphases.’ Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler, ‘The Dematerialization of Art,’ in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds) (1967. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 46–50: 48. 29 Lucy R. Lippard, ‘Escape Attempts,’ in Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966–1972 (1973. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), vii–xii: ix; Jayne Wark, ‘Conceptual Art and Feminism: Martha Rosler,

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Adrian Piper, Eleanor Antin, and Martha Wilson,’ Women’s Art Journal 22.1 (Spring–Summer 2001), 44–50. 30 Piper, Talking to Myself, 29. 31 Ibid., 29. For an overview of Piper’s early work and her turn to Conceptualism, see Bowles, ‘Contingent and Universal,’ in Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment, 33–68. 32 Bowles, Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment, 50. 33 Piper, Talking to Myself, 29–30. 34 Piper, ‘Sol, 1928–2007,’ www.adrianpiper.com/art/sol.shtml, accessed 23 November 2016. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 LeWitt’s paratextual manifestos – ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ (1967) and ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’ (1969) – are well known for their self-reflexive attention to language as an essential component of the artwork. LeWitt, ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ and ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art,’ in Conceptual Art, Alberro and Stimson (eds), 12–16; 106–108. 38 Barrow, ‘Adrian Piper: Space, Time and Reference 1967–1970,’ in Adrian Piper, exhibition catalogue, 12. 39 Piper’s work taps into the historical connections between grids and words, which spans the development of standard language and legal contracts to the invention of moveable type and the shift into large-scale literacy. See Hannah B. Higgins, The Grid Book (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). 40 Personal chronology, in Adrian Piper: A Retrospective, 188. 41 Ibid. 42 On Vito Acconci’s poetry see Acconci, Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writings of Vito Acconci, Craig Dworkin (ed.) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 43 The ‘mimeograph revolution’ names a historical moment in which artists and writers had greater access to reproductive technologies such as letterpress and mimeograph machines and created literary groups through the inexpensive production and distribution of magazines, books, and booklets. See ‘A Little History of the Mimeograph Revolution,’ in Steven Clay and Rodney Phillips, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960–1980: A Sourcebook of Information (New York: New York Public Library, Granary Books, 1998), 13–16. See the entry on 0 to 9 on pages 206–207. 44 Piper, ‘On Conceptual Art,’ in Out of Order, Out of Sight, 241. 45 Piper, Talking to Myself, 30. 46 Ibid., 31. 47 Bowles, Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment, 126. 48 As Piper explains, ‘as an art object, I want simply to look outside myself and see the effect of my existence on the world at large, rather than first in another, secondary object.’ Piper, Talking to Myself, 35. Pamela Franks points out that Piper’s turn to the body was about reaching a wider audience: ‘[i]ncorporating her body made it possible to address a larger public since self-presentation is a representational system general enough to reach most people.’ Pamela Franks, ‘Conceptual Rigor

Adrian Piper’s textual address

and Political Efficacy, Or, The Making of Adrian Piper,’ in Witness to Her Art: Art and Writings by Adrian Piper, Mona Hatoum, Cady Noland, Jenny Holzer, Kara Walker, Daniela Rossell, and Eau de Cologne, Rhea Anastas and Michael Brenson (eds) (Annandale-on-Hudson, New York: Centre for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 2006), 75–82: 80. 49 Piper, ‘Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City,’ Out of Order, Out of Sight, 28. 50 Ibid., 28. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 Bowles, Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment, 135. 55 Fred Moten places Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City in a historical trajectory of black performances that meditate on the resistance of the object produced through the extraction of labour power that constituted enslavement. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 252–253. 56 See Steven Watson, ‘The Art of Max’s,’ in Max’s Kansas City: Art, Glamour, Rockand-Roll, Steven Kasher (ed.) (New York: Abrams Image, 2010), 8–12. See also Yvonne Sewall-Ruskin, High on Rebellion: Inside the Underground at Max’s Kansas City (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1998). 57 Piper, ‘The Logic of Modernism: How Greenberg Stole the Americans Away From a Tradition of Euroethnic Social Content,’ Flash Art 168 (January–February 1993), 56–58, 118, 136: 57. 58 Bowles, Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment, 126. 59 In the entry for Piper in the WACK! catalogue, Corrina Peipon describes the text of Concrete Documentation as ‘influenced by Alain Robbe-Grillet’s New Wave novels.’ Corrina Peipon, ‘Adrian Piper,’ in WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, 282. In the personal chronology included in Adrian Piper: A Retrospective, Piper writes that she saw the film Last Year at Marienbad in the year 1962, ‘for the first of many many hundreds of times.’ Adrian Piper: A Retrospective, 186. Robbe-Grillet wrote the script for Last Year at Marienbad. 60 My understanding of Conceptual Art and photography has been influenced by Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph 1964–1977, exhibition catalogue, Art Institute of Chicago (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). 61 The straight line Piper’s body creates in the photographs resonates with the ‘perform[ance] [of] stillness’ Harvey Young attributes to the earliest photographic depictions of African Americans in the United States. Harvey Young, ‘Still Standing: Daguerreotypes, Photography, and the Black Body,’ in Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 26–75: 27. 62 Henderson, ‘Speaking in Tongues,’ 118. 63 My understanding of Morris’s I-Box has been aided by Robert Morris: The Mind/ Body Problem, exhibition catalogue (New York: Guggenheim Museum and Rizzoli International, 1994).

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64 Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby,’ 203. 65 Fleetwood, On Racial Icons, 9. 66 Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby,’ 203. Original emphasis. 67 Resonating with Spillers’ formulations, Fleetwood uses the term ‘excess flesh’ to ‘attend to ways in which black female corporeality is rendered as an excessive overdetermination and as overdetermined excess.’ N. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 9. 68 Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby,’ 210. 69 Ibid., 203. 70 Ibid., 206. 71 A 1965 public policy report authored by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then assistant secretary for policy planning and research at the Labor department, the Moynihan Report documented African-American poverty in the United States. It is well known for pathologising African-American women, blaming them and matriarchal traditions for impoverished conditions. 72 Ibid., 210. Added emphasis. 73 Ibid., 229. Original emphasis. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid. 76 Piper, Talking to Myself, 35. 77 Ibid., 37. 78 Describing this series in Talking to Myself, Piper writes: ‘Ideally the work has no meaning or independent existence outside its function as a medium of change. It exists only as a catalytic agent between myself and the viewer,’ 42. 79 David Marriott, Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007), xiv. 80 See Amelia Jones’s ‘Survey’ in The Artist’s Body for an informative overview of the body’s appearances in contemporary art practices. The Artist’s Body, Tracey Warr (ed.) (London and New York: Phaidon, 2006), 16–47. See also Hal Foster, ‘Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,’ October 78 (Fall 1996), 107–124; and Maria Walsh, ‘The Evolution of Abjection,’ Art and Psychoanalysis (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 68–81. 81 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4. 82 Ibid., 13. 83 As Kristeva explains, ‘What is abject is not my correlative, which, providing me with someone or something else as support, would allow me to be more or less detached and autonomous. The abject has only one quality of the object – that of being opposed to “I,”’ ibid., 1. 84 In fact, Catalysis presciently foresees the uses the abject will later have for critical race theorists and scholars of the African diaspora to characterise the deleterious effects of living within the concept of racial difference in a society structured by racial dominance. For Darieck Scott, the abject offers an acute angle onto blackness because both are ‘repositor[ies] of fears about sex and death’. Scott, Extravagant

Adrian Piper’s textual address

Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 4. 85 In an interview with Effie Serlis, a student in a class taught by Joyce Kozloff at the School of Visual Arts, ‘Women and the Arts,’ Piper comments upon the performances for Catalysis, the ideas that informed them and their results. Effie Serlis, ‘Adrian Piper,’ Interviews with Women in the Arts: Part 2 (New York: School of Visual Arts, 1976), 24–27: 24. It is important to recall the connection between Mickey Mouse and the history of blackface. 86 Bowles, Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment, 178. 87 Serlis, ‘Adrian Piper,’ 25. 88 Piper, ‘Food for the Spirit,’ in Out of Order, Out of Sight, 55. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid. 93 O’Grady, ‘Olympia’s Maid,’ 177. O’Grady claims Food for the Spirit is a retrieval from a history of damage inflicted on the black female body and echoes earlier readings of the piece as a form of self-affirmation. See also Jane Farver, ‘Introduction,’ Adrian Piper: Reflections 1967–1987 (New York: Alternative Museum, 1987), 3–6. Joanna Freuh, ‘The Body through Women’s Eyes,’ in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (eds) (New York: Henry Abrams, 1994), 190–207. Bowles contests Farver’s and Freuh’s readings of Food for the Spirit by demonstrating how Piper’s photographs fail to provide ‘proof of her existence.’ Bowles, Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment, 210. I think the failures of the photographs are the point, as they highlight the movement Food for the Spirit stages between visibility and invisibility, affirmation and dissolution. 94 Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 162. 95 This idea of Piper’s photographs becoming undone has been influenced by Darby English’s How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). 96 Mercer, ‘Adrian Piper, 1970–1975,’ 156. Added emphasis. 97 Ibid. 98 Piper, ‘The Mythic Being: Getting Back,’ in Out of Order, Out of Sight, 147–149: 147. 99 Piper, ‘Notes on The Mythic Being,’ in ‘Ongoing American Fiction III,’ John Perreault (ed.), special issue, Tri Quarterly 32 (Winter 1975), n.p. 100 As Bowles argues, The Mythic Being ‘exposed the fear of reciprocal violence and terror in the heart of American racism,’ Bowles, Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment, 236.

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Letters from an imaginary enemy, Angela Davis

‘It didn’t matter who I was. I was a convenient figure … ’1 Angela Y. Davis, The Black Power Mix-Tape (2011)

On the run from the law, her image blown up into wildly distorted forms, identified as a terrorist by President Richard Nixon, kept in solitary confinement, and subjected to fantasies about black women’s criminality: the time Angela Davis spent as a fugitive, prisoner, and defendant from 7 August 1970 (when Jonathan Jackson entered a Marin County Courthouse with four guns registered in Davis’s name) to 4 June 1972 (when she was acquitted) reveals the extent to which an image of a black woman can be emptied out and filled up with imaginary threats attributed to racial difference, particularly when the woman does not – as Davis did not – transmit an image of willing submission. In the documentary Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners (2012), Davis recalls learning that the State of California was seeking three counts of the death penalty against her (for murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy). Confronting the seriousness with which the prosecution wanted to see her convicted, and knowing that it was impossible to be executed three times, Davis concluded that this campaign against her ‘wasn’t about [her], but about the construction of an enemy, and I embodied this imaginary enemy.’2 The visual production of Davis as an imaginary enemy became evident when the FBI put her on their list of the top ten most wanted criminals and composed a ‘Wanted’ poster to present Davis as a dangerous fugitive (see Figure 2.1). After Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, began the process of firing her from UCLA (for her membership of the Communist Party), photographs of Davis appeared in the national media, but this wanted poster, and its announcement of a national hunt, brought her exposure to another level. Resonating with the black-and-white forms and austere arrangements of Piper’s conceptual art practices, the wanted poster draws upon the barest elements of representation. It appears objective, but is deeply rhetorical. At the top of the poster, the statement ‘WANTED BY THE FBI’ appears in white boldface letters across a field of dark black ink. The ink highlights the blackness

Letters from an imaginary enemy, Angela Davis

FBI Wanted Poster of Angela Davis, 1970.

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of Davis’s skin and hair in the two photographs placed just below the announcement of the crimes of which she is accused – ‘Interstate Flight – Murder, Kidnapping.’ J. Edgar Hoover, the signator of the poster, addresses his national audience directly, conscripting them into the service of state surveillance: ‘If you have any information concerning this person, please notify me or contact your local police office.’ This address made everyone ‘vigilante viewers’ as ‘you’ are potentially a target for this criminal on the run.3 This wanted poster is a form of visual capture that attempted to freeze a black woman’s movement. With the barest signifying elements, it drew upon entrenched myths about black women’s propensities for criminal deviance. Every word underscores the presumption of Davis’s criminality, and yet the typography is neither large nor bold enough to distract from the photographs of Davis placed at the centre of the poster. Excised from any context of probable cause, the FBI poster insidiously relies upon the perception that skin, facial features, and hair are signifiers of racial difference and pathology. The poster articulates a strong state-sanctioned desire to pin down the body of the real Angela Davis, police her ability to imagine herself in multiple forms, and put her back where she belongs – into a place that is fixed, easy to recognise, on the other side of the sign woman. The photographs function as both evidence and accusation. Indeed, the ‘language’ of the photograph is a significant feature of the poster’s announcement of her criminality, particularly through its pretence to objectivity. They are two headshots that have been transformed into mugshots by their textual and legal surround. In the photograph on the left, Davis wears a plain sweater and looks straight into the camera. In the photograph on the right, wearing sunglasses and a dashiki (a sartorial sign of Black Power), Davis looks slightly beyond the frame of the photograph. Together they are meant to evoke different but related narratives of criminal transformation: from the real criminal to her exotic disguise, from a relatively recognisable African-American woman to an African-Communist traitor.4 However you read them, the photographs suggest that Davis’s multiple appearances are evidence of criminal deception. She is the other of the state; she is not allowed to imagine herself otherwise. The wanted poster revealed the power of the state to draw upon images as a tool for producing an easily consumable icon out of one individual body and then use it to define and police larger collectivities. The wanted poster also made Davis’s Afro into an icon of racial and sexual difference and the political disorder of the period. But it was not only the differences that Davis’s hair came to stand for that were so threatening, her unapologetic command of those differences posed a palpable threat to the white patriarchal state, which furiously worked to depict her as a force of disorder. Needless to say, as a young African-American woman who was a professor of philosophy at UCLA, who wore a ‘natural’, and who openly declared her membership of the

Letters from an imaginary enemy, Angela Davis

Communist Party, Davis defied the icons of black women that had been telegraphed across the American imaginary. Davis’s writing from this period is a crucial aspect of her defiance. It exposes the punishments that are doled out when black women refuse to create images of subservience that appease dominant white culture. In the various genres and modes of writing analysed here – autobiography, critical essays, letters, and defence statements – Davis pays scrupulous attention to the images and perceptions that defined her and the history she lived. To fight against the limited definitions of the black woman offered in American visual culture, she deployed language as a clear, incisive tool capable of cutting through the racism and sexism that distorts how black women are perceived. She also highlighted the collective dimensions of language – the fact that it is inherently dialogical and imprinted by the histories and voices of other people – which allowed her to make writing into a political and creative practice through which collectivities can be imagined and realised, capable of moving between the ‘here’ of racist and sexist oppression and the ‘somewhere else’ of justice. Because Davis wrote against the familiar iconography for black women in the national imaginary, she also reveals the consequences of ‘ungendering’, and Spillers’ ‘Mama’s Baby’ also informs the reading of Davis’s work here. Unlike Piper, though, Davis did not create representations of abjection that suggest the bodily remainders of the violence inflicted upon African-American women during the transatlantic slave trade. Nor does she perform the masculinisation that Piper puts on display in Mythic Being. But Davis’s writing does reflect upon the historical effects of ungendering and offers the possibility of rewriting the conditions in which black women are allowed to appear. Her work documents the ways in which ungendering, both its erasure from and centrality to US history, has shaped the lives of African-American women: how they can be represented as uncontrollable criminals; how they are forced into fixed positions while also assumed to be fungible and therefore amenable to other people’s desires and definitions; how they can be represented as icons of all black women but then denied affiliations with black women as a collectivity; how they are pathologised for their access to the symbolic order but denied their power to name. By writing to interrupt the icons projected onto the black woman in the American imagination, and refusing to relinquish her power to name, Davis also addresses readers with the hope of creating a ‘radically different text of female empowerment’ in which black women could imagine themselves otherwise.5 A reluctant icon

Soon after the appearance of the ‘WANTED’ poster, images of Davis were telegraphed swiftly through the American media. In August 1970, prominent

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profiles on Davis began to appear in nationally circulated newspapers and magazines (such as the New York Times and Time). These stories contributed to the production of Davis as an imaginary enemy. The most notorious of these profiles appeared in Life magazine on 11 September 1970 (see Figure 2.2). On the cover is a black-and-white profile photograph of Davis. Her face and head have been framed so that her Afro expands to the edge of the magazine’s rectangular form. An invasive close-up, the Life photographer has captured a moment in which Davis has bent her head down at an angle. She looks intently at something from behind the ridge of her hair, which appears to have a heaviness that weighs her down. The photograph emphasises the shadows around Davis’s eyes, which contributes to the sense of menace the image transmits. Imposed over the right side of her Afro is the caption – ‘The Making of a Fugitive’ – spelled out in bright white sans serif letters. Up in the left hand corner is the red and white Life magazine logo, which contrasts sharply with the darkness and thick texture of Davis’s hair. There is a much smaller caption that has been placed about an inch away from Davis’s face and is aligned with the small space between her nose and mouth: ‘Wanted by the FBI: Angela Davis.’ Since the words have been set so close to Davis’s closed mouth, it looks like they have been placed there as an attempt to stress her refusal to speak and her unwillingness to explain. Davis would later remark that when this cover story was published, she saw a connection to the Wanted poster. She was convinced Hoover helped orchestrate its argument, and notes how the text shapes and distorts the meanings of the images. As Davis explains, Having confronted my own image in the store where I purchased the magazine I was convinced that FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover had conspired in the appearance of that cover story. More than anything else it seemed to be a magnification and elaboration of the WANTED poster. Moreover, the text of the story gave a rather convincing explanation as to why the pictures should be associated with arms and danger.6

Looking at the other Life magazine covers from 1970, the portrayal of Davis stands out. It is one of just a few black-and-white photographs, and the only depiction of a black woman. In contrast to the other portrayals of women on the Life covers of that year, Davis is not displaying her body through the standard grammars of visual pleasure that Life readers would easily see confirmed in the pages of the magazine. Indeed, before arriving at the opening story, ‘From Promising Childhood to Desperate Flight,’ viewers would see advertisements in which images of white women sell cars, liquor, cigarettes, and televisions. ‘From Promising Childhood’ is a fall from grace narrative. It begins with a school photograph of Davis that depicts her as a smiling girl who wears pigtails and has flowers pinned to her collar. The FBI Wanted poster, in which

Letters from an imaginary enemy, Angela Davis

Cover of Life magazine, September 11, 1970. Photograph by David Dornlas.

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Davis is decidedly not smiling, has been placed opposite the school photograph. When seen in relationship to the wanted poster and the photograph on the cover, the sweet school photograph provokes readers to wonder what happened to this innocent black girl who once successfully aligned herself with an image of proper femininity. The Life story narrates Davis’s upbringing in Birmingham. While racism is factored into its narrative surface – it mentions Edward ‘Bull’ Connor, commissioner of public safety, notorious for his ties to the Ku Klux Klan and his violent enforcement of segregation – ‘From Promising Childhood’ becomes a story about an enigmatic young woman from a ‘remarkable’ (read: proper and respectable) family who refuses to explain how and why she became an angry black woman and militant criminal.7 An example of what Piper identifies as a defensive rationalisation, the article locates the problem in Davis’s emotional response. But in her scholarship and activism, Davis had been clearly identifying the problems motivating her protest: institutions such as the prison-industrial complex are continuations of racial enslavement. The article’s strategic deafness to Davis’s claims about racism substantiates a point Jean Genet made in his article ‘Angela and Her Brothers,’ published on 31 August 1970, in Le Nouvel Observateur. In this article, Genet relays the small amount of information he could glean from French and American newspapers: Jonathan Jackson took over a Marin County courtroom, and Davis was wanted for murder and kidnapping. Genet knows so little, he explains, because ‘Real news doesn’t exist in the United States.’8 While news stories can ‘describe the facts in minute detail,’ Genet writes, they are ‘careful not to explain the why – the why, and not the how – behind these facts. The press does not say why this act was committed. It gives no satisfactory explanation of it whatsoever. Above all, it’s a question of rebellious blacks and militants.’9 Presented as evidence of her militant blackness, there is a full-page photograph of Davis speaking into a hand-held microphone at the centre of the photo-essay. It functions as a hinge between the portrayal of Davis’s proper middle-class childhood and her mysterious transformation into a ‘hostile, strident, and commanding’ woman who took an unforeseen turn to ‘hate and radical commitment.’10 She has been photographed so her head is posed at an angle and the focus is on her mouth. A consistent feature in photographs taken of her during this period, Davis’s mouth becomes an image that densely figures for consumption and internalisation. Connecting to the figures of eating in Piper’s Concrete Infinity Documentation Piece and Food for the Spirit, the attention to Davis’s mouth represents the signs of ‘woman’ black women are expected to internalise and produce so their images can be easily consumed. The focus on Davis’s mouth, and the fact that the crowd is not in the picture, also deflects the content of her speech. She is reduced to a flat icon, what Spillers identifies as the ‘“Black Woman at the Podium,”’ cropped away from those who would

Letters from an imaginary enemy, Angela Davis

have received her address.11 Furthermore, Davis’s arguments and insights appear almost as an afterthought. She is cited in the final section of the article, titled ‘Her Revolutionary Voice Cries Damnation on the System,’ and reproduces excerpts from Davis’s work: an interview for a documentary and a speech she gave for the Soledad brothers in which she articulates her arguments about liberation, revolution, the bourgeois individual, and capitalist exploitation. But the legitimacy of her arguments is undercut by the title that frames them – ‘Her Revolutionary Voice Cries Damnation on the System’ – and the fact that her statements have been placed between two damning photographs: one of Davis and Jonathan Jackson at a protest (the protest sign Davis holds refers to imprisonment as ‘legal lynching’) and the other of the kidnapping at the Marin County Courthouse. In the second photograph, Jackson holds two large automatic weapons, and the kidnapped judge, Harold J. Haley, who will soon be shot and killed, stands with his arms behind his back. The essay, however, does not mention the many death threats Davis received after her membership of the Communist Party was announced, nor does it discuss the fact that Jackson was one of Davis’s bodyguards, which is why he had access to the guns registered in her name. Within the Life magazine feature, Davis’s Afro became central to the transmission of her image. The Afro represented a black woman’s refusal to align herself with the sign woman and the standards of white feminine beauty to which it was supposed to adhere. By the white police state, the Afro was taken to be a living political slogan of Davis’s insurgency.12 However, as the 1970s unfolded and the political uproar that characterised the early part of the decade began to wane, the society of the spectacle conveniently defused the link between black hair and protest by making Davis’s Afro into a ‘style’ and divorcing it from the historical contexts that gave her hair its political meaning. In her 1994 essay ‘Afro Images: Politics, Fashion, and Nostalgia,’ Davis reflects upon the photographs taken of her during the time she spent as a fugitive, prisoner, and defendant. The Afro became an iconic fragment through which she was remembered. After opening with an anecdote that demonstrates she has been conflated with an image of her hair in the American imagination, Davis writes: I am remembered as a hairdo. It is humiliating because it reduces a politics of liberation to a politics of fashion; it is humbling because such encounters with the younger generation demonstrate the fragility and mutability of historical images, particularly those associated with African-American history.13

More than a synecdoche, Davis’s Afro became an exemplary cultural fetish, a fragment wrenched from her life history that suggests the ease with which African-American history can be reduced and manipulated. Telling the story

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of this fetishisation, ‘Afro Images’ brings a note of caution to recent scholarship on the icon that highlights its progressive possibilities. For example, Bishnupriya Ghosh argues for seeing the vital role the icon can play in democracies by creating forms of belonging, and its ability to, as she puts it, create ‘apertures’ that open on to ‘collective aspiration[s]’ and ‘social imaginaries yet to come.’14 The images of Davis transmitted through the American imagination in the early 1970s offer a much bleaker picture of the icon. Davis’s history makes it clear that iconicity can indicate an ideologically fixed image that is wielded for punishment and made to erase both historical and subjective particularities. Discussing her appearance in the New York Times Magazine as one of the most influential ‘fashion trendsetters’ of the last century, Davis writes: ‘I continue to find it ironic that the popularity of “Afro” is attributed to me, when, in actuality, I was emulating a whole host of women, both public figures and women I encountered in my daily life.’15 Against the icon’s emphasis on the extraordinary, highly visible individual, Davis evokes the collective history excised from her iconicity. Moreover, the erasure of black women’s collective identifications through their hairstyles created a gap in which images of Davis became weapons used against the women who made the Afro visible in the first place. In ‘Afro Images,’ Davis suggests that the consumption of her image is a theft that continues a history in which black women’s capacities to claim ownership of their bodies have been denied. Acquiring its celebrity status, the Afro not only obscured the cultural legibility of communities of women with whom Davis identified, it also forgot the violence perpetrated by the white police state on African-American women during the national hunt for Davis. Commenting on a fashion shoot in which an actress appears in a facsimile of the infamous FBI Wanted poster, Davis writes: ‘The way in which the document provided a historical pretext for something akin to a reign of terror for countless young black women is effectively erased by its use as a prop for selling clothes and promoting a seventies fashion nostalgia.’16 With the wide transmission of Davis’s image across the national imaginary, many black women were misidentified as Davis and associated with her supposed criminality. Indeed, thousands of African-American women wearing Afros became ‘targets of oppression’ and were harassed, rounded up, and arrested.17 The facile images of the fashion shoot reproduce the devaluation of black women and erase the suffering inflicted upon them at the hands of the police state. While ‘Afro Images’ tells a story about historical erasure, at the core of the essay is a dialectical tension about the image in the age of spectacle. While many images represented Davis as ‘conspiratorial and monstrous,’ others presented her as a ‘charismatic and raucous revolutionary ready to lead the masses into battle.’18 This polarisation substantiates Fleetwood’s claim that racial iconicity hinges on a relationship between ‘denigration and

Letters from an imaginary enemy, Angela Davis

veneration.’19 Davis rejected both forms of iconicity. She explains that she felt ‘violated’ by the images that depicted her as ‘conspiratorial and monstrous’ and ‘deficient’ in response to the images in which she appeared ‘charismatic and raucous.’20 While these icons are fixed in their moral polarisation, ‘Afro Images’ also traces the productive turn an icon can take. It was precisely the mass proliferation of Davis’s images that allowed a visual culture of resistance to emerge. As Davis explains, ‘The circulation of various photographic images of me – taken by journalists, undercover policemen, and movement activists – played a major role in the campaign that was ultimately responsible for my acquittal.’21 The fact that the surveillance photographs taken of Davis helped to galvanise support for her acquittal attests to the political malleability of images. Indeed, at the conclusion of ‘Afro Images,’ Davis expresses hope for the possibility of developing new strategies for engaging with photographs so their ‘interpretive contexts’ can be transformed, which is exactly what Piper was doing in the artwork she produced when Davis’s image began to circulate.22 The critical retooling Davis hopes for (and Piper achieved) is particularly pressing for images of black women, as they are less likely to become active centres of historical memory and more likely to become, as Spillers shows, iconic placeholders that cover over the deeper histories of racial and sexual violence inflicted through slavery and its institutional legacies. No doubt the icon of the black woman – and the idea that her primary purpose is to mirror white and black masculinities – contributes to the ease with which the histories of AfricanAmerican women have been occluded, forgotten, and made to serve the definitions of others. A ‘political autobiography’

While ‘Afro Images’ indicts the forces that transformed her images into diluted icons of illegible histories, Davis’s resistance to iconicity can be discerned as early as Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974), which was published two years after her acquittal. In the opening sentence of the autobiography’s preface, Davis states: ‘I was not anxious to write this book,’ and then proceeds to explain why: ‘I felt that to write about my life, what I did, what I thought and what happened to me would require a posture of difference, an assumption that I was unlike other women – other Black women.’23 Davis identifies the implicit distinction the genre of autobiography implies. Working against this ‘posture of difference,’ Davis writes an autobiography that does not reify her as a singular icon but instead draws attention to the fact that her story represents patterns of oppression many other people share, African-American women in particular. As Davis explains, ‘the forces that have made my life what it is are the very same forces that have shaped and misshaped the lives of millions of

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my people.’24 To resist the venerated isolation and exceptional individualism the autobiography implies, Davis states that she made a decision to write a ‘political autobiography.’25 This means that she will write about her life as it connects to and represents the lives of others. In this sense, Davis, like Piper, draws on her personal experiences, not to represent her subjectivity, but to transform them into materials for the project of rewriting the ‘I’ of the autobiography otherwise. Davis’s choice to write a political autobiography that emphasises collectivity determines the book’s subjects – political imprisonment, the racialisation of punishment, racial terrorism – but also her writing style, which is unembellished and spare, unencumbered by stylistic flourishes and literary seductions. Her deceptively simple style is firm – to transmit her unequivocal stance and clear vision – but also porous – to reverberate with the lives of other people. As the Wanted poster and the Life magazine photo-essay demonstrate, images of Davis significantly contributed to the forces she was fighting against, and her autobiography can be read as an engagement with the role visual images play in ‘shap[ing] and misshap[ing]’ her history. This is an impulse her autobiography shares with those of Assata Shakur and Elaine Brown: ‘seiz[ing] control,’ as Margo Perkins puts it, ‘over their own images, often distorted and maligned in the popular press.’26 Davis’s attention to the collective dimensions of language is an important part of engaging with the images produced to ‘distort’ and ‘malign’ her. Throughout the autobiography, while inscribing her knowledge that she is living out histories much larger than herself, she also makes it clear that she is working with others to fight against the distorted images of black people flashing across the screens of American culture and circulating through the cultural imagination. Rendering in words the connections between people, both actual or imaginary, ‘here’ and ‘somewhere else,’ allows Davis to refute the icon-making machinery and write the contours of a world free from the distortions of racism and sexism. Davis begins her autobiography in medias res – in hiding and on the run.27 But rather than starting off big, or writing with a collective ‘we,’ Davis narrows in on the small and uses the ‘I’: ‘I believe I thanked her but I am not sure.’ The woman Davis refers to is Helen, who hid Davis in her Los Angeles home. The small act that deserved thanks is pulling a wig out of a shopping bag and handing it to Davis. The larger act is risking her life to protect Davis from the FBI. Surprising for its diminutive scale, the first sentence of the autobiography, ‘I believe I thanked her but I am not sure,’ testifies to Davis’s distraction and vulnerability (she compares the wig to a ‘small frightened animal’) but also her attentiveness to the intimacies informing collaborations among women in the midst of dangerous threats and political crises.28 In the next paragraph, Davis composes a scene that evokes the alienation and strain of putting on a disguise.

Letters from an imaginary enemy, Angela Davis

I walked toward the bathroom and stood before the mirror trying to fit the ends of my hair under the tight elastic. Like broken wings my hands floundered about my head, my thoughts completely disassociated from their movement. When I finally glanced into the mirror to see whether there were bits of my own hair unconcealed by the wig, I saw a face so filled with anguish, tension and uncertainty I did not recognize it as my own. With the false black curls falling over a wrinkled forehead into red swollen eyes, I looked absurd, grotesque. I snatched the wig off my head, threw it on the floor and hit the sink with my fist. It remained cold, white and impenetrable. I forced the wig back on my head. I had to look normal.29

Davis writes in the gap between the hyper-visibility of the criminal spotlight and the body she has to hide. Becoming her own uncanny other, Davis’s efforts to compose an image that would erase the particularity of her body represent the challenges of appearing in a visual field constituted through the visual pathologies of racism and sexism. A politically charged iteration of ‘The Mirror Stage,’ this scene evokes the symbolic order at its most threatening extreme. Davis forces herself to become a disguise while she struggles to hold on to a recognisable image of herself. We might think of this scene in correspondence with Piper’s Concrete Infinity Documentation Piece and Food for the Spirit. While Davis was creating an image of herself that would allow her to blend into a cultural landscape intent on making her an imaginary enemy, Piper composed performances that attest to the necessity and possibility of rewriting the conditions in which black women are allowed to appear. Throughout the autobiography, Davis writes about confronting the images of her that were circulating through the national media. One such scene is a memory that became a premonition. Right before the FBI apprehended her in a Howard Johnson hotel in New York City, she recalls that as she was getting out of the hotel elevator, she was thinking of a time that she watched the television programme The FBI, which she describes as a ‘typical, inane TV melodrama of agents pursuing fugitives, complete with the violent encounter which left the pursued with bullets in their skulls and the FBI agents shown as heroes.’30 She remembers getting up to turn the television off and ‘a photograph of me flashed on the screen as if it were part of the fictionalized FBI pursuit.’31 The fact that Davis remembered the television show right before her own capture attests to the power of these images to infiltrate and shape perception. A precursor to America’s Most Wanted, the fictionalised drama of the television show worked to solidify the fiction of Davis’s criminality as a truth. The photograph helped to buttress this fiction, and was accompanied by a deep voice that places the image within the frame of legal authority. This voice announced that ‘Angela Davis’ was on the top of the FBI’s most wanted list and states, ‘She is very likely armed, so if you see her, do not try to do anything. Contact your FBI

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immediately.’32 For Davis, the warning to not do anything was made in bad faith. Without any indication of posing danger, the directive attests instead to the FBI’s lust to capture her themselves. ‘In other words, let your “very likely armed” FBI have the honor of shooting her down.’33 A scene like this allowed Davis to identify how her image was framed and then deflect the violence attributed to her back onto those who were actually going to wield it. The detached authority of the televisual voice warning viewers about Davis is another instance of language being used to flatten an image into one meaning and telegraph it across the cultural imagination as truth. Davis was forced to write about the consequential effects of images. They were part of her story, and her autobiography would not be complete without them. But her investigation of language, perception, and images did not come into focus only because of her ordeal. It is an important (if heretofore unnoticed) part of Davis’s intellectual background. Her undergraduate thesis in the Department of Comparative Literature at Brandeis University focused on the novels of the French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet.34 An exemplar of the ‘Nouveau-Roman’ in France, Robbe-Grillet’s work rose to prominence in the 1950s along with Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, Marguerite Duras, and Michel Butor. According to Robbe-Grillet, the ‘Nouveau-Roman’ rejects nineteenth-century concepts of character, and his novels focus on the workings of visual perception and the unfolding of the imagination as it encounters the objects of the material world. In Davis’s reading of Robbe-Grillet’s Le Voyeur (1955), she focuses on his rigorous descriptions of objects and their visual characteristics. She writes that the ‘content’ of the novel is ‘an objectification of the extensive perceptive and imaginative capabilities of a particular and unique human being.’35 She traces how the objects in Le Voyeur gradually acquire meaning as they become integrated into the narrative and the consciousness of the protagonist.36 Roland Barthes writes that Robbe-Grillet composes optical descriptions to ‘correct them of metaphor and anthropomorphism’ and nullify the metaphors underlying visibility.37 This negation of opticality results in a literary practice in which, as Barthes explains, ‘nothing of man is offered as a spectacle, even his abandonment.’38 The resistance to spectacle within Robbe-Grillet’s work, which extends even to ‘abandonment,’ is pertinent to Davis’s story and her transformation into an imaginary enemy. Images of her fuelled the demand that she abandon her pursuit of racial justice and submit herself to the law. In the concluding chapter of her thesis, Davis articulates her enthusiasm for Robbe-Grillet’s turn to cinema, as it provided an arena for creating self-consciously political modes of perception: ‘Perhaps it is by the intermediary of the film that [Robbe-Grillet] will firmly launch a movement dedicated to the purpose of teaching man to see the world and to see himself with his eyes liberated from the constraints of outmoded and ineffective myths.’39 Seeing beyond the constraints of ‘outmoded

Letters from an imaginary enemy, Angela Davis

and ineffective myths’ is central to the black feminism animating the work of both Piper and Davis. Davis’s analysis of Robbe-Grillet’s writing makes it clear that for her language was more than an instrument of punitive control. While she does represent the extent to which language can compound the punitive alienation of prison, she is also invested in all the ways in which language escapes material and ideological confines and becomes a site of collaboration. She is particularly attentive to the oral and aural dimensions of protest, the force and movement of words when propelled by political collectivities. Writing about her first night in the Women’s House of Detention in New York City, Davis reflects: ‘In the heavy silence of the jail, I discovered that if I concentrated hard enough, I could hear echoes of slogans being chanted on the other side of the walls.’40 Listening to the words of people protesting her placement in solitary confinement, she experiences an imaginative transport: ‘Looking down from my cell window, I became all together engrossed in the speeches, sometimes losing the sensation of captivity, feeling myself down on the street with them.’41 This ecstatic feeling is cut short when she hears the sounds of her sister’s voice, which ‘shocked [her] into the reality of her situation.’42 Language allows Davis to move imaginatively between ‘here’ and ‘somewhere else,’ but she consistently writes to ground her autobiography in material conditions. While the protests outside the Women’s House of Detention highlight Davis’s attention to the aural and oral dimensions of language, she also focuses on books as vehicles of resistant histories. After finding the only books in the prison library that interested her – a book about communism, another about the Chinese Revolution, and the autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois – Davis wonders how they got there, as her ‘mind kept wandering back to their enigmatic presence.’43 She realises it was most likely Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Claudia Jones, two communist leaders imprisoned during the McCarthy period, who brought these books into prison. By leaving traces of their revolutionary commitments on the shelves of the prison library, Flynn and Jones kept open the possibility of creating imaginary forms of solidarity across capitalism’s oppressive histories. Their books, and Davis’s response to them, demonstrates that language often brings people together in imaginary collaborations that are not dependent upon temporal or spatial proximity, an idea that animates Davis’s autobiography as well. Indeed, Davis attends to the more secretive lines of communication prisoners create to transmit information, create dialogue, and express connection. Enumerating the support she received from other women prisoners, Davis writes: ‘Throughout my stay I received numerous written messages of support from the sisters. (Any written communication between prisoners is illegal; these notes are called ‘kites’ because of the shape they are folded in for easy concealment).’44 These ‘kites’ – messages given material form – suggest the

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traces of others in language and create correspondences that betray the laws that keep prisoners from addressing each other. The attention Davis pays to the resonances of language is part of her efforts to refuse the fantasies produced by law enforcement. These fantasies materialised on the screens of the spectacle, as the television programme The FBI demonstrates, but they also manifested in the quotidian details of prison life. Davis recalls a number of experiences that highlight writing as a means to resist internalising the state’s authority and its fantasy image of the dangerous and disorderly black woman who had to be controlled. The Marin County jailors actively used their authority to interrupt her writing, particularly after she gained the right to work in a small conference room. The jailors insisted she could not eat in the same room in which she worked and used this rule to break her concentration: ‘Often lunch or dinner time would find me deeply immersed in work – reading or writing a statement, letter, or something I simply wanted to write for my own benefit.’45 However, the jailors would insist that she leave her work to eat an ‘unsavory, solitary meal’ and then make her sit for long periods before taking her back to the space in which she worked. 46 The connections and separations among language, food, writing, and meals can be understood as a tactic for insisting that Davis consume and internalise the authority of the jailors and the prison system for which they worked. These experiences connect to the many photographs of Davis that focus on her mouth, which, as noted earlier in this chapter, represented the impulse to deflect the content of her speech and the insistence that she become an easily consumable icon of the black woman. Soon after Davis’s depiction of the jailors moving her away from her writing to eat an ‘unsavory, solitary meal,’ she again draws attention to the figurative relationship between language and food. She describes receiving, through the hands of a benevolent guard, two candy bars that other prisoners sent as presents to celebrate the acquittals of Ericka Huggins and Bobby Seale. Opening them up, Davis discovered they were not really candy bars; they were ‘long letters – kites – concealed under the wrappers.’47 The appearance of these kites underscores letters as material forms, which Davis highlighted earlier in the autobiography, but this time they highlight their imaginary connection to food (through the disguise of the candy bars) and figure for the internalisation of freedom and possibility instead punishment. The autobiography is structured through parallels: between Davis’s own writing and the writings of her fellow prisoners, but also between the US prison system and Jim Crow segregation. Early in the autobiography, Davis recollects her childhood in Birmingham and reflects upon this stringently segregated environment almost thoroughly written by racism. The metaphor of writing is important in this context because when Davis describes her neighbourhood, known as ‘Dynamite Hill’ – where KKK bombings regularly

Letters from an imaginary enemy, Angela Davis

took place to intimidate black residents – she explains that her parents did not allow her to see racism as a force that determines reality absolutely: ‘The more steeped in violence our environment became, the more determined my father and mother were that I, the first-born, learn that the battle of white against Black was not written into the nature of things.’48 Her father’s insistence that racism ‘was not written into the nature of things’ identifies the purpose of Davis’s writing practice. Davis’s resistance to racism’s ability to write the nature of reality becomes clear in her presentation of Jim Crow segregation. Her recollections of segregated Birmingham maps spaces that she could not enter and reveal her attention to the ways in which images and words can be soldered together to reinforce racial hierarchies and create ‘imaginary enemies.’ Recalling the visual exterior of Birmingham’s premier movie theatre for whites, The Alabama, Davis writes: It reminded me of the ones in New York City. Day and night the front of the building glittered with bright neon lights. A luxurious red carpet extended all the way to the sidewalk. On Saturdays and Sundays, the marquee always bore the titles of the latest children’s movies. When we passed, blond-haired children with their mean-looking mothers were always crowded around the ticket booth. We weren’t allowed in The Alabama – our theatres were the Carver and the Eighth Avenue, and the best we could expect from the roach-infested auditoriums was reruns of Tarzan. ‘If only we lived in New York’ I constantly thought.49

The marquee signs written across Davis’s memory show that Jim Crow not only barred black people from the imaginative pleasures a movie theatre represents but embedded its hierarchies in the simplest acts of reading and seeing. In the same paragraph, Davis maps the basic spatial grammars of Jim Crow: ‘if we needed to go to the toilet or wanted a drink of water, we had to seek out a sign bearing the inscription “Colored.” Most Southern Black children of my generation learned how to read the words “Colored” and “White” long before they learned “Look, Dick, look.”’50 This passage draws attention to the fundamental ‘grammars’ of racial difference that black children learned to read, see, and place themselves within. Davis presents her memories of Jim Crow while also recollecting her summer trips to New York City. Travelling there with her mother, the city offered the possibility of writing against segregation’s grammars of reading and seeing. For each instance of segregation in Birmingham she recalls, Davis counters it with a memory from New York City. She creates a rhythm of alternating scenes and perceptions in which limitations are undermined by an experience of freedom and where the city (in which she will eventually be captured as a fugitive) offers escape: ‘When we drove by the amusement park at Birmingham Fairgrounds, where only white children were allowed, I thought about the fun we had at Coney Island in New York.’51 Of course New York City was not, as

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Davis puts it, ‘a paragon of racial concord.’ She recalls hearing, as a child, about family friends who could not find a place to live because they were an inter-racial couple. She recalls ‘stern-looking white men dressed in suits’ following her family on the streets of New York because they knew James Jackson, a Communist and family friend who was forced underground during the McCarthy period.52 But what is important about the comparisons between Birmingham and New York and their two iterations of American racism – one blatant, the other insidious – is that they highlight the emphasis Davis places on the possibility that racism was not ‘written into the nature of things,’ which allowed her to imagine herself beyond the fixed icons of the black woman. Davis’s written reflections on Jim Crow recall the photographs of separate restrooms, drinking fountains, and eating areas, all of which serve as icons of racial injustice in the American imagination. What is not common knowledge is that many Jim Crow restrooms designated ‘colored’ did not have separate lavatories for men and women. In Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow, Elizabeth Abel describes this instance of racism as ‘consigning the bodies behind the ungendered door to an undifferentiated biological domain that is as much a subhuman outside as a prelapsarian home prior to the law of gender.’53 Jim Crow’s spatial collapse of sexual difference, which relegated black bodies to what Abel identifies as a ‘subhuman outside,’ insulted black men and women alike, as it barred access to the recognition offered by discernible gender identities. It connected racial difference to the erasure of sexual difference – thought by many to be crucial to the nature/culture distinction – and thereby reduced black bodies to nature and therefore far away from culture. As Abel explains, the bathroom doors ‘meant being denied, not condemned to, sexual difference and the distinction it confers.’54 Furthermore, the Jim Crow restrooms made blackness into abjection, linking it to bodily waste, an association Piper’s Catalysis enacts. The insults the Jim Crow bathrooms imposed upon black women became the basis for a number of legal challenges, and can also be understood as a twentieth-century instance of ungendering. Davis does not address Jim Crow restrooms in her autobiography, but they emblematise the forms of ungendering that are written into the histories of Jim Crow Davis contests in her work. As Spillers provokes us to see, ungendering dissipates the physical form of the female body so severely it becomes practically illegible. Black women have been (paradoxically) perceived through this illegibility and are therefore all the more vulnerable to becoming imprinted by the narrow repertoire of hyper-visible icons transmitted across American culture. In other words, the repressed history of ungendering and its unconscious force in American cultural life have made it easier for agents of dominant institutions – like those of the FBI and Life magazine – to compose and rely upon distorted images of the black woman. Both Davis’s letters to George Jackson and the opening defence statement she gave at her trial are haunted by

Letters from an imaginary enemy, Angela Davis

the history of ungendering, but they also resist the ways in which ungendering informs the assumption that an African-American woman is not an intact or discrete individual who can imagine herself in multiple forms. Making Spillers’ argument a frame for reading her trial, I analyse Davis’s correspondence with Jackson and her defence statement as claims to psychic and bodily coherence, and in both we see Davis performing her command of language to defy the forces that would make her dissipate behind icons that are rigid and easy to consume. Love letters

A whole book could be written about the letters Davis wrote to George Jackson: how they were seized under questionable (possibly illegal) circumstances; how they were deployed by the prosecution as evidence of Davis’s criminal motive; and how the prosecution, in offering them as evidence, made it clear that if a black woman tried to claim a private life, it would be broken open, subject to search and seizure, and publicly exposed. But the letters were not just forced into evidence, the prosecution made them central to their case, and argued that the letters demonstrated a ‘“boundless and all-consuming passion”’ that would stop at nothing to set Jackson free.55 The prosecution made the letters into what they needed them to be: confessions to ravenous love and calculated blueprints for an imminent crime. Indeed, the prosecution insisted that Davis had an appetite for crime that exceeded all moral boundaries. (They even fabricated a story in which Davis seduced George Jackson’s younger brother Jonathan and lured him into staging the violent takeover at the Marin County courthouse.) Most insidious about the prosecution’s deployment of the letters is the fact they relied upon the idea that a woman of colour could not possess enough psychic and bodily coherence to deploy language for her own purposes and imagine herself in multiple forms. The letters were made to expose a calculated duplicity between what they called Davis’s ‘“cool academic veneer”’ and the passion that fuelled a violent conspiracy.56 A black woman can only have one identity; she could not be an intellectual and a political leader and write about the pleasures of abandonment. Deception and disguise had to be involved. At the closing of the letter she composed on 10 June 1970, Davis writes: ‘For the moment I’ll unleash my thoughts and allow them to go in their instinctive direction toward wild wanderings, fantasies … Something in you has managed to smash through the fortress I long ago erected in my soul.’57 If the woman who composed this passage is black, a member of the Communist party, owns guns, and wears an Afro, the imaginative abandonment she expressed could only mean a criminally dangerous passion. Indeed, the prosecution wanted to portray Davis as catapulting herself into what Bettina Aptheker (Davis’s

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childhood friend and daughter of historian Herbert Aptheker), identifies as a ‘reckless criminal enterprise.’58 Such assumptions emerged from the idea that black women have a limited capacity for imaginatively writing themselves in figurative terms, which actually reflected the prosecution’s inability to see the metaphors animating their perception of Davis as an embodiment of disorder. It was inconceivable to them that the love, war, and revolution she wrote about might be figurative, and Davis, they presumed, would have no choice but to commit in action what she wrote down on paper. In the autobiography, she writes that, when hearing her letters read in court by Albert Harris Jr. (the lead prosecutor), she hoped ‘the jury was not as unintelligent as he counted on their being. Some of them must have heard of metaphor.’59 The prosecution’s attempts to make the letters evidence of Davis’s guilt is a dramatic example of the ways in which black women have been made to embody fears and fantasies white patriarchal culture would rather deflect. Aptheker, in her own published reflections on the trial, offered a damning characterisation of the prosecution’s case against Davis. To her, it was founded upon a ‘theory of irresistible passion.’60 This theory was not fuelled by any ordinary notion of passion against reason, according to Aptheker. Rather, it drew upon a deep-seated assumption that black sexuality was subhuman and out of bonds. Following the prosecution’s logic and the ‘crude racist terms’ in which Davis was portrayed, Aptheker writes: ‘She had not loved George Jackson. She had craved him, as an animal craves its mate. Angela – shrouded in the centuries-old white mystique of Black sexuality; obsessed with desire; sinister, calculating, ruthless.’61 The prosecution, Aptheker attests, tried to transform Davis into an image of a ‘demented, savage creature.’62 Needless to say, there is nothing ‘demented’ or ‘savage’ about the letters Davis wrote to Jackson. They are sincere articulations of love and commitment shot through with ardent affection. Genet’s portrayal of Jackson’s letters as ‘striking poems of love and of combat’ applies equally to her side of the correspondence.63 Moreover, the love Davis and Jackson express for each other was not limited to a heterosexual relationship between two individuals, but encompasses a political love for others and expresses a deep commitment to the collective freedom of black people. These expressions of love had precedents in both Davis’s intellectual formation and in the history of African Americans’ struggle for freedom. By making strong connections between romantic and sexual love and collective dreams of liberation, Davis may have been drawing from her work with Herbert Marcuse (her professor at Brandeis University and University of California San Diego), who argued in An Essay on Liberation (1969) that the erotic, sensuous, and emotive dimensions of the counterculture movement were ushering in a new sensibility capable of upturning the repressive forces of the establishment.64 Davis and Jackson were also drawing upon a rich tradition of African- American

Letters from an imaginary enemy, Angela Davis

expression, one dimension of which Davis would illuminate years later in her 1999 study Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. In this black feminist reading of female Blues singers – Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday – Davis argues that in response to the disappointments of post-Emancipation culture, sexuality became a way for African Americans to experience freedom. Many aspects of the lives of those formerly enslaved, such as their economic status, did not change with Emancipation. Sexuality, however, was ‘one of the most tangible domains in which emancipation was acted upon and through which its meanings were expressed.’65 She argues that female blues singers expressed ‘socially unfulfilled dreams in the language and imagery of individual sexual love.’66 If Blues Legacies helps us see that the correspondence between Davis and Jackson has strong connections to African-American history, the letters were also animated by a strong desire for a radically different future. In the film Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners, Davis states that a crucial part of the passion they felt for each other ‘consisted in being able to imagine ourselves as comrades helping to usher in a new world.’67 The address of the letters created a path for these imaginative acts. Imprisonment made the absence at the heart of the epistolary form – the fact that they were each addressing a person who was not present before them – painfully concrete. It also inspired Davis and Jackson to heighten their capacities to imagine a ‘somewhere else’ that was not constrained by the enslavement of black people that the prison industrial complex so forcefully continues. It is important not to ignore the fact that the Davis–Jackson correspondence was composed of love letters at the expense of focusing exclusively on the revolutionary aspirations animating their correspondence. Skipping over the fact that the letters are expressions of love would risk affirming the fear and discomfort about black women’s sexualities upon which the prosecution tried to capitalise. It is most accurate to claim that the letters Davis and Jackson wrote to each other testify to the erotic feelings that were unleashed when collaboratively imagining their freedom and upturning the long history of institutionalised racism their imprisonment represented. In her letter from 22 June 1970, Davis writes, ‘I love you. I love my people. That is all that matters. Liberation by any means necessary.’68 Black feminism is central to the correspondence between Davis and Jackson. Together they created a dialogue about the thefts, lies, and betrayals that have alienated black women and men from each other. They are particularly focused on the sexist delusion that women’s subordination is a necessary condition for racial equality in a patriarchal society. In June 1970, Jackson wrote that black mothers ‘press,’ ‘hide,’ ‘push,’ and ‘capture’ sons in their wombs, disclosing the punitive restraint the mythical black matriarch is imagined to wield to sustain her emasculating power.69 The image of sons ‘capture[d]’ in the wombs of their

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mothers makes connections between the black woman, her reproductive capacities, the history of slavery, and the prison-industrial complex. Davis argues passionately with Jackson about this myth of the emasculating matriarch and challenges the expectation that black women should compensate for them. For her, these myths are impediments to revolution. She argues that upturning the racist structure of society will only take place if the black male ‘purge[s] himself of the myth that his mother, his woman, must be subdued before he can wage war on the enemy.’70 Writing letters and exchanging words stages the possibility of this purging. Continuing to develop her point, Davis argues that women should be central to the revolution, not the supportive structure at its domestic edges: Only when our lives, our total lives, become inseparable from struggle can we, Black women, do what we have to do for our sons and daughters … We cannot be dismissed as counterrevolutionaries. You’d be surprised how many brothers say this. Nor can it be said that we blot out our natural instincts for survival. Why, why is our condition so wrought with contradictions? We, who have been forced into performing the most degrading kind of labor – a sex machine for the white slave master … .71

Later in the same letter, Davis performatively follows the history of black women’s exploitation and demonstrates how the logic beneath it has been deployed as an instrument of alienation. Her prose has a quick pace and an improvisatory rhythm, as if she is writing to catch up with the speed of her thoughts and mime the ideological efficiency with which ideas about black men, women, rape, and masculinity were telegraphed through American history. It never fails. Rape the Black woman and make the survival of the race dependent on that vicious rape. No recourse to the Black male except death. After raping the Black woman, give her a piece of the pie. Make the survival of the black family dependent on a chasm within. Pound into the mind of the Black male that his superiority, his manhood, has been diminished, has been irreparably damaged by the female of the race. Give him no room, no work with which to objectify his potentialities. Convince the female that he is a lazy son-of-a-bitch. The chasm within.72

This narrative draws attention to the institutional and economic emasculation of black men, which black women have been simultaneously blamed for and forced to internalise as their responsibility. Davis’s letters to Jackson can be understood as sketchbooks in which she drafted arguments that would become the centre of her scholarship. In addition to Blues Legacies, the letters resonate especially with two essays Davis composed in prison: ‘Women and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation’ and ‘Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves.’ In

Letters from an imaginary enemy, Angela Davis

the preface to ‘Reflections,’ Davis articulates her commitment to ‘shattering’ what she calls the ‘reified images’ and ‘grossly distorted categories through which that black woman continues to be perceived.’73 Davis begins by noting the absence of historical work on slavery, which has, she argues, allowed distorted icons of black women to take hold in the American imagination. Drawing upon Herbert Aptheker’s scholarship on slave revolts, part of the limited historical materials made available to her in prison, Davis sketches an ‘accurate portrait’ of black women in enslavement.74 Her aim is to dismantle the ‘cruel misnomer’ at work in the production of the black matriarch, as it denies the exploitation and thefts at the heart of enslaved maternity, and to clear ground for transmitting a different set of images.75 Foreseeing many of the arguments Spillers would make in ‘Mama’s Baby,’ Davis’s ‘Reflections’ makes three interrelated arguments about black women. First, they were ‘annulled’ of gender and made to perform the same brutal work assigned to men. As Davis writes, ‘She shared in the deformed equality of equal oppression.’76 Davis notes that black women were simultaneously expected to perform the domestic labour of caring and attending to basic human needs which, in the context of enslavement, meant sustaining the conditions for survival. Working to keep people alive allowed women to create the grounds of slavery’s undoing, which is the second point Davis makes. As she writes, ‘[the black woman] was uniquely capable of weaving into the warp and woof of domestic life a profound consciousness of resistance.’77 Lastly, Davis focuses on the rape of African-American women under slavery. Rape transmitted a message of emasculation to black men, and helped solidify the exchange of women as the means by which the coordinates of American masculinity were established. Rape was also a tool of counter-insurgency. That is, white men raped black women who resisted slavery. These rapes serve as indirect evidence of women’s sustained role in both slave revolts and creating the grounds of resistant consciousness.78 The convergence of these histories created a misunderstood equality – ‘distorted’ as Davis puts it – among black men and women, a confusion that produced, in turn, the production of the black woman as the mythical black matriarch who emasculates black men. As Davis explains, ‘Black men and women alike remain its potential victims – men unconsciously lunging at the women, equating her with the myth, women sinking back into the shadows, lest an aggressive posture resurrect the myths in themselves.’79 Davis dedicates ‘Reflections’ to Jackson. In the prefatory note, she attests to Jackson’s increased understanding of sexism and his rejection of the ‘mythical transpositions’ of black women that blunted sensitivity to the realities they faced.80 At the conclusion of the essay, however, Davis also sends out a call to black women: ‘accept the full weight of the legacy wrought in blood by our mothers in chains.’81 A clear statement against historical erasure and denial, this statement is an address to women to grapple with the legacies of slavery

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that have been passed through the maternal line. Writing to undo the image of the black matriarch as the imaginary enemy that black women have been coerced into embodying and forced to internalise, this address asks AfricanAmerican women to consciously partake in the project of imagining themselves other than the images invented and perpetuated by white patriarchal dominance. In the defence statement she gave at the opening of her trial, Davis retooled this address for an all-white jury. She asked members of the jury to relinquish the image of the criminally deviant black woman and asked the women in particular to see how the prosecution was using the sign woman to place her outside the bounds of the law. Addressing her defence

The only time she spoke during her trial, in the opening defence statement she gave on 29 March 1972, Davis demonstrated her ability to imagine herself as other than the image produced by and for white patriarchal culture. Davis does not refer to her correspondence with Jackson, but addresses instead the image the prosecution was intent upon drawing in the jury’s imagination. Here Davis refers to the elaborate fantasy concocted by the prosecutor: ‘[Harris] will continue to tell you that I am not the person you see standing before you, but rather an evil, sinister creature pushed to the brink of disaster by ungovernable emotions and passions.’82 The words ‘sinister,’ ‘creature,’ and ‘ungovernable’ are telling; they identify the subhuman criminal animality attributed to black women and highlight the assumption that they were embodiments of disorder, naturally outside the boundaries of civilisation and the law. Davis addresses the jury as rational people who are capable of seeing clearly. Consistently addressing them as ‘you,’ Davis asks them to read the picture the prosecution has created of her as ‘absurd’ and provides clear directions for identifying the distortions in their case: ‘We ask you to keep your eyes focused on the evidence … [y]ou must consistently seek out, through the huge maze of evidence which will confront you that testimony which relates directly to whether I had foreknowledge of what occurred on August 7.’83 By undercutting the alleged ‘eye-witness’ testimony that placed Davis at the Marin County Civic Center on 7 August 1970 – no doubt based upon ‘they all look alike’ kind of logic – Davis puts the prosecutor’s vision into question and casts a sceptical eye upon his attempts to fit her into his idea of the crime: ‘It is a sick kind of game which the prosecutor is playing, he has invented a scheme, a diagram, a conspiracy. Now he must fit his conspirator, his criminal into the picture.’84 Both the fixity and fungibility attributed to black women made the placement of Davis into this ready-made ‘picture’ easy. To refute the prosecution’s claims, Davis provides a forthright account of her own personal history and the larger histories of oppression it reflects. The

Letters from an imaginary enemy, Angela Davis

prosecution was going to insist that Davis was single-minded about freeing George Jackson – and him alone. To counter this accusation, Davis enumerates her extended participation in the Soledad Brothers Defence Committee and documents her contributions to a collective effort to free every member of the Soledad Brothers.85 To make it clear she did not seduce George Jackson’s younger brother Jonathan into staging the kidnapping, she explains her relationship with the entire Jackson family.86 To refute the idea that the guns were evidence of her intentions to commit a crime, Davis discusses the many death threats she received after her membership of the Communist Party was announced publicly.87 She also talks about growing up in the ‘Dynamite Hill’ neighbourhood of Birmingham, where Davis and her family were forced to routinely defend themselves against constant threats of violence.88 To explain why she did not surrender on 7 August, she cites the justifiable fear of unjust treatment many blacks and Chicanos feel when dealing with American law enforcement.89 And to refute the idea that Davis coerced Jackson into violence because he had two books – Violence and Social Change and The Politics of Violence: Revolution in the Modern World – that belonged to her, she explains that in the summer of 1970, she was writing her doctoral dissertation on the work of Immanuel Kant and the theory of force in his political philosophy of history.90 A feminist critique of the prosecution’s case is at the centre of Davis’s defence statement. She argues that Harris was able to compose a distorted picture of her by appealing to base assumptions about women and relying upon the idea that there is something sinister in a woman who does not project an image of submission. It is, she argues, sexism that allows Harris to claim that ‘lurking behind my external appearance are sinister and selfish emotions and passions, which, in his words, know no bounds.’91 Letting her outrage come to the surface, Davis states Members of the jury, this is utterly fantastic, this is utterly absurd. Yet it is understandable that Mr. Harris would like to take advantage of the fact that I am a woman – and women in this society are supposed to act only in accordance with the dictates of their emotions and passions. This is a symptom of male chauvinism, which prevails in this society.92

It was a calculated risk to compose this feminist address in 1972, but it worked. As Davis reports in her autobiography, the women on the jury agreed and sympathised with her assessment: ‘I had not realized that these remarks would strike such a responsive chord in a number of women jurors … As I spoke about the male supremacist character of Harris’ case, heads nodded and receptive expressions broke out on some of the female faces.’93 A feminist address proved to be a good strategy, and seeing the positive response to her claims hinted at the acquittal to come.

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The support the white women jurors expressed for Davis’s defence statement is a crucial (but decidedly fragile) instance of a feminist address in the early 1970s moving across the lines of racial difference. The choice to make a feminist appeal to the women on an all-white jury manifests arguments Davis makes in ‘Women and Capitalism,’ namely, that the harsh separations among black and white women are neither natural nor inherent, but are produced through capitalist ideology.94 Moreover, by making her history as a black woman the ground of her feminist appeal, Davis was also reinforcing her argument that the Women’s Movement should not make sexual oppression the primary and only mode of oppression, but should instead weave black women’s liberation as a ‘priority,’ as Davis writes, ‘into the larger bid for female emancipation.’95 Davis wrote ‘Women and Capitalism’ while in jail, and in the courtroom she may have been drawing upon that argument and the possibility that the white women on the jury might actually be able to see her story of injustice rather than refuse it. It is lamentable that the scope of the feminist address Davis placed at the centre of her defence statement was circumscribed by a judicial system that reinforces black women’s historical denigration rather than giving them access to justice or the power of the law. As Davis explains, ‘The system was poised against [them].’96 Davis was not allowed to direct her address to women who intimately knew what it felt like to be assigned the undervalued work of sustaining white patriarchal culture’s fantasies alongside the added burden of warding off its fears. Davis expresses regret that Mrs Janie Hemphill, the only black woman from the jury pool, was eliminated through a peremptory challenge. Moved by her description of her background – persevering through agricultural work, restaurant work, and domestic labour to ‘finally get a job teaching in a little school’ – Davis writes that ‘Mrs. Hemphill’s story was the universal story of the Black woman in a world that wants to see her crushed. Mrs. Hemphill had overcome.’97 The affinity Davis felt for Mrs Hemphill, and the ways her life and history mirrored both her own and that of her mother did not directly contribute to her acquittal. But certainly similar correspondences among black women facing a ‘world that wants to see [them] crushed’ was crucial to the wide-ranging global support that forcefully emerged when she was on trial. Davis’s acquittal attests to the black feminism telegraphed through her image and work as she defended herself against the nation-state’s wellorchestrated efforts to punish her for imagining herself other than a monstrous, threatening other.98 By making language into a malleable but clear tool that can defend against such racist and sexist distortions, Davis wrote a radical new text of female empowerment, one that makes black feminist collectivities central to the feminist imaginary. While Davis’s work documents the particular challenges black women faced exposing and rewriting the sign woman and its heavily policed

Letters from an imaginary enemy, Angela Davis

connection to white femininity, it also resonates with the work of Spero and Solanas, two white women who defied accusations of monstrosity by writing against the assumption that women should be naturally devoid of aggression. It is the textual correspondences between their engagements with aggression to which we now turn. Notes 1 The Black Power Mix Tape, dir. Göron Olsson. Sweden: Sveriges Television, 2011. 2 Free Angela Davis and All Other Political Prisoners, dir. Shola Lynch. France: De Films En Aiguille, 2012. This statement reiterates a remark Davis made in an interview conducted by George Yancy and published in African-American Philosophers: 17 Conversation, George Yancy (ed.) (New York: Routledge, 1998), 13–30: 28. 3 The idea of the ‘vigilante viewer’ is indebted to Rachel Hall’s study Wanted: The Outlaw in American Visual Culture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2009), 6. 4 This reading is indebted to Lakesia D. Johnson’s chapter ‘Revolutionary Black Women in the News: The Politics of Angela Davis and Kathleen Cleaver,’ in Johnson, Iconic: Decoding Images of Revolutionary Black Woman (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012), 15–44: 17–18. 5 Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby,’ 229. 6 Angela Davis, ‘Afro Images: Politics, Fashion, Nostalgia,’ in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, J. James (ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998): 273–287: 276. 7 ‘From Promising Childhood to Desperate Flight,’ Life (11 September 1970), 20D–27: 21. 8 Jean Genet, ‘Angela and Her Brothers,’ in The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews, Albert Dichy (ed.), Jeff Fort (trans.) (1970. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 56–64: 56. 9 Ibid. 10 ‘From Promising Childhood to Desperate Flight,’ 25. 11 Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby,’ 203. 12 Davis is often a point of focus for black feminist analyses of black women’s hair. In Ayana D. Byrd’s and Lori L. Tharps’ Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America, a photograph of Davis is included in their chapter ‘Revolutionary Roots – Naturals, Afros, and the Changing Politics of Hair: 1965–1979.’ Davis wears an Afro and sits next to Coretta Scott King, whose hair is straightened. Ayana D. Byrd and Lori L. Tharps, Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 51. At the autobiographical opening of Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African-American Women, Nolwie M. Rooks writes about her black activist childhood and the fact that she attended rallies for Davis’s freedom. Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African-American Women (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 2. One of the interviewees in Ingrid Banks’s study ‘reminisced about her desire to wear an “Angela Davis Afro” during the 1970s’ and felt that she was harassed and detained by the police because of her hair, but also because the Afro collapsed men and women in the eyes of police officers. Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Women’s Consciousness (New York:

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New York University Press, 2000), 15–16. When Kobena Mercer discusses the commercialisation of the Afro, his argument resonates with Davis’s attention to the draining of history from her image in ‘Afro Images.’ Kobena Mercer, ‘Black Hair/Style Politics,’ in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Cornel West (eds) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 247–264: 255. 13 Davis, ‘Afro Images,’ 273. 14 Bishnupriya Ghosh, Global Icons: Apertures of the Popular (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 3, 4. 15 Davis, ‘Afro Images,’ 273. 16 Ibid., 277. 17 As Maxine Leeds Craig writes, ‘Some of these reports were accurate but unfortunate accounts of innocent women suffering the indignities as a result of the wide search for her, and some were bolstered by rumors stemming from the history of unjustified arrests of African Americans by police operating on the basis of racial profiling.’ ‘How Black Became Popular: Social Movements and Racial Rearticulation,’ Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 104. 18 Davis, ‘Afro Images,’ 275. 19 Fleetwood, On Racial Icons, 8. 20 Davis, ‘Afro Images,’ 275. 21 Ibid., 274. 22 Ibid., 278. 23 Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974. New York: International Publishers, 1998), xv. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., xvi. Original emphasis. 26 Perkins, Autobiography as Activism, xvi. 27 Cynthia A. Young argues that Davis’s ‘decision to begin there, on the run, literally hunted, cannot help but echo slave narratives.’ ‘Angela Davis and U.S. Third World Left Theory and Praxis,’ in Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 184–208: 187. 28 Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobiography, 3. 29 Ibid., 3–4. 30 Ibid, 15. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 15. 34 Davis, ‘The Novels of Robbe-Grillet: A Study of Method and Meaning,’ B.A. Honours Thesis (Brandeis University, MA, 1971). 35 Ibid., 71. 36 Ibid., 72. 37 Roland Barthes, ‘There is No Robbe-Grillet School,’ in Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (1958. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 91–95: 92. Original emphasis. 38 Ibid., 92.

Letters from an imaginary enemy, Angela Davis

39 Davis, ‘The Novels of Robbe-Grillet,’ 140. Original emphasis. 40 Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobiography, 23. 41 Ibid., 46. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 51. 44 Ibid., 61. 45 Ibid., 301. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 303. 48 Ibid., 79. 49 Ibid., 83. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 84. 53 Elizabeth Abel, Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 130. 54 Ibid., 130. 55 Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobiography, 358. 56 Davis, ‘Opening Defense Statement,’ 345. 57 This letter is reprinted in Bettina Aptheker’s The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis (1975. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 214. 58 Ibid., 166. 59 Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobiography, 374. 60 Aptheker, The Morning Breaks, 166. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid., 167. 63 Jean Genet, ‘Introduction to the First Edition,’ Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, which is reprinted at the end of the 1994 edition. George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (1970. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1994), 331–339: 331. 64 Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). See also ‘Dear Angela,’ a letter Marcuse wrote in support of Davis that was composed on 7 November 1970 and published in the Berkeley journal Ramparts in February 1971. ‘Dear Angela,’ Herbert Marcuse: The New Left and the 1960s, The Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, vol. 3, Douglas Kellner (ed.) (London: Routledge, 2005), 49–50. For Davis’s engagement with Marcuse’s work in particular and Critical Theory in general, see Young, ‘Angela Y. Davis and U.S. Third World Left Theory and Praxis,’ Soul Power, 192–199. 65 Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 4. 66 Ibid., 9. 67 Free Angela Davis and All Other Political Prisoners, dir. Shola Lynch, 2012. 68 Aptheker, The Morning Breaks, 215. 69 George Jackson, Soledad Brother, 4. Perkins analyses the correspondence between Jackson and Davis, and Davis’s challenge to ‘Jackson’s charges of matriarchy and of Black women’s complicity in the disempowering of black men.’ ‘Reading

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Intertextually: Black Power Narratives Then and Now,’ in Autobiography as Activism, 131–147: 138. 70 Aptheker, The Morning Breaks, 211. 71 Ibid., 209. 72 Ibid., 209. 73 Davis, ‘Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,’ in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, James (ed.), 111. 74 Ibid., 112. 75 Ibid., 113. 76 Ibid., 117. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid., 122. 79 Ibid., 126. 80 Ibid., 111. 81 Ibid., 127. 82 Davis, ‘Opening Defense Statement,’ in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, James (ed.), 337–338. 83 Ibid., 331. 84 Ibid., 343. 85 Ibid., 338. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid., 340. 88 Ibid., 339–340. 89 Ibid., 342. 90 Ibid., 345. 91 Ibid., 333. 92 Ibid. 93 Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobiography, 364. 94 Davis, ‘Women and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation,’ The Angela Y. Davis Reader, James (ed.), 180–181. Much of Davis’s Women, Race, and Class (1981) focuses on this topic. See ‘Woman Suffrage at the Turn of the Century: The Rising Influence of Racism,’ ‘Working Women, Black Women and the History of the Suffrage Movement,’ and ‘Racism, Birth Control, and Reproductive Rights,’ in Davis, Women, Race, and Class (1981. New York: Random House, 1981), 110–126; 137–148; 202–221. 95 Davis, ‘Women and Capitalism,’ 186. 96 Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobiography, 353. 97 Ibid. 98 See Young for the global networks of support that rallied for Davis’s acquittal. ‘Angela Y. Davis and U.S. Third World Left Theory and Praxis,’ in Soul Power, 184–208: 203.

Typing the poetry of monsters: Nancy Spero and Valerie Solanas write aggression

II

Typing the poetry of monsters

Introduction

As Part I of Addressing the Other Woman made clear, the austere arrangements of texts and images Adrian Piper composed in the late 1960s and 1970s can be read as contestations of the punitively narrow set of icons through which black women could become recognisable in American culture. Piper’s work offers a sustained analysis of the ways in which the subjectivities of black women have been denied access to a place of value in the symbolic order. By exposing how blatantly and intricately this denial is imposed, the artwork Piper produced in the late 1960s and 1970s confronts how black women’s bodies have been transformed into a malleable ground upon which images, dense with dominant white culture’s fears and fantasies, can be projected. The history Angela Davis lived as the ‘imaginary enemy’ of the US nation-state revealed the lived consequences of the representations Piper’s artwork exposed. On the run from the FBI, Davis was transformed into a violent threat to America’s image of itself. Crucial to the construction of this violent threat is the assumption that black women are naturally and criminally aggressive. If together the work of Piper and Davis contested the assumption that black women are aggressive, the artwork Nancy Spero produced during the same period grappled with the entrenched idea that white women are not. Maud Lavin defines aggression as ‘the use of force to create change,’ and if we agree with her definition, then we know why Spero would take up this fight. Aggression is central to the feminist project of undoing dominant signs of woman and demanding that women have a greater range of representations through which they can recognise themselves.1 Aggression is ‘fruitful’ and ‘destructive’ and, as Lavin argues, crucial to the ‘exercise of dissent.’2 Yet it is clear that in American culture, ‘women’s exercise of aggression has at times been represented as a punishable offense.’3 Violating the norms of femininity, women exercising their aggression are often deemed insane. Linked to behaviours considered ‘“loud, rude, profane, and vulgar”’ – that is, not ‘“pretty”’ – aggression is crucial to a highly recognisable image of female disobedience that can, if read critically, expose gender and sexuality as normalising functions and lay bare the deep-seated assumption that women are monsters.4 As the work of Piper shows, women artists in the late 1960s and early 1970s began unravelling the wide range of punishments that keep women’s aggression in check – including the threat of being perceived as a crazed monster. At the same time, artists, writers, and theorists tried to identify the specific interventions at work in feminist art practices that made aggression their subject. In her often-cited 1976 essay ‘Is There a Feminine Aesthetic?’ the German theorist Silvia Bovenschen stresses the importance of aggression for transforming the hierarchy of values that inform perceptions of women and their artwork. To defend against the continued devaluation of qualities

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attributed to femininity – ‘receptivity, sensitivity, non-violence, tenderness’ – Bovenschen argues that women should ‘mobilise’ aggression so as to ‘combat the constraints of patriarchal organizations.’5 Spero’s Codex Artaud is an elegant ‘mobilisation’ of aggression for the counter-organisation that is the feminist imaginary. In this epic piece, Spero orchestrates typewritten texts and painted images to seize the monstrosity attributed to white women if they do not stay within patriarchy’s constraints.6 Chapter 3 analyses Codex Artaud and the artwork that led to its formal inventions as a feminist claim to women’s aggressive capacities and all that they are linked to: sexuality, disorder, insanity, and protest, but also, quite crucially, the capacity to represent oneself as an other. The reading of Codex Artaud presented here focuses on Spero’s conflicted engagement with Artaud’s writings and the fact that though he was insane, he was able to reproduce, at the scene of writing, a mobile range of self-representations. Spero’s engagement with Artaud’s aggression produced a form of writing that emulates and critiques the masculine privileges that make such self-representations of otherness possible, thereby revealing the aggression from which women in western culture have been traditionally barred. To evoke the psychic mechanisms that enforce this exclusion, we turn to Sigmund Freud’s definition of sexuality as constituted through the expectation that women should not indulge in the pleasures of aggression, but should instead create aesthetically pleasing images of ‘normal’ sexuality devoid of shame and disgust. The idea of the normal heterosexual woman denying her aggression in the name of moral and aesthetic ideals manifested quite forcefully in mid twentieth-century America through the beautiful, all-giving, and repressed white woman Betty Friedan identified in The Feminine Mystique (1963). Spero’s early work from the 1950s and 1960s, sculptures and paintings that represent a struggle with the acquisition of speech to combat the suffocation endemic to the gendered hierarchies of post-war American culture, lay out the restraints that Codex Artaud will blatantly defy. Valerie Solanas exemplifies the deployment of writing to reject the expectation that women renounce their aggressive capacities. An Artaud-like figure who also embodies madness, Solanas’s attempted murder of Andy Warhol demonstrates that this rejection can take a dangerously literal turn. More subtly, her murderous rage reveals the insanity that comes from sustaining a feminist protest alone, bereft of any collective utterances or images that will mirror the value of its transgression. With her infamous SCUM Manifesto (1967), Solanas wrote at feminism’s most violent edge – and was perceived to be a monster for doing so. Therefore, after analysing Spero’s work, this chapter examines Solanas’s infamous manifesto and analyses how it highlights the imbrication of language and aggression for the project of creating a feminist imaginary.

Typing the poetry of monsters

Drawing upon Mary Harron’s well-researched film I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), it highlights Solanas’s history as an unruly feminist lesbian who, with connections to Warhol, Pop Art, Marilyn Monroe, and the typewriter, evokes a historical milieu that brings the feminist stakes of aggression into sharp relief. Tracing the correspondences between Codex Artaud and the SCUM Manifesto deepens our understanding of how Spero’s Codex Artaud protests against the imperative that women should silence themselves, repress their aggressions, and create pleasing images of white maternal femininity. In turn, we see that Solanas’s manifesto does not conform to the presumption that it is just the violent ravings of a lesbian lunatic or a blueprint for murder. Set against Codex Artaud, Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto becomes instead a carefully crafted piece of feminist writing. Unabashedly rejecting the vestiges of the feminine mystique in the late 1960s, Solanas shared Spero’s desire to create textual correspondences that would call to other women and create an imaginary in which women could see their abilities to wield aggression as a ‘force to create change.’ Chapters 3 and 4 trace the corresponding ways in which Spero and Solanas confronted aspects of women and feminism that dominant US culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s found threatening, insane, and grotesque – that is, monstrous. They both wrote aggression so it could be claimed as a force for imagining new worlds for women. And yet, seeing the textual correspondences between the work of Spero and Solanas also illuminates the subtle but significant differences between them. Focusing on the typewriter (as both a writing machine that produces texts and an icon of writing itself), and juxtaposing it with Spero’s and Solanas’s handwritten signatures will illuminate the distinctions between their understandings of voice, language, and presence. Making their ownership clear, the signatures definitively mark the artists’ claim to their work. And yet, their signatures also point to the importance of relinquishing the demands for better images in which women are seen, recognised, and heard – that is, fully present – and instead see the feminist potential of representations marked by gaps and absences, representations in which the conditions of women’s visibility begin to come undone. Notes 1 Maud Lavin, Push Comes to Shove: New Images of Aggressive Women (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 3. Original emphasis. 2 Ibid., 3–4. 3 Ibid., 3. 4 Dianna Taylor, ‘Monstrous women,’ PhaenEx 5.2 (Fall/Winter 2010), 125–151: 137, 134.

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5 Silvia Bovenschen, ‘Is There a Feminist Aesthetic?’ trans. Beth Weckmueller, in Feminist Aesthetics, Gisela Ecker (ed.), trans. Harriet Anderson (1977. London: The Women’s Press, 1985), 23–50: 34, 36. 6 There is a rich body of feminist work devoted to the figure of the monster. Spero was familiar with Susan Gubar’s ‘The Female Monster in Augustan Satire,’ Signs 3.2 (Winter 1977), 380–394. She includes passages from Gubar’s argument in another scroll dense with text, Notes in Time On Women (1979).

Writing the drives in Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud

Her letters-drawings have an address, harangue and apostrophise the passers-by violently. Hélène Cixous, ‘Spero’s Dissidences’1

It is the scale of Codex Artaud that first announces its claim to aggression. Akin to a colossal frieze, Codex Artaud consists of thirty-three large format collage panels that Spero composed to extend across and around museum or gallery walls. The extreme proportional disparities among the individual collages (some are two feet high and ten feet long and others are eleven feet high and three feet long) create a dramatic rhythm between horizontality and verticality. Ancient Egyptian art, The Book of the Dead (c.332–330 BC) in particular, was clearly one of Spero’s inspirations.2 She drew from The Book of the Dead’s epic architectural scale, elegantly arranged visual patterns, and non-linear narrative composition. And yet, for all its grandeur, it is clear that Codex Artaud is neither a book of laws nor a collection of ancient religious manuscripts, but a counter-codex, a sustained depiction of knowledge in the process of being defiled. Upon first looking at Codex Artaud, it is likely viewers’ eyes are drawn to the small figures dispersed throughout the vast empty spaces of the artwork. Spero painted these figures in gouaches of copper, brown, grey, and gold. Sometimes these figures have a rich shimmer, but many of them look tarnished and flat, as though they are archaeological fragments exhumed from the ground. Monstrous and otherworldly, many of them lurk on the underside of idealisation. Their amputated limbs, castrated bodies, and oversized tongues copulate and perform fellatio. Refusing the visual grammars of heterosexuality, the monsters of Codex Artaud are often vulgar, though the work itself is gorgeous. They are distorted figures of fantasy that revolt against the imperative that women artists produce visually pleasing signs of woman that ward off the messy instabilities of sexuality. Codex Artaud is a wasteland of repressed desires and muted utterances. The twentieth-century French poet Antonin Artaud lived out this wasteland

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in his writing, and his extreme literary imagination is central to Codex Artaud. Artaud’s angry demands, grotesque images, scatological humour, cutting sarcasm, and rough curses manifest in the distorted figures that move through the piece with their ravenously open mouths and thick, phallic tongues. Without directly corresponding to Artaud’s work, these monsters, dispersed across the collages, seem to act out his anguish, and the vast, blank spaces Spero has placed them within represent the silence that met his demands. Artaud demanded recognition, but he also wanted to make himself present in language.3 His oeuvre testifies to an exhaustive struggle against what Lacan argues is the ability of language to ‘castrate’ the subjects it produces. That is, Artaud represents language as an ordering force that cuts subjectivity into fragments, represses the body into the order of civilisation, and relegates its most visceral parts to shame and disgust. It is Artaud’s hysterical defiance of language that resonated with Spero as a woman artist. Her identification, however, was riven with ambivalence. Spero appropriated Artaud’s writing to reveal the more forceful repression of women within patriarchal orders of language and images. All the texts in Spero’s typewritten passages are citations of Artaud’s work. She typed out lines from Artaud’s corpus on Bulletin typewriters in the original French.4 (Bulletin typewriters produce capital letters that can be seen from far away, perfect for creating posters and broadsides.) Then she cut and pasted these typed passages onto the thin pieces of paper that serve as the artwork’s ground.5 These texts are, as the epigraph by Cixous attests, full of apostrophes, harangues, and curses. Though Artaud’s language is highly expressive, Spero’s choice to transpose his words into typewritten text signals her affinity with Conceptual Art’s dry and sober use of texts to establish a relationship between the artwork and its viewers/readers.6 Spero asks viewers to read the visual representations of the text and follow their dynamic, unpredictable movement across the panels as they cluster around the figures in jagged formations, creating what Jon Bird calls a ‘typographic cadenza of suffering and alienation.’7 The texts address viewers and ask them to collaborate in the project of claiming the language of aggression for women and then wield it to reject the dominant images of woman in American visual culture that insist upon their subordination and silence. The desire to address viewers and transform them into readers may have inspired both the materials and composition Spero chose for Codex Artaud. Discussing the irregular layout of the piece, the ‘fragmented positioning of the images and quotations,’ Spero writes that a viewer ‘has to change position, to move close or further away according to the size of the images (many are quite small), to move along as in reading a manuscript, or to move further away to view it in its entirety.’8 If this engagement solicits the movement of the body, the thin paper upon which Spero glued the figures and typed passages

Writing the drives in Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud

suggests skin. Indeed, the malleability of the paper resonates with what Jacques Derrida identifies as the ‘subjectile’ in his engagement with Artaud’s own drawings. Similar to the maternal membrane, fluidly existing in the space between figure and ground, the ‘subjectile’ is, according to Derrida ‘[a] sort of skin with pores.’9 In Codex Artaud, the creases, wrinkles, and indentations created by gluing the images and typed passages onto the paper contribute to its skin-like texture. The paper becomes a threshold that shows how words and images imprint the body. If the paper of Codex Artaud figures for skin, then it represents white skin in particular. By marking that skin with images of distorted bodies and offensive words, Spero reveals the hostile struggles taking place on and under its surfaces. But it is important to note that Spero does not identify whiteness as an explicit object of her work’s critique, and Codex Artaud’s depiction of sexual aggression can be read as an extension of the privileges granted to white women, as sex and gender are the primary axes of oppression the artwork contests. At the same time, by refusing to create idealised images of white femininity, Spero’s work challenges the powers white women derive from aligning themselves with an image of woman that mirrors white patriarchal dominance back to itself. It addresses viewers with the possibility of seeing themselves in texts and images composed to fragment that imperative. Defiling tongues

Spero made it clear that the struggle against silence was a dominant theme of her work. She often expressed this struggle through the motif of losing and finding her voice. In her 1992 essay ‘Creation and Procreation,’ Spero reflects upon her marginalised place in the world of post-war American art: ‘I was hidden behind the nuclear family, and the general denial of validity to women artists, particularly mothers.’10 Incorporating Artaud’s writing into her work was a way to combat the silencing inherent to this marginalisation. As Spero explains, I used fragmented quotes from Antonin Artaud – of his desperation, humour, misogyny, and violent language. He speaks of his tongue being cut! – silenced … . I’m literally sticking my tongue out at the world – a woman silenced, victimized and brutalized, hysterical, talking ‘in tongues.’ These descriptions of women fit Artaud’s writings and behaviour. But as a male character, he is canonized because of his ‘otherness’ – his disrupture of language.11

Complicating the idea of finding one’s voice, Spero is citing and ventriloquising Artaud’s words, expressing her marginalisation through his anguished relationship to language while also critiquing the ease with which he accesses and represents that anguish.

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The tongue is central to this paradox, and a primary visual refrain in Codex Artaud. Thick, phallic, intrusive – but often elegantly composed – the tongues in Codex Artaud emblematise the appetites and aggressions erupting throughout the artwork.12 Tied to both the logos of language and the physical act of speaking, the tongue is an image of embodied defiance. It ‘speaks to’ what women have not been allowed to say. Indeed, the tongue is a dramatic image for the desire to resist the imperative that women mute their aggression and compose themselves into silent images. And while the tongues of Codex Artaud articulate a desire to shout and speak out, they also express a demand to reconfigure the subordinated place of women in the orders of language that impede their access to the voice and its association with power, presence, and articulation. Codex Artaud I explores the themes encapsulated by the tongue. It consists of four sheets of paper arranged in a horizontal composition that is about two feet high and seven feet long (see Figure 3.1). A design appears on each piece of paper, and together they create something like a sentence or a narrative composed of dynamic images and texts. The first sheet of paper has been cut diagonally in half, from the bottom corner to the top right corner, but not exactly. Upon and within this imperfect triangle, Spero has placed two images: the lower half of a body, and then a head. She has painted both with the same coppery brown gouache. The body has a human leg and foot, but in lieu of an upper torso, there is a curve of flesh that grows up from its waist and culminates in an elegantly designed tongue with a sharply pointed tip. This tongue veers to the right, toward the head. This head floats without a body, but possesses a mouth out of which juts another decidedly phallic tongue. Spero depicts these two figures, one without a head and the other without a body, in the act of ‘tonguing,’ but not quite: the tips of their tongues do not touch each other, and the blank space that surrounds the tongues highlights the evocatively curved space between them. The figures are frozen there in the inaugural space of Codex Artaud I, denied the satisfactions of their longings. In the next collage, Spero depicts a small figure with wings, sitting and forlornly looking into a shield she holds as though it was a mirror (see Figure 3.2). Christopher Lyon argues that this image alludes to Jean-Jacques-François Le Barbier’s neoclassical painting A Spartan Woman Giving a Shield to Her Son (1805), which represents a mother telling her soldier son to ‘“Return with your shield or on it”’: that is, survive or become an emblem of triumph.13 Spero’s depiction is far less precise than Le Barbier’s painting and much less insistent upon victory. Diminutive, placed at the bottom of paper upon which her image appears, this female figure evokes the loss that would accompany the shield if it returned alone or unmarked. The paper on which the female figure appears has been composed of fragments of tracing paper that Spero glued together haphazardly. They do not

Writing the drives in Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud

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Nancy Spero, Codex Artaud I, 1971. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts. Licensed by Vaga New York/DACS London/Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York.

3.1 

Nancy Spero, Codex Artaud I, 1971, detail. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts. Licensed by Vaga New York/DACS London/Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York.

3.2 

‘All the hazardous science of men is not superior to the direct knowledge that I have of my own being. I am sole judge of what is in me.’ Artaud.

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line up with the lowermost edge of the collage. These fragments are covered with typewritten lines from Artaud’s work and typographic marks; together they create a dark inky pattern that almost obscures the pages upon which they have been typed. Placed within this dense field of inky letters and lines, the female figure seems engulfed by the burdensome weight of language and the laws it upholds. Spero’s citation of A Spartan Woman is an evocation of women’s exile from language and their diminished place within the Oedipal arrangements of patriarchal culture. She garners value and recognition through her son and his place in the warring worlds of men. The first typewritten passage Spero has placed above the figure looking into the shield summons Artaud’s defiance of authority. The passage is an arrogant and sarcastic dismissal of scientific knowledge, and is followed by an absolute claim to Artaud’s knowledge of himself: ‘All the hazardous science of men is not/ superior to the direct knowledge that I have/ of my own being. I am sole judge of what is/ in me.’ Spero has typed the words so they are blurred and obfuscated, which undercuts the commanding presence of Artaud’s voice. In the second passage, Artaud addresses the small-minded men who promote stupidity and presume their authority is pure. These are the men Artaud imagines who are keeping him from realising the ‘direct knowledge’ he has of his ‘own being’: Back to your attics, your medical bedbugs, and you too monsieur sheeplike legislator. It is not for love of men that you rave. Its by imbecile tradition, your ignorance of man is equaled only by your foolishness in trying to limit him.

Artaud directly addresses those he insults. When he writes, ‘And you too/ monsieur/ sheeplike legislator,’ Artaud calls out to a foolish bureaucrat who slavishly supports the laws that uphold a hypocritical and conformist society. It is as if this man, this ‘sheeplike legislator,’ is present at this scene Artaud has composed with his angry interpellations. At the conclusion of the passage, Artaud articulates his desire to see the revenge of the law foisted upon those

Writing the drives in Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud

who wield it. He focuses on the patriarchal family as a possession, a privilege Artaud mocks throughout the passage with the second-person possessive pronoun, ‘your,’ which he makes into a refrain. I wish for you that your law be visited upon your father, your mother, your wife, your children, and all of your posterity, and now, swallow your law.

In this vengeful passage, the repetition of ‘your’ creates a rhythm in which it seems as though the patriarchal family collapses in on itself as the ‘sheeplike legislator’ internalises – ‘swallows’ – the law he upholds. Artaud is a man speaking to other men, and his emphasis on ‘your mother, your wife’ attests to the positioning of women as subordinate objects within the patriarchal family. The image of the female figure looking into a shield subtly underscores this subordination. The third collage in Codex Artaud I is dense with colour and stands out sharply against the blacks and whites of the previous two. It is a square painted from edge to edge with thick and rough layers of paint – bright tangerine orange, muddy orange brown, and metallic grey. In the left corner is a cluster of three heads. They face left, and direct viewers’ eyes to the beginning of Codex Artaud I. One head is large and painted coppery gold and holds its mouth wide open; the second is small and greyish blue and perched just at the edge of the other’s mouth; the third is barely visible, pasted onto the cheek of the largest head. The smaller head sticks its red tongue out so it almost touches the edge of the paper. Together these two heads emblematise the identification and internalisation that are Spero’s themes. The fourth collage of Codex Artaud I is the longest and mirrors the white blankness of the first. It is composed of ripped pieces of paper upon which Spero has repeatedly typed lines from Artaud’s work. These ripped fragments have been placed in a scattered, haphazard fashion so the lines overlap at different angles and scramble the expected orders of reading. A concrete poem, the typewritten lines become an image. Two small heads – visual echoes of the previous collage – are placed at the outermost edge of the typewritten lines. The heads float near the texts but are also alienated and ungrounded. These typed lines repeat two statements from Artaud that attest to the depth of his anxiety: ‘Before committing suicide, I ask that I be given some assurance of being.’ ‘I would like to be sure of death.’ Nothing about Codex Artaud I provides the certainty Artaud seeks. The tongue is not the only expression of defiance in Codex Artaud I. The aesthetic complexity of the collage defies any habits of reading and seeing that would allow the viewer/reader to walk away with a coherent understanding. In turn, Spero’s discordant composition resists interpretations that originate in and reflect back upon one theoretical model. But it is precisely in the work’s

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resistance to coherence that Codex Artaud asks to be read in relationship to Lacan’s theorisation of subjectivity and its attention to the tension between fragmentation and the defended coherence of the ego. One part of Codex Artaud I in which we see the aggressive dynamic of fragmentation and coherence play out is in Spero’s portrayal of the doubled heads.14 In ‘The Mirror Stage,’ Lacan argues that the subject fictionally overcomes its fragmentation and composes an image of its coherence by identifying with the imago, but it is precisely through this process that the subject becomes alienated from itself. The imago, which is both the subject and not the subject, provokes the self to have an aggressive and rivalrous relationship with its own image. The identification with the self as a rivalrous other becomes the foundation for the defensive aggressivity directed toward other people. It is particularly the heads in the third collage of Codex Artaud I that represent this process of internalising the imago and the irresolvable rivalry that emerges from it. Both intimate and alienated at the same time, Spero has depicted the heads so that the smaller head at the mouth’s edge is on the verge of being consumed by the larger head. And by depicting the smaller head sticking out its red tongue, Spero offers the slightest indication that this process of internalising the other hinges upon the phallus, which in turn underscores the argument that the perceptual arrangements Lacan names in ‘The Mirror Stage’ are descriptions of the way masculine subjectivity is composed. But the small size of the tongue is important; it shows Spero is representing an identification with masculinity rather than the fact of its grandeur. Despite Spero’s emphasis on the instability of masculinity, Codex Artaud shows the extent to which Artaud was able to draw from his sanctioned relationship to aggression and, though anguished, work with its creative possibilities to imaginatively represent himself in multiple forms. Spero’s aesthetic exploration of aggression corresponds not only with Lacan’s mirror stage essay, but also with his ‘Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis’. In this 1948 lecture, Lacan underscores that aggression organises the ego’s defensive structure, and argues that through the dream images and forms of speech that manifest in the course of analysis, aggression reveals itself to be the force through which the ego can come undone and lose its rigidly defended structure.15 Lacan portrays the ‘man of modern society’ as purportedly ‘“emancipated”’ but anguished by his fictional coherence, threatened by castration, denying the reality of others, and acting out his aggressions in arenas of historical consequence.16 But psychoanalysis offers this modern man a path to become part of a ‘discreet fraternity’ that acknowledges the impossibility of ever ‘measur[ing] up.’17 Particularly when placed in relationship to Lacan’s depiction of the castrating mother, whom he describes as an animal-monster ‘growl[ing] … with a tiger’s cry,’ this ‘discreet fraternity,’ undercut by Oedipus from the start, highlights the patriarchal foundation upon which Lacan builds his picture

Writing the drives in Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud

of the psychoanalytic subject, even as he highlights the emptiness upon which it is anxiously founded.18 Codex Artaud challenges the premise underlying Lacan’s depiction of human subjectivity by revealing the excesses of Artaud’s struggle with patriarchal order. While Spero creates images that enact Artaud’s antagonistic relationship to himself as other, the typewritten texts make it clear that for Artaud, language is the primary site where this fight takes place. In his angry outbursts against the stupid men who ‘legislate’ against Artaud’s ‘direct knowledge of his own being,’ we can see that Artaud fights against what Lacan identifies as the castrating law of language. This is what Artaud rails against in the passages that defy the ‘sheeplike legislator.’ However, it is also clear that Artaud imagines himself on both sides of castration’s laws. He can use language to make aggressive declarations, but can also represent himself as the victim of its punitive restrictions. By placing the female figure looking into the shield under the texts that represent Artaud’s angry denunciations, Spero implies that those identifying with the feminine position are restricted from defying the castrated state language inflicts, manifesting Lacan’s argument that the castrating force of language is doubly inflected for women. It is the site by which the exchange of women takes place, making ‘woman’ into ‘a sign communicated by men,’ as Elizabeth Cowie argues in her feminist engagement with Claude Lévi-Strauss’s semiotic reading of kinship.19 Codex Artaud resists the orders of language that position woman as this communicated sign. A visual embodiment of Artaud’s ravings against the punitive laws of language and culture, in Codex Artaud the tongue defies the patriarchal forces that insist upon woman as a mute object of exchange. Codex Artaud XVII illustrates this challenge (see Figure 3.3). It is a rectangular and vertically oriented piece, just under four feet high and a foot and a half long. On the upper right side is a large gruesome profile of a head Spero has painted with gold and then overlaid with a brownish-black gouache. The back of his head is cut off so it is intrusively jutting into the paper from the right side. Sticking out of his mouth is a thick, giant tongue – so large it does not seem like it could fit back inside his mouth. Painted to emphasise its straight heaviness, it looks closer to a knife or a piece of carved wood than a tongue. It also has a decidedly phallic appearance. The tongue sticks straight into a piece of paper Spero glued at the top of Codex Artaud XVII. Upon this piece of paper are blocks of Artaud’s writing separated by typographic marks. The block of writing at the top, densely typed in single-spaced lines, is a transcript of a grotesque fantasy in which Artaud describes a rat entering a piece of bread and then devouring it from within, rat droppings on his book, and a group of people ‘sitting around the table at the dôme, who indulge in the luxury of tasting me from a distance with their tongues.’ In this vivid scene that is so disgusting it is funny, Artaud represents himself defiled by distant authorities.

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3.3 

Nancy Spero Codex Artaud XVII, 1972. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts. Licensed by Vaga New York/DACS London/Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York. ‘… The result for me was a death agony, and a rat that got inside a hunk of bread which I had beside me on a table and devoured it from within, covering my books with rat droppings. Part of this spell is the work of a small group of people sitting around tables at the dôme, who know the occult measurement from my perineum to my brain, who indulge in the luxury of tasting me from a distance with their tongues at their disposal, tasting me like the fetus of a newborn child.’ Artaud. ‘The obscene phallic weight of a tongue that prays.’ Artaud.

Writing the drives in Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud

In the two middle blocks, which the tongue defiantly enters, Spero has typed Artaud’s phrase ‘the obscene phallic weight of a tongue that prays.’ The metaphysical act of praying – most likely an address to a patriarchal God – gives authoritative weight to the tongue’s phallic qualities. In contradistinction to this weight, Spero has typed out the letters that compose the words so they are spaced out evenly, pulled apart from their regular grouping as words and arranged in a grid so we see the visual shapes and lines that compose the letters. If we think of Spero representing Artaud through this strange but orderly arrangement of letters, but also through the large tongue that enters the space in which his texts have been arranged, Codex Artaud XVII shows that Artaud’s work can appear in multiple places and embody different forms of authority: in the thick weight of the phallic tongue, but also in the visible arrangement of the grid that the tongue defiles. In other words, Codex Artaud XVII reveals that masculine subjects are granted permission to identify with both linguistic order and its defilement. At the bottom of Codex Artaud XVII, below the grid and the brown tongue that intrudes upon it, is an image of a decapitated head performing fellatio on an amputated body. A double of the much larger head and tongue above it, Spero has painted the tongue with a thin layer of red. It points straight into (what seems to be) female genitalia. With her arm bent at her waist, and her upper torso arching back in pleasure, this figure has been placed in the same position as the blocks of text above her. Spero seems to be representing the female figure as the ‘text’ exchanged and defiled between men. Or maybe she is revealing the female sexual pleasures that emerge from exposing how patriarchy is aligned with the order of language, which the grid articulates, but is also allowed to overtake that order and defile it, which the tongue represents. By showing how Artaud can represent himself on both sides of castration, Codex Artaud XVII opens a space in which transgressive female pleasures can come into visibility beyond the immediate field of representation in which man struggles with himself as other. While Artaud’s work provided a passageway to the voice of aggression Spero seeks to claim, Codex Artaud is not a celebration of the masculinity upon which his aggression relies. By figuring his aggression through phallic tongues that appear in the mouths of doubled heads, Codex Artaud argues that Artaud’s range for representing his aggressions is a privilege that comes with the acquisition of masculinity, even as he calls that masculinity into question with his own hysterical performances of being defiled. By typing Artaud’s words, Spero claims those aggressions and the production of otherness they make possible. In a culture in which women’s acts of aggression are silenced, this claim is not easily articulated. The psychoanalytic understanding of sexuality offers insights into what is at stake in repressing women’s capacities for aggression.

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Writing the instincts

Because of the connections Artaud made between writing, sexuality, and aggression, many post-war psychoanalytic and literary theorists made his work the object of their analysis.20 Artaud seemed to be working with the psychoanalytic understanding of language as the symbolic order, that which places the libidinal economy of the sexual body in the repressive syntax of stable semantic orders. In ‘The Subject in Process,’ Julia Kristeva focuses upon Artaud’s ability to transgress the law of the symbolic order and represent, through writing, the expulsions of the anal stage, which are repressed in the composition of the civilised subject. Artaud’s famous declaration ‘All Writing is Pig Shit’ makes this dimension of his work clear. For Kristeva, such expulsions attest to the ‘permanent aggressivity’ of the infantile libido prior to the installation of the Oedipus complex.21 This aggressivity is not easily absorbed into the identifications that constitute the Oedipal crisis, nor are they easily sublimated. It does return, however, in fragmented and hostile utterances, which Kristeva sees in the ‘interjections’ and ‘expectorations’ that erupt throughout Artaud’s work.22 She argues that the orality of Artaud’s poetry – its screams and ravenous appetites – fluctuates between the graphic pleasures of anal expulsion and their sublimation.23 Ultimately, Kristeva’s analysis sanctions the fact that it is men who have been granted the privilege of taking up, at the scene of writing, the dirty connections between the appetites of the mouth and the aggressions of the anus. This is precisely what Codex Artaud resists: the engrained notion that men have greater access to their aggressions and can create with a fuller array of their impulses. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud offers a model of sexual development that explains how women have been barred from indulging in the pleasures of oral and anal aggressions and explains why those impediments have been so systemically enforced. Three Essays is Freud’s argument for the contingency of sexuality, the malleable array of its manifestations. In this text Freud argues that sexuality is not absent from childhood (as is commonly assumed) but is one of its constitutive forces, creating a template upon which adult sexuality will write itself. Freud argues that in childhood there is a rich range of sexual sensations and experiences that take place beyond genitalia. He focuses on the auto-erotics of thumb sucking, and places continual stress on the mouth and anus as sites of sexual pleasure. According to Freud, it is ‘disgust’ which ‘stamps’ the sexual use of the anus as a perversion.24 Shame and disgust keep the sexual instincts within the bonds of the genitals, but the absolute achievement of sexual normalcy never fully materialises. Permission to indulge in sexual perversities is not distributed evenly across the terrain of sexual difference. Freud reports that women are expected to renounce sexual perversities in order to align with the category of the normal

Writing the drives in Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud

woman and keep perversity in check. Freud makes this clear in the last of the essays, ‘The Transformations of Puberty,’ where he delineates his account of the paths by which masculine men and feminine women are produced. Until puberty, Freud argues, autoerotic activity for boys and girls are the same. The similarity is so pronounced that he proposes making the claim that the sexuality of little girls is of a ‘wholly masculine character.’25 At puberty, significant differences arise. For boys, the project of subordinating sexuality to the genital zone is clear and easy to understand. For girls, it is ‘involut[ed].’26 In direct proportion to the increase in boys’ libidos, girls experience a ‘fresh wave of repression,’ which means taking her ‘piece of masculine sexuality’ out of the picture.27 Girls become proficient in the skills of sexual repression, and internalise those primary ‘inhibitions of sexuality’ – shame and disgust – with greater ease. The identification with shame and disgust is coincident with the transfer of sexual pleasure from the clitoris to the vagina in the phallic phase, which paves the way for the girl’s fraught submission to castration and her proper role in heterosexual reproduction. It is not only clitoral pleasures the girl has to relinquish. Because of her identification with the work of inhibiting disgust and shame, which, as Freud establishes, help to keep sexuality restricted to the genitals, she is not allowed access to the sexual appetites expressed through the mouth and the pleasures of disobedience associated with the anus. Reading Three Essays, a picture emerges: that of women performing the crucial work of giving sexuality its ‘final, normal shape’ and narrowing the ‘pursuit of pleasure,’ so it ‘comes under sway of the reproductive function.’28 In other words, the figure of woman in Three Essays is responsible for maintaining sexual normalcy. She is either sublimating her sexuality through the intimacies of childcare or ‘hold[ing] herself back’ and ‘den[ying] her sexuality,’ and ‘serv[ing]’ as ‘stimuli’ to men’s libido.29 Freud hints that the connection between women and physical beauty is part of this stimulation. He writes that ‘disgust, feelings of shame and the claims of aesthetic and moral ideals’ work together as impediments that men are provoked to transgress.30 Composed the same year Freud wrote Three Essays, Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) makes the cultural practice of jokes an illustration of women’s impeded access to sexual aggression. Freud’s initial focus is examining the wordplay upon which jokes rely, which deepens his arguments about the function of condensation in dream-work. Fairly quickly, however, ‘smut’ jokes become a point of focus for Freud, as they lift the repression of aggression, sexuality, and the connections between the two.31 Freud notes that in ‘civilized’ cultures, smut jokes establish homosocial relations between men and posit an imaginary woman as the object of their sexual appetites.32 This scenario – which can be described as a virtual exchange – is deceptively simple, but relies upon a complicated entanglement of words that articulate masculine dominance and the images that rely upon the greater repressions

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to which women are subjected.33 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious also underscores the fact that women (and upper-class women in particular) are expected to hold back their own capacities for sexual aggression and become rigid metaphors of the civilised, an embodiment that produces imaginary images men can imaginatively defile and exchange. If women play with language to make jokes (a possibility Freud does not entertain), they ruin the pretty pictures they are expected to compose of themselves, which takes the aggressive pleasures of sullying those images away from men. For every normalising limitation Freud describes, he offers a less restrictive way of imagining sexuality. In Three Essays, this opening is the tenuous separation of the instincts from the drives. This separation is crucial for feminist thought and politics, as it unhinges sexuality from biological reproduction and displaces the imperative to shape the instincts into moral norms. Though he is not consistent upon this point, Freud argues that drives are lines of libidinal force and pressure that prop themselves on biology’s instinctual passageways, but do not necessarily follow them faithfully. Contingent upon the vicissitudes of the subject’s psychic history, the drives transform and transcend the instincts. Drives lie, in Freud’s famous formulation, ‘on the frontier between the mental and the physical.’34 They are not external to the body, but displacements of its biological needs and become their ‘psychical representative[s].’35 Drives do not necessarily move toward actual objects such as food for their satisfactions, where the instincts for self-preservation arrive, but to fantasmatic representations of those objects. In other words, drives appear in the virtual space of the psyche.36 Jean Laplanche argues that drives and sexuality are coextensive of each other, and the drives’ re-presentations are perverse, as perversions are deviations from instinct. In a detailed description of the process by which the instincts become perverted by the drive (and therefore sexuality), Laplanche writes: ‘Now sexuality, in its entirety, in the human infant, lies in a movement which deflects the instinct, metaphorizes its aim, displaces and internalizes its object, and concentrates its source on what is ultimately a minimal zone, the erotogenic zone.’37 Laplanche renders sexuality as a form of writing that distances the instinct from the immediate presence of the body and makes it into a metaphor without a clearly defined object of comparison. Building upon Laplanche’s formulations, de Lauretis describes the drive as a form of ‘troping.’38 Which is to say the drives write the instincts, distancing them from biological needs, revealing the unpredictable correspondences between the body and its objects. When read in relationship to this distinction between the instinct and drives, Codex Artaud becomes a depiction of the possibilities women are expected to relinquish on the path to gendered normalcy. Spero’s decision to take up Artaud’s work is part of her efforts not only to imagine women’s instincts beyond the normalising paths toward heterosexual reproduction, but to announce her desire to write those instincts into the virtuality of the drives

Writing the drives in Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud

and their unpredictable array of representations. Typing Artaud’s words, cutting and arranging them on thin pieces of paper that resemble skin, was Spero’s way of staking a claim to the expansive range of his drives. Engaging with Artaud’s work opened imaginative spaces through which women’s sexual aggression could appear in its full metaphorical range and thereby resist the propensity to reinforce the castration of women and turn women’s aggression back on women themselves. While the analyses of Kristeva and Freud offer insights into why Spero engaged with Artaud’s work – to de-essentialise aggression and claim it for women’s art practices – Cixous’s manifesto ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1976) highlights where Spero wanted that aggression to go. ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ draws out Codex Artaud as a form of feminist writing and reveals it to be a protest against the picture of femininity sustained by the patriarchal orders of culture and language. Devoted to writing’s revolutionary possibilities, Cixous begins the manifesto with a declaration that she ‘will speak of women’s writing, of what it will do.’39 Animated by the momentum of unleashed drives, Cixous’s writing breaks up and reveals the singularities that have been hidden within the sign of woman. Writing allows women to stop swallowing the scripts of shame embedded in patriarchal discourse. It allows women to ‘bit[e] that tongue with [their] very own teeth to invent for [themselves] a language to get inside of.’40 ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ unabashedly refutes the positioning of women within the Lacanian definition of language: ‘But we are in no way obliged to deposit our lives in their banks of lack … [w]e have no womanly reason to pledge allegiance to the negative.’41 Against the fixity of woman, Cixous aligns writing with energy and movement: ‘trips, crossings, trudges, abrupt and gradual awakenings, discoveries of a zone at one time timorous and soon to be forthright.’42 We can see Cixous’s idea of writing at play in the elastic and intricate unfolding of texts and images that Spero creates across the elongated spaces of Codex Artaud. For Cixous, women’s writing has the potential to resist a libidinal economy charted in the service of masculinity. It taps into the possibility of writing the instincts into the virtuality of the drives for feminist purposes. Cixous argues that writing is a crucial means by which women recapture, discover, and reveal the full range of their drives: ‘Oral drive, anal drive, vocal drive – all these drives are our strengths.’43 Linking the vocal drive to the oral and anal drives, Cixous argues that the recovery of the voice can take place by accessing the sexual pleasures women have been expected to repress on the path to feminine sexuality. Posing a series of questions that address her readers and ask them to participate in the undoing her manifesto enacts, Cixous writes: Where is the ebullient, infinite woman who, immersed as she was in her naiveté, kept in the dark about herself, led into her self-disdain by the great arm of

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parental-conjugal phallocentrism, hasn’t been ashamed of her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a … divine composure), hasn’t accused herself of being a monster?44

Writing the ‘fantastic tumult’ of a woman’s drives productively puts the imago of femininity – the ‘well-adjusted normal woman’ with ‘divine composure’ – into crisis. These drives trouble assumptions about a ‘normal’ woman’s desires, and do not lead to the expected objects of her satisfactions: the penis, the infant, or her own self-image. In this circumscribed map of subjectivity, the drives remain instincts and settle into images that are turned back upon women as accusations of monstrosity. In Codex Artaud, Spero did not deny that monstrosity, but actively pursued it. Working with writing to move away from the image of the ‘well-adjusted normal woman’ with ‘divine composure,’ Codex Artaud declares women’s capacities to write aggression and all its virtual possibilities. And by scattering the typed traces of his words across her piece, Spero ‘set out,’ in the words of Cixous, on a ‘grammatic revolution.’45 The signs and texts of protest

Spero started working with Artaud’s writing in 1968. When her son, Phillip Golub, started reading the poetry out loud, her identification with his voice was immediate: ‘And I said, That’s me, you know? That’s myself, the artist, a woman artist. I didn’t quite zero in on it, but I knew it was about being a woman artist.’46 While Spero felt a strong affinity for Artaud’s writing, she acknowledged that there were vast differences between herself and this poète maudit. Spero was becoming a feminist. Artaud was a raging misogynist, but heroicised for displaying behaviours for which women are, in Spero’s words, ‘put down as screamers or irrational, characterized as one who screams but can’t act … removed from any sort of participation in the external world.’47 Spero acknowledges that Artaud would have found her appropriation of his work an affront: ‘I knew how much Artaud would have hated a woman re-using his language and shifting his implications.’ Her engagement with his work shows that he could move between wielding representational violence and representing himself as a ‘female victim.’48 As Codex Artaud I and Codex Artaud XVII demonstrated, the doubled figures that appear throughout the artwork enact this mobility. Re-presenting these doubles, Spero articulates the desire to write herself as both powerful and victimised and then make that movement part of participating in the external world. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, political protests became a way for women to announce their capacities to scream about the forms of victimisation they endured while still insisting upon their power to, in Spero’s words, ‘participat[e] in the external world.’49

Writing the drives in Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud

Nancy Spero, Codex Artaud III, 1971. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts. Licensed by Vaga New York/DACS London/Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York. ‘Meat slaughtered with a hammer. Its blood extracted by stabs of a knife.’ Artaud.

Spero’s thematisation of protest is clear in Codex Artaud III (see Figure 3.4). This panel begins with an androgynous figure who, with two outstretched arms, holds a large protest sign high up in the air. The cut-out body, which is not fragmented but coherent, is composed of a muted grey and gold gouache, and there are only the slightest indications of facial features. The protest sign this figure holds up is composed of the same grey-gold gouache, but it also depicts a detailed, three-dimensional portrait of Artaud’s face. If we think of this figure and the sign as a representation of Artaud’s capacity to represent himself in multiple forms, then this first image of Codex Artaud III reveals the connection between multiple self-representations and the capacity to participate in protest. Spero connects this doubled representation of Artaud to victimisation and physical pain. To the right of the protest sign, she has reproduced a passage from Artaud’s writing that emblematises violence, pain, and the animality of the human flesh which, for him, civilisation sacrifices with cheap disregard: ‘Meat slaughtered with a hammer. Its blood extracted by stabs of a knife.’ The actions of Artaud’s statement are graphic and clear, but Spero’s typed representations of them are not. Repeated, fragmented, and crossed-out, echoing beyond the poster like fading voices, these textual obfuscations enact a process of finding Artaud’s graphic descriptions of physical violence and making it a figure for the struggles of the woman artist. The scattered words evoke a search for the strength to represent the violence that Artaud, though tortured by pain, felt sanctioned to express in words. Subsequent images in Codex Artaud III dramaticise the poles of strength and victimisation that Artaud lived out in his writing. To the right of this protest sign is a large shape similar to that of an ‘H.’ It is outlined with a thick line of bright yellow paint, which itself is outlined in black. A straight line splits this ‘H’ shape in two and on the left half, an image of a muscled, bronze,

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and sharply contoured arm bent at the elbow, reaches up into the yellow border. This arm evokes a defiant strength that is underscored by the equally strong and defined shape within which it appears. To the right of the ‘H’ shape, Spero has placed typed passages from Artaud’s experience of electroshock therapy. These passages are typed in legible blocks, and they are moving evocations of losing himself to this violence: ‘I/ anticipated each new treat/ment with despair/ since I knew/ that I would lose consc/iousness once more.’ From the side of those passages is another arm. Spero has painted this arm with a greenish white, and it also has a sharp outline. The arm hangs down to the right, and between its fingers is a string. On the end of the string is a small head placed on a gravestone. Spero has written on this gravestone in painted letters (not typewritten text) Artaud’s description of ‘Madam Death’: a figure who ‘since the/ age of ages has been sounding the/ depth of her dead woman’s column/ her dead woman’s anal column.’ This grotesque and deathly inscription of a ‘dead woman’s anal column’ is set in contrast to ‘this century’ which ‘no/ longer understands fecal poetry.’ This anal cavity is also a space of burial for ‘the corpse … of her abolished/ selves.’ Artaud’s misogyny is clearly on display. The multiple selves of a woman, which we can translate into the capacity to create forms of otherness and self-differentiation, have been ‘abolished,’ buried inside her anal cavity. Artaud exploits the idea that women are barred from anal aggression, and makes the defiled image of a woman the source of ‘fecal poetry’ to underscore the deeper insult of her defilement. Codex Artaud III demonstrates that this burial and defilement are the ground of Artaud’s protests against the cruelty of electroshock therapy. Indeed, the gravestone with the head on top of it, upon which Artaud’s depiction of ‘Madam Death’ has been inscribed, is similar in size and colour to the protest sign. The gravestone is a distorted mirror of the images with which Codex Artaud III begins. Spero exposes Artaud’s depiction of a woman collapsed into a corpse and made into a container of bodily waste, relegated to the work of containing the abject and impeded from the language of the external world. Visualising protest, Codex Artaud reflects upon the historical period from which it emerged, which was dense with insurgent acts that challenged the power of state aggression. Student walkouts, shutdown strikes, and anti-war protests proliferated, writing the cultural landscape with demands for radical change. Significant among these protests was the Women’s General Strike. Also known as the Women’s Strike for Equality, this National Organization of Women (NOW)-sponsored protest took place in various US cities on 26 August 1970 to mark the 50th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote. At the heart of this strike was the intention to make visible the centrality of women’s work to the national economy.50 Friedan proposed that women ‘doing menial chores in the offices as secretaries put the covers on their typewriters … and the telephone operators unplug their switchboards,

Writing the drives in Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud

the waitresses stop waiting, cleaning women stop cleaning … .’51 The strike was also imagined to extend into the private spaces of the home, interrupting the affective and reproductive labour that sustains it. The Women’s General Strike and Codex Artaud are distinct forms of protest. A direct demand for equality, the first took place on the streets of American cities and was orchestrated to make the material conditions of women’s lives visible. The other was composed in Spero’s studio, emphasises aesthetic complexity, and creates an extended picture of a psychic underworld that moves unpredictably between visibility and invisibility. It is important to situate the Women’s General Strike in relationship to Codex Artaud in order to see them as interrelated parts of the same project: claiming aggression and the capacities for multiple self-representations it makes possible. A protest such as the Women’s General Strike, which gave women permission to visibly articulate their demands for change, could help create spaces (both imaginary and actual) for women to create works of art such as Codex Artaud. In turn, Codex Artaud could deepen the demands articulated through a protest such as the Women’s General Strike, as it too offered women a new array of texts and images through which women could recognise themselves. On different registers, feminist protest and art were rewriting the imaginary conditions in which women were allowed to appear. Through its counterspectacles, the women of the General Strike were defying the imperative that women conform to the sign of woman as passive and subordinate. In addition to the concrete political demands – the repeal of anti-abortion laws; the establishment of community-controlled 24-hour child care centres; equal education and employment opportunities – the women created circus-like, over-the-top performances designed to grab the eye and challenge the ‘picture’ of woman in the American imagination.52 In New York City, several protestors chained themselves to giant typewriters. Women smashed coffee cups to show their resistance to what Heidi Hartmann identified in 1976 as ‘occupational segregation.’53 And of course there were statements on protest signs, the texts of feminist protest.54 In one photograph, a placard reads: ‘Oppressed Women: Don’t Cook Dinner! Starve a Rat Today!’ Another placard displays eschatological humor. ‘Repent, Male Chauvinists, Your World is Coming to an End.’ These declarations were attempts to create an atmosphere of threat.55 No doubt people who saw the photographs featuring these placards were shocked by the fact that white women were holding them. The signs are evidence that women were not only capable of anger but turning language back on the ideological forces that would keep women silenced. Indeed, the expectation that women silence their voices and stifle their aggressions transformed into the ground upon which feminist demands became visible and audible. Deploying an unsettling combination of humour and anger, women demonstrated they could reject the imperative to compose images of themselves that serve the

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needs of others. Staging this rejection meant seizing the aggression post-war US culture denied them and deflecting accusations of monstrosity wielded whenever women’s aggression reached beyond its sanctioned confines. The art world had its own forms of feminist activism, of which Spero became a vital part. Both Spero and her husband Leon Golub participated in artists’ protests against the escalating war in Vietnam.56 They were members of the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC), a group of artists formed to pressure art institutions to announce their opposition to the Vietnam war. Spero stated she only attended AWC meetings occasionally, as men dominated the conversations: ‘The men were very outspoken in their complaints. But the women artists were getting an even rawer deal … I had three kids at home still. Then I heard of something that really rang a bell: W.A.R. (Women Artists in Revolution).’57 WAR was a group of feminist artists, critics, and activists (some came from the radical group Red Stockings) who had separated from the Art Workers’ Coalition to address the challenges women faced in the art world. In 1971, Spero joined the Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists, a group that included Lucy R. Lippard and Faith Ringgold. One of this group’s initial goals was to increase the representation of women artists in the Whitney Annual of 1970. (Only 4 per cent of the artists in the exhibition were women.) The Ad Hoc Committee started the ‘Women Now’ demonstrations, regular protests outside the Whitney Museum to demand equal representation in the arts.58 The emphasis the Ad-Hoc Committee placed on institutional intervention was matched by their attention to creating feminist archives. With artist Joyce Kozloff, Spero created the RIP-OFF FILE (1972): a Xeroxed ‘dossier’ of ‘rip-offs, put-downs, and discriminations’ that the women experienced in the art world.59 Spero and Kozloff sent eight hundred women in the art world letters requesting information about their experiences with discrimination. They received a large number of responses that attested to sexist comments, unprofessional hiring practices, and blatant dismissals by galleries and museums. One woman wrote anonymously of her experience teaching for fifteen years in an art school: ‘My general experience was that as long as one played pretty girl and kept one’s mouth shut, one could get along but never reach the top.’60 Spero writes about meeting a man who committed to organising an exhibition of her War Paintings (1966–1970) – a series of visceral paintings that protest the masculinisation of the Vietnam War – but never replied to her enquiries: ‘Many months went by and I never heard from him. I sent him a letter of inquiry, which remained unanswered. A year or so later, I sent him an angry letter. Again unanswered.’61 Spero brought the theme of unanswered letters into Codex Artaud. The momentum created by WAR and the Ad Hoc Committee developed into the AIR (Artist-in-Residence) gallery, an all-women cooperative founded in 1971 and located in SoHo, New York. Created to combat the exclusion of women in contemporary art, it was on the walls of AIR that Codex Artaud

Writing the drives in Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud

had its 1973 debut.62 Spero’s choice to display her work in AIR gallery underscores the importance of institutional spaces in which feminist art’s address to other women can be sustained. In this sense, the AIR gallery mirrored Codex Artaud. Both were animated by the desire for women to represent themselves in multiple forms and create collective arenas in which other women can reflect those representations back to each other. Finding the voice of aggression

Codex Artaud’s claim to aggression was the outcome of a long process – a battle, really – that Spero fought during the 1950s and 1960s on multiple fronts. The conflation of woman with motherhood, and the repressive silencing that conflation entails, was one battleground. The aesthetic dictates and gendered hierarchies of Abstract Expressionism was another. Reading the artwork that Spero produced in the 1950s and 1960s, we can follow Spero discovering how text and writing could serve as tools for combating the interrelated ways women are coerced into denying their capacities to use aggression as a force to create change. Spero’s sculpture Mummified (1950) attests to the silencing the conflation of woman and mother implies. Mummified is a portrait bust, but facial features are only roughly implied63 (see Figure 3.5). Deliberately unfinished, the sculpture is composed of plaster, string, newspaper, and a nylon stocking. The thick and white plaster announces the sculpture’s relationship to white femininity, and the nylon represents its commodified restraints. Invented by DuPont in 1939, nylon stockings were vigorously marketed to and embraced by women in the pre- and post-war years. Mummified shows that Spero was not an enthused consumer. She swirls the nylon stocking up from the figure’s neck so it covers her face and then stuffs it into her mouth. The pun in the title – mommy/ mummy – suggests deadening perceptions of motherhood are the source of this silencing. Mummified is a portrait of a woman without the language to identify repressive feminine ideals. It reflects the world Friedan delineates in The Feminine Mystique (1963), with which Spero’s life aligns, to some degree.64 While her commitment to her artwork put her far away from the American suburbs – she lived precariously in New York City lofts and on shoestring budgets – Spero fought against the assumption that a woman could not really be an artist, and would not have much to say if she was. Spero speaks of the fact that though she received ‘autonomous’ recognition in Chicago, once she married Golub and became a mother, in the eyes of others, her work disappeared: ‘The stigma of motherhood had stuck … My work was virtually and sometimes conspicuously ignored in the 1950s.’65 The habit of conflating a woman with the roles of wife and mother manifested in a review of an exhibition of Spero’s work at

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the Chicago Avant Arts Gallery titled ‘Art Exhibition by Housewife Opens in Area.’66 Mummified evokes the silencing implied by such a reduction. The figure is muted by what Friedan identifies as the ‘problem that has no name,’ wrapped up in a limited notion of white maternal femininity, buried by the imperative to produce a beautiful image of her body from which the comforts of a domestic spaces will radiate.67 In ‘Creation and Pro-Creation,’ Spero implies that the comforts women were expected to give to their children contribute to this imperative. She offers a telling anecdote that underscores how central the image of a beautiful mother was to the idea of the nuclear family. Spero writes that when composing her War Series (1966–1970), scatological paintings full of spewing phalluses and bleeding bodies, a scathing critique of war and masculinisation, she worried she might embarrass her sons. Later, Spero learned they were more concerned that she ‘didn’t appear or dress in more conventional or conservative feminine attire.’68 Nancy Spero, Mummified, 1950. © The The expectation that an American Nancy Spero and Leon Golub mother should make a reassuring Foundation for the Arts. Licensed by image of herself underscores the Vaga New York/DACS London/Courtesy argument Friedan makes in The of Galerie Lelong, New York. Feminine Mystique. Her chapter ‘The Happy Housewife Heroine’ is devoted to the production of images in post-war American culture, and in it she delineates the composite image of woman offered in the pages of McCalls magazine: ‘The image of woman that emerges from this big, pretty magazine is young and frivolous, almost childlike; passive; gaily content in a world of bedroom and kitchen, sex, babies, and home.’69 Though Friedan only focuses on the white upper-class women who became referents for the

Writing the drives in Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud

feminine mystique – severely limiting the scope of her feminist address – The Feminine Mystique is less about actual women than the images exchanged across the post-war American imaginary for the sake of corporate profits. Here Friedan creates a tableau of women ‘liv[ing] the image’ of the beautiful woman and one of the domestic products with which she became associated.70 ‘Millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures of the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands goodbye in front of the picture window … smiling as they ran the new kitchen waxer over the spotless kitchen floor.’71 Women who possessed the right skin colour, sexuality, and resources were able to produce the ‘pretty pictures’ Friedan identifies, and such women were able to garner the recognition other women were cruelly denied, but this recognition was founded upon a repressive idealisation Spero’s work exposes. Ten years after Mummified, Spero produced Les Anges, Merde, Fuck You (1960) (see Figure 3.6). Les Anges is a meditation on motherhood, and the beginning of Spero’s efforts to make writing a formal feature of her work. In Les Anges, Spero has covered paper in uneven swathes of murky black ink that she scratched away. Near the centre of the painting are the small faces of three disembodied heads – prefiguring those that appear throughout Codex Artaud – that look like ghosts or furies. Spero has marked the contours of their profiles in simple lines and then filled them with white gouache with tints of icy blue. The figure in the middle sticks out a small red tongue from its wide-open mouth. Little monsters with unseeing eyes, these figures evoke the movement of aggression, and Spero represents their traces with lighter swathes that trail behind them. Beneath these heads, in calligraphic script, Spero has written the three words announced in her title. They are the brightest parts of a purposefully dark drawing. The white gouache links to Cixous’s call for women to ‘write in white ink’ – the imaginative writing of breast milk – as a means for women to claim the maternal goods for themselves.72 The words in white ink do not emit from the figures’ mouths, but float beneath them. The calligraphic strokes highlight their unruly movement and touch upon their tenderly rendered vulnerability. ‘Les Anges’ is a term of affection, the French name for angels or children. By contrast, ‘fuck you’ is hostility’s best-known epithet. ‘Merde’ is a scatological shout, but also circles back to ‘Les Anges’ as it echoes with mère, the French word for mother. Mignon Nixon reads Les Anges as a depiction of maternal ambivalence – an uncomfortable psychic space in which mothers’ feelings for their children blur beyond love and tenderness and tip into hate and rage.73 In the psychoanalytic literature on mothering, these unpleasant feelings remain, for the most part, unseen and unspoken. Even the work of Melanie Klein, so attentive to the child’s rage against the mother, does not address the mother’s capacities to hate her child.74 The dark mood of Les Anges is a painterly evocation of that

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3.6 

Nancy Spero, Les Anges, Merde, Fuck You, 1960. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts. Licensed by Vaga New York/DACS London/ Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York.

hatred as well as the restraints placed on representations of maternal ambivalence that trouble ideal pictures of maternal love.75 This is what Les Anges expresses frustration about: not just the care children require, but the moral chokehold images of motherhood have over women. In Les Anges, Spero writes her signature to resist the erasure inherent to such images and make the ownership of her work clear. The signature is barely discernible in the right hand corner of the drawing, an index of the artist’s hand and presence. Echoing the words written in white gouache, Spero’s signature testifies to a burial in motherhood as well as the effort to emerge from the dark underside of its suffocating idealisation.76 For Spero, what compounded the impact of maternal femininity’s repressive idealisation was the hegemony of Abstract Expressionism, otherwise known as the New York School of Painting. Spero’s Homage to New York (I Do Not Challenge) (1958) depicts this school of painting and the prestige it commanded77

Writing the drives in Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud

(see Figure 3.7). Produced two years before Spero and Golub left Chicago and moved to Paris, Homage shows that Spero was resentful that her work, dedicated to the figurative tradition and produced in Chicago, was consistently overlooked by the art world powers consolidated in New York. With its garishly bright streaks of yellow, green, orange, and pink oil paint, Homage is a challenge to the artists featured regularly in Art News.78 The painted gravestone evokes their power and declares the death of their movement.79 Composed with calligraphic gestures of muffled rage, there is not one part of Homage that is free from bitter irony.80 It is more death wish than homage, and the statement she writes in paint at the top – ‘I do not challenge’ – is obviously not true. With this declaration, Spero makes irony a subtle weapon. She also truncates the artists’ names into initials and then lines them up in boring vertical rows. She is reductively collecting them all in a phallic gravestone. By contrast, Spero has represented her full name: ‘Nancy’ appears on the left of the gravestone, and ‘Spero’ on the right. Above each part of her name are two heads with rabbit ears sticking out their pink tongues. They are ‘message bearers,’ Nixon explains, that display the defiance animating Spero’s signature.81 The calligraphy in Homage also resists the aesthetic tenets of the New York School, particularly Clement Greenberg’s concepts of pure opticality and medium specificity. Articulated through a highly masculinised rhetoric of heroism, these concepts made Abstract Expressionism the dominant art form of the post-war period. Pure opticality and medium specificity are intimately linked. The first names modern paintings’ capacity to reflect only upon vision; the second describes artwork that meditates upon the specific characteristic of an artistic medium. Both concepts are subtended by an idea of artistic exclusivity.82 According to Greenberg, the best artwork will testify to a struggle with the limits of the visual medium, abandon pretences to mimesis, make the picture plane increasingly flat, and delve further into brushstroke, colour, and shape. Pure opticality in particular aligns with spectacle and its emphasis on immediate visual consumption. Justifying the excision of language and literature from the picture plane, pure opticality and medium specificity occluded avant-garde traditions such as Dadaism and Surrealism, which did not value the purities of medium or vision and interrupted the field of vision with textual fragments. With its painted letters and exclamations, Homage to New York refutes the purity of Greenberg’s concepts, and argues that such concepts had been wielded for the purposes of solidifying the gendered hierarchies of post-war art. There is one painting in particular that announces the gender hierarchies informing Abstract Expressionism, Willem de Kooning’s Woman, I (1950–52). Considered an ‘icon of misogyny,’ Woman, I is one of the rare depictions of the female form in the canon of Abstract Expressionist paintings.83 De Kooning’s image of the woman’s body – placed in strong vertical stance, rendered in swathes of greys and whites – is almost wholly flattened to the surface of the

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Nancy Spero, Homage to New York (I Do Not Challenge), 1958. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts. Licensed by Vaga New York/DACS London/ Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York.

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picture plane. The painting articulates a desire to subject the female form to pure opticality and conflate her with the medium of paint. She embodies a tension between figuration and abstraction, as the painting portrays a suspended moment before she dissolves into the materiality of paint. Viewers are likely to focus upon the woman’s face and breasts, which are both rendered in white, grey, and black. Her face is composed of two wide, staring eyes and a very tense, toothy grin that seethes with menacing anger. Her breasts are large and bulbous, it looks as though they have been hollowed out from within and then roughly outlined by two circular forms. The woman’s arms are straight vertical shapes that dangle from her broad shoulders and liquefy into distorted, almost hook-like hands. Her legs are bubble-gum pink and at the end of her legs de Kooning has left shapes that look like black high-heeled shoes. Woman, I exemplifies the oppositional syntax of gendered subjectivity that informs Abstract Expressionism – one that underscores narratives of men’s heroic struggles to master the physicality of matter, which women come to signify through their assigned otherness. Michael Leja explains that in Abstract Expressionism, ‘[w]omen often symbolized the powerful force fields that had to be negotiated by the conscious, rational part of the subject – gendered as masculine – in this quest for balance, harmony, and resolution of conflict.’84 The fact that they were imagined as ‘force fields’ that male artists wanted control over underscores the fact that the men of Abstract Expressionism were granted access to subjectivities with a wide and complex range that women were expected to help sustain. And yet, the figure in Woman, I is not wholly vanquished. She resists dissolving into matter or abstraction, and some read Woman, I as a response to the ‘newly empowered if not fully liberated American woman.’85 In 1954, de Kooning added another painting to his Woman series. This time, however, the figure was not anonymous. It was Marilyn Monroe, the woman who became the dominant image of white femininity in post-war American culture. De Kooning’s Marilyn Monroe (1954) does not depict a struggle with a monstrous figure. Instead, the painting is composed of loose, round shapes suffused in a warm glow, evoking an almost cartoony sexual availability. Together, the two neat triangles of orange-red paint that compose Monroe’s friendly lips, her slightly unhinged eyes that are thick with mascara, and the curvy bounce of her yellow hair (which rhymes, in colour and form, with the curve of her arm and breast) compose an image that is far more sweet than threatening. This painting does not provoke fear, but allays it. Part of the fascination with Monroe was that her image projected a malleability that emerges from the desire to ‘offer herself,’ in Richard Dyer’s words, to the pleasures of the (typically masculine) viewer.86 Though there are readings of Monroe that inflect her image with complexity, she emblematises the fantasy of hyper-femininity.87 By the time de Kooning embarked upon Marilyn Monroe,

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her image had become ubiquitous. In 1953, the films Niagra, Gentleman Prefer Blondes, and How to Marry a Millionaire, all star vehicles for Monroe, premiered in American theatres. Also 1953 was the inaugural year for Playboy. On the cover of the first issue, Monroe’s arm is stretched high into a friendly wave, and her wide, lipstick-drawn smile invites viewers into the magazine’s more revealing pages. After 1953, portrayals of Monroe became cultural wallpaper, the pervasive images of white femininity feminists in the late 1960s and 1970s fought hard to contest.88 Such a fight became possible through collective protests, which were composed through women addressing and corresponding with other women. As her participation in the AIR gallery suggests, Spero worked to create forms and spaces in which such calls and correspondences solidified women’s sense of belonging. With Codex Artaud we see the aesthetic innovations and feminist insights that can erupt from even the hint of this belonging and the mirrors of recognition it offers. The next and final section of this chapter analyses a letter Spero wrote to Lippard that attests to the galvanising power of this recognition and then returns to Codex Artaud, Codex Artaud VIII and IX specifically, which re-present Artaud’s aggressive and desperate correspondence with his editor. Spero’s portrayal of this correspondence offers important feminist insights about the demand for recognition. Spero’s typed Bulletin font figures prominently in this reading, as it underscores the fact that she was not stepping into Artaud’s position by creating Codex Artaud, but was maintaining a hold on his access to aggression while detaching from his misogyny. Typing absence

A letter Spero wrote to Lucy R. Lippard in October 1971 actively declares war on the sexism of the art world while also attending to writing as a textual form that shapes the production of meaning (see Figure 3.8). After the salutation ‘DEAR LUCY,’ the letter consists of one sentence, ‘THE ENEMIES OF WOMEN’S LIBERATION IN THE ARTS WILL BE CRUSHED,’ typed in Bulletin font.89 Following this statement, Spero types ‘LOVE’ and signs her first name (Nancy) in blue ink. A gesture of intimate camaraderie, this letter is a declaration of love for the sake of war. It inscribes their shared certainty about a common enemy. At the same time, the Bulletin font makes the letter look like a telegram; it creates the distance that contrasts sharply with the intimacy of Spero’s handwritten signature. There is a paradox here – the problem of declaring war against those who have already declared war on you. Does the feminist claim to aggression simply take aggression out of patriarchy’s hands and then wield it in the same way? The letter to Lippard raises this question while also marking the transition between Spero’s use of her own handwriting and the Bulletin font featured in

Writing the drives in Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud

Nancy Spero, Letter to Lucy R. Lippard, 29 October 1971. Lucy R. Lippard Papers, 1930s to 2010, bulk, 1960–1990. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Codex Artaud. Just before writing to Lippard, Spero created the Artaud Paintings (1969–1970), a series of ink, gouache, and watercolour images that prefigure Codex Artaud. The images in the Artaud Paintings are accompanied by passages from Artaud’s writing, which Spero has written in calligraphic strokes of paint

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that in their looseness and roughness suggest a strong identification with Artaud’s work. The Bulletin font signals a more ambivalent relationship to Artaud’s writing. Certainly Spero’s choice to type his words is a form of engagement. It entailed reading and selecting from his work, typing passages, and then placing them in dynamic configurations with her painted figures. At the same time, typing Artaud’s words was a way to create distance and evoke disidentification. The words become less physically and emotionally expressive. Re-presented as typewritten text, Artaud’s aggressive language becomes detached, and Spero defies his authoritarian demand to become fully present to himself in language, to feel himself viscerally in the act of writing without any loss or onotological compromises. With the Bulletin font, Spero makes it clear that she is citing Artaud’s words, not embodying them as her own. The writing becomes a form of citation in the sense that Judith Butler gives the term, an attribution and deflection that reveals the fact that the power of Artaud’s words are actually dependent on their representation by others.90 The detachment implied by citation is crucial to claiming the aggressions that Artaud indulges in so freely and that women are punished for wielding. Spero typed his work to inflect Artaud’s aggressions with her own feminist desires. The significance of Spero’s choice to incorporate Bulletin font into Codex Artaud deepens when we understand that the typewriter is a historical object deployed to reinforce assumptions about women, femininity, subservience, and writing. Writing with the Bulletin typewriters that she described as ‘big old monsters,’ Spero allowed herself to distance herself from the aggressions patriarchal culture has claimed for itself and doled out to women in distorted forms.91 The movement Codex Artaud enacts – between identifying with Artaud’s words and detaching from them – becomes part of the work’s textual address. Codex Artaud is attempting to discover ways of addressing women that do not rely upon one sign of woman and move between presence and absence, sameness and difference, intimacy and detachment. The fact that Spero is not just replicating Artaud’s aggression, but rewriting it with absence contributes to this project. We can see the importance of this rewriting in Spero’s citation of the exchange of letters between Artaud and Jacques Rivière, the editor of La Nouvelle Revue Française, a literary journal to which Artaud submitted his poems in 1923. Because of their lack of coherence and harmony, Rivière rejects the poems but wants to meet the man who composed them, and so begins a correspondence that reveals the extremities of Artaud’s imagination. In letters to Rivière, Artaud laments the formlessness of his thinking, which the process of writing makes explicit: ‘My thought abandons me at every level. From the simple fact of thought to the external fact of its materialization in words.’92 Since Artaud sees

Writing the drives in Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud

his thoughts as manifestations of his being, this experience of abandonment is consequential. Artaud is not interested in whether his poems are good or bad, but wants – demands – confirmation of their ‘absolute acceptability, of their literary existence.’93 To say that Artaud was a difficult correspondent would be an understatement. At one point, when Rivière fails to promptly write back, Artaud composes an angry letter: ‘My letter deserves at least a reply. Return, sir, my letters and manuscripts.’94 It is clear Artaud imagines Rivière, a figure of literary authority, as a thief who prevents the realisation of his work. At the same time, Rivière becomes a mirror that allows Artaud to see the contours and depths of his vision. In a letter he wrote on 6 June 1924, Artaud beautifully renders his aesthetic ideal: the writer effortlessly possessing the coherence of his thoughts as they align with language and express his soul. But a ‘superior and evil will’ intervenes, and there is an aggressive splitting of ‘word and image.’95 Spero placed typed re-presentations of Artaud’s letters to Rivière throughout Codex Artaud. In the last section of Codex Artaud VIII, a horizontal collage that is dense with typewritten text and has only a small smattering of images, Spero repeats one of Artaud’s desperate demands, typed out in four separate lines separated by typographic marks – ‘TELL ME IF YOU RECEIVED MY LAST LETTER–ARTAUD’ (see Figure 3.9). Inscribing his demand for recognition, this desperate plea has been placed in proximity to descriptions of intense psychic and physical anguish. Artaud embodies the pain of rejection, and if we recall Spero’s own testimony in the RIP-OFF FILE, we know that the obsessive reiteration of Artaud’s demands is an important part of Codex Artaud’s feminist argument. In the next panel, Codex Artaud IX, Spero demonstrates that the demand for recognition entails feminised forms of sexual submission (see Figures 3.10 and 3.11). Spero has pasted an image of a body in a supine position – arms splayed wide and legs wide open – just below a typed representation of Artaud’s vengeful denunciations of Rivière: ‘Under the crushed bitter almond is the corpse of a/ dead man, this corpse was named Jacques Rivière.’ Placing this image under Artaud’s angry address, Spero shows how women and sexual submission are figured within an angry rivalry among men. Feminisation is the best revenge, and an image of a sexually supine woman fills in the gaps of silence and misrecognition. Spero’s artwork splits open the patriarchal imaginary so women can see themselves beyond the assignment to embody the passivity masculinity must transcend. Asserting the presence of women, creating spaces in which their voices are heard, and demanding recognition are certainly part of this fight, but as Spero’s Codex Artaud demonstrates, something more complicated emerged out of the feminist claim to presence: not insisting upon it, but abandoning oneself to gaps and absences instead. By making the Artaud–Rivière correspondence

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Nancy Spero, Codex Artaud VIII, 1971. © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts. Licensed by Vaga New York/DACS London/ Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York. ‘Tell me if you received my last letter.’ Antonin Artaud

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Nancy Spero, Codex Artaud IX, 1971. © 1971 Museum Associates, LACMA. Licensed by Art Resource, New York.

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part of Codex Artaud, Spero opened the possibility of claiming aggression without mimetically repeating the ways it has been deployed to sustain a masculinist culture premised on the value of domination. It is compelling to imagine the viewers of Codex Artaud at the AIR gallery in 1973 reading these letters and reflecting upon how their aggressive declarations connect to historically entrenched expectations that women compose images of subordination and craft words of submission. And yet, by focusing so closely on the failures of that correspondence, the work also created opportunities for dis-identifying with Artaud’s crazed demands. Seeing the obsessions of his demands could have provoked viewers to relinquish the demand for patriarchal recognition, which the AIR Nancy Spero, Codex Artaud IX, 1971, Gallery was created to inspire. And detail. Los Angeles County Museum of Art © 1971 Museum Associates, LACMA. by exposing how Artaud makes an Licensed by Art Resource, New York. image of a woman close the gap of ‘Under the crushed bitter almond is the silence and the anxiety it provokes, corpse of a dead man. This corpse was Codex Artaud can be read as a model named Jacques Rivière at the start of a for also relinquishing the demands strange life: my own.’ for better and fully present images ‘Jacques Rivière rejected my poems, but he didn’t reject the letters by which I of women and instead register the destroyed them. It has always struck me as potential of representations that do curious that he died shortly after not offer immediate recognition but publishing those letters.’ pursue instead the gaps and absences inherent to language. This is the textual address of Codex Artaud: a call for women to make the absences of language into sites where the other woman can come into view. Paradoxically, it has only been through the frame of feminist collaborations that women have been able to creatively engage with such absences. The writings of Solanas, to which Chapter 4 turns, demonstrate just how challenging it is to imagine a feminism that engages with absence and relinquishes the demand for presence when women are denied the collective forms that allow them to fight against the punitive deployments of the sign woman.

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Notes 1 Hélène Cixous, ‘Spero Dissidances,’ Poetry in Painting: Writing on Contemporary Arts and Aesthetics, Marta Segarra and Joana Masó (eds) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 21–30: 27. 2 Mignon Nixon, ‘Spero’s Curses,’ October 122 (Fall 2007), 3–30: 26. 3 Jacques Derrida has written about Artaud’s continuously failed attempts to make language and writing present to himself through speech. For Derrida, Artaud does not naively presume the metaphysics of the voice and the flesh, but by roughly inhabiting and voicing its promises – ‘the existence of speech that is a body’ promises – he sets it ablaze and exposes his failures. Jacques Derrida, ‘La parole soufflé,’ in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 168–195: 174. See also, Derrida, ‘The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation,’ in Writing and Difference, 232–250. 4 English translations of Artaud’s work were often placed on the walls adjacent to the artwork. 5 In her interview with Jo Anna Isaak, Spero discusses the papers she used for Codex Artaud: ‘I used these archival art papers that were around the studio and glued them together. They are all different types of paper. The first and fourth piece are the same, the second is French vellum, a tracing paper.’ See ‘Jo Anna Isaak in Conversation with Nancy Spero,’ in Nancy Spero, Jon Bird, Jo Anna Isaak, Sylvère Lotringer (eds) (London: Phaidon, 2006), 8–37: 15. 6 In ‘Dancing to a Different Tune,’ Jon Bird discusses the formal and material dimensions of Spero’s engagement with Artaud’s writing and links it to Conceptual Art, which he sees in the ‘extended format of the scrolls and the relationship they establish between the viewer and the work.’ Jon Bird, ‘Dancing to a Different Tune,’ in Nancy Spero, Jon Bird et al (eds), 40–97: 48. 7 Ibid., 55. 8 Nancy Spero, ‘Statement of Plans #3,’ c.1972 reprinted in Codex Spero: Nancy Spero – Selected Writings and Interviews, 1950–2008, Roel Arkesteijn (ed.) (Amsterdam: de Appel, Roma Publications, 2008), 80. 9 Jacques Derrida, ‘To Unsense the Subjectile,’ in The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 59–148: 64–65. 10 Nancy Spero, ‘Creation and Pro-creation,’ Spero’s contribution to the forum ‘Motherhood, Art, and Apple Pie,’ in M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism, Susan Bee and Mira Schor (eds) (1992. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 297–300: 298. 11 Ibid., 299. 12 Pamela Wye provides an overview of the tongue and its meaning in Spero’s work. She argues that Spero’s tongue ‘embodies a woman’s right to expression without, as a result, her being perceived as, or being thrust into the role of an aberration, a monster, a harpy, or any other negative connotations.’ Pamela Wye, ‘Nancy Spero: Speaking in Tongues,’ in M/E/A/N/I/N/G, Bee and Schor (eds), 405–417: 415. 13 Christopher Lyon, Nancy Spero: The Work (Munich: Prestel, 2010), 140.

Writing the drives in Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud

14 The focus here on doubling in Codex Artaud is meant to resonate with Artaud’s ‘The Theatre and its Double,’ in Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, Susan Sontag (ed.) (1938. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 215–276. 15 Jacques Lacan, ‘Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,’ in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (1977. New York: Norton, 2002), 10–30. 16 Ibid., 29. 17 Ibid., 30. 18 Ibid., 13. 19 Cowie, ‘Woman as Sign,’ 118. 20 Including Julia Kristeva, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and many others. See Antonin Artaud: A Critical Reader, Edward Scheer (ed.) (New York: Routledge, 2004). 21 Julia Kristeva, ‘The Subject in Process,’ trans. Patrick ffrench, in The Tel Quel Reader, Patrick ffrench and Roland-François Mark (eds) (1977. London: Routledge, 1998), 133–178: 144. 22 Ibid., 146. 23 Ibid. 24 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, James Strachey (ed. and trans.), vol. 7 (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 151. See also Griselda Pollock, ‘The Visual Poetics of Shame: A Feminist Reading of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905),’ in Shame and Sexuality: Psychoanalysis and Visual Culture, Claire Pajaczkowska and Ivan Ward (eds) (London: Routledge, 2008), 109–127: 124–125. 25 Freud, Three Essays, 219. 26 Ibid., 207. 27 Ibid., 221. Original emphasis. 28 Ibid., 207, 197. 29 Ibid., 221. 30 Ibid., 177. 31 Freud writes that smut refers to what is ‘common to both sexes … what is excremental in the most basic sense,’ and is therefore linked to that period in psychic life when ‘what is sexual and what is excremental are barely or not at all distinguished.’ Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, J. Strachey (ed. and trans.) vol. 8, 1–247: 97–98. Original emphasis. 32 Ibid., 98–99. 33 Ibid., 100. 34 Freud, Three Essays, 168. 35 Ibid. 36 This formulation is indebted to Teresa de Lauretis, Freud’s Drive: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 60. 37 Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (1970. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 23. Original emphasis. 38 de Lauretis, Freud’s Drive, 29. 39 Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa,’ trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1.4 (Summer 1976), 875–893: 875. Original emphasis. Spero’s work has been described

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as peinture féminine, and Spero would later incorporate Cixous’s writing into her artwork. See Bird, ‘Dancing to a Different Tune,’ Nancy Spero, 46. 40 Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa,’ 887. 41 Ibid., 884. 42 Ibid., 885. 43 Ibid., 891. 44 Ibid., 876. 45 Cixous, ‘Spero Dissidances,’ 26. 46 Margit Rowell, Sylvère Lotringer, and Nancy Spero, ‘A Conversation with Nancy Spero,’ in Margit Rowell (ed.) Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper (New York: Museum of Modern Art/ Henry N. Abrahams, 1996), 137–139: 137. Spero’s son Phillip Golub had a sustained role as his mother’s translator. Spero put his translations on the gallery walls when Codex Artaud was first exhibited at the AIR Gallery in 1973. 47 Spero, ‘Antonin Artaud,’ c.1989 reprinted in Codex Artaud, Arkesteijn (ed.), 65. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Deidre Carmody, ‘General Strike by U.S. Women Urged to Mark 19th Amendment,’ New York Times (20 March 1970), 21. 51 qtd in ibid. 52 After reporting on Friedan’s contention that women are denied equality under the law, Carmody writes, ‘But mainly she and the majority of women in the liberation movement object to the general attitudes of society that picture[s] women as inferior to men.’ Carmody, ‘General Strike by U.S. Women.’ Added emphasis. 53 Heidi Hartmann, ‘Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation by Sex,’ Signs, special issue, ‘Women in the Workplace: The Implications of Occupational Segregation’ 1.3 (Spring 1976), 137–169. 54 Linda Charlton, ‘Women March Down Fifth in Equality Drive,’ New York Times (27 August 1970), 1, 30. 55 On 7 May 1970, Freidan stated: ‘I warn you … if you have not sent this amendment to the states by Aug. 26 [for ratification] we are going to track you down – in your offices, on the beaches, in the mountains, wherever you are. And we’re going to stay with you until you do.’ ‘Congress is Warned of Feminist Strike,’ New York Times (8 May 1970), 27. 56 Spero and Golub were members of the ‘Artists and Writers Protest’ group, and in 1967 contributed to the Collage of Indignation (10’ x 6’), which was exhibited at New York University and Columbia University. Christopher Lyon rightly notes that the vast scale of this collectively produced collage foresees the large-scale work that Spero produced in the 1970s and its emphasis on social protest. Lyon, Nancy Spero, 74. 57 ‘Jo Anna Isaak in Conversation with Nancy Spero,’ in Nancy Spero, Bird et al. (eds), 19. 58 Jeanne Siegel, ‘Nancy Spero: Woman as Protagonist,’ an interview with Spero, in Art Talk: The Early 80s, Siegel (ed.) (New York: Da Capo Publishing, 1988), 257–266: 258. Spero articulated the group’s stance in ‘The Embattled Museum 2: The Whitney Museum and Women, 1970,’ an essay that has the passion of a manifesto: ‘A masculine grip continues to squeeze out the “misfits,” women, whose historical

Writing the drives in Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud

biological subordination is being re-enacted.’ Spero, ‘The Embattled Museum 2: The Whitney and Women, 1970,’ The Art Gallery Magazine 14.4 (January 1971), 26–27: 27. 59 Nancy Spero and Joyce Kozloff (eds), RIP-OFF FILE (New York: Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists, 1972) 1–8: 2. The full RIP-OFF FILE is reprinted in Codex Spero, Arkesteijn (ed.), 57–64, with the original page numbers. 60 Ibid., 3. 61 Ibid., 7. 62 See Spero, ‘Artists in Residence: The First Five Years. An interview with Corinne Robins, 1977,’ Womanart (Winter 1977/Spring 1978), 31, 36. Spero speaks of her engagement with the Art Works Coalition and Women Art Revolution and how they led to the establishment of the AIR gallery. 63 With its rough and chalky white form, Mummified alludes to the work of Jean Dubuffet, his Corps de Dames (1965) series in particular. Dubuffet was the champion of Art Brut. Spero encountered Dubuffet’s work in 1950, the year she was studying in Paris at the Atelier André Lhote. 64 In an interview published in Parachute in 1985, Spero states: ‘In 1961, I was a mother and a married woman, leading a kind of conventional life, except for the artwork, much of which was anarchic.’ ‘Defying the Death Machine: An Interview with Nicole Jolicoeur and Nell Tenhaff,’ in Codex Spero, Arkesteijn (ed.), 9–15: 9. 65 Spero, ‘Creation and Pro-Creation,’ 298. 66 Lyon, Nancy Spero, 27. 67 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, Kirsten Fermaglich and Lisa M. Fine (eds) (1963. New York: Norton, 2013), 9. 68 Spero, ‘Creation and Pro-Creation,’ 299. 69 Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 26–27. 70 Ibid., 45. 71 Ibid., 12. In her chapter ‘Feminist Killjoys,’ Sarah Ahmed argues that the ‘happy housewife’ Friedan delineated is a ‘public fantasy of happiness’ that ‘erases the signs of labor under the signs of happiness.’ Ahmed argues that underlying them is the idea that the housewife’s obligation is to ‘generate happiness by the very act of embracing this image’ (original emphasis). Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 50–87: 50, 53. 72 Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa,’ 881. Spero is doing something similar in Les Anges, but instead of working in a celebratory mode, she writes ‘in white ink’ from frustration about the expectation that mothers are always giving and self-erasing. 73 Nixon, ‘Spero’s Curses,’ 10–11. Writing about maternal ambivalence thirty-five years after Spero produced Les Anges, Rozsika Parker states: ‘the representation of ideal motherhood is still almost exclusively made up of self-abnegation, unstinting love, intuitive knowledge of nurturance and unalloyed pleasure in children.’ Rozsika Parker, Mother Love/ Mother Hate: The Power of Maternal Ambivalence (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), 22. 74 Susan Rubin Suleiman, ‘Writing and Motherhood,’ in The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether (eds) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 352–377: 355.

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75 Nixon writes: ‘The cultural repression of maternal ambivalence is so complete that maternal anger takes on, in this rare representation, the annihilating force of a maternal apocalypse.’ ‘Spero’s Curses,’ 9. 76 Suleiman argued that in the psychoanalytic theorisations of motherhood and creative enterprises, ‘Mothers don’t write; they are written.’ Suleiman, ‘Writing and Motherhood,’ 356. Original emphasis. 77 In 1959, Spero and Golub moved to Paris to escape the pervasive dominance of the New York School. Spero and Golub had lived in Chicago – outside the New York School’s orbit of prestige – and they both continued to work in the figurative tradition. For the references in Homage to New York, see ‘Jo Anna Isaak in Conversation with Nancy Spero,’ in Bird et al. (eds), 8–9. For an overview of how mainstream modernism, with its emphasis on pure opticality, contributed to the erasure of Spero’s work, see Buchloch, ‘Spero’s Other Traditions.’ 78 ‘Jo Anna Isaak in Conversation with Nancy Spero,’ in Nancy Spero, Bird et al. (eds), 8–9. 79 Cixous describes Homage to New York as: ‘A manifesto in the guise of a Farewell: at the very moment when Spero opens, the abstract expressionists are in power. A whole history of modern art stands erect in front of her and lays down the law.’ Cixous, ‘Spero’s Dissidences,’ 25. 80 The idea of a ‘calligraphy of rage’ comes from Catherine Lord, ‘Their Memory is Playing Tricks on Her: Notes Toward a Calligraphy of Rage,’ in WACK!, Butler and Mark (eds), 441–457. 81 Nixon draws upon Jacques Derrida’s ‘Signature, Event, Context’ to claim that Homage to New York ‘performs, but also alters, an ordinary function of first-person voice and of signature’ as it ‘declares her absence not only from the document she has signed – a document created for the express purpose of the existence of the author who inscribes it with her signature.’ Nixon, ‘Spero’s Curses,’ 4–5. 82 Clement Greenberg’s tenets of pure opticality and medium specificity are articulated in ‘Towards a Newer Laocoön,’ in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, Francis Frascina (ed.) (1940. New York: Routledge, 2000), 60–70. 83 For an overview of the feminist analyses of de Kooning’s Woman series, see Cornelia H. Butler, ‘The Woman Problem: On the Contemporaneity of de Kooning’s Women,’ in Willem de Kooning: Tracing the Figure, Butler and Peter Schimmel (eds), exhibition catalogue (Princeton: Princeton University Press for the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, 2002), 180–191. 84 Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 258. 85 Butler, ‘The Woman Problem,’ 187. 86 Richard Dyer, ‘Monroe and Sexuality,’ in Heavenly Bodies; Film Stars and Society (2nd edn. London: Routledge, 1996), 17–63: 49. 87 See Jacqueline Rose, ‘Respect,’ in Women in Dark Times (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), 100–135. 88 This focus on 1953 and Marilyn Monroe is indebted to Pollock’s ‘Killing Men and Dying Women,’ 233–239. In ‘Monroe and Sexuality,’ Richard Dyer discusses the importance of 1953 for Monroe’s career, and links it to the publication of the Kinsey report, in ‘Monroe and Sexuality,’ 25.

Writing the drives in Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud

89 Nancy Spero letter to Lucy R. Lippard, 29 October 1971, Lucy R. Lippard papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 90 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993), 12–16. 91 Lyon, Nancy Spero, 136. 92 Correspondence with Jacques Rivière (1923–1924), in Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, Susan Sontag (ed.) (1976. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 31. 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid., 38. 95 Ibid., 45.

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Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and the texts of aggression

‘Read my manifesto and it will tell you what I am.’ Valerie Solanas, statement after shooting Andy Warhol, qtd in the Village Voice.1

Spero chose Artaud as her anguished kin, but the monstrous figures and typewritten texts of Codex Artaud also corresponded with another writer, Valerie Solanas. Author of the infamous SCUM Manifesto, radical lesbian feminist, ill-fitting lurker who dirtied up the narcissistic sheen of Andy Warhol’s Factory with her butch-dyke persona, Solanas exemplifies the claim to aggression central to Codex Artaud and the period of feminist dissent from which it emerged. As Ellen E. Berry writes, Solanas gave ‘voice to the inchoate rage circulating at the time’ and ‘produced a genuine moment of recognition and affective resonance.’2 So it is no coincidence that Solanas helped put second-wave feminism into motion, mapped the militant edges of Women’s Liberation, and marks the distinctions between liberal and radical feminisms.3 In her vivid depiction of Solanas’s importance for feminism’s second wave, Catherine Lord writes that Solanas was ‘vortex, motive, standard bearer, and inspiration – not merely one angry woman but a distributed network of revolutionary fury.’4 Lord’s depiction of Solanas points to the collective force animating her iconicity; she draws attention to the fact that ‘Valerie Solanas’ is now an iconic assemblage of feminist affects and identifications.5 Informing Solanas’s iconicity is the fact that she bore the symbolic weight of what Victoria Hesford identifies as the ‘feminist-as-lesbian’: a highly recognisable figure who ‘depict[s] the women’s liberationist as a fanatical and irrational pervert,’ and displaces and mollifies feminism’s radical effects.6 Solanas is a crucial iteration of the feministas-lesbian, as she became a vehicle, in Hesford’s words, ‘through which the emotive force of the attack on Women’s Liberation is generated.’7 A fantasy of heteropatriarchy, the ‘feminist-as-lesbian’ displaces the aggressions moving through feminist’s demands for change.8 Solanas performed this symbolic work alone, before, as Avital Ronell reminds us, the appearance of the ‘guerilla girls, Lesbian Avengers, Queer Nation,’

Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and the texts of aggression

collectivities that put anger at the forefront of their interventions.9 In her film I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), director Mary Harron portrays Solanas (played by Lili Taylor) as a lone symbol of the lesbian feminist with a coarse appearance and an unruly revolutionary passion that denizens in Warhol’s Factory dismissed with disgust. Harron’s film is drawn on extensively here, deployed as a cinematic argument that asserts Solanas’s place in the feminist imaginary.10 Harron creates a counterpoint to Solanas’s status as a visual and sexual outsider by highlighting her commitment to language, which she wields against the increased visual dominance of late twentieth-century western culture, and evokes the ways in which Solanas and her work continue animating a feminist imaginary in which writing the other woman might be possible. Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto is a bravura literary performance that plays with the fantasy of a collectivity – a ‘society’ for ‘cutting up men.’ Composed at the place where anger, humour, literature, and protest meet, the SCUM Manifesto is a fully realised vision of patriarchy’s distortions in which women’s capacity for violence becomes a counter-cultural force capable of rewriting the imaginary picture of the world that men have created to serve their own needs.11 These dimensions of the text have a complicated relationship to the fact that Solanas acted upon the frantic feeling that she had been ripped off. She feared Warhol was going to produce her play Up Your Ass (1965) (the full title is Up Your Ass or from the Cradle to the Boat or the Big Suck or Up from Slime) without her participation.12 She became so crazed with the conviction that Warhol would erase her signature that she shot him. This shooting happened on 3 June 1968, just three months before the protests against the Miss America contest, and just a year before the Stonewall Uprising. Solanas’s attempt to murder Warhol is a raw testament to the distortions that erupt from the theft of women’s aggressions. Such thefts push women to live out what they have been denied, and impede the possibility of women creatively deploying those aggressions as ‘force[s] to create change.’13 Indeed, when Solanas took a .32 calibre Beretta automatic out of a paper bag (which also contained a sanitary pad and an address book) and shot Warhol three times, she ‘turned [his] body,’ as James M. Harding puts it, ‘into a kind of permanent collage.’14 Solanas’s damaging act demonstrated to the world that her writing could be present in the body of a man who dismissed her. This chapter analyses Solanas’s deployment of language as a tool to wield aggression for the feminist imaginary. The reading aligns with Lord’s argument that the manifesto is a ‘hyperbolic, ruthless, knee-slapping’ satire, but also analyses the manifesto’s vision of violence as a reflection of the fact that, as Ronell writes, ‘[s]ometimes you have to scream to be heard’ – if you are a woman.15 Solanas took the repression of women’s aggression and turned it inside out, making it into a weapon that targeted the fact that both high art and consumer culture were homogenising women into pleasing signs with

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new levels of force and ubiquity. As with the analysis of Codex Artaud in Chapter 3, this chapter traces how Solanas wrote against the imperative that women make pleasing images with their bodies and worked to recapture the aggression women have had to repress to participate in the script of acceptable femininity condensed within the images of woman circulating through post-war American culture. Solanas challenged this imperative through her writing, but it is clear she also did so with the image of her body. Therefore Solanas is investigated as a visual icon of the feminist lesbian who refused to slide into Pop Art’s contribution to the ‘society of the spectacle’ and defied the narrow definitions of femininity upon which it pivots. Crucial to this chapter’s reading of Solanas as an icon of the ‘feminist-aslesbian’ is the fact that she desperately wanted to receive recognition through writing and, more crucially, wanted to make herself present in language: ‘Read my manifesto and it will tell you what I am.’16 By conflating herself with her text and insisting upon its recognition, Solanas aligns herself with Artaud, and in the ‘threat[s], extortion[s], [and] demand[s]’ she inflicted upon Warhol and Maurice Girodias (her editor at Olympia Press), we can hear the echoes of Artaud’s angry exchanges with Jacques Rivière.17 Solanas’s demand that language represent her presence can also be discerned in her attempt to murder Warhol and in the language of her manifesto. Both attest to the mirroring women have traditionally been denied in western culture – a denial wielded with a particularly aggressive force when women reject the imperative to mirror the value of western culture’s dominant images of masculinity – that is, if they are monsters. Creating a magic world

Published in a period in which the feminist manifesto flourished, Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto gives women permission to reject the imperative to mirror the value of patriarchal culture and remake dominant images of woman.18 It is a careful address to women to create a ‘society’ that will ‘cut up’ and eliminate men and thereby unleash the imaginative possibilities that have been repressed through patriarchal histories. For many readers, these aspects of the manifesto are enough to reject it outright. Only a crazed woman would make such declarations, and only a monster would act upon them. The SCUM Manifesto is, however, a lot more than a call to eliminate men. The skill Solanas brings to its composition suggests that the violence of her text was (at least initially) figurative, a response to the grim picture of the world patriarchy has created and enforced.19 Every sentence in the SCUM Manifesto is crafted with this razor-sharp certainty, and the cut of Solanas’s manifesto was crafted to open a space for women to rewrite the world with vibrant, even thrilling differences. In this way, Solanas crystallises many ambitions Spero expressed in Codex

Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and the texts of aggression

Artaud: to begin imagining what the world might look, feel, and sound like if women were not coerced into repressing the full range of their desires, aggressions, and appetites. The manifesto was the perfect vehicle for Solanas’s project. A literary form for making charged political demands for change, many manifestos were written during the upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s and reflected the period’s charged atmosphere of combative rhetoric and high political stakes.20 Solanas orchestrates the genre’s antagonistic impulses, its unequivocal vision, and its absolute macho certainty.21 A literary technology of force, the manifesto is crafted to address readers and compel them into imagining themselves as part of its audience. Solanas made the manifesto form – which is, in Mary Ann Caws’s words, ‘hortatory, contrarian, bullying, rapid-paced’ – into a vehicle for articulating a feminist voice and demanding that it be heard.22 Right from the start, Solanas addresses other women with a lively characterisation of them as ‘civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females’ who are not completely at the service of patriarchy and are capable of upturning the world it has dully composed.23 Opening the manifesto, Solanas writes Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.24

Making declarations about life and society, Solanas’s voice rings with authority. Her phrase ‘thrill-seeking females’ highlights the fact that her manifesto relies upon an idea of collectivity quite different than the one passed down through patriarchal history. Committed to giving women permission to see themselves in images of energy and action, Solanas writes as though these ‘thrill-seeking females’ already exist and she is simply calling them to come forward and write the world anew. Her manifesto also seems to be addressing women who have yet to realise their capacity to become ‘thrill-seeking females,’ and Solanas’s writing asks them to identify with her feminist battle cry.25 (Think of Spero’s Mummified and its murky portrayal of a silenced woman waiting to be addressed.) ‘Thrill-seeking females’ is one of the manifesto’s refrains. The word ‘thrill’ is linked etymologically to piercing and perforations. Thrills are tinged with fear; at base they are intense emotional states. ‘Thrill-seeking females’ evokes women tearing and cutting through boundaries (physical, conceptual, ideological) and rejecting the limitations inherent to dominant images of woman. The emphasis Solanas places on the ‘thrill’ directly opposes the boredom that is, according to Solanas, the primary characteristic of ‘[l]ife in this society.’ Of course boredom is central to Warhol’s artwork, his films in particular. And in The Feminine Mystique, Friedan consistently touches upon the role of ‘boredom’ in her exploration of ‘the problem that has no name.’ In her chapter

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‘The Happy Housewife Heroine,’ she identifies ‘the terrible boredom that has settled over the American housewife.’26 These two iterations of post-war American boredom come together in Warhol’s film Bike Boy (1967–1968), in which Ingrid Superstar prattles on about food and not much else as she sits on a kitchen counter next to Joe Spencer (the sexual object of the camera’s queer gaze) and takes off her shirt. Jennifer Doyle argues that in Superstar’s performance, ‘the heterosexual woman is literalized as the weak interlocutor – satirized as the woman who won’t shut up, exactly because she knows no one is listening to her.’27 Solanas writes against a collective deafness to women’s words – the pervasive demand that they stop with, in Ronell’s words, ‘the complaint, the nagging, the picking, the chatter, the nonsense.’28 Indeed, the opening of the SCUM Manifesto not only composes the category of ‘civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females’ but addresses these women, compels them to listen and identify with her call. Their proximity to and sharp contrast with Solanas’s description of a boring society is worth noting. They underscore Doyle’s argument that boredom is the ‘first step to taking an interest in the world.’29 There is definitely a thrill reading the outrageous violence Solanas proposes in her manifesto, which her call to ‘destroy the male sex’ exemplifies. Indeed, Solanas is relentless in her efforts to take down the ‘man’ of western culture and reveal the image of woman he has created as a fraudulent (but quite effective) fiction. Over the course of the manifesto, Solanas demonstrates that patriarchy has been buttressed by a relentless propaganda campaign that has successfully convinced women that the ‘female function’ is to ‘bear and raise children and to relax, comfort and boost the ego of the male,’ which makes her ‘interchangeable with every other female.’30 She contrasts this definition of the ‘female function’ with the ‘actual fact’ that it is really meant to ‘relate, groove, love and be herself, irreplaceable by anyone else; the male function is to produce sperm. We now have sperm banks.’31 Solanas not only reduces men to their reproductive function – reversing what has been done to women – she creates an image of an other woman, one that is singular and multi-faceted, not in the service of masculinity. She defines the female function expansively and links it to a list of affirming actions and practices. She writes that the point of the female function is to ‘explore, discover, invent, solve problems, crack jokes, make music – all with love … create a magic world.’32 This lively sentence exemplifies the utopian dimension of the SCUM Manifesto that is overlooked even by sympathetic readers; it places the manifesto’s vision in direct contrast to the expectation that women identify with recognisable definitions of woman and present themselves as passive images that support patriarchal subjectivity. Believe it or not, Solonas reflects on beauty and aesthetics in the manifesto. This reflection shows that Solonas wanted women to write radically different

Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and the texts of aggression

scenes and pictures for themselves. Looking out from the edges of her text, Solanas sees a world composed to reflect the small-minded ugliness of men. She argues that man has ‘decorated his unlandscaped cities with ugly buildings (both inside and out), ugly decors, billboards, highways, cars, garbage trucks, and most notably, [man’s] own putrid self.’33 Men get away with creating this ugliness because ‘Great Art’ serves as their alibi. In the section of the SCUM Manifesto titled ‘Great Art’ and ‘Culture,’ she posits the ‘male artist’ as a fraudulent construct, one part of a ‘highly artificial world in which the male is heroized.’34 According to Solanas, aesthetic pronouncements have been made to serve patriarchal dominance. Exposing the false premise of masculine value, she writes that ‘“Great Art” proves that men are superior to women … . We know that “Great Art” is great because male authorities have told us so, and we can’t claim otherwise, as only those with exquisite sensitivities far superior to ours can perceive and appreciate the slop they appreciate.’35 Whether the allusion to Clement Greenberg’s famous collection of essays Art and Culture (1961) is intentional or not, the ‘Great Art’ and ‘Culture’ section of Solanas’s manifesto certainly underscores her interest in art as a politically contested site that determines who is allowed to make meaning. Critiquing art as a tool of gendered suppression, ‘Great Art’ and ‘Culture’ corresponds with Spero’s Homage to New York and its bitter mockery of Abstract Expressionism’s phallic canonisation. Far more directly, Solanas draws attention to men’s commandeering of aesthetic value. She writes that the ‘veneration’ of canonical art and culture coerces women into ‘boring, passive activity’ and leads them to accept the judgement that their ‘feelings, perceptions, insights and judgments’ are insignificant.36 For Solanas, art was symptomatic of the limited range of images through which women could see themselves. But the SCUM Manifesto is more than a complaint, it also creates a vibrant counter-image to the patriarchal superiority that informs the category of ‘Great Art,’ one of an energised collectivity of women through which women can recognise their creative potential: ‘The true artist is every self-confident, healthy female, and in a female society the only Art, the only Culture, will be conceited, kooky, funky females grooving on each other.’37 In lively, slangy sentences like these, Solanas evokes a hippie positivity – ‘a magic world’ – to enact the collective forms of living she wants members of SCUM to create. Indeed, Solanas posits ‘Great Art’ and ‘Culture’ as impediments men devise to prevent alliances among women. She argues that ‘[e]ven amongst groovy females deep friendships seldom occur in adulthood, as almost all of them are either tied up with men in order to survive economically or bogged down in hacking their way through the jungle and in trying to keep their head above the amorphous mass.’38 Later in the manifesto, Solanas will draw clear lines between members of SCUM and women who capitulate to patriarchal demands – she calls them ‘Daddy’s Girls’ – but Solanas also addresses

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their potential for subversion. Her manifesto is a broad address that does not only affirm and consolidate a pre-existing group but asks women to become part of her feminist cause. A castrating text

As compelling as the ‘thrill seeking females’ are, the moments they collectively leap off the page cannot be separated from the urge for murderous violence that is at the core of the SCUM Manifesto. Anger cuts open the imaginative spaces through which Solanas’s ‘thrill seeking females’ jump. Despite the suggestions of ‘groovy,’ SCUM constituents are not hippy women wearing Paisley dresses and dancing in circles. They have been pushed to the gutter of male sexual dominance, made to live and represent it, and are now ready to give the gutter new meanings by creating ‘disgusting, nasty upsetting “scenes.”’39 A castrating text, the SCUM Manifesto systemically undercuts the prestige bestowed upon masculinity. Deepening what Ronell identifies as the text’s ‘castrative glee’ is Solanas’s choice to defy the imperative that Freud identifies in the Three Essays: that women embody the ‘aesthetic and moral ideals’ that guard against shame and disgust, an embodiment that is coincident with the girl’s acceptance of her castrated position.40 Not only does the SCUM Manifesto cut down all the fictions and pretences of masculine authority, it does so by composing images that revel in disgust. Only Artaud is capable of creating more disgusting images. The acronym of her imaginary collective – SCUM – brings these two dimensions of the text together: it is the ‘Society for Cutting Up Men,’ but also ‘scum,’ frothy slime and all its suggestions of low-life creepiness.41 Solanas creates disgusting images that cut through the assumptions that women should defend against the pleasures of perversity. Such assumptions effectively block the possibility that women could, in Solanas’s words, ‘zestfully, lustfully, tear off a piece.’42 This phrase corresponds to the ‘piece of masculinity’ the girl in Freud’s Three Essays has to renounce as she accedes to the castration complex.43 It also resonates with the erotically torn fragments Spero collages together in Codex Artaud. Central to the SCUM Manifesto is Solanas’s argument that women’s capacities to fulfil the ‘female function’ were ‘wrenched out’ of them during adolescence.44 The SCUM Manifesto was composed to wrench that function back. Solanas demonstrates her affinity with Freudian narratives and categories early in the manifesto. She aligns with Freud at his most biologically reductive, but unlike Freud, uses her essentialism against men.45 Solanas draws upon ideas from genetics – ‘the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene’ – and evolutionary biology and psychology – ‘[h]e is trapped in a twilight zone halfway between humans and apes.’46 These ‘facts’ are marshalled to substantiate the central premise of the manifesto – men are inferior. Putting it in no uncertain

Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and the texts of aggression

terms, Solanas writes, ‘To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.’47 At the centre of Solanas’s argument is a reversal that exposes the projections and thefts upon which patriarchal culture has relied. She claims that men are inferior females, know it, and displace that inferiority onto females, robbing them of all the qualities that could make them ‘groovy’ and ‘thrill-seeking.’ She seeks to reverse patriarchy’s fundamental premise that men are superior to women. This reversal informs every compositional choice Solanas made for the manifesto, all of its words, every one of its claims. Instead of women being incomplete versions of men, Solanas argues that men are incomplete women. In a long descriptive list (a signature characteristic of her manifesto) she argues that man ‘claim[s] as his own all female characteristics’ – ‘emotional strength and independence, forcefulness, dynamism, decisiveness, coolness … ’ – and projects his actual characteristics on to women as ‘vanity, frivolity, triviality, weakness.’48 The SCUM Manifesto relies upon psychoanalytic discourse to create its unmerciful picture of masculinity and translates Freudian concepts into a recognisable feminist vernacular: ‘Women, in other words, don’t have penis envy; men have pussy envy.’49 Alluding to the castration complex, Solanas shows that in order for men to deny their inadequacy, women come to figure for their fears and losses: ‘He hates his passivity, so he projects it onto women, defines the male as active, then sets out to prove that he is (“prove that he is a Man.”).’50 Not surprisingly, fatherhood is an important way for him to prove his manhood and compensate for his perpetually unstable relationship to masculinity. Here, Solanas offers a colloquial version of the Oedipus complex and its role maintaining heterosexual masculinity: Every boy wants to imitate his mother, be her, fuse with her, but Daddy forbids this; he is the mother, he gets to fuse with her. So he tells the boy, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, to not be a sissy, to act like a ‘Man.’ The boy, scared shitless of and ‘respecting’ his father, complies, and becomes just like Daddy.51

While the son internalises the unquestioned value of masculinity, the daughter becomes his sexual object: ‘he gives her hand in marriage, the other part is for him.’52 Through his children, man can ‘preserve his delusion of decisiveness, forcefulness, always-rightness and strength’ and make sure the fictions of masculinity are perpetuated along generational lines.53 Though the heterosexual family is a crucial arena for consolidating masculine power, the project of maintaining this fiction extends far beyond it. Solanas concedes that the one thing man has been very good at is ‘public relations.’54 So the manifesto is devoted to taking down the picture of reality patriarchy has efficiently created, as it ‘bends and swerves,’ in Fah’s words, ‘through nearly

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every major institution that oppresses women.’55 It is the thoroughness with which Solanas approaches male dominance that aligns her work with the radical feminist definition of patriarchy. Indeed, by moving through all the ‘institutions that oppress women,’ the SCUM Manifesto analyses the interrelated parts of the masculine imaginary: repressive standards of dignity and morality; capitalist exploitation and a punitive class system; the rote monotony of the suburbs; racial prejudice. In her extensive catalogue of the damage patriarchal culture has caused, Solanas gives war a prominent position. It is clear she has the Vietnam War in mind; late in the manifesto she refers to ‘LBJ’ and ‘McNamara’ giving orders that ‘servicemen’ have to carry out.56 Solanas is unequivocal about exposing the modern war machine and connecting it to the anxious emptiness at the core of male sexuality. Solanas writes: ‘The male’s normal compensation for not being female, namely, getting his Big Gun off, is grossly inadequate, as he can get it off only a very limited number of times; so he gets it off on a really massive scale, and proves to the entire world that he’s a “Man”.’57 For Solanas, war demonstrates that granting men naturalised access to aggression has made the world into a stage upon which they can shamelessly assert their power to transgress. Solanas declares war on the world men have made and stamping them with shame and disgust is one of her battle tactics. In her discussion of the Men’s Auxillary to SCUM – the only way men can participate in the collectivity – Solanas writes that every man has to participate in the ‘Turd Sessions’ and must declare: ‘“I am a turd, a lowly abject turd.”’58 Most men are not willing to perform their own abjection, Solanas observes; they would rather make women responsible for their pathos. This responsibility is written into the economy. She writes that women are ‘lucky’ if they get a ‘good job – co-managing the shitpile,’ an explicit representation of the reproductive labours assigned to women.59 Solanas had a talent for composing scatological images that reverse the narrow ways in which women have been imagined. Like Artaud, she used writing to create connections between language, the mouth, and the anus. So it makes sense that ‘shit’ is a word she repeats throughout the SCUM Manifesto. It is clear Solanas takes pleasure using this word and in imagining her readers’ thrilling shocks of disgust. A piece of smut, an ‘expectoration’ that erupts repeatedly throughout her text, the word ‘shit’ takes her text into the sexual underworld and defies the expectation that women do not have the instincts for indulging in the appetites of the oral stage or the disobedience of the anal stage. For Solanas, the ‘disease,’ ‘garbage,’ and ‘scum’ that constitute male ontology transform into material through which she creates an expansive repertoire of scatological words and graphic images that creates a ‘gutter perspective’ that highlights men’s undeniable shittiness: ‘Every man, deep down, knows he’s a worthless piece of shit.’60

Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and the texts of aggression

Though he knows it intimately, the fact that man is a ‘worthless piece of shit’ is kept hidden. Solanas saw that it was her responsibility to expose the lies that sustain man’s accepted truths. Writing grotesquely is crucial to this exposure. The grotesque gives her words a palpable force. Against this world – orchestrated, at every turn, to defend masculinity – Solanas composes images that expose the denigrations of man’s erotic life. She makes those images as disgusting as possible: ‘Eaten up with guilt, shame, fears and insecurities and obtaining, if he’s lucky, a barely perceptible physical feeling, the male is, nonetheless, obsessed with screwing; he’ll swim through a river of snot, wade nostril-deep through a mile of vomit, if he thinks there’ll be a friendly pussy awaiting him.’61 Here Solanas enacts one of SCUM’s main activities: making ‘disgusting, nasty, upsetting “scenes.”’62 Portraying a man swimming through a ‘river of snot’ and wading through ‘a mile of vomit,’ Solanas creates a sharp contrast between her numb man, bereft of physical sensations, and these long stretches of space filled with bodily fluids. This joke flagrantly defies the entrenched imperative that women do the work of serving as a symbol for moral and aesthetic ideals. Solanas’s words create a vivid scene that shocks readers into picturing it and indirectly testify to her desire for presence in language. She wanted her manifesto to shock and impact her audience, galvanise them to recognise her genius and take action. The mirrors monsters need

Creating ‘disgusting, nasty upsetting “scenes,”’ undercutting the value and prestige of masculinity, and addressing women with the possibility of aggressively writing a feminist imaginary: Solanas’s manifesto definitely qualifies as monstrous. Two facts confirm such a characterisation: by shooting Warhol, Solanas enacted her transgressions with a real flesh-and-blood violence, and by living openly as a lesbian, she defied the imperatives of heterosexual femininity. Solanas’s transgressions attest to the difficulties women faced in the pre-Women’s Liberation, pre-Stonewall world of the American 1950s. And by resisting the repressions of this world so explicitly in her writing, her criminal act, and her sexuality, Solanas has come to embody the search for words and images that could mirror women’s transgressions and help them realise their capacities to not only reject a punitively narrow definition of woman but write an other woman with which women could identify. Barbara Johnson’s ‘My Monster/My Self ’ (1982) helps to draw out the stakes of Solanas’s monstrosity. An exploration of women’s autobiographical writing, Johnson identifies the forces working to repress women’s capacities for aggression and underscores the importance of mirroring for the project of creating a feminist imaginary. She focuses on the dominant perception that women are

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naturally selfless mothers and nurturers, and charts the constraints this perception has on women’s capacities to write their autobiographies and articulate their ‘desire[s] for resemblance.’63 For women, Johnson argues, such desires are perceived to be monstrous, as they are connected to but also extend far beyond biological reproduction. She makes three books the centre of her analysis: two that reflect the impact of Women’s Liberation – Nancy Friday’s My Mother/My Self (1977) and Dorothy Dinnerstein’s The Mermaid and the Minotaur (1976) – and a classic of Gothic literature, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). While the monster in Frankenstein functions as a metaphor for Shelley’s relationship to writing and femininity, the figures of monstrosity in Friday’s and Dinnerstein’s books suggest that the taboo against women who exceed the bonds of biological reproduction had become, by the 1970s, an object for analysis. For Johnson, the figures of monstrosity that appear in these texts represent the repression of maternal anger. As Johnson writes, ‘[t]he idea that a mother can loathe, fear, and reject her baby has until recently been one of the most repressed of psychoanalytical insights.’64 The repression of maternal anger and aggression is intimately connected to the constraints that keep women from reproducing themselves in writing and finding the aspects of the other within the self that writing can make possible. Though Spero lived as a mother and Solanas did not, they both fought against a one-dimensional definition of woman who naturally assumes the fantasy of a maternal ideal.65 As a woman artist labelled a ‘housewife,’ Spero was occluded by her roles as wife and mother. And certainly the monstrosity attributed to Solanas’s lesbianism is fuelled by the entrenched notion that all women should align themselves with an iteration of heterosexual femininity that culminates in maternity. Johnson argues that the repression of women’s monstrosity connects to the fact that there are so few arenas in which women can see their transgressions mirrored in the eyes of others. Her reading of Frankenstein contrasts the fact that male characters in the novel are given ‘mirror[s]’ of their own ‘transgressions’ but Mary Shelley was ‘“reluctant to bring [her]self forward in print.”’66 Johnson shows that Shelley does not ‘speak into a mirror,’ but as an ‘appendage to a text,’ which reflects the assumption that ‘man is the measure of all things.’67 From evidence of Shelley’s reluctance ‘to bring herself forward in print,’ Johnson argues that women are not only restrained from transgressive acts, they are barred from the possibility of composing doubles of themselves that could reinforce the claims of their work. For Johnson, Frankenstein’s ugly offspring attests to the pervasive force of this restraint, and notes that Shelley’s portrayal of monstrosity contrasts sharply with her depiction of women as ‘beautiful, gentle, selfless, boring, nurturers and victims who never experience inner conflict or true desire.’68 This portrayal – the excesses of which Johnson’s sentence mimes – is intimately linked to the repression of women’s subjective complexities

Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and the texts of aggression

and ambivalences: ‘For it is the fact of self-contradiction,’ Johnson asserts, ‘that is so vigorously repressed in women.’69 A historically sanctioned impulse to conflate women, biological reproduction, and moral ideals stifles the possibilities of women finding the means to represent the full range of their contradictions. And Johnson implies that feminist transgressions must be mirrored if they are not going to be discarded as extreme anomalies that confirm the monstrosity attributed to women but actually impact the symbolic order. Unlike Shelley, Solanas did not deflect her monstrosity with a metaphor; she made it the explicit subject of her work. She created deliberately vulgar words and images to describe the abjection of American women’s lives and expose the monstrosity that had been imposed upon them. Aligned with the other reversals in the SCUM Manifesto, Solanas inverts the monstrosity attributed to SCUM-identified women, and brings it into her portrayal of women who have capitulated to the fiction of male superiority: ‘Daddy’s Girls.’ Resonating with Johnson’s descriptions of the women in Frankenstein, Solanas describes the ideal woman of the world she wants to cut apart as ‘nice, passive, accepting, “cultivated,” polite, dignified, subdued, dependent, scared, mindless, insecure, approval-seeking.’70 This extensive list represents the thoroughness with which ‘Daddy’s Girl’ is coerced into submission. ‘Daddy’s Girls’ are women conflated with their reproductive functions and, through manipulations large and small, reduced to the life project of buttressing men’s egos. Here Solanas goes further into her portrayal: ‘Passive, rattle-headed Daddy’s Girl, ever eager for approval, for a pat on the head, for the “respect” of any passing piece of garbage, is easily reduced to Mama, mindless ministrator to physical needs, soother of the weary, apey brow, booster of the tiny ego, appreciator of the contemptible, a hot water bottle with tits.’71 This long sentence enacts the systemic reach of the ideology that produced ‘Daddy’s Girl.’ Dense with the characteristics that define ‘Daddy’s Girl,’ it brings her exploitation to the surface of the manifesto and by landing on the visual metaphor of ‘a hot water bottle with tits,’ makes that exploitation unequivocally clear. Solanas explains that ‘Daddy’s Girls’ ‘can have a place in the sun, or, rather, in the slime, only as soothers, ego boosters, relaxers, and breeders.’72 Replacing the sun with slime undercuts the prestige ‘Daddy’s Girl’ receives from giving herself over to the work of supporting male-dominated culture. The typology of the ‘Daddy’s Girl’ highlights the fact that women are conflated with maternal femininity. She is a template for ‘Mommy,’ the sign for the imperative that women attend to men’s infantile needs. According to Solanas, this is men’s greatest success: convincing women that they are meant to ‘bear and raise children and to relax, comfort and boost the ego of the male.’73 Making connections between ideas about women’s capacities for biological reproduction and the assignment to perform reproductive and affective labour, Solanas goes so far as to describe the ‘Daddy’s Girl’/ ‘Mommy’ as a completely

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undifferentiated object in the psyche of the father/son: ‘His earliest experiences are with his mother, and he is throughout his life tied to her. It never becomes completely clear to the male that he is not part of his mother, that he is he and she is she.’74 This undifferentiated state is the foundation for the imperative that women identify with dominant images of woman and become easily exchangeable objects that buttress masculinity’s needs. If the SCUM Manifesto further exposes the conflation of women and the maternal, and enacts, to an extreme degree, Johnson’s arguments about women, writing, and monstrosity, then it also maps a cultural landscape quite similar to the one Friedan analyses in The Feminine Mystique.75 It might come as a surprise that the arguments of Solanas and Friedan had similarities and that they both located their analyses in the American suburbs, portraying them as sites of women’s alienation. As the leader of NOW, Friedan was reluctant to make sexuality and lesbianism a focus of the organisation’s political agenda, and it could be argued that The Feminine Mystique lays the foundation for this reluctance, as it makes heterosexual women its primary focus. Worse than anything the ‘Lavender Menace’ could provoke, Solanas’ butch-lesbian persona was probably Friedan’s worst nightmare. There were big disagreements within NOW over Solanas’s crime. Ti-Grace Atkinson left the organisation in part because NOW refused to give Solanas legal support.76 The bad feelings went both ways. The SCUM Manifesto declared protest as far too tame: ‘S.C.U.M. will not picket, demonstrate, march or strike to attempt to achieve its ends.’77 And when Solanas writes that protest is ‘for nice, genteel ladies who scrupulously take only such action as is guaranteed to be effective,’ she may have been taking aim at Friedan and the NOW protests.78 Needless to say, Solanas’s portrayal of the suburbs goes much further than Friedan’s. Solanas indulges in representing the monstrosity at the repressed edges of The Feminine Mystique. In the section of the SCUM Manifesto titled ‘Isolation, Suburbs, and Prevention of Community,’ Solanas makes the suburbs into a prison that is only seemingly benign: ‘the male seeks to isolate her from other men and from what little civilization there is, so he moves her out to the suburbs.’79 She exposes the suburbs as a site of raw exploitation and describes, in quite graphic terms, the reduction of women to animals, which takes place among ‘the most backward segment of society – the “privileged, educated” middle-class, the backwash of humanity.’80 This is where Daddy’s ‘reign’ is so complete that women ‘try to groove on labor pains and lie around in the most advanced nation of the twentieth century with babies chomping away on their tits.’81 A vulgar depiction like this could easily serve as evidence for Friedan’s claim that the radical splits from NOW-inspired liberal feminism were full of women who used ‘“abusive language”’ and ‘“sexual shock tactics”’ and possessed a ‘“man-hating, down-with-motherhood stance.”’82 And yet, in the manifesto at least, Solanas emphasises the exploitations of women’s reproductive capacities,

Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and the texts of aggression

which is not the same thing as a rejection of motherhood. Solanas uses her graphic imagination to show that idealised images of maternal femininity are a ruse – the primary argument of The Feminine Mystique – and force women to submit to ‘Daddy Rule.’ While Solanas does state that ‘Daddy’s Girls’ are the real enemy of SCUM, it is also clear that Solanas was at war with a typology and wanted to address ‘Daddy’s Girls’ and shock them into seeing how monstrous their lives really were. Reading the SCUM Manifesto as a call to create a collectivity that has yet to be, we can understand how urgently Solanas wanted to contribute to an imaginary in which the sharp shocks and accuracies of her writing could be reflected back to her. However, entrenched perceptions and deep-seated fears about the monstrosity of women, and the even greater monstrosity of the feminist-as-lesbian, impeded many from receiving and hearing her call – until, by shooting Warhol, she brought those impediments into sharp relief.83 Seeing the lesbian

Fears of the feminist-as-lesbian fasten to the image. As Amy Villarejo argues, it is on the ‘terrain of the visible’ that ‘gender binarism is most strictly enforced,’ making images tools for fixing the lesbian in a recognisable form while also pushing her to the margins of visibility.84 Looking to collaborate and create in Warhol’s Factory, Solanas not only saw the over determined relationship between women and images that played out across its shiny and elusive terrain, she confronted the fact that even in the Factory, the sign woman was presumptively feminine. In her homage to Solanas, ‘Solanas in a Sea of Men,’ artist Carolee Schneemann renders the images of femininity at play in Warhol’s Factory. She writes that her ‘friends in the Factory were beautiful women playing out Andy’s version of the feminine … they floated and vitalized his filmy waters – sumptuous, real-life dolls.’85 Evoking the malleability and visual passivity that Warhol relied upon, Schneemann argues that women who became and reflected ‘Andy’s version of the feminine’ could be easily ‘overprinted’ and placed into his ‘celluloid collection.’86 Schneemann underscores the argument that images of women produced at the factory relied upon and reinforced woman as a site of exchange among men.87 Second only to her manifesto, the author photograph Fred W. McDarrah took of Solanas exemplifies her active resistance to becoming a ‘sumptuous, real-life doll’ and shows her presenting herself, with a ‘common-sense knowingness,’ through images that signal a lesbian sexuality that defies patriarchy.88 Placed on the cover of the 1968 Olympia Press Edition of the SCUM Manifesto, Solanas looks out from her beret and the thick tuffs of hair that extend beyond it with an unfriendly almost menacing gaze. The thick collar of a winter coat frames her face, and while Solanas’s eyes are not completely visible, one can

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still see and sense her gaze. Her lips are sealed into a thin, tight line. The photograph is dark; it is almost as if Solanas has been covered in newspaper-grey soot (see Figure 4.1). It asks to be read as a clear resistance to becoming a visual object of exchange. We can see in this image that Solanas was, as Fahs

4.1 

Cover of the 1968 Olympia Press Edition of SCUM Manifesto. Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah. ‘Warhol … the ultimate voyeur felled by S.C.U.M. …’ (Time) ‘A diatribe of fanatical shrewdness and wit’ (Newsweek)

Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and the texts of aggression

writes, ‘antipornographic in her gruffness and scumminess.’89 Indeed, the ‘gruffness’ and ‘scumminess’ on display in this photograph evokes what Laura Cottingham identifies as a ‘hard-earned escape from the politically enforced narrative of heterosexuality.’90 Without Solanas’s permission, Maurice Girodias printed the 1968 edition of the manifesto after Solanas was sent to Elmhurst Psychiatric Hospital for the Warhol shooting. It is obvious that Girodias wanted to capitalise on the shock and scandal of her attempt to murder Warhol. Above the image of Solanas’s head are quotes, printed in white lettering, from Time (‘Warhol … the ultimate voyeur, felled by S.C.U.M.’) and Newsweek (‘A diatribe of fanatical density, savage shrewdness, and wit’). Slogans sensationalising the crime bolster the visual suggestions of Solanas’s lesbianism and underscore the long-standing connections between lesbian sexuality and criminality.91 The argument that Girodias appropriated Solanas’s work for profit is substantiated by the fact that McDarrah’s photograph of Solanas that was used for the cover was substantially cropped for the Olympia Press edition of the SCUM Manifesto (see Figure 4.2). Subsequent editions were cropped with even more severity. The cover for the 1970 edition draws upon the visual idiom of Warholian repetition. The cover for the 1971 edition is a tightly cropped image of Solanas’s face (see Figures 4.3 and 4.4). The full photograph McDarrah took of Solanas was staged to depict her as a writer; she is posed in the act of writing, with pen in hand.92 Needless to say, excising the parts of the photograph that depict Solanas as a writer cuts out the possibility of seeing her actively composing her own meanings and puts her image closer to bearing the burden of the feminist-as-lesbian and the monstrosity to which she is linked. The cropped photograph highlights the fixity of the lesbian as an image, which, as Villarejo writes, ‘arrests’ the ‘mobility’ the signifier of the lesbian can ‘trigger.’93 Announcing her resistance to the image of woman sanctioned by heteropatriarchy, the McDarrah photograph of Solanas is an extension of her writing. Its broody grey darkness connects to what de Lauretis proposes to undertake in her lesbian-feminist reading of Freud’s work: articulating a theory of lesbian sexuality in an oeuvre that can only imagine it in the most indirect ways. Drawing upon the metaphor of the photograph, which Freud hints at with his concept of ‘negative perversions,’ de Lauretis proposes: ‘What if one were to follow the path of the component instincts left visible, if darkly, in the background of the picture?’94 Solanas’s photograph seems to follow what de Lauretis identifies as the ‘negative trace of the perversions.’95 It defies any expectation that women embody what Freud identifies in Three Essays as the ‘aesthetic and moral ideals,’ which makes women signs that can be exchanged, joked about, and defiled. As the SCUM Manifesto attests, Solanas wanted to be on the controlling end of the joke (and make men the butt of it) and her defiant self-presentation

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4.2 

Photograph of Valerie Solanas by Fred W. McDarrah 1967.

can be understood as a protest against the centrality of feminine beauty in the definition of woman. In a scene from I Shot Andy Warhol, Harron creates a fictional depiction of Solanas seeing the 1968 protests against the Miss America contest on television. Harron portrays Solanas as feeling ripped off – ‘These women got everything from me’ – but also stresses the affinity Solanas could have felt with the women protesting, the new articulation of visibility it announces, and the forms of recognition it promises: ‘I should be there. Why doesn’t anyone put me on tv?’96 The manifesto expresses disdain for protest – ‘SCUM will not picket, demonstrate, march or strike’ – but there are overlaps between Solanas’s mission and the protest against the Miss America contest: the yearly event that all-toovividly dramaticises the visual exchange of woman across the staging of a national spectacle.97 Robin Morgan and her comrades among New York Radical

Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and the texts of aggression

Cover of the 1970 Olympia Press Edition of the SCUM Manifesto.

Women composed a sharp, pithy, and sarcastic manifesto titled ‘No More Miss America!’ Borrowing from ‘The Ten-Point Program’ (the manifesto of the Black Panther Party), ‘No More Miss America!’ articulated ten objections to the pageant.98 The manifesto was also an address to women to participate in

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4.4 

Cover of the 1971 Olympia Press Edition of the SCUM Manifesto.

a ‘theatre event’ on the Atlantic City boardwalk. Like the SCUM Manifesto, the protestors did not shy away from making scenes that graphically depicted women’s exploitation. To highlight how women in the pageant were treated like cattle, the protestors created what Ruth Rosen calls a ‘mock mini pageant,’ in which they crowned a sheep with a tiara.99 To show how the pageant was complicit with cultural practices that naturalised women’s oppression, they created a ‘freedom trashcan,’ in which they tossed ‘instruments of torture.’ Women disposed of all sorts of objects manufactured to augment their bodies with accoutrements of ‘beauty’: wigs, high heels, make-up, fake eyelashes, girdles. Also tossed into the freedom trashcan were magazines that sold ideals of women’s subservience in realms both sexual and domestic: Cosmopolitan,

Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and the texts of aggression

Ladies Home Journal, Family Circle, and Playboy. Even typing manuals were thrown out in the name of freedom.100 A focus of the Miss America protest was the image of American femininity the pageant promoted – bland, white, and bubbly. The protestors created a larger-than-life ‘Amerika-Dollie’ made of wood to parody this patronising ideal. Amerika Dollie had big circular breasts, a bouffant hairdo, and a wide, cartoonish smile. The New York Radical Women did not limit their protest to parodying images of beauty. Similar to Solanas’s efforts to represent the systemic nature of patriarchal power, the New York Radical Women argued that the Miss America pageant served as a tool of war. ‘Miss America as Military Death Mascot’ (Point 3 of the manifesto) states: ‘The highlight of her reign each year is a cheerleader-tour of American troops abroad – last year she went to Vietnam to pep-talk our husbands, fathers, sons, and boyfriends into dying and killing with a better spirit.’ Miss America provoked the insatiable appetites of American Imperialism, but also presented a mollifying image crafted to distract from its destructive violence. Presumed to be innocuous and easily dismissed, sexualised images of women functioned as carriers of American military force. The image of Marilyn Monroe certainly helped to solidify the image of the ‘American girl’ who presented a sexualised image of her body before the troops to bolster morale and masculinity. Her ten scantily clad performances for American troops stationed in South Korea in February 1954 are infamous. Like the Miss America winners who toured Vietnam and displayed their prettiness before the troops, ‘pep talk[ing]’ men ‘into dying and killing with a better spirit,’ Monroe ‘personifie[d] the unstained patriotic American womanhood our boys are fighting for.’101 An icon of Warhol’s oeuvre, Monroe qualifies as a ‘Daddy’s Girl’ and could be said to emblematise everything Solanas wanted to upturn in the SCUM Manifesto. A key scene in I Shot Andy Warhol sets the pop artist’s iconic depiction of Monroe against Solanas as she begins her descent into insanity. Harron’s direction indicates how images of hyper-femininity were utilised to police Solanas’s paranoid ruckus and its (supposed) connection to her feminism and her lesbianism. In this scene, Solanas has just signed a book contract with Girodias. She is consumed with anxiety; she fears that by signing the contract, she has put herself in a subordinated position: ‘He’s got me all tied up!’ (This statement echoes what Solanas said about Warhol after the shooting: ‘Warhol had me tied up lock, stock and barrel.’)102 At the Factory, with the crumpled pages of the contract in her hands, she raves and paces in front of Warhol (played by Jared Harris), while he sits on a stool and talks on the telephone, timidly attempting to ignore her. On the silver wall behind Warhol is a blackand-white image of Monroe’s face: a still from the 1953 film Niagra. Monroe’s eyes are sleepy and her lips are seductively parted into an ‘O.’ This still is the image Warhol will use for the series of silkscreened images of Monroe in 1967.

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By ‘overprinting’ Monroe’s face and placing the silkscreened images in grid form, Warhol reenacted the endless availability of her image and provoked the insatiable appetite for looking. Continually working over her face with blocks of discordant colours, Warhol highlights the passivity associated with images of hyper-femininity. In the midst of Solanas’s increasingly loud and agitated ravings, Ondine (played by Michael Imperoli) announces: ‘Listen, we have to start instituting rules around here. Only the best looking women are allowed in here and without cunts.’103 Hearing the misogyny directed at her, Solanas stops and gets up in Ondine’s face, asking him ‘Do you know that males are biologically inferior females?’ and then throws him a copy of her manifesto. Ondine throws it right back and asks her why she thinks Warhol – ‘the greatest living artist of all time’ – would want to publish the ‘ravings of a lunatic?’104 With this word ‘lunatic,’ Warhol slinks away, and the image of Solanas’s body – rough with anger – juts into the foreground. In the background is the icon of Monroe’s face (see Figure 4.5). Empty but saturated with the affects associated with femininity, Monroe’s face was a mask that denizens of the Factory could take up and play with without the discomfiting referent of the female body. It sanctioned the idea that women who presented themselves in an obtrusive manner could be discarded as monstrosities through the misogynist epithet of ‘cunts.’ Performing her femininity on the surfaces of images with such ease, Monroe exemplified the image of woman preferred at Warhol’s Factory. Of course the

4.5 

Mary Harron, dir. I Shot Andy Warhol, 1996. Solanas and Monroe.

Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and the texts of aggression

Factory was not a repressively straight place. It opened up the post-war art studio to a range of sexualities, rejected the heroic masculinity of Abstract Expressionism, and allowed the signifiers of gender and sexuality to imaginatively circulate. This freedom was highly circumscribed, however, and did not fully extend to women, much less women artists. As Fahs writes, ‘Andy loomed large as the “father” of the Factory, and women stayed on the outside.’105 While lesbian sexuality could be practised and performed in Factory’s queer spaces, Solanas’s butch look did not fit, and was only tolerated if she was not making demands. The permissiveness of the Factory did not extend to women who protested the punitive limitations inherent to dominant representations of woman. In Harron’s portrayal of a fictional ‘screen test’ for Solanas she stresses the fact that Solanas did not mirror the Factory aesthetic. Replicating Warhol’s silent and slow (sixteen frames per second) reels of black-and-white film, Harron highlights Solanas’s discomfort. Looking ‘lost and uneasy,’ she blinks and squints as if she is being photographed for a mug shot.106 Harron’s rendition of Solanas’s screen test appears within a scene in which two Factory denizens, Ondine and Jackie, comment on Warhol’s cinematic portraits as though they were images in a high school yearbook.107 With sadistic pleasure, Ondine and Jackie express a particular contempt for the women. When Solanas’s image appears they ask: ‘Ugh, what is that horrendous monstrosity? Look at her hair, its so mannish.’108 Harron reproduces the screen tests at key intervals throughout I Shot Andy Warhol (see Figure 4.6). Instead of replicating their silence, she has Solanas read from her manifesto. In control of her medium – language – and undercutting Warhol’s primary emphasis on the image, Solanas is lively and assured. She has a say about how she appears, and her voice lifts and animates the lines of her manifesto. Harron may be drawing from moments in Warhol’s cinematic portrayals of Solanas that work against this familiar story of her oppression: her witty performance in I, a Man (1967), for example, in which she played, as Lord puts it, a ‘butch with a mouth on her.’109 Harron does not hide the fact that her screen tests are fantasy images that affirm the idea that Solanas was shut out and shut up by Warhol’s images of women. Indeed, it is a cruel irony that her play Up Your Ass was not stolen, but buried in a silver trunk that held the light boxes of Billy Name, a prominent Factory photographer and the cinematographer for many of the screen tests.110 From the perspective of the SCUM Manifesto, certain aspects of Warhol’s artwork – particularly its emphasis on visual sheen and glamorous display – reinforce the logic of spectacle that shut away and silenced the aggression of Solanas’s butch-lesbian feminist protest as well as her demand to be seen and heard. Schneemann describes Warhol’s world as an iteration of the spectacle and casts a sceptical shadow on the limited forms of mirroring it offered. She

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4.6 

Mary Harron, dir. I Shot Andy Warhol, 1996. Solanas’s screen test.

outlines the affinity between Warhol’s work and capitalism, noting that ‘astronomical financial rewards fuelled his inventive production, extended the scale of his mirrorings.’111 These ‘mirrorings’ extended into his relationship with Solanas. Warhol was, as Schneemann writes, the ‘mirror Solanas stared into, hypnotized by silver-reflecting surfaces.’112 If Warhol’s Factory functioned as a mirror, it did not give Solanas the recognition she desired and in turn, she refused to do the work of mirroring his genius. Schneemann sees the shooting as an expression of her demand for recognition: ‘She would project back into him the impact of the exclusions she experienced … . If her words couldn’t get her in, her bullets would.’113 Schneemann shows us that Solanas, her writing, and her aggression were one and the same. Solanas writing and typing

‘More than anything else,’ Ronell writes, ‘Valerie Solanas wanted to be a writer.’114 Writing allowed Solanas to gain command of the sign woman and its meanings. With every carefully selected word, meticulously crafted sentence, and scatological image, Solanas refutes the idea that women should remain silent about the realities patriarchal cultures have imposed and align themselves with the flat images of woman that mirror those realities. The seriousness with which Solanas took her writing is on display in the marks she inscribed onto the 1971 Olympia Press copy of her manifesto in the New York Public Library. Again, it is pretty obvious Girodias attempted to

Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and the texts of aggression

capitalise on the scandal of the crime. (Recall the quotes from Time and Newsweek placed above her author portrait on the cover.) Lord argues that when Girodias published another version of the manifesto in 1970, he was ‘tapping into the market for radical feminist publications,’ and she cites other texts published that year: Robin Morgan’s anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful, Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex, and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics.115 Solanas responded to Girodias’s appropriation by defacing the book. With a black pen, she inscribed her disgust with the typographic mistakes and her rejection of the unauthorised edits, but more than copyediting is at stake. On the cover, she vociferously scratched out her name and writes ‘by Maurice Girodias.’ Solanas made these marks with such intensity that she actually scratched bits of the cover’s surface away.116 Inflaming Solanas was the fact that Girodias made ‘S.C.U.M.’ into an acronym for the ‘Society for Cutting Up Men,’ which represents the idea that a collective wrote the book rather than Solanas herself. On the flyleaf, Solanas writes ‘This is not the title,’ and then signs her name, ‘Valerie Solanas.’ She crosses out ‘S.C.U.M.’ and writes ‘SCUM Manifesto,’ with her signature underneath.117 Solanas also wrote ‘LIE! FRAUD!’ diagonally across the copyright page. With these graffiti marks and signatures, Solanas inscribes her presence, her intimate identification with her own text. Recall that the photograph on the Olympia Press edition of the SCUM Manifesto crops the full picture of Solanas writing. These inscriptions put Solanas’s writing hand back into the picture. As with Spero’s signatures in Les Anges and Homage to New York (I Do Not Challenge), the handwritten marks and signatures are claims of ownership and connect to what we have already seen about the manifesto as a genre. Janet Lyon argues that the ‘passion for truth telling’ that animates the manifesto links etymologically to ‘manus and fectus’ – the ‘“hostile hand.”’118 The hostile hand that writes can become the hostile hand that shoots. It is easy to see the handwritten marks Solanas made on the Olympia Press edition of the SCUM Manifesto as the scribbles of a monster, but they must be set in relationship to the typewriter and the role it plays in Solanas’s history. Though it does not have the same impact as her attempt to murder Warhol, the typewriter is an icon of Solanas’s legacy. Harron fittingly stresses the connections between Solanas, her typewriter, and writing throughout I Shot Andy Warhol. After the depiction of the shooting at the film’s opening and the vignettes that tell Solanas’s life story, viewers see her asleep on the roof of a New York City apartment building. Her typewriter is given a prominent place in this tableau: near her body, which is tightly wrapped in her sleeping bag. The sound of typing is also part of the film’s acoustic layers. In rhythmic intervals, viewers can hear Solanas ‘banging at an ancient typewriter,’ which evokes the connection between Solanas’s writing and sexual aggressivity.119 There is a sequence early in the film that cuts between Solanas composing at the typewriter on a roof

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and getting ‘banged’ by a ‘john’ with a ruthless dull force against a brick wall. The scene ends with him stuffing dollar bills into Solanas’s mouth. The image of a woman’s mouth being stuffed with money – a gesture that attempts to imprint the woman’s body with the shame of sexual commodification – underscores the importance of writing as a mode of feminist resistance. Composing at the typewriter, Solanas bangs back. Like Spero typing out passages from Artaud’s work on the Bulletin typewriters she described as ‘big old monsters,’ Solanas made the typewriter a manifestation of her feminist commitments.120 By doing so, she aligned herself with the history of the typewriter Friedrich A. Kittler tells in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Kittler charts the historical connections between typewriters and narrow concepts of woman. Unlike copyeditors and other professions connected to writing, the word typewriter signifies a machine, but also a ‘typist’: a woman performing the mechanical work of transcription.121 The ‘typist’ conjures associations with rote transcription and subservience; it is perfectly suited for young women – girls – who transmit the serious words of men. Kittler cites cartoons and postcards from the late nineteenth century that play off the conflation of the machine with the girl who works at the machine, which the young women’s hyper-feminine appearance helps to naturalise. Such images kept women from writing and kept them as ‘ideal abstraction[s].’122 And yet, a historical dialectic was at work. The typewriter, an ‘innocuous device’ assigned to women, ultimately ‘invert[ed] the gender of writing.’123 Solanas demonstrates that while the typewriter might have been an ‘innocuous device,’ inverting the gender of writing was not. Moreover, her work acts out the historical coincidence of typewriters and guns. According to Kittler, after the Civil War (the period in which the typewriter was invented), ‘the typewriter became a discursive machine gun.’124 The connections between typing, guns, and women writers are implied in Kittler’s analysis, but Solanas makes them explicit. Another scene in I Shot Andy Warhol demonstrates the importance of the typewriter. It shows Solanas claiming ownership of her writing but also distancing herself (ever so slightly) from the demand for language as presence. She sits before a window with her back to the camera; the grey city light streams through half-open drapes (see Figure 4.7). Viewers hear the clackety bangs of Solanas’s typewriter before they see the paper upon which she types. She ashes her cigarette and cranks the typewriter roller so she can read her inky words from the layers of carbon paper. It is the dedication to Up Your Ass, the play that she would soon come to believe Warhol stole. Rather than thanking others, Solanas thanks herself, and acknowledges the various forms of work she put into the production of her text: I dedicate this play to ME, a continuous source of strength and guidance, and without whose unflinching loyalty, devotion, and faith this play would have

Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and the texts of aggression

Mary Harron, dir. I Shot Andy Warhol, 1996. Solanas at the typewriter.

never been written … Additional acknowledgements: Myself – for proof-reading, editorial comments, helpful hints, criticism and suggestions, and an exquisite job of typing. I – for independent research into men, married women, and other degenerates.125

While Taylor reads this mock acknowledgement page, Harron focuses in on the smile that stretches across her face. Along with the rich intonations of Taylor’s voice, Harron’s focus on her smile highlights the satisfaction Solanas takes in reading her own work back to herself. She has playfully inverted the support women have traditionally been expected to perform for men and gives it to herself instead. She takes pleasure reading ‘ME,’ ‘Myself,’ and ‘I,’ and moving among these signifiers for the self. It is as though Solanas’s words appearing in typewriter font become a mirror of affirmation, a place for announcing a claim to her own work and making her capacity for selfdifferentiation visible to herself. Harron sets scenes with Solanas and her typewriter in contrast to depictions of women as ‘typists.’ Entering Warhol’s Factory for the first time, Solanas sees a young blonde woman sitting at a makeshift table painted silver. She is typing, one key at a time. Harron’s version of Warhol precisely articulates the feminisation at work in the conflation of women and typing. When Solanas first gives Warhol Up Your Ass, he exclaims, ‘Did you type this yourself? I’m so impressed,’ which deliberately misses the announcement of the scatological in the title and conflates typing with cute feminine subservience.126 Perceiving women as

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cute ‘typists’ shuts down women’s subjective relationship to language and negates their capacities to deploy aggression to represent themselves in multiple forms. This is the larger theft inspiring Solanas’s demand that Warhol return Up Your Ass, and ultimately what was at stake in her attempt on his life. Solanas could not have typed enough to displace the anger this theft provoked. Conclusion

While staging the textual correspondences between Codex Artaud and the SCUM Manifesto, I felt uncomfortable, knowing that I was tracing the address of a writer who attempted murder. And yet, this discomfort was always underwritten by the knowledge that patriarchal cultures (and their stubborn legacies) have insisted, in a myriad of ways, that women repress their aggressions, which effectively drives them to madness, alienates them from the collective project of feminist change, and sentences them to a living death. Solanas represents the radical possibility and failure of feminism’s collective aspirations.127 Reflecting on Solanas in her introduction to the manifesto, Ronell portrays Solanas as a figure of inconsolable loss. Ronell notes that Solanas possessed ‘an acute sense of injustice,’ which she ‘drag[ged] around at the end, stuporous, drained, shivering in near autistic spheres of solitude.’128 It is not surprising that Solanas’s typewriter is important to Ronell’s portrayal: ‘On some nights, Valerie’s weariness washes over me. I hear her typing out in the apartment above mine.’129 Ronell makes the echo of Solanas’s address connect to the idea of the other woman, an address that was mostly answered with silent derision. Ronell reports that Solanas died in a welfare hotel in San Francisco. At one point before her death, a superintendent happened upon her furiously typing in her room.130 Inviting accusations of monstrosity, Spero and Solanas wielded language as a textual material to protest the fact that women are restricted from transgression and expected to become, in Johnson’s words, ‘beautiful, gentle, selfless, boring, nurturers and victims who never experience inner conflict or true desire.’131 That is, they both engaged with writing as an aggressive act to give themselves and other women expansive arenas in which they can transgress the images of submission to which they are assigned, create representations of subjectivity dense with contradictions, and then address other women as mirrors through which their transgressions can be supported and sustained. And yet, for all their correspondences, their projects do not mirror each other exactly. While Spero was muted by the imperative to be a selfless mother, fears of lesbian sexuality banished Solanas from recognisable definitions of woman and pushed her into the lawless realm of monstrosity. This banishment catapulted Solanas into living her aggressions rather than continuing to write them.

Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and the texts of aggression

If Solanas wrote at the far margins of the sign of woman, exiled from its guiding premise that women are fundamentally sweet, passive, and kind, the work of Kelly and Mulvey, to which Part III turns, demonstrates that the maternal femininity thought to naturally inhere in woman is also restricted and muffled, quite efficiently repressing the possibility that women could address each other across maternal femininity’s contested terrain. Similar to the other artists and writers in this book, Kelly and Mulvey deploy text to write lines of affinity that break down women’s isolation and ask them to participate in the production of a feminist imaginary. Notes 1 Howard Smith, ‘The Shot That Shattered The Velvet Underground,’ Village Voice (6 June 1968), 54. 2 Ellen E. Berry, ‘Apocalyptic Feminism: Negative Aesthetics in Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto,’ Women’s Experimental Writing: Negative Aesthetics and Feminist Critique (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 19–37: 22. 3 For Ti-Grace Atkinson, who resigned from NOW in October 1968, Solanas represented the necessity of a radical feminism that is not focused on putting women in positions of power – Betty Friedan’s stated goal – but destroying those positions instead and ‘fighting unequal power everyplace.’ Atkinson, ‘Resignation from N.O.W.,’ Amazon Odyssey (New York: Link Books, 1974), 9–11: 10. Many argue that Solanas anticipated the radical feminist groups WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), Cell 16, The Furies, Redstockings, and the takeover of the alternative New York newspaper RAT in 1970. For the manifesto’s impact on Radical Feminism, see Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967–1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 104–105. For Solanas’s influence upon the militant Cell 16, see pages 158–159. Berry also charts Solanas’s pivotal place in the history of radical feminism. 4 Lord, ‘Their Memory is Playing Tricks on Her,’ 453. 5 Catherine Lord provides an overview of all the women who have identified Solanas’s importance for feminism: Florence Kennedy, Robin Morgan, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Roxanne Dunbar-Oritz, among others. By reprinting the book covers of various translations of the SCUM Manifesto, Lord also tracks how Solanas’s manifesto has circulated around the globe. ‘Wonder Waif Meets Super Neuter,’ October 132, special issue, ‘Andy Warhol’ (Spring 2010), 135–163: 151–153. 6 Victoria Hesford, Feeling Women’s Liberation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 77. 7 Ibid., 27. 8 This formulation is indebted to Lynda Hart, who writes that ‘[l]esbian identity has served many functions, among them as a site where women’s aggression has been displaced.’ Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 9. Though Lynne Huffer’s suggestion that ‘Valerie’s crazy ways have something to teach us about the possibilities of

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queer feminism’ is convincing, this chapter will deploy the term ‘lesbian’ because it is on the terrain of the lesbian that Solanas had to assert herself. See Lynne Hufer, ‘After Sex,’ in Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 161–176: 163. 9 Avital Ronell, ‘Deviant Payback: The Aims of Valerie Solanas,’ introduction to S.C.U.M. Manifesto (New York: Verso, 2004), 1–31: 17. 10 I Shot Andy Warhol, dir. Mary Harron. New York: Playhouse International Pictures, 1996. Mary Harron did extensive research for I Shot Andy Warhol. Breanne Fahs confirms this in her biography of Solanas, and makes it clear she drew upon Harron’s notes for Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote S.C.U.M. (And Shot Andy Warhol) (New York: Feminist Press, 2014). 11 Dana Heller writes, ‘almost everyone who knew Solanas for any length of time describes her as terrifically angry and terrifically funny.’ ‘Shooting Solanas: Radical Feminist History and the Technology of Failure,’ Feminist Studies 27 (2001), 167–179: 172. 12 Solanas’s play Up Your Ass is dirty and funny – full of wit, turds, and sarcasm – and takes direct aim at the pervasive oppression of women and heterosexual norms. Among an array of ‘hyper-stereotyped yet funky characters,’ as Fahs puts it in her biography of Solanas, is ‘Bongi,’ a streetwise hustler and a persona for Solanas. Fahs, Valerie Solanas, 48. Up Your Ass is focused on Bongi’s tricks and her blatant disregard for men. Up Your Ass is archived in the collection of the Andy Warhol Museum and is available as an ebook Up Your Ass or From the Cradle to the Boat or The Big Sucker or Up from the Slime (1965. Milano: Vanda Publishing, 2014). Fahs writes that ‘Valerie took immense pride in Up Your Ass. This document held much of her identity as a writer, artist, provocateur.’ Ibid., 52. 13 Lavin, Push Comes to Shove, 3. 14 James M. Harding, ‘Forget Fame: Valerie Solanas, the Simplest Surrealist Act, and the (Re)Assertion of Avant-Garde Priorities,’ in Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 151–173: 166. 15 Lord, ‘Their Memory is Playing Tricks on Her,’ 452; Ronell, ‘Deviant Payback,’ 3. 16 Smith, ‘The Shot that Shattered the Velvet Underground,’ 54. 17 Ronell, ‘Deviant Payback,’ 22. Writing about the manifesto, Mary Harron connects it to the work of Artaud. ‘“In style it feels as if it were written in one great rush. It isn’t quite like anything else but it does resemble Artaud’s surrealist manifesto – visionary, hallucinatory rhetoric.”’ Qtd in Fahs, Valerie Solanas, 61. 18 For an analysis of the feminist manifesto, see Janet Lyon, ‘A Second-Wave Problematic: How to Be a Radical,’ Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 168–202. 19 See Lord for an overview of the strategies Solanas deploys to create her ‘lucid, taut, persuasive, fighting prose,’ Lord, ‘Wonder Waif Meets Super Neuter,’ 140–141. 20 For an introduction to the array of manifestos produced during the 1960s and into the 1970s, see Peter Stansill and David Zane Mairowitz (eds), BAMN (By Any Means Necessary): Outlaw Manifestos and Ephemera 1965–70 (1971. Brooklyn: Automedia, 1999).

Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and the texts of aggression

21 Lyon writes that Solanas’s manifesto ‘advertises at every moment its subversive negotiations of a rhetorical form of revolutionary authority.’ Lyon, Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern, 173. Martin Puchner discusses the masculinism of the Futurist manifesto, but underscores it when he writes that it is ‘surprising that later feminists, such as Valerie Solanas, felt free to adopt this genre for their own purposes.’ Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 85. Puchner addresses Solanas’s manifesto on pages 214–216. 22 Mary Ann Caws, ‘The Poetics of the Manifesto: Nowness and Newness,’ in Manifesto: A Century of Isms, Caws (ed.) (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), ix–xxxi: xxi. 23 Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto (1967. New York: Verso, 2004), 35. 24 Ibid., 35. 25 Laura Winkiel argues that Solanas’s manifesto ‘creates the political actors by calling them into being, providing a script for action that is not based on a prior, stable identity.’ Winkiel, ‘The “Sweet Assassin” and the Performative Politics of SCUM Manifesto,’ in The Queer Sixties, Patricia Juliana Smith (ed.) (New York: Routledge, 1999), 63–85: 63. In an interview she gave in 1977 Solanas indicated that her manifesto is a literary fiction, more imaginary than actual: ‘It’s hypothetical. No, hypothetical is the wrong word. It’s just a literary device. There’s no organization called SCUM … It’s not even me … I mean, I thought of it as a state of mind.’ ‘Interview with Howard Smith and Brian Van der Horst,’ Village Voice (25 July 1977), 32. 26 Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 44. 27 Jennifer Doyle, ‘“I Must Be Boring Someone”: Women in Warhol’s Films,’ Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 71–96: 93. 28 Ronell, ‘Deviant Payback,’ 3. 29 Doyle, ‘“I Must Be Boring Someone,”’ 96. 30 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 47. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 64. 34 Ibid., 58. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 59. 37 Ibid., 60. 38 Ibid., 57. 39 Ibid., 61. 40 Ronell, ‘Deviant Payback,’ 11. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 177. 41 Solanas was inconsistent about whether ‘S.C.U.M.’ is an acronym or a noun. I am foregrounding SCUM as an acronym, and the collectivity it signifies, because of the importance of the manifesto for the feminist imaginary. 42 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 36. 43 Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 221. 44 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 51.

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45 Marcie Frank argues that Solanas is ‘stuck at the level of anatomy.’ Marcie Frank, ‘Popping Off Warhol: From the Gutter to the Underground and Beyond,’ in Pop Out: Queer Warhol, Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, and José Esteban Muñoz (eds) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 210–223: 216. 46 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 35–36. 47 Ibid., 35–36. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 38. 50 Ibid., 37. 51 Ibid., 44. 52 Ibid., 42. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid., 38. 55 Fahs, Valerie Solanas, 63. 56 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 74. 57 Ibid., 38–39. 58 Ibid, 73. 59 Ibid., 41. 60 Ibid., 39. Marcie Frank uses the term ‘gutter perspective’ in ‘Popping off Warhol,’ 219. 61 Ibid., 37. 62 Ibid., 61. 63 Barbara Johnson, ‘My Monster/Myself,’ in The Barbara Johnson Reader: The Surprise of Otherness, Melissa Feuerstein, Bill Johnson González, Lili Porten, and Keja Valens (eds) (1982. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 179–190: 181. 64 Ibid., 185. 65 Fahs reports on the fact that Solanas gave birth as a teenager to two children who were given up for adoption in the first chapter of Valerie Solanas, 19–25. 66 Johnson, 181–182. 67 Ibid., 182. Original emphasis. 68 Ibid. 187. 69 Ibid., 189. 70 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 87, 70. 71 Ibid., 45–46. 72 Ibid., 71. 73 Ibid., 47. 74 Ibid., 45. 75 Hesford also charts the parallels between the SCUM Manifesto and The Feminine Mystique in Feeling Women’s Liberation, 104–113. 76 See Fahs, Valerie Solanas, 183–188; Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America (revised edn. New York: Penguin, 2006), 84–87. 77 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 75–76. 78 Ibid., 76. 79 Ibid., 48.

Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and the texts of aggression

80 Ibid., 46. 81 Ibid. 82 Qtd in Rosen, The World Split Open, 87. 83 See Fahs on the impact of the Warhol shooting on radical and liberal feminisms, in Valerie Solanas, 157–158. 84 Amy Villarejo, Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 11. 85 Carolee Schneemann, ‘Solanas in a Sea of Men,’ Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 90–93: 92. 86 Ibid., 92, 91. 87 See Leanne Gilbertson, ‘Andy Warhol’s Beauty #2: Demystifying and Reabstracting the Feminine Mystique, Obliquely,’ Art Journal 62.1 (Spring 2003), 24–33. 88 The idea of ‘common-sense knowingness about appearance’ belongs to Villarejo, Lesbian Rule, 11. Fred W. McDarrah was a photographer for the Village Voice and became well known as a photographer of Beat writers. 89 Fahs, Valerie Solanas, 94. Original emphasis. 90 Laura Cottingham, ‘Notes on the Lesbian,’ Art Journal, special issue, Gay and Lesbian Presence in Art and Art History 55.4 (Winter 1996), 72–77: 73. 91 A reproduction of this cover is in Fahs, Valerie Solanas, n.p. Lynda Hart writes that ‘[l]esbians in mainstream representations have almost been depicted as predatory, dangerous, and pathological,’ but then makes the even more compelling claim that the ‘shadow of the lesbian is laminated to the representation of women’s violence.’ Hart, Fatal Women, x. 92 The full photograph can be seen in Lord, ‘Wonder Waif Meets Super Neuter,’ 143. 93 Villarejo, Lesbian Rules, 14. Fahs evokes the fluctuations of Solanas’s sexual identity. She writes Solanas ‘loved women, hated men, defined herself as asexual, adamantly refused to identify as heterosexual, but resented accusations of herself as a lesbian.’ Fahs also reports that Solanas was an ‘out lesbian’ in high school and college. Fahs, Valerie Solanas, 3, 31. 94 Teresa de Lauretis, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 28. 95 Ibid., 28. 96 Mary Harron and Daniel Minahan, the screenplay for I Shot Andy Warhol (New York: Grove Press, 1996), 128. Original emphasis. Solanas shot Warhol on 3 June 1968, the protests took place in September 1968. 97 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 75. 98 ‘No More Miss America,’ New York Free Press (5 September 1968), 2. 99 Rosen, The World Split Open, 160. 100 Echols, Daring to Be Bad, 93. 101 ‘No More Miss America,’ 2. 102 Harron and Minahan, ‘Introduction,’ I Shot Andy Warhol, vii–xxxi: xxv. 103 Harron and Minahan, I Shot Andy Warhol, 115. Original emphasis. 104 Ibid. 105 Fahs, Valerie Solanas, 95. 106 Harron and Minahan, I Shot Andy Warhol, 76.

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107 To illustrate how out of sync she was with the visual culture of the Eisenhower era, Harron describes one of Solanas’s high school yearbook photographs: ‘There in the middle of these bright wholesome smiles and freshly permed hair is Valerie Solanas, in a work shirt and dungarees, glowering at the camera.’ Ibid., xiii. 108 Ibid., 76. The phrase ‘horrendous monstrosity’ does not appear in the screenplay, but is voiced in the film. 109 Lord, ‘Wonder Waif Meets Super Neuter,’ 144. 110 Harron reports this in the introduction to Harron and Minahan, I Shot Andy Warhol, xix. 111 Schneemann, ‘Solanas in a Sea of Men,’ 90. 112 Ibid. 113 Ibid. 114 Ronell, ‘Deviant Payback,’ 2. 115 Lord, ‘Wonder Waif Meets Super Neuter,’ 142. 116 Desireé D. Rowe, ‘Performative (re)Writing: Valerie Solanas and the Politics of Scribble,’ Women and Language 36.2 (2013), 107–113: 109–110. Rowe’s article includes photographs of the defaced book, from which the analysis here draws. 117 Regarding my decision to refer to the acronym SCUM, see note 40. 118 Lyon, Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern, 14. 119 Harron and Minahan, I Shot Andy Warhol, 44. 120 Lyon, Nancy Spero, 136. 121 Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffery Withrop-Young and Michael Wutz (1986. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 183. 122 Ibid., 184. 123 Ibid., 183. 124 Ibid., 191. 125 Harron and Minahan, I Shot Andy Warhol, 44–45. 126 Ibid., 97. 127 Fahs, Valerie Solanas, 6. See Doyle on the ethical complexities of reading Solanas’s attack on Warhol in feminist terms. ‘“I Must Be Boring Someone,”’ 73–75. 128 Ronell, ‘Deviant Payback,’ 31. 129 Ibid. 130 Ibid., 15. 131 Johnson, ‘My Monster, Myself,’ 187.

Hieroglyphs of maternal desire: the collaborative texts of Mary Kelly and Laura Mulvey

III

Hieroglyphs of maternal desire

Introduction

By tracing textual correspondences between the work of Adrian Piper and Angela Davis, and then that of Nancy Spero and Valerie Solanas, the preceding parts of this book have imagined alliances among the work of artists and writers to draw out the collaborative impulses that animated the art practices by women in the late 1960s and 1970s. This section is slightly different in that it focuses on an actual collaboration between Mary Kelly and Laura Mulvey that emerged in the context of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain. The imaginary correspondences staged between Piper and Davis in Part I represented their work as writing practices that expose and cut through through the disorder assigned to black women as they are positioned on the other side of the sign woman, ‘ungendered,’ disorderly, and out of bonds. Part II followed with an analysis of Spero’s Codex Artaud and Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, both of which explored the monstrosity attached to white women’s aggressivity and their claim to a voice traditionally denied women in a symbolic order that figures the feminine as passive and silent. The early work of Kelly and Mulvey also challenges the castration of women, but instead of seizing the power to cut, they reconfigure the value of maternal femininity and transform it into a ground of feminist collaboration. The specific focus here is on the collaboration between Kelly and Mulvey and how it manifests in and across Kelly’s installation Post-Partum Document as well as the writings on art and film Mulvey produced in the 1970s, which her film Riddles of the Sphinx significantly develops (hereafter PPD and Riddles, respectively). The collaboration between Kelly and Mulvey is signalled most explicitly by a cinematic depiction of Kelly composing PPD in Riddles, but it is also suggested in the thematic and stylistic correspondences between their work.1 As highlighted in the Introduction, Kelly’s PPD has an iconic status in feminist art history, which often occludes the rich expanse of her multi-faceted oeuvre. In a similar way, Mulvey’s name is stubbornly attached to ‘Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema.’ Often the canonical status of that essay occludes the fact that Mulvey is also a director of six films with her former husband, the writer and director Peter Wollen. Riddles is one of those films. A cinematic rewriting of the Oedipal narrative and the place of maternal femininity within it, Riddles enriches our understanding of the culture of feminist collaboration that took hold in Britain in the late 1960s and 1970s and provided a foundation for Kelly’s and Mulvey’s feminist innovations. It is noteworthy that though there has been some significant work in feminist art history that attends to Kelly and Mulvey’s collaboration, it is not common knowledge among scholars working in Women’s Studies, film studies, or feminist theory. Nor does it inform how Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure’ is taught.2 This is ironic, given the fact that Kelly’s and Mulvey’s individual bodies of work have

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been so commonly evoked that many people consider them clichéd iterations of the feminist 1970s. While Kelly and Mulvey are two of the most highly recognisable names in feminist visual studies, that prestige is often undercut by the sense that their work has been surpassed. Thus, the project of reading Kelly’s and Mulvey’s work together necessarily entails pushing past the iconicity of their individual names and challenging the sense that their work is already well-known. Highlighting the collaboration between Kelly and Mulvey works against the iconic isolation of their work. In a recent catalogue essay that accompanied a retrospective exhibition of Kelly’s artwork, Mulvey attests to the historical moment they shared: ‘Mary Kelly and I were both born in 1941, we encountered the Women’s Liberation Movement through the same groups and actions, and with others disovered the importance of psychoanalytic theory for feminism.’3 An important iteration of the ‘groups’ to which Mulvey points are the reading groups that were so central to the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain in the early 1970s. Along with Sally Alexander, Rosalind Delmar, Juliet Mitchell, and others, Kelly and Mulvey were members of the ‘History Group,’ which read foundational texts in Marxist and psychoanalytic thought.4 Supplementing the writings of Marx and Lenin with those of Louis Althusser, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan, the women in this reading group translated the inchoate responses to and feelings of oppression into sharper forms of articulation and thereby developed ways to address other women and create a shared feminist perspective. Psychoanalysis contributed significantly to the development of this address and is crucial to Kelly’s and Mulvey’s exploration of maternal femininity. Both PPD and Riddles pursue the psychoanalytic argument that women can, through pregnancy and the first months of infant care, re-experience their psychic lives before their negative entry into the Oedipus Complex. This imaginary return is dense with sensual and affective pleasures that Kelly and Mulvey place at the centre of their work. They both draw from the concept of the feminine pre-Oedipal – the femininity that is not defined by castration – in order to highlight the possibility that women can do more than perpetually serve as the ground for patriarchal subjectivity through fetishisation (and the losses it represents), but can actually compose their own forms of fetishisation, which is effectively a ‘language’ of desire and loss. The counter-fetishisation Kelly and Mulvey compose is not as rigidly or definitively buried as that which appears in Freud’s work or the scenes from spectacle culture that mirror it. Instead, it draws upon the fact that the fetish makes the unconscious readable. As Mulvey explains, the fetish is ‘on the cusp of consciousness, acknowledging its own process of concealment,’ and is therefore open to deciphering.5 It is the reading of fetishism that Kelly and Mulvey stage in their work that makes their collaboration so important. Their collaboration represents a shared rewriting of maternal femininity strong enough to make it discursively visible.

Hieroglyphs of maternal desire

Kelly and Mulvey draw upon the graphic language of the hieroglyph to evoke this rewriting. Their approach to the hieroglyph strongly resonates with its appearance in Freud, where the hieroglyph is a figure of the unconscious, the purported mysteries of female sexuality, and, like the dark continent, so-called ‘primitive’ cultures. But in PPD and Riddles, the hieroglyph represents a feminist excavation of maternal femininity that opens the work to reflecting on the colonial legacies the dark continent represents. Chapter 5 analyses PPD for its counter-fetishisation and its excavation of maternal femininity. This epic installation is composed of 135 modest-sized wall units organised into six sections. Each section can be considered what Emily Apter calls a ‘maternal reliquary.’6 They display sentimental objects that index a mother’s attention to a child’s care and growth. Marking desires and losses, these objects are the mother’s own fetish objects. They represent Kelly’s efforts to claim the value of maternal femininity and the losses that constitute it, and thereby refute the assumption that the maternal body is only a symbol for the threat of castration and the loss of patriarchal authority and prestige. The fetish objects collected within PPD are traces of an intersubjective process rather than easily consumable visual objects that images of women so often emblematise. Scenes in which the mother teaches the child to speak, read, and write exemplify this intersubjective process, and Kelly creates an array of texts and images of writing to foreground the mother’s fetishisation of the child’s words, which Kelly transforms into poetry, a dimension of PPD that has been unexplored until now. Finally, Chapter 6 is devoted to Mulvey’s work. It analyses the essays Mulvey wrote in the 1970s as the groundwork for Riddles, which are read as a form of cinematic writing. Described by Griselda Pollock as a ‘major piece of feminist poetry,’ Riddles also takes maternal fetishisation as its focus, and shares many of Kelly’s aesthetic arguments – including that of making text a central compositional feature.7 Replete with images of writing, Riddles is a film that actively transforms viewers into readers. This consistent attention to text is the means by which Mulvey represents the pleasures of the maternal bond and transfers them into a feminist imaginary that creates correspondences among women. In both PPD and Riddles, we see the creation of a feminist imaginary that values the reproductive and affective labour through which maternal femininity is defined but also discovers the ways in which women can be unhinged from the naturalised imperatives inherent to the definition of maternal femininity in patriarchy. Performing these critical acts in tandem (rather than relying upon the idea that they are mutually exclusive) allows for correspondences among women that are not premised on women’s reproductive capacities, which encourages women to resist the pervasive expectation that they give themselves to the care of others and exhorts them to pursue feminist collaborations across the divisions of race and class.

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Working with the argument that the fetishisation of women’s bodies is used to reinforce and displace racism and colonialism, the next chapters trace Kelly’s and Mulvey’s engagement with the colonial histories the hieroglyph emblematises. The analysis of PPD ends by analysing how Kelly places her maternal figure in the midst of an urban crisis that involves diminishing state resources and the racist legacies of British colonialism. And in the reading of Riddles here it is argued that the choice to focus on the hieroglyphs within the British Museum – with all its connotations of imperial nation-building – reveals how a feminist imaginary can be productively transmitted along the maternal line but can also move across the lines of race and class written by colonialism. Through poetically dense and visually rich scenes between two women that preserve interracial and intersectional differences, Riddles poses the possibility of feminist collaborations among women on different sides of colonial history. Notes 1 Analysing Kelly’s appearance in Riddles of the Sphinx, Griselda Pollock writes, ‘Embedded in this major feminist intervention in independent cinema is its corresponding intervention in the field of visual arts.’ This statement comes out of Pollock’s analysis of the correspondences between Kelly’s Post-Partum Document and Mulvey’s Riddles of the Sphinx in her chapter ‘Still Working on the Subject: Feminist Poetics and its Avant-Garde Moment,’ in Mary Kelly, Re-Reading Post-Partum Document, Sabine Breitwieser (ed.) (Vienna: Generali Foundation, 1999), 237–260: 239. 2 See Judith Mastai, ‘Portrait of an Artist after Choice: Mary Kelly and the Historicization of Conceptual Art,’ in Social Process/Collaborative Action: Mary Kelly 1970–1975, J. Mastai (ed.) (Charles H. Scott Gallery, Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, 1997), 13–23; Peter Wollen, ‘Thirteen Paragraphs,’ in ibid., 25–31; Griselda Pollock, ‘Histories,’ in ibid., 33–56. Juli Carson, ‘Post-Partum Document: An Introduction,’ in Mary Kelly: Projects, 1973–2010, exhibition catalogue, Dominique Heyes-Moore (ed.) (Manchester: Whitworth Art Gallery, 2011), 74–79. 3 See Laura Mulvey, ‘Mary Kelly: An Aesthetic of Temporality,’ in Mary Kelly: Projects, 1973–2010, Heyes-Moore (ed.), 84–93: 92. For historical overviews of feminist art in Britain, see Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement (London: Pandora Press, 1987); Margaret Harrison, ‘Notes on Feminist Art in Britain 1970–1977,’ Studio International 193.33 (1977), 212–220; and Kathy Battista, Renegotiating the Body: Feminist Art in 1970s London (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013). 4 For the history of the ‘History Group’ and the connection between the work of Juliet Mitchell and Kelly’s PPD, see Mignon Nixon, ‘“Why Freud?” asked the Shrew: Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Post-Partum Document, and the History Group,’ Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 40th Anniversary of Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974) 20.2 (June 2015), 131–140.

Hieroglyphs of maternal desire

5 Mulvey, ‘Preface,’ in Fetishism and Curiosity: Cinema and the Mind’s Eye (London: British Film Institute, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), xxiii–xxviii: xxvii. 6 Emily Apter, ‘The Smell of Money: Mary Kelly in Conversation with Emily Apter,’ in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, E. Apter and William Peitz (eds) (Ithaca: Cornell Univeristy Press, 1993), 352–362: 352. 7 Griselda Pollock and Laura Mulvey, ‘Laura Mulvey in conversation with Griselda Pollock,’ Mamsie: Studies in the Maternal 2.1–2 (2010), 1–13: 7.

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Rewriting maternal femininity in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document

‘[L]ittle girls are told their future is caring for people … ’ Sheila Rowbotham in Nightcleaners (1975)1

Post-Partum Document is an archive of objects that represent the pleasures Kelly’s maternal figure takes in caring for her child: infant clothing; soiled nappies; scribbled drawings; words, dialogues, and stories; letters and typesetting materials; pieces of blankets; and small gifts the child found in nature. These objects are marked by imminent losses, however, making the mother’s pleasures ephemeral. As a result, the framed objects that Kelly presents in PPD index the desires and anxieties that emerge from the events that point to the child’s gradual separation from her: weaning from the breast; eating solid food; learning to scribble, draw, and write; speaking in a recognisable syntax; entering the public world of school; mapping the borders, interiors, and mysteries of the mother’s body. These are poignant losses, and Kelly represents them through objects that forestall a confrontation with absence. They are elegantly presented within framed sequences that, as Kelly explains, ‘parod[y] a familiar type of museum display,’ which let her ‘archaeology of everyday life,’ as she calls it, ‘slip unannounced into the great hall and ask impertinent questions of the keepers.’2 By presenting objects of maternal desire through the idioms of contemporary art (most prominently Minimalism and Conceptual Art) and placing them in the clean, orderly spaces of art institutions, Kelly quietly defies the ‘keepers’ of the ‘great hall’ who would relegate them to the contained and less important keepsake world of maternal sentimentality.3 PPD is an extended rewriting of the value attributed to maternal femininity. It challenges the sacred idealisation of mothers, which sustains and covers up the assumption that mothers serve as the ground of people’s desires but should themselves be restrained when it comes to representing the full range of their own desirous attachments. While sanctioned to the point of reverence, maternal attachments are also perceived to be inherently pathological and ‘asocial,’ and therefore require, according to patriarchal logic, the father’s enforcement of the name as an instrument that separates the maternal dyad (a psychoanalytic

Rewriting maternal femininity in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document

term that designates the intersubjectivity of mother and child). This paternal function is often referred to as the ‘third term’ and brings the organising principles of the symbolic order on to the maternal dyad and instigates the child’s entrance into language, social organisation, and the hierarchies of sexual difference.4 Kelly refutes the poles of idealisation and pathologisation through which maternal femininity is represented by engaging with the idea that maternal femininity is a position in language and therefore not a natural state. By highlighting the absence at the ‘heart’ of maternal femininity, PPD undercuts the singular importance of the Oedipal narrative and the losses it writes into cultural visibility. The six sections of PPD are composed of framed visual objects arranged in cinematic sequences slowed down into still images heavily inscribed and layered with multiple forms of text and writing.5 The last section features images that evoke the Rosetta Stone. It signals that the hieroglyph is an important figure throughout PPD, both at the level of form – the intertwining of words and images – and as theme – a lost history that requires unfamilar forms of reading. Intricate and dense, the pieces of PPD are not easy to see. They compel viewers to approach the work and read the patterns of gestures, texts, and marks. Appearing in a wide array of typographic forms and handwritten inscriptions, the textual appearance of language is central to PPD. Kelly makes diary entries, language lessons, and psychoanalytic texts the artwork’s primary subject. Drawing from Conceptual Art’s attention to theoretical and discursive framing, each section is bookended by theoretical texts that explain in detail how the work engages with psychoanalytic discourse.6 Every part of PPD is dense with signifying textures that create the artwork’s textual address – an address that asks viewers to embark upon a reading process that challenges the demand to see an image of the mother that is full and complete and underlies the visual fetishisation that is a signature of the sign woman. The attention Kelly pays to the textual dimensions of language is part of her engagement with and revision of the psychoanalytic account of the girl’s trajectory through the Oedipal Complex. PPD works from the psychoanalytic argument that pregnancy and the post-partum bond instigates the mother re-experiencing, on an imaginary level, the pre-Oedipal dimensions of her childhood.7 Highlighting its lyricism, Kelly describes this return to the preOedipal as offering access to the ‘fullness of the dyad, the sweetness of that imaginary capsulation which reduces the outside world to absurdity.’8 This means that through pregnancy, a woman has access to the sense of plenitude she possessed as a girl before entering the castration scenario and encountering the forces that coerce her into accepting her inferior, ‘castrated’ status. What cuts off the pleasures of the pre-Oedipal plenitude is the girl’s entry into the symbolic order, which labels her anatomy as ‘negative’ and assures that she will identify with the sign woman as ‘not man’ and come to figure for masculinity’s

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losses (and therefore can be fetishised as a defence against those losses). What cuts off the mother’s return to those pleasures is the fact that the child – who gave her a temporary sense of completion – grows up, speaks, and differentiates himself or herself in language. That is, when the infant begins to separate from the mother, the mother re-experiences the initial ‘cut’ of castration. These repeated losses give rise to the loving representations of the child’s infancy that are at the centre of PPD. PPD engages with this psychoanalytic narrative to rewrite the positioning of maternal femininity. While language is the mechanism by which the girl is called into a negated position, with Kelly it becomes a tool for rewriting what the feminine has been construed to mean. Rather than fully acceding to patriarchy’s hold on the symbolic order, Kelly mines the imaginative possibility of a return to the feminine pre-Oedipal and works with language as a malleable material that can carry sensuous pleasures of that return into discursive visibility. This is an important aspect of the avant-garde feminist poetics that Griselda Pollock sees in both Kelly’s and Mulvey’s work. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s theories of the semiotic, Pollock writes that a poetics take place between the ‘pulsions and energies’ of the preverbal body and the symbolic order.9 It is this poetics that makes feminist collaborations among women so crucial to understanding PPD. Kelly’s and Mulvey’s collaboration mirrors the value and place of these sensuous pleasures and make them part of a shared feminist discourse that can identify maternal femininity as a position in language rather than as a natural state. Making texts and images of writing the central objects of PPD, Kelly allows maternal femininity to become a part of a feminist discourse in which women can participate in the project of displacing fixed images of women’s subordination and draw upon the aesthetic imagination to write images that would allow women to recognise themselves differently. Every section in PPD is an address to viewers to rewrite the vision of maternal femininity they inherit and question the sense of fullness maternal femininity is expected to give. Through this address, which Kelly’s collaboration with Mulvey exemplifies, PPD begins to direct women to create feminist imaginaries beyond the narrow set of images offered by the society of the spectacle and transform the meanings mapped onto women’s negative signification in language. Introducing Post-Partum Document

The ‘Introduction’ to PPD consists of four infant vests made of yellow wool (see Figure 5.1). Each vest has been meticulously folded and carefully arranged in perspex boxes (plastic display cases), and have been placed in an orderly row. These vests are small memorials to the mother’s work of clothing the child’s body. Testaments to the reciprocity of the relationship between mother

Rewriting maternal femininity in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document

Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Introduction, 1973.

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and child, the vests are textured with wrinkles and folds, and the wool holds the traces of both the mother’s touch and the child’s skin. While the serial placement of the vests might suggest an automated routine, Kelly re-presents them as singular objects. Each of the white ribbons that tie up these little vests fold and twist in particular ways; they move across them in calligraphic-like gestures. Most important about this introduction is that the figure of the mother is not pictured. Instead Kelly renders the vests as the mother lovingly sees them. Material enactments of the mother’s desire, the vests dramatically undercut any expectation to see images of women and the demand for maternal plenitude that underlies them. Resisting the presence and transparency of the image is part of Kelly’s efforts to ‘cut across the dominant representation of the woman as the object of the look in order to question the notion of femininity as a pregiven entity.’10 Rather than participate in the visual fetishisation of woman, viewers are asked to see a woman composing her own form of fetishisation.11 Over the course of PPD, texts and images of writing become fetish objects. Though the vests create a strong sentimental pull, Kelly mediates and frames their appearance through diagrams that represent the symbolic order. At the upper right hand corner of the vests, between the neckline and the sleeve, Kelly has imprinted a version of Lacan’s diagrams that map the trajectories of subjectivisation. Kelly’s diagrams ‘document’ the subject/object relations that constitute the maternal dyad but also suggest its separation. The first diagram is a horizontal line composed of dashes. Above this line is the word ‘INTERSUBJECTIVITY,’ printed in simple sans-serif upper-case letters. Below the line is the label ‘Axis,’ followed by a recording of the date. On the left side of the line is an ‘S’ (for subject). On the right side of the line is a lowercase ‘o’ (for object). As the diagram develops in complexity across the four vests – expanding from two lines to three and then four, eventually creating a geometric form that consists of two inverted triangles on top of each other – it becomes clear that the diagrams make maternal femininity difficult, the result of a complicated intersubjective process that takes place through the syntax of recognisable forms (see Figure 5.2). By imprinting the vests with words and shapes, Kelly represents maternal femininity as a discursive production. This is a central argument of PPD: that maternal femininity is not naturally ordained, but is, as Kelly explains, ‘a position the subject occupies in language.’12 Making the complexity of this positioning a compositional feature of PPD contributes to its emphasis on de-centring subjectivity, which complicates any impulse to understand the artwork as primarily autobiographical. As Kelly explains, ‘Although it is a self-documentation of the mother-child relationship, here between myself and my son, the PPD does not describe the unified, transcendental subject of autobiography, but rather, the decentered, socially constituted subject of mutual discourse.’13 This

Rewriting maternal femininity in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document

Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Introduction, 1973, detail.

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‘mutual discourse’ points to the relationship with the child, but also the relationship with the artwork’s viewers and readers. The description of maternal femininity as ‘a position the subject occupies in language’ sounds detached and severe, but Kelly uses the idea of a recognisable discursive position as a point from which to recreate the sensuous and affective pleasures associated with the maternal and then transmit those pleasures to viewers. Indeed, the tenderness with which Kelly presents the vests has a strong affective pull that has drawn many viewers into PPD’s feminist arguments. Even the diagrams and pieces of language allow Kelly to evoke what she calls the ‘non specular … in the visual field’ – the ‘sensory’ and ‘somatic’ aspects of the visual object that are so crucial to Kelly’s representation of maternal loss. 14 Recalling her first time seeing Kelly’s piece in the 1970s, Lucy R. Lippard writes: I was touched by what I sensed of its content rather than by what there was to ‘know’ about the piece – which turned out to be a great deal. The simultaneity of sensual immediacy and immediate nostalgia I recognised from my own, earlier, maternal experience. On a formal basis, I ‘liked’ the melancholy delicacy, the visual parallels to the ephemerality of motherhood; the organic traces and talismans of the mother’s individual discoveries.15

Lippard’s response mirrors the one Kelly hoped to create. Kelly composed PPD’s opening such that it would address her viewers by evoking sensual immediacy. She attempts to touch viewers through its transmission of nostalgia and its subtle evocation of fetishisation (‘talismans of the mother’s individual discoveries’). The pleasures that animate this address are crucial for asking viewers to engage with the complex feminist arguments underlying the piece. Kelly stresses how important it was for her that objects of PPD register as pleasurable so as to ‘engage the viewer.’16 This engagement has many layers, which the multiple forms of text and writing significantly contribute. Initially drawn in by sensual immediacy, the second layer of Lippard’s response points to the rigorous theoretical argument moving through PPD and the forms of reading it requires: ‘I was moved by the intellectual refinement that I then only sensed beneath the image’s surfaces. I went home and read the lengthy “Footnotes and Bibliography” booklet that revealed some of those depths.’17 Six years after she first saw PPD, Lippard attests to an almost complete transformation of her relationship to the piece, one that radically displaces the centrality of the image: ‘[b]y now I can no longer see PPD. In the six years since the first viewing, it has become an excruciatingly complex and demanding experience rather than merely an object of perception.’18 Part of Lippard’s rendition of her extended response is her sensitivity to the tension Kelly creates between expressions of maternal sentimentality and rigorous theoretical formulations.19

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The first chapter of PPD, ‘Documentation I: Analyzed Fecal Stains and Feeding Charts,’ creates a more complicated relationship to maternal sentiment. Indeed, this first chapter puts the installation squarely in the domestic sphere and represents what is perhaps its most despised form of reproductive labour: changing nappies or diapers (see Figure 5.3). ‘Documentation I’ is a series of

Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Documentation I, Analysed faecal stains and feeding charts, 1974, detail.

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twenty-four soiled gossamer diaper liners framed in plastic display cases. Each thin liner, which resembles paper, is marked by traces of waste that acquire the imprint of the liners’ textures and weaves. These depictions trace the child’s bodily consumption and excretion – as well as (though less directly) the breastfeeding mother, as her body serves as the raw materials that had previously formed the child’s developed physical composition and now works to prepare solid food for the child to consume. In ‘Documentation I,’ Kelly has annotated each diaper with a detailed list of what the child has eaten during the day. These lists are placed directly below the representation of the child’s bodily waste, and sometimes the traces of waste seeps into their orderly placement. Marked by the date, the exact time of the feedings, the measurement of the food in ounces and teaspoons, and finally a ‘total’ of liquids and solids, the lists look like documentation in a medical file. The type is small and the list is compact. While these formal features signify objectivity and anonymity, the scrupulous attention to detail registered in the lists signals an obsessive engagement with the child’s bodily traces and the quotidian details of childcare. The representations of the diapers also register anxiety, as the movement away from breastfeeding and to solid food marks the beginning of the child’s differentiation, and therefore the loss of the mother’s fulfilment. At the end of the sequence, Kelly places a simple Lacanianesque algebraic formula that marks this anxiety and its connections to the presumption of femininity’s denigrated place in the symbolic order. Above the straight line (and therefore corresponding to the placement of the child’s waste) is a question, composed in capital letters and placed in parentheses: ‘(WHAT HAVE I DONE WRONG?)’ Below the straight line (and therefore corresponding to the placement of the mother’s charts) is the letter ‘S,’ which represents the subject. The mother fills in a space of absence with a question that is premised on the assumption of her inadequacy. While ‘Documentation I’ reiterates the positioning of woman as inadequate, monumentalising the child’s waste is an act of feminist defiance. Placed together on the wall, this set of diapers sarcastically comments upon the physical gestures of Abstract Expressionism, their link to the body’s physicality, the ground of immanence, and the unconscious – all of which women have been made to figure for, which, in the world of childcare, translates into the expectation that it is the responsibility of women to clean up the child’s waste. ‘Document I’ is a refusal to cover up the work that goes into raising a child and the desires that emerge out of its messy and repetitive processes. Kelly’s refusal was met with outrage. After the 1976 exhibition of PPD at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, there were a large number of harsh reviews. The press became the voice of the ‘great hall’ and its ‘keepers.’ The words ‘DIRTY NAPPIES’ were placed prominently across the front pages of the British tabloid newspapers, and PPD became a symbol of contemporary

Rewriting maternal femininity in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document

art’s absurd decadence. Kelly became the bad mother who articulated her desires by positioning herself as the artist engaging in scatological pleasures. Perhaps what was animating the rage was the fact that Kelly presented the maternal figure fetishising the child but not with the sentimentality that is easy to dismiss. Kelly later reflected on the hostile reactions to PPD. They helped her realise the importance of paying attention to the gender politics of contemporary art and museum exhibitions.20 The outrage provoked by PPD, and ‘Documentation I’ in particular, indicated to Kelly that she was pushing against the patriarchal underpinnings of the symbolic order. She was defying its mandates about what aspects of women’s lives can become visible. ‘The subjective moment of women’s oppression’

PPD reflects and complicates the attention members of the Women’s Movement paid to transforming the conditions of women’s work and undoing the gendered division of labour. During the first years of creating PPD (1973–1975), Kelly participated in two collective projects that highlight her commitment to feminist activism: the installation Women and Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry (1973–1975), produced with Kay Hunt and Margaret Harrison, and the documentary Nightcleaners (1975), produced by the Berwick Film Collective, of which Kelly was a member. Significant in and of themselves, these are important background texts for PPD. They reveal the entrenched connection between maternal femininity and devalued forms of work. They also bring Kelly’s engagement with psychoanalysis into relief and underscore the crucial role text and images of writing play in Kelly’s efforts to bring pre-Oedipal pleasures to PPD’s aesthetic forms. Women and Work (hereafter WW) documents the lives of women who worked in a metal box factory in Bermondsey, South London. The exhibit is a large-scale installation that attempts to represent the impact of the Equal Pay Act (passed in 1970, implemented as law in 1975) on the lives of working women.21 Drawing upon both Minimalism and Conceptual Art, WW is deliberately spare and sober (see Figure 5.4). Transforming the exhibition space into a research centre devoted to the explication of women’s labour conditions, the installation stressed the clarity and visibility of information. At the centre of Women and Work is a longitudinal study and corporate archive for the Metal Box Company. The research was performed and the installation was produced to give people a way to see how women figure into capitalist production. On the walls were maps, data sets, time cards, copies of legislation, and company statistics (such as how often workers see the doctor). There were also photographs of the various kinds of work performed at the factory, which were appended by notes identifying how many men and women were assigned

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Mary Kelly, Margaret Harrison, Kay Hunt, Women and Work, 1973–75. Installation, South London Art Gallery, 1975.

to these jobs. Two televisions placed side-by-side played video recordings of men and women doing and discussing their work. One could also listen to tape recordings of Kelly, Hunt, and Harrison interviewing the owners, managers, and workers.22 The documentation of the workers’ daily schedules is important for understanding Kelly’s relationship to WW. On 8  ×  10 inch pieces of paper, Kelly, Hunt, and Harrison typed up how the workers (both men and women) described the beginning, middle, and end of their workdays, starting with the time they woke up and concluding with the time they went to bed (see Figure 5.5). Below these daily schedules are the workers’ names, their ages, how many children they have, their position at the factory, whether they work full- or part-time, and their weekly work schedule. What stood out to Kelly were the marked differences in how the men and women of the factory represented their time. For the most part, the men focused entirely on tasks they performed at work. By contrast, the women only mentioned the time they left for work and when they arrived home. The work they identified as key to their day-to-day lives took place in or was centred on maintaining the home: washing, cleaning, shopping, cooking, and taking care of children and husbands. Reproductive labour marked the beginning and end of their work days. For example, the

Rewriting maternal femininity in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document

Mary Kelly, Margaret Harrison, Kay Hunt, Women and Work: Daily Schedules, 1975, detail.

day of Joanna Martin, a twenty-one year-old Shrink Wrap Operator, began at 6:00 a.m.: ‘GET UP, GET BABY DRESSED, FED.’ Before going to bed at midnight she spent three hours on ‘BABY’S WASHING CLEAN UP.’ Documenting the second shift of women’s reproductive labour, WW demonstrates what Marxist feminists had been arguing about women, reproductive labour, and the PostFordist capitalist economy. Women not only sustain the domestic space from which the worker (imagined as a man) emerges; they are workers themselves. WW adds to those arguments by revealing that reproductive labour is a form of work where women’s investments and desires are realised. Noting the discrepancy between the men’s and women’s renditions of their schedules, Kelly saw that something was missing from WW. The project did not account for what Kelly will come to identify as the ‘subjective moment of women’s oppression,’ women’s identification with and internalisation of the discursive positioning of femininity and its negative signification in language, which translates into the undervalued forms of work assigned to women.23 In an interview with Douglas Crimp, Kelly points to the schedules and what they suggested: Because there was a question about domestic labour emerging in the women’s movement at that time, as well as my own experience of being pregnant, I

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thought: well, I’m going to see what is really going on in the home. What kind of labour is this? At first I looked at it very sociologically but it became more and more obvious that you couldn’t get to the irrationality of this event, the questions of desire and questions of the social and psychic constructions of maternal femininity.24

It is Kelly’s attention to the ‘irrationality of the event’ and its connection to ‘social and psychic constructions of maternal femininity’ that moved her work in a psychoanalytic direction.25 Psychoanalysis provided a framework for investigating the irrationality of this psychic construction, which in turn allowed her to suggest that the reproductive and affective labour associated with maternal femininity can be sites of pleasure and identification that exceed the value of waged labour.26 In the midst of contributing to WW, Kelly created two 8mm films that were displayed side-by-side at Portsmouth Polytechnic in England in 1974. One film depicts a white woman (Kelly herself) running her hands over her pregnant belly (Figure 5.6). The other film depicts a woman’s hands operating industrial machinery. Both reels are focused on hands: the hands of sensuous touch and the hands of manual production. Setting up a parallel between pregnancy and factory work, the two reels, presented as a diptych, argue for seeing women’s reproductive labour as productive in the Marxist sense.27 However, the film reel that depicts a woman’s hands at work within the space of the factory was separated from its pregnant double and became part of WW. Meanwhile, the reel that portrays Kelly’s pregnant belly became a discrete cinematic object that she named Antepartum after the completion of PPD. This separation suggests that, for Kelly, something was missing in the comparison between pregnancy and women’s work in the factory. In this sense, the film represents desires that exceed and supplement the Marxist feminism of WW. While Kelly’s film could be said to underscore the idea that pregnancy is a means for women to (temporarily) overcome the castrated lack that femininity represents in the patriarchal imagination, it also makes pregnancy into a fantasy of staying within an imaginary space and time before the call into the patriarchal ideology consolidated in the name of the father.

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Mary Kelly, Antepartum, 1973.

Rewriting maternal femininity in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document

Seeing the fantasy Antepartum realises in visual form, it is easy to imagine that Kelly would be responsive to an often-neglected passage in Louis Althusser’s ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ (1971) in which he illustrates how ideology creates the ground for the subject’s interpellation by illustrating how a fetus in the womb is called into a ready-made identity before he or she is born. Althusser writes that ‘if we agree to drop the “sentiments” i.e., the forms of family ideology (paternal/maternal/ conjugal/fraternal) in which the unborn child is expected,’ we can see that it is certain in advance that it will bear its Father’s name, and will therefore have an identity and be irreplaceable. Before its birth, the child is therefore always-already a subject, appointed as a subject in and by the specific familial ideological configuration in which it is ‘expected’ once it has been conceived. I hardly need add that this familial ideological configuration is, in its uniqueness, highly structured, and that it is in this implacable and more or less ‘pathological’ (presupposing that any meaning can be assigned to that term) structure that the former subject-to-be will have to ‘find’ ‘its’ place, i.e. ‘become’ the sexual subject (boy or girl) which it already is in advance.28

This formulation illustrates the depth, reach, and intricacy of the heteropatriarchal family’s interpellations. Althusser argues that before they leave the womb, children are already written by the father’s name and placed in the syntax of sexual difference. Despite the feminist possibilities of Althusser’s formulations – which are substantial – we have to note that he sees through the mother’s body as though it was a transparent screen, which suggests that he does not imagine any possibility of a feminist rewriting of pregnancy to intervene in the interpellation he identifies. Antepartum, on the other hand, begins to suggest that possibility. Kelly’s focus is on the haptic interrelation between the mother and child, making the mother’s body and the pleasure she takes in its physical contours a visual fact. Moreover, the fantasy Antepartum traces – to touch a space and time before the interpellation of a name and the ‘“pathological”’ placement within ideology that name guarantees – is as much for the pregnant woman as it is the child in utero. By making language one of its mediums, PPD takes that fantasy and expands it outward into a feminist discourse that can move between the psyche and the public language of work, but is also capable of calling the child to a less ‘“pathological”’ structure of sexual difference. While Antepartum is an attempt to portray women’s psychic lives from inside the haptic envelope of pregnancy, the documentary film Nightcleaners, like WW, approaches the production of maternal femininity by depicting the work women perform outside the home. The film centres on a group of working-class women who make their living cleaning London business buildings at night, and documents their efforts, along with activists from the Women’s Liberation

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Movement, to create union representation for themselves. The night cleaners’ campaign began when May Hobbs, a former cleaner, became angered by the night cleaners’ deteriorating working conditions and the casualisation of their labour. Hobbs asked members of the Women’s Liberation Workshop to help her contact night cleaners through leafleting. The Berwick Street Collective, which included Marc Karlin, James Scott, Humphry Trevelyan, and Kelly (who worked before the camera as an activist and behind the camera as a director and sound producer), began producing Nightcleaners as part of the campaign.29 A highly reflexive documentary, Nightcleaners begins with a black-and-white still of a woman’s face. The camera is so close to the skin it appears at first as an abstract field of black, white, and grey – a cinematic chiaroscuro that reveals the process of an image decomposing. This still image of a woman’s face, moving unsteadily in and out of visibility, becomes a central refrain of the film. Just as the woman’s face comes into focus, words float from the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. The title of the film appears in fragments and exceeds the cinematic frame. Other words float randomly across the screen (and the woman’s face): ‘right,’ ‘week,’ ‘12 pounds,’ ‘cover.’ This attention to words, unhinged from the syntax of the sentence, takes on more significance when we hear a woman speaking in the voice-over. She relays that the cleaners are not allowed to read the papers on the desks they clean and are told to ‘just arrange them.’ The sequence of words could thus evoke a momentary glimpse of documents and contracts that determine women’s wages, working conditions, and lives. This opening shot announces the film’s visual patterning of inky blacks, hazy greys, and bright fluorescent whites, which evoke women’s state of perpetual sleep deprivation as they work through the dazed half-light of night. For the issue that rises most prominently to the visual and narrative surface of Nightcleaners is not Equal Pay Legislation, nor the masculinist bias of the labour movement, nor the activists’ difficulty reaching and creating relationships with the cleaners (though obviously these are factors in the lives of the nightcleaners). The film focuses a lot on the fact that the nightcleaners were simply never able to get a full night’s sleep. The women work all night cleaning offices, and during the day they take care of their children, slipping in a few hours of sleep before the children come home from school. Fairly early into Nightcleaners, two women are interviewed in a dark hall. Asked why they continue working, the women say they want to buy the things their children need. One of the women has been told by a doctor that she should ‘pack it in’ because it is unlikely that her body can withstand the extensive physical toll of this work. She explains: ‘I care more for my children than I care for myself,’ an illustration of the ‘subjective moment of women’s oppression.’ It also suggests what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has identified as the gendering of ethics – the giving associated with the sign woman and its naturalised link to maternal femininity.30

Rewriting maternal femininity in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document

Watching Nightcleaners is hard work. The moving images are continually (but unpredictably) interrupted by a film leader that blocks the screen with dense black. These blacked-out moments represent the impediments to seeing into women’s lives and understanding how they become aligned with devalued forms of reproductive labour that sustain – often invisibly – both the home and the public world of work.31 It also renders in visual form the impediments to political organising. Often a voice will speak from behind the black screen. In one such moment, the voice of Sheila Rowbotham begins to address a central concern of the night cleaners’ campaign: ‘We had to make a politics which came out of the experience of our own childhoods. We had to make a politics about how we’d been conditioned to be feminine.’ In the midst of this articulation, the film shifts to footage of a woman emptying office garbage cans. Nightcleaners reveals a complex problem: how the negative positioning of the feminine translates into undervalued forms of work for women. The film quite effectively uses a layering of voices to render that translation and its consequences. Many of the voices are recorded interviews of women addressing their working conditions. At one point, a woman is interviewed about how many offices nightcleaners are responsible for on their shifts: ‘We do the actual whole building and we do nine offices at 140.’ Then one hears the voice of an interviewer asking a woman how much she gets paid a week: ‘12 pounds.’ ‘And what are your working hours?’ ‘10–7.’ Then a different voice – again, Rowbotham – reflects upon the problem of indoctrinating women and girls into the reproductive and affective labour of maternal femininity: ‘He can become a skilled engineer; he could drive a plane. Whereas little girls are told that their future is caring for people.’ This statement – ‘girls are told their future is caring for people’ – is articulated as viewers watch a woman cleaning an office alone. Viewers are asked to see and reflect upon the consequences of conflating girls with care, particularly in a context in which the recipients of such care are unknown and absent, and ‘care’ does not capture the harsh working conditions of cleaning offices at night. By pushing at the documentary form, Nightcleaners suggests the importance of rewriting the mutual constitution of femininity and care, and how they figure together in exploitative working conditions. It does not mask the impediments, difficulties, and failures of either the campaign or the film itself, but rather draws upon them and makes them central to the aesthetic form of the film.32 In this sense, Nightcleaners moves away from the immediate and pressing concerns of feminist activism and moves into the more murky realms of psychoanalytic investigation. This step was not without consequences. Women’s lives – made precarious by contingent labour and deteriorating working conditions – were being cut short. At the same time, the portrayal of motherhood in Nightcleaners as a source of women’s oppression strongly suggests that the constellation of forces that naturalise the exploitation depicted

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in the film have such entrenched histories that they cannot be transformed without a sustained investigation into women’s subjective investments in maternal femininity. Indeed, the exploitation of women depicted in both WW and Nightcleaners is much more than a history of oppression that can be easily overturned; rather, the exhibition and film suggest (particularly when we see them retrospectively through PPD) that women’s identification with reproductive labour installs itself in the psyche and is therefore transmitted and internalised through language, images, and scenes that reinforce the ideologically stubborn assumption that a girl’s future and a woman’s life will be devoted to caring for people. Through PPD, Kelly advocated that, in addition to political organising, the ‘longest revolution’ (as Juliet Mitchell referred to it) needs aesthetic practices capable of evoking the intricacy and depth of women’s identifications with maternal femininity.33 This is not the same as banishing maternal femininity or asserting its moral goodness or strength. It is instead situating maternal femininity between the polarised representations through which it is habitually represented, which allows it to be revealed as a discursive rather than as a fixed, naturalised position. For Kelly, psychoanalysis was necessary for developing the aesthetic practices that could stage the possibilities of such a transformation, even as it exemplified the patriarchal assumptions feminists had to examine and undo – one of which is that women’s bodies serve as fetish objects that deflect patriarchy’s losses. Reading hieroglyphs

As mentioned above, in one of the voice-overs woven into Nightcleaners, Sheila Rowbotham states, ‘We had to make a politics which came out of the experience of our own childhoods. We had to make a politics about how we’d been conditioned to be feminine.’ With this comment, the film points to the feminist engagement with psychoanalysis, which was a significant part of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain, and central to the work Kelly and Mulvey produced in the 1970s. Juliet Mitchell’s writings on psychoanalysis exemplify this engagement. A contributing editor to the New Left Review, Mitchell published the key psychoanalytic work coming out of France – a translation of ‘The Mirror Stage’ was published there in 1968 – and was instrumental for bringing psychoanalysis to bear on the questions raised by the Women’s Movement. The iteration of psychoanalysis that appeared in the New Left Review was strongly inflected by Althusser’s theorisation of ideology, which made the unconscious a site of political investigation. In his account of the Lacanian and feminist re-reading of Freud that took place during this period, Peter Wollen explains that ‘[p]sychoanalysis was used, not simply to give a theoretical account of femininity, but to find a way of understanding motherhood as both

Rewriting maternal femininity in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document

a psychoanalytic and a political category.’34 While Freud was the declared enemy in many American feminist tracks of the 1970s, Mitchell investigated Freudian psychoanalysis as a detailed account of women’s denigration.35 In Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974), she approaches psychoanalysis not as an endorsement of patriarchy, but a description of its workings. Mitchell writes that her book was motivated by her interest in the tenacity of sexual difference: how sexual difference, and the ‘inequalities that always rise from it,’ are ‘lived in the heart and the head and transmitted over generations.’36 She was approaching the ideological fixity of sexual difference, a ‘history’ that is ‘acquired,’ Mitchell explains, ‘largely unconsciously’ and therefore quite resistant to change, but not completely.37 By making the unconscious its subject, and, as Pollock explains, ‘defin[ing] the psychic mechanisms by which sexual difference was always being constituted,’ psychoanalysis offered a map for how sexual difference ‘could be altered,’ if taken up ‘through a critically created knowledge of its processes at the intersection with material historical conditions.’38 The work of Kelly and Mulvey pursue this map and its possibility for altering the fixity of sexual difference. Reflecting on the feminist reading of Freud’s work that took place during the Women’s Movement, Mulvey describes it as ‘a chink in the door in which a small crack of light could illuminate some of the problems that early feminist theory was trying to address.’39 Kelly and Mulvey opened up this ‘chink in the door’ and created ways of perceiving women’s bodies that work against the fetishisations upon which the society of the spectacle relies. One such opening was in Freud’s classic essay ‘Femininity.’ Both Kelly and Mulvey worked with its arguments, impasses, and images to acknowledge the depths of patriarchal impediments, and they drew from Freud’s evocation of the hieroglyph to imagine representations of women that are not completely written by lack and loss. A summation of his research on women, the 1933 lecture ‘Femininity’ was part of a new series of lectures that Freud composed to echo the ‘Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis’ he gave between 1915 and 1917 at the University of Vienna during the First World War. The latter lectures were conceived to be a supplement to the earlier series, but differed in one important respect: Freud did not compose them for public, oral delivery. Freud explains that he took his place in the lecture room ‘only by the artifice of the imagination.’40 In other words, he composed the lectures with an imaginary audience in mind, and so the lecture has its own textual address. With this address, Freud maps out – with error, hesitation, and stifled insight – the daughter’s trajectory through the Oedipus complex. This trajectory and the psychic landscapes it creates is a ‘riddle’ that Freud makes comparable to finding an archaeological fragment inscribed with a language one can see but cannot read.41 Freud does not deny the fact that femininity represents the limitations of his knowledge. In the preface, he declares he is not interested in ‘disguis[ing] problems,’ ‘deny[ing]

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the existence of gaps and uncertainties,’ or hiding the anxieties those ‘gaps and uncertainties’ provoke.42 But he also asserts that his lecture consists of ‘nothing but observed facts’ and that there are no ‘speculative additions’ to his arguments.43 Such claims seem to stand in contradistinction to the fact that when he begins to discuss the topic of the lecture – ‘the riddle of the nature of femininity’ – he turns to a literary text – the poem Nordsee (1826) by Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) – that contains an image of a hieroglyph. The reading of ‘Femininity’ that follows ‘excavates’ this hieroglyph and draws out its connection to fetishisation. This excavation provides a way to link Freud’s text to Kelly’s evocation of the hieroglyph in PPD, which is analysed in this chapter’s concluding section, and Mulvey’s rendition of the hieroglyph in Riddles, analysed in Chapter 6. Part of what Freud is grappling with in ‘Femininity’ is passivity – whether it is exclusive to women and what its value is. Ultimately, the description of the girl’s passage through the Oedipus complex in ‘Femininity’ puts her back in the same position we expect her to be in Freud’s texts: deprived and regressive; proper and held back; or frustrated and defiant. And yet, there are indications the lecture did not have to end up at this familiar impasse. A curious move occurs as Freud attempts to deterritorialise sexual difference from the body. While ‘Femininity’ opens with a discussion of the obviousness of sexual difference, Freud troubles his line of inquiry by proposing an originary bisexuality and then distancing sexual difference from bodies themselves to instead discuss their aims, as either active or passive. It is not a surprise that Freud falls back on a depiction of sexual reproduction that relies upon the active/passive divide: ‘The male sex-cell is actively mobile and searches out the female one, and the latter, the ovum, is immobile and waits passively.’44 Each example Freud gives to substantiate the general understanding that activity and passivity match up with masculinity and femininity is countered by scenes that trouble such assertions. The work of raising children is one such instance. The ‘functions of rearing and caring for the young,’ Freud asserts, ‘strike us as feminine par excellence,’ but is anything but passive.45 Narrowing in on breastfeeding, Freud writes, ‘A mother is active in every sense towards her child; the act of lactation itself may equally be described as the mother suckling the baby or as her being sucked by it.’46 For Freud, breastfeeding demonstrates how difficult it is to make masculinity and femininity coincide with activity and passivity, but it is the exception that proves the rule that women are destined for sexual and psychic subordination. Freud’s ultimate confusion, though, is how and why does woman submit to passivity and internalise it as hers? The process of becoming a properly passive woman is far from direct, and, according to Freud’s Oedipal trajectory, demands internalising loss. First, the daughter has to transfer her sexual pleasures from the clitoris – which Freud conceives as the ‘equivalent’ of the penis – to

Rewriting maternal femininity in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document

the vagina, which he describes as ‘truly feminine.’47 Secondly, she has to relinquish her earliest attachments to her mother. This is coincident with the girl’s recognition of castration and internalising the mandate that she is destined to embody it. Freud draws attention to the hatred and hostility that typically accompanies losing the mother as an object of loving identification. It is clear that the reason for this difficulty, which Freud brings into visibility but does not question, is the idea that women are of lesser value. Needless to say, internalising the idea that women are less valuable is consequential.48 The daughter regards the mother with disdain, and she inherits the shame that Freud describes as ‘a feminine characteristic par excellence’ (the same phrase he uses to emphasises women’s naturalised relationship to childcare).49 While relinquishing the mother is a bitter enterprise, Freud argues that the girl’s earliest feelings of love for and attachment to the mother do not disappear; they sediment into the layers of what Freud names ‘the prehistory of women.’50 This archaeological ‘prehistory’ has two ‘strata’: the denigration of the mother inscribed by the Oedipus complex and the idealising pre-Oedipal attachment to the mother.51 Freud suggested the aesthetic dimensions of this rich prehistory and its link to archaeology in ‘Female Sexuality’ (1931), written just two years before ‘Femininity.’ In that essay, when considering the difficulty with which the girl reaches a ‘normal positive Oedipus situation,’ Freud writes that ‘our insight into this early, pre-Oedipus phase in girls comes to us as a surprise, like the discovery, in another field, of the Minoan-Mycenean civilization behind the civilization of Greece.’52 In ‘Femininity’ Freud suggests that women can return to this ‘prehistory’ through pregnancy and motherhood. This return contains an encounter with both the girl’s pre-Oedipal affection and Oedipal disdain. His focus, however, is not on the richness of the former, but the sustained bitterness of the latter, which manifests in the daughter’s repetition of her parents’ ‘unhappy marriage.’53 To make matters worse, he renders the pre-Oedipal attachments to the mother as ‘preparations … for the acquisition of the characteristics with which she will later fulfil her role in the sexual function and perform her invaluable social tasks.’54 One of those ‘tasks’ is linked to creating a pleasing image of oneself: specifically, becoming the attractive figure through which her husband can ‘kindle’ his Oedipal ‘passion[s].’55 Here Freud’s text points to the woman’s role serving as the fetishised object that continues forestalling the masculine subject’s recognition that the woman/mother does not possess the phallus. Crucial to ‘Femininity’ is the conflation of the daughter with the mother. Freud’s portrayal of the girl’s psychic life is grounded in the idea that the daughter’s identification with the mother only moves one way and copies the poles of activity and passivity mapped onto the mother with a rigid, unimaginative exactness. In her thorough indictment of ‘Femininity’ at the opening of Speculum of the Other Woman, Luce Irigaray exposes this assumption and

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argues that Freud’s speculations about feminine sexuality reduce the woman to a flat mirror that cancels out the possibilities of variegated, unpredictable, and singular relationships between mothers and daughters. The reduction of the girl to a mirror of maternal subjectivity is clearest in Freud’s analysis of the girl playing with dolls. He reads the scene of play as an almost exact reenactment of the girl’s relationship to the maternal figure, part of a necessary transition into passivity. Freud argues that the girl playing with dolls is ‘not in fact an expression of her femininity; it served as an identification with her mother with the intention of substituting activity for passivity. She was playing the part of her mother and the doll was herself: now she could do with the baby everything that her mother used to do with her.’56 In Speculum, Irigaray explains that ‘[o]ne could obviously point out that a game – even of dolls – is never simply active or passive but rather frustrates that opposition by the economy of repetition that it puts femininity “into play.”’57 Indeed, the poetics of Irigaray’s immanent critique is itself a form of play that frustrates the economy of sameness upon which patriarchy insists. Artist and writer Silvia Kolbowski identifies what is at stake in Irigaray’s argument that Freud flattens the scene of girls ‘playing with dolls.’ She writes that ‘the girl never exclusively assumes the part of her mother, or herself, or the doll in such a game.’58 Which is to say that the girl’s identification with the doll does not have to be viewed only as passive or active, but can be better understood through ‘metaphors of … layering, simultaneity, fluctuation, nonlinear density,’ which is precisely what an image of the hieroglyph can evoke.59 Though buried in the text, the hieroglyph has a prominent role in Freud’s ‘Femininity.’ Shrouded in mystery, it is the fetish object of this imaginary lecture. At the start of his lecture, as he deliberates on the riddle of femininity, Freud turns to the poets, in particular the nineteenth-century German poet Heine. Freud cites a dream-like fragment from Heine’s poem Nordsee to evoke the difficulty of deciphering femininity: ‘Heads in hieroglyph bonnets,/ Heads in turbans and black birettas,/ Heads in wigs and thousand other/ Wretched, sweating heads of humans.’60 It seems that linking the sartorial adornment of bonnets to hieroglyphs is a way to represent the otherness of femininity – its strange and baffling mysteries – and consequently to stress that this fragment requires deciphering. While it is assumed the bonnets link to women, men of the Middle East and North Africa wear ‘turbans,’ and the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church wear ‘black birettas.’ In this confluence of signs, there is a connection between sartorial display and those of a primitive hoard, echoing the connections between sexual and racial fetishism. The comparison to the ‘uncivilized’ hoard of ‘[w]retched, sweating heads’ signals the atavism Freud builds into his theory – which sees women as set back by proper oedipalisation precisely in order to keep sexual difference intact – and therefore reaffirms what Anne McClintock identifies as the ‘imperial narrative that relegated women

Rewriting maternal femininity in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document

and the colonized to the realm of the unrepresentable, the prehistoric, the Dark Continent.’61 The fragment from Heine’s Nordsee, and the hieroglyph that is central to it, function like a fetish within Freud’s imaginary lecture. It stands in for something Freud refuses to see, and deflects a confrontation with the places to which his knowledge does not extend. In her reading of ‘Femininity,’ Mary Ann Doane draws attention to the fact that the four lines Freud cites from Nordsee have been excised from a larger section of the poem that explores, not what a woman is, but what a man is. Doane argues that Heine’s poem has been ‘castrat[ed],’ illustrating in effect the limited, fragmented existence women are assigned to serve as fetish objects that forestall castration anxieties.62 By transforming the question of femininity into a poetic fragment that disguises the pursuit of man’s ontology, Freud is enacting the process of fetishisation. Assumed to be accessible but also evocative of mystery, the hieroglyph is a particularly fitting sign to represent the fetishisation of women. Because it is first and foremost a pictorial language, hieroglyphs are presumed to have an instant accessibility (like images of women). Doane explains that hieroglyphs are ‘theorised in terms of a certain closeness, the lack of a distance or gap between sign and referent.’63 At the same time, ‘the hieroglyphic, like the woman, harbors a mystery, an inaccessible though desirable otherness.’64 In other words, the hieroglyph is, like the fetish as Mulvey describes it, ‘on the cusp of consciousness, acknowledging its own process of concealment,’ but is also ‘open to processes of decoding.’65 This tension between accessibility and mystery actually makes the hieroglyph perfect for reinscribing habitual depictions of women and those assumed to embody racial difference, as sexual and racial difference are established through a set of physical signs but are also linked to the auratic ‘prehistories’ patriarchal civilisation assumes it has transcended. Both Kelly and Mulvey work with the hieroglyph’s metonymic relationship to Ancient Egypt to suggest that the configuration of maternal femininity in Western culture has been posited as a long-lost mythical history superseded by the march toward capitalist modernity (Friedrich Engels’s ‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State’ [1884] provides the classic account). Because of its positioning in and as the past, maternal femininity is relegated to an atavism that must be transcended (most notably through the Oedipal crisis) and made into a site for fetishisation in the Marxist sense (through the forgetting of reproductive and affective forms of labour considered expressions of maternal femininity). This fetishisation justifies enormous labour extractions from women, and it is for this reason that Kelly and Mulvey expand the hieroglyph beyond its deployment in psychoanalysis and work with the meanings Karl Marx attributes to the hieroglyph in the first volume of Capital. There Marx presents the hieroglyph as figure for the fetishisation of the commodity

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and a displacement of human labour behind the visual and material manifestation of the commodity form.66 Kelly brought the hieroglyph into the 1970s and made it a figure for the feminist interventions of the Women’s Movement. She draws upon the fact that the hieroglyph highlights the pictorial dimension of language, and makes it into a sign that defies the silence expected of women and the assumed transparency of vision the society of the spectacle reinforces. Indeed, the hieroglyph that appears in Freud’s ‘Femininity,’ which emerges from his attention to Heine’s literary language, obliquely points to the Lacanian translation of Freudian concepts through semiotics. In Kelly’s hands, the hieroglyph helps deflect the fantasies of completion brought to images of women and draws the reader into the process of reading and deciphering. That is, the poetics of PPD push open and explore what Freud began to glimpse in his writing, but anxiously closed: that motherhood is an active and creative pursuit, and that women are not only capable of writing their own forms of fetishisation, but do so with materials and objects associated with child rearing. When the mother’s fetishisation of the child is tolerated and dismissed through sentimentality, fetishisation becomes a form of compensation that ultimately reinforces the mother’s lack. As the rest of the chapter shows, Kelly creates a different form of fetishisation, one that highlights the relationship between the hieroglyph and language and links both to the particularities of the mother’s loss. She makes texts and pieces of writing fetish objects, creating a poetry of linguistic and visual signifiers that rewrite the place of maternal femininity in the symbolic order. Lessons in language and loss

Beginning with ‘Documentation II,’ the focus of PPD shifts from the child’s body to his gradual acquisition of language, which becomes the artwork’s central theme and material. In ‘Documentation II,’ Kelly represents the child’s first syllables and single-word utterances. In ‘Documentation III,’ she transcribes his first sentences, scribbles, and conversations. In ‘Documentation IV,’ she engages with his verbal symptoms and the ‘language’ of his behaviour, while also transcribing the mother’s anxieties about separation. ‘Documentation V’ is a small museum display for the gifts the child has given to the mother, which are coincident with his inquiries into sexuality, sexual difference, and the mother’s body. And finally in ‘Documentation VI,’ Kelly renders the child’s ability to read and write the alphabet, which is the foundation for his identification with ‘I’ in language. It is in this last section of PPD that Kelly engages most explicitly with hieroglyphic forms. In an elegant display of artistry and ancient history, each piece that composes ‘Documentation VI’ replicates the form and visual appearance of the Rosetta Stone, the famous Egyptian stele

Rewriting maternal femininity in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document

inscribed with hieroglyphs, Demotic, and ancient Greek, to memorialise the loss that the child’s acquisition of language represents. With each step into speaking, reading, and writing, the maternal figure of PPD comes closer to losing her bond with the child and its link to pre-Oedipal pleasures. In PPD, however, this loss is not as predictable as Freud suggests in ‘Femininity.’ Nor does woman appear twice removed from the symbolic order as Lacan argues in Seminar II.67 Each section cherishes the child’s words and makes them into fetish objects that forestall the knowledge that the child will no longer need his mother to translate or articulate his needs. This fetishisation becomes a poetics that evokes the mother’s active engagement with the materials of the symbolic order and the idea of her negated position. While Kelly stages the mother’s fetishisation of the objects that index her meticulous devotion to the child’s increased ability to write and speak, she is also staging a counter-fetishisation that makes the mother’s labour visible. ‘Documentation II’ exemplifies Kelly’s attention to the work that goes into the child’s language acquisition (see Figure 5.7). She creates an orderly document cataloguing the child’s words and representing the mother’s translation of their meanings. Each of the twenty-three pieces that together constitute ‘Documentation II’ are composed of two parts. The top part evokes the work of a typesetter. It consists of a wood ‘bed’ (lines for setting moveable type). In this bed, Kelly has placed the letters that compose the words: ‘utterance/ gloss/ function/ age.’ Kelly has presented the words as they are laid out in the bed – they appear in reverse – and placed them above the printed appearance of the words on the index cards that transcribe conversational context from which the words have come. In the first piece, the utterance is ‘Ma-Ma,’ and the mother’s gloss is ‘Help Me, See This, Be There.’ The function is ‘Existence.’ While the placement of the letters is orderly and almost severe, those compositional choices become a way to ‘document’ this poetics of subjectivity in which the word ‘Ma-Ma’ signifies the child’s dependence on the mother for his place in the world. Here we see what Margaret Iversen is identifying when she writes that the ‘systematic rigour of Kelly’s art is set against powerful emotion and is itself infused with a sense of anxiety.’68 We can also look back to the austere presentations of the mothers/workers’ schedules in WW and note how much subjective depth Kelly evokes in PPD. In ‘Document II,’ the mother makes the name the child gives her – ‘Ma-Ma’ – into an important object to hold, see, and keep, as it indexes her centrality in the child’s psychic life. Viewers are asked to imagine the detailed, painstaking work of placing these letters and printing these words, which could be considered a materialisation of the more ephemeral work the maternal figure performs translating her son’s words. In the yellow index card below the typeset letters, Kelly records the context in which the child speaks. In the first piece, the card below the typeset presentation of ‘Ma-Ma’ documents a mirror-stage scenario

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5.7 

Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Documentation II, Analysed Utterances and Related Speech Events, 1975, detail. Utterance /Ma-Ma/ Gloss Help Me, See This, Be There Function Existence Age 17.0 Jan 26 1975 Context: M (mother) getting K (son) ready for bed, 21:20 hrs. Speech events (S) 1.1 M: Is that Kelly the baby? (Looking in mirror together) 1.2 K: /ma-ma/ma-ma/

Rewriting maternal femininity in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document

in which the mother guides her child to identifying himself in the mirror. This mirroring seems to be an extension of the typeset letters, which appear in reverse and represent how the mother ‘mirrors’ the child’s words, further documenting her active place in the symbolic order. The attention to the mother’s efforts ‘translating’ the child’s words continues in ‘Documentation III: Analysed Markings and Diary-Perspective Schema,’ in which Kelly records conversations between herself and her son. These conversations tell the story of the boy’s slow adjustment into nursery school and his increasingly sophisticated use of language – he begins to use the first person – and documents the mother’s accompanying anxieties. Each artwork in ‘Documentation III’ is composed of grey sugar paper placed on white cards (see Figure 5.8). Kelly has divided each piece of paper into three rectangular forms (another allusion to the Lacanian diagrams). Drawn with the precision of an architectural blueprint, these are ‘boxes’ that are stacked right next to each other. In the first rectangle on the far left she has typed out, in lowercase letters, the words and phrases the boy articulates as he talks to, interacts with, and demands attention from his mother. She also translates these statements into typewritten texts and places them in parentheses, thereby revealing the imbrication of the mother’s and the child’s speech. The child’s statements attest to his emerging perceptions, as they record the objects, spaces, and people that have come in and out of his field of vision. Prominent among these people is the father: ‘Out there (looking out the window after R leaves the room).’ The second column, just slightly wider than the first, transcribes, in uppercase letters, the mother’s affective responses to the child’s words. For example, in one of the columns on the far left, Kelly has typed out: ‘“Nouf tories”’ (predicting what I’ll say as he gets out too many books).’69 In the next column, Kelly writes, ‘I WANT TO BE PATIENT BUT EVERY EVENT, ESPECIALLY AT BEDTIME, IS A CONTEST, I FEEL TIRED (HE DOESN’T).’ In the column on the right, Kelly composes a diary entry in neat cursive handwriting. These diary entries reflect upon the mother’s concerns about the child’s physical health. The diary entries are difficult to read; the writing is compact and dense, tightly squeezed into its designated box. The child has drawn over and across the three rectangles with crayon drawings and scribbles. Some of these inscriptions are white or quite light, and some are dark. Some of the marks are jagged, composed of sharp vertical and horizontal lines; others are round and circular. Provocative for their wild gestural range, these markings are the child’s first attempts at writing, and draw attention to language as a set of visual shapes. These gestural markings dramatically exceed, and in some instances occlude, the passages the mother has typed and written to fit neatly into the orderly row of boxes (see Figure 5.9). They ‘mess up’ the piece and attest to the child’s resistance to the order and progress the mother’s documentation suggests. Similar to the stained diaper

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5.8 

Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Documentation III, Analysed Markings and Diaryperspective Schema, 1975.

liners in ‘Documentation I,’ the child’s drawings allude to the gestural, improvisational forms of Abstract Expressionism. Indeed, ‘Documentation III’ balances the calligraphic impulses of Abstract Expressionism, gorgeously represented by the gestural marks of Cy Twombly and Jackson Pollock, with the austere forms and sequences of Conceptual Art, here exemplified by Kelly’s boxes and the presentation of information within them.70 Each section of PPD evokes the mother’s loss, but at certain points that loss becomes pronounced through Kelly’s evocation of sentimentality. In ‘Documentation IV: Transitional Objects, Diary and Diagrams,’ Kelly returns to the sentimentality evoked so beautifully with the four neatly folded wool vests in the ‘Introduction’ to PPD. In this section, Kelly has created square display cases that hold and present small white plaster casts of the child’s tiny hands (the kind children create in nursery school) (see Figure 5.10). Kelly has appended each cast with the frayed fragments of the child’s blanket. These fragments are small: about an inch wide and a few inches long. Upon them,

Rewriting maternal femininity in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document

Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Documentation III, Analysed Markings and Diaryperspective Schema, 1975, detail.

Kelly has typed small vignettes and reflections in black letters that stand out sharply against the soft texture and cream colour of the fabric. Bringing an aesthetics of the maternal scrapbook to the spare white squares of Minimalism, these passages document a mother’s complex inner world: work, anxiety, the guilty pleasures of separation, the often stark differences between the mother’s and father’s perspectives. Each appended passage becomes a little ‘poem’ that enacts the mother’s attempts to find a place beyond the perfect good mother and the neglectful bad mother who has difficulty ‘reading’ her child. In one passage, she reflects the hostility to the father and ‘anyone who acts as a third party in our relationship.’ She concludes by writing: ‘I don’t always know what it is he wants.’ In another passage, Kelly expresses her guilt about being away from her son for work – but also shame for realising that there were moments through which she actually did not feel guilty. She records in writing a conversation between herself and her husband about their son’s difficult behaviour,

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5.10 

Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Documentation IV, Transitional Objects, Diary and Diagram, 1976, detail. ‘Coming back from work this week, I realized that I wasn’t thinking about K so often when I was out, or walking faster as I got near the house. I felt a bit guilty, but when I expressed this to R in the form of … “Maybe K’s difficult because we leave him with other people a lot” … R said “on the contrary, it’s because we’re on top of him too much.”’

Rewriting maternal femininity in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document

which she assumes is an indirect articulation of her guilt, anxiety, or neglect.71 These typed texts provide the narrative context in which maternal sentimentality is produced. Their close proximity to the plaster imprint of the child’s hand also invokes his physical presence and the various forms of ‘touch’ that are part of the mother’s acts of care, which are being gradually being displaced through the child’s fluency in language. By typing the mother’s words on frayed pieces of the child’s blanket, Kelly evokes the possibility that mother and child are separating through shared transitional objects and underscores that language itself is the object of the mother’s fetishisation. With each section of PPD, the child’s increased fluency in language undoes the psychic and physical imbrication of the maternal dyad. Knowledge about the world is part of this separation, and in ‘Documentation V,’ Kelly makes objects of the child’s knowledge part of her work’s attention to the process by which the mother creates her own forms of fetishisation – a form of knowledge suspended in disavowal. As Freud defines it, the fetish is a defence mechanism that blocks out the fact that the mother does not have a penis. In Freud’s ‘Fetishism,’ the disavowal is severe, and his text confirms the female body as a site of horror. Freud explains that ‘Probably no male human being is spared the fright of castration at the sight of a female genital.’72 In Documentation V, Kelly offers a slightly more attenuated version of fetishisation, one that evokes how it imbricates knowledge and denial together and invites a process of decoding (Figure 5.11). She has composed the pieces with small objects the child has found in nature and brought to the mother as gifts: leaves, flowers, weeds, snails, beetles, and butterflies. To present these objects, Kelly has drawn upon the visual idioms of a nineteenth-century natural history exhibit. They are placed in wood frames, and each display is appended with a card upon which Kelly has printed ‘SCIENTIFIC NAME,’ ‘COMMON NAME,’ ‘DATE,’ ‘COLLECTOR,’ and ‘HABITAT’ with a decorative serif type on thick orange-brown paper that evokes historical documents and old books. She has then filled in the corresponding information with her own cursive handwriting. After each of these presentations are typed up dialogues in which the child asks questions about the mother’s body and sexual difference. In the first dialogue, which takes place as the child gets into bed, the child asks ‘Mummy, where’s your willy?’ The mother responds to this question: ‘I haven’t got one. I’m a girl and you’re a boy. You’re like Daddy. You two have got one and I don’t.’ The child then reveals his scopophilic drive to see and know: ‘Show me.’ Following these dialogues are the photocopied images of a pregnant female body, with words from an index for a pregnancy manual that suggest the mother anxiously looking to read the signs of her body: ‘ABDOMEN – abdominal cavity, abdominal delivery, abdominal muscles, abdominal pregnancy, ABNORMAL PREGNANCY, ABORTION – incomplete abortion.’ While an ‘incomplete abortion’ is a harrowing event, the layering of objects, words, and

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5.11 

Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Documentation V, Classified Specimens, Proportional Diagrams, Statistical Tables, Research and Index, 1977.

images in ‘Documentation V’ stages a form of fetishisation that works against the idea that the female body is a shocking visual fact that has to be blocked out in horror and repulsion. Composed of interwoven words and images that make the mother’s reproductive and affective labour visible, each section from PPD analysed above can be read as an iteration of Kelly’s hieroglyphic writing. However, Kelly’s investment in the hieroglyph is most explicit in ‘Documentation VI: Prewriting Alphabet, Exergue and Diary’ (see Figure 5.12). In this chapter, which concludes PPD, Kelly draws from the Rosetta Stone for the visual composition of the artwork. With a meticulous attention to detail, Kelly renders the material and design of this rare object, a treasure of the British Museum. Kelly has used resin to evoke the slab of black basalt, and the edges are rough and flaky to evoke the Rosetta Stone’s broken form. She has created three different sections that correspond to the three different alphabetic scripts inscribed on the surface of the Rosetta Stone: hieroglyphs, Demotic, and ancient Greek. The letters inscribed on the resin create an image of language within geological layers. Not only does the viewer/reader have to get up close to the individual pieces that compose ‘Documentation VI’ to read them, she or he has to engage in a form of figurative digging in order to understand the connections between its three parts.

Rewriting maternal femininity in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document

Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Documentation VI, Pre-writing Alphabet, Exergue and Diary, 1978, detail. ‘Kelly Barrie (age 4.5) B is for Balloon. This is the first letter he has constructed with the express purpose of writing a specific word – his surname. He draws P and carefully adds Ɔ. Learning to write “Barrie” has also sorted out, his backwards “b” and the upside down “e.” ɘ. April 19, 1978: Now Kelly is at school all day Ray insisted that he was ready to stay for school dinners. He said Kelly was quite happy and I had to admit it did seem to be true so far …’

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It makes sense that Kelly chose the Rosetta Stone – and its resemblance to a tombstone – as a model for the images in this last chapter, when PPD comes to a close.73 This section documents the mother relinquishing the child to the symbolic order, which reiterates the mother’s own internalisation of her devalued place within patriarchal culture. But again, the point of PPD is to resist that devaluation as a certainty. Recall that the Rosetta Stone was lost in ruins for ages, and was then found and deciphered. Telling the story of Ptolemy V of Egypt passing laws to distribute more economic resources to priests, in PPD, the Rosetta Stone becomes a monument to the mother’s reproductive and affective labour and a site for redistributing those resources in feminist directions. The specific occasion for ‘Documentation VI’ is the child’s efforts to write the letters of the alphabet. Analogous to the placement of the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone, the child’s letters appear at the uppermost part of the plate. The middle sections of ‘Documentation VI’ are commentaries written in the mother’s neatly composed handwriting. Her letters and words are clear, and they resemble the wide bubble shapes of the child’s emergent handwriting, as if to suggest that mother and child wrote at the same time. Each of these diary passages translate and transcribe the child’s associations with the designated letter of the alphabet and trace the shared activity of reading books before bedtime – ‘language lessons’ that attest to the intimacy between the mother and child while also propelling their relationship forward. The bottom section consists of typed diary entries in which the mother tells a complicated story of trying to find a decent school for her son. In ‘Documentation VI,’ we see the fetishisation of the child and the poetic play of his handwriting. The letters the child writes are the most visually compelling part of ‘Documentation VI.’ Thin white marks against the soot-black resin background, rudimentary scratches of rough elegance, the letters are not placed in neat rows, but appear in a delightfully haphazard and scattered arrangement. These marks represent the child’s efforts to shape his mark-making skills to the letters’ recognisable forms, and implicitly, compose his subjectivity to align with the shapes of the symbolic order. The pieces are not presented as a ‘logical alphabet’ that begins with ‘A’ and ends with ‘Z.’ Rather, the sequences reflect the trajectory of the child’s development. The chapter begins with ‘X’ and ‘O’ (which are fundamental shapes for composing the other letters of the alphabet) and ends with the child legibly inscribing his full name. The particular form of fetishisation Kelly creates here allows for the mother’s reproductive and affective labour to acquire material form and emerge within the realms of value the Rosetta Stone represents. ‘Documentation VI’ continues PPD’s efforts to represent the mother’s work providing mirrors for the development of the child’s subjectivity through the quotidian activities of reading and writing with the child, which Kelly transcribes in the middle sections. These

Rewriting maternal femininity in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document

passages have a delightfully imaginative poetics. For example, in the Rosetta Stone devoted to ‘E’ (see Figure 5.13), Kelly writes: E is for elephant. He calls it the ‘curvy one’ and pronounces it ‘eeh.’ He often forgets it and sometimes writes it upside down (upsidedown ‘ɘ’). When he sees an e a present or a breast, he says, ‘What’s that?’ Something at once lost, forgotten, remembered and hoped for. ‘upside down “ɘ” as in “me”.’ E IS FOR ALLIGATORS ENTERTAINING ELEPHANTS. E IS FOR AN EAGLE ON ON ELEPHANT IN AN EGG AND SPOON RACE. GOOD NIGHT EDWARD ELMER ELEPHANT. GOODNIGHT LITTLE E.

Here Kelly renders the child’s attention to the visual dimensions of letters: calling the ‘e’ the ‘curvy one,’ but also writing it upside down. The child also plays with the connection between the letter ‘e’ and the sounds associated with it. The mother’s attention to the echoes between the child’s response to the letter ‘e’ and her body (the breast in particular) is woven into this prose poem – her own ‘reading’ within his acts of reading – that shows his mastery of language displaces her body. From this insight, Kelly renders the child’s imaginative play with the letter ‘e,’ following, in a ventriloquising fashion, the associative play of signifiers the child discovers in the gaps among letters of the alphabet, words that are constituted through those letters, and objects in the world. ‘Documentation VI’ renders the process of the mother fetishising the child’s wordplay. The piece memorialises the spontaneity of his writings and drawings, and deflects the knowledge that he is quite close to seeing himself seamlessly within the symbolic order’s syntax of sense. Quite appropriately, the entry on the letter ‘I’ attests to the separation from the mother and the differentiated form of subjectivity that he acquires as he learns to write that form. In the section below it, Kelly writes ‘I is for ink,’ which registers PPD’s attention to writing. The differentiation writing the ‘I’ makes possible plays out across the sexual division of labour within the institutional spaces of the child’s school, which the mother writes about and reflects upon in the lowermost third of each piece and is the subject of the next and concluding section of this chapter. ‘You’re a real mother now’

‘Documentation VI’ is beautiful, and it would be easy to remain focused on Kelly’s fidelity to the Rosetta Stone and the poetry she inscribes upon it. However, the stories Kelly tells in the lowermost sections of ‘Documentation VI’ extend beyond the maternal dyad and move into the public world of London in the 1970s, which requires an expanded interpretive frame. If PPD delved into the mother’s world to reveal the dimensions of maternal subjectivity that were hardly ever visible to others, then ‘Documentation VI’ represents PPD moving

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5.13 

Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Documentation VI, Pre-writing Alphabet, Exergue and Diary, 1978, detail.

Rewriting maternal femininity in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document

back into the public world. Appearing in typewriter text, these stories are centred upon the mother’s efforts to find a good school for her son and point to subtle forms of women’s economic exploitation, which the naturalisation of maternal femininity sanctions. Kelly renders the effects of naturalising motherhood and making the mother the sole provider of the child’s welfare. She also documents how the mother in PPD reinforces the gendered division of labour and relies upon the metropolitan racism that manifests the colonial histories for which the Rosetta Stone figures. To see the stakes of ‘Documentation VI,’ it is crucial to remind ourselves that the Rosetta Stone was an Egyptian artefact taken by the French during the Napoleonic wars and then traded with the British, and that it tells a story of competing European colonialisms. Its discovery by a French lieutenant in 1799 and the subsequent cracking of the hieroglyphic code in 1822 by JeanFrançois Champollion (after he realised hieroglyphs refer to sounds as well as ideas) precipitated not only the emergence of Egyptology, but also the large-scale looting of Egypt’s storehouse of historical treasures – just one part of the colonial rewriting of Egypt in the nineteenth century.74 The Rosetta Stone emblematises the thefts of the Imperial Age, and its exchange is premised upon the idea of European racial progress, which is accompanied by the right to conquer places and people that have been designated as sites of racial difference and feminised as grounds that will perpetually give and submit. We could say that the Rosetta Stone, placed prominently in the British Museum, stands for the production of race for the purposes of extracting resources and labour. Therefore, like the figure of the dark continent, the Rosetta Stone can be read in relationship to the iterations of racism, sexism, and classicism in late twentieth-century Britain. Kelly obliquely touches upon these histories in ‘Document VI’ when she narrates the mother’s attempt to find a good school for her son amidst London’s eroding public infrastructure. The urban scene Kelly evokes reflects the largescale public disinvestment that began to take place in Europe and the United States in the 1970s. A signature characteristic of global capitalism in the late twentieth century, this financial disinvestment of the public sphere relied upon the gendered division of labour such that women were expected, as Cindi Katz explains, to ‘fill the gap between state and market in ensuring their households’ reproduction and well-being.’75 In ‘Document VI,’ Kelly represents a mother attempting to fill this gap and suggests its conservative effects. The challenges the mother faces finding a good school for her son is the consequence of the fact that she lives in a disadvantaged area of London’s inner city. The material restraints the designation ‘inner city’ names is accompanied by a discourse that positions the mother as a ‘failure or at best a victim of circumstance,’ which underscores her separation from, as Kelly explains, ‘the means of production, possession and “advantage.”’76 The mother’s impeded

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access to resources is made more complicated by the fact that the institutions that oversee the child’s care address the mother as ‘guarantor of [the child’s] well being,’ which underscores the idea that she is naturally inclined to not only give birth but perform reproductive labour.77 Fulfilling the promise to be the ‘guarantor of [the child’s] well being,’ the first imperative of maternal subjectivity, is made difficult by women’s limited access to monetary and institutional resources. The lowermost row of text in ‘Documentation VI’ represents the trying circumstances in which the mother actually participates in repeating this gendered division of labour. In the diary entry, the maternal figure writes about spending a day at the nursery school her son attends. She is required to visit in order to supervise play activities. She writes that her son is a part of a ‘gang’ of rambunctious boy troublemakers, which is part of a general acceptance of typical ‘boy behaviour’ at the school. Her rendering of this scene attests to the permission boys are given to express their aggression, but also, quite crucially, imagine themselves through an array of mythical and imaginative forms: ‘ … all of the boys ran about the hall incessantly shouting and imitating batman, spiderman, bionic man, and an assortment of “monsters” and “badies.”’78 Most of the girls, Kelly explains, did not behave this way. They sat quietly at tables playing with puzzles. The teachers (all women) and the parents (also all women) did not encourage the girls to play differently; they were just relieved not to have more unruly children to manage. Such a scenario reiterates and sanctions the sexual division of labour and transmits the idea that it is the job of girls to help harmonise chaotic environments, an extension of the idea that their futures will consist of caring for people. Placing her own formulations about the ‘subjective moment of women’s oppression’ within an educational and intergenerational context, Kelly shows that the teachers and mothers rely upon girls as helpers. This scene takes place within a child’s nursery school. Its poor, dilapidated state emblematises the crumbling educational system in London’s inner city in the mid-1970s, a discernible source of the mother’s anxiety. The diary entries are devoted to registering the fears provoked by the school’s lack of resources, poor conditions, and overextended teachers. In the diary entry for 22 January 1977, Kelly writes, ‘I noticed the general conditions more than the children this time, like the rubbish outside the building and the dust inside. When I washed the cups the rag looked so grey I couldn’t bring myself to use it … . I feel inadequate myself because I can’t offer Kelly more.’79 By ‘feel[ing] inadequate [her]self,’ the mother manifests the idea that she is solely responsible for the child, and this shapes her response to and perception of the institutional spaces and the children within them. Reflecting upon a visit to a school she could transfer her son to, she describes the place as ‘old and dilapidated and very crowded.’80 She also notes that ‘most

Rewriting maternal femininity in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document

of the children were West Indian or Asian.’81 Here we see how the histories of British colonialism and the racisms that undergirded them – which the Rosetta Stone both indexes and conceals – haunts the discourses that map onto London’s ‘deprived area[s].’82 Seeing children of colour as evidence that the school is ‘bad,’ the mother relies upon the assumption that those designated to embody racial difference also represent neglect. It is in such passages that Kelly makes it clear that the subject position being rendered in PPD is white maternal femininity – a subject position that is motivated by anxieties that in turn provoke or exacerbate racist perceptions. This anxiety is put into circulation by the idea – made real by institutional manifestations of sexism – that the child’s ‘well-being’ is the mother’s responsibility alone and that the child reflects upon her innate capacities for care. These are deep-seated assumptions upon which forces of public disinvestment implicitly rely. While the mother’s diary entries represent the anxieties and defences that inform her response to the public worlds of children’s schools, they also suggest possibilities for imagining beyond them. These possibilities emerge when the text evokes other women in the process of finding childcare. In the diary entry dated 19 May 1977, the mother reflects upon her success getting her son into a better school, and the institutional praise mother and child received for this accomplishment: ‘“your mummy looks after you very well, doesn’t she?”’83 In the following passage, the mother identifies the assumption informing this rhetorical question, and all the work the other women are putting into refuting it: It struck me then how unfair it was to assume that some children were in ‘bad’ schools because their parents didn’t care. On the contrary, all the mothers I’ve met at the playgroup talk about nothing else. Danny’s mother rushed up to me on the street to say she’s found a super infants’ school and that ‘they didn’t use i.t.a. either’ (I didn’t even know what that meant). Ronnie’s mother takes him to school in Swiss Cottage on her way to work every morning and Cloe’s mother has moved back to her mother’s, taking Cloe with her.84

Kelly creates a map of middle-class women responding to the demands, anxieties, and desires associated with motherhood during a historical period in which public infrastructure was eroding and mothers simply had to fend for themselves when it comes to childcare. This portrayal suggests the possibility of feminist collaborations, which perhaps could materialise if women did not have to be wholly consumed by the project of caring for children. That Kelly’s depiction of other women is rendered in language instead of images is crucial. It works against what could be a tendency to perceive or visually depict the women’s efforts through the poles of idealisation (the good mother who does everything she can) and denigration (the bad mother who does not care or has not garnered enough resources to place her child in a good school). These poles inform habitual depictions and understandings of maternal femininity and confirm

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its place at the centre of the sign woman. By inscribing these stories on the surface of this artwork – which represents the creation of the mother’s own forms of fetishisation – the intense attention Kelly pays to other women trying to find good schools for their children could be considered part of the mother forestalling the fact that the child is now separated from her. And yet, what is most important is that this fetishisation opens on to the world of other women. The conclusion of the last diary entry focuses on the child’s successful adjustment to school, but it also focuses on the words of another woman who mirrors the losses this adjustment entail. The mother begins by writing about the questions she asks her son about his school day, but she notes that he is focused on getting out of the house to play with his friend: ‘When he comes home I try to ask him what he does at school, what he has for lunch, but he’s usually not very informative he’s in such a hurry to change his clothes and go out and play with Ronnie. They’ve become very good friends.’85 From there, Kelly enumerates a list of the child’s statements, activities, and objects that signify her replacement. Once he said he didn’t need a mummy and daddy because he and Ronnie could live together and look after themselves. He brought home some flash cards which seem to take the place of our ‘a.b.c.’ sessions and he keeps a little notebook at school which I can go and look at from time to time. Things have definitely changed, and so quickly. When I told Rosalind that he’d started infant’s school she said ‘well, you’re a real mother now.’86

The ‘flash cards’ that substitute for their ‘“a.b.c.”’ sessions’ are particularly poignant, and the fact that the mother goes to look at his notebook at school suggests that his writing remains a fetish object for her. The viewer/reader witnesses the mother watching the maternal dyad come undone. The other woman, Rosalind, mirrors the losses that undoing represents. She asserts that this loss is constituitive of ‘real’ motherhood, and Kelly makes it clear that this separation takes place in and through language. Addressing both Kelly and her viewer/reader, Rosalind serves as the ‘third term’ and has the last word in PPD. Inscribed in stone, Rosalind’s statement further displaces the presence of ‘maternal femininity’ in PPD, and leaves the artwork suspended in loss. This separation of the mother and child is confirmed by the fact that in the uppermost register, the child has written both his first and last name, assuring his place in the symbolic order (see Figure 5.12). Making the child’s full name coincident with the conclusion of PPD indicates the acceptance – or at least the reality – of this separation. The idea suggested by this passage is not a conflation of motherhood with loss. It is not a return to the misery Freud foresees for all women. It is a loss that becomes visible through the words of another woman.

Rewriting maternal femininity in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document

In light of the mother’s participation in racist perceptions that make children of colour signify a ‘bad school,’ we might ask: do the pressures on women to be good mothers and natural providers – which are compounded by school systems polarised by inequality – provoke mothers who have access to forms of privilege (in the case of PPD, middle-class whiteness) and anxiously hold on to them as a way to forestall the knowledge that they actually might not be able to match their internalised expectations of caring for the child’s wellbeing? More often than not, the answer to this question is yes. PPD confirms this. At the same time, the artwork also asks viewers to think about the losses Kelly enumerates as creating a productive de-essentialisation of motherhood that detaches it from the body – and the image of the body – and makes ‘maternal femininity’ a discursive positioning in language, a composite of other people’s words. This de-essentialisation could make it possible to represent motherhood as more than the core of women’s identities. Motherhood could become a discursive position within labour hierarchies that could be seen across the lines of racial and class difference. This possibility is something Mulvey’s work in feminist film theory and feminist experimental cinema, the subject of Chapter 6, also suggests. Mulvey’s focus on the collaborative dimensions of reading and writing opens her work to ‘conceiving a new language of desire’ that does not insist upon sameness among women but creates corresponding texts that move across difference. Notes 1 Nightcleaners Part I, dir. Berwick Street Collective (Mary Kelly, Marc Karlin, James Scott, and Humphrey Trevelyon). London: Luisa Films, 1975. 2 Mary Kelly, ‘Preface,’ Post-Partum Document (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), xx–xxiv: xx. This is the book version of Post-Partum Document drawn from here extensively for the reading of the text of PPD. 3 For Kelly’s engagement with Minimalism and Conceptualism, see Juli Carson, ‘Post-Partum Document: An Introduction,’ in Mary Kelly: Projects, 1973–2010, Heyes-Moore (ed.), 74–79. Margaret Iversen, ‘Visualising the Unconscious: Mary Kelly’s Installations,’ in Mary Kelly, Margaret Iversen, Douglas Crimp, and Homi K. Bhaba (eds) (London: Phaidon, 1997), 34–85. Mastai, ‘Portrait of an Artist after Choice’, 13–23. 4 Within a discussion of the phallocentric orientation of psychoanalysis, Juliet Mitchell writes, ‘To date, the father stands in the position of the third term that must break the asocial dyadic unit of mother and child.’ ‘Introduction – I,’ Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (eds), trans. Jacqueline Rose (1982. New York: Norton, 1985), 1–26: 23. 5 In her interview with Douglas Crimp, Kelly discusses her admiration for the films of Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, Laura Mulvey, and Peter Wollen and how

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they inspired PPD. Douglas Crimp, ‘Douglas Crimp in Conversation with Mary Kelly,’ in Mary Kelly, Iversen et al. (eds), 8–30: 11. 6 Discussing the different forms of fetishisation in PPD, Margaret Iversen identifies theory as one of those objects, substantiating the claim here that language itself is fetishised in PPD: ‘The mother’s fetishistic attachment to the object, itself a displacement from the baby’s body, is sublimated in the pleasure of understanding psychoanalytic theory as well as, in Kelly’s case, the mastery of her artistic materials.’ Iversen, ‘Visualising the Unconscious’, 41. 7 Jo Ann Isaak describes the pre-Oedipal period as a ‘brief period of time’ in which the mother ‘at least in the realm of the imaginary, exists outside of the power of the phallus.’ Isaak, ‘Our Mother Tongue,’ in Kelly, Post-Partum Document, 202–206: 204. 8 Kelly, ‘Preface and Footnotes to the Post-Partum Document,’ Imaging Desire (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 40–57: 57. 9 Pollock, ‘Still Working on the Subject,’ 247. 10 Kelly, ‘Preface,’ Post-Partum Document, xi–xvi: xi. 11 In the preface to the book version of Post-Partum Document, Kelly underscores the importance of ‘female fetishism’ for her project. She identifies it as ‘one of the central and perhaps most controversial questions this particular work poses in relation to the mother’s desire: the possibility of female fetishism.’ After outlining the role fetishism plays within the Oedipus complex, Kelly suggests another form of fetishisation and situates her work there: ‘So perhaps in place of the more familiar notion of pornography, it is possible to talk about the mother’s memorabilia – the way she saves things – first shoes, photographs, locks of hair or school reports. My work precedes from this site.’ ‘Preface,’ Post-Partum Document, xx. 12 Kelly, ‘On Femininity,’ Imaging Desire, 58. 13 Kelly, ‘Notes on Reading the Post-Partum Document,’ Imaging Desire, 23. 14 Mary Kelly, ‘Desiring Images/Imaging Desire,’ Imaging Desire, 126. 15 Lucy R. Lippard, ‘Foreword,’ Post-Partum Document (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), xi–xvi: xi. 16 Qtd in ibid., xiv. 17 Ibid., xi. 18 Ibid. Original emphasis. 19 In an essay published in the feminist magazine Spare Rib in 1978, Laura Mulvey notes that while Lacan’s work has clearly been a strong influence for Post-Partum Document, Kelly’s installation also ‘gives a voice to the pain and pleasure women have lived as mothers, understood by each other, despised as domestic by dominant culture.’ Mulvey, review of Post-Partum Document, Spare Rib 20 (1976), reprinted in Kelly, Post-Partum Document, 201–202: 202. 20 In a 1983 conversation with the ‘Lip Collective,’ Kelly describes her initial worries about exhibiting her work as self-indulgent, but given the ‘outrage’ the exhibition caused, realised its political impact. Lip Collective, ‘Dialogue: Mary Kelly Talks With Members of the Lip Collective,’ Lip Magazine 7 (1983), 5–7: 5–6. Lip Magazine was a feminist magazine published in Melbourne from 1976 to 1984. 21 Women and Work also emerged out of Kelly’s work as leader of the Women’s Workshop, which was part of London’s Artists’ Union and received funding from

Rewriting maternal femininity in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document

the Greater London Arts Association Thames Television Fund. The Artists’ Union was constituted for the purpose of creating alliances between artists and the trade unions. The Women’s Workshop sought to make sure attention to women’s issues did not dissipate within this alliance, and resulted in small changes such as the revision of the union membership cards to include the question: ‘Do you need crèche facilities at Branch meetings?’ Mary Kelly, ‘A Brief History of the Women’s Workshop of the Artists’ Union, 1972–1973,’ in Mastai, Social Process/Collaborative Action, 75–76: 75. 22 Reviewing WW in the pages of Spare Rib, Rosalind Delmar wrote that the South London Art Gallery, where the installation was displayed in 1975, was ‘transformed into a mixture of sites – library, viewing theatre, display centre.’ Reprinted in Mastai, Social Process/Collaborative Action, 91–94: 91. 23 Kelly, ‘Notes on Reading the Post-Partum Document,’ Imaging Desire, 20. 24 ‘Douglas Crimp in Conversation with Mary Kelly,’ 15. 25 As Pollock argues in her reading of WW, the ‘psychic economy of desire and fantasy that bound women to the children they cared for’ required ‘a new theoretical elaboration through feminist intervention to psychoanalysis.’ ‘Still Working on the Subject: Feminist Poetics and its Avant-Garde Moment,’ 242. 26 Discussing Nightcleaners and WW, Pollock writes that these pieces point to ‘the condition of [Post-Partum Document’s] production and the nature of its intervention,’ in ‘Screening the Seventies: Sexuality and Representation in Feminist Practice – a Brechtian Perspective,’ Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988), 155–199: 166. 27 Sonia Wilson describes the logic of the piece: ‘The sequence of ideas provoked by this juxtaposition might run something like this: one woman is labouring, the other will go into labour; one woman works a machine, the other “works” her pregnant body; one woman’s labor is productive; the other’s is reproductive.’ Wilson, Art Labor, Sex Politics: Feminist Effects in 1970s British Art and Performance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 74. 28 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,’ Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), 127–186: 176. 29 For a historical overview of the night cleaners’ campaign, see Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Cleaners’ Organizing in Britain from the 1970s: A Personal Account,’ Antipode 38.3 (2006), 608–625. 30 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak defines the ‘gender-ethics’ as ‘internalized constraints seen as responsibility,’ and identifies it as the ‘hardest roadblock for women the world over.’ ‘Translator’s Preface,’ in Mahasweta Devi, Imaginary Maps: Three Stories by Mahasweta Devi, trans. and introduction Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Routledge, 1995), xxiii–xxix: xxvii, xxviii. Wilson reflects this understanding of the ‘gender-ethics,’ when, commenting on this scene in Nightcleaners: ‘She is hemmed in by the social expectations of her gender, experienced as a moral imperative that is fatally compounded by the capitalist system.’ Art Labor, Sex Politics, 31. 31 For Griselda Pollock, the interruption of the cinematic image ‘advertises its own process of production and catches in the visual field the invisible foundations of

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patriarchal capitalism.’ Pollock, ‘The Pathos of the Political: Documentary, Subjectivity and a Forgotten Moment of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetics in Four Films from the 1970s,’ in Work and the Image II: Work in Modern Times, Valerie Mainz and Griselda Pollock (eds) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 193–223: 215. 32 Claire Johnston and Paul Willeman read Nightcleaners as a fulfilment of Brechtian aesthetics and a breakthrough for feminist filmmaking, characterising it as an engagement with ‘the problem of the “representation of struggle” in cinematic terms.’ Claire Johnston and Paul Willeman, ‘Brecht in Britain: The Independent Political Film (on Nightcleaners),’ Screen 16.4 (1975), 101–118. 33 Juliet Mitchell, ‘Women: The Longest Revolution,’ in Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination: A Socialist-Feminist Reader, Karen V. Hansen and Ilene J. Philipson (eds) (1966. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 43–73: 52–53. 34 Wollen, ‘Thirteen Paragraphs,’ 26. 35 In a 1988 interview with Angela McRobbie, Mitchell explains that the initial impetus for Psychoanalysis and Feminism was a curiosity about American feminists’ ‘hostility to Freud.’ Her work engages with psychoanalysis because ‘[t]he point was not, in fact, that Freudian theory itself denigrated women but rather that it tried to account for that denigration.’ Angela McRobbie, ‘An Interview with Juliet Mitchell,’ New Left Review 1/170 (July–August 1988), 80–91: 80. 36 Juliet Mitchell, ‘Introduction, 1999,’ Psychoanalysis and Feminism (2000. London: Basic Books, 1974), xv–xxxviii: xvii, xviii. 37 Ibid., xxi. 38 Pollock, ‘Still Working on the Subject,’ 242. 39 Pollock and Mulvey, ‘Laura Mulvey in conversation with Griselda Pollock,’ 2–3. 40 Freud, ‘Preface,’ New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Strachey (ed. and trans.), vol. 22, 4–5: 4. 41 Freud, ‘Femininity,’ in ibid., vol. 22: 112–135. 42 Freud, ‘Preface,’ 5. 43 Freud, ‘Femininity,’ 112. 44 Ibid., 113. 45 Ibid., 114. Original emphasis. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 115. 48 Freud writes that the daughter’s love was ‘directed to her phallic mother; with the discovery that her mother is castrated it becomes possible to drop her as an object, so that the motives for hostility, which have long been accumulating, gain the upper hand. This means, therefore, that as a result of the discovery of women’s lack of a penis they are debased in value for girls just as they are for boys and later perhaps for men.’ ‘Femininity,’ 125. 49 Ibid., 121. 50 Ibid., 129. 51 While Freud claims that both strata are ‘left over for the future,’ the earliest attachments to the mother are ‘decisive’ for the girl’s future. Freud describes these

Rewriting maternal femininity in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document

attachments as particularly ‘rich in content,’ as they ‘leave behind so many opportunities for fixations and dispositions.’ ‘Femininity,’ 118, 133. 52 Sigmund Freud, ‘Female Sexuality,’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Strachey (ed. and trans.), vol. 21, 221–244: 225. 53 Freud, ‘Femininity,’ 132. 54 Ibid., 133. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., 127. 57 Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 77. 58 Silvia Kolbowski, ‘Playing with Dolls,’ in The Critical Image: Essays on Contemporary Photography, Carol Squiers (ed.) (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990), 139–154: 141. 59 Ibid. 60 Freud, ‘Femininity,’ 112. 61 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 193. See also Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). Mary Ann Doane notes that the phrase ‘dark continent’ has been depleted of its historical specificity, both within Freud’s archive and the imbrications of colonialism and psychoanalytic thought, and argues that this trope ‘indicates the existence of an intricate historical articulation of the categories of racial difference and sexual difference.’ Mary Ann Doane, ‘Dark Continents: Epistemologies of Racial and Sexual Difference in Psychoanalysis and Cinema,’ Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, and Psychoanalysis (Routledge: New York, 1991), 290–248: 212. Doane traces the phrase ‘dark continent’ to Freud’s essay ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’ (1926). Freud uses it when he confesses that ‘[w]e know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys,’ and then states that ‘we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of women is a “dark continent” for psychology.’ The phrase appears in English, and comes after Freud’s discussion of the mental life of children in which, he argues, ‘we can still detect the same archaic factors which were once dominant generally in the primitive days of civilization.’ Girls’ sexualities emblematise that primitive archaism. Freud, ‘The Question of Lay Analysis,’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Strachey (ed. and trans.), vol. 20, 177–258: 211. 62 Mary Ann Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade,’ Femmes Fatales, 17. 63 Ibid., 18. Original emphasis. 64 Ibid. In her chapter ‘Woman as Hieroglyph,’ Francette Pacteau argues that the distance and proximity attributed to the hieroglyph has everything to do with its metaphorical link to the beautiful woman – the fetish object par excellence. Reconfiguring the castration scenario in light of this insight, Pacteau writes, ‘The beautiful woman, like the mythical hieroglyph, stands for both the possibility and impossibility of the fulfilment of desire, for a privileged moment when the subject’s “infantile” questioning is suspended in expectant fascination.’ Pacteau, The Symptom of Beauty (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 99–119: 119. Original emphasis.

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65 Mulvey, ‘Preface,’ Fetishism and Curiosity, xxviii. 66 In the foreword to Fetishism and Curiosity: Cinema and the Mind, Mulvey offers a clear articulation of the connections between the Freudian and Marxian fetish: ‘Fetishisms disguise, on the one hand (Marx), the worker’s labour as productive of value under capitalism and, on the other (Freud), the anxiety produced by the maternal body perceived as castrated.’ ‘Foreword,’ Fetishism and Curiosity, vii. 67 Jacques Lacan, Seminar II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.), Sylvana Tomaselli (trans.) (1978. New York: Norton, 1991), 262. 68 Iversen, ‘Visualising the Unconscious,’ 35. 69 I am drawing these passages from the book version of Post-Partum Document, 82. 70 Marjorie Welish, ‘Narrating the Hand: Cy Twombly and Mary Kelly,’ Signifying Art: Essays on Art after 1960 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 59–75. 71 Kelly and Mulvey read the work of psychoanalyst Maud Mannoni, who analysed children’s language as transmissions of the parents’ unconscious desires. Kelly draws on this insight to examine the reinscription of patriarchal ideas in the articulation of the maternal desires. Maud Mannoni, The Child, His ‘Illness,’ and the Others (1967. London: Tavistock Publications, 1970). See in particular Chapter 2, ‘The Symptom or the Word,’ 23–62. 72 Freud, ‘Fetishism,’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, J. Strachey (ed. and trans.) vol. 21, 147–157: 154. 73 Margaret Iversen compares the Rosetta Stone and a tombstone in ‘Visualising the Unconscious,’ 44. See also Sabine Hake, ‘Saxa Ioquuntur: Freud’s Archaeology of the Text,’ boundary 2, 20.1 (Spring 1993), 146–173. 74 Edward Said’s Orientalism is a key text for understanding the construction of Egypt through orientalist discourse. Said argues that Champollion’s work deciphering hieroglyphics is exemplary of Orientalist subjectivity, as he became a ‘hero rescuing the Orient from the obscurity, alienation, and strangeness which he himself had properly distinguished.’ Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 121. Timothy Mitchell demonstrates how Egypt was made into an exhibition that produced and mirrored the European power to colonise. Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 75 Cindi Katz, ‘Vagabond Capitalism and the Necessity of Social Reproduction,’ Antipode 33.4 (September 2001), 709–728: 713. 76 Kelly, Post-Partum Document, 168. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid., 174. 79 Ibid., 172. 80 Ibid., 179. 81 Ibid. 82 This depiction of the urban landscape of crisis and racism points to work in British Cultural Studies that analyses metropolitan racism. See John Solomos, Bob Findlay, Simon Jones, and Paul Gilroy, ‘The Organic Crisis of British Capitalism and Race: The Experiences of the Seventies,’ in The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in

Rewriting maternal femininity in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document

70s Britain, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1982), 9–46. For a specific focus on racism in the British educational system in the 1970s, see Hazel Carby, ‘Schooling in Babylon,’ Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America (London: Verso, 1999), 189–218. 83 Kelly, Post-Partum Document, 177. 84 Ibid., 177. 85 Ibid., 184. 86 Ibid.

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‘... [T]he thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without rejecting it, transcending outworn or expressive forms, and daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive of a new language of desire.’ Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975)1

This last chapter begins with this formulation from ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ because it highlights an aspect of Mulvey’s argument that often gets lost: namely, that Mulvey critiques the visual pleasures reiterated through classic Hollywood cinema in order to open a space for feminist experiments with the dominant visual sign of woman. ‘Visual Pleasure’ is an attempt to identify the impediments to feminism’s work opening up new possibilities for women to see and imagine themselves beyond the images and narratives that reinforce the value and centrality of masculinity. Punctuated by lyrical formulations, ‘Visual Pleasure’ also begins imagining pleasures that are not beholden to the limited satisfactions offered to women by patriarchal histories and normalised through the society of the spectacle. ‘Visual Pleasure’ is animated by the possibility that by critiquing standard forms of visual pleasure offered by Hollywood films – namely, the visual fetishisation of women’s bodies – feminist theory and film practices can write a ‘new language of desire.’ Too often, scholars have read ‘Visual Pleasure’ as a wholesale denial of pleasure. It is often understood as an example of paranoid anti-pornography feminism that simplifies the wide array of contingent identifications and pleasures that the act of looking allows.2 Mulvey does state that she is going to use psychoanalysis as a ‘political weapon’ to destroy the cinematic pleasures that reinforce the position of the femininine as castrated in the patriarchal unconscious.3 She also writes that Hollywood cinema’s invisible work ‘satisf[ying]’ and ‘reinforc[ing]’ the masculine ego must be ‘attacked.’4 And yet, Mulvey’s militant vocabulary does not dominate the text, though it does underscore Mandy Merck’s argument that ‘Visual Pleasure’ is, at its heart, a feminist manifesto. Building upon Mulvey’s description of the essay’s stance as ‘polemical, manifesto-like,’5 Merck notes its ‘sweep and seductiveness’ and

Feminist desires and collective reading in the work of Laura Mulvey

argues that Mulvey writes from a position in ‘political solidarity’ with feminist collectivities.6 Contributing to the manifesto’s political force is the fact that Mulvey deploys a form of psychoanalysis inflected by Althusser’s theorisation of ideology. In this sense, the essay corresponds with Juliet Mitchell’s argument that the unconscious gives the inequalities that habitually arise from sexual difference their tenacious ideological hold. If Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism was devoted to analysing the ‘inherent conservatism’ in the psychic life of sexual difference, then Mulvey’s theoretical and cinematic practices in the 1970s were committed to analysing how Hollywood cinema reinforced that ‘inherent conservatism’ and solidified a narrow visual language for perceiving women.7 ‘Visual Pleasure’ is full of references to an Althusserian conception of subjectivity. Mulvey identifies her masculine-identified viewer as an ‘alienated subject.’8 She argues that ‘heterosexual division of labour’ takes place on screen, and then develops that idea when she writes of the ‘actual image of woman’ as ‘(passive) raw material.’9 And since it counters the insistence that women identify themselves with the position of passivity, ‘Visual Pleasure’ can also be read as a counter-interpellation – a call to participate in feminism’s collective forms. Reflecting upon ‘Visual Pleasure,’ Mulvey stresses how much emerging feminist collectivities shaped the essay’s composition. She is adamant about the fact that the Women’s Liberation Movement helped her fight successfully through a ‘long and painful struggle with writing.’10 By putting ‘expression and language on the political agenda,’ the Women’s Liberation Movement gave women a reason and an impetus to write. ‘Suddenly a perspective on the world had unfolded,’ Mulvey writes, ‘that gave women a position to speak from, and things that had to be said not from choice but from political necessity.’11 The position Women’s Liberation gave women to speak from was collective, and Mulvey writes about the emphasis on the ‘unsigned, collaborative writing’ that would allow women ‘to build new means of expression.’12 Mulvey conveys this ‘collective strength’ in ‘Visual Pleasure.’ It is evident in her frequent use of collective pronouns, in the large, pressing stakes of her argument, but also in her tone, which is detached and passionate at the same time. Mulvey’s attention to language, expression, and their political consequences is a consistent feature of the writing she produced in the 1970s. It reflects her engagement with Lacan’s semiotic re-reading of Freud (which she does not utilise in a strict or specialised way) and highlights her emphasis on the symbolic order of visual culture – its systems of collectively agreed upon meanings that the women of Women’s Liberation were attempting to undo. Mulvey’s emphasis on language is evident in two other essays that she wrote in the 1970s: her 1973 review of Allen Jones’s sculpture, ‘Fears, Fantasies and the Male Unconscious or “You Don’t Know What is Happening, Do You, Mr. Jones?”’ and her 1978

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essay ‘Film, Feminism, and the Avant-Garde,’ both of which have strong ties to ‘Visual Pleasure.’ Focused on an exhibition of sculptures in which life-size images of women’s bodies have been made to look like pieces of furniture, Mulvey argues in ‘Fears, Fantasies and the Male Unconscious,’ that Jones’s work exemplifies the fetishisation of women’s bodies in visual culture and uses metaphors of language to identify the visual codes upon which Jones relies: ‘The language which he speaks is the language of fetishism, which speaks to all of us every day, but whose exact grammar and syntax we are usually only dimly aware of.’13 Presenting fetishisation as a language allows her to identify it as a system of substitutions that are only connected through the threat of castration. She describes the familiar objects of fetishisation as ‘signs for the lost penis but have no direct connection with it.’14 Such formulations are part of denaturalising the privilege of masculine subjects to fetishise others. By the close of Mulvey’s essay, fetishism becomes a ‘language’ of readable losses that feminism can claim: ‘The time has come for us to take over the show and exhibit our own fears and desires.’15 The feminist film practices that emerged in the 1970s were an important way women ‘exhibited [their] own fears and desires.’ This cinematic ‘take over’ is the subject of ‘Film, Feminism, and the Avant-Garde,’ as it takes stock of feminist engagements with cinema since the onset of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A catalogue of feminist insights and interventions, Mulvey deploys the metaphor of language to identify how feminist avant-garde innovations ‘break’ with received aesthetic traditions and open on to new forms.16 She describes how feminist avant-garde practices intervene in the established language of film: creating ‘[s]plits in the cinematic sign’ and ‘open[ing] the closed space between screen and spectator.’17 There is a reciprocal relationship between Mulvey’s writing on film and her film practice, and language is the hinge between them. The focus here is on the avant-garde essay film Riddles and its textual address. Corresponding with Kelly’s PPD, Riddles elaborates on a woman’s imaginative return to the pre-Oedipal through pleasurable bonds of pregnancy and childcare. Riddles also creates an aesthetics of the hieroglyph to portray this return and reveal how her protagonist transforms her fetishistic attachment to her child into a language of desire that is not completely beholden to the place of woman in the Oedipal scenarios late capitalism reinforces. This chapter analyses how Mulvey and Wollen use texts and images of writing in Riddles to create a film that transforms pre-Oedipal pleasures into a site for feminist collaboration.18 Reading riddles

Right from the start, it is clear that text and images of writing are central to the composition of Riddles. The film opens with a presentation of the second

Feminist desires and collective reading in the work of Laura Mulvey

edition of Midi-Minuit Fantastique: a French film magazine first published in 1962, which devoted its pages to science fiction, horror, occult, and fantasy film genres (see Figure 6.1). On the worn and yellow cover is an image of Mary Morris in the 1940 film The Thief of Bagdad, and viewers see the issue is devoted to ‘Vamps Fantastiques.’ The glimpse of this elaborate cover image is brief, as there are two Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, dir. hands rapidily flipping through the Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. Opening shot magazine. This reader’s hands – we of Midi-Minuit Fantastique. never see her face – pause for a moment on the essay ‘Le Mythe de la Femme,’ by Félix Labisse, a Belgian Surrealist painter. This essay indicates that Riddles aligns with the genre of the essay film, a self-reflexive cinematic genre that moves among visual, verbal, and textual registers to stage an intersubjective encounter with a viewing public.19 Mulvey and Wollen place the title of the film over the first page of ‘Le Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, dir. Mythe de la Femme’ (see Figure 6.2). Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. Title. This layering suggests that Riddles has been composed palimpsestically in relationship to an archive of mythical figures that materialise the fantasmatic mysteries attributed to woman. A rectangle composed of turquoise lines appears, and within it is a statement from American avant-garde writer Gertrude Stein, specifically from her book How to Write (1931): ‘A narrative of what wishes what it wishes to be.’ This citation signals the film’s utopian aspirations to claim the imaginary qualities attributed to la femme and transform them into a narrative. Following this citation, which is layered on top of images from the magazine, the outline of the film’s seven chapters appears (see Figure 6.3). Riddles has been composed as a ‘book,’ and the cinematic images serve as the book’s ‘pages.’ Inside ‘Le Mythe de la Femme’ are fantasmatic images of women costumed, made up, and posed as birds, butterflies, spiders, cats, and fish (see Figure 6.4). The last image the camera focuses on is a depiction of Greta Garbo’s face superimposed on a photograph of the Great Sphinx of Giza (see Figure 6.5).

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6.3 

Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, dir. Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. Chapters.

6.4 

Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, dir. Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. Image of Mermaid.

6.5 

Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, dir. Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. ‘Sphinx Moderne.’

Grafted on to a famous Egyptian monument, this image of Garbo highlights the film’s relationship to the images of women in Hollywood cinema. It also signals the film’s interest in the imagery associated with Egypt, which provides a ground for staging an excavation of the sexual and racial exploitation the metaphor of the dark continent identifies. The film’s second chapter begins with an image etched on to a Greek vase of the Sphinx and Oedipus facing each other (see Figure 6.6). The Sphinx is posed in a feral crouch; she has a long curly tail and thick wings that sprout with strength and purpose from her shoulders. Oedipus stands upright; the spears placed before him accent his vertical posture and create a clear division between his body and the woman/animal hybrid who seems to address and question him with her eyes. A woman’s voice accompanies this image of Oedipus and the Sphinx. She identifies motherhood as the film’s primary subject, reflects upon how ‘we’ (the directors) chose to represent the Sphinx in relation to the thematic of motherhood: When we were planning the central section of this film, about a mother and child, we decided to use the voice of the Sphinx as an imaginary narrator – because the Sphinx represents not the voice of truth, not an answering voice, but its opposite: a questioning voice, a voice asking a riddle.20

The voice of the Sphinx is central to Riddles. It adds another textual layering

Feminist desires and collective reading in the work of Laura Mulvey

Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, dir. Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. The Sphinx and Oedipus.

to the film and contributes to the destabilisation of the image. Across the arc of Riddles, the voice becomes part of the film’s efforts to reimagine maternal femininity as it moves from the enclosed world of maternal domesticity, to the public worlds of work, and the possibility of writing a feminist imaginary. After this depiction of the Sphinx questioning the order of Oedipus, a woman appears. Viewers may or may not know that this woman is Laura Mulvey, and it is her voice that has been reflecting upon the director’s choices (see Figure 6.7). Mulvey presents herself here as the director/scholar, but only in the humblest of ways. She speaks to her viewers from a narrow stage set made to look like a crowded, quotidian workspace. Upon her desk is a tiny globe of the world, a coffee cup decorated with Christmas imagery, a tape recorder, a microphone, and a spiral notebook from which she reads. This is the modest mise-en-scène through which Mulvey and Wollen’s film will attempt to provide a ‘translation’ of the Sphinx and bring her into feminist discourse. Mulvey returns to the image of Garbo’s face superimposed upon the Sphinx, and focuses on the Sphinx’s forgotten place in the myth of Oedipus, which is

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Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, dir. Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. Laura at her writing desk.

significant for the film’s rewriting of maternal femininity. Mulvey explains that the Oedipus myth ‘associates the Sphinx with motherhood as mystery, with resistance to patriarchy.’21 Underscoring the metaphoric connection between the Sphinx’s riddle and the repression of a resistant motherhood, Mulvey states: ‘Motherhood and how to live it, or not to live it, lies at the root of the dilemma.’22 This is the central dilemma around which Riddles revolves, but the film’s palpable sense of obscurity and uncertainty tells viewers they are not going to receive a clear answer. At moments during this speculative ‘lecture,’ which might be thought of as a soliloquy, Mulvey is self-conscious and uncomfortable in front of the camera. Her pen twirls nervously in her hand. She is reading, not ‘present’ in this scene as an image that can be easily or pleasurably consumed. Mulvey’s hesitant acting style signals her resistance to a seamless film practice. The humble desk at which Mulvey sits evokes the scene of writing within the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain and alludes to the effort women put into finding words and images to represent, as the Sphinx does, women’s feelings of exclusion and suppression and transform them into a political perspective from which women could speak. Such a transformation has to be mirrored to make a discernible impact, and Riddles places a strong emphasis on addressing viewers and transforming them into readers who share a feminist perspective. However, the textual layering of Riddles rejects a mirroring founded upon positive images or mimetic forms

Feminist desires and collective reading in the work of Laura Mulvey

of identification. In her well-known essay ‘Screening the Seventies,’ Griselda Pollock argues that both Kelly and Mulvey engage with strategies of distanciation and defamiliarisation that can be traced back to the work of Bertolt Brecht, which was circulating in the pages of Screen in the 1970s. (Mulvey first published ‘Visual Pleasure’ in Screen in 1975, and Kelly began serving on the editorial board in 1979.) Pollock demonstrates that by utilising the strategies of montage, both PPD and Riddles are committed to ‘non-unity,’ and therefore ‘open to the play of contradictions.’23 As Pollock explains, the artwork and film engage with text and images of writing to ‘create an entirely new kind of spectator as part and parcel of its representational strategies.’24 This creation of a new spectator involves, as Pollock puts it, ‘engag[ing] the social viewer to take up that position as the text’s imagined partner.’25 Directly addressing her viewers, Mulvey makes this engagement explicit. And by taking up the myths that have naturalised women’s subordination and presenting them as feminist dilemmas, Riddles creates a counter-interpellation to women’s psychic indoctrination into their own subordination. Through Mulvey’s address to the viewer/reader, we could say that she is staging a feminist transfer of knowledge that parallels the Oedipal exchanges between men of different generations. And yet, Mulvey suggests that until such an exchange is written into the symbolic order, the Sphinx and the maternal femininity she represents ‘can only speak with a voice apart, a voice off.’26 The third chapter of Riddles, ‘Stones,’ demonstrates just how ‘apart,’ ‘far off,’ the voice of the Sphinx has been. This seven-minute chapter consists of grainy film that depicts the pyramids and the Sphinx of Giza. Shot with a hazy blue filter, the footage looks like an amateur travel film produced by someone on a tour of Egypt.27 But Mulvey and Wollen make the footage strange: it is set to electronic music that is eerie and dull, a chaotic aural ‘language’ that has not been formed into an alphabet and is therefore akin to the ‘noise’ that, according to Mary Ann Doane, is attributed to the female body and its capacity to ‘disrupt representation’ with its ‘undifferentiated presence.’28 The electronic music speeds up as the camera zooms in on the image of the Sphinx’s stone face and then narrows in on her silent lips, which are marked by erosion and hidden in shadow. The lips of the Sphinx come in and out of focus, creating an alternating pattern of clarity and disintegration (see Figure 6.8). While evoking the potential disruption of the Sphinx’s voice, the scene ultimately attests to its containment. The Sphinx’s closed mouth figures for the internalisation of Oedipal dominance fixed into place on scales historical, mythical, and familial. It illustrates what Julia Kristeva identifies as the ‘victory over the mother’ that the child accomplishes through his acquisition of language.29 However, what Riddles reveals is that this ‘victory’ is never complete. Undermining this ‘victory’ and what it suggests about the cultural denigration of maternal femininity,

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6.8 

Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, dir. Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. The lips of the Sphinx.

Mulvey’s address to viewers/readers is also an address to this muted Sphinx. The layers of this address articulate a desire to bring the other woman into a textual collaboration that can realise the imaginative possibilities occluded by her ‘defeat’ and subsequent historical repressions. The Sphinx’s closed mouth is dense with imaginative possibilities that have not been allowed to emerge into visibility in a culture in which Oedipalised triumphs and losses are bestowed with the most value and prestige. The Sphinx – excluded by the rigorously defended ‘victory’ of the Oedipal drama – figures for the other woman that Kelly and Mulvey address in their work. At the centre of Riddles is ‘Louise’s Story Told in 13 Shots,’ the sequence in which the primary narrative of the film unfolds. Each of the shots is a 360-degree pan that circles the spaces in which the protagonist Louise composes her life as the mother of a child named Anna.30 These 360-degree clockwise pans are crucial to the film’s feminist aesthetic and its resistance to dominant visual culture. As Pollock explains, they ‘def[y] the typical linear economy of Hollywood film with its … suture of the spectator to the spectacle that seems cut to the measure only of desire.’31 Before each shot, an intertitle appears. Placed within a rectangle and composed of turquoise blue lettering, the first intertitle states: Perhaps Louise is too close to her child. How much longer can she reject the outside world, other people and other demands. Her husband often

Feminist desires and collective reading in the work of Laura Mulvey

241

Appearing like a poem and visually echoing the citation of Heine’s Nordsee in Freud’s ‘Femininity,’ this textual fragment continues the film’s use of text to address viewers and make them into readers. This fragment in particular represents the film’s primary occupation – the mother’s desires, and the idea, which PPD also represents, that the maternal dyad is fundamentally asocial and must be split up by the father and the strictures of language and the law. Riddles does not take the necessity of this separation as a given. By leaving the last sentence of the passage incomplete, Mulvey and Wollen gesture to the aspects of the narrative that exceed the frame and point ‘somewhere else.’ ‘Her husband’ is represented at the end of this textual fragment, cut from a verb we assume articulates his disapproval. The fragment leads into the first of the film’s 360-degree pans, which circles Louise’s kitchen. If the image of Garbo’s face signifies the modernist glamour of the female film star and the visual pleasures she is expected to transmit, the first ‘shot’ of ‘Louise’s Story’ defies those expectations. It makes the kitchen an arena for focusing on the kinds of reproductive and affective labour mothers have traditionally performed there. It is only Louise’s torso that comes into view as she puts Anna into her high chair and gives her pieces of apple to eat – an act her daughter playfully mimes with her teddy bear, perhaps a form of ‘playing with dolls’ that suggests the singular ways she is internalising her mother’s care (see Figure 6.9). Electronic music that repeats three chords

Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, dir. Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. Daughter in high chair.

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accompanies these actions. This music is so melodically simple it creates a soundscape that sinks into the 360-degree pan, barely noticeable. Halfway into the shot, sound and noise give way to voice and language. The Sphinx begins to speak. Her voice – high pitched but soft – registers as ‘feminine.’ She does not speak in sentences, but recites texts that arise from and associatively connect to the work Louise performs in the home caring for Anna. The first of these phrases suggest an anxious mixture of multiple temporalities without the clear order of a syntax: Time to get ready. Time to come in. Things to forget. Things to lose. Meal time. Story time. Desultory. Peremptory. Keeping going. Keeping looking. Reading like a book. Relief. Things to cook.32

Reflecting the scenes of pleasurable domesticity, this poetic text creates, as Kaja Silverman puts it, ‘a nest of repetitive and incantatory sounds’ that replicates the slow circularity of the 360-degree pan.33 The poetic fragment evokes the discursive production of maternal femininity, but it is far closer to the psyche than a public world of recognisable discourse. The sliding materiality of these words and the elliptical logic of their rhymes and associations show they have been unhinged from their referents. This unhinging highlights the fact that the words and phrases only loosely correspond to the images and sounds appearing on and emerging from the screen. While the gaps among the words, images, and sounds solicit viewers’ participation, its poetic experimentation reflects a fetishistically enclosed world that Louise composes every day with her daughter. The world is presented here to give viewers a glimpse into it, but Mulvey and Wollen do not offer a complete picture. The shot therefore defies the expectation – of both a woman and a film – to present an easily consumable and satisfying image. It is clear Mulvey and Wollen are drawing from the psychoanalytic argument that women return to the pre-Oedipal through pregnancy and childcare to rewrite the idea that women are inevitably reassigned to castration once the maternal dyad comes undone. In ‘Visual Pleasure,’ Mulvey evokes women’s narrow options in a patriarchal culture underwritten by castration: ‘Either she must gracefully give way to the word, the name of the father and the law, or else struggle to keep her child down with her in the half-light of the imaginary.’34 These are the options Riddles is working to expand and reimagine. The first indication that Louise wants to forestall ‘giv[ing] way to … the name of the father and the law’ is the depiction of father’s marginalisation. At the conclusion of the shot is the

Feminist desires and collective reading in the work of Laura Mulvey

hand of a grown man, taking bits of toast from a plate Louise prepares for Anna. Viewers later learn that this man is Chris, Louise’s husband and Anna’s father. This fragmented depiction of him foresees their separation. When the shot concludes, another text interrupts the visual field. It contains the last part of one sentence and the first part of another: bedtime, she likes to stay in Anna’s room waiting for her to fall asleep and tidying away the traces of the day. She still seems to need

This poetic fragment addresses Louise’s desires to stay proximate to her child, and to fetishistically render the child’s traces, as Kelly does in PPD. The last sentence emphasises the continuity of desires – ‘[s]he still seems to need’ – and is cut off before completion. The fragment suggests the lingering excess of maternal longing. Through the slow circularity of the 360-degree pan, the repetitive electronic music, and the Sphinx’s textual address that evokes the linguistic strata of maternal femininity, Mulvey and Wollen create a visual, sonic, and psychic envelope that evokes the enclosure of a maternal world as it slowly opens into the symbolic order, the public worlds of other people, and its accompanying losses for maternal femininity. These losses are not total, and the film does not enact a process in which the maternal body is permanently barred from the symbolic order. Instead, Riddles makes the imaginary pleasures of the maternal dyad attenuate the symbolic order’s power to exile the female body to a noisy and disorderly outside. Doane describes Riddles as a film that ‘deal[s] with the feminist problematic,’ by ‘elaborate[ing] a new syntax, thus “speaking” the female body differently.’35 The film’s feminist deconstruction of the image and the voice is key to speaking the female body differently. The Sphinx enacts this deconstruction.36 Because the place and the body from which she speaks is never revealed, the Sphinx is an example of the acousmêtre: a voice we hear on screen that is not attached to the image of a body.37 Since most acousemêtres are, according to Michel Chion, masculine, there is an enormous feminist potential in this (seemingly) simple choice to have a feminine voice unhinged from the image of a body and from a designated place within the film’s diegetic structure. Chion argues that the acousemêtre provokes the desire to follow the voice as it returns to the maternal body.38 Riddles interrupts that desire, and the film’s engagement with the hieroglyph is part of that interruption. For, as Jacques Derrida argues, the hieroglyph defies the presumption that languages are fundamentally phonetic, which puts the voice as an ‘origin’ or a passageway to metaphysical presence into question.39 With the sound of her voice woven

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among the film’s hieroglyphic forms (but never settling within them), the Sphinx resists expectations that women on screen become fully present through images of their bodies that are synchronised with their voices. It is from within the gaps and absences between voices, images, and texts that the feminist imaginary of Riddles begins to emerge. While intricate aesthetic forms are the means by which Riddles addresses the viewer, these forms are embedded within (and not detached from) the film’s focus on real concerns about childcare. Echoing the preoccupations of Women and Work and Nightcleaners, a primary question animating Riddles is this: once she has separated from Anna’s father, how can Louise take care of Anna and work to support her? While the camera follows Louise and Anna around a park where women push babies in perambulators and toddlers climb the jungle-gym ladders, the Sphinx asks the following questions: Should women demand special working conditions for mothers? Can a child-care campaign attack anything fundamental to women’s oppression? … Is domestic labour productive? Is the division of labour the root of the problem? Is exploitation outside the home better than oppression within it? … . Does the oppression of women operate on the conscious or on the unconscious? What would the politics of the unconscious be like? How necessary is being-a-mother to women, in reality or imagination?40

The Sphinx poses a series of questions that bring feminism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis together, creating an inquiry into the material conditions of motherhood in London in the 1970s. These questions index Women’s Liberation in Britain and mirror the issues of women and work the movement had been addressing since it first began. The next section offers an overview of that historical period and its investment in creating collective reading practices. It culminates with the protests against the 1970 Miss World contest, which both Kelly and Mulvey participated in, and underscores the fetishised image of a woman’s body as a crucial site of feminist intervention. Collaborative reading and writing

In the late 1960s, two protests helped to put the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain into motion: the campaign for fishermen’s safety orchestrated by the wives of fishermen in Hull and led by Lil Bilocca; and the three-week strike by female sewing machinists at the Ford plant in Dagenham, led by Rose Boland. The Dagenham strike began when the women discovered that men were being paid 15 per cent more for doing the same kinds of work, which was justified by the Ford classification of women as unskilled workers. Rowbotham reports that the campaign for fisherman’s safety at Hull and the sewing

Feminist desires and collective reading in the work of Laura Mulvey

machinists’ strike in Dagenham ‘ma[d]e women on the left feel they could do something.’41 The Dagenham strike in particular confirmed this feeling. It ended with the intervention of the Socialist politician Barbara Castle (then the Employment Minister of the Labour Party) and galvanised efforts toward passage of the Equal Pay Act (the subject of Women and Work and Nightcleaners). The campaign for fishermen’s safety and the Dagenham strike were feminist texts that transmitted messages about the value of women and resonated beyond immediate political demands. The National Women’s Liberation Conference that took place at Ruskin College (a trade college in Oxford) in 1970 further solidified the feeling that women could ‘do something.’ Over 500 women attended the Ruskin conference, and the multiple feminist groups to which it gave rise were a crucial turning point for Women’s Liberation in Britain. In her personal recollections of the 1970s, the socialist-feminist writer Anna Paczuska states that the Ruskin conference created spaces in which women could address each other without their voices being silenced. As Paczuska explains, Ruskin was really exciting; because there were lots and lots of people you were talking politics with. Nobody patronizing you, you weren’t out of your depth, you were saying lots of things together. I think that was very inspiring. Afterwards I just read and talked. Nobody would get excited reading Engels on the family now, but we did.42

Creating an expansive arena so women could ‘say lots of things together,’ the Ruskin conference had a far-reaching impact. It made the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain a loose constellation of collective groups rather than a discernible political organisation with defined institutional frameworks. The print material of the movement – its newsletters, magazines, journals, and pamphlets – reflects the spontaneous transformations that came out of the Ruskin Conference, its ever-widening range of issues about which women were talking, reading, and writing. The Tufnell group (named after the anti-war protests in Tufnell Park) started one of the newsletters. They named the second issue of their newsletter Harpies Bizarre, and then it became Shrew when the editorial responsibilities started moving from group to group within the organisational umbrella of the London Women’s Liberation Workshop.43 In the pages of Shrew, one could find announcements for reports on protests, leafleting campaigns, and courses taught by Juliet Mitchell. Shrew also published papers from the Ruskin conference, one of which was entitled ‘Women and the Family,’ collectively written by members of the London Peckham Rye group. ‘Women and the Family’ opens with a formulation that resonates with Rowbotham’s statement in Nightcleaners that girls are told their future is caring for people and underscores Mitchell’s insights

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about the ideological tenacity of sexual difference. Highlighting their collective voice, members of the London Peckham Rye group state We are oppressed and have been from the moment we were born. Our families have squashed us into roles because our mothers wanted daughters in their own image, and our fathers wanted daughters like their submissive wives. We each had a girlhood instead of a childhood and are only now beginning to be conscious of what that means in terms of where we are now. Now we feel we are martyrs. Martyrdom that has, over the years of being housewives and mothers, become almost enjoyable. The family exists on martyrdom. This is generally getting less but only since we have glimpsed how we live from the outside.44

It is not a surprise that the Peckham Rye group highlights the bourgeois heteropatriarchal family as an institution that ‘squashes’ women into punitively narrow roles, or that fathers raise daughters so they become the ‘submissive wives.’ What is surprising is the characterisation of mothers who mould daughters ‘in their own image,’ as is the identification of ‘martyrdom’ as part of the thick affective economy that is perversely enjoyed by ‘housewives and women,’ and no doubt part of the bitter transmission that keeps daughters mirrors of their mothers. ‘Women and the Family’ addresses women’s internalisation of patriarchal dominance and identifies its transmission along the maternal line. Riddles takes up this transmission as one of its subjects, and deploys text and writing to create a different address for the movement of feminism along generational lines. Identifying and resisting these internalisations made feminist politics a process akin to psychoanalytic interpretation. As the Peckham Rye group writes: ‘we … are only now beginning to be conscious.’ Such a process of bringing to light what had been internalised does not produce a satisfying picture of progress. It only allows an emergent and partial picture to come into view. The Peckham Rye group asserts that the Ruskin conference not only gave women a ‘glimpse’ of ‘how [women] live from the outside,’ it also gave women the means to share that view with other women. Women galvanised by the Ruskin conference wanted to widen this ‘glimpse’ into a fuller and clearer way of seeing that was recognisable in public discourse. Opening apertures for seeing ‘how women live’ was precisely what the Women’s History Group worked to achieve. As mentioned earlier, Kelly and Mulvey were members of the History Group, which was focused in particular on the foundational texts in Marxism and psychoanalysis. Together the members of the History Group worked to develop feminist reading practices that could identify how the exploitations of patriarchy shaped the material conditions of women’s lives. As Mulvey explains, ‘We were reading great works by great men that were relevant to understanding the oppression of women but in which we could also find blind spots, symptomatic of misunderstanding.’45

Feminist desires and collective reading in the work of Laura Mulvey

With the work of Friedrich Engels and Claude Lévi-Strauss, they ‘searched for an ethnological “origin” of women’s oppression,’ and this search took them to the work of Freud, the unconscious, and the Oedipus Complex ‘as a possible source for the endlessly repeated inscription of women’s subordination within a patriarchal social system.’46 In the following statement from a published conversation with Kelly, Mulvey reflects upon the Women’s History Group and stresses the impact collective reading practices had upon her developing feminist insights. In 1970, we were in the same women’s reading group, which we called the ‘History Group.’ It was then that we started reading Freud and thinking about psychoanalysis. I wanted to introduce the subject of psychoanalysis, which influenced us and other people working at the same time through the context of the reading group. And I wanted to say that the group was of enormous importance to me, personally and intellectually. The project of collective reading made it possible to question and be in command of the ‘grand ideas of great men.’ As a part of a group, one suddenly found the confidence to ask questions from a political point of view, which as an isolated person struggling with difficult works, had always been impossible (for me at any rate). It was only from being in that group that it became possible to read, and then subsequently to write. The first thing I wrote, was in the Shrew on the ‘Miss World Demonstration.’ You edited it and laid it out, didn’t you?47

At stake in the collective reading practices Mulvey recalls here is not just the supportive environment that allows for the development of a specifically feminist critique. She is also identifying a form of ‘mirroring’ that enabled the women’s feminist insights to develop and take hold in public discourse. This is precisely what Mulvey and Kelly sought when protesting against the Miss World contest that took place in London in 1970, to bring feminist insights about the visual production of woman as sign into public visibility. Modelled after the protests against the Miss America pageant that took place in Atlantic City in 1968, women involved in the Women’s Movement in 1970 protested within and outside of London’s Albert Hall, where the pageant was held. About thirty women infiltrated the building, shouted at Bob Hope, blew whistles, and tossed leaflets, flour, and smoke bombs on stage. One hundred protestors outside Albert Hall put a pantomime cow on display (perhaps alluding to the sheep with tiaras protestors brought to the Atlantic City Boardwalk.) Like the Miss America pageant, the Miss World contest exemplifies the visual production of woman as a sign of passivity and is a grand spectacle that naturalises women’s subordination. For both Kelly and Mulvey, writing about the Miss World contest and articulating what it meant for the Women’s Liberation Movement was part of the protest against it. They expressed how galvanising the protests were, as the beauty pageant exemplified the visual

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fetishisation of women’s bodies that PPD and Riddles would work so carefully to undo. In their essay ‘The Spectacle is Vulnerable: Miss World, 1970,’ Mulvey and her co-author Margarita Jimenez report on their participation in the protest inside Albert Hall. They begin by stating that the Miss World competition ‘is not an erotic exhibition; it is a public celebration of the traditional female road to success.’48 They emphasise the sublimated sexuality of the contest and its enforcement of proper feminine roles. They also write about the internal shifts they had to undergo to imagine themselves addressing a hostile public audience. This shift meant rejecting ‘both our conditioning as women, and our acceptance of bourgeois norms of correct behaviour.’49 Indeed, the protests against Miss World can be understood as a collective effort to reject the expectation that women internalise the idea of their natural passivity and present it as an image for others to consume. By demonstrating against Miss World, Mulvey and Jimenez explain that ‘Women’s Liberation struck a blow against … the physical confines of the way women are seen and the way they fit into society. Most of all, it was a blow against passivity, not only the enforced passivity of the girls on the stage but the passivity we all felt in ourselves.’50 It is precisely this passivity and its internalisation that justifies the economic exploitation of women that Miss World simultaneously masks and celebrates. Kelly addresses the economics of Miss World in an anonymous leaflet she wrote that was distributed outside Albert Hall the night of the protest. Titled ‘Miss World,’ the essay was published in a pamphlet along with accounts from other protestors and then appeared in the radical feminist newspaper 7 Days. Kelly’s essay opens by giving a political-economic history of the Miss World contest: it began in 1951, coincident with England’s post-war strategy of economic recovery. It was designed to establish new markets at home and abroad and transform the economy from industrial production to consumption. According to Kelly, the image of femininity the Miss World beauty contest promotes is one of Britain’s ‘technological innovations.’51 This invention is suspended between art historical conceptions of women’s beauty (images of the Venus de Milo appeared in the television broadcast), and discourses of femininity that draw from a ‘scrap-book life of women’s magazines,’ in which, as Kelly explains, ‘the condition of all women is assumed to be innate and unalterable.’52 Kelly focuses on Eric Morley, the ‘inventor’ of the Miss World contest, and his book The Miss World Story (1967), which she ruthlessly (and rightfully) critiques.53 For Kelly, The Miss World Story demonstrates that sexism functions as a tool for justifying capitalism, and the contestants exemplify the extraction of women’s labour power. She narrows in on Morley’s representation of women’s bodies as raw material, which he takes to manufacture his ‘products’: ‘[W]ith the “basic material” plus the aid of cosmetics and a deportment school, he manufactures the perfect product. It is a sound capital investment … First of

Feminist desires and collective reading in the work of Laura Mulvey

all, the raw material is practically free.’54 Because the contestants are subjected to this production process, Kelly argues that they ‘caricature the alienating effects of selling one’s labour – they are literally engaged in selling “themselves.”’55 Just as the Miss America pageant masked American military aggression abroad, Miss World covers over the ongoing imperial exploits of the British nation. Kelly dismantles the false assumption that the pageant is a way to measure political progress. She points to the hypocrisies about race and nation that Miss World exemplifies, and argues that a spectacle like Miss World functions as a salve for imperial race relations and ‘obscure[s] the anti-imperialist struggles at home and abroad.’56 As Kelly explains, ‘the 27 million people watching the Miss World spectacle’ are allowed to ‘see racism carefully concealed behind the “family of nations” façade: Miss Grenada can become Miss World, make obliging remarks about the British hospitality, and consequently pacify 2 million underpaid immigrant workers.’57 The contestants’ work composing perfected images of their bodies contributes to the production of large-scale ideological ‘banners’ that covered over Britain’s active opposition to national liberation movements so that post-war markets could remain open.58 Not surprisingly, the mainstream press coverage of Miss World did not share Kelly’s critique. The emphasis was instead on the divisions between the contestants and the protestors, and racial difference became a blunt wedge to further seemingly obvious divides. The Observer article reporting on the protests is titled ‘Miss World Was Not Amused,’ and focuses in on the winner’s disdain for the protestors’ interruption of the spectacle.59 Much bigger than the article itself is a black-and-white photograph of the new Miss World, Jennifer Hosten, a statuesque beauty whom the article describes as a ‘22-year-old daughter of a barrister on the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada.’ Hosten’s Caribbean heritage became part of the writer’s clear intention to divide the good contestants from the bad protestors. The writer quotes Hosten as stating, ‘“I do not think women should ever achieve complete economic rights … I still like a gentleman to hold my chair back for me.”’ Set against this statement, which secures Hosten’s place in the British national imaginary through her adherence to the codes of respectability (a production that acquires different meaning given the primitivisation of the Grenadan people in the island’s history of European colonisation), the women protesting Miss World become crazy, racist women who undermined good women like Hosten who only want to align themselves with a comforting image of woman. By insisting upon a division among the contestants and the protestors, and enforcing that division through racial difference, accusations of racism, and proper femininity, the British press helped to impede the possibility that women could connect the interrelated forms of fetishisation and fight collectively against them. These divisions make the emphasis Mulvey places on feminist collectivity vitally important. In ‘The Spectacle is Vulnerable,’ Mulvey and Jimenez show

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that there were moments of collectivity that did not fit into narratives of bitter divisions between women. They compose a poignant vignette in which a momentary alliance among women took place on the edges of the spectacle. As a protestor was dragged away by the police and the contestants were pushed back on stage, they professed their sympathies for each other. As Mulvey and Jimenez tell it: As I was lifted bodily out of the hall, three Miss Worlds came running up to me, a trio of sequined, perfumed visions saying “Are you all right?”, “Let her go.” When the policeman explained we were from WL and demonstrating against them, I managed to say that we weren’t against them, we were for them, but against Mecca and their exploitation.60

Whereas the policeman wanted to insist that contestants and the beauty pageant were one and the same, the protestors were insisting upon their distinction. They wanted to place the passivity and vulnerability assigned to women back to their source – the spectacle itself. The Miss World contest provided clear examples of the kinds of imagery and forms of work Kelly, Mulvey, and other members of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain wanted to dismantle. Placed on a global stage, the contestants’ bodies functioned as fetish objects for national economies and the economic exploitations that have produced them. The images the beauty contestants created with their bodies for the Miss World contest were relatively easy to critique: they emblematise the visual production of the sign woman in patriarchal culture. What proved to be much more challenging is how to compose images of women that could undo the naturalised fixity of such depictions and foster correspondences among women to challenge those images while still allowing for differentiation and singularity. In Riddles, Mulvey and Wollen attempt to compose such images by working with the form of the hieroglyph and allowing it to become a figure for feminist reading practices that could move across the lines of racial and class difference produced by colonial histories. Reading hieroglyphs together

Just as Kelly uses the Rosetta Stone to memorialise the mother’s losses as the maternal dyad comes undone, so Mulvey similarly develops a hieroglyphic aesthetic in Riddles to enact the process of returning to the pre-Oedipal and bringing its pleasures into visibility. Like PPD, Riddles is replete with textual forms and images of writing that layer the cinematic images and make them less transparent and consumable. And also like PPD, Riddles links the exploitation of women’s labour to the colonial histories indexed by the hieroglyph.61 Recall that Riddles opens by presenting the French film magazine MidiMinuit Fantastique and comes to focus on a depiction of Greta Garbo’s face

Feminist desires and collective reading in the work of Laura Mulvey

superimposed on a photograph of the Great Sphinx of Giza. Garbo’s face is an important image for Riddles. At the end of the opening sequence, the camera lingers on it, and Mulvey returns to it in her lecture about the Sphinx. The image of Garbo as the Sphinx represents a cultural logic that links the feminine to primitive animality. It is also an auratic icon of feminine whiteness that signifies ‘civilisation.’ Garbo’s visual appearance exemplifies Richard Dyer’s argument that the faces of white women on the cinematic screens of western culture are given, through specific lighting technologies, a translucent glow that naturalises whiteness and the presumption of its superiority.62 Garbo’s face is also an example of the ‘despotic face of white femininity’ that, according to Camilla Griggers, operates as a force field that holds in tension the signifying mechanisms that regulate what is allowed to appear while also veiling and containing the sacrifices capitalism’s dominant cultures require.63 Lit to perfection, Garbo’s face covers over Egypt in particular, ‘Africa’ in general, and the hierarchies of racial difference produced by the colonial histories inscribed on the North African landscape and the bodies conflated with it. As if to suggest that Egypt has been brought into capitalist modernity through the image of a female film star, blazoned above Garbo’s head is the title ‘Sphinx Moderne.’ As a cinematic fetish object, Garbo’s face draws attention to the fascination with white women on the cinematic screen of western culture that deflects knowledge of castration as well as colonialism’s thefts of land and labour. In effect, this image suggests that Garbo is a ‘Miss World’: the image of her face exemplifies how the fetishisation of white femininity has masked – but is also deeply embedded in – the capitalist extractions of colonialism and became, over the course of the twentieth century, an important means by which the global image economy will extend its reach.64 Riddles will end up troubling this image of white femininity placed over the colonial/racial encounter. It does so by layering and fracturing images with texts and images of writing and making the act of reading part of a collaborative interracial friendship. This collaborative friendship suggests that the interrelationships among women who are identified with the white feminine face of western cinema and the women who are identified with Egypt through blackness can write a feminist imaginary that fosters correspondences. A central relationship in Riddles, the friendship of Louise and Maxine enacts the possibilities of these feminist correspondences. Louise meets Maxine, a British-African woman, at the neighbourhood nursery where she takes Anna the day she returns to work. Tracking the entrance of Louise and Anna into the space of the nursery, the 360-degree pan reveals the creative messiness that covers every inch of the space: leaves and dried flowers; coloured tissue paper; finger paints and easels; all sorts of paper and cardboard creations; dolls; a hamster cage. These objects compose a homemade ‘tapestry’ that signifies

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the imaginative depths of childhood play as it extends beyond the home’s enclosed spaces. At the end of the scene, Maxine tries to ease Louise’s anxieties about leaving Anna. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll look after her.’ The next scene depicts the switchboard where Louise works as a telephone operator. The soundscape is thick with the operators’ dulcet voices connecting others through audio technology and the clacking sounds of their work plugging in the jacks. The first time viewers see Louise at work she is calling Maxine, anxiously checking on Anna, an act for which she will be fired. The camera moves from the image of Louise talking to Maxine, pans across the other operators, and then moves to a map of the world. As viewers we are asked to see the connections among Louise’s work as a telephone operator, Maxine as a British-African subject and her work at the daycare centre, and the picture of the world from the perspective of a British telecommunications company. Analogous to the way in which the phone operators connect voices and information to and from different places, the character Maxine provides a connection between Louise and Anna and the pre-Oedipal pleasures Louise is reluctant to relinquish. Louise and Maxine develop a friendship that builds upon this reluctance. In a crucial scene that takes place in Chris’s production studio, where he works as a film editor, Louise tells Chris that she wants to sell their house and live with Maxine. Just before this disclosure, viewers see Louise and Maxine looking at a Camel cigarette package (which has an image of a camel and a pyramid on its face) in a mirror. Maxine is showing Louise that the letters of cigarette package do not appear ‘in reverse’ as mirror writing because of the mediation of the cellophane (see Figure 6.10). Louise and Maxine are enacting a process of seeing and reading the commodity – and the ‘hieroglyph’ that represents its fetishisation – differently. But even more is at stake, this scene can be considered a feminist rewriting of the mirror stage. The two women playing with images in the mirror defy the narrow idea of woman that is expected to serve as the perceptual support for patriarchal culture as men defend against the losses incurred by capitalist ideology. That is, the film depicts Louise and Maxine recognising themselves beyond the dominant sign of woman and expanding women’s narrow place in the symbolic order. Mulvey and Wollen signal the importance of this scene of reading by reversing the direction of the 360-degree pan. It now turns counterclockwise. This ‘turning back,’ which is coincident with Louise’s refusal to serve as the threat of castration or its mollification, inaugurates a return to the pre-Oedipal that allows for a reconfiguration of the daughter’s castrated place in the symbolic order. This feminist reconfiguration, which the collaboration between the two women makes possible, is most obviously and immediately expressed in Louise’s announcement to Chris that she wants to sell their property and live with Maxine.

Feminist desires and collective reading in the work of Laura Mulvey

Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, dir. Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. Louise and Maxine.

It is not wrong to say that Maxine’s role is limited to supporting Louise’s feminist ‘turn,’ or to note that the support she gives reiterates the racial, colonial, and class hierarchies upon which white and black women were positioned within British culture. Indeed, Riddles may unreflectively rely upon the expectation that black women perform labour associated with the working class and give their affective and reproductive labour both to patriarchal culture and the white women who have been able to garner some of its privileges. This is an expectation that is fostered by racial capitalism and imperialist ideologies that ostensibly erase the historical and economic forces that have shaped the experiences of black people in Britain. Riddles participates in this erasure.65 While Louise, Maxine, and Anna visit Louise’s mother and play in her garden – part of Louise ‘br[inging] herself back into her own past’ – the film does not depict Maxine’s family history.66 A similar erasure is evident in the film’s visual portrayal of Maxine. Her skin is either overexposed or blends so easily into the background she almost disappears. The ‘other side’ of Garbo’s face, these images underscore Dyer’s argument that the standard lighting technologies utilised for the production of western cinema have privileged white skin, making the act of photographing non-white people for the cinematic screen ‘a problem.’67 These aspects of Riddles signal an unconscious reliance upon white privilege, but the film’s representation of the collaborative friendship between Louise

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and Maxine is still worth highlighting. By reading a commodity against the grain, questioning the patriarchal underpinnings of capitalist ideology, and participating in the transformation of the heterosexual family, the friendship between Louise and Maxine does suggest possibilities for reconfiguring arrangements of power among women – arrangements that not only index Britain’s Imperial past, but represent its continual unfolding into the 1970s. Mulvey’s collaboration with Kelly figures into this scene dense with history and possibility.68 After Louise announces that she wants to sell their home and move in with Maxine, Chris shows Louise and Maxine a project he has been working on, a documentary about a woman artist. The artist is Kelly, and the footage depicts her reading from the diary entries for PPD. Chris turns out the lights, and before the pan reaches the screen upon which the film footage plays, viewers see only darkness (recalling the black leader of Nightcleaners) and hear Kelly’s voice as she describes the subject of her recorded conversations: her son’s entrance into nursery school, his use of the pronoun ‘I,’ and, on the psychoanalytic register, a reflection on the splitting of the maternal dyad. Moving unsteadily toward the pieces of artwork on the wall, the camera lights flash on the artwork so they seem to pulsate in and out of visibility. The second piece of footage shows Kelly at a desk before a row of books and a window; she is filmed in profile, almost with her back turned to the camera, and reads from a diary entry that describes her reaction to her son crying at nursery school (see Figure 6.11). The third piece of footage, which is shot in a bright blue film stock that echoes the turquoise lettering used throughout Riddles, shows Kelly playfully dressing her son, and over this imagery

6.11 

Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, dir. Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. Mary Kelly reading from Post-Partum Document.

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Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, dir. Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. Images of Mary Kelly with son.

6.12 

Kelly’s voice continues reflecting on the splitting of the dyad and the third term (the paternal function attributed to fathers and language) (see Figure 6.12). Depicting various moving images and sound recordings – some of which are synchronised and others that are not – this part of the shot contributes to denaturalising maternal femininity. Set in relation to Kelly’s reflections, Chris’s presentation of this material suggests that it is actually his camera work that is functioning as a third term, but it is one that does not forcefully split the maternal dyad. Certainly the idea that the splitting function of the symbolic has transferred from the father to the father’s camera confirms the argument that the cinematic apparatus has been put in the service of patriarchal ideology, but given that the film Chris has produced depicts a woman (Kelly) who is by no means relegated to the imaginary and voices a decidedly clear command of multiple discourses (and the mother’s various placements within them), the cinematic pieces of Kelly included in this shot attenuate the father’s presumed symbolic power. Riddles suggests that collaborative reading practices among women across the lines of racial difference – which the image of Louise and Maxine reading the cigarette pack in the mirror exemplifies – contributes to this rewriting. Writing a feminist imaginary

The importance of Louise and Maxine’s collaborative reading is underscored by what it makes possible in the scenes that follow. The next shot, which can only be described as gorgeous, realises the feminist imaginary for which Riddles

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6.13 

Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, dir. Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. Image of Maxine at the mirror.

has been striving. This penultimate ‘shot’ of ‘Louise’s Story in 13 Shots’ takes place in a room in Maxine’s home: a richly coloured, highly textured world of deep reds and oranges, intricately patterned fabrics, art objects, framed pictures and mirrors, curtains made of bamboo and emerald green beads. Near the conclusion of the shot, viewers see an image of Maxine through those mirrors sitting at a dressing table, and then Louise in a mirror reading a book (see Figures 6.13 and 6.14). Between them, viewers catch a glimpse of a female director behind a camera – another iteration of the third term that materialises the feminist vision of Riddles (see Figure 6.15). Throughout this compelling part of Riddles, Louise reads a text of a dream Maxine wrote down: a Surrealist story dense with mythical resonance about a daughter renouncing her father’s property. Louise asks Maxine: ‘What does it mean? Thoughts, pieces of thoughts?’ Louise’s question – what does it mean? – hangs in the air like the ornate decorations in their home. A dream that tells a story about a daughter relinquishing her patriarchal inheritance is fitting for this scene that portrays acts of reading, deciphering, and seeing between two women. The scene maps this richly developed imaginary (and the place of women within it) on to the symbolic order to highlight their overlaps and soften their distinctions.

Feminist desires and collective reading in the work of Laura Mulvey

Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, dir. Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. Image of Louise at the mirror.

Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, dir. Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. British Film Institute. Image of director between curtains.

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6.15 

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This scene of collaborative reading intimately connects to the intervention in the next and last shot, which circles around the Egyptian galleries of the British Museum: rewriting the definition of the daughter and delinking her from castration. Hinged between the depiction of Louise and Maxine and the museum space is the following text: a detour through these texts, entombed now in glass, whose enigmatic script reminds her of a forgotten history and the the power of a different language.

This poetic fragment, and the idea of a ‘different’ language it transcribes, transitions the viewer from the scene of reading Maxine’s dream to the portrayal of the ancient Egyptian sarcophagi, ‘entombed now in glass,’ adorned with the ‘enigmatic script’ of hieroglyphics. The hieroglyphics represent ‘a forgotten history and the/ power of a different language,’ as well as a different vision of women embedded within that history and language. The hieroglyphs in this last shot of ‘Louise’s Story in 13 Shots’ are difficult to see. Most likely, viewers of the film cannot read hieroglyphs, but even if they could, this scene would not make that translation easy. The direction of the camera panning the museum space calls attention to the wooden frames of the museum cases as well as the multiple and intersecting reflections on the glass: aspects of the scene that limit direct access to this ‘enigmatic script’ (see Figure 6.16). In the voiceover, the Sphinx contributes to the enigma of this scene by offering a poetic meditation on the possibility of discovering a feminist imaginary within the texts of memory and history. After the camera has circled halfway around the gallery, the voice of the Sphinx plaintively narrates a story about a woman reading and discovering the Sphinx (a doubling that seems to provocatively suggest that the Sphinx can move among multiple registers): She remembered reading somewhere a passage from a book she could no longer trace. Words that had struck her at the time and that she now tried to reconstruct. Inscribed on the lid of the box were the words: ‘Anatomy is no longer destiny,’ and inside, when she opened it, she found the figure of the Greek Sphinx with full breasts and feathery wings. She lifted it up out of the box to look at it more closely. As she did so, it seemed to her that its lips moved and it spoke a few phrases in a language she couldn’t understand, except for three words which were repeated several times:

Feminist desires and collective reading in the work of Laura Mulvey

Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, dir. Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. British Film Institute. British Museum, mummy in glass case.

‘Capital,’ ‘Delay,’ ‘Body.’ She placed the lid on the box and closed it. She could feel her heart beat.69

From a memory of a word in a passage in a book a woman cannot find or trace, the story the Sphinx tells is about a woman opening a box inscribed with a statement that refutes Sigmund Freud’s aphorism, ‘Anatomy is destiny.’ This statement is often taken out of context to represent Freud’s biological essentialism, but it is a play on Napoleon’s statement that ‘Politics is Destiny,’ and therefore links, however loosely, to the conquest of Egypt and the colonial discovery of the Rosetta Stone.70 Delinking anatomy from the fiction of its destiny, this dense passage seems to connect to the question of whom the ‘she’ refers to: Louise or Maxine or Anna? Maybe the film’s imaginative dispersal of feminine identity and the rewriting of the sign woman identifies all three characters. The three words the woman in the passage discerns from the Greek Sphinx are ‘“capital,”’ ‘“delay,”’ and ‘“body.”’ Perhaps one way to string together this riddle is to say: the women find the text that links ‘capital’ (which underscores the film’s engagement with Marxist thought) and its relationship to the ‘body,’ but see that reading the body’s value has been deferred (like the Rosetta Stone) and awaits rediscovery. This possibility creates a charged physical and affective response: ‘She could

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feel her heart beat.’ While there is affective satisfaction accompanying this feeling of embodiment, the voice of the Sphinx broaches more questions. The Sphinx describes the ‘she’ wondering about the ‘the particulars she had forgotten’ and speculating about things she cannot quite remember or decipher, like the language of the Sphinx. These speculations lead into the rewriting of the daughter’s position. Just as they are articulated, the camera catches sight of Louise and Anna, hand in hand, entering the Egyptian galleries (see Figure 6.17). Their presence together is significant, for the Sphinx tells a story about memories of the woman’s bodily and sensual proximity to the mother: ‘She remembered how when she had been very small, her mother had lifted her up to carry her on her hip and how she hovered round her cot when she fell asleep.’71 This memory echoes the early scene in Anna’s bedroom, the third ‘shot’ in which the camera circles the space as Louise attends to its details. Another memory involves entering her mother’s bedroom and seeing her sleeping next to another woman: ‘She suddenly understood something that she realized that her mother had tried to explain … ’72 Upon this discovery – and its evocation of a primal scene that replaces heterosexuality with a suggestion of lesbian sexuality – she remembers feeling a surge of panic as though she might be abandoned. She also remembers anticipating her mother’s anger, but her mother smiles reassuringly instead. The daughter’s attention then turns to the shapes of the arches of her mother’s foot, her heel and the back of her calf, an allusion to Freud’s Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva (1907), an analysis of aesthetic fascination, sublimated

6.17 

Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, dir. Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. Mother and daughter entering museum.

Feminist desires and collective reading in the work of Laura Mulvey

desires, and fetishisation. This part of the narrative suggests a revision of the castration scenario: instead of the boy child’s shock and fear of punishment at the discovery of sexual difference – and its corollary of the girl seeing and internalising her exclusion from the Oedipal triangle – the daughter instead receives comfort. Perhaps this is Anna encountering her mother’s life with Maxine, but Riddles is too elusive to allow viewers to confirm this identification with any certainty. What is most important is that Riddles creates a fantasy of feminist correspondences that is transmitted to the figure of the daughter and is capable of rewriting the negation with which the feminine is perpetually linked. By representing in words a daughter who does not inherit the lack, bitterness, or martyrdom which patriarchal culture has bequeathed to women, but instead receives a fulfilling image of her mother’s sexuality, the film moves to undo entrenched expectations of a girl’s castration. A figure for an audience receiving the film’s feminist address, the daughter in Riddles is no longer destined to the dissastisfactions Freud outlines for her in ‘Femininity.’ She has access to writing ‘a new language of desire.’ This chapter has read Riddles as an attempt to excavate the feminine in the patriarchal unconscious of Western culture. It has argued that by staging this excavation within the Egyptian galleries of the British Museum, Riddles tips into the relationships among feminism, the dark continent, and the interrelated formations of sexual and racial difference that have justified colonial relations. Colonialism and its damages are not annulled or transcended in the film. Instead, the afterlives of colonialism become part of the work’s textual address. Which is to say that the film’s work disinterring the repressed and riddled figuration of the mother and daughter in western thought and attempting to bestow both with value leads into an analysis of the production of racial difference for the thefts of land and labour that constitute the colonial project and its place in the development of global capital. In light of this excavation, the stage for this final scene – the Egyptian galleries of the British Museum – is crucial. Mute, still, and encased in glass, many have argued that the Egyptian treasures in the British Museum are consumed as spectacles that consolidate the British national imaginary.73 The collection itself fetishises the objects behind glass; they are robbed of their use-value and are frozen as curatorial commodities, laden with values and histories that exceed their consumption by the British public. While Riddles is complicit in this history, it also offers interpretive practices to read against the commodification of Egypt the British Museum represents. The film works with the retrospective reading practice Karl Marx offers in Capital (1867). There is a scene near the conclusion of the film in which Mulvey is again sitting at her desk, taking notes from a recorder, rehearsing her lecture on the Sphinx. Her recorded voice repeats a fragment from Marx’s opening chapter: ‘Later on, men try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the

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secret of their own social product.’ This citation underscores the hieroglyph’s importance in Riddles, but also asks viewers to revisit and reread the film (and perhaps the iteration of the Women’s Liberation Movement from which it emerged) to trace the ways in which colonialism haunts its textual address. Conclusion

Disinterring the buried figuration of woman on the surface of spectacle culture and in the depths of the patriarchal unconscious, PPD and Riddles forge lines of inheritance among women and for feminism. Needless to say, the lines Kelly and Mulvey imagined through their artwork are distinct from Oedipal models and contribute to sustaining feminist correspondences in historical time. Riddles in particular shows that these lines can move in multiple directions. They can move vertically, from mother to daughter; but also horizontally between women who are, like Mulvey’s characters Louise and Maxine, actively collaborating to write a feminist imaginary. The effect of this feminist imaginary is to stress the value of maternal femininity while resisting the impulse to conflate women with it. Imagining and composing forms of feminist inheritance that rival the Oedipal transmission of patriarchal privilege and loss, the address that Kelly and Mulvey created in the 1970s has broad implications that extend beyond the specifics of their collaboration and even the historical context that gave rise to it. Both PPD and Riddles contribute to the possibility of creating lines of transmission and inheritance for feminist art practices beyond their initial appearances in the late 1960s and 1970s. Which is to say that Kelly and Mulvey not only sought to address women across that period of feminist upheaval, but created correspondences with women of the future whom they had yet to see. Notes 1 Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure,’ 16. 2 2015 marked the 40th anniversary of ‘Visual Pleasure,’ and the essay was the subject of a number of dossiers in journals devoted to feminism, film, and visual studies: European Journal of Media Studies 4.1 (2015); Feminist Media Studies 15.5 (2015); Screen 56.4 (Winter 2015). There were also retrospectives on the essay in special issues of Signs, ‘Beyond the Gaze: Recent Approaches to Film Feminisms’ 30.1 (2004), and Camera Obscura, ‘The Spectatrix’ 7 (1989). 3 Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure,’ 14. 4 Ibid., 16. 5 Mulvey, ‘Introduction to the Second Edition,’ Visual and Other Pleasures (New York: Palgrave, 2009), ix–xxvi: xvii. 6 Mandy Merck, ‘Mulvey’s Manifesto,’ Camera Obscura 66, 22.3 (2007), 1–23: 14, 10. 7 Juliet Mitchell, ‘Introduction, 1999,’ xviii.

Feminist desires and collective reading in the work of Laura Mulvey

8 Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure,’ 16. 9 Ibid., 20, 25. 10 Mulvey, ‘Introduction to the First Edition,’ Visual and Other Pleasures, xxviii. 11 Ibid., xxviii. 12 Ibid. 13 Mulvey, ‘Fears, Fantasies, and the Male Unconscious or “You Don’t Know What Is Happening, Do You, Mr. Jones?”,’ Visual and Other Pleasures, 6–13: 7. 14 Ibid., 11. Original emphasis. 15 Ibid., 13. 16 Laura Mulvey, ‘Film, Feminism, and the Avant-Garde,’ Visual and Other Pleasures, 115–131: 123. 17 Ibid., 123. 18 Peter Wollen provides an insightful overview of how and why language appears in three films he co-directed with Mulvey: Penthesilea (1974), Riddles (1977), and AMY! (1980). He writes that it is in the ‘interface between image and word’ where ‘sexual difference, the subject of our films, takes shape.’ Peter Wollen, ‘The Field of Language in Film,’ October 17, ‘The New Talkies’ (Summer 1981), 53–60: 54. 19 The following texts have informed my understanding of the essay film: Nora M. Alter, ‘Translating the essay into film and installation,’ Journal of Visual Culture 6.1, 44–57; Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Please see Laura Mulvey’s recent reflections on Riddles as an essay film. Mulvey, ‘Riddles as Essay Film,’ in Essays on the Essay Film, Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigon (eds) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 314–321. 20 Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, ‘Riddles of the Sphinx: A Film by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen,’ Script, Screen 18. 2 (1977), 61–78: 61–62. 21 Ibid., 62. 22 Ibid. 23 Pollock ‘Screening the Seventies,’ 165. 24 Ibid., 181. 25 Ibid. Added emphasis. 26 Mulvey and Wollen, Riddles of the Sphinx, 62. 27 Lucy Fischer explains that Mulvey and Wollen used a motion-analyst projector so the footage would be ‘decelerated, reversed, step-printed, and frozen,’ which contributes to the ‘sense of a myth passed down from one epoch to another.’ Lucy Fischer, ‘Mythic Discourse,’ Shot/Countershot: Film Tradition and Women’s Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 32–62: 53–54. In her reading of ‘Stones,’ Kaja Silverman describes this footage of the Sphinx as an ‘extraordinary solicitation’ that has ‘the quality of a knock on a closed door.’ Kaja Silverman, ‘The Fantasy of the Maternal Voice: Female Subjectivity and the Negative Oedipus Complex,’ The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 101–140: 130. Fischer and Silverman are two of a very small number of scholars, including E. Ann Kaplan and Mary Ann Doane, who provide comprehensive readings of Riddles. 28 Mary Ann Doane, ‘Woman’s Stake: Filming the Female Body,’ Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1991), 165–177: 170.

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29 Julia Kristeva, ‘Place Names,’ in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, Leon S. Roudiez (ed.), Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (trans.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 271–294: 289. Original emphasis. 30 The 360-degree pan alludes to Jean-Luc Godard’s 1966 film One or Two Things I Know About Her. Mulvey confirmed this in an interview with the author in London, December 2012: she said she always admired that shot and that it informed her decision to make the 360-degree pan Riddles’s central formal feature. 31 Pollock, ‘Still Working on the Subject,’ 237. 32 Mulvey and Wollen, Riddles of the Sphinx, 63. 33 Silverman, ‘The Fantasy of the Maternal Voice,’ 131. 34 Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure,’ 15. 35 Doane, ‘Woman’s Stake,’ 176. 36 For a classic account of deconstruction in feminist film practice see Annette Kuhn, ‘Textual Politics,’ Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema (London: Pandora, 1982), 156–177: 160. Kuhn’s definition of deconstruction is not beholden to the work of Jacques Derrida; she draws upon the work of Bertolt Brecht, and argues that the signature characteristic of ‘deconstructive cinema’ is the ‘recruitment of the spectator’s active relation to the signification process for certain signifieds.’ 37 Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, Claudia Gorbman (ed. and trans.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 18–19. 38 Throughout The Voice in Cinema, Chion links the primacy of the voice to the maternal body, and Kaja Silverman critiques Chion’s rendition of the voice as a patriarchal fantasy. Silverman, ‘The Fantasy of the Maternal Voice,’ 72–140. 39 Derrida, Of Grammatology. 40 Mulvey and Wollen, Riddles of the Sphinx, 69. 41 Sheila Rowbotham, ‘The Beginnings of Women’s Liberation in Britian,’ Dreams and Dilemmas: Collected Writings (London: Virago Press, 1983), 32–44: 33. 42 Interview with Anna Paczuska, in Michelene Wandor, Once a Feminist: Stories of a Generation, Interviews by Michelene Wandor (London: Virago Press, 1990), 145–159: 153. 43 Eve Setch writes that from 1969 to the end of the 1970s, the London Women’s Liberation Workshop ‘operated as an umbrella organization for local, study and campaign groups; as an office for information and contacts; as a bookshop; as a meeting and social centre; and as a place for producing the newsletter.’ Eve Setch, ‘The Face of Metropolitan Feminism: The London Women’s Liberation Workshop, 1969–1979,’ Twentieth Century British History 13.2 (2002), 171–190: 174. 44 Jan Williams, Hazel Twort, and Ann Bachelli, ‘Women in the Family,’ in Wandor, Once a Feminist, 227–234: 227. Original emphasis. 45 Mulvey, ‘Introduction to the Second Edition,’ Visual and Other Pleasures, xv. 46 Ibid. 47 Kelly, ‘Mary Kelly and Laura Mulvey in Conversation,’ Imaging Desire, 30–31. 48 In her preface to ‘The Spectacle is Vulnerable,’ Mulvey explains the composition of the piece and underscores the fact that it was collectively authored: ‘[Margarita Jimenez and I] decided to use our very different styles of writing to give the piece

Feminist desires and collective reading in the work of Laura Mulvey

two levels; she wrote a first person account of the events, and I wrote an impersonal comment on our action. The piece was, of course, discussed with the whole group, collectively edited and published anonymously.’ ‘Laura Mulvey and Margarita Jimenez, ‘The Spectacle is Vulnerable: Miss World, 1970,’ in Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, 3. 49 Ibid., 4. 50 Ibid., 3–4. 51 Mary Kelly, ‘Miss World,’ in Social Process/Collaborative Action, Mastai (ed.), 57–60: 57. 52 Ibid., 60. 53 Eric Morley, The Miss World Story (London: Angley Books, 1967). 54 Ibid., 58. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., 59. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Christopher Walker, ‘Miss World Was Not Amused,’ The Observer (22 November 1970), 3–4. The reportage in The Guardian by Nicholas de Jongh repeatedly describes the protests as an ‘invasion,’ but represents a strident declaration from one of the leaflets: ‘Mecca are super-pimps, selling women’s bodies to frustrated voyeurs until aging businessmen jump young girls in dark alleys. Our sexuality has been taken from us, turned into money for someone else, then removed, deadened by anxiety.’ Nicholas de Jongh, ‘Beauty O’ershadowed by the Women’s Lib,’ The Guardian (21 November 1970), 1. Mecca is the entertainment corporation that put on the Miss World event. 60 Mulvey and Jimenez, ‘The Spectacle is Vulnerable: Miss World, 1970,’ 5. 61 Reflecting on Riddles in 2009, Mulvey states ‘[W]e were looking for a cinema, which would not be transparent, which would avoid erasing its materiality. So a cinema that was hieroglyphic, non-transparent and that demanded a thinking audience or a Brechtian audience,’ G. Pollock and L. Mulvey, ‘Laura Mulvey in Conversation with Griselda Pollock,’ Mamsie: Studies in the Maternal, 10. 62 In his chapter ‘The Light of the World,’ Richard Dyer demonstrates how cinematic technologies (particularly those involved with light) have privileged whiteness. These technologies and the images they produced have become habitually installed into the cinematic apparatus to the extent that cinematically depicting people of colour is both a problem and an anomaly. Dyer, ‘The Light of the World,’ White (London: Routledge, 1997), 82–144. 63 Camilla Griggers, ‘The Despotic Face of White Femininity,’ Becoming-Woman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 1–35. 64 These insights have been informed by two interrelated chapters in Eva Cherniavsky’s Incorporations: Race, Nation, and the Body Politics of Capital (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2006): ‘White Women in the Age of Their Mechanical Reproduction,’ 71–99; ‘Hollywood’s Hot Voodoo,’ 100–130. 65 As E. Ann Kaplan argues, the film ‘either ignores our cultural, mythic associations with the black image or, worse still, fails to provide a critique of the associations

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that the image inevitably evokes.’ E. Ann Kaplan, ‘Mothers and Daughters in Two Recent Women’s Films: Mulvey/Wollen’s Riddles (1977) and Michelle Citron’s Daughter-Rite (1978),’ Women & Film: Both Sides of the Camera (London: Routledge, 1983), 171–188: 180. Original emphasis. Silverman reads Maxine in multiple ways. She sees her as a ‘trace of Louise’s negative Oedipus Complex,’ and ‘the crucial (racial) other with respect to the “establishment” of feminism, the signifier of what it all too easily forgets and excludes,’ Silverman, ‘The Fantasy of the Maternal Voice,’ 132. 66 Mulvey and Wollen, Riddles of the Sphinx, 70. Hazel V. Carby addresses the erasure of black women within white feminist theory and the service black women have given to white families in ‘White Women Listen! Black Feminism and Boundaries of Sisterhood,’ Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America (London: Verso, 1999), 67–92. 67 Dyer, ‘The Light of the World,’ 89. 68 Peter Wollen reflects on the citation of PPD in Riddles and makes it clear that it attests to the collaborations between Kelly and Mulvey. Wollen, ‘Thirteen Paragraphs,’ 25. 69 Mulvey and Wollen, Riddles of the Sphinx, 75. 70 This passage from Riddles aligns with Doane’s subsequent argument about the assumption of essentialism within psychoanalysis: ‘Anatomy is destiny only if the concept of destiny is recognized for what it really is: a concept proper to fiction.’ Doane, ‘Woman’s Stake,’ 173. Toril Moi provides an exegesis of this phrase and its connection to Napoleon in ‘Is Anatomy Destiny? Freud and Biological Determinism,’ in Whose Freud? The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture, Peter Brooks and Alex Woloch (eds) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 71–92. 71 Mulvey and Wollen, Riddles of the Sphinx, 75. 72 Ibid., 76. 73 As Inderpal Grewal writes, ‘The British subject, alienated and made into a consumer by her/his commodification, saw other races and other peoples also as commodities. The British Museum had shown the world to be a storehouse of goods, and imperialism and the acquisition of artifacts for the museum became synonymous processes.’ ‘Constructing National Subjects: The British Museum and Its Guidebooks,’ in With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture, Lisa Bloom (ed.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 44–57: 54. Grewal’s argument aligns with Timothy Mitchell’s argument that Egypt was made into an ‘exhibition’ and a set of easily consumable visual objects. See in particular Mitchell’s first two chapters, ‘Egypt at the Exhibition’ and ‘Enframing,’ in Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 1–33, 34–62.

Conclusion

Across the arc of this book, I have made the case that the visual and textual manifestations of language were significant parts of art practices aligned with feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s. I narrowed in on the work three artists – Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly – who deployed texts and images of writing to create an address that calls to viewers and asks them to participate in the project of deconstructing the sign woman. I argue that by doing so, these artists identified three crucial mechanisms for keeping that sign ideologically in place: pathologising racial difference, repressing women’s aggression, and idealising maternal femininity. Though Piper, Spero, and Kelly are hardly ever read together, my aim here was to show that their artwork expressed a shared desire to transform how women in western culture have been habitually perceived. The visual appearance of language was crucial for bringing viewers into that collective project. The artwork Piper, Spero, and Kelly composed during this period of historical upheaval is rich, complicated, and dense. It creates visual and textual worlds that reflect feminism’s wide, disparate, and contested reach as well as the serious interventions demanded by the sign woman and the narrow range of appearances and meanings assigned to it by a dominant visual culture that prioritises masculinity. The other woman touched upon throughout this book is a figure for the aspiration to imagine women beyond their subordinated status as the others of patriarchal cultures, which started to become increasingly obsolete in the 1970s, but continued to ‘live in the heart and in the head and transmitted over generations,’ as Juliet Mitchell writes, profoundly shaping and even determining how people perceive women.1 Though the work of Piper, Spero, and Kelly has distinct relationships to psychoanalysis, I see in all three bodies of work an effort to reconfigure the place of woman in the linguistic structure of the patriarchal unconscious. By making the visible appearance of language a central feature of their work, Piper, Spero, and Kelly refused ready-made forms of recognition and created instead representations of women that suggest what is beyond the immediate field of vision and outside the frame of appearance. At the same

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time, they demonstrate that the sign woman cannot be completely dismantled or imagined anew. Its histories mediating relations among masculine subjects are too long and entrenched, for one thing, and its internalisation has been too pervasive and thorough. It is through the spaces between visibility and invisibility that these artists address viewers and ask them to become readers of the visual histories they have inherited and thereby contribute a feminist imaginary in which other definitions of woman can come into view. I paired the artwork of Piper, Spero, and Solanas with the writings of Angela Davis, Valerie Solanas, and Laura Mulvey because they so precisely highlight the attention feminists paid to language, provide detailed historical frames for seeing the artwork’s interventions, and attest to what it might mean to receive and respond to the artists’ address. Though never analysed (or even really thought) together, Davis, Solanas, and Mulvey wrote about specific experiences of living within the visual cultures produced by capitalist patriarchy and did so to create feminist publics that could read these articulations and extend the work of intervening in the narrow and punitive deployments of the sign woman. I hope that by tracing the correspondences between these artists and writers, the historical relevance of the work and its relationship to feminism has become deeper and clearer. I also hope that by reading the work of Davis, Solanas, and Mulvey through the aesthetic frames Piper, Spero, and Kelly created, we can better see and appreciate how these artists and writers shaped feminism’s possibilities in the late 1960s and 1970s. Much more than icons who emblematise feminist arguments and positions, their work defined the historical and intellectual contours of feminism during the late 1960s and 1970s and actively contributed to a feminist imaginary in which women could not only recognise themselves beyond the sign woman, but also represent their subjective relationships to images and thereby contribute to the collective feminist project of directing images of women into unforeseen meanings. Notes 1  Mitchell, ‘Introduction, 1999,’ xviii.

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285

Index

Literary and artistic works are found under authors’ names. Page numbers of figures are indicated in italics followed by the figure number. 0 to 9 38–39 Abel, Elizabeth 88 abjection 13, 51–52, 55–56, 88, 154, 157 see also Kristeva acousemêtre 243 addressing the other woman, concept of 9 aggression 5, 6, 14, 97, 103, 134, 147, 222 and women 5, 6, 14, 97, 103, 104, 105, 109, 110, 117, 121, 122, 125–126, 147, 148, 149, 156, 172 black and white women 103–104 see also Spero, Codex Artaud; Solanas AIR Gallery (Artist in Residence) 126–127, 127, 139 Althusser, Louis 182, 199, 202, 233 ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ 199 Apter, Emily 183 Aptheker, Bettina 89–90 case against Davis 90 Apetheker, Herbert 93 Artaud, Antonin 14, 107–108, 112–113, 115, 118, 122 aggression 14, 104, 105, 114, 118, 134 Kristeva on 118, 121 letters to Jacques Rivière 136–137, 139, 148

poetry 112–113 presence and absence 137 Art Worker’s Coalition 126 Bal, Mieke 4 ‘visual textuality’ 4 Barthes, Roland 6 Robbe-Grillet 84 ‘writerly’ 6 Berger, John 2 Berwick Street Collective 200 black feminism 7, 9, 27, 34, 91 black feminist imagination 27 black feminist visual theory 8 see also Davis; Piper; Spillers Bovenschen, Silvia 103 Bowles, John P. 32, 40 aggression 103–104 ‘Is There a Feminine Aesthetic?’ 103–104 Campaign for Fishermen’s Safety 244 Lil Bilocca 244 Chion, Michel 244 Cixous, Hélène 6, 107, 121, 129 ‘Laugh of the Medusa’ 121–122 women’s writing 121–122 drives 121–122 Spero’s artwork 107, 108, 122 ‘Spero’s Dissidences’ 107, 108

Index

Conceptual Art 25, 29, 34 and feminism 34 grid 29, 37–38 language in 4, 13, 25, 29, 32, 35, 108, 187 relationship to spectacle 28 Contemporary Art 2 correspondences between artists and writers 10–11, 181, 268 Kelly and Mulvey 16, 188, 239, 254 actual collaboration 10, 15–16, 181–182 Piper and Davis 9–10, 13–14, 25–26 Spero and Solanas 10, 14, 105, 172 differences between 105, 172 Cowie, Elizabeth 115 Dagenham strike 244–245 Davis, Angela 10, 13–14, 25–26 Angela Davis: An Autobiography 81–89 analysis of images 82, 83–84 collective address 81–82 communication in prison 85–86 connection to Piper’s artwork 82, 83 defence statement 94–97 language 75, 82, 85–86 for engaging with images 82 metaphor of writing 87 mirror stage 83 political autobiography 82 racial violence 87–88 segregation 87–88 parallel structures 86 reading and seeing 87 sexual difference 88 ungendering 88 ungendering 75 writing in prison 86 writing style 75, 82, 83, 84, 97 and images 86 Afro 74–75, 76, 79–80

‘Afro Images: Politics, Fashion, and Nostalgia’ 79–81 Afro 79–81 black women 80 erasure of history 80 police harassment 80 analysis of images 80–81 dialectical tension 80–81 support for acquittal 81 connection to Piper’s work 81 events at Marin County Courthouse 72, 79 fashion shoot 80 black feminism 85, 91, 96 Blues Legacies and Black Feminism 90–91 correspondence with George Jackson 88–92 black feminism 91 collective vision 91 connection to scholarship 92 manipulation by prosecution 89–90 myths of black matriarch 91–92 defence statement 94–97 feminist address 95–96 dissertation on Immanuel Kant 95 honours thesis 84–85 critique of vision 84 icons of black women 75, 94 racism and sexism 82, 93 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 84–85 icons of 14, 26, 74, 78, 79, 80–81 American media 72, 75–76, 83–84 imaginary enemy 10, 25, 72, 76, 83, 103 Life magazine 76–79 connection to Wanted poster 76 cover of Life magazine 76, 77 (fig. 2.2) ‘From Promising Childhood to Desperate Flight’ 76, 78 photographs 77–78 image of 6, 26, 72, 78, 81, 83–84

287

288

Index

language 75, 85–86, 89, 96 Marcuse, Herbert, connection to 90 ‘Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves’ 92–94 connection to Spillers’ ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe’ 93 images 93 trial of 94–96 defence statement 94–97 feminist address 95–96 image of Davis in 94 ungendering 75, 88–89 Wanted poster 26, 72–75, 73 (fig. 2.1) connection to Piper’s artwork 72 writing 26, 75, 87, 94 de Beauvoir, Simone 2 woman as Other 2 Debord, Guy 7 Society of the Spectacle 7 de Lauretis, Teresa 120, 161 drives 120 lesbian sexuality 161 Derrida, Jacques 6, 109, 243 hieroglyph 243 subjectile 109 writing 6 Doane, Mary Ann 207, 239, 243 Doyle, Jennifer 150 boredom 150 women’s speech 150 Dyer, Richard 133, 251 exhibitions of feminist art 2–3 feminism 1, 3, 10, 16, 146–147, 158, 232, 268 black feminism 7, 9, 27, 34, 91 1960s and 1970s 9, 16, 267 narratives of 9 and psychoanalysis 11, 195, 198, 201–203, 267 see Kelly; Mitchell; Mulvey

race and racism 9 see also black feminism and visual culture 7, 11, 26, 108, 233, 246 feminist art 2–3 exhibitions of 2, 4 and language 267 feminist engagement with language 4–5 feminist imaginary 104, 237, 255–256, 262, 268 relationship to symbolic order 256 feminist protest 3, 5, 124, 134 see also Miss America; Miss World; Women’s General Strike fetishism 182, 202, 203, 215, 234 see also hieroglyph; Kelly, PostPartum Document; Mulvey, Riddles labour 207–208 racism and colonialism 184 spectacle 248 Fleetwood, Nicole R. 26, 50, 80 black icons 150 Freud, Sigmund 14, 15, 104, 203 ‘Femininity’ 203–205 activity and passivity 204–205 castration 204–205 dark continent 206 doll 206 see also Kolbowski fetish 207 Heine, Heinrich 204, 206 hieroglyph 206–207 Oedipal 205 pre-Oedipal 205 see also Irigaray Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious 119–120 imaginary exchange of women 120 see also Solanas Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality 118–119, 120 aggression 118 drives 120 sexuality 119

Index

shame and disgust 118, 119 and sexual difference 118–119 women 119 Friedan, Betty 104 The Feminine Mystique 104, 128–129, 149–150, 158 connections to the SCUM Manifesto 158–159 National Organization of Women 125 ‘Lavender Menace’ 158 Women’s General Strike 124–126 humour 125–126 Genet, Jean 78, 90 ‘Angela and her Brothers’ 78 on George Jackson’s letters 90 Greenberg, Clement 131, 151 Abstract Expressionism 131 pure opticality and medium specificity 131 see also Spero Harron, Mary 105, 147, 162, 165 I Shot Andy Warhol 105, 147, 162, 165–166, 166 (fig. 4.5), 168 (fig. 4.6), 169–171, 171 (fig. 4.7) screen test 167, 168, 168 (fig. 4.6) Solanas writing 169–171 typing 171–172, 171 (fig. 4.7) Hesford, Victoria 146 ‘feminist-as-lesbian’ 146 hieroglyph 15, 206 ancient Egypt 207 Capital 207–208 fetish 207 Freud 183, 203–204 language 208 see also Kelly, Post-Partum Document; Mulvey, Riddles Hemmings, Clare 9 narratives of feminism 9 Henderson, Mae G. 27 ‘“otherness” within the self ’ 27, 47

History Group 182, 246–247 psychoanalysis 182, 247 images of women 1–5, 7–8, 11, 16, 208 writers’ relationship to 11 imaginary 6, 8, 11–12 Irigaray, Luce 12–13 ‘Femininity’ 205–206 mirror stage 12 other woman 12, 13 Speculum of the Other Woman 12–13 Jackson, George 88–89, 95 correspondence with Davis 89–92 Jameson, Fredric 7 visual culture 7 Johnson, Barbara 155 aggression 155 maternal ideal 156 mirroring 156–157 monster 156 ‘My Monster, Myself ’ 155–157, 172 Jones, Amelia 61 Kant, Immanuel 26, 33–34, 35, 57, 62, 63, 95 Critique of Pure Reason 33–34, 35, 50, 57–59, 62 see also Piper Kelly, Mary 5–6, 10, 14–15 appearance in Riddles of the Sphinx 254–255, 255 (figs 6.11, 6.12) Antepartum 198–199, 198 (fig. 5.6) ‘Miss World’ 248–249 Post-Partum Document 4, 5–6, 14, 15, 181, 183, 184, 186–195, 208–225 Abstract Expressionism 212 address 188, 192 autobiography 190 childcare 194, 223 Conceptual Art 186, 187, 212 dark continent 183 fetish 183, 190, 215, 224 counter-fetishisation 183

289

290

Index

fetishization of language 15, 183, 209, 224–225 poetry 183, 208, 219 hieroglyph 15, 183, 187, 208 dark continent 183 images of women 207 Rosetta Stone 187, 208–209, 216–218 iconic status of 14–15, 182–183 maternal dyad 186–187, 190, 215, 219, 224 maternal femininity 185, 190, 192, 195, 202 essentialization of 221–223 racism 223 language and 224–225 loss 186 racism 223, 225 schools 221–223 maternal sentimentality 186, 192–193 Oedipal narrative 187, 188 Post-Partum Document: Introduction 188–192, 189 (fig. 5.1), 192 (fig. 5.2) diagrams 191 mother’s desire 190 sentimentality 190 Post-Partum Document: Documentation I, Analysed Faecal Stains and Feeding Charts 193–195, 193 (fig. 5.3) Abstract Expressionism 194 breastfeeding mother 194 feminist defiance 194 waste 194 Post-Partum Document: Documentation II, Analysed Utterances and Related Speech Events 209–211, 210 (fig. 5.7) language acquisition 209 mirror stage 209 moveable type 209

Post-Partum Document: Documentation III, Analysed Markings and Diary-perspective Schema 211–213, 212 (fig. 5.8), 213 (fig. 5.9) Abstract Expressionism 212 child’s attempt at writing 211 Conceptual Art 212 conversations with son 211 Post-Partum Document: Documentation IV, Transition Objects, Diary and Diagram 212–215, 214 (fig. 5.10) guilt 213 loss 212 touch 215 transitional objects 215 Post-Partum Document: Documentation V, Classified Specimens, Proportional Diagrams, Statistical Tables, Research and Index 215–216, 216 (fig. 5.11) fetishization 215 gifts 215 natural history 215 sexual difference 215 Post-Partum Document: Documentation VI, Pre-writing Alphabet, Exergue and Diary 216–218, 217 (fig. 5.12), 220 (fig. 5.13), 220–225 child’s writing 218 de-essentialization 225 play 219 poetics 219 Rosetta Stone 216, 218 school 221 colonialism and racism 221 gender 222 pre-Oedipal 15, 182, 187

Index

affective and aesthetic pleasures 187–188 psychoanalysis 182, 185–187, 190, 195, 202–203 racism 223, 225 reproductive and affective labour 198, 201–202, 207, 216, 218, 221 text and images of writing 183, 187, 192 symbolic order 187, 188, 195 paternal function 186–187 whiteness 15, 68, 198, 223, 225 Kittler, Friedrich A. 170 Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter 170 Kolbowski, Silvia 206 ‘Playing with Dolls’ 206 Kotz, Liz 9 Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art 9 ‘here’ and ‘somewhere else’ 9, 34, 40, 43, 47, 75, 82, 85 Kristeva, Julia 55, 188, 239 abjection 55–56 Artaud 118 poetics 188 Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection 55 Lacan, Jacques 6, 11, 108, 114, 190, 194, 202 ‘Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis’ 114–115 ‘Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function’ 11, 46, 61, 83 feminist art and writing 11 language and the symbolic order 50, 62 masculine subjectivity 10 Seminar II 11–12 Laplanche, Jean 120 drives 120 Lavin, Maud 103 aggression 103–104

LeWitt, Sol 25, 35 and Piper’s work 35–36 Lippard, Lucy R. 34, 92, 126, 134, 192 Conceptual Art 34 letter from Nancy Spero 134–136, 135 (fig. 3.8) Post-Partum Document 192 Lord, Catherine 146, 147, 167, 169 manifesto 149, 168 address 149 see also Solanas SCUM Manifesto; Mulvey, Visual Pleasure Marcuse, Herbert 90 Marriot, David 55 Max’s Kansas City 41, 42–43 McDarrrah, Fred W. 159, 162 Mercer, Kobena 25, 26, 62 Mitchell, Juliet 11, 182, 202–203, 233, 245–246, 267 New Left Review 202 Psychoanalysis and Feminism 11, 203, 233 see also History Group Miss America Contest 162–165 protest against 162–164 freedom trashcan 164 ‘No More Miss America!’ 163 Vietnam war 165 Miss World Contest 247 protest against 247, 250 Kelly, ‘Miss World,’ 248, 249–250 Mulvey and Margarita Jimenez, ‘Spectacle is Vulnerable: Miss World, 1970,’ 247–250 race 249 Monroe, Marilyn 105, 133–134, 165 monsters 53, 103, 105, 108, 115, 129, 136, 148, 139, 170 see also Johnson, ‘My Monster/ Myself ’ Morris, Robert 47 I-Box (1962) 47, 48–49 (figs 1.7a, 1.7 b)

291

292

Index

Moynihan Report 52 see also Spillers Mulvey, Laura 5, 10, 15–16 collaboration with Kelly 16, 246–247, 254–255, 262 fetishism 182, 234 ‘Fears, Fantasies and the Male Unconscious or “You Don’t Know What is Happening, Do You, Mr. Jones?”’ 233–234 fetishism 234 language 234 film director 181, 236–237 ‘Film, Feminism, and the AvantGarde’ 234 History Group 247 Riddles of the Sphinx 16, 181, 182, 183, 184, 234–244, 235 (figs 6.1, 6.2), 236 (figs 6.3, 6.4, 6.5), 237 (fig. 6.6), 238 (fig. 6.7), 240 (fig. 6.8), 241 (fig. 6.9), 250–262, 253 (fig. 6.10), 254 (fig. 6.11), 255 (fig. 6.12), 256 (fig. 6.13), 257 (figs 6.14, 6.15), 259 (fig. 6.16), 260 (fig. 2.17) 360-degree pan 240, 241, 242, 243, 251, 252 reversal of 360-degree pan 252 acousemêtre 243 address 239, 240, 261 book 235–236 (figs 6.1, 6.2, 6.3) Capital 261–262 hieroglyph 261–262 childcare 244, 251–252, 241 (fig. 6.9) colonialism and racism 251 dark continent 261 Egyptian galleries at the British Museum 184, 258–261, 259, 260 (figs 6.16, 6.17) essay film 16, 234, 235 feminist imaginary 237, 244, 251, 255–262 fetish 243, 251, 261

film director, appearance of 257 (fig. 6.15) Freud, Sigmund 259, 260 Garbo, Greta 235–236, 250–251, 236 (fig. 6.5) Sphinx 235–236 whiteness 251 friendship between Louise and Maxine 251–252, 262 Maxine’s home 255 mirror stage 252 racism and 253 reading together 252, 255, 253 (fig. 6.10) reproductive and affective labour 251–252 hieroglyph 184, 234, 241, 243, 250, 252, 258, 261–262 Kelly, Mary, appearance of 254–255, 254, 255 (figs 6.11, 6.12) Marxism 244, 259 maternal dyad 142, 254, 255 maternal femininity 237, 242 Maxine’s home 256, 256 (fig. 6.13), 257 (fig. 6.14) Mulvey, Laura appearance of 237–238, 238 (fig. 6.7) poetry 242 pre-Oedipal 182, 234, 242, 252, 261 race 253 reproductive and affective labour 241, 244 reproductive labour 253 sound 239, 241 Sphinx 236–237, 239–240, 242, 244, 258–260 mouth 239–240, 240 (fig. 6.8) voice of 236–237, 242 text and images of writing 234–235, 239, 240, 243, 258–260 whiteness 251, 253 see also Dyer ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ 10, 16, 181, 232–233 feminism 233 iconic status of 181–182

Index

language 233, 242 manifesto 232 ‘new language of desire’ 6, 11, 16, 22, 25, 232, 261 psychoanalysis 233, 242 reception of 232–233 writing 183, 233, 234 Women’s Liberation Movement 233 ‘The Spectacle is Vulnerable’ with Jimenez 248, 249–250 feminist collectivity 250 National Women’s Liberation Conference 245 Newsletters of Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain 245 Nightcleaners 195, 199–202 black leader 201 maternal femininity 201 reproductive labour 200–201 sleep deprivation 200 Nixon, Mignon 129 maternal ambivalence 129 Nochlin, Linda 16 O’Grady, Lorraine 8 black feminism 8 Piper 8 Food for the Spirit 59 sign woman 8 other woman 9, 12–13, 16, 27, 139, 147, 150, 155, 172, 224, 240, 241, 267 Peckham Rye Group 246 Piper, Adrian 2, 5, 9, 13 autobiographical dimensions of artwork 26 black feminism 27, 34, 50 body in artwork 40 Catalysis series abjection 55–56 see also Kristeva Catalysis I 53, 56 Catalysis III 56, 57 (fig. 1.9) Catalysis IV 53–54, 54 (fig. 1.8)

Catalysis V 53 Catalysis VI 55 Catalysis VII 55–56 ungendering 53 Conceptual Art 25, 29, 32, 34–35 ‘Conceptual Art’ 40 Concrete Documentation Infinity Piece 43–47, 44 (fig. 1.5), 45 (fig. 1.6), 83 and Robert Morris’s I-Box 47 interplay of words and images 47 photography 46 writing 46 Concrete Infinity 6” Square 36–38, 39 (fig. 1.3) grid and language 37–38 Context #7 30–31, 30 (fig. 1.1) textual address 31 defensive rationalizations 33 feminism 27–28 Food for the Spirit 56–62, 58 (fig. 1.10), 60–61 (figs 1.11a, 1.11b), 83 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason 57–59 language 62 mirror stage 61 photography 59–62 publication history 58 Here and Now 36–37, 37 (fig. 1.2) grid 37 text 36–37 Out of Order, Out of Site 32 foreign guest 32, 33, 43 language in artwork 29, 32, 34 literature 38 Alain Robbe-Grillet 38, 45–46 The Mythic Being 62–63, 75 A 108 (Kant) 63, 64 (fig. 1.12) The Mythic Being: Cruising Women 63 The Mythic Being: Getting Back #2 63 The Mythic Being: I Embody Everything You Most Hate and Fear 63–65, 65 (fig. 1.13) images of Davis 65–66

293

294

Index

philosophy 25, 33, 62, 63 Immanuel Kant 33 photography 59 pseudorational defenses 33 racism and sexism 33 as visual pathologies 34 relationship with the artwork of Sol LeWitt 35 ‘single reality of the other’ 13, 25, 33 symbolic order 103 textual address 25, 32, 40 transformation in artwork 40 Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City 40–42, 41 (fig. 1.4) visual pathologies 5, 13 writings 32, 40, 41 Pollock, Griselda 3, 5, 183, 188, 239, 240 Kelly and Mulvey collaboration 188 ‘other than being other to men’ 5 psychoanalysis 203 Riddles 183 ‘Screening the Seventies’ 239 psychoanalysis 11–12, 13, 15, 114–115, 182, 195, 202, 267 RIP-OFF FILE 126, 137 see also Spero Robbe-Grillet, Alain 45 Robinson, Hilary 12 Ronell, Avital 146–147, 152, 168, 172 Solanas typing 172 Rowbotham, Sheila 201, 245 Schneemann, Carolee 3, 159, 168 Solanas 168 ‘Solanas in a Sea of Men’ 159, 168 Warhol 159, 168 Sign woman 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 115, 200, 224, 259, 268 exchange 12 implicit whiteness of 8, 9 visual dimension 7 Silverman, Kaja 242

Solanas, Valerie 10, 104, 146 aggression 147, 148, 152, 172 appearance in I, a Man 167 Artaud, connection to 104, 146, 147, 148 demand for recognition 168, 159 presence and absence 148, 169 ‘feminist-as-lesbian’ 146, 159, 161 monstrosity 159 Girodias, Maurice 161, 165, 169 icon of feminism 146 images of 147, 148, 155, 157, 159–162, 166–168 covers of SCUM Manifesto 159–161, 160 (fig. 4.1), 163 (fig. 4.3), 164 (fig. 4.4) insanity 104, 165, 166 (fig. 4.5) inscriptions on Olympia Press Edition of SCUM Manifesto 168–169 lesbian 155, 161 monster 156 Monroe, Marilyn 105, 133–134, 165–167, 166 (fig. 4.5) monstrosity 148, 155, 156, 157 motherhood 157–158, 159 other woman 172 photograph of 159–161, 162 (fig. 4.2) book covers 159–161, 163–164 McDarrah, Fred W., photographer 159, 162 SCUM Manifesto 104, 147–155, 157–159, 168–169 aggression 147 art 150–151 boredom 149–150 ‘thrill-seeking females’ 149 castration 152, 153 collectivity 159 call to 159 covers 159–160, 161 ‘Daddy’s Girls’ 151, 157–158 feminist address 149, 152, 172 feminist imaginary 155

Index

Freudianism 150 reversal of castration complex 153 humour 147 jokes 155, 161 images 154 scatological 154–155 language 147 manifesto 149 patriarchy 150, 154 picture of reality 153 war 154 protest 162 SCUM collective 151, 152, 169 violence 150 writing 148, 153, 155, 157, 172 and aggression 155, 157, 172 grotesque 154 signature 105, 169 presence and absence 169 typing 168–170 Up Your Ass 147, 167, 170, 171, 172 Warhol shooting 147, 155, 159, 161, 165, 168, 169, 172 writing 155, 168 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail 7 ‘The Other Side of Woman’ 7–8 visual sign of woman 8 spectacle 7 language 7 Spero, Nancy 5–6, 10, 14–15 Abstract Expressionism 133 gender politics 133 Homage to New York (I Do Not Challenge) 130–131, 151 signature 131 Willem de Kooning 131 Marilyn Monroe 133–134 Woman I 131, 132 address 136, 139 aggression 104, 114–115, 117, 127 AIR Gallery (Artists in Residence) 139 Artaud 104, 107–108, 109, 112, 113, 114, 115, 118, 122, 124, 136–137

citation of 136 letters to Jacques Rivière 136–137, 139, 148 Artaud Paintings 135–136 Bulletin typewriters 108, 136, 170 ‘big old monsters’ 136, 170 Bulletin font 134, 136 Codex Artaud 5, 14, 104, 105, 107–109, 110–114, 115–121, 122–125, 136–139 Codex Artaud I 110–114, 111 (figs 3.1, 3.2) Codex Artaud III 123–124, 123 (fig. 3.4) gravestone 124 protest 123 Codex Artaud XVII 115–117, 116 (fig. 3.3) Egyptian Influence 107 figures 5, 107–108, 110, 122 doubled 122 monsters 5, 108, 129 sexuality 5, 107 language 110 paper 109 presence and absence 137–138 tongue 109–110, 113, 114, 115–117 aggression 118 whiteness 8, 14, 109, 181, Conceptual Art 108 ‘Creation and Procreation’ 109, 128 Homage to New York (I Do Not Challenge) 130–131, 132 (fig. 3.7), 151 Les Anges, Merde, Fuck You 129, 130 (fig. 3.6) figures 129–130 maternal ambivalence 129–130 Nixon on 129–130 motherhood 130 letter to Lucy Lippard 134–135, 135 (fig. 3.8) motherhood 127, 128 Mummified 127–128, 128 (fig. 3.5), 149

295

296

Index

RIP-OFF FILE 126, 137 signature 105, 131 silence 109, 127 see also Mummified War Paintings 126 Women’s General Strike 125 writing 120 drives 120 Spillers, Hortense 13 icons of black women 50, 51–52, 57, 78, 81 ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’ 50, 51, 53, 75 Moynihan Report 52 telegraphing 13, 51 ungendering 13, 50–53, 75, 88 abjection 52, 88 see also black feminism Spivak, Gayatri C. 200 gendering of ethics 200 subjectile 109 text and images of writing 3, 5–6, 13 address to viewers 6, 10, 11, 25, 27, 28, 31, 32, 108, 109, 136, 139, 187, 234, 241, 243, 261, 267 addressing the other woman 5 feminism’s impact on 4–5 ‘here’ and ‘somewhere else’ 9, 34, 40, 43, 47, 75, 82, 85 see also Kotz interruption of visual dominance 7 relationship to images 3, 6 rewriting perceptions of women 5 twentieth-century art 4 Tufnell Group 245 typewriter 105, 136, 169, 170, 171 see also Kittler; Solanas; Spero gender 136 typists 171 Villarejo, Amy 159 images of lesbian 159, 161

visual cultures of capitalism 7 visual perception as consumption 7 see also spectacle Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution 1–2, 3–4 artwork 1, 3–4 connection to collective protest 3 return to 1970s 1 text and images of writing 3–4 WAR (Women Artists in Revolution) 126 Warhol, Andy 149 boredom 149 Factory 167 as father 167 films 150, 167 I, a Man 167 Solanas’s appearance in 167 Bike Boy 150 images of women 159, 168 Schneemann 168 Monroe, Marilyn 165, 166 patriarchy 167 screen tests 167 spectacle 167–168 Wollen, Peter 181, 202–203 woman as other 2, 5 woman as sign 2, 7, 12, 25, 53, 78, 94, 247 exchange 12 racial difference 8, 94 Women and Work 195–198, 196 (fig. 5.4), 197 (fig. 5.5) Kelly’s perspective on 196–198 reproductive labour 196–197 Women’s General Strike 124–126 see also feminist protest Women’s Liberation Movement (Britain) 182, 202, 233, 238 writing 6, 10 deconstruction 6 presence and absence 6 see also Artaud; Solanas